by Julian North
Finally, I asked the question for which I had to have an answer. I forced myself to stare at Havelock, to look into his dark eyes and face the terrible truth. “Why did you bring me to Tuck?”
Havelock strode away from the windows, towards the wall displaying the memory of his family farm, the emerald hills of plenty built on top of blood-tainted soil. “I brought you in because even though Landrew Foster-Rose-Hart gave up on DN10-191, he never gave up the dream—the nightmare—it was intended to bring about. Prosperity through order…more precisely, the control of one group of people over another. That never went away. Indeed, it is coming closer.” Havelock’s eyes widened. “He, and those like him, have another way, a more dreadful way for the highborn to be the demigods they feel they are destined to be”—he pounded a fist against the middle picture frame—“genocide.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
It should have surprised me more than it did. But I grew up in Bronx City. In my world, people lined up for food and water rations, clawing for position like cocks in an arena. Giant machines fired correction pellets into crowds, cowing people with days of chemically induced agony the way wooden rods had once enforced discipline among children. Life was cheap, and people were angry. Once people had nothing left to lose, even emperors trembled. We were the people under the iceberg. The Waste was the answer the highborn sought.
“It is another incredible piece of engineering,” Havelock said. “A creation worthy of Eichmann for the modern age. What you call the Waste is a genetic mutation. We don’t understand how it is introduced. Perhaps by injection or a specialized virus. Its development began in parallel with DN10-191, but it reached the testing phase several years earlier. Like any good industrialist, Landrew hedged his bets; he recognized trilling might not work. Once introduced into the population the Waste spreads itself by corrupting certain indigenous genes related to stamina and aging. The mutated genes are dormant in most carriers, allowing a large population to spread the trait. I’ll bet there are scientists at Rose-Hart who call it merciful: It targets people who possess the specific traits its creators wanted to extinguish. The Culling, they call it.”
I fought my nausea. Standing became difficult as my head spun. I sat down, placing myself on the edge of the couch beside Nythan, my head heavy. “What traits?”
“Leadership and charisma, primarily,” Havelock told me, his rage now switched off. He sounded like a teacher again. I wanted to hit him. “People are pre-disposed to these things through a complicated series of genes, but those markers have become increasingly well mapped over the years. Other characteristics leading to a high AT, such as intelligence, are similarly targeted, according to Doctor Willis’s research.”
“They’re killing the leadership,” I realized, my voice unsteady, my hands trembling with both rage and terror. “People like my brother.”
“They want only deltas and gammas to serve,” Nythan said.
I turned my head towards him, the strange genius who didn’t quite seem to fit into this world. Yet, he seemed to understand it all too well.
“That still doesn’t explain why you need me,” I said, looking around the room. “You have brilliance around you—people like Dr. Willis and Nythan. Others will take Headmaster Havelock seriously if he speaks out. You are all rich. Why do you need me? Why-am-I-here?”
Havelock placed his hands together. “You are here because we need your help if we are to have any chance of fixing this. A war has been declared upon us, but it is a secret war. Each of us have our reasons for fighting the highborn, but the tools the rest of us have are not enough to win that war. Nythan and Doctor Willis can study the mutation, but they have perilously few samples to work from—only what they could obtain from the handful of people willing to come to Lenox in secret. Their evidence and research is fine for us, but it could be questioned. I could take it public, and perhaps some among the elite might care; maybe even some of the Orderists. But the highborn have far more control over the country and the net than anyone imagines. A more likely scenario is that Dr. Willis would be discovered, her work destroyed, and my voice silenced by thousands of other screams. The uproar among the masses would be suppressed, then the information discredited and forgotten. Meanwhile, the men who would fight—people like your brother—would be dying. The time may come to go public, but not yet. Not until we can undo the damage they have done to people like your brother. We need you to do that.”
“You know I’d do anything for Mateo. You knew it before you sent Howards to fetch me out of Bronx City. Those people killed my father, they’ve made life hell for every person I’ve ever cared about. Now they want to make the world worse—forever. But what can I do that all of you cannot?”
Havelock gestured to the others in his study. “None of us are highborn. None of us have the trilling gene…except you.”
It felt like one of Nythan’s jokes. Only he wasn’t laughing. None of them were. “Me? I’m from Bronx City. Ain’t a drop of highborn in me.”
Havelock lifted a brow. “Your mother was a nurse in a maternity ward, was she not? In a hospital, in Manhattan. Where you were born. Not Bronx City. We checked the records.”
I was short of breath. “My mother?”
“Mt. Sinai, the hospital where she worked, was a center for the DN10-191 program,” Havelock explained. “As a nurse in the maternity ward, she might have noticed any unusual activity. She might have been in a position to procure a treatment for her unborn daughter, perhaps not knowing exactly what it was. Maybe she swapped the dose with an unsuspecting patient, so no one ever knew. It might even be the reason she disappeared one day.”
Both of my hands squeezed my knees as I leaned over. It couldn’t be true. I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted to be me, the daughter of my parents. Not some Frankenstein product of richie science, an experiment that never should have been. It had to be a mistake. Yet, I knew it wasn’t. The truth had always been inside me. I just didn’t know it. My cold place, my running. What if I could beat the highborn because I was one? Nythan laid a comforting hand on my back.
“Easy, easy,” he said. “Being highborn doesn’t mean you have to be a total jack-A. Only that you’ll probably be one.”
I croaked out a chuckle. A small fit of coughing followed. The tension in the room eased.
“I can’t control anyone,” I said when my head stopped spinning. “I couldn’t even convince Mateo to go to Lenox so Doc Willis could look at him.”
“True,” Havelock conceded. “We think the trilling gene is a chameleon—it somehow disguises itself as other genes. It’s there, but dormant and hidden, which is why the Rose-Hart scientists thought they’d failed. It has to be triggered. Certain types of brain activity seem to do it. We developed a process that can activate your abilities.”
My eyes narrowed in on that angular, patrician face. He said it so casually, as if a mental switch could be flipped. “A process?”
Havelock looked at Nythan, who answered. “It’s a combination of chemicals and virtual-reality simulation. The drug stimulates areas of the brain to a degree not replicable in everyday life, except perhaps by the most traumatic of events. The VR program augments and guides the effect.” He took a deep breath. “It’s not pleasant, but it seems to work.”
“You’ve done it before?”
Nythan nodded, although I saw something in his eyes. A rare flash of doubt.
“Marie-Ann,” I hissed.
Another nod.
“But she wasn’t highborn either.”
Havelock shrugged, a gesture somewhere between indifference and sheepishness. “Her mother was a servant in the house of a prominent highborn family, years ago. A very beautiful woman, Mrs. Rebello, if the images can be believed. Her daughter, Marie-Ann, was also born at Mt. Sinai, the same year as you. The fee was generously paid for by her highborn employer. We can speculate as to the rest. But Marie-Ann had the gene as well. Dr. Willis was able to activate it, although Marie-Ann never lea
rned to fully control her power. She wasn’t the person that you are. You’ll be stronger. I’ve seen you on the track. You are a fighter.”
“What happened to Marie-Ann, really? Did she jump?”
I heard raindrops striking the window, but nothing else.
“I was on the roof with her,” Alissa said into the quiet. “Lara and I.”
My back arched. “What happened?”
Alissa looked over at Lara, then back at me. She shook her head. “She was acting…strange. I can’t explain it.” She dropped her head towards her feet.
“The girl lost it,” Lara declared. “Ranting. It started in class, before lunch. Paranoid stuff, about being watched. We managed to get her to the roof before it got out of control. Before she destroyed everything. We tried to talk to her. It didn’t work. Alissa pinged for help. But it didn’t come fast enough. She took off running. Didn’t look back, not a moment of hesitation. Just leaped off the damn roof.”
Alissa was still staring at the floor, as if the answer to what had happened was written on her shoes.
“Did your process drive her mad, Nythan?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” he replied, so mild, so calm. “It happened many weeks later. She was under a lot of stress.”
“What you should be asking, Daniela, is did Kris Foster-Rose-Hart get to her?” Lara told me. “Did Kris discover there was another triller, and decide to end any competition.”
“Is that what happened?” I challenged.
“No one knows why it happened,” Havelock pronounced, calming the storm.
“Weren’t there any surveillance drones around?”
“Yes, but you’ve seen we’re not without influence at the Authority,” Alissa said. “Recordings disappear. It’s hard to see what happened on them anyway, from so far away.”
I let out a long breath, as if recovering from a race. “So you want me to take Nythan’s magic treatment that might or might not have driven Marie-Ann insane…What about Kris? Why can she can trill? And Drake? I assume you didn’t help them acquire the ability.”
“We don’t know,” Nythan said, his lips curled in frustration. “We’re pretty sure Kris was first. Something unique must’ve happened to trigger it. Our guess is that she can use her power to activate it in others, help the trait break out, as we call it. That would explain Drake. As to why she would bestow such power on an oaf like him…she must need him for something. The attempt on her father’s life might be unrelated to this. Or it might not. I’m skeptical of coincidence, though.”
Why would Kris want her father dead? I didn’t know enough to guess. But she might’ve needed help making that happen. She recruited one group. There might be others.
“Even if I did this, even if I decided to risk my sanity and my life for you to turn me into something…” I struggled for the right words. “You’ve gone to such lengths. Recruiting me. This process you’ve developed. Why do you need someone who can trill so badly?”
“Because we don’t just want to stop this genocide—this Culling—we need to be able to cure it,” Havelock pronounced. “With the help of a triller, I think we can succeed.”
My heart skipped. I was on my feet. “Cure it? How?”
“Inside the bowels of Rose-Hart Industries. Inside their inner sanctum, under the ground, is a place—a secret place. It is where the controlColonies are kept. It is where the trilling research was conducted, and where the Waste was developed. They built it, they can stop it. Inside their internal network, in a file called Project Wool, are the answers we seek.”
“Nythan can hack anything. So I get why he is here. What do you need me for?”
“They use a closed network,” Nythan said. “Not even hardlines going in and out. We aren’t even sure who works down there.”
“And you think I can help you get in? If I can trill?”
“You’ve seen the Ziggurat from the safe house nearby,” Havelock said. “Their Advanced Development Complex is under there. We’ve got a plan to get in. But even with all the work we’ve done, security is too tight inside. We need things only a triller can do to have any chance. They’ve taken precautions against everything else. Only the unimaginable can circumvent their security.”
Deuces.
“There is a cure inside that building?”
“The solution is inside,” Havelock assured me.
No choice. “What do you need?”
“As Nythan mentioned, we have a plan to enter the complex that we have had in process for a length of time. But there are human guards inside. Few are trusted to guard the controlColonies, but they must be handled. They are protected in ways that only a triller can circumvent,” Havelock told me.
“What’s the other thing we need?”
“Genetic material. The doors and sensors use retinal scans and fingertip DNA identification. We don’t even know who is authorized for access to the ADC. So there is only one person’s DNA we can be sure will get us in: Landrew Foster-Rose-Hart himself.”
“How do we get that?” I asked. “He was injured.”
“We don’t know where he is, but it doesn’t matter for the DNA. A hair sample will work,” Nythan assured me. “Or a toothbrush. Things that will be in his house, on the family floors.”
“We don’t have much time either,” Havelock said. “If Landrew is in a different part of the Ziggurat when we use his DNA for access, an alarm will be triggered. We don’t know his schedule. We don’t know his true medical condition. But there is one day we know he won’t be at work: the night of the Allocators’ Ball. It’s perfect. But we need the DNA first.” He raised a long finger. “We’ve never been able to get anyone close to the Foster-Rose-Harts. Kris must be able to sense any deception. And their family staff has been with them for generations. They are incorruptible by outsiders. We need a triller to get in there.”
“Everything we need is in the Foster-Rose-Hart house? Just sitting around upstairs?”
“Yeah,” Nythan said. “We just need to get in somehow. You’ll have to trill the servants. But it’s risky. First, it is such an unusual request against such loyal people. Just like the mistake Kris made with the headmaster. The more unnatural the action, the harder it will be to persuade someone and make it stick. Worse, if any of the family is inside, you’re in trouble. Like Headmaster Havelock said, trilling doesn’t work on highborn, at least not the control part. Kris has that strange aura, but even she can’t trill a highborn. Landrew didn’t want to start a war among his own kind. But there isn’t any other way to get the material we need.”
I looked down at my hands, thinking about Mateo. He had told me to forget him. I wouldn’t. But this wasn’t about him anymore. Or not just him. The highborn planned to neuter an entire portion of the population to create a permanent servant class. I thought about Kortilla, her brothers, her family. They were also my family. These highborn wanted to create a world worse than anything I could’ve imagined before today. Worse than anything even Mateo feared. And no one would know they did it, until it was far too late. It might be too late even now. How many people already had the Waste? A cure was the only way.
If my mother had done what they said, if she had tried to make me something better than normal, it hadn’t been so I could live in a luxurious condo off the park, and it certainly hadn’t been so I could help make our people into slaves. She wanted me to fight. My anger was cold, powerful. I was ready.
“I have a way into the house,” I told everyone.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
The meeting ended past ten o’clock. Rain pounded the old house like a room full of schoolchildren with drumsticks. Havelock offered me a car home, or to the subway station. I refused both. I’d had enough of the headmaster’s so-called generosity.
“I’ll get you to the station with my familiar. It’s got an extendable canopy,” Nythan suggested.
It was better than the alternative. I walked out the front door, stopping under the awning, without a farewe
ll to my fellow conspirators. A damp chill greeted me outside. I turned up the heat in my skin. We walked into the elements, Nythan’s flying machine above us. The engines whined against the gusts of the storm.
The rain, dark and ugly, fell with a relentless fury. But my skin kept me warm and we had the sidewalks to ourselves. Traffic was sparse. If I couldn’t take a little rain, I didn’t have much chance against the highborn.
Keeping under the protective cover of Nythan’s familiar meant walking slower and closer than I would’ve on a typical evening. My body was numb from all I’d heard tonight. Just walking or talking or doing any mundane thing felt wrong, given what I now knew. I shouldn’t be doing anything but trying to fix this: trying to warn people. Fighting. Instead, I was just walking in the rain.
“I should have made the canopy bigger,” Nythan observed. If anything Nythan had heard tonight troubled him, he gave no sign of it.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I asked as we turned the corner. “I would’ve helped you. Any sane person would’ve helped you. You didn’t need to put me through all this. You didn’t need to lie to me.”
“We didn’t exactly lie—and you weren’t ready. We didn’t really know you either. Think about it. Would you have believed us? We were just a bunch of richies. Even if Havelock had told you about the Culling, would you have thought such a thing possible if you hadn’t spent time among the highborn? Not to mention the trilling. You wouldn’t have accepted a place at school if you had got all this that first day. Marie-Ann had been here for years, and she still thought it was a joke when we told her.”
“How did you convince her?”
Nythan didn’t answer for half of a block. “I’m not sure we did, not until the end. She went through the process of breaking out, but never seemed to quite get it. She could make someone pick a particular food, but that was about the extent of her power. Maybe she never fully believed, even knowing the highborn.”
