by Seth Fishman
Rob watches me closely; they all do, but he’s the one who breaks the silence. “Okay, well now what?”
“Now what, what?” I snap. “You’re the Geek Squad. Hotwire the door or something!”
Rob’s face doesn’t flush, so he’s not really angry at the Geek Squad comment, but he does raise his eyebrow, which is Rob speak for You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve seen him give the eyebrow to dozens of students and a few teachers. Never to me. Leave it to Rob to make me feel like crap with the careful manipulation of a strip of hair over the eye.
But maybe because it’s me, or maybe because he really is our best shot, Rob’s face heroically battles the eyebrow into submission. He sighs, one long one, then moves me aside to take a look at the keypad.
“Can you make it work?” Brayden asks.
“I don’t know, maybe. Probably not. It’s not like this was designed to be broken into.” He peeks around the casing, then pulls along the edges. There’s an audible click, and the casing comes off, revealing a bundle of red wires underneath the flat keypad. We all watch, entranced.
Odessa’s leaning against Jimmy, passed out, and Jimmy pulls her pale cheek upward and gives it a little slap. She doesn’t wake. He checks for pulse, an act only he and I are privy to, and I wait desperately for him to look up, which he does, sighing in relief. I didn’t think Odessa’s infection would spread so quickly, and while I can’t imagine her dying from a thigh wound, I know it’s a real threat. Blood loss, shock, lack of rest, lack of medication, her body is breaking down. And what if she has the virus? If she doesn’t get medical attention very soon, she’ll lose her leg. She could die. We’re close; we’re right here. Just get that door open, and we’ll be fine. I know it. Jimmy’s hair is all awonk, his beard scraggly and dripping with water. He looks haggard and scared. Not for the first time, I wonder if Odessa knows how much Jimmy likes her. Maybe that’s what I don’t know or realize: Jimmy and Odessa might have a childhood together as townies that I have no idea about, a memory of them playing in the snow as kids, sledding down Felix Hill. A history that predates the chaos of prep school, where Odessa became a new person and Jimmy just went along for the ride. Because whatever Jimmy is, he’s looking at her in a way that makes me jealous. Not about him, per se, but about the way his face is so concentrated and caring, as if he were holding a baby or a kitten, his forehead furrowed but his eyes bright, the small smile to make her feel better. Wow.
I peer at Odessa’s face, then do a double take. The thin light makes it hard to see, but something’s wrong, and I don’t like the icy feeling that’s grabbing hold of me. Odessa’s changing, her cheekbones sharpening and her lines becoming more pronounced. She looks more regal, like paintings of Queen Elizabeth, even with her head lolling about.
“We have to hurry, Rob,” I whisper.
“I’m doing the best I can.”
“But Odessa’s aging.”
Rob glances over his shoulder, mutters to himself and grimly sets back to work. The others stare, and Jimmy starts shushing her, even though she’s passed out and not making a sound. Maybe he’s shushing me.
“Are we all infected?” Jo asks, pulling off her gloves and inspecting her hands for signs of aging. She comes right up to me and sticks her face in mine. “Can you see anything, Mia? Any wrinkles? Anything?”
I have to pull back to actually see her, but I look, pushing her head to the side to get a better view in the dim red light. “I can’t see anything in here,” I say. I rub my hand gently along her skin, and though it’s cold, like marble, it’s smooth too. Around the eyes, the lips, the forehead. I bring my fingers down to her neck, and don’t feel anything abnormal. She’s watching me; the others are too. I smile. “You’re totally as young and as beautiful as you’ve ever been.”
“Lucky,” Jimmy says, and I can’t tell if it’s a joke or a way to tell me that I was being insensitive. Maybe both.
Suddenly, Rob starts jumping up and down, little shivers of excitement. His hands are covered in wires, like tiny worms in his palm. I see him pull one out, then another, and switch the two. “This might just work!”
The red light goes off.
“Damn it!” Jimmy says.
“I didn’t think that would happen,” whines Rob.
“Well, fix it!” I say.
“I can’t see which wires I just switched.”
“Great, that’s just friggin’ great.” Jimmy’s huffing. Even in the dark, I can feel his body trying to contain his anger.
“It’s okay, Rob,” Brayden says. “Jimmy, shut up. He’s doing the best he can. He’s doing something. Give him some time.”
Everyone goes quiet again, the gentle flow of the water the only noise—too relaxing a sound for the scenario.
“Hey, Rob,” Jimmy says quietly into the dark, “I’m sorry. It’s not like Mia’s dad gave her the code or anything.”
“Say that again!” Jo bursts out.
“What? Calm down. Jeez.”
“The code!” Jo repeats. Her excitement is palpable, even if unseen, and we all start rustling. She grabs my arm and shakes me.
“Mia,” she spits, “what did your dad’s message say?”
“Huh? I don’t remember. Not exactly . . .” I remember the voice, the sound of his voice. I remember the dark hallway and the deep wrinkles in Mr. Banner’s face. I can’t believe she remembers anything other than her dad’s death.
Brayden, clearly our memory keeper, pipes up. “It said if you can’t find him, if he’s gone into town or something, try my phone number.” He wouldn’t be the first Westbrook student with a photographic memory, but I find myself swelling in pride and gratitude for him anyway.
“This guy’s beginning to creep me out,” Jimmy says, but his tone is lighthearted.
Jo grabs my arm excitedly.
“What, Jo?”
“You don’t get it?” she says.
“Call my dad?”
“Yeah.” She says this slowly, like she’s enunciating to a child. “Try my number.”
I smack myself in the head. Literally. It is a phone directly linked to Dad.
“What’s his phone number?” Rob says, his voice eager.
I pull out my cell phone before I remember the battery’s dead. I curse. “Um, I just have his name on Favorites. I don’t usually dial the actual number.”
I know it’s Brayden who puts his hands on my shoulders. “You can do this, Mia. You’ve dialed it before, right?”
I close my eyes, a redundancy in the dark, but it helps me remember. “I don’t think he’s changed his office line. Like, ever.”
“What’s your home phone?” Rob asks.
“974-585-2379.”
Rob presses a button, and the keypad illuminates green. Even such a small light seems to warm us up, pulling us closer together. He presses the last button, and the pad makes a harsh noise, all of the numbers blinking red, then they go out.
“We need his office number.”
I close my eyes again. “Come on, Mia. You got it,” Jo says, and I hear Brayden shush her. He lets go of my shoulders, backing away, and I’m alone in the dark with numbers swirling in my head. I imagine myself in the lane, back and forth, Coach shouting at me. I hit the wall and turn. I was a little girl, and someone asked me how old I was. Four. That’s how old I was when I fell down the well. Four. My dad has me in his arms and he asks, What’s your name? I’m Mia, and I’m four. Remember, Mia, if anything happens to you, and you can’t find me, what is my phone number? 799 Sycamore Drive, Fenton, Colorado 81937. I’m glad you know your address, Mia. That’s great! But I mean my phone number. Can you tell me what Daddy’s phone number is?
“974-317-9947,” I whisper.
“You get that?” Brayden asks, but Rob’s already pressing away.
There’s a beep and a green light, a happy color and happy sound.
Within the gigantic door, there’s the whirl of steel moving against steel and then a pop. The door opens just enough to throw a squeak of brightness into the room, but with our sensitive eyes, it seems like a spotlight.
No one moves for a second and then—chaos. I’ve never been so glad in my life; we’re all jumping up and down, and I think I’m crying. Jimmy’s lifted Odessa into his arms, and she jerks awake, in a daze but smiling already, and Jimmy leans over and kisses Jo on the cheek and then tosses his head straight up and hollers, his tendons pulling tight. Brayden squeezes me close, and I don’t want to let go but then Rob and Jo are there, and we’re all hugging like best friends should. We’re all so wet still that drops of water splash everywhere, like a small rain shower of happy.
“I never thought you’d remember that number,” Jo admits, laughing. Rob’s face is so hot that his glasses have fogged completely, and I can only see his grinning mouth below them.
“Me neither,” I reply, and we keep holding each other, just that much afraid of what we’ll find on the other side of the door. We might have gotten in, but we have no idea what exactly we’ve gotten in to.
• • •
The door takes the combined strength of all three boys to push open, and when it swings ajar, we’re immediately blasted with a gust of warm wet air, a gross but welcome relief to the near-fatal cold we were all feeling. Inside is an enormous cavern, twice the size of a football field, carved straight out of the rock. The walls are rough, and the place feels like the inside of a huge egg. Peppered across the room are small buildings, twenty or so of them, steamy glass structures that rise from the ground and emit an almost iridescent light.
“Greenhouses,” Odessa breathes, her voice so soft not everyone hears her.
“What did you say?” Something weird is happening to her. She’s sweating a lot, but seems to be feeling better. Her eyes are sharper, more aware of our surroundings. She’s actually looking at things and not lolling near death. It’s creepy that aging for a teenager means becoming a fully developed human.
She looks at me and reaches into her jacket. “Greenhouses. Growing rooms. I used to work in them at Westbrook, for my fungi.” She pulls out her pack of cigarettes and watches mournfully as she drains water onto the floor. She squeezes the pack and throws it onto the ground.
“Oh, yeah,” Jimmy exclaims, a bit too loudly. He’s trying to be as upbeat as possible around her. His beard is still so weird on his face, he’s hard to look at. “You went off to that science fair competition for your mushrooms and stuff.”
“Fungi. And their decay-life capabilities.”
“Yeah, whatever—that stuff.”
Just like me, Odessa got into Westbrook for a reason. She manages to hide her botany passion pretty well, but I remember her when she won Colorado’s state competition. I bet the “science fair” Jimmy mentioned was actually the Intel competition. I bet she did pretty well there too. And by pretty well, I mean a twenty-thousand-dollar scholarship to a university of her choice. That might be a conservative guess: twenty thousand is for tenth place.
“What do greenhouses have to do with electronics?” Brayden asks. I shoot him a dirty look, and he frowns. But he’s right. Something’s wrong. I knew Dad was keeping secrets, but now any guesses I might have had about what happens here have gone out the window.
Even though I went Rambo back in the station, we don’t want to take any chances, so we close the door behind us. It’s just as difficult to do from this side, but there’s a gratifying beep when it seals, and I can hear the sealing mechanism again, like ten Westbrook lockers slamming shut simultaneously. The thought is so mundane that I almost giggle at its normalcy, and I like that feeling of happiness. As if, with the door closing behind me, I can finally be secure. We made it. If I had stumbled upon it accidentally, the room would have been out of a horror movie—plant-filled, steaming structures in the midst of an empty cavern. But for some reason, they don’t bother me at all, and I only feel utter relief. This place, the Cave . . . it’s real.
“Hey, guys,” Brayden says. He’s been peering at the door, checking it out—probably to make sure it’s really sealed—but now he waves his hand upward.
There’s a camera perched above the door, flashing a red light, taking us in. We scream hi and hello and help, and I even shout, “DAD!” but no one comes running. After a short while, screaming feels foolish.
“This is the back entrance, I guess,” Brayden says.
“Yeah,” I say. “The main doors don’t look anything like this.”
“Then,” Rob says, “I guess we should go on.”
“But wait,” Jo shouts, her voice echoing along the walls. “We can’t just hurry ahead, remember? We’ll give them the virus.”
I’ve known this all along, but maybe I was stuffing that away because I was just following his orders. Maybe I didn’t think we’d get here at all.
“What should we do?” I ask, worry in my voice.
“We have to help Odessa,” Jimmy pleads.
We look over at her—Odessa, who is staring at her hands, her cheeks more flush than I’ve seen since we left Westbrook. “I’m fine, Jimmy,” she says, lifting her leg experimentally. Suddenly she coughs—a fit of coughing—and some blood spurts past her lips and onto her shirt. She picks up the fabric in her hands and grimaces. Jimmy wipes it with his gray wool cap and then shoves it in her jacket.
I turn back to Jo. “We don’t have a choice. A bullet wound is bad enough, but the virus . . .”
Jo takes a deep breath and nods. Her face is so tired, her eyes sunken. All of us are exhausted. We’re a bunch of teenage zombies. “Okay. Okay. But, really, let’s keep our distance at first. We have to.”
Winding our way through the many greenhouses, I can’t help but be curious. The glass is steamed over, but I wipe and peer in. Inside there are rows of plants on one side—ones I don’t recognize, but that doesn’t mean much—and on the other are rows of vials and lab equipment.
“Mia,” Jimmy asks as we walk on, “what does your father really do?”
I shake my head, trying to push down my embarrassment. “I don’t know anymore. I thought he worked with microchips.”
“Maybe they use plant life to somehow power their electric grid,” Rob suggests helpfully. He swipes at the steam of a window as we pass, leaving finger trails. “I mean, that’s a pretty big deal, right? Biofuel? That’s worth all this stuff.”
“Maybe,” I say, doubt creeping in. “This doesn’t look like anything I know about biofuel.”
“What do you know about biofuel?” Odessa says, her voice stronger and deeper than before. She’s hobbling more on her own now, but it’s apparent that the virus has taken hold—her face is adult, just like Jimmy’s. Two thirty-year-old seventeen-year-olds walking arm in arm.
Jimmy looks over at her quizzically. She pulls him to a greenhouse, and they stand next to each other, looking at their faint reflections. She touches her face. She doesn’t look like Pippi Longstocking anymore. She hops experimentally on her legs.
“I don’t think you should do that,” Jo says. We’ve all stopped and are watching her in amazement. I can’t believe it. Five minutes ago, she seemed like she was almost dead, and now she’s shrugging off her wound. I don’t like not understanding what’s going on.
“I feel better, though.”
“I bet it’s the virus,” Brayden says. “It’s healing her.”
“What do you mean, healing me?” Odessa touches her wound tentatively, but scowls in pain. She’s definitely not healed up.
Brayden points at Jimmy. “Look at him. He’s a perfect version of himself in the future. He’s older. And, if everything goes like we’ve seen, he’ll start degenerating soon. But for now, his body is aging quickly, so maybe it’s healing quickly.”
Odessa tries to take another step and hobbles painfully. “Not quickly enoug
h.”
“At least there’s something good from this, right?” I say.
“I don’t know,” Rob replies. “Why heal you and then kill you?”
I’m surprised when it’s Jo who speaks. She’s staring at something in the distance, lost in thought, but still here with us. I can guess pretty clearly where her mind is and feel an ache of sorrow for my friend.
“It has nothing to do with healing,” she says, her voice slow and quiet. “The virus isn’t taking years from your life, it’s making you go through those years faster. Don’t you dare think it heals.”
Jimmy and Odessa look at each other, facing their own mortality, but I can barely register that. I put my arms around Jo, but at first she resists. Her body stays stiff a good ten seconds or so before she hugs me back. I hear her sniff, feel her shake. I can feel the others watching, respectfulness mingled with impatience. I’m ashamed to say that I feel some of the same things. I want to make sure Jo’s okay, but I want to get answers, see my father, find some way to help everyone here. I grab her shoulders and look her in the eyes.
“We have to keep going. Even in here, we don’t have much time.”
Jo swallows, looking guiltily at the others before walking on. Brayden brushes his hand lightly against mine.
He whispers in my ear, “You’re really an amazing girl, you know that?”
My body goes flush, and I duck my head.
“It’s true,” he says, and he kisses me at the outer edge of my eye and starts walking after Jo. I feel a happiness in me, one that moves to eclipse the doom we’re living in. And I don’t want it to go.
We’re weaving our way from one greenhouse to the next, Odessa walking more normally.
We have just cleared the last greenhouse when Odessa gasps. My gut leaps, assuming the worst, but instead she’s just pushed up against the final greenhouse window, peeking in.
