Rising Tide

by Rajan Khanna

  Clay is the exact opposite.

  I prepare myself as I walk to the lab, telling myself to be nice, that it’s for Miranda, that it’s for Sergei, and I think I have it down. I can be nice to him. I can ignore how I felt about him in the past.

  But then I see his smug face, the expression that flits over it as I walk in, and I just want to punch him.

  “Miranda’s not here,” he says, his eyes back on whatever work he’s doing.

  “I know. She’s with Sergei. In quarantine.”

  “Oh,” he says. He looks up. “How is he?”

  “The same,” I say. “At least Miranda gets to stay with him. Lewis is going to give her some of her equipment.”

  “Good,” he says. “I don’t suppose they’ll let anyone else in?”

  I shake my head. “Only Miranda.”

  “Damn,” he says.

  “Miranda wanted me to ask if you noticed anything weird about him before he collapsed. Or if he had been working with anything new or different.”

  “He was working on the detection test, same as everyone else,” he says. “He wasn’t even working with any blood at all. Just the reagents.”

  “Could one of those have caused this?”

  “No,” he says. “I can’t imagine how. And we’ve all been working with them.”

  “Did you notice any symptoms?” I ask.

  Clay sits back and crosses his arms across his chest. “Nothing that couldn’t also seem to be the results of overworking. He looked tired. A bit rundown. But most of us do. We’ve been working practically nonstop for days. If I had noticed something, don’t you think I would have said something? And to someone other than you?”

  “Look,” I say. “I’m asking for Miranda. I’m not trying to imply anything. She’s worried about Sergei.”

  Clay stands up. “I’m worried about him, too,” he says. “I’m the one who’s been with him this whole time. While you and Miranda were off having adventures in the sky.”

  “Adventures?” I say, feeling my face get hot. “Fucking adventures? Which recent events would those be? Me losing my ship? Me getting shot? Diego getting tortured? My ship blowing up? Getting thrown in a cell multiple times?” My voice is getting louder now. “Don’t forget that I helped get you that data from Gastown. Or that I helped free the boffins from that camp. Or that I fucking stopped raiders from dropping Ferals on your head.”

  He moves forward. “The team wouldn’t have even needed rescuing if you hadn’t run back at Apple Pi.”

  “Shut your fucking mouth.” I move closer to him. “You weren’t fucking there.”

  “And what about the rest? What about my friends who are still unaccounted for?”

  “Clay.”

  “And it was your presence on Gastown that gave away our location in the first place. Because Ben loses his ship and Miranda jumps to help him get it back. It’s your fault you had to blow your fucking ship up. Miranda’s too.”

  It’s all I can do not to tear into him. There’s something red and pulsing behind my eyes and my fists are clenched at my sides, wanting to be used.

  “And I’m supposed to be happy because, what, because Miranda decided to pretend to be a spy and got us some data from Gastown? Please.”

  “Wait,” I say. “Who are you mad at? Me or her?”

  “Both of you! She changed after you came along. She used to be focused on the work. On the science. Now she drops it all every time you get stuck in a ditch. And if you haven’t noticed, you fall into an awful lot of ditches. She leaves Sergei and me here alone, trapped here, to continue the work while she plays zep with you.”

  Some of the heat inside of me starts to fade. I’m starting to get it now. He is mad at Miranda. Probably a little because he has a thing for her, but mostly because Clay is a zealot. A science zealot. To him there’s nothing higher. And Miranda has at least partially replaced it with caring about people. In Clay’s world, the science comes first. And that’s one of the reasons I can’t stand him and I much prefer Miranda’s company.

  I force myself to take a deep breath. I unclench my hands. I hold them up placatingly. It’s all I can do to keep them still. “I’m not here to fight,” I say. “You have issues with me and Miranda, fine. But this isn’t about us. It’s about Sergei. And he didn’t leave you. He’s been here with you for the past few weeks. And he needs your help.”

  Clay exhales loudly, and his shoulders drop from their bunched-up position. “Like I said, he’s been rundown lately.” He rubs his temples. “I thought it was just exhaustion.” He pauses. “And age. Sergei’s the oldest. I thought the years were just catching up to him.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I think it’s something else.” He sighs. “I’ll get in touch with Miranda. Get her a message through quarantine. I’ll see how I can help.” He lowers his head back to his work.

  I guess that’s it, then. I turn to go.

  “Does it scare you?” he asks, just as I’m about to walk out.

  My first thought is he’s asking me about the disease. The answer is yes, but I’m not going to tell him that. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Your extinction. The world is moving on.”

  “I think you know jack shit about the world, seeing as you’ve been stuck here for weeks.”

  “We’re building something here. Something new. There are no bones for you to pick here.”

  “I can think of a few that are begging to be broken.”

  He nods. “There it is. The threat of violence. Your first and last resort.”

  “Fuck you, Clay. You left out my profanity.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Don’t get too comfortable in your new world just yet,” I say. “You’re not the first to think you’ve emerged from the Sick. Not the first to think you’ve evolved. I’m all for civilization, but it’s not made of bricks, it’s made of paper.”

  “I like paper.”

  “So does fire.” I hold his gaze. “Remember what happened to Gastown.”

  He looks away.

  “That’s the problem with paper,” I say. “Someone can always black out everything you wrote.”

  “Then we’ll keep writing,” he says.

  I nod. “Let’s hope in the end that someone is around to read the book.”

  Two more people get sick the next day. Then five more the day after. Lewis is losing his mind. Miranda has been telling him it’s not the Bug—and it can’t be, otherwise people would have Faded by now. We’d have Ferals on our hands. Instead, Sergei is just wasting away, and now others have joined him. Literally, too. They moved them out to Miranda’s lab. The new one. They wanted to move them all to the Orchard, but Miranda needs access to her equipment. Everyone else has been ordered to stay in their homes and to limit contact with anyone else.

  The whole island is afraid. And as far as I can tell, Miranda has no idea what’s happening. Which makes me afraid. Miranda’s spent years—decades—working on the Bug, but this is entirely new.

  I check on the rabbi to make sure that he’s okay. He is, thankfully. But he’s staying inside.

  Me, I’m supposed to, but I can’t. Big surprise. I have Miranda’s house to hide in, but it feels alien and empty now.

  I’m wandering the streets, ducking Keepers, when Clay finds me.

  “Good,” he says. “I’ve been looking for you.” And that’s when I really know that things are bad—because Clay’s glad to see me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He ruffles his short, brown hair. There’s a lot more gray in it, it seems, than I remember. “I found something on the electron microscope.”

  “What kind of something?”

  He sighs. “Miranda sent out a sample of Sergei’s blood and asked me to run it through the machine. Just on the off chance it might tell us something.”

  “And?”

  We hear some shouts, and both of us look around us. “Can we get off the street?” Clay asks.

  �
��Okay.” I nod. “We can go to . . . my house.”

  I bring him back and let him in. He looks around quickly but doesn’t say anything. He looks uncomfortable. “I found something.”

  “I figured that.”

  “How much do you know about Maenad?”

  I shrug. “A little. What Miranda’s told me. What I picked up from the rest of you.”

  He looks at me, as if searching my face. “The Maenad virus has a very specific structure. It has a shell around it, a protein shell. That’s part of what we’ve been able to assemble with our data and the new data Miranda stole.”

  “What does that have to do with this new disease?”

  He shakes his head, already impatient with me. But he closes his eyes, inhales, and starts again. “Whatever it is that’s infected Sergei has the same protein shell.”

  “It’s the Bug?”

  “No,” he says, on the verge of exasperation again. “It’s not Maenad. Only the shell is the same.”

  “So, what, it’s some kind of mutation?”

  “I don’t think so,” Clay says.

  I grit my teeth. “You know I don’t know much about this, Clay. Plot me a course.”

  “A mutation of the Maenad virus would still resemble the virus. This is something completely different. From all the evidence, the disease seems to be autoimmune. Sergei’s body is attacking itself. That’s not the way Maenad operates. The only reason I can see for the resemblance is that this new disease, this new virus, was engineered.”

  “Wait a second,” I say. Something Miranda told me weeks ago comes flooding back into my brain. “Miranda said that the Cabal was studying the Bug so that they could use it. She said it was possible that they could, I don’t know, scrape out its guts and use it to carry something else.”

  He looks at me, his face grim. “A crude way to put it, but essentially, yes. I think that’s what we have.”

  I start pacing the room. “So this isn’t natural?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Damn it!” I feel something roiling in the pit of me. Something hot and angry. This was scary and bewildering when it was something unknown and natural, but now it’s a weapon. And that means that someone pointed it at us.

  “Fuck!” I’m looking for something to throw when I catch Clay’s I’m-not-at-all-amused look.

  “Are you finished?”

  “Sorry,” I say. “Why are you telling me, though? Why not just tell Miranda?”

  “I will,” he says. “I’m on my way there. But . . . you have a different set of skills.”

  I look at him, surprised. “You want my help?”

  “What I want is to cure this new disease and for Sergei to get better. And I’m going to focus on that. But we don’t know where the new virus came from. And someone should look into it.”

  “Why me? Why not go to Lewis? Or the Keepers?”

  “Because like it or not, you know Sergei. You know us. I may not like you, but I trust you to look out for Sergei and Miranda more than a politician or a group of peacekeepers. You saw what they did to Miranda.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Anything else you can tell me? Maybe how it’s transmitted?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know that. All I can tell you is that as far as I can tell, it’s not airborne,” he says. “But data is extremely thin right now.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He nods, then turns to go.

  “I guess there’s still a place for me, Clay,” I say at his back.

  He turns back to me. “Prove it,” he says, before walking out.

  Believe me, I think. I intend to.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF MIRANDA MEHRA

  I’m failing Sergei.

  I am having no luck with this virus, and he’s the one who’s paying the price. I sat with him today, as I’ve been doing every day since he got sick, and he could barely lift a cup to his mouth to drink. Fatigue and muscle weakness are just two of the symptoms, and it’s progressing so fast. Too fast.

  My best guess is that it’s some kind of autoimmune disease, that his system is destroying its own cells. Breaking him down from the inside. It’s insidious, but what makes it worse is that I can’t seem to get a handle on it. It may share a structure, or part of a structure, with Maenad, but it’s a completely different virus.

  How the Cabal created it, I don’t know. I can’t really afford to think about it, either. Every time I do, I start to slip into a blind rage, and that’s not going to help anyone. But I keep making notes in the margins of my notebooks. They all say the same thing. They will pay.

  In the meantime, I split my time between trying to crack this virus and trying to make Sergei comfortable. We sit for little breaks, and we talk about everything. How the eggs used to taste back on the commune, and how I’ve never been able to find chickens to match. I confess to him that I accidentally let a whole crop of tomatoes die and blamed it on a blight. He talked to me about his childhood growing up. His father was pre-Maenad. He came from Russia and made sure that his sons knew it. Sergei and Nikolai. Sergei’s face clouded over when he talked about his brother. Nikolai died when Sergei was a teenager. He never really talked much about him. I just know it was an accident.

  I asked him how he came to the commune. I knew he hadn’t been born there, but remarkably I had never asked him how he got there. I just regarded him as a fixture.

  “My father mixed . . . chemicals to get by,” he said. “He taught me how to do it.”

  “What kind of chemicals?” I asked.

  He tried to shrug, but the effort made him wince. “A little bit of everything,” he said. That included everything from lamp oil and refreshed gasoline to paralytics and narcotics. When Sergei’s father died, Nikolai looked after him. When Nikolai died, he looked for someplace he could be useful. And he found the commune.

  “They taught me other skills,” he said. “And I found . . . I found I wasn’t too old to learn them.”

  The rest I didn’t need to be told. How he befriended and studied with my father. How he took me in after my parents had died. And yet he talked about that, too.

  “You were so . . . angry,” he said.

  “I was?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  I shook my head. My memories of that time are something of a blur. But in the end I remember Sergei taking care of me, and focusing on the science. I pushed myself. I still regret my parents’ dying, but their death spurred me to be better than I was.

  “You were an angry girl. Angry at the world for taking your parents away. Angry at Maenad. Such anger . . .”

  Now, here, years later, I can imagine it. Such anger.

  “You helped me turn away from that,” I said.

  “Maybe.” His voice was thin and thready. “I might have helped. But I think you did a lot of it yourself. Threw yourself into the work. I . . . I worried. That maybe you would turn to science for all of the answers, and wall yourself off from your emotions.” He shook his head. “But you never did.” His smile was thin. “It’s one of the things I’m most proud of.”

  I squeezed his hand, gently.

  So, yes, we talk about so many things. He told me how he and Clay had bartered for a book from the mainland, smuggled in with one of the inspection crew. A book of old games. And how they passed their time by working through it. “I quite liked croquet,” he said. “That was interesting. Of course we had to use tree branches for clubs and our ball wasn’t anything like it was supposed to be. But I had fun.”

  It made me smile then. It makes me smile now. Thinking of Clay and Sergei playing croquet (whatever that actually looks like). I thought about asking him, but he moved on to talk about other sports. We talk about golf and cricket and soccer.

  The only thing we don’t talk about is the new virus, which I’ve named Enigma.

  I know Sergei wants to know about it, wants to see if he can help, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I don�
��t want him to know exactly what he’s up against. Or how in the dark I am. And it’s a moot point anyway. There isn’t much that he could do. He’s lucid at times, but he’s weak. He sleeps a lot. And sometimes his mind wanders off, lost in the pain and fatigue. How could he help? He would just end up frustrated.

  And yet I am frustrated. I have the others helping me—we’ve taken to sending notes back and forth. We fold papers and send them through slots, carried by gloved Keepers. My wardens are friendly, but I don’t think they realize what they’re doing, or how even this quarantine is slowing us down.

  My hope right now is that Ben can find out something about Enigma. Where it came from or how it was transmitted or, really, anything. New people are being infected every day, and I am working for them as well. We need to stop this.

  But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that my heart was right here. With Sergei.

  And . . . if he doesn’t make it, a part of my heart will die right here with him.

  It’s funny—I used to hate phrases like that. Leaving my heart. Because the heart is an organ and it has nothing to do with emotion, and because I always fall back on the science. But it’s really the best way to say what this feels like.

  That something inside of me, something so vital and central and important, is breaking.

  I think a lot about how Sergei took me in after my parents died. He was close with my father, and I think he felt it was his duty to help look after me. And he did. And he recognized that that little girl, who had just lost her two teachers and mentors, needed to work. To learn. To throw herself into something. And so he gave me just that. Gave me exactly what I needed when I needed it most.

  Damn it, why am I just realizing now how much I’ve depended on him over the years to be my rock? Knowing Sergei was there meant there was always a place to retreat to. Always a home no matter where we were. He encouraged me in every endeavor I put my mind to. He supported my vision of a cure. And he did everything in his power to make that vision a reality. Did he do it for the world? Or for me? And does it really matter?

  No, of course not.

  And so how can I not do everything I can for him right now? Whether that’s studying the structure of Enigma or rubbing his painful limbs and listening to him talk of the old days.