by Bina Shah
When Julien calmed down, he confessed to Bouthain. The whole story: Sabine, the operation, the recovery in the hidden room. The mysterious drug, Ebriatas, in her body. The Panah, and Reuben Faro: it all came tumbling out.
“A place for women? Where they’ve been hiding from the Agency all this time?” said Bouthain.
As Julien explained, Bouthain whistled, a small appreciative wisp of sound through his thin lips. “Insane. Brave, but insane. So she isn’t just illegal, she’s a Rebel. No wonder she’s so dangerous to Faro.”
“He mentioned another one that he seemed to know already: a woman called Lin Serfati. She’s their leader.”
The older man narrowed his eyes. “I’ve never heard of her. But the name is familiar. I don’t know why. How does Faro know her, though?”
“He’s probably been trying to capture her, but I didn’t ask. I just wanted to get away from him, and make sure Sabine was safe.”
“And who helped you during surgery? Ram? Mañalac?”
“And George,” said Julien, reluctant to name any of them, but there was no point keeping anything from Bouthain now. The blush bled from his face down to his neck and chest as he thought about the night he and Sabine had shared the room, and then the bed. “Do you have a display on in her room? Did you alter the records?”
Bouthain shook his head. “There wasn’t one there to begin with, and how would I have one installed without alerting maintenance? Besides, I prefer to do my spying the old-fashioned way. You were in the room with her. She wasn’t in any shape for you two to get up to any trouble.” He grinned, his face breaking into a dozen wrinkled segments. Then he became serious once more. “However, we’ve got a real problem with Reuben Faro. He’s the one that changed the records, not I. He’s got the power to do it.”
“I know,” said Julien. “He wants Sabine.”
“And he’ll get her,” said Bouthain. “If I know Reuben Faro.”
“What? Do you?” Julien was taken aback. How many surprises did Bouthain have up his sleeve?
“He was at school with me. Don’t look so surprised. Green City’s a small place. Or you didn’t realize I was that old? You’re shaking your head no, but I know you mean yes,” Bouthain chuckled. “He was younger than me. Nobody liked Faro. He was the one who’d do anything to get into teachers’ good books, ingratiate himself with anyone who had power or privilege. He was always ambitious, even back then. But he’s a ruthless man. I don’t know who’s more unfortunate to know him: his friends or his enemies.”
“I can’t let him take her.”
Bouthain tapped his fingers together. “How will you stop him?”
It was like being back in medical school, sitting his exams. If Julien could only pass the test, then both he and Sabine would be safe. “I’ll get her back to the Panah somehow.”
“But Faro must know where this Panah is, no? I doubt he’s going to take her there himself, though. Probably wants to get her into a cell and save his own neck.”
Julien bit back a curse. “Why has he let them go on?”
“If I’m guessing right, he thinks of the women as toys, or puppets. It amuses him to let them exist in their own limited way, doing what they do. In a way, he thinks of those women as his creations.”
“He’s a hypocrite.”
“Well, he can afford to be, because it’s rebellion on such a small scale. But he’s not invincible. Those women are supposed to quietly do their job behind the scenes, and then conveniently disappear. Not pop up in a hospital for all of Green City to see. Faro will be blamed.”
“So why did he bring her here? Why didn’t he just let her die?”
Bouthain rubbed his hands together, then shook them out to relieve a cramp. Julien noted the knottiness of arthritis in Bouthain’s fingers. It was strange to think Bouthain was as human as the rest of them. “I don’t know why he helped her. Maybe he was afraid to leave her there in case someone else found her. Or maybe he felt sorry for her, and couldn’t just leave a young woman to die. It’s a sign that there’s still a human being left in there somewhere. But he’s unpredictable, dangerous, and therefore an even bigger threat to you. I guarantee it.”
Julien nodded. “I think he’s going to make a show of ‘capturing’ her, bringing her to justice. As a way of distracting from his own crimes.”
“Yes,” said Bouthain. “It’s about keeping up pretenses. Saving face. She’s going to be sacrificed as a ‘clean-up’ so that the larger rot can remain. That way Faro gets to maintain his position, his status. And even the Panah is permitted to continue. But he’ll also have to deal with you.”
“What can I do?”
Bouthain turned his chair around to face the window once again. The view from his office, on the fifty-sixth floor, was spectacular. On overcast days, the clouds made a thick white carpet through which the upper halves of skyscrapers pushed like trees made of steel and glass. It was hard to imagine how the business of Green City went on underneath: the three-dimensional kaleidoscopic movement of cars and buses, high-speed trains, and Metro cutting through the air at different elevations, pedestrians flowing in and out of buildings, rising up and down in glass-walled elevators. It was as if this room existed on a different plane, purer and more elemental than the one closer to the ground.
With every passing moment that Bouthain spent in contemplation, rocking slightly in his chair, Julien grew more and more convinced that he would have to give Sabine up to Reuben. Maybe Bouthain would tell him to let Sabine go, and save himself. If so, he might as well sign her death certificate then and there. He lowered his face into his palms.
Bouthain tiptoed over to Julien, put his hands on Julien’s shoulders, and bent close. “There is a way to get Sabine out of Green City.”
Julien looked up at him, scarcely breathing. “How?”
“Reuben may be Leader, but he doesn’t know the human body as we do. We can fool him into thinking Sabine is already dead. He’ll report it back to the others, or maybe he’ll cover it up. He can’t make an example out of a dead woman. It won’t matter.”
“I don’t understand …”
“I’m going to inject Sabine with a substance. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while. Induces a coma with a heart rate so slow that even you’d be fooled.”
“What is it?” said Julien.
“Ebriatas.”
He stared in horror at Bouthain. “But … you can’t be serious, Dr. Bouthain. It’s not safe. It nearly killed her! You can’t possibly use it on her again. I won’t allow it.”
The white-haired man shook his head. “I understand your concerns, Dr. Asfour. So let me explain: A few years ago, I was working on Ebriatas at the Science Ministry with the company that was producing it. They sent it to me for trials, after its early versions looked promising. It wasn’t meant to be mixed with alcohol, but that was a minor issue; that only intensified the sedative effect. But we couldn’t run as many tests as we wanted to because there weren’t that many women for the clinical trials. The few women whom we could test it on handled it well at first, but after the trials were over, when they got pregnant, they underwent spontaneous abortions. Miscarriages. I advised that it not be used because its safety was in question.”
“Exactly my point! I can’t imagine how it ended up in Sabine’s system.”
“They shelved it as far as I knew. They said they didn’t want to bother with more tests. But I continued to experiment with it on my own. I thought it still had some promise. Then by sheer chance I isolated an active molecule in Ebriatas that deepens the REM cycle of sleep. At least, that’s my theory. It produces a syndrome not dissimilar to sleep paralysis, but the patient is also unaware of her surroundings, as if she were asleep.”
“But how safe can it possibly be?” said Julien, struggling to make sense of Bouthain’s revelations.
“I combined it with a f
ew other compounds to refine it, and I tried it out on myself before I gave it to anyone else. It seems safe enough for our purposes.”
Julien pulled his hand through his hair, trying to ease the ache at the top of his skull. “Safe enough. But have you given it to anyone else?”
“Let’s just say that your Juliet wouldn’t be the first woman I’ve helped in this manner.”
“Julia, not Juliet,” Julien corrected Bouthain automatically. The Agency had so many ways to spy on citizens: electronic tracking, digital surveillance, following any display trans-missions or emissions of energy from a vehicle, for example. Yet Bouthain, whispering into Julien’s ear, seemed more concerned about the old-fashioned ways, the bugs in the room that could watch or listen to people’s conversations, planted under a desk or chair, or in a corner of a room.
“Never mind. You young people don’t read enough. Shame. Medical education turns out good doctors but vastly uneducated human beings, sometimes. Not you, of course.”
Was Bouthain crazy? In the midst of this most dangerous crisis, Bouthain was going on about Julien’s lack of education. “What about the effects on fertility? The miscarriages? She’s just been through surgery …”
“Dr. Asfour, it will work. It’ll slow her heartbeat down to almost nothing, and to the whole world she’ll appear to have died. We’ll say that she died of the Virus. And then we’ll get her out of here to the crematorium for Virus victims, the one that’s just outside the border. From there, she can move on to safer territory.”
Julien tried to compose himself. “So we manage to get her out of the hospital and take her all the way across Green City. Say she gets across the border. Then what happens to her?”
“That’s up to you, isn’t it?” Bouthain said. “You’ll have to go with her, too. The same way.”
“Me?”
Bouthain gazed at Julien with fatherly concern. “Do you really think Faro’s going to let you live out your life here, work peacefully for the rest of your days at Shifana after this?”
“But …”
“You’ll sleep for a good six or eight hours, then you’ll wake up.”
“You’re sure?”
“I added an extended-release ampakine in there; it’ll get you going, don’t you worry. It’s a bit of a brain-booster, actually. Good for memory, so you won’t have any amnesia. Too bad they didn’t have it when we were in medical school. You’ll wake up smarter than you were before.”
“When do we do it?”
“The sooner the better. We’ll need some help. Whom do you trust the most of the men who helped you?”
“Mañalac,” said Julien automatically. “I’d trust him with my life. I already have.”
Bouthain moved to a locked cabinet at the far corner of his office and opened it with a verbal command. Withdrawing two unlabeled vials, he took them over to a countertop, where he used a pipette to mix the contents of both in a third bottle. His hands moved surely, his eyes steady on the drops falling from the pipette like liquid diamonds.
The Virus was a disease that only women could catch, but men could give it to them—a fact that nobody liked to discuss in Green City. Yet their hand in the decimation of the women made the Perpetuation Bureau defensive, the Leaders tight-lipped, ordinary men fearful enough to respect the boundaries of marriage. The Leaders made a border agreement with the adjoining territory of Semitia to allow the crematorium in a no-go zone between the two countries’ borders. If any woman died of the Virus, to safeguard the rest of the population her body had to be sent there to be burned and forgotten. Only a few hospitals were authorized to handle Virus victims: Shifana was one. The Virus, Bouthain found, became the perfect pretext through which to smuggle a woman here and there out of the City.
While Bouthain worked, Julien looked down at the city through the panoramic window. He’d lived in Green City all his life, never contemplated leaving. Was it really as Bouthain had said: would Reuben Faro come for him when he found Sabine had gone? The red-purple bruise was already developing on Julien’s arm, where Faro had gripped him just above his elbow.
He thought of his gentle parents, Johannes and Celine, tending to their balcony plants, setting out dishes of water for parched birds in the summer. Would Faro go after them if he couldn’t find Julien? He wouldn’t be able to say goodbye. He knew he would lose them to disease and death one day, but he’d taken comfort from the thought that he’d care for them in their last days.
They lived in a small apartment in the poor eastern neighborhood of Keliki. They were not young anymore, his parents: Johannes grizzled and slightly stooped, Celine afflicted with osteoporosis over the last few years. She’d never passed the medical tests that all participants in the Perpetuation scheme had to take before being declared fit for remarriage; she’d suffered malnutrition as a child, and it affected her well into adulthood. That and pernicious anemia earned her a merciful exemption from the Bureau’s rules.
The last time he’d gone home, Celine had greeted him at the door, leaning heavily on a cane. Julien quickly saw that she struggled to keep her balance; he was shocked at the sudden deterioration in her mobility. Instead of embracing her immediately, he hesitated, worried he would hurt her. Celine drew back, her pale blue eyes watching him with nervousness and reserve.
“What’s this?” said Julien in a half joking tone, to cover up his disbelief. “Are you going to beat me with that if I don’t do the washing-up?”
“I use this so I don’t fall. Who will look after your father if something happens to me?” Celine replied. “Come in, I’ve got dinner waiting for you.”
Julien convinced Celine to go for a long-overdue body scan the next morning, which showed she’d been losing bone density for several years now. He squeezed her hand as she lay on the body scan table, wiped her tears when she got the poor results. In five years she’d be in a wheelchair; no science could reconstruct her weakened bones.
If he left Green City for good, who would look after both of them? The Leaders claimed nobody ever suffered from neglect, hunger, or violence in Green City, but the fate of the elderly was less clear-cut. They were expected to fade away from sight when they were no longer able to care for themselves; they would go into a Green City institution from which they would not return.
He wanted desperately to tell them what he was doing: fighting for a woman he had only just met but already loved. He wanted to ask them if in their thirty-year marriage they’d ever felt anything like this wave of certainty, the renewed sense of resolve, the determination to survive so strong for both of them that they’d go to the border of death to escape Green City’s wrath. If he and Sabine didn’t make it, his parents had to know how hard he’d tried. But how to tell them without alerting the Agency to his movements? It was an impossible situation. He had no idea what to do.
Frustrated, he shifted his mind elsewhere: he wanted to know what exactly Bouthain would do after he’d put the drug into Julien’s veins, and Sabine’s. “What if Faro follows us all the way to the cremo? And makes sure they dispose of us while we’re still alive?”
“He won’t be allowed in,” said Bouthain confidently. “Quarantine regulations. In fact, he shouldn’t even be allowed near your bodies. Of course, he’ll break the rules, but he’ll be too squeamish to get too close. Sex with a carrier is what infects the women, but there’s so much ignorance about it all. If you’ve even been in the same room as someone with the Virus, you have to go into quarantine. Faro won’t want to risk being quarantined himself. Once you’re at the border, Semitian rules apply; he won’t be able to circumvent those.”
“Why do they call it the crematorium? I’ve never understood that,” said Julien, to distract himself from his fear. The method of getting rid of the bodies had nothing to do with fire: corpses were dipped in liquid nitrogen, then shaken to dissolve them into powder. The process took all of five minutes, prevented postdeath Viru
s transmission, saved space, was eminently respectful of ecology and the environment. And yet the idea of being irreversibly turned into powder made Julien shudder, even though it hardly mattered what happened to people’s corpses.
“It’s historical,” Bouthain said. “War camps where thousands of bodies were burned en masse. Everyone in Green City is so obsessed with wiping out the old traditions and names, replacing them with those that have no ties to anything that happened before the Final War, and the new regime. Maybe in Semitia they’re more sentimental about the old days and the old ways.”
Seeing the vials in Bouthain’s hands, Julien was struck by a concern: “She was just under anesthesia three days ago. Will that affect her in any way?”
“This drug affects different receptors in the brain than anesthesia. She’s young enough, and healthy otherwise. She’s recovered well so far, hasn’t she? Her bloods are all back up to normal range.”
“You checked her records?”
“Of course I did. Look, I can’t say how this is going to work out for either of you, Dr. Asfour. This drug of mine will probably affect you two in different ways.”
“If we both appear to be dead, won’t it make Faro suspicious?”
“Of what? That she died of complications and that you committed suicide because you didn’t want to be caught? Sounds reasonable to me. Look, here it is.” Bouthain crossed the room and held out his hand, showing Julien the final vial. The colorless liquid moved slowly inside the container, shiny as oil. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“What about my parents? Will he go after them?” Julien said desperately. “You know what they do to the families of criminals. How do I warn them?”
“It’s not safe for you to leave now. But I’ll tell them, once you’re out of here. Reuben won’t bother them. They’re helpless. Harmless.”
Julien considered this. Bouthain was right. There was nothing to be gained from hauling in a lonely old couple, torturing them to extract information they didn’t have. They’d live out their lives, lonelier and sadder than they’d anticipated, outwardly mourning the death of their only son. If they knew he’d disappeared, at least they’d have that secret to comfort them. It would be a life devoid of joy, but perhaps they would learn, in time, to accept it. He’d trust Bouthain to make it right somehow.
