Garth fluttered around her like a moth in front of a porch light at twilight, checking her vitals, jiggling the sterile plastic bag, consulting his portable computer, and holding up the continuing printout of her blood gases. She didn’t have to ask about the results—the darkening expression on his face said it all. “It’s not days anymore, V,” he told her in a low voice. She could hear the pain in it, the regret. “Now it’s more like . . . hours.”
She didn’t move or say anything, just stayed where she was on the cold, uncomfortable chair. She was nearly numb anyway, and it wasn’t as though the news was a big surprise.
“Maybe if you stayed,” Garth suggested hesitantly, “I could do something. Prolong you—”
“To what end?” Violet interrupted. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, waiting. If he had a good reason, something that could actually justify maintaining her miserable, sickly existence, she certainly wanted to hear it.
Instead of replying, Garth bit his lip and looked away. After a moment, he brightened and held a piece of paper up so she could see it. “Did you do this?”
Violet peered at it and it took her a few seconds to comprehend that what was on it was a mass of mathematical equations . . . at least, that’s what it looked like. She shook her head wearily. “What is it?”
Garth pulled it back and studied it again, but his expression remained bewildered. “I’m not sure,” he finally admitted. “It looks chemical, but it seems like it’s done in the old Pre-Collapse form of Western notation.”
Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully, then her gaze cut toward the boy. He was off to the side, standing in front of one of the computers and gazing at it like he expected it to do something at any second. His stance—waiting—was enough to raise chill bumps on her arms. “Must have been him,” she said.
Garth shot the child an unreadable look, then gave a small nod and shoved the paper into his pocket. His face was morose.
“What is he?” Violet asked under her breath.
Unaccountably, Garth stiffened. “I know what he’s not.” When Violet waited for him to continue, he seemed to struggle to find the appropriate words. “He’s not someone who has a single molecule of vampiral antigen in his blood,” he said at last. Violet could easily picture Garth agonizing over how to tell her this while she and Six had been sleeping in the truck, oblivious to the rest of the world. “He’s not someone who’s any good to us. Daxus was telling the truth.”
Violet sat up on the chair, making the IV line stretch out and Garth frown at it. She felt like someone had just punched her in the gut. “What?”
Garth folded his arms protectively, but he didn’t back down. “And if that’s not bad enough,” he continued, “the kid’s hot, V. Practically radioactive. He’s got a tracking device in him accurate to about a hundred yards.” Violet gasped and reached to pull the IV out of her arm, but Garth’s hand stopped her. “We’re shielded in here.”
She sank down again, feeling the cold from the metal chair back seep through the flimsy fabric of her shirt. She should have known—hell, hadn’t she already suspected it when every time she dragged Six off to a new and safe spot, a human security force showed up within minutes? Of course she had, but she’d ignored it, reluctant to face the truth. And how dangerous was that? With her free hand, she pushed her hair off her forehead, then rubbed at her eyes. They were burning with an exhaustion that the transfusion simply wasn’t chasing away. “I don’t understand,” she said at last. “Then why did Nerva want me to get him so badly? Why were the humans guarding him so closely if he’s not a vessel for a vampiral antigen?”
Garth shook his head. “I don’t know, but . . .” He hesitated just long enough for Violet to look sharply at him. In response, he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Whatever they did put in the kid . . . it’s killing him, V.” Her eyes widened. Garth shrugged, but the motion was anything but careless. “It’s some kind of aggressive antagonistic protein, with a very predictable decay.” He stared unhappily at the floor. “He’s got a shelf life of no more than another eight hours.” Finally, Garth lifted his saddened gaze to hers. “The kid’s toast, V.”
She sat there, frozen with disbelief, then abruptly pushed out of the chair. The IV tore free of her arm and leaked blood onto the floor, but she didn’t feel it—the transfusion was complete anyway. Her hand closed around the first thing she saw—a rack of empty test tubes—and she hurled them against the side wall with a curse. The boy spun in surprise and stared at her, but she couldn’t look at him, not right now. Not yet.
Garth sighed and spread his hands, but he made no move to clean up the mess. “What can I tell you?”
“That I should expect this?” she demanded bitterly. “After all, they’re humans.”
Now Garth frowned. “Violet, you sound more and more like Nerva. We’re all humans—we’re just sick.” His expression deepened into a scowl. “And what’s so wrong with being human, anyway?”
For a moment, Violet couldn’t answer as she fought to keep her jaw from trembling. Besides being a species that automatically wanted to exterminate anything more powerful, more beautiful, or better than it in any way, what, indeed? Finally, she gave Garth the only answer she could think of that seemed to cover it all.
“It’s weak.”
It had taken a while to calm things down—including herself—after Violet had thrown the test tubes, but finally she and Garth had calmed Six down enough to where they actually got him to sleep. In the way of room and board, what Garth had to offer wasn’t much: a cup of instant chicken noodle soup and a small, fairly uncomfortable cot with an old synthetic military blanket, but it seemed to more than satisfy the child. Six had lingered over the soup, seeming to enjoy the scent of it as much as the taste as he rolled each spoonful several times around in his mouth before swallowing it. Afterward, he’d tugged the scratchy blanket up and under his chin and settled on the lumpy cot mattress with obvious pleasure and smiled slightly as his eyes fluttered and closed. Violet could feel her internal anger building again as she watched him. Had he ever had anything but capsulated food and water? Had he slept on anything besides a sterile metal shelf?
Right now Six looked like a sleeping angel, some kind of otherworldly creature that didn’t have a single care about what did or didn’t happen in the world of mankind or Hemophages. He was innocent and helpless, vulnerable to everything, and Violet couldn’t stop herself from reaching down to touch his cheek.
But no—she pulled her hand back before her fingertips actually made contact with his skin. She mustn’t wake him up or disturb his sleep. He needed his strength to—
Who was she kidding?
All the strength in the world wasn’t going to help him, and she knew it. That wasn’t why she couldn’t touch him. No, it was the contact, the actual act of touching him as she would a human being about whom she actually cared. She couldn’t do that—she couldn’t touch him because she mustn’t connect with him. He needed to be just as much an inanimate object to her as she needed to be to him. After all, in another eight or twelve hours, neither one of them was going to be alive.
But in that case . . . why not?
Because it would hurt them both just too damned much.
Garth stood off to the side, and by the expression on his face, Violet knew he wished he could figure out something comforting to say. He couldn’t, of course, and so the best he could finally do was hold up something for her to see. “I . . . made you this,” he ventured. An object dangled from his fingers, a sturdy necklace with a white metal disc hanging at its apex. “It’s meta-crystal,” Garth explained. “It tracks biorhythms. It’s white now. When it’s black . . .” He didn’t bother to finish but Violet already knew the rest of the sentence.
When it’s black, you’ll be dead.
A hell of a gift, that.
Even so, Violet managed to find a smile as she reached for it. “Been a while since a man gave me jewelry.” She stopped, then suddenly offered it back to him. Her sm
ile had faded. “I don’t think I’ll be needing it.”
But Garth only gave her a tight-lipped glare. Instead of accepting it, he folded his arms stubbornly. “V, come on—this isn’t the way.”
Her eyes flashed. “Haven’t you heard, Garth? Violence is just another word for change. Now if you don’t mind—”
Instead of moving aside, he caught her by the arm when she tried to step past him. “Still playing the good little revolutionary?” he asked bitterly. “If you’re going to go out like this, don’t you think you ought to at least own up to why you’re really doing it?”
Her lips stretched into a grimace, but before she could retort, both she and Garth jumped as someone blurted a string of unintelligible words at them. When they jerked around, they saw Six standing right behind them. His gaze was fixed on Violet, his eyes blurry with sleepiness and fear. Before she could think of what to do or say, he repeated the words, his hands fluttering urgently in the air between them as he tried to make them understand.
“Six,” Violet began. A third repeat of his words, even louder and more frantic than the rest, cut off the rest of what she was going to say. She had to remind herself not to get impatient, to realize that no matter how dire her circumstances or anyone else’s were, she was still dealing with a child . . . one who was apparently prone to sleepwalking on top of everything else. He had limited intelligence and zero life experience. “Six, calm down—it’s okay—”
Obviously, he didn’t think so. Now he was so worked up, he was nearly hyperventilating. Violet knelt in front of him and gripped his thin shoulders, forcing him to focus on her face and mouth. Easy, now. “Remember,” she said with false calmness, “I don’t speak English.”
It was almost as if a light went off in the child’s head, chasing away the sleep fog and making him realize where he was and what he was doing. “I said—” Six had to pause to catch his breath, then he struggled to find the right words. “Please . . . don’t leave me.”
Before Violet could stand or pull away, Six pushed forward and wrapped his arms around her in a tight, fierce hug.
Dawn.
The sweet, quiet night had passed much too quickly, especially considering it was the last one of her life. As usual, Six wasn’t far away, this time just inside the shielding structure of the trailer—no sense in having his tracking device fire up any sooner than necessary—and admiring the meta-crystal that Garth had given him. Right now it was a strange shade of pearlized gray, a tiny but terrifying step down from the bright white it had been at the onset.
“Look,” Garth said under his breath. His voice was filled with urgency. “Just leave him with me. I’ll figure something out.”
Violet and Garth were standing at the very end of the truck, intentionally out of earshot of the child. Now that he was fully awake and bored with the meta-crystal, Six had gone back to wandering around the flat-space interior and inspecting the equipment and computers, looking quizzically at the firearms and other weapons neatly stacked in strategic areas. Sometimes he looked completely baffled, but now and then it was like something would clear in his head and he would understand completely whatever it was he happened to be staring at. To the casual observer—or, as was the case with Violet and Garth—the child’s behavior was downright eerie.
Violet waited long enough to make Garth think she was actually considering his suggestion, then finally shook her head and sighed. “No. He’ll try to follow me . . . and he’s smart. Maybe smarter than you or me.” Her knowing gaze cut to Garth’s. “There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to contain him. He’ll lead them right back to you.”
Garth’s eyes softened and a ghost of a smile played across his lips. “Well, then. Maybe you’ll have to stay here after all. With him.” There was something else in his tone, something unspoken. No, she didn’t want to go there, not now. She couldn’t.
Violet forced herself to meet his gaze and swallowed, but she couldn’t hold it. Before she turned her head, she knew he’d read the answer in her eyes—that wasn’t going to happen. “No,” she said. The word came out as a croak and she cleared her throat harshly, impatient with the ways in which her body was revealing its growing failure. “What you’re doing is too valuable to jeopardize. Listen, I’ll get him to Kristensen. He’s got the equipment—he can get the tracker out of him.”
Garth’s expression went back to being matter-of-fact, unyielding. The face of a man who looks soft from the outside, but inside just won’t buy the bullshit. “You know they’re likely to lock on to it and intercept you long before you make it that far.”
She refused to look back at him. “That’s a chance I guess I’ll have to take.”
“And the ArchMinistry?”
Violet shrugged. “What about it? I guess it’ll just have to wait for another lifetime.”
Garth looked at her warily, then shook his head. “V, I wish I could, but I don’t trust this. As much as I care about her, the Violet I know would be too stubborn and too blind to do an about-face for a child she doesn’t even know.” He didn’t say it, but the rest of his statement was there, hanging in the air between them.
And too smart.
This time when she gazed at him, Violet managed to keep her face utterly bland—no emotion, no fear, nothing. All she did was nod, like an agreeable little robot soldier. “Good-bye, Garth,” she said simply. Six had wandered close enough to where he heard her words and he looked over at her in alarm; without turning to face him, she held out her hand. A moment later his smaller one slipped into hers and he jumped down out of the trailer. As they left, walking quickly to put as much distance between the boy’s tracking device and the oh-so-precious trailer, Violet didn’t look back at Garth.
“Where are we going?”
Sometimes, there was just nothing as good in the world as the truth. “You’ve got a tracking device inside you,” Violet said bluntly. “We’re going to get you someplace safe.”
Maybe.
FIFTEEN
It was almost like déjà vu, a rewinding and restarting of any one of several of yesterday’s adventures.
Except that it was early morning, and this time the crowds of people were going to work instead of having lunch or leaving the office to add to the evening’s rush hour.
And, of course, except that this was one of her last few hours alive.
Violet and Six moved briskly through the crowd. While Violet felt oddly like she was a walking clock with a dying battery, this time Six seemed to be a little more attuned to the world around him. Apparently he’d embraced the idea that he needed to keep up rather than gawk at all the things he’d never seen before. Violet thought that was too bad; in a part of her mind that she didn’t want to acknowledge, she wished she could slow down and take the child shopping, buy him bags full of the toys he’d never had and never would, then take him for pizza and ice cream. There was one of those children’s pizza parlors down at the other end, next to the video outlet store. Had he ever tasted things like pizza and ice cream? She didn’t know for sure, but Violet doubted it—the only image her mind would provide when she tried to imagine his life at the lab was a tiny white room with a sterile metal cot, a toilet, and a slot through which someone shoved bowls of nutritionally complete mush, perhaps coupled with the nutritious capsules that Violet was convinced had been the bulk of his diet. Probably an overreaction, but the way he’d been so overwhelmed by the everyday made her wonder.
So far, so good—they hadn’t seen any security forces, but Violet was too smart to think that would last for long. They might already be within striking distance, this time holding back and quietly surrounding them, waiting for whatever strategic purposes might suit Daxus best. By now there had to have been fallout from the humans who’d been hurt in yesterday’s manhunt, and it remained to be seen whether Daxus was willing to risk a repeat of that. Then again, this was the ArchMinistry she was dealing with, and that entity thought it could do anything.
“Why aren’t you photokemic, t
oo? Like him?” Six asked suddenly.
Violet blinked, then frowned down at him. “Photo say what?”
“Kemic,” Six repeated. His expression was curious. “Negatively phototrophic. Like Garth—sensitive to light.”
She smiled self-consciously, secretly impressed. How strange that he knew nothing about some things, but more than her about others. “You mean, why am I a freak among freaks?”
He returned the smile, but he looked a little doubtful, as if he wasn’t sure if what she was saying was truly funny. “Yeah . . . I guess so.”
Violet shrugged and glanced around again, letting her mind automatically process the crowd and gauge their safety ratio. “I converted with only mild”—she made quote marks in the air with her fingers—“Photokemia—sort of a reverse albinism. Everything else can be suppressed chemically.” She stretched her mouth into a mock grimace that showed all of her teeth. “Teeth ground down. See?”
He peered at her mouth and she could feel with her tongue that her incisors were already starting to elongate again. That was an interesting phenomenon, something that continued to happen no matter how close a Hemophage got to the end of his or her life span. Six nodded his approval. “Neat,” he said.
She couldn’t help chuckling—only a child would find vampire fangs appealing. “They come in handy if you can’t find a can opener,” she joked.
He grinned, then his face went back to being serious. “What’s it like, Violet?”
She started and looked at him for a moment. How much should she tell him? How much of a child was he really, anyway? Like her, he was doomed, and in some way that neither of them could quite grasp, it was for the same reasons. He deserved to know the truth, or at least as much of it as she could convey. “You contract,” she finally said, “then you convert. There’s a deathlike paralysis for several hours. Then you just . . . wake up.” She didn’t try to hide her sad smile. “The fucked-up irony is that you’ve never felt so good.”
Ultraviolet Page 14
