by Maguire, Ily
“You mean my organs could make you quite a bit of money.”
“Well I didn’t say that, but now that you mention it,” JJ grins.
“Harvesting my organs?” I hear the shrillness in my voice. “That’s way worse than replacing them altogether–”
“No, it’s not. With an AR your organs would be liquefied. In this case you’d be donating them to say, science,” his grin widens.
“No! I won’t do it! I won’t become someone else! Something else.”
“You’d still be you, Rose. You’d still be you,” he grabs my shoulders.
“Let go!” I free myself, pushing past. I turn in the doorway to face him. Patience immediately comes to mind. “Who else wants to use me in this sick little game?”
He pauses and takes a step back.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Rose. I don’t know why you’d want me to perform more tests. It’s not necessary at this point.”
“What’re you talking about? I didn’t say anything about–” I squint at him. He’s pulling a shirt on like he’s all the sudden modest.
“What’s going on here JJ? Rose, what are you doing?” Pike says. He and Ezekiel stand behind me, almost accusing, like I’m doing something wrong or I shouldn’t be here. What kind of girl does he take me for? I push past them and run down the stairs to my room. Tears stream down my face. I’m angry. For some reason, I’m sad, too.
Patience stands in the doorway of my room. The labcoat and goggles are gone.
“Rose, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’d just like to be left alone.” I push past her and attempt to shut the door. I can see Pike standing against the second floor railing looking down at me.
“But I wanted to talk to you,” Patience persists.
“I’m not really in the mood to talk right now, Patience.” I’m trying to be neurotic. I push her out of the way.
“Oh. Okay. I’ll come back later, then.”
Pike turns from the balcony and I can’t tell if it’s disappointment or disgust. He has no idea about JJ and his motives.
“Oh Rose, I almost forgot,” she pushes a letter through the remaining crack. “Another letter for you.”
“Thank you!” I snatch the letter, but before I can close the door she has pricked my finger with something sharp.
“Ouch,” I yelp. The door closes. I put my finger in my mouth. There’s that metallic taste again. Now it’s too dark to read anything. It’ll have to wait until later. It’s the first time since getting here that I’ve outright cried like a little girl.
Like the little girl I used to be.
15
16, March
Dear Rose,
Someone came by today looking for you. They said they wanted to purchase natural organs. Dad almost hit the roof. What’s going on? I don’t know what any of this means, but Dad seemed to know. I’m going to say it – if you’re in trouble, make sure you have someone there you can trust. I don’t know how safe things are or going to get. I don’t think I can write anymore. Just be careful.
All my love,
Dory
I had almost forgotten about the letter after the incident with JJ.
Someone wants to buy my organs. Someone wants to sell my organs. I shake my head and jam the letter under the mattress with the others. For money. I’m not sure I believe he would go through with it without my consent, but then, I really don’t know him well enough.
I don’t know anyone well enough.
“Who can I trust?” Like Dory says in her letter, I need to find someone on my side.
The door creaks open, but no one is there. I blow out the candle. I get up and walk over to close the door all the way, but think twice. I step outside my room. No one’s around, except for something behind the fountain.
My footsteps make soft shushing sounds on the dirt floor. I lift them higher, but it slows me down.
As I approach the fountain, I don’t hear anything but running water and the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears. I almost don’t see anything until I get closer. A shadow from behind the fountain moves slightly. Enough for me to notice its size.
“Ezekiel? What’re you doing?”
Ezekiel drops his arm, but I think he’s finished transmitting whatever it is he was entering into his implanted computer.
“Are you sending something? I didn’t think that was okay. Will the Imperial Bead catch you? Will they find out we’re here?” I’m nervous and confused. Isn’t it really bad if we get caught?
“Keep it down, keep it down.” Ezekiel pulls on his long sleeves. I hadn’t noticed the extent of the tattoos on his dark skin before. They completely cover his upper arms. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
“Well, what were you doing then?” I accuse. “You’ll get us caught,” I say, though I don’t know what this means or how it could happen. Still, I feel empowered like I have some sort of right.
“So what? What happens to you if we get caught? You go back to your affluent life. The life you had before.”
“I – I –” I wasn’t expecting this.
“And if your organs get replaced?”
“But you know that won’t happen. Not now,” I say. He’s scaring me.
Ezekiel ignores me. He doesn’t even look at me. “You’ll get to live even longer. The rest of us here don’t have that option, don’t have that money, the resources, or family connections.”
“Why’re you talking about this?” The room spins. Or is it me that’s dizzy?
“Because you can stand to hear it. You need to hear it,” he says, taking a breath.
No I can’t. I gasp for air.
“You leave here and your life goes back to normal. I leave here and I have nothing.”
“What?” My mind races to Pike. “How could you have nothing?”
Ezekiel turns on me. “If I get sick, I don’t heal like you do. None of us here do.”
“But you can be made comfortable here. If you’re ill,” I sound naïve and I know it. I understand somewhat, I think.
“We’ve all been exposed to so many neurotoxins that our tissue can’t repair or regenerate any longer. The Imperial Bead doesn’t care about us out there. In here, we have each other. If we get caught, we lose all of that. See, Rose–”
It’s the first time he’s called me by my name.
“–we’re not like you. We don’t want to be like you.”
His words sting. I haven’t felt this before. Hurt. I may cry.
“Why don’t you get AR’d then?” I don’t know what to say, so I say something stupid.
He doesn’t answer. I shouldn’t have asked.
“I haven’t done anything,” I say after a minute. “You’re transmitting messages.”
“You’re the reason I’m transmitting messages, Rose! Who do you think tells your sister you’re okay?”
“You transmit to Dory? How do you know my sister?” I don’t know what I feel about this or how I should feel. How does Dory know anyone from outside?
He pushes me out of the way and I’m angry. I want to push him back, but think better of it. I turn and stomp up the two flights of stairs to Pike’s room. As I walk down the hallway, my anger diffuses and I stop a few doors down from his room. Hara closes Pike’s door as she exits. She doesn’t notice me as she walks off in the opposite direction. I change my mind and turn to go back down the way I came.
“Rose, can we talk?” JJ stands a few feet down in his open doorway. This time he is fully clothed. Still, I’m startled and disarmed. I don’t want to be disarmed.
“I was coming up to speak to Pike.” To tattle on Ezekiel, I think, but not now that he was just entertaining Hara.
“Oh. He’s not even here. In Aegis,” he specifies. “Come in. It’ll take just a few minutes. I want to clear up some things.”
Not this again.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea, JJ,” I pause as I see Ezekiel coming up the stairs behind me. “Just for a
minute,” I say and follow him into his room. What am I doing?
The door closes behind me.
16
“Okay, so what do we need to clear up?” I don’t take the seat JJ offers.
“Would you like something to eat?” He holds out a plate of tiny pastries. Where did he get these? Aegis doesn’t have a bakery.
“No, thank you.” It may be the first time in a long time I’ve felt hungry. I’ve been taking these vitamins and they seem to keep hunger pangs away. “What’s this about, JJ?”
“I would just like to talk to you a bit.”
“I’m not going to change my mind about anything, especially not what you proposed before.”
“No, no, that’s not it.” He pours himself something from a teapot on a hot plate. How does he have electricity? Am I the only one left in the dark here?
“Well, what is it then? I really have to find Pike.”
“What for? I mean, like I said, he’s not even in Aegis today.” JJ’s look is curious, his eyes squint at me.
He did say that.
This room makes me nervous. The walls seem to shift in tone depending on his mood, and right now they’re the deep red of a clenched fist.
“Do you have any more tests for me to undergo, JJ?”
JJ smiles and shakes his head. “Not right now. Time is a manipulated variable in this little experiment I like to call Rosamund Campbell. We need to see how time affects all things Rose.”
JJ sips his tea. I knew there would be a lapse in testing, but I didn’t realize how long. I’ve been here at least a month now and I don’t have a solid idea of what it looks like when all the tests are done. Will I get to go home? Do I want to?
“I also asked you in here,” JJ continues.
“To convince me? I’m done with this conversation. Really. I’ve got to go.”
“I wanted to apologize for the way I pressured you,” he rubs my arm. It feels the same as it did before. My skin crawls. “I just needed you to understand the urgency in all of this. It really is for the ultimate good, even if it doesn’t seem like so at first.”
“What’s so urgent, though?”
“Every day people like us get a little closer to death. We are dying, Rose. A little more than the day before. How would you feel if someone in your family was dying? If someone in your family died?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I would care,” I say and can’t believe that it came out of my mouth. I try to think about Dory or little Evie and I get a tinge of emotion, but nothing when I think of my mother or father. How strange.
“Not even your sisters?” He is baiting me. How does he know I have sisters?
I shake my head, though I think I would be sad if they were gone. I was especially close with Dory. I do love her and Evie, too.
“So this is why we have to act fast? It has nothing to do with making money fast?” I ask him.
“Nothing about this would make us money fast, Rose.”
I lean away from him. I don’t trust him. I can’t trust him.
“What would you suggest we do? How would you set this whole thing in motion? Would you connect me to some sort of life-support and slice off parts of my organs?”
JJ laughs.
“I don’t think it’s funny.”
“Rose, you’re not some deli meat. It wouldn’t be like you described at all.”
“Then tell me, what would it be like?” I fold my arms across my chest.
“The process would begin the day before. You would have to fast for 24 hours, but you’d be infused with various vitamins and minerals generally missing in regular diets. That shouldn’t be a problem for you. Then we’d hook you up to an IV of rejuvenating fluids. You’d have to get a lot of sleep the day before the procedure, so we’d keep you on bed rest.”
“You mean you and Hara. You could do all of this here?”
“We could. We’d have everything sterilized and set up. Hara is quite capable of performing everything herself.”
I stifle a laugh. She’s just a nurse. “And then what?”
“Then, whether you’re here in my room, or in the lab, we’d biopsy your organs one at a time. There wouldn’t be any slicing. Just a really long needle gathering a specified amount of viable cells to regrow in something similar to a Petri dish.”
“Wouldn’t that be the same as cloning?”
“Not exactly. Once we regrew your organs, we could change the genetic code to match the recipient. It doesn’t sound like it, but it really would be much less work. All we would need are the cells. They’d take care of the rest given time.”
“All of my organs?”
JJ nods. At least he isn’t shrugging.
“My heart?”
He nods again. “And your brain,” he adds.
“My brain? How could you get those cells without killing me?”
“That would be a bit more delicate,” he says.
“Explain it to me.” I’m getting testy. The sound of his voice already belies the challenge of the task.
“We’d have to stop your heart to harvest the cells. I agree, it wouldn’t be easy, but it is so necessary to further science and test the limits of human capacity,” he talks to himself now, not to me.
“Test the limits of human capacity,” I repeat. “Like with your parents?”
“That isn’t the same, Rose. They had no choice. But nothing they underwent caused them to suffer undue pain.”
Like a robot, he talks of his parents much like Patience did when we were first introduced. I’ve become speechless. I don’t know what to say even given the ability. It’s a lot to wrap my brain around and that’s before it’s biopsied. How much of this plan does Pike know and how much did he consent to?
“But once we had them,” JJ continues, again talking at me, “we’d start it up again. You’d be fine.”
“Yeah, but if I wasn’t, and my heart didn’t restart, you’d be free to take all of my organs without worrying about the opinion of Rosamund Campbell. That sounds like a much better plan to me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Rose.” JJ grabs my shoulders. He has the same tone my father did that night in the hospital. Condescending. Like I have no say in what happens to me, like I don’t know what I’m thinking about. “With you dead, your organs would die, too. They would be worthless without you alive. It would all be a complete waste.”
He lets my shoulders drop. He’s so strong; he was almost holding me up. I feel the weight of my body and I have to regain my balance.
“And my brain? What about that?” I ask.
“Again, we’d have to stop all neurological processes. Though if anything went wrong, not that it would, we’d just implant a chip until we could right things.”
A chip.
“What if I want to leave? Just go home?” I don’t like what he’s proposing. It terrifies me.
“What do you think would happen to you if you go home? Once the Imperial Bead finds out you have such an unprecedented genetic code, which I’m sure they have already, that’s exactly what they’ll do – hook you up to machines and keep your organs alive with or without you. We can’t do that here because we don’t have the capabilities. The Beadledom does, though.”
“So you’ve thought about it?” I, too, consider the validity of this point.
“Rose. Come on now. No one here wants to lose you. We like you. We can keep you safe here.”
“You want to use me, though.”
JJ shakes his head. There’s something terribly charming about him even as he discusses my potential demise. I didn’t learn about any of this during my studies. I don’t know how to relate to others, let alone deal with charming boys.
No, I won’t let him in. I don’t dislike him. I don’t trust him.
“Okay,” I resume. “So you’re going to try to not let me die. What’s in it for me? Fame? Fortune?”
“None of this is about fame, Rose. Think about it. Instead of having completely artificial organs, peop
le could have natural, regenerating ones. There would be nothing fake about them, and they could remain healthy as long as those organs lasted. If their original parts were sick or dying, they could be replaced with yours that never get sick. Were you ever sick as a child?”
I think back, but I can’t remember ever being ill. Not even a little cold. I shake my head.
“These people’s organs could be replaced with real, living parts, grown to their own specifications of size, weight, genetic code. No one would have to lose anyone. No one would lose themselves.”
“But would I be expected to be an unlimited donor. How long would I have to do this?”
JJ pauses and I don’t expect he wants to give me a truthful answer.
“As long as it took to find others like you, or if there was a way to keep the regenerated organs alive without you for any length of time.”
“And you’re sure you can do that here?”
“We think we can try. Hara will be working on that.”
That doesn’t comfort me. I don’t know that I trust her any more than I trust JJ. A couple of kids with basic medical training.
“And we’d be doing this for free? Only the most in need would be recipients, right?” I think about everyone here and what Ezekiel said. I think about Pike. I might consider it then, just with modifications.
“Well, now Rose, let’s not be hasty,” JJ clasps his hands and then lets them go. “We might need a little outside capital to get things going, but in time, eventually, that would be the goal.”
“So you’re saying you’d sell these regrown organs? For how much?” I can’t believe I’m even considering it. This is ridiculous. I must be in some alternate universe. I’ve only heard of this stuff before in books. In real life, it’s unbelievable. Impossible, even. Isn’t it?
“It wouldn’t be like for sale in a store, but it would be to an investor or group of investors. Then they’d see what the market could sustain. Who gets first crack at it.”
“I don’t like this, JJ. It’s a lot of risk and a lot of work and I’m the one at risk. And then to sell them to the highest bidder. You’d sell my organs.”
“Don’t be selfish, Rose.”
