Using every ounce of inner fortitude, I placed one foot in front of the other. The action startled them, and several of the guards shuffled on their feet, their hands trembling as they steadied their aim. Shouting erupted from them all, simultaneously.
I ignored it. I ignored the pounding in my head, the ringing in my ears. Keep walking. Death will be quick. It shouldn’t hurt much. Analiese is gone. My future children are about to be destroyed. If I don’t do this we’ll all be captured anyway. There is nothing left to lose and everything to gain.
I lowered my arms and dropped them to my sides. There was no use in pretending. I wasn’t surrendering. Instead, I smiled and shrugged at the guards. Their bodies stiffened, and seeing their reaction gave me a strange sense of power, a feeling of complete and utter immunity. I had their attention now. I had control of the entire room and they all knew it.
Knowing Kalan would be freaking out back there, I sent him a thought. I’m okay.
Most of the guards continually glanced toward the centre guard, and I assumed he was their leader. I walked directly toward him with stealth. I felt like a lioness, stalking my prey. Queen of the jungle.
“Stop moving. Right now!” he yelled.
I shook my head and continued on. Slow and steady. “No.” I smiled.
“Miss, if you don’t stop, we will have to make you stop. One way or another,” the head guard said. His eyes were hard as flint, his black goatee giving him a fierce countenance.
There was nothing they could do to intimidate me at this point. “You won’t do anything to risk your paycheck. You know I’m the Mitochondrial Eve.”
His eyes narrowed as he hesitated. “Not another step. I mean it.”
I chuckled. “I think you might be interested in knowing the risk you and your men are facing at this moment.” My comment elicited a furrowing of his brow. “I have set the lab on fire. And I think you know what that means.”
Every head jerked toward their leader. He stared straight at me, his eyes wide. He blinked. “Go!” he yelled.
Simultaneously, every gun was lowered and the armour-clad men scrambled toward the exit. They were gone in moments.
I turned back. “Let’s go!” I yelled. Kalan and Marcus came out from around the corner and we went straight for the door. Once out of the building, we ran full tilt. I was slower, so Marcus helped Kalan grasp me under the arms, the two of them almost lifting me off my feet. I felt like I was in an animated film. The roadrunner, my legs going round and round. I pushed my aching bones and barely thawed muscles and ran as hard as I could, my breathing ragged. Marcus let go.
A thunderous boom rang out from behind. We were blasted forward, forced onto our hands and knees, onto bare pavement. Stabbing pain exploded through my knee and palms where I came into contact with concrete and I cried out. Dust, thick and grey, swirled around us as particulate rained down and pelted our backs. Kalan covered his mouth, as did I, but the effort was useless, the air was so thick with the fine dust.
Kalan scrabbled to his feet and grasped my arm. My body was wracked with great gasping coughs and Kalan hacked as well. I’m going to die. In the end, we are all alone. My mother’s face flashed through my mind. I couldn’t leave her. I ran harder.
“Marcus! Take her other arm!” Kalan yelled. “She’s not going to survive if we don’t get her out of here.”
I couldn’t see him, but I knew Marcus was with me when the weight on my feet lifted. We ran. This time I forced my legs to move, my body taxed beyond anything I’d ever experienced before.
Eventually, the particles in the air thinned out, but I continued to cough. Once within a block of the car, Kalan picked me up and ran with me in his arms. I coughed and sputtered, my body curled forward as coughs morphed into gagging.
Tait already had the back door of the car open, his eyes wide as we approached. Kalan lowered me into the backseat and got in beside me. I slumped over onto him and coughed and hacked so hard Kalan’s t-shirt was speckled with a thin spray of blood.
Kalan’s eyes flashed like mirrors reflecting a stormy sky. “Go!”
With a screech of tires, Marcus peeled away. The wail of sirens echoed in the distance.
No longer will a child be considered a blessing from God, but rather, a product manufactured by a scientist. Man will be a created being of man.
-All About Popular Issues
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
KALAN KANE
I’d never seen Marcus drive so fast. We weren’t being pursued, but he continued to speed along, weaving in and out of traffic like a professional racer. But it wasn’t nearly fast enough.
Adriana’s face had turned a deathly white. Her lips and under her nose were dry and chalky with dust from the blast. Her wracking coughs finally stopped, but now she was unconscious. There was no comfort in the quiet, only a deep sense of dread. At least when she was coughing, so hard she had to hold her side, her eyes streaming tears of pain, she’d been conscious. At least I’d known she was still… alive. Now? God, if you do exist, I really need you. Please.
“Adriana, stay with me. Please,” I whispered as I held her clammy face to mine. She was floppy as a rag doll, her body heavy in its slack state.
Tait whimpered in the front passenger seat. Obviously, he’d had a change of heart about walking away from Adriana in her time of vulnerability. “Oh, God,” Tait’s voice wavered. “Why did I say that to her? Why didn’t I come to help you? This is all my fault.” He pressed the back of his shaking hand against his mouth and continually glanced back at Adriana with red-rimmed eyes.
Marcus spoke to Tait, his voice gentle and supportive. “It’s not your fault. Blaming yourself isn’t going to help her now.”
Tait ignored Marcus. “Kalan. Is she going to be okay?” he asked. Before I could respond he turned to Marcus and yelled, “Hurry up! Drive faster!”
“This is as fast as the car goes,” Marcus said perfunctorily. No snide remarks. No quick comeback. Was this the real Marcus?
Tait leaned back and pressed his hand to her forehead. He jerked his hand back, and his eyes widened. I knew he’d felt her cold, clammy skin.
“What if she doesn’t…?” Tait’s voice was barely a whisper. He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his hand over his mouth once again.
Adriana convulsed in my arms. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her mouth dropped open, a strange choking sound emerging from her throat. I shuffled aside so I could lay her down on the backseat. I hovered over her, my ear to her mouth. There was no sound. “Oh, God! No. Please. Please!” I pressed my fingers to her neck. There was no pulse. My heart fell through to my knees.
I started chest compressions.
In some faraway part of my mind I heard Tait’s hysterical questions, but I couldn’t answer. I could only hear my ragged breaths and my own pulse thundering through my ears. I couldn’t take the energy to respond. I had to restart her heart.
After twenty compressions, I leaned over her mouth and listened. Still nothing. Tait continued to badger me with shrill questions, but again, I couldn’t respond.
Adriana’s lips were blue, her skin tone like ash. I repeated another twenty compressions and listened. Nothing.
“Adriana!” I yelled. Marcus swerved to the side of the road and slowed. I punched the back of his seat. “Keep fucking driving! We need to get her to a hospital!” I did another round of compressions, my head pounding, my ears ringing. My own heart rate kept pace with every up and down motion I made. Fifteen. Sixteen. My wrists ached. Seventeen. Eighteen—
Something snapped beneath my fingers, a crunch that vibrated up my palm and made a shiver crawl up my spine.
I’d broken her ribs.
I hesitated, my hands shaking. Another strange sound came from my throat. A gurgle. “Adriana! No. No!” I looked around the car, and took in the horrified expressions of Tait and Marcus. I looked back down to her. Beneath her eyes were dark purple hollows, ma
gnifying her bluish lips. “Oh, God! What should I do?” I placed my hands back on her chest, but I couldn’t bear to press down again. What if the broken rib punctured her heart? It would kill her. But if I stopped compressions, she was dead anyways.
I no longer had an ounce of strength. “I’m so sorry.” I put my hands over her chest and leaned over her so I could use my body weight. Tears fell from my eyes and rained all of her face. One fell into her right eye. I started compressions once again. One. Two. Three.
Instantaneously, the skin around her eye returned to its normal colour. Was I having some kind of delusion? Was I seeing what I wanted to see?
“Oh my God! Kalan, look!” Tait said from the front seat.
Her mouth closed and then opened, and she sucked in a noisy breath. She wheezed so loudly her breath crackled.
A strange tightening built inside my chest followed by pressure in my eyes. Tears of tentative relief slid from my cheeks as I watched her eyes close and then flutter open, the teal irises visible once again.
With each of my tears that fell on her skin, something changed. First, her complexion changed from chalky to rosy once again. The dark circles beneath her eyes disappeared. Then, her breathing evened out. How was this happening? Were my tears doing this?
“What’s happening, Kalan?” Tait demanded.
“She’s healing,” I said.
#
The emergency room admitting staff members were as brusque and unfriendly as usual. They wanted the facts, and with each detail we shared, the deeper the furrows in their brows.
“She was near a building when it exploded,” I repeated for the third time. At least this time, it was the police and not hospital personnel staring at me like I had two heads.
“And you weren’t there?” The grey-haired cop asked. He had heavy circles under his eyes and deep grooves on either side of his mouth. It looked like he hadn’t slept in years.
“That’s what I said, yes.”
“So how, exactly, did you know she was there?” He wrote in his notebook quickly and went back to scrutinizing my face.
“She called me on her cell and told me where she was. I found her in the parking lot,” I held his gaze with what I hoped looked like wholesome confidence.
“Why was she near the Eros lab?” he asked. His hand was still on his notepad as he awaited my response. His gaze felt like it drilled a hole into me.
“She was out for a run. She’s training for a half-marathon.”
He peered at me in silence. His eye twitched. Then he started writing again. “Strange area to train in. Not exactly a residential area. And you two aren’t even from Denver.”
“Adriana runs ten and fifteen miles at a time. She covers a lot of ground. I’m sure she didn’t start out there.” I was thinking on my feet, hoping it all made sense. “We were in Denver on a day trip.”
“Why?”
“Something to do.”
His eyes narrowed. “Where did she start her run, then?”
My mind whirred. Where was the car? What was a plausible reason for her to have run that far?”
Marcus came up behind me, patted me on the back, and smiled at the police officer.
“Adriana asked me to drop her off a few blocks from there. She was planning to stop in at Eros to see if they could help her understand her blood disorder,” Marcus said, his demeanor calm and relaxed. “She was trying to find a geneticist who would have some insight into her and her sister’s genetic condition.”
Adriana’s beautiful face drifted into my mind. She was so courageous, having gone through what she had. The death of her sister, such a short time ago, getting kidnapped, and then coming up with a strategy to evade the guards and blow the building. I had nothing but the utmost love and respect for her.
The police officer’s gruff voice pulled me from my inner thoughts. “Who are you?” he asked, his eyes flicked back and forth between us.
“He’s my twin,” I said. Marcus flashed a fake smile.
The police officer grunted in acknowledgement. “What’s this about her sister’s case?”
“Adriana has a blood disorder. Her sister died a few weeks ago,” Marcus made a face, an attempt at looking concerned. “Botched blood transfusion.”
Now his grey eyebrows met in the middle. “And this Eros place, what is it?”
Marcus set his hand on the cop’s shoulder. He looked at Marcus’s hand like it was contaminated.
Marcus levelled his gaze at the police officer. “Look. My brother is concerned about his girlfriend. Might I suggest you ask me the questions, and let him check on Adriana?”
The police officer’s pupils dilated and his face went limp. Marcus smiled. “Problem solved.”
“Hardly. He’ll still have to put in his report. It’s going to look pretty incomplete.”
“I’ll deal with him later.” Marcus shrugged. “You should go to Adriana. She’ll be gaining consciousness soon.”
“Where’s Tait?” I asked.
“He’s getting us coffee.”
I cocked my head to the side. “On his own free will?” I asked.
Marcus glared in response. “What was that back there? She was dying. I’ve never heard of anyone enduring so many compressions and then miraculously coming back to life. What did you do?”
“My tears. They healed her,” I said. Just saying it sounded preposterous.
Marcus smiled and nodded as if his suspicions had been confirmed. “I knew it.” He started laughing, his laughter oddly happy and out of place. “Jesus. We’re fucking freaks.”
“So you’ve never done that… I mean, healed someone before?” I asked.
Marcus’s face twisted in a look of mocking. “Are you kidding? Do you think I’ve ever cried over anyone in my entire life?”
He had a point. Did sociopaths like Marcus cry about anything?
“What about Genevieve?” I asked.
“What about her?” Marcus’s expression was unreadable.
“She must have died in the explosion,” I said. Finding her and then losing her in such a short period of time hurt. Even though we’d communicated only a few words to one another, most of it mind to mind, I’d found her to be a lovely person. Someone I wanted to know better, someone who could have finally unlocked the secrets to my existence. I knew some details, through observing conversations between her and Malcolm, but there was so much more I’d wanted to ask her. And now I never could. Forever an orphan.
I watched Marcus, unable to predict his response. He’d endeared himself to me in the last few hours and I hoped it would continue.
“Screw her. She deserved what she got.” Marcus spun on his heel and walked away.
My hope evaporated.
“I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature.”
-Francis Collins, Director, National Human Genome Research Institute
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ADRIANA SINCLAIR
I awoke to Kalan hovering over me, his eyes glassy and bloodshot. I glanced around. Everything in the room was ivory and off-white, from the walls, to the curtains, to Kalan’s complexion. I was in the hospital.
Kalan caressed my cheek with his thumb. “Hi.”
“Hi,” I said with a croak. My throat felt raw and hot, like I’d swallowed sandpaper and then sucked on a banana pepper.
“You’re in the hospital,” Kalan said.
“I guessed that much.”
Kalan sucked in a long, audible breath. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ve been better.” I reached up and ran a fingertip over his lips. “And you?”
Kalan kissed my forehead. “One-hundred percent. Rapid healing still works like a charm.”
I tried to raise my head and look down at my body, but my neck was too stiff. “Is there anything wrong with me?”
Kalan shook his head. His chest h
eaved with yet another long intake of air. “A broken rib that now appears like just a fracture. Some bumps and bruises. You inhaled a lot of dust…”
“A broken rib?” I tried to recall a moment where I’d broken a rib, but I couldn’t. “How did that happen?”
Kalan’s expression drooped. Guilt? The man wore his heart on his sleeve. “It’s my fault. I was doing chest compressions and… I broke your rib. I’m so sorry.”
Chest compressions? The last thing I remembered was running. “Why were you doing chest compressions?”
“You had no pulse. You inhaled too much dust.” Kalan looked like he was confessing to a murder. “But the doctors say your healing rate is faster than normal.”
“Faster than normal?” I asked. “Why?”
Kalan once again had an odd expression on his face. One I couldn’t read at all. He pursed his lips together and then answered, “I thought I’d lost you. I’d been doing compressions for so long… and then I broke your rib on top of it. I… I was sure it was over.” His voice broke, and he completed his words in a near-whisper. “One of my tears fell into your eye, and then everything changed. You started to heal.”
“The tears? Mine burn you and yours heal me?” I could hardly believe it.
Kalan nodded. “Apparently, yes.”
I shook my head. How was this possible? What more could Kalan do that we didn’t know about? What more could I do? My tears burned him, but why?
“Thank you.” I grabbed his hand and squeezed.
His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat and he blinked rapidly, his eyes glassy. “You’re welcome.” He smiled and his entire demeanor changed. “Anytime.”
“There are so many unanswered questions. Are we ever going to get answers?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question, but it had to be raised.
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