Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  She’d been asleep in front of the screen, waking to find her fingers curled in her hair, a habit she’s kept from girlhood. She’d untangled her hand from her mane, remembering how her father used to braid it for her, clumsily, even when she was in college. One of the last times she’d seen her father, before the nameless toxin crept into his and her mother’s lungs, Tasha had been home for Christmas and was washing dishes after dinner. Her sister Leona stood nearby, probably proselytizing about one political cause or another. He’d tweaked Leona’s tight curls and looped Tasha’s ponytail around his fingers.

  “Curly and Moe,” he’d smiled.

  A few months after, the coughing had started. A week later it stopped, and Tasha was on a train to Kentucky, wondering if people wore black to cremations the way they did to funerals.

  That night before the Change, Tasha had awakened and was thinking these thoughts when the tab she’d had up onscreen, still chattering to itself, had gone white, transitioning to commercial. The white lifted Tasha’s sleep-blurred eyes, and she watched the materialization of a shimmering woman with skin like the inside of an oyster shell, so perfectly pale it was almost silver. She had beamed at Tasha, staring her in the eyes.

  “Is your family safe?” The voice was like clear, warm oil. “Do you think you can protect them? You can’t. Not without Cybranu.”

  Tasha had sat transfixed, as if before a swaying cobra. The woman’s glimmer leapt across the room and slithered into Tasha’s pupils.

  “If you’ve lost a loved one, you know how difficult illness can be—not just for those lost…but for those they leave behind.”

  Tasha had risen from the couch and stared at the woman like a sleepwalker.

  “With Cybranu, you don’t have to lose anyone else. This tiny chip” –a beautifully manicured hand gesturing to a smooth, sloping neck—“can protect your family, your parents, your children. There is nothing to fear with the Cybranu health implant.”

  Tasha had never known how her parents had become sick and thus had never known what to avoid. The information Leona got from the doctors who deigned to see them was speculative: both of her parents’ lungs contained traces of the same toxins. There was no explanation. Without MINK, the specialists wouldn’t see them. Her parents both withered away like cicada shells. If they’d had MINK policies—and thus the protection of the Chip—then maybe they’d be alive and not vases of ash spread over the goldenrod in Kentucky.

  The woman onscreen had faded away, her hands outstretched like an angel.

  “Think of your family. Shield them from a dangerous world. Only Cybranu can protect you.”

  The screen had melted back into white.

  Tasha is still on the floor, lying on her mother’s rug and remembering. They hadn’t been able to afford MINK—not many could without a corporate job—and in the end, it had meant their deaths. Tasha’s hands are clenching the rug, an involuntary clinging to the earth. She doesn’t like to commit to these memories—sometimes she feels as if she watches them from the ceiling; a ghost of Christmas Past, a voyeur of her own life. To her left she can see the small country of dust bunnies that has colonized the region under the couch. She’d heard somewhere that dust bunnies were the product of humans shedding their skin cells, the cells floating into the air like sparks from a campfire, only to settle into strange lumpy tumbleweeds. Like ash. When she and Leona had sprinkled their parents over the field behind the kennel, she imagined them standing before her, dematerializing, slipping away into smoke. She couldn’t have touched them if she tried.

  She looks away from the dust. In another time, she might have decided to decimate the bunnies’ little town with a vacuum. Not now.

  “Tasha?”

  Tasha jerks as Dinah’s voice drifts into the living room. Tasha’s focus on the past had blurred the present, and now it lands on her like a cartoon piano. She scrambles up from where she lies on the floor, suddenly anxious to talk to the voice next door—anything to extract her from the cocoon she’s been wrapping herself in all morning.

  “Yes,” she calls, hurrying into the bedroom, “I’m here.”

  “There’s a group of them on Berwyn. I can see them,” says Dinah’s muffled voice, sounding thin.

  Tasha rushes to the window in the bedroom and, squatting low, peers out.

  Dinah’s right—there’s a pack of the Minkers milling around an alleyway on Berwyn. Among them, there is someone on the ground. On the twentieth floor it’s too high for Tasha to really tell, but she thinks she can make out blood on the pavement around the prone form. She clenches her teeth. She can hear Dinah crying softly. Who is that person on the pavement? It could be anyone. It could be Gina, Tasha thinks with a stab of something that might be grief, her sometimes-friend/sometimes-frenemy before the Change, who she had gone to college with, worked retail with, hunted for boys with. It could be Gina, or Scout, or any number of the names that she had known—shopping companions, drinking buddies, spa compatriots. But it couldn’t be Gina, Tasha reminds herself bitterly, not that body on the ground surrounded by barking maniacs. It couldn’t be Gina, because before the Change, Gina had gotten the Chip. If Gina is down on the sidewalk, she’s not dead: she’s alive, her mouth coated in blood. There are two kinds of people left, Tasha thinks. Us, and them. In that way, she supposes, not much has changed: just who occupies each category, a shuffling of cards.

  Tasha crouches by the window until her legs burn. Next door, Dinah is still crying.

  “What a world,” Tasha whispers. “What a fucking world.”

  Chapter 3

  Like every moron, Tasha wanted the Chip at first. Cybranu was on every e-board, every screen on the L, every ad, sinking into her eyeballs like salt on a slug. Gina had convinced Tasha to take a day off from work (when she still had a job) and go to Cybranu headquarters for the implant. They’d go together, Gina had wheedled, hold each other’s hands when the injector came to hover by their necks, whisper clichéd comforts as the pain came—the things friends do. Tasha had agreed. It was a Wednesday. April 27th.

  “So she had MINK,” Dinah says through the wall. They’re talking about the weeks before the Change like the countdown before the shiny dropping ball on New Year’s Eve. Everything seems swollen with significance.

  “Yeah, she had it. Her dad was rich. She was on Legacy.”

  Tasha remembers Gina standing in the narrow hallway—Tasha stares at the door, remembering Gina walking through it—applying lip-gloss in the hall mirror. Gina had studied her own reflection with her mouth slightly open, either awestruck or appalled by what she saw, as if she wasn’t quite sure she believed the glass.

  “Figures. Dale was on Legacy too. His parents were loaded. Politicians, I think.”

  Dale. The bathroom beast. He has a name.

  “Anyway,” Dinah continues, apologetic for interrupting. “Keep going.”

  Tasha remembers trying on three different outfits the morning she had gone with Gina to Cybranu: it seems so stupid now, but she thinks of the process of putting on and taking off clothes—the fragments of dressedness and undressedness paraded in and out of the mirror—with a sweet, heavy nostalgia. The sweetness is bittered only slightly by the presence of Gina in the memory: catty, smirking Gina. Gina had been dressed already, wearing bright pink, a bird of paradise with cleavage.

  Tasha had looked Gina up and down.

  “Are you really wearing that?”

  Gina looked down at herself, then into the mirror, then back at Tasha.

  “What? Yeah, why not?”

  “You look like a blonde Kim Kardashian.”

  Gina paused and raised an eyebrow.

  “…who?”

  “No one.” Tasha had turned back to the bedroom and continued hunting through piles of clothes. Gina followed her.

  “What? Jealous? Who knows, there might be some Cybranu hotties.”

  Tasha snorted as she tugged on her jeans, doing the time-honored jig of women worldwide to make her butt fit into the denim
.

  “It’s a doctor’s appointment, Gina. The doctor’s not gonna ask you ‘Blood type and cup size, please.’”

  “He might!”

  “Or she.”

  Gina paused.

  “Maybe if I was drunk.”

  “Jesus Christ. Get out of the way, we’re going to be late.”

  “Ooh, I like the backpack. Prada?”

  “It’s new. Let’s go.”

  “We took the L,” Tasha says to Dinah. Dinah is silent, no doubt struggling to remember the last time she had ridden the train, what it had been like. Tasha had been staring her fellow passengers—the collective urban pastime—when an advertisement for Cybranu illuminated the car from above.

  “…a new lease on life,” Tasha could hear the soothing, vaguely robotic male voice murmuring from hidden speakers. “And a stronger immune system to counteract foreign diseases and bacteria.”

  Gina was able to move closer to Tasha as a wave of Chicagoans exited the car at New Wilson. Following Tasha’s gaze, her eyes reached the ad, which now showcased a young, excruciatingly fit woman with impossibly blonde hair beaming joyfully down at them. Someone was always beaming at you in advertisements. Her voice carried down through the buzz of the car,

  “Thanks to Cybranu I lost ten pounds, and I’m stronger and healthier than I’ve ever been.”

  “Is it going to hurt?” Tasha turned to Gina.

  Gina had been staring at her Glass and checking her messages. The Glass is transparent, like everything that is both stylish and hi-tech, and Tasha could see the words on the screen through the device, even if they were backwards. But that’s part of the appeal of a Glass: showing off.

  “Is it going to hurt?” Tasha repeated.

  “You won’t feel a thing,” Gina said, not looking up.

  Tasha had considered the idea of not feeling a thing as the L rocked soundlessly along the tracks, weighing the advantages and disadvantages. Numbness had its risks: what if they accidentally hacked her throat open while attempting to implant the little chip? She would be laid back on the sterile white table, humming and looking at the ceiling, twiddling her thumbs while she obliviously leaked to death, the doctors scurrying around to stanch the blood. But she supposed this wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Even if she did die in a puddle of her own fluids, she’d be blissfully ignorant, humming away to her last breath. Above, the ad continued, various beautiful people appearing on the glowing screen to extol the virtues of Cybranu.

  “I hope I brought my MINK card,” Gina had said, pawing through her purse.

  “Rubbing it in your face,” Dinah says shrilly.

  “I know, right?” It’s the first time Tasha has felt like laughing in days. “She totally was. She was that kind of girl.” She feels slightly guilty for using the word “was” so freely. But Gina had never been a friend, not a real one. Tasha can’t remember having a real friend, not since she and her sister were six and eight, braiding hair and chasing dandelion fluff. But what does that make Dinah, she thinks quickly. Tasha has only known her—really known her—for five days now. But she’s certainly something.

  The two women on their opposite sides of the wall are silent for a moment.

  “You know, I didn’t even know what MINK was until I met Dale,” Dinah says quietly, almost too quietly for Tasha to hear.

  “No?” Tasha tries not to sound shocked. She doesn’t know where Dinah was from, but it had to have been in a turtle shell under a rock for her not to have heard of MINK. It was the only provider of health coverage in the country, founded by the great Barton Knox three decades or so back.

  “I moved here from Mexico,” Dinah says, a little defiantly, “before you guys made it Newest Mexico. We had Universal before we got absorbed. None of this Medical Inoculation Network of Knicks crap.”

  “Knox,” Tasha corrects, laughing a little. “The Medical Inoculation Network of Knox.”

  “Yeah…him,” Dinah says flatly, then laughs. Tasha wishes she could see her face. “Why’d you guys go along with that shit anyway?”

  Tasha shrugs despite the fact that no one can see it but her.

  “I don’t know. My parents would have been too young to vote when it was proposed. I’ve seen the videos online of the protests. People bombed Barton Knox’s house at first. I don’t think the States were entirely cool with the whole MINK thing, but Knox was rich. He cannibalized all the smaller health companies and made himself the head honcho.” She winces at her use of “cannibalize” and hopes Dinah hadn’t noticed.

  “What did you even need it for?” Dinah asks. “I mean, besides the Chip.” Tasha wonders why Dinah didn’t ask Dale this kind of stuff before the Change, but if he was the kind of guy she had to hide in the bathroom from after he’d been drinking, she can imagine that asking certain questions was a no-go.

  “Antibiotics, prosthetics, breast implants, new kidneys, everything.”

  “So if you had the flu…”

  “You’d just have the flu unless you had MINK. If you had something as stupid as a yeast infection, you still needed MINK. Most doctors wouldn’t even let you in the door unless you had it.”

  Dinah scoffs.

  “At all? What if you just couldn’t afford the premiums? You couldn’t pay cash?”

  “Sometimes they’d let you put it on MCPs—”

  “MCPs?”

  “Medical credit provider cards.” She pauses, thinking of her parents. “But the interest rates were insane.”

  “How much were the premiums?”

  “Put it this way…a year of MINK payments could pay for a seat on the shuttle tour of the Moon they do every three years.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  They’re silent for awhile and Tasha feels vaguely annoyed. She’d been hoping to be distracted from thinking about her parents by talking to Dinah, but here she is again. Her parents’ condition had worsened, and without MINK the bills charged to MCP cards had mounted rapidly, the lot of them quickly maxed and the credit cut off. That’s where the treatment had stopped—any further therapy or medication could only have been paid for by selling the kennel they’d owned since before they were married, which Tasha’s parents refused to do. In the end, though, that’s exactly what had to be done, as neither Leona, a refugee of sorts, or Tasha, a college student, had any money. Leona had overseen the selling of the kennel in order to pay the stone-faced collector. The two sisters had stood outside the gates after signing the papers, staring through the grim metal at the rows and rows of pens once occupied by keening dogs.

  “So you didn’t have MINK?” Dinah asks eventually, and Tasha sighs.

  “No. But my job would have offered it with discounted rates after I’d worked there for nine months, so I could’ve had it eventually.”

  “A discount would have been nice. I should have gotten a job with you. Where did you work?”

  “The Apiary.”

  “The shopping mall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. With the blue uniforms?”

  Tasha sighs. The uniforms were infamous.

  “Yeah. Other companies would’ve given a discount too, though. Anyone with government contracts. McDonald’s. Wal-Mart. The army. Unless you failed the Knox exam.”

  Dinah shifts in her apartment. The walls are so thin Tasha can feel the movement from where she leans. They must be nearly back-to-back.

  “Ohh, I heard about the Knox exam.” She’s interested now: tabloid stuff. “Like with the Frenches.”

  Tasha nods, remembering. It was a widely- publicized incident: Maxwell and Sayuri French—philanthropic millionaires, founders of Change for the Socially Estranged—were rejected for MINK coverage because (the Frenches believed) their mission was to build enormous relief centers for the States’ homeless, which wasn’t too popular with Knox lobbyists. The story burned hot and fast: when pressed for comment, the MINK board released a statement that suggested the Frenches were dangerous radicals and stated that MIN
K had the sole discretion to reject any applicant whose Knox Exam results were questionable. Furthermore, the statement said, the MINK Corporation believed strongly in “the dignity of the homeless,” and the centers the Frenches desired to build violated that dignity. And that was all.

  “What happened to them?” Dinah says, no doubt recalling all the crazy rumors. “I heard that Sayuri had some terminal illness that was eating through her internal organs like little ratones, and through their money too. After MINK dissed them, they disappeared.”

  Tasha remembers. Even the National Enquirer hadn’t been able to sniff them out, though Tasha had seen a headline once: “Frenches Use Final Funds for Last Trip to Space.” Tasha imagines them bouncing in slow motion across the surface of the Moon, seeking homeless extra-terrestrials who they could provide some service for. Of course, at that point, they had been more the vagrant ETs themselves. Tasha wonders if Sayuri died from whatever illness she was facing, or if she’d gone down at the jaws of Minkers, who had carried their MINK cards proudly. More like MINK tablets: metal things the size of a business card, thin but solid; not heavy, plated with artificial gold. Gina had shown Tasha hers every chance she got, but never let Tasha hold it.

  “What was Cybranu like? Did you see anyone famous getting their Chip? My friend went to get hers and saw the mayor’s wife in the waiting room.”

  Dinah pauses. It’s become a mental sequence: one cannot mention someone getting the Chip without then remembering that the person is somewhere in the city now, gnawing on necks.

  “No,” Tasha says quickly, to pop the heavy balloon that inflates between these thoughts, but also because she has remembered something. “No, I didn’t see anyone famous. But I did see this weird lady in the subway.”

  Downtown, Tasha and Gina had exited the train underground, borne along by swarms of Chicagoans. Tasha remembers the walls and the cracked pavement as damp, a vague dripping sound echoing from someplace down the train’s shadowy wormhole. Whenever she was in the subway, Tasha had the half-fearful, half-hopeful expectation that an ancient Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle would come strolling down one of the tunnels the city had cordoned off when they released the new trains. Tasha had heard about mole people—crazies who withdrew from society, choosing to live in the eternally nocturnal burrows of L’s from bygone days. She could imagine one of the loons putting on a half-shell and getting into some throwback crime fighting. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing in the world, or the city. The only uproar would be between the Net hosts battling over interview and reality show rights.