Sinless

by Sarah Tarkoff

  “I’m sorry,” I said, hugging him.

  His voice got softer. “You were right. You knew we couldn’t trust them.”

  “But I still shouldn’t have tried to rescue Dr. Marko on my own with no information,” I admitted.

  “I’m glad you did. Because it’s what got you here, and we wouldn’t have gotten Marko out of that cell without you convincing him.”

  I looked over at Owen, who was helping Marko into the back of the truck—time for us to go, too. As we walked back, I asked Jude, “Are they really the good guys?”

  “They saved my life. They’re not the bad guys,” Jude insisted.

  I hopped into the back of the truck as Jude closed the door behind me. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

  I squeezed into a carton next to a middle-aged female scientist. I could feel the heat from all the squirming, breathing bodies. “Here we go,” the woman across from me said as the truck rumbled forward.

  The bumps felt bigger this time—the truck was moving faster. We had a deadline to make. Finally we slowed to a stop. I could hear the mumbled voices of the guards outside. “We gotta take a look in the back.”

  “How come?” Owen’s voice asked, annoyed.

  “Extra security measure today. Because of the power outage.” Because of the prison break.

  “Of course,” Owen said. I heard the footsteps moving toward the back of the truck. A hand fumbling with a latch. And then—a lurch.

  Owen was flooring it. The truck sped away from the gate, and everyone in the back of the truck cried out as we were tossed backward.

  Gunshots rang out, lots of them, from behind us. Our screams were deafening inside the container.

  The truck turned sharply, going off-road, the ride getting bumpier.

  I peeked my head out of the carton, saw that the other scientists were doing the same. A bullet shot through the container above our heads. Everyone ducked, hugged the floor in fear.

  I saw Dr. Marko nearby, eyes closed, counting. Calculating how far we’d driven, I suspected. How far until we reached the “perimeter.”

  The woman next to me was praying. “God, please . . . I’ll do whatever You want me to do; I’ll go back there . . .” I took her hand, started to pray with her. She smiled at me.

  And then the ground fell out from underneath us as the scientists and the cartons and I were slammed back and forth. The truck was on deeply uneven terrain, headed down a steep hill off-road.

  More screams as bodies slammed into the ceiling.

  The truck hit solid ground again, and we all hurtled back toward earth. My limbs were aching, bruised . . .

  But the gunshots had ceased. We all remained quiet, listening . . . and we felt the truck stabilize. We were back on a paved road, hurtling down the mountain.

  “Is that it?” one of them asked.

  “I don’t know. Did we already cross the perimeter?”

  “Now,” Dr. Marko said. Everyone looked at him. “We’re crossing it now.”

  He closed his eyes, bracing himself. The others continued to pray, began to shake, held each other’s hands.

  “In case this is it,” one man said, “it’s been lovely being imprisoned with all of you.”

  But the truck drove on. And the scientists kept looking around at each other, watching, waiting.

  “Nothing’s happening,” a young woman whispered.

  “They really did it! They disabled the perimeter!”

  “Is that really it?” another asked.

  They began cheering and celebrating, hugging each other as best they could, crammed into the back of that truck.

  “Do you have a phone?” one of them asked me. “I want to call my wife.”

  “I don’t, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What are they going to do with us now?” another wondered.

  My stomach filled with dread. “I assume they’ll put you into hiding somewhere. So the people from that compound can’t find you. Maybe they’ll let your families go with you? Or maybe they have some other plan, I don’t know,” I said, watching the mixed emotions on their faces. I wanted so badly to give them the good news they all wanted to hear. That they were going back to their lives before prison. But I had a feeling that wasn’t going to happen, for any of us.

  The woman I’d shared a carton with was smiling. “I’ll get to meet my grandbabies.”

  “More than one?” the man next to her asked.

  “My daughter was pregnant with twins. Gave birth a few months ago. I haven’t even gotten to see a picture.”

  And then I noticed her nose was dripping blood. The man next to her noticed, too. “Hey, you’ve got a little . . .” He pointed.

  She put her hand to her face, concerned. “What?” And then she collapsed.

  The other scientists began to scream, stand, run to her, move away from her. “She’s passed out.” “Is she okay?” “What happened?” “Why is it just happening to her?” “She’s not responding.” “Someone get some water, something!”

  But it wasn’t just her. Many of them were bleeding. They had their hands to their faces, feeling it, realizing what was happening. One by one, they all began to drop.

  I started banging on the wall of the truck, trying to get Jude and Owen’s attention. “Stop! Help!” I screamed louder, desperate, but the truck kept moving, and the scientists kept wailing, crying, falling.

  A body slumped on top of me—Dr. Marko, bleeding like all the rest of them. Dead. I looked around. I was surrounded, smothered, by a pile of dead bodies.

  Chapter 12

  I screamed and screamed and screamed, but the truck rumbled on, down the hills, throwing me back and forth from one dead body into another. I began to cry, pray, grow delirious. They weren’t going to stop, I realized. They either didn’t know or didn’t care that all their passengers but one were dead.

  I tried to imagine them still alive, hoped that the movements of gravity that rocked them around were signs of life. But as the truck jostled us, I felt their blood, their lifeless weight on top of me. Denial gave way to panic, gave way to horror.

  After a while I became numb to it; it just became my state of being. I am a person who lives in the middle of this pile of dead bodies, and that’s totally normal. It’s a totally normal way to get from one place to another.

  Finally, after twenty minutes that felt like twenty days, the truck stopped, and a sliver of light came through—we’d stopped in a tunnel. A silhouetted figure looked in. “Oh.”

  Owen hopped into the truck bed, knelt to take the pulses of the scientists closest to the door. I saw Jude standing outside, horrified. “Grace? Grace!”

  “I’m over here.” My voice came out as a squeak.

  He jumped inside, picked his way through to me. Extended a hand, pulled me up, out of the carnage. “It’s okay. I’m here. I’ve got you.”

  I grabbed onto him, sobbing. “They’re dead, they’re all dead.” Jude looked around, disbelieving, as I turned on Owen. “You said the perimeter was disabled.”

  “We thought it was,” Owen said, shaken.

  “Liar!” I screamed.

  “Why would I lie about that? Do you think I’m a monster? Do you think I wanted this to happen?”

  “You keep lying, you all keep lying,” I sputtered, out of control. Jude put a hand on my back, trying to calm me down, but I wasn’t going to calm down. “You give me one good reason why I don’t turn you in to the prophet for mass murder.”

  “Okay, you wanna know the truth?” Owen looked me in the eye, confrontational. “I disabled the perimeter. But we didn’t know how these things worked for sure. There’s two ways they could have been designed. One way, the thing in their brains gets a signal when they cross the perimeter, that signal is what drops them dead. Shut down the perimeter, you’re good, everyone gets out alive. The other way . . . the thing in their brains needs a signal to keep them alive. You shut down the perimeter, they stop getting any signal at all . . . and they die, some amo
unt of time later. It’s like a kill switch.”

  “If you weren’t sure . . .”

  “Dawn told you, I know she did—the technology they were working on in there? Any day now, they were gonna reach completion. And once that happened, any day they could’ve dropped it like a bomb on every innocent person in the world. We didn’t have time to work out a perfect plan to save every scientist. We had to end that project now, before any more damage could be done.”

  “You are a monster,” I said, still shaking.

  “No, I just saved your life, and the lives of everyone you know, so shove it.”

  I stared at him with rage as a pickup truck pulled up next to us.

  “That’s our ride,” Owen said, jumping out to meet the driver.

  Once he was gone, I looked over at Jude. He was despondent, desperate, his voice shaking. “This is all my fault . . .”

  “It’s Dawn’s fault,” I told him. “You didn’t know.”

  He shook his head. “But I trusted her. You didn’t, and I did. And because I did, I led every single one of these people to their deaths.” I squeezed his hand, glad he was still on my side. Though I didn’t say it, and the upper pill Jude handed me kept it from showing on my face, I felt the same guilt he did. That feeling in my gut—Great Spirit or whatever it was—had told me something was wrong before we started the mission. I’d been the one to convince Dr. Marko to come. By trying to save him, I’d been the one to kill him.

  And then, something miraculous—from the pile of bodies, I saw movement. “Jude!” I cried, pointing. A hand was moving—Dr. Marko’s.

  “Dr. Marko!” Jude ran to him, supported him up. “He’s breathing.”

  “Dr. Marko, can you hear us?” I asked him.

  He opened his eyes—looked around the truck bed, saw the devastation. “Oh . . .”

  “You’re okay,” I said, overjoyed. I hugged him, and he winced.

  “Careful, sweetheart.” He noticed my face, now returned to its normal, pious state, and his brow furrowed. “It’s you.”

  My shame at being called out as his file thief was overpowered by my relief that he was alive enough to do it. “Yeah. It’s me. I thought you were dead.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Will the others be okay?” I asked, hopeful.

  Marko shook his head. “It doesn’t look so promising.”

  “But you—you’re alive,” Jude said.

  “Maybe because I’m new? The bugs start replicating as soon as you’re infected, but I was only there a couple days . . .”

  “Bugs?” I interrupted.

  “The transmitters,” he said. “Nanotech.” He must have seen my blank expression, because he quickly explained, “Nano means small, tech means . . . tech. It’s a network of tiny little machines. They sit in your brain, feeding on the sugars in your bloodstream, waiting on an input—you know, checking to see if we’ve passed the perimeter. The guys at that prison camp infected me with them the moment I got here. These ones anyway.”

  These ones. It all clicked into place. I looked at Jude, I could tell we were thinking the same thing. “There’s more than one kind . . .”

  “Exactly,” Dr. Marko said. “You can make a little computer do just about anything. An input could be neural spiking when you’ve activated the region of your brain associated with guilt. That’d be the prefrontal cortex, by the way, where your conscience lives. So this network measures your conscience and judges you based on it. Output, these machines could affect your hormones, make you healthy, unhealthy . . .”

  “Make your throat close up,” Jude said softly.

  Marko nodded, solemn. “Yep. Found that out on day one of lockup. That’s the big secret, the reason for all the Punishments. The Revelations were never Great Spirit—they were orchestrated by the scientists I was locked up with.”

  It all began to make sense. “So the tech in our brains—it was invented by someone working for the prophet?”

  “So it seems.”

  “And we all have these in our blood.”

  “Tens of thousands of them, each and every one of us. All you’ve gotta do is breathe one in, and they’ll replicate in your bloodstream. Invisible to the naked eye. Spray them out over a city, and suddenly every single person’s infected.” He looked to me. “Remember that experiment I wanted to do? I don’t have to do it anymore. I already know who’s been eating the cookies.” At Jude’s look of confusion, he added, “Long story.”

  “So the nanotech runs off the sugars in my blood?”

  “Genius, isn’t it? An endless power source. They’ll run until you die. Once your brain activity ceases, they’re designed to stop working and self-destruct. The waste hides in your cells, so you can dissect human brains all day and never find them.”

  “But what you have in your brain, the transmitter, the thing that almost killed you—that’s different?” Jude asked.

  “Newer. Deadlier. But same idea. Yours Punish you for feeling guilt, mine give me an aneurysm for leaving prison.” He looked at us. “But both of those are just the beginning. Like I said, you can get a computer to do almost anything.”

  “What’s next?” I asked.

  “I was only in the lab a couple days, so I didn’t really get the full picture, but . . . your friend, the awful one with the beard—he’s not wrong to be afraid. You slowed them down for sure, but . . . Joshua can always abduct other scientists, find other facilities. I’d guess six months from now, they’ll be ramping up production on the projects we just abandoned. Truly terrifying days are coming.”

  I tried to put that thought out of my head. “We’re just glad you’re okay.”

  “‘Okay’ is a strong word. My head hurts like a mother,” Dr. Marko said. “Also, not to be demanding, but maybe I should see a doctor or something?”

  Jude stepped out of the truck to find Owen, who wasn’t nearly as overjoyed at Marko’s recovery—he spoke like it was a problem to be dealt with rather than a miracle. We helped Dr. Marko out of the container and into the bed of the pickup truck. We all hid under a blanket in the back of the pickup as we rumbled out of that tunnel, away from the truck full of dead bodies.

  When we arrived where I’d met up with Jude and Owen, we loaded Dr. Marko into my dad’s car, taking care to lay down blankets to sit on so we wouldn’t bloody the seats. Owen thankfully sped out of our lives on Jude’s motorcycle.

  “Where do we take him?” I asked. “Joshua will know if we take him to a hospital.”

  “I know where,” Jude said, putting a lead foot on the gas pedal.

  “How are you doing back there, Dr. Marko?” I asked as we drove through a densely forested back road.

  “Okay,” he said. I could hear that he was getting sleepy, and I knew that with a potential brain injury, we had to keep him conscious. I intermittently reached back and poked him as we drove, making sure he didn’t fall asleep.

  “Does my wife know I’m okay?” Dr. Marko asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “She’ll be so happy to hear.” I looked at Jude. Neither of us knew if Marko would ever get to see his family again.

  We pulled up to a nondescript house in the far suburbs of D.C. “Where are we?” I asked, but Jude shook his head.

  I followed as he moved to the door, knocked. An older man answered, someone I’d never seen before.

  “Jude?” The concern in the man’s voice made me think this was someone Jude was close to.

  Jude gestured to the car, where he could see Dr. Marko had slumped in the backseat. “We need a doctor.”

  The man looked, nodded. “Bring him inside.”

  Jude must have noticed the wary way the man was looking at me, because he quickly added, “She’s with us. Grace, Father Dennehy . . . Father Dennehy, Grace.” I remembered the name—this was the priest who had saved Jude after the car accident, ferried him away to his new life. This was who would be taking in Dr. Marko until Dawn’s resistance figured out something else to do with him. The man smiled, shook m
y hand, and opened the door to welcome us inside.

  The house was modest, with a large cross on the wall. While the priest called a doctor he knew we could trust, Jude brought Marko inside. Jude filled in Father Dennehy on everything—the mission, the lies, the dead scientists. Father Dennehy shook his head, growing more and more concerned as Jude spoke. “Dawn’s getting desperate,” he told Jude. “She thought we would have accomplished more by now. Desperate people are dangerous.”

  “Can’t you do anything?” Jude asked.

  “Dawn thinks she’s doing what’s right. I can’t say I know she’s wrong . . . but I know I wouldn’t have the stomach for it. For any of it. Priests don’t make great generals.”

  “Why not?” I interjected. “You’d do what’s right—that’s the best kind of general.”

  Father Dennehy laughed a little. “I know my limits. Spiritual counsel, that’s the path God intended for me. Baptisms, weddings . . .”

  “Saving lives,” Jude said, smiling his thanks.

  “You always have a safe haven here,” the priest told Jude.

  When the doctor arrived, we watched nervously as she examined Dr. Marko. After twenty minutes or so, she gave us the all clear. “Your friend is going to be just fine.”

  I was relieved. “We’ll see you soon, I hope!” I told Dr. Marko as Jude said his goodbyes to Father Dennehy. I really did hope that.

  Jude and I drove home in uncomfortable silence. When we got close to his village, Jude took a deep breath. “What now?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I think that’s up to you.”

  He looked at me. “Nova Scotia?”

  The dark expression I’d been wearing was finally lit by a smile. “You still want to?” I asked.

  “It’s about time.”

  Chapter 13

  We made a plan. Tomorrow night, he’d pick me up at the site of the crash, and we’d drive north and meet his friends in Rochester. He said he had a few loose ends to tie up before we left, so I’d have to go to school, make everything look normal before disappearing.