Regeneration (The Incubation Trilogy Book 3)

by Laura Disilverio

  “He’s in shock,” the nursing proctor says. “Wheel a gurney over here.”

  I do as she says, and between us and Jereth we heft the soldier into a prone position on the gurney. Without hesitation, the proctor slices through his uniform with a scalpel, exposing a broad chest and an extended abdomen solid with blue, purple and magenta bruising.

  “There’s no blood,” I say. “Where was he hit?” Confused, I look up in time to see the proctor bite her thin lip.

  “The bleeding’s internal,” she tells me. “The result of a percussive weapon of some sort. His internal organs are . . . There’s nothing I can do.” She turns away and begins to triage the remaining patients.

  I’m astonished when Jereth’s hand snakes out and he grabs her wrist. “You have to help him. We need him.”

  She jerks her arm away. “I don’t— I can’t— We need a doctor, a surgeon. If I could, I would.” Tears of frustration at her impotence, or anger at Jereth’s interference, brighten her eyes. Blinking, she focuses on the next patient, a man with bandaged eyes.

  Jereth storms out, his compact frame taut with anger or fear, I’m not sure which. Either way, it seems a bit of an over-reaction. Before I can ponder it further, a tug on my sleeve startles me and makes me look down. The soldier’s cold fingers brush mine as his hand falls away. His eyes are open, glued to mine. They’re a pale straw color, with a thin circle of brilliant yellow around the pupil. He knows he’s dying. His eyes beseech me. His lips move and I lean in to hear what he’s saying.

  “Tell . . . tell my wife . . .”

  The words are barely audible. His breath is sour. His fingers fumble with mine. “Tell her . . .”

  “That you love her?” It’s a guess, but it’s what I would want someone to tell Saben if I were dying far away from him.

  His face relaxes into an almost-smile, although he can’t form any more words. His eyes close. I know there’s no point trying to get his wife’s name from him. I reach for his hand and hold it between both of mine, trying to warm it. Futile. After a few minutes, I acknowledge that he’s gone. It’s a bit sad and unsettling that I couldn’t pinpoint that moment he passed over from life to death. I vow that I will do my best to find his wife when this is over and pass along her husband’s dying words. To aid in the search, I quickly run a swab inside the dead man’s cheek and tuck it into a sample tube and seal it with the rubber stopper. I can run the DNA and, when I get access to the right computers again, like the ones at the MSFP, crosscheck it with marriage records. That will tell me his wife’s name and location. Sliding the tube up my sleeve, I ask the nursing proctor what she needs me to do.

  I’m weary and bedraggled when I make my way toward Idris’s office for the staff meeting at six o’clock. If I didn’t know it before, I know now why I turned my gift for biochemistry toward research rather than doctoring. Dealing with injured people, helping them, is the most exhausting thing I’ve done in months. Jereth is turning a corner ahead of me as I enter the hallway, and I hurry to catch up with him. I’ll be late for the meeting, but I decide to risk it.

  “Jereth.”

  He spins around, almost tripping over his feet, and stutters. “Oh, uh, Jax. Hi. I didn’t see you. You startled me.” His brown eyes peer at me from behind the fringe of mouse brown hair.

  I eye him, wondering why he’s so nervous. “I wanted to let you know the prisoner you brought in died.”

  He scowls, looking suddenly older, but only says, “I figured. Thanks for following up with me. I’m on my way to dinner, so I’d better—”

  “I was wondering what you meant when you said ‘We need him.’ Who needed the prisoner? What for?”

  His chin jerks up. “What? I didn’t say that. You misheard me. No one needs another geneborn Prag. There’s too many of them as it is. Idris put me in charge of them, though—it’s my first leadership opportunity with the Defiance—and I don’t want to let him down.” His fingers twine in his bangs, pulling them straight out from his head and letting them flop back.

  “You sound like Idris,” I remark, trying to prolong the encounter long enough to figure out what’s going on. Something is.

  He starts edging away. “Well, I’ve gotta . . . you know . . . dinner, busy . . . see you later, maybe.”

  My brows twitch together as I watch him scuttle away. Definitely something weird going on with him.

  Chapter Ten

  I don’t think about the prisoners the next few days, not until food poisoning fells half the compound. Luckily not ill myself, I’m in the lab, trying to trace the source of the illness, whether a naturally occurring food-borne pathogen, or a toxin introduced as an act of sabotage, when the doors slide open and Wyck walks in. His brown hair springs in every direction, longer than I’ve ever seen it, and there’s a crease between his brows. He looks healthy, though, so he hasn’t come down with whatever bug has almost everyone else camped out in the nearest hyfac.

  I’m happy to see him, but after a quick smile, I swivel my stool and resume peering through the microscope eyepiece. “Now’s not a good time, Wyck. Idris is on my case to find out what caused the vomiting and diarrhea. I think—”

  “I need to show you something, Ev,” Wyck interrupts me.

  The gravity of his tone makes me turn slowly. I study his face and see no hint of his usual humor. His mouth is drawn into a tight line and his chin is turtled in toward his neck.

  “Okay,” I say, standing. Something is clearly very wrong. If Wyck needs me, I’m prepared to drop everything to help.

  A half-smile of relief curves his lips. “I knew I could count on you. Come on.”

  He reaches for my hand and I link my fingers through his. The contact brings back memories of happier times here in the Kube, when he’d grab my hand and tug me along to show me a new gadget he’d invented or tell me about sneaking into the IPF armory and taking apart a beamer to see how it worked. This time, he hurries me toward the elevators and once we’re inside he drops my hand. The sudden cool on my palm is chilling.

  “What are we—?” I start, but he shakes his head slightly and rolls his eyes upward and to the left, indicating the top corner of the elevator. He thinks there’s a chance we’re being recorded, I realize. It’s totally possible. Supervising Proctor Fonner had imagers and recording devices installed throughout the Kube when he was in charge. He’d justified the installations by saying that although he trusted the ACs and staff of InKubator 9, it was his responsibility to verify that they were worthy of that trust. Even at eleven years old, I’d disdained that circular logic. Has Idris activated them? I wouldn’t put it past him.

  The elevator sinks past Basement Level One with its generators and HVAC systems, past Level Two, which is mainly storage, and jolts to a stop at Level Three, the lowest level. I can’t remember ever being down here. The elevator is at the end of a long corridor dimly lit by biolume fixtures. Wyck steps out like he knows where he’s going and the fixtures brighten, triggered by our movement. They show a concrete hallway with putty-colored walls unadorned by paint, pictures or even directional signs. Ancient metal pipes with rust blooming around each joint sag from U-shaped supports bolted into the ceiling scant inches above us. Dreary is the only word that comes to mind. The air feels damp on my skin—no surprise since the water table in the Florida Canton is perilously near the surface and this level must be more or less under water.

  “Where are we? What are we doing here?” I whisper.

  Wyck slows and leans close to my ear to answer. The warmth of him is reassuring. “I don’t know what this level was originally,” he says. “Utility tunnels beneath a garage maybe? But now it’s where they’re keeping the prisoners. I wasn’t ever down here until this morning. Jereth turned up sick—vomiting his guts up—and I took it upon myself to give the prisoners a look-see. Idris put him in charge of them, you know, and besides himself and four guards—two for the day shift and two at night—I don’t know that anyone else has seen the prisoners since we brought them
here. I figured with Jereth laid up, they might need more manpower. I wasn’t prepared for—”

  He reclaims my hand and pulls me down the hall so fast we’re jogging, our booted feet clomping on the concrete. A line of yellow light on our right turns out to be coming from beneath a door. I’m expecting a guard, but a pool of vomit a few feet from the door suggests whoever was on duty has deserted his post for the nearest hyfac.

  “In here.” Wyck zaps the maglock with his pass key and pushes the door open. “They’re all like this. It reminds me of—”

  Before I can ask what he means, we’re through the door and I’m staring at one of the prisoners lying on a narrow bed. It’s covered with a white sheet and another one is twisted around his legs, draping to the floor. A gallon-sized water container sits on the floor near the bed. The room reeks of piss and vomit and fear. My gaze fixes on the prisoner. His head has been shaved—no, he’s pulled his hair out. Eyes widening with horror, I spot the clumps of hair on the bed and floor around him, and his bleeding scalp. Fever reddens his forehead and cheeks. Froth speckles his lips. His eyes are shut and he’s so still I wonder if he’s in a coma. I stand transfixed for a moment before my brain kicks in.

  “We shouldn’t be in here without bio gear,” I say, dragging Wyck from the room and closing the door with a bang. It’s too late. If what the prisoner has is contagious, transmissible by air, Wyck and I have already been exposed. “We need to notify—”

  “Ev.” Wyck takes me by the shoulders and gives me a little shake. “They’re all like this—the prisoners. I checked them all after finding this guy. But this isn’t the same as the illness that’s going around. It’s not what Jereth has, or the guard.” He indicates the vomit slick with a chin nod. “When I first walked in here, it reminded me of, of that lab.”

  I know immediately what lab he means. The hidden lab between here and Atlanta, the one where we found Anton, a victim of government sponsored vaccine testing, living out his life in agony and hiding, abetted by his insane wife. I still have nightmares about the place. That, too, was underground and felt deserted . . . but this isn’t the same thing. That’s ridiculous. This is a Kube, occupied by a ragtag rebel force, not a government-run and -funded research laboratory. I don’t know what’s made the prisoners ill, but no one else seems to have it, and Jereth and the guards have been interacting with the prisoners routinely, as far as I know. I say as much to Wyck.

  Running a hand through his hair, he say, “I know. I don’t understand it. Maybe they were all exposed to something before they arrived. But it’s weird that Jereth hasn’t mentioned how ill they are; at least, I haven’t heard anything about it.”

  “Me, either. I need to see the others.”

  Reluctantly, Wyck leads me to the next room down the hall and zaps the lock open. As I’m pushing the door inward, a voice croaks from behind us. “Hey, you can’t go in there. What are you doing down here?”

  My heartbeat triples. We turn, automatically separating to put more space between us so we don’t present a single target. The absent guard stumbles toward us, one hand clutching his stomach, the other fumbling to unholster the beamer slung over his back. His skin is the same putty color as the wall, and he looks like he’d topple over if I poked my forefinger into his chest. He’s no physical threat to us. My heartbeat stays elevated, though, because he could still sound the alarm. His bleary eyes skip from me to Wyck, and suspicion turns to confusion. “Oh, Lieutenant Sharpe. I, uh, didn’t know you were . . . Are you . . ?”

  Without missing a beat, Wyck says, “Jereth has food poisoning, too, and asked me to look in on things down here. It looks like you could use some relief.”

  “There’s no one else cleared—” the Defier starts, but the hope in his eyes says he’ll worship Wyck forever if he can release him from duty to suffer in bed.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Wyck says, real compassion in his voice. “You’re no good to anyone in this condition. Head over to the infirmary and I’ll take over until your relief can get here. Who else is on duty?”

  “Trilma,” he says, “but she’s . . .” He motions with his head and I’m sure he’s trying to say that Trilma is in the hyfac, equally unfit for guard duty.

  “Get out of here,” Wyck says. When the Defier still hesitates, he adds, “That’s an order.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” The man manages a thankful smile and stumbles toward the elevator.

  I feel slightly guilty for hoping that he doesn’t throw up in there—or worse—since we’ll have to ride up in it momentarily. I abandon my plan to see all the ill prisoners. Trilma could come around the corner any minute, and she might sound the alarm rather than talk to us. Instead, I start toward the elevator, saying, “Let’s find Jereth and ask him a few questions, then we can alert the nursing proctor, put her into full bio gear and see if there’s anything she can do for these men.”

  We run Jereth to ground in a hyfac near his quarters, directed that way by his bunkmate. With only a cursory knock, Wyck and I plunge into the white-tiled space, undeterred by the sounds of distress within. The room smells vile—a noxious mix of bile, diarrhea and bleach— and I breathe shallowly through my mouth. Jereth’s feet poke out from under a stall door and retching sounds issue from within. He’s throwing his guts up.

  “Jereth, are you okay?” Wyck calls.

  A mumble is his only answer. Tearing off a few strips of sanitation paper, I dampen them at the sink and hand them to Wyck who passes them under the stall door. There’s silence for a few moments and I shift from foot to foot impatiently, wanting to throw open the door and drag Jereth out. Wyck motions for me to be patient and is rewarded by the whoosh of air suction as Jereth flushes. The stall door opens.

  Jereth stands there, skin the color of mold, hair lank, face drawn from dehydration. He looks like death. In fact, he looks like death would be a step up from his current state. Flecks of vomit speckle his uniform. He stares at us from dull eyes and stumbles to the sink, splashing water on his face. Straightening, he wipes his face with his sleeve. “It’s nice of you to check on me,” he says, “but I’m going back to bed. I don’t know what I ate, but I’m never eating it again.”

  “We’re not here—” Wyck starts.

  I interrupt him. “We saw the prisoners.”

  I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Jereth’s face blanches even whiter. He slumps so his back presses against the sink. “You had no right—” The words leak out like air from a squeezed latex glove. “The guards let you—”

  “They’re ill, too.”

  “Damn them.” Jereth’s whole frame shakes, from anger or illness. “The prisoners are my—”

  “Did you know they’re ill, maybe dying?”

  His silence and his shifting gaze are my answer. His fingers pluck at the fabric covering his thighs.

  “Have they gotten any care? Have you been treating them?”

  A strange “heh-heh-heh” that’s part vocalization and part snort issues from between Jereth’s barely parted lips. At first I think he’s having an asthma attack, but then I realize he’s laughing. Jereth’s laughing. The incongruity of it is unnerving. I exchange a glance with Wyck who looks as confused as I feel. Gooseflesh pops out on my arms and I rub them.

  “What’s so funny?” Wyck asks, his confusion and uncertainty coming out as anger.

  “You could say that, that I’ve been treating them,” Jereth says. His pointy tongue flicks out to moisten his chapped lips. “In fact, it’s because of my ‘treatments’ that they are so ill.”

  Incredibly, there’s a ring of pride in his voice. It grows stronger as he speaks, and he steps away from the sink which was supporting him.

  “What have you done?” I whisper. An image of the slide in my lab long after hours flashes into my brain. “It was you—you were working in my lab.”

  “The Defiance’s lab,” Jereth’s shoots back. “Doing work for the Defiance. Important work. Work that is going to guarantee our victory
with a minimum number of lives lost. Lives that matter, anyway. You think you’re such a heroine because of your locust solution. Well, I’ll be lauded right alongside you.” His lips twist into a smirk of triumph and his eyes glitter.

  “Why?” The single word blasts from Wyck.

  “Because I’ve found a way to take down the geneborns. Before I ever came here, I was experimenting with viruses, working on ways to combine them to best effect. Initially, I—”

  I largely tune him out as he launches into the technical particulars of his research because I am trying to remember just what I told him about my research. Too much.

  When I return my attention to him, he is saying, “As a weapon, though, they were unsatisfactory because there was no way to target only the individuals we wished to affect without the possibility of infecting our own troops—”

  “Where did you study? How old are you?” I interrupt him. No way he is the twenty-one or -two he looks.

  His upper lip pulls back, displaying his strangely small teeth. “I’m twenty-nine. I’ve always looked young for my age.”

  From his scowl I deduce that his looks were problematic at times.

  “My parents were researchers for an organization called the Centers for Disease Control which came under the Ministry of Science and Food Production for a while after the Between, but was then transferred to the Ministry of Defense. All my training was on the job, as it were, like yours was.”

  It all comes together. The ease with which he understood my work, his constant questions about it. Wanting to record my experiments was only a ruse to learn more. I feel so stupid.

  “My father was my mentor, like Dr. Ronan is to you. He taught me everything he knew, said I surpassed him in creativity if not knowledge. I couldn’t get a slot at university, however, because I wasn’t geneborn. Year after year, I watched people with half my ability advance to university because they were engineered to be scientists, while I worked as a lab technician, sterilizing Petri dishes, disposing of hundreds upon thousands of lab mice, knowing I’d never get the go-ahead to pursue my own experiments. We have a lot in common, Everly,” he says, eyes scanning my face eagerly. “We were both marginalized because of our birth, despite our genius, and we both use science to solve the nation’s most pressing problems, and—”