“We have nothing in common.” My voice is low, little better than a growl. “I’m using science to kill the locusts. Eradicating the locusts will help people, enable us to farm outside again, increase food production. I kill insects. You kill people, innocent people.”
“No, no, no.” He steps toward me, shaking his head back and forth. Distress twists his deceptively boyish features. “You’ve got it all wrong. My viro-weapon won’t kill innocents—it only targets geneborns. That’s the genius of it. I was able to marry your research on gene targeting with my own research on pathogens to create a weapon that only affects geneborns. No nats will be affected.”
He says it like I should be reassured, but I’m horrified. “Geneborns are people,” I say, “like you and me and Wyck. They didn’t ask to be created through DNA splicing, anymore than we asked to be born the way we were. Some of them are evil, sure, but most of them are just normal. You can’t create a weapon that will wipe out all of them.”
He stands taller, obviously offended. His Adam’s apple bobs. “I already have. It’s an elegant fusing of rhinopharyngitis to make it highly contagious, and rabies to give it near one hundred percent lethality. The beauty of it is that anyone can catch the cold, but the rabies will only activate in the presence of the gene for gold eyes. Too many of the Defiers, and the Prags, too, think brute force and tactics will win this war, but you and I know it’s the scientists who are going to determine the outcome. “
“You murdering bastard.” Wyck’s fist comes out of nowhere and socks Jereth in the jaw.
He staggers backward, thudding into the sink. Knees buckling, he sags and the back of his head clonks the sink on the way down. I wince. On the floor, he twists sideways and heaves, dredging up nothing more than a thin trickle of bile.
“Come on, Ev,” Wyck says, striding to the door. “Let’s find Idris and get him to put a stop to this.”
Jereth lifts his head up as if it weighs a ton and locks eyes with me. “Who do you think funded and authorized my research? Who brought geneborn prisoners here so I could move on to human testing? Go tell Idris, by all means.”
Weak laughter follows us out of the hyfac into the hallway.
“It can’t be true,” Wyck says, the beginnings of disillusion darkening his eyes. “Idris can’t know.”
I don’t say anything, but in my mind I’m seeing Idris aim his beamer at the geneborn prisoners in the courtyard after Alexander died and blast them without flinching, and I’m hearing him swear that he will kill every geneborn in Amerada. It’s true.
I see the realization hit Wyck at the same time. His footsteps stutter, and then he’s whipping around, stiff-arming his way back into the hyfac. I’m right behind him, in time to hear Jereth’s, “Hey, what are—” and a cracking noise like a branch snapping. I freeze, but realize almost immediately that Wyck did what had to be done. We can’t let Jereth tell Idris we know. I enter the hyfac to see Wyck lowering Jereth’s body to the floor, his head positioned under the sink.
I take in the scene rapidly. “It’ll pass,” I say. “He was weak, dizzy. He slipped in his vomit”—I gesture to the bile puddle—”and cracked his head on the sink on his way down. Broke his neck. Freak accident. There’s no reason Idris should be suspicious.”
Wyck is quiet, staring down at Jereth.
“We had to do it,” I tell him. “We had to buy time to figure out what to do.”
“I know.” He jerks his head up and I see nothing but resolve in his eyes. “Let’s get out of here.”
Chapter Eleven
We turn right out of the hyfac and put some distance between us and the dead Jereth. We pass no one. When we’ve rounded two corners, I halt Wyck by clutching his forearm. “Wait. We’ve got to think this through.” I rub my temples with my fingertips. My eyes meet Wyck’s and they’re filled with the same confusion, worry and dawning despair that I feel. “Who else?” I whisper. “Who else do you think knows?”
Wyck looks up and down the currently deserted hall. “Not here,” he says.
He’s right. We need to talk somewhere we can’t be overheard. Trying to look natural, we walk side by side, not talking, down the hall and into the dome. Without even discussing it, we mount ACV scooters and head toward the cluster of purple-needled pine trees where we gathered with Halla to plan our escape from the Kube. It feels like a lifetime ago. Now, her grave is here, marked by a simple stone. Hidden behind the sweeping boughs, I sink to a cushion of fallen needles not far from Halla. Wyck paces, scuffing up musty-smelling duff.
“No way Fiere knows,” I say, resuming our conversation as if we hadn’t been interrupted. I keep my voice low, even though the closest ACs are two fields over, tending a new soybean hybrid with an extra rich oil. There are no imagers or recording devices to spy on us here. “Idris has never trusted her. She was too close to Alexander and he was jealous.”
“I buy that,” Wyck says. “Chrysto’s not in on it, either. He’d have told me.”
I don’t know Chrysto well enough to guess, so I hope Wyck’s right and not blinded by love. “Rhedyn?”
“Maybe.”
“Anjeta? Faruq? Vinson?” I name the Defiers who seem to be closest to Idris. Faruq is the one who turned over the geneborn prisoners in the lab after Alexander was killed.
“Faruq—almost definitely. They’ve known each other since they were boys. The others . . . I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”
I agree with him. “We assume they all know,” I say. The sharp scent of pine fills my nostrils and I look down to see I’ve been unconsciously picking up single pine needles and breaking them open. My fingers are sticky.
“Anyone up the chain?” Wyck asks. “In the Defiance High Command?”
That thought is hugely unsettling, implying that dozens of people, people who might end up running our country, condone what Idris is planning. I gnaw on my lip. “I think it’s probably Idris’s idea,” I say after thinking about it. “It’s the kind of plan that would appeal to him—bold, outside the box, lethal. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s doing this without briefing the command chain, that he’s going to present them with a fait accompli. He’ll say he’s doing it for the Defiance, for Amerada, but it’s really about revenge. The consequences—he hasn’t thought this through. If he manages to kill all the geneborns, or even most of them, Amerada will devolve into chaos. The geneborns are most of the military, almost all of the doctors, court officials, high-level administrators. The Defiance doesn’t have enough people to fill all those positions, and even if they did, they’re not trained. The High Command would recognize that.” I can dimly perceive the magnitude of the disaster and it scares me.
“There’s a vaccine, isn’t there?” Wyck says hopefully. “For rabies? We could vaccinate all the geneborns before—”
I’m shaking my head before he finishes. “There might be a vial or two in a lab or clinic somewhere, but nothing like enough to do vaccinations on that scale. It’s manufactured by growing the primary culture in chicken fibroblasts, and since the birds died off . . . “ I let him absorb the implications.
“It could be almost as bad as during the Between,” Wyck says. Neither of us lived through the Between, but we’ve heard the stories of lawlessness, atrocities, marauding bands terrifying people, food available only for outrageous prices on the black market, and more.
A thick silence wraps around us. I break it, conscious of time passing. “What are we talking about here?” I ask, looking at Wyck from under my brows.
“Stopping it. This. Mass murder. We can’t let Idris go through with this.”
My shoulders sag with relief. I know Wyck was appalled by what Jereth told us, but I also know he is loyal to Idris, respects him as his commander. I’m glad he has no doubts, no hesitation about going against him. Insubordination. Mutiny. Or is it only mutiny on a ship?
“How?”
“I don’t know,” Wyck admits. “Maybe we can make Idris think we go along with it,” he starts doubtfully, �
��and get him to spill more details.”
I shake my head so my hair whisks across my shoulders. “He might buy that from you, but there’s no way he’ll believe me. He’ll put me under guard, or kill me, as soon as he finds out I know.” I say it matter-of-factly, but my hands are cold. I rub them together to roll the sap off my fingers in little gray balls. “I need to leave.”
Wyck doesn’t argue with my conclusion. “Where will you go?”
“Atlanta. Saben. I need to warn him, warn everyone.” The thought of Saben has haunted me since the moment I realized what Jereth put in motion.
“You can’t go to Atlanta. You’re too high profile. You’ll be arrested or shot on sight. Besides, I need you here. You’re the only one I can trust completely. You can’t leave me to deal with Idris on my own. We’ll send Fiere.”
Everything that is in me yearns to go to Atlanta, to warn Saben, to run with him to an Outpost, somewhere far away where the deadly virus won’t catch up with him. If I’m with him, he’ll be okay. It’s nonsense, but I can’t help feeling it’s true. Wyck’s eyeing me, willing me to make the right choice. I force myself to think. The answer comes to me immediately. “Dr. Ronan. He’ll go if I tell him why. Idris won’t even notice he’s not around. If you or I or Fiere disappear, he’ll know something’s up immediately.”
Wyck nods his agreement. He reaches out to squeeze my knee and I know he’s thankful I’m staying.
“I think I have a part of Jereth’s research,” I say, remembering the slide Idris broke, “and maybe we can find more in the lab or in his quarters. Dr. Ronan can take it with him. He can go to my mother. He taught her long ago. She’ll believe him. His testimony won’t be tainted the way mine would be because he’s not associated with the Defiance.” It pains me to admit my mother might not believe me, might think my coming was a trick, but I don’t blame her. “She’ll put her scientists onto the problem. It needs to be a large-scale response, the wholesale manufacture and distribution of the vaccine if we’re to have any hope of guarding the geneborns against the virus. We can’t do it from here.”
“What are our options here?” he asks obliquely, digging the toe of his boot into the layers of pine needles.
“Killing Idris won’t stop the deployment of the virus if it’s already been distributed,” I say, guiltily acknowledging that my thoughts have traveled the same pathways. “There’s no telling who in Idris’s inner circle knows, or what they know, or who outside the Kube is in on it, or who they’ve given the technology to, or even the finished viro-weapon.” The list of things we don’t know is daunting. If only it were as simple as assassinating Idris. “That’s the problem with discoveries, inventions,” I say sadly. “You can’t un-know something once you know it. The politicians in the twentieth century couldn’t put the nuclear bomb genie back in the bottle, and look what happened with Iran and Israel in 2021. We can’t, either.”
“You’re saying that if we kill Idris, we lose our best chance of finding out if the viro-weapon has already been shipped and how they’re going to spread it,” Wyck says. “Damn it, I shouldn’t have killed Jereth.”
“You had to. Jereth wouldn’t know the operational details, anyway. If you were Idris would you trust Jereth with anything you didn’t have to?”
“Not a chance.”
I nod. “So we need to figure out a way to isolate Idris and interrogate him. Nothing to it.”
“Let’s run away together,” Wyck jokes, acknowledging the difficulty of our task.
“Again.” A feeling of déjà vu sweeps over me. Even if we could, it wouldn’t be the same, because Wyck and I are older, Halla isn’t here, and we carry too much responsibility now. We have a hard mission in front of us: getting as much information as possible from Idris, and warning the geneborns of the threat without getting ourselves killed by Idris, the IPF or the Defiance who will see us as traitors. We are traitors. It’s a sobering thought. Idris has found a way to oust the Prags and bring the Defiance to power, the outcome we’ve been fighting for, and we’re going to sabotage it, if we can.
The cost is too high, I remind myself. The price is too many lives, and our own integrity, our humanity, our goodness. “I wish we could,” I say. “I wish we could leave all this and just run away.”
“We need a plan.” Wyck sinks down so he’s level with me. “First, we tell Fiere, okay?”
I nod. We need more people on our side. “You do that while I brief Dr. Ronan and get him on his way to Atlanta,” I say.
“Copy that. I hope to hell she believes me. The three of us should be able to overpower Idris.”
“If we can get him alone.”
“I’ve got that figured. I’ll say I need to see him alone after the staff meeting, tell him that weapons are going missing from the armory. I’ll take him down there to show him, and the three of us can jump him.”
“That’s good.” I bite my lip. “What if he won’t tell us anything?” I don’t know if I can bring myself to torture someone, even to get information that could save thousands of lives. I have the know-how, certainly, after four months in the Central Detention Facility, but I can’t do what was done to me, and I don’t want to know if Wyck could do it or not.
“We’ll do what we have to,” Wyck says.
“What about the guard?” I ask, remembering the ill Defier who confronted us in the prisoner wing. He knows we saw them.
Wyck frowns, and says, “He’s in the infirmary, more concerned with staying close to a bathroom than anything else. I think it’s an acceptable risk, given how short our timeline is.”
Relieved, I nod. “Once we know what Idris knows, we need to tell the High Command,” I say, standing and brushing off my rear end. Wyck stands, too. “Do you know how to reach anyone at a high enough level to act on this?” I ask him.
He gives a curt nod. “I haven’t met any of them, don’t even have any real names, but I can point you in the right direction.”
I know why it has to be me. I have no authority with the Defiance troops holding the Kube. Wyck does. Any hope we have of keeping the situation here under control lies with him. I’m expendable. It’s a dismaying, yet freeing, feeling. Now that the locust solution is underway, my death would have less impact on coming events than Wyck’s or Fiere’s. I refute the dead Jereth in my mind. He’s wrong. Scientists might make a contribution when it comes to armed conflict, but in the end, it’s all about the warriors.
“It’s almost time for the staff meeting. I’ve got to talk to Dr. Ronan beforehand.”
“And I need to grab Fiere,” Wyck agrees. Neither of us moves. “If either one of us isn’t there, the other will have to improvise and proceed alone.”
He’s acknowledging that we might not both make it to the meeting, not if Idris is onto us. We might never see each other again. I nod, swallow hard, and lean forward to kiss him lightly on the lips. “I love you, you know.”
“Of course you do.” He smiles into my eyes, and for a moment he’s the old, carefree Wyck. “I love you, too.”
Chapter Twelve
Entering the lab six minutes later, I spot Dr. Ronan removing test tubes from a centrifuge and hurry to him. A technician works at the back counter, but no one else is there. The atmosphere is normal, not tense like it would be if Idris’s troops were hiding under the counters, waiting to detain me. With any luck, Jereth’s body hasn’t been discovered yet, although that’s unlikely with so many people ill. I hurry toward Dr. Ronan, who glares from under his poky eyebrows, and says, “Where the hell—”
“In the cold room. Now,” I say, taking him by the upper arm and hustling him toward the walk-in unit. His lab coat crinkles under my fingers and his arm is surprisingly muscular underneath. After one sidelong look at me, he keeps pace, and doesn’t expostulate when I close the door.
“Tell me,” he says.
“We only have a few minutes, so listen.” The room’s chill penetrates as I run through what Wyck and I discovered, going into as much detail as p
ossible about Jereth’s viro-weapon.
Dr. Ronan puffs his cheeks out and expels air sharply. “That weasel used my laboratory—my lab—to perpetrate such an abomination—” He stops himself, undoubtedly recognizing that time is short. He looks into the middle distance over my shoulder for a too-long moment, and then his gaze snaps back to mine. His sharp blue eyes could belong to a forty-year-old, rather than a man who’s well past his ninetieth birthday. “It’s got to be the DNA coding for the yellow eyes,” he says. “That’s the only piece of DNA that would reliably be unique to every geneborn. That’s what the virus targets, what activates the rabies.”
I had already reached the same conclusion, but it’s reassuring to hear him verbalize it. “That’s what I think, too. We need to develop a process that excises that bit of coding, that removes the marker.” Then, even if the Defiance manages to disseminate the virus widely, it won’t ever turn on, like a missile that never identifies its target and so falls to the ground, a harmless dud.
He scrubs a gnarled hand up and down his cheek. “The science is simple. The hard part is—”
“—removing the marker from all the geneborns before Idris deploys his weapon. It may already be out there.” The thought makes me want to heave, and I worry that I’m coming down with the food poisoning that’s leveled more than half the compound. I don’t have time to be sick. “That’s why you need to go to Atlanta. You need to make contact with Minister Alden, and work with her scientists to develop the process.” I talk faster when he starts to interrupt. “She’s got the power and the resources to get it into mass production quickly, to harness the government’s communications apparatus to let the geneborns know that the situation is dire. Maybe you’ll get to see Minister Fonner again since he’s in charge of the Ministry of Information,” I say with a wisp of humor. The former Supervising Proctor and Dr. Ronan had butted heads on more than one occasion.
Regeneration (The Incubation Trilogy Book 3) Page 13
