Regeneration (The Incubation Trilogy Book 3)

by Laura Disilverio

  Aligning the strip of sealant on the knife blade, Fiere holds it over the fire. The flickering flames cast shadows on her face, making her look at one moment as if she’s smiling, and then grimacing the next. When she doesn’t say anything, I continue. “I told Alexander on the beach the day he died. He was happy.”

  “You’ll have to hold the edges of the wound closed,” she says. “Whatever you do, don’t scream. We don’t know who else might be hiding out around here.” We’d heard unidentifiable scufflings and seen the glow of a distant fire through the cracks of a shed’s weathered boards as we made our way through the supposedly deserted warehouse district to this building. “Here, bite down on this.” She puts a folded towel between my teeth. “Ready?”

  I nod, bite down on the towel, and use both hands to hold the flaps of skin on either side of the cut together. It hurts, but that discomfort is nothing compared to the searing blast that lights up every pain receptor when she applies the molten sealant to the cut and presses against it with the flat of the knife blade to ensure it bonds. I grind my teeth on the cloth but can’t hold back a moan. Sweat pops out on my brow.

  “Almost there,” Fiere says. Two seconds later she removes the knife and blows across the wound to cool it. “That’ll hold as long as you don’t do anything stupid.”

  I spit out the towel, my mouth feeling dry and muzzy, and reach for my water bladder. Swishing a swallow around in my mouth, I act like my story wasn’t disrupted by a spot of impromptu surgery, and say, “I told Idris a couple weeks later, when he caught me with Saben. He ordered me not to tell anyone else.”

  “Yeah, like you ever cared what Idris said.” Fiere sits back on her haunches and studies me.

  “Fair enough.” I manage a weak smile. “But I didn’t know how to bring it up with you or Wyck, what to say. It seemed easier to just not talk about it. Being related to Alden felt like it might be problematic with the Defiance, and, really, what does it matter who my parents are?”

  I’m astonished when I hear the words come out of my mouth and realize the partial truth of them. The whole first sixteen years of my life, my driving goal was finding out who my parents were, where I came from. Now, even though it’s satisfying to know, it doesn’t make a difference to who I am or to my relationships. I’m still Everly Jax. I still have the same talents and flaws. I still feel the same way about the Prags, the Defiance, my friends, Saben. “I’m still me,” I tell Fiere, even though the words are inadequate to express what I mean.

  “Of course you are,” she snaps. “It’s not about that. It’s about trust. You didn’t trust me enough to tell me.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “I think it is.” She jumps to her feet and kicks out the fire with booted feet.

  Acrid smoke makes me cough. A lick of anger makes me say, “It’s not like you’ve bared your soul and every detail of your life to me, Fiere. I don’t know what your life was like before the RESCO or how you came to be there. I don’t know if you’ve ever loved a man, if you want children, or anything about your parents. I don’t need to know. We can trust each other without giving up every secret, can’t we?”

  I can tell by the set of her shoulders that she’s arrested by my words. “I loved Alexander,” she finally whispers.

  “I know. Of course you did. He rescued you, he was like a father to—”

  “No.” The word is too loud. She comes closer and leans down. I sense rather than see her bangs flop across her forehead. “No. I loved him the way you love Saben, like Wyck and Chrysto love each other.”

  Her words rock me back and blot out the throbbing pain in my calf. I don’t know what to say. “He was—”

  “Old enough to be my father? I know. It didn’t matter.” Her tone is as bitter as the smoke still wisping around the room. “Completely unaware of my feelings? I know that, too. I never let on. I knew he didn’t feel that way about me, and it would only have made things awkward if I’d told him how I felt. But now, since he died . . . I wish I had.”

  “I’m so sorry, Fiere.”

  “So if you think I’m jealous that you’re his daughter, I’m not. I never wanted to be his daughter.”

  She stomps away from me. A moment later I hear a creak as the door opens, and then nothing. Fiere can move as silently as fog when she wants to. I sit there for a long time, gradually growing stiffer, my leg on fire, listening for Fiere’s return. By the time I stretch out on the floor, exhausted, she still isn’t back. I fall into a shallow sleep thinking about how I can approach the High Command, worrying about Fiere, and yearning for Saben.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Fiere is back not long after sun-up. I’m eating yet another vegeprote bar, wondering how long I’m going to give her before I strike out on my own, when a dim stripe of light appears on the floor. Fiere slips through the door carrying a small bag with handles, says “Good morning,” and flips me a tube of ointment. “Antibiotic cream,” she says.

  “Where’d you get it?” I ask, understanding from her bearing that she doesn’t want to revisit last night’s conversation. Fine by me. I ruck up my jumpsuit leg and smear the cream on the cut. It’s cool and soothing. Bliss.

  “Traded for it.” She doesn’t say more. Instead, she pulls garments from the bag and tosses some at me. “We can’t traipse around Atlanta in blood-stained IPF uniforms. I got us a change of clothes.”

  “Traded for them?”

  She slants a grin. “Let’s say I ‘appropriated’ them. There’s an inhabited community not more than half a mile from here. Servers at the petroleum processing plant, it looked like.”

  I have no qualms about donning the stolen clothes which turn out to be a pair of tobacco-colored leggings and a bronze tunic that’s too big for me. The sleeves droop past my hands and I roll them. Fiere strips off her jumpsuit unselfconsciously, baring her small-breasted, sinewy body with the hysterectomy scar that could condemn her to death, and various other scars that testify to accidents and combat. She dresses in another uniform, this one dark green with Amerada Petrochemical imprinted over a chest pocket, and an inch-wide belt cinching the waist. She smashes a matching cap onto her head and tucks her short hair behind her ears. From a distance, she could pass for a youth.

  “You know Atlanta better than I do,” she says. “How do we get there?”

  I told her on our journey here about the address and contact name Wyck gave me. “The address is in the city center, not too far from the ministry buildings, I think. Probably twenty-five miles from here, if I’m guessing right about where we are. Too far to walk—we don’t have the time. The viro-bombs will go off in another thirty hours, if Idris wasn’t lying about that. We need an ACV. It’s a risk to steal—’appropriate’—one, but not as big a risk as not getting there in time.” The two biggest dangers are that we’ll get caught stealing the ACV, or that it will be missed quickly and its locator pinged.

  Fiere nods, accepting my assessment. “The plant.” She gestures to her uniform. “They’re sure to have ACVs.”

  “Security?”

  Fiere squints as she thinks. “If we wait an hour until the servers have reported for duty, we might find one in the neighborhood where I got the clothes. It might not be missed as soon, either—not until shift end.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  An hour later we’ve scored a rust-bucket of a two-seater ACV with a clogged or damaged nozzle on one side so the vehicle lists to the left. It doesn’t matter. It’s transport. With any luck, the owner won’t be home until well after we’ve abandoned it, a careful two miles or so from where we’re going. Its nav system is broken, but it’s got a compass, and I point it to the north. The landscape is the bare dun color I’ve known all my life, dotted here and there with trees crowned with chartreuse kudzu rather than leaves. The sky is a murky blue today, as if whoever painted it rinsed his paintbrush in dirty water before dipping it in the blue. The whole area was apparently built up at one point, but now most of the homes and shopping area
s have crumbled to brick dust or concrete chunks. Kudzu covers the remains like a blanket drawn up over a corpse, revealing only the contours of what once was vital and alive.

  I’m not sure how far south of the city we are, but it’s only twenty minutes until we get to the remains of the road that ringed Atlanta, and a few minutes more before the ruins of the old airport comes up on our left. Its runways and taxiways are buckled and potholed; the buildings have caved in roofs and gaping holes where windows used to be; and abandoned airplanes, long ago scavenged for parts and reduced to metal skeletons are upended here and there.

  “Would you ever have ridden in a plane?” Fiere asks, swiveling her head to keep the airport in sight as we glide past.

  “Rather than creep along in an ACV like this?” I pat the dashboard. “In a heartbeat. At least up until the flu. Airplanes were nothing but big incubators for the virus once it started spreading.”

  “I’ll stick to land travel, thanks,” Fiere says.

  We spot a handful of other ACVs as we travel, but none of them looks official, thankfully. I keep some way off the remains of the interstate, close enough to navigate by it but far enough away to avoid encounters. Sensing familiar territory, I swing further east and feel vindicated when I sight the iron fences that surround the Atlanta Zoo, a spooky site at night, peopled by Psyche dealers and users. I point it out to Fiere. “Not far, now.”

  Now that I have my bearings, I steer toward Centennial Park, planning to ditch the ACV there. My calf hurts enough that I don’t want to walk farther than necessary, but I also don’t want to leave the ACV close enough to our real destination that government forces might track us down by pinging the ACV’s locator. The late April morning is as perfect as a morning can be in this area, which is to say I don’t feel like a wet sock is plastered over my face. Scudding clouds on the horizon, and a certain stillness in the air, however, promise storms as the day goes on. We circle the park counter-clockwise slowly, looking for signs of IPF presence, but see no unusual activity.

  “End of the road,” I say, letting the ACV settle with a lurch. “We hoof it from here.”

  Fiere nods. “If we get separated, we meet back here, on the hour, starting at eighteen hundred hours. If the other one of us hasn’t shown by midnight, whoever’s here moves on.”

  “To where?” I ask.

  Fiere looks disconcerted, and then grim. “Hell if I know. To another Defiance cell, if we can locate one. I’m not going back to the Kube so Idris can shoot me as a traitor, that’s for sure. Otherwise . . .” She shrugs.

  It makes me wonder where we all will end up.

  A microdrone whizzes past and I instinctively bow my head to defeat its facial recognition software. I need a better disguise than red hair if I’m going to stay anonymous in the capital. Since the trial, I’m too well known in Atlanta. I wish I had access to the safe house that Griselda led me to when I first arrived here, but it’s gone, as is Griselda. A memory of finding her body intrudes and I push it away. Fiere also notes the threat from the surveillance drones and says, “We need to keep a low profile.”

  “Agreed. Let’s move.”

  With every step causing pain to flare in my calf, I lead the way past the statue of Prime Minister Iceneder, and out of the park. As we approach the gold-topped Capitol and the government buildings surrounding it, I note unusual crowds. Yes, Atlanta is the capital of Amerada, but it’s population is less than one percent of what it was before the pandemic. It seems like half of those must be here in the city center. Worse, there’s an unusually large number of IPF patrols gliding past on ACV scooters, and microdrones are thick in the air.

  “Is it always like this?” Fiere asks, jostled against me by a passing stranger.

  “No.” I’m short with my answer, trying to overhear the conversations of passersby so I can figure out what’s going on. I catch snippets of several conversations, but not enough to clue me in.

  “ . . . the announcement about . . .”

  “ . . . new Prime Minister?”

  “It’s about time that . . .”

  Fiere looks as frustrated as I feel, until we both hear a man tell a woman, “I’ve heard a rumor that all geneborns are supposed to report to—”

  Fiere and I exchange a glance as we move past the couple. Is it possible? Could Dr. Ronan have reached Minister Alden already? Could the government have moved this quickly to take action against the viro-bombs? Cautious hope rises within me. If so, it will save many lives. I edge Fiere up against a brick building with an overhang and speak looking down at the sidewalk to hide my face.

  “I really want to hear the announcement, but every minute we’re in this throng we’re in danger.”

  Fiere nods, the green cap slipping forward. She shoves it back. “Agreed. Do you know a back way to the address? Contacting the High Command needs to be our priority. We can figure out what all this”—she spirals a hand—”is about later.”

  “Okay. Come on.” I lead her out of the square fronting the Capitol and into a neighboring housing area by a circuitous route. The hubbub stays behind us. The relative quiet is a blessing. The houses in this neighborhood are new since the Between, built of polyglass and resins, and of recycled naturals like stone and brick. The sunlight striking the polyglass makes the houses glow green, blue, or amber. Every now and then an empty lot strewn with rubble bears witness to the destruction that occurred here when the city was firebombed in 2045. Partitions of repurposed metal separate the houses, giving an illusion, at least, of privacy. I imagine that pre-locusts, towering magnolias and live oaks provided more natural boundaries.

  We turn onto Wisteria Way. Houses line one side of the street only. A cemetery, an old one, by the looks of the fire-licked tombstones visible through holes in the wall, occupies several acres across from the houses. The area is largely inhabited by people who serve in the ministries; Minister Fonner’s house, where I stayed when I first arrived in Atlanta, is only two blocks from here. Few people are around now. I assume they’re mostly gathered near the Capitol, waiting for the announcement to be broadcast. That’s a boon to us.

  The house number we’re looking for is 4143 and the block we’re in sports numbers in the 3000s. “We’re getting close,” I tell Fiere. Sweat slides down my spine, a product of heat and fear.

  She slows and my calf is grateful for the respite. “How do we play this?” she asks. “There’s sure to be defenses. The High Command isn’t letting just anyone waltz into their headquarters.”

  I agree with her, even though this quiet neighborhood doesn’t seem a likely spot for armed guards. “We give the old password,” I say, unable to think of anything else, “and hope it keeps them from shooting us long enough to explain why we’re here.”

  With a fatalistic nod, Fiere moves forward again. I’m both eager and reluctant to reach our destination. We desperately need to be successful with our mission, but part of me worries that the High Command will endorse Idris’s plan, or state that they can’t move into the open to combat it, and I don’t know what we’ll do then. I’m going to find Saben, I decide, the minute we’re done here, whether we succeed or fail miserably. I trample the thought that “failing miserably” might mean we get shot on sight.

  We pass a small, boxlike house of blue polyglass and gray granite with 4140 etched over the doorway. I glimpse movement behind the windows. Not everyone is in the square waiting for the announcement. We’ve got to look casual, non-threatening. “Next one,” I breathe. My heartbeats quicken but I keep my steps even.

  Outside the next house, my footsteps stutter when I read 4144 in black numerals on the door. I stroll past, Fiere staying even with me.

  “What the hell—?” she asks in a low voice. “There is no 4143.”

  “Odd numbers would be on the other side of the street,” I say, “but there’s only the cemetery over there. You don’t think—?”

  “I do.” Fiere is halfway across the street before I catch up with her. “Look sad,” she commands,
“like we’re visiting your father’s grave. Tears would be good.”

  I can tell the moment she remembers who my father is and how recently he died by the way her teeth click together at the end of the word “good.”

  “No one’s been buried in this cemetery since before the Between,” I say. I catch her arm to slow her down and we continue at a moderate pace until we’re standing in front of the six-foot high stone wall that surrounds the ground. The wall used to be white, but it’s now pock-marked and grimed by years of war, fires, and neglect. It’s holed and crumbled in spots, so when I suggest looking for a gate, Fiere throws me a look and crouches to duck through one of the larger holes.

  Inside, the cemetery is just as depressing as it appeared from the other side of the wall. Tombstones are knocked over, broken, or missing. Statuary of angels, madonnas, Christ figures and lambs all have missing limbs or heads, or lie in pieces on the ground. Tree skeletons remain, bare limbs gnarled and cracked, draped with long-dead Spanish moss that breaks into thin twigs and rains down on us as we brush against it. The place is deserted except for ghosts and a lone old woman a distance away, kneeling beside a grave as if in prayer. She’s wearing a black tunic and a headscarf that only half-covers bushy white hair. I keep a wary eye on her, but she doesn’t move except to wipe dust off the dark gray marker with a cloth.

  Fiere’s moved ahead of me, scanning the area in a way that suggests she’s looking for signs of activity—trails worn into the dirt, a clean surface where everything else is filmed with dirt—but I’m distracted by the stories the grave markers tell. In a plot marked off by a wrought iron fence, there are twenty-five or so plots, all with the name Abershire on them. The older ones, lettering barely legible against weathered marble, bear legends like “Phineas Abershire, Patriarch and Patriot, Jul 9, 1700-Sep 12, 1778,” and “Deborah Dawson Abershire, Beloved Wife and Mother, Taken Too Soon.” She died in the 1950s. From the dates, at least half of the people interred here died during the pandemic, early on when there were still enough people left to bury the dead. I’m saddened by a short grave with a heart-shaped headstone that reads “Ella Abershire, 2/2/2023-2/3/2023.”