Regeneration (The Incubation Trilogy Book 3)

by Laura Disilverio

  “Fine. You have five minutes.” Alden sweeps away, giving orders into the transmitter again.

  I am utterly wrung out, my emotions having run the gamut from guilt to despair to terror to hope. Still, I manage a small smile as Saben pulls me in for a hug and kisses me, his lips soft and gentle on mine.

  “Might be hard to do that through a bio mask,” he says. “It might be a while between kisses.” He smoothes my hair back from my brow.

  “As long as you’re okay and we’re together, that’s all that matters. Let’s get going.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The next two months were horrific beyond description. A third bomb, near the Atlanta railroad depot, also exploded before the IPF teams could find and disarm it. The other four bombs were neutralized before they went off, but the damage was done. Geneborns began exhibiting rabies symptoms within three days of the explosions. Despite travel restrictions, the disease spread as panicked geneborns tried to flee to uncontaminated areas. Labs under the MSFP’s control began manufacturing batches of rabies vaccine, but the amount they could produce was inadequate. It took longer than we had hoped, an agonizing ten days, before the DNA marker excision protocol, the molecular scissors, was perfected. Saben, who had offered himself up (as had many of the geneborns working at the MSFP) as a guinea pig for testing the protocol, was one of the first to undergo the procedure.

  Building on experiments started in 2015 or 2016, shortly before the first wave of the pandemic, we perfected an electroporation technique to “infect” the geneborns with our molecular scissors. I tried to explain it to Saben before he underwent the process. “It’s an application of intermittent electric pulses that changes the permeability of cell walls, and allows large molecules that don’t normally pass through those walls to do so.”

  “Sounds painful.” We were in the lab, Saben clad in a paper gown and sitting on a metal gurney. He swung his bare legs gently.

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. “No. The ‘large’ molecule is the DNA editor, the molecular scissors, and it’s microscopic. We’ll administer the DNA-editing solution orally, then treat you with pulses of a high-voltage electrical field for five minutes. The solution will suffuse all your cells. They transform and we’re done. Gene electrotransfer complete, nothing left to trigger the rabies. And no more gold eyes.” I gave him a confident smile, even though I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it would work. It had to work.

  I stayed with him, clutching his hand, when Dr. Ronan administered the solution. I only let go for him to enter the portable electroporation chamber. I laughed and cried simultaneously as his gold eyes changed to a clear hazel while I watched. He was safe.

  “What color are they?” Saben asked, emerging from the cubicle.

  I told him.

  “Do you like them?”

  Dr. Ronan harrumphed before I could answer. “What I would like is for you to get back to work so I can inoculate more people. The crisis isn’t over, you know.”

  While the labs developed the molecular scissors and electroporation protocol, Saben and his team had a streamlined process in place for administering it. It had to be done on a house to house basis as no geneborn would leave the semi-protection of shelter to go into a public place to receive the vaccination. Team members had to wear full bio containment gear in case they came in contact with a rabid patient—anyone, natural born or geneborn, could contract the disease from an infected person’s saliva or body fluids. It was slow going.

  We lived at the MSFP, sleeping on cots set up in the conference rooms and halls. There was no privacy and the hygiene facilities were strained beyond capacity. No one complained. Saben worked twenty hours a day heading up a team traveling to geneborns’ houses to provide the vaccine. He came back with stories of looting and of houses full of rotting corpses, and of vigilante teams trying to track down geneborns and shoot them “in the name of mercy, to put them out of their misery.” They shot many geneborns who weren’t even infected.

  More people behaved in a way that gave me hope for Amerada, however. Once the nats understood the scope and nature of the disaster, many of them took to providing food (scarce for everyone), air filters, and other necessities to geneborns in their homes so they wouldn’t have to leave them and risk infection. Some natural borns took geneborns into their own homes and protected them and cared for them as best they could if they fell ill. The Defiance, under Vestor’s leadership, declared a truce with the Prags and used their infrastructure to support the government’s efforts. Their members, already armed, patrolled the countryside, enforcing curfews and travel restrictions, and slowing the work of the vigilantes. I heard through the grapevine that Wyck was leading one of the patrolling squads and the news sent me running to the hyfac, so relieved that he was alive and apparently well that I bawled my eyes out for ten minutes.

  I worked hours similar to Saben’s, but in the MSFP’s labs—familiar territory. Dr. Ronan and I and teams of scientists worked in shifts around the clock to produce enough solution to distribute to every geneborn in the country. A couple of our shipments were intercepted by the vigilante genocidists, and it was heartbreaking to know that more people would die in the time it would take us to produce more and get it to the far corners of Amerada. I couldn’t help wondering when I heard about the third intercepted and destroyed shipment, what Idris was doing. Had he survived his injuries? Was he masterminding the vigilante attacks, still doing everything he could to guarantee the death of all geneborns? Some of the attacks bore his stamp of surgical execution and audacity. There was no way to know.

  Change took place quietly in the government during the emergency. Premier Dubonnet stepped aside, accepting responsibility for the disaster. A leadership triumvirate formed to make decisions, consisting of Minister Fonner, Loránd Vestor, and the geneborn head of the IPF— not General Bledsoe who murdered Alexander, because he contracted rabies, but his replacement, a man who Saben said was reasonable and intelligent. I heard a rumor that my mother was asked to serve on the triumvirate but declined, saying she was needed where she was. I ask her about it during a rare lull, as we washed our hands at adjacent sinks in the hyfac early one morning.

  Lathering her hands and letting the water flow over them, she says, “My time has come and gone, Everly. I like to think that I did my part to restore Amerada after the pandemics, that I stepped up to the tasks that needed to be done. I gave up a lot to do that.”

  She turns to dry her hands under the airflow of a dryer, not looking at me, but I suspect she means me and Idris and Alexander. Him most of all.

  “Now, I’m too damn old to play politics, to maneuver and compromise and sit in meetings day in and day out. Meetings—the scourge of productivity. Fonner thrives on them and he’s welcome to them. He’s a superior administrator and a good man, deep down. I’ll lead the MSFP until this is over, and then I’ll turn it over to someone younger, someone with new ideas and more energy.”

  “You do more than most people my age.”

  That earns a sliver of a smile. She is thinner than before, her uniform hanging loosely, and her hair is almost completely silver. I let the water run over my hands longer than I need to, and then splash some on my face. “What will you do then?” I can’t see her retiring to a small house somewhere in Atlanta, or even outside the capital, whiling away her days doing—what?

  “I’m a doctor, you know. By training. That’s how Alexander and I met—in med school. I may return to that. Find a community that needs a doctor and park myself there. Do good on a smaller scale.”

  “No meetings.” I smile.

  “Exactly.” She returns my smile. “And you—what will you do, Everly?”

  I have no answer. I haven’t thought beyond today, this week. I don’t know what the options are. Prison, for one, as far too many people here know who I really am now, and I get the feeling at least one or two of them would be happy to turn me over to the authorities once the crisis passes. If I don’t end up in prison, I
suppose I could continue to serve in the MSFP. Dr. Ronan will stay here, I am sure, now that Kube 9 is obliterated, and I know he’ll want to have me on his team. There is still a lot of work to be done with the locusts, breeding and releasing the infected and mutated variety to hasten their extinction. I can do that, although so can many other people with access to my research protocols. I think about my and Wyck’s original plan, to head to an outpost in the west. I can’t see myself doing that now. I am needed here. Wherever I go, and whatever I do, I know I will be with Saben, unless I end up in prison, of course.

  “Find Halla’s baby,” I say, surprising myself and Minister Alden. “I promised.”

  “And then?”

  The idea of a baby, of being responsible for one, fills me with terror. “I don’t know. It’ll depend. I might not even be able to find him. Or he might be—” Dead.

  She smoothes a hand over her already neat hair, and says, “You’ll be a good mother, Everly Jax, when the time comes. As good a mother as you are a scientist and friend.” Without looking at me or waiting for a reply, she exits the hyfac, leaving me gaping with astonishment.

  At about the ten week point the health crisis begins to wane, with fewer geneborns falling ill and deaths decreasing. Only now can we begin to assemble a picture of the damage to Amerada’s society and economy and the toll is staggering. Almost three-fifths of people who serve in the government are dead or missing, having fled the populated areas and not returned. Ministries scramble to find replacements, but the nats mostly don’t have enough education or training, and government services slow to a crawl. The domes are less affected, because many of the workers were nats already, but distributing food to the communities is cumbersome and slow without experienced Ministry of Transportation servers to keep trains running on schedule.

  With less need for vaccine and molecular scissors solution production, Minister Alden orders that all MSFP servers employed in those efforts are to take three days off on a staggered schedule. When she announces at a ministry-wide meeting that the cots are being packed back into storerooms, and that we’re all to go home, I realize I don’t have a home. It’s an unsettling feeling. Saben, sitting beside me, squeezes my hand and whispers, “Come home with me.”

  So I do. Not to his parents’ house, but to the small billet the IPF assigned him when he first arrived for duty in Atlanta. It’s not unlike the billet I had what seems like eons ago, downstairs from Marizat. Her name was on the list of the dead geneborns early on. It’s all so sad. So many people dead for no reason. And yet, I can’t deny that positive change is beginning to come from the devastation. The sense of enmity between natural borns and geneborns, the feelings of resentment and hatred, have begun to dissipate, eroded by tragedy and compassion. It’s helped in large part, of course, by the fact that there is no longer a physical way of telling one from the other: the gold eyes are gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Two weeks after I move in with Saben, Vestor pops into the lab where I’ve returned to doing locust eradication work. I’m alone except for a thousand locust instars humming in a cage at the far end of the room.

  “My dear Everly. Lovely to see you.” He embraces me, smacking a kiss onto each cheek.

  “Minister Vestor! To what do I owe the honor?”

  If he hears my sarcasm, he doesn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he sweeps the length of the lab in his crisp white minister’s garb, and stares into the cage at the mostly quiescent instars. He pings the cage’s mesh to make one drop. “Hard to believe something as small and fragile as a grasshopper can wreak the havoc they have,” he says, turning to smile at me. The mole on his cheek winks. His mahogany hair is swept back from his forehead, baring his surprisingly unlined and deceptively cherubic face. “Speaking of havoc . . .”

  I cross my arms over my chest, knowing he’s leading up to something, and not sure I want to get sucked into whatever it is.

  “Idris Ford.”

  I let my hands drop to my sides. “What about him?” I’ve heard nothing from or about Idris since that day in the prison. I had wondered about him once or twice, but on the whole, I thought ignorance of his fate was preferable to knowledge. I’m about to be proved right, I know.

  “Rumor has it”—he taps his fingertips together, starting with his pinkies and rolling toward his thumbs—”rumor has it that Idris is holed up on an old paddlewheel replica called the Chattanooga Belle. I believe you know of it?”

  When I don’t commit myself one way or the other, he continues.

  “Rumor is, of course, as reliable as a Psyche addict looking for an inhalation, but it says he has managed to sail—steam? Row, for all I know—the ship downriver to within shooting distance of the coast and the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “That’s not possible,” I gasp. “The Belle wasn’t seaworthy.”

  “I think I said it was all rumor?”

  “Don’t think I’m falling for that.” I flip a notebook closed and it fans some sheets of paper off my desk. “You didn’t come down here to find me to chat about ‘rumors.’ You know something and you want me to do something I’m probably not going to want to do.”

  “Ah, Everly, I knew the first moment I saw you, bald and defensive, that you were something special. Didn’t I tell you so?” He beams.

  “I don’t recall. Cut to the chase, Minister, please. I’ve got work to do.” I stoop to gather up the fallen pages and make a show of straightening them.

  “I want you to go after him. Bring him back to answer for what he did, for his crimes against humanity.” Vestor’s expression is uncharacteristically grim. “I’ve spoken to Emilia and she agrees.”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “You won’t be alone,” he assures me with a calming motion. “I’ve tasked Fiere to lead the team charged with recapturing him. She wants you along. She says”—he folds the fingers of his left hand in toward his palm and studies his nails—”that Idris has always had a soft spot for you. She thinks having you along will be an advantage.” He peeps through his lashes at me, gauging my reaction.

  “So soft that he was going to execute me.” Even as I say it, I realize that there has always been—something—something indefinable between Idris and me.

  There’s an uncharacteristic edge to Vestor’s voice when he says, “I need you to do it, Everly. It’s sensitive. Emilia’s connection to Idris Ford—well, it makes things tricky. She says let the chips fall where they may, let him reap what he has sowed, but it’s not that simple. The new government is fragile, untested. There are those from both sides—the Prags and the Defiers—who would like to see it fail. We don’t need our opponents connecting Emilia with the man who committed mass murder and destabilized Amerada. I need someone I can trust on this mission, not a run-of-the-mill IPF soldier who might broadcast any accusations Ford might make. Understand?”

  I nod.

  “Your chum Sharpe is part of the team, too. The three musketeers, together again.” He beams like he’s offering me a treat.

  Wyck once called Halla and me and him the three musketeers. It would be wonderful to see Wyck again. We haven’t talked since that night in the Kube. “What about my work here?”

  From the way Vestor smiles, he knows I’ve capitulated.

  “It will be waiting for you when you get back. You’ve trained your team well—they can continue in your absence.”

  Now I’m not even necessary here. The thought unsettles me. “Fine,” I say ungraciously. “I’ll go. When?”

  “Two hours.” Vestor claps a hand on my shoulder. “Thank you, Everly. I have faith that you and Fiere and young Sharpe will handle the prisoner retrieval efficiently and discreetly. Once he’s back in custody, trust me to ensure that he never gets the chance to wreak havoc again. I believe in you. I always have. Ah, and before you go, I have something for you.” He pulls an envelope from his chest pocket and hands it to me.

  With a questioning look, I slit it open and withdraw a single sheet of paper headed with the Amerada
crest. I scan it and look up at him, not daring to trust the printed word.

  “That’s right,” he says with a wink. “It’s a full pardon. You are no longer a wanted murderer, Everly Jax. You can be yourself again.”

  The relief I feel surprises me. The page trembles in my hand and I make a business of refolding it. “Thank you.”

  “Didn’t I tell you at the outset that I was the best defense attorney in Atlanta, that I’d get you off?” His boastfulness is oddly endearing. “And you doubted me.” He shakes his head in mock sorrow.

  “Never,” I said. “I believed in you.”

  His rich laughter lingers in the room as he exits after handing me a new ID microchip, one I assume links to my real DNA and identity, and another envelope.

  I don’t hesitate. I slit my forearm with a scalpel, getting a sense of déjà vu, pry out the Rose Budd ID chip and insert my real identity. Sealing the small incision and wiping away the blood, I summon my lab deputy and tell him I’ll be gone, perhaps for as long as a couple of weeks. He’s pleased to be left in charge and promises to keep the locust eradication effort humming along. Leaving the lab, I requisition an ACV and return to the billet, where I write a note for Saben. He has returned to the IPF temporarily, helping with training until the IPF is back to something approaching full strength. He’s gone on a four-night mission, running a survival exercise a couple hundred miles west of the capital. With any luck, I’ll be back in Atlanta before he returns from his trip. Then, I head to the address Vestor handed me on his way out. It’s a building at Base Falcon, on the southeast side of Atlanta.

  I’ve never actually been on the base, although I surveilled it once, hunting for Halla, and I look around with interest after the sentries scan my microchip and let me in through a series of three gates. The buildings are one-story, painted tan or brown, and laid out in an orderly grid. Only the two-foot high numerals painted on them make it possible to distinguish one from the other. A handful are damaged from the fighting that occurred when the Defiance captured the base, but young recruits are busily making repairs, and soon those buildings, too, will look like the rest. I shake my head at the sameness of it all, but then think that the military’s penchant for order is not all that unlike a laboratory’s. Everything has a place, and a lab isn’t safe or the research conducted there reliable unless specific procedures are scrupulously followed.