And now he saw it, after eight years of deliberately avoiding this entire side of town. He stopped across the street from it, staring at it. The little windows were so dirty he couldn't see inside. The door no longer had any words on it and it was padlocked shut. He stood there for a long time, trying to force himself to cross the street, jump over the tiny fence and into the back yard. He wanted to know if mom's herbs were still there, in their old pots. But he just couldn't do it. He knelt where he was, put his head down and said his goodbyes in whispers. To his parents, and to Samson, and to the little yard with the not-garden garden. And when he felt there was nothing else he could say, he turned around and ran back to Janet's, soaking his feet in the gray puddles, splattering mud and dirt on his clothes.
As soon as he got on his block, he saw the unmistakable form of Brody, sitting on a stoop of Janet's house, so he picked up the pace.
"Hey Brody! What the hell are you doing here? You don't skip school, remember? Who am I supposed to cheat of now?" He was panting hard from his run. Brody looked up at him and he wished he didn't say anything just now. His face was not at all like Brody's face was supposed to be. He unlocked the door and pulled Brody in by the arm, not saying anything. He was going to tell him whatever it was in his own time. He sat him down at the kitchen table and went to the stove to make tea.
"Hungry?" He didn't think he was, but worrying about the little things would take the edge off. Brody just shook his head. The tea kettle boiled and he poured the two cups, no sugar for Brody, the way he always drank it, and sat down on the other side of the table, looking at his friend, waiting. Brody didn't touch his tea, just sat there like a statue, looking blankly at the wood grain in front of him. He let him, for a long time, and then finally Brody took a screen out of his pocket, turned it on, and handed it to him, not saying a word.
He watched a tall man with very white hair pacing a small room in front of a light haired man and a woman who were sitting on a bench behind him. Brody's parents, but a little older than he remembered them. They looked smaller now, especially Max. He was the largest man Riley had ever been picked up by when he was little, and he remembered how tiny he felt when Max held him, and how safe. There was something comforting about being pressed against his stubbly cheek, smelling of pipe tobacco, and something else, sweet and syrupy, that he always smelled of. He couldn't remember the woman's name now. She looked small, and he could see dark circles under her stark blue eyes, looking much too large for her face. He didn't really get a chance to know her when he was little. She'd serve them supper on occasion, but mostly, she let them be.
Something in the room dinged. The man stopped his pacing and moved away from the camera with a nod at Brody's parents. Their faces were smiling now, full-on smiles with no life in them.
"My name is Max Fuller, and this is my wife, Alana. For years we lived in a small town called Waller, in Zoriner territory. We were what you'd call missionaries, I guess. We wanted to help civilize them, because we thought we could. Alana's sister married a Zoriner. Illegally, of course. We got to know the man a little, and it seemed that maybe they weren't the animals we were taught to believe they were. We were idealistic, I guess, and young, and stupid. So we moved to Waller, and lived among them for years. We even raised our boy there, hoping he could remain one of us in the end. But when he turned six, we already knew we'd lost him. Everything about him, except for the way he looked, was Zoriner, even then. He was full of anger, and there was a maliciousness to him that shouldn't have been possible with his genes. We saw then that we made a mistake, a terrible mistake... I urge any of you who may feel pity for them or compassion and who might think you can change how somebody is wired-- with Zoriners, you can't. They might not all be as dumb as we were taught, but they are all not quite human anymore. There is raw animal anger in every one of them, no matter how docile they seem. They will turn on you, and they will turn on everyone who looks like you. Our son, Brody, his name was, he is dead to us now. He is one of them. We can't ever undo the damage they did to our boy... We are just not the same species anymore. They look human, but they are not. The Alliance was right in keeping us isolated from them. I never thought I'd say that, but here it is. They were right. They are animals. And the best we can do is keep them contained."
There were tears running down Alana's face. She didn't try to hide them or wipe them away. She didn't seem to notice that she was crying.
The white haired man stood in front of the camera now. "This message was brought to you by the Council's office of public information. Thank you for watching. If you know of anyone who could benefit from this message, please pass it on to them. And, as the laws dictate, if you know someone who has committed a crime or plans to commit one, it is your lawful obligation to notify the Council immediately."
The feed shut off. Brody was still staring at the same spot on the table, not moving at all. He didn't know what to say to him now. They always just assumed that Brody's parents were killed, like everyone else's parents who were taken by the Alliance. He never thought of Brody as not a Zoriner anyway, so this, everything that Max said, it didn't make sense for him to say it. He couldn't possibly mean it about them, about Brody.
He heard the door open, and saw Janet standing in the hallway, looking at the two of them. He wished he could just tell her, show her what he saw. She'd know something, but it wasn't his secret to tell. Maybe it wasn't so secret anymore, and that's why Brody had it on his screen in the first place. Maybe everyone in Waller already saw it, and that's why Brody wasn't in school now, but sitting here, staring into nothing.
Janet shook her head at Riley and walked back out. She seemed to know they would want privacy for this, and he was sure then that she knew what this was about. That meant everybody knew.
"There is no way he meant any of it, Brody. You know that. They probably threatened them or tortured them." He cringed when he said it, regretting it coming out like that, "I'm sorry. Sorry for saying that, I wasn't thinking. But it didn't seem real, not like real them. They made them do it, somehow. Maybe they were trying to protect you. I don't know..." He got up and walked around to where Brody was sitting and put his hand on his shoulder, squeezing hard. He wished he'd say something already. Or pound his fists on the table. Or cry. Anything better than sitting there like that.
And then he did. He jumped up, grabbed him by his jacket collar, and slammed him against the wall, hard, "I need to know something. There isn't a person in Waller now who doesn't think I'm a traitor or a danger to them after this. Not a one, Riley. They broadcast this in school today, on everyone's screen. Trina, too. She and I are over... I need to know if... If you are I are done too." He was still holding him against the wall, staring him in the eyes.
"That's what you think of me? That I'd walk away from you because of this? What the hell is wrong with you? What kind of an asshole do you think I am, Brody?" He sounded angry, he knew. He pushed Brody away from him, and walked out of the house. He needed air, away from that. Away from that look in Brody's eyes, that question, as if he truly believed he was capable of something like that...
He stood on the stoop just breathing, trying to calm himself enough to do what he knew he needed to do. He was still panting when he went back in the house. Brody was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, holding his head in his hands and sobbing like a little kid.
"Please, don't say anything, Riley. Just. Don't. Talk." So he sat, waiting, his back to Brody, waiting for him to stop crying, waiting for him to know for sure that he'd never betray him. That even if Max and Alana meant everything in that feed, it couldn't change how he felt about Brody. Nothing ever could.
He let him be for a long time, and then went to Trina's, just down the street, to talk to her. Only she slammed the door in his face before he got a chance to say anything. And when he got back to the house, Brody was gone. He never saw him in school again. He went looking for him every day after school at Andy's warehouse, and then at home, but he always jus
t missed him. Andy promised to tell him that he was looking for him every time, and he believed he did, only Brody never came.
He saw him walking down the street one day, keeping his head down, not looking at anybody, and he ran after him, screaming his name, but Brody wouldn't stop. And when he was just catching up, he turned around and looked at him for a long time, then shook his head and turned away from him. He knew then he couldn't chase him like that, that Brody didn't want him to. He would give him time. However long he needed.
Two days after that Brody was gone.
Mi2
Doctor Sandra Groning, March 3, 2122, Manchester, UK
Cassandra was making tea. She always made tea when she felt that she might need to talk. She never pressed her for it, she just knew. Like Charlie always knew. She spent so many years wishing she had that ability to read people's moods, but it never came, and the doctor in her knew that it wouldn't come. She just wasn't wired that way. She could definitely use the tea though, if not the conversation. She never quite knew how to explain what she was working on to Cassie and not make her feel like an idiot, and she didn't want to do that, but the only words she knew for any of it were full of strange-to-Cassie names and numbers and markers. She had no need to know any of those things.
She could smell a hint of jasmine in the tea that Cassie brought her. That was a rare luxury, and she was afraid to ask her what she did to get it. You couldn't grow jasmine in a pot on a windowsill. And it was the middle of winter, so even if you had decent enough land to grow things on, this wasn't grown here, and flying anything in was prohibitively expensive. But she welcomed the sweet scent, the scent of their summers, now a million years ago, in the country, the air warm and humid and full of jasmine and fireflies. She missed that old house, missed everything about it. The small one they moved to when everybody lost all the money they had and they didn't know how to get any of it back, that one she didn't miss at all. But Cassie probably did. That's why she stayed, not just the graves.
Cassie was looking at her over her tea cup, a big utilitarian thing, a tea mug, really, steaming in her hand.
"I think Jason and I made a mistake, Cassie. I've been trying to figure it out, to fix it for weeks, but I don't think I know how to, and it scares me to death. The subjects have been having babies for six generations now after the GSX shot, and all has been going well. The babies are healthy. We've tested every one of them and there were no issues, not a one. Anyway, Amy, one of the first to mature from Tanka's litter, we mated her for days. Tom, her mate, is perfectly healthy too, and has done fine by them before, so we know it's not him, but we had her mate with Leto just in case, and Leto had just gotten Sophie pregnant, but it didn't make a difference. We just couldn't seem to get her pregnant, Cassie. So Jason and I tried with Tanka's other females, and only 3 out of 7 got pregnant..." She needed a break, to think of how to tell her what it meant, or what she thought it meant. So she sat there looking into her tea mug, inhaling the smell, and trying her best not to feel like the murderer Cassie probably thought she was when she just started working on AlterX.
"They started distributing SG17 in schools fifteen years ago to all the girls as a shot, Cassie. Every girl in the cities gets one when she turns 12. And the GSX won't work on them at all. It can't help them. These kids, they might never be able to have kids. I may have killed everybody after all, Cassie, and I don't know if I have enough time left to fix it. I don't even know if it's something that can be fixed..."
She leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes. She was bone tired and more scared than she wanted to admit to Cassie, or to anyone just yet. Jason knew, of course, and was scrambling to help her figure out what happened, sleeping as little as she was these days. He was always at the damn lab. She hated the lab now and stayed in the office as much as she could, thinking, worrying.
She heard Cassie rinsing the cups in the sink, running as little water as she could. She must have thought she was asleep. She heard her put the cups away and quietly leave the room. She liked this Cassie, the non-kid Cassie. It took the edge off her loneliness to have her around to talk to or just sit there with her, and Cassie spent all her time with her now, mothering her, feeding her, making sure she got at least a little bit of sleep every night. She half suspected that Cassie was spiking her tea with some sleep inducing herb at times. She got good at this herb thing. They fascinated her, so she let her start a small nursery under the fake lights in the little space next to the lab that hasn't been used for anything in years. That's probably where she went to now, to talk to her plants.
She knew she had to make the call. Just couldn't bring herself to do it yet, not without knowing what was causing this, not when there was still some hope that this was a fluke, or that maybe they did something wrong reworking the formulas for the shots to test on rats instead of Bonobos. Nobody wanted to wait for decades, so they had to do it this way. Still, there was a chance it wouldn't affect human females the same way, there had to be.
She forced herself to get up and went to look for Jason, to the lab. He didn't even turn his head at her from behind the microscope. He aged so much in the last few years, his hair was almost entirely gray and it was hard for her to look at him without feeling that she'd done this to him, cost him all of his youth with her experiments. But he seemed to belong here now, like the Bonobos and the damn rats belonged here now, she thought without humour. That's what she did to people in her incessant search for the cure and now for the cure from the bloody cure. She walked up behind him to see what he was looking at, and watched, fascinated, as he was staring at fully mapped out genetic profiles of every subject female born here in the last three years.
That's what he'd apparently been locked up in here doing for weeks now. She knew he had something, as he still hadn't even acknowledged her, so she waited. Looking at the screens in front of him, and then she saw it, the thing that seemed to hold his attention, the flaw. The bloody fail safe in the SG17, in case some women were immune to the effects of the meds, even if only in the smallest of margins. A nanogen signal to the Mi2 gene to turn off. That's it. A flaw that had no more chances to become inheritable than say a person catching a flu being able to pass it on to their offspring, and yet, there it was.
"Jason, I need you to do something, as quickly as you can. I need you to map the infertility rate in any city's sample of females who were born to the treated group. We should have about nine years of those to work with. Comb the main nets, pull up every known clinic, whatever you need to. We need a statistically viable sample, a thousand at least. Send it to my screens, please. I have to go."
He looked at her, eyes red rimmed from lack of sleep, at least she hoped that's all it was.
"I don't think I can fix this, Sandra. I can't figure out a way to. I'm going to keep at it, of course, but I think we'll need help, maybe a lot of help and a few miracles, because this - it latching on and propagating itself- this doesn't make any bloody sense. This shouldn't even be possible..."
She knew he'd feel guilty, the fail-safe being his idea, but it really was harmless. And he was right, this shouldn't be possible. "It doesn't matter, Jason. Nobody could have seen this. We just have to find a way to fix it. I'm going to try to get us some help. Get me those stats, will you? And please get some sleep. You look like shit." She smiled at him, so he knew she didn't blame him for this, couldn't blame him for this, and left to make arrangements that would likely take her away from here for the next few months at least.
She'd have to find a way to explain all of this to a bunch of non-doctors, a bunch of politicos, and hope they would understand the implications of this. They had the resources to help fix this. She needed those, desperately. She didn't even want the credit. They could do it elsewhere, hand it to Darius Huxer, for all she cared. He seemed to want the fame and something named after him. She had plenty of that now, on every bloody vial of the SG17 shot.
She'd likely have more of it than she could take when the flaw comes out. The headli
nes again, only now, they'd have a right to call her the killer of babies after all. Sandra Groning, the destroyer of them all. Bloody hell. Maybe she'd get lucky enough to die before that happens. Before Cassie wakes up to those headlines again.
She was sitting in a stuffy white walled room in a tiny hotel in Stockholm when she got the data she was dreading from Jason: 13.9 % infertility with all other factors accounted for. So 4.6% increase in the first generation over current population averages, margin of error at under 1%. The feeling of dread returned. These numbers were too high for her not to know that the flaw propagated in humans. It simply couldn't be anything else.
But how do you convince a bunch of politicos that an increase in infertility of roughly 4% in a still over populated and economically unstable world merited their attention, and more importantly, their fear? How do you ask them to invest already limited resources into fixing something that has been making the immediate situation better? Birth rate within the city populations was under control for the first time in probably the history of the human race. It was becoming manageable again to provide for the basic needs of their populations. How could she convince them to pull the SG17, at least until they could find the fix for the damaged Mi2?
She had no idea how to make them see any of it through her eyes. How to make them see that it wasn't a fluke and that it would get worse and worse with future generations. And not for the first time this week, she wished she never took that walk among the corpses on Madeline all those years ago.
Serpent Stew
Amelia, April 22, 2236 Woods, 220 Kilometers Outside The Compound
She wished Drake was with them now. She missed the giant. Missed the sage smell about him and that gentle way he had of making everything seem better, and safer. And she missed feeling safe. For so many weeks now she hadn't felt completely safe. None of them did. And this slow going through the woods was getting to her.
Escape (Alliance Book 1) Page 10
