by Kira Peikoff
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said, ashamed to have asked.
He pulled her closer, looking her in the eye. “Our daughter died.”
Words deserted her. She thought of Theo, and what would become of her if anything happened to him. She didn’t know how a parent could go on.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
His voice trembled. “She died of old age.”
“What?”
“Progeria. She turned into a little old woman before our eyes, bald with arthritis and wrinkly skin and frail bones that cracked if she kicked a ball. At eleven, she was dead.”
Natalie glanced at the framed picture on his nightstand. There was the smiling little girl with her white hair and pinched mouth, and the same mischievous eyes as her father.
“My God. How horrible!” She recalled the cases she’d read in the medical literature about such rare, genetically unfortunate children. Of course, there was no cure for aging as yet, no way to slow its progression. “She must have been the opposite of Zoe.”
“In genetics, but not personality. Hallie was spunky and playful and bright, so bright. I think they would have liked each other very much.”
Natalie sat down beside him and draped her arm around his shoulders. They sat in silence for a minute until she gestured toward the window, at the sleeping compound beyond. “All this. The research, the hospital center, me and Zoe and the Archon Prize. It’s all for her.”
“Yes.”
But it’s too late, she wanted to say. Dead is dead is dead. No scientist in the world could change that.
“Is it all still—worth it?” she asked instead. “If she’s not here to benefit?”
“It’s her legacy. Remember I told you the Network started out with the vision of defeating aging? I wanted to figure out a way to eliminate it on a grand scale, so this same tragedy stops repeating itself every minute of every day.”
“We’re going to. We just need more time.”
“I believe you. And you need to believe me. You have so much to offer—don’t waste it on me.”
“Is that why you told me? So I would give up on you?”
He lifted one shoulder, as if to convey the futility of her affection. “You deserve to know it’s not your fault.”
“Well.” She forced herself to stand up and gave him one last squeeze. “I’m always around if you need a friend.”
“Thank you.” He took her hand in both of his and kissed it. When he looked up at her, she knew she was seeing through every mask of disguises in his arsenal to the real, raw man himself—whatever his name.
“In another life,” he whispered, “you would have been it.”
She smiled sadly. “Too bad this one’s all we’ve got.”
She turned around before he could see the tears in her eyes.
CHAPTER 33
Nervous chatter about the nation’s manhunt for Galileo and his so-called victims swelled around the compound like the wave at a stadium, and Zoe didn’t like it one bit. The sense of safety she’d acquired over the last couple of months, of seclusion amid the mountains, was beginning to feel like a cruel desert mirage. The hardest part was that no one seemed to have any real facts, not even Galileo himself—or at least, none that he was willing to discuss. All they knew was that he had returned to inspect the compound’s secret evacuation tunnel, test the intercom system wired in every room, and host somber test drills.
During one such drill, everyone was called to the quad. “We’ll know the moment anyone violates our boundaries,” he revealed. “An invisible laser surrounds our perimeter that, if breached, trips on the security alerts in the Brain.” He went on to explain that a weapons vault was hidden in the floor there, and underneath that was the entrance to the secret tunnel. It cut a path deep underneath the mountains in a mile-long stretch of blackness, and eventually opened up through a manhole at the Turquoise Trail Campground and RV Park. A fleet of fully loaded RVs was waiting at all times to shuttle escapees to nearby safe houses.
Zoe remembered Natalie once asking him whether he suffered from paranoia. A hazard of the job, he had replied. She wondered now, as she made her way alone from her apartment to the Brain, whether these precautions were necessary, or if they were just his way of reassuring himself that he was still running the show.
She wished she could analyze the situation with Theo, but a strange distance had developed between them since the night of their kiss. They saw each other at most mealtimes in the cafeteria, but he refused to meet her eye, turning instead to chat up one of his mom’s colleagues or tease the dorky tech guys with whom he’d become friends. Even though Zoe knew she was well liked and had plenty of other people to talk to, there was something to be said for having a peer, someone roughly her own age.
Theo was the closest approximation, and without him, she felt painfully alone. To be fair, their estrangement wasn’t only his doing. She avoided him, too, taking circuitous paths from the labs to the hospital to the gym so as not to pass through the quad, where he often hung out. They were stranded in the chasm between friendship and crush, with no way to reconcile the two. How could they ever go back to being friends, when their feelings for each other were out? But how could they ever grow as a couple, when she literally couldn’t? When she tossed and turned late at night, one thought crept through her mind with the terrifying ring of truth—what if she was not worth loving?
Galileo’s return and the community’s sense of impending disaster—whether real or hyped—provided a distraction. On the third day of his visit, while everyone else was convening for dinner, Zoe decided to do a little research of her own to see if all the doomsday prep was justified.
Weeks had passed since she’d interacted with the outside. It almost seemed like a distant planet—but not quite. Her acute longing for Gramps brought into sharp relief every last memory of home—the colorful garden they loved in Riverside Park, the sweet smell of her mother’s hazelnut coffee, the silver skyscrapers that reflected the afternoon sunlight. Home was waiting for her—her family was waiting for her—half a continent away. How bad could the world be?
There was only one way to find out.
When she reached the Brain, the control tower perched upon the highest peak of the compound, she climbed the winding stairs and pushed open the heavy steel door. Inside, the circular room looked like a lighthouse transformed into a cockpit. A panorama of windows allowed for 360-degree views of the quad, the ring of adobe buildings around it, and the mountains beyond. Computer touch screens and live streaming video were built seamlessly into the walls next to a multitude of levers and red buttons and knobs that reached higher than Zoe could on tiptoes. She didn’t doubt that some logic existed behind the impressive panel, but it was beyond her comprehension. All she wanted was to get online, and this was the only place to do it.
She was greeted by Ted, one of the techies who traded shifts monitoring the compound’s electronic activities. He was a quiet, thirty-something guy with friendly dimples and thick black glasses. Theo had once told her that he’d gotten his PhD in computer science from Stanford and was practically a genius, but she’d never be able to tell by looking at him.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I want to go online.”
“You sure?”
She’d stayed away from the Internet these past two months for fear that it might burden her with a dangerous homesickness and guilt over leaving, but her curiosity had become too powerful to ignore.
“Yep. I’m allowed to, right?”
“Yeah. Just check with me before you send anything so I can anonymize it first.”
“I just want to check the news.”
“Go for it.”
She pulled up a stool to one of the touch screens and tapped out “the Network” into a Google news search. The Internet was lightning fast. In a split second, a long list of blue links appeared, with headlines like Network’s “Galileo” an Avowed Cult Leader and FBI Planning Covert Operation t
o Hinder Network: Source and Profile of a Psychopath Through His Victims.
The last link led to a list with pictures of his thirty-one alleged victims—the two men whose suspicious deaths Galileo had assured everyone that he had nothing to do with, plus the twenty-nine missing people—the researchers and doctors and patients whom Zoe had come to know and admire.
In the last spot was her own smiling face.
It was her high school senior picture. Next to it, in boldface italics, was another link: Have You Seen This Girl?
When she tapped, the page redirected to a number for a national hotline.
She closed the window, then went back to Google and typed in her own name. The first link took her breath away:
Kidnapped Girl Who Can’t Age: a Sign of the Apocalypse?
She touched the link and was led to the blog of an apparently popular preacher, whose Twitter handle@TJschurch counted over two hundred thousand followers.
Zoe Kincaid is Pandora reborn for modern times, sent by God as a test of our faith in His perfect nature. Experimenting on her to re-jigger human longevity would be the same as opening that dangerous box and releasing a plague of epic proportions . . . It is critically urgent that she be found and isolated from exploitation by that satanic cult before such tampering unleashes His wrath . . .
Zoe stared at the words. She had never given much thought to religion, either positive or negative, but the idea that she was some kind of stealth pawn of God to be avoided at all costs—it was ludicrous, wasn’t it? She was just a girl with a freaky condition trying to get by with her dignity intact.
She wasn’t a plague.
But what if she was?
What if figuring out how to help people live longer really was going to doom the world? Why hadn’t she thought bigger than herself and Gramps?
She had to find Natalie. She sprinted out of the Brain, forgetting to say good-bye to Ted, and ran as fast as she could to the cafeteria, winding down three flights of stairs and through the darkening quad, gasping past the fire in her lungs.
Only a few scattered people were still eating. Natalie’s brunette bob was nowhere in sight, so she pushed back through the door and dashed to the research center, the likeliest other place Natalie would be—retracing her steps across the quad, down more flights of stairs into the bowels of the compound, then through the ant-farm maze of hallways to Natalie’s lab in a faraway interior corner.
Sure enough, she was there, along with Nina Hernandez and a few other researchers from the aging team, all wearing white coats, plastic hair caps, and blue gloves. They were crowded around a counter studying a bunch of slides. When Zoe burst in, they all stopped working and looked up at her.
“Zoe!” Natalie exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Right now?”
“If you can.”
Natalie murmured something to the others and walked toward her, pulling off her gloves. Her eyes carried the dazzled gleam of a miner who’s struck gold.
“Get this,” she said, putting a hand on Zoe’s shoulder and steering her into the hallway, “your virus infected the mice in five different regions of their genomes. Five! We’ve gone from about twenty-five thousand possible locations to five!”
“That’s great,” Zoe replied weakly.
“So that means starting tonight, we’re going to start preparing knockouts to deliver to five different mice at the gamete stage, each one targeted to silence a different gene—”
“Natalie,” she interrupted. “Do you really think that I know what that means?”
“Oh, sorry.” But she didn’t look sorry, just impatient. “A knockout is an artificial piece of DNA that we insert to stifle expression of a certain gene. So we’re going to silence these five different genes, one in each mouse embryo, to see if any of them is actually the master regulator. If one dies, we’ll know we’ve found it, since living beings are unable to grow without it.”
“No kidding.”
“Excuse me?”
Zoe glared up at her. “You don’t give a damn about me, do you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I rush here to find you, and you don’t even ask what’s wrong. You only care about my genes!”
Natalie’s mouth twisted as though she’d been stung. “I—that’s not true!—wait, where are you going? Stop!”
“Forget it,” Zoe called over her shoulder, on her way out. What was the point of waiting around for some forced apology? Her primary concern was clear. For all Natalie cared, she saw Zoe as just another lab rat, only a rarer specimen, a prized capture. The team had gotten what they needed. If she died right now, who here would mourn?
Gramps would. Her parents would. The people who knew and loved her in spite of Syndrome X—not because of it. She thought of something Gramps told her after her diagnosis: You’re destined for greatness, sweetheart—not because of your body, but your mind. He’d gone on to praise her independence, bravery, and tenacity. What he didn’t know was that in her desire to grow into the fine young woman of his expectations, she’d copied the best parts of him.
Missing him was like missing a phantom limb. She ached in a place where pain couldn’t be measured, but where it could be felt the most.
Outside in the quad, the night sky glittered with stars, and she remembered the way he had taught her to find her way home if ever she was lost. Just find the Big Dipper, then stretch out her hand wide. The distance between thumb and pinky was about the space between the cup and the North Star.
In New York City, it was practically impossible to see anything in the sky but light pollution, so she’d never tried out his advice, but now she tilted her head to the sky. The number of constellations you could see in the desert was stunning, but the familiar angles of the Dipper jumped out at her like a jigsaw piece. She held out her palm and closed one eye, following the line of her hand to the bright glowing star at her pinky.
“Hey, champ,” came a friendly voice behind her, “what’re you up to?”
She snatched her hand back and turned around. Galileo was towering behind her, sweating as though he had just worked out. The second they made eye contact, his face contorted with worry and he dropped to his knees.
“What’s wrong?”
He reached up to wipe tears from her cheek. She hadn’t realized she was crying.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” she admitted in a small voice.
“What is it? Can I help?”
She shook her head, unsure where to even begin.
“Come on, there must be something I can do.”
A thought as radiant as Polaris popped into her mind. “Actually, remember the letter I gave you to send my grandfather?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you arrange for him to send a reply?”
He let out a troubled sigh and took her hands in his. “Zoe, I didn’t know how to tell you this before, but your grandfather never got your letter.”
“What? Why not?”
“He’s missing.”
CHAPTER 34
Injecting the mice embryos with gene silencers was like firing a gun at the start of a horse race—except the winner would be the first to die.
All of Natalie’s colleagues on the aging team were crowded around the pregnant rats like spectators—Nina, James, Karen, Susan, Peter, Terrance, Richard, and Gina, as well as Helen, an honorary onlooker. Over the past arduous weeks, a kinship had formed among them devoid of the competitiveness so rampant in academia. In this lab, they shared the goal of advancing scientific knowledge about aging. Period.
If the elusive gene was silenced, the results would not take long to come in, perhaps a day at the most. No living organism, in their hypothesis, could grow without the biological instructions ordered by the master regulator gene that was embedded in all species since the beginning of life on Earth. By switching off its crucial green light in utero, embryonic development stopped short, and
death would soon follow.
But if the green light stayed on throughout life, as it naturally did in every animal now, the gene’s orders would continue unchecked, even after maturity was reached—eventually leading to the body’s breakdown and death. The trick was to find the gene and silence it in young, healthy adults, so that the developmental progression known as aging could be stopped after it was no longer needed, but before it turned lethal.
Natalie wondered if anyone in history had ever been so eager for the death of a mouse embryo. Finding the gene would be no less than paradigm shifting—as consequential in the twenty-first century as Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microbes in the seventeenth, Mendel’s laws of inheritance in the nineteenth, and Watson and Crick’s DNA double helix in the twentieth.
Now all they could do was wait.
In the fantasies she would never admit, she enjoyed imagining Galileo’s reaction to the victory that might be imminent. This project was their baby—the union of their life’s missions. She liked to think that its success might motivate him to relinquish his painful past and commit to life in the present. All progress—all survival—required forward motion, but she understood that no doctor or scientist could speed up the healing of a human heart. In that most personal lab, the rules were reversed. Expert opinions meant nothing, persistence could spell failure, and letting go was sometimes the only path to discovery.
Her confusion over Zoe’s behavior persisted. That sudden burst of criticism had come as a shock, and even though Natalie knew it wasn’t fair, she still felt guilty for whatever she had done wrong. Zoe had turned utterly cold in the days since, so far from her normal self. She wore a permanent scowl and refused any attempts at reconciliation. She even avoided Theo. Whatever her private struggles, the message was clear—she wanted to be left alone.
The anticipation currently mounting in the lab—Nina’s pacing, Helen’s wide-eyed glances at the mice, the group’s excited chatter—seemed wrong without Zoe there. She was holed up in her apartment for some reason Natalie couldn’t understand. The Zoe she knew was as intent on conquering aging as any of them and would have been first in line to witness this experiment. Then again, teenagers were notoriously moody. If the breakthrough happened, hopefully she would come around. And maybe someday, so would Galileo.
