Nicoli sat back and studied me. “And it’s highly contagious.”
“Highly.”
“What are the symptoms?”
“Well, there’s a range of symptoms, really. First, a fever will develop, the
body’s first response to an intruder. Some victims start to develop buboes, or
bulblike growths that normally turn purple or black, hence the name. Others will
develop severe pneumonia, as did our doctor in this journal entry. I’m sure we’ll find as we read on that his sputum will start to consist entirely of blood, instead of just tinged with it. And, as his little girl did, others will develop septicemia.
No matter the symptoms, the outcome is always the same. The virus attaches to
the cells, makes its way to the lymph nodes and attacks our immune system. We
have no defenses against it.”
Nicoli nodded. “Would you like me to keep reading?”
“Please.”
He began again:
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“‘Wednesday, September 17th. It is the late-night hours, and I have just been
informed that my little Belle has already succumbed. I barely have the strength to move, my own blood even spotting these pages. My strapping boy Philippe has
taken to the disease, and although my wife shows no symptoms as of yet, I am
sure she will by morning. She has decided to come along with us, and is lying in
the bed with our son, holding him tightly. I hope…’ It doesn’t say anything else.”
A long moment passed before either of us spoke. Finally, he handed me the
papers.
“Thank you,” I whispered as I stood.
Before I could turn, he caught my wrist. “Elyse.”
The shock of his touch was almost as powerful as the flutter I felt when he
used my first name. He cleared his throat. “Dr. Morgan. I have confidence in
you, for what it’s worth.”
As the elevator doors shut behind me, I acknowledged to myself that his
confidence in me was worth very much. Very much, indeed.
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Chapter Nine
Despite my initial complaints about the amount of information I received, I
managed to sift through and organize it within two days. I reviewed the lab tests first—most of which had been thorough and relatively creative. It became
obvious that the UN sent me every single piece of information they documented
on the virus, without regard to relevance. The spectrum of the work started at
completely silly and ended with impressively ingenious. But they all ended up in
the same category: failure.
One doctor’s work irritated me. He’d found a way to halt the functioning of
infected cells. Unfortunately, he had stopped the functioning of every other cell in the patient’s body as well. By using hydrogen cyanide. The whole experiment
was conducted with scarcely more elements than a grade-school science project. I
wondered that this man’s findings even had a place among the experiments of
his more brilliant counterparts. At the very least, a few lab rats could have been spared in preventing this man from practicing medicine. I shuddered at the more
serious implications of his primitive experiment.
I was also disgusted, physically sickened, when I came across an experiment
conducted with live human patients. Furiously, I scrolled through it, reading
with horror that the anonymous scientist had intentionally infected human
beings and had found to his surprise that he couldn’t reverse the effects of the
virus. Every single patient died within the usual forty-eight hours, ranging from small children to the elderly. Happily, one of the patients tried to escape,
Degrees of Wrong
facilitating the need for the doctor to restrain him, and thereby infecting himself with the disease. I scrolled to the end. His closing entry read:
I’m relieved to find I’ve been infected with the Black Death. I can now desist with these inhumane experiments and hope that God will understand why I had to do it. My only comfort is that I won’t live long enough to see my family executed for my failure.
Surely they will understand that I sacrificed everything that a person could sacrifice for them. May God forgive me.
He had been held by the very terrorists who engineered the disease—
somehow the UN had confiscated his findings. I hardly made it to the bathroom
before vomiting. I lumbered back to the computer, still on the verge of tears. I
needed a break.
Nicoli would be expecting me soon, anyway. That I even considered giving
him the benefit of the doubt now seemed like a laughable waste of deliberation.
The last few evenings were not dissimilar to the very first night that he appeared at the gym—except that I changed the variables leading up to my inevitable
failure.
That second night, he’d materialized again on the machine next to me,
choosing the same run I did—the Mountain Run. So, to test my theory—to give
him the benefit of the doubt—I’d waited until he warmed up before changing my
setting to the Beach Run, despite my aversion to it.
I’d known the moment my dot disappeared from his input screen—his head
jerked in my direction. Mere seconds had passed before the devil red dot
appeared on my input screen once again, only seconds more before it passed me
there on the beautiful, unspecified shore.
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Not even the solitude of the sunshine and gently lapping waves could have
consoled my temper.
The third night, I’d waited a little longer before going to the gym. I’d figured
that, as a scientist, I should introduce a new variable before I called a theory a fact. At one o’clock in the morning I started my warm-up on the Highway
Endurance Run. I breathed in the solitude as I breezed through one small town
and saw another one on the horizon.
The sound of the machine next to me starting up smothered the momentary
peace. Nicoli grinned—though not at me directly—as he selected the Highway
Endurance Run at a pace faster than mine. This completed the testing period, the
theory now a proven fact—Nicoli was irritating me. On purpose.
I’d considered waiting until he ran at full speed before reaching over to push
his emergency stop button. Dr. Folsom and her silly do no harm policy held me back. Barely. Instead, I plodded along, fuming, accepting my inescapable defeat
at the end of the run—and cursing myself for eating so much chocolate in the
first place. Because of the chocolate alone, I stayed and endured the humiliation.
And as always, he finished before me and left the gym, depriving me of the
chance to flail at him with my limp limbs and scream things at him no educated
person had any business thinking about, especially at two o’clock in the
morning.
So now, the fourth night, it was with burdened feet that I made my way to
the gym. He leaned against my usual machine, grinning in his usual foolish
fashion—which caused the usual heart palpitations.
“You’re making a nuisance of yourself, Captain.” I noticed he was fully
dressed and fought back the disappointment.
His grin widened. “Am I? That’s not my intention, Dr. Morgan.”
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“
Perhaps you could explain your intention, then. Because from my
perspective, it appears that you come here each and every evening, regardless of
the time, and break the joint custody contract we verbally agreed to.”
“How much chocolate have you eaten today, Dr. Morgan?”
I could barely see him through my narrowed eyes. “You, of course, can see
how that wouldn’t be any of your business, Captain.”
He chuckled. “I was just wondering if you could skip your workout this
evening.”
“What for?” And why was he dressed? Get a hold of yourself, idiot.
He shrugged. “There’s been a development which…Dr. Folsom thought you
might be interested in.”
Dr. Folsom had been up to no good, of late. “What is it?”
He shrugged again. “It’s easier to show you than to tell you. Why don’t you
run your things to your room and meet me at the transport pods?”
The transport pods? “Um, no, I don’t think so. Thanks anyway.”
I walked to my machine, but he moved to block my way. Undeterred, I
moved to the next one. He caught my arm and whirled me around, scorching my
skin with the contact.
“You’re making my life very difficult right now,” he mused. “You well know
how Dr. Folsom can be when she doesn’t get her way.”
Yes, yes I did. And it suited me just fine. “That doesn’t sound like my
problem.” I made a display of giving it more consideration, then reiterated,
“Nope, definitely not my problem.” Besides, the idea of working out sans Nicoli
seemed too peaceful a temptation to pass up.
“I need you to cooperate.”
“I am absolutely not going.”
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“Not even for one of these?” He offered his open hand, revealing a little
gold-wrapped jewel I knew to contain dark chocolate and caramel.
“Where did you get that?” Had he gone through my things? Had Dr. Folsom
shown him my hidden stash? Well, stash es?
“I ordered twenty- one pounds.”
I stared at the bribe in his hand, the shiny little morsel so alluring, even in
this horrible gymnasium lighting. “I am not some treat-trained pet,” I informed
him as I snatched it from his hand and strode to the door. “I’ll meet you there in ten minutes.”
“What a splendid weakness you have.” He laughed.
It did not warrant comment.
I dropped off my water bottle and towel in my room, chewing my chocolate
prize as I approached the elevator. I felt a bit relieved for the change of pace—
especially since the evening wouldn’t end with me breathless, sweaty and, well,
a loser.
He waited for me at the end of the transport hall. I followed him into one of
the transport rooms, where he had prepared a smaller pod—a four-seater—for
our excursion. With an agile hop, he landed in the pod and reached his hand out
to help me in. The intimacy screamed at me, and I hesitated.
“Dr. Folsom’s not coming?”
“No. Just me and you.”
I bit my lip. “Why don’t you just tell me what it is? You could tell Dr. Folsom
I went, and I would corroborate your story. She wouldn’t have to know the
difference.” I shoved my hands in my pockets to keep from fidgeting. Now was
not the time to show weakness. Again.
His hand fell. “Don’t you trust me?”
Implicitly. “No.”
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He laughed and held out his hand again. “Don’t worry. Your virtue is safe
with me.” He smiled with the cliché.
I eyed his hand long enough for him to be insulted. The reasonable part of
me demanded that I turn, run from the transport room. The curious,
irresponsible and admittedly larger part of me wondered why I wasn’t already
seated and strapped in. I took his hand.
He used it to pull me closer, and when close enough, his arm encircled my
waist. He lifted me in with ease, as if I didn’t consume three thousand calories of chocolate per day. When my feet met with pod, I scrambled away from his
disorienting touch.
He seated himself in the conductor’s spot, and I strapped myself next to him.
He maneuvered the controls with a seasoned finesse. Within seconds, the glass
shield closed around us and the room filled with water. The lights dimmed, the
controls the only illumination in the cabin.
“When the floor opens, we’ll drop out,” he said.
Despite my expectation of it, my stomach fluttered with the sense of lost
gravity when we dropped, and I gasped. I heard his soft chuckle but wouldn’t
satisfy him with a dirty look.
He negotiated the pitch black without the spotlight, instead pulling up a
screen which appeared to be a map of the ocean floor and surrounding sea
structures.
Noticing my interest in it, he said, “This is an explored region of the ocean.
When a defined area has been thoroughly explored, we work to put it into map
form, for easier navigation.”
“Ah. And how much is mapped out?”
“When the UOC first began its exploration, only roughly fifteen percent of
the oceans of the world had been explored, and only twenty percent of that had
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ever been officially documented. Now, we’ve covered about thirty-five percent
of the oceans. It may seem slow-moving.” He shrugged.
“Not at all. It’s a huge undertaking.”
“Very. That’s why the UN decided to place less emphasis on space
exploration and concentrate their efforts right here at home. They haven’t
regretted it.”
“No,” I agreed. “They haven’t.”
In fact, it had paid off richly. In the past fifty years, they found oil pockets
scattered throughout the ocean floors of the earth, containing enough of the fuel to sustain the entire population for hundreds of years. Although, due to the
developments in technology—and the use of hydrogen-powered everything—the demand for oil had dissipated to almost nonexistence. Still, because of these
massive discoveries, more funds were shoveled toward the UOC to see what else
they could find—and to protect the assets already detected. At least, that was Dr.
Folsom’s rendition.
“So, is it useless to ask where we’re going?” I turned around in my seat,
surprised to find the outline of the massive Bellator was no longer visible.
“You’ll see. We’re almost there.”
Without warning, fireworks appeared. Everywhere. I shook my head, peered
closer—fireworks couldn’t exist down here. All around us, a soup of illuminated
marine life exploded into color.
Purples, blues and fluorescent whites glowed in the water in forms large and
small, creating an orchestrated symphony for the eyes. Some seemed to move
with the ocean current, while others displayed rigid control of their flighty,
harmonic movements. Tiny, indiscernible dots and larger silvery fish and even
eellike creatures flitted about the cabin, all glowing with different colors and at different intensities.
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“Breathtaking.” I had seen pictures of this, but the images fell marginally
short of seeing this miraculous display firsthand.
“Yes. They responded to the movement of the pod. It’s a chemical reaction
called—”
“Bioluminescence,” I said, still in a state of awe.
He chuckled. “Yes. ‘I forgot you’re a genius of some sort’,” he quoted me.
The pod shuddered, and the glowing forms disappeared for a moment as the
muck stirred up from our landing encompassed them.
“Are we on the bottom?” I asked nervously.
“Yes. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”
“How—how far down are we?”
“About two thousands meters.”
“We’re over a mile deep?” Could he hear my heart beat—hear it skip beats? I thought I could.
“You need to trust me, Elyse. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you. I’ve
done this countless times. This isn’t even close to the crush depths of these
pods.”
“Crush depth? What is that?”
“I would think it would be self-explanatory.”
I gulped. “What kind of pressure can the pod withhold?”
“That’s top secret.” He winked. Then he saw that I wouldn’t be placated.
“Look, we’ve taken pods similar to this to the ocean’s deepest point.”
“The Mariana Trench?” I asked, incredulous.
“We’ve taken it there too.”
“The Mariana Trench isn’t the deepest point?” I was sure I’d studied that
somewhere. Not prone to forgetting statistics, I remembered reading the Mariana
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Trench was some eleven thousand meters deep. If he had meant to distract me, it
worked.
He shook his head.
“What’s the deepest point?”
“The Mariana Trench is, as far as the textbooks are concerned. Between you
and me though, we’ve found a point deeper than that. Much deeper.”
“Where? Where is it?” Was he deliberately feeding me tidbits at a time?
“Sorry, Doc.” He stretched out in his seat, resting his head on his interlaced
hands behind him. I noticed he never bothered to buckle in. “Top secret.
Unless…” His rakish grin was illuminated by the gentle glow of an inquisitive
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