“Great,” Meke said, not smiling.
Arya weaved her fingers together, intently reading the handheld. “Most of the questions are quite straightforward. You shouldn’t have any problems answering them.”
Meke nodded. Most of the questions were about what happened at the institution. Bare facts inflicted little pain. Arya massaged her neck. “Here are a few questions that I don’t know what you’ll say to. In our last meeting, you seemed a bit unsettled.”
Meke kneaded her left hand, remaining silent. Arya raised her eyes to meet Meke’s. “What kind of man do you think Doctor Ball is?”
“Arya, it isn’t a fair question. I don’t see why I need to answer it.”
Arya closed her eyes. “This exposé is more than facts. It’s about showing how evil all of this is.” Arya gestured around the room. “We need a villain. We need someone for them to hate.”
“Why don’t we blame Lucio Donner? He’s the one who started the program.”
Arya shook her head. “People respect Donner too much right now. Look at the docs. He can do no wrong. He’s the smartest man in Prosperon, the next president. People won’t believe us. Doctor Ball, on the other hand, people will believe.”
“But don’t you think Lucio Donner is responsible?”
“What I think doesn’t matter. What matters is what will happen. If you sympathize with Doctor Ball, we will get nowhere.”
“What about the dead Squares and Fivers? Wouldn’t you think that people would object more to their deaths?”
“Perhaps, but that’s the wrong way to start. We’re trying to abolish the system. Sterling says that it’s very important that people remember what life is about. We used to cherish life—maybe not all the time—but a lot more than we do now.” Arya bent forward. “This is for your parents. They wanted a world where these things on our hands didn’t matter. We need to do that now, rather than later.”
Meke looked down at her hands, the Zeroes only faint orbs in the light. Perhaps this would be another way for her to show everyone how she could bring value. How she could count for something. All of Arya’s words made sense, but Meke’s brain refused to accept them as truth.
“Arya, I don’t know what I feel about the man. He did all these terrible things, but he was also very kind to me.”
Arya rubbed the bridge of her nose and looked at Meke with weary eyes. “Maybe what you think are kindnesses aren’t truly kindnesses. He gave you all these things, but have you ever thought about the reasons why? I can promise you, nothing in Genex is done out of kindness.” Meke shrugged. “Think about it. Or, better yet, get it from the source itself,” Arya said.
“I can talk to him?” Meke asked, both anxious and excited.
“Yes.”
For the first time since Arya had entered the room, Meke noticed the deep blush circles under her eyes. Arya’s lips flattened into a straight line. “It has to be you. I wish it didn’t have to be, but it is what it is. If you don’t think him evil, nobody else will. We can talk all I want about numbers and statistics. It’s all irrelevant.” Arya laughed, her dark eyes penetrating. “Prosperon may try to cleanse us of our emotions, but humans are still emotional creatures. We’re using that.”
“I know,” Meke said, letting her chin drop to her chest. “How’s Cecil?”
“Dying. And you know who’s responsible for that.”
Meke exhaled. “How long does he have?”
“Not long. His fever is so high that his body is in total failure. Soon his heart will stop.”
“The Genex shots did this?”
“The symptoms match those of the patients in the mountains almost exactly.”
Meke looked at her elbow’s crook. Now she was the only one. She shivered.
Arya got up so abruptly that the chair skidded away. “I’ll set up the visit.” Her face was smooth now, all signs of weariness gone. As Arya reached the door, she turned around. “Meke, I know all of this is difficult. I know that, but you’re the only one. I know you’ll do the right thing.” She paused. “Also, you may want to visit Cecil today.”
Meke put her head in her hands after Arya left. She needed to do the right thing, except she didn’t know what it was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MEKE STOOD outside of the door. It looked like every other door in the complex: broad and gray. The room inside looked just like any other room as well, except for the man inside.
Two large men by the door marked the only difference between this room and all others. One of them glanced at her hands and then stared outward. His expression didn’t change as he opened the door.
Doctor Ball lay huddled on the bed, his back to the door. His head turned slowly, his cheeks and nose coming into view. His watery blue eyes widened as his eyes beheld her. They stared at each other.
Doctor Ball didn’t look much better than he did in the mountains. A white bandage was wrapped around his head, making the paleness underneath more startling. Through the thin shirt, Meke could see the sharp shoulder bones through fabric. What had happened to this man?
“Meke, is that you?” He struggled to form the words, his fingers shaking.
“It’s me. I wanted to see you before…”
Doctor Ball blinked and looked down at his hands. His star glowed dimly, more dimly than usual. After fumbling with her hands at the door, Meke sat in a chair facing the wasted man.
All of her anger had dissolved into nothingness. Just hours ago, Meke had been in Cecil’s room, looking at the flat line of his heartbeat. She had blamed Doctor Ball. She had blamed everyone. Now, she just felt exhausted.
Her gaze caught his red-rimmed eyes; he flinched, but held her gaze. “I’m here to understand what you did,” Meke said. Doctor Ball didn’t respond. “I want to understand why you did what you did.”
Meke felt the sudden rush of warm breath on her arm as Doctor Ball laughed. It was a harsh, ugly laugh, something far from humor. “It doesn’t matter why I did what I did. I’m going to hang for it either way. Your friends will make sure of that.”
Meke slumped back into her chair. “I care. I’m not here on their behalf.”
Doctor Ball returned his watery stare at her. “Are you sure about that?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, anyway.”
Meke leaned back into the chair, blinking. She wasn’t sure who was behind this whole conversation anymore. Arya may have sent her, but the decision was hers to make. “I need to know. I deserve it.”
“Maybe you do. I never intended for this to happen.” His eyes wandered upward. “Nothing happened the way that it was supposed to happen.”
Meke sucked in her breath. “Please, just tell me. I don’t want to think of you as a bad man. You were kind to me, and I won’t forget that.”
Doctor Ball straightened a bit and grimaced. “I always liked you, you know. I tried to do my best by you.” His shoulders slumped. “I planned it out so well. The experiments. I gave you an education.”
“What does my education have to do with it?”
“When you came, we knew you were something special.” These words made Meke stop breathing momentarily. “We suspected that you’d be one of the first successes. We were right.”
“We?”
“Lucio and I.”
Meke tried to match the two ideas in her mind: her, a Zero, and Lucio Donner, the top Star, in the same sentence.
“After a year, we realized that we were right. You’d be our prize subject. You needed education; you needed a way to communicate with us, to explain things to us. You couldn’t be just another Zero.”
Meke wished that she could take pride in this specialness. In yet another way, she had fulfilled her parents’ wish for her to be more than the empty circles. The fact that her specialness came from this experiment made her not want it. “So, it was all just to make me a better subject?”
“No! Like I said, I always liked you. You always worked hard, not like most Zeroes.”
“It all started about 20 years ag
o. I was just another associate scientist at the Ministry of Science and Technology. I was just another one of the doctors. Nothing terribly special.”
His blue eyes grew more watery. “One day, Lucio Donner approached me. He was new back then. He was young—twenty, if a day. He asked me to be part of a research program.”
“What kind of program?”
“At that time, he told me that it was just experiments with gene modifications and mutations. That was what I’d been studying since medical school. I finally had a chance to put my theories to work. It was thrilling. After years of writing articles and studying DNA models, I finally had a chance to be a real Star.”
A corner of his thin lips slowly upturned. “Pure cutting-edge research—adventurous things that we couldn’t do at the Ministry without other Stars interfering. We came up with new hybrids of animals. New plant forms.”
Doctor Ball’s eyes glimmered, his mind mired in a world long past.
“When did people become involved?” she asked.
Doctor Ball frowned, shaking his head. “I’m not even sure. One day we were doing petri dishes; the next, we were experimenting on mice. Somewhere along the way, human subjects became involved. It was the natural order of things.”
“These were human beings. People with feelings and thoughts.” Meke squeezed her left hand so hard that the freshly healed bones ached. She squeezed some more.
Doctor Ball cowered as if Meke had raised her hand to strike him. “It had to be done. We wouldn’t know if the genetic therapy would work without human subjects.”
Meke leapt onto her feet, and started pacing the small room. “Why Zeroes?”
Doctor Ball waved his hand. “They were the ones Lucio sent. I just…needed people.”
“What about the ones buried in the mountains right now? They’re not all Zeroes.”
“We had to use them in our accelerated experiments. They were the only ones with somewhat similar genetic composition as you.”
Meke’s brain felt weighted down with this. She walked faster, almost hitting the wall in her concentration.
“But you told me that I was sick and there was a cure. Why did you even bother?”
“That’s what they told me to say.”
Meke stopped in front of the bed. “You didn’t think that was strange?”
“Well, yes—wait, no. It’s important that the subjects remain calm. Agitated subjects are very bad for experiments. Also, I needed to focus. I couldn’t worry about little things like keeping subjects calm.”
Meke bit down on her tongue. “Focus on what?” she asked, steadying her hands.
“My work! Genetic manipulation is a very delicate thing. I needed to focus on it exclusively.” Meke couldn’t say anything to that. “Please don’t think of me as a bad man. I thought I was doing a good thing. My work would destroy the ranking system. No more Zeroes, no more Equis. Just Stars and Fivers. It would be for the greater good.”
It was almost like her lip had a mind of its own. The left edge of her upper lip lifted in a sneer. “A cute new society? You purposefully manipulated my body so I could become a—” Meke almost didn’t say the word, but she had to make him understand, “a…a weapon. Doesn’t sound like a cure or even an equal society.”
Doctor Ball shook his head frantically, his cheeks swaying slightly. “No! You don’t understand.” His eyes were pleading. “These experiments—the genetic improvements and the cures—are very closely related. To advance one is to advance the other. That’s why we need you.”
Doctor Ball bent over and placed his wrinkled hands on hers. Meke tried not to jerk her hand away. With a slow, smooth motion, Meke removed her hand. “What in the world did you think would happen with your experiments? Did you truly think you’d just create something and save the world?”
Doctor Ball shifted on the bed, making the sheet slide off. Meke saw the faint darkness of the old bruises on his legs. “I don’t know.” He ran his hands through his hair, making it stick out at wild angles. “I thought it’d just go somewhere better. It was just so fascinating. Humans have been trying to optimize themselves for a long time, and I finally had the chance to do it on a molecular level. It’s something that every Star dreams of.” Doctor Ball closed his eyes for a moment. “I was following orders. I had no choice.”
“You always have a choice.”
Doctor Ball shook his head in a slow swinging motion. “No, I didn’t have a choice. I only had a few years left to prove myself. It’s all lost now. Useless.” His body seemed to wilt, as if he could no longer resist gravity’s pull.
Meke’s head jerked up. “What do you mean?”
“There was a reason why they air bombed the place with me there. They meant to kill me, but I lived. I’m no longer helpful. I couldn’t give them anyone else like you. My life’s work—destroyed.”
A wave of unwanted pity snuck upon Meke. Prosperon had treated him as a Zero. Unlike Zeroes, Stars had more hope to contribute to Prosperon, but when that hope died, it was an ugly sight.
“You couldn’t get anyone else like me?”
“No. The experiments were put on an accelerated schedule. We tried different dosages with the same miserable results.” Doctor Ball’s expression softened as he fell deeper into thought. “It’s confounding. It must be that your particular genetic makeup is better suited to the treatment than any other genetic makeup.”
“It worked on Cecil, for a bit anyway.”
Doctor Ball wrinkled his forehead, creating deep crevasses. “Cecil?” His hand went to his forehead as he scowled. “Ah yes, subject 323. He survived?”
Meke swallowed, trying to ease the burn in her eyes. “He did for a while, but he’s dead now.”
Doctor Ball nodded. “Ah, I see. Maybe his genetic makeup was stronger. But nobody seems to have thrived like you.”
The word felt like a blow. She may be the sole survivor of this mad experiment. Meke looked at her hands. They looked like they always did, firm and calloused. Something under her skin, something deep in her genetic makeup made her…she wasn’t even sure what it made her. Impervious wasn’t the right word. Adaptive was a better word. Her body somehow accommodated the deadly toxin and made it hers.
Meke smiled, but it was a joyless smile. This proved one area where she wasn’t a Zero. She had beaten everyone, even Fivers and Stars. That realization brought her no pleasure, only pain.
Meke jerked her head up when the guard opened the door. The large, nameless man pointed at his watch. Time was up. Meke raised her hand palm out, fingers spread. She mouthed, five more minutes. The man gave her a curt nod and closed the door.
Meke bent forward, her head a couple of inches closer to Doctor Ball. “Do you know about the exposé?” she asked.
“You mean the farce? Oh yes, I know all about it.” Scorn appeared on his face, distorting it into something that Meke didn’t recognize. “The great man himself explained about the exposé. How I’d get my say.”
“What’s wrong with that? Aren’t they being charitable, giving you the chance to say something?”
“They will hardly let me say anything. It’s all rigged. Do you truly expect me to be able to say whatever I want? No, I’ll be surprised if they record it at all. They may even edit it to make me look worse.”
Doctor Ball laid back into his pillow. All anger and scorn gone, replaced by weariness etched deep into his wrinkles. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. I was dead either way.”
Meke closed her eyes. He was right, of course. His life had ended already. For Stars, posterity was everything. Meke wondered if being a Star wasn’t as wonderful as she had thought. Stars carried the heaviest burden of contributions. Doctor Ball had told her once that he had meant to have children, but his studies proved too demanding.
“I’m testifying,” Meke said.
Doctor Ball flinched. “Yes, I expected that.”
The guard opened the door and cocked his head toward the hallway. Meke rose from her chair. Doctor Ball re
mained on the bed, looking up to the ceiling. Meke put her hand on his forearm. His eyes jerked toward her.
“Goodbye,” Meke said.
Without looking back, she walked out of the room, up the elevator and entered her room.
She had made her decision. Now she needed to live with it.
Meke closed her eyes, allowing the silhouettes in the room fill her mind. It was easier to just feel the shapes and edges of the room reveling in the room’s smallness and sparseness. Her sense explored every nook, cranny, corner and bump around her. It felt simple and straightforward. Nothing like what she would have to do in a few days.
Meke laughed. She would be throwing away almost everything she worked for in a short few days. Now she only thought of shapes and feelings. She would be something, and supposed it no longer mattered what her parents would have thought. Only what she thought mattered.
Rather than think about the consequences, Meke rolled over and went to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
MEKE BEHELD the bare half of the room. They had turned the Nerve Center into a television studio. She had never seen the Nerve Center so empty of people. It felt unsettling, almost wrong. Half of the room was bare, with screens and dark walls surrounding the room. The screens shone with numbers, pictures and data. One screen showed a close-up photograph of the dead bodies in the mountains, their hands hidden.
Meke looked away from that picture, focusing on the stark neatness of the room. The other half teemed with moving, murmuring and jostling bodies. Meke squeezed herself between two people in the front so she could see everything. Several people held small black devices in their hands. Camerapeople. They would broadcast the exposé over the Webs live. All of them leaned against the wall, waiting for the production to start.
Sterling was nowhere to be seen. For some reason, Meke had expected Sterling to supervise the exposé. Before Meke could explore this thought further, her eyes met Trove’s. All moisture left her mouth, destination unknown. With effort, Meke forced the corners of her mouth upward. Trove returned the smile with a bit more force.
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