by Andrea Ring
I don’t say anything, and Erica turns back to Dad.
“You didn’t even ask me.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Dad lies. “But I will if you ask me to.”
I can see the thoughts churning through Dad’s head. He planned this. He wants her to ask for it, and then he’ll pretend to give it to her, and all will be well. I see him radiate sympathy and hope in his gaze, and he laser-focuses that fake emotion on the woman he says he loves.
She sighs and looks at the ground between them. Then she lifts her head and smiles softly. Damn, he’s good.
Then before either of us can react, Erica grabs my tomato knife off the counter and plunges it into her stomach.
***
“No!” I scream as Dad lunges for Erica and Tessa comes running.
Erica crumples to the floor, cradled in Dad’s arms. “No,” he whispers.
I slide to the floor beside them as a monster headache screams in my temples.
Tessa enters the kitchen and kneels beside me. “What happened?”
“Tessa, grab me a clean towel,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Breathe,” Dad says, his nose almost pressed to Erica’s. “Just breathe. Now picture the wound. Feel the pain, and tell your body to stop feeling it. Tell your body to stop sending the signals.”
As he talks, his hand inches closer and closer to the knife.
We both watch Erica take a shallow breath. “Better?” he asks her.
Erica licks her lips. “A little.”
Erica’s completely lying, if my headache is any indication. My eyes tear from the pain, and I quickly suppress my tear ducts. I try to hammer back at the headache, but I can’t make a dent in it.
“Now don’t look,” he says. “Close your eyes. Squeeze my hand.”
Erica’s eyes flutter shut, and a tremor of panic rolls through me. She’s bleeding. We have to stop it.
Dad grabs the knife and jerks it out in one swift motion. Erica’s body bows up at the pain, I gasp aloud, and her eyes fly open. She sees the blood-coated knife, and her chest heaves.
“Close your eyes, damn it!” Dad growls as he drops the knife to the floor. “We’re not done yet.”
Erica turns her head away from him, and her chest convulses again. Then she vomits all over her shoulder and the floor. Dad tries to hold her head up so that the vomit goes out instead of back down her throat. But Erica gags, and vomit sprays across Dad’s chest.
“Thomas, press on the wound,” he says, as he flips Erica’s entire body on its side.
“Towel!” I scream at Tessa. She’s frozen holding a dish towel in her limp hands. I reach over and rip it from her hands and press the towel to Erica’s stomach.
“Now picture the wound again,” Dad says. “Picture your body healing it. Force your body to repair the damage. You can do it.”
Erica blinks too fast, and the motion looks alien. Beads of sweat pop out on her upper lip, and I know she has zero control over the pain. “No,” she whispers.
Dad nods his head at me and at the knife. “Cut your hand and heal her. Now!”
I clench my jaw, lean over them both, and grab the knife. I slash my palm open, throw the towel aside, push Erica’s shirt up, and press my wound to hers.
What should I do first? Damn it, I can’t think through the pain. I breathe through my teeth and try to focus.
I make a few nerve connections and trace the neural network up to her brain. I hook into her brainstem and assess the situation.
Erica actually pierced a portion of her large intestine. Her system is now contaminated with bacteria, and if I don’t clear it all out fast, she could get a major infection.
I heal damaged arteries and veins first to stop the bleeding. Then I—
I suddenly lose contact with her body. I mean, I’m still hooked in, but it’s like the connection was severed. I can’t read her system.
I abandon my work and trace back up to her brain. When I reach the brain stem, I realize the connections I built, the new nerves, have been dissolved. Erica’s brain is filled with T cells, all focused on attacking anything I’ve built since I entered.
Shit! I’ve never had this happen before. I’m using Erica’s cells to build the new connections, so the body shouldn’t be attacking. But I am using my own Protein T, and Erica can’t manufacture Protein T…damn me and my experiments! I enhanced Erica’s immune system, and I coded it to suppress attacks against her new DNA, but the enhancing part…it’s way out of control. It would be fine if my proteins were cold viruses, but they’re not. And her immune system is fucking with my ability to heal her.
“What’s taking so long?” Dad says.
“Quiet,” I snap back. I can barely focus on what I need to do to heal her, let alone explain it out loud. But Dad knows how fast I work, and I can’t keep him silent if I take much longer.
I attack her T-cells and re-grow my neural connections to her brain. Bingo. Information on her body comes flooding back to me, and I continue killing T-cells while I head back down to the wound and start killing bacteria.
It’s like trying to shoot two separate targets with a gun in each hand. My shots are only accurate where I’m focusing my attention.
I flip back and forth, and when I have bacteria cleared from the actual site of internal damage, I heal her intestinal wall. Erica’s body shudders as she throws up again and then goes limp. Too limp.
“Hurry, damn it!” Dad yells. “Cut off the nerves! She’s feeling every bit of this!”
“I thought she did that herself,” I say, trying to concentrate on my two-front war.
But I knew she wasn’t controlling the pain. What’s wrong with me?
“Not well enough,” he says.
I abandon the fight to stop the nerve signals from the wound, and my connection breaks again.
But at least my headache vanishes.
Swearing under my breath, I re-grow the nerves in her brain and go back to fighting T-cells.
“What’s wrong?” Dad asks.
“Her immune system,” I say. “It’s fighting me. I keep losing the connection. Stop distracting me.”
Dad shuts up, but I know this is only temporary. He’ll be yelling when this is all over.
I heal more damaged tissue, kill more T-cells, ice the occasional bacteria in my way. About twenty minutes in, Erica’s breath turns noticeably shallow.
“Dad,” I whisper.
“Take out the lymph nodes in her neck,” he says. “You need the connection to finish this. Force the T-cells to travel farther.”
I notice a few bacteria trapped in one of her veins. They’re traveling to her heart. I dissolve them and move to the lymph nodes. I stop their ability to produce T-cells. Two more minutes and I have the brain cleared of the enemy and can focus on the bacteria.
I still have to stop what I’m doing and manage T-cells coming in from the rest of her body, but the full-on assault is over. I finish with bacteria and heal all the tissue damage except for the external wound.
I take a deep breath. My chest hitches, and it’s difficult to draw the air all the way into my lungs. I give myself a shot of adrenaline, and I feel a little better.
“Status,” Dad says.
I swallow. “Damage healed. All the…the bacteria are dead. She pierced her intestine.”
“Blood loss?”
“Some, but…” and I stop to lick my parched lips, “…not bad.”
“Why’s she unconscious?” he asks.
I clench my eyes shut against a wave of weariness that crashes through me. “Shock,” I whisper.
“Can you bring her out of it?”
I nod, but the motion is jerky, and Dad lays Erica’s head gently on the floor (away from the pool of vomit) and pulls one of my eyelids up.
“Back out now,” he says.
I release more adrenaline, just enough to give me one last boost. I manage to heal Erica, and I pull my hand off of her and cradle it to my chest. Blood runs down my wrist.<
br />
“Heal your hand,” Dad commands.
My hand’s not healed? I open my fist and bring my hand up to my face. Blood runs in a steady stream down my palm and drips onto Erica’s thigh.
“Heal it!”
But I can’t. I’m out.
“Stay with her,” he says to Tessa, then he hauls himself to his feet, steps over Erica, and jerks me up by my arm. He puts his hands on my cheeks, and I open my eyes. “Stay with me,” he says.
“I’m here,” I whisper.
“Is it bad, or can you sleep it off?”
I’m still processing the question when he bellows in my face. “Thomas!”
“Sleep,” I whisper. “Sleep.”
Dad grabs the bloody towel off the floor and wraps it around my hand. Then he throws me over his shoulder, and I pass out.
Chapter Forty-Two
Voices drift to my ears through the fog of sleep.
“Yes, I asked him to do it,” Dad says. “But I’m not apologizing.”
Erica sighs. “You’re not allowed to do that. You’re not allowed to just say, ‘Get over it!’ Michael, you’re doing to me exactly what Ron did. You’re giving me no choices.”
Dad doesn’t reply.
“At least give me the opportunity to forgive you,” she says. “Admit you made a mistake, and we can try to move past this.”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” he says stubbornly.
God, he sounds like me. Or I sound like him.
“I’ll give you one chance to back down. One. That’s all you get,” she says.
“I’m sorry you’re unhappy with the choice I made,” he says.
I hear rapid footsteps on the floor. The front door opens and slams shut.
Then something heavy thuds against a wall, and glass shatters.
The front door opens again and slams shut.
“Did you hear that?”
I open my eyes and find Tessa sitting on the bed beside me. “Yeah,” I say. “How did you know I was up?”
“Your breathing changed,” she says.
I roll to my back. “I don’t know why it didn’t work.”
“What didn’t work?”
“My genetic engineering,” I say. “Making your mom a Dweller.”
“It did work,” Tessa says, “but Mom refused to use the ability.”
“Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” she says.
“Not to me. She had a freaking knife in her stomach!”
Tessa glares at me. “She didn’t ask for it. Why would she use an ability she didn’t ask for?”
“Um, because it would have saved her life?” I say. “Why stab herself if not to prove Dad changed her?”
Tessa shakes her head. “She did do it to prove your dad was lying. But then, I don’t know, maybe she was punishing him.”
“She should know better than that,” I say. “One, no one can punish my dad. He just digs his heels in. And two, it’s shitty to use his one weakness against him. He would die for your mom.”
“But that’s the last thing Mom would want.” Tessa sighs. “Let’s not have this conversation again. You and I got past it. I don’t want to fight about it again.”
“Yeah,” I say on a sigh of my own. “Do you think they’ll get past it?”
Tessa bites her lip. “I don’t know. Your dad isn’t you.”
***
That’s funny to hear, because I think my dad and I are pretty much the same person in two different bodies.
Okay, maybe Dad plays a little faster and a little looser with the truth. But maybe that comes from years of experience. He’s collected a lifetime of wisdom and confidence, and when he makes a decision that is counter to his core values, he stands by it. Even when he knows he’s hurting people.
Maybe that’s just arrogance. And I certainly have my share of arrogance.
And it usually kicks in when I’ve made a hard decision, when I have to compromise in some fashion. I need that little bit of arrogance to back me up. I need it to win the argument when my decision is challenged.
But when you think about it, if a decision is sound, morally, you don’t need arrogance. You don’t need much of anything to back you up. Truth is on your side.
So maybe the arrogance kicks in when you’re not so confident, when you can’t stand on your moral high ground, when you know someone has a good shot at challenging you and winning. In this case, arrogance hides the truth: you’re really not sure you made the right decision.
Dad knows he was wrong.
And yet he would make that same wrong decision again. And again.
Because he’d rather lose than argument than lose the woman he loves. Even if that woman leaves.
That’s the decision I made when I forced Tessa into letting me heal her. I would rather have had her alive and apart from me, than dead and together, which really isn’t together at all.
I wonder if Dad was in the same position I was, if Erica would have said no to becoming a Dweller. I wonder if Dad already knew what her decision would have been. He must have, or he would have asked her about it beforehand. Or maybe not, because Dad assumes he knows lots of things. And he’s usually right.
But why blatantly lie to Erica? Why not let her discover her abilities on her own, and claim they were an unintended consequence of the operation? Dad could have gotten away with it if he’d kept his mouth shut.
But again, Dad’s arrogant. He thinks he can scam anyone.
I remember my last conversation with my grandma before she passed away. She told me Dad is the most self-aware person she knew.
So Dad knows he’s arrogant. He usually reads people well. There must be some reason he lied, and some reason he wanted Erica to find out he lied.
He loves her. I believe that.
But I also believe he wanted her to leave.
Why?
Chapter Forty-Three
Dad had a couch delivered to my house today, and he’s currently riding it.
Since I lived in his house for seventeen years, I can hardly complain. But I’d like to, because Tessa is staying the night with her mom.
She wants to talk Erica out of breaking up with Dad. Good luck with that.
I’m supposed to be talking Dad into apologizing. God, when did I turn into the parent?
Em requested a two-day sleep-over yesterday with Jack and Tyrion. I balked, but Jack pleaded with me. It’s hard to deny two females with tears in their eyes, so I relented. But I’d much rather be cuddling up with Em and Tessa than preparing my speech for Dad.
When I can’t get Tessa and Em out of my head, I decide to abandon a prepared speech and just take Dad head on. Probably nothing I say is going to make a difference anyway.
I go out to the living room and stretch my legs out on the floor. Dad’s reading a novel and doesn’t acknowledge my intrusion.
“So why’d you do it?” I ask.
He flips a page. “Which part?”
“All of it.”
“You tell me,” he says, his eyes glued to his book. “If you’d had the balls, you would have done the same thing to Tessa.”
Ahh, a little bravado and a lot of arrogance. An offensive attack. He must be feeling some major guilt.
“Actually, I wouldn’t have done the same,” I say. “I’m confident I can fix any health issue Tessa has. She doesn’t need to be a Dweller.”
Dad doesn’t reply.
“So is that the reason? You can’t fix Erica, so you gave her the ability to fix herself?”
Dad closes his book and throws it to the floor. “I have a week left,” he says.
“Until what?”
Dad just looks at me.
Oh.
I shoot to my feet. “How do you know you have a week? There’s no way you could know that.”
“Let’s assume I do know it.”
“What the fuck are we doing, sitting here?” I scream. “We need to be in the lab!” I think of all the time I’ve wasted this last couple of week
s, when I could have been working on lifespan.
Dad doesn’t move. “I have to plan for the end.”
“You’re reading a fucking novel!” I yell. “When you’re dying!”
“I’m not dying, Thomas,” he says. “I’m just going to die.”
I narrow my eyes. “So this isn’t about lifespan. This is something else. Jack told you something about your death.”
“It seems that Erica and I are going to be hit by a car,” he says, neither confirming nor denying Jack’s involvement. “She drags me on those walks around the neighborhood every night. I’m sure that’s how it happens.”
I swallow. “Does Erica die, too?”
“No.”
“So tell her. Tell her what’s about to happen. You don’t have to break up with her over this. She’ll be devastated!”
“She knows, Thomas.”
I sink to the floor. Erica knows that Dad is trying to save her life, and she’s leaving him over it. I hope Tessa can talk some sense into her, because at this point, I can’t fault Dad for what he’s done.
“Look,” I say, “there are two issues here. One is your relationship with Erica, and if you’re going to die in a week, you have to fix it. Just apologize and move on. Life’s too short.”
“Ha, ha,” he says.
My eyes suddenly tear, and I blink hard. “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean that.”
Dad leans his head back against the couch. “Death is inevitable. I’ve accepted it. What’s the second issue?”
“A plan,” I say. “I know you have one. How are we going to stop you from being hit by a car? First, you can’t leave the house.”
Dad smiles. “That’s my plan in a nutshell. But maybe I should go back to my own house. I’m afraid a drunk driver is going to plow through your living room.”
I smile back. “But Erica has to be with you. As long as you’re apart, maybe you’ll be okay.”
“Or maybe a drunk Erica will plow through your living room.”
I glare at him. “That’s not funny.”
He shrugs. “I’m not trying to be funny. I’m trying to think of every scenario.”
I lean back on my hands. “Give me another one.”
“There’s some crisis…Erica has some crisis that forces me to leave the house. We end up together and get hit.”
