Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  On Dany’s first day at the BioGENEius lab, Isobel Lau took them to see the facilities. On the tour, she showed Dany the ­microtome. “This machine,” Isobel said, “was a big part of our first real breakthrough with the virus. The sections that this microtome produces, when fed a viral brain – thinner even than onion skin paper.”

  Dany stared at the machine, thinking of a word. Three letters. Five points.

  She stared at that machine, thinking of all of the people she’d ever known and lost track of. The ones who just one day weren’t there anymore. Just there and then gone.

  Thinking of a woman named Phil.

  Thinking of a man the kids called Veg. Because of his ­cauliflower ear. But it was only funny if you didn’t know how he got the damage. Bill was his real name. He used to run the conven­ience store, and he sold her mom real cigarettes for a quarter each, until those too were impossible to get.

  Had Bill been infected? Had it been Bill’s brain that they’d fed to that machine?

  While Isobel explained the finer points of the microtome, Jasper looked at Dany, his brown eyes soft with concern. “It’s a rough kind of science,” Jasper added, quietly. His words had the ring of an apology.

  Isobel Lau raised an eyebrow and gave the biologist a ­corrective glance. “In the early days,” she reminded him, “with a virus of this magnitude? Well, a little rough science is called for.”

  Dany turns away from the memory, and looks at her kid ­sister, at those enormous brown eyes. “What about treatment?” she asks Isobel.

  “Once we get you into the lab,” Lau tells her, “we can begin to think about that. But the clock is ticking.”

  “My little sister,” Dany begins.

  “Your sister,” Isobel asks, her voice brisk. “She’s with you?”

  “Yeah,” Dany says.

  “Then I’m sorry, Dany. I’m truly sorry, but she’ll need to come in too. Let us pick her up. Let us see if we can keep her safe,” Isobel says, her voice gentle.

  But there is no “safe.”

  The MDC would just contain her sister. Stick her in some kind of a glorified glovebox, just like Dany and her rats. And if Mac was fine? They’d send her off to the Ministry of Child Services. They might even send both of them there. That’s if they didn’t feed Dany to the machine, if they didn’t slice and dice her brain. She pictures deli-sized slices emerging from a microtome.

  “It’s not safe,” Dany says.

  “No,” Isobel tells her, misunderstanding. “No, you aren’t safe. No one’s safe when they’re with you.” And it is like her lungs collapse, the air pushes out of Dany’s chest all at once and, for a moment, she can’t breathe, she just can’t catch a breath.

  There are prime numbers and then there are the patterns in the primes. Today, Dany skip-counts primes, leaping through the sums by the power of ten. Two, twenty-nine, five hundred and forty-one.

  Breathe, she tells herself, breathe.

  “You’re a danger,” Lau tells her flatly. “You’re a danger to every living person you come in contact with.”

  Dany taps the temple of Eva’s glasses, and with that tiny click, the tinny voice in her ear dies away, and Isobel vanishes with it.

  “What’d she say?” Eva asks brightly.

  And for a long beat, Dany stands there, staring at what looks like an ordinary pair of glasses in her hand. “Nothing,” Dany says, finally. “She didn’t say nothing.”

  She slides her fingers over her mask, testing the seal.

  Dany is pretty sure she knows how the new virus is transmitted – the one thing that ties Jasper, Dany, Liz and Bea together. Saliva. Three tiny snapshots rise up from the swamp of her mind: Jasper’s tea, a wrinkled pea in her copy of Shrewsbury and Liz’s voice, asking, in a decent imitation of Bea, “Want some sparkle?”

  A tiny virus has turned Dany into a ticking time bomb. And that bomb is attached to a clock that has no visible hands. She wants to tell Eva, but there are no words.

  She can’t find words.

  “It’s the new strain,” Dany finally manages. “That’s what got Liz and Jasper.”

  “People need to know,” Eva says.

  Dany shakes her head. “Yeah, who’ll listen to a couple of teenagers?”

  “I could post a video, like, of what happened to Liz and Jasper. I could put it up on the interweb,” Eva says.

  Her glasses, Dany thinks. Of course, she’s taped all of it on her glasses.

  Dany nods, and five clicks later, it is done.

  As they close in on Faraday’s house, the girls come to a decision.

  “My father’s yacht,” Eva tells her, “it’ll be perfect. Sort of like a plague vacay.”

  “Your dad has a yacht,” Dany repeats.

  “Fully stocked. But one small problem. It’s moored out by Steveston. Len Wahl, the malignant narcissist who spawned me, is schlepping a foot model. She’s got a condo out there.”

  “Like Chaucer meets Boccaccio,” Dany says.

  Eva bumps a look her way.

  Dany doesn’t bother explaining. “I like to read,” she says and shrugs.

  “And I like to survive extinction-level events,” quips Eva. “In spite of my research interests, I am fond of humankind.”

  “I have to stop at the prison-hospice on our way out,” she tells Eva. “For my aunt.”

  “Oh, DJ, I’m sorry,” Eva says and looked at her sadly. “But if she’s at the hospice, do you really think we can help her?”

  “She’s not sick,” Dany says.

  “Wait, your aunt’s in jail again?” Eva stares at Dany, surprise plainly written on her face.

  But Dany grips Mac’s hand, picks up the pace, and the last fifty yards of their walk are spent, by Dany at least, in brooding silence.

  Eva, meanwhile, calls out updates – every time she gets a new follower, every time the outbreak video is viewed and shared. “I’m going viral!”

  Eva laughs an evil laugh, mwa-ha-ha, and then catches sight of Dany’s expression.

  “Too soon? Okay, yah, too soon. I’ll be serious.” Grinning wildly, Eva draws a giant X over her heart – and Dany, she has to turn away.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 19

  The three girls stand in the back alley, surveying Mister Faraday’s house.

  “Well, let’s see what our school tuition pays for,” Eva says.

  “Uh, we go to public school,” Dany reminds her. She is holding Mac’s hand in a firm grip.

  “Whatever,” Eva says. “I think he’s in there.”

  Banging noises float out of the garage. Dany leads the way through the door, and there, in the middle of chaos, they find him. Their history teacher, Faraday, is sitting cross-legged on an oil-spattered floor. He looks less like a history teacher than a mechanic, one who has been set down in the midst of an exploded three-dimensional diagram. All of the small parts that belong inside of his VW Bug are strewn around him. Dany takes the whole of the scene in at a glance. To one side of Faraday, there is a vintage scooter. A Sunbeam. The bike is all in one piece, but will only hold two of them.

  Dany glances from Mac to Eva and back to Mac, her heart sinking.

  She frowns at Faraday. Bad luck, that’s what it is.

  “Can someone tell me what the hell you’re doing in my garage?” Faraday asks.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” Eva says, one hand jigging in the air.

  Mister Faraday closes his eyes, bites back a word and puts his teacher face on.

  Finally, his eyes come to rest on Dany. Whatever he was about to say is gone. Faraday stands up in a clatter of car parts, and holds out the palms of his hands. “Jesus, Dany, who did that to your face?”

  Her gut twists.

  She feels a little sick, thinking of Bea, locked in that room. How Dany, always, is the one to survive. She hasn’t seen her own f
ace, not yet – but she can feel it. Her right eye is swelling up, and it throbs with every beat of her stupid heart.

  Dany shrugs him off. “Just an accident,” she says, and looks down at the floor.

  “Let me guess,” Eva says to Faraday. With a sweep of her hand, she takes in the mess. “This would be your car’s motor and your motor would be a precursor to movement – specifically, to velocity, which, I know, implies speed and direction, but we know where to go, Mister Faraday. We’ve worked it all out.”

  Eva looks at Dany.

  Dany shrugs unhappily. “You’d probably better sit for this,” she tells him. The girls sit down on the oil-stained floor and, after a bewildered moment, Faraday sits down too. “The virus,” Dany tells him, “it’s made a leap. Mutated.” Faraday’s hands work as he listens, putting the puzzle pieces of his car back into working order.

  Part Two

  | Chapter 0 = X + 20

  Dany’s right eye is swelling shut. With every heartbeat, blood ebbs and flows, and her eye pulses with pain. The sky above Faraday’s dark yard slowly fills with red, and she has to remind herself of how little time has passed. Only this morning, she had history class with Liz. Only yesterday, she stood in the rat house with Jasper.

  A part of her is still in that classroom. And a part of her is still in the blue suit.

  And at Darling-­Holmes, and at Bea’s, and at the prison-hospice.

  Seeing a red rope. Hearing the sound of bone dislodged from a fleshy socket.

  The ringing of alarms. And always, always, at the back of her throat, the acrid taste of smoke.

  But, as always, too, she is sitting quietly at home on her bed, on a park bench, in the back of a classroom, reading a book, reading so many goddamned books.

  She tries to remember all of the books she’s read in her life. Only the books are not just there, like pictures on microfilm. She doesn’t have forever photographs of each page. It feels strange, for a reason she can’t name, but maybe books aren’t the same as the places a person has been, which somehow are forever. But yes, she knows for sure there have been times when she’s tripped over a thing, a feeling, and called up a page in front of her eyes – but, today, the page she trips over is angled away from her, and she has to crane to catch a glimpse. So it’s hard for her to collect up more than a few words. Tonight, she trips on a book by Frantz Fanon and catches a single line before the page fades from view. In her mind, the words light up with new meaning.

  We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.

  After the fire, there were police. Police and psychiatrists, doctors and fire investigators, specialists in arson. They thought that Dany set the fire.

  Because, when they asked her, she shrugged and said, “It’s all my fault.”

  The fire was all her fault. She hadn’t protected Zeke, and the accelerant on her arms seemed to confirm her story. At least, until the coroner’s report came in. And somehow, they went back to work, building a new story out of the old nouns, drawing completely different lines, and when all the little dots were connected up, they thought it was Zeke, that a little boy with spiky hair and enormous black eyes had doused a pillow in the stuff. Because his shoes, like his hands, had been soaked in petrol. Because his little shoes had been found a few feet from the fire’s point of origin. Because marking the place that the fire had caught were tiny rubber soles, melted to the spot.

  Dany knew there was only one reason for an eight-year-old boy to try to burn the world down around him. Because he couldn’t stand another night of it. Another hour. Another minute. Another brutal second.

  It was because, when he turned eight, they separated him from Dany – making him sleep in the boy’s ward, where Dany couldn’t look out for him. Night after night. Day after day. Without end.

  It happened because it got to that point.

  It happened because Dany wasn’t able to protect him.

  It happened because he couldn’t breathe.

  Dany tries to tell herself that she couldn’t have protected him. Not really. How could she, when she couldn’t even protect herself? But deep down, she knows. It’s all her fault.

  Ten minutes later, Dany sits at the kitchen table with Mac and Eva. The earpiece of Eva’s glasses has opened up to reveal a pair of tiny wires, now clipped onto Faraday’s portable battery.

  “It’s perfect,” Dany says.

  Faraday steps into the doorway, shifting on his feet. He looks a question her way, but Dany turns her gaze back to the lens-screen. A moment later, she’s reeling off the sequence of digits, quick, so their imprint doesn’t have a chance to fade from her eyes. Eva thumbs in the numbers. Laughing madly, Eva flips the lens so that it projects its image on the table. It’s an image that, Dany doesn’t doubt, means nothing to Faraday. An oceanic blue splosh. A few pixels of colour.

  “What am I seeing?” Faraday asks.

  “Your destiny,” Eva tells him.

  “We need a place that no one else will think to go,” Dany tells him, eyes on the image. “A place that’s isolated, but survivable.”

  He stares at the girls blankly.

  “We’ve found a secret island,” Eva adds. Again, the mad scientist laugh rings out.

  “It’s a historical site, but it’s pretty much abandoned at this time of year,” Dany says. “It’s where they used to put the lepers.”

  “Hansen’s disease,” Eva corrects, “is the proper term now.”

  Dany looks at an oil stain on Faraday’s shirt. How can they be any clearer?

  “D’Arcy Island will be safe,” Dany says slowly. “Because no one’s there. Other people aren’t safe.”

  “And now we’ve got the address,” Eva says. “The latitude, the longitude, it’s all right here.” Eva taps the side of Dany’s head.

  “Your memory,” Faraday asks, “it’s eidetic?”

  Eva answers before Dany can. “Her brain’s picture perfect.”

  But while Eva is excited about it, thinking about her memory just makes Dany sad. “Nah, not perfect. Sometimes, I don’t know … it’s like I time travel. Sometimes the things I see or smell, they get … stuck. Or maybe I get stuck.” Dany rubs her temple. It hurts to make sense of her brain. Later, she’ll think about her brain later. “But, yeah, I remember stuff,” she says and shrugs. “Whether I want to or not.”

  And for a long moment, she feels Mister Faraday’s eyes taking her in, as if Dany is a problem he can’t begin to frame.

  Dany turns from Faraday to her kid sister. “Grab your pencil crayons,” she tells the kid. Flicking a look at Faraday’s mask, she explains. “We need a copy, in case.”

  The kid settles herself at the table, and pulls out a Ziploc baggie filled with sharp pencil crayon stubs. Five minutes later, they are looking at a pencil-crayoned map. Most of the page is a map of the Haro Strait. There, inside of its blue waters, a red dot emerges from a tiny unnamed island, a flyspeck of a place, a pixel in a sea of blue. Mac has drawn a sea monster, too, but that’s probably artistic license. The kid’s squared off one corner of the map, where she’s done a blown-up version of the island – a detailed shoreline of D’Arcy Island – an all-but-perfect copy of the internet image, though she’s only just looked at the projected image once.

  Dany gets the kid to draw a map to Antoine’s farm next. Dany knows there’s a chance that things will go wrong before then, and she may not be around to tell them the way.

  “The kid’s memory, too,” Faraday says, a trace of awe in his voice.

  “She likes drawing,” Dany says. Again, the shrug.

  “Erm, our vehicle?” Eva asks.

  “Just about ready,” Faraday tells them. “I just need to pop the carburetor back in and then pack up some supplies for this island of yours, and we’re gone. Looks like we’d better bring potable water, in case.”

  “We can g
et started,” Dany says. “You know, finding stuff that looks useful.” Her eyes trawl the closed cupboards.

  She feels Faraday’s eyes on her. And, from the corner of one eye, can see him shake his head. “Fine,” he says, his voice tight. “Just, look, stay out of anything personal.”

  Dany glances at Eva.

  Beneath those enormous bangs, her eyebrows waggle. “Personal,” she whispers, and her eyes fly wide.

  “I can hear you,” Faraday says slowly, his expression incredulous. Eva can’t help herself, she giggles. Shaking his head, their history teacher stares at her for a beat. “Look, I have some old military relics. They’re not safe. Stay out of those.”

  The girls nod, and he retreats to his garage.

  “Military relics!” Eva whispers, a Cheshire cat grin on her face.

  They pack up what they can.

  While Faraday packs up dry goods and ferries them out of the kitchen, Dany slips upstairs. She’s supposed to grab what she can from the medicine cabinet, but what Dany needs is the key to Faraday’s vintage BSA Sunbeam scooter. So far, she’s come across an old Mylar blanket, torn; a couple rolls of duct tape; and a socket wrench. But no key. She’s also found a really old gun. There, in his office, an ancient service revolver is hung on the wall in a case – the gun, its manual and a box of bullets are socketed in a velvet inlay.

  Of course, you can’t shoot a virus. But maybe you can outrun it.

  So what Dany needs is a ride. And for that, she needs the key to Faraday’s scooter.

  Eventually, she finds what she needs. On top of his bookshelf, stashed in a folder box stuffed with old papers, she finds the manual to Faraday’s old scooter. A glance through the book tells her that the early model didn’t even have an ignition key. Now that she’s read the manual, all she needs is half a minute alone in that garage.