by Kathryn Hoff
Reyna glanced at the sleeping babies. “So, who are Gabe and Deedee’s real mom and dad?”
“The identity of the egg and sperm donors is confidential.”
“But what happened to Alpha and Beta?” I asked. Talking about it made me squirm, but I had to know.
“Tilly saw four young women boarding here during their pregnancy, but after they gave birth, only two babies were brought here to be fostered by Dr. Mendez. It was around that time that Bert and Tilly’s own daughter died. Perhaps, in her disturbed state, Tilly thought something terrible had happened to the other two babies. In fact, Alpha and Beta were born perfectly healthy, but they didn’t have the traits we needed. Now we know why—Bert had always had religious qualms about the gene suppression technique. He substituted unaltered embryos for the first two attempts.”
It must have been torture for Bert and Tilly to see Quinn’s specially engineered babies here at the lab when they’d lost their own daughter and grandchild. No wonder Tilly thought God was judging her.
“Where are Alpha and Beta now?” Chubb asked.
“They went to good foster homes.”
Reyna snorted. “Great. All the Eclipse orphans needing homes, and Quinn and Mendez make more.”
“You don’t get it,” Rico snapped. “All you can think about is a couple of babies. People are dying every day, and Quinn’s doing everything he can to find a cure!”
“We’re all doing what we can,” Paula said mildly.
Reyna’s lip jutted out. “And the girls? What happened to them?”
“The surrogate mothers gave birth normally, with no problems. For their part in the work, they each were given scholarships for two years at an educational program of their choice.”
Reyna’s eyes opened wide. Carry someone else’s baby for nine months, for two years of art school? I had the feeling she’d leap at that.
I asked, “What’s going to happen to Bert and Tilly now?” Tilly was a little obsessed, but her heart was in the right place. She’d tried to warn Reyna and me away from harm, and she’d even lent me her coat.
“At the moment, they’re both receiving care in a survivors’ counseling center. Dr. Westerly is reluctant to pursue criminal charges against Bert, although that’s still under consideration. They really are not bad people, simply overwhelmed by grief and guilt, as so many Eclipse survivors are.”
“I’m glad they’re out of here,” Reyna said. “Maybe there won’t be any more problems.”
“It means more work for all of us,” Paula said, “but at this point, training someone new would just divert us from more important tasks. Timing is crucial—we must finish phage development in the next few weeks before strain seven becomes more widespread.”
She turned to Reyna. “It’s time, Reyna. This morning, we’ll transfer Delta to the iso lab.”
Reyna buried her head in her hands. Chubb looked miserable. Deedee, sleeping peacefully in her crib, was as beautiful as one of Reyna’s angels.
Half an hour later, I dressed in my white suit and went to the nursery to take Deedee away. She was used to seeing me dressed that way, and to my carrying her away from Reyna and Gabe. She made no fuss at all when I picked her up.
“Like the first day of school,” I said. “Don’t let her see you’re upset.”
Reyna hissed, “Leave me alone, traitor.” But she blinked back tears and smiled as I carried Deedee away.
In the iso lab’s prep room, Deedee gazed around curiously as I put her into Westerly’s white-suited arms. I tried not to snuffle as Westerly carried Deedee through the decontamination room and into the red zone.
I felt like a criminal.
To avoid Reyna’s accusing glares, I spent the rest of the morning cleaning the primate lab. I figured the smoke smell would bother Barney, so I used the mop to clean the walls, ceiling, and floor.
Rico came in while I was mopping. “Is that what you’re training for, Kennedy? To be a janitor?” He mimicked speaking into a mike. “Calling Jacqueline Kennedy, clean-up, aisle three.”
“Why not? It’s a job.” Probably as good a job as I was likely to get, the way things were going. “What do you want?” Rico had no time for me when anyone else was around—why was he wasting his precious break talking to an underage janitor-in-training?
He leaned against the wall, arms folded, looking satisfied. “I told you Bert and Tilly were fishy. Messing with Quinn’s samples, fire in the bathroom, paint on the wall, letting Molly out, last night’s fire—they did it all. Mystery solved. And now, guess who’s the new lab tech?”
Oh, he just wanted someone to brag to. “Congratulations.”
Rico lowered his voice. “I heard Stonehouse is bringing in more soldiers to tighten security. Did you hear there was a riot west of town? Somebody started a rumor that a family was sick with strain seven. A mob came and tried to burn their house down with the family still inside.”
My breakfast threatened to come up. “Were they? Sick with strain seven?”
Rico shook his head. “The ECA says strain seven is nowhere near here. But who knows whether to trust the ECA? For all we know strain seven could be spreading through the city right now.
And if it was, it wouldn’t be long before people would be pointing the finger at us for bringing it into the region. A few soldiers might not be enough to keep the rioters and firebugs away.
Rico put a hand on my arm. “Look, Kennedy, you might be right about Quinn being a pompous ass, but if there’s one thing Eclipse has taught me, it’s that being nice doesn’t mean squat. When things get bad, it’s who you know that counts. Being on Quinn’s team means we’ll be first in line to get the new phages—when strain seven hits and people are dropping like flies, we’ll be safe because we were Quinn’s test cases. The way I see it, we’re all depending on Quinn’s phages now.”
I took my arm away. “That doesn’t make me like him.”
He flashed a little smile. “So? You’re not winning any personality contests either.”
After Deedee went into the red zone, Reyna hardly came to the nursery at all.
“Forget it,” she told Chubb, when he asked her to watch Gabe. “You didn’t worry about dumping Gabe on me so you could get job training from Stonehouse. Now it’s my turn. If I’m gonna go to art school, I need a portfolio.” Her door had begun to sprout realistic drawings of hands and feet and eyes between the pixies and fashion models. There was a beautiful sketch of Deedee, sleeping with her thumb in her mouth, and one of Mary Koh that showed a friendlier smile than I’d ever seen on her.
On Chubb’s hip, Gabe looked around hopefully. “Deedeedeedeedee?”
Chubb wiped Gabe’s chin. “Sorry, buddy. Your sister’s busy saving the world, and your auntie Reyna’s having a snit fit. Kennedy, with Tilly gone, Stonehouse wants me to help with supplies part-time. Could you…?”
“Go on,” I said. “I’ll watch Gabe. Just be back by four so I can help Paula dress.”
The days passed in a haze of routine. Help Paula or Westerly in the prep room, take the dog for a run, prep room, babysit Gabe, prep room, schoolwork, prep room…Westerly gave me an old-fashioned pager, salvaged from some Eclipsed doctor. Every few hours it buzzed, sending me to the prep room to help her or Paula dress in the white suits. They alternated shifts taking care of Deedee in the red zone, even taking turns spending the night in the lab. I hardly saw Paula anymore except when I was helping her put on the white suit.
In between runs to the prep room, I watched Gabe three hours a day so Chubb could work with Stonehouse. You’d think taking care of one baby would be half as much work as taking care of two, but now that Gabe had graduated to running, I got more exercise chasing after Gabe than I did walking the dog.
Whenever I had a free moment, I tried to do schoolwork. Math was never hard for me, as long as I had enough quiet time to think about it. Chemistry was all right, like math problems with chemicals instead of apples and oranges, but I wished I could see it in action. What good
was working in a laboratory if I never got the chance to do lab work? English I could muddle through, looking up words that looked interesting, but history?
I dragged my way through the World War II unit, a sorry mishmash of diplomacy that failed, battles that went wrong, and cold-blooded killing in numbers that would have seemed incredible before Eclipse. It was so senseless, I hated even reading about it. Getting through the unit test was awful, but on the fourth try I finally managed it.
To celebrate the end of World War II, I took a detour to one of the few history chapters I’d actually liked: Ancient Egypt. There was a sculpture of a baboon, Thoth, God of Wisdom, so realistic it made me lonely for Molly, and for Tika and Henry and all the other primates at the zoo. The ancient Egyptians must have been pretty smart to see wisdom in a baboon’s eyes.
In other ways, the ancient Egyptians were hard to understand. The pharaohs had been obsessed with death, devoting their lives to preparing tombs as grand as palaces. When a pharaoh died, his priests spent weeks preparing his carcass, removing and preserving the innards in jars, salting his body down until it was nice and dried out, then stuffing it with sand and wrapping it in bandages from head to toe. Then they closed it up in a tomb with the pharaoh’s whole life story painted on the wall with hundreds of tiny figures that even Reyna would like.
We incinerated our dead like trash, burning the bodies as quickly and thoroughly as possible to keep Eclipse from contaminating the living. So who was more civilized?
CHAPTER 24
End times
At the end of one of my Gabe-watching shifts, Chubb motioned to me. “Come see. Stonehouse’s new recruits are in.”
Chubb and I took turns peeping through the uncovered bit of window in the second-floor storeroom, watching Sergeant Stonehouse drill his new team on riot procedures.
“No, you dunderhead! You don’t both go to the gate! One goes to the gate and one to the isolation lab. You there! Hold your weapon up. Up!”
I winced, as one of the soldiers dropped his rifle. “They’re not doing so good.”
Chubb shook his head. “They’re just kids, straight out of teen home. Maybe I haven’t done much more than change diapers, but at least I’m learning something from Stonehouse. He thinks I could join the army as a supply clerk.”
“I thought you wanted your own shop?” I said it without thinking—what chance would Chubb have to own his own business?
Chubb made a disgusted grunt. “Look—Stonehouse just made that poor kid cry. If I ever do have a shop, I’ll hire a dozen kids like that and teach them all how to serve customers and take inventory and calculate expenses. What about you?”
“Me? I’ll go back to the zoo and clean the monkey cages like I used to. And I’ll shop in your store and buy Reyna’s clothes.”
“You’re good with words. What should I call my store?”
“Emporium. Chubb’s Emporium.”
He nodded. “Emporium’s all right, but I’m not going to do serious business with a name like Chubb. How about ‘Burbage’s Emporium’?”
“Too hard to say. How about ‘Burbage Boutique. Charles Burbage, proprietor.’”
Chubb grinned. “‘Charles Burbage, proprietor.’ I like the sound of that.”
Gabe looked up. “Chubb ubb?”
“You should start now,” I said. “We should start calling you Charles instead of Chubb. Or,” I raised my eyebrows at him, “I could keep calling you Chump.”
He laughed. “All right, do you want to be Jackie or Jacqueline?”
“Jackie’s fine, as long as you stop calling me Jackass.”
“Fair enough. You’re Jackie and I’m Charles. And Gabe is…what?”
I chucked Gabe under the chin. “Not Gamma. Gabe for Gabriel.”
“What do you think, buddy? Gabriel Zeta.”
Gabe squirmed. “Chubb ubb ubb?”
After Deedee had been in the red zone for five days, I was bringing Barney back to his cage after morning play time in the courtyard. I stopped short when I saw Rico at the primate lab desk.
“What are you doing here?” I’d hardly seen him since Bert’s dismissal had ended our investigation.
“Nothing!” His hair was a mess and his eyes were red. He shoved whatever he was reading under the procedure manual.
Barney trotted contentedly into his cage. I reached up to the shelf for a biscuit. “Why are you reading the procedure book? Do you think Molly’s coming back soon?”
“Molly? No. I wasn’t reading the procedures. I was just taking a break, and I found this. Here, it must be yours.”
He pushed a pamphlet at me. The End of the World—Prepare for Judgment.
I backed off. “Uh-uh, not mine. Maybe one of the guards left it here. Better show it to Stonehouse—if one of the guards is an End-Timer, he should know about it.”
“Maybe Bert left it here.” He tipped it into the recycle bin. “Most of it’s harmless, telling you to be good and pray and all. The same sort of thing the priest used to say in church. You’re Catholic, aren’t you?”
“I never went to church. Not that I remember, anyway.” I gave Barney the biscuit and told him he was a good boy. He grinned back at me, his tongue spilling out.
“Kennedy is a Catholic name—maybe you went, but you’ve forgotten. We used to go to mass every week. I know the rosary and everything.”
I shrugged. “Are you all right? You look worn out.” In fact, he looked like he hadn’t slept in days. I hoped he wasn’t getting sucked into the End-Timer crap.
Rico grimaced. “Quinn’s working me night and day. I just came in here for a break.”
“I thought you liked working for the genius?”
“I do. Except that he’s a perfectionist too. I do everything he tells me as best I can, but nothing is ever good enough.”
Quinn shouted from the phage lab, “Rico! Where are you? I need those gels!”
Rico winced. “Right here, Dr. Quinn! I’ll get them.” He scurried out the door.
I was glad he was gone—I wanted to filch a blank lab notebook for Reyna, one she could use for sketching. I owed her a thank-you gift for dumping Gabe on her when Paula buzzed me during my babycare shift.
Besides, I wanted to see what Rico was hiding—he’d had more than the End-Timer pamphlet in his hands.
I pulled the pamphlet from the recycle bin, then lifted the procedure manual and found the other papers Rico had shoved underneath—pages of dense text with Secret—Not for distribution printed in red across the top.
I slipped them all into the notebook.
Chubb—Charles—had brought lunch to the nursery, but I told him I had an essay to finish and took my sandwich to my room to see what had Rico so worked up.
The pamphlet was the usual “Repent now” stuff: The End Times are here. The light of a thousand suns shall shine upon the Earth. Hosts of angels will take those who repent and truly believe to a new, beautiful home.
It sounded like an alien abduction.
The “secret” pages were what I was interested in. They were a draft scientific article: Facilitation of eclipsiana-specific bacteriophage production in humans through transspecies genetic insertion sourced from pan troglodytes, by Leonard Mendez, PhD and Avery Quinn, PhD.
The paper was eight pages of dense, technical language, like I’d seen in Paula’s biology books. I munched my egg salad sandwich and started to read. My dictionary was so old it didn’t even have some of the science words, but I understood some of it. Enough, anyway.
Transspecies meant across different species. Genetic insertion: putting genes from one species into another.
Rico walked in my door, not even knocking, and closed it behind him.
“You stinking idiot,” he hissed. “Give it back! You had no right to take it!”
“Neither did you. What’d you do, ‘borrow’ this from Quinn’s desk?”
Rico’s panicked face showed it was true. “I just wanted to learn more about the science. It’s a draft, not re
ady for publication. Give it back. You can’t even read it, it’s too technical.”
“Can you?”
“Yeah. I mean some of it. It’s weird stuff, about cavemen genes.”
“Cavemen?” That wasn’t what I expected.
Rico raised his chin proudly. “That’s right! You don’t know much, do you, monkey girl? That’s what ‘trog-lo-dites’ means. Look it up if you don’t believe me.”
I flipped the pages of my battered dictionary. Troglodyte: cave dweller.
“You’re right,” I admitted.
“So give it back!”
I folded the paper in half and stuffed it inside my jumpsuit. “I want to read it.”
“You? Monkey girl, that’s what you are. All you’re good for is shoveling shit. Give it back.” He took a step forward, his fists clenched.
I stood up. Rico was bigger than me, and heavier, but shoveling shit had made me strong. Besides, he was a suck-up, teachers-pet type who’d probably never hit anybody in his life, while I’d been fighting since the first day I set foot in orphan home. If he wanted a fight, I was ready to give him one.
Charles came to the door. “What’s going on?”
Rico’s face was tight with anger. “She took something of mine!”
Charles raised his eyebrows at me. I spread my empty hands and said helpfully, “Maybe you left it somewhere, Rico. I’m sure it will turn up.”
With a screech like a baby baboon, Rico rushed at me, arms outstretched. I pivoted half a step to the side, whapped him on the head as he went past, and shoved him face down on the bed.