Earthquake

by Aprilynne Pike

“Don’t get caught,” I warn.

  He backs up a few steps and grins—a perfect, boyish half grin that makes my heart race and tear apart all at the same time. “Like I would,” he says. Then he spins and walks away.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I expect Daniel to be waiting for me in the lab’s lobby. Pacing even. Worrying that I might not come. But when I stand on my tip-toes to peer through the windows, he’s in the lab already, meandering around in his hazmat suit.

  Yesterday that would have made me nervous. Today I understand what he’s doing.

  Making me feel unimportant. Hardly worth his worries.

  And predictable. Under his power even.

  But I see through the ruse; it won’t work. I know he must be concerned on the inside. I take my time going through the procedures involved in suiting up. I don’t hurry or rush. I don’t stall—my work is waiting—but I won’t rush for him again. Better to stay calm. Collected. I have a job to do.

  He straightens when the air locks announce my arrival. Relief crosses his face for the barest of instants, but because I’m watching, I see it.

  “Tavia, I—”

  “I can’t talk about it,” I interrupt, trying my best to sound sad instead of mad. Today I am not the Tavia he knows, who has to be spoon-fed science so she can complete her task. I am the goddess with powers he will never have. Who went around his back to create the vaccine he wants.

  Who sees now what he truly is.

  But I can’t let him know that. He has to think that he succeeded, that I’m still subservient.

  “I just can’t,” I repeat, letting my voice quaver as I power up my microscope.

  “You can’t feel guilty, Tavia,” Daniel says in his most fatherly voice. It makes me want to grind my teeth. “He was following you. Spying on you. He deserved it.”

  Deserved to die in agony with no trial? Bowing before the almighty Daniel playing judge, jury, and executioner? No one deserves that.

  I turn to look him in the face, our eyes meeting as I realize we’re nearly the same height. Why did I always feel small? “I know. It’s just hard,” I say, looking down, so he can’t catch the rebellion in my eyes. “Can we get to work? I think that’s the best thing for me right now.”

  “Of course. Whatever it takes for you to feel comfortable.” The falseness rolls off him now, and I can’t believe I didn’t appreciate it before. I curse myself for seeing what I wanted to see.

  “I think that’s best.” This time my voice is strong and steady, and I thank the gods that I found Thomas before I came up here to face Daniel. That he prepared me—reminded me of my advantage.

  And it’s not a big advantage. Daniel is utterly brilliant, and on top of that he knows more about me than I know about myself. The one thing I cannot do is allow him to use that against me.

  He needs you so much more than you need him, I remind myself, letting Thomas’s words play through my head on repeat.

  Daniel’s gloved hand touches my plastic-draped shoulder in a comforting gesture, but even though there are so many layers between us, his touch seems to burn down to the bone. Then he slips onto his stool and begins to rattle off an explanation of the slides of vaccine he’s prepared and how he thinks we should integrate the virus-fighting protein.

  The one he still doesn’t know came from my blood.

  • • •

  It’s almost six hours later when I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. Behind the small window that looks into the lab from the foyer I can see Audra, standing on her tip-toes and waving her arms.

  She apparently missed the buzzer.

  Annoyance crosses Daniel’s face for just a second before he walks over to the window and presses the intercom button. “What is it, Audra?”

  “I need to read Tavia’s TB test.” Audra’s voice sounds tinny over the intercom. There was no TB test. What is she pulling? “She was supposed to come in at lunch, but I guess she forgot.” Audra is staring hard at me. “The test has a narrow window of time to be read,” she says, looking back at Daniel. “I can’t wait until morning or I’ll have to do the whole thing over again.”

  “How long will it take?” Daniel says with obvious exasperation.

  “Oh, just a few minutes,” Audra says with a smile that makes her look even younger than her fifteen years.

  Daniel stands, looking at neither of us for a few seconds, hands on hips. “Better go, I guess,” he says to me, and I know he’s just trying to keep up appearances.

  I wonder what I’m getting into, but I trust Audra a hell of a lot more than I trust Daniel, so I go with it.

  “You know,” Daniel says as I rise, “take your time. Maybe get something to eat. I’ll prepare the test slides, and then they’ll have to sit for maybe twenty minutes before we can see the results. Back in half an hour?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I reply, barely paying attention. It’s the first time I’ve stood up from my stool since entering the lab at noon, and every part of my body feels sore.

  But we’ve done it.

  We think.

  Daniel’s right though. We can’t do anything else right at this moment. What we need now is for our tests to incubate. Right before Audra got here we took blood samples from every tech and scientist in the lab and set up Petri dishes in a warm bath to keep the cells alive. All Daniel will have to do while I’m with Audra is expose the samples to the vaccine.

  The new one.

  Not the one I made under my microscope, but the one I created with my powers. Because it doesn’t matter if I can do it on the cellular level with a micropipette and my transformative powers; it’s simply too slow. I need to be able to create the serum en masse with only my abilities. My first three attempts earlier today failed.

  I finally manage to create a good batch on my fourth try.

  Then Daniel made me do it again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Until I did it ten times in a row without flubbing it.

  I’m exhausted, but if today has shown me one thing, it’s that I truly am the only Earthbound in the world who could do this. The vaccine is so complex it would be impossible for anyone of lesser strength to create. Even after months of study.

  But it’s done, and all that’s left to do is test it. So in half an hour I’ll come back and we’ll see if I’m as good as I hope.

  It has to work. I have to believe that. I can’t afford the tiniest ripple in my confidence. Not anymore. I’ve put myself in a very dangerous position with Daniel.

  And I hope I can get out of it.

  I try to shake the fuzz from my head as I go through each step of the decontamination process twice before leaving the lab—it would be just my luck to cause an epidemic when we’re this close.

  I wish . . .

  I wish I could go tell Benson. But I don’t dare.

  Now I realize what a big risk I took by running to him this morning. Letting the security people see us kiss. Overhear my comments about Daniel.

  Because if Daniel knew what Benson means to me, he would use him as a weapon.

  And it would work.

  I swallow hard and push that thought away. A few seconds later I’m standing in the lab’s lobby with Audra, who’s dressed in soft green scrubs.

  “Thank you for coming. Why don’t we go out this way,” she says, gesturing to the lobby doors. But that pause, that hesitation—I recognize the look in her eyes.

  From myself.

  Something’s wrong.

  I nod in agreement, and she leads me to a small, quiet alcove just around the corner from the lab. “Obviously there’s no TB test,” she says after we each take a seat across a small circular table, her voice a shade above a whisper. “I didn’t know how else to get you away from Daniel. Do you . . . do you trust him?” My head jerks up, and I peer at her face. Unfortunat
ely, her expression doesn’t give anything away.

  So now we do the tightrope walk. If I say yes, whatever she has to say will be taken off the table—literally.

  But if I say no . . . there’s so much risk. Audra is still a sworn Curatoriate. They found her at thirteen, re-awakened her memories, and took her in. And they’ve told her they’re looking for her diligo, whether that’s true or not. She has many valid reasons to be very loyal to them.

  Worse—I realize, every muscle in my body clenching up—she’s a doctor. She was on the helicopter when Logan and I were “rescued.” She knows we didn’t go anywhere.

  She might even be the one treating those Earthbounds with the virus in the secret room.

  She could be as embroiled in this as anyone.

  THIRTY-SIX

  “The hesitation is enough,” Audra says, and I have to remind myself that she’s so wise beyond her years. “There are whispers just beginning to take root in the medical department. Dark, dark whispers,” she says, turning her light brown eyes to me now, and the depth of sorrow I see there takes me by surprise. No, not even sorrow—despair.

  Betrayal.

  What in the world has happened?

  “You saw what Daniel did to that Reduciate this morning.”

  “Everyone saw,” I whisper in a vicious hiss, still angry at the whole thing.

  She nods passively. “Sometimes we need a reminder that Daniel is exceptionally powerful. At least that seems to be what he thinks. Do you understand what he did to that man? Physically, I mean?”

  “Only in the vaguest terms,” I admit, my voice shaky.

  “Let me show you,” Audra says, and a pen and notebook appear in her hands, newly created. “I’ve heard of him doing it before. And not just in this life. It’s his preferred method of execution because any Destroyer can do it before or after resurgence. So it’s always been possible for him.”

  She’s sketching now, with long fingers, and though her lines lack the grace and beauty that a drawing by an artist like me would have had, I can appreciate the precision and control that allow her to wield a scalpel. It’s easy to see the angle of a chin, the curve of a neck, the long tubes that make up the inside of a human throat.

  “Pretty basic—this is the esophagus,” Audra says, pointing with her pen. “Windpipe, same thing. The food we eat goes down it and also the air we breathe. It’s ever so simple,” Audra continues, and she draws two straight lines across the esophagus, an inch or so apart from each other. “Daniel simply removed this small section of the esophagus. Not his entire neck—that would be messy and bloody and all of the Curatoriates would be horrified. But,” she says, pointing with her pen again, “keep the job inside the skin and you get all of the drama with none of the gore. A show of power rather than ruthlessness.”

  It had all seemed pretty ruthless to me, but I remember my discussion with Thomas and see that this was the perfect way to accomplish everything Daniel wanted. Including his attempt to paralyze me with guilt, to keep me even tighter under his thumb. I’m so glad that part failed.

  Audra looks up at me, her pen unmoving between her limp fingers. “Death is fast,” she says calmly, almost blandly. “With no air to the lungs, all of the muscles in the esophagus seize up, trying to prevent the unpreventable. Blood pours from the mouth as the victim coughs and sputters and tries to suck in oxygen, but it’s impossible. If you do it right,” she says, gripping her pen again and artfully filling in a few more landmarks, “you remove the vocal chords as well. Then there’s no screaming to frighten your followers.”

  No screaming. More strategizing on Daniel’s part. It’s almost worse than if he’d hacked the man to bloody pieces.

  “I apologize for the gratuitous physical descriptions, but this is the kind of thing we med-folk are into,” Audra says, misreading my white face; I’m not grossed out—I’m devastated by Daniel’s horrific cunning. “A stark bundle of facts that help us find logic in this world.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, trying to push my imagination away from the thought of dying in such a way, should everything go wrong in the lab tonight. “But I don’t understand why this is a problem.” Other than the fact that Daniel executed a man without any semblance of a trial, that is. And is strategically infecting Earthbounds. And is somehow working with the Reduciata.

  Audra glances around, and the hollow fear I saw before is back. “The body was sent to medical, of course,” she says, whispering now. “Daniel told us he wanted it cremated immediately. That he couldn’t stand the thought of even the lifeless remains of someone so traitorous in his headquarters. If he hadn’t needed to head right up to work with you, he probably would have watched us dispose of his remains personally. But he didn’t. And so of course we didn’t listen,” she adds so calmly, as if saying the sky was blue.

  “What did you do?” I ask, admiring her guts.

  “We autopsied. You can learn so much from cadavers that you simply cannot learn any other way.” She folds her hands in front of her, the ostensible epitome of calm. But I see a tiny tremor in her fingertips. Fingers that are so conditioned to remain steady. “So they started heating the cremator, just in case they needed to dispose of the evidence quickly. And then six doctors gathered for the initial Y-incision.”

  I attempt to follow her explanation, but I’m still not sure why she feels the need to tell me all of this. Why it was worth risking Daniel catching her in a lie.

  “We were in the midst of giving dictation on the internal cut across the esophagus, the blood that filled the cavity of the lungs, the near-complete absence of the vocal chords, when we realized what had happened.” She stops and stares hard at me.

  “I don’t understand,” I say after a long few seconds.

  “We didn’t see it right away either,” she whispers, and then she looks down at her drawing, the pen lying across it.

  A few seconds later they both pop out of existence.

  That’s right. Audra has her memories, but she hasn’t resurged. Her creations don’t last.

  “His throat was still cut?” I ask as realization fills my brain in an avalanche of terrifying truths—the section of my plane that returned to normal after the crash, everything I created that was gone in five minutes before I reconnected with Logan. “It should have been whole,” I say as my stomach writhes and twists. At that second it occurs to me that Daniel never helped with any of the destroying work in the lab.

  “The blood in the lungs, the food contents spilled into the abdominal cavity from the collapsed tube, those were expected. The removal of the piece of esophagus still happened with all of its consequences. Including death, of course. But after all was said and done, the windpipe should have reverted.” She looks up at me and, for once, looks like the teenager her body says she is. “Daniel has found his diligo. And he’s keeping her a secret. Why would he do that, Tavia?”

  I want to blithely respond that it’s because he’s a lying liar who lies—but it goes deeper than that. I remember the first day Logan and I met him, the despair in his eyes as he used his desperate search for his partner to justify questionable choices. The sorrow I’ve seen in his expressions since. I believed those emotions absolutely, even when I couldn’t believe anything else. Believed that in his twisted way he was justifying so much because of his need to find her.

  But it was completely false.

  If he wasn’t looking for her, why would he have done those things? Especially in light of our discovery that he has ties to the Reduciata. What could he need to work so hard to hide if he can draw from both brotherhoods? And who is this person, this partner he keeps hidden away?

  “Who knows about this?” I say in a whisper so low even Audra can barely hear me.

  “Almost no one.”

  “What about the body?”

  “As soon as we realized the implications, we destroyed it. Cremated it immediately
.” She leans forward on her elbows. “Sometimes the truth is too dangerous to keep around.”

  I nod, feeling the veracity of that statement down to my toes.

  “We’re trying to keep it quiet,” Audra says. “But a good chunk of the medical wing knows, and they have partners and friends in other areas of the Curatoria whom they have to think about. They’re afraid, and when people are afraid, they talk.” She shrugs and laughs in a sad, self-deprecating way. “I suppose that’s what I’m doing right now.”

  I don’t speak as I try to comprehend how deep this well of lies goes.

  And I thought it was pretty damn deep already.

  “I’m not ashamed to confess that I’m terrified. I felt I had to tell you because you’re working so closely with him,” Audra says.

  “Thank you,” I say, my own voice sounding very far away.

  “There’s more,” she says, and she clasps her bottom lip between her teeth. “When you came here, on the helicopter, I didn’t—I don’t—know where you came from. But when the chopper landed and our med team was ushered on, you and Logan were already there. Unconscious,” she adds. It’s darkly humorous to me that she wants me to know she didn’t drug me.

  “We were told only that we would simply be going up and down and that we were not to tell you anything about where we had all come from. I didn’t question it at the time,” she says with a single-shoulder shrug. “The secret of our location is one of our greatest safeties. But now, after everything, I wonder.” She leans toward me, our noses only inches apart. “Tavia, I think you were brought here under false pretenses, that you’ve been lied to every moment since you arrived. And I—I’m sorry I was a part of that.”

  She reaches out and clasps my hand. “I’m not telling you to stop working on the cure,” she says, her voice fierce, “because the gods know we need it. But be careful. I—I get the impression that you’re a victim in all of this as much as anyone . . . although I would have said the same thing about Daniel before this morning. Point is, you should be aware that the man you’re working with is hiding something. Something big.”