by Kat Falls
He surprised me by nodding. Then again, he’d probably felt that way for years but had stayed in the West for me. “I know it’s been hard, knowing what you know,” he said quietly. “But, sweetheart, I’d rather see you struggle to keep a secret than struggle to stay alive,” he finished. “If things have changed in Moline, if the situation is too dangerous, we’re going back.” He held up a silencing finger before I even got my mouth open. “No debate.”
Great. He was using that tone. The one that said, “My back is up, my ears are deaf, and nothing — not logic, not guilt, not even a high-drama fit — is going to change my mind.” I clamped my lips shut. For now, all I could do was hope that all was well in Moline, because if the situation had turned bad there, I’d have to tell him the real reason I couldn’t go home, and I didn’t want to think about how that would go over.
“Back in the jeep, McEvoy,” Hyrax ordered. “Those grups are probably giving their pals a big heads-up that you’re coming. Every minute you waste here gives them more time to round up a pack. I’m not having my people ambushed because you took too long fussing over a scared little girl.”
“I don’t see you agreeing to live in Moline,” my dad said dryly.
“Either you go now or you go without guards. Your choice, fetch.”
“He’ll go now.” I grabbed my backpack and two-ton duffel from the jeep and dropped them on the wet ground to hug my dad. “Be careful.”
“Back at you,” he returned.
I didn’t go straight to the infirmary as Hyrax had ordered. Instead, I waited in the muddy construction site that was Gateway Station until Captain Hyrax’s convoy of jeeps returned an hour later. If chaos had broken out in Moline, my dad wasn’t going to let me live there, and I’d more than burned the bridge back to the West — I’d nuked it into oblivion. So where did that leave me?
On Arsenal Island.
All things considered, it wasn’t a bad fallback plan. If I was living on base, I’d have a shot at finding out where the patrol had taken Mahari. And if I could free her, I’d find out about Rafe. No reason not to dream big. The first step was easy enough: get official permission to stay.
To that end, I sidled up to Captain Hyrax as he climbed out of a jeep. “No luck finding the lionesses?”
He held up a silencing finger, covering one ear with his other hand. A transparent wire coiled from his ear to a radio on his shoulder. “We lost the trail, and then ran into some trouble with another bunch of grups.” He paused to listen. “A few cuts and scrapes. Nothing that could lead to infection.” Pause. “Understood.”
He waved over a guard. “Tell Solis to send over some medics to patch up your team.” He finally turned his reptilian gaze on me.
“Captain, if I need to stay on base for more than one —”
“No,” he said. “When your father shows up tomorrow, you’re out of here. East, West, I don’t care where you go as long as you’re gone.” His face could have been carved from granite.
I thought of that big RV sitting by the bridge. I had a sneaking suspicion about who was lurking behind those dark windows. It was time for step two: go over Hyrax’s head.
I sprinted across Gateway Station toward the enormous RV, shouting, “Chairman Prejean, can I talk to you?”
No response.
“Please.” I rapped on the tinted window. “It’s really important!”
A guard spilled out of the front passenger seat, fingers to his earpiece, listening intently. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll tell her.” His eyes cut to me. “Go,” he said, motioning toward the back of the trailer.
Another guard stood by an open door at the back, but when I started for it, he dropped an arm in my way. “When you’re inside, wash your hands and then stand directly under the blower for two minutes.”
I noticed the air system embedded in the trailer’s ceiling just inside the back door. Beyond that was a dividing wall of plastic.
The guard handed me plastic shoe coverings. “Put them on after the dry bath.”
I hoisted myself into the sterile antechamber, washed my hands with a chemical solution at a built-in sink while the air system whisked the germs off me. All these precautions would have comforted me six months ago; now they seemed like overkill.
Once I was bootied up, I slipped through a slit in the divider and into a plastic bubble of a room that was kept inflated by filtered air. The interior resembled a comfortable living room, though every surface was seamless and slick. Easily wiped down. And I had no doubt it was — on the hour, every hour. Was this what Everson’s childhood had been like? He’d mentioned air filters and plastic sheeting and said that all his mother’s employees, including his tutors, had been required to change into sanitized clothing.
“No, no. Don’t move,” Chairman Prejean said from where she was curled up on a window seat, her back to me. “Wait for the air to settle.” With her lean body wrapped in a long white jacket and her hair shaved down to stubble, she reminded me of the cancer patients who’d wandered the hospitals halls when my mother was dying.
I stayed by the slit of a door. Originally, Chairman Prejean had been Titan’s chief executive officer. But when the company — her company — got out of the labyrinth theme park business and put Titan’s considerable resources toward building the reparation wall, Ms. Prejean gave herself a new title: chairman — a title so bland, it didn’t go at all with the paramilitary force that Titan had become. But then, that was probably why she chose it.
Chairman Prejean unclipped her earpiece and placed it on the windowsill — perfectly aligned with the edge. “I’m not usually quite this cautious, but being so close to the quarantine line …” She rose to face me and sighed. “Well, it’s a trigger.”
I didn’t flinch at her flattened features. Chairman Prejean’s transparent surgical mask was as much her trademark as her stubbled head. Thankfully my germaphobia had never gotten that bad. She looked worse than creepy — pale and hairless as she was — and sounded like a speech therapist with a headache. Voice soft, words precise — probably to make up for the mask’s muffling effect.
She beckoned me closer with a latex-gloved hand. “We should be fine now. The filters will have sucked up whatever came in with you. One can hope, anyway.” Her spine curved like a snake’s as she settled onto the corner of her desk.
I swallowed against the tightness in my throat. “I’m Delaney. Mack’s daughter.”
A crease appeared in her forehead, indicating that she had arched her plucked-to-nothing eyebrows. “I know who you are, Lane. We met last fall, albeit briefly. It’s not every day that I overlook quarantine breaking.”
I nodded. She was reminding me that she had already done favors — lifesaving favors — for my dad and me. As if I didn’t already realize the power she had over me.
“In fact,” she continued, “I know quite a bit about you, between Ev’s report and the background check we did when I hired your father.” She clasped her gloved hands, entwining red-tipped fingers.
“You’re bleeding!” I gasped before I’d fully processed what I was seeing.
“It’s nothing.” She splayed her bloody fingertips as if flashing a new manicure. “I cut my nails below the quick to keep debris from collecting.”
Debris. Another synonym for germs. The Inuits with their fifty words for snow had nothing on the germaphobes in the West. I adjusted my attitude and changed the topic. “Chairman, I’d like to stay on Arsenal.” This got me another invisible brow arch. “After the lion-women attacked us tonight, my dad went ahead to Moline without me. To check out the compound. If he doesn’t think it’s safe —”
“Of course it isn’t safe,” she said simply. “It’s on the wrong side of the quarantine line.”
“Yes, and we knew the risks, and I signed the waiver. But if Moline has changed since last fall — if my dad thinks it’s gotten too dangerous, he won’t let me live there.”
She frowned. At least that’s what it looked like. I couldn’t be certain with
the transparent mask distorting her nose and mouth.
I hurried on with my idea. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t do the job. If I could stay here on the base … he’d be okay with that. He could still live in Moline and fetch the missing strain for you.”
She smoothed a gloved hand over her stubbled head as she considered my request. “He will have a problem with Moline. It’s a hotbed of violence and only getting worse.”
“I’m willing to enlist,” I blurted out before she could say no.
“Enlist?” She blinked at me from her perch on the desk. “As a guard?”
I nodded. If my life wasn’t on the line, I’d scrub toilets before enlisting in the patrol. Actually, being a new recruit probably meant lots of toilet scrubbing. Didn’t matter. Right now, I’d do whatever it took to stay on this side of the wall.
“I see.” Clasping her blood-tipped hands, she rested them on her knee. “Do you know what a line guard does, Lane?”
Was that a trick question? “Guard the quarantine line.”
“Why?”
“To make sure that we don’t have an outbreak of the Ferae Naturae virus in the West.”
“That’s the simple answer. The accurate answer is: The patrol is responsible for keeping the humans in the West safe from genetic contamination.”
I straightened. “I can do that.”
She studied me intently, like she was checking my DNA for weak links. “If you see someone infected with Ferae,” she proposed, “say, a young woman infected with colobus monkey on the west bank of the river. She landed there in a small rowboat. What would you do?”
“Arrest her.”
“No, Lane. We don’t have jails for infected people. We don’t hold trials for them. There is only one correct answer.”
Shoot her! Shoot her in the head with the cold determination of a psychopath. That’s what Chairman Prejean needed to hear, but I couldn’t get those words past my lips. Yes, I’d killed Chorda with a machete. Standing back and pulling a trigger had to be easier than that … But I was hung up on the cold-blooded part, the not-in-self-defense part. “I’d convince her to cross back to the east bank,” I said finally.
Chairman Prejean’s smooshed features betrayed nothing. “Have you ever thought that certain animalistic mutations can make a person seem more appealing, not less?”
Another gimme question. So easy a baboon could guess what she wanted to hear. But Chorda’s ex-queens were even more beautiful — and terrifying — because of their powerful muscles. “That depends on what you mean by appealing.”
“Well, you’ve certainly made this easy.” She pressed her hands to her knees and stood. “The answer is no. You’re no line guard. You haven’t got it in you to put the safety of every man, woman, and child in the West first.”
“No. I do. I —”
“You don’t,” she said flatly. “You’re too sensitive, and that makes you reactive — reckless, even.”
“I’m not reckless,” I protested.
“Really?” She leaned toward a screen on her desk and turned it on with a touch. On it, a fight broke out. Two people with white blind eyes that came from shooting with a night-vision camera. That was me! Me, stealing a baton from the guard who’d been yelling at Jia. Guardsman Bhatt. The Chairman’s gaze slid from the monitor to me. “You were saying?”
I gritted my teeth. “He was bullying her.”
“And that bothered you, proving you’re too sensitive. The last thing the patrol needs is a sensitive guard.”
She paused the recording just as I dropped the baton. Jia stood off to a side, slightly hunched, with her teeth bared and her fingers curled as if clawed. Every inch of her revealed her wild child years in the Feral Zone. Had Rafe been that savage when my dad left him in the orphan camp all those years ago? If so, who’d tamed him? Not that Rafe was all that tame now, but at least he had the basics of social interaction down.
On the screen, Jia looked as friendly as a snarling pit bull. Worry nipped at me. It wouldn’t matter that Jia had 100 percent human DNA; if she couldn’t act human, she’d never be accepted into a compound like Moline. All the orphans were too wild to mix in with civilized people. At least, that was the explanation the patrol gave for why the orphans couldn’t immigrate to the West. Really, the Titan Corporation didn’t want anyone confirming the rumors about what existed beyond the wall.
And then it hit me.
“Let me take care of the orphans,” I said in a rush. We were all misfits, stuck between two worlds. Why not be misfits together? At least we’d understand one another.
Chairman Prejean did a slow blink. “The strays?” She flicked a blood-tipped finger at Jia’s image on the screen. “They may as well have Ferae. They watched their infected parents get wilder by the day. Parents with misshapen mouths and overlarge teeth who mangled language until they forgot how to talk altogether. You really think you can undo years of living with beast-people with what — good intentions?”
“I can try,” I said firmly. “If you’ll let me stay.”
“No.”
She began to rise as if to dismiss me, and I had to clench my fists against the flailing desperation invading my limbs. But then the chairman paused, and her pale predator’s gaze turned me into prey. Maybe the lionesses had been right. Maybe I was a rabbit.
“Unless …” she said.
“What is it? I’ll do it,” I blurted, just as she wanted me to.
She sank back onto the desk and crossed her latex-encased forearms. “If I do agree to employ you on Arsenal to civilize the strays, you’ll have to agree to a stipulation that won’t be written into your contract but will be binding nonetheless.”
“What stipulation?”
“Stay away from my son.”
So Everson was still on Arsenal.
“Your recklessness puts others in danger,” she went on. “Namely the people you drag along on your adventures. They get hurt. People like … Rafe.”
I inhaled sharply. “That wasn’t my —”
“Fault?” She pretended to consider it. “Maybe not. Yet you came out of it just fine while he clearly didn’t.”
I shook my head. Not in denial but to keep her words from putting down roots in my brain. I couldn’t deny it. Rafe had accompanied me to Chicago, and he’d gotten more than hurt: He’d gotten infected.
But how did Chairman Prejean know about it?
From Everson, obviously, and I resented it. He had no right to tell her about things that had happened to me or to Rafe — especially when he hadn’t even been there. Personal, private, heartbreaking things.
“I suppose I should be grateful that my son came back with just a few scars,” the chairman went on.
And with that, my resentment evaporated.
“Five scars on his perfect face. But he’s the lucky one.” She hefted her words like rocks, piling them on my shoulders, waiting for me to collapse under the weight. “So what if people wince when they look at him? At least he’s alive. Not like that little ape-boy … What was his name?”
“I’ll stay away from Everson.” I couldn’t spit the promise out fast enough. Anything to get her to stop talking. Thinking about Rafe was painful enough — if she poked at my memories of Cosmo, the little ape-boy, if she forced me to remember his murder and small unmarked grave, I’d shatter. And I wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction. Not when she was the person responsible for the virus that caused Cosmo’s messed-up DNA in the first place. Because of her, he’d been treated as less than human every day of his short life.
“I’m protecting my son, Lane. Face the facts. You’re a loose cannon.”
I bristled. I’d gone into the zone because my dad’s life was at stake. I hadn’t asked Everson to come with me. But I wasn’t going to waste my breath explaining that to her. “I’m going to run into him. This island isn’t that big and we’re friends. He —”
“Were. Past tense. Make sure he knows it.”
How? Brush him off without
explanation? Everson had shown up in Moline — unasked — out of concern for me. And when I couldn’t find my dad and decided to do Director Spurling’s fetch for him, Everson had insisted on coming along even though it meant traveling deep into the Feral Zone. He’d said he wanted to hunt for the missing strains of the virus, and he had, but Everson also had my back. He didn’t deserve to be scraped off like old gum now.
“He’s going to ask why,” I pointed out.
“Lie to him. Unless you have a problem with that?” she asked softly.
No, but she should. She’d lied to him his entire childhood, including telling him he had an autoimmune disease to keep him from ever leaving their home. Given her honesty scale, what she was asking of me was nothing. Besides, I’d gotten good at lying over the past six months. The threat of arrest had been an amazing motivator. “Nope. No problem at all. I’ll think of something to put him off.”
“I’m sure you will.” She straightened with an undulation, the way a python unfurled to swallow its prey. “But if you tell him that I’ve interfered in his life, if you even hint at it, I’ll have a hovercopter dump you on the roof of the biohazard department with ‘quarantine breaker’ stamped on your forehead. That would certainly make Director Spurling happy. She’s not your biggest fan, as I’m sure you know.”
“I won’t go near Everson,” I vowed. “And I won’t tell him the order came from you.”
She peered at my face for a moment, and then her posture became languid once more. “When it comes to the strays, you have no idea what you’re asking for.” She glanced at the frozen image of Jia on the monitor.
I shrugged. “I’m reckless like that.”
She chuckled, which surprised me. Her germ obsession had me thinking she was humorless. Or maybe it was the fact she’d destroyed the earth’s biosphere. A toss-up.
“All right, Lane,” she said. “You may stay and try to socialize the little beasts. I’ll pay you what we pay a new recruit, though you won’t have the status of even the lowest guard.”
I straightened to keep from sagging with relief. Chairman Prejean had no idea just how life-or-death my request had been, and I wasn’t about to clue her in. As I considered what it was going to be like staying on Arsenal, the lionesses sprang into my thoughts. If the patrol had Mahari locked away somewhere, this woman would know. The odds that she’d tell me? Not-in-this-lifetime to zip.