by Kat Falls
“The lion-woman?” I echoed. They’d caught one? How? The answer hit me like a Taser strike. The guards hadn’t just captured a lioness. They’d had one all along. “You have Mahari.”
“Yes,” the chairman confirmed.
My blood went hot, and my gaze whipped to Everson. “You knew the whole time?”
He said nothing, which was answer enough. I gritted my teeth against my rising temper. Who cared if he’d lied to my face? It didn’t matter. I’d been stupid to think he was the exception.
I turned back to the mother of the liar. “What makes you think she knows where Rafe is?”
The chairman raised her nonexistent brows. “If the other lion-women know, I’d say chances are good this one does too.”
“Will you free her if she tells me?” I asked.
“That’s a big no-go.” Hyrax hooked his thumbs into his waistband as he regarded me. “The grup’s got a serious hate on for humans. She tore out a guard’s tongue. With her claws. Tore it right out. He nearly died from shock and blood loss.”
“Why was his tongue anywhere near her?” I demanded.
“Irrelevant,” Chairman Prejean said smoothly. “We don’t need to release the lion-woman. We just need to find out Rafe’s location. As soon as she tells you, Captain Hyrax will send out a strike team to retrieve him.”
“Don’t you mean hunt?” I snapped.
She waved a hand so raw, it looked as if she’d soaked it in bleach. Actually, she probably had.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she said. “We need one small vial of his blood, that’s all. If he cooperates, it’ll take less than a minute.”
If he cooperates. That was a big if. Rafe hated line guards. They hadn’t exactly been kind when he’d lived in the orphan camp. Even if the guards explained that they needed his blood to create a vaccine, Rafe might not cooperate. At this point, a vaccine wouldn’t help him. He wasn’t as selfish as I’d first thought, but I didn’t see him letting himself get caught by the patrol for the greater good. Not even if the guards asked nicely — which they wouldn’t.
“You should know, Lane,” Chairman Prejean said, breaking into my downward spiral, “we have more efficient ways to extract the information. I’m only offering you this opportunity because my son asked me to.”
I glanced at him, but he was still in guard mode, giving away nothing.
“Ev thinks the lion-woman might give you Rafe’s location willingly …”
She paused, giving me time to figure out the alternative. For a moment, we just stared at each other as a knot tightened in my gut. It tightened and tightened, hard and cold, until it was all I felt.
“And if she doesn’t, you’ll torture her?” I asked quietly.
“Nothing in the Geneva Conventions prohibits using interrogation techniques on an animal,” Hyrax drawled.
I glared at him. “Mahari isn’t an animal, and we’re not at war.”
“We are,” the chairman corrected. When I started to protest, she held up a blood-crusted finger. “Not with the infected. They’re the casualties. We’re at war with the virus, and it’s winning.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have created it,” I said under my breath, though not softly enough, going by the warning look Everson shot me.
“Captain Hyrax, have the strike team ready to deploy,” the chairman said, clearly dismissing him. She waited until he’d left the room before adding, “You’ll make sure no animal gets hurt, won’t you, Lane? After all, you did work at a no-kill shelter.”
The gall of her, calling Mahari an animal when she was the reason Mahari had gotten infected with lion DNA in the first place. Her twitch of smile was my breaking point. “Chairman, why did you invent Ferae?”
Everson swore under his breath, using words so obscene that, any other time, I would have gaped at him. Instead, I watched every muscle in Chairman Prejean’s body go rigid and the color drain from her already-pale face.
“Because human ingenuity needs to be encouraged,” she finally ground out.
I shook my head to signal my confusion.
“People were getting so lazy,” she explained with an impatient huff. “The world was a mess — environmentally, politically — and yet, people wanted easy answers, expected easy solutions. They didn’t value tenacity and outside-the-box thinking anymore, not even in others. So I created the Titan Imaginariums and filled them with mazes and puzzles and other challenges — to encourage human ingenuity. After spending the day experiencing wonder, people left with the sense that the world is filled with possibilities just waiting to be unlocked.”
“Some possibilities shouldn’t be unlocked,” I said acidly.
“Who’s to say which those are?” she countered. She clasped her throat with raw, reddened fingers. “We can fix this. We can. I still believe in human ingenuity.” Her tone had regained its usual coating of freezer burn. “But it won’t happen if we’re not human.”
I held in my “Give me a break” and settled for, “I’ll talk to Mahari.”
Chairman Prejean closed her eyes. “Good.”
“And when” — if wasn’t an option — “she tells me where Rafe is, I’m going with the strike team. Rafe won’t show for a bunch of guards, but he’ll show for me.” At least, I hoped so.
“Of course,” the chairman agreed without hesitation. Seeing my surprise, she smiled faintly. “Ev said you’d insist on it.”
Everson handed me a black nylon backpack and a flak jacket. Not just a jacket, I realized, feeling its heft. Body armor.
Anger settled like a spiked ball in my stomach as we took the elevator to the basement level. Everson, however, acted as if he did this every day — went to work in a silent, scary basement. Oh, wait, he did.
Would anyone tell the orphans where I’d gone? Probably not. And making it worse, I’d left without saying good-bye. At least I’d never promised them that I would. I’d always known that chances were good I’d leave this island unexpectedly. I should count myself lucky that I wasn’t leaving in handcuffs.
Still ignoring Everson, I opened the nylon backpack, aka a bug-out bag, and found energy bars, bottled water, first aid supplies, a lighter, compass, flashlight, and Swiss army knife. I stuffed the flak jacket in as well.
Everson frowned. “You should put that on.”
I shot him a dagger of a look. “You’re using Mahari in medical tests, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” For once he sounded as stiff as Rafe had always made him out to be. “An antigen.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s a kind of cure.”
“For Ferae?”
“What else?”
“Don’t you have to test it on animals first?” I asked accusingly.
“We are.” His scars stretched flat over his cheekbones as he spoke. “Do you know how America legally defines who’s human? Simple: one hundred percent human DNA. Less than that, you don’t cross the quarantine line, you’re not a citizen, and you have no rights because you’re not human. In other words, manimals don’t qualify.”
“If you really believed they’re not human, you wouldn’t hide them in a basement. You’d put them in your lab with the other mongrels and give tours.”
The elevator door slid open, revealing a brightly lit corridor. Neither one of us moved.
“Did you want us to hold off on humans until the antigen goes through six rounds of animal testing? That’ll take a decade at least,” he said, the rasp in his voice even more pronounced. “And by then, anyone who’s infected now will be feral. As in, mutated and insane. That includes Rafe. Think he cares how we define him so long as we’re testing the cure on manimals now?”
Rafe, mutated and insane — I could picture it. Had pictured it many times awake and asleep. But still. “You could’ve asked for volunteers. Infected people would’ve lined up from here to Moline for a possible cure.”
“We tried it, but they didn’t come back for follow-up testing. Just took the dose and disappea
red into the zone. And we learned nothing. We don’t know if the antigen has side effects or if it stopped working. Maybe that’s why none of the volunteers came back — ’cause they went feral fast, like with the inhibitor. So we made a choice. A hard choice. No one on Dr. Solis’s team feels good about it. But this way has gotten us a lot closer to a cure.”
They could have found another solution if they’d tried, but they took the quick, easy way: defined infected people as animals and took away their rights. And there was no one to stop them on this side of the wall. It was revolting. Everson had lied to me and that was the least of it. He was imprisoning people to use as test subjects. Yes, they were infected with animal DNA, but they were still people. And yet, some small part of me — some horrible, selfish part — was glad Dr. Solis’s team had moved forward so fast. For Rafe’s sake.
I swallowed the acid burn of my own double standards and asked the billion-dollar question: “Does it work?”
Everson shot me a knowing look, clearly aware of the moral contortions I’d just performed to ask about the end result.
“We’re calling them functionally cured,” he threw over his shoulder as he strode out of the elevator.
“What does that mean?” I followed him down the corridor.
“It means we can remove the virus from the subject’s system, but not the animal DNA. That’s why my mother refuses to call it a cure. She thinks the infected are a lost cause.”
My stomach clenched. “What?”
“That’s why she goes on record saying ‘Everyone in the East is dead.’ To her, they are.”
“So she can forget what she did,” I growled.
“Yeah,” he said like I’d stated the obvious.
“Do they have to keep taking it?” And more important, could I get a dose to Rafe?
“It’s a single-dose serum. It interferes with an enzyme that Ferae needs to multiply. After a week, there’s not a trace of the virus in their blood.” Everson paused before a steel door with a mesh-wire porthole. “They can’t infect anyone, and they don’t have to worry about going feral. Isn’t that worth pursuing? Finding a way for manimals to hang on to their humanity?”
Definitely worth pursuing. “I want a dose for Rafe.”
Everson put his back to the mesh porthole, blocking it, and took what looked like a small yellow toothpaste tube from his pocket. “I figured as much.” He dropped the tube into my outstretched hand. “You have to take his blood first. The blood sample won’t do us any good after he takes this.”
I tested that the cap was tight and then tucked the tube into the pocket on my cargos with a Velcro seal. “How does he take it?”
“He squeezes it out under his upper lip. But before that, you need to tell him we don’t know the long-term effects. It’s an untested drug. If he wants to take it, the risk is on him.”
I gave a curt nod. It was Rafe’s body. His health. His choice. Of course I’d tell him the risks. I wasn’t the one going around kidnapping people to use as test subjects.
Everson pressed his index finger to a control pad by the door. A green light flashed, and the door clunked ajar. Beyond it, a big, impassive guard sat before an enormous control console watching camera feeds — row upon row of them. The guard nodded at Everson as we entered.
“We call this the skybox.” Everson pointed to the console. “We can run the whole installation from here. It’s the same setup that was used in the Titan theme parks.”
I drew closer to the wall screen displaying the multiple camera feeds. Shadowy figures flickered on the tiny screens. “Are those people?”
“People?” the guard echoed with a snort.
Everson gave the man a sharp look.
There were so many screens. So many pacing figures. I felt sick through and through. “Who took them from the Feral Zone?” The correct word was kidnapped.
“The strike team,” Everson said in a flat voice. “They were trained to infiltrate hostile territory. Now their job includes recovering ferals infected with the different strains.”
“Mahari isn’t feral.”
“Mahari?” the guard asked.
“Subject 2666,” Everson told him.
“Not feral?” The guard raised a brow. “Could’ve fooled me.”
His fingers flew across the keyboard and enlarged one of the screens. The feed from the holding cell was set to night vision, which turned the occupant’s eyes an eerie white as she paced. Though a tangled mane of hair hid much of her face, it had to be Mahari. She had a lion’s prowl and the heft of an Amazon. Going by her darting glares at the cameras, the floating bots irritated her immensely. Maybe because they were rotating to follow her moves, or maybe she just hated being watched as she paced. With shocking speed, she snatched up a tray and whipped it at one of the cameras. As the bot swerved, she leapt into the air and caught it, but the camera bot didn’t so much as dip under her considerable weight.
The guard gave a low whistle. “Those are set to hover at ten feet. Heck of a jump.” He flipped the view on-screen to the second camera. In a tank top and hospital pants, Mahari dangled from the hovering bot, her body swinging as she tried to disembowel the camera with her claws.
The guard twisted in his chair to face me, all smug humor gone. “Still think she isn’t feral?”
“She’s mad because you’ve caged her.” I glared at Everson. “Like Chorda caged her. You made her like this.”
“She’s been like that from the moment she woke up from the tranquilizer.” Everson sighed. “But you’re right, that’s not feral behavior.”
“Are you kidding? She tries to bite anyone who gets close,” the guard protested.
“That’s intentional, not virus driven,” Everson said. “If she was feral, she’d be drooling and acting more animal.”
“How many people do you have down here?”
Everson jabbed another button and Mahari’s image disappeared as the giant screen became a window, which overlooked darkness broken only by pinpricks of light forming lines. I moved closer to the glass, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. The guard station was perched high above a vast maze, its many twisting avenues illuminated by tiny footlights.
“A labyrinth,” I breathed, awed by the beauty of its pattern even knowing that manimals were imprisoned within those curving walls.
“One of my mother’s designs,” Everson explained.
“The patrol added it?”
“No. It was in the original building design. The patrol planned to keep ferals on base to study the progression of the disease, but we only began doing it four months ago.”
I frowned at that news.
“Light up 2666’s cell,” he told the guard.
“Mahari,” I corrected. Was it easier to mistreat her if she remained nameless? Probably: A number dehumanized her, but I wasn’t going to let it slide.
Deep within the labyrinth, a square of light flicked on.
“And the path,” Everson said over his shoulder as he opened a door onto a steel catwalk outside the skybox, three stories above the maze.
I joined Everson in time to see a glowing path cut its way through the twists and turns of corridors to end at Mahari’s cell.
“Why do you keep this place so dark?” I repositioned my bug-out bag to cross my chest.
“They stay calmer this way.”
“How did you get them all down here without anyone noticing?”
“Through a retrieval tunnel at the back of the maze. It accesses the river’s lock-and-dam system. Come on. I’ll take you down to the start of the path.” He beckoned me to the metal stairs that spiraled into the darkness below.
My fingers prickled again, now verging on numb. “You’re not coming into the maze with me?”
“I’d just stir them up. They hate guards.”
“Can’t imagine why.”
“You’ll be fine.” Everson tapped an impatient fist against the railing. “They’re behind weapons-grade glass. Just go fast and touch nothing.
”
I managed to nod before following him down the metal steps, my heart pounding louder than my feet.
Three stories down, we stepped into a holding pen of sorts. Tucked under the skybox was yet another lab behind glass. Technicians in hygienic jumpsuits paused in their work to stare at us. One sharp gesture from Everson and all gazes dropped. Such was the power of the Titan prince. I was feeling distinctly uncharitable toward him, even with a dose of the cure in my pocket.
I turned my back on the lab with its grisly goings-on to face an enormous door with a line of clockwork gears embedded between layers of glass. Everson turned the silver disc centered on the door, and it slid open silently.
“I know how this looks,” he muttered. “Bad. Cruel. But we’re curing them.”
My skin grew clammy as I eyed the cell doors staggered along the corridors. “Are you going to dissect them to make sure?”
“Of course not. But we need to keep them here to see the long-term effects.”
Before me, four corridors branched off, all dark except the single path of light, the second on the left. I entered the maze, following the glowing floor tiles. The smell of bleach, sharp in my nose, reminded me of the animal shelter where I used to volunteer. The virus was passed via a bite or open cut. I couldn’t catch Ferae just by breathing the same air as infected people. And anyway, the cells must have been sealed up tight, since the maze was as silent as an airless room. The walls gleamed in the darkness, cleaner than clean, which gave me some comfort. Clean was good.
With my back to Everson, I drew my dial from under my shirt. He wouldn’t like me recording his secret lab, but too bad. I tapped the dial’s screen and turned on the camera.
“Are you sure the glass will hold?” I called over my shoulder, knowing it was a stupid question, but needing the reassurance.
“A bullet couldn’t pierce it,” he said, still in the open doorway, arms crossed like a sentry. “It’s made from the stuff they used to use on space shuttles.”