by Teri Terry
Persey is one of the last to fall ill. Her eyes are wide, frightened, full of pain. I drop to my knees next to her bed and take her hand.
She holds it tight as another wave of pain passes through her.
“Help me,” she whispers. “Please.”
Cepta is here too, and no matter her views on Persey usurping her place with Xander, her eyes are full of pity, and rage that we can’t do anything. My strength is almost gone, but I can’t let her die in this much pain. Like so many times before, I join with Persey, dive into the sun of her pain—I ask Beatriz and the others to shield me from it as much as they can so I can see more clearly…
There is no darkness inside Persey; I checked before, so I know this already. Yet…
Where does it come from? Is it already there in those who will survive…or is it made?
If it is made, then how?
Everything in our bodies is made by transcribing a section of DNA to RNA—basically, making a readable copy of a gene—and then translating the RNA to make a protein. Even though every cell we are made up of carries all our genetic information in our DNA, genes aren’t always active—so hair doesn’t grow bone, and bone doesn’t grow hair. Cells are differentiated. But this process has been subverted in this illness: infected cells are forced to overproduce a new protein until it kills them.
Could there be something deep inside the genetic code that makes what saved me and the other survivors? We still got sick, so it couldn’t have been there to begin with, but maybe it is activated by this illness?
I’m so deep within Persey now that even with the others trying to shield me, her pain is taking away my ability to think. Still I try to find something, anything, that is different between my DNA and hers….
Is there—could it be—here? These repeating sequences of DNA inside me. Junk DNA, geneticists call it: junk because it doesn’t seem to code for protein or have any function they can identify, other than maybe structural—and even that they’re not sure of. We both have large numbers of repeating sections of junk DNA, but…some stretches of them are completely different.
Is this it? I need to compare DNA in more of those who fall ill and more survivors to know for sure. But if it is, can this be altered inside her, the same way I changed my hair, to change the course of the disease?
But I’m too late. She dies.
Persey was the last to die. Within a day, all of Community who were here, except three who didn’t come down with it and so must be immune, are dead. The only others left are me, Cepta, Callie, and Xander.
Cepta—the one who controlled all in this place for so long—seems to have started to lose it.
She whispers in my mind. Didn’t you notice who he sent away with Beatriz? His favorites. Those he wanted to save.
What?
The ones who left with Beatriz and Elena—all his favorites. Sent to safety. And poor Persey wasn’t even one of them.
“Cepta, dear woman,” Xander says, and holds out his arms. Trembling, she goes to his embrace. Her rambling thoughts calm.
Callie goes to Anna, and she and many of the people who live below come to help us. Those who served us—the immune—now outnumber us greatly. How will this change things?
Pyres are built for the dead, and I’m worried for Callie, but she says she’ll be all right to stay, to see the fire. That now that she knows about Jenna, it won’t scare her the way it did before. A torch is cast, and soon the flames dance.
I’m exhausted beyond imagining, and yet…
How did Xander and Cepta think staying isolated here would keep everyone safe from the epidemic? It was always going to find them eventually—especially when other people kept coming, drawn by the resources they have in this place. Even without Jenna around to spread this thing, people who are ill are still contagious to those they come in contact with.
And either Xander lied or Cepta did: how long has Callie lived here? Xander said she’s been here the whole year since she’s been missing, but then how did he know she is immune?
As we watch the pyres, I both feel the disappointment in Xander’s mind and see it in his aura. It turns out that the members of his Community weren’t that special after all. Most were scientists and engineers; they were carefully picked by Xander for their brains and skills. But at the end, they were people—human, like the rest of us—and so they were mortal. Most died; some few were immune; there were no survivors, not today. That’s not unexpected, as surviving is so rare and there were only about eighty Community members here, but Xander somehow thought his followers would find a way to survive—as if they could think their way out of dying.
With Persey I’d felt I might have been on the edge of working something out, something that could have helped—but I was too late.
Always too late.
CHAPTER 23
CALLIE
SHAY IS SLUMPED DOWN ON THE SOFA, not moving—barely even making the effort to breathe—but she’s not asleep either. Chamberlain butts against her hand, and she hardly stirs.
“Tea?” I say, and she slowly turns her eyes to me and blinks as if she’s having trouble understanding what I said. Then she nods.
I go to make it. Things have changed. Today it is Shay who needs Chamberlain, and she needs me too. Even though I’m desperately sad for all that has happened and how she feels, it gives me a warm feeling inside that somebody needs me and not the other way around.
I bring the tea in, put it on the table, half push her upright until she helps and sits up herself.
“Thank you, Callie,” she says. Chamberlain sees a lap available and jumps onto her, plonks his front paws against her chest and headbutts her chin. She half smiles, gives in and strokes him. “Oh, to be a cat,” she says.
“Drink that. It’ll make you feel better.”
She turns and looks at me properly now, seeing me and not some horror remembered from earlier. She smiles. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”
“I’m sorry I scared you earlier by going to the great hall.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t know you were immune. How did you know?”
“I don’t know how; I just did.”
“Can you remember ever having been around the epidemic before?”
I shake my head, and now I’m the one cast back to the horror in the hall: I’d have remembered that, wouldn’t I? I shudder and push it out of my mind.
“But Xander knew you were immune,” Shay says.
“Yes. And that I know now that I’m really Callie, not Lara.”
She leans down over her tea, in her hands now. “I don’t always know what I should or shouldn’t say, what you know, what you remember. If hearing something might freak you out or be useful or good to know, even if it hurts.”
“So that must mean you’re thinking of telling me something.”
“Yes. But I might have to touch your mind, see if there are blocks that’ll stop you from being able to deal with it.”
I swallow. I’m scared, but I want to know—to fill in more of the blanks inside of me. “Go on. Do it.”
She sips her tea, looks at me carefully as if searching for an answer. “Do you know who Xander is to you?” she says, finally.
I’m puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Well, do you know who he is to me?”
“Cepta said he’s your father.”
“Yes, that’s right.” She nods at me encouragingly, and I’m thinking about Xander and how he is with me, and contrasting that with how he is with other people, and there is some strand of memory tied up with him and me—and a tickle in my mind. I sense that Shay is there, inside me, gentle and soothing—taking away barriers, taking away blocks.
I frown. “Is he…I mean, I think he’s my father too. Isn’t he?” My head is whirling with knowing this—and realizing that somehow I always knew it; it was just hidden. I
put the two things together and open my eyes wider.
“Does that mean that you’re my sister?”
Shay smiles. “Yes. I told you that the first time I met you, but I’m not surprised you don’t remember; you weren’t very well then. I’m your sister. Half sister, that is. We had different mothers.”
Mothers. And now my thoughts are going somewhere else, to a fractured image in my mind: dark hair, long and straight like mine. A quick smile, good-night kisses on my cheek. And all at once, it comes into closer focus, and I can see her clearly: Mum. And I’m hit with pain and homesickness and wanting her to hug me so much that I can barely stand it. And then there is my brother too, who’d tickle me and chase me around the house, and I’d run away screeching until Mum told us to be quiet, that the neighbors would call social services if I didn’t stop screaming like that. There are tears hot on my cheeks.
Shay turns toward me; her hand is on my shoulder, and she is my sister but one I don’t know—at least, not like I know Mum and Kai. But she is the closest thing I have to someone who is mine, and when I finally turn to her, her arms go around me. We squish Chamberlain between us a little, but he doesn’t seem to mind.
And, as if she misses them as much as I do, Shay cries too.
CHAPTER 24
SHAY
“I FELT YOU WERE CLOSE TO SOMETHING,” Xander says. “When you were joined with Persey, you seemed to have something almost figured out.” He’s all curiosity and wanting to know; no sadness for Persey, a young girl who loved him. Misguided she might have been, but she did. It was all through her thoughts even as she died.
“I might have been onto something,” I say. “I’m not sure if it was real or just me hoping.”
“Tell me. Maybe we can work it out together,” he says, but I hesitate, not wanting to go there. He takes my hand. “There are more people who can be saved.” And he is passionate about this. He desperately wants to help people survive…
And then, all at once, it is there—a realization, one I’m surprised I didn’t reach before:
He wants there to be more survivors.
And I’m not sure what this means—when or how it started, or if it even matters now.
“Shay?” he prompts.
“All right,” I say. “Remember when my hair regrew after it was burned off in that fire? I made it grow back straight, not curly—and what I did wasn’t just acting on my hair itself, on the protein that makes it curl or grow straight. It was more than that.”
“What did you do?”
“I’ll show you—it’s easier that way.” His mind touches mine and I go back in time, remember what I did. I replay it for him, careful to keep my shields up at the same time so he only sees what I want him to see—as if that isn’t enough—and as he relives it with me, incredulity takes over his aura.
“You changed your genes?” he says. “You reprogrammed the actual code in your cells to make your hair grow this way?”
“Yes.”
“That’s amazing,” he says, and thoughts flicker through him too fast to follow—all the things that could be done. “This is true evolution, Shay: the moment humans can decide for themselves how they will change.” His excitement and desire to know how to do this, to try it for himself, make his own blocks almost come undone, and I’m seeing him more clearly than I have before.
“But is that a good thing? To be able to decide how we evolve?” I say, and I want to feel his clarity, his certainty—not this doubt that clouds me inside.
“Straight hair doesn’t hurt anyone, does it?”
“Well, no; I guess not. But I didn’t think it through. I didn’t really even know what I was doing then.”
“You could save lives. Think about it, Shay. This could open a whole new world of medicine. If you could master this and apply it to others, you could potentially cure a range of genetic inherited conditions—maybe even metabolic diseases, like diabetes.”
And I can’t argue with what he’s saying, yet I’m still uneasy thinking about this. Where would it stop if we could do these things? Are there boundaries in what we can do—what we should do?
“But for now, let’s go back to the epidemic,” Xander says. “How does this apply?”
“I’m not sure of this, not at all. But there were differences in junk DNA—marked differences—between Persey and myself. If this is what is different between survivors and those who die, if we can work out exactly what part of it is important to survival and track the genes involved—then it might be possible to change them.”
“Using existing medical technology to effect genetic changes isn’t impossible,” he says. “But it would take time—more time than an ill person can spare. Do you think you could change genes in somebody else too?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I feel it should be possible to do it to another person if I’m joined with them; I’m not sure that I know how.”
“You could try.”
I tilt my head, look at him, considering. “Why me? I’ve explained it to you now. Why can’t you try it?”
“I don’t seem to have the same instinct for healing that you do.”
And another realization, insight, into this man who is my father: maybe healing requires caring for others more than yourself. And he doesn’t, does he? I’m sad for him. He cares for Callie—I know he does—but not enough. And maybe he cares a little for me too, but still…
Not enough.
I shake my head. “I don’t think I can do it. I can’t face it; do you understand? Joining with people who are dying, trying to save them, and failing. I can’t go through it again.”
“Rest, Shay. There will be another day. Think how you would have felt if Callie had been ill and you could have saved her, but didn’t know how because you didn’t develop the skills when you had the chance?”
“Callie’s immune. And how did you know that, anyway? Cepta said Callie’s only been here for maybe six months, but didn’t you say she’s been here all along—the whole year and a few months now since she’s been missing? And this is a place that until recently the flu had never been.”
There are ripples in his aura; he’s annoyed but trying not to be.
“You misremember,” he says. “I said I took Callie to Cepta to begin with, and that is true, but it wasn’t here. I brought Callie here when the epidemic started to take hold; we went through infected areas on the way and she was fine, so it seemed likely she was immune.”
I’m looking at him, and his words are reasonable—yet…There is doubt still, inside me.
“Was Callie on Shetland?” I ask.
“For a time. Not in the research institute; I have a house there—as you know, since you stayed there yourself.”
“Did she know Jenna there?”
He’s perplexed. “Why are you still so interested in Jenna?” I’m not sure what to say, and he looks at me for a moment, shakes his head. “Look. No matter what you may think, I care about Callie. If there is something you’ve worked out about her illness, tell me.”
I pause, thinking, not sure at first what to tell him when so much of what he says seems slippery with half truths. But she is his daughter, after all. Maybe there is something he knows that will help me figure this out.
“I’m not sure her illness is an illness,” I say, finally.
“What do you mean?”
“She seems to have some strange sort of tie to Jenna. She knew how Jenna died. Exactly. She couldn’t have been with her, so how did she know? That’s the nightmare she’s been having.”
“What? That doesn’t make sense. Maybe she heard about it and made it up in her imaginings.”
“No, it can’t be that. Jenna shared her memory with me of when her physical body was destroyed in fire; Callie’s nightmare was too like what really happened to be anything other than Jenna’s actual memory. And I don’t understan
d it either, but there’s something there—something that connects Callie to Jenna, as if each of them is tangled up somehow with the other. And I don’t think Cepta suppressing these memories—or nightmares, or whatever they are—has been helpful. Once Callie accepted it for what it was, she’s been more or less fine.”
“I just don’t see how…”
“No. But it is what it is, however improbable.”
“Cepta was doing her best with Callie.”
“Oh? Or maybe she was holding on to Callie and her so-called illness, to hold on to you.”
There is a flash of anger through his aura now, and I’ve only said what I thought, but maybe I’ve gone too far.
He quickly suppresses his anger. “You spend too much time thinking about the wrong things. Enough deflection, Shay. You need to focus on how to save someone from the epidemic, and then give it another try.”
I cross my arms. “It’s too late. Everybody who could catch it here has died.”
“We’ll find someone; there are places out there where this epidemic is still spreading, still killing people. What if you could help them—don’t you want to?”
I shake my head. “It’s not that I don’t want to; I just can’t.” I get up, walk out, cutting off the conversation. I’m uneasy—and not completely sure why. If there is a chance, however small, that I could find a way to do this, shouldn’t I try?
But how many more souls will I cradle and then lose?
I can’t face it. Not again.
I walk back to the house, to Callie. Is she really better, or am I kidding myself? I remind myself what I came here to do: find Callie and take her home. But I have to be sure she is okay before we can try to leave this place.
Cepta is leaning against a tree in the path ahead of me, not moving, and when I suddenly notice her standing there, I jump.
We need to be vigilant, she whispers in my mind.