Genesis Cure (Genesis Book 7)

by Eliza Green

  ‘They need them to determine who has the virus.’

  Stephen eyed the charges who had volunteered to give blood. A mix of first gens and second. Plus a couple of thirds.

  ‘We can take our own samples, Bill. We can analyse them here. These men need to stop.’

  Bill’s temper flared. In that flash of anger, Stephen saw the man who had once feared him, before he understood what Stephen was.

  The investigator pointed at the infirmary. ‘You’ve got a room filled with seven sick Indigenes. That’s seven more than your usual zero. Harvey and Jameson already took blood samples from the elders, but now they need to take samples from Indigenes who are not sick.’

  Stephen scoffed. ‘You expect my charges to let these men stick needles in them?’

  ‘I do, and they will.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Bill pulled Stephen farther away from the waiting men.

  Harvey shouted, ‘Hurry up, Bill. We need to get going soon.’

  Bill waved his demands away. To Stephen he said, ‘Look, this localised sickness might be nothing, or it could spread to the surface. You need to do what you can to keep it localised. You need to lock down this district.’

  ‘Lock it down?’

  Stephen couldn’t believe what he was suggesting. Over a few sick Indigenes?

  ‘Yeah. Don’t be pigheaded about it. You know I’m right.’

  ‘We can take our own samples and analyse here.’

  Bill pointed at Harvey and Jameson. ‘And these men can do the work faster. They understand your genetics. Jameson understands Tanya’s.’ He lowered his arm, his anger softening a little. ‘Trust me, I would not let them do this if there was another way.’

  With a sigh, Stephen nodded. His pride had taken a battering of late and he was struggling to manage his feelings.

  Serena returned with new Indigenes. ‘I have more volunteers for the sample—’

  She jerked to a stop when she saw Stephen. He tried to soften his mood with a smile but Serena remained wary.

  She lined the new volunteers up behind the current ones in the roughly hewn space with minimal lighting. They had cleaner spaces than this to take samples, but a defeated Stephen just stood back.

  One at a time, Jameson stabbed each volunteer with a titanium-strength needle and drew clear blood. ‘First, second or third gen? Please state it for the records.’

  ‘They needed a mix,’ said Serena to Stephen.

  He appreciated her efforts to include him. Then she rolled up her sleeve and joined the back of the line.

  A horrified Stephen pulled her out of it. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m giving a sample.’

  ‘You know nothing about these men, or what they will do with your blood.’

  ‘They can’t do anything more than they already have.’ She jerked her arm. ‘Please, let me help.’

  Stephen released her and she re-joined the line.

  After the samples had been taken, Harvey said, ‘We’ll take these back to the hospital and analyse them.’

  Bill nodded and the men left.

  To Stephen, he said, ‘You’re a scientist, Stephen. Start thinking like one.’

  Bill called Ben and followed the men out. Ben gave Stephen’s arm a squeeze as he passed; the sentiment shocked him out of his submission. He’d been too passive, expecting things to work out on their own. Bill was right. He needed to approach this problem like a scientist.

  As soon as the guests left, he headed for his lab and collected a blood sample kit. Upon his return to the infirmary, he took his own samples from the Elite, then one from himself. Serena offered up another sample.

  He took them to the lab and stored them in a cool box before leaving to get Anton. In the Central Core, he approached Clement, an Indigene who belonged to a different district and who had been invaluable here.

  ‘Clement, can you complete your interviews alone?’

  The blue-eyed Indigene nodded. Stephen pulled Anton away from his interviews. He walked him out of the Core.

  Anton frowned at him. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We have some blood samples to analyse. Harvey and Jameson have taken samples of their own, but let’s run our own tests in conjunction with theirs. Let’s start from the beginning.’

  Fuelled by a plan, Stephen picked up the pace, eager to get started.

  Anton kept up with him. ‘What about the Nexus?’

  ‘The ban holds, but we still need to work out what’s causing their illness.’ He thought of another sample he could take. ‘Where’s Margaux?’

  ‘I don’t know. The infirmary possibly? You want me to get her?’

  ‘I’ll get her.’ He gave Anton’s shoulder a squeeze. ‘Start up the analysis machine. She will be our patient zero.’

  He returned to the infirmary but found no Margaux there. Instead, he saw Emile had regained consciousness. Unlike Margaux, the illness had not affected the type of air he could breathe. With the former elder now fully recovered, it worried him that she might be the carrier.

  A coughing Emile spotted him and attempted to sit up. ‘This is your fault, Stephen.’

  He already knew that. He blamed himself every day for letting Tanya get as far as she had.

  Ignoring the elder’s contempt for him, he walked over to the bed. ‘Emile, how are you feeling?’

  The elder looked paler than usual. His body shook as though a tremor ran through him. ‘You have done this district a disservice. We knew you were too young to be a leader. Leadership needs age’—Emile coughed into his hand—‘not infancy. You have made a mess of things.’

  Stephen disagreed with the latter, but some of what Emile said was true. It hurt him to hear the accusations.

  Emile continued in a raspy voice, ‘You let several GS humans into your district. You allowed humans to take my blood. Your mind is unhinged.’

  Stephen said nothing as Emile rambled on. He wanted to leave, but Emile was one of his test subjects. To figure out what was wrong, he needed the elder to keep talking.

  ‘Emile, you’re not well. But we’re doing everything we can to fix that.’

  As though he hadn’t heard him, Emile ranted on, pointing down at the bed. ‘The humans are to blame. They brought infection into our district. We must break off all contact.’

  His eyes slid to Laura on the other side of the room, tending to one of the sick. Stephen noticed her shoulders stiffen.

  ‘She should be the first to leave.’ Emile coughed again. ‘We must cleanse the district of their diseases.’

  Stephen had heard enough. ‘It’s more than that, Emile, and you know it. The humans have been down here more than once. They are not to blame.’

  ‘They are carriers. Your district is the only one suffering from this strain, whatever it is. The common denominator is the human. They are a scourge. They must be eliminated from this space.’

  Emile’s eyes closed as the conversation appeared to drain him. Stephen relished the break from Emile’s tongue lashing.

  ‘He didn’t mean it,’ he said to Laura.

  She turned, looking more tired than angry. ‘He did, and he might not be wrong. We don’t know if we’re carriers.’ She sighed. ‘What do you want to do?’

  He had no idea, but inaction couldn’t feature in his plans. ‘I need to lock down the district. That won’t go down well with some but I can’t worry about that now.’

  Laura nodded once. ‘I’ll get Arianna and Clement to arrange for the exits to be blocked.’

  She left the room.

  Stephen stared down at a now sleeping Emile. The other elders were in a similar state of chests rising and falling. Their translucent skin looked paler and thinner than usual.

  Five medics tended to the others in the room. Stephen called out to two of them. ‘Get down to Anton’s lab. Help him to bring the 3D body scanner up here. We’re going to scan the elders.’

  The two medics left. Stephen sensed the panic rising within the district. H
e assumed word about the lockdown was spreading fast. As expected, not many were happy about it. Or happy with him.

  29

  Bill ordered the car to drive to the hospital. Once past the security gates, it pulled up to the front of the white-bricked building. Jameson got out first, carrying both his medical bag and a cooler box with the blood samples like a baby. Harvey tried to take the box from him more than once, but Jameson told him to leave it.

  Bill followed the pair inside, Ben behind him.

  ‘What happens now?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Now we hope this pair can work together.’

  The two geneticists’ personalities were like chalk and cheese. Harvey was the dominant alpha, liking things his own way. He guessed that working on the first-gen code and being Charles Deighton’s personal physician had turned him hard and unyielding.

  Jameson, a man whom Bill had watched care for a captured Indigene boy eight years ago, seemed to be a softer personality. But when it came to the business of genetics, Jameson could hold his own. He had been Tanya’s personal physician. She’d been as soft as an attack dog.

  The men entered the lift together, neither waiting for Bill or Ben to catch up.

  ‘Sons of bitches,’ Bill muttered when the lift door closed just as they reached it.

  Ben pressed the call button, which flashed red. ‘They do that often?’

  ‘No. I usually get some respect.’ While they waited, Bill asked Ben something. In a low voice, he said, ‘Between you and me, I recorded Harvey visiting our old friend Marcus. You know anything about their relationship on Earth?’

  Ben visibly stiffened at his mention of Marcus, but he frowned and shook his head. ‘First time I saw him was on the passenger ship. I didn’t know who he was then. When you asked me to look up information on him, Harvey’s real face flashed up on screen. Still nothing. Whatever he did on Earth while the criminals were in power, it had nothing to do with the neighbourhoods.’ Ben paused. ‘Should I be worried?’

  He didn’t want to worry the teen over nothing. ‘No. Marcus isn’t going anywhere for a long time.’

  The lift door opened and Bill nudged Ben in first. Arriving on the lower levels, the door opened and Bill marched out of it. He slapped open the double doors of the lab, half expecting to see two bickering scientists at work. But what he found was two doctors working as though they’d been lab partners for years. Harvey was transferring tiny sticks into a clear machine, while the results fed to a screen.

  Bill stared at the cryogenic room at the back of the lab that housed the sleeping Conditioned and the Elite. The latter had little time left on this new Earth. Tanya’s stasis pod stood between both sets, as though she commanded her own space.

  What have you done to the Nexus, Tanya?

  He switched his focus back to the doctors. One was reading information on screen, while the other was removing the analysed samples from a strange analysis machine and inserting new ones. Ben stood in a spot that gave him a good view of the screen. Bill walked up to Jameson, who was fiddling with the strange machine.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s an immunoanalyser. It will perform a biochemical analysis on the blood samples we’ve taken and detect the presence of an analyte.’

  Bill frowned. ‘Analyte?’

  ‘Large protein. In this case, the presence of antibodies. If there are any, we’ll know if there’s an infection, and possibly a cause.’

  His patience eluded him. ‘So what’s the result?’

  ‘Calm, Bill.’ Jameson pushed him back gently. ‘We’ve been at this for about three seconds. Wait for Harvey to finish what he’s doing.’

  Bill remembered Harvey doing something similar when Laura had gotten ill. Except the machine he’d used was a DNA analyser. While he didn’t fully trust the man, he couldn’t imagine anyone better qualified to figure out this mess.

  Five agonising minutes passed. Bill tapped his foot as he waited a further fifteen minutes for Harvey to feed the samples into the machine. One by one, the data from the Elite presented on screen, followed by second and third-gen analysis. The screen displayed a chemical analysis of their blood work. Bill wished he knew more to understand what he was looking at.

  Jameson rubbed his chin. Bill couldn’t tell if that was a good sign or a bad one.

  ‘What is it?’ he said, trying to hurry up the thought process.

  ‘As I feared. It is a virus. A strong one. See here.’ He pointed at an elevated number that Bill assumed was the antibody count. ‘This indicates an infection of some kind. But there’s not enough data to determine what the virus is, or where it came from.’

  ‘Could the Indigenes’ boosted immune system count for the elevation?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Possibly.’ Jameson glanced at him. ‘We don’t know what normal looks like in their species. All we have are the samples from today. We’d need old lab samples to compare results.’

  ‘What about the Elite? What tests did you perform on them? Would any have caused this virus?’

  Jameson shrugged. ‘You name it, we did it. But their immune systems have been too severely compromised to know for sure. It would be like comparing apples to oranges.’

  Three samples showed on screen. Bill pointed to the one on the left presenting with a higher antibody count. ‘First gen?’ Jameson nodded. ‘And these other two with lower numbers?’

  ‘Second,’ said Harvey, pointing at the middle, then the right one. ‘Third gen right there. That last sample’s from Serena. We’re not seeing the presence of the virus in any other generation. It seems to be confined to the first gen for now.’

  ‘For now?’ He worried for Laura’s safety.

  ‘We don’t know if it will affect the younger Indigenes. Their code will have natural antibodies to fight the strain but we still don’t know where it came from.’

  Bill glanced at the Elite. ‘We know.’

  Harvey wagged his finger. ‘Not confirmed until we compare samples from the Conditioned and the Elite. Tanya’s mind entered the Nexus using Simon as a vehicle.’

  ‘The Nexus absorbs energy,’ Bill said. ‘And Simon carried two minds inside.’

  Harvey folded his arms. ‘Explain how it works.’

  ‘The Nexus connects with the consciousness, not the body. The body remains on the outside while the mind transports to a different plane.’

  It’s how Stephen had described the experience to him. He’d told him some things about it, but after Tanya’s unplanned visit Bill had forced his friend to explain it in full. Had Laura used it since then?

  ‘Then what? Why do they use it?’

  ‘To heal.’

  ‘Mind or body?’

  Bill didn’t see how that mattered. ‘Both, I guess.’

  ‘You guess or you know?’

  ‘I know. It’s both.’ The Indigenes also used it to heal physically.

  Harvey unfolded his arms. ‘The Nexus may not connect with the body directly, but there is a connection. It’s possible a GS virus may have been passed through that connection. The Elite were not strong, physically. They were—are—more prone to diseases.’

  ‘Tanya was subjected to a lot of testing, so that could have introduced something,’ said Jameson, continuing his analysis on screen.

  Bill saw that he’d removed the samples of second and third gen from screen to leave only the first-gen ones. He pulled up two new samples, one for the Conditioned and the one for the Elite.

  ‘I took these samples from our guests yesterday.’

  Bill saw the sample from the Elite had deteriorated. ‘No luck in stopping the degradation?’

  Jameson shook his head.

  Harvey took a closer look. ‘Have you tried lengthening the telomeres?’

  Jameson frowned. ‘The telomeres should be strong. Their mutations guaranteed it.’

  One screen showed DNA strands. Harvey pointed to a distinctive structure in the chain. ‘Here, at the ends of the chromosomes. The telomere may be shortening too fast
. It’s hard to say what your experiments on the board members did to them. We boosted production of telomerase in the Indigenes, to rebuild the telomeres and to give them infinite cell division. Not only in the Indigenes—we use that technique in the genetic manipulation clinics to prolong life. In your mutation, it’s possible your rigorous testing weakened the telomeres.’

  Jameson’s nod gave Bill hope.

  ‘Using the machine and the stolen Nexus energy to heal their bodies might have triggered new changes within them,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Check if that’s the case and fix it,’ suggested Harvey.

  Jameson nodded again, eyes on the screen. He pointed suddenly. ‘See those?’

  Bill went in for a closer look, but it all looked the same to him.

  Harvey also pointed at the sample on the right, showing a dark tissue sample from one of the Conditioned. It appeared to have cell damage. ‘Slight variations in the DNA code, but this could be something.’

  ‘Does that mean the Conditioned had the virus?’ asked Bill.

  Jameson said, ‘This is a sample from Simon, post-mortem.’ Tanya’s host body. ‘It’s hard to compare living with dead, but anomalies in the cells could indicate the presence of a strain. It could also be nothing.’

  ‘And if it’s nothing?’

  Jameson locked his gaze on Bill. ‘It means the virus is not from either Tanya or Simon. We could be dealing with a new source.’

  30

  In his lab, Stephen’s head thumped as he listened to Bill’s theory about the origin of the virus. On screen were the preliminary results of the blood samples taken by both Harvey and Jameson. It shocked him to see neither Tanya nor Simon had the virus. His own tests hadn’t uncovered any new angle to that of the Earth doctors.

  ‘If it’s not Tanya causing it, where is the infection coming from?’

  Bill’s face filled the screen. ‘I don’t know. These are just preliminary tests.’

  ‘And you trust this pair?’

  Bill shook his head. ‘About as far as I can throw them, but on this? Yeah. They’re scientists. Curiosity is driving them.’