Contagion

by Contagion (retail) (epub)

  I put the book down, wander upstairs, and stare at Kai as he sleeps. And I can feel him—without touching him or reaching to his mind. There is a pattern of energy to him that I recognize as unique to Kai. I’m sure I could find him in a crowded room with my eyes shut by following this. Even while he sleeps, everything that makes him Kai is still there: his energy, passion, protectiveness and care—and anger too, directed at himself as much as at anyone or anything else.

  I touch his hand, and he stirs in his sleep. He’s warm, solid, real. Yet all matter is ultimately made up of atoms, and atoms—with tiny particles spinning in orbit around a tiny nucleus—are mostly empty space, aren’t they? Our eyes are used to focusing on the dense level of energy, and so we see objects and ourselves as solid and still, but neither of these things are really true.

  I reach, but not to Kai inside: to Kai outside, past the physical and into the space around him.

  Colors shimmer and vibrate, and I gasp: it’s there. His aura is there, where it must always have been; colors that reach out from his skin and surround him. Until I looked as I am doing now—or maybe unlooked is more apt—I couldn’t see it. The red and pink of passion, the blue of caring, the edges of black anger. And other, more subtle touches too, that I haven’t felt in as much detail before seeing them as I do now: flashes of silver—of intuition; another shade of soft blue—of truthfulness. So much of what he has been, is now, and will be is here, in these waves of color, in the variations of hue and vibration—sort of like, but not the same thing as, color and sound.

  It’s like his fingerprint, the pattern of energy that is his individual voice.

  His…Vox? Is that what that word written on that drawing really means?

  And what of myself?

  I hold out my hand and unlook in the same way. I move my hand around in wonder and watch the colors ripple. It’s a rainbow—it’s around both hands, intensifying up my arms. It is so like the drawing I found in Dr. 1’s book. There are other colors and subtleties, but the rainbow is the overall effect.

  Downstairs again, I delve further into the books and charts: what does my aura mean? There are several references, and the answer isn’t exactly the same in every book. But overriding it all is that those with rainbow auras may be skilled at energy work: they are healers. And they may also be star people—first incarnations on the earth. Whoa, what the hell does that even mean?

  The more I read—the books, the charts, about the colors—the more my mind spins. Somehow it feels like Dr. 1’s books were left here for me to discover; they relate to me and what I am.

  And I can kid myself that all I’m doing here is trying to figure him out, to help find him, but there is a hunger inside me to know, and know more—to figure out my new self.

  Healers can adjust auras to make people well. Is that what I did when I fixed my ear, and helped Kai after he’d been beaten up and tied to that bench—and at the hospital when I had a concussion too?

  I didn’t know how I did it the first times; I reached out and then into the hurt. But when I was in the hospital with my thoughts muddy and confused from the concussion, I had to work it out, and…yes. I think that is what I did. Maybe if I examined the aura first, I could use it to target things more specifically, and not do it all by feeling my way.

  My intake of breath is sharp when the implications fall into place. If adjusting an aura can heal, can it also hurt? Those soldiers; I struck them with my anger, and they fell to the ground. I shudder: a way to heal, twisted around to cause pain.

  Page after page, I read until the light is so dim that my eyes hurt. Finally I have to stop. I stand and stretch, then wander to the door.

  The stars are out tonight.

  I read all about how to use telescopes in one of Dr. 1’s books earlier, and now I’m ready to give it a try.

  The shutters and roof of the conservatory are in the way, but there are switches by the wall. I try them, and the shutters slide away, the roof and the doors slide open. I uncover the telescope and switch it on.

  Despite the colors I can see around them, the stars above me are still cold and distant, as they always have been. I’m somehow nervous—of what I will see, or what I won’t see—through the lenses of this telescope.

  I’m thinking about what I’ll try to find in the sky when the screen and controls come to life. The whole telescope moves, adjusts, without me touching it.

  This model is far more advanced than the ones in Dr. 1’s books. It looks like it isn’t off an assembly line either. Was it made to order? I study the screen and controls, trying to work it out.

  Interesting. It looks as though the telescope has been programmed to track particular coordinates through the sky, adjusting for the movement of our planet and the stars. As soon as I turned it on, it oriented itself. What did Dr. 1 find so fascinating that he wanted it always in view when he turned on his telescope?

  Hesitant, I line my eyes up with the eyepieces. There is a blurry splash of radiant light and color on a background of inky darkness, so beautiful that I gasp. I adjust the focus for my eyes, and a binary star system jumps into stark relief, centered and bright. The star pair is so beautiful, it almost hurts to see it with such clarity—a luminous golden star, and a smaller blue one that shadows it. Streaks of multicolored aura surround them both, fine trails of color I can feel and trace in ways I couldn’t with my naked eyes.

  The maps of the sky, of the constellations, are in my mind from one of Dr. 1’s astronomy books. This binary is the bottom star of the Northern Cross, the head of the Cygnus swan. It’s called Albireo.

  The beauty, clarity, and remoteness of the stars captivate me, and with them, their auras—the record of all they have been and the traces of all they will be. And as I stare at the night sky again and again, and think about that instead of everything else I should be thinking about, a realization settles in. Dr. 1 isn’t the only one who isn’t quite what I thought. Neither am I, and neither is the illness that made me this way.

  There is something about all of this—Dr. 1, the epidemic, how I am now, the auras, his drawing, particles being waves, waves affecting particles—that all fits together. But I can’t quite see how, not yet. Something is missing.

  I feel more than see when Callie comes back. She stands behind me and watches.

  “Hi,” I say, and stand upright. I turn to face her and reach around her for her aura at the same time. But Callie has no color, at least none I can see, just darkness.

  Hi.

  “Sorry I upset you before. I didn’t mean to.”

  I know. Callie sighs, leans against the wall. It’s being here, on this island. Just being here makes me angry, and we don’t seem to be any closer to finding Dr. 1.

  “Maybe, just maybe, we are. I’ve been thinking. I’ve got some ideas about this Dr. 1 and what he did. I need your help to work it out.”

  CHAPTER 28

  CALLIE

  I STARE AT SHAY. Can her blue eyes see things my dark ones can’t? I want to believe her. I’m so desperate to find Dr. 1, I’d do anything.

  What can I do to help?

  Shay covers the telescope and flicks switches that make the shutters and glass roof and doors slide closed. She faces me.

  “You haven’t told us very much about that research place underground. I need you to tell me everything you can remember.”

  I don’t want to; I hated it there! There is panic leaking into my voice and thoughts.

  “I know. I’m sorry. But I really think it could help. You see, I think maybe we’re on the wrong track about the epidemic, but I can’t quite figure out exactly how or why. There might be something you know that will make all the pieces fit together.”

  Would I really do anything to find Dr. 1? I’m not sure I even can remember what she wants to know, but the thought of trying to makes me want to run away, far and fast.

  I’m scared.

  Shay sits on the sofa and holds out a hand. I put my dark one in hers and sit next to her.
r />   Can you feel my hand is there? I ask her, wistful.

  “Sort of; there’s like a tingling or something. Can you feel mine?”

  I shake my head. Not the way you mean. There is a resistance when my hands or feet or any part of me is pushed against something—I can’t go through things. But I can’t tell the difference between your hand and a wall. I can’t taste or smell anything either. I can only see and hear.

  “But you can see that I’m holding your hand. And you know that I’m your friend and I care about you, don’t you?”

  I believe her. But is that only because I want to?

  No. Shay is my friend.

  I nod.

  “And I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important.”

  I stare back at Shay, at her steady eyes locked on mine—the only ones that don’t look straight through me. I finally sigh. All right. What do you want to know?

  “Everything you can remember about being underground, right from when you first got there.”

  I lean back on the sofa, and after a while I begin. I tell her everything I can, though much of it—especially early on—is hazy, mixed up.

  We arrived in groups. I had a friend—one I met in my group. We used to talk all night sometimes to keep from being scared. I frown. I can’t remember her clearly apart from that, not even her name.

  After lots of blood tests and scans and stuff, one day they took some of us and put us in these little rooms, one to a room. I was injected with something through a wall—there was a window, and a nurse who had her hands in heavy gloves that came through the wall.

  It hurt. I got very sick, like you were—everything hurt so much, I screamed. It seemed to go on forever. I thought I’d die, but I didn’t.

  Then I was better. They seemed very excited about that at first. I remember Dr. 1 coming to see me. I frown again, struggling to remember. That was the first time I saw him, I think. It was obvious he was the boss; they all did what he said.

  They did lots of tests; some of them hurt. I don’t want to think about that.

  “It’s okay, Callie. I’m here, and they can’t hurt you anymore.”

  I worked out I could tell people what to do and make them do stuff—like you can now. Once I almost got a nurse to let me out before someone stopped her.

  And then they didn’t want me to talk. They made me wear a mask so I couldn’t.

  Then, one day, they said I needed to be cured. Even though I wasn’t sick anymore.

  I stop talking for a moment, and Shay doesn’t press. She waits, but does it in a way that I know she wants me to tell her. I take a deep breath—my version of it, anyway—and go on. I’d told Kai and Shay a little about this before, but now I tell her all of it—how it hurt, and then it didn’t; that I was out of my body and watched it burn to ash. Then it got vacuumed up, taken away, and put with all the other bags of ash.

  How I followed a scientist down below to some big control room. Then followed some techs down a hatch to a huge round thing that hummed—a giant worm in an even bigger tunnel.

  Shay’s eyes light up when I mention the worm. “Tell me more about that; everything you can.”

  I try to describe it, but my words don’t seem to be enough for her.

  “I wonder if…Callie, would it be all right if you remember it and I see if I can see what you remember? Like how sometimes we can see each other’s thoughts?”

  Okay. You can try. Shay’s thoughts link with mine, and I go back…

  I’m flying, faster and faster along the giant worm. It calls to me inside. Something inside it is part of me.

  I stop; there are doctors next to a section of the worm, doing something with equipment attached it.

  Then they go to their next victims; sedate and inject them. I hide my head under my arms and cover my ears so I can’t hear or see what they are doing anymore.

  Then Shay wants to know all about the night I escaped. I show her people getting sick; the guns and the blood. The explosion underneath us; smoke and fire. No, no earthquake or anything before that. And the explosions above ground, away from us, that come later—I didn’t know then, but that must have been the oil place.

  And we sit there as the sky begins to lighten, me wanting to forget, and Shay slowly sifting through my memories.

  CHAPTER 29

  SHAY

  THERE ARE FOOTSTEPS ON THE STAIRS and then into the room. “Have you been up all night?” Kai asks.

  I stir and look up. “Yes. And with Callie’s help”—I smile at her—“I think I’ve worked a few things out.”

  He comes in, sits on the chair across from us. “Such as?”

  “What Dr. 1 was doing on this island; why his research was being done here, in such an isolated place. They built a particle accelerator underground. You know, like at CERN in Switzerland—a massive structure that spins particles around faster and faster, and then has them collide.”

  “A particle accelerator? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Callie saw it. She didn’t know what it was, but when she described it and showed it to me in her memory, I was sure. We went to CERN on a science trip last year. It was basically the same equipment.”

  “But what does this have to do with the epidemic?”

  “There are some papers here that I read yesterday, but I didn’t realize how important they were until I saw the particle accelerator in Callie’s memory. At CERN, one of the experiments they were doing was creating antimatter, and experimenting with using it to kill cultured tumor cells—with the goal of one day being able to inject a tumor with antimatter to kill it. What I think they’ve done here is just another step: using more antimatter to kill more cells.”

  “Antimatter?” Kai’s eyes widen. “That sounds way too Doctor Who.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? But that’s not the worst of it. They weren’t trying to cure cancer, not the way they were going about it; that must have been some sort of cover story, or a way of getting doctors and nurses to work for them. They weren’t targeting antimatter at cancer cells to save someone’s life; they were targeting it at whole human beings.”

  Kai frowns. “But if they weren’t looking for a cure for cancer, then why were they doing this?”

  “I’m guessing here, but could they have been developing a new type of something like a biological weapon? It’s not biological in this case, but it could be used in a similar way to target and kill enemies. That could be why the army—that Special Alternatives Regiment—are involved, and also why they seem to act on their own. I bet it isn’t the sort of thing everyone would know about, in the forces or in the government.”

  “My God. That’s a hell of an alternative.” Kai crosses his arms like he wants to keep out what I’ve said.

  “And then their weapon got out and gave us the Aberdeen flu. Though it’s misnamed: not only is it not from Aberdeen, it’s also not a flu, or any sort of disease—not in the sense we think of diseases. It’s not anything biological at all. They had a particle accelerator, not bacteria or viruses. Callie’s memories of the accelerator—of it being run, followed by extraction of something from the accelerator, and then injection into subjects—yes. It all confirms that that is what they were doing.”

  Kai’s frown deepens. “But if the illness is caused by antimatter, isn’t that like a poison? How could a poison be contagious and spread the way it has?”

  “From quantum physics we know that light can act as both waves and particles, right? And that matter can do that too. It makes sense that antimatter can as well: that antimatter particles can be things—like a poison—but can also be waves. Waves that can spread out and cause contagion. It may be they didn’t even know it would spread like it did until it happened. In fact, I’m guessing they didn’t know—a weapon is only useful if you can aim it where you want.”

  Kai shakes his head. “I can’t take this in. Quantum physics? Particles and waves? You’re starting to sound like Alex.”

  When Kai mentions his stepfather—my f
ather, not that Kai knows—I flinch inside, but keep it from my face. I tell myself there are more important things to deal with now…or maybe I’m just avoiding it.

  “We still need to find out more,” I say. “But there is one thing I’m sure of: the epidemic began with something that came out of a particle accelerator, here on this island.”

  That night, we all head out to the remains of the barn, the one that hid the elevator shaft—where Callie escaped from underground. I can’t let her go alone, and Kai won’t let us go without him.

  He’s having trouble believing; he thinks it sounds too sci-fi, too far-fetched. But if you went back in time and showed cavemen that you can shoot a mammoth with a gun, they’d think it was magic, wouldn’t they? Even just go back a hundred years, and our ancestors would have trouble believing our computers and all the things they can do.

  To get to what is left of the barn, we have to walk through dead, black places. Walking through cold ashes feels like disturbing the graves of the dead. A hundred Callies could rest here; more.

  “Okay, Callie?”

  Yes.

  She’s been subdued; the anger dulled down since she told me everything and showed me her memories. But her resolve inside is strong. Even if it means going back to the one place she never wanted to go again—she wants to get Dr. 1 more than anything.

  Yes. I do.

  We link our thoughts again when we reach the burned-out barn. Callie searches for a way in and finds a crack that leads into the elevator shaft. She heads down below, and I feel her terror of this place—of being locked up underground, of not being able to find her way out again.

  The fires are long gone; it’s cold and dead. She goes up and down corridors, finding ways to travel down and down again. The place is so destroyed that none of the locked doors are intact enough to stop her. Skeletons huddle in corners, behind locked exits; flesh burned away and eye sockets empty.