“Me too,” I say. “We all want the same thing. To figure this thing out and end Tercera.”
Riyah raises one eyebrow. “Sure. We're basically the same. Except, our dad didn't create it in the first place, and none of us are immune. Which means you can't die, but we all will, and soon. Thanks to your dad.”
I can't swallow past the lump in my throat, so I look down at the muddy toes of my black boots. “Yeah.” People here either seem to love me for no reason, or hate me for something I didn't even do.
Wesley takes my hand and his support makes me choke back a sob. What's wrong with me?
“Ruby was six when her dad's work was stolen. He was murdered for his refusal to weaponize Tercera. Neither Donovan nor Ruby had anything to do with its release. The next time you want to carve something with your sharp tongue Riyah, feel free to take it up with me. I don't appreciate you attacking her, and I won’t allow it. You can be replaced, and you will be if you prove unable to work with us. Is that clear?”
Amir clucks. “My apologies. Riyah's had a hard day. Her best friend Peter was one of the first suppressant failures. He's not doing well. If you'll forgive her sharp tone, you'll find she's quite capable, and motivated to help. There's an old plasma donation center we thought might work out well for your research. When we got word from Rafe that you were coming, we started cleaning it up.” Amir makes eye contact with me when I look up and then points down the road. When I nod, he steps down the path he indicated.
Wesley lets go of my hand when I start walking, but he stays next to me, almost close enough to touch. I've almost forgotten in all my grief that Wesley was my friend first. For years I thought it was all we'd ever be. Somehow, one kiss confused me and I forgot that. When he jumped in to defend me, it bridged a gap I didn't even realize was there. My exhaustion, and depression, and fear still crowd around me, but I'm a little less alone.
I've only taken a few steps when something bounds out from behind a tree and leaps into the road in front of us. I stand transfixed, afraid if I move it will flee.
I barely whisper the question for Wesley, “Is that what I think it is?”
He grins. “I don’t know. Do you think it’s a kangaroo with a baby joey in its pouch?”
My jaw drops. “It looks just like I imagined it would.” It bounces away, pivoting mid bounce and disappearing into the trees that line the road. I can’t quite help the note of wonder in my voice. “What's it doing here?”
“Baton Rouge boasted an awesome zoo Before. After the Marking someone freed the animals. Seeing kangaroos and wallabies, who have apparently thrived in the wilds of Louisiana, is awesome. Let me know if you feel the same when you hear wolves howling, or watch a tiger take down one of our cows. My least favorite critters are the gators in all the waterways, although from what I understand they're indigenous.”
Job jogs up to stand on my other side. “Was that a kangaroo?”
I grin. “Yep.” Pretty cool.
We walk down the main street and around a corner, and once the ambient noise dies down, I notice another set of footsteps behind us. I turn and notice that Rafe's walking a few steps back.
“Oh,” I say. “I didn't realize you were coming.”
Rafe arches one eyebrow. “I'm here to make sure you're safe and that you have what you need. I may not have the history with you that Wesley has, but seeing this through is sort of the main focus of my job for the foreseeable future. That and preparing for this Cleansing, I guess.”
I nod and turn back to the path. The sun's setting, so if I don't pay attention, I might fall flat on my face. Three buildings down, we reach a one-story, red brick building with a sign that reads: Life Share Blood Center.
A few windows are boarded up, presumably where the glass was smashed or broken, but several are intact. When we walk inside it looks relatively clean. Someone took the time to clean the windows enough that the last rays of the sun's light streams through. I only notice two cockroaches in the corner, and I'm pretty sure they're both dead.
Rafe turns to Job. “Will this work?”
It annoys me that he's asking Job instead of me. It annoys me that I'm going to be living in a plasma center now, as though I'm literally a walking blood repository.
But most of all, it annoys me that I'm so irritated by everything instead of taking charge of things myself. I clear my throat and before Job can answer, I do. “Will it work for what? A dance party? My walk in closet? A roller skating rink?”
Rafe forces a laugh. “Job mentioned you'd need to run some tests, and of course when more babies are born, or for the very ill-”
“Oh.” My hands clench into fists. “You meant will this work for draining me of my blood until I'm nothing more than a dry husk?”
Job frowns. “Antibodies should be in the plasma, which replaces—”
I cut him off. “Every 48 hours. You may be a few years ahead of me, and I may have taken some time off, but my understanding of blood and viruses is pretty solid, Job.” I spin on my heel and glare at Riyah. Her friend's dying. Well, get in line to be pissed, lady. Everyone here's dying soon. We're running out of time, and I'm expected to wave a syringe over my arm and fix all of it.
She raises one eyebrow at me.
“How much blood will it take to atone for my father's mistake, in your estimation? By my calculations, I should have about eight pounds of blood in my body. I'd say I've given less than an ounce in the past few days, all told. Will eight pints of blood be enough for you? Or will it take ten? Fifty? None of it will bring back the billions who have already died.”
Wesley clears his throat. “No one requires any more of your blood tonight. I hope we all feel better tomorrow morning.”
Rafe nods. “I've ordered beds to be placed in the office in the back for you and Rhonda. I assumed Job would feel better being on site, as well.”
“Oh good. I've guilted you all into backing off. But see, that wasn't my goal, not really. I'm as eager as you to see what we've got to work with. It's not even dinner time yet. I imagine Job's fingers are itching to throw my plasma under a microscope.”
The gleam in Job's eye answers that.
“I am too, and there's no reason to wait. There's nothing magical that dinner will fix.”
I sit down by the apheresis machine. The Marked kids may not know much about science, but there's a stocked cart next to the machine. They all want what my dad hid inside of me, and they may never have heard of gamma globulins, but they knew enough to put me in a place with plasma machines instead of a straight up blood donation center.
“Well?” I look over at Job. “Do I have to do everything myself?”
Wesley shakes his head. “You just got here. You don't have to do this right now.”
I point at Riyah. “Don't I? People are sick and they're dying. There isn't any time to waste.”
Job grabs a needle and opens the hermetically sealed pouch. He turns to Rafe. “Is there any power? The only light in here is coming from that window.”
Amir smiles and takes a step closer. “We have generators, and I made sure one was allocated for this building. That's the kind of science we spearhead. Propane and gasoline are both hard to come by, but the Unmarked have actually provided a lot of information on that type of thing over the years. We only have one manufacturing plant for each, so we use energy very sparingly, but we do have enough fuel for this type of thing. We've already hooked the generator up outside.”
Riyah walks toward the door. “I'll get it going.”
Job preps my arm with nearly dry alcohol wipes and uses a rubber band to help emphasize my vein.
Wesley exhales loudly. “I'm going to find some kind of food for you to eat. This rush is ridiculous. We won’t fix anything by forgetting what it means to be human.” He storms out the door.
Job draws two small vials of blood while we wait for the tell-tale hum of the generator. When we hear it, he turns on the machine and punches on some buttons. “It appears to be working properly.” He grabs anoth
er kit, this one with the double flexible tubing and connects it to the machine. “I'm excited to compare the blood and the plasma components. I'm hopeful the plasma will provide what we need, but it'll be good to consider each separately.”
I watch as the wide-bore needle goes into the vein in the inside of my right elbow crease. A tiny pinch. I see my blood flowing out of my body and into the machine. Job presses some buttons and I realize what he’s doing, calculating total blood volume. The volume to remove is usually based on weight. He turns to me. “You're what? A hundred pounds?”
I nod. “Ninety-two when I left Port Gibson.”
He shakes his head. “If anything, it looks like you've lost a few pounds on this trip. Better stay on the low side.” He programs it to take less than half the normal amount of plasma.
Yet again, I underperform. If Sam were here, he could give half again more than a typical person.
I think about all the people we saw on our way into the center of Baton Rouge. Even if I donate plasma twice a week for the next six months, it won't be enough. Maybe we can stimulate the healed or boosted individuals like Wesley, or Rhonda to make antibodies if Job can reverse engineer what he thinks my dad did. Even so, I can't help the despair that creeps inside and curls around the empty places inside my chest. I wonder if my dad foresaw this when he realized Tercera was stolen and injected me with the antibodies—that I'd become the mop used to clean up his mess.
Once the machine starts with the first blood pull, Job takes the vials over to the table that's been set up with a microscope and other tools. I close my eyes and try not to think about any of it. Of course, that's hard to do when the freezing cold saline starts to flow back into my arm along with my recycled red blood cells. I try to suppress the shivers that start as my body temperature drops from the infusion of room temperature saline. I learned how this process works a few years ago, but it’s my first time to experience it myself.
The Unmarked don't allow donations until the age of seventeen, so even if I were back home, I might be doing the very same thing right now. The machine pulls whole red blood cells out and the centrifuge spins it around. Then the plasma's collected and the red platelets are added to saline and sent back into my arm in the flip side of the same wide-bore needle.
I breathe in and out while listening to the beeping and whirring of the blood draw. Every time I glance at Riyah, who came back in silently after turning on the generator, I have to look away. If she hates me this much, you'd think she would ask for someone else to be assigned to this position. When the door bangs open and two figures enter, too backlit to make out, I sit up quickly. I bend my arm without thinking, forgetting about the needle. I straighten it back out quickly, and fall back to the chair with a whimper.
“Are you alright?” a female voice asks. I rack my brain to place the voice.
Libby walks around to the side of my chair and I look up into her face. Her completely clear and blemish-free face. She beams at me, a tear sliding down her cheek.
“I begged Wesley to let me bring your dinner. I needed the chance to thank you from the bottom of my heart.” She sets a bowl of some kind of stew on a little table next to my left arm, the one not stuck with an IV. “Thank you, thank you, thank you—” Her voice cracks at the end, and I take her hand in mine, something I'd have been too afraid to do last week.
“You're welcome.”
After a few more moments of gratitude, Wesley leads Libby out.
While Job is bent over the microscope and Rafe's busy talking to Amir and Riyah, I lean over the machine and press the buttons that will double the amount of plasma it's taking. Surely I can at least give the normal amount of plasma, in spite of my size. It's not like I'm giving blood. Plasma refreshes in 48 hours. If anything has become clear to me today, it’s that some of the people out there can't wait.
6
I must have dozed off, which makes sense, given how tired I was.
When I open my eyes, I'm not in the plasma center anymore. I know because it's bright, so bright I can barely see. I'm not hooked up to the IV either, but I'm cold, even colder than the saline made me. I sit up in bed, rub my arms, and breathe onto my hands. I look around, surprised to see I'm in a clean, white room, sitting up now on a small, white cot. I didn't expect the Marked to have cleared out an old office quite so effectively. I blink my eyes several times to make sure I'm seeing things right. Wasn't I supposed to be in the plasma center? The entire room is clean, bright, and white, and sunlight streams through a window high on the smooth unadorned wall.
I sit up straighter, swing my legs over the side, and slide off the cot. I'm wearing a white, sleeveless nightgown in the middle of winter. Geez, no wonder I'm freezing. The room’s so empty that there’s nothing else I can put on to cover myself up. In fact, other than a second cot that’s empty, a small metal table that's bolted to the wall, and chairs that are bolted to the floor, I don't see anything else in the room.
“Rhonda?” I call out quietly at first, but when no one answers, I raise my voice. “Rhonda?”
No answer.
I cross the room, one shiny white tile at a time, my bare feet gobbling up the space between the white door and me. My hand looks pale when I reach for the knob. Why am I so pale? Probably because I upped the amount of plasma a little too high. Goosebumps stand out on my arms, and I remember that when your blood volume is too low, your body has trouble regulating your temperature. Maybe in two days when I can donate again, I'll keep the settings where Job says they should be.
I shake my head again to try and orient myself, and turn the knob. It does not open onto anything resembling where I was when I closed my eyes.
I am not in the plasma center, or anywhere near it.
A chill runs up my spine, and more goosebumps pebble my skin. I step into the empty hallway beyond, and look at door after closed door running ahead of me as far as I can see. “Rhonda? Job?” I call out loudly this time, as loudly as I can. My voice echoes in the hallway, but there’s still no answer.
I spin around and see the same thing the other direction. My heart rate spikes. Where the hell am I?
My bare feet slap on the alternating black and white tiles as I run the length of the hall. I reach for the closest knob on the closest door, but before I even touch it, I already know. It's locked. My hands begin to shake. I pivot on my heel and sprint for the door I exited a moment before.
Also locked.
I choke back the sob that threatens to escape my throat. I'm alone, in a bizarre building, without anyone to help. I'm cold, and volume depleted, and locked in a never-ending hallway in a white nightgown that doesn’t cover enough and won’t keep me warm. I cross my arms over my chest and force myself to breathe.
I will not panic. I will not collapse. I will be calm, and logical in this situation that I don't understand. I need to pick a direction and keep track of doorways, counting as I go. Even so, I can't keep my pace from escalating as I walk past doorway after doorway, checking each knob with growing panic. Locked. Locked. Locked. Always locked.
I've passed a hundred and twenty-seven doors when I finally see it fifty yards ahead of me. One black door.
I can't explain how I know, but I do. Someone is behind this door, someone who is no longer alive. A dead person waits behind that dark painted door. When I close my eyes, I can picture a casket as dark as ink, shiny, and long. My heart sinks. I don't want to see a corpse. I don't. I can't. But I walk toward the door, strangely unable to stop myself, my hand reaching for the knob involuntarily. When I finally reach it, the knob turns like I knew it would, and I leap back as if burned by fire. I slip on the slick tile and fall on my backside on the unforgiving tile. I scrabble backwards until I feel the wall behind my back, staring all the while at the door in front of me.
The ominous black door.
My hands are stiff now, arctic, ice-cubes covered by my skin. Even blowing on my fingers doesn't help. For the first time, I wonder. Maybe that door doesn't have someone dea
d behind it. Maybe it's for someone who's dying. Maybe that's why I'm here. Maybe that's why I'm so cold. Maybe that's why I'm all alone.
Maybe it's for me.
The ventricles in my chest ice over one by one, as the frost reaches the middle of my body. Frozen, my heart doesn't hurt nearly as much. I force myself to stand, stiff and cold, and shuffle toward the door. I think about death.
My dad's dead, murdered by my, well, by my bio father. Probably. I could've saved him and I didn't. My biological father will be dead soon because of my actions.
Millions and millions, maybe billions, are all dead because of my cowardice. If I'd saved my dad, he could have saved them all. And then, I held the key to saving them all after my dad died, but I was too dumb to figure it out.
I couldn't save my mom, or Aunt Anne.
Sam.
I refuse to think about him. I can't. My heart will stop beating if I do, I know it. I reach for the knob, turn it and walk inside, ready to let it all go. The black door, the death door, where my casket awaits me.
I welcome it.
Except when I walk inside, there isn't a casket as dark as sin, as shiny as a mirror, as long as a bed. In fact, there's no casket at all. There's just a bed that’s much nicer than the cot I woke up in. It’s a single bed, sized for one person. I finally remember where I've seen beds like that. In hospitals, including the one Libby lay in just last night.
I'm so caught up in identifying the bed, that I don't immediately realize it's occupied. The one room that's open and there's an actual person lying on it. This person is covered by a sheet and a blanket, but I can see the chest rising and falling, steadily. He's sleeping. Why do I think it's a male? Because of the broad shoulders under the sheet, and the wide frame. I walk closer, one agonizing step at a time, and as I do, I make out more details. High cheekbones, golden skin, a chiseled jaw, full lips, and long, blond hair.
“Sam!” I shriek.
No casket, but not a hospital either. Lying on a bed behind a door of death. My icicle hands are so stiff I can barely move them, but I rush to Sam's side and place my frozen claw on his cheek, expecting it his skin to feel like mine, devoid of life, devoid of heat.
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