Tabitha was on her knees, her hands behind her back. Leon was with Mayor Helen. They both stood next to Sergeant Bennings as if they were no longer enemies. The world was pretty much empty and yet all these people had come to the same spot—for what, the cure? But the cure wasn’t here. It had never been here.
The shifting politics made my eyes swim. I didn’t understand why Sergeant Bennings was here, why Tabitha was on the ground, why we weren’t prisoners or already dead, why Jane of all people was alive and cured. The cure!
Even thinking those words made my heart skip a beat. There was a cure. I had denied it and yet there Jane stood. Everything that had marked her skin as sick was fading away like it had never existed.
My thoughts strayed to Alden and what he would think of me, of us, if the Feeb skin he hated so much were to disappear. Then I saw Ricker at Jimmy’s bedside and my feelings became all mixed up. I focused on the cure. Things would somehow get better now. Somehow.
I decided to figure out this puzzle in front of me. I had always been good with puzzles. It helped take my mind off how I’d killed my mother during childbirth, how my aunt had died from a throat cancer that took her ability to speak but not to slap, how my uncle had cared for me until the Vs killed him. I was the bringer of death. That’s why my father had named me Maibe because it meant grave.
But even so, my uncle had cared for me as if I were a wounded animal. He’d brought me puzzles, sometimes jigsaws with beautiful landscapes and vivid colors, sometimes puzzles I held in my hand and needed to separate in a special way. He set me onto these tasks and I would work for hours until I figured them out.
The cure must be so close. I would figure this out, find the cure, and bring it back to my friends.
I stepped carefully over to Sergeant Bennings and Mayor Helen. The only people under the guns were Tabitha’s. I would try my best not to change that.
“You need to know,” I said. “We did not kill your people at the cave. Me and my friends—we were there, but we didn’t kill anyone.”
“You and your runaways, you mean.” Mayor Helen’s tone wasn’t kind.
Sergeant Bennings looked me over. He had his son’s eyes, but there was a hardness to him that Alden never carried. He was taller than both Mayor Helen and me. His beard was thick and salted with gray.
“We’ve helped everyone in this town ten times over. If it wasn’t for Gabbi and Ricker and Ano—Mayor Helen, you should know—”
“Please stop speaking, Maibe.”
Her words burned my mouth shut. I forced myself to become a polite young woman, like my aunt had sometimes beaten me into being. I had learned to fear her, but I had also learned the power in silence. I could not risk saying the wrong thing, not when Sergeant Bennings was the one with the power of life and death over us.
“You have always been a good girl,” Mayor Helen said. “You took the best care of your Faints. But a cure is within reach and Sergeant Bennings and I have come to a necessary agreement.”
“Did he tell you he had planned to blow up our water supply?” Tabitha said.
“That was as a last resort,” Leon said.
“In case an agreement was not possible,” Sergeant Bennings said.
“But it is possible, is it not?” Mayor Helen said.
Sergeant Bennings inclined his head.
I couldn’t hold back this time. “You’ve been working for Sergeant Bennings?”
Leon scratched his beard and stared at me until I looked away. “Don’t be dumb, girl. We know each other from the camps. I was uninfected once and Sergeant Bennings is a good man. As soon as we got to town today and I saw he had the cured one, I told him I’d help any way I could.”
“You’ve always been trustworthy,” Sergeant Bennings said. “There’s a real chance now. We find the cure, we can start putting things right again.”
“She knows where it is?” Leon said, looking off toward Jane.
Sergeant Bennings shook his head. “She doesn’t remember.”
“But she will remember,” Mayor Helen said. “She must.”
“She’s trying,” Sergeant Bennings said. “I’ll give her that.”
A boom like from a bomb sent vibrations through the church. Mayor Helen flinched. Leon looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. Sergeant Bennings hadn’t forgotten though—he flicked a glance my way, an unreadable expression in his eyes. I went cold at that look. He was hiding something.
“Another attack. They’re going to kill us.”
“We have to get outside.”
“They blew the reservoir!”
“We are drawing away the Vs.” Sergeant Bennings voice boomed like the bomb, stopping all other voices. “We have set interval charges to go off throughout today to draw the mob away from the town.”
“The camps are destroyed,” Mayor Helen said, speaking to what was left of our town now crammed into the church between Faints and uninfected with guns. “Sergeant Bennings’ people are in need of fresh food and a new home. Our home.”
“They want to live with Feebs?” Tabitha said from her position on the floor. “They tried that before. It didn’t work out so well for us.”
Mayor Helen paused then, a pained expression on her face. “In exchange for our lives and a chance at the cure, we will be going to work for Sergeant Bennings and his people.”
“What does that even mean?” someone shouted.
“What about our Faints? Our sick?”
A growl erupted in the back. There was a scream. A shot was fired. The noise seemed to suck the air out of the room. People moved away, opened up space.
Betty lay on the ground.
The blood darkened her navy blue shirt to match her black shorts.
The soldier raised a hand and said, “She went V, Sergeant Bennings, there was nothing I could do.”
Sergeant Bennings nodded. “Some of you will be forced to leave, for our own protection. Some of you will be allowed to stay and continue to do the good farming work you’ve started here. Those of you too sick to work…will also be allowed to stay.” But he didn’t say for how long and everyone heard the unspoken threat anyway.
“But what about the cure?” Corrina demanded, stepping away from a bed. “You didn’t have to kill her. Why did you kill her? You have the cure, so give us the cure and we won’t be a danger to you anymore. We’ll be able to care for our sick.”
A shout of agreement rose up.
“Calm down, people!” Mayor Helen yelled.
Leon left and talked quietly with Bernice and Nindal. They slipped out the back. I looked around, wanting to tell someone, anyone because it seemed like their leaving meant something even though I didn’t understand what it could be. Then I noticed that Sergeant Bennings had watched them go. Tabitha was old news—made powerless again. They were working for whoever had the best shot at the cure.
“We want the cure! We want the cure!” This became a chant. People punched their fists in the air. Voices filled the space. The Faints protested with us by becoming restless in their beds.
Sergeant Bennings held up his hands for silence, but the chanting continued for several more rounds before dying away.
“I don’t have the cure to give you.”
“That’s a lie!” someone yelled.
“No. It’s the truth,” he said. “Tell them, Jane. Tell them what you remember.”
She’d showed such a brave face when she was pointing the gun at me, but my snap judgment of her wasn’t totally fair. She looked worn out. The Feeb markings on her skin had faded, but her eyes looked haunted. She’d survived in this insane world for three years just like the rest of us.
“I was kidnapped and infected and cured.” She looked at everyone, except somehow not at Corrina and Dylan, as if she couldn’t bear to acknowledge their existence. “I was infected on purpose and then cured on purpose and then I found a way to escape. I don’t know what they did. I don’t know where it was, but it’s out there. We just have to find it. We can f
ind it.”
A thick silence filled the room.
“So there’s no cure?” Ricker said into the emptiness.
“There is a cure,” Sergeant Bennings said. His eyes flicked to me. “But we don’t know how to find it.” His lip twitched at the end, almost unnoticeable, almost nonexistent.
He was lying.
Chapter 18
Sergeant Bennings escorted me to my old hotel room. Ricker and Gabbi had protested leaving me alone with him, but they had guns and we did not. I still had not puzzled out why he was here. They had Jane. If she didn’t remember where to find the cure there was nothing we could do to fix that. His remark about farming made me think this was about food but there were still plenty of places to scavenge.
I was allowed to gather a few things, some clothes, some personal items. They were moving all the Feebs out to make room for the uninfected.
He watched me like I was a criminal. Maybe I was. Maybe I had always been one in some form or another. I pulled a bag from the closet and began packing.
“Do you know where he is?”
I stopped. I knew who he was talking about. I pretended not to know. “Who?”
“Alden’s been missing for months now. I came here because I thought he’d be here. Because of you.”
“He knew I was here. He’s come here before. It—”
“He’s been here before? He knew where this place was all this time?”
I saw it was too late to take back my words so I didn’t. “Yes.”
“I cannot believe… Do you know where he is?”
“I do not.” I resumed my packing. Lesa would want her favorite shirt with a picture of Dolly the Fish on it. The colors always seemed to register in her eyes.
I was going to wait him out. I was going to keep what little power was left to me and make him ask whatever it was he was trying to ask.
“How often did he come here?”
That wasn’t what he really wanted to know, but I answered it anyway, letting him stall. “Once every couple of months. But sometimes I went to meet him.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“What did you talk about? What did he say?”
The longing in his voice spoke more than his actual words. He didn’t care about what we had talked about. He cared that his son had done all this behind his back, that he’d lost his son a long time ago.
“We traded information, sometimes supplies, sometimes—”
“—I see.” His mouth snapped shut.
I zipped up one bag and grabbed a second one, then began filling it with supplies from the kitchen. Cans of food, the fruit we had just picked. The leftover oatmeal. My ankle bumped against a table leg. Pain shot through my body, making me stiffen. I had forgotten about my injury once it had dulled to a low throb, but now it screamed at me.
“I need your help.” He turned his back to me and began to rifle through a shelf of books as if embarrassed by this confession. “I need you to help me find my son.”
I stopped packing and curled up the leg of my pants. Spots of blood covered it. Part of the cloth was torn.
My fingers froze as I revealed the skin. I began to shake. This didn’t make any sense.
Sergeant Bennings picked up a book, flipped its pages, returned it to the shelf. “But how can I even trust that you will find him?”
I stared at my skin, at the puckered flesh, at the indents that formed an irregular oval.
The bite had broken the skin.
The bite had made me bleed.
The bite had been from a V.
Sergeant Bennings sighed, rifled through his pockets, and pulled out a small journal.
Why wasn’t I trapped in the fevers like Ano and Kern? I dropped my pant leg down to hide the wound. Maybe it was Corrina’s tea. I didn’t think I’d felt anything from it, but maybe that was the point. Maybe that’s how it worked.
But a little voice inside me whispered that this wasn’t a very good lie. Ano had gone into the fevers minutes after getting bit. So had Kern.
Ricker and I hadn’t made the tea until hours after I’d been bit.
Sergeant Bennings set the journal on the dining table and stepped back.
I tried to hide the shaking in my hands as I opened the journal.
I stared. My name was scrawled all over it. Again and again, in cursive, in block letters, in big capitals and tiny swirls. There were drawings too, notes, little maps with markers.
Alden’s handwriting.
I rifled through the pages, they were as if from a mind gone crazy. Most of it didn’t make sense. In the center of one page there was a crude map. This map had been circled by a pencil so many times the marks formed a dark ring, making the paper fragile and smooth.
I recognized the drawing.
It was of a camp. We’d been sitting on a ledge above it. It was where I had tried to kiss Alden once. It was where the Garcia family had been murdered.
Someone had drawn an arrow through the circle, pointing to the camp. In dark, blocky letters, the arrow's label said:
Cure?
Alden
He couldn’t stop staring at his skin. Wrinkled and veined and ashy—but fading. It would take a couple of days, maybe weeks, for all of it to be gone.
He was back in the hospital bed, legs and arms strapped down. The speaker box and camera lens were his only company, but he didn’t even care.
Dr. Ferrad entered through a hatch-type door—this thick, bulky metal that looked more like something out of a submarine than a research facility. She left it open and entered the room, her white suit and plastic face guard so bright it almost hurt his eyes.
When Dr. Ferrad moved to his bedside, he saw Kailyn waited in the doorway almost like she was afraid to come in.
“I won’t bite,” Alden croaked.
“You might,” Dr. Ferrad said. “You haven’t received the full dose yet.”
Kailyn didn’t say a word.
Dr. Ferrad lifted thin tubing—there were two of them, red, full of blood. The tubes were inserted into each of his arms. The blood ran through a machine. The motor that powered the machine hiccuped sometimes. In his dreams, Alden had thought it was someone beating a drum, but now he knew it was the machine’s pump.
The lines snaked onto the ground and across the room, disappearing behind a door.
“Does the machine clean my blood?” Alden asked.
“Yes, it prepares it,” Dr. Ferrad said.
“What does that mean? It’s the cure right? The machine cures the blood?”
Dr. Ferrad stopped checking his monitors. “Something like that.” But her words were too careful, there was too long of a pause between his question and her answer.
“The V girl—is the cure from her?”
There was a moan. Alden thought it was Kailyn, but she stared at him with those wide eyes behind those glasses, looking exactly like before. Light glinted off her glasses and sort of outlined her body. She didn’t say a word. It was weird she was there at all if Dr. Ferrad really meant he wasn’t fully cured yet. She didn’t have any protective gear like what Dr. Ferrad wore.
The moan sounded again, but Dr. Ferrad didn’t act like she noticed anything. Was it all in his head?
“That would have been ideal. But no, we have not found a way to cure her or use her to cure others.” Dr. Ferrad cocked her head. “No, we still have not found the way.”
“But—”
“There now.” She patted the sheet, but her kindness felt forced, what with the full bodysuit and all. She left, walking right through where Kailyn stood like she hadn’t even seen her.
Alden realized she hadn’t seen her—Kailyn had never been there. What had Maibe called them?
She’d been a ghost-memory.
Kailyn disappeared but his panic remained. He stared at the machine, listened to its hum, and watched his blood flow through it, along the ground, disappear behind a door, and return back to him through the other tube. He willed it to
go faster.
Chapter 19
I stood in between Ano and Jimmy’s beds. My chest felt constricted, as if there wasn’t enough air left in the whole world for me to breathe.
They were trapped. They wouldn’t get any better unless we found the cure.
I tried to ignore the wound in my leg—the burning that didn’t make sense, the fevers that weren’t happening.
Sweat poured off Ano, but Jimmy was different. A half-smile stayed on his face. His forehead was cool to the touch. He lay so still, except sometimes his eyelids twitched.
We’d set off to get medicine and now things were worse than before. All that was left was the cure. All we could do was follow the clues Alden had left in the journal and hope they would lead to a permanent cure.
“I know where Alden went.”
Sergeant Bennings stood too close. “You know where he is?” He had followed me into the hospital and waved the guards away when they tried to stop me from entering. He was masked and gloved and he loomed over me. I was the one who could hurt him, infect him, but it didn’t feel that way.
“I know one place he’s been, which is more than you’ve got.”
“Tell me,” Sergeant Bennings said.
“Take me with you,” I said.
“I will not travel with sick—”
“You have to take me too.” Tabitha was still tied up though they’d moved her onto a chair and next to Kern’s bed.
Sergeant Bennings and Tabitha began arguing. Their voices rose in pitch. Sweat formed on their foreheads from the warm air inside the church. The guards at the door stepped forward.
Corrina left a Faint’s bedside. She grabbed a bottle and threw it onto the floor. The glass shattered and sent shards in every direction. Tabitha froze. Sergeant Bennings whirled around. His guards pointed guns at Corrina’s head. I stepped forward, not thinking. One of the guards shifted to point his gun at me.
“You are both looking for the same thing.” Corrina’s voice was quiet yet somehow that made her words more powerful. “You are looking for Alden, for the cure, for Dr. Ferrad. Are you not?”
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