by Teri Terry
“But this is all true: Louis. Also now deceased. I hated all subjects in school equally. Blue.”
The door closes behind him, and I stare at the empty space left behind.
If Spike wears a mask, what hides behind it?
CHAPTER 7
ELENA FINALLY GOES OFF TO SLEEP and I get private use of a laptop.
I log on to JIT. There is only one draft post, and it was posted weeks ago: the title is “JIT is compromised.” All that is there is the title.
Oh my God. What does that mean? What is going on with Iona—is she okay? I can’t believe I’ve been so self-preoccupied that I hadn’t thought of checking on her until Beatriz spoke about best friends.
All right, think: if she’s managed to put up a post, she must be all right. It must just be that the website isn’t safe to use anymore.
If it was just her login that was compromised, she could have changed it. But then I couldn’t have logged in; she’d have no way to warn me that JIT had been targeted by someone. Or Kai either, for that matter—he had her login details in the note I left him.
I go to the public JIT webpage. The last story—a heartbreaking one about unaccompanied immune children being kept behind fences near Glasgow—was posted a few weeks ago. Nothing since.
One thing I know about Iona: if there is any way she can be, she’ll be blogging somewhere. I just have to find her.
Think, think, think. She wouldn’t have hidden a new blog so thoroughly that I couldn’t find it, would she? It’d have to be hard to link her to it, so that whoever compromised her previous blog couldn’t easily find it—but not impossible for someone who really knows her.
I try searching for everything I can think of—family names, favorite books, even Demon, her cat’s name—and nothing works.
Finally I think back to one of the last times we were messaging each other, when she told me Lochy had died. She said she loved him, something I was sure she hadn’t told anyone else, since it was the first I’d heard of it.
Could she have used Lochy’s name for a new blog?
Soon I find a news blog with the address JusticeForLochy.co.uk. There’s a post about the cause of the epidemic being antimatter: it must be her.
I click on “About me” to see if there is anything else to back up my conclusion. It all sounds made up, like not about a real person—certainly not about Iona—but there, hidden in the detail near the bottom? Favorite song: “My Sharona.”
What was it that Lochy called me on his login when I was messaging Iona? Curly—that’s it.
I hit the “Contact me” button. Hi. It’s Curly. Are you okay?
And I wait. It’s late; she’s probably asleep. I hit “refresh” again and again, hoping, thinking I’ll check again tomorrow, and then…there’s a new blog post.
Some drivel about going back to the beginning, back to basics, back to her original password. I’ve only just read it and it vanishes.
Think, Shay. What was the very first password Iona gave me to her blog all that time ago?
BieberIsHot99. Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I think she’s moved on since then.
It works. I log in.
Shay: Iona?
Iona: Shay? I’m so glad to hear from you!
Shay: Likewise!
Iona: Where are you?
I hesitate. Her last site was compromised; should I answer on this one? No.
Shay: Sorry, better not say, but I’m fine. What happened with JIT?
Iona: I don’t know. I’d arranged on JIT for Kai to stay with a friend in Paisley, near Glasgow. Before Kai got there, my friend’s place was staked out. He spotted what was happening and contacted me. I put the warning message up on JIT and stopped using it. It must have been there they worked out where Kai would be. There was no other way they could have found out.
Shay: What about Kai?
Iona: According to my friend, Kai never arrived, so he must have gotten the message. I haven’t heard from him since then, sorry. Though I did get a random call—some woman asked for me, then hung up when I said who I was. I wondered if that was him, checking if I was okay, but I don’t know for sure.
At least I know he got off Shetland and missed being caught in Glasgow—that time.
Iona: Can you tell me anything about what is happening with you?
I hesitate and then think, why not? It’s not a secret; those nutcases probably bragged about what they’d done all over the internet.
Shay: I was in a supposedly secure air force facility with a bunch of other survivors. It was attacked and destroyed by some survivor-hunting group called Vigil. A few of us got away.
Iona: Oh my God, Shay. How terrifying, how awful. Are you safe now?
Alex says we are, but there is a niggle inside me that says no—whether from Vigil or something else entirely. I hesitate; I don’t know there is a problem, so why worry Iona?
Shay: I think so. Best not to say much else for now. We’re trying to work things out. Like what has happened to make us different.
Iona: How are you different—really? The stuff online is all over the place. I’m sure most of it can’t be believed.
Shay: I’m still me, Iona. No matter what.
Iona: Of course you are, but…
Shay: Look, I’ve got to go.
We say goodbye, and I log off and wonder why I wouldn’t tell her anything.
Why I couldn’t.
* * *
Restless and unable to sleep, I stare out of my bedroom window. It’s a dark night, windy and starting to rain. There aren’t any lights I can see, anywhere but here. Are we on a generator? Is the power out?
How long can we stay here, on our own, undetected? Even in a quarantine zone, won’t people fly over and see the lights and wonder? And how long will there be enough food to eat?
There is something about that attack on the facility that is still bothering me, and I struggle to focus on what it could be.
Alex thought that someone leaked our location, either accidentally or on purpose, and this led Vigil to us. But can it really be as simple as that?
My thoughts are skittish; they don’t want to go back there, but I make myself focus back on that night…
On Alex waking me; he took Beatriz. On the panicked run; we stopped when I remembered Spike. On Elena taking Beatriz when Alex and I went back for Spike.
We were trapped by the door. There were five of them—those who would kill us. Alex was trying to open the door. I struck out, and two of them died. The horror of that moment takes over so strongly, it is hard to see them as they were. Before they fell.
They thought they were safe in their biohazard suits. They were wrong, and—
Wait a minute.
Their suits: their biohazard suits. They were the heavy, reinforced kind—they looked like the real deal, like the army wore. Their weapons too: they weren’t the sort of thing civilians should be able to get their hands on.
What does it mean?
Maybe they raided an army depot and stole these things, but it’s hard to imagine that they were organized enough, smooth enough, to pull something like that off. Maybe they bought them on the black market. There are sure to be enterprising souls selling these things given the hysteria about the epidemic.
Or maybe…someone outfitted them. Someone in the army. Someone who wanted to destroy us and gave Vigil the gear and told them exactly where we were.
But why would they do this? We were in a contained government facility under control; the government was hoping they could solve the epidemic using us. So why would they act against themselves?
There is one obvious candidate: Lieutenant Kirkland-Smith and his regiment, SAR. He hunted me in Killin. They shot at me and would have killed me there if they’d gotten the chance—I’m sure of it. They seemed to be working on their
own before, not with the rest of the army. Maybe they still are, and they are out there somewhere—hunting for us.
I still can’t work out why they wanted to destroy us. There must be a reason, and given where we were, I can’t see that it has anything to do with just wanting to kill carriers of the illness. There’s got to be more to it. Maybe something that just relates to SAR?
What are they trying to hide?
Alex thinks we’re safe here, that no one knows we are alive, let alone where we are, and even if they did that they wouldn’t come here inside the zone. But I’m not so sure.
If they come again, we need to be ready. I need to go beyond what I can do now, and I need to understand it all—to know how to use what is inside me.
I shiver and pull the curtains closed, as if that will be enough to shut out the world. As I walk across the room to the bed, I spot my profile in the mirror and can’t stop myself from turning to look at my hair: singed, short. It’s awful. I never knew I was so vain about my hair until most of it got burned off.
And here I am, still focusing on the external: how I look, being warm and dry, well-fed, and safe. But what about the things that really plague me, the answers that can’t be found outside?
I sit on the side of the bed and look in—reaching—starting with my blood. The rush and roar of it provides a focus. Blood cells; molecules; atoms.
Particles.
I spin with them in beautiful randomness, but they’re in such huge numbers that the random becomes predictable overall. Deterministic. The whole acts in concert to behave in certain ways—but what if the random movements can be influenced?
Then they become something that can be manipulated.
I reach into the skin of my scalp and find the hair follicles. I encourage them, like talking to plants, or more like singing to them: grow, grow, grow. I can feel it within and without—my hair lengthening, becoming stronger, starting to curl, and—
Wait. Instead of just making my hair grow, can I change it—make it straight?
I focus to a point within the hair follicles, to the cells, to the genetic code within each cell—the winding, twisting strands of DNA. How do I find the gene I need?
I go back to the hair, to the protein that makes it curly. Protein is made by transcribing DNA to RNA, then translating RNA into protein. I follow the path backward, from protein to RNA to DNA; now I know the exact stretch of my DNA that codes for curly hair. I trial small changes in the base sequence, one after another, to see what they do to the hair protein; finally I find one that works.
Cell after cell I visit. Adjust. Change. Grow. I’m getting tired—this is more work than I would have thought.
When I finally think enough is enough and open my eyes, I reach up to feel with my hands. Long straight hair. WOW, double WOW, and WOW again.
I get up and look in the mirror. My dark hair is a few inches past shoulder length and has a nice bit of wave at the ends—that’d be when I started growing my hair, before I changed it from curly to straight.
So not only can I speed up how my hair grows, I can also change it—from curly to straight. Could I change the color of it if I wanted to? Or my eye color. Or how tall I am. Or anything, really…
CHAPTER 8
I SLEEP LATE, REALLY LATE. I wake up a few times but feel leaden with exhaustion and can’t convince myself to stir.
Finally Beatriz comes to check on me.
Are you all right? she says from the other side of the door.
Yes. Just tired.
Elena says you’ve missed breakfast. But Spike says he’s going to make us pancakes.
Yummy! I’ll be down soon.
When I finally venture into the kitchen, pancakes—second breakfasts?—are underway.
Spike turns when I walk in, and his eyes open wide. He whistles. “When I said you could try to make your hair grow faster, I didn’t actually think you could.”
“Wasn’t your hair curly before?” Beatriz says.
“Maybe when it grows back it grows different?” I say, uneasy about admitting what I did without knowing why.
Elena wanders in to get a cup of tea while we’re eating and tells us that Alex wants us when we’ve finished. She is fascinated by my hair. “Tell me how you did it. Can you change my hair from white back to red?”
“You were ginger?”
“Afraid so. Or wait a minute: could you make me blonde?”
I shake my head. “I’ve heard of people who’ve had chemo and lose their hair having it different when it grows back—maybe it’s like that. It was kind of all burned away, and then I just sort of encouraged it to grow faster. Just like we metabolized drugs quicker to make them stop working.” But that wasn’t all I did, and I’m shocked. I’m lying. Why?
She seems to accept what I say, without question, and soon leaves with her cup of tea.
Now I know I can hide things I want to hide—that I have a mask of my own.
“If you did it deliberately, changed your naturally curly hair to straight, is that genetic manipulation?” Spike says, not letting it go. “Or something more basic at a physical level?”
“I really don’t know,” I say.
“If it was genetic—well. That’d be exciting! What else could we do? Make me look like an Olympic athlete?” Spike extends his arms and then curls them up. “Of course, my biceps are pretty amazing already.”
“Sure. Well, I guess time will tell, if it grows back curly or not when it starts growing normally. Though that’ll take a while.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Spike comes close and stares at the top of my head.
“Watching my hair grow will get boring in a hurry. Didn’t Alex want us?”
The link-ups Alex has been working on are ready. He has us gather together in his office downstairs where he’s set up a giant computer screen against the wall.
“I’m going to start by showing you images of the underground research institute the air force has unearthed on Shetland,” he says.
There are images of underground—photos they took with drones sent down to a place still too dangerous for people to investigate after the explosions and fires. There are destroyed labs and equipment. Skeletons are there too, and I shudder. I’ve seen this before through Callie’s eyes.
Is this too much for Beatriz? Elena objects, but Beatriz is staring at the screen, fascinated. Maybe it doesn’t seem real to her? But whether it upsets her or not, I’m not sure she should see this either. Alex and Elena are having a silent conversation, and then she says nothing else.
“It’s hard to believe this was all there underground and nobody knew about it,” Spike says. “How could they build it without anyone noticing?”
“There were secret underground facilities on Shetland already,” Alex says. “They were built during the Second World War, similar to the caves at Gibraltar, as a place to hide and continue operations if the islands were invaded. They were crucial strategically: Norway was occupied in the war. These islands between Scotland and Norway are a stepping stone between the two.
“Then during the Cold War, extensive bunkers were added, places that could survive nuclear war—or so they hoped.”
“So did they expand what was already there, underground, when they built the accelerator?” I say.
“Exactly,” Alex says. “I’ll show you how it was before.” He taps away at a keyboard, and then there are more images: grainy old photos from decades ago of underground places. “And then they built this.”
Images of the worm fill the screen, like Callie showed me in her memories—before it was destroyed.
“This was the particle accelerator,” Alex says. “They believe antimatter was being created, that this was the infectious agent—as I’ve told you before.”
“But why would anybody do this?” Elena says.
“I read that they�
��ve been doing experiments at CERN in Switzerland, using antimatter to target and kill tumor cells,” I say. And as I say the words, I’m remembering where I read this article: at Dr. 1’s house on Shetland. “Maybe they were going further here and trying to cure cancer. Or maybe they were trying to make a weapon, and it got away.”
“This is just speculation,” Alex says.
“But no matter why, how could they do this to anyone?” Elena asks.
It’s not a question any of us can answer: maybe they didn’t know what they were dealing with, what could happen?
Or maybe they did.
Even if they had no idea of the implications and consequences of their research, is that any sort of excuse? They should have. You can’t hand a weapon to a child and then lament you didn’t know what they’d do with it.
“Wait a minute,” Spike says. “How did the authorities get these photos? Wasn’t the place destroyed by the time they were investigating?”
“Depends who was doing the investigating,” I say. “The army was involved in Shetland from the beginning, weren’t they?”
The others are looking at me now with a mixture of shock and curiosity.
“Yes. It’s true, but only part of the army, and the rest didn’t know what they were up to—at least, not officially,” Alex says. “There’s a secret regiment—”
“Special Alternatives Regiment,” I say.
“Yes. SAR. They are completely separate from the rest of the armed forces, who’ve only just begun to uncover SAR’s role at Shetland. I only learned of them recently myself through my work at the air force facility.” Now Alex is looking at me too. “How did you know about them?”
“They tried to kill me.” I tell them the story of Killin and the lieutenant who used Kai in an attempt to trap me and how we got away. I can tell this is all news to Alex.
“That couldn’t have been sanctioned by the forces, army or otherwise: they were trying to track down survivors and take them to the air force facility to study, even before they suspected they might be contagious,” Alex says. “SAR must have been acting alone, even after the epidemic was established. Interesting.”