Catalyst

by Lydia Kang

  Caliga’s vaccine is in here too. It has to be.

  I look around desperately for a way to open the doors, but there’s no hammer or anything I could use. A tall container of liquid nitrogen sits in the corner, along with oxygen tanks. I grab the liquid nitrogen container and detach the opening spigot. Holding it at eye level, I carefully pour the liquid nitrogen down the face of the locked plasticleer door.

  “Julian really, really isn’t going to like this,” Andy warns me.

  “Get back, Andy. Go to Bianca’s bed, and push it as far away from me as you can. Cover your faces with the blanket,” I order him. Andy’s weak, but the hover beds are feather-light to push around.

  “Okay, but I just wanna say . . . I had nothing to do with this!” he yells from beneath the sheets.

  I have to work fast. The liquid pours down in serpentine rivulets, evaporating into smoky plumes so quickly that almost no liquid drips onto the floor. Soon, the room’s floor fills with clouds of nitrogen.

  “Stop!”

  I spin around to see Julian standing in the doorway, livid.

  “What are you doing, Benten?” he growls, striding forward and yanking my arm. The empty canister falls from my hands, banging onto the floor, hidden under the plumes of nitrogen clouds. Renata scuttles in behind him, her eyes wide with surprise.

  “He’s poisoning the children!” I tell her. “Ask him! Ask him about the yellow dye!” I turn to Julian and beg. “Sean. If you’re awake in there . . . please. Open this door. If you’re there, do it.”

  “Sean isn’t here,” Julian says coldly. He grabs for my wrist, but the floor is icy cold from the nitro, and water condenses to make it slippery. As he loses his balance, I grab the canister on the floor, heave it over my head, and bring it smashing down on the frozen patch of plasticleer door.

  And just like that, the front of it shatters, raining down bits of sharp plastic onto my feet and the floor. The bottles are no longer locked away. No longer secret.

  Benzene. Polonium-210. Arsenic.

  They’re sitting there like soldiers in a row, waiting to kill.

  Julian’s a monster.

  He’s been trying to cause more mutations, just like that senator had suggested. I’d compared it to using a shovel to do surgery. No wonder Julian had looked pissed.

  He starts toward me, but my eye catches on a vial at the end of the shelf. CJ-001. A single vial with Caliga’s initials on them. I grab it.

  “No!” Julian yells angrily. “You idiot girl!” Julian rushes me and pins my shoulder to the broken wall of glass, but my legs are still free. I knee him in the groin, and he bends over in agony, gasping. It’s all the time I need. I drop the vial and crush it under my shoe.

  Julian yanks me away from the wall and twists my arm behind my back. I try to punch him, but he catches my hand easily.

  “You stupid, stupid girl!” I don’t even see the blow, I only feel it—his large, well-placed fist against my left cheek, before I’m falling. The hard, unforgiving floor ricochets against the back of my head.

  I can’t see. I can’t move. I can’t even lift my arms. Under my body, broken shards dig into the contours of my hip and spine. Julian’s hand curls around my neck, not squeezing, but nearly encircling it. He’s panting hard, and Renata whimpers in the corner. The air smells of burned plastic. The scent of fury.

  “Get the solitary room ready,” he barks at her. With a cruel yank of my arm that threatens to pop my shoulder, he drags me out of the infirmary and into the transport.

  Inside, I try to get up, but my face is crushed to the floor by Julian’s shoe. I scream, but it’s no use.

  The door opens and he pulls me up and throws me out of the transport. Vaguely, I notice the English garden shrubbery whizzing by as I try to get my footing underneath me. My own yells grow hoarse and disappear in the space around me, replaced by a single voice.

  “Zelia!”

  Cy and Micah stand openmouthed at Cy’s bedroom door. The sight of Cy renews my energy, and I kick and claw like an alley cat, but one swift kick to my kidneys takes my breath away. Julian drags me to the side of the garden.

  “Let her go!” Cy yells, his voice full of fear and fury and terrible things. Micah’s fighting to hold him back. For once, I’m thankful.

  My eyes lock on Cy as I beg silently. Don’t hurt yourself for me. Don’t do it.

  Julian kicks me into a hidden room behind the back of the garden. It’s black and plain, with nothing but a drain in the middle, which horrifies me.

  “You were right, Zelia. My methods are crude. I need to be using a scalpel, not a shovel, as you so poetically described it. You could be my blade. You could create, like your father did.”

  “I’m not like my father,” I growl.

  “Well. We’ll have to change the balance of this argument, won’t we?” Julian says, breathing hard into my face. His finger trails down my breastbone, before lifting away, hooking something. The chain of my necklace strains hard against my neck before it snaps off with a vicious tug.

  “You’ve more spirit than I expected, Zelia. And you need to be broken.”

  Suddenly, without my necklace, my breathing is too shallow. I force a gasp to feed my body. I need my necklace, now more than ever.

  If I fall asleep, I will die.

  CHAPTER 23

  MY BODY IS BATTERED. I’M GOING ON only two hours of scant sleep I’d snatched in Caliga’s room last night. All I crave now is sleep.

  And I can’t.

  Twelve times a minute, I force air in, gasping like a fish out of water. Seven hundred and twenty times per hour. My hands start to shake uncontrollably after six hours in my prison. My eyes feel gritty from lack of sleep, and my head is throbbing from Julian’s blow and the hypoxia.

  This room is a dimly lit, square box with a hard marble floor. Hours later (could it be morning now? Seven or eight a.m.?), the door opens. I shield myself from the biting light, while someone shoves a tray of food and water into my cell. I guzzle the water, but leave the food untouched.

  Instead, I sit cross-legged in the corner, holding the titanium spork (of all things) way out in front of me. Watching it, never letting go. I count in fives, forcing a hard breath after number five. If I let go of the spork, it means I’ve fallen asleep. It clatters to the marble floor, waking me up. I rub my face, curse Julian, hold the spork in the same position, and go back to counting and breathing.

  This is how I keep myself up.

  This is how I stay alive.

  For now.

  • • •

  IT FEELS LIKE MORE THAN A DAY goes by, although I can’t be certain. I’ve lost count of the hours.

  My hands tremble so much that I spill the water before I can drink it. At one point, I slip into a dream but wake myself up, only to find that I’ve jabbed myself with the spork. My arm bleeds with four tiny punctures. I can’t remember doing the actual jabbing.

  I cry for Cy, and for Marka, Dyl . . . for everyone in Carus, and Caliga. But even in my psychosis of seeing pink trees festooned with dead opossums, I never beg for mercy.

  “Just say you’re sorry,” Julian says to me, appearing in the corner. He’s covered in fur, just like Tabitha.

  “Are you warm?” I ask.

  “Just say you’re sorry.”

  “I’d like to skin you alive. I’d chew you up. I bet you taste like petroleum,” I say in a warbling voice. Julian’s image shimmers away as the spork clatters to the floor.

  This happens over and over. We have these conversations, and always, I end up chasing my dropped spork.

  But soon, it occurs to me that the hallucinations might kill me anyway: bloody rodents, worms, and butterflies birth out of Julian’s mouth and attack my fingers.

  My spork clatters on the floor, and I hold it out again.

  When my mouth starts to fill w
ith blood from involuntarily biting my cheeks, I start to think.

  Yes. Maybe he has gotten the better of me. Maybe it’s time to give up.

  “You should,” Julian says casually. He looks normal for once, in a white suit. His pupils constrict, and Sean’s worried face fills the room, expanding like a balloon so large, it squeezes me to the wall. “Please, Zelia. You’ll never survive. Say you’re sorry.”

  “I am sorry,” I say, weeping. “Not for Julian. For everyone else.” I have no tears, because my body is wrung out, made of Zelia jerky. Dry, sinewy, unreal.

  I splay my hands open, and nothing clatters to the floor. The spork is gone. Where did it go? My dry eyes burn like they’ve been dipped in black pepper.

  “Get her to her room. C’mon.” Caliga’s voice enters my head, but it must be another hallucination.

  Strong arms scoop me up and I laugh, swatting at the butterflies that are dancing around my head. But instead of wings, they are shiny and edged with razor blades. One of them hits my cheek, and I touch the wound and look wonderingly at the red on my fingers.

  “Beautiful,” I say, and touch my tongue to the red smear. It tastes like death and metal.

  “She’s covered in blood,” Micah’s voice says, close to my ear. “Look what she’s done to herself.” I can’t see him. I only see clouds of the flying razors.

  Something touches my neck, and immediately my lungs expand, almost painfully so. My back arches as oxygen floods me. The butterflies shimmer away, but within the darkness of my mind, shadows and sharp, unseen things continue to fly. And I cannot make them go away.

  “Sleep, Zelia. You’ll be safe now,” Micah murmurs.

  “Yes, sleep,” Caliga says.

  My old enemies are asking me to die. The two people I thought I’d never trust. But I can’t fight anymore. My eyelids close as I surrender to unconsciousness.

  • • •

  WHEN I WAKE, I FEEL OLD. AS if I’ve lost a life and gotten it back, only to find I’ve outgrown my own body. Completely disoriented.

  “You’re up. I was just about to leave.”

  Caliga’s sitting on the edge of my bed. She wears a simple beige dress, her white hair pulled into a practical ponytail. The only color is the bright pink of her bottom lip, where she’s just been biting it. My grooming bots try to fling themselves at me, but she shoos them away.

  “God, they are so overprotective! I’ve been trying to convince them that I’m not going to secretly do your makeup.”

  My eyelashes are crusty and stuck together, and my mouth tastes like a sewer. “How long have I been out? What day is it? What happened?”

  “Julian let me and Micah get you. You were in there for almost three days. He gave me your necklace and we brought you back here.”

  Three days. I mentally count the days since we left Carus. That means we only have three more full days to meet my family in Chicago.

  “Where is Cy?” I sit up in bed, rubbing my face. My brain feels bruised, like there’s a loose sledgehammer swimming inside my skull. But my shaky hands and hallucinations are gone.

  “You can’t see him anymore. There’s nothing I could do about that.”

  Nothing she could do about Cy? Does that mean she had something to do with getting me out of my sleep-deprivation nightmare?

  “Caliga,” I say slowly. “What did you do?”

  Caliga stands and opens the door. “I should get going. I have to get ready.” Micah walks in with a tray of food. He dodges Caliga as she darts out of my room.

  “Hey. You look so much better.” A warm smile softens his eyes.

  I shake my head. “Wait. First tell me what happened.”

  “Eat first, talk later.”

  Micah leaves so I can wolf down my breakfast and shower. The bots apply a pain patch to my neck, and I start to feel more human. Even so, I keep my necklace on. It’s worth the inconvenience of talking between breaths. I meet Micah outside my room, but the transport door stays shut when I wave my bracelet in front of the scanner.

  “My access is gone,” I say, stricken.

  “That’s no surprise. Julian was furious that you destroyed Caliga’s vaccine. I honestly thought he wanted you dead. Sean would tell us, in moments he was let through, that Julian wouldn’t listen to him.”

  “So Caliga’s okay?”

  Micah doesn’t meet my eye. “She’s getting ready for Julian.”

  “What? How is that possible? It’s got to take at least another few days to make a vaccine. Longer, if she puts up a fight about giving another blood sample. Maybe there’s time to mess with the vaccine—”

  Micah grabs my arm so quickly, I stumble. “Wait. Zel, you don’t understand. Caliga made the new batch. She volunteered, to get you out of there. To get your necklace back.”

  “What?” My recently swallowed breakfast threatens to rise up. “She can’t do that!”

  “It’s done. She made her decision.” He pulls me closer and his voice drops to a barely audible whisper. “She’s doing this for us. We’re leaving tonight, Zelia. Caliga’s going to be with Julian tonight, and she’s going to sneak him the sedative. Cy finally got Sean’s help to finish it. As soon as Julian’s unconscious, Sean is going to set us free.”

  “This is ridiculous. What if Julian doesn’t take it? And Caliga gets attacked anyway? No way.”

  “This isn’t your choice.”

  “What does Cy think of this? Blink? It’s crazy.”

  “They agree with the plan.”

  “I want to talk to Caliga!”

  “I’m telling you. It’s too late. It’s done.” The helplessness in his expression tells me there’s no point. I can push and yell all I want, but there it is.

  Caliga’s the bait, and we’ll all benefit from her sacrifice.

  • • •

  MY ACCESS IS NEAR TO NOTHING. I’M stuck in my room and the meadow all day long, except for meals. I hope that I still get my one hour of freedom before curfew. I’ll need every minute of it.

  I want to talk to Caliga, but I can’t. I’m desperate to see Cy, but I can’t. Does he still care? Is he still slicing himself open when he’s alone, when I can’t be with him?

  I wonder if he’s been practicing his trait. Not once did he try to speak to me or touch me when I was being punished. He hasn’t tried since I’ve been recovering, either. I think of the “Luna” poem, and wish I could recite it back to him.

  Do you remember me?

  I am here, in the same sky.

  I will wait for you, ready to catch

  The quarters and halves and broken hearts.

  Micah says we’re fleeing Avida forever after Caliga and Julian leave dinner. Sean told him that once Julian is incapacitated, he’ll be granted access to disengage our bracelets so we can leave Inky. It’s the price Sean is willing to pay for his own freedom. He’d never be able to silence Julian without our help. And then, when our bracelets shut down and fall off, we’ll know we’re free.

  When.

  If.

  As I pace inside my room, everything here seems different. It already smells like a memory, like old things. The door swishes open and I jump up, eager for more information from Micah. A wide figure blocks the light and the door shuts.

  It’s Renata.

  “I didn’t think anyone had access to my room anymore,” I say.

  “Well, in Julian’s eyes, I’m nobody. Being forgotten does have its privileges.”

  I drop my head. “I’m sorry about Victoria. Really sorry.”

  “I know,” she says, sitting on the edge of my bed.

  “How are Andy and Bianca?”

  “Hanging in there. Now that I know why they’re sick, it’s easier to figure out how to treat them. Victoria was the only one who got radioactive polonium. We never would have been able to reverse that. Th
e others might have a chance.”

  “How do you know Julian won’t do it to other kids?”

  “I don’t.” She turns and spies Ana’s glass unicorn on a wall shelf. She picks it up, turning its prickly body this way and that. “He’ll be at it again, unless he’s stopped.” Her eyes flick to me as she says this, waiting for me to fill the silence that follows.

  “Do you know?” I ask. I’m not willing to say more.

  “I do. Micah told me.” She brings the unicorn over and I stretch out my palm, but she doesn’t give it to me. I immediately want to snatch it from her grasp, but try to control myself. “I think your plan is going to fail.”

  “Why?”

  Renata’s bracelet buzzes. “I have to go,” she says. “But I’m telling you. If you’re relying on Sean to save you, then your plan has more problems than I do.” She goes to leave but turns around quickly. “Oh. I almost took this.” She hands me the glass unicorn. “Funny that you should own something that’s not supposed to exist. Did you make it?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm. But you’ll take care of it anyway, won’t you?” She smiles at me and her crinkling eyes remind me so much of Marka, I can’t reply. When the door shuts behind her, I finally think of something to say. But I think Renata already knew my answer.

  Maybe I started to know, that day that I forced the attention of the senators onto myself, instead of Xiulan. Or when Penelope with the super vision held my hand in the transport. Or when I saw Renata weeping over Victoria’s lifeless body.

  This isn’t just about me, and escaping Avida to find my Carus family. Not anymore.

  It’s much, much bigger.

  CHAPTER 24

  DINNER IS REPLETE WITH POTENTIAL ENERGY LIKE a huge ball teetering on the edge of a step. On the rooftop, I can barely sit still in my smothering gown. When Cy, Micah, and Élodie arrive, they’re surprised to see me sitting at the table. Cy almost runs to my side.