Sever (Chemical Garden Trilogy)

by Lauren DeStefano

  I don’t want to see this, but I can’t look away.

  “Our Jenna was an interesting candidate to test your parents’ theory,” Vaughn says. “I won’t go into the gory details; I know you were attached to her. Needless to say, she didn’t survive.”

  That’s when I stop listening. I stare at my brother, and I try to listen to the voice coming through the speaker over his bed. It’s giving commands and words that mean nothing to me, but I will them to be the only thing I hear.

  I know what’s about to happen even before I see the needle reaching for his eye.

  My hand is touching the glass. My mouth forms the word “Count.” Count the seconds until it’s over. I think that’s what he’s doing. I think I catch his bottom lip just barely moving. There’s a second needle for the other eye, and just seeing it happen to him brings back every memory of my experience in that same position. Cecily was there to tell me her story about trying to make kites fly. There’s no one to talk to Rowan. No one at all but the nurses who monitor his IV and hoist his limp body back onto the stretcher when it’s through.

  When the tape is removed from his eyelids, he blinks. I watch his fingers curl into an almost-fist, and I realize that in tandem I’ve made a fist over my heart.

  Vaughn is still talking.

  “Stop,” I say, breathless. “You don’t have to explain. I understand. We’re your case study.”

  “Smart girl,” he says. “Come, follow me. I’ll let you see him now.”

  Rather than one armed guard marking the checkpoint to Rowan’s room, there are two, and an authorization card that Vaughn swipes through a panel to unlock the door.

  Rowan is being kept in a room as soulless and sterile as the rest of this place. He’s lying on a bed where a first generation nurse is monitoring the fluid that runs down a tube and into his arm. Everywhere are screens with wires that lead to his pulse points.

  I’m not certain whether he’s conscious. His eyes are closed, eyelids dark like bruises.

  Is this how I looked when I was the subject of Vaughn’s most invasive experiments? Rowan seems so fragile now, when less than an hour ago he was strong and his skin had color to it. I’m afraid to get any closer, afraid I’ll damage him, but then Vaughn nudges me forward and I make my way to the bedside.

  “How’s our boy doing?” he asks the nurse. In answer she hands him a chart.

  “Rowan?” I brush the tape residue from his brow with my thumb.

  I can see his eyes moving beneath his eyelids, and then he manages to blink. He looks at me, and I’m not sure if he can register who I am; his eyes are all pupil.

  Vaughn is asking him to clench his fists as best he can. Good. Move his toes. Good. Blink once, and again. Good.

  I say his name, and he groans.

  “He isn’t in any pain,” Vaughn says. “But he’ll be down until the morning.”

  How could my brother have agreed to this? While Vaughn had me restrained and too sedated to put up a fight, my brother has been willingly enduring the same torturous regimes. How long did it take for Vaughn to manipulate him this much? How long will it take me to undo it?

  Can it be undone?

  When Vaughn leads me back into the hallway, I feel as though I’m the one who has been drugged. My eyes ache, and I can barely feel my legs carrying me forward.

  Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky. And, oh, how glad he is that I’m here now. There are so many things he wants to show me; there’s a world of things beyond my greatest dreams.

  He has no idea what I am capable of dreaming.

  We’re in an elevator that’s made of glass, going up. On one side are the sterile levels of the sterile building, and on the other side, the sky slowly going purple going pink.

  For now we must remain in this place, he says. It’s a secure building. Our business is within these walls, and then we must get back to our plane in the morning. From the door to the plane. But look, look at that view.

  We’ve reached our destination, the thirteenth floor. One wall is made up entirely of windows, so much that I feel like I’m inside the building’s skeleton. I stand before the glass, and Vaughn puts his hands on my shoulders and says, “Look. What do you see?”

  I see an ocean that’s spilled out of a wineglass, its body clear and sparkling and folding over itself. I see a ribbon of sand. I see clean buildings, tidy streets with streetlights that turn green, yellow, red. I see cars.

  I don’t have words to answer his question.

  On a distant building, on a giant screen, a woman is washing her hands and then smiling as she holds the bottle up beside her face with its label clearly shown. The woman is much older than me, much younger than Vaughn.

  “The people here have been cured?” I ask, not quite believing I’ve just said the words.

  I see the reflection of Vaughn’s smile in the glass, over the perfect ocean. “No, darling,” he says. “Those people down there have never even heard of the virus.”

  I’M SLOWLY starting to believe.

  Rose was Vaughn’s first true subject. She was his favorite—until Rowan and I came along, at least. He begins the story after we sit at a table in the cafeteria that’s built into the fifteenth floor. All around us are doctors and nurses, all different ages but mostly first generation. Or is “first generation” even the term for them? What do you call someone who isn’t a first generation or a new generation? What do you call it when death comes with a number attached to it that the person living cannot see?

  Vaughn doesn’t pressure me to eat what’s on my tray. He saws a knife into his steak and goes on with his story.

  He first saw Rose when she was a toddler, when her parents brought her along to a lecture on antibiotic resistance. She and Linden played together, crawling under tables and tagging each other and laughing. It occurred to him then that Linden should have a playmate, but more important, one day he would need to find a wife. This was before Vaughn knew about this place, before he had been contacted by the president, when he still believed his future grandchildren might hold answers that his own son did not. He proposed an engagement between their children, but Rose’s parents declined.

  “I could see even then that she was too good for her parents,” he says. “They had no idea what they had in her.”

  Rose is alive for an instant in my mind. She has sharp brown eyes and a wicked smile. Her hair is alight.

  And then I hear, once again, Linden’s wailing as she stopped breathing.

  She would have been free. She would have stuffed herself with fresh strawberries and teased Madame’s guards and traveled the country with her father.

  “They were always out there, her parents. They lived like gypsies rather than civilized professionals. And several years later, I saw Rose again when her father brought her to a conference on the Florida coast. She was growing to be every bit as beautiful as I would have expected. Looked a great deal like her mother.

  “Her father pulled me aside and told me that the president had recruited him to do research for his team. He told me about this place. He wanted me to partner with him.

  “And then, tragically, he was killed.”

  I don’t ask about the car bombing that killed Rose’s father. I can see in Vaughn’s eyes that this tragic occurrence was less than accidental.

  “You have to understand,” Vaughn says. “I couldn’t let that clever girl go back to her mother’s brothel. You should have heard the mouth she had on her already. It pained me to think of her becoming a common street whore. No. I did what was best. She and my son were better for it.”

  Vaughn is polishing off his plate. “Before Rose came along, I’m ashamed to say I had a close call with Linden. One of my treatments made him ill. Fortunately, he recovered with little more than a few missing molars, but I knew that I couldn’t risk anything like that again. If I wanted to cure my child, I couldn’t also tr
eat him like my guinea pig.”

  “That’s why you used Rose,” I say.

  “ ‘Used’ is an ugly word. I don’t know if I like that. No, I prefer to think that she was an invaluable learning experience for me. Thanks to my treatments, she lived several months after her twentieth birthday. Hers is the study that earned me the president’s attention. I set a mortality record with her. But she wasn’t the one. Not quite.”

  “And you think my brother and I are ‘the one’?” I ask.

  “Sadly, no,” Vaughn says. “Once I came to this place, I discovered that someone else beat me to it. There have been several avenues of cures discovered.”

  The words don’t even feel real. He says them so casually that I’m left wondering if I’ve misunderstood.

  Vaughn sees that he’s confused me, and he smiles in that disarmingly kind way. “You and your brother are my case study,” he says. “Right now we’re determining whether or not your bodies will be able to handle the existing cures. None of the cures have proven to be universal, I’m afraid. Some people are living into their thirties now. But in cases of others that have received the same cure, there have been some gruesome fatalities, depending on ethnicity, gender, and age at the time treatment is administered. Up until now there haven’t been any tests done on subjects with heterochromia. And then, the heterochromia proved to be a dead end, sadly. But I remain convinced that there is something unique about your DNA; the heterochromia was just a surface side effect. There’s no question that you and your brother were custom made. The only question is what your parents’ intentions were.”

  All those times he left the mansion for days at a time—a convention in Seattle, a conference in Clearwater—was he really coming here, with my brother in tow?

  I stare out the window that’s behind him. This is what an ocean looks like, I think, when there isn’t a world buried inside it.

  The world isn’t all gone. Only part of what we were taught is true. Wars and natural disasters have annihilated some landmasses, have reduced countries by halves and thirds and so on, have caused erratic weather in places that were temperate hundreds of years ago. Some things have changed. But not everything. Not the most important thing: There’s still life left. There are still places to go.

  “You and your brother were never meant to be ordinary,” Vaughn says. “Your parents had plans for the both of you. Big plans. And I’m determined to fulfill them.”

  As we ride the elevator down, I think of Linden, Cecily, and Gabriel still trapped in that dying piece of the world, with them thinking it’s all there is.

  The question, Vaughn says, is not whether a cure will be found in time to save his son and grandson, but whether it will be perfected in time. Can I imagine the chaos, he asks, that would happen if people knew all of this was going on? No. Better to carry on his image of just another doctor working aimlessly, and to let the supposed rebels, like my brother, destroy labs and spread pro-naturalism. Better to let the people be ignorant and hopeless. And then, once the cure is introduced, they’ll be so grateful and so desperate for a structured existence to save them from the cesspool that the country has become. They’ll be back under the president’s control.

  “You’ve always had trouble with relinquishing control, haven’t you?” Vaughn says as we exit the elevator. “But it’s a rewarding thing. People need a leader. They need to feel that someone is in charge, that they’re in the hands of someone greater than they are. It’s far scarier for each of us to believe that we are the only ones in charge of our own destinies. We know our own downfalls.”

  “So you kept me in the dark,” I say.

  “I’ve told a few little lies I thought would be easier. The blue June Beans, for instance, were not giving you small doses of the virus. They contained minuscule doses of an experimental cure. The withdrawals after you ran away made you ill, like I expected. But it gave me an idea. I stopped administering the same treatment to your brother, to minimal effect. He hardly even developed a fever. It furthers the theory that the virus in males is entirely unrelated to the virus in females.”

  Suddenly I don’t want to hear any more of this. My mind is spinning.

  This white hallway is the same as all the others, but it seems different now. Everything seems different, even Vaughn. When he finally stops talking long enough for me to speak, I ask, “When can I see Rowan again?”

  “In the morning,” he tells me. “There’s no need for concern. He’ll be as good as new by then.”

  In addition to a cafeteria this building has a floor made up of bedrooms. I don’t ask how Vaughn has arranged for me to have my own room, or how I was permitted to enter this secure building. I think he anticipated capturing me when Cecily was in the hospital; I don’t think he anticipated that his son wouldn’t abandon me. How do Cecily and Linden factor into this plan? He’s left them in Madame’s care, but will they ever know about this place? What happens when we return?

  “You’re looking weary,” Vaughn says. “Wash up, if you’d like. Rest. Enjoy the view. I’ll come for you in the morning.”

  My bedroom, in contrast to the rest of the building, is warm and softly lit. The bed is lush and inviting, the bedding gold satin.

  I step inside, and when the door is closed behind me, I hear the click of a lock.

  BEFORE I SLEEP, I think of the nurse that was monitoring Rowan’s vitals. I thought she was a first generation, but maybe she isn’t. Maybe she’s just a person who was born and has reached a certain age. Maybe she just is.

  What a thought.

  I’m too tired to dream.

  A knock on the door startles me awake. Daylight fills the room through the glass wall, and I have to shield my eyes.

  “Rhine?” It’s Rowan’s voice. “Are you awake? Can I come in?”

  “Yes,” I say, pushing myself upright.

  He closes the door behind him and sits on the edge of the bed. To see him now, bright-eyed and warm with color, I would never suspect the awful state I left him in yesterday evening.

  “I’m sorry about what you had to see.” He shrugs the backpack from his shoulders and unzips one of its pockets. The backpack has the lotus emblem. “Dr. Ashby told me this morning that you underwent the same procedure. He said that even though it wasn’t entirely of your own will, you did exceptionally well.”

  Exceptionally well. How has Vaughn managed to convince my brother that all of this is okay?

  Worse still is that I’m starting to understand Vaughn’s methods. I’m starting to see a different side to things: a doctor who wants nothing more than to save the world, and the meddlesome daughter-in-law who foils his attempts and must be restrained, tracked, sedated if that’s what it takes, because the world hangs in the balance.

  I don’t know what’s worse—helping my former father-in-law or returning to the dying world that I’ve always known. As I begin to awaken more, I’m filled with a divine and yet horrifying feeling that something within me has changed.

  “He admitted that he may have been wrong to keep you in the dark about what he was doing.” Rowan is looking down as he speaks, and his tone is practical, but I know him and I know that he’s contrite. For not protecting me. For letting himself believe I was dead.

  “When Mom and Dad died, I gave up believing in everything they’d devoted their lives to. And then, once you were gone—it took me a while to dig up their things we’d buried. It wasn’t that I wanted to understand their research. I just wanted to read their words. I wanted to remember how it felt to belong to them.”

  “Rowan . . . ”

  He inches onto the bed until he’s beside me. Our mother’s notebook is in his hands.

  “I’ve always coddled you,” he says. “But I shouldn’t have. You’re no more a child than I am.” I’m older than him, in fact. “You have a right to see this.”

  He opens the notebook so that it falls into both of our laps. Before I see the words, I see his hands smoothing over the edges and then moving away like c
urtains parting.

  I’ve never seen this before, and I have no idea, yet, what it means, but I would know my mother’s handwriting anywhere.

  In my nervousness the words all run together, and it takes a few seconds for me to read them.

  And as usual the meaning of her words is over my head. My brother was the one who understood the science of things. But I try to hang on. I read and reread several pages about Subject A and Subject B, who were apparently children born in the lab where my parents worked. Subject A, female, was capable of loud wailing noises though she never learned to speak. Subject B, male, gave little to no indication that he was aware of any outside presences. By the fifth page, both subjects have died, the first generation of my parents’ Chemical Garden project annihilated.

  On the sixth page there’s a photo of both subjects. They’re lying beside each other in a crib, limp and pale. I can tell by their faraway stares that they’re blind.

  Before my brother and I were born, our mother gave birth to a set of malformed twins who only lived for five years. I never saw them before this moment, and I wish I could undo it, because this is an image that will always haunt me.

  They look exactly like Rowan and me. The same feathery blond hair we had as children. The same heterochromatic eyes, only without any life to them. It’s like staring at our corpses.

  I realize my hands are shaking, but I go on reading, this time in a frenzy. I flip through the pages, skimming for words that will be of value to me. Words I’ll understand.

  There’s a new set of Subject A and Subject B for round two of the Chemical Garden project. A photo of two chubby, healthy infants lying on a blue sheet. There is life to them. I should know; the baby on the left is me. For several more pages my brother and I are Subject A and Subject B. Then we learn to crawl, learn to walk, verbalize ahead of schedule. It becomes clear that we will live, and here is where my mother confesses that she and my father took the risky chance of naming us. Rowan, she writes, is prone to violent tantrums. He’s three years old on this page; eventually they learned that his tantrums were the result of pain from persistent inner-ear infections. Rhine has difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy. Lately she tells stories of children in the bedroom walls. Turned out to be mice that had found a way in through the vents.