Sandpaper Kiss

by Angel Wedge

  She moved closer, put her arms around me and rested her cheek against mine. She said one word that I still didn’t know, but it was the tone that mattered. I knew she would be coming with me. Maybe she wanted to be safe, to get away from the scientists who had tormented her, but I found myself hoping that some of her enthusiasm was because she wanted to spend time with me as well. I could feel her body, warm against mine, and I had to assume she felt the same way. It was probably a bad idea, we’d been through a hell of a lot of stress lately and there was no way to know if we’d even get on when we weren’t running for our lives. But I could hope.

  * * *

  I approached the city gates on my own, while Kitty remained hidden near the edge of the jungle. I was worried for her, even though I knew she could take care of herself much better than me. I think some part of me still wanted to think of her as a child, just because she was smaller than me. But after whatever had been done to her on a genetic level, there was no way I could gauge her actual age. Her body looked adult, just built to a slightly smaller scale. She certainly acted mature enough, and her eyes spoke volumes when we didn’t have enough words to share.

  The city gates loomed ahead. This wasn’t a fence with a few breaks in it now, the gateway had become a kind of border checkpoint with proper guard huts, and two heavy barriers with an area between them for searching vehicles. The olive uniforms of the Sante Benedicté People’s Militia were strutting around, trying to give the impression they were in charge, but they seemed to be taking orders from the black-uniformed civil servants. Outside the gates, foreign soldiers were pacing back and forth, checking their weapons. I wondered if they were waiting for me. That was more worrying than anything I’d thought about previously. If Barishkov had convinced the UN forces that I was some kind of saboteur, they could stop me here and I’d never be able to get my pictures home. But the UN had authorised my visit, and there was no way I’d get on a plane without their support. I had to just hope that Paul had as much reach as he’d thought.

  I walked up to the gate, and was immediately stopped by two heavy set men in uniforms. One American, one French. Maybe they were trying to convince the locals that this wasn’t just the US steamrollering their local politics.

  “Papers, please,” the guy on the left hid his aggression behind a token veneer of politeness. I don’t know if it was his stance, or the expression of a man who’d been doing the same unpleasant job all day and wanted someone he could look down on, but I got the impression that sliver of civility was only because I had white skin and might be one of their people. I’d met way too many soldiers who thought like that, in different parts of the world, it was an expression you saw often. They were a minority, but they were the ones you remembered, and the ones you photographed when doing a story about military oppression.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I haven’t got my papers, but you should have a record of me. I’m Mark Jenner, with the party authorised by the Department of Humanitarian Affairs in Oimbawa.” They just stood and glared, but eventually deigned to radio back and check if they could let me inside. As I waited for a response, I looked back over my shoulder to where Kitty would be waiting. There was no way I’d see her from here, the troops had been tiny silhouettes in the distance when we’d left the road, but I wondered if she might be able to see me. I hoped I’d be able to keep my promise and get back to her.

  The UN gate guards sent for their commanding officer, but it turned out he was unavailable. The other group of guards, the local Militia, sent for their commander too. Maybe it was just to try and exert some control over the situation, to show off that the Americans hadn’t totally taken over, but at least they managed to raise someone with authority. Eventually, I ended up standing in a circle of six armed men, while a similar number of people with various claims to authority debated what to do with me.

  They wouldn’t tell me what was going on, and that really made me worry. They demanded my passport again and again, even after I told them that I had been lost in the jungle and had walked back from Lucretia Falls. They also demanded to know my allegiance, which I didn’t know how to answer because they completely stonewalled me when I asked what the options were. Something had gone very wrong here, I was sure now, and I didn’t even know if Paul would be able to dig me out.

  Eventually, the American turned to me. “Come with us.” I didn’t have much choice, and they marched me at gunpoint towards the actual city, and a police cell. Somehow I was less afraid, with the realisation that a similar situation hadn’t turned out too badly when I’d been in Sante Benedicté towards the end of last month.

  The next person to visit me was an old man with tufts of white hair around his ears. He was a doctor, and looked suitably concerned as he cut dressed the wounds on my hip and leg. He said that I’d done well to keep it clean, but still swabbed it with an acrid smelling solution, and gave me some pills to reduce the risk of infection. He seemed a little amused by my screams as he poked at my shoulder, which was swollen and a disturbing shade of blue and purple. The guard quickly made an excuse to leave the room.

  “Ah, don’t worry, is just bruise,” he spoke with an accent I couldn’t quite place, muttering out of the corner of his mouth, then switched to speaking what might have been Portuguese for a brief sentence, and back to English for the not so reassuring: “Maybe a little broken bone, a loose chip or some such that injured the muscle. But this will set on itself, so I just bandage and you not stretch too much.”

  A few hours later, having swallowed half a dozen painkillers, I found myself thinking more clearly. I thought back to one time in Brazil, trying to remember a couple of words of their language. By guessing at similar meanings from related languages, I was able to hazard an interpretation of his handful of Portuguese words: “No worries, Corporal Marcos said to watch for you. I’ll call in big brother, stupid soldiers have no idea who is in charge here.”

  While I waited, there was nobody to talk to, no sound except the soldiers pacing in the corridor. They didn’t want to spend time with the prisoner, they had their own room with at least a fan to circulate the humid air. I could hear it buzzing from the next room, over the lazy drone of the fat, black flies that circled in search of blood.

  I couldn’t stop worrying about the cat girl. I was in a cage now, but at least I had tasteless gruel made from ground kola nuts. She was out there with nothing. Alone. But as I sat there, I realised just how much I’d missed in trying to figure out her name. Mandarin, Cantonese, Szechuan, so many different dialects. But I’d heard her talk enough to know which one she was speaking. I might not understand them too well, but I could at least guess how to pronounce , Lù qí chā.

  Lucretia?

  I’d thought that poor girl must have been created in the labs, by whatever arcane process the technicians had discovered. But her emotional maturity, as well as physical development, said she was older than that facility had existed. Now I knew how to pronounce that name, it was like the last piece of a jigsaw slotting into place. Barishkov, maybe, had been interested in hybridising species. Giving one animal the characteristics of another was important to him, as his pride in specimen 118 had shown. But Faulkner wanted to save his daughter, so a hybrid that didn’t exhibit any traces of the Keppler-Monroe Syndrome would be of no interest to him.

  How would their research allow him to develop a cure, though? Would he transplant organs from a hybrid, and hope that their immunity would somehow protect his daughter? Or in the course of creating monsters, had Barishkov’s people found a way to rewrite the genetic code of a living creature, and turn a pure human into something else?

  As soon as I thought about it, I was sure that my Kitty was actually Lucretia Faulkner, but changed through some science that was impossibly complex, relying on techniques it would take me years to learn about, let alone understand. Did she not want me to know that? Did she not want to name ‘Father’ as Faulkner, or had he turned away from her when he saw what he’d made, lik
e a modern day Dr Frankenstein? Or had their treatment – whether gene therapy, or surgery, or whatever else it could involve – been invasive enough to rob her of her memory?

  Whatever the case, my sympathy for this girl could only increase. And maybe, I thought, there was something in her diary that could tell me the truth.

  Chapter 22 — The Hardest Choice

  The Observation Room stood above the Lucretia Falls facility like a giant greenhouse, though the air conditioning was constantly fighting against the glass-trapped heat in a vain attempt to keep the interior comfortable. The dome commanded a spectacular view in all directions, and once upon a time the whole staff had come up here to look out over the jungle. Some of Conrad Faulkner’s most precious memories were of standing here with Lucretia at sunset, waiting for the last line of fire above the canopy to vanish below the horizon, and then turning to see the marker post glowing like a star.

  The marker was the first piece of modern architecture installed here, before they broke ground at the Falls itself. The plaque bore a carving, a twin of that on the foundation stone a hundred yards beneath Faulkner’s feet. One was solid concrete, the other chrome polished to a mirror finish. Both inscribed with Lucretia’s drawing of the falls. The marker was placed on the spot from which they’d first seen the falls, and it was supposed to be something she could be proud of; a sign that she had made this place.

  Now, Faulkner stood alone in the Observation Room, his footprints a single line in the dust. The marker post’s glitter was too much like an early gravestone, and he couldn’t look at the view without tears now that his beloved daughter was too sick to share the experience. Everything that should have been a sign of hope had turned into yet another bitter reminder of all his failures.

  When he’d discovered Marianna was sick, he’d thought that he could do something. He said that he was a genius, and he had many of the greatest scientists in the world working under him. If there was any chance of a cure being found, the resources he could bring to bear on the problem would make it happen. He’d thrown himself into his work, and then the next time he remembered really talking to his wife she was in a hospital bed. His team of hand-picked geniuses made a revolutionary discovery, showing that reduced absorption of certain vitamins was a symptom of Keppler-Monroe Syndrome, not a cause, and so that trying to treat the nutritional deficiencies was unlikely to have any effect on stopping organ failures later in the prognosis. He’d managed to confirm that the disease was genetic; and developed a test that had shown he was a carrier.

  “Does that mean Lucretia could…” her voice had been weak and trembling, but he remembered her words exactly, even now. He’d just nodded, trying to keep himself from crying. He’d done a test already, and got the worst answer he could have imagined. Marianna was afraid, but a new determination seemed to appear somewhere inside her. She said there was no way it could be right to let their daughter go through this too.

  “I don’t care about rules and legislations. You’re going to find some way to cure her, the company worships you, half the drug companies in the world would give you whatever you ask for. If anyone’s smart enough, it’s you.” He tried to explain, tripping over his words and hoping she wouldn’t blame him as the bearer of bad news, that even if some drug could be found to ameliorate the symptoms, it would be at least 3 years before they could start human testing. That was when she’d said the words that he’d carried in his heart ever since. She didn’t care about the rules, she didn’t care about the law. If there was some drug that might save their daughter, Marianna would be happy to test it. She was dying anyway, and she would do whatever it took. For family, and for making sure nobody else was ever in this situation.

  Though it took years to get to that stage, and a revolutionary idea from geneticists Paler and Barishkov, it was that conversation that had planted the seeds for the Lucretia Falls facility. A place where American laws wouldn’t hold back pure research that might just give his daughter a shadow of a chance at life. Now, even with some of the best doctors money could buy on his staff, that chance was looking less likely than ever.

  “Professor?” Doctor Corliss called from the staircase on the other side of the room, “They told me to find you. It’s Lucretia…”

  “Liver failure,” Faulkner whispered. He’d been expecting this announcement for days now, knowing it was only a matter of time. It was her liver that had killed Marianna in the end, and he had hoped so much that he would have got further in his research before his little angel went the same way.

  “Her heart, too,” Barishkov came up behind Corliss, “We need to act now if we’re going to save her. We have maybe 48 hours, we just need your word.” He was right, of course. Barishkov had come so close to a cure without even realising the genius of his own work, but Faulkner had spotted how it could be used. He had made a synthetic virus, capable of replacing the faulty gene with a copy from a different individual, effectively rewriting the patient’s DNA. Initially it hadn’t helped, as the virus’s transcriptase proteins seemed unable to identify cells which had already been changed. It was one of his students, Dr Justine Paler, who had suggested that they could substitute an equivalent allele from a different species, that might be compatible enough to function but easier for the virus to recognise.

  If it was as simple as injecting her with the virus and waiting, the treatment would have started months ago. It worked on Marianna’s tissue samples, repairing the damage, but treating this disease was going to be a lot more difficult than they anticipated. The virus could copy the gene they wanted, replacing the faulty one from the patient. But somehow it couldn’t stop there. It had to have a whole chromosome from the donor species, and as yet they couldn’t quite understand the conditions under which it stopped its copying, meaning that the patient’s whole genome was subject to radical changes. That the treatment wasn’t always fatal was a testament to Barishkov’s genius, but turning a living girl into a hybrid was a nightmare process, like going through fetal development all over again. Through many trials, they had determined that they could create a survivable cure using the genetic material of Panthera pardus alba, the creature known locally as the white tiger. But the patient’s hearing range would be vastly expanded, their skin composition would change leading to the growth of tiger-like fur, their shoulders would dislocate and their bone and muscle structure would change dramatically, forcing them to learn to walk again.

  When they first came to Lucretia Falls, Faulkner had debated for weeks whether it could be justified to put his daughter through so much pain if it could save her life. He’d done his best to explain it to her, and the sketches in her diary convinced him that she understood the concept to some degree. But the early experiments on his secondary patients showed that such gross physical changes would be too much for an adult body to cope with. For an infant, maybe up to 2 years old, the body was already changing so much that it might be possible. But Lucretia was 11 years old by that point, and the risk was just too high. They’d tried to find a better variant of the virus, calling in other world-renowned specialists in that area, and every version of the serum was better than the last, allowing the specimens to remain more human. But they couldn’t find one that would be survivable by a subject over the apparent age of about 6 years.

  Faulkner had failed. Maybe in time they would find a better treatment. Maybe all he had to do was keep his daughter alive just a few months longer. But she’d already had one major transplant, and he’d seen how long it took her to recover. Not to mention the ethical problems: the only possible donor in the jungle was one of the specimens who had survived the viral treatment when she was younger. Six months earlier, there had been several specimens who could donate organs to Lucretia and wouldn’t be missed. Faulkner had signed off on a kidney transplant, but three potential donors had died in surgery before they had a success. Barishkov had recruited Dr Dorolev, who was more skilled with these kinds of surgeries, but to Faulkner it seemed like a futile gesture
. Lucretia was still alive, could still be saved, but at what cost?

  “You can’t think of the experiments as people,” Barishkov insisted, “You shouldn’t even have interacted with them, they’re not your field.”

  On some level, he had to concede that the man might be right. He had a tough decision to make, he had to sign a paper to order the death of a child. Not a human child, but with all he’d seen Faulkner couldn’t see the distinction any more. Could he kill a child he’d spoken to and played with – one of the specimens human enough for him to start thinking of them as his adopted children – if it was the only way for his little angel to live? He knew the potential donor might not live long anyway; only one of the specimens had lived this long, but that wasn’t the point. Was his own flesh and blood that much more important than a child who had never had a real life, with growth hormones taking the place of years to raise her to the right level of physical development?

  It was an extremely difficult decision, to Faulkner’s mind. Barishkov said it was an easy choice and the answer should always be yes, without question. That was precisely why Igor Barishkov didn’t have the authority to make that choice.

  Chapter 23 — Reunion

  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it sooner. We already knew that Faulkner’s lab had the capability of patching one animal’s DNA into another, creating the hybrids I’d seen in the lab. That was an incredible thing, that would revolutionise our understanding of animal biology on its own. But Faulkner had gone one step further, mixing animal genetic material into a human. It had been the piece of his psyche I couldn’t wrap my head around all the time I’d been in the lab: what could have pushed a respectable scientist to break all the rules, borrow money and take his family away to this remote place?