by Rajan Khanna
The rest of the world, what’s left of it, has paid the price.
Now it’s the Cabal who has me. Every moment since I realized that, I’ve been expecting anything. Everything. After all, I stole their data. I defeated Enigma. I killed Hector.
So let me say that I was surprised, and more than a little confused, when they pulled me from my cell and dragged me to get washed. It was oddly welcome, because I needed to bathe so badly, and because after all that time alone, after being so sick, it woke me up.
They scrubbed me down, then gave me a clean set of clothes. I thought, this protocol makes sense, it minimizes the chance of infection or contamination.
When I was dressed, in a loose pair of pants belted with rope, and a large, flowing tunic, they brought me to her.
My skin still prickled from the wash, and my hair was still wet when I met Blaze. She walked into the room, all confidence, tall and thin, her black skin practically shining in the lights that lit the place. Her hair was up, and her hands were behind her back. I tried to size her up, of course. She seemed sure of herself, attractive, well-cared for, healthy. I don’t believe for a second that you can see intelligence inside of someone, but it seemed to radiate from her. That was probably the confidence, but her eyes were as assessing as mine were.
She walked forward until she was about a meter in front of me, and then she stopped. She inclined her head ever so slightly to one side. No more than fifteen degrees. Then she said, simply, “I am Blaze. Welcome to the Helix.”
The name brought up connections. “After the double-helical structure of DNA,” I said.
She nodded. “And the structure, a stairway leading up. Onward.”
“Why am I here?” I asked.
Blaze nodded, her hair bobbing behind her. “A fair question,” she said. “Especially after you caused us so much trouble.”
I remained silent.
She nodded again, ever so slightly. “You’re here because you’re valuable. As much of a thorn as you’ve proved, your knowledge of 2602 is impressive.”
“‘2602’?”
“What we call it. ‘The Bug.’ I believe you call it ‘Maenad.’ Colorful.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You brought me here for my scientific knowledge?”
Her eyes fixed on mine. “You know we value that.”
“What makes you think that I would allow you to benefit from what I know, what I’ve spent my whole life working on?”
She held her hands out, palms up to the sky. “Helping to further scientific knowledge is its own goal.”
“Not if you use it for your own personal gain.”
She cocked her head to one side. “Do you think what we’re doing is for ourselves?” A tiny scoff or sigh erupted out of her. “We’re doing this for the world.”
“The world?” I asked, my contempt and surprise bubbling out of me. “How?”
“What do you value?” Blaze asked. “Intelligence. Safety. Caring. Structure.” She marked each of these on her fingers, as if counting. She shook her head slowly. “We crave the same things. Those are the things that we want from the new world. Someone needs to wipe away the chaos of the old world and create the new. Create order. You have to build the house before you can live in it. Sometimes that requires clearing away old debris.”
“And allying with the Valhallans? What part does that play?”
She moved forward. She’s taller than me, and she loomed over me. “An alliance of convenience.” She showed her teeth. “When the old world collapsed, the Valhallans moved to fill the vacuum. They created structure on the ashes of chaos. They built Valhalla, and then they took Gastown. Who better to work with? They have the sheer manpower to help accomplish many of our goals. They provide housing and protection and, most of all, time. And one day . . .”
I narrowed my eyes at that. “One day?”
She smiled again. There was nothing human behind that smile. “We can talk about that later. For now I want you to get used to the idea of being here. Working here. We will provide a place for you to stay, food, water to bathe, and, if you are good, recreation.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You still haven’t reached the part where you give me [and I think I shrugged here] one good reason to want to help you.”
Her face went hard. No emotion at all. Blank. A cipher. Then she held up a finger. “One reason, then. Because if you do not help us, we will kill Ben.”
* * *
It took me a while to stop from shaking after that. To stop from feeling this crushing sense of desperation. Now you can see why I don’t have much faith in this reaching you. How would it even get to you?
But I wanted to write it all down. It needs to be known.
So, yes, they threatened you. How could I not work for them after that? I know you would tell me that I shouldn’t, that you aren’t worth it. At least, I think that’s what you would say. I know you’ve spent a lot of your life trying to stay alive, and maybe you’d want to buy some time until we figured something out, but you know what, Ben? You’re not here. It’s not your decision. And I couldn’t live with myself if I let you die. If I let them kill you. So, I’m trying to figure it out. I’ll work with them long enough to find my break. Our break. It hasn’t come yet.
Otherwise, it’s a pretty rote life. I have my little room, which they call a dormitory and I call a cell. Every morning, they wake me up, I wash and dress, and I go with some others to a lab where I study Maenad, or a Maenad variant. At first, it was just a huge debrief, they wanted everything I knew, and everything I could give them. I tried to hold some things back, but it was hard. They had already retrieved some of our notes back when Maya was on the island (and more about her in a minute), and they knew the direction of our research. They had me reconstruct the screening protocol we put together to see if someone was infected. Every time I tried to leave something out or obfuscate, they would ask me questions, sometimes probing, other times innocent, but they would always ferret out the inconsistencies, always get to what I was hiding or trying to falsify.
It would be impressive if they weren’t so hateful.
I don’t see Blaze much these days. Not after she welcomed me to the fold. She visits the lab, and sometimes she checks on my progress, but most of the time she’s off being the evil leader of the Helix, plotting her plans and planning her schemes. No, I have a different handler now.
Maya.
That I didn’t claw the bitch’s eyes out when I first saw her still remains a wonder to me. I guess I was thinking about you, and how they might not be so inclined to keep you alive if I bashed one of their people’s heads open with a electrophoresis machine. I can’t imagine what Rosie saw in her. She still wears those ridiculous hoop earrings, still looks like I could break her in half with my bare hands. Every time I see her insipid smile, I think back to Sergei and how she and Hector brought the Enigma virus to the island and how Sergei died as a result. I also think about what I did to Hector. What I would have done to Maya had she not escaped.
Hector. That’s an interesting thing. What bothers me most when I think about him is this feeling of absence, because I don’t feel guilty or bad about him dying. I don’t feel remorse for killing him. I think I should feel bad, and I don’t. What does that say about me?
At least I’m not alone here. This “dormitory” that I’m in is in a long row of them. I have someone on either side of me. At night, when we’re left alone, we talk some. The man to my left is named Dimitri. He’s older than me, though I’ve never seen him in person. He told me a little about his past. I think you’d like him, he’s a little rough around the edges. He comes from out east, used to travel a lot. He said he bought passage on airships by offering medical help. He hasn’t told me yet where he learned those skills, though I’ve asked. It seems like a tender spot for him.
The woman on my right side (when you’re facing the door) is named Carmen. She’s closer to my age, and we have a lot in common. She grew up in, well, she says it wasn’
t a commune, but it sure sounds like one. They didn’t all study science, but they studied something. She studied biology, disease. They weren’t really hoping for anything on the scale of a cure, just protection really. They started studying Maenad to chart how it worked, what it did, how it was transmitted, how they could avoid infection. They gathered more information than most. She decided, get this, to travel, to teach people about what she knew. That, of course, brought her to the attention of the Helix and they . . .“recruited” her for their efforts.
Which is one of the interesting things. The Helix is already full of smart, learned individuals, people who flocked to the cause, willingly. But that’s not enough for whatever they have planned. They have to draft in others, people like me and Carmen and Dimitri. They need us. What we know. What we can do.
Do you know what the greatest thing about that is, Ben? The greatest thing about that is it means we’re valuable. So hang in there. Stay as safe as you can. Because I intend to use that to my advantage.
CHAPTER TEN
I spend a lot of time in my cabin, sitting with my back against the wall, knees drawn up against my chest. Two empty jars of hooch roll slightly on the floor next to me. A third is open between my legs. I can’t get my head to clear. There’s all these . . . thoughts swirling around inside. Feelings, probably, too. But I don’t want them. I can’t bear them. So I reach for the jar and slug back some booze and try to kill all those moving things. Try to drown them. Scour myself from the inside out.
I haven’t made much progress.
But if I drink enough, I’ll pass out and then, at least, I’ll get a break. You have to have backup plans, after all.
With one hand, I absently twirl the revolver on the ground beside me. It helps a little. Moving. Touching something. Only a little. But it takes me outside my head.
I can fuzz out the thoughts, most of the time. But the worst are the faces. They’re harder to avoid, and they’re instantly recognizable. My father, Miranda, Mal, others. All of the names Tess brought up back at the library. All of the people I failed.
The first to come, oddly enough, was Sergei. Odd because it was Miranda trying to find a cure for him. I wasn’t the one who infected him; I wasn’t the one who could save him.
But you were the one who brought back the traitors. And it’s because of you that they infected Miranda and Sergei.
That voice keeps bubbling up, and I keep trying to push it down, but it’s somehow more buoyant than it used to be. Louder. More insistent.
And it’s right. I was the one who hatched the plan to save the boffins from the prison camp. Another trap set up by the Cabal, baited by Tess and the information she leaked to Miranda and me. I was the one who fell for it, who went to rescue the boffins and brought back people I didn’t know, people who brought a new virus with them. A virus that infected Miranda, that killed Sergei.
And Miranda . . .
When I think about her, it’s like everything goes white for a moment. My feelings are too vast to even comprehend. Crushing, like a gigantic wave. And they make me, my thoughts, my sense of myself, so incredibly small by comparison.
Miranda was infected, yes, by the same disease that killed Sergei, but that’s not what killed her. What killed Miranda was a bomb that fell on the house that she had been living in. Yes, the bomb came from an attack by raiders. And yes, they found out the location of the island from any number of places (Tess being one of those), but . . .
Thinking about the raiders makes my blood boil. Thinking about Tess brings up rage, too, even though she’s dead.
I see the burning library. I smell the burning books.
I spin the revolver next to me. The barrel rotates several times before pointing back at me.
I take another drink from the jar. A long pull. Place the jar on the floor.
What killed Miranda was that she was trapped in the house when the bombs fell. She was dying, so maybe she wouldn’t have been able to get out anyway, but I’ll never know. To protect her from whatever was attacking us, I barricaded her in. So that nothing could get to her from the ground. But I didn’t even stop to think that it might come from the sky. Me. A man who spent almost all of his life up in the air. I didn’t see it coming.
That’s bad enough. But what’s the worst in all of this, the thing that keeps me up at night, the thing that cracks me into so many tiny pieces, is that I left her. I left her alone. While she was sick, dying, and about to face god knows what, I left her. I could have stayed with her. I could have held her hand in the darkness. I could have been there to defend her from whatever might have found her. I could have been there next to her when the bombs fell, so that she wouldn’t have had to die alone. I could have died with her.
I should have died with her.
The truth is that I dream about that. I wish it. I crave it. Because now I have to live with this pain inside of me. All the time. And the regret. The guilt. If anyone should have died that day, it should have been me. But the universe doesn’t run on justice or fairness. That much is obvious.
I reach for the revolver again. My left hand on that, my right hand on the jar.
“Ben, what are you doing?” Claudia’s voice breaks me out of my introspection. I look up at her, then follow her gaze back to me. The jar is still on the ground, my right hand curled around it. It’s the revolver that is halfway to my lips.
“Nothing,” I say, putting the pistol down on the floor. “Just drinking.”
“I think we need to talk,” she says.
“About what?”
“About you,” she says, incredulous.
I look at her, my face blank. “I’m fine,” I say. “Everything’s fine.”
“Like hell it is,” she says.
“What do you want me to say, Claudia?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “We just finished what you spent the last six months planning—you got your revenge. I thought that warranted some kind of response.”
I look at her blankly some more. Trying to get a sense of what she wants, trying to find meaning through the swirling and whirling thoughts. Then it dawns on me. “You want this all to be done, don’t you?” I say. “You think Tess is dead and now . . . Ben can move on. Put this all behind us. Be the way it used to be.”
She crosses her arms and glares at me. “I think that you are pathetic. I’m standing here looking at you and all I see is a wretched excuse for a human being. I see ballast that I should dump at the next stop because it’s weighing me down.”
She shakes her head. “And I keep thinking that it’s a good thing that your father isn’t here. Frankly, he’d be disgusted.”
It stings. But it conjures up a memory. One of the early days, after Claudia had joined us. She and Dad had worked out a deal—she would help us find places to forage and he’d provide transport and shelter on the Cherub. On one of those first trips, we upset a Feral nest. We stood there, three of us, back to back, Dad and me firing our guns until they went dry, Claudia taking out Feral after Feral with her bow and arrows. The breathless excitement of being alive, with good barter no less, at the end.
Already the hero worship for Claudia had started, already the crush and the attraction. So when she gave me a pat on the shoulder, as if to say, “good job,” it was a mix of delight at her appreciation but also embarrassment and shame at the fact that she clearly thought of me as a kid.
That night, Claudia and Dad stayed up, drinking a bottle of wine, while I lay on my mat nearby. I couldn’t sleep, though, too keyed up with that potent mix of adrenaline, fatigue, attraction, and shame.
Through slitted eyes I watched them, drinking, their faces flushed. Happy. Equals. I remember Claudia saying, “He’s a good kid, isn’t he?”
My father, looking at me, took a sip of the wine from the bottle’s neck and wiped his mouth with the back of his glove. “Yes,” he said, nodding his head. “He is.” He took another pull on the bottle. Wiped his mouth again. “I’m hard on him, I know. But I’m not a
lways going to be around. And when I’m not . . .” Another pull. “I want him to be able to take care of himself.”
“Ben!” Claudia snaps. “Are you even listening to me?”
Suddenly I’m angry. I’m not even sure at whom, but there’s a fire building inside of me, and Claudia is in front of me and I spit that fire right out. “Shut up! Just . . . shut up.” I clench my hands into fists. “You have no fucking idea. Things will never be the way they used to be, Claudia. The world is changed. I’m changed. Nothing can be . . .” I feel something heavy and dark surging up inside of me, something to make me want to curl up in a ball, so I stomp down on it hard, the way that Sarah stomped down on my back. “It’s all fucked.”
“So what? You just . . . carry on the way you have been? Tell me, Ben, do you drink yourself to death? Or do you throw yourself into another room full of armed men? Or maybe you’ve figured out some other way to end it all.”
“Claudia—”
“It’s pathetic.”
I glare at her.
“Do you remember after your father Faded?” she asks. My mind sends me snippets of sensations—the harsh fumes of alcohol, a spinning sense of being unmoored, the feeling of too much space in the Cherub. “It was a lot like this, but you got through it.”
I remember that, remember pushing her away. Running hungry. What really brought me out of that was Miranda.
“I thought that getting your revenge on Tess would give you back the fire that you lost. Yet here we are, and you seem even worse than before.”
“We burned down a library,” I say through gritted teeth.