by Ramona Finn
“They found one!” she said, over and over again. “It’s her!”
The other survivors gathered around in a large circle to stare at me. “You!” was all they said.
I had the sudden urge to run away. It was getting claustrophobic in here.
“Please, I don’t want any trouble,” I said. “Tam, what did I do wrong?”
“Okay, stop!” Tam ordered, and surprisingly, they obeyed. Everyone scattered back to where they’d come from as if nothing had happened. Tam took my hand and pulled me to a small sofa by the wall, behind the door. She sat and patted the space next to her.
“Sit,” she said, and I did. “That Farrow boy has been waiting for someone like you. You must have the genetics he wants.”
“Ben wants my genetics?”
“Who is Ben? I’m talking R.L. Farrow.” She’d said his name as if it tasted bad. “He worked on each one of us, but none of us made him happy,” she said, doing air quotes with her fingers. “Over the years, he has experimented on us. Many have died.” She pushed her arm into my face. Her skin was bruised with lesions all the way up and down her arm. “Kept taking samples—combined samples, split the genes, tried to mutate them…but nothing worked. This used to be his lab, you know. Then he moved on and forgot about us. I don’t think he knows we’re still alive. The clones feed us—like we’re zoo animals.”
I wanted to ask what a zoo animal was, but it didn’t seem relevant. “But if you survived the Acceptance, then you’re immune. Isn’t that what R.L. Farrow is looking for?”
Tam laughed with her mouth wide open. She had large gaps in her teeth, and her tongue was unusually purple. “Immunity? This girl still thinks it’s about the Cure!” She announced this to everyone. Several turned to us and laughed. Some shook their heads in what looked like pity.
Tam looked at me once more and said, in a low voice, “It has never been about the Cure.”
Those were the same words that R.L. said in the vids.
Tam coughed until she couldn’t breathe. She hit herself in the chest to catch her breath. Then she continued, “Farrow is obsessed with living forever. He is afraid to die. He just doesn’t mind letting everyone around him die in service of his goals.”
“That’s why he’s kept experimenting on you? To find longevity?” Just like in the vids. “Do all the Farrows know this?”
She shrugged again. “Young Farrow and his wife know it. We see only them and the clones. The clones feed us,” she repeated.
“His wife? You mean Sue-Jane?”
“Sue…something,” Tam said. “She’s weird, always spacey. Haven’t seen her in a long time. She’s probably dead, like all the rest.”
“The rest?”
“Young Farrow likes to use us all in his experiments. He only wants one thing—immortality.”
“But that’s not possible,” I said, feeling like this conversation was getting weirder by the moment. How could I really trust that Tam was telling the truth? Everyone in this room seemed to be out of touch with the world outside, and even out of touch with themselves. Maybe they were here to be treated…like in a medical sector.
But something about this woman’s words rang true, especially because of what I’d seen in the vids.
“Are you the only survivors of the Acceptance, or are there rooms like this all over the Sky Labs?” I asked. I didn’t know why, but my mind went to Kev. I wondered if he’d been shoved into a room like this somewhere else…while R.L. experimented on him, as well.
Tam shrugged. “The Labs? I know nothing. I am a failed experiment. That’s what the young Farrow says.” Then she giggled. “But in the Greens, there are many of us—hundreds, even. We have a labyrinth; we have resources.” She’d emphasized each word, as if it were a delicious secret she was divulging.
A bell rang. Everyone looked up, as if they’d never heard it before. Even Tam looked surprised. I jumped out of my chair and moved closer to the door. I didn’t want to get locked in here, if that’s what the bell meant. As the second and third chime rang out, everyone shuffled to a table and sat down. I didn’t know what to do.
“Ooh! Dinner,” Tam said, licking her lips. She twisted herself into her chair and placed her hands on the table in expectation.
Before I could react, a clone walked in carrying a large tray of food. My heart jumped into my throat. What would happen if the clones found me in here talking to people who weren’t supposed to exist? Instinctively, I pressed myself against the wall as if that would magically hide me.
The clone turned to look at me. It was Dax.
“There are two more clones on their way here to serve dinner,” he said without emotion. But, somehow, I could tell he was about to panic.
I headed for the now wide-open door.
“Hurry,” Dax whispered, turning away from me.
“Girl, stay for dinner!” Tam called out to me. “I will tell you stories. Tell you how Wallace and I saw you coming!”
“What?” I stopped in my tracks. She knew Wallace?
“Go!” Dax cried.
“I have to go,” I said to Tam, my body already half out the door. “I’ll return, I promise.”
“Promise or no promise, it matters not,” she said in a sing-song voice as she stared at the wall across from her. “We’ll be here until we’re gone. You come or go, we’ll be here.”
Her words sent chills through me. What was keeping them in this room? The door wasn’t locked, and if I could find my way to my apartment in these corridors, couldn’t they go somewhere else? I vowed to return, and to find out more. Especially about Wallace, my old mentor.
I found the door that put me back into the main family hallways. As I walked back to my apartment, I couldn’t help replaying everything that had just happened, from seeing the vids to meeting those old survivors. Skylar Two would’ve liked them, I thought. They hated the Farrows as much as he did, and the Rejs revered people who were older. It was a testament to their survival skills in a world where most people died young.
My insides ached as I recalled the horrific picture of Skylar One lying on the ground dead. He would never have that chance to grow old. I hoped Skylar Two did—that he was still out there, leading his people. He’d better get my message. I wouldn’t know what to do if he was killed while I was getting partnered to Ben. That would be the cruelest joke.
Ben was so convinced that the Rejs were our enemy. Skylar Two insisted they didn’t have the resources.
I stopped at my apartment door, my hand pressed against the computer panel as it verified my identity.
Resources. Tam had used that word.
No. They were too old to even play a game of chess. They were so damaged by R.L.’s experiments. There was no way they could….
They hated the Farrows. They’d had a long time to plan and think.
No, Ty. Not possible.
But what if?
What if there was another group that was trying to make trouble for the Farrows? A group that had nothing to do with the Rejs.
If there were hundreds of survivors in the Greens, and they had ‘resources,’ could they be the source of the attacks that were driving Ben nuts?
I took one last look at the hallway outside my apartment, and then I stepped into my home. Tam and her people didn’t look harmful. But then, as I had learned since arriving in the Greens, looks could be highly deceiving.
Chapter Twenty-Five
There was no way I was going to be able to sleep that night. Tam’s words flooded my mind, crashing against the edges of my brain like the swishing of sewer waters during a minor quake.
It was almost morning anyway, so there also didn’t seem to be any point to even trying to sleep. Soon enough, the sunlight peeked through my windows. I sat down at my computer terminal.
If Ben was right and I had the access that he had, then either he really didn’t know anything about his father’s secrets, or else he was a really good liar. SKY had let me in to look at the Cure files. They were th
e same ones I’d found during my visit to the labs. I thought the Farrows were hiding things from me, but there was nothing in the files that we in the Geos didn’t already know about the Virus. Apparently, there were no secrets. That meant one thing only, though. There really hadn’t been any significant progress made on finding the Cure in the last decade.
That just made me feel sick.
I thought about all of us in the Geos, watching the show day after day, speculating about how close the scientists in the Labs were to finding the Cure. I thought about my parents, working themselves literally to death in the hope that someday I, or my children if not me, would get to live out in the open—free of illness. I thought about me actually being immune to the Virus, and why R.L. didn’t just use my blood to create a serum. What about Kev’s, too? He was immune—no matter what silly theories my friends believed about how Kev had cleverly or coincidentally avoided the contaminated areas during the Acceptance. And all those old people in the back passages—they were immune, too. The Farrows had had access to some version of a possible Cure all this time, yet they’d never made use of it.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to stand in the middle of the Greens cafeteria at peak hour and scream to everyone that we’d had the Cure now for years, and that even if we didn’t, we could bring my people up from the Geos to live there together with the Elites, instead of leaving them below ground to die of other diseases like the Cough.
But would anyone care?
The Elites, it seemed—if R.L. Farrow’s goals were the same as theirs—only cared about living in luxury for as long as they could. They wanted to be immortal. They didn’t care about those who lived on or below the surface; we were too far away for them to even bother thinking about us. They made the show to give hope and occasionally sent down food, all to make themselves feel better, to be able to think of themselves as altruistic, when in reality their charitable acts were payments for their guilt.
The doorbell rang. I knew it was Ben, even if it was at least an hour too early for his regular visit.
“Couldn’t sleep, huh?” he asked as he walked in. “Me, neither. I can’t believe our ceremony is only a day away.”
I wheeled my desk chair around to face him.
“Why are you lying to me?” I figured there was no point dancing around the issues anymore. I had twenty-four hours to get to the truth before I became one of them. “The research into the Cure has been over for years. There’s never been a plan to bring the people in the Geos up to the Labs.”
Ben’s demeanor changed. His eyes darted to the screen behind me. He could see I’d been looking at Cure files. Slowly, the color returned to his face and he leaned closer to my computer screen.
“These files are empty,” he said, squinting at the screen. “Did you delete their contents?”
“No, I didn’t.” I stood up to get out of his way.
He sat in my chair and began typing, apparently searching for something. “The files are missing. Everything on the Cure is gone. Tylia, did you delete them?”
“I said no!” Was he trying to evade my questions by distracting me with something else? “You tell me why there hasn’t been any significant progress on the Cure in the last few years. Are the Farrows focusing their efforts on something else?”
“What are you talking about?” He jumped to his feet and met my gaze with an equally wild stare. “What else could we be working on?”
I couldn’t decide if Ben was an amazing liar or he was completely out of his father’s loop.
“Your father is researching immortality,” I told him. “He doesn’t care about finding the Cure.”
Ben opened his mouth to make some retort, but then he closed it again. He fell back into my desk chair and pressed his lips together so tightly that the skin around his mouth went white. Then he started mumbling to himself. He ran a hand through his hair.
“You’re sounding a lot like the Rejs.” He stared at the floor as he spoke. “This is what’s been causing all the trouble…rumors that stir up discontent, distrust. What you’re saying is very dangerous. You need to drop it. Now.”
I stepped back. “Are you accusing me of something?”
Ben looked right at me. His eyes were wide, but he said nothing for a long time. Finally, he folded his hands in front of himself and looked pained.
“I’m going to tell you something I haven’t shared with anyone—not even my family.”
He took a deep breath and released it slowly. “When I was 14,” he began, “I spent most of my time in the labs with the other scientists. I had a breakthrough in the search for the Cure. I’d isolated the original Virus and discovered that the version that was out on the surface was a mutation. But it wasn’t a natural mutation—someone had done it on purpose, making it stronger and harder to defeat. This new Virus was what forced people underground in the first place 75 years ago.”
I fell into the couch behind me, listening with great interest. It felt, finally, like Ben was opening up to me. His knee began to quiver, but he kept talking.
“I brought it up to Father, and he didn’t seem shocked. In fact, he was angry, which really surprised me. Publicly, though, he gave me an award and made a big deal out of my discovery, because by then, I’d told several people, and Father couldn’t contain the news before it spread. That’s when I first became the star of the show. My sister Chen was the star up until then, but she didn’t seem to mind the spotlight shifting to me. Even Father paid more attention to me—more than I was used to.”
He rubbed his hands together as if he were trying to get rid of his skin. The quiver in his knees became a full-out shaking.
“A month later, I got sick.”
“Sick? In the Greens? Does that happen?”
“No,” he said. “Somehow, I had been exposed to the Virus…the mutated one. It happened in the lab. I don’t remember how, but Father and Chen discovered me on the floor of the lab and quarantined me for weeks. I almost died, but I beat it. I didn’t die, obviously.”
“Is that why R.L. thinks we’re compatible?”
Ben exhaled loudly and shook his head. “Tylia, I’m not immune. I was cured.”
I gasped so fast that I ended up choking on my own saliva. There was a Cure already?
“The antidote I was given was created by Chen,” he went on. “I was the guinea pig, so to speak. It worked on me, but for some reason, when we tested it out on others on the surface, it failed.”
“But why did it work on you alone?”
He shrugged. “Maybe I have partial immunity? I don’t know. But we didn’t tell anyone because we didn’t want to get their hopes up. Anyway, you were partially right in your accusation. The search for the Cure hasn’t been abandoned, but it has slowed in the last few years. Your immunity, and Kev’s, should have been enough to create a serum, a vaccine, but we found out that the Virus has mutated again. So, it’s like we’re chasing a runaway train. We just can’t catch up.”
I moved closer to Ben, kneeling on the floor in front of him. “You said that, when you first isolated the Virus, that it had been changed, but not naturally. Is it possible that someone is keeping the Virus alive and making it stronger so that we never find a Cure?”
Ben’s eyes locked onto mine. His hands were shaking now. “Look, Ty, when I was in quarantine, and convinced that I was going to die, someone visited me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. They were in full environmental suit with a mask covering their entire face. They even used a voice changer so I couldn’t tell if they were a man or a woman. It didn’t matter who it was. What mattered was what they said.”
I waited as he took another breath.
“He or she warned me to stop asking questions about the Virus. I was ordered to stay in line with the family’s policies, and do my part without question—or else.”
“Or else what?” Now I was shaking along with him.
“I was ordered to play my part or, the next time, I wouldn’t
be saved.”
I sat back on my heels to absorb his words.
“So, there is a Cure.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Ben said. “I’m warning you to stay in your lane. If you want to survive here in the Labs, and you want your parents to survive, you need to stop asking questions.” He took my hands in his. “We can have a good life here. We just shouldn’t dig into things that are none of our business. Let Father do what he needs to do. We’ll have each other and a good, long life.”
I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. “What about the people in the Geos? And the Rejs?”
Ben pushed back and stood up, leaving me seated on the floor, aghast.
“You and your obsession with the Rejs!” He paced the floor of my small apartment. “They have no future, as far as I’m concerned, and you need to get over it. As for the Geos, the Cough is a bigger worry than the Virus now. That’s what we need to focus our energy on. That’s what’s actually happening in the labs.”
Nothing that I knew about my world was real.
“So, there’s never been a plan to integrate the people in the Geos with the Elites in the Sky Labs, is that right?” I needed to straighten things in my head, so I could see more clearly what I was getting into.
“There was in the beginning, but the more time went on, the less likely it was that it was going to happen.”
“What about the Acceptance? Did any of the survivors end up living here?” I knew part of the answer to that question, but I wanted to know the official story. I wanted to know what Ben knew.
“There haven’t been any survivors for years, not until you and Kev.”
I tried to read his face to see if he really believed that, or if it was another story being told to keep me acquiescent. I couldn’t tell. Did he not know of Tam and the others in the back passages?
“The Acceptance, as an event, was created to give the Geos hope,” he continued. “And it gave us valuable information about how the Virus was mutating. So, even though there will never be a Cure, we are looking to fix things like the Cough and other Geos-related diseases. We just can’t tell the full truth because there would be riots. The people would lose hope and anger would reign.”