“Today’s a simple thing for you. You end. Much harder for us, for me. I’ve given my soul for this work. For advancement. Health. Food. This—” and he waved his hand at the table and blades, “today is easier if you understand.”
He watched as though hoping for her permission, but his words fed her rage.
Sighing, he walked away.
The place inside her, the one that opened on a hillside over Collimais back on the day she pinpointed signals all the way out to the horizon—she remembered that place. A place of knowledge, of knowing more of the world than anyone around her could possibly understand.
She turned her sight on again.
Traces from Melville’s game lingered, including the sulfur compounds that anyone ought to be able to smell. She’d acclimated to the odor but still saw the sulfur.
Cobalt clouds surrounded everyone’s face, drifting in and out of their noses and mouths, little pulsing plumes of carbon and water. Life. Her own face had the cloud. Melville had the cloud.
She stared. But his breath was different. It had sulfur and traces of complex compounds.
That’s why he smells. Methylamines, ketones, she saw them all in his breath.
His lungs were rotten.
Melville spoke to the recruits, explaining that they would cut into Myrta’s temples, peel the skin and learn the musculature, then remove the eyelids and dissect her eyes. “I’ll make the first incision.”
“No.” Odile released a scalpel from the tray.
He turned, eyebrows up. “Wonderful morale.” Odile pushed at her waist and her face flushed again.
Jack struggled against Floyd, moaning through the gag.
Melville roared, “Stop interrupting my class,” and slammed his fist into Jack’s stomach. Jack doubled over, unconscious and on the floor again. Floyd came to the table, sweat glistening down the sides of his face. “Take a scalpel, Floyd. Autore, Odile has more courage than you.”
Floyd nodded quickly and released a second scalpel.
Odile took the flat of hers and pressed it on Myrta’s temple, a cool pressure.
Myrta saw more gases from Melville’s mouth than before, and the cloud was going in and out harder, faster. His eyes were harder too. His arousal, her terror, they tied together inside her, into a knot. She whispered, “Please, Odile, stop. Please.” But Odile just stared at the side of her face, studying it.
The recruits were close enough that their breath, warm and heavy, pulsed on her arm, matching her waves of fear and rage. Jack was curling into himself.
Odile said, “We should increase acuity, memory, and pleasure.”
Melville nodded. “Get on with it. Do it.”
Odile looked up at Melville, her face almost languid. “You believe in me. No one else ever has. You really believe in me, like a proper papa. Thank you, Papa.”
She said it like a forlorn child.
Confusion clouded Melville’s face. “Odile . . . girl. I’m your mentor, not your father.”
Her face—the grief, the emptiness. “In a way, you are. You’re like a papa to me. You are.”
In that bizarre moment, as he stared uncomprehending, and Odile seemed to hold his gaze and neither looked away from the other, Myrta heard a ripping sound near her legs and felt the straps loosen. Blood rushed to her feet, painful needles, knives, she almost cried out, but she bit her tongue and the fleshy part of her cheek. She shot a glance down. Odile had sliced the binding. The straps on her chest loosened, and the clamps against her head clicked.
“Get up,” Odile yelled. Then she grabbed one of the recruits around the middle and jabbed upward into his stomach. He flailed, bizarrely uncoordinated, and she threw her other fist into his jaw. He was down. He was out.
“Myrta, get up,” she yelled again as she grabbed the other recruit.
Myrta twisted her legs off the table, her feet hammering with the rush of blood. “Jack!” She stumbled off the table and lunged at Melville, who had Odile around the middle. Myrta threw herself at his back, got a leg around him, and grappled at his stomach. He let go of Odile and wrenched her off, gripped her wrist so tightly that something crunched, and pain shot into her hand. She clamped her other arm around his neck, and they toppled over. She twisted to break the fall with her shoulder, but her head still hit the cement and her ears rang.
Somehow Alphonse was there, and papers were sliding across the floor. He was on Floyd, and Jack was coming to.
Odile was going for Melville’s stomach now, grabbing at it. The man’s shirt was partly open, and the drugs were there, strapped to him. Odile pulled tubing off in pops, and Melville slugged her, pushed her, and began reattaching the tubes. Myrta got up. Her right eye refused to focus, and her hand pulsed in pain. She kicked. Her foot connected with his stomach, he fell, wheezing and coughing. Odile got on top of him and slammed his head into the floor with a loud crack. He passed out.
Breathing heavily, Odile pulled his shirt open.
Melville’s chest was wrinkled and shrunken. This man was so sick.
“We have to reconnect these.” Odile untangled the tubing and matched ends on his drug manifold.
Myrta scooted back. “Connect them? You want him back? No!”
“Myrta,” Odile hissed. “He’s unconscious right now. Help me connect his tubes.”
“Why?” Myrta cried, pushing further away, toward Jack and Alphonse. They’d handled Floyd, and Alphonse was binding him with strapping from the table.
“We can use the drugs to make him remember anything we want.” Odile removed her own drug pack and shunted that into Melville’s manifold too. “Al. Come here. Tie his hands.”
Alphonse frowned, but cut off more strapping. As he bound Melville’s hands and feet, Odile went to the other recruits and adjusted their drug ports. They were out.
Then she was back on Melville, dosing him, and he groaned alert.
Pressed back against the exam table, Myrta cried out, “Odile,” but her cousin ignored her.
“Ephraim taught me the drugs, Mel.” Odile checked each connection on the manifold and the strapping now binding his wrists and ankles. “He told me all the details of the first person you killed.”
Myrta took a sharp inward breath.
Odile adjusted a port and dialed up a knob. “Do you remember Jose?”
The names on that sheet in Collimais came to Myrta’s mind. There’d been a Jose.
Melville was watching Odile’s hands on the manifold. He didn’t move his head at all, only his eyes, which looked like those of a snake. Unreadable. “Stop that. I’m not your monkey.” Then he gasped, and pain flashed on his face.
Odile had done something. “You sound afraid.”
He stared at her finger, at the port on the end. A drug from her pack, not his. A pain drug. From her pack. He said in a panicked voice, “Stop. Yes. I remember—” But his gaze dragged down, and he coughed.
“What?” Her finger hovered over the port. He didn’t respond, and she pushed at the drug port.
“I didn’t want to!” He was trembling violently. “I didn’t want to hurt Jose. It could have been Ephraim’s job, but they thought I had more promise.”
Odile scoffed. “Wrong. They could manipulate you. Tell me about Jose.”
He looked over to Floyd, unconscious next to Myrta.
Odile pushed the button.
“Oh,” he cried, doubling around himself, wheezing. “I remember. Jose was my uncle.”
“Your uncle?” Her eyes roved back and forth over the drugs and she pushed two in concert. “Tell me about that.”
Melville’s eyebrows drew close. He seemed unfocused. “I was his favorite nephew . . .”
Odile gave him more pain, and he groaned and stared at her, wide-eyed.
“Why were you his favorite?”
Her cousin was treating this m
an like some sort of sub-human thing, like a machine, the drugs no more than dials to tinker with. “Odile stop it!”
Melville snapped his gaze to Myrta, his eyes focused like a predator’s, his gaze roving to her temples. She cowered back against the table legs.
Odile glared at her, then returned to Melville, dosing him with each word. He groaned, punctuated, every time. “Why. Were. You. His—”
“Because I heard things!”
Odile pushed a different drug and his face lit with pleasure. Flushed. His expression almost heavenly.
His words sunk in. I heard things. There was moisture in his eyes, and he shuddered with each breath he took.
Odile moved her hand to the end again and he cowered. “Don’t—please, Odile. I’ll talk. I heard more frequencies. I was audiovoyant. The world, it was music. Life was music, and you don’t hear it. I could. I heard angels, harmonies everywhere . . .” He began to sob, curled around himself.
“You had a genetic variation from the founders.”
It was unfathomable.
“I didn’t know my uncle had the vision trait. I thought it would be a stranger. I didn’t know, didn’t know.”
Odile remained stony-eyed. “But you hurt him anyway.”
“They made me.”
“Coward!”
“I had no choice,” he screamed back. “They drugged me. Like you. I fought, said no. And they—” The scars around his malformed ear were red. “They took it. My hearing.” He curled around himself, moaning. “I cooperated . . . to keep the other ear.” Myrta could only just make out his next words. “It doesn’t work with one.”
Odile doubled two of the ports.
“Stop it!” Myrta couldn’t take her eyes off of the man. His face streaked; his body convulsing.
“Get it through your thick skull, Myrta. He wants to kill you, and Ephraim has always wanted him out of this place.”
Myrta’s head swam, every part of this was wrong.
“Melville,” Odile said, “remember Jose’s face.” The man contorted, and Odile continued, “I’m dosing you with suggestibility and emotion.”
He said, cheeks wetter than before, “Why? Please don’t. Please stop.”
“Oh, believe me, this is for your own good. Are you going to cooperate?”
Melville shook.
“I want you to remember cutting Jose.”
Melville moaned.
Odile’s voice was razor sharp. “The person feeling the dissection is you.”
A cry tore from Melville’s mouth in another man’s voice, “Melville, stop!” and Melville arched on the ground, his head flung back.
He went silent, staring straight up. Except for the faint carbon pulse around his mouth, Myrta would have thought him dead.
Odile rocked back and took a long breath. She rolled her shoulders, stood and stared at Melville, studied him like Nathan might a field.
He was so small, bound like an animal.
She walked around him, lying unconscious, and said to Myrta, “Jose was first. Ephraim has said for years that if Melville faced his past, he’d leave discerning.”
A new spike of dread pierced Myrta. “How many were there?”
“Thirty-eight. On the second, he started and Ephraim finished.” She sat again and reached for the stimulant port.
Myrta lunged, grabbed her arm. “You can’t do this. You’re hurting him, and he’s dying.”
Odile shook her head and started in. Myrta scooted away, stumbled back to Jack, hands over her ears, trying not to hear Melville’s pleas.
Ephraim’s name came up again and again. Myrta was sobbing, rocking against Jack, who was too weak to do anything but rest his arm around her shoulders. Alphonse was muttering about radiation and petroleum, adversity and cooperation.
With each name that Odile forced, Melville grew weaker.
And Myrta’s life flashed through her mind. The decisions others had made to steer her, mold her. Her parents sending her away. Celeste withholding the truth. Terrence shaping her into a steading wife. Emmett planning his children through her. Melville seeing her as some sort of threat to the entire continent. People controlling people from beginning to end.
She wrenched her thoughts back and threw herself in front of Melville, who was unconscious again.
Sweaty, Odile panted, “Get out of my way.”
Myrta held her ground between them. “He’s helpless.”
“He wants you dead.”
A discordant sound, like a squeaking hinge, whimpered behind her. Myrta whipped her head around. But Melville was no more than a husk now, his eyes hollow. “I’m sorry,” he said, his face open.
Odile grabbed her arms and pulled. “Get out of my way.”
Sobbing, Myrta yanked away from Odile and drew Melville to herself. He was so light. So wasted. So sick. His breath full of the wrong things. He smelled horrible. He’d lost control of his bowels, but she held him. This frail man, with her papa, oh, what they’d done. Odile had suffered too. It had all been ripped from her journal, the years lost, the absence of her life.
This, now.
“Odile. You matter. You’ve always mattered. You’re my cousin, we’re family, and I love you. You’re not a placeholder.” She pulled Melville closer, unwilling for this brokenness to continue one more second.
Odile’s stony eyes morphed from dispassion into something else, hot and flayed wide. “Did you read my diary?”
Movement broke out across the room. Floyd was out of his bindings and lurching toward the knives in the tray. Screaming, Myrta released Melville and scrabbled back to the wall. Floyd howled, his eyes strange, and he lunged.
He plunged the knife straight into Melville’s chest and yelled, “You killed me!” He pulled the knife back out. Blood spurted twice, three times.
Melville’s blue cloud vanished.
Floyd turned the knife on himself and plunged a second time, straight under his ribs. He fell to his side, as blood soaked his clothes and pooled on the floor.
The room fell silent. Odile stared at the death. The other recruits still lay unconscious.
Alphonse pushed up and began gathering papers. “Can we leave? Can we leave now?”
Odile turned to him, and her eyes grew wide as they landed on the papers. She picked up one sheet, then another. “You got all of these? You got these?”
He didn’t answer, just kept gathering. Myrta went to Jack. He was pale, but his bleeding had stopped. They stood and left the trailer.
Outside, the shadows were crisp and vehicles drove in the distance.
Jack leaned against the wall of the trailer, panting. “How do we . . . get out of here?”
Alphonse gripped a share of the files with one hand and Odile’s arm with the other. “We walk out the front when everyone leaves.”
Jack breathed his next words. “You’re really . . . not all here . . . are you? Odile’s a recruit. Myrta’s marked up . . . like a book. I’m bloody.” He tipped his head at the files. “And these.”
Myrta clutched her share of them to her chest. It had been Alphonse’s connections that had gotten them in. “What about Zelia? Can’t you do something like you did before?”
He looked at her like she was the addled one. “No, Myrta. Not after the records vault.”
“We go to the . . . loading dock. Go out with . . . shipments.” Jack was very pale.
Odile shook her head. “The cargo’s checked at the front gate.”
Myrta scanned the grounds. There had to be a way out. In the distance, the extraction rigs pounded away. But Ephraim was right—closer on the property, she could track people by their breath, and there were no puffs of breath anywhere nearby except for their own.
She looked out, past the fence, out where they’d stood the previous night. Stunned, she focused on the wires wr
apping the fence rails. There was no haze of maroon at the fence. There was no halo. No oxygen radicals, no ozone . . .
The others kept arguing as she focused in and out. No ozone . . . those wires were as dead as a shovel. “The fence is off.”
Jack was leaning against Alphonse. Odile kept putting one hand to the side of her head and reaching for something at her waist. Then pulling her hand away and looking irritated.
Alphonse muttered, “We find somewhere to hide. Wait until dark and leave then.”
“When the floodlights are on? It’s never dark and the gate’s always guarded.”
“The fence is off,” Myrta repeated.
“All right. What do you suggest?” Jack breathed, his face gray.
They weren’t listening. They could leave this minute. She grabbed Odile’s shoulder and pointed at the fence. “It’s off!”
“It is?”
Myrta ran to it, grabbed it with her free hand. The wires were dead. Like a shovel. She started climbing.
Alphonse glanced up. “Conjunction. It must have fried the wires.” Odile passed the files to Myrta and followed her over. Alphonse helped Jack. They fell to the other side and ran.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Two suns blazed overhead. Stavo’s face was leathery, eyes pounded into it deep and dark.
Strange plants surrounded them, gelatinous and furry at the same time, with downward hanging limbs that plumbed the ground. Under these red and purple tree-like plants, wide pads lobed with brown and orange riffles spread along the ground. A single spiceberry shrub grew, and ramshackle buildings dotted the crest of a nearby hill.
Stavo’s voice was thick. “Turaset was founded. It was not an easy path.”
They walked up to a few sad metal huts. A graveyard lay beyond, stretching down the hill and up the next. Overcome with grief, Alphonse barely managed to speak. “So much death.”
“People.” Stavo leaned onto his knees, squinting at the rows of grave markers. “Livestock. Each life was so precious.”
Meager patches of crops—rye, poppy, a few he didn’t know—grew between the shacks. A sickly mare and an emaciated foal grazed in a pen.
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