“I’m trying to save the world,” you said, and opened these two doors into the cleanest, probably the most colorful place, I’d ever seen. It had all the amenities, but I didn’t care about those as much as I did the balcony overlooking the ocean. The doors were open, admitting the salt breeze and I realized, in that moment, I didn’t care what we were going to be doing as long as I got to stay there, hear the ocean, and talk to you.
“All right,” I told you, and scratched at the stubble on my face. They hadn’t let me slow down for more than a cursory sponge bath in four days. I had to reek, and I needed to shave. “Let me shower and then we can start.”
“Doctor Morgan,” you laughed as you spoke, and it was this beautiful throaty chuckle. “No. I’ll have food sent up, and you can rest. I had no idea they had you traveling in such a primitive fashion.” We were thousands of miles away from the world I knew in my daily life, one that was dirty and dank and filled with death.
It was enough to make a man drunk on the heavenly nature of it all. “Can you send me up files or maybe eat with me and fill me in on what we’re going to do?” Maybe I was leaping without looking, but I found I didn’t care. From the moment I met you, I found something in myself I’d been missing for years. I found hope.
You laughed when I invited you to join me, and Dirk scowled. Instead of being repulsed—because by that point, not only did I know I reeked, I couldn’t escape my own stink—you looked thoughtful. “Very well. I could stand for some lunch, but I do insist you shower.”
“I’ll do that right now.” I all but ran for the bathroom. Just as the door closed, I heard Dirk’s laughter.
An hour later, we sat on the balcony in the sun and ate shrimp, and prawns, and foods I didn’t recognize then. We talked about your genetic research, and the mutations the plague had spread into our genetic code. You even showed me the workup on yourself you’d had done and asked me if I objected to undergoing the same level of scrutiny.
“Every piece of information gives us another piece of the puzzle. If we’re to find the RNA vectors to correct the problem, I need to know how it works on all of us.” Your passion for your work was like a drug. One taste and I was hooked.
“Whatever you need, but I’m a surgeon and an emergency room physician, not a researcher.” What use could you possibly have for me?
“That’s why I need you, Oz. You know people, and you’ve worked on more patients than I will ever see. I’m a researcher, and I spend most of my time in the lab. I can look at the formations on the slide or on a computer model, but you see the whole body. You’re also familiar with reactions, allergies, and common responses to them. I don’t know if I can save our species. I don’t even know if I can save one life, but I want to try.”
That was the key, the moment I think I fell in love with you. It was another month before I worked up the courage to kiss you. And a month after that before you told me the truth of your relationship with Dirk. That I wouldn’t be the only man in your life.”
Pulling his attention from the past, he met Valda’s surprised gaze and smiled slowly. “Then, as now, I’m content to be in your world—with you. Forever and always. You don’t remember, but I do, and I can wait ‘til you fall in love with me again. Even if you never do, I’m not leaving you. I’ll never leave. You asked me to help you save lives, and that’s what I’ll do.” He didn’t add save yours to it. He didn’t want to share that fear. Not yet.
Clearing his throat, he rose and squeezed her hand once before relinquishing his spot to Andreas. “It was a week after we kissed that Andreas arrived at the facility.”
So many questions seemed to reflect in her gaze, but she kept them to herself and she sucked on upper lip as she looked to Andreas.
Oz hoped to hell they’d made the right call. Dirk’s rigid posture warned him that the man who’d been with her longest was terrified. He buried his fear in fury, but they’d done everything else.
If they planned to solve this, they had to be whole and whole meant with Valda.
Always.
Chapter 16
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love. - Washington Irving
ANDREAS
Oz gave up his spot, but Andreas wasn’t in a big hurry to sit there. No matter how irrational the source of his anger, he couldn’t shake the repudiation he felt for the woman on the bed. Loving her and hating her in the same breath tore at his soul.
Valda held her hand out to him, eyebrows raised. How did she always know the exact action to challenge him? If he rejected the offer, he was an ass. If he accepted it, he was a hypocrite.
“You wanted her to know the truth,” Dirk growled the words and gave him a shove. He and the soldier had been butting heads on this project since the beginning. They didn’t have time to repeat the earlier fight, so he accepted her hand and took a seat on the edge of the bed.
Against the white sheets and steel frame, she looked tiny and diminished, yet the spirit in her eyes and the command in her voice—they were her.
“If you don’t want to talk, you don’t have to.” Her granting him release shamed him, and he shook his head.
“I don’t want to be absolved,” he admitted, though the irony wasn’t lost on him. Thankfully, none of his brothers commented on the lapse. “I am simply looking for where to begin. Oz told you of the moment you changed his life, and I suppose I should do no less.”
“Tell me the truth, it’s all I want.” A sigh accompanied the words, and her nails bit into his palm. The remonstration accompanying the surrender was both charming and aggravating.
But wasn’t that Valda in a nutshell?
“Very well, understand my perception of truth does not always follow with the rest of our…group here.” He wanted to say family, yet he doubted she was ready for that part of the story to be confirmed.
Not yet.
“Then educate us, wise ass. I’m tired of talking in circles.” There she was, the woman he loved. Sharp. Acerbic. To the point.
The guys chuckled, and Andreas smiled. “As you wish, your majesty.” The sarcastic use of the address tweaked her once upon a time, and her furrowed forehead suggested it still had the ability.
“My arrival to your facility outside of Auckland had less to do with medicine and more to do with stopping you…
“It was summer when I arrived, the holidays had just passed. I’d made my way over from Mexico City traveling under the grace and auspices of my office. With so much wrong in the world, few of the clergy were willing to step beyond the walls of their churches or abbeys. In some ways, though we’ve come so far, the pandemic sent portions of our population back to the Dark Ages. I appreciated what of our culture that choice saved, but I didn’t want to be one of them.
It is during the darkest of times that faith was needed the most, and I planned to capitalize on it. Looking back, I admit…I didn’t make the best choices. I did what I needed to do in order to survive. Homes would open to a priest, and trains would allow me as a passenger. There was always someone willing to have me around.
I’d traveled from Mexico to the United States, then north to Iceland. From there, I traveled to Great Britain and parts of Free Europe, then down to Africa. I’d been on that journey for nearly a year when word reached me that the child of the Aloria Bashan was alive and more—she was a scientist.
Fear attached itself to your name, and most only ever whispered your mother’s name if they could curse and spit after. I’d traded on the goodwill and false hopes of the surviving masses. Their faith wasn’t mine, because in what world did a merciful god allow the pandemic to happen?
Regretfully, no matter what I read in my Bible or what I shared with those around the meal tables I sat at, I couldn’t believe the pandemic served some greater purpose. For I’d come to one conclusion as I traveled that I couldn’t shake—fewer and fewer children were present. Most were in the teens, and bab
ies were so rare that they stood out. There seemed no rhyme or reason for it, isolated populations showed signs of both. Yet your name they whispered, but without the heat of hate they used with your mother’s.
Another rumor reached me on Madagascar. Not only was Valda Bashan a scientist, but she worked to discover a cure for the pandemic. Interestingly, I heard your name in reverence and in curse.
Faith, as always, was a tricky thing. I must have been drunk as hell one night, because I announced very loudly that I would go on a quest. I would bring God to you and bless your work. If you were not on the side of the righteous, well, then you would not survive the encounter.
Yes, I was that arrogant of an asshole.
The people of the dirthole I’d been ministering to pooled all their resources and hired a bush pilot to take me to the mainland. From there, I found a ride on a transport plane. It took another week, but I made it to Auckland.
Whereas your name was known in all the secret little corners of the world, you seemed to be a virtual stranger in the city closest to your facility. Or were you a secret? I had my ideas. I used what little cash I had to hire a taxi. The driver dropped me at the gate and left. I rang the bell and waited.
Dirk was the one who came down to see what I wanted. He took one look at me and told me to go away.
In retrospect, I had no way of determining whether his order was a test or a genuine dismissal. I hadn’t crossed an ocean and a sea only to be sent away so pre-emptively. I set up camp at the gates. Though people came and went, I didn’t try to sneak in. I survived for two days on a couple of protein bars and the water those who went by left me.
I wasn’t sure if they felt sorry for me or were fascinated by why an unkempt man like me lingered. On the third morning, I woke to Dirk kicking me. As he often liked to say, he tested whether I was alive or dead. When I woke, he jerked his head toward the inside of the gates.
Once there, I followed him to the main house and then passed it by to go to this little bungalow. By then, I staggered—dehydrated, starving, and exhausted. Before I realized what he planned, he shoved me into an outdoor shower.
“Strip off the clothes. There are clean ones on the bench. Use the soap—and a lot of it. Wash everywhere. When you’re done, there will be food.” He didn’t give me a chance to argue, and simply left me there. It sounded like a plan, so I washed up. When I finished, I found the linen pants and loose shirt. It looked like something out of a movie, but I put it on anyway.
My hair had grown long, and I had a considerable beard. Outside the shower, I found scissors and a razor. I cleaned up as best I could, then I walked over to a lounge chair set up on the sand beneath a canopy.
A few hours later, I woke and you sat in a chair studying me. You wore a bandeau top in a deep plum color and some kind of big poofy pants in the same color embroidered in gold thread. Gold bangles decorated your arms and your hair was pulled away from your face with a band of the same color as your top.
You were lovely, absolutely lovely.
“Well, Father, you seem to be refreshed from your long journey,” you said. “We found your identification in your bag, and my people verified it.”
“Have you?” I admit, my greeting wasn’t the most gracious. “So not only do you mind invading people’s bodies and hopes, but also their privacy as well?”
Anger always sustained me when my faith faltered. What I disliked about it was how easily I alienated others, and here I had come all this way to debunk the mythology of the ethereal Valda Bashan, yet I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around how earthly your beauty and how magical your reputation—good and bad.
“I am not certain about the first two charges, but you were waiting outside my property and wanted to see me—or did you come here for some kind of assistance, Father?”
“Stop calling me that.” Twice you referred to me as a priest, and both times, it gave me pause. “Andreas will do.”
“Very well. I’m not a very big fan of organized religion. Oneness with the universe, absolutely. Peace with oneself, desirable. Surrendering to a power I cannot quantify or even begin to comprehend much less prove the existence of? No. It goes against the grain.” Your explanation and agreement were so easily made that I almost took offense. Then you said, “You’ve had a bath, fresh clothes, and there’s food on the table. You are welcome to the bungalow for the night. What else can we do for you?”
“Tell me if you’re good or evil.” I don’t know why I phrased it that way, and I regretted it immediately.
Instead of being offended, you laughed and waved your hand at something behind me. When I twisted to see, it was Dirk and Oz standing on a veranda near the house. Dirk looked gruff and imposing and Oz thoughtful.
“Good and evil are concepts,” you said, pulling my attention back to you. “They are perceptions of the world. Do you truly believe a villain thinks of themselves as evil? Or are they merely committed to a course of action no matter the personal cost to others? By that same token, those heroes we all admire, are they truly good? Or willing to take risks others would not? Who is more good? The priest who espouses a belief so others feel better even if it wounds him? Or the doctor who believes in nothing except for the patient in front of him?”
As ashamed as your questions made me, they also lit within me a need to argue and to examine those points one, by one. “They are not merely concepts, so easily quantified as you detailed earlier. They are choices. Options. The starving man who slaughters another villager to steal food is not the same as the starving man who asks another for aid.”
“Nor is the victim of the slaughter the same as the one who merely refuses to look at the distressed, who steps passed them as they sit at the gate, exhausted, starving and filthy. The opposite of good is not evil, it is indifference. The opposite of evil is not good, it is compassion. I agree, they are all choices, but it is how we perceive these choices. Do we see the indifferent man as evil because he didn’t help? If we refuse assistance, because we have none to give, are we then evil?”
You made my head ache in all the right ways. You never backed down from the debate. We sat there for hours discussing the world and its condition. We discussed fear and hope. We discussed dreams and nightmares. We discussed faith and the lack thereof. When it came to the meal, I was starving, and though I kept offering you some, you refused.
When I asked why, you said, “You’re feeding my mind. It has been a long time since someone challenged me this way and I like it. Eat, regain your strength. I would like to argue some more.”
I never understood what drove me to your facility from another continent, but I recognized I’d traveled several continents to arrive there at that time. And I never left. Each day you would find me—sometimes for an hour, sometimes for a whole afternoon. Once, you didn’t come, and I went looking for you. We would argue, debate, and discuss…sometimes we even dissected an entire philosophy, or you would demand that I tell you of all I had seen.
Eventually, I would join you, Dirk and Oz for breakfast each day. I’d come all that way and I found my home. Eventually, I found faith. Maybe a month after you and Oz took your relationship to another level, Dirk found me on the beach and asked me my intentions.
When I told him I’d fallen in love with you, he said, “We all love her, but are you worthy of her?”
It rocked me a little, and I asked, “If you are her lover, then there is no place for me.”
The statement earned me the first of what would eventually become many head knocks by him. “You don’t get to decide if there is no place for you. You can decide you don’t want one, and you can decide you wish to leave. Her lovers are her choices. She’s made a place for you here and you fill a need in her. Are you worthy of that?”
Andreas sighed, focusing on the woman in the bed. His Valda never looked weak, and even now, ravaged as she was, she met his gaze with a kind of ferocity. “My answer then is my answer now. I want to be worthy of you.”
“So, you fight wi
th me?” Was she surprised? Perhaps, but beneath it was an undercurrent of delight.
“If it pleases you and pulls you out of that place you disappear to, then yes. I fight with you.” For the first time in a long while, hope crept into his soul once more. She had that effect on him. “I would do anything for you.”
He lifted her hand and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “I’ve never regretted the hell I traveled through to find you. I won’t regret it now, but even as we were figuring out my place, a plane crashed into the waves off the shore…”
Hatch pushed away from the wall and circled the bed. Andreas wanted to continue to share the past with her, but they had to cover the important parts first if they had any chance at survival…
Rising, he surrendered his place to the other man. To his surprise, Dirk bumped his fist lightly against Andreas’ shoulder. They disagreed. All four of them, sometimes with violent consequences, but they were also family and she was the center of their world.
With a nod, Andreas blew out a breath.
This had to work.
Chapter 17
Time moves in one direction, memory in another. - William Gibson
HATCH
Hatch didn’t hesitate. If a person hesitated, they might die. Easing onto the side of her med bay bed, he took her hands in his. “You doing okay, beautiful? We’re hitting you with a lot.”
“I have a headache,” she admitted, curling her fingers into his palm. “And I think it’s partially because I don’t remember these times. I hate that I don’t remember it.”
He hated that she didn’t remember, too. “We can always build new memories, beautiful. Remember that if you remember nothing else.” The vitals seemed like they were all in the green, but he slanted a look toward Oz. The physician nodded his head. His brow seemed permanently furrowed, but likely because he worried they would stress her out too much.
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