Not my friend, she thought, as she hung helplessly in Cleo’s arms. My enemy.
Shots rang out, punctuated by shouting and the muffled crunch of fists colliding with flesh and bone. The clearing shook with the impact of bodies hitting the ground. Someone was calling her name, but Gabi’s vision had gone black as she was drawn toward a warm, welcoming void. She could smell Gram’s lavender spice scent close by and wanted to go toward it, but Cleo was shaking her, shouting in her ear.
“Breathe!” Cleo yelled. “Do it, goddammit!” Gabi would have laughed if she could have. Cleo’s hand was still sealing off her mouth and pinching her nose so hard it hurt. It wouldn’t be long now, but the void was changing even as Gabi reached toward Gram’s scent. In a quicksilver shift, the blackness wasn’t welcoming Gabi in but pushing her out. Things were rushing toward her, colors and the smell of blood and the music of the silvery stream nearby that had tried to take her away. The blurry blob of Cleo’s head resolved into its regal shape. Gabi’s legs prickled back to life, kicking out for the ground.
The pressure that had built in her skull under Cleo’s relentless grip drained down Gabi’s spine and crackled along her nerve endings, painful at first, but then, oh then… ecstasy. Cleo’s face was close to hers.
“Feel that,” Cleo said as Gabi tried unsuccessfully to free her face of the woman’s hand. It wasn’t a question. It was a command. And suddenly, Gabi did feel something. No. She felt everything. Breath. Oxygen, beating through her like a stormy surf, all the way down to the shriveled depths of her lower lungs as it resurrected the starved tissue. For the very first time, air blasted through the brick wall midway down Gabi’s lungs and she was fully, finally breathing.
“DAD?” GABI whispered. Sam looked wretched. They were feeding him, and he had access to the exercise yard as well as a daily shower and shave, but he looked spectral. The orange jumpsuit, a relic of the old penal system, hung on him like a discarded wrapper, his cheeks lined and sunken. Gabi’s first sight of him nearly undid her, despite her new, heady strength.
“Gabriela?” Gratitude, joy, and guilt played across Sam’s features, though Gabi couldn’t see his eyes clearly behind the clouded panes of his glasses. Mathew had refused to come, preferring to join Cleo Walker’s task force in organizing the Liberation gathering later that day. He wasn’t yet ready to face his fallen hero. The guard assigned to watch Sam told Gabi he had no interaction with the other detainees, even at mealtimes or in the exercise yard. His fellow executive councilmembers and the advance teams awaiting trial didn’t trust him and blamed him for their downfall. Even facing life sentences, many of them remained loyal to Nystrom and the few other councilmembers who’d managed to escape Alder before the FCC troops moved in. Over a quarter of the Unitas population had followed the fugitives to a stronghold in the Southwest, disbelieving all evidence of the council’s corruption. To their loyal followers, Nystrom and his cronies were holy men, mustering for a holy war.
Gabi knew a day would soon come when she and everyone on the continent would have to face this threat. Attacks had already begun as sleeper cells managed to infiltrate FCC-held areas and turn themselves into human bombs. But for today, it was enough for Gabi to know that Sam was ignorant about the horrors on D Wing. He’d found out that the empty wards were in use during one of his visits to the ninth floor, and so Messenger Nystrom was obliged to give him a limited tour on the day Gabi had seen them there. Rehab for the Lilim, Nystrom told Sam—top secret so as not to incite a panic among the fellows. Still, as one of the most prominent councilmembers, Sam was an accessory to crimes against humanity.
And he knew about me, Gabi reminded herself as she faced him across the table in the visitors’ room. He knew the whole time.
“Honey.” Sam reached out his hand, but she couldn’t bring herself to take it. He withdrew with a sigh. “I’m so glad you came.”
“I wanted to. I—” Gabi stumbled over her planned speech, which was compassionate but firm. It was time for him to tell her the whole truth. But more than anything, Gabi realized, as she looked across the table at the man who’d raised her with such love and kindness, she wanted to forgive him. She needed to, for both their sakes. “Just tell me,” she said. The plea was all she could manage as she reached out and pulled the glasses from Sam’s face, cleaning them on the hem of her shirt. She needed to see his eyes when he told her.
Sam nodded wearily and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Where should I start?”
“Cleo told me about my real mom and her plan to give birth to a child with certain traits that would prove that humans evolved from nonhuman ancestors, and the whole Adam-and-Eve thing was a myth. She said someone in the FCC leaked the experiment to Messenger Nystrom, and that Unitas planned to kill us both. That’s why my mother wanted Cleo to take her to Alder. She didn’t think the FCC could protect her from Unitas, so she decided I would be safest if someone in the fellowship took me in. She didn’t know for sure if I would be born any different than anybody else, but she knew that Nystrom would come after us either way. She was a threat for even trying to discredit the doctrine.”
“I swear to you that I didn’t know about any of that, Gabriela,” her father said, leaning toward her with an urgent expression on his face. “We thought Artis was just another one of the Returned. The nurses took you as soon as you were delivered, at her request. She knew it would be harder if she saw you. It was pure coincidence that Artis ended up in that room with Therese while Therese was recovering from her miscarriage. We’d had a lot of Returned that week, so they put Artis on a fellows’ floor when she came in. It didn’t take much to convince us. Therese was heartbroken, and it was a second chance. Cleo came and took Artis away, and that was that. We didn’t know anything about her or what she had planned, though the letter I found tucked into your blanket hinted that there was something bigger going on.”
“So you’re the one who found it?” Gabi asked, blinking away tears.
“Therese was sleeping when they brought you in, so I saw the letter first. I couldn’t understand why Artis left it. She was so insistent that you never find out you were adopted, but I guess she hoped that someday it might be safe for you to know about her. Your gram was caring for Mathew while we were at the Care Center. When we came home with you, I gave the note to her for safekeeping. She wasn’t living with us then, so I thought it would be safely out of reach. I wasn’t thinking that clearly, to be honest. We were just struggling to figure out what to do about everything.”
“You mean me,” Gabi said with a note of accusation.
Sam flushed but kept going. “Dr. Tanako hadn’t seen anything like you before, honey. He assumed your mother was exposed to nuclear radiation during one of the meltdowns, and that’s why you were like that.”
“Are,” Gabi corrected, raising her chin defiantly to expose Cleo’s cuts, which had healed around the edges but remained open and pulsing.
Sam winced. “Right, of course. How you are. I never wanted—”
Gabi shook her head. “Just keep going.”
“We didn’t know what to do, so I called Ben Nystrom on the second day, before they let us take you home. He was the one who suggested that we find a way to keep your condition quiet. He said you could never hope to have a normal life as long as others saw you as defective. Therese and I were scared. We wanted what was best for you. We took you home and started brainstorming ways to hide your… your—”
“They’re called mammalian pharyngeal pouches, Dad. They work like fish gills. You had them too, did you know that? When you were an embryo. Everybody does at that stage, and vomeronasal organs up in their noses too, only mine got stronger instead of going away. It’s why I’ve always been so sensitive. I can smell the detergent on the guard’s uniform on the other side of that door and the tea you had this morning before you brushed your teeth. I can even smell how enraged the other councilmembers are at being locked up. It’s like burned hair. They literally stink.”
“Gabr
iela, I have never been ashamed of you,” Sam insisted. “That’s not what it was about.”
“Then what was it about?” Gabi exploded, knocking her chair over as she rose. “Because it sure seems like I’ve been your dirty little secret all these years!”
“You’d only been home with us a couple of weeks when Therese was murdered,” Sam explained. “I… we….”
Gabi slammed her hands on the table, causing Sam to jump. With her new vitality came a quick temper she was still trying to master, along with dozens of other new feelings that kept her on her toes.
“What do you mean ‘murdered’? You always told me it was an accident.”
The lines around Sam’s mouth deepened. “Therese’s death wasn’t an accident, honey.”
“What? You mean you lied about that too?”
“It was a car accident, but it wasn’t weather-related. She was hit by another car while she was bringing you back from an appointment at the Care Center. Ben told me there was evidence that the crash was Tribal retribution for us having adopted you as one of our own. He said they wanted you back but fled the scene because they heard sirens before they could extract you from the car. He said the Tribes would do anything to take you from us. From me. That’s why I agreed to put you on the medication, Gabriela. Nystrom set the scientists to work on it as soon as he realized you were Artis’s child and that we were determined to keep you. He told me the pills would suppress your birth defects—” Gabi opened her mouth to object, but Sam continued.
“That’s what we thought they were, honey. And the pills worked. You were a little weaker, but your, um, pouches closed up quickly. We didn’t know about the other thing, the vomi… vemer….”
“Vomeronasal organ,” Gabi supplied tersely.
“Right, we didn’t know about that, but I’m guessing it was affected too. It wasn’t until Cleo brought you back and the FCC troops moved in that I found out Nystrom had been the one who orchestrated the crash. He wanted you dead so you would never be a threat to Unitas. I had no idea.” Sam’s face crumpled for an instant before he regained his composure and went on. “Ben was like a father figure to me—overbearing at times but always there, especially after Therese died. When I think of how he deceived me all those years….”
“Did you know they were using me?” Gabi asked quietly, the fight gone out of her as she realized Sam was telling the truth. “Did you know that every time you brought me in for a checkup or an oxygen treatment that they were drawing my blood for DNA samples to use as models for their cannibalism experiment?”
“No. Oh God, no.” Sam disintegrated, burying his face in his hands and sobbing into them. Instinctively Gabi rushed around the table to lay her hand on his heaving back.
“Shhh, Dad, shhh. I believe you, okay? It’s okay.”
After a few minutes, Sam raised his head, wiping his face on the long sleeve of his jumpsuit, but he wouldn’t look at her. He just stared brokenly across the table where she had been a moment ago.
“I deserve whatever the FCC throws at me. I knew that FCC communities were being reestablished along the coasts, but I believed in the vision of Unitas, of bringing people together in a way that would end all wars rather than making the same mistakes of the past. And it did, didn’t it? For a time?” Sam turned to Gabi with a childlike expression that melted the last of her defenses.
“But people died, Dad,” she said gently. “The advance teams were violent, and a lot of people didn’t come willingly. They were coerced by fear and starvation and lies.”
“If I had known,” Sam said, laying his hand on top of hers, “I never would have gone along. The only reason I was voted onto the council in the first place was because Ben wanted to keep an eye on you. He never thought people would respond to me the way they did. It surprised me too.”
The security guard poked his head inside the door, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry, Brother Lowell, but visitation is over. I’ll have to escort the young lady out. I’ll give you a few minutes to say goodbye.” He closed the door again, and to her astonishment, Gabi began to cry. Not silent, dignified tears, but the panicked, sloppy tears that she had cried when her father dropped her off for her first day of school. She’d clung to Sam’s trouser leg when he set her down in the classroom, wrapping her thin arms around his knee and soaking his pants with tears and snot. As he had then, Sam drew her close, palming her curly head. “Honey, it’s going to be fine, I promise.”
Gabi raised her mottled face to his. “Cleo said you can request that your trial be moved to FCC headquarters in the Pacific Northwest since the jury here would be biased. Put in the request, Dad, please. I’m going out there, and so is Mathew. If you’re tried at headquarters, you’ll serve your sentence there, and we can visit you. Mathew wants to go to a training academy out there so he can work with Cleo and her taskforce, and the FCC scientists want me to help them with some studies. Turns out, there are other people like me out there—people who are showing signs of physical adaptation to the effects of the Strain and climate.”
“They’re going to study you?” Sam asked incredulously. “Like you’re some sort of—”
“No,” Gabi interrupted. “I’m going to work with them, and in exchange they’re going to pay for me to study marine biology at a university. Whales, Dad.” The two smiled at each other, and Gabi’s love for her father came surging back. He had lied to her, yes, but that didn’t change the fact he had done it to protect her. “Whales aren’t actually extinct, did you know that?” Gabi continued, her eyes alight. “They’re still out there! The oceans are pretty wrecked, but marine life is adapting too. Whale fins and flippers are starting to split. It’s like the whales are trying to go back to having fingers and toes because it’s less toxic on land right now.”
Sam shook his head. He was still adjusting to a world in which the doctrine wasn’t the ultimate truth. His beliefs had been the foundation of his existence, and he was a long way from relinquishing them.
When the guard came to lead Gabi away, she went without complaint after extracting a promise from her father to demand a trial at FCC headquarters. She had the biggest day of her life to prepare for, and now she could do it with an unburdened heart.
GABI HAD never seen so many people in one place. Fellows from all over were crammed into the central plaza, filling up the surrounding parking lots and filling every temple complex building. The small stage was shaded by an awning, but those not watching on indoor screens overflowed the unsheltered plaza. Though their entire framework for life had been shattered, the FCC assured the fellows that they would be free to practice their religion in whatever way they saw fit, as long as doing so did not infringe upon the rights of others. Unitas as a governing body, however, would cease to exist. There’d been no outright protests apart from the fellows who’d followed Nystrom and his associates to the Southwest, but the mood in Alder was deeply unsettled. Cleo Walker’s miraculous return, the exploded myth of the Tribes and Lilim, and Marcus Ingles’s testimonial had gone a long way toward helping people understand what it was they were being liberated from, but the plaza still buzzed with tension. More FCC troops were on their way to establish an interim government during the transition, and life would never be the same. The FCC felt that bringing everyone together for an official declaration of liberation would help mark the new beginning.
Way before she had reconciled herself to stepping up to the podium in front of hundreds of thousands of people, it was Gabi’s turn to speak. She rose from her chair on strong legs, terrified but not betraying so much as a tremble. She had to suppress the urge to use her new strength to bound off the stage and cower underneath it until everyone went away. Every color, sound, and smell blared at her with overripe intensity. Gabi’s appetite grew more voracious every day, and her body still felt like it was a fancy suit that someone might force her to relinquish at any moment.
Mathew and Marnie grinned at Gabi from just beyond the apron of the stage, where they stood beside Jordan and
his family. Jordan’s sister, who had thrown herself—black face paint and all—over Jordan when the first shot was fired in the clearing, stood by their parents on one side, while Jordan loomed on the other. He, Gabi, and Marnie had been spending a lot of time together since their return from the mountains, when he and his sister weren’t helping his parents strategize about what to do next. Spruce was their home but was ravaged and full of nightmares now. Since Jordan’s sister had been assigned as an FCC officer for the Pacific Northwest region, going there seemed a good option, and one Gabi and Marnie unashamedly lobbied for.
Marnie had moved into the Lowell house in Alder, making her own plans for joining Mathew at the training center in the Pacific Northwest. With the yoke of Unitas off her shoulders, Marnie was free to do as she pleased, and what pleased her, as it turned out, was becoming the next Cleo Walker. Moments before mounting the stage, Marnie had pulled Gabi aside for a pep talk worthy of an Apostle General.
“You’ve got this, Lowell,” she’d said, grasping Gabi around the arms and giving her a little shake. “You’re a freaking superhero, and no matter what happens up on that stage, you win, got it? You already saved my ass and everyone else’s, so don’t you dare forget it.” Gabi had been taken aback by the vehemence of Marnie’s heartfelt words, but they also gave her the courage to place her hands on her friend’s cheeks, look deeply into her Cleopatra eyes, and kiss her soundly on the mouth with all the confused joy and delicious longing Gabi felt when they were together. She had left Marnie standing at the foot of the risers leading up to the stage, eyes wide and a slow smile of wonder dawning on her face.
Gabi approached the podium, hot air scorching the skin on her legs as it blasted across the plaza. Her hair, which had grown longer but no less unruly with her improved health, spilled over the light cotton scarf twined around her neck and tickled arms burnished to bronze by the sun during her daily runs with Marnie. Gabi had no cards to read from, though a book was cradled in the crook of her arm. The crowd quieted as she reached out to adjust the microphone, and feedback squealed from the speakers. Gabi opened the book, found her place, and cleared her throat.
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