When Mason’s task shift ended for the day, he went into Cibelo and to a G.I.N. store there. He’d been tasking only six full days now, so he didn’t have many credits to spend. But he didn’t need much. Just enough to test the theory for Lonn.
Smoking was illegal in the Safe Lands, but he did find a small box of matches on the cooking aisle next to the birthday candles. He recalled an Old book of children’s experiments that Papa Eli had given him for Christmas one year. Mason had done them all many times. He felt fairly confident that he could find what he needed. He bought the box of matches, a box of the birthday candles, a box of bendable drinking straws, a roll of tape, and a package of dental floss. It all came to eight credits, nearly a full day’s task credits. He sighed, hoping this wouldn’t be a waste of time.
As he paid, he asked the clerk for a few extra plastic bags. The clerk was more than generous, shoving a handful into the one holding Mason’s purchase.
Mason carried it all to the Get Out Now Diner. The place was empty for the moment, so he sat at the table in the back and ordered a salad, which would likely be put on Lonn’s tab. Mason wasn’t sure how Lonn paid for all the meals here. Maybe the cooks were rebels too.
While he waited for his salad, he started his balloon. He took five straws, pinching one end of each and tucking it into the open end of another, then bending the straws until he had a misshapen ring. He then ripped off four foot-long strips of dental floss, tying one end of each evenly spaced around the straw ring. Next he taped the ring around the opening of one of the plastic bags, pleating the excess bag here and there, careful to leave no holes.
His salad arrived then, so he took a break and ate. When he was done, he tore apart the box that held the birthday candles until he’d removed the back. He used a tine of his fork to poke a hole in each corner. Then he tied the other end of each piece of dental floss around each hole.
He’d just completed that step when Lonn and his mother arrived.
“What are you doing?” Mother asked.
“An experiment.” Mason looked to Lonn. “Do you think the cook would mind if I lit a few birthday candles?”
“No. What kind of experiment is this?”
“You’ll see.” Mason used his fork to poke four closely spaced holes in the center of the cardboard. He pushed a birthday candle through each until they were about halfway through. Then Mason slid out of the booth, pulling his “balloon” with him. “Will you help me, Mother?”
Lonn got up so that Mother could get out.
“What am I doing?” she asked.
“Hold the top of the bag, please, while I light these candles.” Mason pinched the top of the bag to show her what he wanted, and she took it from him. Then he grabbed the matches from the table and squatted under the bag. By then, the waitress and chef had come out around the counter to watch.
Mason put his hands near the candles and struck a match. He had two candles lit before the match burned too close to his fingers, forcing him to drop it on the floor. He lit a second match and lit the other two candles. “Okay, give it a moment,” he said, taking the bag from his mother.
He let go of it and it sank, so he grabbed it again and waited longer. He continued to release and catch the bag until it hovered in place. He stepped back and watched as it slowly rose into the air and finally bumped against the ceiling.
The waitress and cook cheered and clapped for the balloon. Mason grinned at them.
“It flies,” the waitress said.
“You wanted to show this to me?” Lonn asked. “Omar’s balloon?”
Mason sat down across from Lonn and leaned over the table. “What if we could build one big enough to lift a man? Carry him over the wall where he could get a message to the rebels in the Midlands?”
Lonn didn’t look convinced. “How big would it have to be to lift a man? And how would you get the controlled flames big enough?”
“I don’t know yet,” Mason said. “But I think it’s possible.”
“I can see that it might be possible.” Lonn gestured to the balloon, which was already starting to sink. Mason saw the bag had shriveled, meaning the flames had gotten too hot. “But I think it’s unlikely to work. Might be just as likely to kill the man inside as lift him.”
Mason pursed his lips, then got up and blew out the candles on his balloon. He wanted to say that he felt Lonn’s plan to sneak a man through the turnstile was also unlikely to work, but there was no point in that. Lonn would do what he would do. And so would Mason.
“You have no objections to me trying, do you?” Mason asked.
“Of course not. Just don’t get caught.”
Mason grinned. The game was on. He wadded up the remains of his balloon and put them in the trash, then came back and sat across from his mother and Lonn. As he watched the two interact, he realized he still knew very little about his guardian angel — and possible stepfather. “Why did you get fired from the MC?” he asked Lonn. “What were you researching?”
Lonn’s eyes bored into his. “What makes you think I was researching anything? Or that I got fired?”
“I read your bio in the History Department. They didn’t say you were fired, by the way. It says ‘forced retirement.’ ”
“Forced.” Lonn huffed a laugh. “It was indeed forced.”
“What happened?” Mason asked.
“I’d been doing experiments. And I hadn’t told anyone about them.”
“Not even Lawten?”
“Not at first. It all started with Martana’s death in sixty-eight. She was hypoxic, and I felt like she wouldn’t have had an oxygen deficiency if she’d been healthy. The plague causes anemia, which decreases the amount of red blood cells in the body and therefore decreases the amount of oxygen in the blood. So I set out to find a way to increase red blood cells. I got nowhere for the first few years, and most my free time was spent with the growing rebellion anyway.
“But I got thinking one day about trying to filter blood. To create a sieve. We did that for dialysis patients, so why couldn’t we do something similar for the plague? I started talking with a man in technology design. I also brought in a biologist, and we used a dialysis machine as a prototype. Together, we found a way to filter the virus from the blood.”
“That’s amazing!” Mason said. “Why wouldn’t they want that?”
“Well, it didn’t work. I mean, it did, but the problem was that the blood is not the location of the infection. Blood carries the infection throughout the body. It’s a transmitter of the virus. But the replication of the virus happens in the lymph nodes and the spleen. So transfusion might have filtered the virus from the blood, but it didn’t stop the virus from entering the blood all over again.”
Oh. That made sense. Frustrating, though. “So what did you do?”
“I tried another theory. I tasked in the MC, and we occasionally worked with bioengineering on transplant patients. My first instinct was to grow new organs — a spleen, lymph nodes, intestines, whatever was needed — to flush out the plague. I hoped that the combination of new organs with filtered blood would provide the cure. We could rebuild the body, so to speak, replacing the infected areas one at a time.”
The very idea enthralled Mason. “How can you grow a new organ?”
Lonn smiled at his mother. “You ask the same questions Tamara asked. Another time on that one, okay? It’s a complicated procedure. If we ever get out of here, I’ll take you both over to bioengineering. You’ll love it.”
Mason already felt a tinge of excitement. “So, your plan didn’t work?”
“The virus is too complex. It latches on in so many places that what works for one person might not for another. And growing organs is time-consuming, and transplants are hard on patients. None of this was ideal. So I came up with yet another idea: Grow a womb.”
Mindboggling. “You can do that?”
“I didn’t see why not. Now, whether or not the womb could grow a child to term, well, it would have been an experiment
. I approached the bioengineering department about it, and it turned out they’d been trying to do this for a few years. They had successfully grown and implanted a womb for a woman who couldn’t conceive, but it did not keep the virus from the fetus. Learning this sent me back to the virus itself and the meds we were already using.”
“And you found out there was a stimulant in the meds?”
Lonn’s eyebrows sank. “No. What makes you ask that?”
“That’s kind of how I got here,” Mason said. “Ciddah learned that there was a stimulant in the meds, and she and I were testing my blood to find it.”
“Why your blood?”
“It was just a wild guess on my part. She told me she’d tested a variety of blood types, but it was all infected blood.”
“And if the meds catalyzed with the virus, it would be impossible to detect what was in the meds.”
“Exactly.”
“But they stopped you before you could do this test?”
“Almost. The enforcers came just as the blood meter was running the blood. I hid in the closet while Ciddah went out to talk with the enforcers. They took her away but didn’t find me. And when I came out, I checked for a result. The blood meter said Xiaodrine.”
Lonn wrinkled his nose. “Odd. Why put that in the meds?”
Lonn knew the med? Maybe Mason would finally get some answers. “What is it?”
“It’s an amphetamine designed to fight obesity. It speeds up the metabolism. The plague does slow the metabolism, but I’d think Xiaodrine would be a dangerous combination with the plague.”
“Why?”
“Xiaodrine is processed in the liver. It would interact with other medications and reduce the benefit of the antivirals in the meds. Plus, I’ve read studies from bioengineering that say dependency on amphetamines has a physiological impact on the immune system.”
“So why put Xiaodrine in the meds?” Mother asked.
“I don’t know. Whose meds were you testing?”
“Ciddah’s old prescription. Once she learned about the stims, she started compounding her own meds.”
“Clever girl.”
Mason thought so and couldn’t help smiling.
“It never occurred to me to ask to compound my own meds,” Lonn said. “I’m surprised they allowed it.”
“Why?” Mother asked.
“Because meds for the plague aren’t compounded in a regular Pharmco. They’re made in the compounding pharmacy located in the main lab. Every medic knows that. How would she have gotten the recipe?”
A connection clicked in Mason’s mind and his heart sank. “This was the Pharmco in City Hall. And Ciddah . . . she’s . . . she was together with Lawten Renzor.”
“Ahh . . . yes. Renzor’s girl. The plot thickens. That Pharmco . . . and the SC . . . things go on there that no one is supposed to talk about. Some do, of course, which only adds to the legends. If this Ciddah was one of Lawten’s femmes, he’d probably let her do whatever she wanted.”
“But she stole things from the Pharmco to compound meds for her parents, and then Otley came asking questions.”
“Well, sure. Otley’s been after Renzor’s job for a while now. He was just waiting to catch the man doing something wrong.”
Like letting his girlfriend take unauthorized meds.
“Well, the two of you got further than I did,” Lonn said. “I’d tried to take a closer look at the meds, but I didn’t have any reason to wonder what was in them so much as to wonder why every patient’s prescription was so different.”
“I don’t understand,” Mason said. “You don’t write the prescription? Aren’t you the medic?”
“You just asked one of the biggest questions every medic has, Mason. We write prescriptions for everything but meds for the thin plague.”
“Then would they have let you compound your own?”
“I wish I’d thought to try compounding my own. But, again, I don’t think I would have been allowed. I think that was a privilege granted to someone Renzor highly favored. A golden ticket of sorts.”
Wonderful. This conversation might be getting them somewhere in regard to the meds conspiracy, but it wasn’t giving Mason any confidence that Ciddah truly cared for him. “Fine. But you believed there was some difference to the recipe other than the volume of compounded suspension based on the patient’s weight?”
“It’s obviously more than simply consulting a dosing chart. Some of my patients had to vape meds three times a day. Some only once a week. And some patients were far healthier than others. I wanted to find out why.”
“But that wasn’t a safe question to ask,” Mason said.
“It was not. And I made the mistake of talking about it with Lawten one day. He brought it up too. Looking back, I know they put him up to it. They’d been watching me. I didn’t know either, fool that I was. And when Lawten and I had that long conversation about the meds, he recorded it. He took the recording to the Guild, and I was — how did you put it? — promoted to ‘forced retirement’ for task infraction.”
“What’s task infraction?” Mother asked.
“All taskers sign an oath when we graduate from our mentoring programs,” Lonn said. “We’re not to ask questions outside our task. We are not to meddle in another task area. And that’s what I’d been doing. I wasn’t tasked as a bioengineer or a technology designer, after all. I was fired. And Lawten got my job.”
“And a seat on the Safe Lands Guild,” Mason said.
They sat silently for a moment, until Lonn said, “We need to find a way to test more meds. A wider variety. See if they all contain Xiaodrine. See what else they contain. I wish we could talk with your Ciddah.”
Your Ciddah. A nice thought. He wondered if she was grieving him, believing him dead. Was she still with Levi and the others? “I wish we could visit the compounding lab.”
“You know, I’ve never been there. To the blood lab, either,” Lonn said. “I’m sure you know that medics take a blood draw of every patient at every visit.”
“Yes. Why?”
“Again, I don’t know. I always assumed they were monitoring the meds to make sure they’d prescribed the best dosage. But who’s to say that’s what they’re doing.”
That thought was a little scary. “What else could they be doing?”
Lonn chuckled. “Oh, Mason, it won’t do to have you trust our government so easily. The fact is, they could be doing anything.”
CHAPTER
12
Jemma woke in the Rehabilitation Center, inside the same cell she’d been in last time: cell 40, at the very end. She had a wall to her left, and the cells on her right and across the way were empty. Her nearest neighbor was four or five cells away. She didn’t bother trying to speak with him. She didn’t see Levi. She hoped he’d gotten away.
The first night in the RC, she’d wept. Why had Mia betrayed her in this way? It had been Mia’s choice to remain in the harem. Yet she had said such hateful things to Jemma after she’d stunned her. Mia blamed Jemma for something, though Jemma did not understand what it might be.
After she’d tired of her anger toward Mia, she’d remembered Levi’s instructions before leaving the basements that night. She was to pretend to betray the rebels. She was to give up the location of theater nine as a rebel meeting place. But not at first. Not until Zane had time to prepare it. She had to hold out for a few days, then she could pretend to switch sides in order to protect herself.
Protect her from what, though? They wouldn’t kill her. They’d put her back in the harem and make her pregnant.
Again she wondered why Mia had done this to her. For a reward, perhaps?
She’d spent the next day and night in the RC as well, and woke on the third day shortly before an enforcer came for her and transported her to the lobby, where Matron Dlorah was waiting with Ewan, one of the harem enforcers.
“Hello, Jemma. We have a meeting with the task director general,” Matron said. “We mustn’t be late.”
“What does he want?” Jemma asked.
Ewan held open the door and Matron waved for Jemma to exit first. “You’ll find out when he tells you,” she said.
A quick ride in a black car brought them to City Hall. The task director general’s office was on the top floor of the building. An elevator took them there far too quickly.
Jemma had never been in the task director’s office. It had the same opulence of the harem, though the colors here were black and red with dark hardwood floors. Three of the four walls were made of floor-toceiling windows that offered a splendid view of the city and surrounding area. And as her gaze fell to the fourth wall and the man sitting between it and a large desk, she almost felt as if she were standing in a throne room.
Jemma had seen Lawten Renzor before, in Champion Theater right before the entertainment orientation. He looked older now, though he wasn’t wearing makeup like he had been the night he’d been on the ColorCast. He was a hunched man with flaking skin and a large nose that claimed most of his face. The size of his nose made his dark eyes seem smaller and more intense. A pale number nine glowed on his cheek.
Kruse, whom she remembered was the personal assistant to the ruler of the Safe Lands, stood next to the task director general’s desk. He was bald with smooth pinkish skin and a funny black SimArt tattoo that looked like a hand slapping the side of his head.
“Ms. Levi, welcome,” Kruse said in a happy voice. “Please have a seat.” He gestured to a chair in front of the task director’s desk. “Matron Dlorah, would you mind waiting outside?”
Matron shot Kruse an indignant glare. “Ms. Levi is my charge. What concerns her, concerns my harem.”
“If there is something you need know, Matron, I will inform you,” the task director said. Where Kruse’s voice was pleasant, the task director’s was grating and deep.
Jemma shivered at the looks Matron and the task director exchanged, but Matron turned to leave the room without saying another word.
“Ms. Levi, you and your rebel outsider friends have deprived our nation of nine surrogates,” the task director said.
“Ten,” Jemma said, lifting her chin. She must stay confident and proud. This nation had no right to imprison people.
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