Reaching into the enclosure to pick up a dead locust, I burst out of the locust lab, babbling about the experiment’s success. Torina gives me an astonished look and motions for me to calm down. “Slowly,” she directs. “Coherently.”
I hear echoes of Dr. Ronan in her request and take a deep breath. Succinctly and coherently, but with increasing speed, I tell her. I display the dead locust on my palm.
Her first reaction is disbelief. “Are you sure? One dead locust isn’t proof of concept.”
I drag her into the locust lab and let her examine the evidence for herself. Her skepticism turns to amazement. “Ealy, you did it.”
“We did it. I built on the work you’d already done, and some ideas I’d discussed with Dr. Ronan at the Kube, and it was Dr. Allaway in Australia who pointed me in the right direction, finally. We all did it.”
“You realize Dr. Usher will say he did it?” Torina says dryly.
I shrug. “Let him. I don’t care.”
She eyes me curiously. “You’re an odd one, you know that?”
“Why? Because I don’t care who gets the credit?” I laugh. “We’re on the verge of being locust-free . . . Do you realize what that means? We can farm outside again, without domes. We can hugely—vastly—increase the acreage being cultivated. We can feed everyone, Torina! Everyone. Better yet, people can feed themselves. We can try new crops and return to raising livestock. We can—” The amazing implications are too much for me and I stutter to silence.
“We can celebrate,” Torina says with a jubilant smile, finally catching my mood.
Before I can stop her, she’s bustling out of the lab. I’m not sure where she’s going, but she returns fifteen minutes later, trailed by half the scientists and technicians on our floor. They’re chattering and smiling and carrying cups and beakers filled with beverages. Torina lifts a flask of Wexl, pours some into a beaker, and hands it to me. I take it cautiously, overwhelmed by the attention, and want to sink into the floor when they begin to cheer, “Hip, hip, hooray!”
For an hour, we relax and celebrate and I explain my methodology roughly twenty-eight times to the interested scientists and technicians. We all conjecture about the changes in store for the country once the last locusts die off. One woman wants to plant pansies in a window box, a young technician gets excited about repopulating bees from captive-bred stock and keeping a hive to harvest honey, and a meteorologist wonders what the re-growth of trees will do to the weather patterns.
“This’ll undermine the Prags, won’t it?” one scientist observes, pulling at the ends of his mustache. “We won’t need ’em anymore. Won’t need ’em to grow our food, or run procreation programs. It’s revolutionary.”
He speaks quietly, speculatively, but his words fall into one of those lulls that sometimes happen in group conversations. A sense of unease filters through the room, like a bad smell. I don’t understand the reaction; we’ll still need a government, after all. No one is talking about overthrowing the Prags. Conversation resumes, but people begin to drift away in ones and twos. Soon, Torina and I are the only ones left and she tells me to prepare a presentation for the Premier and her staff.
“You’ll be briefing them tomorrow at nine o’clock,” she says triumphantly. “Too bad Dr. Usher is out of town.” Her sly look says she deliberately set up the briefing while Keegan is still gone so he can’t be involved. I demur about the timing, not wanting to heap logs onto the pyre of Keegan’s hatred, but she counters with, “We can’t delay in informing the Premier. She can’t hear about it through back-channel chit-chat. This is the most important scientific breakthrough of the decade; hell, it’s one of the century’s top ten discoveries. Dr. Usher left me in charge—this is on me, not you, Ealy.”
I understand her logic, and I hope Keegan sees it the same way. Somehow, I doubt he will.
I arrive at my billet several hours later, tired and hungry, to find Saben and Marizat chatting in the lobby. He’s back! I feel lighter, less tired, and immeasurably happier at the sight of him. My smile reveals my feelings, I’m sure, judging by Marizat’s “oh-hoh” expression. Saben’s looking tired, but his smile takes away some of his weariness and he leans down to kiss my cheek.
“You’re back,” I say unnecessarily. “How was your trip?”
“I missed you.” His gold eyes smile into mine, but there’s warning in them. “I came by hoping you might want to have dinner with me.”
“Don’t mind me,” Marizat says. “I’ll eat by my lonely self.”
She’s only teasing and I wave goodbye as she enters the elevator. “I’m not much of a cook,” I warn Saben.
“We’re going out,” he says, and I sense something behind the words.
With a slight frown, I nod, tell him I need to change and will be back in five minutes, and take the stairs two at a time. Splashing water on my face and brushing my hair, I notice my eyes seem bluer, the charcoal ring around them more pronounced. I take my last two eye color changing tablets and wonder how I’ll get more. Can I risk going to the warehouse by the train station where I met Griselda? She had stocks of the pills. I brush my teeth quickly and rejoin Saben.
“Where to?” I ask. “I’m starving.”
“The baseball stadium. I brought a picnic. We need to be private.”
Again, I sense an undertone that suggests more than wanting to be alone with me for romantic reasons. He shoulders a long duffel cinched at the neck I hadn’t noticed before, takes my hand, and leads me outside again. It’s downright cool this evening now that we’re into November, but the chill refreshes me. Since Saben doesn’t seem to want to talk about his trip yet, I tell him about my breakthrough, everyone’s congratulations, and tomorrow’s presentation for the Premier.
“That’s fantastic,” he says, his face lighting up. “I knew you’d do it. How long until all the locusts are gone?”
I take him through the science and the difficulties that still remain, until we arrive at the stadium fence. The sight of it seems to bring whatever’s on Saben’s mind to the forefront again and he goes silent as he opens the locks and we walk through the tunnel.
We exit the tunnel and face the empty field. “Maybe there’ll be baseball again,” he says, “once the locusts are gone and grass can grow. We might have time for having fun, playing games.”
It’s interesting to me how the destruction of the locusts means different things to different people. Everyone is excited about the prospect of more food, more easily grown, but beyond that, people’s hopes are different: flowers, honey, governmental changes, baseball. Maybe those wishes aren’t so different, after all, I think, climbing the steep steps beside Saben. They’re all about hope, after all, about hope that things will be more beautiful, easier, different.
We settle into the same seats we occupied before and Saben digs through his duffel and comes up with IPF-issue compressed food pods, water bladders, and a bunch of carrots, greens still attached. “Not gourmet,” he apologizes.
“That’s okay.” I bite the end off a carrot, starving, and relish the crisp sweetness. “What happened on the trip?” I ask after I’ve swallowed. “Something did. I can tell you’re upset or worried.”
He surprises me with a kiss. “I missed you. I mean, I really missed you.” He kisses me again and suddenly I’m not so hungry.
When we come up for air, I say, “I missed you, too, but there’s more, isn’t there?”
He nods, looking out over the field, and says, “I’m not sure I should tell you. It might put you in danger.”
I give him an astonished look and burst out laughing. “Right. Because I’m not in any danger now.” I stretch a lock of my dyed hair to the side. “I’m a convicted murderer living under a fake identity and working under the nose of the government that sentenced me to death. No danger in that, nosiree.”
He smiles ruefully. “You’ve got a point. Okay. This wasn’t a normal mission. I’ve pulled prisoner escort duty before, but this wasn’t like that. For one thing,
it was all very hush-hush. We had no official orders, nothing on record. My commander gave me and one other guy the assignment verbally and told us we couldn’t tell anyone where we were going or what we were doing. Said we’d be charged with treason if we talked.
“We traveled at night. First, we stopped at three different detention centers—the one you were at and a couple not far outside the city—and picked up prisoners at each one. We ended up with seventeen, fourteen men and three women. Then, we proceeded to our destination. At first, I thought our navigation systems were busted, because there was nothing there, nothing but an electrified fence, tall enough you wouldn’t want to tackle it without rappelling gear.”
I give him a skeptical look and he amends, “Well, practically. The place felt creepy. We were out in the middle of nowhere with no one around for miles, it felt like. Guards popped up as soon as we approached the gate and offloaded the prisoners. I asked where they were going to house them, and basically got told it was none of my business. One of them winked at me, though, and pointed down.
“‘Hell?’ I asked, just being a smart-ass. ‘Might as well be,’ he said. It took me a bit to figure out that he meant the prisoners would be living underground.”
A violent shiver shakes me and I drop the carrot. Saben bends to pick it up, giving me a concerned look. “You all right?”
“Were there biohazard signs posted on the fence or anywhere?”
Saben squinches his eyes, thinking. “Yes,” he says. “How did you know?”
I flash back to the underground laboratory Halla and Wyck and I stumbled on during our journey to Atlanta. I see Anton, scratching at the boils erupting all over his body, and his crazed wife Alaura, ready to incinerate me and Wyck. They were both victims, in different ways, of vaccine research experiments gone horribly awry. “Where was this site?” I ask. “Southeast of here?”
“No, due north.”
Not the same facility, then. Another one. The implications make my chest ache with the effort of breathing. The government—it has to be the government if IPF soldiers like Saben are involved, doesn’t it?—is using prisoners as research guinea pigs again. Or maybe they never stopped. I feel sick. Leaping up, I run down two rows and throw up. I swipe the back of my hand across my mouth and stay bent over, hands on my knees. Tremors shake my limbs.
Saben puts a hand on my back. “What’s wrong? What is it? Are you ill?”
“The facility,” I say, straightening. “I know what it’s for.”
We climb back up to our seats and I tell him about stumbling across the abandoned underground laboratory hidden out in the woods. “We met a former lab technician who said the site had been used for vaccine research that didn’t pan out, and that all the test subjects were criminals. When the government decided to close the site, they euthanized all the subjects—victims. Incinerated them.” I can still feel the metal rivets digging into my back where I had pressed hard against the vent, desperate to climb to the surface before Anton and Alaura fired up the incinerator. I wiggle my shoulder blades to dispel the feeling.
Saben’s jaw drops. “You think I delivered the prisoners to a lab where they’re going to be experimented on? Like rats? Didn’t the Nazis do something like that during World War I?”
“Two,” I correct his history. “Yes, they did. And they incinerated people.” My mind plays back stuttering images in black and white from the reels the history proctor showed us.
Saben is silent for a moment. Then he says, “That’s not the worst part.”
I look at him apprehensively.
“I knew one of the prisoners. You knew her, too.”
“Who?” I ask, my mind going immediately to Fiere. But she is safe with the Defiance, isn’t she?
“Kareen. Remember?”
I gasp. How could I forget? She was a Bulrush spy married to a government minister who discovered her activities and planned to kill her. Helping her escape the Atlanta area was my first mission for Bulrush. I killed a man. Unbidden, the sound of my knife tearing his windpipe comes back to me. “Did she say anything?”
Shaking his head, Saben says, “We didn’t get a chance to talk except once, briefly. She asked me to let her children know she loved them. I promised.”
“She knows she’s not coming out of there alive,” I whisper. I try not to think about the types of experiments she might be subject to, or visualize her leaving the facility as a wisp of smoke rising from the incinerator vent. She was a brave woman, and a kind one. “How will you get in touch with her children?” It never crosses my mind that Saben won’t fulfill his pledge.
“Minister O’Connell’s still the head of the Ministry of Defense—the IPF falls under him, so I do, too—and he lives not far from the capitol. I’m sure I can find an opportunity to talk to the kids.”
“They already think she’s dead,” I remind him. After Kareen’s disappearance, her husband put it about that she was murdered so he wouldn’t have to admit his wife was a spy who had deserted him.
“I’ll think of something.”
We sit in silence for long moments, Saben’s arm draped over my shoulder, holding me close to his side. Despite the depressing news he brought and the horrifying implications, I feel safe and loved. As if he hears my thoughts, he tightens his arm around me.
He speaks, his voice low and tortured. “I delivered those people to—”
Putting a finger to his lips, I say. “Ssh. It’s not your fault. You didn’t know.”
“We have to do something.”
The resolve in his voice breaks something in me. He’s a good man, a truly good man who doesn’t for one minute think about hiding behind the idea that he was only obeying orders. “I love you.”
He looks into my face, his gold eyes alight, and says, “You do?”
“Yep.” A bubble of happiness rises in me. I love Saben.
His lips graze mine and he whispers against them, “That’s convenient, because I love you and I’m planning to spend the rest of my life showing you how much.”
We kiss for a long time before remembering to eat our picnic. By unspoken agreement, we don’t talk about Kareen or the fate of the other prisoners. There’ll be time for that later. I’m kind of hoping we’ll go back to kissing when we finish eating, but Saben grabs my hand and pulls me up. Opening the neck of his duffle, he shows me a baseball bat. “I’m going to teach you how to hit a baseball,” he says.
He starts down the steps, taking them two at a time, and I follow, laughing and out of breath.
“It’s dark,” I protest when we hit the field. It’s not the dead of night, but the sun has set and the sky is slipping past ash gray to light navy and is quickly closing in on gunmetal.
“We can’t risk the lights, so . . .” Saben pulls a baseball coated with a biolume gel from the bag. “Ta-da.”
I laugh, and acquiesce to his madness.
“You stand here,” he says, “at home plate.” He positions me. “Those”—he points toward slight depressions that mark out the points of a diamond on dirt lanes—“are first base, second base and third base. There’s no actual bases anymore, so just pretend.”
“Okay.”
He hefts the bat and demonstrates how to place my hands. Then he takes a cut at an imaginary ball. “Watch how my hips swivel and the way my hands follow through.”
“Always happy to watch your hips,” I murmur.
“You’re not taking this seriously.”
“Sorry.” I prim my lips to keep the laughter from escaping.
He wraps my fingers around the bat and helps me position the bat above my right shoulder. Walking out to what he calls the pitcher’s mound, he says, “Keep your eye on the ball. Ready?”
I nod and he lofts the ball in an underhand motion. I can follow the glowing sphere easily as it arcs toward me. I swing hard and miss. The bat’s momentum carries me around in a half-circle.
“You swung late,” Saben says as I retrieve the ball and hurl it toward him. It drops seve
ral feet in front of him and he stoops to scoop it up. “Anticipate where the ball is going to be.”
Right. Rolling my eyes, I resume my position, “choking up” on the bat when directed, and swing ineffectively at several more pitches. Finally, when it’s full dark and I’m about to announce I’m hopeless and quit, the bat nicks the ball and it dribbles toward Saben.
“Run to first, run to first,” he calls, lunging for the ball.
I sprint toward first base and he chases me, holding the ball at arm’s length. I’m surprised by how good running for fun feels, the contraction and release in my muscles, the way my lungs labor. I stop where the base used to be and Saben plows into me, his arms going around me to hold us up.
“Safe! We’ll make a baseball player out of you yet,” he says, kissing my sweaty neck. The way he says it makes me think it’s what his father used to say to him, and I think that he’ll be a good father some day. I hug him tightly.
On our way back to my billet half an hour later, I think we’re probably the only two people in the whole country who discussed secret government labs and played baseball tonight. I drift off to sleep thinking of Saben, and my dreams are happy for the first time in ages.
Chapter Twenty Six
The next morning, I’m so nervous before my presentation to the Premier that I’m afraid damp patches will show under my arms.
“Relax,” Torina says, sensing my nerves. “You’re a messenger with good news—no one’s going to shoot you.”
She walks beside me as we hurry through the elevated tunnel that connects the MSFP with the Capitol and approach the Premier’s conference room. The soldiers on either side of the door perform rapid DNA tests to confirm our identity before letting us in. I halt on the threshold, dismayed by the sight of the oval table with the Premier facing me and the ministers arrayed around it, nameplates illuminated in front of them. Minister Alden sits to the Premier’s left and Minister Fonner, looking as praying mantis-ish and inscrutable as ever, on her right. I suspect their proximity to the Premier bodes well for the chances of one of them succeeding her.
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