Origin

by Jessica Khoury

  Uncle Jakob shakes the water from his lab coat. “Gonna be a nasty one, sounds like.” He gives me a curious look. “You all right?”

  “Who, me?” I ask, a bit too shrill.

  “I thought you’d be more excited.”

  Excited. The thing is, a week ago he would have been right. “I’m just…” My voice betrays me again.

  “I know.” He nods. “It’s too much for words.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” I’m relieved when he starts down the hall, apparently satisfied that I’m about to burst with excitement. In truth, I am overwhelmed with apprehension. It’s growing in my stomach like bacteria in a petri dish.

  I hold my breath as Uncle Jakob opens the door to my own lab.

  Inside is the rest of the Immortis team. They are serious and drawn, and my heart falls a little. They don’t look like people excitedly anticipating the task at hand. They look as cold and expressionless as slabs of concrete.

  I can’t help but notice the polished syringe lying on the table next to Uncle Paolo, who turns and greets me with a slow nod. Mother helps me put on my lab coat, with my name newly stitched onto the breast. She squeezes my shoulder and then pats it encouragingly.

  Uncle Paolo’s earlier energy is muted now, but I can still see it tugging at his face. “Pia, it’s almost time.”

  I nod slowly, then notice that the back corner of the room is curtained off.

  “I’m going to let you prepare the Immortis,” says Uncle Paolo.

  My heart, which has been sinking ever since I entered the room, suddenly climbs up into my throat like a panicked monkey searching for a way out. “What do I do?” I whisper.

  He hands me the syringe, then tells me to sit down. Numbly I sit on the nearest stool, surrounded by a semicircle of the most elite—and stone-faced—biologists in the world. Lightning splits the sky outside and whips their faces with streaks of blue-white light.

  “Pia,” Uncle Paolo begins, voice smooth and even. “You’ve been tested numerous times over the past few years in ways that perhaps confused and even angered you. Those tests were not random. They were for a particular purpose: to gauge whether or not you were even capable of doing the kind of research necessary to attain our goal and fulfill the original mission of the Little Cambridge Research Facility.”

  I say the words automatically. “To advance the human species through the grafting of positive eugenics and biomedical engineering in order to create an immortal Homo sapiens.”

  “Precisely. All of that, all of the tests, come to a culmination today. Because of your excellent performance and flawless record, we know that you are entirely capable and suited to the task at hand.”

  No. Please, no.…Surely there’s another way.…

  Uncle Paolo draws a deep breath. “That is, the merging of the catalyst and elysia. A task that falls to you, as our greatest hope and most crowning achievement.”

  The way he says catalyst sends a chill up the back of my neck.

  “Come, Pia.”

  I follow him to the curtain in the corner, with the other scientists behind me. Uncle Paolo takes the edge of the curtain in his hand. It’s checkered blue and white, like the blankets we use when picnicking in the courtyard on special occasions.

  “The catalyst,” he says, and he pulls the curtain aside.

  Stretched on my metal exam table, unconscious and dressed in a small white gown, is Ami.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Are you all right?” Uncle Paolo asks.

  The others murmur behind me: “Told you she wasn’t ready…” “Too much to ask of a mere girl…” “Damn it, Paolo, you should have listened to us.…”

  He hisses for them to be silent. “Pia, you know what you have to do. This is the only way. The good of our species, Pia. That’s all that matters. The end justifies the means.”

  He said those words before, about a kitten.

  Nausea churns in my stomach, and my chest feels like it’s pressed in a vice. My mother’s hands clamp around my shoulders.

  “Be strong for us, Pia. Be strong for me. For yourself,” she urges.

  “Come on, Pia,” encourages Uncle Jakob. “You can do it. We have all done it. It’s necessary.”

  “He’s right,” Uncle Paolo adds, and Uncle Sergei murmurs assent. Uncle Haruto remains silent, and I can feel his dark eyes boring into my back.

  My destiny of death. My legacy of blood.

  A wire runs from a patch over Ami’s heart to a computer monitoring her heartbeat, which sounds in high, monotone beeps. They’ve inserted a clear plastic tube into the vein on the inside of her elbow, and a thin stream of blood trickles through it to a plastic bag hung on a rolling hook. Her wrist hangs over the side of the exam table. I can see three bright red drops of blood on the floor; they must have dripped when the tube was inserted in her arm.

  Ami’s hand twitches. Do the others see it? Is she waking up? How did she get here? Did they kidnap her?

  Then I see it, just as a powerful roll of thunder unfurls outside the window, making the glass rattle.

  Lying on the Formica countertop by the sink, discarded and forgotten by the Immortis team, is a small stone bird on a woven necklace.

  My necklace.

  My hand reaches automatically to my collarbone. Bare. It must have fallen off last night, probably while Kapukiri was telling the legend…and Ami found it.

  And came to Little Cam to give it back.

  My mind races, throwing all the pieces together: Eio told me about the Ai’oans who once left the village, who listened when the scientists promised to take them to cities and in airplanes. The Ai’oans who turned their backs on their people and never returned. More lies, and these ones led to death.

  So this morning, someone must have left Little Cam. Who? Uncle Timothy? He would have circled the compound, started through the jungle…and would never have made it to Ai’oa. I shut my eyes and see the whole scene as it must have played out. Ami walking quickly through the trees, her monkey trailing her, and in her hands is my necklace. Uncle Timothy or whomever it was stopping and realizing that their job has just become much, much easier, because here is an Ai’oan all alone in the jungle. A defenseless child, no less. Easy prey.

  The horror of it overwhelms me in a cold, malignant wind that sweeps from my head to my feet. Unwitting Ami, on such a gentle, considerate mission, snapped up by monsters.

  For me. All for me. All of it, from beginning to end, a list of names and deaths stretching back to 1902, countless lives destroyed—all for me.

  I sway on my feet, and Uncle Haruto tenses, probably sensing I’m about to collapse. But I don’t. I stand, because the truth I face is so horrible, so devastating, that I won’t give myself the luxury of fainting.

  I deserve to suffer the truth.

  Aunt Harriet’s words, spoken only minutes ago, stampede through my brain. They couldn’t be bringing in subjects all the time; someone on the outside would notice.

  Unless the subjects weren’t brought from the outside at all…because the scientists had an entire village of unwitting prey right here in the Amazon: the Ai’oans. My Ai’oans. Deep inside my heart, a fire begins to burn.

  How dare he reach his bloodstained hands into my Ai’oa. How dare he harm my sweet, innocent Ami. And how dare he put the needle carrying her death in my hands, expecting me to execute his unspeakable crime.

  Uncle Paolo is talking, describing the process. “The elysia will flow through the subject’s veins until it reaches her heart, which is where the catalysis takes place—and which is why we can’t draw a few cups of blood and simply mix it with elysia in a petri dish. The heart will absorb the lethal chemicals in elysia, and the blood that flows back out is pure Immortis. Then we draw it out and hurry with the transfusion. We need the blood hot and fresh. If the Immortis cools, it’s useless to us.”

  He’s already rolling up his sleeve, baring his forearm, dabbing alcohol on the place where he’ll inject himself with Ami’s fresh blood, stolen from her vei
ns as she dies.

  They are all waiting. Watching. Wondering if I’m strong enough, ready enough.

  I look at the needle and look at Ami. Her hand is twitching.

  I want to say, You’re all monsters, how dare you do this? But instead what comes out is, “Do you even know her name?” It’s a whisper, barely audible.

  Uncle Paolo cocks his head. “Name? Pia, you know better than that. This is Subject 334. Nothing more. No one more. Just…think of it as another kitten.”

  Those words—another kitten—are what snap the thin thread still tying me to Uncle Paolo and his damned destiny.

  “She is not an animal,” I hiss. Shock transforms Uncle Paolo’s face. “She is a child! A human being! Not a lab experiment!”

  “Pia!” Shock turns into anger. He steps forward. I step back. Behind me, equally surprised scientists move out of my way. Whatever they expected from me, I doubt they expected this.

  But my blood is flowing again, hot and wild and reckless and enraged to the point of madness. The sorrow, the guilt, the confusion, the horror, all of the emotions that have rioted in me for the last few days are simply fuel to feed the fire that rages now into an inferno. It consumes and fills me, and I overflow.

  “You monster! All of you!” I whirl on the others. “How can you do this? How can you—” I choke on my own voice. “Mother! How could you?”

  “Pia, calm down,” Uncle Paolo intervenes. He’s using his soothing voice, sweet and liquid as honey. “Just calm down a minute. You don’t have to do it. You’re not ready, I see that now. It’s too soon—”

  “Too soon? Not soon enough! Not soon enough for you to finally give me the truth!”

  He starts toward me. I dart behind a table, keeping it between us. “Pia, listen to me, will you? You’re losing your self-control.”

  “Monsters in the closet,” I say, remembering something Aunt Nénine said once, long, long ago. Inanely, I begin to giggle and tremble all at once. “Monsters in the closet.”

  “Pia…” A worried look comes into his eyes. He thinks I’ve lost my mind.

  Maybe I have.

  “Give me the syringe,” he orders. The others begin to edge around the walls, getting between me and the door.

  “No.” I grasp it tightly to my chest. “Not so you can inject her. No. Let her go.”

  “Pia, you know that’s not possible. Damn it, Pia, we’ve come all this way! You were so close. This is why you were created, don’t you see that? This is your purpose! This is how you were created! Quitting now means quitting on your own existence. You owe your life—your endless life—to what goes on in this room.”

  “Murder?”

  “It’s not murder, Pia, not really. Think of it not as murder, not as evil, but as the—”

  “Greatest form of compassion, I know. You’ve said it before.” I relax, hands lowering a little.

  “Good, yes!” He relaxes too.

  “The greater good,” I say, nodding slowly. “The perfecting of mankind.”

  “Yes.” A smile, small and encouraging, brightens his face.

  I hold up the syringe of elysia. “And this is the way.”

  He nods, watching me carefully, but I see triumph in his eyes.

  I nod thoughtfully, studying the crystal liquid. “You know what I say?”

  “What, Pia? Tell me.”

  “I say screw it.” I throw the syringe to the tile floor, where it shatters and splatters elysia all over our shoes.

  Our eyes meet, his shocked and wide, mine wild and blazing.

  “I’m through with you, Dr. Paolo Domingo Alvez. Through with all of you. Through with Little Cam, and Dr. Falk, and elysia, and my damn destiny!” I step on the broken glass, grind it with my heel. “And you know what? I choose chaos. I choose to regress. I choose devolution and extinction and weakness and emotion and my heart, all of it! Because if this”—I point at Ami—“is what it means to be truly human, then I don’t want to be human. And I sure as hell don’t want to be one forever. Screw your immortality. Screw your damn ideals and destiny. And screw you.”

  Shaking with rage, I turn and run for Ami, intending to rip the tube out of her arm and carry her all the way back to Ai’oa.

  But I only make it three steps, and suddenly Uncle Jakob and Uncle Haruto have me by the arms, holding me still, and Uncle Sergei holds my head from behind so I can’t bite them. I struggle, but it’s no use. I have unbreakable skin, the sensory perceptions of a hawk, and I will never die—but I am betrayed by my lack of strength. I want to scream with frustration.

  Uncle Paolo shakes his head and sighs, long and deep. “I’m sorry, Pia. I’m sorry we failed with you. I’m sorry that after all our hopes and best intentions, you still resorted to the same stupidity and blindness of humans far, far beneath your level.”

  He reaches into the pocket of his lab coat and pulls out a syringe, the twin to the one I shattered. Horrified, I feel my heart slow and sicken.

  “I hoped it wouldn’t work out this way, but a good scientist is always prepared.” He presses the syringe, squirting a few drops of elysia into the sink.

  That’s when I notice the metal cart by my left elbow. It’s got three trays, and each one is filled with glass beakers.

  “I think I taught you that years ago,” Uncle Paolo is saying. “Do you remember? Of course you do. Your memory, unlike your decision here today, is perfect.”

  He walks to the far side of Ami so that he can still see me over her body. His eyes are fixed on me, so he doesn’t notice her eyelashes flutter and open, her head turn. Her gaze falls on me, and though confusion clouds her face, she still recognizes me.

  “Pia?” she whispers.

  I hook my foot around the leg of the cart and jerk it sideways. Glass beakers fly everywhere, smashing into the walls and floor. Everyone ducks, and Uncle Haruto yells. I think a shard of glass landed in his eye. He falls forward and collides with the exam table. His flailing hand catches the tube in Ami’s arm, and it comes loose. Blood drains from her like syrup from a bottle, splashing onto the floor. Uncle Haruto slips in it and falls to the tile.

  For a moment, everything is chaos, just long enough for me to break free and grab the syringe from Uncle Paolo’s hands. I move as swiftly as the lightning outside, pulling Ami off the gurney and dragging her to the door, and I spare a split second to grab my necklace off the counter. When Jakob and Haruto grab me from behind, I stab blindly with the syringe, and they immediately back away from the needle. I keep it raised threateningly and pull Ami with one arm. My shoes track scarlet across the shining white tile.

  “Stop, Pia!” orders Paolo as he crashes into the fallen metal cart and steps on the shattered beakers. He shouts and hops sideways, and I hope they’ve punctured the soles of his shoes. Ami is coming to; we’re almost at the door.

  I throw it open and pull her into the hallway, slamming the door behind us. Ami is still unconscious, but a small moan slips from her mouth. I shake her, but she doesn’t rouse. I let her sink to the floor and look around.

  There’s a shelf against the wall holding sheets and lab coats, and I grab it with both hands and heave. It crashes to the floor with a loud clatter as an enormous boom of thunder rattles the building and, one by one, the fluorescent lights above us flicker out.

  The generators have been hit. It’ll take Clarence at least five minutes to get the electricity back on. Come on, Pia, don’t waste this chance.…I shove the shelf against the door. It won’t hold them for long, but maybe long enough.

  Ami is slumped against the wall, eyes shut and skin pale. Her arm is still bleeding. When Uncle Haruto tore the tube from Ami’s arm, it ripped the cut wider, and my dragging her across the floor only made it worse. In the darkness, I can just make out a sticky trail of blood leading from under the lab door. How much has she lost?

  I dig through the supplies that fell from the shelf when I overturned it and find gauze and tape. Just when I start to turn back to Ami, my fingers brush something glass, an
d it rolls across the floor. I snatch it up, hoping it’s some kind of antibiotic I can put on the cut. Eyes straining to read the label in the dark, I reach out and grip Ami’s upper arm, trying to lessen the flow of blood. From some open window down the hall, lightning flashes, and my eyes catch the label on the vial.

  E13.

  E13. I remember the bird in the electric cage, its energy spent, the serum kicking in.…

  A loud crash makes me look up. The scientists must be using something heavy to batter at the door.

  Hurry, Pia!

  I pop the lid off the glass vial with my teeth; there’s nothing to inject it with, and I have no idea how much it will take, but there’s no time. I push the vial between her lips and empty half of the contents down her throat, exhaling in relief when she swallows. Then I press the gauze to her arm and wrap tape around it three, four, five times.

  Ami’s eyes snap open. Another flash of lightning, and I see her pupils are constricted to tiny pinpoints.

  “Pia!” She sits up, her entire body trembling. “What happened? Where am I? Why’s it so dark?”

  “Just hold my hand. I know you’re scared, but you have to run!”

  Before I even finish speaking, she’s on her feet and zipping down the hall, pulling me along behind her. Her movements are jerky and rapid, just like the bird’s when it was running on the E13. Congratulations, Uncle Paolo. Your serum works perfectly.

  Outside, people are yelling and running everywhere, trying to get the lights back on. It’ll be only minutes before Clarence has the backup generators on, and then we’ll never be able to escape.

  I don’t bother with hiding. The rain and confusion is cover enough. We head for the nearest portion of fence, and when I look back, I see that Paolo and the others have made it out. They spot us much too quickly.

  “Go,” I hiss. “Run as fast as you can, Ami, toward the fence!”

  “Pia, I brought your necklace,” she says. “You dropped it.”

  “It’s okay, Ami! I have it.”

  “Good. Because it means something special,” she yells over her shoulder, “and if you lost it, it would be terrible. Pia…” She stops running and looks back. “They’re chasing us. Why are they chasing us?”