by Tosca Lee
“Good,” she says groggily. I gather her up, her little body warm, her head sweet-smelling against my neck as she wraps her arms around it.
“It’s time for us to get cleaned up for dinner,” I say, heart pounding against my ribs.
“Just one question,” Micah says.
I look wildly around, my gaze snagging on the pool table, and the rack of cues behind it.
Karam shakes his head faintly, as though saying I’d never make it there in time.
“What’s Winnie short for?”
“I told you—”
“Not you,” Micah says. “I’m asking Truly.”
My lips pull back from my teeth. “You leave her alone.”
“Truly? Seth wanted to know,” Micah says. “What’s Winnie short for?”
“We’re leaving,” I say. But as I start toward the door, Preston moves to block my way.
“Truly!” Micah says.
“Chase!” I shout toward the tunnel and the library beyond it. Knowing that if he’s in the maintenance room above it he’ll hear me through the stairwell. “Chase!”
“He isn’t there,” Karam says, coming toward me.
I go stone still. “What have you done?”
“He’s being detained in storage.”
Where Jax’s cell was meant to be—ten levels below, accessed by sealed stairwells.
“Wynter,” Truly says in my arms.
“What’s that, Truly?” Micah says.
She lifts her head.
“Shh-shh. We have to go,” I say.
“Wyn-ter,” she says again, in two distinct syllables.
“Yes, it’s winter outside,” Micah says, pointing upward.
“No. That’s Winnie’s name,” she says.
“Oh, is it?” Micah says.
Our eyes lock.
In an instant, I’m running for the tunnel. They grab me, hauling me backward, Truly wailing as Micah tries to take her. Silent lightning cracks overhead.
“Don’t you touch her!” I shout as Karam and Preston drag me toward the sofa. “Take your hands off of her!”
Micah pries her from my arms, and he might as well be tearing off one of my limbs. I scream and she starts crying, a handful of my hair in her fist.
“You hurt her and I swear I’ll kill you,” I say, voice rasping like that of a woman possessed.
Sharp pain in my neck. For a weird, disjointed moment, all I can think about is that stupid bee. That somehow it’s escaped the screen and stung me.
Before the room goes dark.
• • •
I’M AWARE OF voices, raised in argument.
Of cold concrete beneath my cheek.
Truly.
I shove up, but can’t move my arms and flop back. Find my hands zip-tied around a pole. I grab it and push to my knees, head spinning—and then double over and puke on the floor. It isn’t much, just a wet spot on the concrete, mostly bile.
“Obviously neither one of them knew!” someone says. Nelise. “Or why would she tell her to come here? And why would Noah let her stay? No. Impossible.”
“Why not just check her ID?” Delaney.
“We couldn’t find any.” Karam.
I cough and then spit as one voice rises over the others.
“You have no idea what you’ve just done. So help me, the day our justice system is functioning again, I will not only turn you over to federal authorities—and see your ass deported—but make sure she hits each of you with every lawsuit money can buy!”
Julie.
“For what? Restraining a murderer wanted by the federal government? I don’t think so.” Preston.
I lift my head, which feels like it weighs a hundred pounds, and sit back on my heels. Look unsteadily around.
We’re no longer in the atrium but gathered in a storage area partitioned by chain-link fence, the one pen not stocked with pallets of canned food and totes of freeze-dried stroganoff looking vaguely like a fight cage. But it isn’t a fight cage. It’s Jax’s cell.
And there, pacing inside it, is Chase.
“D’jou—drug me?” I manage to get out, the words cottony and foreign in my mouth. At the sound of my voice, Chase strides to the fence directly in front of me and crouches down, clasping the chain link.
“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”
And then I remember the summer storm. The lightning flashing as Truly wailed and Micah pried her from my arms.
“Truly. Truly!” I say, searching the assembled Denizens, their faces moonlike and round in the LED light.
I find her snared in Rima’s arms, the doctor crouched down beside her.
“Winnie!” she cries, straining against Rima, the sight, the sound of her tearing at my heart.
“Truly, can you tell us what you told me earlier today?” Micah says, leaning over to peer at her.
She shakes her head. “No!”
Chase grabs the chain-link fence. “Micah, leave her alone!”
“Truly . . .” Micah tries again.
“You. Get away from her,” I say very quietly. Homicide in my voice.
“Tell them,” Julie says, and I realize she’s talking to me. “For God’s sake, tell them!”
Chase gives the chain link a sharp rattle. I turn and find him staring at me with a warning in his eyes.
Rudy comes to stand in front of the cage. “If you have something to tell us, Winnie . . .” He pauses for effect. “Now would be the time.”
I’ve been here before. Except this time I’m not standing at the open gate of the religious community I grew up in but kneeling thirteen stories underground, facing not the loss of my eternal salvation, but a short walk into a freezer.
I clasp the cold metal of the pole. Haul myself to my feet.
“My name,” I say, “is Wynter Roth.”
Chase releases a harsh breath behind me as those before me exchange glances.
“Truly?” I say, looking at her.
Rudy lifts his hand. “She’s not the one—”
“Shut up!” I say. “Truly? What’s your mommy’s name?”
She looks up through her lashes. “Jackie,” she whispers.
“And what’s your last name?”
“Theisen,” she says, eyes roving over the assembled others.
“How does your mommy know me?”
“She’s your sister,” she says, the words a soft whine.
I give her a small smile. “Truly, what’s your daddy’s name?”
“Magnus.”
“Is he the leader of New Earth?” I ask.
She nods. “He’s God’s Ter-preter.”
I ignore the quizzical glances and turn to Micah, my head pounding. “Take her upstairs. I’ll tell you the rest.”
• • •
I SPEND THE next hour recounting life in the Enclave, shut off from the outside world. How Magnus’s first wife died and he married my sister, Jackie. How he tried to take me as a second wife. My failed escape, witnessed by the community, which Jackie orchestrated so Magnus would have no choice but to cast me out.
That I went to live with Julie and her family. How I learned Kestral—Magnus’s first wife—was not dead at all, but living here with Rima, Micah, Nelise, and the others who arrived before us.
Nelise’s eyes go wide as she exchanges a look with Karam.
“Two days after you came through here,” Micah says, “Kestral left without explanation.”
“She went back to Iowa,” Chase says. “We met her on the road outside the compound after Wynter retrieved Truly.”
“If what you’re saying is true, it seems that’d be the last place she’d ever want to go,” Preston says.
“Magnus was sick,” I say. “She knew it was safe.”
It’s a lie. Magnus was sick, but she couldn’t have known; he’d been infected for only a few hours.
It occurs to me that I never knew exactly why Kestral went back. Whether it was to confront Magnus, appear to the community as proof of his lies, help me g
et Truly out . . . or a combination of all three.
“Kestral never said anything about a Magnus,” Nelise says. “Or any of this.”
“She did to Noah,” I say. “Which is why he believed me when I told him about Magnus’s illegal business deals, including those with his former partner, Blaine—who conveniently died two weeks after delivering a set of stolen animal samples to Magnus. The same ones Magnus sent my sister to deliver to a third party. He threatened to kill her if she failed. She brought them to me instead.”
“Stolen animal samples?” Delaney says, looking lost.
“Of the pigs that first contracted the disease,” I say.
“You mean—”
“Rapid early-onset dementia.” The disease ravaging our nation.
“All these nights we’ve been talking about it, asking where it came from . . . you’re saying you knew all along?” Sha’Neal says, her voice going up an octave. “You and”—she looks at Julie and then Chase in turn—“you and you?”
“Wait,” Nelise says. “Why would anyone want those?”
I look at her like she’s stupid. Mostly because, other than being a botanical savant, she is.
“Uhh . . . a vaccine?” Julie says, sarcastically.
“Or good old-fashioned biological warfare,” Chase says, his forehead pressed against the chain link.
“Excuse me,” Rudy says. “But nobody’s talking about the issue, which is the fact that this woman is wanted for murder! What about the murder?” he demands.
“There wasn’t one,” I say. “Magnus reported that I stole ‘research’ from an off-site New Earth lab and killed Jackie in the process. But the last time I saw Jackie, she was alive. Sick . . .” I pause, swallowing back emotion at the memory of that night. The sound of her heels on the pavement as she ran down the street will haunt me the rest of my life. “. . . which is why she couldn’t take them to Colorado or rescue Truly herself. But alive.”
Micah glances down, scrolls through a set of screenshots of the article I thought I deleted. Reads: “. . . potentially life-saving research was stolen in a violent break-in at the New Earth lab in Ames that claimed the life of Theisen’s wife, Jaclyn.”
“Except I’ve never heard of an off-site lab. And I would never harm my own sister,” I say.
“It’s all she talked about!” Julie says. “Trying to get Truly and Jackie out of New Earth and somewhere safe!”
“So she gives you the samples. Then what?” Preston says.
How do I tell the story of those five days? On the run after Julie’s SUV broke down. Stuck in a snowstorm with Chase, whom I had to convince I was not a terrorist. Crossing into Colorado after I thought Chase had been killed.
How do I tell it without saying whose daughter Truly really is?
“Julie’s husband, Ken, would have been the perfect person to give them to,” I say. “It’s the reason Jackie brought them to Illinois. But Ken got sick while traveling with the CDC team. So I took them to a Dr. Ashley Neal at Colorado State—someone Jackie met while working the New Earth ministry in Ames, where he did his graduate work.”
It sounds so simple, stated like that. “I took them.” May they never know how frickin’ hard it is to travel hundreds of miles in the middle of a blackout without enough gas when you’re wanted for murder.
“After the attack on the CDC, the National Guard flew him and the samples to the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. I assume by now he’s in England or Switzerland or wherever the companies are that have agreed to help make it.”
“Unfortunately, Noah’s not here to corroborate her story,” Micah says. “And without the Internet I can’t verify the identity of Dr. Neal, if he exists, or anything else she said.”
“I’m telling you the truth!”
“So after this Dr. Neal left for Omaha, you drove back to Iowa and kidnapped your niece,” Rudy says, frowning.
“Her father was infected,” I say. “I’m her only surviving family.”
I don’t say that he infected himself—with a vial he thought was a vaccine meant for Truly.
“Why didn’t you take the samples to the authorities, or the CDC?” Preston says.
“You ever tried walking into the CDC with stolen samples at the outset of a pandemic?” I say.
“But then at least they would have had them! It would have been a small price to pay to save—”
“I’ll tell you why! Because Dr. Neal knew my sister and trusted me. Because Colorado is a lot closer than Atlanta, where I had less chance of getting through the city alive, and if I had, who knows what would’ve happened to them in the attack!”
Rudy shakes his head. “I—this is . . .” He laughs. “This is very elaborate. And all a bit much. Don’t you think?”
“No one could make this up!” Chase says.
“As Micah pointed out, there’s no way to verify any of this,” Preston says.
Julie’s face is white. “She’s told you the truth!”
“Yes,” Nelise says. “She admitted she’s wanted for murder!”
Ezra turns on Julie. “You seriously believe one man could dupe the government into hunting for an innocent—”
“That man?” Julie says. “Absolutely. I wouldn’t put anything past that lying, manipulative psychopath. He had money. Friends in high places!”
“Be that as it may, I don’t think any one of us feels safe with a wanted murderer living among us,” Rudy says.
“No,” Reverend Carolyn says. “We can’t go through this again. Just keep her locked up until Open Day!”
“We’re talking about our children’s safety!” Sabine says. “My daughter’s safety!”
“Stop!” Chase shouts from behind me. “She’s telling the truth!”
I glance over my shoulder in time to see him close his eyes with a curse. When he opens them, his expression is terrible.
“I can prove it,” he says.
DAY 82
* * *
Karam returns ten minutes later, a small object in his hand.
Chase’s phone.
He hands it to Micah.
“43832,” Chase says, clutching the chain link.
Micah taps the code in, kneels down, and frowns as he thumbs through to a notepad of saved files.
The same ones Chase found on the USB drive in the carrier the samples were in the night he confronted me.
Articles about the “Bellevue 13”—the first patients linked to the same location. Obituaries of the two slaughterhouse workers and the farmer, whose pigs dug up the caribou carcass infected with the disease. The home page of a gourmet pork supplier. A roster of vendors offering samples at a Redmond, Washington, Baconfest.
“Go to my photos,” Chase says.
Micah glances at him and, after a few taps, pauses.
“What is it?” Rudy asks, trying to peer over Micah’s head.
“A photo of some medical slides. Labeled ‘Porcine boar tissue and soil, Fairbanks, AK, PrP’ ”—he frowns—“and what looks like a specimen bag.” He looks up. “Someone get Rima.”
Julie goes after the doctor, who took Truly upstairs.
“The ‘PrP’ stands for prion,” I say, repeating what Ken told me in what might have been his last lucid conversation before I summarize Ashley’s explanation in Colorado. “The virus triggers rapid misfolding of proteins in the brain, which causes dementia. It’s like mad cow, only faster. But instead of tainted meat, which normally causes the disease, the virus is now being spread by influenza A.”
Rima returns with Julie.
“Truly’s with Lauren,” Julie says to me, as Micah gestures Rima over and shows her the image on the phone.
“Can you tell what this is?” he says.
The doctor tilts her head, studying the picture. “Some kind of sample . . . of a pig’s brain from Alaska. One that apparently died of prion disease.” She looks up, clearly confused. “What does this have to do with anything?”
Micah taps the files back open
. “What do you make of these?”
Rima studies them with a frown, swiping slowly from one to the other. And then she abruptly looks up.
“This would suggest a prion disease caused by a virus. But—I’ve never heard of such a thing,” she says, shaking her head. “These files show the progression of the initial outbreak. Where did you find this? If this is causing the rapid early-onset dementia, those samples contain all the antigens necessary to produce a vaccine!”
“She claims she took these to a veterinarian at Colorado State,” Micah says.
“Perhaps not so strange a choice, given that it’s a zoonotic disease—one spread from animals to humans. I assume many veterinary schools contain prion research labs,” Rima says, glancing strangely at me. “The most important question is, where are they now?”
“At the university medical center in Omaha,” Micah says. “Or so she claims.”
Rima looks at me, her large brown eyes startled. “If that’s true . . . then this woman is a hero.”
“Or a very good storyteller,” Rudy says. “For all we know, she sold the samples to China, is hiding out here with her accomplice and orphaned niece until the sick die off and the banks are back online to accept the transfer from her offshore account.”
I stare at him. “What?”
“The only storyteller here is you!” Julie shouts.
“I bet she’s in on it!” Rudy says, pointing at her. “Tell me, Julie—what’s your cut?”
“Excuse me?”
“She didn’t know anything about it!” I say, frightened now. Not just for myself and Chase, but for Julie. Horrified at the way the others are looking at her now, sizing her up as though seeing her in a new light. I glance at Chase, still clutching the chain link, wondering why he isn’t saying anything. But he just drops his head and shakes it side to side.
“She had no idea Jackie came to the house,” I say. “I lied when I left—I said I was going back to Iowa.”
“You saw the files! What more do you need?” Julie says.
“It doesn’t prove that she took them where she said, or that they’re in Omaha or Switzerland, or anywhere,” Preston says.
“I don’t care about a bunch of pig samples.” Sabine.
“Well you ought to!” Julie.