My head is already shaking from side to side. “No thank you,” I say, staring at what can only be described as a man-sandwich. “I’ll go with a wrap. You know, the kind with something healthy on it. They’re called ve-ge-ta-bles,” I say slowly.
Logan just makes a grunting sound and digs back into his sandwich. We both eat for several minutes and I think I’ve escaped his questions until he swallows the last bite of his meal and asks—with the same casualness I tried to fake—“So . . . you don’t remember the sandwiches, and sometimes I feel like you don’t remember . . . other things.”
I had hoped to push this conversation off for a while—until we knew each other better. I should have known I couldn’t hide something like this from the man who has known me since the beginning of time. “I don’t remember much of anything, really.”
A handful of words, but they took every ounce of my remaining courage to say.
“What do you mean? You said you don’t remember the lives when we weren’t together, but you obviously remember being Rebecca. You made all of this,” he adds, gesturing at the room.
“I do! And you as Quinn, of course. But it’s like remembering childhood friends. There’s no clarity there. I—I see you do things, and a memory of you doing the same thing in the past will spring into my mind, but I don’t think I remember as clearly as you do.” I pick at the stitching on the quilt to avoid looking directly at him.
His eyebrows lower as he considers this. “What about beyond that? Do you remember being Jenna Farthing?”
I shake my head. “No.” If anything, that’s a completely new name.
“At all?” Logan asks, and now he looks genuinely worried.
“Nothing,” I whisper. “I had vague memories of being Embeth, and Kahonda, and Shihon right after my awakening. I wrote them down in my journal.” Which the Reduciates now have. “But Audra suggested that those . . .” Man, it’s so hard to even say. “That those might just be me remembering Rebecca’s memories. Oh, and some wispy memories as Sonya, but you didn’t know me then.” I still haven’t told him about my dreams of her. With their constantly evolving endings, I don’t know what’s true and what’s just my crazy brain making stuff up—and so I can’t trust them. I want to; I’m convinced there’s truth in there. I just can’t tell the difference.
Logan opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, then closes it again, having changed his mind.
It feels ironic to sit here in this room that is a replica of the only home I remember sharing with him. For him it’s one of many. Hundreds? Thousands? I have no idea.
I should. I think. “Logan, do you remember all of your lives?”
He pauses, nods, and then tilts his head to the side. “Yes and no. I remember a few thousand years pretty clearly, but beyond that, it’s like you said—a childhood memory.”
Despite everything I’ve learned about being an Earthbound, the idea of remembering thousands of years is hard to even consider. It simply doesn’t mesh with the experiences I’ve been having with my own memories.
“I have a few very, very shady memories of back when we were Earthmakers, before humans—but I don’t know anyone who really remembers that very clearly. Despite the fact that we’re still being punished for what we did,” he adds sardonically.
“The beginning of the world,” I say, and the bitter cast in my tone makes Logan give me a worried glance. I lean back on the feather pillows feeling suddenly weak. “You remember the beginning of the world,” I explain. “And I can’t even clearly recall the last life we shared.”
“Hey,” Logan says quietly, reaching for my hand and wrapping his fingers around my cold skin. “It’s not like this changes anything.” He squeezes my hand and waits for me to look up at him. “You’re still you even if you don’t remember everything.” He lifts my hand to his mouth and brushes his lips across my knuckles in an exceptionally old-fashioned but gentlemanly gesture, and a flash of memory erupts in my head of him doing the same things as Quinn. Not just once—a hundred times.
Hope wells within me, and I blurt, “I remember more things all the time. Just now, I had a new memory.”
“Good,” he says. “But I really do want you to know that it doesn’t matter.”
Warmth spreads through me, and I finish my wrap even though I don’t feel hungry anymore. I feel full.
A knock on the door startles me, and I give Logan a wary glance. “Do you think it’s Alanna?” I whisper. “Or maybe someone telling me I should start work on the vaccine tonight after all?” Part of me hopes it is. I’m anxious to do something.
“That would be just perfect,” he says with a groan. “I’ll get it.” He opens the door enough to peek out, but not enough for whoever is out there to see into the room. To see me. He’s protecting me again, and I smile at the thought.
But then he swings the door wide, and a man and woman I don’t recognize step just inside the doorway. “Tavia Michaels?” the woman asks. She sounds nervous.
I scoot to the edge of the bed but don’t say anything.
“I—we need your help. Could you possibly come with us?”
“Where?” I don’t like this.
“To . . . our holding cells, I guess you could call them,” she says, sharing a telling glance with the man I assume is her partner.
“Not to be locked up,” the man hurriedly adds; my doubt and fear must be pretty obvious on my face. “We need your assistance with one of the people we’re holding. When the two of you were brought in yesterday, another person was brought in as well. A prisoner.”
Prisoner? I glance at Logan, but he doesn’t seem to understand any more than I do.
“I don’t remember seeing anyone else,” I say.
Her face pales. “He was brought in after you. In a different chopper. From what I understand, they raided the Reduciata base you two were held in after they got you away.”
We stand in an awkward square of silence until the man with her gestures to the open doorway. “We can fill you in as we walk.”
Logan and I start to exit, but the man lays his hand on Logan’s chest. “We only need Miss Michaels.”
Logan raises an eyebrow. “Are you two partners?”
They share a glance, then nod.
Logan looks toward the man, then gestures with his chin to the woman. “Would you let her go anywhere without you in a place like this?”
The man bristles but lets Logan pass.
“Is this person a threat?” I ask, fear starting to bubble up in my stomach.
But the woman is shaking her head. “He’s human, so very containable. But he’s fighting us so hard that we’re having to keep him almost constantly tranquilized.”
“Which wouldn’t be a problem,” the man beside her pipes in, “except that when he is conscious, he won’t eat. He won’t drink. It’s been twenty-four hours, and he hasn’t slept. We’re worried about his health.”
“Okay . . .” I say, even more confused. What does this have to do with me?
“There’s only one thing he keeps asking for.”
The hallway is silent as I look between them.
“You,” the first woman says again. “Generally we wouldn’t give a prisoner anything he wanted until he agreed to cooperate, but with all the tranquilizer serum we’ve had to inject him with and his refusal to eat or drink, we’re . . . we’re afraid he’ll hurt himself.”
“Usually we would go to Daniel with this, but as you can imagine, he’s so busy with the fallout from this morning’s disaster that he’s completely unavailable for anything else. That’s why we came right to you.”
“Why would he want me?” I ask, squeezing Logan’s hand as a trickle of fear travels down my spine.
They look between each other, and I wait for them to reveal whatever it is they’re not telling me. “We think it would be best if you see for yours
elf.”
They lead us past the landing that looks over the extravagant atrium—still alive with people sitting in front of the blue glow of televisions—and then down a spartan hallway. Premonition hums within me, and my stomach churns. Every nerve crackles with alertness, but after the wringer I’ve already put my mind through, even that buzz feels feeble and sickening.
We stop at a thick set of double doors, waiting as the woman creates a key in her hand and unlocks three different locks. I raise my eyebrows at Logan, wondering why they would need such a thing.
Maybe I don’t want to know.
But when the doors open I’m seized by panic.
It’s not that it looks exactly the same as the Reduciata cells where Logan and I were held—I mean, the architecture is completely different and the walls are simply a nondescript cream instead of that stark, glaring white. But it has the same feel, and as I take tiny steps through the doorway I almost expect to see a huge Reduciata symbol, just like in our prison.
Instead, I see walls lined with three of those two-ways mirrors. Except that this time I’m on the other side. The side you can always see through.
“He’s in this third cell,” the woman says, and suddenly I wish Logan weren’t here. That I was alone.
I deny the truth of my suspicions all the way down the hallway, and even when I come around the corner I tell myself a million reasons why it’s not . . .
It won’t be . . .
It can’t be . . .
“Benson.” The words are out of my mouth in a hushed whisper before I can stop them. I sway on my feet, and blackness starts to close in around my eyes. I have to reach my hand out to the wall to keep myself from crumpling.
“Tavia!” Logan’s hands wrap around my shoulders, holding me steady.
Benson is sitting in the middle of the floor, his head resting in his hands. His shirt is gone, and from this angle I can see the Reduciata tattoo on his shoulder. It seems to grow as I stare at it, enveloping everything else about him.
“He says he won’t talk to anyone but you,” the woman says, her voice quiet, as though Benson were sleeping. As though he could hear us at all. But even as tired as he must be, and despite his slumped posture, I can see the tension in his shoulders, the tiny muscles clenching at his temple.
He’s not asleep.
At least I can’t see his face. That might break me.
As though sensing my presence, Benson shifts and starts to lift his head toward the glass.
No. I can’t. I spin away from the two-way mirror.
“Not tonight,” I mumble as the man and woman look at me funny. “I can’t deal with him tonight,” I clarify. I try to think clearly, but my entire brain has gone into shutdown mode. It just can’t handle one more awful thing tonight.
The disaster in the South Pacific shattered my world, but Benson? He’ll destroy what’s left of it.
SEVENTEEN
The Curatoria lab is a welcome reprieve from the chaos of last night. But still, as much as I try to pay attention while Daniel takes me from one station to another, attempting to explain all the shiny, hulking pieces of equipment, my mind continues to return to everything that happened last night. Not just with Benson. Logan too.
As soon as we left the security wing, Logan began asking me who Benson was—who he was to me—but I kept refusing to answer his questions until finally he just stormed out of our room. I don’t know where he went, but he was back by the time I woke up. He must have crept in after I went to sleep.
Which left me sneaking out this morning.
I’m going to have to talk to him—talk to both of them, actually—but at least for now, I have something else to do.
If I can focus.
“This one we’re just about ready to release to the rest of the world,” Daniel says, stroking a white and silver machine whose function I can’t remember. “I think they’re ready for it.” I see his hand suddenly clench, and he sighs. “Or they will be if there’s anything left in a few months.” He stares off into space for a few seconds, and then his head jerks up, he takes a deep breath, and his entire posture changes—like I’ve seen it do before within just the two days I’ve known him. It’s uncanny, really. As though he changes moods like I change clothes.
It makes me question how real any of his personas are, but for now—after that terrible newscast yesterday—I force myself to shake off my suspicions. As much as I believed Sammi, she never did tell me what her mistrust was based on.
And Daniel admitted he’d made mistakes.
Either way, none of that matters now; I don’t have a choice. I have to do this.
“Come in here before we suit up,” Daniel says, beckoning me into a dim room. Inside, Daniel has set up what looks like a mini PowerPoint presentation.
“Do you know anything about viruses?” he asks, motioning me to take a seat in an office-style chair in front of a four-foot-square screen.
“Not a thing,” I admit. “Not the sciency bits anyway. I know they make you sick. That’s pretty much it.”
“Okay, from the beginning then,” Daniel says, clicking the mouse. A picture of a simple drawing of a square with some kind of legs . . . sort of . . . appears on the projection screen.
“Viruses are essentially made up of three parts,” Daniel says. “The shell, the genetic material inside the shell, and an injection mechanism . . .” As he talks I can tell that he’s struggling to simplify the concept, to make it understandable to me. But I barely understand the theory, much less the practical implications. After flipping through a couple of slides on the anatomy of a virus, he walks me through common treatments and tries to explain the mutations that made each ineffective against the Reduciata’s bioengineered disaster. Pretty soon we’re staring at a flowchart covered with words I can barely pronounce, much less define, like “replication inhibitors” and “spontaneous mutation.”
“So what are we supposed to do?” I ask, because after all of that I still haven’t the faintest clue.
“We need a new vaccine, but at this point we simply do not have time for conventional development. We have two electron microscopes that are many times stronger than anything any other lab in the world has—one for you, and one for me. I’ve already spent much of the last several months analyzing the RNA in the virus, and I think I have found the section responsible for replication, which is how the virus grows. I brought my most powerful Creators and Destroyers in to assist me, and we tried to use both powers to first destroy the original segment of the DNA and then replace it with a newly created segment that would fight the virus.”
“I take it that didn’t work.”
He shakes his head. “We couldn’t do it fast enough. The instant the segment was destroyed, the strand of DNA broke apart completely. That was when I realized I needed to not simply create a new piece, but transform the existing piece. I needed you.”
“So you know which part of the DNA has to be changed?”
Daniel looks weary. “No. I haven’t found the right part of the DNA yet. I’ve found what I think is the right section—a section of about ten thousand pairs. We’ll need to go pair by pair, transform the DNA, test it against the RNA, and then move on.”
Now I understand his weariness. “How long do you think it will take?” I ask in a small voice.
“It depends on how lucky we get,” Daniel replies, and he tries to smile, but it feels like a grotesque mockery. “I spent four months finding the segment of the RNA that we needed, but I got pretty fast in the end. Hopefully with us working together, and a bit of good fortune, it will take a week or two.”
May as well be forever.
But we have to try. Because who knows what piece of the world will disappear next.
“I . . .” He stops, purses his lips, shakes his head, and then continues. “I’m not sure I should even tell you this, but I don’t
want to hide things from you more than is necessary.”
More than is necessary? I’m pretty sure I don’t like the sound of that.
“We had an attack yesterday. Not here at the headquarters,” he clarifies quickly. “But at one of our sentry stations a few hundred miles away.”
“Reduciates?”
He swallows. “Reduciates who were specifically asking questions about you.”
I try to shrug away his words—the way they make my heart race in fear. “Isn’t that somewhat expected? I mean, you did just break me out of a Reduciata prison. It seems like they would be trying to get me back, right?” I don’t add that they might be after Benson too. I mean, he’s the one who knows Reduciata secrets, not me.
“Of course I knew they would come after you. But they’re already closer than we expected and—” He waves his hands dismissively. “I probably shouldn’t be burdening you with this. Besides,” he says with a bright smile, “it’s simply a sign that they know it’s only a matter of time before we have the vaccine and they don’t. I just want—I need you to understand how focused you are going to have to be. We want to work quickly and efficiently. We have people to save. Not just the humans, but the entire Curatoria. The Reduciata have essentially declared open warfare on us.”
As if I didn’t have enough pressure. I look down at the notes in my lap, and they look even less like English than before. I have to take several slow breaths to push back the dismayed tears that want to form.
“Now, Tavia,” he says, pulling me out of my haze, “in order for this to work I need to teach you about the structure of individual strands of DNA. Not that I’m an expert,” he says quickly. “The lab guys all taught me. But you need to know exactly what you’re working with for your transforming powers to work.” He clicks, and a picture appears of a double helix with about a dozen lines pointing to tiny parts.
“Daniel?” I ask before he can launch into his new lecture.