I raise one eyebrow—it’s essentially word-for-word what Logan and I decided.
“So we came back and gave some sort of sob story about how we hadn’t connected in ages and hadn’t come in contact with the Curatoria in a thousand years. They had no record of us, but they gave us our vows and we”—he glances at Alanna—“we acted very enthusiastic, so they let us in.”
“If the Curatoria has one glaring fault, it’s letting too many people in—no offense,” Alanna adds, glancing at us. “So Thomas and I started poking around, and we thought we were being subtle, but Sammi, she’s smart. She caught on.” Alanna laughs sadly. “She cornered me one day and straight-out threatened me. Bold little mortal thing. She was old family Curatoria—loyal to the bone, that one. But when I explained to her what Thomas had seen, the little bit we’d managed to uncover, she decided that she needed to look into it for the good of the Curatoria as a whole.” Alanna swallows hard. “She was always so loyal to the ideals of the Curatoria. To the organization. In the end she didn’t want Daniel to ruin it, and that’s why we started working as a team.”
“And when they were asked to come and pretend to be my aunt and uncle?”
“We were certain that either we’d been caught or it was the luckiest break we’d ever gotten. I’m still not entirely sure which. After . . . after they died we weren’t sure if we should stay. We decided we’d give it one month and then we’d go out and try to find you ourselves. Not that we had any idea how we were going to do that. Luckily, you found us instead.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me who you were?” I ask. I don’t bother adding that technically it was Daniel who found me.
“Because you were Daniel’s prisoner.”
Prisoner. Is that what everyone here thinks of me as? But didn’t I come to that very conclusion this morning? A prisoner, one way or another.
“I had no idea where your loyalties lay. We decided we had to keep acting just like we do with everyone else until the time was right.” Her hand slides across the table and touches my arm lightly. “I’m sorry I was so awful that first day. I had to get into that room and destroy any evidence Sammi and Mark might have left. I should have done it before but . . .” She shrugs. “I wanted to believe they were coming back. When suddenly you had already moved in, I knew I had to act fast. I had one chance to get rid of their stuff and throw you off at the same time, and I’m afraid I made the most of it.”
I have a weird urge to cry at her apology. Because the consequences have already happened. I had never felt so blatantly affronted, and, in the end, it was Alanna’s actions that convinced me to get rid of my scar.
But now’s not the time to tell her that.
“And after that?” I said, my voice still cold.
“I tested you. Provoked you. Wanted to see what you would do and how you would react. I wasn’t ready to put my life in your hands.” She doesn’t drop her eyes from mine the entire time. “To be honest, I’m still not one hundred percent sure. But we don’t have the luxury of time anymore.”
Funny that. “Me either,” I say, rising to my feet. “Daniel will notice if I’m late back from my lunch break.” I halt when everyone just looks at me in shock and maybe a bit of horror. To be honest, it makes me a little angry. “What do you expect me to do? I can’t stop. I’m . . . I’m the only hope anyone has of beating the virus.”
“We don’t want you to stop,” Thomas says, clearing the expression on his face. “I just didn’t think we’d have to wrap everything up so quickly. Maybe . . . maybe we can talk later? And—and if you wanted to tell me about the work you’re doing, I might be able to help.”
I nod, but even though everything’s shouting at me that they’re telling the truth, that doesn’t mean that they’re entirely in the right either. What proof do they have, really? If Daniel were trying to poison the world, why would he bother to develop a vaccine when he could just focus on finding his partner and then hole himself away until the world was dead? This meeting with Thomas and Alanna hasn’t made things clearer; if anything, it’s made them more murky.
I wish I could talk to Logan. Or Benson. Really talk. But I can’t help but feel like that ship has sailed. Maybe they both have.
“I should go,” I murmur, feeling like I’m somehow quitting by leaving. But I don’t know what to do, and being here isn’t helping me think clearly.
“You two leave first,” Alanna says to Logan, and I seize up with panic—I’m not ready to be alone with him. “We’ll follow when the coast is clear.” She grips my shoulders with both hands. “And I apologize for the awful things I’m certain to say when I next see you. I need to ‘keep up appearances,’” she winks, “and my terrible personality gives us a degree of privacy you wouldn’t believe. Between that and the rather unacceptable level of PDA we engage in, no one here can stand us. I’ve seen people literally run in the other direction when they see us.”
I don’t doubt it. I’d basically started doing that very thing. I just give a silent nod and then turn to the door without waiting for Logan to follow.
He trails behind me anyway.
“Tavia,” he says, catching up as soon as the door closes behind us. “Just give me fifteen minutes. Ten. One. Please,” he says, grasping at my hand now, “I’m begging you.”
I look up, and my eyes are caught in his. I read the world in his eyes. A world of sorrow and regret, of love and loss, of ache and fulfillment.
Then you’re in the wrong world. Thomas’s words echo through my ears.
I’m not hiding anything, I argue to myself. Not anymore.
But I don’t know that.
Even Logan can’t truly answer that for me. It’s been two hundred years since he knew me. I can’t comprehend being a liar, a murderer, or anything like that. But having a brain injury has changed so much of me—even my personality. Maybe before that I would have seen this kind of capability within myself.
Maybe I’ve actually done something awful. Maybe that’s why the Reduciata are looking for me. Maybe the real reason I couldn’t tell my secret to Logan is that my secret is I’m part of this whole conspiracy.
I unconsciously grip Logan’s shirt in my fists as I realize that maybe I really am immune.
And maybe it’s because I helped develop the virus.
In my dream this morning Sonya worried about “fixing the problem.” Is that because she—I—created it?
TWENTY-FIVE
I sway on my feet a little as I try to convince myself it’s not possible.
But how the hell do I know that isn’t exactly what happened? Exactly why Daniel wants my help. Maybe even why he sent me to the medical department: to try to get that progress back.
There are so many things I don’t know about myself, and when I look up into the eternity of Logan’s eyes my heart drops as I wonder if, despite my powers, with everything that has happened—everything everyone except me remembers and feels and knows—maybe I’m just an ant too.
“Can’t we just go somewhere and talk?” Logan asks, and I look up at him like his voice is my anchor to the earth, keeping me from being swept away by everything I’ve discovered in the last hour.
Time. I have no time. I pull the phone I’m not allowed to use from my pocket. “I’ve got about ten minutes before Daniel notices I’m not back,” I say. “That’s all I can give you.”
“Where should we go?”
I have no idea. I feel like I’ve only seen about 10 percent of this cavernous place, and I’m too tired to make a room of my own.
“We can just sit here,” Logan suggests, somehow sensing how overwhelmed I am.
I nod gratefully, and we slide our backs down the wall and sit next to each other on the floor, our thighs touching in some form of a stalemate.
“I should have told you.”
His jaw tightens at my admission, but he just shakes his head
. “I shouldn’t have yelled.”
“I did tell him I was with you.”
“But you’re not sure. I heard that part.” He continues without giving me a chance to deny it. “And I just can’t understand it. Is it because of . . . of the problems with your brain?”
Even though I’ve told him all the basics about how my brain injury affects me, affects my past memories, I didn’t tell him what Audra told me about how I likely won’t remember this life at all. And I find myself holding that one piece of information back even now. I can’t confess to him just how messed up I am. But I do nod. I can’t avoid the question entirely.
“Is it ever going to . . . heal completely? Give you back the things you don’t know now?”
“No. I might be able to recover more if I can collect artifacts from other lives, but I don’t think it’s going to be much clearer than what I remember about being Rebecca.” I don’t meet his eyes. I can’t bear to see the disappointment. “Does that change things between us?”
The silence lasts long enough that I have to look up to make sure he heard me. He’s staring at me with a twisted expression of horror. “How can you even ask that? The only thing that ever—ever—stands between us is not knowing that the other one exists. If I found you nearly dead, in a coma on life support, I would sit by your bed and hold your hand until your last heartbeat. This is—this is nothing compared to that.”
Warmth spreads from the top of my head down as he looks at me with glittering, almost worshipful eyes.
“In my last life I was a man named Darius,” Logan says after a long pause. “I fell in love and got married young. Nineteen. Everyone told me I was an idiot, but I was head over heels in love, and it seemed like the most natural thing to do.”
I wait for a surge of jealousy, but it doesn’t come. I can’t deny him a life—a love, even—before he knew about me. I would be a hypocrite at best.
“We got married soon after we found out she was pregnant. It was an accident, but we were happy. So happy.”
“What happened?” I ask breathlessly.
“Car wreck. Multi-car pileup. No substances involved. Just one of those things. They were both killed. I thought . . . I thought I would literally die of a broken heart.” He rubs his hands over each other like he’s suddenly cold. “I started drinking heavily. Became an alcoholic. Died in my forties after an utterly wasted life.”
Oh gods. The dream. Sammi’s father said the Reduciates made it look like he drank himself to death. He doesn’t know. I’m completely unaware of my tears until I feel one tickle my chin. I turn away and try to subtly scrub my cheek. What am I supposed to do? Tell him? I have no idea what the right thing to do here is. So I stay silent.
“But I look back now—after remembering everything—and all I can think is, ‘Well, that was a shame.’ I don’t feel the same grief for her that led me to fritter away my life. She—both of them, really—feels like a passing fancy. Just so small.” And I shiver a little as he uses the same word Daniel did yesterday.
“Nothing else in the world, in any of my lives, matters a fraction as much as you do.” He shrugs. “Obviously I don’t like that it’s not the same for you. But I’m not going to let that stop me from loving you.”
“But you loved your family,” I blurt, just needing to say it. To hear him say something about them after what he said last night.
“I did. And they were wonderful people. I don’t want you to think I don’t care. Or that they don’t matter.”
“Do they?” I whisper. Because I’m not convinced at all.
He’s still for a long time before he nods. “They matter,” he says hesitantly, “but not the way you do. If I ever lost you . . .” His voice trails off and he shudders. He turns to me, his eyes shimmering. “I vow, I swear on everything I hold dear in this world, on my very eternal life, that I will never, ever give up on you. No matter what happens. Never,” he says, his voice almost vicious in its intensity.
All the feeling drains from my limbs.
Two boys, two vows, two loves.
Slowly, so slowly, I raise my eyelids, peer through my lashes. I know when I look into the chasm of adoration in Logan’s eyes that I have never been loved so deeply and completely by anyone in my life as this boy in front of me. Even the love my parents have for me seems pale compared to what I see in his eyes.
And it frightens me.
But how can you deny something this immense? I don’t think any human can, and for the first time I understand a sliver of what the Earthbound around me keep saying—about the depth of love humans simply can’t comprehend.
But I may as well be human because I don’t understand it. Where does that leave me?
As though he can’t help himself, Logan leans forward and brushes my lips with the softest kiss I’ve even known. So soft I wouldn’t have believed it happened except that my lips are on fire from the merest touch of his mouth.
“Tavia,” he whispers, “come home.”
I choke on a sob and shake my head. “I don’t have a home.”
“I’m your home. Let me hold you tonight. Please.”
“I don’t know.” The words are so quiet even I barely hear them.
“I’ll wait,” he murmurs, not moving forward to try to kiss me again, just sitting there, our mouths maybe two inches apart—just close enough to share the same breaths. He lifts his arm and hands me a perfect, freshly created blood-red rose. With no thorns. “I’ll wait forever. Because what we have, it’s worth it. It’s worth anything.” Abruptly he pushes to his feet, and the space in front of my face feels more than empty. And in a fierce voice he says, “And I’ll fight to get it back.”
TWENTY-SIX
Daniel looks up when I walk in fully suited. His annoyance is gone, but his expression still holds a question.
“I’m ready now,” I say. At the very least, I’m fully awake after everything I’ve heard in the last hour.
I don’t trust him. I’m not certain that I really ever did, even before hearing Thomas’s story. I believed in Mark and Sammi. Maybe they were wrong, but I was inclined to believe they were right. Still am. Because of them I’ve never fully confided in Daniel, and even when I felt like we were developing some kind of camaraderie, I still wondered.
Now I do a hell of a lot more than just wonder. Could Daniel really be behind the creation of the virus?
Worse, could I have worked with him so long ago?
Did we make me immune?
First things first, there’s got to be a way to figure out if it’s true. If I am immune. I try to remember everything I ever learned in science and finally come up with what I hope is a decent plan. It’s another hour and a half before Daniel leaves to use the restroom and I finally get my chance to put it into action.
As soon as he’s stepped through the doorway into the first decontamination area, I create a pin and poke my fingertip. I close the hole in my glove as quickly as possible just in case Benson is wrong and I can get infected. A very tiny smear of blood sits on a slide, and I take a droplet with a micropipette before reaching for the disease samples. Even after three days I’m still squeamish about their origins, but I squelch the thought and mix the blood and virus on my slide.
I follow all of the procedures I’ve learned by rote, creating a stain, transforming the water into a fixative, and finally, with one more glance at the lab exit, I slide my sample into place.
The tiny droplets are still far too big, and I use my powers to strip away more and more layers of cells as I increase the magnification, until I’m left with a handful of single cells I can look at in detail.
I’m not sure just what it is I’m seeing, and I turn a knob to zoom to the level I’m accustomed to.
And my hands start to tremble.
There are the strands of viral DNA inside the nucleus of my blood cells. But instead of beginning the re
plication process, the double helix strands are coming apart. They’re literally falling to pieces in front of my eyes. The nuclei in my blood cells aren’t simply repressing the virus, they’re destroying it!
It’s true. I’m immune.
I’m immune, I’m a Transformist, and I’m the most powerful Earthbound in the world. That’s got to be the secret. Or . . . three secrets. I’m just missing whatever connects them all together. And yet, something—a voice inside me that I’m petrified to listen to—tells me I still don’t know everything.
What more could there possibly be? Everything is straining credulity as it is.
I hear the unmistakable sounds of Daniel returning, and I stare at the view before me, trying to memorize each part, knowing I have only seconds. The air lock releases with a hiss, and, with a twinge of regret, I transform the sample in front of me to the viral strand—so familiar now I can simply create it—and a strand of generic DNA that I’m certain won’t align correctly with the split virus strand.
But it’ll look legit enough to keep Daniel from suspecting anything.
Probably.
“That one didn’t work,” I say as soon as he comes to stand behind me. I transform the entire slide into a puff of air, the way I’ve been doing all day—less cleanup for the lab techs—before Daniel can get more than a glance at it.
He’s silent for a brief moment, and guilt makes my heart race, but after another couple of seconds he sinks down onto the stool beside me and asks, “How are you holding up?”
“I’m doing okay,” I say, hoping he doesn’t hear how fast and shallow my breathing is. “It’s just monotonous.”
“Well, hopefully it will get exciting soon,” he says. But I hear hopelessness in his voice. Just a touch. “We’ve had . . . another attack. The closest of the three this time. I’m giving us twenty-four hours more—maybe I could stretch it to thirty-six if we’re making progress—then we’ll need to relocate.”
“Where could be safer than here?” I ask, verging on panic.