The man sank his teeth into her ear.
Liz screamed, tried to jump back, but his teeth held tight. She struck at his face, over and over, but he latched onto her ear like a gene-tweaked Doberman. Liz palmed his head with both hands and pushed, hard as she could.
A crack rang through her skull as the cartilage of her ear tore away. She screamed, clutched the hot ragged wetness on the side of her head, fell backward over a table. Beakers crashed down around her.
Training finally overcame shock, and Liz reached for her sidearm. Too late. The man leaped on top, straddling her, pinning her arms to the floor. A piece of her suit—along with her ear—dangled from his teeth like a dog’s chew toy.
She watched helplessly as the naked, sore-ridden man reached for a beaker shard, swung it above his head, and drove it deep into her trachea.
Liz screamed, but only a bubbling gurgle came out. She bucked, tried to free her arms, to stem the flow of life spurting out of her, but her hands remained pinned, useless.
As Liz’s last breath bubbled from her throat, she had one final thought. How absurd, to be killed by a dead man.
Liz woke, tried to sit up, failed. She could see around her, but was immobile, as though she were encased in ice. A woman, about Liz’s own age, stood above her. A brief sense of familiarity flashed through Liz’s mind, replaced by anger and confusion. A desire to strike out, to hurt, surged through Liz, checked only by her paralysis.
TALIA SPENCER
She screamed. A twinge of relief cooled her rage as she realized she could shout.
An older man hurried into the room and gestured for the woman to leave.
“Dad!”
“Shhhh. Quiet, Liz. You’ll be okay.”
“What’s going on?”
“You’re in my office at the hospital. You instructed your coworkers to put you under my care if you were ever injured. Do you remember that? You suffered a severe head injury.”
Liz recalled giving those instructions. Her father was among the best doctors in the city. A specialist in emergency medicine and infectious disease, Dr. Nicolas Arus was well-versed in a dozen other fields. He often joked that he was a jack of all trades, master of none, but the medical establishment regarded him as a leading authority in several branches of medicine.
A phantom pain burned in Liz’s trachea. She tried to reach for her throat. “Why can’t I move!”
“I gave you a partial paralytic. Disorientation and aggression are common after the type of head injury you sustained. The drug is standard.” He pushed another drug into Liz’s catheter. “This will help.”
When Liz was finally able to reach for her throat, she let out a long breath at finding it fully intact. “What happened to my neck?”
“What do you mean? I already scanned your c-spine—it’s perfectly fine.”
“I swear this . . . corpse . . . came to life and stabbed me in the throat. After . . .” she shuddered. “After biting my ear off.”
Nicolas frowned, put his hand on his daughter’s head. “I’m sorry, dear. Concussions as severe as the one you suffered can cause false memories. Sometimes terrifying ones.”
“But how did I get a concussion?”
“They didn’t give me a history.”
“Who’s they? Who brought me in?”
“The nurses brought you to me, and I assume your coworkers brought you to them, as you’d instructed in case of an accident.”
Liz got up from her bed. “No one from Detective Division checked on me?”
Nicolas shook his head.
Disappointment flickered through Liz’s confusion. “I need to get to GeneCrime.”
Her father frowned, placed his hands on her shoulders. “Liz, you had a severe head injury. If your blood pressure spikes, you could suffer an intracranial hemorrhage. You need to stay here.”
“I feel fine, Dad. Better than ever, actually. I have to go.” She hugged her father and noticed the pendant he always wore on a fine chain around his neck—a serpent wound around a staff—was missing. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without your Rod of Asclepius.”
Nicolas smiled. “I’m glad to see the detective in you wasn’t harmed. It broke off recently. But Elizabeth,” his face grew stern as he took her wrists, “I must insist that you remain under my care.”
Liz shook free and hurried to the door, pleased at the absence of stiffness she’d expected. “Don’t worry about me!”
She barged through the doors of GeneCrime’s Detective Division. “Really, not one of you came to visit me?”
Her answer was a room of wide eyes.
Liz glanced behind her, sure some gene-tweaked monster had barged in. “What the hell? You all look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Stroger, a detective Liz liked, stood up and looked her over. “Are you okay?”
“Aside from a concussion and some wonky false memories, yeah, I’m fine. What’s wrong with you? Did you figure out what was in my Quarantainer?”
“Liz, we didn’t know there was a Quarantainer. We didn’t even know if you, well . . .” Stroger pointed to a poster on the wall. Liz’s photo stared back at her from under a single word in bold print: MISSING.
“Is this a joke?”
Stroger shook his head. Liz looked around the room. Nobody laughed. She checked the poster’s date stamp. March 11.
“What’s today’s date?” she asked.
“March 15.”
“I’ve been out four days! What happened?”
“That’s what everyone is hoping to ask you. All we know is what Enforcement reported: when Musk came back to the room he left you in, you were gone, along with a corpse.”
“What? Then who took me to the hospital?”
“Hospital? Liz, we checked every hospital. Most of us thought you were dead.”
“Why would I be dead?”
Stroger’s eyes roved Liz’s body, searching. “The only thing we found in the room Musk left you in was a large puddle of blood, streaked with signs of struggle. Almost four pints. We had the lab analyze it.
“Liz, it was your blood.”
Liz stormed back into her father’s office.
“How can I have lost four pints of blood and not have a wound? And why didn’t you tell me I was out for four days?”
“I was trying to tell you when you ran out of here, against my orders! But what about blood?”
“I said, how can they have found half my blood volume at the scene, yet I don’t have a scratch on me?”
Nicolas furrowed his brow. “That’s not possible. You had a cerebral contusion with multiple microhemorrhages, which is why we kept you sedated for four days and why I insist that you stay here. But you had no external bleeding.”
“Dad, our labs identify gene-tweaked chimeras with DNA the world has never seen. I think they can do a simple human blood analysis.”
Nicolas shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, Liz, other than they must have had a contaminated sample. You had no external wounds when you arrived.”
“That’s the other thing. How did I get here? No one from GeneCrime brought me in.”
“Then who brought you to the nurses?”
Liz was already on her way out the door when she answered. “That’s what I’m about to find out.”
She marched up to the nurses’ station. “Who was on duty the night of March 11?”
A dark-haired nurse looked Liz up and down. “I was. Can I help you?”
“Someone checked me in that night, and I need to find out who. Do you remember me?”
The nurse stared for a moment, shook her head.
“I would have been unconscious.”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t remember. But there were three of us on duty—one of the others may have admitted you. The log will show. Wh
at’s your name?”
“Elizabeth Arus.”
The nurse typed into her terminal. “Nothing under that.”
“Try Liz.”
The nurse tapped some keys, shook her head. “Sorry, nothing.”
Impossible. Unless whoever brought me in gave a false name. “Do you keep photos of admitted patients?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
“I can’t. Patient privacy.”
Liz flashed her badge.
The nurse’s eyes widened. “Oh. GeneCrime. Still,” the nurse said uncertainly, “unless you have a warrant . . .”
Liz reached over the desk and turned the screen toward her. “I do.”
“Ma’am, really, can I please—”
“Yes, I’ll have it sent right over,” Liz lied as she scanned the photos.
Her face was not among them.
Liz walked long through the warm night air. Usually, she hated the overcrowded city streets, but tonight she lost herself in the river of bodies flowing the sidewalks, hoping a change of scenery might give her some insight into what was going on.
It didn’t help. Unable to make sense of anything, Liz concluded that she needed more information. She stopped, stood like a stone in a river as pedestrians streamed past, and turned back the way she’d come.
The door gave a shrill creak, as if to chide Liz for this breach of trust. She winced and squeezed through.
In the course of hunting gene-tweakers, Liz had snuck into hundreds of places without guilt. But this time was different. This time, the office was her father’s.
I know he cared for me after . . . well, after whatever happened four days ago. Liz rammed her toe into a chair leg, muttered a string of curses. But someone brought me to him, and he’s not saying who.
She flipped her light to its lowest red setting, shuffled through the consultation area, and crept into her father’s personal workroom. In the crowded city, as in most of the country, space was at a premium—for a doctor to have his own consultation area, personal office, lab, and two patient rooms was testament to his standing in the medical community.
Liz powered up the photoroller on her father’s desk and flicked through the projected images. Some ancient, two-dimensional photos of open, rolling landscapes. A familiar three-dimensional shot of her and Nicolas, some more of her father with colleagues, and a few of him receiving various awards. But not a single one of Mom. Liz had once asked her father why he never kept photos of her mother. He said he couldn’t bear to be reminded.
She moved on to the lab, opened the black coolbox, and froze.
Inside, wrapped in a silver Quarantainer, was a cube the same size as the one she’d found four nights earlier.
She tried to talk down her rising heart rate. Okay, let’s not jump to conclusions. I’m sure Dad uses Quarantainers, and there are probably many med boxes this size. She pressed her thumb to the Quarantainer’s screen. It recognized her print and prompted her passcode. She swallowed, entered the letters. The Quarantainer accepted and presented two options: OPEN or INCINERATE.
A voice cut the silence behind Liz. “I couldn’t crack it, even when I had your thumbprint.”
Liz spun around.
“I tried your mother’s name, but it informed me two more wrong entries would incinerate the contents.”
“What’s going on?” Liz demanded.
Her father’s face was lined, weary. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time, Liz, but I didn’t think you would understand. Now, though, I need you to try. Now it is a matter of life and death.”
“Enough with the dramatic generalities.” Liz held up the Quarantainer, trembling in her hands. “Tell me why you have this.”
“Think, Liz. You’re the detective. You applied them to the wrong goal, but you’ve always had smarts.”
Liz’s head swam as she tried to put it together. The puzzle was incomplete, with too many missing pieces to see the big picture.
“Stop the games and tell me what’s happening.”
Nicolas sighed. “Very well. What if I told you the memory you have, the memory of the man in the lab attacking you, is not the result of a head injury, but is an accurate recollection?”
Liz shuddered, recalling the helpless terror of that moment. “I—that man was a dead. His skin was rotting.”
“Yes, he was dead when you found him.”
“Then how did he attack me!” Liz said, her voice rising.
“I gave him back his life.”
Liz looked from one eye to the other, searching for a lie. “Impossible.”
Her father keyed his mobile terminal, put it on speaker.
A man answered, groggy. “Nicolas?”
“Sorry for waking you at this hour, Arthur, but could you please come into the lab? It’s important.”
“Anything for you.”
Moments later, the door behind Liz opened. She spun around, recoiled. The corpse from the lab, his face now free of growths, looked nervously from Liz to Nicolas.
Only when her shoulders hit the wall did Liz realize she’d been staggering backward. “How . . . how can he . . .”
Pride erased the weary lines on her father’s face. “Liz, there is an ailment that has plagued mankind throughout history, a disease with one hundred percent prevalence and mortality.”
“No, don’t . . .”
“Yes, Liz. That ailment is death, and I have developed the cure.”
Liz shook her head. “That’s not possible.”
“Isn’t it? Liz, in both our lines of work, we must make conclusions based on the best evidence available. The evidence is before you. You found this man, dead, just four nights ago, and yet here he stands.”
“Who are you?” Liz asked the man, the wall cold on her back.
“Arthur Teasdale. I’m a geneticist.”
“A gene-tweaker,” Liz corrected.
Her father tsked. “Among those you label gene-tweakers are some of the best minds in medicine. And Arthur was on the cutting edge.”
Arthur nodded. “But even the best make mistakes. I accidently exposed myself to a virus I’d been manipulating. It was supposed to help people—to stop cancer cells from dividing—but it was incomplete at exposure. At that stage, it was destructive. My one hope lay with your father. We used to work together, and I knew of his research.”
“And I gladly helped an old friend,” Nicolas said. “Liz, you should know enough about viruses to understand the basic concept behind my cure. Death, in many cases, results from errors in genetic material. Take the case of cancer, which arises from mutations in—”
“I know how cancer works.” Liz’s memory of her mother on her deathbed, riddled with tumors, flashed through her mind.
“Of course you do.” Nicolas frowned. “All too well. And you’ll remember that your mother’s cancer resulted from an experimental virus—a virus that made changes to her genome, not unlike the one that killed Arthur here. But my virus can reverse those changes. All I need is a patient’s genetic code from before their cancer. I load chromosome segments into viral vectors I’ve bred not to reproduce, but to search for anomalies between the patient’s pre-disease genome and their current, diseased DNA. When a virus finds an inconsistency, it replaces the damaged code with a healthy copy. Once the process is complete, the patient returns to a pre-disease state.”
“This just sounds like advanced gene therapy,” Liz said. “And what you’re saying, if true, is that you’ve found a cure for cancer. That is not the same as a cure for death.”
“True. But then I administered the virus to someone who’d died in my care, just hours before. At the time, I thought it was a long shot, but it brought them back, Liz! In retrospect it makes sense: our bodies function to support life—when the structure to fulfill that goal is returned to perfection,
function follows.”
Liz shook her head and pointed at Arthur. “Four days ago, his skin was rotting. There was a hole in his arm nearly to the bone. Even if your treatment repaired his DNA, it wouldn’t reverse physical damage.”
Nicolas smiled. “Good point. That step was difficult, but inevitable. I have been doing this longer than you want to imagine, Liz.
“Because a dose of the virus contains all of a patient’s genetic information, the virus knows, in a manner of speaking, exactly how the patient’s body should be structured. Once I pump the virus through the body, I map morphological inconsistencies and activate the genes coding for missing or diseased tissue. You are right that this is all basically gene therapy; it’s just more comprehensive than anyone previously envisioned. I call it Möbius, after the Möbius strip. You remember it?”
Liz nodded.
“When viewed from above, the strip forms the basis of the recycling symbol—the symbol for recovering what has already been used. And when viewed from the side, the strip forms an infinity loop. Do you remember what curious result you get when you try to divide a Möbius strip into equal halves?”
“It remains in one piece.”
“Very good. This is precisely what my viruses do: they recover used, aged DNA to provide infinite life. When the processes of disease and injury try to break down the body, to cut life short, Möbius allows us to remain whole.”
Liz stared at her father, searching for any hint of a lie. He’s telling the truth. She felt a twinge of awe; the feeling was quickly replaced by a sense of betrayal.
“You’re just like every other gene-tweaker,” Liz said finally, addressing both men. “Never considering the consequences of your work. You forget history. It was gene-tweakers, trying to increase food production, who tweaked the crops that killed the bees. And then it was gene-tweakers who brought back the Neanderthals the North enslaved as pollinators. And when the Civil War broke out, it was gene-tweakers who created the bioweapons we’re still chasing down. Misery and war—these are the fruits of gene-tweaking. And now, in the most overpopulated era of human history, with death the only thing saving us from our own destruction, you would eliminate it?”