Genesis (35 page)

“Rosie?”

She looked up and slowly got to her feet. Pip. Her pulse sped up, relief flooding her. His shirt was ripped and covered in dirt and there were scratches on his face, but he was alive. She wanted to fling her arms around him, and he took a step back from her as if sensing her intention.

“What happened?” she said.

His eyes were huge and he looked down at his hand. She saw a smear of blood on his knuckle. “I couldn’t go back, Rosie.” His voice cracked. “I couldn’t let him take me.”

He’d killed the grunt. She felt cold. What was Helios turning him into? She wanted to tell him it was all right but the words wouldn’t come.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. But he shook his head and met her eyes and she was shocked to see tears and such a depth of pain, of desperation. He was broken. She stepped forward and threw her arms around his neck, clutching him tight. After a second’s hesitation he hugged her back, lifting her off the floor and holding on so tight, she could barely breathe. He buried his face in her shoulder and she held him while he cried. She wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that, but eventually he loosened his grip. No one passed them while they were locked together. Maybe they saw their grief and went another way, Rosie wasn’t sure, but for that at least, she was glad. She knew he hated her seeing him break down like that, much less anyone else.

They shared her water when he’d recovered enough and Rosie said, “How did you know we were here?”

“I saw the hoppers.” He looked incredibly weary now and he reached into the side pocket of his pants. “I came to give you this.” It was a full bag of blood. “Maybe he didn’t get enough last time.”

Rosie hesitated. “I can’t just hand them a bag of blood. The doctors will want to know why and where it came from. And then
they
might find out.”

“It’s worth the risk.”

She felt torn. She didn’t want to put Pip at risk, but he was right and it might be her dad’s only chance. She took the bag.

“Anyway, I won’t be hanging around,” he said.

Her heart twisted but she didn’t argue. It wasn’t safe for him to stay. “So this is it?” she said softly. She hated Helios so much for doing this to them. She was close to tears and an echo of the abandonment she’d felt when her mum died came back to her, like a fist to her stomach.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“It’s better if you don’t know. And … I’m sorry, about everything, you know.”

“Yeah,” Rosie said.

They stared at each other. Pip swayed away from her as if to leave, but then he leaned forward and took her face between his hands and kissed her gently. “Bye, Rosie,” he whispered against her lips and ran down the corridor.

In the end, Rosie put Pip’s blood into her dad herself.

She waited until the night nurses had gone, until there was no one else around, then she hooked up the bag of blood to her dad’s drip and her aunt kept watch while it leaked into him.

She didn’t know what the doctors would think if he got better but she couldn’t think that far ahead. Pip was gone. It felt as though some part of her had been chopped out. Was this what love was? If it was, she didn’t know how people survived it. The weariness of the loss felt like it might consume her.

For weeks the news waves had been full of reports of a secret lab on Mars. They talked about genetic experiments, the missing Ferals who had been taken as subjects and the most explosive claim of all: that the MalX was no natural disease and had been released by a powerful corporation named Helios. After one webnet picked it up, the rest had followed and it had gone global.

Rosie struggled to find any satisfaction in the victory. The real perpetrators, those unseen puppeteers Yuang had answered to, were nowhere to be found. They were ghosts, too powerful to touch. When she and Riley took down the Enclave, they had only touched a skein of the Helios web and she was sure they were off somewhere, repairing it, making it stronger.

The Genesis colony was closed now, restricted access only. All they’d been left with was news vision of the United Earth Commission and the Senate sending the Elite in to raid offices long since devoid of any connections to those who had vanished. She wondered what Riley would think – if he was still alive. Would he consider it enough that the world now knew his parents had died trying to expose Helios’s terrible work? Was it enough that he had managed to save at least some of those people who had been in there?

Rosie knew it was selfish but sometimes she felt it was too high a price to pay.

Had it really been worth Juli’s life? Had it been worth Pip disappearing? Had it been worth this?

She stood outside the glass walls of her dad’s room looking in, watching the doctors.

“You okay?” Aunt Essie put her arms loosely around her neck and rested her head against hers.

“Not really,” she said.

“Yeah, I know,” her aunt whispered, and they both fell silent.

In the room the doctor was trying to talk to her dad but Rosie could see that he wasn’t making much sense. The hospital staff wanted answers he just couldn’t give. This had never happened before in the MalX floor; people were brought here to die, not to recover.

Rosie held tight to Aunt Essie’s forearm while they checked and re-checked his vitals. Every so often he’d look at her and she tried to smile, but inside she felt a great gaping hole in her chest.

When he’d finally woken in the early hours of the day before, he’d looked at her and smiled a faint slow smile. It was the first time she’d seen him smile for so long and she almost cried, but then he’d spoken. “Rosie, love, where’s your mother?” he’d said.

Then she
had
cried. He thought her mum was still alive. He didn’t know what day it was, what year. He didn’t remember where they’d been.

The doctor said his mind had fractured, like a switch in his brain had been flipped. Whether it was because of the disease or the stress of everything that had happened, they couldn’t say, but they were sending him to a psychiatric care unit. She was going to live with Aunt Essie, permanently, until he recovered. If he recovered.

“Time to go,” her aunt said and hugged her briefly. “He needs some sleep.” Rosie nodded and wiped a tear from her cheek. “We can come back tomorrow.”

“Okay.” Rosie waved at her dad and he nodded and raised his hand.

Aunt Essie put an arm around her and led her out.

She’d found them a new apartment on the edge of Central West. There hadn’t been enough room at her old one at Orbitcorp. “A new start,” her aunt had said. But Rosie wasn’t sure if it was. It felt more like hiding. They weren’t sure if Helios would be looking for them or not. It seemed unlikely now they’d put the files out and the Enclave was finished, but even so, few people knew where they lived. They would still be looking for Pip, of that she was certain, and if anyone figured out it was his blood that had cured her dad, they would be coming for her and anyone else who had any connection to him.

“I don’t know about you but I could handle the biggest, greasiest bowl of noodles ever,” Aunt Essie said as she opened the door of their apartment. “And maybe a glass of vodka. How about you?”

Rosie cast her a sideways glance and put the bag of groceries they’d bought on the way home on the kitchen bench. “I don’t think vodka is good for my growth,” she said.

“What growth?” Essie locked the door and dumped her bag on the lounge.

But Rosie had stopped listening. On the far side of the bench, just in front of an empty vase, was a smooth green pendant – exactly like the one she wore around her neck – except this one had a set of letters carved roughly into it.

“Aunt Essie,” she whispered.

They both just looked at it for a moment.

“Is that from who I think it’s from?” her aunt said.

“It has to be.” Slowly, Rosie picked it up and traced the R and S with her fingertip. Riley Shore.

“Son of a bitch,” Aunt Essie said, “he broke into our apartment.”

Rosie almost laughed. Only her aunt would look at it that way. “It’s a message,” she said. “He made it out.”

“God knows how.”

For the first time in weeks Rosie felt something that she thought might be hope. Riley was alive.

“This calls for a celebration,” Aunt Essie said and got out two glasses and her bottle of vodka. She poured a shot into her glass and filled Rosie’s with cordial then raised hers high.

“To the man with more lives than a mangy sewer cat.” She grinned.

Later, after her aunt had gone to bed, Rosie took the pendant and strung it on her necklace beside the other one. She stood out on their tiny balcony, holding them both in her hand. The air was cooler fifteen storeys up but she could still feel the waft of heat from the streets below. The lights from Central, the towers and shuttle lines, were like dimming stars, bright but shrouded with humidity. The sounds of the streets rose up to become a hum that penetrated walls and kept going up into space. She looked up at the stars, barely visible against the glow of the city.

The new school year would start soon. She thought about Juli and how she wouldn’t be going, how she would never see the constellations again or know how it felt to turn seventeen, never kiss a boy again. Never do anything again. Rosie felt the little ache near her heart that she thought would always be there now; the first scar, Nerita had called it, the scar that never heals.

She tightened her hand around the pendants and thought about Pip and about Riley and all those people he had managed to get out from Helios’s clutching greedy hands. Perhaps something good had come from it; some people had lived and, miraculously, Riley was one of them. She hoped then that he didn’t want to give up fighting yet, because she felt like she wasn’t done with Helios. They had killed her mother, her friend and made Pip into a murderer and an exile – they deserved to pay for it. No, she wasn’t ready to give up, not by a long shot.

Lara Morgan grew up in the hills outside of Perth, Western Australia but has spent the years since then roaming the world and investigating other hills. She has worked in the arts, at a newspaper and, once, a car wash, but all pale in comparison to being a writer which allows her to work in her pyjamas. She is also the author of a fantasy trilogy called The Twins of Saranthium. The Rosie Black Chronicles is her first series for young adults. She now lives in Geraldton, Western Australia – most of the time. You can visit her online at: www.lara-morgan.com.

Rosie Black’s story has had a bit of help in its journey to the page, and if it wasn’t for the following people, it might never have made it.

Isobelle Carmody who was my mentor at the very beginning – in fact even before the story had a proper ending – and who gave me invaluable advice on writing for young adults which I have never forgotten. Amanda Lines, Kathleen Wheeldon and Jackie Gill for reading my manuscript, enthusiasm and unfailing support. Dr Stacy Mader who patiently answered my many and random questions about Mars, space and astrophysics and especially about black holes – although one never appears in the book. To Tim Flannery, whom I have never met, but who wrote a fabulous book on climate change called
The Weather Makers
which partly inspired this story. It must be remembered that any errors in the science are entirely mine and were caused by a glitch in the space–time continuum – or by the fact that I don’t have an astrophysics or climatology degree. Thanks also to my fabulous agent Clare Forster as always, to Sarah Foster for loving Rosie and her world, and to Virginia Grant for being such a wonderful editor. And also to Writing WA which partnered me with Isobelle in the first place.

And last, but always first, my husband Grant who makes everything possible.