In the End (Starbounders) (12 page)

Fear, cold as ice, runs through every nerve and vein. “But she’s important to their research,” I protest. “They won’t kill her, will they?”

“Not on purpose. But Rice is concerned. . . . There are so many complications from blood loss—”

“I’ll come back,” I cut her off. “I’ll leave right now.”

“Amy, don’t be stupid. You’ll never get in, and you’ll wind up dead. What good will you be to Baby then?”

“But—”

“No. Just find Ken. He has clearance I don’t. He has access to New Hope research, to New Hope test subjects. I’ve already told you: If you want to get Baby out, Ken can do that. He’s really the only way. You just have to convince him to take Baby as his own subject.”

“Are you sure?”

There’s a long pause. “No. Like I said, I haven’t been able to contact him. Gareth has been hacking the system so I can briefly speak with you. . . . But the researchers are on a different circuit. It’s too risky for me to try.”

I know Kay wants me to search out her brother, but I can’t put all my hope in a man I can’t find.

“Maybe Rice can get Baby,” I try. “He would have the right clearance, and Dr. Reynolds’s trust.”

“I’ve talked to him. A couple of times. The longest conversation lasted about thirty seconds. He used his earpiece to relay information to me when he knew neither of us was being monitored, just like I’m doing for you. Do you know the risk he was taking? I don’t know when we’ll be able to speak again. He’s scared too, Amy. He wanted me to tell you to be strong and patient.”

Be strong and patient.
Just like when I was in the Ward. I’m filled with something recently unfamiliar—reassurance. Rice came through for me once. I have to believe he can do it again.

“Find Ken,” Kay says. “He’ll have access to information I don’t. He can give you a better idea of how Baby is, of how to get her out. Do you understand?”

I want to
go
. I want to be
doing
something. But she’s right. This is my only option.

“Okay.”

“Just be careful.”

“I will,” I promise.

“If . . . When you find him, he may not trust you. Tell him that you’re my friend. And then tell him this. Tell him ‘Ted doesn’t need you.’ He’ll know what it means. He’ll know I sent you.”

My earpiece goes dead. “Kay?” I whisper. “Kay . . . are you still there?”

After a few long seconds her voice cuts back in. “Gareth is telling me I have to go.”

“Wait . . . what about my mother? What about Adam? Are they safe?”

There’s a long pause, and I thinks she’s cut out, but I hear a sigh and before she’s gone for good, she responds.

“Sunshine, no one is safe.”

Chapter Eighteen

I try to wait for Jacks to return, but after a few minutes of pacing I decide to go find him. I double-check my weapons and am about to leave when Jacks appears.

“Hey, I just came to see if you needed anything.” He looks me over. “Are you okay?”

I cross my arms and try to rub the cold from them. “No.”

He doesn’t say anything, just waits for me to go on.

“Baby . . . uh, my sister. She’s really in trouble.”

“How could you know that?”

“I . . .” I close my eyes, trying to think. “I didn’t tell you everything. I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure I could trust you.”

Jacks puts his arms on my shoulders and makes me sit on the bottom bunk. I think he’s going to sit next to me, but instead he pulls up a chair.

“Tell me.”

And so I tell him everything. About Dr. Reynolds and my mother. About how I found out about the Floraes and how New Hope doesn’t want anyone to know they were the ones who created them. How I was put in the Ward, and Kay helped me escape. I tell him about my earpiece and what Kay told me. I tell him about Ken and how he worked for Hutsen-Prime. How he might be able to access information about Baby—

“Wait. Hutsen-Prime?” Jacks cuts in.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Amy, Doc has Hutsen-Prime boxes in his office. I thought they were a chemical company or something. It’s where the flu shots come from.”

It takes a minute for it to sink in. “They have to be from New Hope. And if Doc is working with New Hope, he’s probably working with Dr. Reynolds. . . . But that also means he’ll know where Ken is.” I look up at Jacks. “We have to go see Doc.”

“You think Doc is . . . what, like a spy or something?” He looks incredulous.

“I don’t know what Doc is, but if he’s injecting people with something from New Hope, I doubt it’s a flu shot. If Ken is working on a vaccine, maybe Doc is testing it.” I look down and see I’m clenching and unclenching my fists. Anger, fear, hope, love—all tossing around inside of me. I try to calm myself. Doc isn’t Dr. Reynolds, but my rage flares when I think of all the damage Dr. Reynolds has done. If Doc is helping him, he’s just as guilty. “I need to find out what Doc knows.”

“How?” Jacks asks, his voice heavy with concern. “How are you going to find that out?”

I stand, my hand going to the Guardian gun at my hip. “Any way I have to.”

“Whoa, Amy. Let’s take this down a notch. I’m sure Doc will tell us if we just ask him. You need a second to calm down.”

“Jacks, every second could count.”

“I get that. Just”—he takes a breath—“just don’t hurt Doc.”

I stare at him for a moment, remembering that Doc is Jacks’s father. “Fine,” I say, nodding once.

I spring into action, and we’re out of the cell, Jacks hurrying to catch up with me. But as we rush down the stairs and out of the cellblock, something’s bothering me.

“Your father really didn’t tell you anything about New Hope or Hutsen-Prime?” I whisper.

He shakes his head as we enter the exercise yard and make our way through the makeshift shelters. “Amy, as far as I know, my father was a second-rate doctor who blew his career and his marriage because he couldn’t stop popping pills. The only one who would give him a job was my uncle.”

We’re at the front wall now. Jacks grabs my arm and looks into my eyes. “He’s a loser, Amy. He can barely keep his shit together. I doubt he’s part of some crazy conspiracy.”

I think about my mother, her part in New Hope and creating the bacteria that caused the Florae infection. I think about Rice, all his secrets, many I still didn’t know. “You can’t know someone completely,” I say. “Not truly.”

He takes a deep breath, steeling himself, then leads me through a side door and straight to Doc’s office.

Doc’s sitting at his desk, looking over papers while chewing on a pen. When he hears us, he looks up.

“Jacks,” he says, pleased. His eyes flick to me, and his expression changes from genuine happiness to feigned delight. “Amy. Hi there. Have you changed your mind about the flu shot?”

That’s all it takes. His phony smile, his false upbeat voice. For a second I see Dr. Reynolds, not Doc, sitting in his chair. I walk over to him, spin his chair around, and pull out my knife.

“I know you’re working with New Hope.” I push the blade to his neck. “And you are going to tell me everything that I want to know.”

Chapter Nineteen

“Amy!” Jacks screams, his hand gripping my shoulder. “Amy. Let me ask him,” he says firmly.

“Jacks, I have to know.”

“Okay. But you need to calm down.”

I back off slowly, dropping my knife to my side, and step away.

“Wh-what is this about?” Doc asks Jacks quietly, his face white.

“Amy has been telling me some things,” Jacks says, his voice even. “Things about you and a place called New Hope.” Doc glances over at me and he looks nervous. “I hear those flu shots might actually be something else.”

Even though we have no proof, just my assumptions, Jacks sounds confident, as if he’s completely sure of what he’s saying. The power in his voice is impressive. As Jacks talks, Doc tries to look unaffected, but he begins to shift nervously in his chair.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says with a tight, pinched face.

“Doc.” Jacks leans in.
“Dad.”
The word is strained coming from Jacks’s mouth, but it has the desired effect. Doc studies Jacks’s face, his expression conflicted. Jacks continues in his soothing voice, “There’s no reason to keep secrets from me.”

My fingers twitch around the hilt of my knife, and Doc’s eyes flick to it. “Tell us,” I snap, unable control my tone.

“Well . . .” He shrugs, unable to meet Jacks’s gaze. “You seem to already know most of it anyway. New Hope sends me the vaccine, and I give it to the people here, tell them it’s a flu shot. Then we see if it works.”

He says all this so nonchalantly, as if the fact that Dr. Reynolds is using Fort Black as his personal laboratory is nothing at all. I’d thought Ken was sent to study the people here, but it’s far worse—they’re using them as lab rats.

I push aside my horror. “How do you know if it works?” I manage to ask. “Most people stay behind the walls.”

“Most, but not all. Sometimes we’ll get a Scrapper who’s been bitten or one of the men who clean up the Florae bodies or someone on garbage duty.” Another little shrug. “Sometimes I have to create situations in which to test the effectiveness.”

Before I can ask what he means, he moves to stand up. My knife rises with him, and then his hands come up too. “I just want to show you,” he says. He goes to the cabinet and retrieves a paper. “Here, look.” He shoves the paper at me. I glance at it. At the top is typed
F1T13
. Under that are a lot of chemical names I don’t understand, followed by instructions to remove the site of infection if a patient becomes exposed to a Florae’s bodily fluid.

“Harmless,” he says, as if the meaning of what I’m looking at should be obvious to me. “Jacks, you yourself kept records for me.”

Jacks glances at me. “Amy, I swear I didn’t know.” He looks back to Doc, with a look of realization on his face. “I was injected with that F1T13 thing . . . and a bunch of shots before that. What about side effects? And all those women who died last year?”

“That was . . . regrettable.”

After an empty moment, I repeat the word.
“Regrettable?”

Doc sits back down. No shrug this time, at least. He plays with his ear nervously. “New Hope sent me a fertility drug to test on the women. I was unprepared for the strength of the adverse reaction. So many died. . . . I had no way of knowing that a side effect would be a high risk of hypertension. As soon as I saw the increase in deaths caused by heart attack and stroke, I discontinued the study.”

“You wouldn’t do something like this. . . .” Jacks’s face betrays his horror. I know what he’s feeling. I felt that way when I found out what my mother had done, what she had created. Jacks backs away, reaching behind him for something to steady himself on.

I reach out and take Jacks’s hand. “You’re responsible for their deaths,” I say to Doc.

“No. No,” Doc protests. “I’m just the observer, the middleman. I get the medicine and instructions. Give this batch to women, give this batch to children. Give the potential Florae vaccine to everyone.”

“You gave that shit to me,” Jacks says, unbelieving.

“Yes, but the Florae vaccine’s only side effect seems to be an increased tendency toward violence.”

He says this as if it’s somehow a good thing. I’m so angry, I have to concentrate on keeping my breathing even. These people are making Fort Black even more dangerous. As if it needed the help. And I can’t even think about the women they so “regrettably” killed.

“What . . . ,” Jacks asks quietly. “What about the Black Pox? Was that you, too?”

“No. That’s just an unfortunate mutation of the chicken pox virus. We had nothing to do with that. I’m not responsible for every disease that manifests. Where there are people, there is sickness. There always has been and always will be.”

“It makes your job easier,” I say with venom in my voice. “When people die by your hand, you can blame some random virus.”

Doc looks down and doesn’t respond.

I give Jacks’s hand a squeeze before releasing it. From my baggy shorts I pull out the sketch of Ken. I hold it up for him to see.

“Do you know this man?”

“No,” he answers quickly.

“He’s lying,” Jacks tells me. I wish Jacks knew sign language. I wish I could take his hand again and have him sign to me, like Rice could. I’d ask him if he really knew Doc was lying or if he was just bluffing again.

“You lied to us for years,
Dad
,” he spits out the last word. “About the drugs, about your downward spiral of a career.”

“I haven’t lied to you about any of this, Jacks. I just didn’t tell you. I thought it would be better for you if you didn’t know.”

It stings, knowing Jacks used this exact excuse for not telling me Doc was his father. Like father, like son. Jacks just shakes his head though, and I realize it’s not really the same at all.

“That’s the bullshit you used to give Mom.
I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to worry.
No, it’s better to have reality come crashing down all at once. It’s better to find out from a random nurse that Mom ran into in the grocery store that your father lost his medical license for stealing drugs. It’s better to find out that we have no money when the car is being repossessed and the house is being foreclosed on. It’s better to find out that your father has been playing mad scientist with people’s lives, years after the fact.”

Doc considers this for a moment, then looks past Jacks at me. “Amy, are you sure you want to dig any deeper?” he pleads. “You have many valuable skills. You could make a good life for yourself in Fort Black.”

“You’re insane,” I whisper.

But he goes on. “Don’t you want to just go back home with Jacks and forget all this? I was going to contact New Hope when you first arrived; I had been told to look out for you. But I saw you two together, and I talked it over with my brother. We knew you and Jacks would get along. We thought it would be better for you both.”

“My uncle . . . he knows about all this?” Jacks asks. He shakes his head. “Of course he does.”

Doc nods, his jaw tight. “The testing has been going on for a long time,” he continues. “My brother sold Fort Black out long before the infection broke. Hutsen-Prime had been using the prisoners as test subjects and paying the Warden a fair price.”

“When he hired you, I actually thought he was trying to help you,” Jacks says. “He even convinced me and Layla to come here to talk to you. To forgive you. That’s why we were here when the infection broke out. I thought he wanted to help us patch things up.”

“Don’t act so naive, Jacks. You know what kind of man your uncle is. But we’re looking out for you.” Doc turns to me. “I was told if you came here to report it immediately to New Hope and we didn’t. If you back down now, you can live here. You’ll be safe with Jacks. Why get involved?”

“I’m already involved,” I tell him. Even if I wanted to forget New Hope, I couldn’t. Not with all I left behind there. I hold up the sketch. “Do. You. Know. Him?”

Doc doesn’t look at it again. Instead he looks at me, his eyes cold. “You’re talking about Ken Oh. He’s a researcher for New Hope. He works on the vaccines and brings them to me when they’re modified.”

I let out a long breath. Finally I’m getting somewhere. “And where can I find him?”

“I’ve already let him know that you’re looking for him.” He taps his ear with a sad smile.

“How . . . ?” I start, but then I realize. He contacted Ken the same way Kay contacted me. Through an earpiece. I can just see it glinting in his ear.

“Ken’s been listening in the whole time,” he says. “He says he doesn’t know what you want with him, but if you’re this determined, he’ll send for you when he has a free moment.” Doc’s eyes narrow as he listens. He looks back up at me. “Go to Jacks’s cell and wait for him.”

I just stare at him, my head spinning.
I’ve gotten to Ken? Finally?

“Amy, let’s go,” Jacks says, glaring at Doc. “We got what we came for.”

I turn to Jacks. “How do we know he’s telling the truth? He’s lied to you for years—”

“I didn’t lie. I just kept information from you that was best withheld,” Doc tells Jacks. “Calling the vaccine a flu shot made things simpler.”

I whirl around, my voice shaking with rage. “Do you think people are too stupid to decide for themselves if they want to be tested on, or do you just not care?”

“Amy, relax.” Jacks pulls me from the room and hurries me down the hall.

“Relax?”
I ask, my voice a thin screech.

“Don’t be stupid,” he says through clenched teeth. He looks at me with urgency, and I understand:
If I want to keep going, I need to stop making trouble
. I look at the pain on his face. He’s just gotten a shock as well.

“Okay,” I say softly. “Are you . . . ?”

“I’m fine. . . . I mean, I knew Doc wasn’t going to win any father-of-the-year awards.”

He’s hiding his hurt, and for now I let him. We need to get back to his cell and wait for Ken. I charge forward, into the exercise yard—into chaos. People are running around wildly, trampling through tents and cardboard boxes.

“What’s going on?” I ask Jacks, but he looks just as confused as I am.

“I don’t—”

A woman runs at us, her hands scraped and bloodied. “It’s here!” she screams. “It’s inside!”

Jacks catches her and holds her arms. “What is it? What’s inside?”

“A Florae!” She wriggles from his grasp. “Run!” she screeches before disappearing into a sea of panic.