Some Fine Day (32 page)

Will asks something else, and I fall asleep again to the two of them quietly talking. I must sleep straight through to the next afternoon, because when I wake the house is quiet and dim light is coming through the stained glass windows. I’m on the couch, under a blue blanket, and Will is lying on the rug in front of the fireplace.

I stretch and my back cracks in about fifteen places, but I feel better than I have for days. Weeks, actually. I suddenly have to pee, so I head down the hall and start opening doors. The third is a half bathroom, just a toilet, where I eliminate about a gallon of nuclear yellow urine. It doesn’t hurt though, so I guess the shot did its work.

I curl up facing Will and wait for him to wake up. His blonde hair is army short now, but it suits him. I could just watch him forever, but then his eyes open.

“You’re back,” he says.

“I feel better.”

“No. I mean, you’re
back
.”

I look at my hand and notice that it’s not a crone’s claw anymore. The skin is smooth.

It’s like being told you have a terminal illness and then finding out it was all a mistake. I’ll never forget how the cop at the roadblock looked at me. As if I was nothing.

“That’s how they looked at us in the lab,” Will says, and I realized I must have spoken my thoughts aloud. “Like we weren’t even human.” He’s quiet for a minute. “A few times I just wished I were dead. Many times, I did. They were careful though. After a couple of us found ways. . .Then they watched us all the time. Made us sick, one by one, while they recorded the symptoms. Asking the same questions, over and over. I think they were physics, like me. Why, Jansin? Why would they do that to us?”

I just shake my head. It’s not a question I can answer. I could give him the official story, that it was necessary for the greater good. But that’s not what he means.

His arms are still green with bruises at the injection sites. I think of how close he came to being infected like Nileen.

“It’s all my fault,” I whisper.

Will’s face hardens. “None of this is your fault. You didn’t ask to be taken by the clan any more than I asked to be taken by the soldiers.” Will rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. “I used to dream of you, Jansin. Awake and asleep both. When they would come for me. You’re what I held onto. To keep myself sane.”

I don’t know what to say. I wish we were alone somewhere, really alone, not on the floor of a strange house with legions of scarily competent people looking for us. I’m not even sure exactly what we are to each other anymore. Friends? Something more? I know what we could have been, but that was another lifetime.

What’s been done to Will, what he’s witnessed. . . that would drive a weaker person insane. He’s not crazy, but he’s not the same, that’s for sure. I doubt he ever will be. He was already wounded when I met him. I’m just not sure what kind of scars I’m dealing with now.

“I thought you were dead,” I say. “I thought you were all dead. That’s what they told me.”

“Well, they’re liars.”

“Yes,” I say.

We watch the rain wash in sheets down the windows.

“How do they do that?” Will asks after a while. “Make it rain?”

“The people who built the prefectures diverted underground rivers to feed the sewage and drinking water system. They also created a sprinkler network. Fire is one of our biggest worries down here. But it turns out people like having weather. They need it. It breaks the tedium. They can make it snow too.”

“I’ve never seen snow,” Will says. “I don’t think it exists anymore. Not for real.”

“Do you remember how the woods used to smell after a heavy rain?” He nods. “That’s one of the things I miss the most. The air. It was always different.”

“I miss the boats,” he says. “Being out on the water. The world just seemed so endless. I was born on a sailboat and I’ve probably spent more than half my life out at sea. I’d give anything just to see it one more time.”

There’s a polite cough at the door and Rafiq comes in with a tray of soup and bread and tea. My stomach leaps at the smell. It’s hollow enough to park a tank in there.

“Shower’s upstairs, second door on the left,” he says. “I’ve left towels and clean clothes Samer bought this morning.”

We thank him and devour the food, then go clean up. When I look in the bathroom mirror, I see that I’m not back to normal, not entirely. My hair is streaked with white, not salt and pepper, but thick swathes from root to tip.  I know I should be grateful I’m not dead, or old forever, but it still looks strange, disfiguring, like a half-healed scar.

The clothes fit well, a black long-sleeved sweater and pants similar to agent gear. Sturdy combat boots. My old outfit, which used to be one of my nicest, is so stained with blood and filth I don’t even want to touch it with my newly clean hands. It goes straight into the trash.

We regroup in the study about an hour later. Will is dressed the same as me, except he got a black T-shirt. With his cropped hair and pale skin, he looks like a different person from the boy I met less than a year ago. He looks older. Harder.

Like yesterday, Will and I take the loveseat, and Rafiq settles into his armchair. Samer sits by the window, eyes watchful and alert.

The light outside has dimmed. It’s raining again.

“I need to know about Substation 99,” I say.

Rafiq nods and activates the holofire. It looks perfectly real, down to the glowing coals underneath, although I’m not sure why he needs the andirons and poker. For effect, I suppose.

“Then you’re in the right place,” he says.

Did God do it on purpose? Were we being tested? Punished? Or was it all simply proof that there is no God?

“Before we start,” Rafiq says, “you need to understand what things were like in the early days of the prefectures. My wife, Beth, was stationed at Fort Detrick, so we ended up at Raven Rock. At first, we counted ourselves lucky to be there. Very lucky. What was happening on the surface was. . . Well, some of it defied imagination. Hordes of emaciated refugees. Plague. Wildfires, and then floods that swallowed the ashes of entire cities.

“We had enough food for half a year. After that, the hydroponic farms would be in full production, and we’d grow what we needed. But it didn’t work out that way. As often happens, a series of small mistakes cascaded into full-blown crisis. For one thing, there were more of us than we’d planned for, a lot more. Last-minute shuttles kept arriving, relatives of high-ranking officials, others who knew how to arrange a well-placed bribe. A stop was put to it eventually, but it was too late. Everything was already massively behind schedule. The stores that were supposed to keep us alive for six months lasted two.”

Rafiq pauses and sips a mug of steaming tea. “We were put on strict rationing, barely eight hundred calories a day, and there were some who began to believe that we’d made a terrible mistake. My wife was among them. She thought we were all going to die down here. Then, on our hundredth day underground, a storm on the surface knocked out one of the ventilation tubes in Sector G.”

He looks at me and my insides turn to ice. I never knew about this. I never even knew there
was
a Sector G. The histories make it sound like everything was perfectly planned and executed, down to the last detail.

“Now we understand how to make them cane-proof. But back then, it seems the engineers had miscalculated.”

“What happened?” Will asks.

“Why, it flooded, of course. The sea came pouring down and submerged the entire sector and part of those adjacent before it was sealed off. Twenty-five thousand people drowned.” He rubs his forehead wearily. “If we were frightened before, afterwards. . . I can’t describe the terror, the claustrophobia. Ironically, it was probably the reason the rest of us survived until the first harvest. A tenth fewer mouths to feed.”

“That’s a horrible story,” I say. The image of bloated corpses drifting in the darkness pops into my head and I push it away. “Why are you telling us this?”

“Because you need to know the context in which Beth and I started Project Nix.”

“Wait a second.
You
?”

“Well, it was Beth’s brainchild. She was a geneticist, a brilliant one. She started to wonder if there wasn’t a way we could adapt to the harsh new surface conditions. If, for example, people were given specialized amphibian genes, among others. She and eight others volunteered themselves as experimental subjects. It sounds mad to say it now, but you have to understand the pressure we were under.”

Will has gone rigid next to me. I take his hand, but I don’t think he even notices.

“You know how it turned out,” Rafiq says, his cultured voice relating these horrors so casually I want to reach across the carpet and shake him. “They
changed
. In one sense, it was more successful than we dared to hope. But the changes went beyond the merely physical. Something was missing, something that makes us human. Mercy, perhaps. Empathy for others. And they looked. . . wrong. A recommendation was made that the project be terminated. Clean slate.” He holds his giant hands out to us in mute appeal. “I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t let them murder my wife.”

“So you set them loose,” Will says in a monotone.

“I commandeered a mole and took them to the surface. Six had survived the process. Your mother helped me, Jansin, and I will forever be in Tamiko’s debt for it. She was very young then but such a promising student. She worshipped Beth. Me, they punished with early retirement. They knew I’d never publically discuss it. We managed to conceal your mother’s involvement. It would have destroyed her career.”

Your mother helped me
.

I remember the look on her face when she asked what I knew about Nix. The slight hesitation before she denied any knowledge. She must have assumed at first that I’d somehow discovered the original project, her role in it. Then she realized her mistake.
We had a
falling out
, she said. Like it was some disagreement over how to split the check at an expensive restaurant. Not that Rafiq’s wife turned herself into some kind of monster and then they both unleashed her and five more like her on the surface. I don’t think Mom knew about Rebekah, her outrage was genuine, but I do wonder what other secrets she’s kept from me.

It sickens me that we
made
the toads, but it has the ring of truth. Nothing natural could evolve that quickly.

“Why take the others?” I ask. “Why not just your wife? Wouldn’t that have been easier?”

Rafiq stares into the holofire. “I didn’t want her to be lonely. I didn’t want her to be the only one of her species.”

“Did you know they could breed?” Will demands. He’s breathing hard now. “Did you know that?”

“We thought they were sterile.”

“Well, they’re not,” Will spits out. “There’s more of them now. And they hunt us for sport. Maybe even food. But I guess you didn’t have to worry about that, since you just dumped them and ran back to your hole in the ground.”

“I’m sorry. So sorry. If you know what it is to love someone. . .”

“I loved my mother. My father, and my sister.” He stares at Rafiq, and his hatred is so raw it’s like electricity crackling in the air. “But I’m sure they’d understand, if they were still alive.”

Heavy silence descends over the room.

The situation is spinning out of control, and I can’t let that happen. I ache for Will’s loss, but it’s not the toads I care about. It’s Tisiphone. And what I hope is inside her.

“What you did is beyond stupid,” I say to Rafiq. “But it was a long time ago, and your motives weren’t evil, just selfish. Not like what they’re doing now.”

Rafiq gets the hint. “I found out a year ago that Rebekah Carlsson had restarted Nix, her own incarnation of it,” he says quickly. “She was assigned as a senior scientist to 99 when there was a toad attack. Unlike the other times, they managed to capture some alive. I think her grant was about to be cut off, they were getting ready to close the station, and she saw an opportunity to make a name for herself. She had a subspecialty in biosciences. If the toads could be controlled somehow. . .

“Of course, her goals for Nix were nowhere near as complex as what Beth accomplished. Carlsson focused on behavioral modification, primarily through pharmaceuticals. It’s all she was qualified for.”

There’s a whiff of academic snobbery in his tone, which I ignore.

“Now they’ve promoted her to managing the flu project, even though she has little expertise in bioweapons and Nix failed to deliver concrete results. Typical military. If you know how to kiss the right arses and tart up your data a bit, you’re golden.” He pauses for breath. “Well, that doesn’t matter. I just want to put an end to it. I have no idea if my wife is still alive. If she’s one of the
subjects
. But I can’t allow her work to be turned into such an abomination.”

Will is staring at the wall, and I can sense fury rolling off him in waves, but he hasn’t walked out, which shows impressive self-control as far as I’m concerned.

“How do you know all this?” I ask.