Fear My Mortality Read online

  There was a shout. A struggle somewhere beyond me.

  Suddenly Michael was there, an outline stretching toward me. I crashed into his arms, and he punched us backward and away from danger. We landed in the corner of the room where it was quiet.

  His body cushioned the impact, his arms tightened around me, smothering the roaring and crashing, pulling me in to the shadows where I was safe. Where I could breathe again for the first time.

  I tried to see his face. I started to speak even though I didn’t know what I was going to say, but someone else lifted me up and wrenched me away from him and I started screaming.

  “Tie her down. Do it fast. Don’t let her get you.”

  There was a flurry of movement. My back hit the chair. Black-clad figures rushed around me, tugging my arms and legs as I tried to fight them, kick them, scratch them. Scissors flashed, ripping through my clothes, material falling away and air rushing in. I searched for Michael, but he was gone. It wasn’t really him, just somebody trying to grab me and stop me getting to the door.

  “Get off me!” I yanked at the new holds they’d tied to my wrists and ankles, pulling and shoving, jerking upward as hard as I could.

  Reid’s voice was close by, and I craned to see him, imagining that he rubbed his chest where I’d shoved him, that there was a wince in his voice. “Sir?” he asked. “What should we do now?”

  “Give her another dose of immortality.” This was a new voice, combined with a person-shaped shadow across the floor.

  There was a pause, and the surprise radiating off Reid hit me. “I don’t think we should, sir. Her reaction already—it’s incredible. She’s amazingly strong. We don’t know what another dose will do to her.”

  “Reid. That’s an order. Give her another dose. We’re breaking new ground here. I want to see what she does.”

  Reid slammed a syringe into my arm. The nectar burned under my skin.

  No rose this time. No honeyed sugar warming me.

  The wall blistered, red paint rising in welts. The wall in my head blistered too, burnished iron glowing hot. I sensed a prickle against my legs and looked down just in time to see my bare calf glowing.

  I turned my hands over, palms up, and puddles of heat shimmered in them. It couldn’t be real. The volcano trapped inside me. Even if the leather restraints around my wrists crinkled and contracted as if they’d been thrown into an oven. But the strength in my hands was real. The horrible pounding of my blood was real.

  I screamed with effort as I pulled my wrists upward and the bands around them stretched. The arm of the chair lifted. The leather frayed even more, giving me hope that maybe I could get out of this. Get away from these people and all the craziness.

  With a rip, the bands warped and stretched, shrieking apart. The arm of the chair came with it, separating with a groan and a snap. I flexed my fingers, feeling the strength in them. My ankles wrenched free. I didn’t really know how, but I stood up and walked off the chair.

  To my right, Reid froze, hands splayed out as if he was warding off the heat waves rising around me. His Hazard suit shone, drooping at the wrists as though it was melting off him. I crouched, just a bit, the way I’d seen Josh do, right before he leaped at Michael and almost took his head off. Except that I didn’t have a weapon.

  I snatched the broken arm of the chair, lifting it into the air and hurling it across the room. It struck Reid in the shoulder and his face flashed pain before he cried out, grabbing at his arm. I didn’t think I’d thrown it that hard, but his arm flopped as if I’d dislocated his shoulder. I wondered what would happen if I pitched the whole chair at him. I spun, ready to wrench it off the floor, but I didn’t realize that the other person, the shadow, waited behind me. His drone hummed as it rose, its black and gold body brilliant in the light.

  Crack.

  The dart was a prickly weed in my side, and I plucked it out. I half-turned before the drone got off another one, this time in my neck. It pulsed there, forcing me to my knees. I reached out, heaving fire out of my mouth, feeling it spread from every pore in my body as if I’d turned into some kind of girl-dragon.

  Forget dragons. Forget Reid. I was going to throw the chair at the guy with the drone.

  A third dart hit my chest as I managed to turn. My knees scraped the floor as I finally saw his face. It was the medic from the Terminal. The man who’d administered the recovery dome. Cheyne. Michael’s godfather. The man who told me to come to the recovery center. His big body blocked the light, blocked the door, drone control visor masking his eyes.

  “Well done, Ava,” he said, right before I fell onto my face.

  Boots ran past me and fire extinguishers hissed, surrounding me in clouds of foam, killing my hope of escape.

  The room shifted. My cheek dragged the floor, skipping over every little groove in the concrete as they each took one of my feet and pulled me along. A silvery trail followed me, but it took me forever to figure out it was made of tears.

  Chapter Six

  They heaved me onto a white bed in a white room. My head lolled to the side as they maneuvered me onto my stomach on the plastic covered surgical bed. I tried to move my eyes. There were metal domes and glaring lights. Drones floated around me, chattering and zooming in and out.

  Cheyne shouted orders, and I guessed we weren’t alone. “Take her blood, measure her hormone levels. We need to know what happened in there and why.”

  Someone else said, “Her heart rate’s off the charts, sir, and so is her brain activity. Her thought patterns are segmented. Look at this. Her frontal cortex—it’s out of step with the rest of her brain.”

  Cheyne leaned in with a sudden laugh. “No,” he said. “It’s not out of step. It’s in control.” He smirked at me. “She’s compartmentalizing her brain to protect herself. But we need to know how.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough. We can’t give her anything else until we get the bone marrow. It could mess up the results.”

  Cheyne grabbed the top of my head with his thick fingers and tilted it so I looked up at him. “It seems that the more nectar we give you, the stronger your reaction. Given your response just now, we can’t give you any more. So, I’m sorry, but this is going to hurt after all.” He paused and added, “Of course, the paralytic we shot you with might help a bit. But not much.”

  As if he was sorry. The smirk on his face told me that he didn’t care. I couldn’t believe I’d fallen for it—his panic at the Terminal, as though he was trying to look after me, help me. I couldn’t believe I’d let Michael drive me to the recovery center, the very place I should have stayed away from.

  Something pressed on my ankles. I couldn’t sense much of it, but I assumed they were clamping restraints on me. I discovered I was right when they hefted my arms and clipped my wrists to the side of the bed. My finger twitched. The paralytic might be wearing off, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  They talked among themselves—medical jargon I didn’t understand. More talk of hormones, molecular structure, pituitary-something-or-other. Recalibrating nectar dosage to achieve equilibrium, whatever that meant. At one point, Reid sauntered into the room with a bunch of vials and Cheyne greeted him with, “We can regulate the dose. It should still work.”

  Reid nodded and said, “Yes, sir. Just like before?”

  Then they receded out of view, and somehow that scared me more. I was sure I was going to die. They’d never let me go. They’d tell Mom that something happened to me, that I didn’t make it. Like Josh.

  Reid poked his freckled face into mine. “We’re going to take the bone marrow now. Try not to move.” He laughed at his own joke and disappeared again.

  I shut my eyes and tried to breathe, tried not to be afraid, but as the needle pierced my hip, a scream formed in my windpipe. A scream that never came out. Was never heard. But lasted too long.

  “Almost done now, Ava.”

  Somebody dressed in white moved at th
e edge of my vision. I cracked open my eyes, desperate to see where I was and who was speaking to me. No more green-lit room and steel chair. No more white bed and sharp lights. But the pain lingered in my lower back and hip, a dull throb.

  “It will take a while for her to become fully conscious.” The same quiet voice said, “Can I get you anything, Mrs. Holland?”

  Mom’s voice murmured something, and Dad’s joined hers, a rising growl that drew me further awake.

  “Yes, very soon, I think. She’ll be perfectly fine.”

  Dad’s sharp words cut through the haze. “Don’t lie to me! She’s not fine. She’ll never be fine.” There was a pause and a sob. “I can’t believe we almost killed her at Implosion.”

  The white figure tensed and retreated from the room.

  Somebody leaned in and stroked my hair. I recognized the ring Dad gave Mom for her fiftieth birthday the year before. “She’ll never be fine again.”

  “Mom?”

  “Hush. Don’t try to talk.”

  “Mom, they did stuff to me.”

  “They ran the tests, honey.”

  “They put me in a chair and stuck needles into me. They had this stuff and it was black and they called it nectar. Michael’s godfather was there and they took my clothes. And then they pulled out my bones.”

  Dad leaned in. I smelled his aftershave. I frowned because Dad only shaved in the mornings, making me wonder how much time had passed. Worse, I wondered what had happened while I was unconscious. “It’s all right, honey. The doctors explained … The drug they gave you to administer the test causes hallucinations. You’re okay. It wasn’t real. Whatever you thought happened, it didn’t.”

  “Hallucinations.” I said the word slowly. “Drug. You mean nectar. The black stuff.”

  My head ached. I tried to see them better. They had their foreheads together—Mom’s tilted toward the crook of Dad’s neck as he stroked the shoulder of her favorite blue cardigan. She’d had time to go home and change. My neck was stiff, but I attempted to see the window to figure out whether it was night or day.

  “Nectar? I’ve never heard of that. No. They told us what it was … ” Dad frowned toward Mom. “What did they call it?”

  Mom said, “I don’t remember. One of those drugs.”

  Hallucinations? The green light, the leather straps, the cut on my forehead that healed as soon as they injected the nectar … the terrible heat that filled my body after the second dose, the terrible strength. My parents shook their heads, the certainty on their faces irrefutable, brushing away the possibility that anything had been done to me other than a harmless blood test.

  I started to speak, to tell them that they were wrong, but Mom’s hand touched mine, trembling like a butterfly. She said, “The results came in, sweetheart. And it’s … ” She sobbed and covered her mouth.

  Dad took over, his face grim. “It’s not good news, Ava. You and Josh, they told us you have a gene they’ve never seen before. It’s one in a million. It’s really unlucky, but, sweetie, it inhibits regeneration.”

  I thought it through. I went over it in my head—a gene, regeneration. I had a gene that nobody else had, except for Josh, he had it too. And it killed him. Whichever way I looked at it, it led to only one question. “So if I’m killed … I’ll die?”

  “Yes.” He dropped his head into his hands. “You’ll die.”

  The room filled with silence the way that the last rays of the setting sun wink out when the light is gone and all that’s left is heavy quiet.

  I’d die. I wouldn’t regenerate like other people. I wouldn’t heal. If I were shot, I’d bleed out. If I were strangled, I’d suffocate. If I dropped to the bottom of a pool and never came up, I’d drown.

  I was drowning right then. “How long have I been here?”

  “Just the night,” Dad answered. “They said we can take you home this afternoon.”

  “All right.” I had a gene that meant I would die. Just like Josh had died.

  Josh was right—I was a freak.

  I woke to the sound of Mom screaming.

  I tried to sit up as movement blurred in front of me. I caught sight of Mom’s blue cardigan, flung across the top of her chair. Then Dad’s brown hair flying as he dashed across the room to where Mom grappled with Reid. She grabbed him by the shoulder and tried to gouge out his eyes.

  The sheets tangled around me as I scrambled to get to my feet. As I sat up, the room swam, sunlit windows slid across my view, the white light angled. I skidded across and touched my feet to the floor, pressing back against the bed to steady myself as the room stopped slipping, the threatening speckled dark receded, and I righted myself.

  By then, Dad pulled Mom back and blood trickled from Reid’s cheek and nose, dripping onto his uniform.

  Mom’s voice grated in the sudden silence. “You promised we could bury him.”

  I tried to breathe as Mom’s words sank in. They weren’t going to release Josh’s body. There wouldn’t be a wake. We wouldn’t be able to say good-bye …

  Reid touched a finger to his cheek and frowned at the blood. “Mrs. Holland. It’s an offense to strike a Hazard Officer.” As he spoke, tiny blue blood vessels became visible on his cheek and the side of his nose. In another moment, the wound zipped itself up, the skin sealed and the bleeding stopped.

  “Where’s my son?”

  Reid’s hand went to the tranquilizer gun at his waist and I waited for the wasp to arrive, but he just looked past Mom to Dad. “Mr. Holland?”

  Dad pulled Mom further away, talking quietly into her ear. She struggled and tears streamed down her cheeks, grief pouring from her words. “But they said we could bury him. I need to bury him.” She pulled away from Dad, who struggled to restrain her.

  “Mrs. Holland,” Reid said. “I won’t forgive you twice.”

  Dad yanked Mom back and she howled like a wounded animal. She collapsed against him, submerging her face in his shirt.

  It was Dad’s turn to become angry. “You said there was no biological hazard. You said it was genetic. Surely, we have the right—”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Holland. As I explained to your wife, there is a serious public health risk associated with your son’s body. There are any number of diseases your son could have carried and we simply don’t know what his remains will do now that he’s dead. We aren’t able to anticipate what kind of contagions his body might produce—or already contain. He must be quarantined at all costs.”

  He took a step forward, a quiet threat, and Dad pulled Mom further back, keeping a distance.

  Dad’s face was pale. His words were soft, an attempt to stay calm. “You’re saying that his body could endanger others. That his mortality could … spread.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t, of course. We’ve always resisted viruses and bacterial infections. We know they exist—we’ve seen the deadly effect on animals of cancerous cells and bacterial infections—but no virus or bacteria has succeeded in harming a human being. Yet.” His face twisted in an expression close to disgust and he held up a warning finger. “Combined with a death gene, there’s no saying what could happen.”

  Dad’s voice was worried. “What about Ava? Will she be okay?”

  Reid shrugged. “There are theories that the first humans were mortal, that regeneration evolved over time. Some people believe mortals lived alongside us a long time ago.” He glowered. “Until we wiped them out.”

  I tried to remember back to history class, or maybe it was biology when the teacher had eyed the religious kids sitting in the back row and declared that the curriculum required she teach at least two lessons on the theory of regeneration. She said that, according to the theory, we’d started out as microorganisms, slowly evolving into inferior pre-humans—just animals really, with primitive instincts—finally giving way to the smart, strong human beings we were today. Mostly, I remembered the kids interrupting and arguing that the theory was wrong: humans were given the gift
of regeneration when Eve made her choice—Adam had lived for 930 years and that was even longer than we did now.

  Reid smiled for the first time. “Mr. Holland, your daughter has existed in society without any consequences so far. So did your son. We have no reason to suspect that she is a threat to the community.” His smile broadened. “As long as she stays alive, that is.”

  Dad glared at Reid and took a step in my direction, placing himself between my bed and the officer. He froze as his gaze slid from the empty bed to the floor where I crouched.

  Mom and Dad’s faces were gray, and a smirk twisted Reid’s expression, as though he knew I was awake the whole time and he was just waiting for my parents to catch up.

  Dad turned even paler. “Honey. We thought you were asleep. We didn’t want you to hear … ” His jaw clenched. He rounded on Officer Reid. “Thank you for the information, officer. We’ve taken up enough of your time already.”

  “Of course.” Reid reached inside his suit and pulled out a card. “You know where to reach us if you have any concerns.”

  I tried not to sag with relief when he was gone. All I wanted was to go home, leave the recovery center behind me, do something normal. Like calling Hannah or dancing or even loading the dishwasher. I had to get away from this place. I had to get away from that man pretending to be a Hazard and the memory of a green room that wasn’t supposed to exist. Then maybe I could get it out of my head, the feeling of Reid’s arm crushing my neck, pushing me into the chair, dragging me across the floor. Maybe I could convince myself that it was all a hallucination like Mom and Dad insisted.

  I waved my arm in the air, flapping the IV line around. “Can I get some help with this, please?”

  Dad raced to me, pressing the buzzer for the nurse, helping me back to the bed.

  Within moments, the nurse reappeared, but she didn’t meet my eyes as she removed the IV shunt. This time, she wore gloves.