Wilder Girls(79)

“Hey,” I say, and Reese turns. “Look.”

“What the hell is that?”

We inch closer. It’s not moving, but Raxter taught me not to trust my eyes. Things can be dangerous long after they’re dead.

“Is that—”

“A worm,” Reese says.

It’s caked in dried blood, but underneath I can see pale, translucent flesh. And somehow it looks familiar. I’ve never seen it before, I’m sure of that, but there’s a twitch in my gut; like answering like.

The worm, and the scalpel, and I can put it together now. Byatt here, with the scalpel in her hand, digging through her insides until she found what she was looking for.

   “That was inside her,” I say. And then, because we’re both thinking it: “There’s one inside us, too, isn’t there? It’s the Tox.”

Parasites, living in our bodies, making us their own. Using those who can take it, abandoning those who can’t. Protecting themselves at all costs. Inside me, inside the animals—inside Raxter. Making us wild.

I can’t keep looking at it. I bend over, convulsing as I dry heave.

“It’s okay,” Reese says, rubbing my back.

“I want it out of me.” Tears spring to my eye, and I’m breathing too fast, I have to slow down, I have to. “Please, get it out.”

“We can’t do that.”

I straighten, push her arm off me. “Don’t you want it out of you?”

“We don’t know what might happen if we try. We could bleed to death.” Reese tucks my hair behind my ears, gives me a shaky smile. She’s trying so hard to make it okay. “We’ll figure it out,” she says. “We’ll figure it all out.”

“I don’t understand. How could we not know?”

“It must’ve grown. It would’ve been small to start with. Microscopic.”

“But”—and I feel lost, like the whole world’s learned a new language and left me out of it—“what about tests? Our blood tests, and physicals. And why now? Why us?”

“I don’t know,” Reese says. She goes back to the clipboard from Byatt’s bed and starts flipping through the papers collected there. I wish I could be like her; I wish I could let go of things when there’s nothing to be done.

   I stand next to her, read over her shoulder and catch words here and there that I know—“estrogen,” “adapting,” and over and over again, “failure”—but most of it’s all charts and numbers. Are the answers in there somewhere?

More charts, more paragraphs done in unreadable handwriting, and Reese flicks through quickly, barely looking at them, until she stops on one page.

“What is it?”

She folds over the corner, then dumps our backpack out on the mattress, fishes through it for the records we took from the school.

“Reese?”

“I thought I recognized this,” she says, and lays out the pieces of paper. Twin graphs, with analysis printed below in text so small I’d need a magnifying glass to make it out.

“It tracks the climate,” Reese explains, pointing to one axis where years are listed. The year of the Tox is highlighted on one copy, yellow ink faded and bleeding. “The average temperature on Raxter over time. Look, it goes way back.”

One copy in the school records, and another here in a makeshift hospital, pinned to Byatt’s bed. And there it is—the climate changing, the temperature rising. I read once about creatures trapped in the arctic ice. Prehistoric, ancient things, coming awake as the ice melts. In Maine, on Raxter, a parasite slowly reaching into the weakest things—the irises, the crabs—until it was strong enough to reach into the wilderness. Into us.





CHAPTER 26


Reese keeps staring at the graphs, and I take the clipboard from the bed, peer at the rest of the documents. Observations made about a patient BW. And on the bottom of every form, the same signature. I can’t read it, but there’s a printed name underneath, under “Attending Doctor.”

“?‘Audrey Paretta,’?” I read. “That was Byatt’s doctor.”

Headmistress said they dosed her with the gas. It would’ve been Paretta who did it, who made the decision to kill my best friend. If she were here, I’d tear her eyes out with my bare hands.

“She got evacuated,” Reese says gently. “There’s nothing we can do about her right now.”

I nod, push the thought of Paretta out of my head, and keep flipping through the clipboard. Tests and tests, and none of them working. The Tox too strong to die, and us too weak to live. RAX009, they labeled her. Eight others, then, and I think of Mona in that body bag.

   Welch said that night that they thought they’d gotten it right. They must have sent Mona back to school, waited to see if she would last, if the cure they’d found would hold. But she didn’t, and it didn’t, and I bet she’s somewhere in this building, eyes wide and staring, body stiff and sliced open for answers. This story was hers too.

I give Reese another minute to poke through the room, let her gather up the documents from Byatt’s bed and shove them back into the bag. When she finishes we both head for the door. There’s nothing more we need in here, and the jets will be overhead soon enough. It’s time to get Byatt.