Vox(72)

Lorenzo, who’s been listening in, his head so close to mine I can feel the bristle of unshaved cheek, interrupts. “Morgan, we need the lab for propagation. We’ve got a limited quantity of serum. You know that.”

Silence, then: “That’s being dealt with. By another team. The propagation, I mean.”

Right. And the reverse engineering. The Gold team must be as busy as a hive today.

I nod to Lorenzo and point toward the storage refrigerator behind him, then wedge the intercom’s handset between my ear and shoulder, leaving my hands free. I hold up six fingers, then only one.

“Nice,” Lorenzo says after opening the refrigerator and counting the vials. He mouths, “Morgan?”

I shrug, as if to say, Who else?

“Jean? Did you hear me? I said Mrs. Ray is here. We’re bringing her down in a few minutes.”

“Yeah, Morgan. I heard you.” And I hang up.

Last night, or this morning, I asked Patrick about the viability of reversing the serum, turning our cure into a weapon using only the product.

“It’s doable without Lorenzo’s formulas,” he said in the darkness of his study. “If they have the right type of chemists on the Gold team.” He looked over the notes, this time using my method—top page to bottom—instead of turning the pages over and laying them to the side as he finished. Of course he didn’t want to see the poem again. Getting slapped in the face once was enough. “Definitely doable, but slower. See, they need to break down the product and—”

Everything else Patrick said was a blur. I’m no chemist.

“Lorenzo,” I say, taking the single vial of serum from the fridge and two packets of sterile syringes from the cabinet next to it. I pretend to study them, and lower my voice to the barest of whispers. “The notes I have are the only copies, right?”

He slaps the counter with the palm of his hand and sprints toward the rodent and rabbit room. I hear the main door of the lab hiss open and closed.





SIXTY-ONE




Lin, even absent, guides me through the setup. Her notes are pristine, as detailed as a set of blueprints. If she were here, I wouldn’t be handling the injection, and that injection wouldn’t deliver a concoction of proteins and stem cells into Mrs. Ray’s bloodstream. Lin would take care of that, through a strategically placed borehole in our subject’s skull—not an operation I was keen on trying myself.

As if she anticipated her own sudden disappearance, Lin assembled two separate procedures. I put the instructions for direct-to-brain delivery aside, wincing at the photographs of skulls and immobilizing frames and boring instruments, wondering what sort of nutcase one had to be to try this on himself. Or herself, I think, remembering the woman who took an electric drill to her own head sometime in the 1970s. She said it opened up her mind.

Right.

What I’m about to do is easier, since Mrs. Ray will have already been prepped with a catheter before leaving the nursing home where she now spends her days. I suppose she’ll be returning there once the trial is over; she has no home to go to with Del out of the picture. Some favor I’m doing her, I think, and wonder if the old woman who planted my gardens might be better off in her current state. At least she won’t understand what’s going on when some bureaucrat in a suit informs her what’s happened to her son and daughter-in-law.

And her grandchildren.

Lorenzo’s offer is still on the table, but how can I even debate it with myself? What brand of monster would hop on a flight with a forged passport and leave four children behind? Then again, how fucked-up would I have to be to stay, knowing exactly what will become of this next baby?

Super fucked-up, I decide. Either way, I lose.

The main door hisses open and shut again, and footsteps echo through the empty lab. The mice squeak at the intrusion into their space.

“Enzo?”

But it isn’t Lorenzo. The intruder is Morgan, and behind him a young man dressed in orderly’s scrubs wheels Mrs. Ray into the room.

She looks much older than the last time I saw her.

Steven, now on a fool’s mission to find his girl, was still struggling with multiplication tables when Delilah Ray came to the house with her plans for my garden. America’s first black president had taken the keys, and Mrs. Ray was in high form, all talk of politics and hope and how “it was about time, darlin’, this country got on the right track.” She always called me “darlin’” in that sweet Southern way of hers.

Until she had the stroke.

It happened not long before the hopeful president handed over his keys to a new man, the one Mrs. Ray would never refer to as a darlin’ or hopeful or charismatic, or anything else on the positive end of her rich vocabulary’s spectrum.

When I called that day to ask about a problem with one of my rosebushes, her son answered and gave me the news. I can still hear the hope in his voice, feel the breathless, wordless optimism hanging between us like a storm cloud as I outlined my research.

“What if it doesn’t work?” Del said. “What if my mother still speaks in riddles and nonwords?”

“Then we’ll try again,” I said. “And we’ll keep trying.”

That was when he mentioned money. I told him not even to think about it; there would be no fee.

I turn to my first human subject now, an old woman in a wheelchair gazing around the white emptiness of the lab. “How are you, Mrs. Ray?” I say, knowing she won’t interpret this as anything but a string of unfamiliar words.