Your One & Only(62)



Jack couldn’t face Jonah. He couldn’t bear to see in his brother’s eyes the same hatred he felt. He stumbled away, then braced his hands against the side of West Lab and was sick in the squat juniper shrubs at the base of the building. By the time that was finished, Jonah was gone.





Chapter Nineteen


ALTHEA


The night had been terrifying, but they were safe now.

Althea could still feel the heat from the flames on her face. She could smell the burning wood and chemicals on her skin. The boats were lost. The initial blast had destroyed them, polluting the water and leaving burning debris strewn everywhere. They’d tried to salvage the supplies that were to go to Copan that very day at dawn. Vispera was already facing shortages from the ruined fields, and they couldn’t afford to lose more, but what few boxes they were able to pull from the wreckage had already been rifled through, the contents taken. Althea knew by whom.

Those who’d been at the boats, preparing last-minute supplies when the explosion erupted, made up the injured who now filled the clinic. It was mostly Gen-300s and 290s. Althea herself had pulled Althea-307 from the banks of Blue River. She’d been face-down in the mud. Althea couldn’t tell how badly she was injured, but blood covered the front of her dress. The other Gen-300 Altheas stood to the side, their faces white as paper. They didn’t move to touch Althea-307, making Althea wonder if their connection with Althea-307 had already been broken by death.

Althea’s sisters hadn’t been at the explosion, but when she returned from the wreckage, they’d all climbed from their beds, and now they were sitting up together in a circle, holding hands. After the horrifying night and her last conversation with Jack, the comfort of her sisters was like a warm, familiar blanket.

Sitting in a circle in the dorms, her hands twined with those of her sisters, she felt calm. Like the other times she communed with them, the warm liquid filled her limbs. She’d been close, but she wouldn’t fracture. They welcomed her back, and they were here, together, out of harm’s way. They needed her. Vispera needed her. She was one of them, and nothing else mattered.

The Altheas had put on the necklaces that had been a gift from the Gen-300 Altheas on the occasion of the Gen-310s’ first Pairing Ceremony. With Althea-307 in the clinic and close to death, it seemed fitting to wear them. They were made of pale, lustrous pearls that glistened in the light of the candles next to each Althea’s bed. The pearls warmed against Althea’s skin. If they had a Ceremony of Loss, which they would hold for Althea-307’s accidental death, as they did for any untimely death, they would wear them to that, too. The pearls had been collected from oysters off the coast a day’s journey away. Smooth and iridescent, they shivered along her sisters’ necks, picking up different colors from the candlelight; silver and gold, pink and blue. Althea focused her eyes on the colors. They came and went in the flickering light, swimming on the creamy surface of the beads like shimmering, silver-lipped oyster shells and the ocean from which they’d come.

Althea could picture the ocean. The colorless gray mingled with the warm liquid calm from communing with her sisters, until that calm retreated slightly, a tide going out. Then, like rustling pebbles pulled by a receding wave, the ocean gray she’d imagined turned into the gray of Jack’s eyes.

Althea’s eyes snapped open at the same moment all nine faces of her sisters turned toward her. Their sharp anger engulfed her, and she dropped their hands with a gasp.

“It’s been a long night,” Althea-316 said tersely. “We should go to bed.”

With weighty tension in the room, they changed silently into their nightgowns, and Althea climbed into her bed, the last in the row of ten Althea beds.

Althea waited until her sisters’ breathing deepened, and then dressed and slipped quietly out, clutching the box holding the two books she and Jack had found.

She needed to escape the suffocating room, her sisters, and the frightening accusation she’d seen in their eyes. She didn’t know if they were already planning a Bonding Ceremony for her, but even if they were, she had some time before it happened. She’d get away before then somehow. She just wasn’t sure how yet.

Jack was probably asleep at the clinic. He’d looked ready to collapse before, worn down with exhaustion and also, she knew, with the strain that had developed between them. She crept down the stairs of the Althea dorm to the common sitting room in the foyer. She found a chair in the corner and settled into the soft cushions. She’d been unable to look at the books until now. When she touched the cover of the book titled The Ark Project, shreds of cloth sprinkled onto her hand. She flipped through it. The type inside was minuscule, and none of it looked like it would be useful in figuring out what Jonah had planned. It was a sort of textbook compiled by something called the Global Health Initiative, and it was full of lists and numbers, all of them mystifying. The book actually referred to the Original Ten. She turned the pages quickly.

Most of what she found in the book was familiar. It told the story of the scientists who created the original models. It related how those scientists traveled from places all over the globe, forgotten places with names like Bali, Saint Petersburg, Patagonia, Sweden, and the Marquesas Islands, and how they’d gathered together for the final phase of their work in what would eventually be known as Vispera.

The book also narrated the advance of the Slow Plague over three decades, from the time the scientists had seen the first hints of something wrong, the first clues that pointed to the inescapable deterioration of the human immune system. The Plague manifested in myriad diseases, lethal allergies, and physiological disorders that made the human species unable to carry on. The world itself had turned deadly, as if the very air they breathed and the food they ate had turned to poison.

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