Deadline

Ask her about the reservoir conditions, prompted George.

“George—I mean, I want to know, what do the reservoir conditions have to do with any of this?” My voice sounded unfamiliar to my own ears, like someone else was asking the question.

“The immune system can learn to deal with almost anything, given sufficient time and exposure. How else could we have stayed alive for this long?” Dr. Abbey turned to look at me, eyes dark and very tired beneath the erratically bleached fringe of her hair. “The reservoir conditions are our bodies figuring out how to process the virus. How to work around it. They’re our immune responses writ large and inconvenient, like the autoimmune diseases people used to suffer from before the Rising.”

Just about everyone with an autoimmune syndrome either died during the Rising or found their suffering greatly alleviated as the body’s immune responses got something much better to waste their time on than attacking their own cells: the sudden burgeoning Kellis-Amberlee infection doing its best to wipe out everything in its path. Autoimmune disorders still crop up, but they’re nothing compared to their numbers before the Rising turned the medical world on its ear.

The facts flashed across my mind like puzzle pieces falling inexorably into place, each of them notching smoothly into place with the ones around it. The things Kelly was surprised by. The illegally massive dog with the induced reservoir conditions, and the casual way Dr. Abbey said he wouldn’t amplify, like she knew, absolutely, what she was talking about. The spiders, the bugs, and the octopuses with their grasping limbs and their staring, alien eyes. All of it made sense, if I just stopped trying to force it.

I turned toward Kelly before I realized that I was intending to move. Her eyes widened, and she took a step back, almost pressing herself against Maggie. Maggie gave her a puzzled look as she stepped out of the way.

“I don’t know what he’s so pissed about, but I’m not going to get in his way,” she said, in a tone that bordered on the sympathetic. “Better you than me.”

Alaric and Becks were watching me with confusion. Dr. Abbey turned to watch me advancing on Kelly, and there was no confusion in her expression, just calm satisfaction, the teacher’s face once more watching her student finally understand the lesson.

“The reservoir conditions are an immune response,” I said. It wasn’t a question; it didn’t need to be. I could see the confirmation in Kelly’s widening eyes. “They’re the way the body copes with the Kellis-Amberlee infection, aren’t they?” She didn’t answer me. “Aren’t they?!” I shouted, and slammed my hand into the safety glass.

Maggie and Alaric jumped. Becks stepped up beside me. And Kelly flinched.

“Yes,” she said. “They are. They just… they just happen. We think it has something to do with exposure in infancy, but the research has never been… it’s never…”

All my sympathy for her was gone, like it had never existed at all. I wasn’t seeing a person anymore. I was seeing the CDC, and the virus that took George away. “I’m going to ask you one question, Doc, and I want you to think really hard about your answer, because you’re legally dead, and if we want to hand you to this nice lady,” I gestured toward Dr. Abbey, “for her experiments, well, there’s really not much you can do about it. Don’t lie to me. Understand?”

Kelly nodded mutely.

“Good. I’m glad to see that we have an agreement. Now, tell me: The reservoir conditions. What do they do? What do they really do?”

“They teach the immune system how to handle an ongoing live Kellis-Amberlee infection,” said Kelly, meeting my eyes at last. She sounded oddly relieved, like she’d known we were going to wind up here and just hadn’t known how to force the issue on her own. “They teach the body what to do about it.”

“Meaning what?”

Alaric spoke abruptly, his own voice glacially cold: “That’s the wrong question, Shaun.”

“All right, you’re the Newsie. What’s the right question? What should I be asking her?”

“Ask her what would have happened if you hadn’t pulled the trigger.” Alaric looked at Kelly for a long moment, and then looked away, like he couldn’t bear the sight of her. “Ask her what would have happened to Georgia if you’d just left her alone in the van and hadn’t pulled the trigger.”

Kelly’s answer was a hushed whisper, so soft that, for a moment, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The words seemed to get louder and louder as they echoed inside my head, repeating over and over again until I couldn’t bear the sound of them. I slammed my fist into the safety glass as hard as I could, so hard I could feel my knuckles threaten to give way. Then I turned on my heel and stalked away, back down the dank-smelling alley where the octopuses watched with their alien eyes, back pasty renks of massive spiders, past the working lab technicians, who barely even looked up as I passed them. I was running by that point, running as I tried to outpace the words still echoing in my ears—those horrible, condemning, world-destroying words. It didn’t do any good. No matter how fast I ran, no matter how hard I hit the world, nothing could take those words back again.

Those five small, simple words that changed everything:

“She would have gotten better.”

Shaun and I had one of those awkward talks today—the ones that hurt the most because they’re the ones you don’t want to have, ever, but have to have eventually. This one was about our birth parents. Who they were, why they gave us up, whether they survived the Rising, all those things they say adopted kids are supposed to ask. Whether they wanted us. That’s a big one for Shaun. He’s always been more forgiving of the Masons than I am, but for some reason, it’s really important to him that we were wanted before we wound up here.