Reached (Matched #3)

We are always fighting against going quiet, going gentle.

“Yes,” I say to Rebecca.

“And?” she asks. “How long before they start letting people go?”

“They will have already begun,” I say.

CHAPTER 29

KY

Someone comes inside. I hear the door open and then footsteps crossing the floor.

Could it be Cassia?

Not this time. Whoever this is doesn’t smell like Cassia’s flowers-and-paper scent. This person smells like sweat and smoke. And they breathe differently than she does. Lower. Louder, like they’ve been running and they’re trying to hold it in.

I hear the person reach for the bag.

But I don’t need new fluid. Someone just changed it. Where are they now? Do they know what’s happening?

I feel a tug on my arm. They’ve unhooked the bag from my line and started to drain it. The liquid drips into some kind of bucket instead of into me.

I’m turned toward the window so the wind rattling the panes is even louder now.

Is this happening to everyone? Or only to me? Is someone trying to make sure I don’t come back?

I can hear my own heart slowing down.

I’m going deeper.

The pain is less.

It’s harder to remember to breathe. I repeat Cassia’s poem to myself, breathing with the beats.

New. Rose. Old. Rose. Queen. Anne’s. Lace.

In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In.

Out.

CHAPTER 30

XANDER

I must have fallen asleep, because I jump when the prison door opens. “Get him out,” someone says to the guard, and then Oker appears in front of my cell, watching the guard unlock the door. “You,” Oker says. “Time to get back to work.”

I glance at the cell across from me. Cassia hasn’t come in. Did she spend the whole night watching over Ky? Or have they made her work all this time? All the other prisoners are quiet. I can hear them breathing, but no one else seems to be awake.

When we get outside, I see that it’s dark: not even early morning yet. “You’re working for me,” Oker says, “so you keep the same hours I do.” He points to the research lab across the way. “That’s mine,” he says. “Do what I say, and you can spend most of your day in there instead of locked up.”

If Leyna’s the physic of this village, then I think Oker is the pilot.

“Follow my instructions exactly,” he tells me. “All I need are your hands since mine don’t work right.”

“Oker isn’t much for introductions,” one of the assistants says after Oker’s left. “I’m Noah. I’ve worked with Oker since he came here.” Noah looks to be somewhere in his mid-thirties. “This is Tess.”

Tess nods to me. She’s a little younger than Noah and has a kind smile.

“I’m Xander,” I say. “What’s all this?” One of the walls of the lab is covered with pictures of people I don’t know. Some are old photos and pages torn from books, but most look like they might have been drawn by hand. Did Oker do that before his hands stopped working right? I’m impressed, and it makes me think of that nurse back in the medical center. Maybe I am the only one who can’t make things—pictures, poems—without any training.

“Oker calls them the heroes of the past,” Noah says. “He believes we should know the work of those who came before us.”

“He trained in the Society, didn’t he,” I say.

“Yes,” Tess says. “He came here ten years ago, right before his Final Banquet.”

“He’s ninety?” I ask. I’ve never known anyone so old.

“Yes,” Noah says. “The oldest person in the world, as far as we know.”

The office door slams open and we all get back to work.

A few hours later, Oker tells the assistants to take a break. “Not you,” he says to me. “I need to make something and you can stay and help me with it.”

Noah and Tess send me sympathetic looks.

Oker sets a bunch of neatly labeled boxes and jars in front of me and hands me a list. “Put this compound together,” he says, and I start measuring. He goes back over to the cabinet to rummage through more ingredients. I hear them clinking together.

Then, to my surprise, he starts talking to me. “You said you saw approximately two thousand patients while you worked in the medical center in Camas,” he says. “Over the course of four months.”

“Yes,” I say. “There were many more patients that I didn’t treat, of course, in other parts of the center and other buildings in Camas.”

“Out of all the ones you did see, how many looked better when they were still than my patients here?” he asks.

“None,” I say.

“That’s a fast answer,” he says. “Take your time to think it over.”

I think back on all of my patients. I can’t remember everyone’s face, but I can call up the last hundred. And Lei, of course.

“None,” I say again.

Oker folds his arms and sits back, satisfied. He watches me measure a few more ingredients. “All right,” he says. “Now you can ask a question.”

I didn’t expect this opportunity, but I’m going to take advantage of it. “What’s the difference between the bags you make and the ones the Rising uses?” I ask.

Oker pushes a container toward me. “Have you ever heard of Alzheimer’s disease?”

That’s a question, not an answer. But I go along with it. “No,” I say.

“Of course not,” Oker says. “Because I cured it before you were born.”

“You cured it,” I say. “Just you. No one else?”

Oker taps a couple of the pictures on the wall behind him. “Not by myself. I was part of a research team in the Society. That disease clogged up the brain with extra proteins. Others before us had worked on the project, but we figured out a way to control the level of expression of those proteins. We shut them down.” He leans a little closer to look at the compound I’ve made. “So, to answer your first question, the difference is that I know what I’m doing when I put together the medication. Unlike the Rising. I know how to help keep some of the proteins from the mutation from accumulating because they act in ways that are similar to the disease we cured. And I know how to keep the patients’ platelets from accumulating in the spleen so patients don’t rupture and bleed internally. The other difference is that I don’t include as many narcotics in my solutions. My patients feel some pain. Not agony, more like discomfort. It reminds them to breathe. More likely to get them back that way.”

“But is that a good thing?” I ask. “What if they can feel all the pain of the boils?”

Oker snorts. “If they feel something, they fight,” he says. “If you were in a place with no pain, why would you want to come back?”

He slides a tray of powder in my direction. “Measure this out and distill it in the solution.”

I look down at the instructions and measure two grams of the powder into the liquid.

“Sometimes I can’t believe this,” Oker mutters. I can’t tell if he’s talking to himself or not, but then he glances in my direction. “Here I am, working on a cure for that damn Plague again.”

“Wait,” I say. “You worked on the first cure?”

He nods. “The Society knew about the work we’d done in protein expression. They pulled my team to work on the cure for the Plague. Before the Society sent it out to the Enemy, they wanted to make sure we had a cure—in case the Plague came back.”

“So the Rising lied,” I say. “The Society did have a cure.”

“Of course they did,” Oker says. “Not enough for a pandemic, so the Rising does get credit for making more. But the Society came up with the cure first. I bet your Pilot didn’t mention that.”

“He didn’t,” I say.

“I paid a considerable amount for my escape here,” Oker says. “The current Pilot is the one who brought me out.” Oker walks over to look for something else in the cupboard. “That was before he was the Rising’s Pilot,” he says, his voice muffled. “When the Rising asked him to lead, I told him not to believe them. They’re no rebellion. They’re Society, with a different name, and they just want you and your followers, I said. But he was so sure it would work.” Oker comes back to the table. “Maybe he wasn’t that sure,” he says. “He kept note of where I was here in Endstone.”

So Oker was part of the vanishings that Lei told me about. “Did that bother you?” I ask. “Him keeping track of you like that?”

“No,” Oker says. “I wanted to be out of the Society, and I was. I don’t mind feeling useful now and then. Here.” He hands me the datapod. “Scroll through this list for me.”

As I do, he grumbles. “Can’t they narrow it down any more? We all assume that it’s something environmental. Well, we eat anything we can find or grow. It’s a long list. We’ll find something to help them. But it might not be in time.”

“Why didn’t the Pilot bring you into Camas or Central?” I ask. “That would be a better place to work on the cure. They could bring you supplies and plants from the mountain. In the Provinces, you’d have access to all the data, the equipment . . .”

Oker’s face is rigid. “Because I agreed to work with him on one condition only,” he says. “That I stay right here.”

I nod.

“Once you get out,” Oker says, “you don’t go back.”

His hands look so old, like paper covering bone, but the veins stand out, fat with life and blood. “I can tell you have another question,” he says, his voice annoyed and interested at the same time. “Ask it.”

“The Pilot told us that someone contaminated the water supplies,” I say. “Do you think they also created the mutation? They both happened so fast. It seems like the mutation could have been manipulated, just like the outbreak was.”

“That’s a good question,” Oker says, “but I’d bet that the mutation occurred naturally. Small genetic changes take place regularly in nature, but unless there is an advantage conferred by a mutation, it is simply lost because other nonmutated versions predominate.” He points to another jar, and I take it down for him and unstop the lid. “But if some kind of selective pressure is present and confers an advantage to a mutation, that mutation ends up outgrowing and surviving the nonmutated forms.”

“That’s what a virologist back in Camas told me,” I say.

“He’s right,” Oker says. “At least to my thinking.”

“He also told me that it was likely the cure itself that applied the selective pressure and caused the mutation.”

“It’s likely,” Oker says, “but even so, I don’t think anyone planned that part. It was, as we who live outside of the Society sometimes say, bad luck. One of the mutations was immune to the cure, and so it flourished and caught on.”