“You have to understand,” Vaughn says. “I couldn’t let that clever girl go back to her mother’s brothel. You should have heard the mouth she had on her already. It pained me to think of her becoming a common street whore. No. I did what was best. She and my son were better for it.”
Vaughn is polishing off his plate. “Before Rose came along, I’m ashamed to say I had a close call with Linden. One of my treatments made him ill. Fortunately, he recovered with little more than a few missing molars, but I knew that I couldn’t risk anything like that again. If I wanted to cure my child, I couldn’t also treat him like my guinea pig.”
“That’s why you used Rose,” I say.
“ ‘Used’ is an ugly word. I don’t know if I like that. No, I prefer to think that she was an invaluable learning experience for me. Thanks to my treatments, she lived several months after her twentieth birthday. Hers is the study that earned me the president’s attention. I set a mortality record with her. But she wasn’t the one. Not quite.”
“And you think my brother and I are ‘the one’?” I ask.
“Sadly, no,” Vaughn says. “Once I came to this place, I discovered that someone else beat me to it. There have been several avenues of cures discovered.”
The words don’t even feel real. He says them so casually that I’m left wondering if I’ve misunderstood.
Vaughn sees that he’s confused me, and he smiles in that disarmingly kind way. “You and your brother are my case study,” he says. “Right now we’re determining whether or not your bodies will be able to handle the existing cures. None of the cures have proven to be universal, I’m afraid. Some people are living into their thirties now. But in cases of others that have received the same cure, there have been some gruesome fatalities, depending on ethnicity, gender, and age at the time treatment is administered. Up until now there haven’t been any tests done on subjects with heterochromia. And then, the heterochromia proved to be a dead end, sadly. But I remain convinced that there is something unique about your DNA; the heterochromia was just a surface side effect. There’s no question that you and your brother were custom made. The only question is what your parents’ intentions were.”
All those times he left the mansion for days at a time—a convention in Seattle, a conference in Clearwater—was he really coming here, with my brother in tow?
I stare out the window that’s behind him. This is what an ocean looks like, I think, when there isn’t a world buried inside it.
The world isn’t all gone. Only part of what we were taught is true. Wars and natural disasters have annihilated some landmasses, have reduced countries by halves and thirds and so on, have caused erratic weather in places that were temperate hundreds of years ago. Some things have changed. But not everything. Not the most important thing: There’s still life left. There are still places to go.
“You and your brother were never meant to be ordinary,” Vaughn says. “Your parents had plans for the both of you. Big plans. And I’m determined to fulfill them.”
As we ride the elevator down, I think of Linden, Cecily, and Gabriel still trapped in that dying piece of the world, with them thinking it’s all there is.
The question, Vaughn says, is not whether a cure will be found in time to save his son and grandson, but whether it will be perfected in time. Can I imagine the chaos, he asks, that would happen if people knew all of this was going on? No. Better to carry on his image of just another doctor working aimlessly, and to let the supposed rebels, like my brother, destroy labs and spread pro-naturalism. Better to let the people be ignorant and hopeless. And then, once the cure is introduced, they’ll be so grateful and so desperate for a structured existence to save them from the cesspool that the country has become. They’ll be back under the president’s control.
“You’ve always had trouble with relinquishing control, haven’t you?” Vaughn says as we exit the elevator. “But it’s a rewarding thing. People need a leader. They need to feel that someone is in charge, that they’re in the hands of someone greater than they are. It’s far scarier for each of us to believe that we are the only ones in charge of our own destinies. We know our own downfalls.”
“So you kept me in the dark,” I say.
“I’ve told a few little lies I thought would be easier. The blue June Beans, for instance, were not giving you small doses of the virus. They contained minuscule doses of an experimental cure. The withdrawals after you ran away made you ill, like I expected. But it gave me an idea. I stopped administering the same treatment to your brother, to minimal effect. He hardly even developed a fever. It furthers the theory that the virus in males is entirely unrelated to the virus in females.”
Suddenly I don’t want to hear any more of this. My mind is spinning.
This white hallway is the same as all the others, but it seems different now. Everything seems different, even Vaughn. When he finally stops talking long enough for me to speak, I ask, “When can I see Rowan again?”
“In the morning,” he tells me. “There’s no need for concern. He’ll be as good as new by then.”
In addition to a cafeteria this building has a floor made up of bedrooms. I don’t ask how Vaughn has arranged for me to have my own room, or how I was permitted to enter this secure building. I think he anticipated capturing me when Cecily was in the hospital; I don’t think he anticipated that his son wouldn’t abandon me. How do Cecily and Linden factor into this plan? He’s left them in Madame’s care, but will they ever know about this place? What happens when we return?
“You’re looking weary,” Vaughn says. “Wash up, if you’d like. Rest. Enjoy the view. I’ll come for you in the morning.”
My bedroom, in contrast to the rest of the building, is warm and softly lit. The bed is lush and inviting, the bedding gold satin.
I step inside, and when the door is closed behind me, I hear the click of a lock.