Vaughn is waiting by the limo’s open door. The light rain makes little shadows on his gray suit. I can’t bring myself to look at him, but he puts his hand on my shoulder to stop me from getting into the car, and he tells Rowan to go on ahead, and then Vaughn closes the door.
“It seems the terms of our agreement have changed,” he says. “But I still have something you want, don’t I?”
He lowers his face until our eyes meet, and he waits for me to answer with the obvious, as though I’m a child.
“Gabriel,” I say.
“And you do still have something that I want. I still need your cooperation.”
I don’t know what more he wants from me. He already has my DNA, and the insides of my eyes, and my brother. He has enough fuel to take us all to a place where people go on living, indifferent or else oblivious to our misery. None of it is going to save his son.
“Can I still count on that cooperation?” he asks.
His eyes are almost kind. I have to look away from them, but I nod.
“Good girl,” he says, and opens the door for me. As long as Vaughn is still alive, there will always be doors to open. There will always be something horrible waiting on the other side.
On the flight out to Hawaii, Vaughn tells us that he’s sorry he didn’t arrange for meals, but our next treatment is going to require a twelve-hour fasting. He has pills for us instead, and I am grateful when they make me feel drowsy. On some faraway level I’m aware of my body curling up on the seat, my eyes closing.
I’m barely conscious by the time we land. I try to call for my brother, but I can’t move my tongue. Through a sheen of darkness I see the oriental rug rushing toward me as I fall, and then someone is holding me by the arms and I’m eased into a wheelchair.
I feel the mugginess and the heat. I hear the city noises and the ocean’s waves, everything through a vacuum as I fall down, down, into the darkness I’m craving.
The darkness isn’t perfect, though. Bits of reality peek through. A cold metal table under me. Surgical tools rattling on a rolling cart. Voices talking miles away from me, in a place where it still means something to be alive.
I wake up spluttering and gagging. A tube has just been pulled from my throat; when I manage to open my eyes, I see the nurse taking it away. It’s bright in this room, and I can’t see the nurse’s face, can’t tell if she’s first generation or new or something else entirely.
She runs an ice cube across my lips and tells me that I’m brave. I want to ask her what’s happening, but I can’t speak.
“Rest now,” I hear Vaughn say. “It’s done, Rhine. It’s all done.”
Linden is in the darkness with me, and he’s trying to speak. But something isn’t right. I can’t hear his words. I can’t understand them.
“You have to go now,” I tell him, and he does. Even the dead know that we have to face certain things alone.
When I open my eyes again, I’m in a white room on an inclined mattress.
“Rhine?” Rowan says, and at once he has moved from the window to my bedside. He’s all dressed in white like the walls and the curtains and the blanket that’s drawn up to my chest. There’s another bed on the other side of the end table, its blankets disturbed. I suppose Rowan recovered sooner than I did.
He takes my hand. Odd, he was never one for affection. I find that I have the strength to wriggle my fingers between his. The numbness of sleep is receding.
I try to speak. “What’s happening to us?”
He smiles in a way I’ve rarely seen since we were children, when we were still foolish enough to think the world had anything to promise us. “Dr. Ashby has done it,” Rowan says. “He’s modified an existing formula for the cure. He made his official presentation to President Guiltree this morning. We were both supposed to attend, but you’ve been asleep, and I wanted to be here when you woke up. I wanted to be the one to tell you that we’ve been cured.”
I must still be groggy, because I’m having trouble understanding. “I thought none of the cures were universal.”
He squeezes my hand. “We think this one is,” he says. “He’s spent this past week testing dosages on us and comparing his findings with other subjects. He’s tested all of our hormone levels and our cell counts, and none of the abnormalities of the other treatments have appeared with this one.”
All I understand from that is the word “week.”
Linden has been dead for a week.
“Rhine?” Rowan says. I hear myself sniffle, and the room blurs through a rush of tears. “What’s the matter?” he asks, and dabs at my cheeks with the cuff of his sleeve.
A week. Gabriel has remained frozen for all the things he knows and because I’m the only bargaining chip that could ever awaken him.
Cecily has been alone.
“How can anything be the matter?” my brother says. “You understand, don’t you? We’re cured.”
“I don’t care,” I say, before the tears make it impossible to speak.
“Cure” is one of the most precious words in the English language. It’s a short word. A clean and simple word. But it isn’t so easy a thing as it sounds. There are questions like: How will this affect us in ten years? In twenty? What will it do to our children? Our children’s children? Our immune systems are going to suffer, I’m being told. We may develop tumors. We’ll be more vulnerable to toxins in the air. Minor ailments like colds run the risk of progressing into respiratory infections. Rowan and I have been fitted with tracking devices that will also keep track of our vital signs, which will be monitored around the clock.
In time the scientists are hoping the effects will take to female reproductive systems. There are already studies being planned to test the results of a new generation conceiving with a partner that wasn’t born with the virus. This is not the conclusion, but only the beginning, the spark. We will undergo monthly physical examinations. And then there is the matter of certainty. The virus wouldn’t have affected us until after my twentieth birthday and Rowan’s twenty-fifth. There are fifty other participants in the study who vary in age, but we will all have to survive that fatal year before there’s even going to be talk of starting to make these findings public. The hope is that more participants can be brought into the study annually as researchers build data on how the initial subjects are reacting to treatment.
All of this, of course, assumes that the formula for the cure that Vaughn modified will do what it’s supposed to, and we won’t all die a gruesome death like some subjects in other studies.
And because of the sensitivity and confidentiality of it all, we will not be allowed to return to the public. The president doesn’t have the funds to keep all of us here, so we will return to the States, where we’ll be monitored by the doctor assigned to our care—Vaughn, as far as Rowan and I are concerned.
I’m back to the familiar role of a prisoner, only this time without the formality of a husband. At least Rowan won’t be free to destroy any more labs. He’ll have to leave his friends behind, but he doesn’t even think enough of them to mention it. Maybe that’s why Bee stared at me with such contempt—she knew that for me, Rowan would abandon any life he had built elsewhere.
Rowan is the one who tells me all of these things. He talks softly, patiently, as I sit on the window ledge and watch boats with colorful triangles for sails scratch the ocean.
I don’t touch the dinner that’s gone cold on my nightstand. I don’t ask any questions or give any indication that I’ve heard what he’s telling me.
I watch the perfectly imperfect people several stories below, living their perfectly imperfect lives, and I think about how many decades will have to pass before the whole world can be like that again. I think about how many decades will pass before someone gets another idea to make the world perfect and destroys it completely.
“Rhine, please,” Rowan says. He sits on the ledge beside me. “You have to care about this.” After our parents died, one morning he interrupted my sulking by throwing the blankets away from me. The cold air made me wince. “I’m not going to spoon-feed you,” he said. But I suppose that’s what he’s doing now—forcing me to take in this news, hoping it will cure this incurable grief I feel. It’s not like him to say “please.”
I’m quiet for a while, and then I say, “Do you remember when we were kids, and we used to look out at the sky and pretend we could see the planets? You said Venus was a woman whose hair was on fire. I said Mars was crawling with worms.”
“I remember,” he says.
I look at the sky, blue and cloudless. It doesn’t seem as limitless as it used to. “I haven’t seen Venus and Mars for a long time,” I say. “I think they’re dead.”
I fall sideways and rest my head on his shoulder.
“You’re really in pain over Linden’s death,” he says, putting his arm around me and gently tugging at some of my hair. “But your own life hasn’t ended. You have to go on.”
“You can go ahead and say that I’m too sensitive now. I know you’re thinking it.”
“What I was thinking,” he says, “is that you’ve grown up while we were apart, but maybe you haven’t changed that much.”
“I’m still weak, you mean.”
“You were never weak,” he says. “Just empathetic. I’ve always worried about you. It’s dangerous to become attached to anyone in our world. To trust anyone.”
“I don’t know how you think it’s something that can be helped,” I say.
“I just hate to see you like this,” he says. “Isn’t there anything I can do?”
You could murder Vaughn. You could free Gabriel. You could help repair the damage that’s been done to our home. By you.
This room is surely being recorded, though, and all I say is, “No.”
He tilts my chin, and then he cups his hands around my ear and whispers, “I don’t believe that.”
I look at him, and I see the same look in his eyes as on the morning when I told him I was going to bring Linden home. Vaughn may be Rowan’s benefactor, but I’m his twin sister. Even after this time spent apart, he can read me. He knows as well as I do that walls have ears. He knows there’s something I can’t say. And if I know my brother at all, he’s going to find a way to hear it.
Chapter 27
WE RETURN to the mansion on an afternoon so humid, the air is like old bathwater.
Vaughn has updated my key card so that, in addition to the ground floor and the wives’ floor, I’ll have access to the guest level where Rowan will be staying. I didn’t even know we had a guest level, but according to Vaughn, it’s one down from the wives’ floor. But there will be time for Rowan to explore his new accommodations later. For now Vaughn has asked me to show Rowan the gardens, turn on the pool holograms if I’d like. Just be inside and cleaned up by five p.m., in time for dinner.
