Blight Page 19

  “What are you doing?” I push forward. “He’s sedated. I used all the mor—”

  The guard who frisked me catches me around the stomach, knocking the air from my lungs. He yanks one arm behind my back, and I cry out as I feel it pop out of joint. I blink tears away to see one of the other guards upending the backpack, scattering syringes, our grimy water bottle, and stale gum across the forest floor.

  “He’s not going to hurt anyone. You don’t have to restrain him,” I gasp. Then the guard has my other arm behind me, and I feel the bite of the zip tie.

  “Stop!” I shrug him off and stumble forward. “You’re hurting—”

  A buzz close to my ear, a cold burn, and my vision goes white. I catch a glimpse of the treetops illuminated by the drone, pinwheeling, and then the captain’s face, and then nothing.

  I come to in the back of a covered personnel transport, slumped on a metal bench. My shoulder throbs and my brain feels muzzled. I try to twist into a more comfortable position, but my arms are still tied behind my back. Daylight streams in from the rear of the vehicle, where the road is spooling out behind us in a hot white ribbon. Buildings sprawl on either side, warehouses and cinder-block storefronts, fenced lots and depots filled with armored trucks. We must be entering Atlanta proper—AgraStar’s headquarters.

  “She’s awake.”

  I sit up. Eight helmeted AgraStar guards sit on the benches around me, but it’s the one across from me who spoke, a young man with smooth, dark brown skin and a scar across his chin.

  “Where’s Alder?” I struggle to make my tongue form the words.

  “Who’s that?” the guard across from me asks. He looks so familiar, like . . .

  “The shirk boy that was with her,” the female guard beside him says, turning to me. “He’s up in one of the trucks with the medic.”

  “Why do you care so much?” The guard across from me gives me a curious look, like he might believe me if I could only explain. Even his voice strikes a chord of memory.

  One of the other guards snorts. “Because she’s a shirk like him. You heard what she said. She’s got some miracle cure for fighting the blight, but screw us, she was going to let everyone die unless we saved her boyfriend.”

  “That’s not how it is.” I pull at the zip tie. “I’m one of you. Untie me. Look at my wrist.”

  “Like we’re falling for that.” The nasty guard shakes his head. “Lie all you like. They’ll get the truth out of you once we’re back inside the yellow zone.”

  The guard across from me—the one I could half swear I know—pulls off his helmet and runs a hand over his close-cropped hair. The gesture is so familiar, so . . . His deep brown eyes meet mine.

  “Ellison?” I whisper.

  He frowns and looks from me to his fellow guards. “What’s she talking about?”

  “You’re not . . .” He looks exactly like Ellison, talks like Ellison, moves like Ellison. But Ellison never had a scar like that, and Ellison is lying beneath three feet of poisoned dirt. I lean forward on the bench, trying to breathe. My vision dims, and I pitch forward onto the floor as I lose consciousness.

  I wake in a hospital room. Sunlight pours through the window, sparkling on the pristine white floors. I lift my head, but I can’t see any buildings or trees on the other side of the glass, only sky. Where am I? Atlanta? I look down. Someone has undressed me, bathed me, and put me in a cotton gown printed with a pattern of small AgraStar logos. My hands rest at my sides, but something is wrong with them. A thin, rubbery layer of something gray-white covers them from palm to fingertips, as if the inner portion of my hands have been dipped in paint and then dried. I flex my fingers and shiver. I’m cold. So cold.

  My heart races, the rhythm matched by the low, frantic beep of the machine to my right. I push myself up, and pain shoots through my elbow. I look down. An IV shunt sticks out of my skin, connected to a bag of saline above the bed. I swallow. There’s a pitcher of water on the side table, collecting condensation.

  Water. I kick my legs free of the blankets and crawl out of bed. My body moves so slowly. I would think I’ve been drugged, except my mind feels perfectly clear. I skip the plastic cup and drink straight from the pitcher, gulping down water until my lungs force me to take a breath. I’ve finished almost half of it when the door chimes, and a pale woman in blue hospital scrubs and a matching cap strolls in, examining a smartboard.

  “Miss Salcedo?” She looks up and smiles at me.

  I lower the pitcher to the table. “No. Torres. My name is Torres.” My voice sounds gravelly, hoarse. I cough.

  She frowns at her smartboard, and then her face lights up again. “Ah. I see. How are you feeling, Miss Torres?”

  The way she says my name puts an uneasy feeling in my stomach. I should be relieved. I don’t know where I am, but I’m not in a jail cell. This isn’t how we talk to prisoners. AgraStar must have decided I’m valuable if they’re giving me medical treatment. I step back toward the window, pulling the IV stand with me. “Fine.”

  “Are you hungry?” She glances at the water pitcher, then back at me, and laughs. “I can certainly see you were thirsty.”

  I look at my hospital gown. I’ve spilled splotches of water down my front. My face burns.

  “Where’s Alder?”

  “The scavenger you brought in?” She raises her eyebrows, as if she’s surprised I mentioned him. “I’m not authorized—”

  “I only want to know if he’s alive. Just tell me that.”

  “He’s being treated in another part of the facility,” she says. “He’ll recover.”

  I let out a sigh of relief, and at the same moment, my stomach grumbles.

  “Hungry after all!” The woman smiles and turns for the exit. “I’ll see if we can’t find something in Refectory for you.”

  “Wait. Why did you . . .” I try to follow her, but the IV stand slows me down. The door closes between us. I tug at its manual grip, wave my hand in front of the motion sensor, bang on the glass. Nothing. It stays calmly and stubbornly closed. A glass antechamber, with nothing in it but a wall of cabinets and a hand-washing station, separates my room from the hall. Everything out there is white and putty gray.

  “Hey!” I shout, pounding on the glass. “Come back! Please!”

  No one answers. No one comes.

  I hit the glass one last time in frustration and storm away, tangling myself in the IV stand as I go.

  “Dammit!” I pull the shunt from my arm, grab a handful of tissues to blot up the blood, and kick the stand.

  The heart-rate monitor beeps soft and fast. I look inside my robe at the electrodes stuck to my skin. They must be monitoring me remotely. I need to calm down, figure out where I am. I roll my injured shoulder. It doesn’t hurt at all. In fact . . . I look down at my hands again. My skin tingles under the stretchy material. I’m almost good as new.

  A few flashes of memory skitter by. A dark loading bay, a medic drawing blood, the squeak of stretcher wheels. And a woman on the other side of the glass, shouting. “You have to let me in! You have to let me see her!”

  I step into the patch of sunshine under the window and immediately reel back. I’m in a skyscraper, dozens of stories in the air—higher than I’ve ever been. I press my face against the glass and look down on a neat green park trimmed with trees, and across at the neighboring steel- and-chrome towers. None of them are as tall as the one I’m in. Enclosed walkways span the open space between the buildings, connecting them in a crisscrossing pattern. Gray streets jammed with tankers and trucks pass below. Between the towers, I spot stretches of highway wrapping around the western edge of the city, fortified with concrete barriers, concertina wire, and machine-gun nests. Atlanta. I must be in the heart of it. I’ve heard stories from people stationed here, but they always talked about looking up at the buildings, never down.

  The door chimes. An orderly walks in, carrying a gray cafeteria tray, and after him a woman. She’s no doctor or medic. It’s in the way she walks—
confident, but unhurried. She has golden-brown skin and chin-length platinum-blond hair, and wears a white silk pencil skirt and blazer. Her matching heels lend another few inches to her already imposing height. She carries a small gold box.

  She stops when she sees me. For a split second, her face registers some emotion I can’t name—not surprise, something deeper and more subdued than that. I can’t stop looking at her. I don’t know if it’s just that her walking in is like catching sight of a flash of pyrite on a dull riverbed, or if it’s something else. Something familiar, but not.

  “Thank you,” she says as the orderly sets the tray on the rolling table next to the bed.

  I frown. She’s older than I first thought, around the same age as the Deacon and Rosalie. I hear it in her voice. We wait in awkward silence until the orderly finishes arranging the tray and leaves.

  “They said you were hungry.” She gestures to the food—slices of pear with bright yellow skin alongside chunks of a slippery-looking orange fruit, perfectly black coffee with a tiny pitcher of thick cream beside it, fluffy eggs and toast, a still-melting pat of butter on top. “Please, eat.”

  The smell of bread and coffee pushes all other thoughts from my mind. I temporarily lose all dignity, clamber over the bed, sit on its edge, and dig in, scooping up the eggs with a piece of toast. They’re lightly salted and airy, the coffee is smooth, and the orange fruit tastes like syrup in my mouth.

  “May I sit?” She gestures to the foot of the bed. Her wrist com catches my eye. It isn’t the standard dark green plastic, but a milky mother-of-pearl cuff glowing softly with data.

  I stop, mouth full, and nod.

  She takes a seat, smooths her skirt, and laughs, a tight, unnatural sound. “I know they said you were hungry. They forgot to tell me you were part horse.”

  I swallow and blush. Why is some woman dressed like an AgraStar CEO sitting here trying to joke with me? No one brings prisoners trays of fresh breakfast foods and sits next to them while they eat. Does that mean I’m not a prisoner? But then why is my door locked from the outside? I need to be more careful, watch what I give away, try to make sense of all this.

  “That would be much easier without those dermagrafts.” The woman nods at my hands. “They should have done the trick by now. Would you like some help taking them off?”

  I look down at the rubbery coating on my palms and then up at her. As nice as she’s being, they could still change their minds any second and decide I’m not worth the security risk. I have to be cooperative, compliant, a model employee, unless I want to end up like everyone else on SCP-52.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Here.” She holds out her hands.

  I place one of mine in them. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Dr. Orelia Salcedo.” She pinches the edge of the dermagraft and begins to peel it up slowly, uncovering the rosy skin of my palm. “You’ll have heard of me?”

  I stiffen. Salcedo?

  I realize she’s waiting for my answer. “N-no.” I make myself blink, try to look natural.

  Her face falls, but she tries to cover it by swiping a strand of hair out of her eyes and focusing on the dermagrafts. “I’m the head of AgraStar’s research and development department.”

  I go still as stone, my hand frozen in hers. Research and development? She has to have known about the blight project, then. She has to have known what it did, what it was designed to do. She might even have been the architect behind the whole thing. At the very least, she would have signed off on it.

  I straighten my spine. “I appreciate you coming to see me, ma’am,” I say. “Whatever you want to know about the seeds or the blight, I’ll do my best to tell you.”

  Dr. Salcedo ignores my offer and pulls the last of the dermagraft from my right hand with a snap. “All done. Now the other one.”

  I stare at my hand. The skin is as good as new, smooth and perfectly restored, down to the whorls in my fingertips. I’ve heard about med tech like this, but I’ve never seen it. I always thought it was reserved for severe cases—whole-body burns and facial mutilations, not cosmetic scarring.

  “You might feel some itching for a few days,” Dr. Salcedo says, pulling my other dermagraft free. “But don’t worry. That means it’s healing.”

  “Ma’am—”

  She laughs once, almost a yelp of pain. “Please, you don’t need to call me ma’am.”

  “What do you want me to call you?” I ask.

  She glances at her coms, and then up at me. “It’s Torres, yes?”

  I frown and give a single nod.

  “You’ve brought us something very valuable, Miss Torres.” She balls up the used dermagrafts and places them on the bed between us. “Two things, really.”

  “The seeds?” I say.

  “That’s right.” She looks me in the eye. “AgraStar appreciates your loyalty and all the trouble you went through to bring this information to us. You’ve saved countless lives.”

  “What’s the other thing?”

  She reaches for my hands again. “You’ve brought my daughter home.”

  “Your daughter?” I frown. “No, I . . . there was no one else but Alder . . .” And then the pieces come together. Miss Salcedo. The tray of exotic fruits and real bread. The top-shelf medical care. The intensity in the way Dr. Salcedo looks at me.

  “I’m your mother, Tempest.” The head of AgraStar R&D squeezes my hands in hers. “I’ve been looking for you for fourteen years.”

  .18.

  SWEETBAY MAGNOLIA

  MAGNOLIA VIRGINIANA

  I study her face, trying to make out some reflection of my own. I think I can see it, if I look past the makeup and dyed hair. The strong jaw; the almond eyes and long, black lashes. Our noses are different—hers aquiline, mine broad—and her eyes are seafoam green, whereas mine are brown. Am I seeing the truth or just random patterns amplified by suggestion?

  “How . . . how do you know?” I say. “There must be some mistake. . . .”

  “You were missing your coms when you came in,” Dr. Salcedo says. “Triage did a blood test to identify you, and it flagged your missing-person report. But the moment I saw you . . . I would have known you anywhere. You look so much like your father.”

  She reaches out to caress my hair, but I shrink back. This is too much, too strange.

  “Forgive me.” She draws her hand away. “I look at you, and I still see my baby, my little girl, but this must be difficult for you. They warned me it would be.”

  “I . . . I’m sorry.” I look down at my tray. My mind is reeling, but my body feels still, detached. Am I really here? Maybe I’ll wake up in the back of the truck any minute, or lying on the asphalt, my hands pinned behind my back.

  “Do you remember anything? You were so young, barely three, but . . .”

  “I don’t know.” I rub the bridge of my nose. That moment in the creek comes back to me, the memory of the bathtub and the woman. “Just . . . flashes, I guess. Things that don’t—didn’t—make sense.”

  She sighs and sits straight. “It’s not your fault.”

  “You said I looked like my father,” I say haltingly. “What I remember . . . it’s mainly him. In the forest. We were always walking and he would si—”

  “Don’t talk about him,” Dr. Salcedo snaps. Then she softens. “Please. It’s too hard to hear.”

  I swallow. I’m not dreaming. This woman may be my mother, but she’s still AgraStar management. I can’t afford to make her angry.

  “Can I ask . . .” I hesitate. “What happened? How did . . .”

  “He kidnapped you,” she says. “He took you from me.”

  My head swims. My father? The man who ate dandelions and sang as I rode on his shoulders? “Why would he do that?”

  “He met some people who . . .” She presses her lips together and looks away, twisting her com cuff absentmindedly. “They radicalized him. He stopped believing in AgraStar’s mission. He wanted us to leave—all three of us—but I didn’t
think he was serious. Leave a prestigious job at AgraStar? To become a scavenger?” She shakes her head and scoffs.

  “But I ended up at the SCP compound,” I say, confused.

  She frowns, comes back to me. “The security analysts said your father had gone southwest, into Bloom territory. They scoured all their scavenger surrender records and new contracts for three years—believe me, that wasn’t easy to arrange.” She gives a small, humorless laugh. “We never thought he would stay in AgraStar territory, much less survive off the grid. The facility you turned up at in the SCP region didn’t flag your intake record as suspicious, and so they never cross-referenced your DNA.”

  “And my father was dead.” I stare at my half-eaten breakfast, no longer hungry. “So there was no one to question.”

  “If your facility managers hadn’t died in the accident, you can believe there would be an inquest.” Her voice ices over. “We’re ordering a full audit of intake and security procedures at all compounds. Nothing like this will ever happen again.”

  Something gnaws at me. The accident. Does she know about the Deacon’s part in it? Did she know what R&D was making out there? She must have. And that means she must know whether the blight was a simple miscalculation or a weapon all along, like Crake said.

  “Could I see the security records?” I say. “Maybe I could help piece together what happened.”

  “Oh, m’ija, no.” She softens. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  M’ija. That word clicks home in my brain and sends all the tumblers of my memory turning. “Put this over your eyes so I don’t get soap in them.” Someone pushing me in a swing. “Higher, Mami, higher!” Hiding under a table, raised voices in the kitchen, staying quiet so the grown-ups don’t notice me. “Come sit with me, m’ija.” Leaning my head against someone and swiping through the pages of a story on a tablet. Her arms. The gentle press of peace all around me.

  And like that, all my walls come down. All my certainties and doubts, plans and strategizing crumble, as if they were tuned to the frequency of that one word. My eyes sting. I want to curl up with my head on my mother’s lap and run circles around the city, my hair flapping behind me, blood singing with endorphins, at the same time. That word. It isn’t simply some pet name. It’s everything I’ve worked for all my life. That word is belonging.