JUDE AND CLAIRE LOWE, PAIR

five. Fraternal twins. “Artificially induced at age eight,” according to their files, their real files, which meant that was when they were injected with whatever version of whatever drug Kells was working on then to cause the symptoms of G1821.

“Wait a second,” Jamie said, looking up from the files. ““What happened to I. Lowe?”

“There is no I.”

Jamie snapped his fingers. “Exactly.”

Stella just shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t like any boys’ names that started with I?”

“Like ‘Ignatius’?” Daniel chimed in.

“Or ‘Ira,’ ” I said.

“Which brings up another point,” Jamie said, and bit his thumbnail. “These weren’t the kids’ real names. They couldn’t have been. They would have all had names on their birth certificates.”

“I didn’t see any birth certificates in the files,” I said. Only death certificates. “Their medical records use the aliases or whatever, though.”

“So Kells must have renamed them—but how do you get a six- or seven-year-old to accept a new name?”

“And lie to doctors and nurses about it?” I asked. I thought about the files I’d thumbed through, but no hospital names stood out. “Give me that,” I said to Jamie, and he handed me one of the files. F. Lowe. Frederick.

“These records are from Mount Tom Hospital. Someone Google it.”

Daniel did. “Doesn’t exist.” He paused. “So are these records even real?”

“I think they are,” Stella said. “I mean, why fabricate someone’s entire medical history? Especially if you’re not even using that person’s real name?”

A thought dawned on me. “It’s another layer of protection,” I said. “The names were changed, the places and dates—none of it’s real. If it were, it would make the children, and what happened to them, too easy to actually find. But I think Stella’s right, that what’s actually reported there is real. The symptoms, the treatment, the consequences. I mean, we saw the archives. The real files, with the kids’ real names, might be in there somewhere, but without knowing what they are, no one would ever find them.”

Daniel nodded slowly. “So none of this can be used as evidence,” he said quietly. “Kells was a real person with a real identity, and once you have an identity, it’s not easy to shake. If anyone traced her history and found the archives, like we did, and tried to report this stuff, like I want to, these would just look like the fictional records from fictional kids that never existed.”

“Smart,” Jamie said.

Very.

“But how would she be allowed to foster so many kids? Especially when they kept dying on her?” Stella asked.

“The same way she had the resources to find us,” I said. “And to experiment on us, and to do all of this research—”

“Plus,” Jamie said, “bad shit happens to kids in foster care all the time.”

I looked at Kells’s frozen image on the screen, and pressed play.

“J. woke up two days after induction complaining of sickness. The thermometer showed a fever of 99.6. I’m hopeful that this is just a normal cold, or flu, since the others presented with temperatures above 101 before they expired.”

“Expired? Damn, that’s cold,” Jamie said.

“Claire seems fine, anyway,” Kells continued, looking perfectly calm, not worried at all.

“Fast forward,” Jamie said, and I did.

Kells looked tense and worried now. “J. has developed the fever. Same symptoms as the others, mostly, but with a few key differences. He seems disoriented. I’ve caught him speaking in the third person, to himself, and occasionally to me. He has asked to see Claire, but I don’t want to frighten her. I need her amenable and willing to endure future testing, particularly if Jude expires like the rest.”

I stopped the DVD. “Claire was in my grade,” I said to no one in particular.

“And Jude was in mine,” Daniel said.

Stella picked up the pile of papers on the table. “But it says they were fraternal twins. Pair five.”

I nodded.

“Why lie?” I asked.

I pressed play, but Dr. Kells had switched the focus of her interview, or recording, or whatever this was, to a discussion of the properties of Amylethe. Daniel and Stella kept watching as Jamie and I picked out the DVDs with the months and dates that corresponded to medical events in Jude’s file. When this DVD finished, we put the next one in.

Kells sat down at the little table in the green and white room, practically beaming. “My name is Deborah Susan Kells,” she said to the camera. “Today is Monday, March fifth, two months after the induction of subject J.L. according to the Lenaurd protocol, which appears to have been a success.”

The four of us looked at one another.

“After the injection series, he began developing at a magnificent rate,” Kells said, leaning forward in her chair. “Beyond what I could have hoped.” She kept talking, about Jude’s advancement, his development, physical and otherwise. He was becoming “gifted,” to use Kells’s words, and she was proud of him, proud of what she’d done to him. But it was also changing him—subtly at first. And then not. When he was ten years old, she began to worry.

“He is moody, depressive—aggressive, even. I’ve noticed the development of secondary sex characteristics—deepening voice, the beginnings of facial and chest hair. He appears to be undergoing puberty, despite his age. I’ve ordered an evaluation and intervention, and I will report back with the results next month.” She turned the camera off.

We put the next DVD in, riveted.

“The psychiatrist has returned with a diagnosis of conduct disorder,” she said, clearly shaken. “And the behavior of Subject J continues to deteriorate. He has become antisocial and extremely aggressive. Claire reported that she caught her brother pulling the feathers off a sparrow fledgling that had fallen out of its nest. We’ve been administering Amylethe to try to arrest the . . . side effects . . . of the manifestation.”

“That’s why,” Daniel said quietly.

“Why what?”

“Why they lied about his age. If he started undergoing puberty at ten, he would have looked too old to pass for seventeen.” Daniel picked up a handful of paper and spoke while reading it. “She kept testing all kinds of drugs on him, not just the typical antipsychotics—hormones, experimental stuff.” And then Daniel looked at each of us. “This is why you guys look older than you are. There was something about rapid maturation in New Theories. It started at age eighteen in subjects, and continued to twenty-one.”

“Except none of us are eighteen,” Stella said aloud.

Jamie looked skeptical. “And people always think I’m younger than I am. Maybe it’s like that thing where growth hormones in milk make you go through puberty earlier?”

I wished Noah could have been there to hear that. “She gave me Amylethe too,” I said to Daniel, remembering Kells’s words in Horizons. “She said it would make me better.”

Daniel looked at me then. “Did it work? Do you feel better?”

I did feel better, but it wasn’t because of the drugs, or the implants. How could I describe what I’d gone through just to get here? How I’d felt beyond sick and not myself every day since waking up in Horizons? Until I’d gotten those things inside me out?

“No,” I said. “I don’t think it worked.”

“What about your, um . . . power?”

Jamie cringed. “It sounds cheesy when you put it like that.”

I didn’t answer my brother, because the truth was, I didn’t know if it still worked or didn’t. I hadn’t tried it, not since— “Wait right here,” I said, and threw off my blanket. I took the stairs two at a time and pushed open the door to the bedroom I would sleep in for as long as we were here. I spotted what I was looking for on a chair in the corner.

I looked through the small gray duffel bag until I found them. The implants, the capsules or whatever, that had been inside me until Stella cut them out. I closed my fist around them and brought them downstairs. Daniel examined one of them under the light.

“These were inside you?”

“Yup.”

“Where?”

“In my stomach, I think.”

“They couldn’t have actually been in your stomach, or you would have died taking them out.”

“Fine,” I said. “They were forty-two degrees south of my right fibia and seventh metatarsal.”

“You don’t have a fibia. That’s not a real bone.”

I gave my brother the finger.

“No need to get snippy,” Daniel said prissily. “Okay, so, these were inside you when you left Horizons, right?”

“Right.”

“And your ability didn’t work after you left there, right?”

“Correct.”

“You tried?”

I thought about Mr. Ernst. About what I’d done to him after what he’d tried to do to Stella and me. “Yes.” I did try.

“What happened?” Daniel prodded. “Who did you try to . . .” His voice trailed off. “Who hurt you?”

Jamie almost literally began to whistle and twiddle his thumbs. Stella looked at the floor.

“It was nothing,” I said, falsely calm. “It was fine in the end.”

Daniel handed me back the implants and then looked down at the mess of papers. “All right. We know the anomaly is triggered by fear and stress. So, what if anytime your nervous system was flooded with adrenaline, or cortisol, those things reacted, negating your ability? Like a fail-safe to make you safer, better, in case you ever left Horizons.”

But they hadn’t made me safer, I thought. My mind conjured an image of Mr. Ernst, what I did to him, and I blinked, hoping it would disappear.

Daniel chose his words carefully. “But you were actually safer in the sense that you couldn’t accidentally . . . hurt someone. You couldn’t protect yourself, but you were safer for other people to be around.”

I wondered if that were true.

“Anyway, Dr. Kells thought of herself as a scientist, a researcher. She had plans to send you back home, right?”

“That’s what she said.”

“So those implants must have been part of her plan to do it. She thought she’d have time to tweak the effects, figure out how to counteract the anomaly, before you guys escaped.”

Before I killed her. But Daniel had a point. Everything Kells had done to us, done to me, had been in pursuit of a cure. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. And when she hadn’t succeeded, and Jude had let me out, she’d decided to put me down like an animal before I could be set loose and hurt anyone else.

As we watched the interviews, we realized Daniel had been right. Jude got worse, no matter what Kells did to try to fix him. She attempted to hide her distress as he grew older, more dangerous, but the drugs she pumped into him didn’t always mitigate his behavior. Sometimes he didn’t seem to know who he was; he was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, and when someone “else” emerged, Claire was the only one who could get him, the real him, to break through, which Daniel guessed was why Kells had been willing to foster her, gender notwithstanding.

Hearing and watching Kells talk about Jude made the hair rise on my skin. You could tell she was losing control but she couldn’t admit it. Jude was her success story after years and years of failure. She couldn’t accept that in trying to cure the anomaly, she had actually done something worse. Her only true success had been managing to keep Claire and Jude alive after induction. Claire was completely normal, actually, despite Kells’s efforts to make her otherwise. Kells guessed Claire wasn’t a carrier. If she had been, Kells could’ve triggered the mutation the way she had with Jude.

“That explains why Jude survived after the asylum but Claire didn’t,” Daniel said. But then again, almost to himself, “But what about his hands?”

Jude’s hands. The hands he supposedly didn’t have anymore, after the patient room door at the Tamerlane had slammed shut on him, separating him from me, and his wrists from his hands.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Daniel mumbled.

“Doesn’t it, though?” Stella looked from Daniel to me to Jamie. “Jude has a healing factor.”

“So did Noah,” Jamie said. I shot him a look. “Does. So does Noah.”

Which is why he had to be alive. “Which is why he’s still out there,” I said.

“But Jude can’t heal without hurting someone else,” Stella said. “When the door slammed shut on him in the asylum, you wouldn’t have been affected, because you’re . . . different.”

“Oh my God,” Daniel said.

“What?” I looked at him.

“Rachel and Claire,” Daniel said. “They were normal, not carriers. They were at the Tamerlane with you and Jude. Jude healed because of them. He killed them, not . . .”

Me. Not me.

I swallowed. There was no way to really ever know what had happened, or who was more responsible. I’d wished that the building would collapse. I’d wished for Jude to die. It had collapsed and he hadn’t died, but if Rachel and Claire had been killed because of Jude’s ability, because his body had needed to heal itself, it still wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been the one to hurt him. So who was responsible for that? Him or me? Did it matter?

“A question, though,” Stella said, interrupting the silence. “Something I don’t get. Maybe one of you can help me out. Why no girls? Why did Kells foster only boys till Claire? I mean, if I’m a carrier, and Mara’s a carrier, and we’ve manifested, then why—”

Daniel cut in. “Why were most of the twins boys?”

Stella nodded.

“There was something in New Theories about the Y chromosome and a healing factor,” Daniel said, getting up to search for the book. “Most greater abilities were of different subtypes that could bind to an X or Y chromosome, but not that one. It had to be a Y.”

I thought about the children Kells had experimented on. Eight little boys, once healthy and now dead. She’d been trying to solve a problem, she’d said, to fix the anomaly, to create someone who could heal himself and, by extension, others—and her, too.

She had been trying to create Noah, but she’d made Jude instead.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 599