because she was right. I had to look at the blood. My fingers trembled as I prepared the slide, and I wondered if Kelis had noticed. And then I wasn't thinking about anything at all because what I could see in front of me was what I'd somehow feared without even knowing it, and the memories washed back over me, too strong to resist.
Most of all I remembered the excitement, a taste in the back of my throat that was very much like fear. My heart pounding, loud in my ears and heavy in my chest. And maybe it was fear, a little, because what if we were wrong? If we doled out hope and then took it back again, would anyone there forgive us? With the way nerves were on edge, tempers frayed – it would only take one spark, and that might be it. But…
'I really think this is it,' Ash said, and there was an edge of excitement in his normally cool voice.
I looked at the slide again, at the lab work, the electron microscope images and grainy NMR scans, but they were all telling us the same thing. 'This is… you know how fucking dangerous this is, right?'
But Ash was grinning now, that smile I remembered from college but hadn't seen in a while, when he knew he'd done something clever and was planning on being insufferable about it. 'Yeah, because dying in agony while your brains slide out of your ears isn't dangerous at all.' The lab felt too small to contain the force of his personality when he was in a mood like this.
I ignored him and took one final look at the slide, the papers. As if the facts might have changed while I wasn't looking. But of course they hadn't. 'It really is O-neg.'
'Yeah,' Ashok said, 'and before that, it really was AB. This is it, Jasmine. Stop second guessing and start celebrating!'
'Shit,' I exclaimed. 'Shit. We are geniuses!'
He swept me up into a hug. 'Yeah, babe, we really are.'
'Twisted geniuses.'
He gave me a last squeeze, and then let me go. 'The best kind.'
'Because what we did here is mental. You know that, don't you? I mean, we're generally in the business of curing retro-viruses, not creating them.'
'Not to mention the military tech in there that would make Al Qaeda's eyes light up. If they weren't, you know, dying in agony along with everyone else.'
'And the stem cells – don't want to forget them.'
'How can I, when they're so untested the FDA isn't even within five years of issuing a licence?'
Our jubilation had tipped over into near hysteria, and we must have been shouting pretty damn loud because Abuke poked his head round the door and frowned. Then he saw our faces and his frown slipped into another expression, harder to define.
'You did it?' he said. 'You've found it?'
I smiled. 'Yeah, I really think we have.'
But a vaccine that turns a rat's blood from one type to another isn't necessarily the same as a Cure that does the same thing for humans. In any normal medical research there'd be years of testing to go before we moved on to live subjects. Fat chance. It was live testing or nothing, and there weren't a whole lot of subjects to choose from.
The five of us lay in identical beds wearing hospital gowns, tubes in our arms, expressions of unease on our faces. I guess it was flattering in a way, that the other three were prepared to put so much trust in mine and Ash's work. Or more likely it was just desperation.
Yesterday, the base had seen its first Cull. The rest of us would follow, weeks or days later, who knew, but it would be soon.
On the bed beside me Ash smiled, but it was strained. The muscles in his cheeks tensing and releasing as his teeth ground, a nervous habit I'm not sure he knew he had. 'Ready?' I asked him.
'Jasmine…' he said softly, and I realised suddenly that he was going to say something serious, probably about us – but I was married and in love with another man.
'We'll be fine,' I said hurriedly. 'I've got faith in us.'
'Yeah.' His eyes closed slowly, then opened again, and he knew I didn't want to hear whatever he wanted to say. 'I'm glad I'm here with you,' he said finally, 'whatever happens.'
And then we both took the needles nestling in the cannula in our arms, and pushed. A second's hesitation, then the other three did the same. The Cure, mainlined, spreading through our system like the virus it was. Taking our DNA and changing it. DNA transcribing to RNA, coalescing and knotting to form the templates for alien proteins inside us, closing off the source of the AB blood cells that marked us for death. Telling our bodies that we'd been O-negs all the time, we just hadn't realised it yet.
Doing all of that – and something else too. A second after the small pain of the injection came a pain that was a thousand times worse. It felt as if something essential was being ripped loose right in the heart of us, and then again, and again, and again, until I couldn't imagine that it would ever end. Ash was the first to start screaming and once he'd started, he didn't stop. None of us did.
And now, here, as I looked at the slide, I knew exactly what I was seeing. Except, of course, that it shouldn't be possible. I turned to Kelis, hoping she couldn't see my shaking hands, that she wouldn't notice the way all the blood had drained from my face. Blood – ironic how everything comes back to that.
'Hey,' I said, and tried not to wince at the fake casualness of it, my inability to seem normal when everything inside me was screaming as loud as it had when I first took the Cure. 'Any chance you can scare up some food? I didn't have any breakfast earlier.'
She looked at the boy's corpse, and then at me, eyebrows raised. 'You're hungry – seriously?'
'Yeah, what can I say – I'm a doctor. Gore gives me an appetite.'
She shrugged and headed out the door, maybe glad to get away from the gore herself. Strange to think of a killer being queasy at the sight of blood. But then killer didn't quite capture her. It implied a love of it, or a clinical efficiency. Soren was a killer. Kelis had gone about killing with a kind of weary resignation, like it had been her third-choice career while there was a kid at home with an out-of-work husband and she needed to bring in the dough.
I'd brought my medical bag with me. The sterile needle and syringe were right where they always were. I had to stop myself shooting edgy, guilty looks at the other scientists as I drew out my own blood from the crook of my elbow and carefully smeared it onto a slide. They wouldn't think there was anything odd about it. Why should they? I was just a fellow scientist, going about my scientific business.
The slide clicked into place beside the one I'd taken from the Infected boy. I already knew what I'd see, but like a lump of vomit stuck halfway up my throat, I was still reluctant to bring it all the way into the light of day. I took one deep shaking breath, a second, then put my eye against the microscope and focussed.
The slide of my blood was on the left. The boy's blood was on the right. I remembered that – but there was no other way to tell. The two slides were identical, the same sickly, deformed red blood cells, twisted into a shape that nature had never seen before Ash and I had had our bright idea, five years ago, when we'd believed we might be able to save the human race.
The cobbled-together, wing-and-a-prayer hybrid we'd engineered in a lab from cutting-edge medical tech and code black military wetware had driven me insane. Somehow, it had done something very different, but equally terrible, to the people of Cuba.
Ash and I had meant to cure one plague. Had we managed to start another? I guess I should have been feeling guilty, for letting loose this thing that could wipe out the last, ragged remnant of humanity. But that wasn't what I was thinking about right then. What I was thinking was that Queen M had been right: this thing was Infectious and I was a carrier. Hell, I was Patient Zero. And if she ever picked up even a hint of it, I'd be shark meat.
Suddenly escape was looking a whole lot more urgent. Fuck everyone else. I had to get out of there right now.
CHAPTER THREE
I'd finally managed to discover the location of the camera in my room, hidden in the handle of my wardrobe
