“Greta.”
My name is spoken by a voice that freezes my soul to ice. I raise my eyes and see a young Daniel. Barely more than a teenager. And his partner. Marianna. The Ice Queen I used to call her in a long-past life. She’s only about thirty, but her hair is prematurely graying—as it always is. It adds to her austere facade.
Ah, so not the SS kind of trouble. The Earthbound kind of trouble. They must be desperate if they’re together again. They’re never together. It’s too risky. Someone might find out.
Someone like me.
They’ve been hunting me since I was that tiny, half-frozen child in England and I saw them together and the Ice Queen murdered me for it, not recognizing me as my child-self.
Though in that life Daniel had gotten himself so scarred I barely recognized him for who he was when I accidentally awakened my memories as Greta nearly thirty years ago.
Ironic, that all these years I’ve been hiding from the SS, and who catches me but Daniel and Marianna? My nemeses, who secretly formed and ran both the Curatoria and the Reduciata—bending all the Earthbounds in the world to their twisted wills.
It’s a level of greed and corruption I can scarcely imagine, though I’ve meditated on it for almost thirty years now.
And yet, a cheerful thought comes to me: if it is they who have found me, perhaps my friends are safe. I know it’s the last comforting thought I’ll have in this life.
Perhaps that’s why my mouthy side kicks in. “You’ve caught me,” I say. “An old woman of seventy-three. But I have several lives left. Are you really going to spend the next few hundred years chasing me?”
“No,” Marianna says, piping up from behind Daniel. She has a glass syringe, and whatever is in it makes fear tremble within me as my incredible intuition kicks in. “This will be the last time. The last time you see anything, actually. But especially us. And, of course, also your diligo—Quinn, I believe his name was the last time you saw him.”
That makes me fall silent. He is my weakness, and she knows it.
I’m not ashamed of that. The businesslike relationship she and Daniel have come to share is downright unnatural for a pair of Earthbounds. We should be entwined so tightly that death feels preferable to separation.
I certainly feel that way. But without the help of the Curatoria, what are my chances of ever finding my Quinn again? I’ve always known that the probability was small—especially when the war began—but whatever Daniel and Marianna have come up with, they obviously think they can do something of permanence. To ensure Quinn and I never meet again.
Marianna passes the syringe off to Daniel and walks to the opposite side of the room. I’m not sure if she’s handing off her dirty work, or if after shooting me last time, she feels he deserves a turn. Regardless, I have no time to protest before the sting of a needle plunges into my arm.
FORTY
I return to reality with the ghost pain in my arm replaced by the overwhelming agony in my stomach—the shirt around the knife brilliant with the red of my own blood.
But even that can’t wholly distract me from what I just saw.
That moment. That moment is what made me what I am. Daniel and Marianna gave me the virus. They expected me to die forever.
But I didn’t.
Why didn’t I?
I should have. Instead, the virus changed me. It must have mutated, even back then. I know at least one memory-less life must have passed between Greta and Sonya, but what I clearly remember from touching Sonya’s twine braid is that as a newly graduated eighteen-year-old, I stumbled upon a ring in an antique jewelry store and awakened my memories.
Along with abilities so powerful—so difficult to control—they terrified me.
I have all the pieces now. Not all the answers, but the pieces: I knew about Marianna and Daniel’s secret partnership; Marianna must have recognized my child-self after she shot me. Then they had to get rid of me. Eternally. That’s why they tried the virus on me. But that ill-fated experiment turned me into a Transformist and gave me unimaginable powers along with immunity.
I knew all of those incredible things had to be tied together. I just needed more information.
But has it all come too late? I look down as I throw my hand over the pain in my stomach, forcing back a scream as that hurts even worse. The knife is still there, blood staining my shirt all around it.
Oh dear gods! Leave it? Pull it out? I clench my fist around the bloody handle, but I’m frozen with indecision. All I can think of is Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride, and a bubble of laughter builds up in my throat. I gasp against it, knowing that I’m lost if I let the hysteria take over.
I have to breathe.
I have to talk.
“You don’t want to save the world,” I say, my mind fuzzy from the pain as I pretend to be far more ignorant than I am. “You’re going . . . you’re going to let them all die.” And he might succeed. I only made maybe a hundred thousand doses of the vaccine. Not enough for even the barest fraction of the human race. And now he’s going to kill me.
Leaving over six billion people without a cure.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he says softly, his face close to mine. “I want to save the world for the important people. But you’re right; there aren’t very many of those.” He shoves me from him, and I stagger, falling against the table where the electron microscope sits. The one I’ve been hunched in front of for four days. “And you are not one of them.”
He reaches out a hand, and in the same motion he used with the red-haired Reduciate pawn this morning, he clenches his fist.
Suddenly, I can’t breathe. My body tightens, spasms, searching for air. I slide to the ground as I fight the urge to cough, remembering the conversation I had with Audra. No air to the lungs, all of the muscles in the esophagus seize up, trying to prevent the unpreventable.
The drawing. Audra’s drawing!
I picture it in my mind and continue to fight. I close my eyes, grip the hilt of the knife in my stomach even tighter, and force myself to concentrate on each individual part of my throat, willing it back together, transforming destruction into wholeness. The esophagus, the tubes that connect to the lungs, the vocal chords. It feels like it takes hours, even though I know it can’t be much longer than a single second.
The pain recedes; I suck a cautious, silent breath in through my nose.
And my lungs calm.
I did it!
I open my eyes the tiniest crack. Daniel’s watching me, but it’s not with suspicion—he’s watching me die. He thinks he’s watching me die. There are few Earthbounds powerful enough to heal themselves from the inside out with no medical knowledge whatsoever.
But then, he’s always underestimated me.
Audra’s voice sounds so loudly in my head that it’s like she’s there screaming it in my ear: Blood pours from the mouth as the victim coughs and sputters and tries to suck in oxygen, but the connection to the lungs is gone.
I have to make it look good. I let myself cough, forcing it out of my new throat as I collapse onto the floor. Shaking away the gross-factor, I use my powers to fill my mouth with my own blood, and the next time I cough it splatters everywhere.
Daniel jerks back and away from the splash of red, and in the split second that his eyes leave me I suck in a deep breath, fall fully to the floor, and hold it, willing my entire body to be completely still. I have to convince him I’m dead.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
I want to cry when I hear Daniel move, but it’s not away; he moves closer. I don’t understand until I feel something small and cool against my lips. For a second I think he’s trying to feed me something, but a tiny peek from under my lashes shows me a test tube with a small amount of blood in it.
Finally Daniel walks away. My lungs are burning, but I force myself to suck in air slowly and sile
ntly.
Why did he take my blood?
The answer makes my body rigid with fear even as I chide myself. Of course he knows I’m immune. He’s Marianna’s diligo. He knows everything the Reduciata knows. Has always known. But now that he’s not in such a hurry, of course he’ll want to study my blood.
But no one, no one except me, knows the truth. That my blood is more than immune. That it’s a cure. More than a cure. That it can turn Earthbounds into . . . into whatever I am now.
He can’t have it.
Marianna cannot have it.
The sheer enormity of the depth these two have gone to fills me with a rage that momentarily numbs the pain in my stomach.
How long? Everybody talks about Daniel as though he’s been the leader of the Curatoria for as long as it’s been in existence. They must have been scamming everyone the entire time. . . .
From the beginning of the existence of the brotherhoods, just like Greta thought.
I glare at Daniel’s back. My acting job has bought me a few minutes, max. If I were at a hospital I’d probably leave the knife in, but it’s so sharp, surely it’s just going to do more damage. I brace myself and then make the knife disappear with a thought. It’s much less violent than actually pulling it out, but the moment it goes away I feel my life ebbing out of me through that void—sucking my energy.
I create a tight strip of bandaging across my abdomen. I debate closing the skin, but all that will do is make me bleed internally. And make it more difficult for a doctor to get inside again to patch me up. Bandaging will have to do. I consider trying to heal myself the way I did my throat, but dismiss the idea almost immediately. I was only able to restore my esophagus because Audra took me through step-by-step. And even so, I know I’m going to have to have her look at it later. Fix my shoddy work.
Right now I just need to get out of this lab!
Keeping a close eye on Daniel’s back, I force my aching body to rise from the floor. He’s on the phone. And after seeing Sonya’s last moments I’m betting I can guess with whom.
“She’s dead,” he says softly. “We’ll have to fight her again in her next life—with her immunity we might be fighting her forever—but at least she can’t interfere anymore right now.”
I stare at the tiny vial of my blood hanging from Daniel’s fingers.
Part of me wants to transform it into infected blood.
But if Daniel and Marianna caught the virus it would kill them forever. And what landforms would they take with them? How many more millions of people would I condemn to death for my own vengeance?
With a heart-rending pang of regret, I ripple my fingers and transform the red liquid in the tube to simple water with food coloring. Then I take a deep breath and change all of the new serum into the old, useless vaccine. I remind myself that the cure exists within me—that the blueprint is in my head. I’ll just have to find another way to get it to the world.
“I’ll tell them a Reduciate assassin killed her,” Daniel says. “It works every time.”
Of course it does.
I inch toward the air locks. The timing will have to be perfect.
“Absolutely. Worked on every sample and every mutation. I have her blood and the vaccine; I’ll be on a chopper within the hour. We’re cutting it close—I don’t know how much longer they’ll live.”
They. The two Earthbounds dying in the secret room, I assume.
I stretch my hand out toward the button that will activate the air locks, but his next words shock me into stillness.
“I’ll pick up the mixed pair on my way out. They’ll come easily enough, and I’ll infect them in the air. One more week for the virus to kill them while we get to the safe house and this will all be over.”
My lungs freeze. One week. Not only do I have to get out of here, I have to make sure that he doesn’t.
And that he doesn’t lay one finger on Thomas and Alanna.
Daniel’s starting to turn. With one hand I push the air-lock switch, and with the other I transform the floor into air, plunging all of its contents down to whatever lies beneath.
I wish I knew the layout of the headquarters better—I’d take out layers and layers of ceilings and floors. Maybe create an endless void. But even as strong as I am, I’m not all-powerful, and I can’t change what I’m not familiar with. What I can’t see.
But some of it is visible now, so before I go I transform one more floor, dumping Daniel and the debris another ten feet.
Daniel’s face as he falls would be satisfying if I wasn’t far, far too late. If he hadn’t already killed so many people—destroyed so many lives. But as I stand in the air-lock doorway, I can’t help but feel a pang of regret as the beautiful microscopes shatter on the concrete floor two stories down from the lab, and debris piles on top of it all. On top of Daniel.
FORTY-ONE
There’s no time for reveries—and no guarantee that the fall killed Daniel. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since becoming an Earthbound, it’s that it is hard to kill a god.
I know I should have done something more extreme—cut off his life directly—but I just couldn’t. I can’t become what he is.
Too late, as I stare at the destruction of the lab, I realize what I’ve done—I’ve exposed samples of the virus into the Curatoria headquarters. If the destruction of Death Valley doesn’t kill them, the virus will. Forever. I have to tell everyone to get out!
Doing what I can, I create a huge plastic dome around the rubble, then stagger into the hallway and toward the grand staircase that looks like it’s a million miles away. Pain shoots through my abdomen, and blackness crowds in on my vision. I force it away. Once I get to the stairs it’ll be easier.
Or so I think. The first step down jars my body, and renewed agony ripples through me. My head spins and my knees tremble. “Help.” But my brand-new vocal chords don’t want to work quite right. “Help! Help me!” I finally manage to yell in a voice that only just sounds like my own.
Faces turn to me. And shock and gasps ripple through the crowd. The last time they saw me Daniel was declaring me to be their salvation. What am I now? I remember how I look, my mouth caked in my own blood, my clothes spattered and ripped. I must appear completely crazy.
The conspiracy theories pouring from my lips certainly don’t help my image. “Daniel has betrayed you all. He’s . . . he’s . . . a Reduciate.” No, it’s worse than that; he’s manipulated their entire organization and thrust the world into infinite peril. But that’s the only word they’ll understand—Reduciate. “He did this.” My head swirls. I’m not sure if I’m talking or whispering now. “Help.” I get that last plea out before my knees collapse from under me.
And I fall against something warm and solid.
“Tavia.” Thomas. Thank you, gods. I don’t even mind that he and Alanna were supposed to stay in hiding. Maybe now we all really can leave together.
“We have to escape.” I try to open my eyes, but they won’t obey.
“Drink this.” Alanna’s voice pushing a straw into my mouth. Something sugary sweet. I don’t like it, but a tiny sliver of my consciousness reminds me that I need it if I’m going to survive. If anyone is going to survive. I am the vaccine now.
“Where is he?” Thomas whispers, but not to me. I don’t know who he’s talking about.
“I don’t know. I told him not to go far, but he said he had something to do.”
No. Logan. They don’t know where he is. And it’s because I sent him after my artifacts.
“Tavia,” Thomas repeats, bending down so I can see his face without opening my eyes too much. “We’re a hundred miles away from anything. You’re hurt—I’m going to take you to medical. We need to get you fixed up, then we’ll leave. Just like we talked about earlier.”
“No, Thomas, listen to me.” I reach out and grab his sleeve, hanging on lik
e that’s all that’s keeping me here in this world. “Daniel knows about you and Alanna. Knows everything. If he’s not dead, he’s coming after you next. But . . . but . . .” My brain is swimming me toward unconsciousness. But there’s something—something I have to tell him. “The virus,” I finally remember. “It might be loose.”
Thomas hesitates, staring at me in horror.
“Thomas, please,” I beg. “I destroyed the lab. I may have let the virus out. Everyone has to leave—especially you.”
He stares. An infinity passes. “Logan or Benson?”
Now? Seriously?
“I can’t save them both. There’s no time. We can look for Logan, or we can break Benson out. We can’t do both.”
The crowd around me yells, grumbles, calls out questions, but it’s like all sound has been muted. Time slows, stills, stops.
Which one?
Which one?
Of course.
“Benson,” I breathe.
Then my legs are swept out from under me, and I’m crushed against Thomas’s huge chest. He’s holding me, running down the stairs so quickly that each step jolts my entire body and I have to bite down on screams of pain.
At the bottom of the stairs he doesn’t pause but heads for the western staircase that will lead us to the security wing. To Benson. Thank you, I think, my eyes trying to close on their own again.
“Stop them!” Daniel’s voice reverberates through the hallway. Tears of pure and utter hopelessness well up in my eyes as Thomas jerks to a stop and turns just enough that I can see Daniel. He looks terribly powerful, standing there, straight and tall, though his sleeve is torn and dusty and blood pours down several gashes—the most obvious across his forehead, blood striping his face like a macabre mask. He points a finger at us. “She has the vaccine, and they’re taking it to the Reduciates!”
The Curatoriates hear his lie, and unlike how they reacted when I made a similar declaration while equally bloody, they listen to him. And then they turn as one, the fear and anger in their eyes shooting directly at us.