Charisma (22 page)

She peers around, frowning. I step out of the bushes.

“You look good for a corpse,” I say, barely able to control the urge to race over and drag her by the hair back to Tacoma.

Her expression goes steely and her eyes scan back and forth. “Are you alone?”

I pat my pocket as if I'm carrying a phone. “Not for long.”

She shakes her head apologetically. “No reception out here, I'm afraid.” Her face withdraws into the cabin and a few moments later, she opens the door and steps out.

A coldness plants itself at the base of my spine with
exactly how
stupid I've been to come out here alone. It's just me and the doctor who treated unsuspecting people with killer genes. And that's the good scenario. In the bad one, she has friends with her.

I clutch the stick behind my back, and keep my distance. “Look, I don't care about exposing you or getting anyone in trouble. I just want me and my friends not to die. Please, make things right.”

Her hand rests upon a hip clad in top-of-the-line hiking shorts. “Don't you think I want that too?”

“Then why've you been playing dead? You should be leading the research team.”

“You honestly believe I'd be allowed to do any research? Maybe if folks had kept quiet and avoided the media circus, I could've helped.” She shakes her head in disgust.

“The media never bothered you before. And what did you expect when your experimental subjects went into comas and died? How could you test something so dangerous on us?”

She sighs and takes a few steps forward. “The preliminary trial in Portland was going fine. What happened afterward was totally unforeseen. I truly wanted to make things better for you guys. And for a while, anyway, it worked. Aren't you finally the girl you dreamed of being?”

“I'm the girl who could go comatose at any moment. What kind of life is that?”

She hovers about ten feet away. Close enough for me to see a sheen of sweat on her temple. Her eyes track a hawk soaring above the trees, and then her gaze snaps back to me. “Wasn't it worth the risk to enjoy even a few days of life to its fullest rather than enduring a long existence of mediocrity?”

Mediocrity. Of course, that's all I represented to her. “That's the kind of trade-off you don't get to decide for anyone else. I looked up to you, saw you as the type of
researcher I
wanted to be someday. You were just a con woman.”

She brushes a three-hundred-dollar suede boot over a patch of clover. “I'm sorry, Aislyn. It really wasn't a con. And the science behind Charisma still holds tremendous promise.”

I try reading her, but the myriad of emotions flickering across her features don't add up to a comprehensible whole. I inch backward. “If CZ88's so great, why didn't you take it yourself?”

Her eyes seem to swallow the shadows cast by the trees. “If I needed to improve myself that way, I would've.” She takes a long breath. “Every great scientific breakthrough comes with setbacks. You know that. And there are those with resources who still support what I do. You could work with us. I always appreciated your insights, and I'm so close to nailing a cure. One that would let you keep your sociability.”

A flutter of hope beckons, as real as the crow staring at us from its perch in the pine tree. The person most likely to fix everything is here, offering a chance I'd thought was lost. To keep the parts of CZ88 that've been so life-changing, yet remove the parts that could be life-ending. Win-win.

If I can trust her.

I stare at her face, so sure, so smug. Of what? That she can convince me again? Her manipulation has always been made easy by her smarts, I'll bet. At the top of her class, the most brilliant one at Nova Genetics, their star. Never confined to
mediocrity
. What would it be like to be so freakishly smart? Sure, I've always felt intelligent, but she operates at a different level, almost as if . . . Suddenly, a thought so crazy, yet so fitting, hits me.

My mouth opens involuntarily. “Oh my God. You
have
been enhanced. But not with CZ88.”

She squints and a rising heat seems to shimmer off her skin. Finally, clear emotions spread across her features: surprise, and, more intensely, shame. It isn't an emotion I've seen on her before and she wears it like an ill-fitting shoe.

I say, “That's why you're special. Why your IQ is way outside of the norm.”

She crouches a few inches as if she's about to spring. Only then do I realize she's also been hiding one arm behind her back. I jump sideways and swing my stick just as she lunges forward with a syringe pointed like an ice pick.

Holy crap! Hasn't she killed enough people with her damn needles? I whip the branch, hitting her in the thigh, but not before she scrapes my forearm with the syringe.

She bounces from one foot to the other like a tennis
player waiting
for a serve. “You're not going to bash my head in. That would take more of a warrior gene than God or science granted you.”

I keep my distance, panting. My vision begins to go fuzzy. “What's in the syringe?”

“Just a little sedative. For horses. A girl's best friend out in these parts. The drug, not the horses.” She eyes my arm. I glance at the tiny scrape, bubbling with pinpricks of blood. A surface wound. Hopefully. But I feel woozy.

She coos, “Let yourself go, Aislyn. Once you've had some rest, we can discuss this more sensibly.”

I take a step backward. “So when did you get the alteration that made you smart?”

She leans forward, swinging the syringe. “The gene modification was only an extra boost. I was always smart.” A pulling around her eyes and the tightness of her voice suggest a deep hurt.

“But maybe not smart enough, huh?” I take another wobbly step back, clutching the branch in front of my chest. “Did your dad force you to be his guinea pig?” It would explain her abandonment of his company now, when he most needs her to take responsibility for the mess she created, and why she's working with VidaLexor to find a cure, if that's what she's really doing out here.

The nearby crow squawks as Dr. Sternfield races forward, plunging the syringe toward my chest. I smack her arm with the branch, causing a sickening crack that sends her spinning around but also causes the branch to fly out of my hand.

In a second, she hurls herself at me again. Only this time I have no weapon. I don't dare turn around and run, terrified of a needle in my back. So I kick out toward her chest, praying I'll avoid the syringe. She stumbles back, but stabs at my calf, embedding the needle a half inch. As her thumb goes for the plunger, I grab her forearm and push her to the ground.

My vision is going dark, the way it did when the blood-jackers siphoned me. How long do I have? Seconds?

With the last of my energy, I throw myself onto her arm and yank the needle out of my leg. As I lose consciousness, I stab it toward her thigh, hoping against hope that she gets more of the drug than me.

• • •

When I awake, the sky has darkened to a blue-black twilight. Oh hell, Mom and Sammy must be frantic.

The body under me is warm, but still. Gingerly, I feel around for the syringe, which is still jammed into Dr. Sternfield's thigh. I pull it out and throw the evil thing into the foliage.

With a groggy head, I stumble through the faint light toward the cabin, stopping to vomit in the bushes. Inside, I flip a switch on the wall, revealing the doctor's lair. It might not have cell reception, but it has electricity. Inside is an
array of
tables filled with notes, a computer, lab equipment, cases
of food
I recognize from her mother's house, and a refrigerator filled with racks of vials. Scrambling, I tear open a supply cabinet and dig around until I find a rope.

I lumber outside to tie up Dr. Sternfield before she comes at me again, but the ground where we'd lain is bare. To my right, there's a thrashing in the trees. If she contacts someone to help her, to keep me silent, oh, God, no.

I chase after the cracking branches and catch up to Dr. Sternfield as she reaches a small clearing where a Jeep's parked. Balling my fist, I bring it down on her back and once more we're on the ground wrestling. She gnashes her teeth, and clearly has desperation on her side.

I may not have the warrior gene, but I have the upper body of someone who's spent years perfecting her butterfly stroke. More importantly, it's my life on the line.

“You bitch!” I wallop her upside the head and flip her over to loop the rope around her wrists as I sit on her legs. “You don't know me at all.”

She screams and twists until I jam an elbow into her kidney. That knocks the air out of her long enough for me to pull the rope down to her ankles as well. With more knots than necessary, I tie her up as tightly as I was the night before last.

She grunts. “Now what?”

I rock her to the side and check her pockets. “There's no way I can carry you into the Jeep and I don't trust you enough to untie you.” I pull the keys from her pocket. “So get comfy.”

She whips back and forth, eyes in panic mode. “No, Aislyn. I was serious about working together. And I really am just inches away from a cure. That's what Dr. Dulcet's been paying me to do. No one else has the slightest inkling of which DNA to modify. If the police take me in, all my work comes to a halt. You just need to trust me.”

I don't need her super IQ to know what a bad plan that is. “If you want me to believe you, name the genes you manipulated.”

She rattles off three genes.

I sigh. “The researchers already identified those.”

“Well, I'm not giving you the complete formula until you release me. But I can guarantee the other researchers won't figure it out.”

“Why not? They've done multiple genomic scans on all of us, and located the viral vector you used to deliver your crappy combo of gene mods. There are a lot of smart doctors besides you, even if they haven't been genetically modified.”

She smolders. “They've had almost a month. And they've only found the obvious candidates. You won't find what you need.”

“How can you be so sure?” In that moment, I remember something she once said about one scientist's trash being another's treasure. And hadn't Xavier scribbled
JUNK
on his notes? Maybe that wasn't because he thought his guesses were useless. What if he realized that the search was limited too narrowly? To genes. But about fifty percent of our DNA is considered “junk” because it doesn't code for
protein-creating
sequences.

My breathing becomes very rapid. “You altered our junk DNA too, to regulate our genes somehow.”

Her smugness is replaced by tangible, raging anxiety. “Don't be ridiculous.”

“No, what's ridiculous is how easy I can read you, thanks to Charisma. Gotta love the irony, huh?”

I run back into the cabin and grab her computer along with boxes I fill with the vials from her refrigerator. She's been busy. To keep the vials cool, I stuff bags of frozen berries from her freezer between them.

As Dr. Sternfield hollers obscenities alternated with offers, I take five trips to clear the cabin of anything that resembles research. On my final scan of her secret lab, I spot a well-worn copy of
Flowers for Algernon
. Figures. I leave it for her.

With the last load in the Jeep, I throw a blanket onto Dr. Sternfield and ignore her pleas as I drive off into the last evening.

At the nearest town, I'm tempted to pull in to the sheriff's station, but the urge to drive straight to Tacoma is stronger. My compromise is to stop at a gas station along the way to make an anonymous call to the police, letting them know that a criminal doctor who's been on the news is wrapped up and waiting for them at a nearby cabin. Of course, I'll have a lot to answer for, but my priority is to get this research into the hands of someone I can trust. Dr. Culdicott isn't the warmest doctor on the planet, but she's my go-to person.

Less than two hours later, I park at Florence Bishop Children's. My body trembles as I hurry into the
emergency department.
I explain to the receptionist that it's urgent I speak to Dr. Culdicott. She nods as if she's heard it all before, and insists I take a seat in the waiting room. Same-old, same-old.

Ten minutes later, Dr. Culdicott surges through the door, and, as soon as she hears my story, summons an orderly to help us load all the research notes, vials, and laptop from the Jeep onto a cart and into her private office.

My stomach growls; my head aches. Trying to ignore both, I say, “Tell the researchers they need to examine changes to junk DNA too.”

She nods and has some demands of her own, which include contacting Mom and calling the police. I don't know who I'm more scared of. Well, yes I do, and she barges in first.

“Aislyn, what on earth were you thinking? Are you hell-bent on getting killed?”