Temper (18 page)

“I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Megs.” This, at least, isn’t a lie. I care about her way too much.

He nods, turns, and strides away toward camp without looking back. Once he’s out of sight and there’s nothing but me and the mountains and a stretch of fence heading in either direction, I fumble in my pocket for the note. The dirt-smudged scrap is tiny, torn, and on it is one word written in something suspiciously dark brown. ‘Go.’

To the other ship. I shred it and scatter the pieces on the wind. A one word order. Like it’s that easy.

Easier than being a prisoner?

Again I picture her curled up on that mattress, gagged and with eyes so full of sadness they hurt to remember. It’s not as though I haven’t heard the whispers of what might happen to Kaih. Everyone is so terrified by the internal fighting and the uncontrollable tempers, that they’ve turned on her without questioning the green robes’ proof.

Promising not to tell all I know about last night and looking for the ship is something I can do. For her. For Asher. For Zed. As always, the weight of him is heavy on my shoulders. Maybe answering this will make up for what I’ve done. The times I should have spoken but didn’t. The truths I kept locked inside.

Anything is better than sitting here in camp wondering what the green robes have planned, waiting for a Company attack or worrying the truce existing between the Lifers and the Fishies could be destroyed over a bowl of stew.

I take two steps before reason kicks in. Not yet. I have to wait until the right moment to leave. I must prepare and slip out without a fuss if I want to get all the way to the other side of the city.

Preparation isn’t my only delay. Before I can go, I have an appointment to keep with Charley.

***

The waiting room in the medical center is empty of patients when I head there after my watch. I enter to the sound of a soft bell. A nurse smiles at me and tells me to wait while she gets Charley. I don’t sit on one of the chairs lining the walls. Instead, I pace the length of the small tiled area. As much as I want answers, part of me hopes Charley puts off our conversation.

How can I believe anything she tells me?

The air here is thick with bleach, the bulk kind they use to clean the floors after people like me are sick on them. Was that only yesterday? It seems forever ago.

“Samuai.” I look up at the sound of Charley’s voice. She crosses the room with her hand out in greeting. “I’d begun to think you weren’t coming.”

I swallow, and have to force my hand out to touch hers.

You’re a liar.

I think but don’t say the words, fighting a hot rush of anger. This is going to be harder than I thought. I believed in Charley, but her performance last night at the council hurt. If the green robes are screwing us all, then part of the reason they have the opportunity is the faith I put in this woman. Her and Keane.

But at least I always knew he’d do anything to get what he wanted. I thought Charley was above persuasion. Like being a doctor made her immune to being human. I thought she was a good person.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “Your hand is clammy.”

“I had to run from the fence line.”

Her brows gather. “You should have been exempted from watch. If you overdo it, you could open yourself up to getting sick again.”

“We all have to do our part.”

“I know.” She turns and leads me toward her office, but I imagine I hear the weight of the world in those two words. Or maybe it’s that I can’t quite let go of the idea that she would be able to stand before the council and lie about Kaih and feel no remorse.

Her office is the second door in a short hallway. Unlike the one I explored with Kaih, everything here is bright white and clean. Same in the office. The old and dented walls are newly painted. The scent lingers in the room now that we’ve left some of the bleach smell behind.

She shuts the door and gestures me to take a seat on one side of a white table. No ornate wooden desk here. Everything is bare and open. The room of a woman with nothing to hide. She sits opposite and leans toward me.

I take my time looking around the mostly empty room. There’s one painting on the far wall. A bland seascape with tiny birds on a stormy sky. Other than the table and chairs there’s only one piece of furniture.

“Pretty small filing cabinet,” I say. Then wish I hadn’t. What is it with me? I don’t want to give away that I know about the secret areas of the hospital but my mouth has other ideas.

I’m daring her to lie to me.

She blinks and looks down at it. “Thankfully we haven’t had too many patients so far, and we do have some tech available. No point keeping paper copies of everything.”

“Right.”

This is insane. Any second I’m going to say something about other files in another room not far from this one. Something I can’t explain away. Sitting opposite her with her wise eyes and clever mouth and knowing that it’s all lies scrapes at the raw parts inside me.

I press my nails into my palms. Anything to keep my focus on the here and now.

Her fingers steeple in front of her. “So, I promised you answers, what did you want to know?”

I almost laugh then. Instead, I cough until my eyes stream and breath comes in gasps. Charley kindly pours me a glass of water from a jug on the edge of the desk. I take the glass and sip. Too soon. I suck in water instead of air.

I double over, and I cough until I’m weak from it.

Charley’s hand striking my back is somewhere between a pat and a thump. It works, and I can breathe again.

Afterwards, she perches on the edge of the table. Her black pants and white shirt make her appear every inch the professional, trustworthy doctor. “Shall I check your wounds first?”

I nod because the alternative is to say I don’t want her hands on any part of me.

She unwraps the bandages to reveal clean lines on my forearms, pale pink and puckered where once they were open, red, and dripping pale green pus.

Her brows lift. “These have healed faster than I expected even considering what we know about injuries to people on board the ship.”

“A lot can happen in a night.”

She winds the bandage around her hand. “So it seems.”

Again I think I hear something resembling regret in her voice but it’s probably my imagination playing tricks. She probably lied about Kaih without a qualm and is about to do the same about the results of the test she did on me.

“What’s the diagnosis?” I ask, because I think that’s what the me who still believed in Charley would have asked.

She straightens. “These look good, but you’ve had a big couple of days. Maybe we should save this conversation for another time.”

Yes. I could delay. Head out to get my own answers and leave this place and the green robes far behind. It would be so easy, but easy is what made me leave the Pelican in the first place, running from Asher and Mother and the expectations of my role as a Fishie. I don’t want easy any more.

I jerk my head. “No. Let’s do this now.”

She walks around the table and sits again on the other side. She takes a moment to place the neatly rolled bandage on one corner of the table and then pulls a thin screen from beneath a pile of paper. A swipe of her hand and the black becomes a whole load of figures I can’t read upside down let alone understand.

“The first thing you need to understand,” she begins, “Is that the events of the last few days have rendered many of our theories about you obsolete.”

“How?”

“These samples were taken from you, we believe only a few days after you left the ship and all that entails. The self-destruct anger response has only kicked in recently. Weeks after you all stopped being exposed to whatever it was neutralizing the violent urges.”

Despite myself and my distrust of everything that comes out of her mouth, I’m curious. “It changes things?”

“Significantly. First, how familiar are you with brain chemistry?”

My ignorance must show on my face because she chuckles. I laugh too, forgetting for a second that this woman lied about a murder.

Then she sighs. “To be honest, I don’t know that much more than you.”

“But you’re the doctor.”

“Yes. I have medical training. More than anyone here, and I like to think I have a good grasp of basic biology. But you have to understand that in the years since the Upheaval, there aren’t such things as medical schools anymore.”

I’m listening but not much is making sense. “I let you operate on me.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not as though I picked up a scalpel and declared myself a doctor. I did have training.”

“Then how?”

“My father and his before him were surgeons. He taught me and had collected every resource he could. However, most resources and experts who survived went to work for the Company.”

“Why?”

“For the same reason there was support for the Pelican. It’s not like your ancestors were taken against their will. Even the Lifers were originally given a choice. The Company was greeted by survivors as the best hope of saving humanity should the aliens return.”

“You believe it?”

She picks up a pen and passes it hand to hand. A nervous gesture? The green robes are hiding so much I don’t know if this is part of it. She doesn’t answer for so long I begin to think she’s not going to.

“Do you think there were aliens?” I ask again.

I don’t miss the way her eyes flick toward the door. She sighs. “I think it’s entirely possible.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Her smile is tight. “It’s the only one you’re going to get.”

I stand, knocking the chair over in my haste. “I should have known not to bother coming here. This was never about telling me the truth. All you care about is feeding me enough lies and evasive answers that I stop asking questions.”

“You’re not giving me a chance.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I know your brain is a ticking time bomb created by the Company, and unless Asher can manage a miracle I’m your only shot at making sure it doesn’t blow up in your face or in your head or at all.” By the time she finishes, she’s panting.

I blink. “I don’t think I’ve heard you shout before.”

She pours a glass of water and takes a sip. “My father always told me that a raised voice drowns out the message of the speaker.”

“I don’t know. I heard you loud and clear.”

“At least let me finish. Then make up your mind.”

I pick up the chair and sit. I tell myself it’s because I need to make sure the green robes don’t realize how much I know about the other ship and the murder cover up, but I’m not sure it isn’t because I’ve believed in Charley so completely that I’m struggling to turn the instinct off.

“Okay, you trained under your dad and then you joined the green robes instead of the Company and started experimenting on brains.”

The pen is in her hands again. “While that’s an extreme simplification of what happened, it’s not entirely untrue.”

“Glad that’s sorted. What did you find out?”

“Not enough. At least, not until we were gifted the opportunity to work with a brain showing something closer to an end result of where the Company has been taking their research.”

“Me?”

I think she tries to offer a kind smile. “You. We were interested in the wiping of your memories. You were by no means the first example of that we’d seen, and our solution for the block worked well.”

I shudder at the memory of the pain. “You could say that.”

“You regained your memories.”

She says it as though that’s all that matters. The pain in my head since the procedure makes me doubt it worked as well as she believes, but arguing might result in her wanting to have a look … with a scalpel.

“Anyway,” she continues. “When we examined you, we found so much more than we expected.”

“You mean the healing and stuff?”

“Many of your physical advantages are a result of breeding. Those selected to travel, for want of a better word, must have been tested extensively.”

She goes on a little more about the kinds of tests they might have used. She’s presenting her theories as educated guesses, but all I can think of are the files Kaih and I saw in another part of this very building. Those are the results of the tests she’s talking about and they were more than required to fill the Pelican.

Thinking about the other ship, I want to leave now. There might be others like us, ignorant and waiting for an eventual landing date that will never come. Time presses on me. What if the Company was spooked by our defection? They might have already released the other ship, or worse.

“But these are all only guesses?” I ask, unable to resist forcing the issue. Let there be no doubt that she didn’t have the opportunity to tell me the truth. She’ll never be able to say I didn’t ask.

She hesitates, and her eyes don’t quite meet mine. I swear the whole world stops, waiting for her answer. When it comes it’s barely a whisper. “Yes.”

It shouldn’t surprise me, but it’s a blow.

I duck my head and rub at the back of my neck. “What else did you find?”

“When we operated, you hadn’t been away from the ship long enough to trigger the rage problems we see today. What we did find was nano-bots spread through your system, and I believe these are involved in the absorption of a serum that kept your brain chemistry in balance. Being away from the ship and regular doses affected this delicate balance resulting in swelling a particular area of the brain.”

“I’m confused.”

Her arms fold. “I warned you that this is complicated, and I’m not going to make you an expert in five minutes.”

“Try.”

She sighs and plucks a piece of paper off a pile and puts the pen in her hand to use, making a quick sketch. “I’m no artist but different parts of the brain serve different functions.”

“That much I know.”

She rings one section. “Violence comes from the more primitive parts of the brain, deep in the limbic system. Swelling that can be directed here presses on those areas which would otherwise regulate aggressive behaviors.”

“Swelling?”

She chews the end of the pen. “More accurately, growth.”