The Sons of Adam: The sequel of The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 2) (26 page)

"It was the devils," the little girl said, with a dry mouth. "I saw them run. They were white like you and were shouting your name."

Lür went over to the huts in disbelief. The silence was so thick that he didn't even recognize the place. Until that morning it had been a noisy melting-pot of chattering women, children running around and the laughter of his oldest sons, who were almost warriors like him.

They were all empty. Other than one, the large circular hut made of bricks and reeds. The sacred hut where Lür had officiated so many ceremonies. He slowly walked in, despite the swarm of buzzing flies that had been attracted by the heat given off by the recently destroyed corpses.

They'd all been stacked on top each other: his wives, the adolescents, the children. On the top of the human pyramid were the babies, Lür's latest children. They were surrounded by a circle of cowrie shells, an expense that only she could afford in order to leave her mark.

Because he knew that it had been Adana straight away. The ancient sounds of her words, spoken years ago, came back to him as cool as the river water.

"It doesn't matter where you run, it doesn't matter where you hide. My sons will find you and remind you that you will never have a family if it's not with me."

30

Deadline

IAGO

Another night came around, and I received Nagorno's call again, and another night that I spent in my laboratory. Increasingly more tired, increasingly more desperate because the countdown seemed to be creeping by faster than my hours of research, and the results were still a long way off from optimistic.

After Nagorno hung up, I stared for a long time at the phone, as if it could give me one of the answers that were tormenting me.

"Was that your brother?" Manon asked, without taking her eyes off whatever she was looking at under the microscope.

"It was."

"What did he say?"

"The same thing he says every night:
Is it ready?
"

"What did you tell him?”

"The same thing I tell him every night:
Soon
."

"Are you sure that the call can't be traced? I could help you with that, give me the SIM card and I can get in touch with certain contacts who..."

"My father is already trying," I interrupted. I still didn't trust her enough to give her my SIM card and all its secrets. "Although Nagorno is generally more advanced with technology than we are. At best, he can try to pinpoint an area, but it would be too broad to begin a search."

I shook my head helplessly upon mentioning my father. Lür had lost several days tracking all the islands of Lugo and the surrounding area where my brother and my son could have hid Adriana. He never left anything to chance when it came to finding people. The times he had had to find me or one of my brothers in order to keep the Ancient Family together left no doubt in my mind that Adriana wasn't on the Galician coast.

I went to pick him up one rainy morning on his return. His shoulders were hunched and he rubbed his sleepy, dark eyes.

"Back to the drawing board," he muttered, as if reciting a mantra. "When there are no results, you've just got to go back to the drawing board."

That night, Nagorno called me again to share his impatience.

"Is it ready?"

"It will be soon, I'm on the right track. You just have to worry about keeping that heart of yours beating. How's Adriana"

"I'm the one who asks the questions."

"Nagorno, how is Adriana? Tell me something, give me something to hold onto."

"No details, don't try being smart."

"I'm not. You're the boss. Just tell me how Adriana is."

He was quiet for a while. Something in my begging tone convinced him that it wasn't a trick.

"Adriana is fine, brother. I'm not a psychopath, although you both think that I am. She's strong, she'll hold up, and Gunnarr is very concerned about her wellbeing, although he wouldn't be at all pleased to know that I think that."

Back once again to the perverse family dynamics, and Dana stuck in the middle of it, surviving as best she could.

Marion's voice pulled me back from my dark thoughts.

"Are you coming for dinner? You're going to pass out on the test bench."

"No, I'm going to stay here. You go. I'll go down to the kitchen and grab a quick snack."

"You haven't been out in days, Iago," she reminded me, as she took off her lab coat and pulled a trench coat from the coat stand.

"I don't need to go out, time's running out and we're not seeing any results," I repeated again. Every day we ended up having the same conversation, saying the same sentences, as if we were a married couple.

"We will, we'll see results soon."

"Or not. Perhaps I shouldn't have accepted to get into such a complex line of work given the tight deadline that my brother's given me."

"I know, but as you said yourself, there's no alternative," she said, picking up her clutch and walking down the stairs.

"No, there isn't," I replied to an empty space.

No, there isn't.

I stood up and took one of the mice from its cages. It was impossible to tell in so few days whether the viral therapy was showing any results. I sat down, feeling unsure and full of doubts, in a field that I knew little about. If I had have followed the line of the HeLa cells, the one I began together with my Danish friend, Flemming, everything would be more familiar, more known, I would already have a base that I could tweak.

But unfortunately, the HeLa cells, some tremendously aggressive cancer cells that Flemming had used in our previous research, where not the answer that Nagorno needed. They killed my friend when he injected himself with them, they took over his body in just a few days and created such a metastases that modern medicine wasn't able to beat it.

And that's when it hit me: everything I had been overlooking.

The truth left me paralyzed, standing in the middle of the lab, and the mouse ran out of my hands.

I didn't care.

Let it run away, escape, I didn't think I'd even need it anymore.

Because I'd just realized that the HeLa cells wouldn't kill my brother. His cancer inhibitors were still intact, if I cultivated Nagorno's cells with HeLa cells, which would have an active telomerase, and I injected him with it, his heart would go back to having longevo telomeres, always long, always regenerating. His cancer inhibitors would keep tumors at bay, his life wouldn't be at risk.

The evil I inoculated him with would be reversed.

Balance would be restored.

Then he would give me back Dana and leave us alone.

I looked at the clock. My first impulse was to share my findings with my father, but Marion would be back at any minute.

No, I wasn't going to tell her about it. I still had so many questions to ask her about her past, to many gaps to fill.

Was she alone when she was born? Did she live with her family? Was she on her own when she discovered her longevity?

How had she managed to get by for six millennia?

Didn't she ever have a moment of desperation, when she wanted to throw the towel in, plunge a dagger into her own stomach?

Had she always been self-sufficient, had she always taken care of herself? How many children, how many companions, how many deaths did she have behind her. Was she always rich, distinguished, didn't she ever lose her fortune, had all the governments and leaders been on her side, how many falls of empires had she escaped from in time?

The only reason I hadn't asked her all these questions was because I was afraid of the answers, and my only goal at that time was to save Dana.

The rest, even the answers to the enigma that was Marion, could wait.

And telling Marion about my new line of research would mean telling her about the secret of the longevo gene: that it wasn't a mutation, that the telomerase wasn't the only answer, that we were immune to cancer and that combination made us unique.

So I ran down the stairs, to the third floor, to get the files from the research that Flemming sent me. I buried myself in them until I heard the doorbell and opened the door for Marion, after having hid all the material.

Marion found me back in the lab, with a lighter heart and a glow of hope in my eyes that I had to try and hide.

"I picked you up some food from the Cañadío, I was guessing that you still haven't had any dinner," she said, putting a recycled cardboard tray on the bench, that smelled amazing.

I silently thanked that way she had of being concerned about my lack of sleep and my love of hot food.

Then she put her lab coat back on and went over to the cages.

"By the way," she said, looking puzzled, crossing her arms and turning to face me, "has a mouse escaped?"

"I'm afraid so. You were right, I'm too exhausted and I should rest. I'm not being very productive right now. I'm going to bed, and you should call it a night as well. We'll start again first thing in the morning, if you like."

She nodded, not very convinced at seeing me give in so easily, and left in silence.

I went to the window and watched her disappear into the mist of the Santander night. I turned off the lab lights and went down to the third floor, where I spent the night planning my new line of research with the HeLa cells.

So often, I had been an addict of ´even harder´, of pushing the limits of my strength and my brain, of that dual challenge that posed no insurmountable obstacle. I was a trained soldier. By day I continued with the research of the oncolytic viruses with Marion, and by night, I freed the apparatus that Flemming had given me from their cases, which I had never got rid of, and began a process that I already knew: get hold of cells with active telomerase for Nagorno.

I would rest when I had Dana in my arms. In the house that was waiting for us, that I had refused to go back to.

But unfortunately, the truth was another matter. As the days went by, and we made very little progress with the research and the oncolytic virus, Marion became concerned, worried about me.

"I don't understand, we've got two days left and nothing conclusive. Why aren't you more upset?"

I know she was looking at me apprehensively. I hadn't found time to shave in days, my closets were empty because I didn't have time to wash and iron my clothes, and eating was no longer among my priorities.

"I am, believe me. I am."

I looked horrific, but the nights of insomnia were quickly paying off and I was finding it difficult to pretend that our research was giving me hope.

Two days to free Dana.

My own countdown.

"That's not the way it looks. Iago, maybe you're building up false hopes. The formula we're going to give your brother has little possibility of curing him."

"But it has some, even though it is minimal, it's better than nothing, and I owe that to you," I argued with her, over and over again. But she really wasn't  being fooled by my sudden confidence.

The day of the deadline finally arrived. I had had a long night, a very long night. And a very long day. As far as Marion was concerned, we had synthesized a fairly promising compound using a virus, although we were concerned that we hadn't had time to tests its effects, not even on the mice. Behind her back, the time had come to replicate Flemming's work and copy the same thing he had done to his cells in Nagorno's cells.

Nagorno called ahead of time.

"Is it ready?" he asked, for the umpteenth time.

"It is, Nagorno, it is. Tell me where I need to send it to.

Nagorno took a few seconds to react, then he recovered his cool, or at least pretended to, and sent me a messenger from a company I had never heard of to pick up the injection in a couple of hours.

"Are you going to send it to him then?" Marion asked, as soon as I hung up. "You're going to kill him, your wife will die, and it will be your fault."

"I hope not."

She looked at me with a strange expression on her face, as if I had seriously deceived her. She took the lab coat off, hung it on the coat rack and walked over to the door of the laboratory.

"I'm going back to Paris, Iago del Castillo. I promised to help you as much as I could, and that's what I've done. But I'd like for your wife to live, I told you that. I wouldn't want you to come back to me just looking for comfort. But over time I've learned that only the present exists. You talk to me between the lines, about the time that will come when Adriana dies, and I know the inevitability of that time. But I found you today, today, Iago."

We held each other's gaze longer than necessary. In the end I looked away. None of all this made much sense.

"Marion, I'm doing everything I can so that Adriana lives. I'm not going to talk about anything else right now. I will always be in debt to you for the favor you've done, and you can count on me for anything you need in the future. That's not changed.