“I thought we’d be taking the samples the usual way,” I say. “With swabs, not needles. You only need a little tissue.”
“This way is better,” the Archivist says.
“You’re not stealing from us the way the Society does,” one of the women tells me, her voice quiet and calm. “You’re taking our blood and giving it back.” She holds out her arm. “I’m ready.”
The Archivist hands me a case. When I open it up I see sterile tubes and syringes sealed away in plastic. “Go ahead,” he tells me. “It’s all worked out. I have the tablets to give to you when you finish. You don’t need to know any more than that.”
He’s right. I don’t want to try to understand the complicated system of trades and balancing. And I certainly don’t want to know what these people have paid to be here. Is a trade like this even sanctioned by the other Archivists or is this man conducting transactions on the side? What have I stumbled into? I didn’t realize that black market blood would be the price of the blue tablets.
“You’re going to get caught,” I say.
“No,” he says. “I won’t.”
“Please,” the woman says. “I want to get home.”
I put on a pair of gloves and prepare a syringe. She keeps her eyes closed the whole time. I slide the needle of the syringe into the vein near the crook of her elbow. She makes a startled sound. “Almost done,” I say. “Hold on.” I pull the syringe back out and hold it up. Her blood is dark.
“Thank you,” she says, and the Archivist hands her a square of cotton that she presses against the inside of her arm.
When I’ve finished, the Archivist gives me the blue tablets. And then he tells the others, “We’ll be here again next week. Bring your children. Don’t you want to make sure you have samples for them, too?”
“I won’t be here next week,” I tell the Archivist.
“Why not?” he asks. “You’re doing them a service.”
“No,” I say. “I’m not. The science doesn’t exist yet to bring people back.”
If it did, I thought, I’m sure people would use it. Like Patrick and Aida Markham. If there was a way to bring their son back, they’d do it.
Back at home, using a little scalpel stolen from the medical center, I perform the only surgery I’ll likely ever do, slicing very carefully along the back of the tablets, cutting the paper from the Archivists’ port into strips, inserting them, and then holding the packages over the incinerator to melt the adhesive back together.
It takes almost all night, and in the morning I wake up to the sound of screaming in the Borough as they take Ky away. Not long after that, Cassia leaves, too, and thanks to me, she’s got blue tablets to take with her.
I walk back to my wing to check on the patients. “Any adverse reactions to the cure?” I ask.
The nurse shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Five of them are responding well. But the rest, including the patient with the rash, are not. Of course, it’s still early.” She doesn’t need to articulate what we both know: Usually we’ve seen some sort of response by now. This isn’t good.
“Has anyone else manifested with the rash?”
“We haven’t checked since they came in,” she says. “It’s been less than an hour.”
“Let’s do it now,” I say.
We turn one of the patients over carefully. Nothing. We turn another patient. Nothing.
But the third patient’s rash circles her entire body. Her lesions aren’t yet as red as those belonging to the first patient, but the reaction is certainly atypical. “Call the virologist,” I tell one of the medics. Carefully, we turn the woman back over and I catch my breath. Blood seeps from her mouth and nose.
“We have a patient with different symptoms,” I tell the head physic over the port. Before he can answer, another voice comes over my miniport. It’s the virologist. “Carrow?”
“Yes?”
“I analyzed the viral genome taken from the patient with the circumferential rash,” he says. “It reveals an additional copy of the neural-insertion envelope protein gene. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I do.
We have a mutation on our hands.
CHAPTER 15
CASSIA
At dusk the evening light gilds the white of the barricade into gold, and the sky is cool and blue except for the spot where the sun burns down beyond the horizon. That’s when we gather, more of us each day. One person tells two people, and two tell four, and it increases exponentially, and within a few weeks of beginning we have what I think of as an outbreak of our own.
I don’t know who started referring to this place as the Gallery, but the name caught on. I’m glad people cared enough to name it. I like it best when I hear the whispers of those who are here for the first time, who stand before the wall with their hands over their mouths and tears in their eyes. Though I could be wrong, I think that many of them feel as I do whenever I come here.
I am not alone.
If I have a little time and can stay for a while, I show whoever wants to learn how to write. Once they’ve seen me do it, they make their own marks, clumsy at first, then definite, confident.
I teach them printing, not the ornate cursive Ky taught me. Printing is easier because of the separate, distinct lines. It’s the joining together—the writing without ceasing and the continuous movement—that is most difficult to learn, that feels so foreign to our hands. Now and then I do write in cursive so I don’t lose the feeling of connection to what I’m putting down, and more importantly, to Ky. When I write without lifting the stick from the ground or the pencil from the paper, I’m reminded of Hunter and his people, how they drew the blue lines on their skin and then onto the next person.
“That’s harder,” a man says, watching me write in cursive. “But the regular way—it’s not bad.”
“No,” I say.
“So why haven’t we been doing it all along?” he asks.
“I think some people have,” I say, and he nods.
We have to be careful. There are still pockets of Society sympathizers who want to fight and destroy, and they can be dangerous. The Rising itself hasn’t forbidden us to gather like this, but the Pilot has asked that everyone focus attention on completing our work and ending the Plague. He tells us that saving people is what matters most, and I believe that to be true, but I think we are also saving ourselves here in the Gallery. So many people have waited a long time to create, or had to hide what they’d done.