Revolution World (20 page)

"You were about to go right back up to the bombsite," Max said, apologizing for tackling her. "It's not safe up there."

"It's not safe down here!" Clio blurted out as she scooted away from Max. She leapt to her feet and began pulling her mother and sister down the hall. "We have to get out of here!" she cried.

She tried to explain, but her garbled account involving rooms of blood and tortured monsters did not instill the proper sense of urgency in her audience. They were attempting to make her lie down and breathe slowly when Seth caught up to her.

"Did she hit her head?" Harmony asked him anxiously. Seth shook his head as he bent over and gasped for air.

"Then what is she going on about?" asked Kalliope looking deeply trouble by the sight of her sister freaking out.

"She met Uncle Hester in the treatment room," Seth said slowly, looking at Max. Understanding flashed across Max's face. It was rapidly chased away by a stormy expression.

Max bent over Clio. Very slowly and clearly, he said, "I know you saw something that frightened you, but you are in no danger now. Tell us what you saw."

Clio cleared her throat and began to explain. As she talked, Seth slid behind her and folded his arms around her. Kalliope moved to stop him, but Clio shook her head. When she was done, Max sat down on the floor and sighed.

"Max?" asked Harmony, working to keep her tone neutral. When he didn't deny what Clio had told them, she seemed to harden. "I think the girls and I should leave now. We can worry about what Clio saw another day. Right now this building is under attack and we need to get out."

Clio looked at her mother. She wondered if anything could shake her mother's poise, but really didn't want to be there when something finally did.

Max shook his head. "I know this may not be what you want to hear, but we can't leave right now. The building is in automatic lockdown until the threat is gone. We can't get out. That's why we didn't want Clio in the stairwell. She'd get stuck in there until Gloria lifts the lockdown. And you know Gloria." They all smiled tightly at that.

"She sent out an update," Seth said, holding up his handheld. "That second explosion was our defense system shooting down a moving target. It was five hundred feet from the building. Nothing else is coming towards us right now. She's processing satellite, infrared, anything she can find. She thinks the two attacks were it, but until she's sure we are still in lockdown."

"So, we are stuck here?" asked Kalliope.

"Even if we weren't, I would do everything in my power to convince you to stay. It is very safe here. Out there, who knows?" Max said sincerely.

"So what was in that room?" asked Clio. She stood up and gave Seth and Max a stubborn look. She had never had anyone question her word before and she did not like it at all.

"She saw our Uncle Hester," Max said slowly, looking at Harmony. "He is horribly scarred, maimed and very old. He suffers from a rare disorder that we call Z-Factor Deficiency. It is like porphyria. He is missing certain enzymes required to correctly process hemoglobin. That's the stuff in red blood cells that transports oxygen. He requires blood transfusions to survive."

Max waited for a minute, but no one spoke so he continued. "Because of his condition, he is very sensitive to sunlight. The scars you saw were the result of exposure to direct sunlight for several hours on multiple occasions. So if he appeared confused and disoriented, it was because he is in a lot of pain right now and the explosion interrupted his treatment."

Kalliope pushed her sister. "Insensitive clod," she said. "You ran like a sissy and scared the crap out of some poor, sick old man."

Clio opened her mouth to protest. "If you were there in a room full of blood, you'd think differently. There's no logical reason for a room like that."

"Actually there is," said Seth quietly. "The Z-Factor Deficiency runs in our family. The Omerta family. One of the reasons we established the embassy here was because there is a blood bank close by that is willing to sell us the quantities we need to supply the ZFD sufferers back home."

Clio looked at him for a long moment until the puzzle pieces fell into place. "You have it. You have this Z-Factor Deficiency."

Seth nodded. "I think you can understand why we try to keep this condition a secret."

Clio couldn't believe that her initial reaction to someone with a debilitating disease was to run screaming like some sort of bigoted medieval peasant. If she had thrown stones and screamed witch, she couldn't have acted any more stupidly. She felt awful.

"I'm sorry," she said, taking his hand. He held her eyes and, for once, she knew he understood what she wanted to say.

"Z-Factor Deficiency? What does that mean? That sounds like something off a cut-rate science fiction show," Harmony said. The scientist in her was having a hard time with this.

Max shrugged. "That's what we call it. It's not in any medical journals. Because it's so rare and we've worked to keep it secret, there's no medical research. We're not even really sure it's a porphyria. We just know that if the victims go outside, they fry. And if they don't get blood transfusions every other week, they die. They die horribly and painfully. It's not pretty."

"Can I see your treatment facility?" she asked briskly.

Clio looked up from cuddling on the floor with Seth. "Maybe we should just wait for the lockdown to end someplace safe," she suggested. She really didn't want to go back to that room.

"Nonsense. Might as well use this time productively," her mother replied and began walking in the right direction.

"I don't understand why Omerta needs to cultivate blood supplies all the way down in Texas. Synth blood is freely available and much easier to maintain and ship," she said to Max as Kalliope followed in her wake. After a brief murmured exchange, Seth and Clio trailed behind them.

"Synth blood doesn't work. It has to be whole human blood. Most of us with ZFD require about 250 ml of whole blood every two weeks starting at puberty," Seth called out to her.

Harmony stopped and turned to him in disbelief. "Really? That much? But that amount requires two human donors giving blood regularly. Given the short shelf life of blood and all the other factors, I can see how this would be a very rare disease indeed." This was a nice way of saying that she couldn't understand how anyone, much less a whole family, could survive with this disease.

"Why doesn't synth blood work?" asked Kalliope.

"Again, we don't really know," replied Max. "We've tried. But the only thing that works is whole human blood. We can't even get by with plasma donors."

"You ought to put it up for inclusion on the list of acceptable human gene mods," Clio said. "Then we could work on a cure."

"Sometimes we talk about it," Max replied after a pause. "But most of the victims would prefer to keep it private. And it would take years to get it approved and even longer before there was hope of a cure. We'd be so far down on the list and you know how it is with a really rare case. Nobody would bother even if we paid huge sums of money."

"The UN Gene Council is very slow to add anything new to the list of acceptable human splices," Harmony agreed. "It's one of the reasons Floracopia tends to stay away from medical gene mods. There's just too much red tape."

They reached the room and Max opened the door. "Please wait here for a minute," he asked, holding a hand up. "Uncle Hester has had a very upsetting day and I want to get him calmed down before I introduce him to anyone. He doesn't see that many people."

While they waited outside, Harmony continued to quiz Seth. "How does ZFD manifest?"

"Usually it starts in puberty," he replied carefully. Clio could tell he was having a hard time talking about this. "For the most part it is passed genetically, but there have been occasional cases where the disease was passed through bodily fluids. That's extremely rare, though. When the disease begins, the victim begins to waste away, experiencing horrible stomach cramps and joint pain. Unless they are born into a family familiar with the disease or they get really lucky, they die quickly. With regular transfusions they can lead an almost normal life, but like I say, it has to be whole live blood."

"Interesting," Harmony replied. "What are some of the other side effects beside the photosensitivity?"

Seth hesitated a very long time. Clio nudged him a little before he said, "There can be dental deformities. Longevity is affected."

"That makes sense," Harmony replied. "Any disease that affects the skin will affect the teeth. And, of course, people requiring daily transfusions won't live as long as healthy adults."

Max opened the door and motioned them in. "This is Uncle Hester." He held the old man's hand and beamed at him encouragingly. The old man looked at the women anxiously. "He doesn't speak much English," Max said. "He's pretty embarrassed about running into you earlier and how he acted. You scared him, popping out like that."

Clio was mortified. "I'm so sorry," she told the old man. He smiled at her tentatively.

Kalliope prowled the room, looking at all the equipment and blood banks while Harmony gently examined the old man with ill-concealed fascination. Clio sat down next to Seth.

"You really need all this blood?" Kalliope asked. She was having trouble with the sheer scale of the thing.

"Most of it is shipped back to Queen Charlotte's Island," replied Max. "These large refrigerators are specially designed to preserve the blood as long as possible. Since people with ZFD die horribly without regular transfusions, we try to maintain a large back-up supply."

"How many people with ZFD does Omerta have?" she asked, still unwilling to believe the necessity of so much blood.

"Look here at this cooling system," Max said, by way of a reply. "I bet you could design something even more efficient." Kalliope's eyebrows shot up, but she allowed herself to be distracted by the inner workings of the blood bank.

"Any more news about what's going on upstairs?" Clio asked Seth as he tapped away on his handheld.

"Yeah," he replied. "We are almost out of lockdown. Gloria has confirmed that the two attacks are the only threat right now and they have both been contained. Apparently, it was two old trucks filled with your basic gasoline and fertilizer bomb and tricked out with a remote control. There's no clue yet as to who did this or why, but we are working with the local police to examine the wreckage and search the area for whoever was controlling the trucks."

"Great," she said. Seth avoided looking at her. As part of her new resolve to be better at communicating, she asked, "What's wrong?"

"Oh, you know," replied Seth, running a hand through his hair and then gesturing about him vaguely. "Everything."

After a short pause, he continued. "I didn't want to spring all this stuff about my condition on you. Terrorists tried to blow up my house. You were out with that guy last night."

"That's like three days of conversations in three sentences," Clio replied, trying to figure out what to say. "Which should we talk about first?"

Seth just shrugged and slumped against a wall. Clio took the initiative. "So you have a disease. Big deal. Before they cured diabetes, people had to give themselves injections and monitor their blood sugar constantly. That sounds like way more of a hassle than your thing. Transfusions every couple of weeks and you can't go out in the sun? It could be worse. ZFD, did you call it? What a funny name."

A smile tugged at the corners of Seth's mouth. "I always thought so too, but the Omerta Board came up with that name and they aren't so great at taking criticism. Z-Factor Deficiency. Sounds like something out of a comic book." They smiled at each other and Clio felt that maybe everything would turn out all right after all.

"From what you are describing, it sounds like it would be a fairly straightforward splice to fix this condition. You really ought to urge your Board of Directors to put this disease up for human gene mod list," Harmony said to Max as she probed Uncle Hester's shoulder joint.

"I will try, but they are very resistant to that idea," he replied. "Possibly if I tell them that Floracopia is willing to begin work, they will embrace the idea."

Harmony shook her head. "You would be much better served by a company that solely focuses on medical splicing. We really aren't set up for that. And we have a long list of vital projects. I would love to work on this, but we aren't the best for the job. And you deserve the best."

"Thank you for your refusal," Max said with a crooked smile. He stepped towards Harmony as though he would touch her. Seth watched him, waiting for the joke that inevitably came out of his uncle, but Max just stood there looking into Harmony's eyes.

"Yes, well, sorry," said Harmony briskly as she turned back to Uncle Hester. Now she began examining his eyes. The old man seemed to enjoy the attention, even if it consisted of impersonal poking and prodding. Over her shoulder she said, "I am really curious to know why synthetic blood won't work. Modifying synthetic blood for this condition
is
a project Floracopia could work on."

Max raised an eyebrow. "Really? That would be quite wonderful."

"We could?" Kalliope asked, giving her mother a quizzical glance. Harmony attempted to look in Uncle Hester's mouth, but here the old man pulled away. Harmony turned to Max. He shook his head but didn't explain.

"Seth said the disease causes dental deformities," Clio whispered to her mother. Probably why the old man is embarrassed to have someone look in his mouth, she thought. Clio didn't say that, though. She thought it would be rude.

Harmony looked even more interested as Uncle Hester edged away from her. "We may not be able to find a solution, but technically we could work on synth blood without having to obtain permission from the UN Gene Council. It's not human tissue," Harmony cautioned as Max did a little jig. "And it would still be a backburner project. We have starving people waiting for crops. We have to finish those splices first."

Max reached over and hugged Harmony who looked uncomfortable with human interaction but not displeased.