The 100 Year Miracle (36 page)

“Hooper lied to you.”

“Everyone has lied to me!” Her anger was at the surface, like simmering milk with only the top skim to keep the bubbles from bursting and splattering out of the pot.

“I haven’t,” John said.

“You’re the worst of them! You followed me, chased me, spied on me.”

“It wasn’t me, but I believe it happened. I believe some of it happened.”

His voice was even. His eyes were steady. They took her in, looked her over, examined her like something under his microscope. What did it mean that he believed her? She suspected a trap.

“How far down the path have you gone?” he asked her.

It was not the question she expected. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

No one alive had taken the waters. There were only reports, sketches, stories passed down in families, stories told to missionaries and what they wrote down, altered and changed. John’s curiosity was almost insatiable. He wanted to know what she knew, to open her mind and see what she had seen. What was a hallucination? What was real? Could she tell? Was it different for her, a white woman, than it would be for him? He had not taken any himself. He could have, but he had not. Without the proper ritual, it would have been sacrilege. Without other members of his tribe, it would have been dangerous. But still, he wanted to know. He wanted to grab her and shake the answers from her, but it was obvious, standing there, that she would not survive it.

“What have you seen?” he repeated.

“I haven’t seen anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You do know.”

He stared at her hard, stared until her muscles squirmed under her skin.

“Your hair is falling out,” he said.

She made a face at him, something to convey what a ridiculous comment that was, to talk about her appearance at a time like this, but it wasn’t so ridiculous. Not really. Her hair was greasy and hanging in strings around her face. She had noticed it in the bathroom. She hadn’t had the chance to shower much in the past week, and so that was fine. It was to be expected, but when she had bent forward to wash her hands, she had seen her own scalp. It had stopped her. She could see the dull, grayish skin under the strings of dark hair. It wasn’t visible in patches but all over, a general thinning of her hair that she was sure hadn’t been there before. It had worried her, but that made her feel vain, and so she pushed the feeling aside and did not deal with it anymore.

“Why is her hair falling out?”

Rachel’s head snapped up. She had not known the Streatfields’ son was there. He was smaller than John and standing somewhere behind him. She had not seen him and still could not. They were ganging up on her.

“I’m fine. You need to leave. I have work to do.”

“You’re not fine, and you need to come back to the mainland with me. No one else can help you. Not like I can.”

Rachel almost laughed. She wouldn’t have trusted John to save her place in line for the bathroom, and he thought she would leave the island with him. Absurd.

John watched her thoughts play across her face. She had no mask anymore, no ability to hide anything. She had waded into this on her own, unprotected, unaware, and she had taken too much. John did not pretend to know the right amount, the spiritual amount, but anyone could have seen that she had overdosed. John could only begin, as a scientist and as an Olloo’et, to guess at the consequences—her nervous system, her prefrontal cortex. She needed help. She needed a doctor. A medicine man. Both. She was dying.

“Go to hell,” Rachel said.

John smacked both hands against the door. She didn’t know he was going to do it, and the force of it knocked her back into the room. The sound disoriented her. She took two skittering steps and opened her mouth to object, but before the words could find their way out, John had her chin in his hand and was forcing her face up toward his. It made her mad, and she swung the box cutter at his bicep.

He made a sound like an animal. She had stuck him but not deep. He was wearing a puffy coat, a sweatshirt, layers to protect him from the elements, and she was not strong. She would have tried again, but he had his hand around hers, squeezing. She dropped the box cutter, but he didn’t let go.

“Look at me,” he said, holding her face near his.

Rachel tried to twist away, but it was useless, and it tired her.

“Your pupils are huge,” he said. “Are you hallucinating right now?”

“Get your hands off of me.”

John reeled when her breath hit his face. It took all he had to hang on to her, his hand still wrapped around her chin. He pushed her backward into the room, taking shallow breaths to keep from retching. It smelled like rotting fish and unwashed bodies and something else, something Rachel couldn’t smell anymore.

John’s arm hurt. He would need stitches, antibiotic. He tried to ignore it. He looked around. He looked and did not like what he saw.

“Jesus, what are you doing in here? Are you concentrating it?”

John let her slide out of his hands. He didn’t even think about it. He was concentrating on the tanks, the lights, the aerators. Then he saw the feeding stations, the algae. Oh, God—

Rachel tried to stand in his way, but he moved around her, covering the distance to the tanks in three long, loping steps. The grow lights simulating daytime were on, and the
Artemia lucis
were not glowing. They would likely not glow again. Under the microscope, Rachel had seen the cysts that, if left alone, would disperse in the water and do nothing at all for another hundred years. The animals had bred. To see, just to see, Rachel had ground a small sample of the cysts and taken it. The effect had been far stronger than with the adults and much more immediate. She was having trouble holding her thoughts together, but she knew one thing. She had to get them back to the mainland right away. She had to start experimenting with them, and she did not have time for this.

“Leave that alone!”

John had known, but he had not known. He had suspected something, something like this, but to see it, to see this most sacred thing floating here, manipulated, turned into something it could not be, should not be. He reached into one of the tanks and pulled out a flask full of the
Artemia lucis
and their eggs.

He turned his eyes to her. How could she, and how did she? Both questions at the same time, questions from the scientist in him, questions from the Olloo’et. He settled on just one. “What have you done?”

“Everything!” She puffed herself up, lifted onto her toes, pushed her shoulders wide, the blades coming together in the middle of her back. “Everything you couldn’t.”

John, with the flask still in his hand, looked at her. “I never wanted to.”

“Liar!”

“We were here to observe, to learn. Never to interfere. Never to take.”

“I am saving people.” There was passion in Rachel’s voice. “I am making the world better, bearable.”

“You don’t understand,” John countered.

“I understand everything.”

“You won’t survive this.”

Juno had followed them into the room, and neither of the scientists was paying him any attention. He did not matter. He was not important. He wasn’t until suddenly he was.

“You gave this to my father, didn’t you?”

John’s eyes went wide and swung to look at Juno, who was locked on Rachel.

“You experimented on him,” Juno said. “That’s what’s wrong with him, isn’t it?”

John looked from Juno to Rachel and back again.

She pressed her lips shut like a child.

John looked as though he’d been shot. “You experimented on a person? A stranger?”

Rachel squeezed her jaw muscles tight. She would not tell them anything. They could not make her.

“How much did you give him?” John demanded.

He was still holding the flask in his hand, and she lunged for it. With his good arm, he held it up out of her reach, and she clawed at him trying to get at it.

“Tell me what you did,” he demanded.

“No!” Rachel shouted.

John tossed the glass flask at the wall. It bounced once, and then shattered on the hardwood floor. Juno jumped out of the way, as though the spray might burn him. Rachel let out a primal cry, and John reached into the tank and grabbed two more.

“This is sacred. Do you not understand? Are you so blind? You perverted it. You used it. You were selfish. Now look. Look at yourself!” John could no longer keep his temper.

“I am saving people,” she shouted back. “Didn’t you hear me? I am saving myself!”

“You are dying!”

“I am alive! I am alive for the first time in years!”

John threw the two flasks at the wall in just the same spot. Only one broke this time, but they both spilled. The sound Rachel made was subhuman. She threw herself at him.

If any of them had been paying attention, they might have heard noises coming from downstairs, but they were not listening. John grabbed more flasks.

“Tell me what you gave that man. Tell me what you did!”

“Those are mine!”

“They are not yours. You have no right.” John threw the samples to the floor.

Rachel screamed. She could not imagine losing her work. She could not imagine going back to the way things had been, the endless, terrible pain. She would do anything, anything not to go back. There were no boundaries anymore.

“Tell me!”

“Go to hell!”

Smash, smash, smash.

Rachel hit him. Then she hit him again. She pummeled him with her fists, both of them, one right after the other. Hitting and hitting and hitting. John, with his good arm up to protect his face, reached for the whole tank.

“No!”

She grabbed hold of his coat tight, so he couldn’t throw her off, and she bit him. She sank her teeth into the back of his neck like a fox grabs hold of a chicken. Joy surged through her. She had him. She had him then.

“Stop it!”

The hands were on her, grabbing her. Rachel tried to fight them off, but two attackers at once were too much for her. She flailed helplessly as Juno pulled her off, yanked her down to the ground, to the ruined carpet at their feet. He pinned her there, using his weight to hold her down.

John, free, grabbed the tank and brought all of it—the flasks and the fans and the lights and the tubes and the cords—crashing to the floor in an unholy mess of fouled water, broken glass, and electrical equipment.

Rachel howled, watching helplessly from the floor as John reached up again and again, grabbing the edge of every remaining tank, bringing them all crashing and spilling to the ground around her.

*   *   *

Tilda opened her eyes. She’d fallen out of consciousness. Her arm was curled up close to her body. Before she’d been terrified to leave her starfish position, and now she was afraid to move back to it.

She wasn’t nauseated anymore. That was something. And she had a view. She could see the 100-Year Miracle off in the middle distance. The light was so electric, so very, very green, it was hard to believe nature created such a thing. It was the kind of green that could only really be appreciated against black velvet, like those terrible sunrise paintings sold off the side of interstates. But here again, nature had provided. The sky was nothing but black velvet. The clouds blocked the moon and the stars, leaving nothing but that beautiful ring of green. She could see the shape of it as it curled around the island, marking it as special, as the chosen spot of the chosen people. It really was something.

She looked at the Miracle—the very last day of it that anyone alive would ever see—and she appreciated it and rhapsodized about it and was all but writing poetry in her mind when it occurred to her that, yes, she could see the Miracle. She could see it now, and she could not before, and, if that were true, it meant she was nearing land. She was quite near it, in fact. There it was. Right there. Her home. Jesus Christ on a cracker.

The whole thing was so exciting that Tilda sat right up. The hull shifted and bobbed under her. She held her breath and kicked herself for being so rash, but shift and bob was all it did. She was not dislodged, but she did have to make a decision. Did she risk staying with the boat, knowing the tide could change and send her farther away again? That she could float right past the island into open water before the sun came up, greatly reducing the likelihood of anyone finding her? But how close was she really? And how cold was the water? She knew she wouldn’t have a lot of time before her old friend hypothermia rejoined the party. Still. It was close. She thought it was close. The green blaze in the water threw up enough ambient light for her to make out the tops of the trees and something that might have been a house. Not her house. But a structure of some kind. Something straight and true and unnatural.

Tilda took a breath, squeezed her hands into fists, and pitched herself forward. The hit of the cold was almost too much. It was a vise around her lungs and a knife through her brain, and there was a moment—just a portion of a second—before she remembered to kick her legs and make her strokes and head for shore.

41.

The sounds Rachel made were unholy, inhuman. They made the two men want to clamp their hands down over their ears. She made a sound like she was being boiled alive. She writhed under him, and Juno let her go. They both let her go. She scrambled to her feet, shaking and groaning. And then she ran. She ran out of the room, snatching up one of the duffel bags that still held a few of the plastic containers. She ran out into the hall and down the stairs, her footsteps banging loud and fast on each wooden tread. She grabbed the end of the banister and swung herself around 180 degrees and sprinted down the center hall toward the back of the house and the sliding glass door.

It was hard to do it. The new dose—so much stronger than before or was it somehow cumulative?—was pulsing through her arms and her legs, her hands and her feet. She needed to write this down, to add it to the notebooks, but holding that thought was so hard. She could feel the effect of the tincture spreading, and everything it touched went numb. She told her legs to move, and she knew that they did because stationary things passed her, or she passed them, or something happened, and she was not in the same space as before. Artwork moved past her head, furniture. She saw Harry’s library, the door wide open, the room empty, and then she was beyond it. It was hard to keep track. Telling her legs to move was all she could do. She could not feel them take action, could not sense her feet making contact with the floor. She could not check their work because she could not look down for fear her balance, precarious as it was, would fail her.