Catalyst (25 page)

“Zelia. This is Ryba,” Tabitha says proudly. Ryba holds out a dripping hand and I stoop to shake it. It’s rubbery and slick. She’s healed so well.

“Hi Ryba,” I say. “Wow. You’re . . . beautiful.” I can’t help it. The golden hair and the pearlescent body are straight out of a fairy tale, if not for the lack of fish tail.

“Thank you,” she says, her chin dipping into the water. “You look like a bird of paradise.”

I nod in acceptance. “Not my choice, but whatever.”

Julian’s already sitting at the head of the table, a goblet of red wine in hand. His eyes are fixed on Caliga, who sits alone in the corner, swirling the lemon in her water glass. Xiulan walks to Julian, interrupting his line of vision. She leans over to whisper, her skin swirling in blue and orange, and he slams down his wineglass.

“I didn’t authorize that.”

Xiulan whispers hurriedly and her arms go black.

“I’ll deal with it later.” Julian waves his hand dismissively, but the irritation on his face remains. Xiulan slinks away and sits down, staring straight ahead of her. Micah comes to stand next to me.

“What’s going on?” I ask him.

“I don’t know.” He and I sit down across from Xiulan. She looks too frightened to speak, but Micah asks anyway. “Xiulan, what happened?”

“Some of our newer drug samples got sent to Okks, of all places. It’s all over the news.”

“Who sent them?”

“I don’t know. I’m in charge of shipping from the R&D lab, but I didn’t do it.”

We try to console Xiulan, but nothing we say makes her feel better. Micah whispers to me, “The police and Feds will put more pressure on Inky and Avida. They’ll have to publicly show that they’re doing something about it. This is bad.”

“What a weird mistake,” I say, but Micah shakes his head.

“This is no mistake. Places like Avida and Aureus—they don’t make mistakes.”

We all sit and eat our dinner with somber concentration. Renata never shows up, but the other kids seem afraid to ask about her absence. After dessert, the candles and lights wink out. They’re replaced with black lights and music. Strange shapes begin to glow around us from the fluorescing clothes, nail polish, and makeup worn by everyone. I suppose it would be a fun club experience, dancing under a black light, except that nobody is in the mood.

“Let’s get out of here,” I mouth to Cy, who’s several seats away. We head past the strange glowing lips, eyes, and bits of luminous clothing to the transport doors.

“Zel, what’s that?” Cy points to a huge splotch on the feathers of my skirt. It’s glowing eerily blue-green, and doesn’t match any pattern on my gown. I reach for it and it’s damp.

“Weird.”

Micah and Élodie have also decided to leave. Inside the transport in the normal light, the wet splotch on my gown is bright yellow. It has a strange, chemical scent that’s familiar, mixed with a sugary citrus note. My stomach drops and my heart starts pounding.

Oh no. This can’t be what I think it is. Please.
No.

The doors have opened to Cy and Micah’s floor. Since it’s free time, Élodie is allowed to step out with them, but I don’t exit the transport.

“What’s the matter?” Élodie asks. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

“No.” I try to smile, faking nonchalance. “I’ll be back in a second. I forgot something.”

Cy watches me with suspicion but lets the doors close. I scan my bracelet and head for the locked infirmary. Inside, Renata is gone. Victoria’s body has been removed too, but Bianca continues to sleep under an oxygen mask, and Andy’s playing a game on his holo.

His lemonade is still sitting by his bedside. I run over and smell it. Ugh, it reeks. I dump it down the sink in the corner of the room, before searching wildly by the beds and tables.

“God, where is it? Where is he keeping this stuff?” I say as Andy cowers from my frantic gestures.

I know what this smell is. Yellow color in daylight, fluorescing blue-green under black light. I used to use it in one of my first labs, for histochemical stains. Finally, peering through the glass of the far laboratory wall’s transparent cabinets, I see the stoppered container. The liquid inside is bright yellow. The label is turned toward the back, but I know what it is.

Acridine yellow. A dye that’s incredibly toxic. It causes mutations in animals and bacteria. And someone was hoping it would cause new mutations in Andy, by slipping it into his lemonade. I look frantically for a lock pad to scan my bracelet, but when I find it, the door won’t open. And then I remember.

Caliga’s vaccine is in here too. It has to be.

I look around desperately for a way to open the doors, but there’s no hammer or anything I could use. A tall container of liquid nitrogen sits in the corner, along with oxygen tanks. I grab the liquid nitrogen container and detach the opening spigot. Holding it at eye level, I carefully pour the liquid nitrogen down the face of the locked plasticleer door.

“Julian really,
really
isn’t going to like this,” Andy warns me.

“Get back, Andy. Go to Bianca’s bed, and push it as far away from me as you can. Cover your faces with the blanket,” I order him. Andy’s weak, but the hover beds are feather-light to push around.

“Okay, but I just wanna say . . . I had nothing to do with this!” he yells from beneath the sheets.

I have to work fast. The liquid pours down in serpentine rivulets, evaporating into smoky plumes so quickly that almost no liquid drips onto the floor. Soon, the room’s floor fills with clouds of nitrogen.

“Stop!”

I spin around to see Julian standing in the doorway, livid.

“What are you doing, Benten?” he growls, striding forward and yanking my arm. The empty canister falls from my hands, banging onto the floor, hidden under the plumes of nitrogen clouds. Renata scuttles in behind him, her eyes wide with surprise.

“He’s poisoning the children!” I tell her. “Ask him! Ask him about the yellow dye!” I turn to Julian and beg. “Sean. If you’re awake in there . . . please. Open this door. If you’re there, do it.”

“Sean isn’t here,” Julian says coldly. He grabs for my wrist, but the floor is icy cold from the nitro, and water condenses to make it slippery. As he loses his balance, I grab the canister on the floor, heave it over my head, and bring it smashing down on the frozen patch of plasticleer door.

And just like that, the front of it shatters, raining down bits of sharp plastic onto my feet and the floor. The bottles are no longer locked away. No longer secret.

Benzene. Polonium-210. Arsenic.

They’re sitting there like soldiers in a row, waiting to kill.

Julian’s a monster.

He’s been trying to cause more mutations, just like that senator had suggested. I’d compared it to using a shovel to do surgery. No wonder Julian had looked pissed.

He starts toward me, but my eye catches on a vial at the end of the shelf. CJ-001. A single vial with Caliga’s initials on them. I grab it.

“
No!
” Julian yells angrily. “You idiot girl!” Julian rushes me and pins my shoulder to the broken wall of glass, but my legs are still free. I knee him in the groin, and he bends over in agony, gasping. It’s all the time I need. I drop the vial and crush it under my shoe.

Julian yanks me away from the wall and twists my arm behind my back. I try to punch him, but he catches my hand easily.

“You stupid, stupid girl!” I don’t even see the blow, I only feel it—his large, well-placed fist against my left cheek, before I’m falling. The hard, unforgiving floor ricochets against the back of my head.

I can’t see. I can’t move. I can’t even lift my arms. Under my body, broken shards dig into the contours of my hip and spine. Julian’s hand curls around my neck, not squeezing, but nearly encircling it. He’s panting hard, and Renata whimpers in the corner. The air smells of burned plastic. The scent of fury.

“Get the solitary room ready,” he barks at her. With a cruel yank of my arm that threatens to pop my shoulder, he drags me out of the infirmary and into the transport.

Inside, I try to get up, but my face is crushed to the floor by Julian’s shoe. I scream, but it’s no use.

The door opens and he pulls me up and throws me out of the transport. Vaguely, I notice the English garden shrubbery whizzing by as I try to get my footing underneath me. My own yells grow hoarse and disappear in the space around me, replaced by a single voice.

“Zelia!”

Cy and Micah stand openmouthed at Cy’s bedroom door. The sight of Cy renews my energy, and I kick and claw like an alley cat, but one swift kick to my kidneys takes my breath away. Julian drags me to the side of the garden.

“Let her go!” Cy yells, his voice full of fear and fury and terrible things. Micah’s fighting to hold him back. For once, I’m thankful.

My eyes lock on Cy as I beg silently.
Don’t hurt yourself for me. Don’t do it.

Julian kicks me into a hidden room behind the back of the garden. It’s black and plain, with nothing but a drain in the middle, which horrifies me.

“You were right, Zelia. My methods are crude. I need to be using a scalpel, not a shovel, as you so poetically described it. You could be my blade. You could create, like your father did.”

“I’m not like my father,” I growl.

“Well. We’ll have to change the balance of this argument, won’t we?” Julian says, breathing hard into my face. His finger trails down my breastbone, before lifting away, hooking something. The chain of my necklace strains hard against my neck before it snaps off with a vicious tug.

“You’ve more spirit than I expected, Zelia. And you need to be broken.”

Suddenly, without my necklace, my breathing is too shallow. I force a gasp to feed my body. I need my necklace, now more than ever.

If I fall asleep, I will die.

CHAPTER 23

M
Y BODY IS BATTERED.
I’
M GOING ON
only two hours of scant sleep I’d snatched in Caliga’s room last night. All I crave now is sleep.

And I can’t.

Twelve times a minute, I force air in, gasping like a fish out of water. Seven hundred and twenty times per hour. My hands start to shake uncontrollably after six hours in my prison. My eyes feel gritty from lack of sleep, and my head is throbbing from Julian’s blow and the hypoxia.

This room is a dimly lit, square box with a hard marble floor. Hours later (could it be morning now? Seven or eight a.m.?), the door opens. I shield myself from the biting light, while someone shoves a tray of food and water into my cell. I guzzle the water, but leave the food untouched.

Instead, I sit cross-legged in the corner, holding the titanium spork (of all things) way out in front of me. Watching it, never letting go. I count in fives, forcing a hard breath after number five. If I let go of the spork, it means I’ve fallen asleep. It clatters to the marble floor, waking me up. I rub my face, curse Julian, hold the spork in the same position, and go back to counting and breathing.

This is how I keep myself up.

This is how I stay alive.

For now.

• • •

I
T FEELS LIKE MORE THAN A DAY
goes by, although I can’t be certain. I’ve lost count of the hours.

My hands tremble so much that I spill the water before I can drink it. At one point, I slip into a dream but wake myself up, only to find that I’ve jabbed myself with the spork. My arm bleeds with four tiny punctures. I can’t remember doing the actual jabbing.

I cry for Cy, and for Marka, Dyl . . . for everyone in Carus, and Caliga. But even in my psychosis of seeing pink trees festooned with dead opossums, I never beg for mercy.

“Just say you’re sorry,” Julian says to me, appearing in the corner. He’s covered in fur, just like Tabitha.

“Are you warm?” I ask.

“Just say you’re sorry.”

“I’d like to skin you alive. I’d chew you up. I bet you taste like petroleum,” I say in a warbling voice. Julian’s image shimmers away as the spork clatters to the floor.

This happens over and over. We have these conversations, and always, I end up chasing my dropped spork.

But soon, it occurs to me that the hallucinations might kill me anyway: bloody rodents, worms, and butterflies birth out of Julian’s mouth and attack my fingers.

My spork clatters on the floor, and I hold it out again.

When my mouth starts to fill with blood from involuntarily biting my cheeks, I start to think.

Yes. Maybe he has gotten the better of me. Maybe it’s time to give up.

“You should,” Julian says casually. He looks normal for once, in a white suit. His pupils constrict, and Sean’s worried face fills the room, expanding like a balloon so large, it squeezes me to the wall. “Please, Zelia. You’ll never survive. Say you’re sorry.”

“I am sorry,” I say, weeping. “Not for Julian. For everyone else.” I have no tears, because my body is wrung out, made of Zelia jerky. Dry, sinewy, unreal.

I splay my hands open, and nothing clatters to the floor. The spork is gone. Where did it go? My dry eyes burn like they’ve been dipped in black pepper.