Chad nodded and closed the door.
Jennifer gazed at the bordered floor panel. Earth was sliding into view. Clouds over the Pacific Ocean. So beautiful. So treacherous, so morally diseased. But so beautiful.
A sudden desire came over her to once again see Tony Indivino’s grave, in the Allegheny Mountains of New York. Tony Indivino, whom she had loved when she was young, as she’d never loved since. Tony, killed by the Sleepers, but not before he’d conceived of Sanctuary, the safe haven for them all…
Jennifer destroyed the thought. Tony was dead. What was dead no longer existed. What no longer existed must not be allowed to control the living, even momentarily. To allow that was to risk maudlin and ineffective sentimentality.
Tony was dead. No one who was dead mattered to Jennifer any longer.
No one.
“I think you should read the reports,” Will said. “At least once.”
“No,” Jennifer said. She moved slightly farther away from his body in their bed. “And I asked you not to bring up the subject again.”
“I know what you asked,” Will said evenly.
“Then please respect my request.”
Will raised himself on one elbow and looked at her. “You run the neuropharm project, Jennifer. That means you should be aware of every factor. The aftermath of La Solana is a factor. The FBI-CIA team has determined that the bomb came in on a trajectory from the Rocky Mountain site, as we expected. They’re analyzing every molecule of matter up there. You should at least monitor the reports we’ve dipped to—”
Jennifer got out of bed. In one fluid motion she put on a pale austere robe. She left the bedroom.
“Jennifer!” Will called after her, and now she heard his anger, that regrettable anger that weakened Will so much as a project member, as an ally. As a man. “Jennifer—you can’t go on pretending La Solana wasn’t real! It happened!”
Yes, it happened, Jennifer thought, closing the bedroom door on Will’s voice. Past tense. It was over. There was no reason to think about it anymore. What was over was no more real now than what had never existed. There was no difference.
Their small sitting room—all personal dwellings on Sanctuary were small—was dark. “Lights on,” Jennifer said. Lately, she didn’t care for the dark. Sometimes she thought she glimpsed a figure at the edges of dark rooms, a short thick body with masses of unruly dark hair held by a red ribbon. The figure wasn’t real, of course. It didn’t exist.
Therefore, it never had.
Eighteen
Theresa was very sick. But if she had been Changed, she would have been ever sicker. Jackson found he couldn’t appreciate the irony.
Theresa had been exposed to 240 rads. As soon as Jackson raced back from Kelvin-Castner to their apartment, he scrubbed as much of it as possible out of her system. He didn’t send her to a hospital; the enclaves no longer had hospitals worthy of the name. Not necessary.
Jackson ordered the equipment he needed by emergency comlink; it reached his apartment at the same time he did. Theresa was hysterical.
“Sssshhhh, Tessie, it’s going to be all right. Hang on, sweetheart, it’s okay, just help us as much as you can.”
“Dead!” Theresa cried, over and over. “Dead… dead… dead…”
“No, you’re not going to die. Sssshhhh, Tessie, hush…” But he couldn’t calm her.
“Sedate her,” Vicki said, struggling to hold Theresa’s flailing arms. “Jackson… it’s kinder.”
He did. Then he and Vicki worked on Theresa’s limp body. He pumped out the contents of her stomach and sent specialized robotic scouring tubes down her esophagus and bronchial tree, up her rectum, into her nose and ears and vagina and across her retinas. He and Vicki scrubbed every inch of Theresa’s skin with a chemical compound. Vicki cut Theresa’s long fair hair and shaved off the stubble. For that, Jackson left the room. He stood in the hallway and pounded his fists on the wall.
When he returned, Vicki was kind enough not to look directly at his face.
He inserted an endotracheal tube; the lining of her airway was going to slough and swell, and she would need mechanical help in breathing. Next came an injection to make her sweat as much as possible. An IV laced with nutrients and electrolytes. When he and Vicki were done, they stood over Theresa’s form lying on her bed, covered with a cotton sheet. Invasive monitors fed to a central terminal, supplemented by green, texture monitor patches dotting her skin. She looked. Jackson thought despairingly, like a skinny plucked moldy sparrow.
Vicki said, “I’ll stay, Jackson. You can’t nurse your sister through this alone.”
“I ordered a nursing ’bot, with radiation-sickness software. It’ll be here soon. It had to be shipped from Atlanta.”
“No substitute for people.”
“Do you know anything about radiation sickness?” he said, more harshly than he intended.
“You’ll teach me.”
“But Lizzie and Dirk—”
“—don’t need me,” she finished. “Lizzie can manage fine. And at least nothing novel and innovative is going to happen at the camp.”
Jackson didn’t smile. He barely heard her. “If Theresa were Changed—”
“I guessed that she wasn’t,” Vicki said. “But why not?”
He ignored the question. “If she were Changed, this would actually be worse. When Miranda Sharifi designed the Cell Cleaner, she didn’t take into account radiation sickness. Well, she couldn’t cover everything. The Cell Cleaner roots out aberrant DNA. That’s how come it catches tumors so early. But Theresa…” He couldn’t finish.
Vicki did it for him. “Is going to be a mass of mutated aberrant DNA. Jackson, I’m so sorry. Where’s the tech pilot?”
“Went home herself, I guess.”
“Then let’s hope she’s related to a doctor, too.”
He looked at Vicki angrily. “I’m not a roving humanitarian, damn it! The pilot isn’t my patient.”
Vicki didn’t answer. But she touched his shoulder briefly before saying, “I’m going to get some sleep. You watch her now and I’ll relieve you in a few hours.”
“Ask the house system to wake you up. Its name is Jones, and the guest-program entry word is ‘Michelangelo.’ ”
“I know,” Vicki said, and Jackson didn’t think to ask her how she knew.
After an hour, he called the Manhattan East Airfield and sent a message to the tech pilot who had flown Theresa Aranow. He appended a file on treating radiation sickness.
Then he pulled a chair close to his sister’s bed and watched her sleeping face while it was still whole.
Vicki crept into the room in the middle of the night and said gently, “Let me sit with her.”
Jackson had been half dozing. He had dreamed fitfully. Huge blobs attacked him, trying to engulf his head… he realized they had been Theresa’s T-cells, being mobilized to fight her own body. He sat up in his chair and said groggily, “No… I’ll stay here.”
“Jackson, you look like shit. Go to bed. Nothing is going to change before morning.”
But Theresa was already changing. Radiation bums across her pale skin, sores inside her mouth and on her tongue.
“Jackson—”
“I’ll stay.”
She pulled up a chair and sat beside him. Some minutes—hours?—later, he woke to find himself stumbling along the hallway to his bedroom, Vicki tugging him along. He didn’t remember falling asleep or waking up. She dumped him fully clothed, on his bed, and instantly he sank into restless dreams.
The next time he woke, Cazie was shaking his shoulder, looming over him like a Greek Fury.
“Jackson! I’ve left you a dozen top-priority messages from K-C—what’s the matter with you? Don’t you realize how important this deal is? And even if you don’t, can’t you at least do me the courtesy of answering once in thirty-six hours even if you’re sulking? God, I can’t believe that you—”