“You forgot about me.” Her lips are closed as usual, but her voice rings clear with the accusation. Her eyes lift and she glares at me, her expression perfectly matching the saw’s edge of her words.
“Oh, Ana.” I don’t know what to say. Where to start. And there isn’t time either. I can’t endanger my elixir. It’s the only thing that might get both me and Dyl out of this whole mess together. I clutch the cold bag full of bottles close to my chest.
Ana doesn’t move, but extends her hand delicately toward my precious cargo. I feel the pressure of her invisible touch as she taps my bag from afar. She comes closer, and I stiffen.
“That’s your treasure?” her voice asks, like a small child.
“Sort of. I’m hoping to get back something . . . someone I lost.” In whatever strange and tilted world she’s in, I could get away with talking riddles, but I cannot lie. Especially not now.
“A trinket for a treasure,” her voice intones, and her hand reaches to pat my cheek. Her corporeal touch is nothing like the whispery ones from afar. She’s so real, so warm. So here. The gentle gesture undoes me. After a minute, I wipe away the mess on my face and adjust my grip on the bottles.
“Oh, Ana! I have to go. It’s time.”
“Here.” She reaches into the fridge and grabs Cy’s brew, the last bottle I almost took. “You need it. Brother doesn’t.”
“But—”
“And this.” She pulls out an entire rack of thimble-sized vials of green liquid.
“What is that?”
“Vera’s skin.”
“I can’t use that,” I say, and push the tray away, but Ana shoves it back at me. She opens the other refrigerator door and waves at the entire Carus supply of traits in their bottles.
“You need your family.”
“How is this going to help?”
“They are too much for you. Caliga will bring darkness, the sickness. Tegg has armor that cannot break, even with a knife. And there are others too. Blink, the one who swims in the black. The strong one, Bill.”
“And green skin is going to help me how?” I shake my head. “It took Callie a week before Vera’s injections worked on her.” I pause, thinking. No, it would never work in time. But maybe it could. I run to a different fridge where the rest of the newly made bio-accelerant is. It seemed to work on Callie. I already know it works within Cy. Why not me?
As Ana removes rack after rack, lining up the bottles, I get a vial of bio-accelerant ready. I load a human-sized dose into a skin-pouch and slap it to my shoulder. Ana picks up a tiny green vial and shows it to me.
“How do you know about this stuff?”
“Cy,” she says.
“And you understand how this all works?” I ask, dumbfounded. Ana stops for a second and holds out the bottle of green liquid.
“Science is easy. It follows rules. This”—she taps her chest—“has no map.”
Oh. While I ponder a universe-sized amount of philosophy in her simple sentence, Ana gathers a pile of syringes.
“You need your family,” she repeats, waiting.
My family. I’m going to take them with me after all. I smile. For the first time in days, I don’t feel alone.
In the next half hour, Ana helps me load up syringe after syringe.
“You’re sure this won’t kill me?” I say, after the first injection goes into my forearm, forming a bleb of green under the skin.
“We’re all going to die sometime,” she says, bringing me another syringe.
Gah. She didn’t really answer my question. Ana delivers the next bee sting of a shot. I wince, waiting for a horrible sign that the green gook is going to kill me, but it doesn’t happen.
I pull up my shirt and see that my stomach is covered in round green patches. So are my arms and my legs. My sleeves and leggings will keep them hidden.
Next is a tray of Hex’s stuff. It didn’t make Callie grow extra limbs, so who knows what this stuff is going to do. Hex has thirty tiny different plastic vials, all labeled with his boy-scrawl. One row is labeled SUPERFAILS. I pull one out that catches my eye and peer at the writing on the cap.
Hand-growth formula / Finger-locking good
Typical Hex humor, except I have no idea what he means. I grab two of those, plus another.
Eyelids in triplicate. Screw sunglasses!
I take the leftover accelerant and add it to each of the vials. Then I gather up a collection of them in my hands. Where am I going to hide these? My cold pack only fits the two vials of my elixir, and I’ve no pockets. I peek down the neck of my shirt, eyeing my bra.
Well, this is convenient. What else is going to go in there, after all? It’s just excess real estate. Goosebumps erupt as I tuck each cold vial into my bra. Good thing the vials are tiny. After the last adjustment to the vault of my newly grown chest, Ana pulls my hand toward the door.
“One more.”
She drags me into the hallway, leading me downstairs to Marka’s lab. I nearly trip trying to keep up with her. Despite the maze-like hallways, she finds the lab with faultless accuracy. Inside, the darkness contrasts against the backlit wall of scents. My finger touches a glass door.
“But she said her trait isn’t usable.”
Ana shrugs, and says simply, “It’s Marka. Bring her with you.” She unearths a tiny pillbox from Marka’s desk labeled HYPEROSMIA, PO BATCH 107. She dumps the three peach-colored tablets into my palm.
“It will open the eyes of your nose,” she says.
“Okay.” I try desperately to refrain from visualizing eyeballs sprouting from the tip of my schnoz. Secretly, though, I doubt I’ll use it. The way Marka freaks out when she smells normal Neian air can’t be helpful. I won’t hurt Ana’s feelings, so I wrap the pills in a folded paper and stuff it next to Hex’s tiny bottles.
Now I just need to get out of here. In her rumpled nightgown, Ana follows me as I run out of Marka’s lab and head to the front door of Carus.
“Can you unlock the doors, Ana?”
She shakes her head and promptly crumples into a ball on the floor. I knew her mood would only last so long. She kneads her belly with her fingertips. I pull her hand away, risking a slap, but she lets me. Her fingertips are smooth and silky. Something’s wrong. I bring her hand closer and see that the pads of her fingertips are scarred by flat skin. Something or someone burned off the whorls and lines of her fingerprints.
“They open nothing,” Ana says.
“Did Marka do this to you?”
She shakes her head, rocks a little more.
“Micah,” I say. “Micah did this.”
Ana doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to.
CHAPTER 26
WE HEAD TO MY ROOM. THE CITY is lit with the yellow-green lights studding the underside of the agriplane. Blue ones glow on the corners of buildings below.
“Open windows,” I bark. The three invisible glass squares move aside, disappearing into the layers of the thick glass. The perpetually balmy Neian air breezes in with its familiar smelclass="underline" the stagnant odor of a city shrouded under a ceiling-sky of crops.
On my bed, Dyl’s purse is curled into a small lump. I spill out all the items onto the bed. In the empty purse, I stow the cold pack with the Zelia-brand of elixir and a microcard with copies of my notes. I hold the ring pillow and Dyl’s holo stud, thinking.
I’ve missed listening to her voice on the diary, but Wilbert’s dream/wake concoction has been too much to handle; adding Dyl’s voice would have been intolerable. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m going to get her back and screw the odds. When she’s safe again, I’ll have her tell me everything she never had the chance to, because I’d stopped listening.