“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says with a tight, pinched face.
“Doc.” Jacks leans in. “Dad.” The word is strained coming from Jacks’s mouth, but it has the desired effect. Doc studies Jacks’s face, his expression conflicted. Jacks continues in his soothing voice, “There’s no reason to keep secrets from me.”
My fingers twitch around the hilt of my knife, and Doc’s eyes flick to it. “Tell us,” I snap, unable control my tone.
“Well . . .” He shrugs, unable to meet Jacks’s gaze. “You seem to already know most of it anyway. New Hope sends me the vaccine, and I give it to the people here, tell them it’s a flu shot. Then we see if it works.”
He says all this so nonchalantly, as if the fact that Dr. Reynolds is using Fort Black as his personal laboratory is nothing at all. I’d thought Ken was sent to study the people here, but it’s far worse—they’re using them as lab rats.
I push aside my horror. “How do you know if it works?” I manage to ask. “Most people stay behind the walls.”
“Most, but not all. Sometimes we’ll get a Scrapper who’s been bitten or one of the men who clean up the Florae bodies or someone on garbage duty.” Another little shrug. “Sometimes I have to create situations in which to test the effectiveness.”
Before I can ask what he means, he moves to stand up. My knife rises with him, and then his hands come up too. “I just want to show you,” he says. He goes to the cabinet and retrieves a paper. “Here, look.” He shoves the paper at me. I glance at it. At the top is typed F1T13. Under that are a lot of chemical names I don’t understand, followed by instructions to remove the site of infection if a patient becomes exposed to a Florae’s bodily fluid.
“Harmless,” he says, as if the meaning of what I’m looking at should be obvious to me. “Jacks, you yourself kept records for me.”
Jacks glances at me. “Amy, I swear I didn’t know.” He looks back to Doc, with a look of realization on his face. “I was injected with that F1T13 thing . . . and a bunch of shots before that. What about side effects? And all those women who died last year?”
“That was . . . regrettable.”
After an empty moment, I repeat the word. “Regrettable?”
Doc sits back down. No shrug this time, at least. He plays with his ear nervously. “New Hope sent me a fertility drug to test on the women. I was unprepared for the strength of the adverse reaction. So many died. . . . I had no way of knowing that a side effect would be a high risk of hypertension. As soon as I saw the increase in deaths caused by heart attack and stroke, I discontinued the study.”
“You wouldn’t do something like this. . . .” Jacks’s face betrays his horror. I know what he’s feeling. I felt that way when I found out what my mother had done, what she had created. Jacks backs away, reaching behind him for something to steady himself on.
I reach out and take Jacks’s hand. “You’re responsible for their deaths,” I say to Doc.
“No. No,” Doc protests. “I’m just the observer, the middleman. I get the medicine and instructions. Give this batch to women, give this batch to children. Give the potential Florae vaccine to everyone.”
“You gave that shit to me,” Jacks says, unbelieving.
“Yes, but the Florae vaccine’s only side effect seems to be an increased tendency toward violence.”
He says this as if it’s somehow a good thing. I’m so angry, I have to concentrate on keeping my breathing even. These people are making Fort Black even more dangerous. As if it needed the help. And I can’t even think about the women they so “regrettably” killed.
“What . . . ,” Jacks asks quietly. “What about the Black Pox? Was that you, too?”
“No. That’s just an unfortunate mutation of the chicken pox virus. We had nothing to do with that. I’m not responsible for every disease that manifests. Where there are people, there is sickness. There always has been and always will be.”
“It makes your job easier,” I say with venom in my voice. “When people die by your hand, you can blame some random virus.”
Doc looks down and doesn’t respond.
I give Jacks’s hand a squeeze before releasing it. From my baggy shorts I pull out the sketch of Ken. I hold it up for him to see.
“Do you know this man?”
“No,” he answers quickly.
“He’s lying,” Jacks tells me. I wish Jacks knew sign language. I wish I could take his hand again and have him sign to me, like Rice could. I’d ask him if he really knew Doc was lying or if he was just bluffing again.
“You lied to us for years, Dad,” he spits out the last word. “About the drugs, about your downward spiral of a career.”
“I haven’t lied to you about any of this, Jacks. I just didn’t tell you. I thought it would be better for you if you didn’t know.”
It stings, knowing Jacks used this exact excuse for not telling me Doc was his father. Like father, like son. Jacks just shakes his head though, and I realize it’s not really the same at all.
“That’s the bullshit you used to give Mom. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to worry. No, it’s better to have reality come crashing down all at once. It’s better to find out from a random nurse that Mom ran into in the grocery store that your father lost his medical license for stealing drugs. It’s better to find out that we have no money when the car is being repossessed and the house is being foreclosed on. It’s better to find out that your father has been playing mad scientist with people’s lives, years after the fact.”
Doc considers this for a moment, then looks past Jacks at me. “Amy, are you sure you want to dig any deeper?” he pleads. “You have many valuable skills. You could make a good life for yourself in Fort Black.”
“You’re insane,” I whisper.
But he goes on. “Don’t you want to just go back home with Jacks and forget all this? I was going to contact New Hope when you first arrived; I had been told to look out for you. But I saw you two together, and I talked it over with my brother. We knew you and Jacks would get along. We thought it would be better for you both.”
“My uncle . . . he knows about all this?” Jacks asks. He shakes his head. “Of course he does.”
Doc nods, his jaw tight. “The testing has been going on for a long time,” he continues. “My brother sold Fort Black out long before the infection broke. Hutsen-Prime had been using the prisoners as test subjects and paying the Warden a fair price.”
“When he hired you, I actually thought he was trying to help you,” Jacks says. “He even convinced me and Layla to come here to talk to you. To forgive you. That’s why we were here when the infection broke out. I thought he wanted to help us patch things up.”
“Don’t act so naive, Jacks. You know what kind of man your uncle is. But we’re looking out for you.” Doc turns to me. “I was told if you came here to report it immediately to New Hope and we didn’t. If you back down now, you can live here. You’ll be safe with Jacks. Why get involved?”
“I’m already involved,” I tell him. Even if I wanted to forget New Hope, I couldn’t. Not with all I left behind there. I hold up the sketch. “Do. You. Know. Him?”
Doc doesn’t look at it again. Instead he looks at me, his eyes cold. “You’re talking about Ken Oh. He’s a researcher for New Hope. He works on the vaccines and brings them to me when they’re modified.”
I let out a long breath. Finally I’m getting somewhere. “And where can I find him?”
“I’ve already let him know that you’re looking for him.” He taps his ear with a sad smile.
“How . . . ?” I start, but then I realize. He contacted Ken the same way Kay contacted me. Through an earpiece. I can just see it glinting in his ear.