Felz clicked the play arrow on the file.
A tight shot: a mouse in a lab tray. It squeaked in obvious pain and tottered a few inches across the tray before toppling over, breathing heavily.
A hand entered the frame—Clayton’s hand, his fingers gripping a pair of tweezers. Clayton’s other hand appeared, and in it, a petri dish. He tweezed out a speck of ambrosia and laid it beside the mouse.
The mouse lay still. Luke was aware of the passage of time only in the tension that built up in his arms and fingers, and the sheen of sweat slicking his forehead.
The mouse dragged itself to the ambrosia. Its squeaks sounded different: almost pleading, though that was surely only Luke’s interpretation. It drew nearer to the speck until—
“Whoa, what the hell happened there?” Luke said.
Felz moved the cursor, backtracking the file. He played it again. Luke concentrated this time—he knew it was coming. And still…
“I can’t make it out.”
“Yes, none of us can,” Felz said. “I’ve replayed that section hundreds of times. We gave it to an audiovisual wizard, had her blow up the image and slow it down—it clarifies nothing. It simply happens too fast.”
“It looks like—”
“Like the ambrosia goes into the mouse, yes. Penetrates its skin. But the ambrosia is gelatinous. How could it solidify itself to pierce flesh, and not leave a wound? We inspected the mouse afterward. No hole. No blood. No scar. We thought since the entry point is near the mouse’s mouth, perhaps it entered there. We slowed the footage down, looked at it frame by frame. One frame, the ambrosia’s there. The next, it’s gone.”
“And it’s inside the mouse.”
“It simply must be,” said Felz.
The video resumed. The mouse lay still a few seconds, then hopped up and began racing around the tray, faster and faster until it flung itself out onto the bench.
Someone said, “Damn!” as the mouse skittered across the table with gleeful abandon. Clayton entered the frame, chasing it. Another man dashed behind him. Next came Clayton’s voice. “I’ve got it.”
The video ended.
Felz said: “Likely you already know what I’m going to tell you. You’ve realized that the Hesperus, the Trieste, and the trillion-odd dollars funding this project wouldn’t have materialized were it not for what happened to that mouse.”
Luke said: “It was cured.”
“The cancer was eradicated. There was not one discoverable cancerous cell in its body. It was riddled with the stuff and then, all gone.”
“What about the ambrosia?” Luke said. “Was it isolated inside the mouse?”
Felz shook his head. “The mouse was totally unchanged, other than the eradication of its cancer. Its amino profile and bone density and factors x, y, and z—all unchanged, except for changes that would naturally occur with the cancer gone.”
“But it’s just a mouse,” said Luke. “And it’s cancer. How can we know this stuff will address the ’Gets in humans?”
“Dr. Nelson, we would have searched for this stuff, as you call it, if all it did was cure cancer in mice. It’s a remarkable discovery any way you slice it. If your brother could have infected a mouse with the ’Gets, well, we would know to a certainty. But the disease doesn’t interact with animals, as you well know. We did, however, perform tests on cancerous human cells. Lab tests only, but the results were promising.”
“And that was enough to spur all this?”
“My God, man, what else were we waiting for? If not now, when?”
“So,” Luke said, “what you’ve found is some kind of—”
“Universal healer?” Felz shook his head wonderingly, a stunned smile on his face. “It would seem so. Imagine a drug that cures everything and anything. Whitewashes all the sickness in your body, fixing you completely. It seems crazy, but—”
“But this isn’t a drug. This is an organism. How do you know the effects aren’t temporary? Or that that stuff isn’t doing something to make it run around like that, to subtly injure the mouse?”
“Like what?”
I mean, controlling it in some way, Luke thought but didn’t say, remembering the weird prickle he’d gotten when he’d stared at the ambrosia.
Felz said: “Are you a religious man, Dr. Nelson? Your brother isn’t. Men like us rarely are. But you?”
Luke shook his head. “My mom used to say she prayed at the church of State and Main, which was the intersection where the local bank sat.”
Felz nodded and said, “I only ask because of something your brother said. It was the one time when he sounded truly helpless—casting his lot with the fates, you could say. He’d been researching the ’Gets before this business with ambrosia. He couldn’t crack it for the life of him. Totally stymied. Then he encountered the ambrosia and couldn’t make heads or tails of it, either.
“One night after another fruitless session with the ambrosia, he said: What if the devil unleashed a perfectly unexplainable plague on humanity? If so, isn’t it equally possible that God created the perfect, if inexplicable cure?” Felz shrugged. “Clayton believes in keys and locks. For every lock, there exists a key. You just have to find those keys. Find them, and trust in the will of a higher power.”
“Locks and keys.”
“Exactly, Dr. Nelson. Locks and keys.”
“And this particular key—you think it’s eight miles down?”
Felz closed the laptop. “That’s the hope. Perhaps there’s an abundance of it. Perhaps—and this is an admittedly out-there hypothesis—what we’ve found so far are shreds off a far larger organism. A mother-organism, if you will.”
A quaver passed down Luke’s spine. A mother-organism. Huge and amorphous and ageless, lying in darkness at the bottom of the sea. Jesus.
“Why wouldn’t Dr. Parks want to be part of this?”
Felz started. “I beg pardon?”
“Dr. Eva Parks. She discovered it. Why wouldn’t she want to be part of perhaps the greatest discovery in human history?”
Of course, Luke knew it had to be Clayton. His bullying ways. He was thinking about their childhood sandbox: how Clay had commandeered the toys for no other purpose than to deprive Luke of the satisfaction of playing with them.
“Dr. Nelson…” Felz licked his lips, smearing that ever-present dab of spit across them. “Dr. Parks committed suicide shortly after the sample arrived in our custody. She hanged herself in her apartment in Maine. In her closet, with a length of nautical rope.”
“Good God. Why would she do such a thing?”
“That I do not know. From all outward appearances she was happy. A good career. Engaged to another doctor she’d met at graduate school.” Felz glanced at the cooler and licked his lips again. “There is no sensible cause, but suicide is not a sensible act.”
A door banged open. Luke and Felz craned their necks toward the sound.
“The very man I’m looking for,” a new voice said.
13.
THE VOICE BELONGED to a woman in combat fatigues. Tall and incredibly broad across the shoulders, that broadness tapering toward her waist, which was cinched in a thick belt. She wore no insignia of rank. Those things didn’t mean as much now, the same way a policeman’s badge carried less heft. Ever since the ’Gets, people were measured by their abilities rather than by the pieces of tin pinned to their chests.