“What?” Jaxon asked, frowning over at me.
“Disease on Starway 8.”
His mouth thinned. “It’s either something new, or…”
“Yeah.” I nodded, my stomach knotting up.
With our efforts, our thefts of cure-alls over the last five years, the director and other personnel on Starway 8 were fairly well-protected against disease. So were many of the children. But we hadn’t managed to get any inoculations to them in almost a year. That meant this was either a mutated strain of some already-known sickness, which would make it even more dangerous; something entirely new that could hit anyone; or something that had been around for a while, and it was the newcomers and the little ones who were dropping like bees covered in pesticides.
My heart turned over like lead. There had to be something we could do.
I sprang up, disturbing Bonk enough for him to crack open one greenish-yellow eye. “You want this?” I asked Jaxon, holding out the tablet.
He shook his head, so I powered down and then slid the tablet back into the cubbyhole under my console.
“Where are you going?” Jax’s question, or rather the wariness in his voice, made me hesitate midstep.
“Nowhere.” I glanced at him over my shoulder, my hand already reaching for the touch panel adjacent to the automatic door. “Staying on the ship. I’ll be back soon.”
He nodded, and I let myself off the bridge, heading for the lab attachment I’d closed up tightly two days earlier. My heart pounded a little harder with each step I took along theEndeavor’s corridors, across the central cargo bay, and then through the rear air lock and accordion-like vacuum seal.What am I doing?
Then again, I’d acted on some pretty bad ideas in the last several days. Why stop now?
The second I entered the stolen lab, the stale air hit me like a dirty sock in the face. My breaths tasted like crap on my tongue and didn’t quite satisfy my lungs.
I shut the door again and cautiously sniffed, adjusting to the stuffiness. We’d kept the lab sufficiently ventilated for Big Guy’s sake, but I’d stopped doing that when he’d left, and I hadn’t thought anyone would be back in here, least of all me.
The oxygen levels seemed okay—although definitely not ideal—and if I hadn’t been about to do the unthinkable, I’d have gone back and opened all the doors to let in some fresh air again. Being locked inside a silent metal can with rank O2and no systems running was totally unnerving, but there was no way I was risking an accidental audience for this.
In finding the concealed test tubes with my initials and ID number on them, Big Guy had helped me link the enhancer to my blood. I never got sick, and Fiona had said the false vaccines boosted healing. What if I could boost healing at the orphanage without giving the children something invasive, altering, and possibly dangerous like that military-engineered cocktail? The Overseer’s serum did who-knew-what to a person, but what if Fiona could use her knowledge or her medicinal plants to make something less risky out of one of the serum’s main ingredients?
At least, I hoped it would be less risky. I didn’t know what made my blood different, but I’d been carrying it around inside me for twenty-six years and it hadn’t killed me or made me sick or insane. Chances were, it wouldn’t harm the kids, either.
All those days in a frightened haze, all those vials of blood stolen from me, and no one had ever told me what they’d found; they’d just taken. And my knowledge was as incomplete as ever, because I hadn’t let anyone near me with a needle since the day my father decided I was no longer worth keeping around. Not even Surral had ever gotten a blood sample out of me, and she was my doctor.
Maybe it was time to finally find out what the hell was inside me. It would be worth it if I could help Starway 8.
Shoving aside remembered whispers of “foreign,” “inexplicable,” and “unknown” that still made my hair stand up with a shiver, I went directly to what I needed and opened one of the drawers I’d taken stock of during a previous exploration of the lab attachment.
Bingo. Needles. Vials. Blood bags. Everything in sterile cases.
It was too bad I’d dumped the test tubes Big Guy had found, or I wouldn’t have to do this.
Trying not to overthink my actions, I pushed up my sleeve before I could change my mind. I grabbed a rubber strip and tied it just above my elbow with the help of one hand and my teeth. Then I sprayed the inner part of my elbow with a disinfectant, feeling more and more detached the further I got into the process.
I knew exactly what to expect. The cool dampness on my skin that would almost instantly evaporate. The eye-stinging, nose-wrinkling odor of antiseptic. The sharp prick and then the steady flow of blood. Sometimes, they’d drained me straight into oblivion.
I paused, the syringe in my almost-steady hand. I’d never drawn my own blood before, and I had definitely never given it voluntarily. But doing this on my own terms, for my own reasons, was different and somehow empowering. I didn’t know if I was making a good decision, or the right one, but at least it was mine.Mychoice.
I looked down at my pale skin and at the needle poised over my inner elbow. My heart raced, and the tourniquet felt tight and uncomfortable.
Who could this hurt? I’d kissed people, had sex with Gabe, bled on just about all of my crew members, and whatever was different about my blood or fluids had never harmed them. There was no reason to think my body contained anything damaging to other people, at least not in its natural state.
I forced the slight tremor from my hand. If I was going to do this, there was no sense in mucking it up with the jitters. I’d seen my blood drawn often enough to have the right idea about technique, and I went straight for the vein I knew worked the best. Maybe it was more the feel of the process I knew by heart? In any case, I got blood flowing into the syringe on only the second try and then filled up a whole blood bag before calling it quits.
Sliding the needle out of my vein, I held a sterile compress to my arm until blood stopped welling from the tiny hole I’d made. I wondered if I felt a little woozy. I couldn’t tell. It might have been my memory supplying everything about how I thought Ishouldfeel after something like this—how I often had.
In the end, I decided it was just the ghost of the past haunting my imagination. I stood and felt fine. I pulled my sleeve down, not bothering with any kind of bandage, and then threw the used needle and syringe into the covered biohazard trash.
