My brain seemed to slow down and speed up all at once, bouncing between shock and possibilities. “But a beneficial genetic anomaly needs to occur first? Propelling that change?”
Fiona nodded. “In this case, the anomaly seems to have produced a person who’ll never get sick.”
Was I life-form A1? Human, but improved? “Genetic flukes happen all the time, though. Is this one different?” I asked.
“A little.” Fiona shrugged. “It’s not just a small jump; it’s a big one. And it has the potential to spread—if it hasn’t already.”
“What do you mean?” Miko asked.
“I ran diagnostics at the molecular level. It’s a change at the genetic level, and it appears to be a dominant trait,” Fiona said.
Trying to process that, I asked, “How do we help the orphans with it?”
Her tasteless meal as forgotten as mine, she said, “I was hoping at first that this might somehow inoculate them for life, but I was wrong. A1 blood will eradicate the infection, but it’ll also eventually get eliminated from the host body, because it can’t change the host’s own white blood cells. Giving someone A1 blood just temporarily adds to what they’ve already got.”
“How do you know this?” Shiori asked, chiming in for the first time with a question that, as usual, landed in the air somewhere between Fiona and me on the opposite side of the table from her.
“I mixed some of the test blood with some of my own and then watched,” Fiona answered. “The immune cells from A1 and mine didn’t merge in any way. They stayed separate. But A1 cells will help fight off sickness in the short term, like taking medicine. And that just further confirms that there’s no long-term risk.”
“So the shift has to happen at the genetic level?” I asked. “You have to be born with it?”
Fiona confirmed with a nod. “It was either a fluke at conception, and A1 is the first step toward evolution of the human species—ifA1 procreates—or whoever’s blood this is had at least one parent already carrying the genetic material necessary to produce a child with type A1 blood.”
Holy shit!The few bites I’d eaten were about to come back up. Mom got sick—shediedfrom a fever. So either I was the starting point of type A1 blood, or my father…
I couldn’t recall. Had he ever gotten sick?
Noodle-and-red-sauce acid burned in my throat. If the Grand Galactic Overseer was the next step for the human species, we were so incredibly fucked.
And if he was, he’d also used me as a lab rat instead of himself. If he wasexactlylike me, I was going to wring his neck.
Horror percussed through me like the beat of a too-loud drum. If he knew, he could have saved her. All he’d had to do was inject Mom with some of my blood. Or maybe his own.
I jerked back as if slapped.Of coursehe knew. I’d never tried to find out the truth before now because I’d been running from what I thought was something alien and horrible in my blood. And the possibility of my father tracing me back to any tests and finding me had put the fear of all the Powers That Be into me. But Fiona had figured it out in just a couple of days in a makeshift lab full of pieced-together, stolen equipment on a beat-up old cargo ship. With all the technology the Overseer had at his disposal, there was no way he hadn’t known. It was simply that creating enhanced soldiers with my special healing blood had been more important to him than saving Mom.
“Tess?” Miko bumped my leg under the table with her foot. “You all right?”
Rattled to the core, I said, “Yeah. Just thinking.” My voice came out hoarse, and I cleared my throat.
Miko had lost her hand the day of the explosion on Hourglass Mile. No, she didn’tloseit; she sawed it off just before the fortuitous blast. Fortuitous for us, anyway. She and Shiori found theEndeavorbefore Jax and I did. We hadn’t known, or cared, who was on board when we’d vaulted up into the open cargo cruiser and raced toward the bridge. As long as there weren’t guards with guns on the ship, we were good. The two small women huddled in the corner together, one old and blind and the other spewing blood, hadn’t seemed like much of a threat.
That afternoon sometimes still felt like yesterday, especially when I was alone at night in the dark, and with this new, unimagined information about myself, my thoughts raced wildly, just like Jax and I had that day.
I’d powered up the ship and taken stock of the controls—luckily nothing newfangled or fancy—and been ready to take off when Jax had looked out the huge window panels and seen a pair of inmates running across the cargo-level docks. He’d yelled for me to wait, thinking they could make it to us. But then we’d watched as the man was gunned down by the chasing guards, hit in the head. The woman got hit, too—in the leg. She’d fallen, sliding through her companion’s blood.
Even though we hadn’t known them, Jax had run back out, picked her up, and brought her on board the ship with us, somehow escaping the hail of bullets himself. The woman was Fiona. Just like us, she and her partner had run up from the mines, making a break for it as half the prison had dissolved into chaos and flames.
We’d taken off, bullets pinging against the cargo cruiser’s outer armor, and I’d jumped us all the way to the Outer Zones, somehow bumbling through the coordinates math with Jax’s help, even though I’d been terrified of ramming us into a moon.
Everyone was still alive when I slowed us down in 17, and Jax and I did our best to clean and bind Fiona’s wound and doctor the blunt stump of Miko’s arm. Miko had been in shock, in and out of consciousness, and Shiori had been murmuring soft words and holding her close.
There’d been blood everywhere—so much that I was surprised it hadn’t permanently stained the bridge. Something from the explosion had sliced my hand. I had no idea what, but it had throbbed like crazy, and I’d been bleeding, too.
Fiona had seemed like she had a decent chance of making it, but I was sure Miko would die of infection. We’d found the ship’s medical supplies in a severely understocked state. No antibiotics. Some saline. Hardly enough sterile gauze.
Getting help had been out of the question. We’d have endangered any doctor or clinic that chose to assist us, and I was sure someone would see us and turn us in, even in a rebel-friendly zone. That was when Jax first told me about the Fold—a place where we could get medical treatment and disappear. He had friends there. It turned out that Fiona did, too, and that was when they discovered they had more in common than any of us could have possibly known, including a birth planet. We eventually found the rebel hideout, but it had taken days and days of searching, even for people in the know.
And in that time, Miko hadn’t died. She never got even a hint of infection. Neither did Fiona. Nor did I.
