I remind myself that I am dead inside.
I’ve been dead inside for years.
I watch in cold silence as striations of blood fracture the snowy ground beneath him. When I speak, my voice feels faraway. Flat.
“How did you do that?” I ask.
Damani laughs, eyeing me then with something like appreciation before studying a bloody, sooty James on-screen. “You really are one of our best executioners,” she says. “Soledad always talked about how unflappable you were. He said you once ate an entire sandwich after decapitating a prisoner.”
That’s a lie, I don’t say to her.
James begins to stir, a strangled cry ripping from his throat. The bend of his limbs, I note, are unnatural; shards of bone have pushed through his pant leg, his shirtsleeve.
My chest caves in only a little.
Softly, I say, “I have no memory of being offered a sandwich.”
Damani laughs again, louder this time. “Right. Anyway, we remote-detonated the stock of artillery he stole.” She nods at James, now convulsing with pain. “The subject doesn’t seem to understand that everything he learned from his brother was first taught to him by his father—who was trained, from the beginning, byus.”
“Idiot,” I whisper, watching him struggle.
James groans, lifting a shaking hand to his chest, then his broken arm, his broken leg. He unleashes a stream of expletives before slackening, gasping for air.
“Obviously we don’t want him to die, not yet,” says Damani, “but this incapacitation gives us the time we need to prepare for the next phase. Klaus predicts that, in addition to breaking major bones, the severity of the blast will cause the subject to sustain a partial tear of a mid-cervical vertebrae and a hemorrhage of the brain. The subject’s powers are expected to be strong enough to revive him overnight, granting us a recess of roughly six to eight hours in the program.” She turns to me, opening her mouth to say more, then hesitates.
“It’s a relief,” she says finally, “that no one here carries the mutative gene anymore. Isn’t it?”
I say nothing at first, trying to decide whether this is a test. But then, with The Reestablishment, most things are a test.
All of us on the island were administered the mutative vaccine, the gene-editing therapy that reversed the effects of an experimental program designed by The Reestablishment in its early years. All supernormal transmutations—like James’s healing powers—were erased from the population overnight. Everyone, as a result, became much easier to govern.
Everyone, except me.
“Isn’t it?” she asks again.
I nod.
“The experiment,” Damani says, “brilliant though it was for its time, proved an enormous headache back on the mainland.” She smiles now, looking strange. “People running around with unregulated, untested powers. They turned all our hard work against us in the end. Didn’t they?”
This is the circulating theory, the disturbing hypothesis about Rosabelle Wolff, daughter of the disgraced, high-ranking official who sold himself to the rebels for a song. People believe I can’t connect to the Nexus because I retained the mutative gene; that I somehow possess a power strong enough to resist the advances of technology. Some people think my father had something to do with it. That I’m a plant, a double agent. The fact that they can’t read my mind makes it impossible to be certain—but how this might be true,I can’t even fathom.
I haven’t spoken to my father in over a decade.
“Didn’t they?” she asks again.
“Yes,” I say. “They did.”
There’s a brutalcrunch, then a piercing scream, and I turn sharply to the screens, where James is attempting to put his leg back together. His hands are slick with blood, his face contorted in pain. For a moment I think I can’t imagine his agony, and then I remember that I can.
“We’re learning from our mistakes, Rosabelle. We’ve learned we need to control every aspect of the experiment ad infinitum. Forever.” Damani places a hand on my shoulder, and I resist the impulse to snap her neck. “Without constant control, we can’t guarantee results, can we?”
“No,” I say. “We can’t.”
She holds my eyes for a beat. “Your meeting with Soledad was originally scheduled for tomorrow. In advance of your imminent deployment, you’ll complete your interrogation today. Once you’ve been cleared, Lieutenant Rivers will walk you through the next movements of the mission.”
I feel the rise of panic. “Commander, with all due respect, I need to speak with my sister—”
“Later,” she says, before nodding toward the exit.
