50

 

I RACE OVER to the table, pulling Sissy along with me.

“Gene?”

There’s no time to explain what I’m doing. In the dark, it takes me a second to locate it on the table. There. I grab it—the hypodermic needle Ashley June left for me to use. I thrust the needle into the crook of my arm, depress the needle halfway down.

“Do you trust me, Sissy?” I say.

“What are you—”

I pull her shirt sleeve up, inject her. She doesn’t resist or flinch, only stares at me. I push the remaining fluid into her bloodstream.

And it hits me right then. A spasm of cold wetness shudders through my viscera, a cold blast that suddenly, on a dime, turns boiling hot. My bones, cells, the electrons within those cells, all set aflame. My legs turn to ash as I slump down onto the tabletop. My body slides to the ground.

Sissy kneels next to me. “Gene? What’s happening to you?”

Lying on the floor, I feel the sway of the Domain Building, its oscillations keening wider and wider. I hear their howls ratcheting up in volume, so many of thousands of them, their screams mirroring the frenzy in my own head.

“Gene?”

Hard to speak. But the pain subsides for just a moment. “I injected us with concentrated dusker serum. We’ll turn really quickly, in under a minute.”

“What? Say that again?”

“We’re going to turn. Human to dusker.”

Her eyes widen with horror. “What the hell have you done?”

“No, Sissy, listen. This is the only way we survive.”

She stares down at her arm. At the spot I injected her, right above the branding. Her eyes huge with disbelief. “You’ve turned me into a … dusker?”

“No, listen, Sissy.” I clutch her arm, hold on desperately like it’s a rope over a canyon. “This is the only way we survive. Once we turn, we become them. We won’t smell. We won’t stick out. We’ll blend in seamlessly. Don’t you get it? We won’t be prey. When they break in, they won’t be able to find us. We can get the hell out of here.”

“But Gene,” she says. “We become them. I’d rather die—”

“No. Listen.” I lean in closer. “Once we’re somewhere safe, we ingest each other’s blood. We’ll re-turn. We’ll become human again.”

“How can you be so sure—”

“We’re the Origin. We’re the cure!”

“I know that! But you still shouldn’t have—”

“I don’t want to die, Sissy!”

“And I don’t want to live if it means becoming one of them!”

Now I grab both her arms. “This is the only way David has a chance to survive.” Something in her eyes relents at the mention of his name. “We get out of here alive, we book for the Palace. We get him out of that tank. Think of him, Sissy!” An idea comes to mind. “Once we get back to the Palace, we find the Origin weapons and use them on each other. We’ll re-turn much faster that way.”

Her chest rises and falls, uncertainty swimming in her eyes.

“We can do this, Sissy. We won’t forget who we are.”

Her eyebrows knit close together, a deep vertical line creasing between them. Her hands suddenly clench. “Gene, it’s beginning!” she cries as her body arches upward, her back bending and locking in place. I reach for her, wrapping myself around her, ease her down to the floor. Her arms start to thrash, smacking me across the face, as cold-hot sweat gushes out of her pores like lava ice. Then she calms, in the eye of the storm I entered a few seconds ago.

And which I am now leaving. The internal burning comes even hotter now, scorching my bones but somehow freezing the marrow. My vision goes white, then red, the colors reversing themselves like a photograph negative. Acid for blood, hot coals for organs, boiling soup for brains.

Never forget, I start to say. But the words are mush on my burning tongue, and my tongue is swollen and unwieldy. Then a cloud blooms in my vision, terrible and horrific, a thousand petals of black that burst into pollens of poison. I’m turning, it’s overtaking me, it’s a mistake! And then my body goes limp, and—