I sat there stinging in the aftermath of what we’d just been told. My head throbbed; my ears rang. It felt like I was waking up from being coldcocked.
Patrick was on his feet, the Winchester dangling at his side. The moonglow through the closed blinds scrolled across the contours of his body. “Come again?”
“Every organism has a purpose,” the Rebel said. “There are workers, fertilizers, spreaders, soldiers. Your and your brother’s purpose is to die.”
“Like now?”
“Not yet. But soon.”
I reached out a wobbly hand like I was trying to shape the air, but I was really trying to shape my own thoughts. “Explain … can you explain what the hell you’re talking about please? Like now?”
The Rebel sat perfectly still. If it weren’t for the amplitude waves on his mask, he might’ve been a statue. “We injected a viral vector into selected human ova stored in fertility banks for women who were infertile.”
“Like Mom,” I said, my voice hoarse.
“What’s a viral vector?” Alex asked.
“Our scientists take a virus designed through natural selection to penetrate human cells—”
“Like smallpox,” I said.
“Not like smallpox,” the Rebel said. “Smallpox.”
“You injected us—the eggs that made us … whatever—with friggin’ smallpox?” I said.
“Yes.”
He tapped his chest, and another hologram floated into existence. This one showed a bunch of oval cells with what looked like dumbbells inside them. A high-magnification image of smallpox? In the hologram a needle pierced one of the cells and withdrew the interior matter. Through the pounding in my head, I wondered how anyone could operate a needle that small.
“First we excised the DNA sequences that made it virulent,” the Rebel said. “We rendered the smallpox inert.”
“So why use it?” I asked.
“Because it’s a suitably spacious virus.”
“Spacious? Who cares if it’s spacious?”
“Chance,” Alex said gently. “Let him talk.”
She reached out, took Patrick’s hand, and tugged him down to sit next to her again on the couch. She put a hand on his knee.
My own knee was bouncing up and down. I was jittery with nerves and fear. I put my palms on my thighs, tried to still them.
“Because what remains after we remove the virulent sequences is a biological vehicle with lots of … cargo room,” the Rebel said. “This allows us to fill this storage space with new genetic material.”
A new needle appeared now in the hologram, filling the punctured cell with fresh matter.
The Rebel said, “The virus acts as before, but rather than infecting the organism—”
“Us,” Patrick said. “We’re the organisms.”
The Rebel continued unwaveringly, dispassionate and clear, “Rather than infecting you, it transports this new genetic material into your cells. More precisely, it transports it to the target DNA sequence on the chosen chromosome, where it inserts itself.”
Now we watched a blue-light rendering of the viral vector channeling through the cells of an organism, burrowing into the DNA ladders, and then injecting its new genetic contents.
“A Trojan horse,” I said.
“I do not understand.”
“Never mind,” I said. “So what is this new genetic material you put inside me and Patrick?” My tone was bitter, laced with anger.
“Immunity to the pollen, as you suggested earlier. That is what protects you from transformation on your eighteenth year.”
“And?” Patrick said through clenched teeth. He went to stand again, but Alex kept her hand firm on his thigh, holding him down.
“And a dispersal mechanism buried inside your cells. Designed to weaponize you.”
“Weaponize…” I couldn’t finish the thought.
The hologram vanished. The Rebel was silent for a moment. Maybe this was his version of struggling for an explanation. “We discussed the pollen of the Harvesters. How it affected select members of your adult population?”
“Yes.”
“Your genetically modified DNA contains a stretch of coding designed to do the same to Hatchlings.”
“The dispersal mechanism,” I said. “We blow up like McCafferty and release a spray that kills the Hatchlings?”
“That is a crude manner of understanding it, but yes.”
“I’d love to hear the un-crude manner,” Alex muttered.
“So that’s what I am?” I said, my voice shaking. “A weapon of mass destruction?”
“Patrick is the weapon,” the Rebel said calmly. “You are merely the fail-safe.”
I sat there, shaking. “I’m not even the damn weapon?”
“You are the backup weapon. We need you to activate as well in case the primary dispersal mechanism fails.”
A horrifying image scratched its way into my brain: McCafferty’s swollen body, blown open atop the water tower. That was gonna happen to Patrick. That was gonna happen to me. What would it feel like? Would part of me know?
I shoved away the fear, grabbed for my anger. It felt safer.
“Well, that’s terrific.” I stood up, banged my hands against my sides. “Not only is my immunity useless, since I’m designed to die, but I don’t even get to sacrifice myself in some dramatic, meaningful way, since I’m just Mr. Secondary. So much for our awesome secret mission. So much for us being humanity’s salvation. The most important people on the planet. Our one job: Stay alive at any cost. For what? So we can die?”
“Chance,” Alex said. “You gotta keep your voice down.”
I leaned forward and jabbed a finger in the Rebel’s mask. “This sucks.”
I sat. Caught my breath. Temper tantrum over.
The Rebel remained motionless.
After a minute or two, Patrick got up and sat next to me on the couch. He put his arm around my shoulders, gave a squeeze, and then let go. He looked at the Rebel.
“Okay,” he said. “So if I do it—detonate or whatever—successfully, then Chance can live, right?”
“That risk cannot be taken. The slightest error in your dispersal mechanism will lead to failure. The odds of activation success of the primary mechanism solely are 57.4563 percent. The odds of success for both primary and secondary mechanisms are 89.5332 percent. Every life on your planet is at stake—”
“I don’t care about everyone on my planet,” Patrick said. “I care about my brother.”
“Patrick,” I said. “If you go, I go. That’s how it’s gonna be.”
He was staring at me, his face as stubborn as ever.
The Rebel said, “A secondary benefit of your … spray, as you put it, is that it will additionally wipe the Harvester pollen from the air.”
Slowly, I shifted my gaze back to the Rebel. “You mean it gets rid of the spores that transform us?”
“It disintegrates them on contact. We engineered it to do so, of course. There would be no point in preserving your planet if we could not save the remaining host organisms on the planet.”
I looked past Patrick to Alex. Her face was red like she was going to cry, but she didn’t cry. Not Alex.
Patrick turned his head and looked at her, too.
She pressed a hand over her mouth. She knew she was the reason.
We wouldn’t die to save all of humanity.
But we’d die to save her.
“Okay,” I said. “So let’s go do this, then.”
The Rebel said, “It is not that simple.” Same infuriatingly rational tone.
I almost laughed. “Of course it’s not.”
“We understand how the Harvesters affect the host species,” he said. “But the Hatchlings are different on every planet.”
“Because they have to steal DNA from the host organisms that suit each environment,” I said, in my best let’s-move-this-along voice.
After all the crap that just got dropped on us, I figured I was allowed some attitude.
“That is correct. Decades ago we were able to prepare you and your brother as dispersal mechanisms.”
Patrick said, “Call me a mechanism one more time and I’ll punch you in your floaty brain.”
The Rebel looked at him. Then continued, “When given the destructive pollen, your bodies are designed to replicate it on a massive scale and release it, spreading it to the Hatchlings. It will replicate inside the Hatchlings using their DNA code and trigger them to pass it from Hatchling to Hatchling, cleaning the air in the process. It is engineered to spread at a massively accelerated rate.”
“What about the Drones and Queens?” I asked.
“They’ve been accounted for as well,” the Rebel said. “The dispersal will make your planet uninhabitable by Harvesters for approximately twenty-four thousand years.”
“Sounds good to me,” Patrick said.
“But because we did not then know what genetic form the Hatchlings would take on your planet, we could not engineer the destructive serum.”
“So we’re dispersal mechanisms with nothing to disperse,” I said.
“You are primed. But not yet armed. It was not possible until the Hatchlings were born. Until we could capture one. We had to examine their unique physiology before we could design a serum precisely fitted to their DNA. Precisely engineered to destroy them.”
“Have you done that?”
“At great cost.”
“What does that mean?” Alex asked.
“The Harvesters raided our last remaining outpost in an attempt to locate the destructive serum we were engineering. They killed us.”
“Except you?”
“And one other. He escaped with the serum. I have received broken transmissions from him, and I believe him to be coherent. I will meet with him. When I do, I will send you another set of coordinates for a meeting. We will bring the serum and inject you.”
“And then it just … works?”
“You are exquisitely designed. Once the serum goes into your bodies, your bodies will know what to do with it.”
“What do we do until then?”
“Check the helmet. Every day. And stay out of sight. We cannot risk your being devoured by a Hatchling.”
The last word was barely out of the Rebel’s mouth when the big front window exploded, the venetian blinds billowing inward. Shards flew at us, scattering across the couch, the armchairs, the carpet. The metal blinds ripped free of their mounting, wrapping around the bulging form on the carpet behind the couch.
It rose. Shook free of the blinds.
The stench hit us.
The hardened fingertips of either hand clicked against one another like jaws.
Nostril holes quivered.
The Hatchling drew himself up to his full height.