For weeks the news waves had been full of reports of a secret lab on Mars. They talked about genetic experiments, the missing Ferals who had been taken as subjects and the most explosive claim of all: that the MalX was no natural disease and had been released by a powerful corporation named Helios. After one webnet picked it up, the rest had followed and it had gone global.
Rosie struggled to find any satisfaction in the victory. The real perpetrators, those unseen puppeteers Yuang had answered to, were nowhere to be found. They were ghosts, too powerful to touch. When she and Riley took down the Enclave, they had only touched a skein of the Helios web and she was sure they were off somewhere, repairing it, making it stronger.
The Genesis colony was closed now, restricted access only. All they’d been left with was news vision of the United Earth Commission and the Senate sending the Elite in to raid offices long since devoid of any connections to those who had vanished. She wondered what Riley would think – if he was still alive. Would he consider it enough that the world now knew his parents had died trying to expose Helios’s terrible work? Was it enough that he had managed to save at least some of those people who had been in there?
Rosie knew it was selfish but sometimes she felt it was too high a price to pay.
Had it really been worth Juli’s life? Had it been worth Pip disappearing? Had it been worth this?
She stood outside the glass walls of her dad’s room looking in, watching the doctors.
“You okay?” Aunt Essie put her arms loosely around her neck and rested her head against hers.
“Not really,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” her aunt whispered, and they both fell silent.
In the room the doctor was trying to talk to her dad but Rosie could see that he wasn’t making much sense. The hospital staff wanted answers he just couldn’t give. This had never happened before in the MalX floor; people were brought here to die, not to recover.
Rosie held tight to Aunt Essie’s forearm while they checked and re-checked his vitals. Every so often he’d look at her and she tried to smile, but inside she felt a great gaping hole in her chest.
When he’d finally woken in the early hours of the day before, he’d looked at her and smiled a faint slow smile. It was the first time she’d seen him smile for so long and she almost cried, but then he’d spoken. “Rosie, love, where’s your mother?” he’d said.
Then she had cried. He thought her mum was still alive. He didn’t know what day it was, what year. He didn’t remember where they’d been.
The doctor said his mind had fractured, like a switch in his brain had been flipped. Whether it was because of the disease or the stress of everything that had happened, they couldn’t say, but they were sending him to a psychiatric care unit. She was going to live with Aunt Essie, permanently, until he recovered. If he recovered.
“Time to go,” her aunt said and hugged her briefly. “He needs some sleep.” Rosie nodded and wiped a tear from her cheek. “We can come back tomorrow.”
“Okay.” Rosie waved at her dad and he nodded and raised his hand.
Aunt Essie put an arm around her and led her out.
She’d found them a new apartment on the edge of Central West. There hadn’t been enough room at her old one at Orbitcorp. “A new start,” her aunt had said. But Rosie wasn’t sure if it was. It felt more like hiding. They weren’t sure if Helios would be looking for them or not. It seemed unlikely now they’d put the files out and the Enclave was finished, but even so, few people knew where they lived. They would still be looking for Pip, of that she was certain, and if anyone figured out it was his blood that had cured her dad, they would be coming for her and anyone else who had any connection to him.
“I don’t know about you but I could handle the biggest, greasiest bowl of noodles ever,” Aunt Essie said as she opened the door of their apartment. “And maybe a glass of vodka. How about you?”
Rosie cast her a sideways glance and put the bag of groceries they’d bought on the way home on the kitchen bench. “I don’t think vodka is good for my growth,” she said.
“What growth?” Essie locked the door and dumped her bag on the lounge.
But Rosie had stopped listening. On the far side of the bench, just in front of an empty vase, was a smooth green pendant – exactly like the one she wore around her neck – except this one had a set of letters carved roughly into it.
“Aunt Essie,” she whispered.
They both just looked at it for a moment.
“Is that from who I think it’s from?” her aunt said.
“It has to be.” Slowly, Rosie picked it up and traced the R and S with her fingertip. Riley Shore.
“Son of a bitch,” Aunt Essie said, “he broke into our apartment.”
Rosie almost laughed. Only her aunt would look at it that way. “It’s a message,” she said. “He made it out.”
“God knows how.”
For the first time in weeks Rosie felt something that she thought might be hope. Riley was alive.
“This calls for a celebration,” Aunt Essie said and got out two glasses and her bottle of vodka. She poured a shot into her glass and filled Rosie’s with cordial then raised hers high.
“To the man with more lives than a mangy sewer cat.” She grinned.
Later, after her aunt had gone to bed, Rosie took the pendant and strung it on her necklace beside the other one. She stood out on their tiny balcony, holding them both in her hand. The air was cooler fifteen storeys up but she could still feel the waft of heat from the streets below. The lights from Central, the towers and shuttle lines, were like dimming stars, bright but shrouded with humidity. The sounds of the streets rose up to become a hum that penetrated walls and kept going up into space. She looked up at the stars, barely visible against the glow of the city.
The new school year would start soon. She thought about Juli and how she wouldn’t be going, how she would never see the constellations again or know how it felt to turn seventeen, never kiss a boy again. Never do anything again. Rosie felt the little ache near her heart that she thought would always be there now; the first scar, Nerita had called it, the scar that never heals.
She tightened her hand around the pendants and thought about Pip and about Riley and all those people he had managed to get out from Helios’s clutching greedy hands. Perhaps something good had come from it; some people had lived and, miraculously, Riley was one of them. She hoped then that he didn’t want to give up fighting yet, because she felt like she wasn’t done with Helios. They had killed her mother, her friend and made Pip into a murderer and an exile – they deserved to pay for it. No, she wasn’t ready to give up, not by a long shot.