I’M INSIDE ARISTOTLE’S MIND, lost in his pain. I’m trying to take it from him and can no longer tell if it is his, or mine.
Cepta is back now. She joins with us, and her help eases the pain enough that I can continue my search inside him—deeper, closer into the coiled strands of his DNA.
And just like Persey, and the last few who died, he is missing some sections of junk DNA that I have. I convince Cepta to let me look inside her again, and her junk DNA is almost identical to mine. There must be some link between these differences and what is happening to Aristotle now; I can feel it.
But I don’t know how to fix it, or if it can be fixed, or what to do. I’m as helpless as I was before.
I ask Cepta what she makes of it, but she doesn’t answer. She’s distracted, deep in Aristotle’s mind. Even as he is about to die, she is trying to learn something from him, and he is somehow resisting, and I’m both puzzled and angry and can’t follow her thoughts.
And then he is gone.
The link between the three of us is broken with his death, and I open my eyes. My vision is defocused, split. It wavers, and then two become one again.
Cepta has moved on to a woman behind us.
Callie is holding a boy’s hand; he’s crying out, and there are tears in her eyes. I frown. What was his name? Jamar—yes, Jamar. His hair—that’s how I remembered him. It sticks out in odd tufts.
Like my hair did when it was growing back after the fire. I changed my hair—changed my DNA.
I don’t walk. He’s on the floor, like Aristotle’s body. Easier to crawl.
Callie protests. “You can’t do this anymore,” she says. She’s right, but how can I stop? He’ll die screaming in pain if I don’t help him right now.
I ease her away and take her place by his side.
I smile at Jamar, hold his eyes and reach out to him. We are joined, inside.
Now there are others in my mind to help. Beatriz has linked them together and found me again. They ease his pain, and I focus deeper inside. Cells, DNA, junk DNA—but like all those who die, he is missing the sequences that I have, that Cepta has.
But what does it actually do?
With Beatriz shielding me, now I can think.
Go back to basics.
Genes in DNA code for RNA; DNA is transcribed to RNA, making a messenger that can be translated into protein—the stuff we are made of, head to toe, is all produced this way.
But junk DNA doesn’t do this—it doesn’t code for any known genes. It’s thought to be structural—purpose or purposes largely unknown. Hence called junk.
How do differences in junk DNA change whether someone lives or dies?
I don’t know.
But die he does: Jamar, and then another, and another.
Until finally they are all gone. I lie down among them, as still as they are, on the ground. Callie tries to raise me, but I can’t even open my eyes. I hear her footsteps; she’s gone. Cepta too. I’m alone with the dead.
What use am I as a healer? Everyone dies, and as each one slips away in a kaleidoscope of fear and agony, they take part of me with them. Soon nothing will be left behind but an exhausted shell, one that has almost stopped feeling anything at all. I wish it would stop completely and take away the pain of the dead—their last thoughts and memories. But the only way that can happen is if I die too.
It wouldn’t be much of a step for me to take now, crossing the line between living and dying. My fatigue is absolute, and with it comes cold, deep and numbing. A cold that settles into my bones, makes them stiff—awkward. As if the parts of me that move don’t coordinate anymore—instead they drag what they are joined to along.
The tiredness and cold are one and the same—I can’t tell them apart. I can’t heal myself. I’m lying still. Quiet. I can’t move or I’ll shatter.
Callie is back now, Xander with her. I vaguely feel him gather me up. He carries me out of the hall of death.
The night air is chill, and I shiver.
I blank out again, and when I come back to myself, I’m in my bed, alone with Callie. She is the one who comforts me now.
My thoughts are thick and slow, but sleep won’t come: too tired to sleep sounds ridiculous, but it’s exactly what I am.
Why didn’t I run away, refuse to try again? I never made a choice—it was thrust upon me.
Xander—he’s my father, but that feels remote and disconnected from who or what I am. He thinks this duty is mine. That it falls on me even as it is killing me.
Because death isn’t just when the last breath is taken and the heart stops beating, when the last synapses in the brain fire and then thought is gone. There are other ways to die—slowly, but just as sure.
When hope is gone, there is nothing left.