Chapter 1
One
Mara
When the doctors ask what I remember, the answer they want to hear is “Nothing.” If only that were true.
Dr. Benitez clears her throat, drawing my attention away from a poster of a lion with the word Resilience typed beneath it. The doctor’s hair is slicked back today, and she’s wearing eyeshadow, an odd eggplant color pressed into her lids. I wonder if she has a big date tonight.
I’m not sure if people date anymore. Not that it matters, not to someone like me. My romantic prospects died when I did.
“How much do you remember of your time under the virus’s influence, Mara?
” She stands two feet from where I’m propped up on the rusting exam table, her brow creased in concern.
I used to think her puckered expression meant something, but in my six months at the facility, I’ve come to understand Dr. Benitez defaults to anxiety the way I default to indifference.
We all had to find our own coping methods when the world ended. Some of us hardened. Some cracked. Some shattered.
I haven’t figured out which applies to me yet. I didn’t think I’d have to. I thought my time was up the moment the infected man closed his teeth around my wrist.
How much do you remember?
I shake my head. Speech was a mountain to climb in the beginning, the phrases and definitions unearthing themselves and clawing back to my tongue, so I slid into silence for my first month. It’s become another default.
Dr. Benitez purses her lips, but she doesn’t question me. I can’t imagine I’m the first person between these walls to lie. Every single room in this building harbors monsters. Monsters with stories and secrets. Three hundred of us relearning humanity.
My heart beats on a semiregular basis and my lungs are teaching themselves to take in consistent breaths, but none of it matters.
A nasty scar traces down the doctor’s neck from an old wound. The outline of a tranquilizer gun, tucked against her hip, is visible underneath her faded lab coat. I don’t blame her for taking precautions. I don’t trust myself, either, tossed back into this bright, loud, overwhelming world.
She jots something onto her cerulean plastic clipboard. “Dyebucetin varies in its effectiveness in the reparation of cells in the cerebral cortex. It’ll take time.”
Dr. Benitez isn’t sure if the treatment will bring me back to life.
For all the doctors know, the Altered might drop dead—really dead—one day, or grow third arms, or lose all our extremities.
The last two are more my illogical fear than the doctors’, but I used to think the living dead were illogical, and then I became one.
“And what about the nightmares?” she asks.
I grind my teeth. Admitting to the night terrors that have plagued me since I woke to my third life was an early day’s mistake. Memories of the creature I was when the virus hijacked my body and the girl I was before.
What do I remember?
Jeans rolled up to asphalt-torn knees and four legs distorted by the pool water.
The image pulses with the kick of her feet.
She complains her eyes are muddy and boring, and if I were braver, I’d tell her how the sun pulls out flecks of gold and auburn in her irises; I’d tell her looking into them is like drowning. But I am not brave.
“Stopped,” I lie. “Sweet dreams on this end.”
“Please,” the man says, and I know the word used to mean something, but I’ve long stopped caring. His garbled screams are a quiet hum behind his heartbeat and the blood pumping in his veins, warm and alive.
I take his skull between my hands, slamming down, down, down, until he stops screaming.
Dr. Benitez snorts a laugh, covering her mouth with a hand. With a shake of her head, she says, “I suppose it’s a positive sign your sense of humor survived the virus.”
The virus. It sounds so harmless when she says it. Like Letalis Tichnosis—the Tick—was the common cold and not an ancient disease trapped in a glacier, waiting for its chance to escape again. The virus didn’t just gnaw on our brains; it chewed the world to shreds.
Instead of a response, I give her a tiny smile, because it’s what she wants, and I almost mean it. She smiles back as if she’s forgotten where she is, what I am. She does it often: treats me like I’m human.
I am anything but. I’m a patchwork quilt of lacerations and punctures and dry open wounds that have woken up and are protesting their existence as I shuffle back toward life.
Some time ago, I was shot straight through the shoulder, and blood oozes from the cut each time I raise my arm over my head.
Three of the fingers on my left hand are gone, and until the doctors stitched it up, I’d worn the skin and muscle surrounding the bone like a gross-looking claw.
To top it off, two large slashes make an X bisecting my nose.
I am better off than most, and as pesky as the doctor’s questions are, they are kinder than mine would be if the roles were reversed, so complaints are scarce.
“It was humor”—I pause to wrangle my occasionally rebellious tongue—“or my humanity.”