Chapter 31
“You… what?”
“I finished it,” Bella repeated, but that didn’t make the fact any more digestible. God, Yasmine was surprised she didn’t throw up right then and there. It felt like someone had stuck putty inside of her lungs. Her breath could barely maneuver around it.
She’d given that one-month deadline to Bella out of pure desperation, not out of actual confidence. As much as she did believe in Bella’s intelligence, there was being smart, and then there was being able to summon biblical miracles.
But Bella didn’t look like she was joking, or lying. A rarity.
Yasmine choked out, “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry,” Bella said. “I’ll explain.”
There was something odd in the tone of her voice. She should have been overjoyed. She should have been lording this over Yasmine like she deserved to. But she was delivering the information like a doctor delivered bad news.
Before Yasmine could question her about it, Bella was pulling her out of her seat, toward the dinosaur of a lab computer. Wallace had been moved to a makeshift hospital bed a couple of feet away, and Yasmine pulled away briefly to check on him.
She couldn’t help it—even if Bella said he was fine, even if she was still at risk of having another Nightmare if she looked at his injuries too long—this was her son.
There was never going to be an option where she looked away.
What she saw filled her both with relief, and a renewed sense of terrible unease. On the upside, his vitals did look stable. All the correct lines were spiking and rolling on the monitor. But physically, he looked exactly the same as before: withered.
His arms were tight and weak. He’d lost so much muscle mass.
Only now, with the evidence laid out skinny and stricken in front of her, could she truly process how horrific Bella’s family’s powers were.
They’d reduced him to something as fragile as an egg shell.
But he’s alive.
She rammed that thought through her skull with a jackhammer, over and over.
Muscle can easily be regained. Wallace was like her, an infernal busy-body. He’d be training his calves into overdrive the minute he was back to walking, zigzagging around Manhattan like a worker bee on the way to his little job.
And if Bella could really make him immortal—gooseflesh ran down her arms just at the thought—he’d be back on his feet even sooner.
As if sensing the turn in Yasmine’s thoughts, Bella’s warm fingers pulled at her wrist, prying it from the side of Wallace’s bed.
“It’ll be better if we cover the research before he wakes up,” she said gently. “The last thing you’ll want is to have to pick between comforting your son and listening to me drone on about molecular biology.”
Yasmine’s fingers tightened once more on the cool metal of the gurney, an innate reflex, as if he was being taken away from her again, before she finally loosened her grip.
You’ll just be sitting a few feet away. Don’t be dramatic.
In a show of rare obedience towards rationality, she joined Bella by the computer.
Thankfully, what Bella had ready to present to her was definitely interesting enough to serve as a worthy distraction—on the screen was a high-definition picture of…
something? Yasmine’s mind reeled to place it.
What it looked like was a strand of black frayed hair, picked out of a cheap wig, but it couldn’t be that, because this picture was clearly zoomed in a thousand times smaller than the human eye could ever perceive.
“Alright,” Yasmine said, perching her elbows on the desk and leaning in towards the pixels. “Tell me what I’m looking at, because I have no fucking clue.”
Bella gave her a warm smile, sliding into the chair next to her and pressing the two of them thigh-to-thigh, just like they used to work a few weeks ago.
God, how many years have passed in these few goddamn weeks?
Before Yasmine could spiral again, Bella drew her attention toward something she hadn’t noticed before—tapping the right portion of the screen with her fingernail.
“That’s a clump of Wallace’s cells,” she said plainly, then slid her finger towards the black strand of hair. “And that’s my infection.”
“Wait, that’s the fungus?”
Now that Bella said it, Yasmine could immediately spot the resemblance.
It looked almost identical in color and thickness to the black strands that had invaded Bella’s cells and taken over her mitochondria.
But what had thrown her off was the way it was splintered into many split ends—splattered, as if someone had flayed it alive with a hairbrush.
“Mhm. I captured a few back-to-back shots of it, like my very own stop motion film.” She began pressing down on the arrow keys. “You can see here, it looks pretty normal, but then I introduced a bit of protein isolated from Wallace’s genome and… and… boom.”
The last captured photo was like the aftermath of a battlefield. The fungus had been completely lysed—decimated into shriveled, shredded husks lying around like corpses.
Yasmine slowly turned to face Bella, and they shared a long, loaded look. It felt like a lit fuse slowly approaching the waiting body of the bomb.
“His enzymes… killed the fungus?”
There was no fucking way. She was probably way off base. That would mean—
“Assassinated it, really,” Bella cut her off, sounding vaguely proud of him.
“The human children of vampires are very often unturnable, right? I think this is why. They must have a gene mutation that specifically immunizes them against this fungus. His body is literally inhospitable to bloodsucking. Bless his pure heart.”
Yasmine’s chest felt like it was seizing. “But what does that mean for him? If his body is inhospitable to vampirism, could he ever be made immortal?”
Bella gave her a tight smile.
“Made… yes,” she said. “You could use a pretty standard stabilizing agent—something that matches his genetic markers but can act as a delivery system for the fungus—we can essentially trick his cells into accepting it. Like a Trojan horse.”
Yasmine took a shaky breath in. “God. I hate you. You’re a fucking genius, Bella,” she said, then expelled the air trapped in her chest. “Biomimetic cloaking.”
“Exactly,” Bella exhaled, blushing slightly. “But that would still make him a vampire. He’d still have to drink blood to live, probably work through a sun allergy. That’s not what you tasked me with. You said one month to figure out immortality, so I…”
Bella turned her attention back to the screen and tapped a sequence on the keyboard, so the shriveled cells vanished. In their place appeared a towering, three-dimensional genomic map of the fungus, twisting slowly in a bright blue rendering.
Yasmine leaned so close to the screen that the blue light washed out her skin.
“There’s more?” Her eyes traced the intricate branches of the model. It was like observing a network of densely interconnected roots. It was miraculous. “What is this?”
“Just a full map of the fungus’s genome.”
Yasmine nearly slapped her across the face.
"Just a—" she gasped out, her voice dropping into a stunned, hollow register. "Bella… do not fuck with me.”
“Trust me, I would not have skipped sleeping for three nights just to fuck with you.”
“Three nights? This should have taken a team of geneticists a year."
For the first time in weeks, a flicker of genuine, quiet pride sparked in Bella’s eyes.
“Not my fault they’re slow,” she said simply, but didn’t pause to soak in the compliment.
She was already moving on, tapping the glass to indicate a dark knot in the molecular chain.
“This specific section right here—this is the L-Vamp gene cluster. It’s the part that forces the body to depend on blood to survive. ”
Before Yasmine could jump in, Bella was hitting the spacebar, and a tiny, glowing DNA strand drifted across the screen. It latched onto the L-Vamp cluster, and with a clean, digital snap, the knot was deleted entirely, vanishing from the model.
“So I built a genetic sniper,” Bella explained.
“A synthetic retrovirus. I’ve programmed it to act like a pair of microscopic scissors.
The second it enters Wallace’s system—or anyone who is infected, for that matter—the virus is going to hijack the fungal cells, hunt down that L-Vamp cluster, and literally snip it out of the infection’s DNA.
It completely amputates the blood dependency, the sun sensitivity, all the extraneous vampiric bits…
It should, theoretically, make the person functionally immortal.
So, yeah. Congratulations, humanity. I’ve officially extended your lease. ”
Bella mimed throwing a fistful of confetti into the air, letting out a mirthless laugh.
Yasmine blinked at her in absolute, fatal astonishment.
“Just… like that?”
“Just like that,” Bella said with a shrug. “Add it to the list of remarkable things that have ever happened on a…” She looked at her phone. “Tuesday.”
For all the moments of Yasmine’s life that had produced a Wikipedia page, absolutely nothing compared to this. Nothing except, maybe, when she met Bella in the first place.
She felt numb. Her chest had completely hollowed out of panic, refilled now with an aggressive, dizzying wave of awe.
Was this how humans felt when they first struck two sticks together and made fire?
She wanted to throw her arms around Bella’s neck.
She wanted to grab her by the collar and kiss her. She wanted to drop to her knees.
Everything felt entirely appropriate and entirely inadequate all at once.
It was a quiet, crushing blow to her pride.
She had spent a lifetime navigating the world with the absolute conviction that she was unmatched, that no one could run at her pace.
What an ugly, bloated delusion. She wasn't the apex of anything.
Standing next to the casual divinity of Bella's mind, Yasmine felt… not small, but entirely, beautifully eclipsed. Her ego didn’t feel shattered. It felt, for the first time, relieved.
It seemed that Atlas could finally shrug.