8. 8
Elias was perched on the stool next to me at the workstation, leaning forward on his elbows.
During the first hour, he’d occasionally ask what I was doing or to explain my process, but as time dragged on, he spoke less and less.
I glanced over intermittently, and he never looked quite bored, but the longer I worked, the further off he appeared to be.
I didn’t blame him. I wanted to daydream about Greece, too.
Not wanting to interrupt or distract me, Elias kept his hands to himself, an absolutely monumental task for him. A few times I saw his hand come toward me before he realized what he was doing. He did his best to be good, finally busying himself when he retrieved the laptop from our room.
“They made some heinous shit,” he said, breaking the silence of the last forty-five minutes.
Resting against the eyepiece of the microscope, I was watching the virus destroy a compound I’d added to it. “I’m aware.”
“I’m reading about an artificial adrenaline they made, NP4x,” he said. “They were experimenting on dead animals, bringing them back to life.”
I leaned back, away from my equipment to look at him.
He was wearing his reading glasses. Adamant that his vision was perfect, he swore that he only wore them because reading strained his eyes.
They were cute on him, but I teased him anyway, mostly by calling him old.
I was young and spry in my late twenties, but he was somehow ancient at thirty-one.
“Maybe that’s what they used on Dr. Fassi.” My voice was quiet, not wanting to speak the words.
“Maybe.”
“He was a nice man,” I said. “He deserved better.”
More than simply nice, he was kind. Nice was when he ignored how late I often was, how I ran into the lab at ten after eight with a fresh water bottle and red cheeks from speaking with Elias. Kind was how he built me back up after our lack of progress repeatedly tore me down.
Elias took his glasses off and set them on his keyboard. “I knew him.”
I snorted. “I know. You were obsessed with the donuts his wife made. What were they called, sfenj?”
“I knew him,” he repeated. “Before.”
Before. . . My head tilted to the side. “What do you mean?”
“Fassi was a part of Unit 12.” Elias stared back at me, his expression blank, awaiting my own reaction.
Dr. Fassi was the one who recommended me to the board based on research of mine he had read.
I trusted him. Aside from Elias, he was the reason I came to work every day.
It wouldn't be a stretch to call him a friend.
At least I believed it to be true, yet Elias was telling me he was a government plant.
The United States had their eyes on me before I had even graduated, and dragged me into that Baker and Pryor lab knowing exactly the danger they were putting me into.
They were all complicit in the horrors I'd experienced.
My life was not my own and it never had been. It belonged to everyone else.
“Why would you keep this from me?” I asked, standing up. I backed away from Elias, and he didn’t move an inch.
His hand was in his hair, and I watched the struggle play out on his face. “I couldn’t tell you. I shouldn’t be telling you now.”
“Then why say anything at all?” Honesty was everything, but in that moment I considered how safe being in the dark would feel.
He looked down at the ground. “You deserve to know.”
I ripped off my gloves, throwing them at the trash can.
I missed. “How can you expect me to trust you? Over and over again you tell me that what we have is genuine, but then you tell me the man that hand-plucked me from Michigan was working with you the entire time in some grand conspiracy to stop Dr. Taylor.”
He rested his face in his hands, shaking his head. I wasn’t sure if it was directed at me or himself. “If any other person on Earth had caught Dr. Fassi’s attention, I wouldn’t be here. I’m sorry that it was you.”
“I can’t even look at you.”
The amount of conversations I’d forced Elias into about my suspicions was astronomical.
For months after the incident I asked him if he was ordered to get with me for information.
He promised that wasn’t the case. Trust was not easy for me, and I had to remind myself of how he acted, how much he’d done for me.
I thought it was selflessness, but he might have just been following orders.
I thought we'd been over this, but apparently we hadn't.
“I wanted to tell you,” he said. “I should have.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I wasn't–I’m not permitted to disclose a word about Baker and Pryor or the lead up to it. It’s all classified information.”
“So you tell me now, when I’m trapped in Russia with you, so you can talk your way out of it without me running away.
” Getting angry, I began to clean up around the lab.
I grabbed the gloves that didn’t make it into the trash can and threw them away.
I gathered the untouched slides on the counter and threw them back into the box I pulled them from.
“I can’t wait to hear how you plan to make me believe you this time. ”
“Fassi wanted you to join our team. He was going to make a case that you should be a part of Unit 12,” he confessed.
“I begged him to change his mind. I didn’t want you to be involved.
After I met you, and I mean that first day when you shook my hand in the breakroom, all I wanted to do was protect you from this. You didn't deserve any of it.”
“No. I didn't,” I snapped. “I still don't, but here I am. Is this you protecting me?”
“Yes.” He nodded emphatically. “I'm here because this is all I can do for you now.”
I shook my head. “I can’t believe this.” I’d shared so much of my life with him, secrets and fears and dreams, and all I could feel was confused. I thought he was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I trusted him, possibly against my better judgement, and I didn’t want to.
“I don’t lie to you.” He stood and slowly walked to me. When he was nearly touching me, he spoke again. “Tell me what we have doesn’t feel real to you. Go ahead.”
“A lot of things feel real. I just can't tell what is and isn't.”
“My feelings are pretty clear,” he said. A hand reached up to cup my cheek. “I gave you my dead mom’s ring, Cassie.”
I sighed. “You did.”
It was such a fond memory, too. I’d spent the afternoon poking around his closet, looking through his old photos.
He told me how important I was to him, how he’d been imagining me wearing it for weeks.
Nearly impossible to accept such a sentimental gift, I found it even more difficult to turn it down. He was important to me, too.
“I got in a lot of fucking trouble for getting you out of Baker and Pryor. They’ve almost killed me because of it, sending me to the places they do.”
“So if you die, it’s my fault?” I asked.
“No, it’s mine. All of it is. I–ugh,” he groaned, his free hand reaching up to rub his forehead.
“Tell me why you waited to say this,” I urged. “A real answer.”
More than anything, I wanted him and the life we had only just begun to build together. The life we shared that I believed to be genuine. He communicated everything to me, and I couldn’t believe that he’d kept this to himself. There had to be more, right? More secrets?
“I didn’t think it would matter. I thought you’d leave after a few weeks with me,” he said, his voice soft. His hand fell from my cheek. “After a while, it was never the right time. You weren’t okay. I wasn’t going to make it harder for you.”
I looked at the ground, unsure what to say. It felt real, but I wanted it to be a lie. It would be so much easier if it was all a lie. I could run. I could call Parsons and beg for a helicopter to take Elias away, and I'd work here on my own to fulfill my end of the bargain.
“Cassie,” he whispered.
“I’m really confused,” I said, swallowing hard. My mouth was so dry. “About everything.”
“It doesn't matter what I can or can’t say anymore. I’ll tell you.”
“You should just spit it out.”
He seemed genuine. His reaction to coming here was earnest enough, though that might've had nothing to do with me. Montgomery definitely didn’t like him, as if Elias really was fighting his orders every step of the way.
It didn't feel like a conspiracy against me, but it was fucked. Everything felt fucked.
Elias pulled me into an embrace. I didn’t return the hug, but I didn’t pull away. I let him hold me close.
“I. . .” he trailed off. “I have never felt this way about anyone before. Please believe me.”
I wrapped my arms around him. “I'm mad at you.”
“You should be. Hit me. Cuss me out. I don't care.”
“I can't think about this right now. I need to get back to work.”
He pulled back, hand lingering on my arm. “I'm sorry.”
He wasn't forgiven, and I wouldn't forget that he'd withheld that from me.
At the same time, he shot Dr. Fassi to save my life.
He was thrown around, beaten, and wounded by the man he knew better than I did, and not once did he burden me with his pain.
I grieved, cried, and felt sorry for myself and he wiped my tears away.
But this is not where we needed to have this conversation.
“We're going to talk about this later,” I said, pointing at the stool he'd occupied earlier. “Sit down and be quiet.”
Elias sat where I told him to, resuming his earlier task of report reading, but I could still feel his eyes on me. I considered making him move further from me so I didn't have to smell him, to hear him breathe, but I decided against it. His presence made me feel safe, even if it pissed me off.
This virus was terrifying, more so than Variant-13.
Besides volatile acids, nothing I was doing was breaking through the structure, and it was not possible to inject a corrosive into someone and have them survive.
We were going to have to discover a new element in order to make any headway on a cure.
The door opened behind me. “It is quiet in here.”
It was Misha.