Chapter 9 Rosabelle
Rosabelle
Chapter 9
“Your letter,” Damani says, impatient. “The one from Lieutenant Rivers. Sebastian ,” she corrects herself. “It was confirmed through Clara’s comms that she delivered your mail to you this morning. You don’t remember?”
I resist the urge to pat myself down, search my empty pockets for the small stack of mail Clara handed me only hours ago—no, a lifetime ago. But I’m no longer wearing this morning’s clothes. I’m dressed in a benign set of pink medic scrubs. White tennis shoes. My request for a standard-issue, black tactical uniform was summarily rejected. My boots were not returned to me. My clothes were incinerated.
Papa’s coat—my only winter coat—was destroyed.
“Why would James have my mail?” I manage to ask.
She frowns. “The subject swiped them from your coat at some point before leaving you in the hall. I believe his exact words were: Now we’re even. I suppose it makes sense you wouldn’t remember—you were nearly dead with fever.”
I return my eyes to the screens, heart pounding so hard I’m worried Damani can hear it. Perhaps it’s because it feels like a violation for a stranger to open my mail before I do— or because I have no idea what Sebastian might be sending me this time—or perhaps, more terrifyingly, because I think I do know what he’s sending me and I don’t want to process the news like this, with the eyes of my world watching me—
“Never mind, here we go,” says Damani, nodding up at the monitors. “I was worried I’d missed it.”
Panic wreaks havoc in my chest.
James is stepping into his bullet-riddled utility pants, tugging the waist up around his hips when a sharp corner of an envelope pushes out of a side pocket. I hold my breath, watching as he tugs free the stack, confused for only a second before a smile brightens his features. He shakes a bit of water from his hair, glances at the headline of yesterday’s paper—
ARK ISLAND STILL LEADS THE WORLD
AS ONLY SELF-SUSTAINING NATION
—then folds the slim sheaf back into his pocket. He pins the heavy envelope between his teeth as he zips, buttons, and pulls his blood-crusted sweater over his head and then, finally, sinks into a seated position before the dwindling fire.
“Well, well, well,” he says, turning the stationery over in his hands. “This is some fancy paper.”
Somehow, my heart beats harder.
It strikes me, as I observe him, that James lives in his skin without self-consciousness, comfortable despite the violent scars on his body, despite knowing he’s being watched. This fact inspires in me a voracious envy I’m helpless to suppress.
He looks up at a nearby squirrel, and Damani switches screens to better capture his face.
“People don’t really send letters anymore,” he says to the rodent, ripping open the envelope. “Not unless they want to say something really—”
James’s eyebrows fly upward, the words dying in his throat as he unsheathes the shimmery card from its sleeve. I watch, paralyzed, as his eyes move across the page. He lifts his head sharply, scowling at the squirrel when he says—
“Who the fuck is Sebastian?”
Damani laughs, clapping her hands together. “Oh, this is great.”
I’m hardly breathing.
“She’s getting married? The serial killer is getting married next week to some douchebag named Sebastian Alastair von Douchebag the Fourth?”
Bile has risen up my throat.
“You’re the serial killer,” Damani says to me in an undertone. “The subject will refer to you as a serial killer several more times over the next twelve hours.”
“I’m sorry, but does her fiancé know that she might be dead right now? Does he even know she’s a serial killer?” James seems unusually bothered by the invitation, which he wastes no time holding over the fire, glaring as flames devour the expensive stationery. “Downer wedding.”
“Belated congratulations, by the way,” says Damani. “The island is buzzing—we all got our invitations yesterday. It’ll be the wedding of the year.”
I shake my head an inch, acutely aware that all Ark officials—including Sebastian—are watching me for a reaction. “He’s not my fiancé,” I force out. “We’re not getting married.”
James picks up a sizable rock, which he throws forcefully at a small boulder, eyes intent as he watches it break apart. From the wreckage he picks out a jagged piece.
“I’m sure it’s hard to believe,” Damani says to me, her eyes still glued to the screens. James has begun to use a round stone as a hammer, hitting it against the rough edges of the jagged piece, honing it into a crude blade. “Certainly no one thought Lieutenant Rivers would honor the betrothal after your family’s fall from grace. But he put forth a passionate argument in front of the council, and the motion was passed with shockingly little objection.”
I swallow. My throat feels raw.
“Oh, and you should know,” Damani adds, sparing me a glance. “Going forward, we’ve decided you’ll be reporting to Lieutenant Rivers—”
I stiffen, the statement like a slap to the face.
“—who knows you nearly as well as Soledad once did.”
On-screen, James is using the crude blade to sharpen a stick into a spear.
“We all realize the complications of having you report to your fiancé, but duty supersedes all else in this case. Until we can get you online, you’ll have to be under the command of someone who knows your history. The wedding will need to be postponed regardless—just until the mission is complete—but I’m sure Sebastian will understand.”
“Commander—”
Damani holds up a finger, her eyes unfocusing as she receives a message. She glances again at James before saying, “Affirmative.”
There’s a heartbeat of silence, a muted boom —
A fiery explosion rattles the screens, the blast lifting James in the air before flinging him like a rag doll against a neighboring tree, from which a quiver of birds scatter like shrapnel. Angry shrieks of wildlife score the haze of fire and smoke, nearly drowning out James’s agonized cry as he slams violently into every branch on his way down the trunk, finally hitting the forest floor with a dull thud several feet from where he once stood.
He doesn’t move.
A spike of panic compels me to scream and I kill the instinct mercilessly, shuttering so far inward I begin to feel numb, alien in my own body.
I remind myself that I am dead inside.
I’ve been dead inside for years.
I watch in cold silence as striations of blood fracture the snowy ground beneath him. When I speak, my voice feels faraway. Flat.
“How did you do that?” I ask.
Damani laughs, eyeing me then with something like appreciation before studying a bloody, sooty James on-screen. “You really are one of our best executioners,” she says. “Soledad always talked about how unflappable you were. He said you once ate an entire sandwich after decapitating a prisoner.”
That’s a lie , I don’t say to her.
James begins to stir, a strangled cry ripping from his throat. The bend of his limbs, I note, are unnatural; shards of bone have pushed through his pant leg, his shirtsleeve.
My chest caves in only a little.
Softly, I say, “I have no memory of being offered a sandwich.”
Damani laughs again, louder this time. “Right. Anyway, we remote-detonated the stock of artillery he stole.” She nods at James, now convulsing with pain. “The subject doesn’t seem to understand that everything he learned from his brother was first taught to him by his father—who was trained, from the beginning, by us .”
“Idiot,” I whisper, watching him struggle.
James groans, lifting a shaking hand to his chest, then his broken arm, his broken leg. He unleashes a stream of expletives before slackening, gasping for air.
“Obviously we don’t want him to die, not yet,” says Damani, “but this incapacitation gives us the time we need to prepare for the next phase. Klaus predicts that, in addition to breaking major bones, the severity of the blast will cause the subject to sustain a partial tear of a mid-cervical vertebrae and a hemorrhage of the brain. The subject’s powers are expected to be strong enough to revive him overnight, granting us a recess of roughly six to eight hours in the program.” She turns to me, opening her mouth to say more, then hesitates.
“It’s a relief,” she says finally, “that no one here carries the mutative gene anymore. Isn’t it?”
I say nothing at first, trying to decide whether this is a test. But then, with The Reestablishment, most things are a test.
All of us on the island were administered the mutative vaccine, the gene-editing therapy that reversed the effects of an experimental program designed by The Reestablishment in its early years. All supernormal transmutations—like James’s healing powers—were erased from the population overnight. Everyone, as a result, became much easier to govern.
Everyone, except me.
“Isn’t it?” she asks again.
I nod.
“The experiment,” Damani says, “brilliant though it was for its time, proved an enormous headache back on the mainland.” She smiles now, looking strange. “People running around with unregulated, untested powers. They turned all our hard work against us in the end. Didn’t they?”
This is the circulating theory, the disturbing hypothesis about Rosabelle Wolff, daughter of the disgraced, high-ranking official who sold himself to the rebels for a song. People believe I can’t connect to the Nexus because I retained the mutative gene; that I somehow possess a power strong enough to resist the advances of technology. Some people think my father had something to do with it. That I’m a plant, a double agent. The fact that they can’t read my mind makes it impossible to be certain—but how this might be true, I can’t even fathom.
I haven’t spoken to my father in over a decade.
“Didn’t they?” she asks again.
“Yes,” I say. “They did.”
There’s a brutal crunch , then a piercing scream, and I turn sharply to the screens, where James is attempting to put his leg back together. His hands are slick with blood, his face contorted in pain. For a moment I think I can’t imagine his agony, and then I remember that I can.
“We’re learning from our mistakes, Rosabelle. We’ve learned we need to control every aspect of the experiment ad infinitum. Forever.” Damani places a hand on my shoulder, and I resist the impulse to snap her neck. “Without constant control, we can’t guarantee results, can we?”
“No,” I say. “We can’t.”
She holds my eyes for a beat. “Your meeting with Soledad was originally scheduled for tomorrow. In advance of your imminent deployment, you’ll complete your interrogation today. Once you’ve been cleared, Lieutenant Rivers will walk you through the next movements of the mission.”
I feel the rise of panic. “Commander, with all due respect, I need to speak with my sister—”
“Later,” she says, before nodding toward the exit.
There’s the gasp of glass unsealing, a rush of air—and I turn, as if through time, toward the opening door.