To the Well-Organized Mind

Chapter Sixteen

[Nia]

I have finally found it—the necessary element to isolate and create an antibiotic from. Now I just need the right specimen to collect it from. The ferals I have worked with up until now are the baseline, but I have seen others...others that have human elements or socialized tendencies. I have seen them training dogs, whistling, even using a type of sign language for communication. Those are the ferals I need.

-from Gerald P. Anagnost's logs

*

Some people would prefer to know their days are numbered. Maybe so they can better prepare or live life to the fullest or other such nonsense. I think they're really just masochists who need the inevitable looming over them because it gives them a twisted pleasure.

I do not count myself among them.

My mind was reeling so much by Tavelin's dashing of my last hope that I eventually wandered away upstairs, shutting the door to the world behind me. Jaden was still pressing Tavelin for more information, but that was the equivalent of begging for more details on my manner of my death as if knowing more could make it more palatable. But no matter how much sugar you dump on shit, you're still eating shit.

So this is what it feels like to truly know the end is near. I've known for a long time it was coming. But with hope always worming its way through, it never sunk in as adamantly as it does now.

How much time do I have left? Impossible to know. Everyone regresses into feralism at differing rates, dependent on things only Tavelin can probably reveal. Environment. Genetics. Whatever.

I am frozen in indecision, unsure how best to spend my remaining time. And so I spend the next couple days locked in my room. Jaden has knocked on my door, of course, but I haven't answered. She left food, which I didn't touch.

When she leaves the book, my curiosity finally gets the better of me and I drag the slender tome inside.

I've never seen this book before. Handwritten. When I flip the cover and a note flies out, I realize why.

I never gave this journal to you, but I thought you might be needing it right now. It has information on your father. His name was Will, and he was more interested in keeping the humanity in humans than in staying alive.

Her awkward handwriting is shaky and large. We are some of the only people in Asis who know how to read and write, and we don't do it regularly. Perhaps before, when I was under Ridge's tutelage, holding a pencil and writing for minutes at a time would not cramp my hand. But I've gotten out of the practice now, and I can imagine Jaden's discomfort forming the letters of even this short note.

I recall her writing much more during my youth, but now I can't remember the last time I saw her scratching away on paper. Maybe paper is too precious a commodity, though, and she'd write more if given the chance. I'd always thought knowing how to read was one of my least useful skills. But looking at this browned journal, tattered with curled corners, I realize my gift is not to be rued.

Opening the journal, I assume it was written by Will. But as my eyes run over the words, I realize it was written by my mother.

The journal details my mother meeting Will, how they somehow managed to fall in love despite everything she did to push him away because he was a liability. It goes into descriptions of their band of survivors struggling to find food and shelter. They manage to plant a garden, and a few scant weeks before it comes to fruition, a roving feral gang threatens their safety. Their band makes the difficult decision to migrate away. My mother cries over the loss of the garden and then destroys it so that no one else may benefit from their hard labor.