Imaginer

31 - Where Said History is Analyzed

(**A/N: A couple paragraphs have been added to the end! For those who've read this chapter before August 24th, 2012, feel free to scroll to the bottom. It's not crucial that you read it, but you can if you want!)

31

         A life was better than no life. I knew that. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I rather they’d not have saved us in the first place. Who knew how many people were injected with that formula? What exactly were they doing to those people, and why was everyone running? I gave a voice to my questions.

         Jacoby shuddered. “They’re working on a counter formula. Something that’ll reverse what the drug did in the first place, in order to erase our abilities.” He gulped down a breath. “But it’s not working. It hadn’t worked for thousands of people; they tried it on every type of Other and made modifications as they went. The counter formula in its beginning stages cancelled out the original one entirely, and the Others couldn’t live without it.” He closed his eyes like he hoped it would make the truth less gruesome. “They all died,” he said, eyes still shut. “They died in days. Even the smallest dose of the anti-formula could kill you, just slower. Remember Jack?” He opened his eyes again when I murmured that I did. “They didn’t manage to catch him and ship him off back to their lab, but he was injected with the counter formula. Do you remember what happened to him?”

         An unpleasant chill ran down my spine. “His veins were black,” I whispered. “Just like…yours.” I stared at him. Had he been injected?

         Jacoby caught my alarmed expression and shook his head furiously. “I think I’d be dead by now if that’d really happened.” He frowned a moment later, a cactus ballooning up from the ground to replace the annoyance on his face. “I forgot to ask my doctor that,” he said.

         I started when I remembered something. When his flowers had been crushed, something had leaked and seeped into the dirt. Something shimmery.

         “Are you serious?” he said, once I relayed to him what I’d seen. “Did it…Did it look like piss?”

         I snorted. “I don’t know. Does pee have shimmery qualities?” We let the matter drop. It was a whole other path we had to take, and there wasn’t enough information to discuss.

        “Did your doctor say anything else?”

         Jacoby nodded slowly. “The F.H.D are running out of patience, and the cardiologists hired to help the C.S.C make the counter formula are getting nervous. A dead Other is the same as no Other, really. It was what they wanted in the first place. The main idea was that no one should be given powers like Alterists or Swindlers or Illusionists. Effective counter formula or not, it gets rid of the problem.” He laughed bitterly. “It saves them time, too. Easier to wipe us out completely than spend millions trying to create an anti-drug.”

         His morbidity shocked me into silence.

         “How did we end up with so many different kinds of Others? Is it by generations?” I asked, once the pause after Jacoby’s explanation was stretched and stretched to the point where I thought it would snap and whip us both in the face. I needed to think of something other than Jack, with his bleeding and smell of rotting flesh.

         “That’s what I thought at first, that people born in a certain time, say, the 1970s, would all be, say, Illusionists. But that doesn’t make sense.” He looked up into the sky, squinting at the sun. After a few seconds he brought his attention back to me, confused and helpless. “Look at me and you. We’re the same age, yet I’m an Imaginer and you’re a Probe.”