(**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.”
“Then how does it work?”
He smiled a little. “I don’t know. But your point about generations…the formula was the least ‘perfect’ at the start. Yeah?” He waited for my nod before continuing. “So it would only make sense that the side effects were the greatest in the start, too.”
I struggled to keep up with his train of thought, still wrapped around my question of why there were so many different Others.
“So you’re saying older Others have stronger powers?”
Jacoby smiled a tiny bit wider, and a dandelion pushed through the dirt beside his hand. It bobbed around for a few seconds before resting its head against Jacoby’s arm.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“So out of all the Others, we’re probably the weakest?” I said. What a strange idea. It was usually the young that were strong, not the old.
“Yup.”
“How can there be a ‘weak’ or a ‘strong’ Imaginer?” I asked. “Does an Imaginer born earlier have giant flowers or something?”
He shrugged. “I think they can compel their flowers to do stuff. I mean…” He cupped his dandelion’s head and turned it towards me. “Go get her,” he urged. “C’mon. Get her.”
The dandelion tilted its head to look at him, then wiggled all of its seeds.
“C’mon. Go to Jasslyn.” He stared down at his dandelion like he would a dog.
“I see what you mean,” I said, as another ripple passed through the dandelion’s fluffy head.
I crossed my legs and set my elbows on my knees, my thoughts going back to how there could be so many different powers. It felt more like I was solving a brainteaser than figuring out an altered species of human beings. I liked it better that way.
Jacoby interrupted my thoughts, though there wasn’t much to interrupt.
“I don’t really care at this point,” he said. “I’m already an Imaginer, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
I frowned at his response. “Well, I’m already a Probe, but I still want to find out more about what happened and what’s going on. It’s no reason to say you don’t care anymore.” I suddenly found myself irritated that he was so indifferent.
His eyes flashed, glinting with annoyance. “What’s up with you?” he said.
“Nothing’s up with me, it’s just…you act like you don’t care when you should care. This is just as much of a problem for you as it is for anyone else.”
“I’m not acting,” he said coldly. Where his hand touched the ground, tiger lilies started growing, baring their petals like fangs at me. “You don’t think I’m aware of this issue?” He swiped at his flowers, which made them leap up and multiply in size. They were growling now. “I’ve lived with this for sixteen years, damn it!” he shouted. “You didn’t even know until a month ago.”
My mouth hung open. “Shut your mouth,” I hissed. His words burned me. With that single comment, he’d made me feel useless. My brain caught up and I snapped, “What does it matter if I only found out recently? I’m still part of this. If there’s going to be some mass killing, I’m in it, too, aren’t I?”
He was without words for a few seconds, moving his jaw as if it’d just been unhinged. He managed a brief nod, a dip of the head that let me know he was over it.
My secretary finally went on a lunch break. The neat, manila folders of news flooded into my central processing system, and I closed my eyes. To hear from a friend that you weren’t supposed to live long enough to remember anything was…well, “surprised” wouldn’t be enough to cover it, not even a portion of it. Shock eventually passed into hysteria.
I started laughing.
Jacoby jerked away from me like I’d sprouted an extra limb and slapped his face with it.
The laughing passed into sadness, a terrible, wailing sadness that attached its nozzle to my veins and drowned me from the inside out.
To hide my mania, I clenched my teeth and forced a smile, catching, for some reason, the most morbid, cynical thought swirling in my head and saying it out loud. “Some of us might be spared if they’re still going to bother with making the anti-formula. And at least after tampering with us, there’s a chance they’ll get the original formula right with no side effects.”
Jacoby’s expression turned solemn, and he leaned back against the tree. “They probably will. They started out with the right intent. It just…didn’t turn out well. They’ll make the right formula. For the future generations.” His eyes glinted when he said it, and I knew he felt the same way about it as I did.
“Maybe. And…that’ll be pretty great, right?” I was mortified when my voice changed at that last sentence and even more embarrassed when my eyes moistened. I didn’t know why I felt like crying; perhaps it was the wretchedness of it all. We were the guinea pigs of this experiment, yet the unfairness I felt couldn’t be completely justified, because the drug we’d been injected with could save hundreds upon thousands of lives. Somewhere in my head, a voice told me that I should be proud to be a part of this, that I should be bursting with delight to have been a stepping-stone that helped this entire process.
But I didn’t volunteer for this. I didn’t ask for it.
Jacoby picked up on my oncoming tears. He looked at me with wide eyes. His reaction made my face turn red.
He looked so sympathetic. I made a mental note then and there that I would never go to see a counsellor if I had problems. Ever. Seeing people looking at me like that made me cry, a miniature Niagara Falls on my face.
My cheeks felt like a furnace. “Don’t look at me,” I said to him.
“Jasslyn—”
“Give me a minute,” I said, my voice garbled from the tears and my hands covering my face.
He placed a hand on my back and that set me off.
I clenched my teeth and pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, cutting off the sound.
I miss Nic. I miss Mom.
Their text messages and missed calls flashed in front of my eyes, every one of them leaving a scorch mark of their own.
I thought of Nic and rolling around on her bedroom floor laughing over a prank call. I thought of lounging around on the couch back home with my mom in our PJs, watching reruns of our favourite television soap operas. I thought of the first camping trip we’d gone on after the divorce.
I wanted to go home and convince myself that I was a normal kid. I wanted to go home and open the door and see my mom sitting by the window reading her favourite book.
Jacoby’s hand left my back, and a moment later, I was pulled backwards into his chest until I sat, half on his legs, half on the ground, and he held me there, both arms wrapped around my stomach and chest pressed against my back.
I kept my face buried in my hands until the tears had dried on my cheeks.
Jacoby shifted and said, “Jasslyn?”
I lifted my head.
“Are you feeling better?”
I nodded wordlessly.
“Jasslyn?”
“Hm?”
“Why were you crying?” Jacoby asked abruptly.
I felt my eyes, and only because I deemed them to be at an acceptable level of puffiness, I turned and looked at him. “I’m crying because I’m bitter, and bitter because we have to go through this”—I gestured around us—“for the good of the future generation.” I dropped my gaze and ripped up several blades of grass in frustration. “I shouldn’t be bitter, and I know that, because this is all working towards something good and you can’t get to ‘good’ without passing a little bit of ‘bad’. But it’s just…just so…” My voice trailed off.
“Unfair,” Jacoby finished, meeting my gaze steadily.
“Yeah,” I murmured.
“I know how you feel. I’m pretty sure a lot of people would if they were in this position.”
“But then the C.S.C are the ones all of us should thank. They gave us life when we were about to die. And now they’re—”
“—the ones that are killing us? I know. It’s ironic. The people that’ll be the end of us are the ones that gave us life in the first place.”
I shook my head, hardly able to wrap my head around any of the new information. “How did they even create a formula like that?”
He shrugged. “Beats me.”
I took a moment to digest this, turned the thought over and over in my head. It made me wince to imagine a tiny six-pound baby having a needle jabbed straight into his heart. My thoughts drifted around, wondering how on earth a formula could keep someone living for a lifetime.
“Did the doctor say anything else?” I realized only then that he was still holding me. I dislodged his arms and faced him.
“Not really,” Jacoby replied. He braced his arms behind him and leaned back. “He warned us to be careful about where we go and what we say. ‘A low profile is crucial at this stage,’ he said.” Jacoby and I were both silent before he added in an irritated huff, much like his old self, “As if we didn’t know that already.”
(**A/N: Choppy ending, and choppy beginning next chapter. Again, middle of a giant chapter in my manuscript :P QotC: Do you guys prefer short updates, like 2-4 pages, or longer ones? I updated sooner than I planned. Makes it worth commenting, eh? Eh? EH? :D)