Chapter 298

"This book can’t be checked out."

The librarian said it while looking at Rachel with a face full of displeasure. Rachel, her face gone pale, pressed her friend the librarian.

"Don’t tell me Hybris blocked lending on it. Has their net already tightened this far?"

"Hybris? ...What’s that?"

They say a dog scalded by hot water fears even cold. Anna clutched her head; Rachel’s noisy overreaction gave her a headache. She regretted having told her everything so honestly.

Realizing she’d blown a small matter wildly out of proportion, Rachel flushed with embarrassment.

"Ah, it’s nothing. Anyway! That’s not the point—why exactly can’t I check it out?"

"Government publications can’t be loaned out under the security policy. On-site use only."

"Oh, I’ll look nicely and bring it right back. No one’s looking for this stuff anyway—can’t you make an exception?"

"If I get fired, are you going to support me, Rachel?"

At the librarian’s tart reply, Rachel faltered, and Anna jumped in. With eyes that practically radiated heat, she shot the librarian a look and announced, unyielding:

"I’m going behind the desk to make copies. Once I do that, I won’t push any further."

"As you wish."

With a weary air, the librarian let Anna in behind the desk. Anna hurried to copy the two books: the initial design schematics and the post-completion as-built drawings of the Deep Drainage Tunnel, and the government funding records for the CellGuard Research Laboratory.

Through materials clearly published in June 2012 with a purpose in mind, Anna and Rachel learned that the Baggers City Integrated Psychological Health Center had been sited over the main entrance of the drainage tunnel. And it was highly likely that segments of the tunnel were the de facto nest of CellGuard, operating with its identity concealed.

And, as chance would have it, the director of the Psychological Health Center was Jackson Cliff, the counselor Anna and Rachel had relied on for so long. He had always listened to the two women’s grief with genuine attention and deep empathy. They did not want to believe Jackson had any connection to a vicious group responsible for so many atrocities. But they couldn’t flatly declare he had no connection at all.

When Anna finished copying, she returned the books to the librarian, then took a large table with Rachel and spread out the copies. The librarian watched the two women, who didn’t look ready to leave, then shook her head and turned back to her work screen.

Anna slid a densely printed copy toward Rachel.

"Read this. It’s the Helso Research Promotion Fund Summary Report."

"What is it?"

Quietly, Anna told her that CellGuard had received close to ten million dollars in funding despite being at the very bottom of the review rankings. At that, Rachel narrowed her eyes and began reading the sentences in the report line by line.

The Helso CellGuard Research Laboratory was a biotechnology company founded in 2012. Its address matched exactly the location of the Mermaid Statue Memorial that Anna had found via the dark web. Everything else in the record was threadbare. Other labs’ entries listed detailed budget items such as personnel costs and equipment replacement, but most of CellGuard’s fields were blank.

"Definitely suspicious. They took this much money and didn’t even fill out the forms properly."

"And the fact it hasn’t blown up and stayed quiet until now—that’s strange, isn’t it?"

"Right. What kind of lab takes that much money—doing what, exactly?"

"‘Research to enhance biocompatibility by stage-specific modulation of immune responses’? What on earth does that even mean."

Even Rachel, who had been reading smoothly through the stated reasons for allocating the grant, stalled at the same point Anna had. For two people who had lived with a wall between them and science, the phrasing was a knot beyond their scope of understanding. They set comprehension aside for the moment and turned the page.

On the next page, the reasons for allocating the grant were spelled out more concretely. As the two women read the lab’s research outline with care, another question rose to their faces.

The moment Rachel looked at Anna as if doubting what she’d seen, Anna looked back at her the same way. The book contained a detailed description of research on immune modulation in a particular group. And the particular group in the report was surrogates.

Anna’s face contorted in disbelief.

"What did I just... read?"

In the early winter of his eighteenth year, after setting the Federal Biological Research Institute on fire, Isaac used the lapse when the security system was disabled to escape. Evading the special operations officers pursuing him, he pushed north doggedly and crossed into Canada.

He wintered in a barren forest, enduring lethal cold. When the weather warmed and the woods thickened, he headed back south into the United States and found the land where he’d spent his childhood. It was his home, where sea met land in salt-steeped wetlands—a smell he remembered.

Morning in the misted marsh was as milky as the sight of an old man with cataracts. Instead of going straight to his old house, Isaac waited for high tide, took a kayak, and, pushing through the pale fog that blurred his view, slipped between the small islands. He holed up in an abandoned shack and slept four days straight, like a bear in hibernation. It was a sleep brushing against death, as if to compensate for the chopped-up nights of the last four years at the Institute. He would never again fall into a sleep like that.

He set out in the afternoon, with the sun beating down hard. The archipelago of saline marsh islands had changed greatly from the past. Shifts in sea level had altered the terrain, and the places where people had once carved out a living were overgrown with a dense tangle of plants.

People no longer lived in the marsh. Under the banner of protecting the natural ecosystem, the government had driven out everyone who’d lived here, and all forms of life except humans had inherited the empty ground.

Kayaking through a marsh boiling with fierce vitality, Isaac reached a shore. He climbed a knoll, his feet sinking into fine, sucking sand, and spotted a corrugated iron roof peeking through the thick grass. Two flags were stuck atop the roof—one the Stars and Stripes, the other the Albanian flag: a black double-headed eagle on a red field. Sun-bleached and faded, the flags tilted, listing along with the house itself.

There were traces of a chicken coop in the yard, but the grass had grown thick and dense, thrusting leaves through the wire mesh as if prisoners stretching for freedom. In front of it lay a heap of baskets woven of cordgrass, on the verge of falling apart. From these small clues, Isaac guessed the owner of the house. It was the home of Ezra’s first love, the mute woman with the large birthmark on her face.

"I’m sick of being weak."

Isaac had long wondered. Ezra, who had crossed the island to rape Yuri, what had he done to his lover, the mute woman?

A clammy wind brushed him with a chill. Years had passed since Ezra’s death, but a desolate, ill-omened air still clung to the place.

Isaac tore away the vines that wrapped the building like disheveled hair. He stepped inside a house whose ceiling had lowered as it tilted, a place that could have collapsed at any moment. And in there, he found a skeleton. Flesh and blood and muscle had long since broken down; only bone and hair and the scraps of clothing clinging flat to the bones remained.

A bleak wind moved through the ruin inside his chest. Another scene of carnage joined the images that rose when he closed his eyes, etched like photographs on the insides of his eyelids.

She had died lying flat on the floor. From the traces left around the bones, it wasn’t hard to guess what had been done to her before she died. Isaac’s glass-blue eyes lingered for a long time on the empty sockets of the skull.

The last face she had seen before dying had been a face like Isaac’s. Through the imagined gaze of the dead, Isaac could witness the thin membrane between himself and Ezra shudder, and watch unwholesome beings blend into one.

After staring a long time into the skeleton’s black-hole voids, Isaac gathered the woman’s white remains and buried her, then set out again.

His old house wasn’t far from the mute woman’s. He located it by the broken piling bridge. Most of it was gone, but there were still marks where they’d driven narrow rows of posts into the soft ground to make a bridge connecting island to island.

His old house, too, was buried in lush overgrowth. But unlike the others, there were signs someone had come relatively recently to cut back the grass. No doubt after Isaac’s escape, the federal authorities had sent personnel to watch his old home.

His old house had weathered the years in relatively sound condition. The brown Spanish tiles on the roof had blown off in the sea wind, exposing the waterproof sheeting and insulation inside in an ugly way, but aside from that there were no major faults; with a bit of work here and there, it seemed livable again.

By contrast, the shed where the twins had lived had become a thicket, with grass piercing up through the wooden floor and vines climbing the walls. After quietly taking in the eerie scene of a cast-off past, Isaac turned without hesitation toward the couple’s house.