Pure Page 9

  “How did you get in here?” I peeked into the hall as the door swung shut, but I couldn’t see my guard. “Where’d he go?”

  “Shh.” Redge put a finger to his lips and nodded at the speaker. “I have ways.” He wiggled his eyebrows and grinned. “Dawg can get in and out of restricted areas in the medical unit’s computer. I just reassigned your guard.”

  “You reassigned him?” I stifled a laugh. I was cut off from Elyle and my parents. Jonah hadn’t transmitted yet. Redge began to be a comfort of sorts.

  “So, are you all right?” he asked, his voice low. “From the guard, I’m guessing you’re confined to the unit.”

  “Don’t remind me.” My smiled vanished.

  “What did they do to you?”

  I didn’t want to remember, but Redge had helped me, and I guessed I owed him an explanation. “Rylant interrogated me.” I motioned for him to come closer, speaking in a whisper. “It was pretty awful. Before that, Doctor Frank installed an anti-seizure device, here, at the back of my neck.” I rubbed the awful bump again. “It’s probably useful, but I want it removed.”

  “Anti-seizure device?” Redge looked skeptical. “Let me see.”

  “Why?”

  “It could be a monitoring device to keep track of where you are. See? I have one.” He spun around to show me his own small lump behind his ear.

  “What?” A monitor in my neck? It was horrible! Disgusting! I lifted my hair and twisted around. “What does it look like?”

  “No, it’s not like mine. Bigger. Different location, too.”

  “Are you sure it’s not a monitor?”

  “I could get Dawg to check for you, if you don’t mind him sniffing around in your file.”

  “Do it,” I hissed. I probably didn’t have any privacy anymore, so what difference did it make? Everyone knew my secrets.

  As Redge punched commands into his slate, I began to wonder why they would guard me if I had a monitor. I wasn’t supposed to leave the unit.

  “Did they give you the monitor so you could go out to the Academy?” I said to the top of Redge’s head. He was still hunched over his screen.

  “No, I had it long before that.” Redge looked up, frowning. Then he said, “I didn’t want to go back to the Academy after that first class, but Doctor Frank made me. He’s the one who arranged it. When he noticed how I rewrote my knowledge pilot’s program to create Dawg, he convinced Rylant that I could contribute to society, even if I was skidge.” Skidge! I had almost forgotten that Redge was skidge. “If only they knew everything that Dawg could do!” He flashed a bitter smile.

  He had already been through this, would still be going through it long after Rylant’s tests had proved me pure. How sad. “What happened to you?” I glanced uneasily at his undersized legs, and then at his muscular arms resting on his wheels. “Did your parents…?”

  “Parents?” Redge shook his head and his face twisted into a resentful mask. “Don’t have any. I’m a ward of Purity.”

  Suddenly, I wanted to know everything about Redge. I had all along, really. What had happened to him? What might happen to me, if Purity got some ridiculous idea that I needed extended tests? I was almost too afraid to ask.

  “You live here?”

  “You could say that. I’ve been here a few months. Mostly I’ve been shoved into different medical units and work camps in the Beyond.”

  “The Beyond!” I shuddered. “I don’t know anyone who’s been to the Beyond!” I’d heard stories about half-human skidge who ruled the streets. How you could get a geneblaster and a false womb practically anywhere and make a new species in your kitchen. “What was it like?”

  Redge shrugged. “I only saw the work camps.” He got a faraway, pained look. “At the last camp, a guard attacked one of the more bizarre constructions. Febber, he was called. He had webbed hands and gills that breathed air. Impossible to hide that. There was this guard who bullied him and called him ‘Fish Fodder.’ Kept saying ‘Only the people that God made should walk the earth.’ Until the day he let Febber have it with his prodder.” His voice got hard. “Then Febber didn’t get bullied anymore.”

  Redge blinked repeatedly. I stared at him, horrified. Redge slowly recovered himself.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, knowing it wouldn’t help. I threw a worried glance at the speaker, hoping that whoever was supposed to be listening was asleep on the job.

  Redge nodded, wiping his eyes, then asked more quietly, “You know why the Purity settlements were really created?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you don’t believe that schlock they feed you at the Academy, do you?”

  “No! Not all of it. I mean, I know it’s propaganda.”

  “But do you know the truth? Did you know that gen-eng of humans used to be researched by respected scientists?”

  “Oh, come on. They would never…”

  “Sure they would. With government resources, they were out to perfect humanity, eliminate undesirable conditions — anything from poor eyesight to short people. Any fetus with a risk of disease was destroyed. Not smart enough — destroyed. There were a lot of kinks to work out as they learned how to manipulate genetic technology. That’s when the Purity movement started.”

  “I know — to protect our gene pool. They introduced laws to limit enhancement, to guarantee our right to a genetically pure future. Blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard it all.”

  “Wrong again. Purity wanted to protect the future, but just for select individuals, pure or not, that weren’t a burden on society.” Redge was ignoring his slate and staring fiercely at me. His cheeks were pink and he was obviously getting worked up. “They didn’t want to pay for health care, food, and so on, for the twisted creations that were made by mistake. Oil and gas deposits had dried up. The energy freeze had begun a frantic scramble for resources. Purity’s select communities, such as Dawn, were just a way to keep the undesirables out and the resources for the select few. I bet you half the people in Dawn are enhanced or the product of past enhancement. As long as it works or benefits Purity, they’ll ignore it. Dawn and all the other Purity settlements are just intolerant, greedy states, serviced off the backs of skidge in work camps and undesirables in the Beyond.”

  His slate beeped, and Redge glanced down. Just in time, I thought. His face was now redder than I’d ever seen, but I guess he had reason to be upset. Not that I believed everything he said. Half the people in Dawn were skidge? Not possible. Yet I was beginning to understand why he was so angry.

  “No monitor,” Redge told me. “But be careful.”

  “Thanks, I will,” I said, relieved. I was safe, for now, although I would have to watch Doctor Frank. “So how did you end up in Dawn?” I asked, still curious.

  Redge sighed. “When Doctor Frank got out of Detention Block and got his medical license back, he brought me here.”

  “He was in Detention?”

  “Shh! Didn’t you know? I thought everyone did. I’m Doctor Frank’s trophy.” Redge’s wide blue eyes were full of sparks. His thick lips were set in a pout. “He created me back in a lab at Dumacorp. Of course, he knew that most gen-eng of humans was illegal, although he would tell you that the laws are too strict. And he knew that if Purity discovered me, which they did, they would label me a biohazard, sterilize me, and pack me off to some work camp. As for Doctor Frank, he only ended up in Detention for ten years, but my sentence is more permanent.”

  At least I’m not skidge, I told myself. I could never be in a situation like Redge’s. “Why did Doctor Frank do it?”

  “With a geneblaster anyone can play God!” He spit out his next words. “Doctor Frank said he wanted a son, but I know he just wanted to see if he could do the science. What was he thinking? He had to realize that Purity was going to catch him. They always do. Now, he feels guilty. He wants to help. He wants to do another procedure on my legs. Get me an education.”

  Redge was breathing hard with the effort of keeping his rising emotions
in check. With a look, I reminded him again about the speaker.

  “I can talk to a machine like no one else. But every time I leave this unit, I feel like someone is pointing a big flashing red arrow at me with a sign that says FREAK. Those kids at the Academy just see the wheelchair and think skidge. They’re all probably coded against disease and programmed with memory boosts. The perfection of nature.” He shook his head.

  “Can’t Doctor Frank fix your legs?” I didn’t trust Doctor Frank. He was too close to Rylant and he’d tried to get me to heal on demand. Yet he had helped me recover and he seemed to care when Rylant wasn’t in the room. If he could help Redge get out of the wheelchair…

  Redge grunted. “He can’t undo the past by fixing my legs! He can’t take away who I am — how I was created! I was just cultured for a kick. Let’s create a kid with no legs, Doctor Frank. He can slither around on the lab floor like a snake — entertain us on late nights. We can even have Skidge Olympics, if we create enough.”

  The strength of his anger, his sarcasm, frightened me. “So you won’t let him fix your legs?”

  “I have let him fix my legs!” Redge hissed. He shoved his wheels against the bed in utter frustration, jarring me. “Regenerative cell therapy three times. Frank tried to re-grow the nerves in my legs but it never worked. Now he wants to try it again with some new injection and cell-bonding technique. He’s talked about a biotech prosthesis as a last resort, but I told him that he’s not going to make me into a false-legged cyborg.

  “You know,” he continued his furious rant, “I’ve never been able to feel my legs. Do you know what it’s like to hope three times that you’ll walk, to go through three operations, only to wake up with the same old useless, shriveled limbs?” He slapped a hand down hard onto his thigh. “I won’t do it again.”

  “I’m…I’m… sorry.” What else could I say? It was a terrible story. He could never get better, never heal, and obviously never forgive. I wondered what it would be like never to hear Mur again, then I quickly banished the thought. Would I ask Doctor Frank for help, just to get Mur back? I didn’t know.

  Redge’s mouth was twisting as something new bubbled to the surface. He seemed to be searching for the right words. “I wasn’t going to ask, but…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t trust Doctor Frank’s worthless procedures, but I saw you heal Elyle. I mean, I thought she was dead, but then she wasn’t. So I wondered… well… could you help?”

  He was asking me to heal him! I couldn’t believe it. First Doctor Frank, now him. My eyes skittered to my slate on the bedside table. Angry and hurt, I wanted to roll inside myself, disappear into the heat and pain that I deserved for pushing Elyle down those stairs. I hung my head to hide the tears that were beginning to well in my eyes.

  “I can’t do much of anything right now.”

  Redge exhaled deeply. “Oh, sorry. I shouldn’t have…”

  “It’s all right,” I interrupted before he made me feel worse. “Looks like we’re in the same place right now.” I looked up. “But if I were you, I’d let Doctor Frank try again. Over and over again. Until it worked.”

  “You understand nothing.” Redge scowled.

  “Maybe I don’t,” I challenged him. “But what have you got to lose?”

  Redge stared at me for a long moment. Then he spun around in his wheelchair on the smooth, silvery carpet, narrowly missing the edge of the desk. “Come on. I want to take you somewhere.” His eyes began to sparkle with a different energy. He gave me a sly smile. Something had triggered a sudden mood change in him.

  “Where?”

  He pointed to the door.

  “Out of the unit? But the guard!”

  “No, not out of the unit. Purity is watching you too closely right now. Not that Dawg couldn’t do it.” He grinned widely. “I go on walkabouts all the time. Whenever I need to get away.”

  “That’s how you got to the cafe!”

  “Yeah.”

  “But how do you get out? And what about your monitor?”

  “I just disengage my monitor, release the doors, and distract the guards. Dawg is more than Doctor Frank suspects. He’s an electronic life form. He didn’t used to be. I made him live.”

  “No way!” I glanced at his slate.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I do, I just didn’t think it could be done.”

  “It can.” Redge wiggled his eyebrows. “Dawg?”

  “What is your bidding, masterful one?” Dawg’s voice, from the slate on Redge’s lap, was deep and resonant.

  I jumped, terrified that if we hadn’t been heard already, we surely would be now.

  “Are you afraid of a little electronic life form?” Redge croaked. “Maybe it’ll take over the world and get rid of all us humans one day. We’re not that great a species anyway. Dawg could outdistance us any day.” He turned to the speaker and pretended to shoot at it with his hand, blowing an imaginary puff of smoke from his index finger.

  I smiled, preferring him confident and happy to raging with anger.

  He opened the door a crack and peeked into the hall. “Just give me a minute,” he said when he was back inside.

  “Sure.” Just to get out of this room would be a relief.

  Redge gave me another crazy grin. This guy was part maniac, part genius. Then to Dawg he whispered, “Operation Rae, Dawg. Execute.”

  duke and rae

  The hall was empty. No Purity guard. No bustling medics. No patients. Just a long empty corridor with a shining tile floor and sterile white walls.

  “Where is everyone?” I hissed.

  “Shh.”

  No guard. The glassed-in medic station was abandoned. As I walked beside Redge in his wheelchair, I had the eerie feeling that we were completely alone in the building — until I noticed a medic in an office off the back of the station. She had her back to us and seemed to be reading a display screen.

  When we were far enough away from her, I whispered, “What did you do?”

  My blood was pulsing loudly in my ears. We might even get away with this. It was exhilarating, like pulling a prank on Rylant and Doctor Frank.

  “I arranged for an emergency staff meeting. Dawg sent a high-priority message.”

  “You got everyone out of the way?” I laughed.

  Redge didn’t answer but his eyes were twinkling. He spoke quietly into his slate. “Dawg. Wheels are rolling. How’re tricks?”

  “All’s well, boss.”

  Redge smiled. “Let’s go.”

  We took the freight elevator to the basement. Redge couldn’t do the stairs in his chair and I felt too weak to tackle six flights.

  “So now what?” I asked as the elevator lights blinked. “Where are we going?”

  “Nowhere special.” Redge shrugged and grinned. “Are you hungry?”

  The door opened onto a narrow hall with square overhead lights. The idea of food made my stomach juices curdle. I felt dizzy and faint, but I ignored it and pushed on.

  “But you said we weren’t leaving the unit,” I said, thinking of the cafe.

  “No, we’re staying inside. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I wondered what the big secret was, and where we were going. The thrill of leaving my hospital room behind was fading, and I felt exposed in my too-short gown. I began to worry. Could I trust Redge? He could get pretty weird, and he had his own agenda. If Purity caught me, they would think that I was trying to escape, that I had something to hide. Maybe they’d install a monitor! I decided to go back soon, hopefully before they noticed I was gone.

  The tiled floor echoed my footsteps. Redge’s wheels were quieter. We passed gray metal doors every so often. They were closed, but I kept expecting a stream of Purity officers to burst out from one of them. I followed a step behind Redge, watching his arm muscles ripple as he spun his wheels, noticing that he didn’t use the controls. Maybe they were too
loud. Maybe he liked to direct the chair himself.

  Then there was blue carpet on the floor. We turned a corner and the hall widened. I could see an open door at the end of the hall. Voices came from it, and the smell of spiced food, which sparked a new wave of nausea.

  “We made it,” Redge announced, as we entered a large room with tables, chairs, and a cafeteria counter.

  Two people in wheelchairs wore medical gowns like mine. The woman had only one leg. I couldn’t tell why the man was in a wheelchair. I sidled in behind Redge’s wheelchair, hoping no one would order me back to my room or call a Purity guard.

  Redge waved at an Asian woman behind the counter. He rolled over to a table, yanked a seat out of the way, and tucked his wheelchair under the table. I sat, too, grateful for a chance to rest.

  “We shouldn’t stay too long,” I said. “I want to get back before they notice I’m missing.”

  “Just a few minutes,” Redge agreed, obviously enjoying his freedom.

  Near the counter, a thin twenty-something man with a long ponytail was holding the attention of the two in wheelchairs. “We have to fight for our rights!” He gestured wildly with his arms. “Show them they can’t push us around.”

  “Keep it down, Duke,” said the woman behind the counter. One of her arms ended in a misshapen flipper with two bent fingers where her hand should have been. I stared at it. These people were like Redge. I didn’t belong here.

  The woman came over. “Hey, Redge. You brought a friend.” She smiled at me. “I’m Rae. You are…”

  “Lenni.”

  Rae bounced on her toes when she walked, even though she was old, maybe sixty-five. Her gray hair streaked with black was caught up in a bun, her eyes were almond-shaped, her skin gleamed the color of creamed coffee. Something about her appealed to me, and I felt the urge to draw her — until I remembered that I couldn’t.

  “Hey, Lenni. What’ll you have?” She pointed to display boards that were mounted above the long counter.