I hold her fiery gaze. “And what did I do to him?”
“You broke him. He’s not the monster you seem to think he is.”
I sigh inwardly. “I don’t think he’s a monster. But he’s not innocent, either.”
“No one’s hands are clean here. Not even yours, so get off your pedestal. He’d burn the world down for you.”
I open my mouth to respond, but she puts her palm up, cutting me off. “If you don’t even want to understand him, you don’t deserve him.”
Her words slice through me, tears flooding my eyes as she turns her back and walks away. I take a deep breath to steady myself.
I hear Nova loud and clear. But I can’t understand a man who doesn’t want to explain himself to me. Marcus hasn’t even tried to make things right. He owes me that.
An hour later, McClain practically collapses into his lab chair after our visit to Cheyenne’s room. It wasn’t even that far—Carissa brought her to her own room in the Sub, which is a short walk from the lab, but it exhausted McClain.
He said it’s impossible to diagnose her definitively with the limited resources here, but he thinks she likely has uterine fibroids, polyps, or adenomyosis. None of the conditions is life-threatening, but the heavy bleeding could leave her anemic, so Carissa is making sure she gets plenty of food and rest.
When I go over to the rat cages, I find my latest test subject, a scrappy little rat I named Poe, alive and well. Which doesn’t mean our newest strain of stabilizer works, but does prove it’s not deadly.
“You’ll be working alone soon,” McClain says, his tone matter of fact.
I turn to face him, sadness welling inside me. His silence about what’s happening to him has been weird, but hearing him say it out loud is almost worse. I ask the question that’s been eating at me.
“If you weren’t here, with the shield active ... would you still be dying?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
My shoulders sink. “I thought maybe turning on your aromium could help heal you.”
“It may have slowed the process, but I never got an implant.”
Of course not. Why experiment on himself when he had other people to inject with his untested chemical compound? I’m reminded that McClain was a string puller in all of this, not an innocent bystander.
“Didn’t you care about them?” My question comes out bitterly. “The twenty-five, or however many people it was, who were all injected with it, but you spared yourself. Didn’t that feel ... selfish?”
A sad smile deepens the crinkles around his eyes. “It was twenty-six. I wanted to inject myself, but I didn’t make the cut.”
“How is that possible? It was your project.”
“I led the experiment and virus teams, and I required everyone on those teams to pass extensive genetic testing. My genetic predisposition to cancer disqualified me.”
I’m too taken aback to answer for a few seconds. “Cancer?”
“Pancreatic, most likely. It’s progressing quickly. I wanted to complete a stabilizer before the end, but I’m almost out of time.”
My anger dissipates. He’s frail, full of regret, and likely working while in a lot of pain to try to clean up the mess he created.
“So my mom, Marcus, Ellison, Virginia, Pax ... they all passed the genetic testing?”
“Well, not Pax, but his father. They were all chosen for their expertise, but passing the testing was required.”
“What was Marcus an expert in?”
McClain’s eyes light with warmness. “He scored almost perfectly on his medical school entrance exams. He also had a lot of qualities that can’t be quantified.”
I’m so curious about what he was like before, so I can’t help prodding for more details.
“Such as?”
