“Okay. I love you, Marcus.”
“I love you, too. And we’ll be together again soon.”
17
“Whatever this new Idaho group is, we need to end it quickly. They have members who worked in intelligence, the military, and law enforcement in old America. We need to show them they chose the wrong side.” - Excerpt from a message from New America President Soren Whitman to his top advisers
Six Years Ago
Marcus
The lab is quiet when I walk in, several people gathered around Ellison James’s desk.
When I glance over at the oncology nurse practitioner on our team, she’s holding something against her face.
“I’m fine,” she says, the words muffled by whatever’s in her hand.
Yeva, sitting on the edge of Ellison’s desk, drops her brows in concern and says, “Her face got hit.”
I walk over to them, anger tightening my chest. Ellison is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. “Who hit you?”
“Test Subject Two.” She’s talking like she has cotton in her mouth, and when she pulls the bag of ice away, I see why. She has a badly swollen lip, a black eye, and blood on her face.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” another team member, Mariah Kennedy, says.
Ellison shakes her head and says, “I’m fine, really.”
“Why did he hit you?” I ask.
“No idea. I was checking the test subjects and he grabbed my breast. When I told him to stop, he hit me.”
“What the hell? Were you alone in there?”
She shrugs, saying, “Why wouldn’t I be?” though it comes out,“Wha wooden I be?”
Our experiments have shown so much promise that we’re fast-tracking human trials. Our test subjects are being paid a lot of money, and they all had to sign nondisclosure agreements. None of them has any idea what they got injected with, or what we expect it to do to them.
I wasn’t given that information either, but one of the test subjects told me he’d let us shoot him up with more mysterious substances for another two hundred thousand dollars. I questioned him about it and found out none of our fifteen human test subjects know anything about aromium.
Dr. McClain took a team to a string of islands near the Bahamas to pull extracts from plants, and we got good results with a flower extract from one. The compound we created, aromium, is the same bright blue as the flower.
“Maybe Test Subject Two is just a douchebag,” Mariah says, shrugging.
“What about yesterday, though?” Dr. P asks from nearby.
Two female test subjects got into a fight over nothing yesterday. We observe the test subjects around the clock, and atone thirty a.m., one of the women jumped another woman who was returning to bed after using the bathroom.
They’re both in medical isolation now—one with a broken wrist and a concussion, the other one with internal bleeding that required surgery.
These people were vetted thoroughly. Our psychological evaluations were designed to weed out people who were unstable in any way.
“It’s not a coincidence, you guys,” Dr. P says when no one answers his question. “We observed increased agitation, aggression, and sexual urges in the rats. And now we’re seeing those same things in the humans.”
“Seeing what things?” Dr. Lucy Hollis walks into the lab carrying a tray of baked goods, which is a regular occurrence for her.
“Test Subject Two assaulted Ellison,” Dr. P says.
Lucy looks at Ellison, her jaw dropping. She sets down the tray and rushes over.
