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It’s my turn to be hurt.
“Fuck you,” I blaze. “We should run. We should let them come for us if they want. We should load up on as much Regenermax as won’t kill us and we should go live in the wild.”
“You want to live in the woods?”
“I was thinking Canada.”
He snorts. “Briarlee…”
I get close to him, lower my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You could do it. You could develop a dose for both of us that would make us almost invincible.”
“We’d risk losing our minds. We’d be nothing more than animals.”
“Is that risk worse than the risk of living here forever, me in this cell? You in a slightly bigger one?”
* * *
Daniel
She looks at me with her beautiful eyes and I feel the siren’s call to rebellion.
Her idea is sinking into my mind. It’s wrong on so many levels. But it’s also right in many other ways. We need to be free. We will lose our minds in here. Our spirits will be broken. Maybe one day, a long time from now, our handlers will let us go. Or maybe they won’t. Maybe we’ll die in here if we don’t take our fate into our own hands.
Since arriving at the facility, I’ve weaned myself off Regenermax. The healing is done. My injuries have not returned. The physical gains I made during treatment have eased considerably. I can’t think on the Regenermax. Not as well as I need to in order to develop and refine it. I’ve been clean for three weeks.
What she doesn’t know—what nobody knows—is that I’ve been developing a super version of the drug. A potential one hit that would have cataclysmic effects on the body. It’s dangerous. Very dangerous. Either the subject withstands the onslaught of regenerative growth, or they die. It could likely lead to tumors. There’s no way to test that, but anything that speeds up cell replication has that possible effect.
I could dose us both with it. It would turn us into the human equivalent of monsters. But then what? This place isn’t one that you can simply leave by brute force.
“We’re going to do this, aren’t we?”
“What do you mean?”
She smiles at me a little too broadly. “That’s your thinking face. You’re thinking about how to do this.”
She’s right. I have an idea.
“What would you give up for freedom?” Her answer to this question matters more than she can imagine, because my idea is nearly unthinkable. I suppose, on some level, I have been planning this all along, but it is as it was the first time I took Regenermax. I have to be pushed to my limits to take this out. Seeing Briarlee so angry and miserable in her confinement makes me consider an almost unspeakable option.
“Everything.”
“Everything is a lot,” I say solemnly.
“As long as we’re alive, and together. I don’t care.”
That’s a bold answer. We’ll see if she really means it.
Chapter Sixteen
“Ready?”
She looks at me. Total trust, even as we stand on the brink of a last-ditch attempt at escape. If this goes wrong, I’m certain we will be shown no mercy. One or both of us may be killed or imprisoned. Forever. We are about to cash in every chip, burn every bridge. This is the proverbial point of no return.
“Ready.”
“I need you to understand, this isn’t like the previous formulation. It’s much stronger. It could have intense, even poisonous side effects. My research indicates that it is safe for consumption, but the processes it will unleash in the body are much quicker and much more intense than what Regenermax does. That acts on the cellular level to increase healing and in some cases, growth. This goes one step further. If it works, it will step into the genome itself. It will unlock genetic potential we all carry, but isn’t activated in modern humans. We will not be ourselves after this. But it should make us almost impossible to capture.”
I can tell she’s not really listening. Her eyes are locked on the vial. She wants the treatment. She wants the freedom. With that first dose in the woods, I began a process with her that I’m not sure could ever have ended any other way. She’s not the same Briarlee I used to know.
She used to be sweet, but harmless. She used to drift through the world, taking what came easy and rejecting the rest. That’s not who is standing in front of me now. This woman doesn’t want what is easy. She wants her freedom. She wants me. She has fought for both, and I’m not sure there’s a warning I could give her that would stop her from taking this preparation. It’s taken me months to produce this. Every day she’s spent in here, she’s become that much more desperate. The old Briarlee would have been quite content in captivity. This one isn’t.
