44
Musílkova 27, Prague, Czech Republic
November 30
Eva sat in one corner of the room, knees up, while Rhodri sat in the other, biting his lower lip like he was containing a thought best left unsaid. She shivered through her sweater, pulled herself tighter, refusing to take her eyes off him. Her mother sang lullabies softly between them.
“You’re not real,” she told him, spat the words across the room. “You’re not real and we both know it.”
Rhodri said nothing in return.
“The cocktail is working, so you can’t speak, you can’t touch me. If you were real, you wouldn’t sit there so quietly. You and I both know that.”
He shrugged, noncommittal.
Eva got up, moved to the stretcher, took her mother’s hand, but kept a careful watch on Rhodri, who stayed in his place, silent.
“Mama, I don’t know if you can hear me in there. I hope you can. I just want you to know… just know that I’m going to make you better. Soon. I promise you. You just have to hold on there a little bit longer.”
“Shh, dear, shh,” said her mother softly, her hands brushing hair that wasn’t there, in a reality long since gone. “No more nightmares for you, dear. It’s all right.”
Eva smiled weakly, nodded.
The door opened, and Eva made a quick check to the corner to make sure Rhodri hadn’t moved, that it wasn’t him. He hadn’t moved an inch; he sat there, nonplussed, watched Dmitri come in.
“So?” said Eva urgently. “Did it work? Did it do anything?”
Dmitri tried to hide a smile, but failed.
“Like magic,” he said happily. “It cut through the delusions like nobody’s business. I can’t tell how much he remembers, but he’s definitely back to his normal self. The virus wasn’t destructive, whatever it did. It just messed with brain chemistry.”
Eva smiled, nodded.
“So we can make up two more doses then? We can fix my mother next?”
He winced, scratched at his cheek.
“Actually, the boss wants to see you first.”
“But I—”
“He says it’s important, and honestly, I kind of agree with him. You’ll want to hear this.”
Eva shook her head, holding on to her mother’s hand tightly.
“I’m not leaving until she’s cured. Leave me if you like, but you have to let me fix her before anything else. It’s hell, the place she’s trapped. I can’t leave her there any longer.”
“I get you, kid. So listen, I’ll start the incubator working, and we can see the boss while it works. Sound fair?”
Eva eyed the machine, checked Dmitri’s expression of pure sincerity. She nodded slowly, and he made his way over, tapped the trackpad and started the process to create another container of serum. Then he took her by the arm and led her gently to the door. She turned back to her mother, touched her shoulder lightly.
“I’ll be back, mama. I’ll be right back.”
Dmitri brought her out, down a narrow hallway to an antechamber, built like it was an entirely different building. The walls were a dark crimson, gold patterns accenting the design. A pair of antique chairs sat at either side of a set of large, heavy double-doors. The floor was layered in opaque plastic covering, the kind used to contain spills; it ran up the edges of the walls slightly, roughly laid; out of place.
The doors opened as they approached, and Eva found herself in the most magnificent bedroom she had ever seen: intricate wood panelling and murals all around the room, like a Renaissance exhibit where you slept. The ceiling was high and was laced with pinpoints of light in columns up to a single spot at the top of an arch, where a skylight gave an almost unlikely view of the heavens.
To the right was a large window, an arched stain glass portion at the top, giving a frosted view of Prague that did a wonderful job of hiding the truth. There were dressers and a desk, a large reading chair and a dozen antique lamps, and in the centre of the room was an expansive plush bed.
Like the floors, the bed was like an anachronism, layered with plastic and synthetic fabric, machines framing it coldly, all whirring and beeping the status of their patient. Dmitri deposited her at the bedside, backed away quietly, and the man on the bed opened his eyes weakly, smiled at her.
“Eva,” he said weakly. “welcome. It’s good to see you at last. I’m Richard, an acquaintance of your mother’s.”
Eva said nothing, tried to find the right expression for the situation.
“I hear that I have you to thank for my life,” he continued, then tweaked to something, motioned to the side. “Dmitri, could you make sure Eva’s cure is uploaded with the rest of them? I don’t want to miss the deadline.”
“Already taken care of, boss.”
“Excellent,” Richard said, nodding happily. “Yes, the cure seems to be brilliantly made, Eva. But I must say, it’s not that much of a shock to me. I’ve been trying to convince your mother to let me invite you into our little club for some time. I wonder if things would have turned out differently if we’d had your help instead of Rhodri’s…”
On the other side of the room, in the corner again, Rhodri rolled his eyes in silence. Eva ignored it.
“What does my mother have to do with this? She was a doctor. She helped people! How did you make her have anything to do with the kinds of atrocities—”
“Eva, dear, I think you misunderstand us.”
“Oh, I understand you pretty well. You kill people for kicks. It’s pretty easy to grasp.”
He shook his head, reached a weak arm out to her, but she pushed it away. Dmitri made a subtle step forward behind her.
“Eva, we don’t make viruses. We make the cures.”
Eva blinked, backed up.
“You… what? What cures?”
He sat up, pained, leaned forward in bed, his arms across his folded legs, like a sickly skeleton wrapped in sheets. He thought a moment, avoided looking at her.
“For the last two years, we have been working here, in Prague, and elsewhere, to discover, isolate and treat strains of viruses that are largely ignored by the major corporations. They’re not as glamorous, not as profitable, I dare say, but they’re vital. If left untreated, they grow and spread and mutate and then one day, they take down a city, kill millions, and it’s only then that people wonder what went wrong. ‘How could this happen?’ they ask, ‘I thought the worst of it was over.’ It’s a cycle that never ends, and I’ve seen it far too many times to bear.
“My goal — our little group’s goal — was to eliminate those strains before they took over Europe. We had our hands full with the eastern plagues that passed through Prague. The ones the Chinese didn’t catch. But we also wanted to tackle the western ones as well, and ideally before they got this far east. We tried making alliances with doctors across Europe, offering bounties, but there are only so many incubators left outside government hands, and the risks of using them is not for the weak of heart. So it was decided we had to find an agent who could sample and treat the viruses no one else had seen…”
“Wait, are you saying…”
“We hired Rhodri to handle that role.”
At the side of the room, Rhodri seemed close to tears, hurt by the revelation, lowered his face into his hands. Eva nearly threw up.
“He was saving people?” she gasped.
The frail man said nothing for a moment, and Eva noticed Dmitri shake his head to himself.
“Rhodri saved thousands, I’m sure. We sent him an incubator, and he used it to do the initial diagnoses, and build the cure compounds. By the time you left Italy, he’d found the treatments to nearly two dozen diseases. Diseases that, because of his work, will never harm another soul again.”
Rhodri stared headlong into Eva, accusing.
“I… I didn’t know…”
“Your mother didn’t want you to know. She thought you weren’t able to cope with it. She was afraid of what it might do to you, after you’d worked so hard to get your life back together. She outright refused to let me offer you the job, and I admit, when I heard about Rhodri and his apparent skills, I went behind her back to recruit him. When she found out, she was furious; she was certain that bringing your boyfriend into our team would put an unbearable strain on your relationship. I think he agreed with her, vowed to keep it secret.”
“If I’d known… I blamed him…”
Dmitri coughed from behind, and Richard reached out, held Eva’s hand.
“It’s not as simple as it seemed, my dear,” he said. “Not by a long shot. It missed our attention, too, at first… but after watching the situation closely, Dmitri realized that every time the two of you left a city, a massive plague ravaged the population. Almost like clockwork. Right after he finished deploying the antivirus, the reports began to trickle in from sources around the region; within days, it was a flood no one could overcome.”
“I don’t understand,” Eva said blankly. “Deployed how? He worked hard, but never long enough to vaccinate dozens, let alone hundreds of people. How can you be sure it was him?”
“Oh, it was more than possible it was him. So much so, it was unlikely to be anyone else. We weren’t inoculating in the traditional sense, given how limited our resources were. We created a series of aerosolized payloads, left them in key locations around town, and let the contagious nature of our compounds do the rest.”
“Just like a typical terrorist strike—” Eva began.
“But with an anti-virus instead, yes,” smiled Richard. “Traditional treatment vectors like booster shots are still part of the plan, but those methods are delayed, wrought with red tape and political infighting. We thought of all the lives we could save by pushing the cures straight to the people at risk, right when they needed them, and we decided it was worth the risk.”
“Except if something went wrong,” Eva noted.
“Indeed. We were shocked to discover things had gone wrong, and put countless hours into deciphering the cause.”
Eva frowned.
“So you were treating multiple viruses in a single treatment, right?”
“Yes, it was the most efficient way to operate.”
“But if you mixed that many compounds, maybe they were interacting with each other, making something new, something dangerous you didn’t expect. I saw that a bunch of times… you might have been making a poison with all your cures.”
“We thought of that, too,” he said sadly. “So in Linz, we were careful to test that angle. Our agent here, he tested the compound endlessly, checked it from every angle, and he was certain there was no chance of side-effects from that set. And yet, somehow, once deployed by Rhodri in Linz, we had the same results. Massive casualties.”
Eva looked to Rhodri. He seemed as confused about all this as she was. She shook it off, kept from looking at him. Dmitri’s phone purred softly, and he flipped it open, backing out of the room.
“We checked and double-checked everything,” Richard continued. “You can imagine our emotions at the time: we were mortified that we were somehow making things worse, and we were desperate to figure out how it had gone all wrong. We’d been working nearly a year in advance of Rhodri’s involvement without any issues whatsoever, and now suddenly it was all falling apart? It made no sense; we started second-guessing ourselves, thinking maybe it was a difference between eastern and western coding techniques… anything that might help it make sense.
“But in the end, it was clear it wasn’t on our end. It wasn’t the individual cures. It was something added to the mix right before deployment. It had to be. Somewhere along the way, Rhodri had decided to use us to release new viruses into the wild. We had enabled him, and so many lost their lives because of it.”
“Wait, hold on,” Eva said, her voice cracking with emotion, Rhodri in the corner looking hopeful and yet tired, weak. “How do you know it was him? Maybe it was one of your other people. You had someone reviewing stuff, maybe that person did it, and you’re just blaming—”
“That man is in the hospital, fighting for his life, after falling prey to one of Rhodri’s booby traps.”
Eva blinked. She glanced over to Rhodri, briefly, and in that second, his expression changed. A slow, sly grin.
“What are you talking about?”
“This virus, the one that infected me, your mother... it was put into a package we received from Rhodri. He’s trying to kill us, Eva, because we know what he’s done…”
Eva sighed loudly, overcome, lowered her head in shame, regret, something.
“Don’t worry,” she said softly. “It’s over now.”
“What do you mean? What’s over?”
“He’s not going to hurt anyone anymore. He’s dead. Rhodri’s dead.”
Richard sat up in bed, mouth hanging open, reached out and touched Eva’s shoulder gently, squeezing.
“What do you mean, he’s dead?”
“I killed him. It was… it was an accident, but it happened. I haven’t been able to tell how I should feel about it, all this time. But now I think… I think it was for the best. It’s horrible to say that, but I do. I’m glad he’s dead, that he can’t hurt anyone else.”
Rhodri scowled at her, got to his feet, and her heart jerked in her chest.
“Eva,” Richard said carefully, deliberate. “When did this happen? When did he die?”
Eva frowned.
“Months ago. Early July. He—”
“He’s not dead,” Richard said, ominously. “He can’t be dead. We were poisoned three weeks ago, Eva. He’s been threatening us, the whole city, for weeks.”
“Wait, you mean Prague-1—”
“Rhodri is alive,” he said, weak. “And I fear he’s come to finish what he started.”