The Brightest Night (Origin #3) - Jennifer L. Armentrout Page 0,33

I’d wasted even a minute feeling guilty over not remembering what my father’s voice sounded like.

“I think it’s just hard to really accept that people you trust—people you need to trust, who are supposed to be looking out for the health and wealth of their community—can be so evil,” I said finally. “Even when you see evidence of it and know that people are capable of anything.”

“It’s just different when you see it happening with your own eyes. I think there’s a part of our psyche, the human part of us, that automatically wants to believe the best in people and in situations. Maybe because it’s easier or less scary. Maybe it’s even a survival tool. I don’t know,” Zoe said. “But the thing is, there are groups of people out there who believe the one percent control the world. Like some sort of shadow government is behind the wheel, and in a way, they’re right. The public doesn’t know the Daedalus exist, and that that organization has their hands in everything, but they haven’t been able to stretch their reach to seize absolute control on a global level, not to a point where the impact on ordinary people’s lives is no longer hidden and easy to overlook. To do that, they’ll need to get rid of anyone who can fight back and then move on to humans they find undesirable. They could reshape the law, the government, and society to what most benefits them.”

Pressing her lips again, she shook her head. “But is that really their goal? There are a lot of people they’d need to take out if they didn’t want to spend every waking moment fearing a rebellion. And do we really know what their endgame truly is? We don’t, but I can’t figure out how they plan to accomplish any of this with a hundred or so trained Trojans and an army of recently mutated humans.”

I mulled that over, thinking about how the world viewed Jason Dasher as a hero. “But if they make themselves out to be the heroes’ like Jason Dasher did, and they make those they want to get rid of the villains, it may be easy for them to take control.”

Zoe fell quiet, and there was a part of me that couldn’t even believe we were having this conversation, so maybe Zoe was on to something about how the human psyche seeks to protect via levels of denial.

But like I’d realized before, the luxury of denial was something none of us could afford.

“It’s already begun.” Unease coated my skin. “Look at how the Luxen are being blamed for people getting sick. Something that’s biologically impossible, but not a lot of people seem to question what they’re being fed by people like Senator Freeman.” I tucked my hair behind my ears. “We didn’t really get to talk about the whole flu thing that the Sons of Liberty guy told us about. What was his name? Steven? I didn’t get a chance to ask Eaton about it, but what if that’s true?”

Zoe sat back, eyes widening with surprise. “God, I can’t believe I forgot about that.”

“A lot has been happening,” I reminded her.

Raising her brows in agreement, she nodded. “Steven said that the Daedalus had weaponized the flu and have been releasing it in batches, right?”

I nodded.

Her gaze drifted to the rippling curtains. “They manipulated a strain of the flu to carry the mutation. People who get their yearly flu shot may still get pretty sick, but they won’t mutate. Those who didn’t get the shot will…”

“Mutate or die.” Like Ryan, one of our classmates, who had gotten the flu and died. Or Coop and Sarah. They’d mutated. But then there’d been the outbreaks in Boulder and Kansas City. People died there, too. Steven claimed those cases were test runs, and the mutated virus hadn’t been released widely.

Yet.

Even right now, I could hear my mom lecturing about the importance of the flu vaccine. Had she known what the Daedalus were going to do with the flu virus? Closing my eyes, I cursed myself. She had to know. She worked in infectious diseases, and God, she could’ve been a part of making that weaponized strain at some point. Was that why she’d been so pro–flu shot? Because she knew what was coming, and if so, was that further evidence of a change of heart?

It didn’t matter.

Because it didn’t undo what she’d done, and her change of heart didn’t change enough. She could’ve warned people. She