feet up onto the coffee table, obscuring the papers.
For the next ten minutes I sip at my water and pretend to listen while he enumerates blood disease symptoms. The room starts to close in on me, all the walls at once. All of a sudden, his cologne is overpowering, sickening. He’s moved closer to me and he’s leaning in, a breath away from my face. His left hand presses on my knee with such force I can feel each one of his fingers, an independent pressure point boring into my skin. There’s a gold band I’ve never noticed on this hand, and I’m thinking “smarmy” might not be the right word for him.
“So. We should talk more about Freddie,” he says. “How about you come back this afternoon. Say, four? We can discuss everything over a drink.”
I feel myself smiling and nodding and saying yes, agreeing to whore myself to this mad scientist for my daughter’s sake.
“Terrific. It’s a date, then,” he says. “But right now, I’ve got some work to do. Deadline in a few hours.” He pauses and avoids my eyes. “We’re rolling out flu shots before the season hits us.” Alex releases my knee and takes my hand, pulling me up with him. “I know things aren’t good with you and Malcolm right now, Elena. Maybe we can find a way to fix that, too.”
The room suddenly fills with music, a familiar strain of trumpets and other brass I recognize from Apocalypse Now. It’s Alex’s phone.
Of course. He would have his ringtone set to Wagner.
“I have to take this,” he says, and I catch a quick flash of the photo on the phone’s screen before I let him turn me toward the door.
I steal one final glance at the coffee table. The papers are gone.
FIFTY-ONE
When I leave Alex’s apartment, it’s nearly noon. I’m high on adrenaline and low on morale as I jog back along the beige hallway to my own quarters with three phrases from Madeleine Sinclair’s speech last night echoing through me.
Better America.
Better families.
Better humans.
I think of the Genics Institute, really the Eugenics Institute, and break into a run, hoping Lissa or Ruby Jo will be in. There’s so much to tell them.
I should be shocked, but I’m not. Appalled, maybe, and all the other words I can think of that go with it, but not shocked. We’ve always done this, we humans in our little societies. We categorize and compare and devise ways to separate ourselves into teams, not so differently from the rituals of a grade school gym class. I pick her, we say. But not him.
Someone is always last; someone is always at the bottom of the barrel, the last to be chosen.
You’d think we’d grow out of that nonsense.
Ruby Jo listens while I give the digested version of Malcolm’s visit, the guards’ conversation, and the papers in Alex’s apartment. Lissa, curled up on the sofa and alert, scribbles notes on a pad of paper, only stopping to mutter something about a twenty-first-century Jim Crow state, only the dividing line of segregation isn’t skin color but Q scores.
“Fucking Progressives,” Lissa says.
I have no idea what she’s talking about.
“It’s a Progressive thing. Progressive with a capital P, that is. They were a big deal in the early 1900s with their Get-Rid-of-the-Idiots programs.”
Ruby Jo shifts in her chair. “I hate that word.”
“Progressive? Or idiot?” Lissa says.
No one laughs.
“There were two doctors hanging about near Underwood’s office today,” I say.
Lissa’s head jerks up from her notepad. “M or PH?”
“I don’t know.” The men outside Underwood’s office weren’t wearing white coats and stethoscopes, but they didn’t have the tweed-and-Birkenstock mien of career academics. “Medical doctors, maybe.” Of course they’d have more doctors here. With over a hundred kids crammed together in dormitories, colds and flu would spread, well, like a virus. And the chill air today is a harsh reminder that we’re about to start another round of flu season, just as Alex said. The entire school will need shots, especially the younger ones.