Fiona nodded. “In this case, the anomaly seems to have produced a person who’ll never get sick.”
Was I life-form A1? Human, but improved? “Genetic flukes happen all the time, though. Is this one different?” I asked.
“A little.” Fiona shrugged. “It’s not just a small jump; it’s a big one. And it has the potential to spread—if it hasn’t already.”
“What do you mean?” Miko asked.
“I ran diagnostics at the molecular level. It’s a change at the genetic level, and it appears to be a dominant trait,” Fiona said.
Trying to process that, I asked, “How do we help the orphans with it?”
Her tasteless meal as forgotten as mine, she said, “I was hoping at first that this might somehow inoculate them for life, but I was wrong. A1 blood will eradicate the infection, but it’ll also eventually get eliminated from the host body, because it can’t change the host’s own white blood cells. Giving someone A1 blood just temporarily adds to what they’ve already got.”
“How do you know this?” Shiori asked, chiming in for the first time with a question that, as usual, landed in the air somewhere between Fiona and me on the opposite side of the table from her.
“I mixed some of the test blood with some of my own and then watched,” Fiona answered. “The immune cells from A1 and mine didn’t merge in any way. They stayed separate. But A1 cells will help fight off sickness in the short term, like taking medicine. And that just further confirms that there’s no long-term risk.”
“So the shift has to happen at the genetic level?” I asked. “You have to be born with it?”
Fiona confirmed with a nod. “It was either a fluke at conception, and A1 is the first step toward evolution of the human species—if A1 procreates—or whoever’s blood this is had at least one parent already carrying the genetic material necessary to produce a child with type A1 blood.”
Holy shit! The few bites I’d eaten were about to come back up. Mom got sick—she died from a fever. So either I was the starting point of type A1 blood, or my father…
I couldn’t recall. Had he ever gotten sick?
Noodle-and-red-sauce acid burned in my throat. If the Grand Galactic Overseer was the next step for the human species, we were so incredibly fucked.
And if he was, he’d also used me as a lab rat instead of himself. If he was exactly like me, I was going to wring his neck.
Horror percussed through me like the beat of a too-loud drum. If he knew, he could have saved her. All he’d had to do was inject Mom with some of my blood. Or maybe his own.
I jerked back as if slapped. Of course he knew. I’d never tried to find out the truth before now because I’d been running from what I thought was something alien and horrible in my blood. And the possibility of my father tracing me back to any tests and finding me had put the fear of all the Powers That Be into me. But Fiona had figured it out in just a couple of days in a makeshift lab full of pieced-together, stolen equipment on a beat-up old cargo ship. With all the technology the Overseer had at his disposal, there was no way he hadn’t known. It was simply that creating enhanced soldiers with my special healing blood had been more important to him than saving Mom.
“Tess?” Miko bumped my leg under the table with her foot. “You all right?”
Rattled to the core, I said, “Yeah. Just thinking.” My voice came out hoarse, and I cleared my throat.
Miko had lost her hand the day of the explosion on Hourglass Mile. No, she didn’t lose it; she sawed it off just before the fortuitous blast. Fortuitous for us, anyway. She and Shiori found the Endeavor before Jax and I did. We hadn’t known, or cared, who was on board when we’d vaulted up into the open cargo cruiser and raced toward the bridge. As long as there weren’t guards with guns on the ship, we were good. The two small women huddled in the corner together, one old and blind and the other spewing blood, hadn’t seemed like much of a threat.
That afternoon sometimes still felt like yesterday, especially when I was alone at night in the dark, and with this new, unimagined information about myself, my thoughts raced wildly, just like Jax and I had that day.