“But you stayed together,” Rex said.
“For a time. Over the next few months we both became more and more absorbed in our work. Howard was fixated on the question of overpopulation and continued refining and upgrading his Wellplants. I assembled a team of grad assistants, and some of them got spliced, too. Many of them became close friends and allies. Some still are.
“That fall, flu season started early, and it was quickly clear it would be a bad one. Later, we would look back and realize it was the first year of the great pandemic. Anyway, with so many people getting sick, I returned to work on the immunity virus, hoping to make headway, but I never managed to crack it. Howard declined to help, saying he was too busy with his other work.” Her face twisted at the memory. “He said it was a dead end. And even with the death toll rising, quickly skyrocketing, even when it became clear we were looking at a full-blown pandemic, Howard spoke about letting nature take its course. He said the flu was nature self-correcting, trying to reestablish some sort of sustainable equilibrium. Theoretically, it was an interesting argument, but this wasn’t theoretical. Millions of lives were at stake.”
“Including my dad,” I said quietly.
She nodded gravely. “Yes, including your dad…my brother.…Anyway, we argued about that. A lot. Even so, I continued working on both tracks—a flu vaccine and the splicing technology—both using the same virus. I made much more progress with the latter, and soon I was ready for the next round of tests, a broader and more ambitious sort of splice.”
“I bet Wells was thrilled about that,” I said.
“I didn’t tell him. Not yet. But as we were preparing for the next round of tests, the North American gray wolf was declared officially extinct. I was devastated. I acquired a small sample of the wolf’s DNA and used that as the basis for the next test, the broader splice, which once again I administered to myself. A broader splice meant broader changes. The transition took twenty-four very unpleasant hours. When Howard saw me after I’d sweated out the procedure, he was enraged. He called me a freak, an abomination.”
“Sounds familiar,” Rex said.
“It does now.” Her eyes were pained and unfocused, recalling the painful memory. “But back then, it was an escalation. Things had grown increasingly tense between us, but this was the first time he actually scared me. Later that night, a fire broke out in my lab, a suspicious one. I lost all of my work on the immunity virus and on the splice medium, everything that wasn’t in my head. But more tragic, one of the university’s security staff died in the fire. When the police came to question me, it was clear they thought I had set the blaze.”
“Why?”
“There was overwhelming evidence to suggest as much. Charges on my credit card, my ID card being used to swipe in before the blaze. They thought I was trying to hide a lack of progress in my research. I realized I was being set up, clumsily, but convincingly. I also discovered that someone had broken into my apartment. I feared for my safety.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I fled. I had a little bit of money from a few patents I’d licensed. I packed up and I disappeared.”
I thought back to what Trudy had told me about that time, about how upset Grandma and Grandad had been about how Dymphna left. I wondered how much of it was because she’d spliced herself, and how much was because of the police’s suspicions. I made a note to ask her later.
Dymphna dabbed at her eyes. “I tried to continue my work, but it took several years before I learned enough about life on the run, and staying hidden, that I could resume it. In all likelihood, I wouldn’t have solved the immunity virus anyway, but when…when your father got sick, Jimi, when he died, I couldn’t help but feel responsible. If I hadn’t failed, Danny would still be alive.”
I put my hand on her wrist. “It’s not your fault,” I said. “You tried. Maybe it just wasn’t possible.”
She put her hand over mine. “But it was, you see.”
THIRTY-SIX
Dymphna sat back, letting her words sink in. “How do you know?” I finally asked.
“I kept in touch with friends who were still working with Howard,” Dymphna said, “friends personally closer to me, even though their work was more adjacent to his. They kept an eye on him for me over the years, even as he left academia and started building his empire. His scientific work continued to break new ground, but they were all concerned about his increasingly extreme personal views, and his obsession with me. Two years ago, they told me about this new stage to the Wellplant implantation procedure: infecting the subject with some sort of virus that would bolster the patient’s immunity. They got hold of a sample, and some of Wells’s data on it.”
“Your immunity virus?” Rex asked. “He finally perfected it?”
She looked at him grimly and nodded. “It was an almost perfect genetic match to my virus, with one simple but brilliant tweak, one I might never have thought of. Maybe Howard wouldn’t have, either, if not for his Wellplant. But it was definitely a version of the same virus. He had indeed perfected it. I don’t think he realized his virus had any connection to the splice medium—he might not have wanted it had he known, he’s such a bigot. But here’s the thing: from his notes we learned that he’d actually perfected the immunity virus quite some time ago. A decade, in fact. The second year of the great pandemic. But he never released his findings.”
“Why?” Rex asked.
She ignored him at first, turning to me with eyes welling as she waited for me to do the math. It took me a second.
“But”—my own tears came on fast—“that means he had perfected it before my dad died. Before so many other people died.”
She nodded. “I’m afraid it does,” she said softly. “He was serious about letting nature take its course. When it suits his purposes, at least.”
I had no words. I was breathless, drowning in an ocean of fury and sorrow.
“I’m sorry, Jimi,” she said. “I was devastated, too, when I realized that implication. But there were other terrible implications, as well.”
Rex stepped closer and put his arm around my shoulders. “Like what?” he asked, his voice grim.
“Like, why would he start administering the immunity virus to his Wellplant customers now?”
“And…why would he?” Rex asked her.
But I spoke first, as the answer clicked into place in my head. “Because he was also perfecting his super-flu. And he was planning on releasing it. To finish the job the first pandemic started.”
“Precisely,” Dymphna said. “They call it a slate-wiper in epidemiological circles, an extinction-level event that would reset the planet. Wells was immunizing his subjects against the avian flu because he was entering the operational phase of his genocidal master plan. And he didn’t want his chosen few to perish with everyone else.”
She paused for a moment, maybe to give us a chance to respond or ask questions. But we were both speechless.
“I called an emergency meeting of Chimerica’s governing council,” she continued. “And we came up with a plan. We were pretty sure chimeras were already immune to whatever Wells would unleash, because I had used our original attempt at an immunity virus as a medium.”