“We saw this one hijack your vehicle,” he said, giving Dara a slight shove that turned up the temperature in her eyes.
“What do you mean you saw it? Were you following me? Spying on me?” Between CLAD, Chimerica, and Wells and his goons, I was sick of being followed and spied on and abducted and hijacked.
“We picked you up as you approached our Pedricktown site. That’s how we saw your vehicle intercepted. Like it or not, you are important, Jimi Corcoran, both to those who want to protect you, and those who wish you harm.”
Dymphna stepped around Rex and me. “You must be Cronos,” she said.
“And you must be Dymphna,” he said back. He gave Dara a gentle push, away from him, and said, “You can take that off now, if you like.”
She glared at him as she peeled off the duct tape, leaving a pink rectangle of irritated skin around her mouth.
“It is about time we met,” Dymphna said. “We have much to discuss.”
“And much to do,” Cronos countered. The two masked figures behind him spread out. He turned toward me again and took off his shades, revealing dark, gray-brown irises surrounded by yellow and streaked with red, eyes that seemed ravaged by disease or trauma. But even as I took a step back, involuntarily, recoiling or retreating, I also sensed something familiar about them. “You and I need to talk, as well.”
“About what?” I asked, stepping forward again to reclaim the space I had abandoned.
Cronos looked at Ogden and held out his hand as if to say, Go ahead.
“First, whatever it was you were coming to tell me,” Ogden said. “Before you were taken.”
I looked at Rex, who shrugged, and at Dymphna, who nodded.
“Well,” I said, “I was going to tell you that Chimerica has tested the chicken carcass from Wells Life Sciences and they refused to share the results of the testing. But since then they’ve confirmed that it’s infected with some sort of flu. The mystery bug spreading among the H4Hers started with the people who harassed us that night back in Philadelphia, who handled the chicken. The guy who reached into the bag is already dead.”
“Our testing indicated that the chicken was infected with a particularly virulent engineered variant of the H7N7 virus,” Dymphna said. “A version of a virus that Howard Wells has been working on for quite some time.”
“For what purpose?”
“He wants to start a new pandemic,” I said. “Worse than the last one. He wants to kill people on a massive scale, to relieve the pressures on the planet, the climate.”
Cronos turned his gun toward Dymphna. “You knew this, and you concealed it?”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Chimeras are immune to Wells’s bug. That’s because the virus that makes the splicing medium work is a variant of the same virus as Wells’s.”
“And you developed the splice medium?” he said.
“Yes, that’s right. Both the original and this one. Two years ago, when we first became aware of Wells’s plan, we—Chimerica, that is—released a new version of this immunity virus through the splice medium that we distribute to the genies in our network. Just like the previous variant, this one confers immunity, but it’s contagious, so it is spreading immunity to everyone who come into contact with chimeras, and to those who come into contact with those people, and so on.”
Cronos was silent for a moment after she finished, then he shook his head. “But while you’re waiting, Wells is still preparing.” He laughed bitterly. “There’s nothing Chimerica likes more than putting off action. The longer you wait, the more prepared Wells will be.”
Dymphna’s eyes hardened. “The longer we wait, the more people will be immune. The less impact the virus will have.”
“If Wells was ready to release his super-flu, he would have done it already. You said the virus was transmitted through the splice medium. And that chimeras are all immune, right?”
“Probably so, yes.”
“Then we need to act. Now. We need to tell people what Wells is doing, try to stop it. And if that forces his hand and prompts him to act before he is ready to reveal himself, so much the better.”
Dymphna took another deep breath. “I’m told you have a plan to take down the Wellplant network.”
Cronos shot Ogden an acid glare. Then he turned back to Dymphna. “That’s right. And the recent outage proves it will work.”
“How?”
Cronos laughed, a bitter raspy cackle. “I’d love to have you join us. But if you’re not part of us, you’re against us.”
“Is that how you see it? We’re either collaborators or enemies?”
“If you’re not with us, I can’t tell you anything at all.”
“And you expect me to sign on to a plan I don’t know?” She shook her head. “I’m afraid that’s not how it works.”
He paused, studying Dymphna. “Fine. You’ve been candid with me, so, seeing as how someone has apparently already been talking about it”—he shot another glare at Ogden before continuing—“I guess I can share some of the details. We plan on releasing an operating system patch into the Wellplant network. Malware, they used to call it, back in the Internet days. It will crash the network and incapacitate anyone with a Wellplant for forty-eight hours. It will demonstrate to the world the vulnerability of Wells’s technology, the vulnerability of every brain that is connected to it. It will destroy Wells’s empire.”
Dymphna raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to incapacitate all of them?” She tilted her head. “There are pilots with Wellplants. People running factories, power plants, heavy machinery. If you incapacitate them all, people could get hurt.”
Cronos chuckled under his mask. “That’s a chance I’m willing to take,” he said. “We are going to stop the people who are trying to hurt us.”
“Not everyone who has a Wellplant is trying to hurt chimeras, for heaven’s sake,” Dymphna said. “Many are working hard to make the world a better place, working for nonprofits or in the public sector, even running businesses, keeping people employed. We are fighting against the hatred and fear that defines our opponents. Fighting it with hatred and fear simply begets more hatred and fear. It plays right into their hands, into the lies they’ve been saying about us. It takes love to combat hatred and fear, compassion, figuratively and in this case literally, as well. Togetherness will save lives, while at the same time giving those who fear us a chance to see that there is nothing to be afraid of at all.”
Cronos laughed, but it sounded forced. “Your heavy-handed fairy tales are what’s going to get us killed. Telling us to love those who want to hurt us.” Once again he sounded vaguely familiar, and I wondered if it was because he still seemed to be doing his best to sound like some kind of super villain.
“Okay, what of those who have been made a part of the network as part of their jobs?” she demanded. “The police, the first responders? What of the world leaders who have implants? Taking them down will lead to massive disruptions across the planet. You’ll make even more people hate and fear us.”
“They should fear us! And they hate us already. Even those who didn’t before they got spiked. Once they got their Wellplants, they became the enemy. Or part of the enemy.”