He pushed himself away from the windowsill and I turned my head to follow him as he strode past me. “Do not run away from me again!” I shouted. As he reached the doorway, I froze him again with a single word: “Del!”
FORTY-FIVE
Cronos stood in the doorway for several seconds, absolutely motionless, before he turned and came back into the room. Ogden watched him in silence.
“It is you, isn’t it?” I asked breathlessly. My heart beat erratically, like it was going crazy, like everything was going crazy.
Cronos came slowly around in front of me.
“I’m not Del,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“How?” I said, my voice catching on the emotions rising within me, shock and hope and fury threatening to spill over. “How could you let me believe you were dead?”
“Del is dead. And so is Tamil.” Tamil was the name he’d adopted as a chimera, briefly. Before he’d died.
He reached up and pulled off his hood, revealing a face that was more scar tissue than anything else, the skin shiny and tight over lumps and striations. “Those parts of me are gone. I am Cronos now.”
“But…how?” I asked again. “I saw you die.”
He smiled, and it was both ghastly and sweet.
“No, Jimi, you saw what should have killed me. You saw me shot and burned, by both chemicals and fire. I saw on the news that they said they hadn’t recovered my body because the chemicals in that pit had dissolved it. Well, not entirely.” He took off his gloves and looked down at his red, raw hands. “It seems my salamander splice kept me alive, regenerating just enough of me after I crawled out of that chemical pit and away from that terrible place. It regrew me as best it could.” He laughed under his breath, raspy and bitter, but sounding more and more like Del. “Turns out the best was still not very good. I should have died, but I didn’t. For better or for worse.”
Then he looked up at me, his eyes burning behind his seared skin. “At first, for me, it was definitely for worse. But I realized it was for a reason. I had to suffer through the nonks’ hatred, see the depths of it, so I could serve as a living reminder—or a half-living one—of what they were capable of, what they wanted to do to us all. I’ve seen it, up close. My experiences gave me the determination to do something about it, to bring together others who felt the same way, who wanted to be a part of the solution. There aren’t a lot of us, a few dozen—not like the thousands in Chimerica—but we are acting, doing, not just talking and keeping secrets. We are making a difference, changing the world. And who better to make sure no other chimera suffers like this at the hands of the nonks? Who better to prevent more atrocities from happening, and to avenge those that have already occurred?”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Sorry for what happened to you and—and sorry I wasn’t able to do more to prevent it, or to help you afterward. But it doesn’t make it right, Del, what you’re planning to do. What you’re planning to let happen. Even if we can’t stop Wells and his insanity, we can still tell people about the immunity virus. You released the details about the super-flu, you can get word out about the cure, too, the same way.”
He paused for a long moment, then he stood. “No. Once Wells has released his bio-pathogen, we’ll release our cyber-pathogen. Let him kill the nonks, then we’ll kill the Plants. Most of the nonks hate us anyway. Those who are already close to chimeras, friends and allies like you, who don’t fear us or hate us or seek to take away our rights, they’ll be spared.” He smiled as he pulled his hood back over his head. “And those who avoid us like the plague, well…they’ll get the plague.”
“You can’t mean that, Del,” I said, as he moved toward the door.
He stopped and put a hand on my shoulder. “I told you: Del is gone. You saw him die. I am Cronos. And I must go. Next time we talk, this will all be over, and you’ll see that the world is a better place for it.”
Ogden was still in the corner, watching and listening, his eyes wide with horror.
Cronos strode through the door, and from the hallway he called back, “Let’s go, Ogden. We have work to do.”
Ogden stared at me for another moment, his eyes unreadable, then he dashed through the door after Cronos.
Cronos’s revelations had left me reeling. My brain felt like it was split in two, each hemisphere careening in a different direction: one side trying desperately to make sense of a world where my best friend was not only still alive, but the head of CLAD—and the other, trying to get a grip on his and Wells’s plans. Two madmen with two different approaches to killing vast numbers of people.
They had to be stopped, both of them. But I had no idea how. CLAD had put out the word about Wells and his virus, but Cronos was right: too many of the people who should be stopping it had Wellplants, and apparently, in some way, they were complicit.
It was hard to imagine all of them going along with it. But maybe they would.
I thought of Chris Bembry, robotically opening his gate for that van from Wells Life Sciences, and I wondered if he was in on it. Conceivably, the drones spraying fire retardant could be used to spread a flu virus, although that would hardly be enough to come close to the kind of impact Dymphna had described. And I didn’t know Claudia’s dad well, but from what she’d told me about him, participating in such a scheme would be against everything Chris Bembry believed in.
But maybe that didn’t matter anymore. Maybe it wasn’t Chris Bembry doing it, but the Wellplant. Everyone said the new version was much more powerful than before. Could they be more powerful than a human brain? I felt sick at the thought that maybe the new Wellplants were overpowering the brains they were implanted in. And did that mean Howard Wells was controlling them all?
I had no idea, but even if I knew, there wasn’t much I could do tied to a chair.
With enough time, maybe I could shuffle out into the hallway and tip myself down the steps, hope that the chair broke up more completely than I did. More likely, I would just snap my neck.
I could still hear people walking around on the first floor, speaking in hushed tones, so I knew they hadn’t left yet. I resolved that once they did, if no other idea presented itself, I would try to get to the stairs.
The front door opened and closed, and it was quiet for a few seconds, then it opened and closed again, and I heard footsteps running up the stairs, and then creeping down the hallway. Ogden appeared in the doorway with his finger against his lips.
“How could you do this?” I hissed in a loud whisper as he hurried closer. “This is genocide.”
“Shh!” he said, crouching next to me and sawing at the zip tie around my right wrist with a tiny pen knife. “I created that second malware program to be used on one person, Howard Wells, not everyone wearing a Wellplant. This is another one of Cronos’s surprise plans. It’s like with the bombing at the convention. From what I heard, no one was supposed to get hurt, but he changed the plan at the last minute. He said if I don’t go through with this, he’ll kill me, and my family.” The zip tie fell away and he put the knife in my hand, along with Claudia’s car keys. “We’re set up at the old RCA building in Camden, up in the tower. That’s where we’re going now. The Wellplant we’ve been using can receive, but it can’t transmit until we fully activate it. But once we activate it and upload the malware, the network will figure out pretty quickly that it’s not implanted and doesn’t have authorization, and it will shut us down. I’ll do what I can to stop this, but it’s a simple process—just click ENTER, and the malware will launch, first one, then the other. Cronos doesn’t need me at this point, so…he might just kill me and do it himself anyway. If you want to stop him, you need to get over there quick.”