THURSDAY: Chapter XXVI

Following breakfast, Madeline enlisted Echo's help to prepare for the remainder of our journey and she chased me and Scout outside to "do something useful."

I sensed she wanted me to get to know him better.

For nearly ten minutes, I simply sat on the ground with my arms wrapped around my knees while Scout leaned against a tree stump, sharpening a knife. It was midday, but foggy from the day before, the lingering scent of cyanide tinting the air.

"Why am I not dead..." I uttered, just loud enough for Scout to hear me. My eyes flickered up to him and he nearly fell over in his panic, dropping the knife. I winced.

"I'm sorry," I added. "I didn't mean it like that..."

Did I?

"The poison. Why didn't it affect me? Or Madeline? How are any of us alive?"

Scout didn't look entirely convinced, but nonetheless, he stooped to retrieve the knife and then leaned back against the stump, albeit a little more stiff than before.

"We're immune to it, Nova," Scout said quietly. "You and Echo were naturally immune, and I and Madeline were... genetically altered to be immune to it."

"Why?" I questioned, and then: "How?"

"For us government officials, all of us were," Scout admitted. "When the virus started killing the population, the government couldn't fall. It had to be there to fallback on."

"And then you turned traitor..." I finished the story.

"And then I turned traitor..." Scout reiterated, pleased. "They never saw that coming."

I smiled down at the ground, a mental image making its way around my head until Scout spoke again.

"You know, Nova. There's another thing they never saw coming..."

"What's that?"

I met his eyes, recognizing the affection in them.

"You."

It was one word, and he was clearly proud to say it. And yet, it made no sense to me.

"Me?"

"Not just you," Scout laughed. "All of you: Echo, you, Grace, Dauphin. All of them."

"All of who?" I nearly shouted. "Who are Grace and Dauphin?"

"You'll meet them soon," he told me. "You think you're the only one immune to it?"

"No," I scowled. "I knew I wasn't the only one." I paused: thinking. "How'd you find out I was immune to it?"

Scout smiled in response and twirled his knife in his fingers.

"They made it only too easy," he told me. "I collected a sample of my blood and DNA the day before the procedure, and then again a week after, when the transformation for supposed to be complete. Later, in the privacy of my personal lab, I scanned and compared the two samples using their own methods. But then I broke it down further. I figured out that certain strands that were altered in my genetic makeup were found naturally in certain bloodlines. But it wasn't consistent. Some genes only went from father to daughter, or mother to son, and some skipped the first child but were transferred to any child afterward while other's only went to the eldest. Some only counted if another was present, and some had to be the only one of those select strands. The possibilities were endless."

I stared at him, memories from advanced biology running through my mind.

"But that's ridiculous," I informed him. "The chances of any one of us having the perfect genetic makeup to counter this is-"

"One in a million?" Scout cut me off. "That's what I thought, too... but it was still possible, and that made it worth looking into. The first DNA I ran in the system was Madeline's. I wanted to make sure she'd be safe. She didn't match any of the strands, so I did the only thing I could think of to protect her: I stole a vial of the formula and injected her with it, myself."

"They didn't notice it missing?" I questioned.

"Oh, they did!" he told me. "Launched an investigation. Caught their guy. He was arrested. Probably never saw the light of day again..."

"But-"

"Caught the wrong guy, by the way," he added.

"But-"

"Nope. I don't feel bad about it."

He seemed to wait for another 'but', and then he continued with his story.

"That was really as far as I could go with the data that I had. I had a possibility that people could be immune to it, but nothing set in steel. I coded my computer system to start running tests using information straight from the main information log of the UVGRO - the United Vicinities Genetic Research Organization. See, starting about fifty years ago, they started a mandatory testing of every baby born. It's a simple blood test that puts the baby in the system, and it also holds the potential for finding each child's genetic makeup. Every day I was at work, my computer was running six names per minute and automatically filing any ones into an encrypted folder that held any of the genes. These names were further studied for the final count of-"

"Not even a hundred," I told him. "It's impossible."

"One hundred and thirteen, actually," he corrected me. "Out of the thousands of people on Earth, just one hundred and thirteen are immune to it."

He stared at me, eyes narrow as though daring me to figure out what he wasn't telling me. He wanted me to figure out the final part of the story on my own.

And then I realized it…

"We're it, aren't we?" I asked him quietly. He looked away. "They killed everyone else, didn't they? We're the only ones left?"

I prayed he would shake his head. Not for the first time since this had all started, I wanted so to be wrong.

But Scout only nodded, and the reality of our situation suddenly made so much more sense…