The Wounded

It displayed my fit of anger in all its glory. Shattered wood, and toppled cans in the corner. I growled and grabbed a can of juice, piercing the lid and downing it quickly. I was ashamed of my behavior. The thing was… I knew she didn’t care. But I did. I destroyed something important to her.

I swept up the splinters and threw it in a bucket. Hastily tossing a shirt on, I went to make my way down to one of the fires to destroy the evidence.

I swung the bucket through the entrance, and it collided with something soft. I heard a slight thump, and the air being pushed from her lungs. “Damn it!” I said loudly. I swept the blanket aside. Rosa lay on the rocky ground, propped up on her elbows, looking like she was glued to her place. She stared up at me, her eyes round and red. “You ok?” I asked, even though I knew the answer was no.

She shook her head as if trying to clear it. Opening her mouth to speak, she stopped and then bit down on her lip. I ran my hands through my hair. I didn’t want her to say anything. Not one word.

It came out fu

“Apella’s dead.”

I pulled her up, and we stumbled towards the infirmary. The rocks beneath us, sharp under my bare feet. I wanted to see for myself. Rosa could have been wrong. She wasn’t a doctor. I knew Apella’s lungs were giving out, I knew that searching for a cure for Orry was taking what little strength she had left, but dead? No.

I clasped the door and paused for a second. I prepared for the worst. Rosa was clutching my shirt like she was drowning. Her tiny fingers pressed into my chest. I opened the door and strode inside.

*****

Would this be me? If I lost her, would this be what everyone saw?

There was no sound but for the small, breathless whimpers of a man who had lost everything. Alexei sat next to a lifeless shell folded over the desk, his head in his hands. “No, no, no, no…” he whispered, over and over, and my remade heart started breaking. My mentor, my friend, my almost mother, was dead.

We broke apart. I went to Alexei, and Rosa to the other side of Apella. I patted Alexei on the back and carefully reached under Apella’s hair to find her pulse. She was cold. My fingers pressed in deeper, but there was no blood pumping through her veins. I looked to Rosa, and it was like she had stopped breathing. Her face was so still, her expression unreadable. Her eyes sca

Right then, Matt walked in. It took him two seconds to work out what had happened, and his wrinkles deepened. He carefully lifted Apella to the bed. Her arm fell limply, blue ink marking her fingers and hands. I watched Rosa react and suppress, react and suppress. The piece of paper scrunched in her hand. Her eyes flitted to the writing, and confusion spread all over her face. She shook her head slowly and let it fall from her hands.

“That’s it then. It’s for nothing.” She heaved a breath and wrung her hands, the tears she was trying to hold in just pouring from her eyes now. She kind of hiccupped and put her hand to chest. “Oh Jesus, he’s going to die.” I could feel everything she was feeling. The devastation, the fear of what we were about to face. I reached out to grab her but she backed away, turned, and ran. She was a shadow as she slipped out the door.

I kneeled down and scooped up the piece of paper, as it danced across the floor from the gust of Rosa’s departure. My eyes went over each word.

Fava Beans

Oranges

Each underlined heavily. I smiled.

Apella, your final gift to us was a good one.

I could have screamed, but everyone’s eyes were on me as I walked away from the infirmary. How could this happen? How could it all end like this? With a grocery list scrawled over ink-smudged paper. She must have gone crazy, the sickness invading her brain or something. I was so angry with her… for not saving Orry, for leaving me with nothing but a useless scrap to hold onto, for dying. How could she just… die like that?

I pictured her hanging over that desk. All the things that made her alive suddenly pulled from her like pulling a hermit crab from its shell. I thought she looked like a ghost when she was alive, now she was one. And she would always haunt me. Because I hated her and loved her at the same time. So much.

I squatted down and put my hands to the wet rocks.

Damn it, damn it, damn it, I thought as I wiped my sniffling nose with a shaky hand.

Could this please be a dream? I wasn’t even half the person I would need to be to deal with this. I pulled my hair back from my face and shoved down the bile that was rising in my throat. I thought about Addy, Clara, Deshi, and now Apella. They were all gone, dead, lost. There was no fairness to this. People were going to drop away, dissolve into the stacks of bodies, because we were in a war. We could hide underground, pit ourselves against the idea of it, but it was always there. And it was going to take everyone and everything if we let it. I felt my organs seize in my chest, because now it was going to take my son.

I punched the rock, my knuckles splitting, the skin opening, bleeding. The pain was a nice feeling. It was on the outside of me, instead of the pain that ran back and forth over my insides like a two-man saw.

Stop. Just stop. Please.

Whoever’s controlling this puppet show we’re all in, please cut the strings. Don’t make me do this. Go through this.

But it was done. No one was listening. I was tied to the sky, and the strings that bound us together were breaking.

J oseph

Fava beans and oranges. I knew to Rosa this meant nothing, a grocery list, some random items. And on their own, they didn’t mean anything. But combined with Orry’s symptoms, they meant the world. Thanks to Apella, he would live.

In those months before I found Rosa, I learned the process of how Orry was made, how they were all designed and produced. There were steps you had to follow, important steps. You couldn’t skip one. I knew Este had been in a hurry, that she’d doubled the amount of embryos to be produced and implanted. She’d also messed around with chromosomes, trying to make the offspring more All Kind, but I never thought she’d be this reckless. It was as obvious to me as it must have been to Apella… that Este had skipped over the pre-implantation genetic screening. This would check the embryos for predispositions to different intolerances and genetic disorders. One disorder, which had shown to be particularly common in the embryos that had been produced, was a G6 PD deficiency. It was a severe intolerance to fava beans that caused vomiting, seizures, jaundice, anemia, and eventually death if not treated.

I stood over Apella’s body. She was almost grey. Alexei had stopped crying, but his face remained contorted in anguish. I put my hand on hers and mentally thanked her. I squeezed Alexei’s shoulder. He looked up at me and smiled. “So she did it?” he asked quietly.

I nodded somberly. “She did.”

“Good,” he said. “I knew it couldn’t be for nothing.” There was a glimmer of hope in his eyes, and pride. “I think she held on as long as she could, so that she could find the answer. I watched her work. She wrote down the final word, smiled, and sighed her last breath before she laid her head down on the table.” He swept his thi