A Better World

CHAPTER 33

The pond was shallow, the edges rimmed with toppled cattails, their stalks broken. The water smoothly mirrored the hazy November sky, and the air was crisp with the scent of pine and a promise of the snow the winter would bring.

A muffled boom rolled in from the distance, some hunter’s shotgun, and Ethan tried not to read omens in that.

“What do you think, chunks? Pretty, huh?” His daughter squinted up and flopped her arm. The scientist in him imagined the scientist in her; he sometimes pictured Violet as a tiny being in the cockpit of a vehicle she didn’t understand. Row upon row of dials and switches and knobs, and no instruction manual. Nothing to do but stab and twist at random and see what happened. Punch that button, this appendage flaps. Interesting.

Amy said, “She’s cold.”

Ethan jumped. It was the first thing she’d said to him in almost twenty-four hours, and though he was pretty sure the blanket he had wrapped around his daughter was keeping her plenty warm, he nodded, wrapped it tighter, and then turned back to the cabin.

His wife was still pissed off. Not that he blamed her.

Yesterday, after taking the clerk’s keys and duct-taping the man’s hands and feet, he’d carried the bags out of the gas station. Amy had looked at him, confused, as he’d led her around back to the battered pickup parked there. He put the bags in the bed, next to a battered toolbox.

“What’s this?”

“Our new truck. Come on.”

“Ethan, what did you—”

“What I had to. Please, Amy, trust me.”

She started for the truck, then said, “There’s no car seat.”

“We’re not going far.”

She stared at him, and he had one of those moments when he realized the difference a baby made. Turn refugee and flee their city? She was game. Believe him when he said to run from federal agents? You got it. Drive a couple of miles without a car seat? Houston, we have a problem.

“Baby, please, we have to go. I promise I’ll drive carefully.”

Reluctantly, she had climbed in.

His every instinct was screaming at him to hit the open road, to put distance between himself and Cuyahoga Falls. But he had to be smart. They were being tracked by an incredibly powerful governmental agency. It wouldn’t take long for them to discover the hogtied clerk, learn the make and model of the truck Ethan had stolen. And while he supposed he could swap license plates, somehow he didn’t suspect that would fool an agency that could co-opt security cameras at will.

No, much as he wanted to run, it was smarter to hide. If they were lucky, the DAR would start looking hundreds of miles out. Maybe lose track of them altogether. For a while.

“Where are we going?” In the passenger seat, Amy was clutching Violet with all her strength.

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Honey, I love you, but I’m about to kick your ass.”

“I’ll explain everything once we get settled.” He’d tried a smile, gotten nothing in return. “Look, right now we have to concentrate. This will only work if we don’t pass any cameras. Can you help me?”

She grimaced but leaned forward and stared through the windshield. They’d stuck to back roads and residential streets, wending their way to the national park, the same one they’d just trekked through. The first couple of houses hadn’t looked right—too close to the street, or with cars parked in front. After another few moments, he spotted a hand-painted sign that read THE HENDERSONS’ HIDEAWAY beside a dirt driveway. “This might do.”

“Do for what?”

He steered the truck up the drive, wound forty yards through faded pines. The Hendersons had the right idea of a hideaway: a cabin in the woods, tastefully sized and out of sight of the neighbors. Add the pond out back and you had the perfect spot for summer weekends. “Yeah. This will work.”

“Ethan . . .”

“Two minutes.”

He hopped out of the truck and went to the front door. Banged on it, got no response. There was a big bay window in front, and he tented his hands over his eyes to look inside. The furniture inside was covered with sheets. Perfect.

There wasn’t a crowbar in the toolbox, but he found a tire iron with a tapered point for popping off hubcaps. He walked back to the front door, slid it into the jamb. Hesitated for a moment, then thought, Hey, you’re already a fugitive and a car thief. In for a criminal penny.

A fast, sharp jerk and the wood gave with a splinter, the door swinging open.

Ethan turned, found his wife holding their daughter and looking at him like he’d lost his mind. He smiled, said, “Welcome home. Want to get a fire going?”

“Start over.”

“From where?”

“From, you know, over.”

“Okay.” Ethan used the iron poker to jiggle the logs in the fireplace. Sparks danced upward as the wood cracked. “So the first gifted were recognized in 1986, right? That means that for the last twenty-seven years, pretty much every geneticist on the planet has been trying to figure out how they came to be. The first step, and maybe the most important, was mapping the human genome. If the brilliants hadn’t come along, that wouldn’t have gotten a tenth of the funding or attention. Hell, I bet we wouldn’t have finished mapping the genome until, like, 2003.”

“And instead it was done in 1995.”

“Right. Now we had a benchmark. Everybody figured it would be easy after that—compare enough abnorms to norms, and we’d be able to spot the gene for brilliance. Of course, that takes a lot of computational power and time, so it was years before everybody accepted it wouldn’t be that simple.”

“There’s no gene for it.”

“Correct. So everybody fans out in different directions. Some people start looking at causes and working backward—was it pollution, growth hormones, the ozone layer, nuclear testing, et cetera. Others decided it must not be genetic at all, but some sort of a virus or prion, a structure that infected a percentage of people. Abe and I and others like us, though, we still believed DNA was the key—just not one gene. Like intelligence.”

“Intelligence is genetic.”

“Sure, right, but there’s no single gene for it. We still don’t know exactly how it works, but the research coming out of Stanford and Tokyo suggests that it’s actually dozens of genes, maybe hundreds, that in conjunction determine baseline intelligence. And it turns out the same is true of the brilliants. Only it’s even more subtle.”

Violet gave a short cry, and they both paused, looked over at her. The scene was cozy: mom and dad by a flickering fire, baby tightly swaddled and napping. All they were missing was eggnog and it could have been a Christmas card.

If you left out the fact that federal agents might kick in the door at any moment.

“So what is it?”

“Epigenetically associated telomere lengthening.”

She gave him a look, and he said, “Right. So telomeres are these nucleotide sequences at the ends of chromosomes that protect them from unraveling. Like the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces.”

He walked her through it as best he could, how telomeres varied in length, how they’d discovered that longer telomeres at the end of certain chromosomes were tied to cellular lifespan. Ethan’s conviction was that it wasn’t the genes themselves that were different, but rather their interactive mechanisms. An epigenetic solution explained why the answer was so elusive. The root cause had occurred not to the brilliants themselves, but to their ancestors two or three generations back. Not only that, it hadn’t altered their DNA sequence—only the way in which those genes were regulated.

“Think of it like cooking. The DNA sequence provides the raw ingredients. But the way those ingredients interact, the order they’re added to the pan, the temperature used, that all changes the final result.

“Only here, it’s not a handful of ingredients; human DNA has more than twenty-one thousand genes, and they interact in very subtle, complex ways. Still, once we started looking at epigenetic alterations in gene expressions, specifically as they relate to telomeres, we found the pattern.”

“Simple as that.”

He smiled, cocked an eyebrow. “Pretty sexy, right?”

“So what was the root cause?”

“Hmm?”

“You said that something had happened to their ancestors that created the brilliants.”

“Oh, that.” He shrugged. “No idea. Science tends to be about stumbling onto the what, then spending decades understanding the why. My guess, there is no single cause. For a hundred and fifty years humanity has toyed with the planet. We’ve poisoned the seas and damaged the food chain and tested thermonuclear weapons and introduced mutated crops and just basically been mucking with things we don’t fully understand. And one of the results of that is the gifted.”

She stared at the fire, the light tracing the fine features of her face, making her eyes glow. “So you figured out what makes people brilliant. Why not share it?”

“Once we understood the pattern, it occurred to Abe that it might be possible to recreate it. That it might actually be pretty easy.”

“Easy? People have been working on this for thirty years.”

“Right. Locating the cause was hard. But replicating it isn’t. Call it the three-potato theory.” He saw her look and laughed. “A phrase of Abe’s. Say that the cause of the gifted is eating three potatoes in a row. Figuring that out, given the entire range of human experience, that’s hard. But once you realize it—”

“All you need to do is eat three potatoes.”

“Or in this case, design a target therapy using non-coding RNA to regulate gene expression.”

“And it works? You can make people brilliant?”

“Our proof-of-concept work was wildly successful. We were just trying to figure out how to move into phase one trials on human beings when Abe disappeared.”

Amy stood up and stalked away. The move was so sudden that his first thought was maybe she’d heard something, and he stood quickly. “What is it?”

She was staring out the window, her hands clenching and unclenching.

“Baby?”

His wife whirled. “You stupid, stupid little boy.”

Her words caught him like a sucker punch. It had been such a relief to talk to her, to tell her about his triumph. To sit in this stolen moment of comfort and show off for his wife. “I don’t—”

“What did you think would happen?” She hissed the words, and it was worse than a yell. “Did you think?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Are you really that blind?” Amy stepped forward, and the firelight that a moment ago had made her so lovely now only underscored her fury. “You and Abe. Two dumb geniuses.”

“Look, I know it’s off-the-reservation, but you have to understand, we were onto the biggest discovery since, I don’t know, splitting the atom.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly right. And what did they use that for?”

He opened his mouth, closed it.

“You have a family, Ethan. A daughter. And you and your buddy cook up this little science project—”

“Hey—”

“—that will change the whole world. I mean, change everything. And it didn’t occur to you that people would want to take it from you?”

“I.” He blew a breath. “I’m a scientist. I just wanted to know.”

“Well, congratulations. You’ve made history.” The scorn in her voice was shocking. The two of them were good liberal intellectuals, they talked, they listened. They fought, sure, but didn’t go for blood. In the years they’d been married, he’d never heard her speak this way.

That’s not true. It’s just never been directed at you. But you heard it last night, when she called on Jeremy’s god to damn him.

“Amy . . .”

“Be quiet, Ethan. Just. Be quiet.”

And he had, the rest of the day. He’d hoped a night’s sleep might clear it all up, but though they’d shared the master bed, she’d slept huddled up on the far edge, her body angular with fury even in her sleep. This morning he’d made breakfast, cooking eggs and brewing coffee.

She hadn’t said a word. Hadn’t, in fact, said anything to him until just now, when she suggested Violet was cold.

They started back toward the cabin. The boom of another shotgun rang out, closer this time. He wanted to talk to her, to beg her to talk to him, but he forced himself to stay quiet.

And at the back entrance to the cabin, she turned and held out her arms for Vi. Ethan passed her over in silence. Amy clutched their daughter and started away, then changed her mind. “Ethan, I love you. You know that. But I don’t know if I can forgive you.”

“Amy . . .”

“If it was just us, that would be different. But someone kidnapped Abe, probably killed him. Those same people are after you. Maybe that’s federal agents, maybe not, but it doesn’t matter because the DAR is chasing you too. You robbed a gas station yesterday—”

“I had no choice!”

“And all of that, all of it, is going to come down on us.” She hoisted their daughter. “On her. Think about that.”

Then she walked inside and slammed the door.