Hybrids

Chapter Forty-two

Mary prayed repeatedly throughout the night, whispering softly, trying not to disturb Louise. “God in heaven, God of grace, save him…”

And later: “God, please, don’t let Ponter die.”

And later still: “Damn you, God, you owe me one…”

Finally, after tossing and turning all night, tormented by dreams of drowning in a sea of blood, Mary became aware of sunlight streaming in through the lodge’s small window, and the kek-kek-kek call of passenger pigeons heralding the dawn.

Louise was also awake, lying on the couch, staring up at the wooden ceiling.

There was a vacuum box and a laser cooker in the hunting lodge, presumably powered by solar panels on the roof. Mary opened the vacuum box and found some chops—of what kind of animal, she had no idea—and some roots. She cooked them up, making a simple breakfast for her and Louise.

The lodge had a small square table with saddle-seats on all four sides. Mary straddled one, and Louise sat opposite her.

“How are you doing?” asked Mary gently, after they’d finished eating. She’d never seen Louise like this: bedraggled, with dark circles under her eyes.

“I’m okay,” she said softly, in her accented voice, but she sounded anything but.

Mary wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t know whether it was best to bring up the topic of Reuben, or to let it be, in hopes that Louise had somehow put it out of her own mind, at least for a few moments. But then Mary thought of the rape, and her utter inability to stop thinking about it early on. There was no way Louise could be thinking about anything other than her dead boyfriend.

Mary reached a hand across the table, taking one of Louise’s. “He was a good man,” she said, her own voice breaking as she did so.

Louise nodded, her brown eyes dry but bloodshot. “We’d talked about moving in together.” Louise shook her head. “He was divorced, and, you know, nobody my age bothers getting married in Québec—the law treats you the same whether you have the piece of paper or not, so why bother? But we’d talked about making things permanent.” She looked away. “It was almost a joke between us. He’d say things like, ‘Well, when we move in together, we’ll have to get a place with big closets,’ because he thought I had too many clothes.” She looked at Mary; her eyes were moist now. “Just joking stuff like that, but…” She shook her head. “But, you know, I thought it was really going to happen. After I finished my work at Synergy, I’d move back up to Sudbury. Or we’d go to Montréal, and Reuben would set himself up in private practice. Or…” She shrugged, apparently realizing it was pointless to go on enumerating options that now could never be.

Mary squeezed Louise’s hand, and just sat with her for a time. Finally, though, she said, “I want to go find Ponter.” She shook her head. “Damn, I got so used to these Companions letting us keep in touch, but with Hak broken…”

“Ponter must be okay,” said Louise, realizing, apparently, that it was now her turn to provide comfort. “He wasn’t showing the slightest sign of fever.”

Mary tried to nod in agreement, but her head didn’t seem to want to move. She was so upset, so nervous, so…

Suddenly there was a scratching sound at the door. Mary’s heart jumped. She knew she almost certainly had nothing to fear from Neanderthals, but this was prime hunting territory—or else the lodge wouldn’t have been built here. Who knew what sorts of beasts were prowling outside?

“We can’t go looking for Ponter,” said Louise. “Think about it: the lasers may have zapped the virus that was in him, but that hardly confers immunity, and we’re infected, too, no? It may not do anything to white Gliksins, but we’re carriers. He can’t see us until you and I have been decontaminated, as well.”

“So, what should we do then?” asked Mary.

“Get Jock Krieger,” said Louise.

“What? Why? He can’t hurt anyone where we left him.”

“No, but if there is an antidote for the virus, or a way to neutralize it on a large scale, he’s the one who would know, right?”

“What makes you think he’ll tell us?” said Mary.

Louise’s tone was firm for the first time since Reuben had died. “If he doesn’t, I’ll kill him,” she said simply.

They waited until it had been many minutes since they’d heard any animal sounds from outside. Then, cautiously, they opened the lodge’s door, snow swirling in.

It took most of the morning to reach the building near Konbor Square where’d they’d deposited the trussed-up Jock Krieger.

“I half expect him to be gone,” said Louise as they approached the closed door. “That bastard seems to have no end of tricks up his sleeve…”

She pushed up the five-pronged control that unlatched the door.

Jock was not gone.

He was lying on his side. Pools of dark blood were on the floor around him. His skin was white, waxy.

Mary turned him over. There was coagulated blood all over Jock’s cheeks and chin, and extending down like wine-colored sideburns from his ears. She glanced down briefly and saw that his pants were also soaked with blood, which had presumably poured out of his lower orifices.

Mary fought to keep down the tubers and meat she’d eaten for breakfast. She looked over at Louise, who was biting her lower lip. Mary turned away and tried to make sense of it all.

Two dead Gliksins.

Two dead male Gliksins…

It was almost as if…

Surfer Joe, Mark II.

But no. No, that was impossible. Impossible! Yes, Mary had doodled a design for a virus that would only kill male Gliksins, but she’d shredded those sheets of paper, and she’d certainly never coded it into Jock’s program. He’d obviously made his virus before Mary had rendered it harmless, then, but…

But it was behaving like the one Mary had thought of, the one that would kill Homo sapiens who had Y chromosomes.

Mary hadn’t made that virus. She had not …

Unless…

No, no. That was crazy.

But she’d traveled between universes, and so had Jock. And if, in one version of her reality, she had not made Surfer Joe deadly to male Homo sapiens, then…

Then, perhaps, in another version of reality she had gone ahead with her fantasy, had mapped out such a virus…

And this Jock Krieger, the one who had exsanguinated through every natural opening in his body, might have come from that version of reality…

Mary shook her head. It was all too bizarre. Besides, hadn’t Ponter and Louise said often enough that the universe Mary called home and the one Ponter called home were entangled? That they were the two original branches that had split apart when consciousness first arose on Earth 40,000 years ago?

If that was the case…

If that was the case, then someone other than Mary had modified the virus.

But who? Why?