Eli closed his eyes and drew up the image of his father lying broken at the bottom of the stairs. A shallow red pool spreading around the pastor’s head, like a halo, only in the dim basement the blood had looked black. His eyes wet, his mouth hinging open and closed.
What had his father been going down there to do?
Eli would never know. He opened his eyes and began to absently thumb the pages of the book.
“How old are you?” asked the medic.
Eli swallowed. “Twelve.”
“Do you know your next of kin?”
He shook his head. There was an aunt somewhere. A cousin, maybe. But Eli had never met them. His world had been here. His father’s church. Their congregation. There was a phone tree, he thought, a communication network used to spread the word when there was a celebration, a birth—or a death.
The woman slipped away from his side and spoke to two of the officers. Her voice was low, but Eli caught some of the words: “The boy has nothing.”
But again, she was wrong.
Eli didn’t have a mother, or a father, or a home, but he still had faith.
Not because of the scars on his back, or any of Pastor Cardale’s less physical sermons. No, Eli had faith because of how it felt when he pushed his father down the basement stairs. When the pastor’s head struck the basement floor at the bottom. When he finally stopped moving.
In that moment, Eli had felt peace. Like a small sliver of the world made right.
Something—someone—had guided Eli’s hand. Given him the courage to place his palm flat against his father’s back and push.
The pastor had fallen so fast, bounced like a ball down the old wooden steps before landing in a heap at the bottom.
Eli had followed slowly, taking each step with care as he drew his phone from his pocket. But he didn’t dial, didn’t push Call.
Instead, Eli sat down on the bottom step, safely away from the blood, and held the phone in his hands, and waited.
Waited until his father’s chest stilled, until the pool of blood stopped spreading, and the pastor’s eyes went empty, flat.
Eli remembered one of his father’s sermons, then.
Those who don’t believe in the soul have never seen one leave.
He was right, thought Eli, finally dialing 911.
There really was a difference.
“Don’t worry,” said the medic, returning to the front porch. “We’re going to find somewhere for you to go.” She knelt down in front of him, a gesture clearly meant to make him feel like they were equals. “I know it’s scary,” she said, even though it wasn’t. “But I’m going to tell you something that helps me when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Every end is a new beginning.” She straightened. “Come on, let’s go.”
Eli rose to his feet and followed her down the porch steps.
He was still waiting for the sense of calm to fade, but it didn’t.
Not when they led him away from the house. Not when they perched him on the edge of the unused ambulance. Not when they drove him away. Eli looked back once, and only once, at the house, the chapel, and then he turned, facing forward.
Every end is a new beginning.
XIII
FOUR YEARS AGO
EON—LABORATORY WING
STELL entered the observation room just in time to see a man in a white lab coat crack open Cardale’s chest. The patient was strapped to a steel table, and the surgeon was using some kind of saw, and a collection of clamps and metal pins, and Eli was not only still alive—he was awake.
A mask ran across the EO’s nose and mouth, with a hose connected to a machine behind his head, but whatever it was feeding Eli, it didn’t seem to be helping. The pain showed in every muscle, his whole body tensed against the restraints, the skin around his wrists and ankles white from pressure. A strap held Eli’s head back against the steel table, denying him a view of his own dissection, though Stell doubted he needed to look to know what was happening. Beads of sweat ran down Eli’s face and into his hair as the surgeon widened the cut in his chest.
Stell didn’t know what he’d expected to find, but he hadn’t expected this.
As the surgeon finished sawing through his patient’s sternum and pinned the flesh back, Cardale groaned, the sound low and muffled by the mask. Blood poured out of his open chest, slicking the metal table, the lip of which was too shallow to contain the ceaseless flow. Ribbons of red spilled over the sides, dripping to the floor.
Stell felt sick.
“Remarkable, isn’t he?”
He turned to find an average-looking man tugging off a pair of blood-slicked gloves. Behind round glasses, the doctor’s deep-set eyes were bright, pupils dilated with the pleasure of discovery.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” demanded Stell.
“Learning,” said the doctor.
“You’re torturing him.”
“We’re studying him.”
“While he’s conscious.”
“Necessarily,” said the doctor with a patient smile. “Mr. Cardale’s regenerative abilities render any anesthesia useless.”
“Then what’s with the mask?”
“Ah,” said the doctor, “one of my more genius moments, that. You see, we cannot anesthetize him, but that doesn’t mean we can’t dampen his functions a little. The mask is part of an oxygen deprivation system. It reduces the breathable air to twenty-five percent. It’s taking all of his regenerative ability to stave off the damage done by starving the cells, which buys us a bit more time on the rest of the body before it heals.”
Stell stared at Eli’s chest as it struggled to rise and fall. From this angle, Stell could almost see his heart.
“We’ve never come across an EO like Mr. Cardale,” continued the doctor. “His ability—if we find a way to harness it—could revolutionize medicine.”
“EO abilities can’t be harnessed,” said Stell. “They aren’t transferable.”
“Yet,” said the doctor. “But if we could understand—”
“Enough,” said Stell, transfixed by the sight of Eli’s ruined body. “Tell them to stop.”
The doctor frowned. “If they take out the clamps, he’ll heal, and we’ll have to start all over again. I really must insist—”
“What’s your name?”
“Haverty.”
“Well, Dr. Haverty. I’m Director Stell. And I’m officially discontinuing this experiment. Make them stop, or lose your job.”
The sick smile slid from Haverty’s face. He pulled a microphone from the viewing room wall and clicked it on.
“Terminate the session,” he ordered the surgeons still in the room.
The men and women hesitated.
“I said—terminate it,” repeated Haverty curtly.
The surgeons began to methodically remove the various pins and clamps from Eli’s open chest cavity. The moment they were gone, the tension in the EO’s body began to recede. His back sank to the metal table, and his hands unclenched, the color returning to his limbs as his body put itself back together. Ribs cracked into place. Skin settled and fused. The lines of his face smoothed. And his breathing, while still labored (they left the mask on), began to even.
The only sign that something horrific had happened was the sheer quantity of blood left pooling on the table and floor.
“Are you happy now?” grumbled Dr. Haverty.
“I’m a long way from happy,” said Stell, storming out of the observation room. “And you, Dr. Haverty—you’re fired.”
* * *
“PUT your forehead against the wall and your hands through the gap.”
Eli did as he was told, feeling for the break in the fiberglass. He couldn’t see anything—his world had been a mottled black wall since the soldiers had thrown the hood over his head and dragged him from the concrete cell that morning. He knew, before they came, that something was wrong—no, not wrong, but certainly different. Haverty was a man of habit, and even though Eli didn’t have a perfect sense of time, he had a tenuous enough hold to know their last session had ended too abruptly.
He found the gap in the fiberglass, a kind of narrow shelf, and rested his wrists on the lip. A hand jerked his hands farther into the gap, but a few moments later the cuffs came free.
“Take three steps back.”
Eli retreated, expecting to meet another wall, but finding only space.
“Reach up and remove the hood.”
Eli did, assaulted by the sudden brightness of the space. But unlike the sterile overheads of the operating theater, the light here was crisp, and clean, without being glaring. He was facing a floor-to-ceiling fiberglass wall, perforated by holes and interrupted only by the narrow cubby through which he’d placed his hands. On the other side stood three soldiers in head-to-toe riot gear, their faces hidden behind helmets. Two gripped batons—cattle prods, judging by the faint hum, the slight current of blue light. The third was coiling the discarded cuffs.
“What am I doing here?” asked Eli, but the soldiers didn’t answer. They simply turned and left, steps echoing as they retreated. Somewhere a door opened, closed, pressurized, and as it did, the world beyond the fiberglass disappeared, the wall, transparent seconds before, becoming opaque.