The way he said it, not thinking of the home he’d let burn to the ground. That anger churned in me, so thick I could feel it licking at my throat. “But why are you here, Dr. Bellanger?” I asked, and let the question hold all the implications of that. Why was he here? Why was he alive? Why? “We thought you were dead. We thought Fiona was dead. And you just let us. You never reached out, all this time? You never wondered about us?”
Bellanger examined me, his eyes steady and probing. Having him right in front of me made me feel like everything else was an illusion. Maybe this strange desert outpost would vanish if I traced my finger along the right seam of it.
“Of course I wondered about you.” He sounded almost hurt. “I’ve followed your paths with great interest. I know all about your lives.” He was looking directly at me as he said it, and I realized that Bellanger knew. When I’d appeared on TV, bubbling over with my plans to make him proud, he’d been listening.
“You have to understand,” he went on. “In 1977, I watched my miracle fall apart around me. The pressure placed on me was ugly. I’d achieved the impossible nine times in a row, but the world wanted another miracle, bigger and better and bolder. Something they could hold in their hands. They wanted to take what I’d done and package it into a pill, put it on the shelves of drugstores like—like common aspirin. First they ignored me, then they mocked me, and finally they tried to stop me. But when I succeeded, what did they want? They wanted it for themselves. I was this close to handing over my life’s work so that my colleagues could play God without earning it.”
Bellanger had said similar things in his letters to me. This attitude that I’d always mistaken for confidence, for a maverick brilliance, now sounded petty. I’d always pictured his work as tragically interrupted, but I knew the truth: He’d chosen Fiona over her sisters, over her future sisters. Over everything.
“When I saw Fiona—when I saw that little girl, wielding those powers—I knew what I’d truly accomplished. It may have taken eight attempts before her, but I did it. There she was. A miracle.” Bellanger had grown more animated as he spoke about Fiona, gesturing, face flushed, and he rose to his feet briefly, as if to underscore the magnitude of what he was telling us. “I watched Fiona push a glass off the table without using her hands—gravity itself defied by this tiny girl—I saw her slam doors and start fires without moving a muscle. The entire natural world was bowing down to this scrap of a child. And all I wanted was to protect this miracle at any cost.”
“What about the rest of us? You never saw the rest of us as miracles?” I asked it partially to test him, but there was a stubborn hurt behind the words. Bellanger looked at me with a faint surprise, as if he’d never seen it from this angle.
“You thought the eight of us were just expendable,” Isabelle said.
“Of course not. I merely trusted that you could fend for yourselves.”
“What about the Grassis?” Isabelle asked.
Until now, Bellanger had been studiedly casual, but now I watched as he took some time to compose himself. “So you think you’ve figured some things out,” he said. “But I can promise you don’t understand the full truth.”
Isabelle persisted. “You let them die, and you used their deaths to hide away.”
“Let them die? Angela tried to kill me,” he said. “You want to know what happened that night? Angela came into my lab uninvited. She drew a gun on me in front of Fiona. She said she’d spend the rest of her life in prison to play out some revenge fantasy.”
“Revenge for what?” asked Cate. She squeezed my hand, a signal. I knew that she was thinking of Lily-Anne. Bellanger hadn’t mentioned her yet. She was a clear absence in this story.
“For what? For everything. For paranoid fantasies. Angela had always been an erratic woman. Fiona was getting agitated,” Bellanger said. “I tried to warn Angela. I was the only one who noticed when the fire began on the hem of her dress. One little flame. Tiny enough to pinch out with my fingertips. But before I knew it, the fire had grown out of control. It was no normal fire. That little flame was ravenous, insatiable, inevitable. The heat was enough to blaze your skin away. When I looked back, Angela was already burning—Gina too. I couldn’t save the Grassis or the others, so I fled with Fiona.”
“You didn’t even warn us,” I said, struck by the impersonality of the others. “You didn’t warn my mother and me, or Isabelle, or Patricia.”