“You mean experiment. Maim. You rip people from their homes,” Vern cried out, but appealing to Ollie’s moral sense was a fool’s errand.
“The problem with your people—and I truly mean no offense when I say that—is a lack of understanding of the bigger picture,” said Ollie. Vern hardly recognized her for how calm she sounded. Like Vern, she’d always had a streak of passion. That had been a lie. She was a calculating manipulator who relished asserting her dominance. “Do you know who James Marion Sims is, V? Sorry, Vern,” she said with a small, cruel smile. “He was a pioneering doctor in the nineteenth century and the founder of modern gynecology. He innovated a number of techniques and surgeries that would end up becoming foundational to the discipline. But this knowledge did not come out of the ether. He did it by testing on slaves. Of course, today we don’t enslave people in that sense, and methods today are not as cruel. He performed surgeries on those women without anesthesia. Today, Cainland itself is the anesthesia. It gives people a purpose, a reason. Of course, there’s the added benefit of creating a self-sustaining population with a high susceptibility to the fungus.”
There was no talking Ollie and her ilk into believing Vern and her ilk were actually people. They were collateral damage in a useless battle waged to attain more power. Vern wondered what they’d even learned—if it was helpful or necessary. In sixty years of trying to make another Queen, they’d gotten lucky with Vern. Was that all the data they had to show for it? A runaway?
“Cainland is a zoo,” said Vern.
“That may be true—certain specifications were necessary for containment, for keeping a collective whole wedded to the space—but let me ask you, would you have rather grown up where Queen lives now?”
“Is that where you killed Lucy?” asked Vern. “At some military lab?”
“Lucy?” Ollie asked, sounding amused. “You mean Lucy Jenkins? The girl who got away. She was a spitfire, wasn’t she? Scout’s honor, we didn’t kill her. We never found her, and I didn’t know she was dead until just now. Send her my love when she visits you. She knows me. I drove her back to the compound from court.”
The grief of it was endless. Where did it start? Where did it end? Like the horizon, there was no reaching the borders. Yet still Vern wanted to treat it like something small she could hold.
“Did you know what they were going to do to you?” Vern asked Queen, turning her eyes to her.
Queen smiled. “They didn’t do nothing to me, Vern. I wanted to help them.”
How could a woman be so lost that she couldn’t understand the depth of her own suffering?
“Queen, is she not an angel of death in the flesh? Glorious and blazing. A sun. She was the one to catch the military’s and the FBI’s attention.” Queen cooed as Ollie praised her, drunk with giggles. “It was her strength that couldn’t be hidden. Everything else came later, but that was the key we wanted to unlock. It was the height of the Cold War, the weapons race. Most departments were focused on nuclear missiles, but that could never be the whole picture. Soldiers strong as Queen? That interested us. How many years of suffering might we have avoided if we’d cracked that?”
Vern couldn’t process half of what Ollie was saying. None of it made sense. “That was a long time ago. You can’t know all that.” Ollie had several years on Vern, but when they’d met, she couldn’t have been any older than her midtwenties.
“I’m an essential asset,” said Ollie in explanation, “but it was Eamon Fields who was the visionary. Without him, Cainland would never have been. It was never in the plan for him to have a child, but it worked out so well, didn’t it? It’s a shame that your actions—leaving Cainland—mean it must finally end.”
Vern shoved her body as forward as it would go with the restraints holding her back.
“Of course, those showing infection potential will be relocated elsewhere, but everyone else? Your actions, your show of your true form to so many, has brought this on. Some things can only be carried out in secret. When it’s no longer secret, it must end. I am truly sorry about what’s going to happen to your family, but they are not the first casualties in the pursuit of medical progress. Far from it.”
“You can’t do this. People will know,” Vern cried out, desperate.
“Will they? Or will it just be another sad mass suicide from a sad cult led by a megalomaniac?”