* * *
GOGO SQUINTED at her computer. A friend had been able to get into Ollie’s laptop and salvage a few files. He’d emailed them to Gogo this morning.
“What do they say?” asked Vern, trying to keep her tone soft, kind. It didn’t come naturally to her.
“It looks like a list of targets,” said Gogo, still reading from her perch on her bed, her legs crossed.
“Targets?”
“Potential recruits for Cainland, maybe? They’re medical files. Detailed genome maps.”
Vern leaned against the bedroom door with crossed arms and tapped her foot on the floor.
Gogo clicked several keys and continued to browse through. “I think they’re looking for people vulnerable to the fungus.”
Vern released her arms from her chest and let them fall awkwardly to her sides. “Like they wanted us dead?”
Gogo shook her head. “Usually, with a fungus like this, you’d only expect it to infect the severely immunocompromised. Whoever’s computer this is, they’re looking for the outliers, the people who the fungus can colonize but not kill.”
Vern folded her hand into a loose fist. “People like me.”
Gogo looked up from the laptop screen to Vern. “And most of the people at Cainland, I’m guessing, all the people that have been recruited over the years.”
“You think this is happening to everybody back at the compound?”
Gogo scratched the back of her neck as she continued to read. “No. In reality, they can only search for people who they think might be vulnerable. That doesn’t actually guarantee anything.”
Vern tilted her head in question, skeptical. “But everybody there gets the hauntings.”
“As much as you?”
Vern had to concede that point. “Night terrors, at least. But that’s all that used to happen to me, too.”
Gogo took everything Vern said in stride, barely reactive. Each answer she gave was calm and considered. Any warmth that had been between them over the last months had gone. “I’d guess there’s varying degrees of infection. Most people never get beyond having night terrors. You, on the other hand?”
Gogo read further as Vern strode a short, manic course over the woven carpet on Gogo’s floor. “You’re in here, Vern. It looks like they recruited you specifically—or your mother, in order to get to you, I guess. Did you know that?”
Vern grabbed Gogo’s laptop. “I was born at Cainland.”
“I don’t think you were. You were chosen based on a particular set of gene markers in your DNA. They wanted someone with a high chance of manifesting the fungus,” said Gogo.
So they, Ollie and Eamon and whoever else, had wanted this to happen to Vern. Wanted to use her. Vern was used to her whole world being a lie, but each new learned fabrication jolted her still.
It was a childish thought, perhaps, but she thought it anyway, without shame: she would hurt them for playing with her body like a game of Operation.
Gogo stretched her arms up and yawned, her leather vest, sewn with an array of patches, riding up to reveal the bottom hem of her black, gray, and white plaid shirt.
The two of them were close enough that Vern could examine her properly, lick up the little details of her. She savored these intricacies in people, always had: the way the clock face of her brother Carmichael’s watch never faced up, the band too big on his thin wrist despite being set to the tightest notch. Lucy’s dark sideburns, the little beads of hair like black pearls. Mam’s gospel humming, ever so quiet, so as not to be heard until you were right up close. Even a few feet away, Vern would always have to strain to catch the notes, the words.
Gogo smelled mostly of shampoo, something generic and clean. Rainfall or Spring Zest or Mountain Air. She wore fingerless gloves on her hands, shiny black. There was a paperback book in her back pocket, which made her sit slightly hunched to the left.
“We should probably call it quits for the night,” said Gogo. “Bridget will be nagging us about supper soon anyway, yeah?”
Vern was still avoiding the cabin’s common areas. She didn’t want to see Howling looking happy and carefree, only for his face to fall when she walked in. Nor did she want to see the opposite, him looking sad and upset by the pain, only for his mood to perk when he saw her, forever bound by love to her despite how she’d wronged him.
Howling lay on the sofa most days, Feral bringing him treasures from the woods to play with. He was healing quickly, according to Gogo, and she suspected he was mostly waiting for his spirit rather than his bones to mend.