Sever (The Chemical Garden #3)(31)
Author: Lauren DeStefano

“Rhine has lived quite comfortably as my son’s bride. She’s been to lavish parties and had a domestic to wait on her hand and foot. She’s become quite close with her sister wives—one in particular, it seems.”

“Rhine?” Rowan says. He peels back the curtain of my hair that’s hiding my face. “You’re married?”

There’s no easy answer to that. Yes. No. Not anymore. I can’t bring myself to look at him.

“I planned on telling you about your sister,” Vaughn goes on. “But the opportunity hadn’t yet presented itself. I didn’t want to distract you. And I admit I was afraid that if you knew she was alive and well, you would lose sight of what’s important. You would be so distracted with your own interests that you would forget that what you’re doing now is saving something much bigger than yourself.” He reaches right over me and pats Rowan’s knee. He’s showing me that my brother, the one thing I thought belonged to me, is in his control. “What you’re doing is saving the world.”

When I find my voice, I say, “How did you know to look for my brother at all? How did you know that I was a twin?”

He laughs, and all the kindness of his son’s voice is in the sound. “From the stories you told our dear Cecily, of course.”

I’m shaking when the limo finally stops. Vaughn steps outside and says that he’ll allow us a few moments alone, but he reminds Rowan that we’re on a tight schedule. There’s a meeting we must attend.

When the door closes, leaving us alone, Rowan says, “I’m so sorry that I wasn’t there to protect you.”

I raise my eyes to meet his, and hope sparks in me. Hope that he sees Vaughn the way that I see him.

But he says, “Do you have any idea how lucky we are? If Dr. Ashby hadn’t found you— I don’t even want to think about what could have happened.”

“Lucky?” I manage to blurt out. “I was stuffed into the back of a van and driven down the coastline and married against my will. You were left to assume I was dead. How is that lucky?”

“Because we get to be a part of something bigger now,” he says. “We get to live.”

“Rowan, none of this sounds unbelievable to you?”

“I’ve never been a believer in things I haven’t seen for myself,” he says. “You’re smart to have doubts. I’m not asking you to trust Dr. Ashby. I’m asking you to trust me.”

I feel like I don’t know my own brother anymore. That’s what I want to tell him. I open my mouth, but I lose my nerve. He looks right into my eyes, and, oh, how I want to believe everything he says. How I want to change reality to conform to what he’s thinking. I can get us back to Manhattan. I can live with what he’s done; I can find a way to rebuild our parents’ home and spend the rest of my days planting lilies in the yard. I can never leave home again if that’s what it’ll take for us to be safe.

I cannot turn against him. I cannot leave him in Vaughn’s clutches and say good-bye to him, because I’ve already lost my parents, and my husband, and a sister wife, and quite possibly Gabriel. But to lose faith in my brother would mean becoming a girl I wouldn’t know how to be.

Vaughn opens the door and smiles that geriatric smile of his. “All set?” he asks.

“I think so,” Rowan says, looking at me. “Rhine?”

“Okay,” I say.

Vaughn leads us to the private jet that awaits us on the tarmac. It’s got President Guiltree’s emblem—the royal blue silhouette of an eagle flying across a white sun—printed on one of its wings. I add this to the long list of questions I don’t know that I want answered.

Inside, the jet isn’t very much bigger than the inside of the plane Reed has in his shed. It is fancier, though, with a beige leather wraparound seat and an oriental rug, and curtains that also bear the president’s emblem.

Once we’re seated, Vaughn orders the attendant to pour us glasses of champagne. When I only stare into my glass, Vaughn says, “I’ve found it settles the nerves for first-time flyers.”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I say.

“I’ve forgotten what a brave thing you are,” Vaughn says, and takes a sip from his glass. “Remind me to tell you, Rowan, the story of your sister and the hurricane. For now I think I should tell her the story I told you. It’s the only way to make her understand.”

“Keep an open mind,” Rowan says.

In response I stare at him. He’s calm; he has already accepted whatever Vaughn has laid out for him. But the Vaughn I know is different. The truth may be in his words somewhere, sure, but it’s buried in his own version of reality, where things are never exactly as he would have one think. I should know. For a time I was married to a boy who lived in such a reality.

“Picture a world that’s riddled with filth,” Vaughn says. It isn’t very hard.

“The world was divided into continents, countries, cities, towns. America was at its height more than two centuries ago. It was among the world leaders in medicine and technology. It also relied heavily on foreign imports.

“There was structure, a concept foreign to your generation now. You live among failed efforts and rotting crops, but once, there was order. The president at the time was more than a figurehead.”

He takes a sip of his champagne and stares sideways out his window, as though the organized country he speaks of is directly below us.

“The order didn’t last. History will tell us that it never does. War broke out, diseases, death. The president had a vision for what a precious commodity a country at peace could become. Maybe it would set an example and bring peace to the rest of the world. And while citizens were at their most vulnerable, he soothed them with promises of protection, promises that he could separate them from such devastation.”

This isn’t an act of Vaughn’s imagination. History books have said such things, even though Reed tells me that the books aren’t very reliable.

“The government began to confiscate things believed to cause disease—tanning booths, which you haven’t heard of, darling, because they were worthless; specific chemicals that went into foods; water filters. Even sun exposure was limited. The towers that powered cellular phones were deactivated. There was once an infrastructure known as the Internet, through which anyone could have access to any information. This became a luxury afforded only to specific professions. There were hiccups of protest, of course, as was to be expected. But in the decades that followed, American citizens thrived. Its self-contained economy flourished.”

I let myself picture this, though I shouldn’t. It does no good to dwell on the things I’ll never have. Time is too precious.

“It didn’t last forever, as you can see,” Vaughn says. “Every generation has its rebels, of course. It’s the human condition to question the way of things. The president had no choice but to quell the tension that was arising among citizens. There were several ways he might have gone about this—finances, properties. But ultimately he chose the one thing he was certain no generation would want to lose—its children. He employed the finest geneticists to engineer the perfect generation of children that would be less susceptible to common bacteria. A flu epidemic that would once have been fatal would now be nothing but a slight case of the sniffles. As the technology progressed, the geneticists discovered a way to eradicate cancer and other genetic ailments entirely. The president announced that the illness-inducing devices that had been confiscated would be returned to society.”

This part of the story I know. I was supposed to be perfect. I was supposed to live for decades and decades. There’s no need for him to go on, but he does.

“As society changed, the president gradually arranged for new books to be distributed as old ones were filtered out. History was slowly being changed and rewritten; there’s speculation that over the course of several decades he planned to wipe out any trace of the world that existed outside of America. Rather than having citizens believe that the rest of the world had been destroyed, they would believe it had never existed at all. No Internet and no international communications. The facts would be so muddled and disjointed that no one would know the truth.”

I think of my father’s atlas, and the boats Gabriel told me about in the history book in the library, and all the notes in Reed’s library books. Full of lies. It wasn’t enough that they stole our future; they had to steal our past.

“Don’t look so crestfallen,” Vaughn says. “You’ve heard stories about times when people lived well into their hundreds. The truth is that our country was suffering. Toxins in the air and in the water had already shortened the human life span to practically half of that. That’s why you don’t see anyone from before my time roaming around. The natural humans that remained when the virus was discovered were hardly fertile anyway. Really, the world was already a mess. This virus just made it slightly messier.

“And I suppose the rest you know. The first generations thrived and went on to have children of their own. It wasn’t until more than two decades later that the fatal flaw was discovered. Females could not live past twenty, and males past twenty-five.”

Twenty and twenty-five. Numbers we’re all familiar with.

“There was a new president by then, our own Roderick Guiltree III, who inherited the title from his late father. With all our children dying off, the government lost its only leg to stand on. The police officers and doctors and lawyers it had bribed into compliance for so many years turned against the government. Pro-science and pro-naturalism stances formed. And then the very first laboratory explosion occurred, which, unfortunately, was the laboratory that started this whole affliction. And it was the only one that contained the research and technology that brought us the first generations. Because while natural children were gone for good, we might have at least been able to create more first generations, who are, as you know, living well into their seventies now. Some believe the research was destroyed by rebels, others by the government. A conspiracy to end the human race entirely, perhaps.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I blurt. “Who would want to end the human race?”

Vaughn, unfazed by my outburst, says, “Those who had grown tired of the endless cycle.”

I don’t want to believe him, and I hate that I do.

“But things aren’t always as they appear. The rest of this story cannot be told. It can only be seen.”

“Seen,” I say, and my voice flutters down to the earth.

“I know it’s a lot to process at once,” Rowan says. “It’s okay if you don’t believe all of it at first. I didn’t.”