After I Fully Prepared for the Apocalypse, the Ungrateful Cried with Regret novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: What Her Father Put in Her

I did not run at Nolan. I walked to him, took him by the sleeve and pulled him into the scale house.

Outside, my mother was still screaming his name.

I shut the door and put my back against it.

"Tell me what my father put in me," I said. "All of it, this time."

Nolan sat down on the cot, and he looked very tired.

"When you were six, your blood was failing," he said. "The doctors gave you a few months."

"I remember the hospital."

"Your father was a chemist at Calder. He was working on a compound for the lab, and it wasn't finished."

I waited.

"He gave you the second batch in secret," Nolan said. "The first dose didn't take, and the second did."

"The dose in his notebook."

"Yes."

"It cured me."

"It rebuilt your blood. It also made you what you are." He looked at my hands. "You run hot because it never stopped working."

I flexed my fingers. The air above them shimmered.

All my life my mother had told me my hands were too warm.

"She knew," I said.

"Your mother signed the papers the day it was given. Calder found out within a year."

"Found out how?"

"A nurse reported it, and the lab's board decided you were a protected asset. They didn't take you. They paid your mother a monthly check for twenty-three years to keep you at home, healthy and quiet."

I laughed. It came out as a sound I had never heard myself make.

"She told me Dad left us nothing."

"Your father's life insurance was yours. The checks were hers."

"And this spring?"

"The checks stopped. Your father's file was reopened after someone found his notebook copy in the archive." Nolan did not look away. "That's when the lab decided to collect you before the twenty-eighth."

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