They took turns telling the story, handing it back and forth. The place where they ended up, a living facility at Fort Detrick, really did seem like a dorm on the inside—the dorms they’d seen in movies, at least. Neither had ever set foot inside a real one. The only difference was that they couldn’t leave. They were two of just ten women living there, all of whom got along well enough. The atmosphere was relaxed, relatively speaking. It sure as hell wasn’t prison.
They got their first injections on day one. Nothing much to it—no worse than tetanus shots. The medical technicians said they might experience fever or chills, but they didn’t. Not even after all three shots had been administered. There were no ill effects at all, and for the next two months it stayed like that. One of the girls in the dorm had done pretty well in science in high school, and remembered reading about something called a control group. Sometimes in an experiment, one group of subjects would get a certain drug, say, and another group would think they were getting the drug but instead just got sugar pills or shots of some neutral solution. Maybe that had happened here. Maybe they were just the control. That was a nice thought, and it lasted until about the middle of month three.
When the effect started, it came on slowly. Little bouts of it, at first. Even when it got stronger, it was hard to notice, because it didn’t work among the women themselves. It only seemed to work on outsiders, like the medical techs, or people who drove past the building within a certain distance. For probably a week or better, each woman in the dorm kept the phenomenon to herself, afraid she was imagining it. Afraid she was going crazy.
Then the strangest thing happened: One of the techs, during a routine physical—they performed them twice a week—asked one of the girls a question he’d never asked before.
Are you hearing things in your head that seem unfamiliar? Thoughts that don’t seem to be your own?
The girl’s eyes went wide. Yes, she said. Yes, what the hell is it? Other girls overheard. They crowded around and spoke up, relieved to know they weren’t alone with their symptoms. In the midst of it all, the tech took out a phone and dialed, and that was the end of life in the dorm.
Within the hour, the ten of them were in a different building—not so much like a dorm, very much like a prison, in fact. Each had her own barred cell. Different researchers came to look at them. Most of these were older men, some of them in military uniforms. They spoke among themselves, talking about the women as if they weren’t standing right there, in their cages. As if the women couldn’t hear them. Which was strange, really, since the women could do much more than hear them.
“They knew we weren’t leaving that place,” Sandra said. “Not in two years. Not ever. They didn’t care that we could hear it in their thoughts, either. It didn’t matter what we knew. They had us.”
“For a while we thought they might use us to spy on people,” Audrey said. “Put us in hotel rooms next door to important guests—VIP types from other countries, something like that—find out what they were thinking. Sounds plausible, right? For the rest of our lives we’d just be glorified listening devices.”
She looked away into the glare of sunlight off the nearest towers. The highest floors gleamed wet where clouds had touched them.
“It turned out we weren’t even going to be that, though,” she said.
Dryden looked at them, one and then the other. “What did they want you to be?”
“White mice,” Sandra said. “We were going to stay locked up the rest of our lives, so they could watch us and see what happened long-term. See if the effect changed over time—got stronger or weaker, anything like that. See if we all got cancer in three years, or seven, or ten. See if we got Alzheimer’s in our thirties.”
“They did want human listening devices,” Audrey said, “but they were going to choose those people very carefully. People who were just right for the job.”
“So that was going to be it for us,” Sandra said. “Except our ages, nothing in that building was going to change for the rest of our lives. And then something happened. A physical exam of one of the women—her name was Rebecca Grant—turned up a result no one had even been looking for. Rebecca was pregnant. She’d conceived right before going to prison.”
Both Sandra and Audrey looked at Rachel.
Though she’d already heard the story, the girl’s emotional response was evident. Dryden saw her throat tighten.
“Rachel was born on May 1, 2001,” Audrey said. “They allowed Rebecca to raise her, right there in the living facility with the rest of us. The researchers were very interested in how she would turn out—whether she’d have the same capability as her mother. Even though Rachel was conceived before Rebecca had the RNA treatment, the drug would’ve still affected her as a developing fetus. You already know it worked on her, but as it turned out, it didn’t work exactly the same way it had with everyone else. Rachel was different from her mother. Different from all of us, in one very important way.”
“Which was what?” Dryden asked.
Rachel turned to him. “They won’t tell me,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE