Deadly Design (9780698173613) Read online

  “She’s off today. She went with Emma’s parents to the airport,” I say, feeling a twinge of guilt because I’m glad Emma’s going back to Minnesota.

  Mom opens a bag of dark red apples, places them in a glass bowl, and offers me one. I don’t want it, but it’s healthy and supposed to be good for my heart, so I take it.

  “Dr. Fabos called earlier today,” she says, but it doesn’t mean anything. Considering how much my parents call him, I’m surprised he hasn’t changed his number.

  “What did he say?” I ask, and try to sound interested, even though he never says anything when he returns their calls. Just the usual “we’re working on it.”

  “They have a new kind of pacemaker,” she says, and now Dad is standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

  “It’s better than the one they used in . . .” Dad pauses, but he can’t rewind his words. “It’s better than the one they used in James. It’s got a higher voltage. They think it might work.”

  What do I say? Do I have a pacemaker put in just to make them happy? Just to give them hope, when I know it won’t work? Or do I tell them the truth? Tell them who Dr. Mueller really was and what he did to their sons and other people’s sons and daughters? Do I let them know that they’d better hurry up and get used to the idea of me dying? Do I make myself get used to the idea?

  It’s September. The only word I’ve had from Dr. Bartholomew is that her team is working around the clock. But the clock keeps ticking, and I’ve got three and half months left—pacemaker or no pacemaker.

  My parents have aged at least ten years in the last few months. They’ve been clinging to a tiny boat out in the ocean. Before Connor and I were in the boat, they were sharing it with Chase. But a giant wave came, and even though they tried to hold on to him, they couldn’t. Then Connor and I came on board, and the ocean calmed. It stayed calm for so long, they forgot that sometimes you have to hang on to those you love, because giant waves are still out there. One came, and it took Connor. Now it’s just me and them. They’re both hanging on to me, and I wish it were enough. But the fact is, when and if the wave comes, it will take all of us under.

  The doorbell rings.

  “I got it,” Dad says, relieved, I think, to have a moment to gather his thoughts once he sends whoever it is away.

  I pick up a box of breakfast cereal that has a picture of every grain known to mankind on the front. It’s going to taste like shit. I might as well drive a mile outside of town and go graze in a field. On the bright side, if I have to eat shit like this for the next three months, dying might not seem so bad.

  The front door opens. I slide the box into the cupboard next to the other boxes of high-fiber and no-fat cereal, then I hear a voice. A familiar voice. My hand starts shaking, and I drop the box onto the counter. Mom gives me a puzzled look, and we both walk toward the entryway.

  “Hello, Kyle,” Dr. Bartholomew says. She’s wearing a pale green skirt with a thin white blouse. Without her doctor’s coat, she seems even smaller, even more like her brother. Her shoulder-length hair is pulled back into a small ponytail, exposing a neck that seems too long.

  “You two know each other?” Dad asks. “What was your name?”

  “Dr. Bartholomew, but call me Claudia, please.” She offers my dad, and then my mom, her hand.

  “You’re a doctor?” Mom asks as she hangs on to Claudia’s hand for an awkward moment before letting go.

  “Yes. Might we sit down? We have a lot to discuss.”

  A lot. I feel my own hope building like a massive dam strong enough to hold back any wave, even a tsunami. But she can’t have figured out something already. Not when I met her barely two weeks ago.

  We go into the living room. Dr. Bartholomew settles herself in the center of the sofa. Dad sits in his recliner, and Mom takes her place standing beside him, her hand clenching his. I can’t sit, so I pace and wait.

  “I gather from your reaction that Kyle hasn’t mentioned our visit.” She glances over her shoulder at me. I shake my head. “I’m not surprised. I suppose he didn’t want to get your hopes up. Kyle, through great efforts, found me. You knew my brother. He’s gone by several names during his life, but I believe you knew him as Dr. Mueller.”

  All expression drains from my parents’ faces.

  Dr. Bartholomew stares at them, waiting, it would seem, for them to come out of their temporary shock, for their brains to come back online. “I won’t drag things out,” she says. “I know you are only interested in one thing, and that’s saving your son.”

  “You can save him?” Mom asks, and the hope in the room is both exhilarating and suffocating. “Does your brother know how to save him?”

  “I’m afraid he died recently,” she says. “Pancreatic cancer. It spread quite rapidly, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to complete his research, so he passed it on to me.” Again she looks at me, the expression in her eyes asking for my discretion. How can they trust anyone related to the man who killed one of their sons and was more than willing to kill the other one in the name of science?

  “I’ve been methodically going through his research since I acquired it, and I do believe I can help. Though I caution, this may not be the exact solution you were hoping for.”

  We wait for her to continue.

  “It’s impossible to reprogram all of the DNA in a human body. Science is simply not far enough advanced. In two or three years, at most perhaps ten, we will be at a point where technology could save Kyle. It may be as simple as adding a new piece of genetic information into his heart to nullify the sequence that tells it to stop. I have an army of researchers and endless resources at my disposal working on this, not to mention other geneticists. Given time, we will be able to cure you.”

  “I don’t have time,” I protest. “I’ll be dead in a few months!”

  Shit!

  Mom and Dad look at me with utter disbelief. They thought they had time. They thought a solution could be found because they had time. But now the date of execution’s been moved up, and I never told them. I knew, and I kept it from them.

  Dr. Bartholomew clears her throat, pulling us back to the main matter at hand. “I’m afraid Kyle’s right. There’s something different about Kyle’s DNA, something different from the others.” She looks at me, telling me to trust her with those small sharp eyes. “It might be a mutation due to the fact that he was frozen for two years,” she lies. “Anyway, it would seem likely that he won’t make it past his seventeenth birthday. But,” she says quickly, “as I said, I think I have found a way to possibly save him.”

  “After I’m dead,” I point out. “You said you might be able to save me in two to ten years.”

  “I do have an idea of how to save you.”

  “You can save him?” Mom says, bracing for the wave that’s approaching much faster than she’d realized.

  Bartholomew stares at me, forcing me to stand still with the intensity of her eyes. “Shortly after conception, after the egg split into two, forming you and your brother, a decision was made to keep you frozen for almost two years. What I’m proposing now is not much different from that decision. I’m suggesting that you be cryogenically frozen until the time comes that science is able to cure you.”

  We are silent. Questions, and a few bad movies I’ve seen, flood my brain, just like I know they’re flooding the brains of my parents. The questions in my dad’s head start to form on his lips, and then he looks at me as if he’s afraid to ask them.

  “Isn’t that something that’s done after the person dies?” Dad asks.

  “Legally,” she says, lifting her delicate brows, “yes. It is against the law to freeze someone who is still alive. However, if the hope is to eventually thaw and heal the body, it only makes sense that the freezing should be done before the body is completely ravaged by disease. But disease isn’t my concern in Kyle’s case. It’s—”


  “But Dr. Fabos says there’s a new pacemaker that could work,” Mom interrupts. “Shouldn’t we try that first?”

  Dr. Bartholomew gives her a sympathetic smile. “If it doesn’t work, and there is no reason to believe that it will, Kyle will be dead. His body will be collected for examination and either cremation or burial, and this opportunity will no longer be possible.”

  I start shivering. “But the body is mostly made of water. The brain is eighty percent water. When water freezes, it expands. That would destroy all of my cells.”

  She nods approvingly, like I’m some budding scientist. “You’re absolutely right. That’s why vitrification is so important. The process is very complicated, but to simplify it, let me just say that the blood in the body is replaced with a cryoprotectant solution, sort of like putting antifreeze in your radiator. This enables the body’s tissue to freeze without water molecules crystallizing and causing damage. Of course there is still some concern with what’s called fracturing of tissues, but I’ve seen very promising research in this area. I have no doubt the damage to tissue will be minimal at best.”

  I’m shivering so hard now that my teeth are chattering. “No,” I say. “No way. I’m not doing that. I’ll just live out the time I have left. But I won’t let you freeze me. Fuck that.”

  I swear I can hear my father’s heart sinking in his chest. I can feel my mother’s muscles tensing against the approaching wave.

  If I’m dead anyway, what does it matter if I’m buried in the ground or if I’m frozen in some lab—again? If being frozen instead of buried makes my parents feel better, why not? It’s just that . . . I can’t stand the thought of being that cold. Cremate me and let science try to resurrect me like a phoenix from the ashes, but I don’t want to be cold.

  “What are the chances you’ll really be able to fix me and bring me back?” I ask.

  “It’s not a hundred percent. I’m sure that’s not what you want to hear, but I can tell you what is certain.” Her eyes take hold of mine, and she looks at me with the tenderness of a grandmother and the certainty of a doctor holding lab results. “If you don’t do this, you will die. This is a chance, a very good chance, and it is your only chance.” Her eyes break from mine, and she steadies herself with a few deep breaths. “There is, however, something you need to know before you decide.”

  Great. Freezing me was the good news.

  “I’m going to be very blunt,” she says. “Your birthday is quickly approaching. We know that some of the others died on their birthdays, some died after, and some died before. You’re a bit different, so there’s no way to know exactly when your heart will stop. But it’s safe to say that you won’t live past your birthday, and there’s a good chance you won’t even make it until then.” She closes her eyes for a moment. “If a young man dies, an autopsy will be ordered. All of the others were subjected to autopsies, and you will be too. You know what happens in an autopsy.”

  A shiver runs down my spine like the blunt end of a scalpel is pressing against the center of my back. In an autopsy, they take out all of your organs. They weigh them, examine them, and then they stick them back in, but they don’t reattach anything. They just put them in and sew you up, like sticking in candy in a piñata.

  “We have to make certain that does not happen, and since there is no way to predict exactly when you are going to die, we need to act quickly. The sooner, the better.”

  “B-but,” Dad stutters, “how long do you think he’ll be frozen? How sure are you that you can bring him back?”

  “We’ve had great success recently with freezing organs. We’ve tested slices of brain and found that after the vitrification process, the slices were able to send neurological signals. And there was a dog—”

  “Have they ever unfrozen a person?” I interrupt.

  Her head tilts sympathetically. “No, but the science is almost there. With nanotechnologies, we’ll soon have tiny robots that can go into a body and repair damaged cells. And hopefully, they’ll be able to plug a new sequence into your DNA—all of your DNA—to keep your heart from stopping. The advancements in nanomolecular science are staggering. My team is on the cusp of being able to prevent strokes and heart attacks, even killing cancer cells as soon as they start forming, by using this technology. This will work, Kyle. I’m certain of it. Scientific advancements are happening at such a staggering pace. Not even two centuries ago doctors didn’t know enough to wash their hands between patients. Now we’ve mapped the entire human genetic code.”

  “When will I die? I mean, I will die, right? You can’t be alive and frozen.” I don’t want to ask. I don’t want to know because I don’t want to do this, but my parents . . . I can see the fear in their eyes, but I can also see the hope. “Will it hurt?”

  Dr. Bartholomew gives me a reassuring smile. “You’ll go to sleep. That’s all. You’ll be given anesthesia, and you’ll go to sleep. They won’t so much as prick your finger until you’re completely under; I promise. Your body will be cooled gradually while certain processes are being performed.”

  “Like draining my blood and replacing it with ‘antifreeze’?”

  “Yes.”

  I look down at the veins in my arms. At the blood moving through them. “How cold will my body be once it’s done?” I hear my voice, but it can’t be me. I can’t be talking or breathing or doing anything but fighting the urge to run as far and as fast as I can.

  She hesitates, like she’d like to lie to me but has too much integrity to do so. “The entire cooling process takes a few weeks, but when it’s complete, you’ll be cooled to negative one hundred ninety-six degrees Celsius.”

  I was never good at converting Fahrenheit into Celsius, but if 32 degrees Fahrenheit is freezing, negative 196 degrees Celsius is . . .

  “Why so cold?”

  “It’s the temperature of liquid nitrogen. They’re experimenting with alternatives to liquid nitrogen as the primary cooling agent, but for now . . .”

  I remember a movie I saw once about a caveman found frozen in the ice somewhere near the North Pole. He was really confused once he thawed out. He’d never seen an airplane, or for that matter, a person with straight teeth. He couldn’t take it, and he ended up killing himself. What if it’s not just a couple of years? What if they fix me, and my parents are dead and people are flying hovercrafts instead of driving cars, or what if there’s a nuclear war and the scientists aren’t around to thaw me out? What if there’s nobody around to put the blood back into my veins?

  “How soon do I need to decide?” I ask.

  “Anytime before you die,” she says, “but I highly recommend we proceed as soon as possible.” She opens her purse and sets a thick envelope on the coffee table. “This should answer most of your questions. A story will have to be devised to explain Kyle’s absence from school. My apologies for being deceptive, but I pretended to be a social worker and called the school to speak with your counselor. It was brought to my attention that your principal knows some things about your condition. I suggest that we simply say that you’ve gone somewhere for treatment. But we must be careful.”

  She gives me a supportive look.

  “It’s imperative that no one comes looking for you. Just as the procedures to create you were illegal, so is this course of action. It’s only because I have certain connections that this is an option at all, but confidentiality must be kept. Once you are cured and revived, you need to be able to step back into your life with as little turmoil as possible. You’ll tell people you were simply away for a time due to ambiguous health issues. They resolved and now you’re back. I’ll be able to secure transcripts showing you were able to continue your education, perhaps through an online school. If needed, I can even include a few semesters of college. But no one, absolutely no one outside of this room, can know where you really are. I have a letter, drafted by a friend of mine at Johns Hopkins, stating that Kyle is b
eing transferred to his care and that his team will be trying to find a solution to his condition. If you agree to this plan, the letter will be sent to the cardiac hospital in Dallas. All the loose ends will be tied up.” She looks at each of us in turn. “But this can only work if I have your complete trust and silence.”

  “Cami,” I say. “I won’t do it if she can’t know.”

  “A girlfriend?” Bartholomew asks.

  I nod.

  Bartholomew takes a deep breath and dampens her thin lips with her tongue. “No doubt, it’s a serious relationship. Can you make her understand the consequences if she tells anyone the truth about where you are?”

  I nod, and she frowns.

  “Very well,” she says. “But she must know what’s at stake. All of you must. Your life, for one, Kyle. And not just my reputation, but my freedom and my work. If anyone discovers what we’re doing, I could go to prison, and countless people who could have been saved by my work will perish, including you.”

  “She won’t tell anyone,” I say, it’s the only thing in the world I know for sure.

  Dr. Bartholomew doesn’t like it. She may not be a parent, but she has the disapproving look pegged perfectly. “Fine,” she says. “But I want to meet her. You can bring her with you to the institute. She must understand the gravity of the situation. If she tells anyone, if you’re discovered, you could be left frozen indefinitely, or worse.”

  What could be worse than being frozen . . . indefinitely? Being thawed like a turkey on the kitchen counter. Having someone pull the plug, because someone broke the law and froze me before I died, before the doctors could cut me open and weigh my organs.

  “It’s a lot to take in, I know, but I want you to read through all of the information. I’ve included a card with my phone number. Please, call me as soon as you decide.” Dr. Bartholomew stands and straightens her skirt. “Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions or concerns.” She comes toward me and takes hold of my hand. “I made you a promise. But I can only keep it if you let me. I hope you will.” She squeezes my hand.