Not that I believed anything about our situation was supernatural, but I could see how people back in Alexander's day might have believed the rumors that his mother was a witch.
"But however it happened," he went on, "she said she gave Alexander's blood incredible regenerative properties. She implied that it was resistant to disease, and that wherever on the body there's enough blood near the surface, it could be impervious to surface wounds."
Goose bumps rose on my legs. "Walk through fire."
"Blood, near the surface of the body." The wind ruffled the part of his hair that was still down.
"Your heel," I remembered. His heel was the only part of his body that looked burned in the way a normal burn would look, and he said it had taken much longer to recover. "The Achilles' heel. There's so little tissue there. Less blood at the surface, probably?"
"So more opportunity to be injured and not heal. That's what I thought, too." He leaned back, fingers to his mouth like he wished he had a cigarette.
"The Great," I said. He inclined his head. Invincible. Indestructible. To some extent, at least. "Does that mean some kind of ancient genetic engineering? Is that possible?"
"These days there is biotechnology, and a science called epigenetics that has to do with how genes express themselves, but we don't have anything like this . . . We're not necessarily at the peak of all knowledge now, though, like people tend to think we are. Who knows what was possible then."
We looked out the front window again.
"What if they can't deactivate it?" I said, unable to hold it back anymore. "Now, if they capture us, they have everything they need. And the only way to destroy the cure . . ."
"No," he said. I'm sure we'd all thought it, even if no one would admit it. How much was one girl's life really worth, when the alternative was this terrible?
My own grubby hair clung damply to my neck. I pulled it back. "I'm not saying it should be Plan A, but if it's me or half the world? Do the math."
"We're going to figure something out," he said firmly. I almost believed him.
For a while we stared out the window, watching the miles go by and the headlights approach and zoom past. Driving in a musty van toward the unknown felt like half my childhood. Funny that that was comforting now, when I started off every one of those drives in tears over yet another last-second move. By a couple hours in, though, my mom would always make it better. She'd stop at a gas station, we'd buy whatever weird regional snack we could find, and we'd sit in the parking lot and speculate about our new home.
I wasn't used to these intrusive memories being nice ones. I felt Stellan looking at me. I told him what I'd just been thinking. "And she'd do what she always did when I was upset. She would . . . pet me. Just rub my back, or my hair, like I was a scared puppy. I always calmed down. Is that weird? I don't know why I just told you that."
He shrugged and stretched his legs into the space between the driver's and passenger's seat. "I don't know why I tell you a lot of things."
"I could have saved her," I whispered. "The cure is my blood. I was right there."
"You didn't know," he said.
"I loved her so much."
He pulled his feet back in. Headlights from an oncoming car slanted across his face. "I know."
"You don't." Outside was flat as far as I could see, dotted with shadows I knew were scrubby bushes, and lights in the distance. It was like voicing one of the concerns I'd had since the tomb, and then letting myself talk about my mom, had opened a floodgate. Or maybe it was Stellan. I had a definite tendency to overshare with him in a way I never did with anyone else. Maybe Jack was right and the two of us understood things no one else really could. "I had no other family. We weren't anywhere long enough for me to find people I cared about, and if I did, we left them. She was all I had, and even though I loved her, I spent a lot of time resenting her for that."
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Stellan turn in his seat to watch me.
"I'm sorry. I know that sounds whiny and that all you guys had childhoods so much worse; this doesn't even compare." I had barely let myself think these things, but now I couldn't stop. You could say things in the dark that weren't okay in the daylight, I guess. Studying the broken headrest of the passenger's seat in front of me, I went on. "When she got kidnapped, I felt so horribly guilty, and at the same time, I almost blamed her. I couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if she'd told me the truth so I wouldn't have stumbled into it blind like I did."