There wasn't.
I took a single, shuddering breath. "Okay," I said. "Let's go."
All the way to the lab, Jack and Stellan and Elodie grilled Nisha about specifics, even though they knew nothing would change my mind now.
I sat in a chair. Nisha rolled over a jangling cart of medical supplies and wrapped a piece of elastic tight around my arm. She felt for a vein on the inside of my elbow.
A tear slipped down my cheek, then another and another.
Colette tried to wipe them away until she realized it was futile. Luc kissed me on both cheeks. Elodie pressed her lips together and squeezed my knee hard. Jack hugged me so tightly, my ribs almost cracked. Stellan sat beside me, holding my hand and stroking my hair.
I don't want to die, said the voice in my head. I don't want to die. I don't want to die. The tears flowed more freely.
As I held out my arm and Nisha swabbed the inside of my elbow, Stellan leaned close to my ear and whispered about random distracting things like dogs in strollers in Japan. I was shaking now, hard enough that he had to steady my arm for Nisha, but he just kept talking, smoothly, about how once he'd seen someone walking three cats on leashes in a Tokyo park, and I laughed through the tears.
Nisha pressed the needle into my arm and pushed down. There was a second when I felt only the cool of the liquid going into my veins. Then, the cool turned to fire, and I screamed.
CHAPTER 26
I woke up to Nisha on the computer, her back to me. I silently assessed my body. Everything felt like it was where it should be. "What happened?" I croaked, and Nisha startled.
A chair scraped and Stellan was standing over me, the relief in his posture palpable. "How are you feeling?"
I hauled myself to sitting, and found everyone else crowded around the couch I'd been lying on. "Fine, actually. Just dizzy. Did it work?"
"The good news is that you're alive," Elodie said.
At that word-alive-my brain woke up. It was like I'd stopped breathing for too long and suddenly air rushed through me.
"Being alive is too much cause for celebration lately. We've really lowered the bar." Elodie glared from me to Luc, but I could hear the relief in her voice.
I felt giddy, euphoric, dizzy with it. Hot tears pricked at my eyes. I realized then just how sure I'd been that I'd never hear one of Elodie's sarcastic comments again.
Stellan sat down next to me. "How does it feel being a lab rat?" he murmured, his voice husky with suppressed emotion. He hadn't thought I was going to make it, either.
I clung to his hand, marveling at the feeling of it, at the air going into my lungs with each shaky breath, at the sunlight through the window. I'd never known quite how amazing being alive was until I thought I'd given it up.
"The bad news," Nisha said slowly, "is that it didn't work. We have no vaccine."
"Wait, what?" I was still light-headed. I hadn't heard right.
She got out of her chair. "We've looked at your blood already. If the modification was going to take, it would happen quickly, and it hasn't. It appears the Great modification does nothing to you. Maybe Olympias designed a safeguard that you two wouldn't kill each other. We may never understand how, just like we don't understand how she created the virus in the first place. But it also means we can't make the vaccine replicate like we wished to."
"Then why did I pass out?"
"The pain? The fear? Perhaps some of the other agents we put in the serum? You should be fine."
Another wave of dizziness hit me, and I curled back into the couch cushions. "So what do we do? We have no vaccine and no plan, and the meeting is set to happen sometime in the next twelve hours."
"That is the million-dollar question," Rocco said, his hands on the back of Luc's chair.
Stellan got a text and went upstairs to retrieve Anya, and soon she was sitting on the floor at our feet coloring while everyone tossed out ideas. If we could get ahold of the Saxons' virus supply, we could destroy it. But without someone on the inside, that seemed unlikely. Maybe we could somehow force the Circle to take the cure. And Colette could post a video warning people in the cities not to drink tap water in case the Saxons released it anyway.
"That would cause a whole new level of mass panic," Jack said. "And if the virus were released in aerosol form, it'd be no use at all."
He startled when Anya tapped on his knee and handed him a crayon and a page out of her coloring book, saying something bossy-sounding in Russian. Jack looked taken aback but obeyed, sitting cross-legged on the floor and shading in a bright orange sun.