Inhuman Read Free Page B

one-woman welcoming committee. Her spiky gray hair didn’t move as she strode forward, tablet in hand. I saw my school photo on its screen.
    “Delaney McEvoy?” The woman clearly knew she had the right girl, but she waited for my nod before continuing. “I’m Director Taryn Spurling. Head of Biohazard Defense.” She turned to the jumpsuit who’d brought me. “Did you get a sample?”
    He handed her the vial of my blood and my dial.
    “Is someone going to tell my father I’m here?” My voice came out higher than normal.
    Above her face mask, Director Spurling’s laser-blue gaze sharpened. “You know where he is?”
    “Visiting galleries in California. He’s an art dealer.”
    She stiffened. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Delaney. A lot better. You see, I’ve got all the evidence I need. I can issue the order anytime to have your father shot on sight.”
    Her words punched the air out of my lungs. “For what?”
    “You’re not going to help him by lying.”
    “But he is an art dealer,” I said helplessly.
    “Yes, of course.” She spoke through a clenched jaw. “That’s where the big money is. But my sources tell me that Ian McEvoy will retrieve anything if the price is right.”
    “Retrieve?” Understanding crawled out of the primordial mud of my mind, tiny and grasping. “You mean from the other side of the wall….”
    “Now that look almost works. You almost have me believing that you don’t know” — Spurling leaned in until her face mask grazed my ear — “that your father is a fetch.”
    I recoiled. “No. That’s not true.”
    Under that mask, the woman was smirking, I was sure of it. Well, Director Spurling was wrong. Dead wrong. My father was no fetch. He wore bifocals and was lactose intolerant. Him, scale the Titan wall and sneak into the Feral Zone? Not possible. But the word fetch had triggered my memory of the last fetch they’d arrested. He’d been executed by a firing squad in front of the Titan. As always, our online classes were cancelled so that we could do the patriotic thing and watch the event in real time. The worst moment wasn’t when the bullets flung the man against the wall, as awful as that had been to see. It was earlier, when they’d forced a black hood over his head, making him face death in total darkness — alone. That seemed beyond cruel.
    “Put her in a containment room.” Director Spurling’s thin voice dragged me back into the moment.
    “You’re keeping me here?” I began to sweat, which plastered the vinyl vest to my skin.
    Spurling didn’t spare me a glance, just headed for the door, tossing off a last order as she passed the jumpsuit. “Call me if she’s still alive in the morning.”

I paced the cold, white box of a room. I’d been stuck in there for just over an hour and already I was losing it. It was too much like a hospital room. Too much like where my mother had spent her last days. But Director Spurling could lock me up for months if she felt like it. The Biohazard Defense Department had the authority to do whatever was deemed necessary to keep the nation safe.
    What did it matter if they kept me in quarantine forever? I flopped onto the small, starchy bed. Even if I didn’t have Ferae — and I absolutely, positively didn’t — life as I knew it was over. A sneeze sent people running. A rumor of serious illness, even if it wasn’t contagious, turned a person into a pariah. I’d learned that when my mother’s cancer diagnosis set off a chain reaction of hysteria. Within days of her first chemo treatment, she was fired without notice. My father’s gallery business dried up. But hardest to understand was the way our friends cut off all contact once they heard the news. I wasn’t invited to a single birthday party or sleepover that year. Since our extended family had all died during the plague, in the end, as my mom grew sicker and sicker, it was just the three of us. Now we were a family of two, me and