Reached

believes we should know the work of those who came before us.”
    “He trained in the Society, didn’t he,” I say.
    “Yes,” Tess says. “He came here ten years ago, right before his Final Banquet.”
    “He’s
ninety
?” I ask. I’ve never known anyone so old.
    “Yes,” Noah says. “The oldest person in the world, as far as we know.”
    The office door slams open and we all get back to work.

    A few hours later, Oker tells the assistants to take a break. “Not you,” he says to me. “I need to make something and you can stay and help me with it.”
    Noah and Tess send me sympathetic looks.
    Oker sets a bunch of neatly labeled boxes and jars in front of me and hands me a list. “Put this compound together,” he says, and I start measuring. He goes back over to the cabinet to rummage through more ingredients. I hear them clinking together.
    Then, to my surprise, he starts talking to me. “You said you saw approximately two thousand patients while you worked in the medical center in Camas,” he says. “Over the course of four months.”
    “Yes,” I say. “There were many more patients that I didn’t treat, of course, in other parts of the center and other buildings in Camas.”
    “Out of all the ones you
did
see, how many looked better when they were still than my patients here?” he asks.
    “None,” I say.
    “That’s a fast answer,” he says. “Take your time to think it over.”
    I think back on all of my patients. I can’t remember everyone’s face, but I can call up the last hundred. And Lei, of course.
    “None,” I say again.
    Oker folds his arms and sits back, satisfied. He watches me measure a few more ingredients. “All right,” he says. “Now
you
can ask a question.”
    I didn’t expect this opportunity, but I’m going to take advantage of it. “What’s the difference between the bags you make and the ones the Rising uses?” I ask.
    Oker pushes a container toward me. “Have you ever heard of Alzheimer’s disease?”
    That’s a question, not an answer. But I go along with it. “No,” I say.
    “Of course not,” Oker says. “Because I cured it before you were born.”
    “
You
cured it,” I say. “Just you. No one else?”
    Oker taps a couple of the pictures on the wall behind him. “Not by myself. I was part of a research team in the Society. That disease clogged up the brain with extra proteins. Others before us had worked on the project, but
we
figured out a way to control the level of expression of those proteins. We shut them down.” He leans a little closer to look at the compound I’ve made. “So, to answer your first question, the difference is that I know what I’m doing when I put together the medication. Unlike the Rising. I know how to help keep some of the proteins from the mutation from accumulating because they act in ways that are similar to the disease we cured. And I know how to keep the patients’ platelets from accumulating in the spleen so patients don’t rupture and bleed internally. The other difference is that I don’t include as many narcotics in my solutions. My patients feel some pain. Not agony, more like discomfort. It reminds them to breathe. More likely to get them back that way.”
    “But is that a good thing?” I ask. “What if they can feel all the pain of the boils?”
    Oker snorts. “If they feel something, they fight,” he says. “If you were in a place with no pain, why would you want to come back?”
    He slides a tray of powder in my direction. “Measure this out and distill it in the solution.”
    I look down at the instructions and measure two grams of the powder into the liquid.
    “Sometimes I can’t believe this,” Oker mutters. I can’t tell if he’s talking to himself or not, but then he glances in my direction. “Here I am, working on a cure for that damn Plague again.”
    “Wait,” I say. “You worked on the first cure?”
    He nods. “The Society knew about the work we’d done in protein expression. They pulled my team to work on the cure for the Plague. Before the Society sent it out to the Enemy, they wanted to make sure we had a cure—in case the Plague came back.”
    “So the Rising lied,” I say. “The Society
did
have a cure.”
    “Of course they did,” Oker says. “Not enough for a pandemic, so the Rising does get credit for making more. But the Society came up with the cure first. I bet your Pilot didn’t mention that.”
    “He didn’t,” I say.
    “I paid a