Marta looks up from one of the magazines she found tucked into the pocket next to her seat and turns to Nicky. "What?"
Nicky's brows rise. "I didn't say anything."
"You've been staring at me for fifteen minutes."
Nicky is looking at her curiously. "I'm trying to understand you."
"The better to put me in a box?" Marta suggests.
"Maybe," Nicky acknowledges.
They're six hours into a thirteen hour flight; and during all that time, they've not spoken a word to one another until now. Within a few minutes of reaching altitude, Marta had fallen asleep, realizing her first moment of safety since she and Aaron had met with Nicky. With that sense of security, she'd asked if Nicky needed her for anything; when the other woman shook her head, Marta had simply curled up, the events of the previous day (had it only been a day?!) catching up with her.
She had nodded off to the image of cool, imperturbable Nicky Parsons leaning back in her seat, looking bored; and had woken up five hours to the same. How was it possible that she was completely rumpled and disheveled while Nicky still looked ridiculously fresh and dewy?
It's like Nicky is superhuman, unflappably serene. Marta longs for a fraction of that confidence. She'd been covered with a cashmere blanket when she'd awakened; Nicky or Sophie? Didn't matter; she loved the soft grey cover now draping her legs.
"Which part? Me? Sterisyn Morlanta? Aaron?"
"Whatever." Nicky shrugs, a study of careful indifference. But Marta can see the deep intelligence in those brown eyes. A clearly analytical mind to go with what's slowly being revelead to be a deeply faceted woman.
"Why?" Marta asks. "Apart from pigeonholing me, what do you get?"
"You guys came to me, threw my life into chaos, and I had to call my mom to bail me out after observing cone of silence for over a year. I haven't had to do that since I was seventeen, when I stole one of the cars for a joyride."
"You didn't have to meet us."
"You guys are on the run. What's Cross thinking that he'd reach out another fugitive? For all he knew, I'd use you guys as leverage or a bargaining chip to get my life back."
Marta is unsettled. She never thought of that. She wonders if Aaron had. "Would you?"
Nicky's gaze is steely. "There's nothing left in the life I had before that I want back. But you. Cross wants you to have your life back. I keep thinking about what he said. He doesn't care about himself. But he wants you to be free. Enough that he was willing to risk his and your safety. Why?"
Marta doesn't respond for a few minutes.
"You said you'd kill me if I kept talking science."
Nicky waves her hand. "Papal dispensation. Go."
A faint half smile touches Marta's lips. "Neurology." Marta pauses, wondering how to proceed. "When I was thirteen I decided I needed to understand the brain."
"I cannot even imagine the conversations you had with your friends."
Marta shakes her head. "I didn't have a lot of friends. I was a little intense and focused. It made talking to people…difficult sometimes."
"Why the brain?"
"Do you have any idea how magnificent is the brain? How mysterious and curious and heartbreaking?"
Marta waits to see the smirk that commonly crosses someone's expression when she talks like this. Nicky, who doesn't have a problem being scornful as the moment requires, is not mocking. She is listening, leaning forward. Engaged. It gives Marta impetus to keep talking.
"People talk about how we only use ten percent of our brain. They imagine what we could accomplish if we used more than that? But I'm not interested in what the brain can accomplish. I'm interested in what causes the brain to die. What degrades its cellular composition, what causes it to malfunction, and in doing so, impairs the body?"
"What happened at thirteen?" Nicky inquires with a flash of insight.
"My mother died of complications from Huntington's Disease."
It hadn't been enough that she'd been awkward and shy, had difficulty making and keeping friends; there had also been the added challenges of helping her sister care for their deteriorating mother over a number of years that should have been childhood and adolescence. There had been the accompanying embarrassment and despair of trying to keep their father sober enough to keep his job so they had health insurance while they'd tried to manage everything else.
"I'm not familiar with that," Nicky states.
"It's a degenerative and fatal disease for which there is no cure. It's been described as having Parkinsons, ALS – Lou Gehrig's Disease – and Alzheimers, all at once. It's caused by a breakdown of the brain's nerve cells. It manifests between your thirties and fifties – first, tremors, faint shaking, mood swings, changes in your mental acuity. After onset, the disease worsens over a ten to twenty-five year period. It takes away your ability to walk, talk, eat, function. Eventually you die from pneumonia, or heart disease or some other complication because you've lost all facility and use of your mind and body. It's not like cancer where you actually die from cancer. With Huntington's, you die from complications brought on by the illness."
Marta can recite these facts now without pain and anger raging through her. "My mother's illness actually progressed quite rapidly, maybe ten years from the time she first noticed symptoms. Toward the end, she had no control over any part of her body. She was…shaking so hard, her body thrashing around, her muscle control was all gone. She'd choke. On the good days, she barely remembered who she was or who we were. The bad days were when she knew what was happening to her." Marta's voice slows, takes on a dreamy quality: "When she died she was so peaceful. Not moving. Just silent and still. And gone."
"I'm sorry," Nicky offers gently.
Marta nods. "I was in pre-med when I realized it wasn't medicine I needed to go into. It was biochemistry. And neurochemistry. As a doctor, I could only treat with what existed. But those two disciplines? I could study the chemical processes and transformations of the body. Everything from DNA to cell development to proteins and parts. I could examine the connections between organic compounds in the nervous system and how they affected neural processes. So I got dual degrees."
Her sister had come to the graduation ceremony, the only member of their admittedly small family to celebrate her achievement. Their father, by then, had been long dead, the fatality of a drunk driving bender.
"I could have spent a lifetime working on things in a lab, earning my way to something that could make a difference. But Sterisyn Morlanta came to me five years after I'd been working on research that looked at how gene and antibody treatments could remove malformed proteins in the brain. It was access to resources that were unprecedented. It wasn't just the science, Nicky. Yeah. I was there because the science was amazing and I really thought I was contributing to keeping our country safe. Save lives, bring home more of our people. All of that."
She can see Nicky struggling to stop herself from snorting. Marta gets it. Even to her ears it sounds insanely naïve. Who is that idealistic and stupid?
"There's not enough funding for Huntington's research because less than thirty thousand people in the US are afflicted, and maybe two hundred thousand more are at risk of inheriting it. It's a family disease: you stand a 50/50 chance if your parent has or had HD. Part of my deal with them was also that I could work on my projects on the side, with full funding." She leans forward, eyes wide and brilliant with conviction. "What we did at Sterisyn Morlanta? What we learned, what we created to improve physical and psychological repair and recovery? It put us light years ahead of any research that's ever been done – or even concieved."
Marta knows she's talking fast now; Nicky's not going anywhere, but Marta can't stop herself from rushing through this part, not because of what they accomplished, but because of what was destroyed. "There's no cure for Huntington's or ALS or motor neuron diseases like them, in practice or even in development. But for one really brief moment at Sterisyn Morlanta two years ago, when we'd perfected the chem protocols, I truly believed that a therapy could be possible." Marta's jaw hurts from clenching her teeth. "And then it all burned down along with eight assets and twenty-three people. My colleagues, and a few of whom were my friends."
The memory of the carnage she'd survived no longer causes her to wake up trembling; but it haunts her still, the memory of the screams, the smell of fear, the pleading and begging to live.
Such a contrast to the night a year earlier, the radiant joy and excitement they'd all shared when their team had reviewed the analysis of the chemical tweak they'd administered to test subjects, and had discovered that the new drug had succeeded in rapidly eliminating inert substances in the brain. The drug had corrected the malfunction for making proteins in the brain, reversing the neural cell death caused by the buildup of broken and tangled proteins, and the loss of specific protein channels and receptors at the connections between neurons.
It had been the first glimpse of hope she'd had since the moment she'd witnessed her mother dropping and cracking her favorite tea cup as her shaking had gotten worse. How her mother had wept uncontrollably, less angry and upset over the teacup as over what she'd railed as an unfair curse. Or the moment years later before she'd stopped being able to talk, how her mother had screamed in a fit of delirium that Marta had this nightmare to look forward to? Her poor, suffering mum, who'd embraced her later that day, begging her daughter's forgiveness for the cruel and capricious things her malady-ridden brain spewed.
"How close were you to a cure?"
"Not close at all," Marta explains. "We made some breakthroughs, but I never imagined anything we discovered would be ready to treat in the near future. The chems we created for the agents were custom tailored to their bodies. It wasn't one size fits all. The underlying science, the IP – that's what was valuable. It would have been a few more decades before anything we were doing would have been safe enough or ready for FDA consideration. Two of the agents died from the physical viraling. But I thought…shit. What if I could ensure that some future kid doesn't spend ten years of her life, from the time she's three until she's thirteen, watching her mother slur her words, lose control of her bowels, die of pnemonia, drowning in her own body because it had failed her in every way?"
Nicky is watching her, silent, assessing. Then: "Marta, you said there's a 50/50 chance of inheriting Huntington's if your parent had it."
Nicky is no dummy, Marta thinks, looking out into the blackness beyind her porthole window. She knows the exact moment when Nicky realizes; it's the sudden, indrawn breath, the tension emanating from the other side. She turns her gaze back toward Nicky, fully prepared to be defensive.
But she doesn't see pity in those chocolate brown eyes. She sees the deepest flare of sadness, of genuine sympathy.
"Does Cross know?" Despite her neutral expression, Nicky's eyes are reddening.
Marta sighs. "He says we're all dying already; my schedule's just a bit more accelerated. One of the nice things about that brain of his is how quickly he accepts a situation without the bullshit that goes into wishing and hoping things are different. The tremendous thing about knowing your date of death – because I know approximately how long I've got once the symptoms emerge – is how freeing it is."
"He's okay with it?"
Marta shakes her head. "No. He's not okay with it. He's accepted it. He's prepared to do whatever I need when the time comes."
Nicky's eyebrows soar. Marta's laugh is a little hollow. "Oh God, I'd never do that to him!" Ask him to euthanize her? He would. He totally would. Because he loves her. But she'd never ask such a thing of him, never saddle such a burden on him.
"I didn't mean for that to sound dramatic," Marta wheezes, amused. "I meant…Aaron's committed to see this through the end, but he's also agreed to what I want. And what I want isn't him suffering."
They'd talked about a hospice facility in Oregon she knew of, one where she'd be able to die with peace and dignity.
"Aaron is protective. But it's more about the years he thinks I should have, the ones he doesn't want me to miss out on." Marta pushes back in her seat, enjoying the dual luxuries of plush leather and soft cashmere. "Up until we met you and Aaron suggested he wanted me to 'be free, get my life back,' I hadn't thought about how I am most alive when I'm with him. He wants me for however long we can be together. And after last night – thanks for the condom, by the way - I realize it's all I want or need for what I've got left."
Marta's smile is rueful. "It's funny, Nicky. My mother's symptoms manifested when she was a year older than me. I'll be gone in at most, two more decades, my body and my mind having been destroyed long before then. But Aaron…the way his body works now, the cellular regeneration, the way he heals and how his physical and psychological degradation have slowed down? There's every possibility he could live sixty years beyond me."
"Sixty years…without you." There is something so bleak about Nicky's voice it draws Marta's attention.
Marta nods. Even though she's made peace with dying from Huntington's, some things still wound and hurt. "He accepts that, too," Marta whispers. "I'd like to think, though, Nicky that while he'll always cherish me, eventually – because he'll have length of years – he'll find someone else who deserves him, have a chance to be happy, at peace." There's satisfaction in knowing he'll outlive their hunters, be able to spit on their graves. "So it wasn't all for naught, if at least Aaron lives."
The haunted look in Nicky's eyes is disconcerting. "Surviving isn't the same as living."
Nicky turns her head, looks away, her jaw tight. Silence descends again and Marta's about to go back to her magazine when Nicky speaks, her voice taut and resigned. "I have some laptops that belonged to Treadstone and Blackbriar. We'd…I'd been smuggling out decommisioned hard drives and laptops for a few years."
Marta stares at Nicky, who's still refusing to look at her, who's still pretending to be unaffected.
"It's not enough to be in their network. Cross is going to have to learn how those networks function, the protocols we used."
"You're going to help him," Marta breathed.
Nicky looks at her now, those dark eyes luminous. "No promises, Marta. But I'll give him a fighting chance."
Marta's not sure how to feel. She had been relieved last night by Nicky's refusal to help. She figured she could talk him into abandoning his plan altogether.
"He's not wrong in assuming Byers will back down to protect his other projects. There's no way Blackbriar or Outcome were the last of the line."
Marta doesn't speak; looks down at her hands, worrying that fine cashmere blanket. "It's a stupid, dangerous plan," she whispers.
"Yeah, it is. Most plans are. But I can make it less stupid and dangerous."
"Why? Again I have to ask you, what's in it for you?"
"Redemption." Nicky's response is as enigmatic as the expression on her face.
Marta looks out the window, not willing to commit. Then, off cuff: "I don't suppose you'd care to explain the bit about your mother, her decorator named Alex, and this plane?"
Nicky tilts her head, looks at Marta with an almost feline expression of satisfaction. "No," Nicky answers shortly and simply. "This was't quid pro quo."
"Yeah, well, sedet, aeternumque sedebit," Marta quips with a shrug. "Can't blame me for trying."
Nicky can't seem to stop the small smile that pulls at her red mouth. Marta folds her legs under, spreading the cashmere over her bare feet. She's going to steal this ridiculously soft blanket, she decides.
Though they retreat back to their silences, it is, surprisingly, companionable.
***** sedet, aeternumque sedebit means "seated, be seated forever." In other words, stop trying and you'll die.