Thanks for the reviews. Yes, an experimental new treatment means more drama! ;)
Chapter 7.
In the two weeks that she'd been injecting Kate with the serum, Juliet hadn't seen any improvement. This on its own would have been cause enough for concern, but the most recent samples she'd taken showed the same decline in Kate's white blood cell count that she'd observed in the other women in the lead up to their deaths.
So far she was healthy, but her morning sickness was so severe that Juliet had noticed her slipping out of Jack's tent before it was even light, staying out in the jungle for hours pretending to pick fruit so that he wouldn't question her about what she was doing there. She could tell that he was worried about her, but Kate was so distant and secretive on the whole that he didn't seem any more suspicious of these disappearances than of her mood swings, or the looser clothes she'd adopted to hide the changes visible to anyone who knew what to look for.
"I think we need to tell him," she insisted when she noticed how laboured Kate's breathing had become as she climbed up onto the bed in the examination room. The walk from the beach wasn't long, and she'd never had any trouble with it before; it might just be the few extra pounds was carrying, or the fact that she wasn't as active these days, but that didn't stop the panic that was beginning to claw at Juliet's heart.
Now that Kate was less than ten days from the beginning of her second trimester, she guessed that she had about a week to come up with a new approach to her treatment before the real symptoms started; three before the damage became irreversible, and she lost her and her baby too. It wasn't much time; after three years of searching for a solution that wouldn't put the mother further at risk, she was running out of viable ideas.
"No, Juliet," Kate argued, shooting her a warning look, and Juliet was amazed at how composed she managed to sound. If she didn't do something soon, then both Kate and her baby would be dead before the month was out, and yet she held strong, immovable on this point. Nothing she said seemed to leave much of an impression; she was either really brave, or really stupid. "We've been through this – not until you can promise me that I'm not gonna die."
"I just think that if we tell him…" Juliet began, trying to explain her hope that Jack might be able to offer her a fresh angle, one that could save their lives, but Kate cut her off before she could finish.
"He'll know what to do?" she supplied, and Juliet could hear the contempt in her tone, making it clear that she disagreed. "What makes you think he'll handle it any better than he did last time? That he won't just freak out?"
The truth was that Juliet didn't. In fact, the more she thought about it…
"You know I'm right," Kate told her, her voice softening when she seemed to pick up on the difficulty Juliet was having admitting that there wasn't anything anyone else could do.
That it was up to her.
"If it helps, at least we won't have to lie to him for much longer," Kate quipped with a watery smile, but her joke fell flat when her voice quivered and she bit her lip, looking as if she might burst into tears.
Seeing how frightened she was underneath her bravado, Juliet felt her heart go out to the younger woman. It was easy for her to think that she understood what she was going through, but she wasn't the one who'd been handed a death sentence.
"You're not going to die, Kate," she assured her, dragging her stool over to the side of the bed, but it wasn't the concrete promise that she knew she was hoping for, and she could tell that Kate didn't believe her.
"Sun did," she whispered, her green eyes wide and glistening when she looked up at her, and Juliet wasn't sure what to say to this.
"I know," she agreed after a long moment, swallowing against the lump that formed in her throat whenever she was forced to think about her past failures. For some reason, the Korean woman stuck out in her mind: perhaps because she'd come so close to getting her off the island. "But she was a different case."
She tried to infuse them with as much meaning as she could, but they were just words and they both knew it.
"Isn't there something else you can try?" Kate pressed when the silence became so unbearable that Juliet turned away to arrange the instruments for her exam. "Something you didn't do with the other women?"
"Nothing that I've been able to test," she confessed, trying to deter her, but as she'd come to expect, she seized on this small measure of hope.
"So test it now. On me," she insisted, sitting up straighter on the bed, her resolve to fight what was happening to her returning now that she knew that she had a chance.
Juliet wanted to help her, to give her the assurance that her eyes pleaded for, but she wasn't sure that she could do what she was asking. It was hard enough when the treatment failed and the women died: how could she live with herself knowing that she'd played an active part in Kate's death?
"You don't understand, Kate – if I'm wrong, I could kill you. You and your baby could both die," she insisted, but Kate was past the point of letting something like this stop her.
"So I die some other way," she agreed. "Does it matter? This thing you're suggesting, it gives me a fifty-fifty shot, right? That's more than I have now."
"I know you're scared, Kate," Juliet tried again, hoping to keep her from acting on impulse, talking her into doing something that they would both regret, "but maybe we should think about this…"
"We don't have time to think about it," Kate insisted, her expression fierce as she stared her down. "I want you to do it."
"You don't even know what it is yet," Juliet reminded her, but she could see that it didn't matter. She was desperate. She had nothing left to lose.
"So tell me, if that's what you need to do, but my mind is made up," Kate told her, crossing her arms when she swung her legs around to perch on the edge of the bed. "I want to do this, Juliet. I have to."
"During the first three months of pregnancy, the uterus releases proteins designed to suppress the uterine immune response – to keep the mother's body from rejecting the foetus," Juliet began with a sigh, waiting until Kate nodded to continue.
"Around the beginning of the second trimester, we would normally see a reduction of these proteins, to keep them from leaking into the circulatory system and causing a complete suppression of the maternal immune response – one that would compromise the mother's ability to carry to term.
"For some reason, it happens differently here. About eleven weeks after conception, the mother's white blood cell count plummets and her body begins to treat the foetus as an infection. When it tries to fight back, they both die."
"Okay, so what's your idea?" Kate pressed when she stopped to let her digest this, some of the colour draining from her face at hearing her death put into such definite terms.
"I give you another injection, to try to bring the glycoproteins down to a more manageable level before they become dangerous."
"If that's what's supposed to happen…" Kate argued, no longer seeming to follow Juliet's train of thought, Juliet didn't need to hear the rest of the question to know what it was. She was looking for a way to justify it to herself; to convince herself that it wasn't as big a risk as she'd made it sound.
"I'm not an immunologist, Kate," she explained, so that she would understand why she was so reluctant to make her her guinea pig. She hadn't even had time to research it, much less perfect the dosage. "I don't know enough about how immune systems work to feel confident tampering with yours. If I make a mistake, I could be exposing you and your baby to any number of potentially lethal pathogens on this island.
"Do you understand what I'm saying?" she repeated when Kate opened her mouth, she was sure, to tell her that she didn't care. "If we do this, you put yourself at risk of a contracting fatal infection, and then, Kate, you will die."
Next chapter: Jack confronts Kate about her behaviour... ;)