The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [61]
Ma had me cradled in her lap, and the pickup bounced along on the rib road like a baby buggy. Man, I hadn’t felt this spoiled since I carried a blankie. She reached over to stroke Jed’s arm sympathetically. “How much can you tell us, honey? What happened?” She ran her finger gently down the scar on his face. He turned his head away and stared off toward the mudslide.
“I was snooping around in places I didn’t belong. Like some other people I know—” He paused to squint at me and Barbie. “And one day I had an accident. A terrible accident. A long fall. Broke my head open. Broke both legs while I was snowballing down. Landed in a crater of nasty water. Somehow dragged myself halfway onto land, even though I don’t remember doing it. I was almost dead when one of the ORC guards found me. I didn’t wake up for a week.”
“You didn’t run away on purpose?” Barbie whispered.
He drew a deep breath and pressed his lips together tightly, shaking his head. “And I’m sorry you had to think that, believe me, but it was better than the alternative.” Then he continued his story. “At first I thought I was in a hospital. My legs were all bandaged in casts held up in the air with pulleys. Traction, it’s called. My legs had been broken and twisted and—it’s hard to explain. They looked like pretzels before the surgery. Stan showed me the pictures.”
I knew what he’d left out. My back had been there. “Your legs were petrified,” I said.
He licked his lips nervously, craned his head to look through the cab window at Boots Odum, then shrugged and nodded. “Sort of. Petrification is the replacement of organic material with minerals, through capillary action, and it takes hundreds or thousands of years or even longer. What happened to me is called adrification. I was the first human it happened to . . . well, at least to this extent. They didn’t know what to do. They performed surgery to straighten my legs out, but I’m still not normal. The adrium is still in my tissues.”
“So that’s what it’s called,” said Barbie. “Adrium.”
We all knew he was talking about the substance that ORC was mining from the rocks.
Jed nodded. “Based on the Hindi word for rock. A new element that Stan discovered. So far, it hasn’t been located anywhere else on earth. It has unusual properties of attraction, but it’s, well, I can’t go into it very far. Besides having to kill you if I tell you, it involves a lot of science that I don’t completely understand yet myself. But suffice it to say, from what we know so far, some isotopes are stable, some are unstable, some are right-handed and behave one way, some are left-handed and behave another way, and the more we experiment—”
“Wait!” I blurted. “Adrium has hands?”
Jed smiled crookedly in the moonlight. “Handedness isn’t just about hands—it’s about which side is dominant. And the harder we try to figure it out, the more trouble we get into.”
“You say we a lot,” Ma said. “Are you working for ORC now?”
“Not yet, but someday maybe. Obviously I’ve had a lot of free time, and Stan’s been teaching me some things. You’ll be happy to know I’ve finished my high school diploma already. As soon as we find a cure, I’m going to start working on degrees in biochemical engineering and physics. But I can’t go to college with these legs.” He gave his left brace a slap.
“You seem to get around all right,” Ma said.
“True. The problem is we don’t know yet exactly how the adrium poison spreads, and we don’t have an antidote yet. Until we know it’s contained, Stan says we can’t risk exposing the public.”
Did he say poison? “Thanks a lot for nothing!” I said, punching his arm. “Are we going to be prisoners at ORC now like you?”
“Seb, I’m not a prisoner. I’m in secret quarantine. And you, dough boy, have already been exposed. Everyone at home may have been. Our property has the most intense concentration of unstable adrium I’ve—whoops.” He