Sister Sun took a breath to steady her nerves. It was not fear that made her tremble. It was a terrible excitement.
“As I have said many times, Honored One,” she began, “science is like a knife. Used by a heretic, it is a thing of great evil. Used in the cause of righteousness, it is a holy weapon of great power.”
“And do you believe that you have discovered a way to turn these evil things to holy purpose?”
“Yes,” she said. “I have.”
He set down his knife. “Explain it to me.”
She did. It did not take very long. Saint John had a first-class intellect. And it was a cold mind, capable of separating rational assessment from emotions and religious passion. Sister Sun told him what she’d discovered in those notes, and how it coincided with theories she had been working on prior to kneeling to kiss the knife and join the Night Church. She explained what she’d learned from those notes, and she outlined what she did not yet know.
“You say that the notes include a formula to cure the Reaper Plague?” asked Saint John.
“A treatment,” she corrected. “But it amounts to the same thing. McReady was poised to eradicate the plague and all the gray people. But she apparently went elsewhere to complete her research.”
“Could you create a countermeasure to this ‘treatment’?” asked the saint.
Sister Sun chewed her lip, then gave a slow shake of her head. “No. Not as such,” she said. “But I could take her research and turn it to serve us.”
“How?”
Sister Sun told him.
“What would be required for you to do this?”
She said, “I need a lab. Or at least basic equipment.”
“We’re in a desert.”
She
shook her head. “There’s a biological testing facility less than two hundred miles from here. I can use that. It would have a portable generator, which could be repaired and refueled. With ten reapers as assistants, I can have the lab running inside two weeks.”
He considered this, his lips pursed.
“And if you had fifty reapers as assistants—how quickly could you get it running?”
She stared at him. At his dark and glittering eyes. At his smile.
Then she smiled too.
34
BENNY LOOKED FOR NIX THE rest of the day but didn’t find her.
While he was walking back to try the mess hall again, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see a blue balloon floating on the hot air. It was on the far side of the trench, though, and the zoms all raised their dead eyes to stare at it. The balloon had barely any lift and bounced from one to another of the zoms, touching the tops of heads, rebounding from clumsy fingers.
It must have escaped from Eve, he thought.
Then it occurred to him—how was it able to float at all?
Benny knew about helium from Peppertoes, the clown at the harvest fair in Mountainside. He had a big tank of helium—an item that must have cost him a fair percentage of the ration dollars he was paid by the town to perform for the kids. Every year Peppertoes would give a helium-filled balloon to the kid who grew the biggest sweet pepper. Morgie’s cousin Bethy won twice.
But who around here had a tank of helium?
He watched the balloon bounce and bounce, and then he saw a zom make a successful grab at it. The blue orb vanished into the crowd of the dead, and a second later there was a loud pop!
Benny frowned at the zoms, then scanned the sky for more balloons. There were none. And when he looked over at the playground, the children were gone. Siesta time?