The Diviners

“Jericho?” Evie asked, her voice still sleep-caked.

“What happened, Evie?”

“You were shot. Unc and I got you back here,” she said carefully. “Jericho, what’s in those blue vials?”

“How many did it take?”

“Three.”

“Did I… did I hurt you or Will?”

“No,” she lied. “Jericho, please.”

“You won’t understand,” he said softly.

“Please stop telling me that.”

“You won’t.”

“I won’t unless you tell me.”

“The infantile paralysis. There was no miracle. It burned through me just like it did my sister. It shut down my legs, then my arms, and finally my lungs. They put me in the metal coffin and told me I’d be in it for the rest of my life. Trapped. I’d never breathe on my own. Never walk or ride a horse again. Never touch anyone.” His gaze flicked over the curve of Evie’s body. “Never do a thing but stare up at that ceiling till I died. After the war, there were soldiers coming back with their arms and legs missing. Men blown apart. They had a secret innovation they were trying—the Daedalus program—to help the soldiers coming back.”

“What sort of innovation?”

Jericho took a deep breath. “A merging of man and machine. A human-automaton hybrid,” Jericho said. “They would replace what had been damaged beyond repair in the war or by disease with steel and wires and cogs. We would be the perfect miracle of the industrial age. The robotnik. You’re staring.”

Evie quickly looked away. “I… I’m sorry. It’s so fantastic. I just don’t understand….” She looked at him again. “Please.”

“We were the test subjects,” Jericho continued. “They wouldn’t tell us anything except that the machinery would replace our defective parts and, over time, fuse with our very human systems. This was achieved by a new miracle serum—the vials of blue liquid—and vitamin tonic. It was supposed to keep the balance between our two selves. We would change mankind, they promised.”

“That’s astonishing. But why hasn’t it been in the papers? Why isn’t this the biggest story since Moses brought down the Ten Commandments?”

“Because it didn’t work,” Jericho said bitterly.

“But… I don’t understand.”

“I told you there were others.” With one finger, Jericho rolled a spent ampoule in his palm. “Their bodies rejected the formula, or the machinery, or both. It might be a few days or a few weeks, but then they’d turn feverish as the infection burned through their ravaged bodies, proving just how human they were after all. But the ones who died were lucky.”

“Lucky?” Evie said, incredulous.

Jericho’s expression darkened. “Some went mad. They’d see things that weren’t there, talk to nothing at all. They’d rage with prophecies. Or they’d go wild until the orderlies would have to come with the restraints, and even then it took an awful lot of men to hold them down. The doctors doped them while they tried to figure out what to do. I watched them shrink back into themselves. Husks sent off to asylums to die.”

Jericho placed the ampoule on the bedside table. The glass still had a blue cast to it. “There was this soldier in the bed beside mine. Sergeant Barry Leonard, from Topeka. I remember he told me that if I wanted to know what Topeka looked like, I should just imagine hell with a dry-goods store. And the dry-goods store didn’t have anything you wanted, anyway. He was a pretty funny fellow.”

Jericho grinned at some private memory, then went serious again.

“He’d come back from the war with both legs and an arm gone. Less than half a man lying in that bed. People walked right past him. They wouldn’t even look. It was as if they were afraid that if they looked, they’d catch his bad luck. His pain was more terrifying to them than death.”

Evie bent her arm, propped her head up with one hand. Jericho sat up and draped the sheet around him, but not before Evie sneaked a furtive glance at his chest—the soft golden hair, the beautiful muscle, the long older scar alongside the newer one made by Uncle Will. She wanted to touch him, to place a kiss at the center of his chest.

“They took us both for Daedalus, said we were good candidates. They wheeled us in together. Just before I went under the ether, I saw Sergeant Leonard grinning at me. ‘Don’t take any wooden nickels, kid.’ That’s what he always used to say.” Jericho’s smile was wan. “I still remember what it felt like to wiggle my toes for the first time in months. You wouldn’t know that a big toe could be so incredible. The first time I walked outside and felt the sun on my face…” He shook his head. “I wanted to reach up and pull the sun down, hold it like a ball you get for a birthday when you’re a kid, never let it go. Within a week, I was running. I could run for miles and not tire. Sergeant Leonard ran alongside me, daring me to keep up. When we finished, he patted me on the back like a brother. He said we were a new breed, the future. The way he said it, full of wonder and hope…” Jericho shook away the memory. “We would sit together on the bench in the courtyard, looking out at the sun setting over the hills, marveling at the constancy of it.”