The Immortals by Mary Hallberg (chrysanthemum read aloud txt) 📗

and humid. Even though it was only in the fifties, I shivered and felt bone chillingly cold. I wished I had thought to bring a jacket.

Jacey slammed the car door, swinging her abnormally large purse out of the way, and motioned for me to follow her. “This way,” she said. She led me up a set of stairs that wound up the outside of the building and led to a gray door.

The stairs creaked loudly as we jogged up them. “Jacey, are you sure this is the right entrance?” I said from several steps below. “This doesn’t even look like the front of the building.”

“It’s not,” she said. “Trust me, this is the right one.”

I doubted this, but I didn’t argue and kept going. She got to the top before me and opened the door with no trouble. The room it opened into was dark, and she flicked on a light switch. I knew this couldn’t be the right entrance, despite what she said. Then again, her definition of right and mine were often different.

Sure enough, she led me to a row of shelves on the far side of the room, every one of them filled with plastic bags full of syringes. Now I understood why Jacey had brought such a large purse. She picked up two of the plastic bags. “As much as you can carry,” she said. “Help yourself.”

I hesitated. “Jacey, are you sure this is...I don’t know, legal?”

“Of course!” she said without hesitation. She picked up two more bags and stuffed them into her already full purse. “They make this stuff by the truckload. That’s why it’s here; it’s for us. Take advantage of it.”

This was a far cry from putting a little card in the mail and getting a nice, neat, three month supply. “How many people do this?”

She shrugged. “Lots of people. Almost all my other friends do. Well, all the Immortal ones anyway. I guess a few non-Immortals do it, but they’d probably get arrested pretty quickly.” She snickered. “That little card is just for people who are too lazy to come down here themselves.” She picked up another plastic bag and handed it to me. “Kenzie, there’s nothing to worry about. I promise.”

I took the bag and squeezed it into my backpack. “Okay, but...Jacey, can we actually get in trouble?”

I knew I was pestering her and for a second I thought she might get angry. But she just smiled. “Kenzie...we can’t get in trouble for anything.”

chapter seven

Jacey didn’t show up for biology the next morning. I figured she had opted for a spontaneous night out and was still nursing a hangover.

That afternoon as I sat down to tackle the next novel on my English reading list, I got a call from her asking me to come over. I often ended up at her house after school; sometimes we worked on homework, but she frequently talked me into various time wasters like meeting up with friends and going out to eat or shopping. But from the tone of her voice, it was obvious that we weren’t going to get anything done today, productive or non productive.

I knew something was really wrong when I tried to open the front door and found it locked. I didn’t even know where the doorbell was so, dumbfounded, I knocked. She could have been anywhere in that huge house, and after a minute, I was afraid she hadn’t heard me. But just as I raised my hand to knock again, the door swung open. Jacey stood in the doorway, biting her lip.

“Hey Kenzie,” she said. “Come on in.”

I saw a broken window out of the corner of my eye and gasped. “Jacey, what happened?”

“Someone broke in last night while we were asleep.” She kept walking to the living room, where Elizabeth sat with her eyes on her phone. She didn’t look up when I walked in.

“Um...what?” I knew I probably should have said more, but they were both so casual that I didn’t know how to react. I would have been a lot more outwardly nervous if someone had broken into my house in the middle of the night. Then again, this was Jacey and Elizabeth.

“Yeah, it was actually really early, probably four or so. I didn’t even hear it. Mom did, but by the time she got downstairs the guy had left. She freaked and called the police, but since there are no felony cameras around here there’s not much we can do. So she just went to work and forgot about it.”

When the Immortals program first began, there was lots of outrage. One of the things people got angry over was the fact that non-Immortals couldn’t testify against Immortals in court. The idea was that Immortals were less likely to commit crimes because clearly we had done something good to get in, so why would we? But still, there was that possibility. So the government installed felony cameras throughout The Necropolis. This way, if an Immortal committed a crime, there was a greater chance it would be caught on camera and they would be convicted and have to face the consequences. They also said it would protect Immortals. Because of our wealth a lot of Immortals got robbed in the beginning. So it would also help if a crime was committed against us. According to their theory, everyone would win.

“Did they dust for fingerprints or anything?” I asked.

Jacey nodded, then said, “All they took was a drawer full of TNV. Nothing else.”

“Damn,” I said. “We just got that yesterday.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Elizabeth said, finally looking up from her phone. “Why would someone steal TNV? Immortals have unlimited access to it, and nobody else would want it.

“A non-Immortal might want some,” I said.

“Why would a non-Immortal want TNV just to live forever the way the rest of the world is living now?”

“Maybe they don’t want to live forever. Maybe they just had some disease they want to cure.” I was thinking in particular of my father.