Hope - Levy, Marc (web ebook reader .TXT) 📗

browsing thrift stores for furniture for the loft. He would head over to the Center, where Luke would be waiting for him. Hope always joined them as soon as she could, and the three of them spent most of their evenings deep in research that they would devote hours to discussing.

Tyla soon tired of the situation and broke up with Luke in the middle of October. The captain of the basketball team was a better fit. Luke had been dealt a hard blow and sought emotional refuge by spending even more time at the Center.

Around the second or third week of November, Flinch promoted him to assistant. Luke was flattered by his professor’s demonstration of trust and savored the reward of being Flinch’s chosen one.

Soon, Tyla had faded into distant memory, and the three friends were back to the way things had been all those months ago.

Other than the heavy workloads, the money troubles she and Josh were facing, the endless migraines that forced her to wear glasses whenever she looked at a screen (ugly glasses that she only ever wore when she absolutely had to, when it felt like her brain was about to explode), and other than her father’s absence and his refusal to leave Amelia’s side, life was wonderful, and the future looked bright and promising.

Their experiments and the progress they were making at the Center were just as thrilling. Flinch spoke to the university hospital’s director and managed to get them permission to use a scanner there twice a week, an hour before the maintenance team came to check its settings.

This special privilege had to remain a secret, and a procedure was set up to make sure the three were as discreet as possible.

On Thursdays and Sundays, they would slip into the hospital via the morgue at precisely ten to eleven at night. They would skirt the corridor that led to the boiler room, where they hopped into the service elevator, squeezed between the dirty-laundry wagons as they were whisked up to the next floor. A service door took them to the medical imaging center, usually closed at that hour. By following these instructions to the letter, they were able to make use of cutting-edge equipment for a full fifty-five minutes, before creeping back out as silently as they had arrived. This short time was all Luke needed to compare the computer’s reconstructed images with those that had shown up on the scanner, before subjecting Josh to the same tests.

After a month of this, Hope began opposing the idea of Josh continuing to expose himself to the magnetic fields radiating out of a machine that Luke had only just got a grip on—even in the name of science. They decided that a better guinea pig was needed. They just didn’t know who, or what, that might be.

As winter’s first chill nipped at the air, Hope decided to use the Center’s other equipment for her own personal projects.

Whenever she could, she would slip away, closing herself into the first empty room she found, to pore over her own research.

One night during one of these secret breaks, she met two female students, one German and the other Japanese, who were working on cloning brain cells. The three young women quickly became friends, regularly meeting whenever they needed a coffee fix.

Night after night, Hope would ask them question after question, and it wasn’t long before she realized that there might be some overlap between their projects, or at least between their projects and her favorite topic, neurodegenerative diseases.

Hope piqued their interest when she mused that one day it might be possible to clone healthy cells and reinject them as a way of treating these illnesses. She used Josh and Luke’s findings to prove her point, and the two girls quickly grasped exactly what it was that Hope could help them with.

She began leaving increasingly often to meet with her two new friends.

Although it took Luke and Josh a while to figure out what was going on, which made Hope feel somewhat less guilty, the shifting dynamics didn’t get past Flinch. Initially, he didn’t seem to mind, but as Christmas crept nearer, he called Hope into his office. Since she had found her calling, a passion that spoke to her, she would be subjected to the same rules as everyone else if she was to retain her Longview privileges. Attending the weekly meeting was no longer optional. She would need to report back on her progress regularly, sharing her findings with the community. If she didn’t, she would cease to be welcome at the Center.

Hope asked if she could take a little time to consider, and Flinch agreed to give her until the end of the year.

When she decided to talk to Josh about it, she was annoyed to find him only half listening.

That night, Hope had covered the wooden crate that served as a coffee table with a pretty white tablecloth she had bought on one of her Sunday flea market expeditions. She had set the table, laying out mismatched plates on which she served Josh’s favorite meal—the only one she knew how to cook.

But every time she tried to speak, Josh interrupted her with stories of his own research.

“What Luke did this week was just incredible!” he exclaimed, refusing second helpings.

“As incredible as my cooking?”

“Listen to this, Hope. We’ve mapped out almost two-thirds of my brain and stocked a full twenty terabytes of my memory.”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Yeah, it’s so good, thanks. I’m just full.”

“You know we’re not married yet, right?”

“You want us to get married?” Josh asked.

“I don’t think so, no. You’ve already got me acting like your little housewife.”

“What did I say?”

“What didn’t you say? All you can do is talk about you, about Luke and your stupid research. You haven’t asked me a single question. It’s like I stopped existing a month ago,” Hope sighed. “Ever stop to think it was weird that I wasn’t spending my nights with