Breaking Destiny by Mitty Walters

Author:Mitty Walters [Walters, Mitty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-73391-171-9

18

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With a bit of hustle, I manage to get a hand in the opening just as the elevator doors were closing.

“Going down?” I asked.

Yoonie said nothing. When the doors closed behind me, I pressed the button.

There it was again, the faint but pleasant scent of jasmine.

I cleared my throat. “So this Woodhouse fella? Kind of a sneaky bastard, ain’t he?”

This got me a whole lot of nothing.

We rode the rest of the way in silence. Even before the doors were fully open again, she was gone. Straight across the lobby she went and out into the night, all but speed-walking.

Outside there were four golf carts lined up. Yoonie climbed into one and I stepped around to the passenger side, but she sped off without me.

“Sorry about my cancer,” I called after her.

The buggy stopped. She sat there, hands at ten and two, staring straight ahead. I was just about to walk over when suddenly she sped off again.

So I climbed into a cart of my own.

Despite the joy of lying in a proper bed for the first time in months—one with the most comfortable pillow-topped mattress ever made—sleep refused to come.

My mind was a tad too busy.

Not the least of my considerations was the fact that directly across the hall from my apartment was a woman who could wave a magic wand and erase my cancer.

This remission, or whatever it was, might be temporary, but Yoonie could make it permanent. For the very first time since the diagnosis, I realized there might actually be a way to beat this thing.

And that sort of threw a wrench into my plans.

If my dying didn’t go as expected, then what? I couldn’t exactly go back to Carolyn, even if my identity wasn’t blown. What else? Start over with a new identity in a new city?

What cities would be left after this ‘Reset’ business? Yoonie had said that without a Ticket, I had a one in five chance of survival. If I had a twenty percent chance of living, that meant I also had an eighty percent chance of dying. So when they let this virus loose, eighty percent of the world’s population would die?

Whoa.

Who could do something like this? Was the Order some secret branch of the government?

Desert or not, you don’t hide an operation of this scale on American soil. Not without, at a minimum, some sort of tacit approval from a very high level. Whoever the hell they were, not only did they have immense resources but tremendous power to boot.

And they were hellbent on wiping out most of the world’s population.

I wondered what the world be like with eighty percent of everybody gone?

There’s what, seven and a half billion people on the planet? So, around six billion would die?

The hugeness of this realization caused an odd heaviness. Almost like… grief?

Odd because… well, sand.

Granted, six billion grains is a whole bunch of sand. But sand nonetheless.

So why did that bother me so much?

I shook it off.

The other aspect was that curing my cancer would also turn me into one of those Forever people.

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