‘Yes. Cynthia. Please alert Lee Bentley we’re on our way.’
Grace felt a visceral surge of panic and anger. He was doing it again. Broadsiding her.
‘Warren, you should have asked me first.’
‘So you could say no?’
‘I don’t have time.’
‘Make it.’ He reached for her hand.
Warren walked down the brightly lit hallway toward a lab at the far end of the corridor, Grace seething behind him, the images of Lee tumbling one on top of the other.
When Grace had been tapped to work the pediatric side of heart transplants at the Center, she’d immediately come into conflict with a leggy young researcher, Lee Ann Bentley, doing postdoc work on kids.
There had been a whiff of scandal that Lee had falsified lab results before coming to the Center in an effort to prove the effectiveness of a new immune suppressor used on chimps in heart transplants. Two primates had died before anything conclusive could be determined, the bodies conveniently cremated. Lee had been exonerated of any wrongdoing, but it had left Grace feeling there was something creepy buried under all that perfection.
Lee was concentrating on xenografts and xenobiotics, genetically altering animal hearts so that one day, they’d be recognized as human by a transplant recipient. Grace was going another direction completely: chimerism. Mutual cell assimilation. Tricking the body into accepting a new, human heart as if it were its own.
She’d stumbled onto it by accident years before during her internship – that if she first transplanted bone marrow from the donor, the patient’s immune system could be tricked into accepting the donor heart almost as if it were its own. That meant lower doses of immune-suppressant drugs. The patient would still have to be on a rigorous drug program for the rest of his life, but at lower doses. Since the immune-suppressant drugs were so toxic, the lesser the dosage the better.
Later, that groundbreaking research was validated when transplant surgeons in Lyon, France, infused an Australian patient with donor marrow cells before performing a successful hand transplant, and then again when a woman in Paris, infused first with marrow cells from a donor, had a partial face transplant.
But when Grace was trying it, she was among a small group of surgeons and the only one at the Center. She’d been working there only a couple of weeks when she butted heads with Lee over a patient, a six-year-old boy who needed a heart transplant.
Lee talked the parents into putting a genetically altered pig’s heart into his small chest. Grace had passionately argued with her in private beforehand. It was too experimental. Risky. Safer options hadn’t been exhausted yet. Lee had shrugged and smiled, and the smile had been a cold thing.
‘It doesn’t really matter, does it? If he dies?’
She’d said it so quickly, matter-of-factly, Grace wasn’t certain she’d heard correctly. ‘It does to his parents,’ Grace said. ‘It does to me.’
In the end, the parents prevailed, signing off on the surgery. The boy died three days later. A week afterward, a human heart became available that would have worked, and Grace had never forgiven Lee for killing him.
The research side of the Center had always been Warren’s particular interest, and Grace had a growing suspicion that Warren was willing to sacrifice patients on the hospital side to be used as guinea pigs for research that was still experimental.
Or she could just be jealous that Lee was Warren’s favorite now, and had been for some time. Part of her still missed him.
A sterile tray the size Grace used for making cookies glowed in purple light as Warren pushed open the door to the lab. ‘Don’t turn on the light. She’s got cartilage cells that are light sensitive.’
A green light cast a glow over the counters. It was a narrow, windowless room and Grace felt slightly claustrophobic. Out of the gloom, Lee Bentley emerged, her hair gleaming.
‘Well, well. We meet again.’
Her hair had grown long since Grace had last seen her, and she wore it in a thick braid that shone the color of wheat and made her cheekbones look high. She had the talent for smiling with her teeth and never having the smile ease up her face. Her eyes were pale green, humorless and cold. Somewhere in Lee’s genetic code, marauders clambered in fur boots over a dung hill, swinging mastodon thigh bones and shattering the skulls of slumbering children. She was taller than Grace and just as slender and could have easily modeled. Whips and chains, probably.
‘Still killing chimps?’
‘Please,’ Warren said.
‘She’s a lab tech,’ Lee said. ‘She couldn’t find the jugular if she Googled it.’
‘Biologist,’ Grace said. ‘They call us forensic biologists.’
‘Both of you.’ Warren held up his hands in a classic gesture of peace. ‘Lee, I’m sorry.’
He was siding with her. How could he side with her?
‘I want Grace to see this.’ His voice held a pleading note.
Lee narrowed her eyes, debating something with herself, and then whirled and went down an aisle. She walked past what appeared to be an ear floating in gelatin and stopped before a large metal container the size of a Crock-Pot, connected by a snarl of tubes to the wall. It was a bioreactor, for growing things. A monitor attached to the tubes beeped in a steady pulse, and Grace saw at the far end of the counter a printer spitting out a stream of data.
The human ear meant Lee was focusing now on an entirely different direction in her research, and it made Grace queasy. ‘What am I looking at?’ she said irritably.
Lee slid her hand over the outside of the bioreactor, caressing it. ‘First, a few thoughts. There are almost three hundred kids – just in America – waiting at any given time for a heart. Often a heart that never comes.’
‘And the neck bone’s connected to the chin bone. I know the stats, I know how many die waiting. Can you leave the theatrics for your Nobel prize speech and cut to the chase?’
Lee lifted her chin and looked at Warren. ‘She’s impossible.’
Grace thought she saw him nod in agreement and she snapped, ‘Good. I’m gone.’
Warren clamped a hand gently on her shoulder and she bit off her sarcasm when she saw the pain and tenderness in his face.
‘Grace. Please. I need your help.’ His voice was low and urgent. He was turned away from Lee so the researcher couldn’t hear their conversation, and Grace felt again the connection with this aging man. ‘I need you to see this.’
She nodded and he took a breath, relieved. Grace moved primly down the aisle and stood next to Lee, noting that her perfume held a mix of citrus and musk, and something fainter.
Perhaps gunpowder. ‘What’s in there?’ Grace said.
Lee lifted the lid. Inside the vat floated a human heart.
It was the size of a tiny fist. It swayed gently in a thick, viscous liquid. It was an odd tan color and floated in a soupy nutrient sea the red color of Jell-O. Grace felt a wave of nausea. The last time she had seen a human heart was in Guatemala. She closed her eyes and steadied herself against the counter.
‘Grace? Are you okay?’ Warren said, alarmed.
‘I need to leave. Go into the hall.’
She patted her way blindly past them toward the door and burst through it into the hall, taking gulps of air and leaning against