Traces

"This used to be my mother's laptop," Julie said without looking up.

She navigated a messy folder structure, that made Romeo's head spin. The machine smelled old, like burned dust and mysterious chemicals. It had a history.

"I guess it was her lucky charm, documenting all her early research before I was born."

That explained the scratches and burn marks.

"She gifted it to me when I was twelve, so I could work on my theories," she noted. If her mother was half as messy as her daughter, it was a miracle it still booted up.

"Oh, yeah. The Scaleable Fusion Reactor thingy—because that's what ginger kids do," Romeo laughed. Julie was way more chaotic than he thought—especially for a genius.

It was a sharp contrast from the strict Capulet heir he got to know from Verona High.

Romeo's father was a scientist too, but the exact opposite.

Clean-shaven, pedantic, organized—he never understood how Maxwell scored his free-spirited wife. Or rather—why? They seemed to have nothing in common, unlike the Capulets.

"What can I say?" Julie giggled too. "Mom let me stay home if I came up with something smart. It was much better than getting bullied in school."

"Bullied? You? On Verona Island?" that was news for him, "did someone have a death wish?"

"No, dum-dum, not here," she rolled her eyes. "There's a pretty big world out there, you know."

Right. He hadn't seen her in school before this semester—or in general. He'd also travel, but Maxwell had him learn everything here—under Church supervision.

"I went to the Republican Sciences Academy," her casual namedrop made him sweat.

The RSA was the most prestigious place—only the smartest fraction of the elite could get in. It was a private establishment run by the creme of the planet's scientists.

Was—because the Church of Uniformity shut it down for its blasphemous teachings.

"I keep forgetting that everyone in your family is a genius," he mumbled.

"That's debatable," Julie smirked. "We have Tybalt too."

Well, she got a point.

"And my mom might be smart, but she has no idea about cyber security—"

She opened a folder and typed in a long password faster than Romeo could follow.

"I wrote my hypothesis and deleted it thanks to a misclick. I was so mad. I scoured the internet for a recovery program, and voila." Even the laptop struggled to keep up.

It loaded a folder with unsorted documents and images.

Julie clicked the first one, and Romeo's heart skipped a beat.

"It looks like what the friar projected out in the classroom."

"Yep, it's exactly that place," she nodded. Still, it was very different—clean, well-lit, and in perfect condition. Not the burned-out research facility of horrors.

There were only a few images, most of them damaged.

"Didn't you say only a handful of people knew about it?" Romeo noticed the bold letters X-137 above a heavy blast door. It had a yellow triangle on it, with a radiation sign.

"I meant that nobody knew what was going on there," she clarified. "Including me. My parents would never say a word. But when you mentioned Vat 16, I remembered this picture."

It was blurry and pixelated, with the bottom half missing.

But what was still there sent a chill down his spine—numbered, tall glass containers.

They were empty, except for a nasty green liquid. The image focused on two men in lab coats, the number 16 blurred to the right. Underneath the print, a scribble with a marker spelled Papa.

The man on the right was Lord Capulet—not yet balding. The left looked familiar too, though much younger than he ever remembered.

Maxwell Montague.

"When was this?" he yelled, ears thrumming with excitement.

"The metadata says sixteen years ago," Julie's full lips stretched into a smug grin. "It's hard to imagine your old man and mine were best buds, huh? And I suspect my mom took the picture."

"Did they clone something?" Romeo asked, sliding closer.

The cinnamon scent was intoxicating. He realized how near he had gotten to the copper-haired beauty. His heart throbbed, the excitement and the intimacy getting to his head.

"Unclear," Julie gasped, aware of his proximity.

Romeo pulled away, hands trembling.

"My mom got pregnant with me around then and left the project," she explained. "You saw those big yellow signs. And a document mentioned that they worked with Cesium-137."

"I've no idea what that is," Romeo admitted, still staring at the picture.

"It's a radioactive isotope," Julie said. "If those vats have a soup full of them—I can see why they didn't want my mother anywhere nearby. But then, what does it have to do with cloning?"

"Radioactive? Like gamma radiation?"

The wheels ground against each other in his head. He had to admit, he was nowhere near the genius like her, to put the pieces together. What did it have to do with Paris and him?

"Well, how deep do you want to go into it?" she teased.

He wanted answers, but he already felt a headache coming.

"When that truck hit me, they measured gamma my radiation," he explained. "And then they stuffed me with iodine—"

"Hold on," Julie stared at him. "Iodine does nothing—your gamma radiation? You'd be dead."

"Or some mutant," Romeo pointed out, the word heavy on his tongue. "Like your lackeys said that day." He regretted mentioning it, but they were too far into this mystery to turn back now.

"No, I mean—you'd be dead then too," she protested. "The Church—"

She slammed the laptop's cover and jumped off the bed.

Realizing her leg was in cast, she hissed, grabbing the wheelchair's handle. Romeo's first thought was that she was trying to escape, but she pointed at a messy desk.

"There's a portable scanner," she plopped back in pain. "Mind grabbing it for me?"

Romeo helped put her leg down to ease the strain before walking over. The task seemed more challenging than he first thought. His fingers combed through garbage and chaos on that desk.

"Where is it? Or how does it look?" he hovered.

He didn't need to wait for the answer. Once he leaned over, a display lit up with a red warning, the familiar crackling noise filling the room. He heard the same when the medic scanned him.

"Shit, what does it say?" Julie choked out.

"Um, three-point-six rem," Romeo read it. "Is that bad?"

He remembered something about rems. The island had a nuclear incident hundreds of years back. They taught about radiation in school but he couldn't place the numbers.

"Soak up 300 rem for a few seconds, and there is a fifty percent chance you'll die within thirty days," Julie was pale as snow. Her fingers trembled, but Romeo let a loud sigh out.

"Way to scare me," he shook his head. "This thing beeps like I'm already dead. Then 3,6 is not great, not terrible—"

"I said if you get 300 you die," she noted, fingers trembling. "But you radiate this much—or more."

Julie scooted towards the farther end of the bed.

"That's the limit this thing can measure—and you weren't even touching it."