“Don’t hate me too much.”
“I don’t hate you at all.”
“My motives were good. They haven’t always been. Certainly weren’t spotless when I went to work at Project Ninety-nine. But my motives were good this time, Joe.”
Driving out of the light storm of Los Angeles and its suburbs, toward the mountain darkness where Nina dwelled, Joe waited for Rose to tell him why he should hate her.
“So… let me tell you,” she said, “about the project’s only true success…”
Ascend, now, in the elevator from the little glimpse of hell at the bottom of those six subterranean levels, leaving the boy in his containment vessel, and come all the way up to the security room where the descent began. Farther still, to the southeast corner of the ground floor, where CCY-21-21 resides.
She was conceived without passion in the same month as 89-58, though she was the project not of Doctors Blom and Ramlock, but of Rose Tucker. She is a lovely child, delicate, fair of face, with golden hair and amethyst eyes. Although the majority of the orphans living here are of average intelligence, CCY-21-21 has an unusually high IQ, even higher perhaps than 89-58, and she loves to learn. She is a quiet girl, with much grace and natural charm, but for the first three years of her life, she exhibits no paranormal abilities.
Then on a sunny May afternoon, when she is participating in a session of supervised play with other children on the orphanage lawn, she finds a sparrow with a broken wing and one torn eye. It lies in the grass beneath a tree, flopping weakly, and when she gathers it into her small hands, it becomes fearfully still. Crying, the girl hurries with the bird to the nearest handler, asking what can be done. The sparrow is now so weak and so paralysed by fear that it can only feebly work its beak—and produces no sound whatsoever. The bird is dying, the handler sees nothing to be done, but the girl will not accept the sparrow’s pending death. She sits on the ground, grips the bird gently in her left hand, and carefully strokes it with her right, singing softly to it a song about Robin Red Breast—and in but a minute the sparrow is restored. The fractures in the wing knit firm again, and the torn eye heals into a bright, clear orb. The bird sings—and flies.
CCY-21-21 becomes the centre of a happy whirlwind of attention. Rose Tucker, who has been driven to the contemplation of suicide by the nightmare of Project 99, is as reborn as the bird, stepping back from the abyss into which she has been peering. For the next fifteen months, 21-21’s healing power is explored. At first it is an unreliable talent, which she cannot exercise at will, but month by wondrous month she learns to summon and control her gift, until she can apply it whenever asked to do so. Those on Project 99 with medical problems are brought to a level of health they never expected to enjoy again. A select few politicians and military figures—and members of their families—suffering from life-threatening illnesses, are brought secretly to the child to be healed. There are those in Project 99 who believe that 21-21 is their greatest asset—although others find 89-58, in spite of the considerable control problems that he poses, to be the most interesting and most valuable property in the long run.
Now, look here, come forward in time to one rainy day in August, fifteen months after the restoration of the injured sparrow. A staff geneticist named Amos has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of the disease. While healing Amos with only a soft and lingering touch, the girl detects an illness in addition to the malignancy, this one not of a physical nature but nonetheless debilitating. Perhaps because of what he has seen at Project 99, perhaps for numerous other reasons that have accumulated throughout his fifty years, Amos has decided that life is without purpose or meaning, that we have no destiny but the void, that we are only dust in the wind. This darkness in him is blacker than the cancer, and the girl heals this, as well, by the simple expediency of showing Amos the light of God and the strange dimensional lattices of realms beyond our own.