Page 108 of A Better World

“Linda—” he started, making a show of exasperation.

“—Don’t,” she said. “Tell me the truth. If you don’t, I’m taking Josie and Hip and we’re leaving right now.”

Russell sat hard in the opposite chair. He was still wearing his coat. Snow melted and pooled in wet drips at his feet. His face reddened and he smiled at her, an awful, empty smile. “It’s just a little bad,” he said.

“Omnium sludge?”

“It’s double the average pediatric cancers and aplastic anemias. Idiopathic leukemia’s a made-up name they use to hide the disease. They use other names, too. Adults can get just as sick, but they need a high, chronic exposure. Kids need less. It gets into their growth factors. I didn’t know any of this until you had me looking. The numbers were all input wrong so I did a lot of the work by hand. Even then, I wasn’t sure. I just knew something was off, that they were hiding something. The relationship I found isn’t causal. There isn’t enough data. It’s not even enough to take it off the market. There’d have to be more trials.”

“That’s what Rachel fixes,” she said. “She pays people off, so no one runs more trials.”

“That’s not my lane. I just run the numbers.”

She winced at that. After a while, he looked away.

“And they hired you to lie,” she said.

“No,” he said with great certainty. “I’ve been telling you—I use the data I get. They liked that I come from the regulatory agencies. I know how things work.”

“How far have they gone to keep this secret?”

“I don’t think there’s any violence,” he said. “It’s money and NDAs. Everyone takes the money.”

“Gal’s kids are sick because of Omnium,” Linda said. “Because they swam in the river, and no one ever remediated there, because no one will admit the problem. They blame it on epigenetics. That could have been Josie or Hip. We swam in the river before I knew better. I was at that dump out there. It was supposed to be house trash, but they’d combined it with Omnium waste processing. The liner’s at least sixty years old. Don’t tell me it’s not seeping into the aquifer. So even if you’re not doctoring the data, the silence is killing people. Hell, Russell, that aquifer’s our drinking water. It’s probably poisoning us, too.”

Russell shrugged. “I can’t say.”

“We have to report this. We’re obliged.”

He shook his head. “It won’t make any difference. The Parson family’s been divesting, getting all their money out. They’re spinning another company called Caladrius. Lloyd’ll run it. Caladrius’ll be all their non-Omnium holdings—their tech and banks. They’ll be clean. As soon as the Omnium patent’s over, BetterWorld plans to release all its data and the remediation starts. It’s less than a year, now, actually. Maybe just six months.”

“I don’t get it. They kept the secret for eighty years and now they’re going to open their books? Why?” Linda asked.

“They won’t be able to make any more money off of it, and the generics’ll be running their own studies. So it’ll come out either way. Essentially, they’re going to stop making Omnium very soon. What we do about it now doesn’t matter. If we say something, it will literally have zero effect. The EPA’s useless on this. There isn’t a whistleblower in the world that has the teeth. We wouldn’t save a single life. And to be honest, I’m not even sure Omnium is actually bad. Plastic caused a lot of sickness, too.”

“You’re saying you think Omnium’s an improvement?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“How would you know? How would anyone know, when you don’t have the data? I’ve been here over six months and met three kids that Omnium is killing. That’s already a very high incidence. This thing could be huge, Russ.”

He nodded. She was surprised to see she’d scored a point, and he’d heard her. “Yeah. It might be very, very bad, just like Fielding told you. Worse than anyone imagines. But I want you to know I didn’t figure it out right away. It’s been a process. And the thing is, we’re trapped in this. We might as well get something out of it.”

“You didn’t trust me to tell me,” she said.

“I told you, I haven’t been sure.”

Growing up, she’d learned obliviousness. When people are puking all the time, or high, or lost and wandering the house they’ve known their whole lives, it’s upsetting. You learn not to see. Not to get upset.That was how she’d managed to grow up and still love her family. Still appreciate the occasions when meals were cooked, and fresh clothing appeared. When her dad had given her a snow globe, instead of spending that money on Glamp. Probably, this was why she hadn’t noticed Chernin’s obvious drug addiction. Possibly, it was how she’d overlooked Russell’s struggle. The man had hyperventilated into a paper bag, and she’d still gone to sleep that night, woken the next morning, and let it roll off her like water off a duck. She’d seen this mess of an office, so out of character that he may as well have scraped the wordhelpinto his chest, and she’d let it go.

The emotion inside her was something much deeper than sorrow. It was a shift of everything deep down: an inversion and a break and a decimation. “You’re lying to me, Russell Bowen,” she said. “You’ve been lying to me our whole life together.”

An hour later, he appeared in their bedroom, where she was packing. “Leaving won’t change anything.”

Linda felt a pull inside her, a pain not so different from when Fielding had announced her terminal cancer. An incredible loss.

“What is this, between us?” she asked.

His eyes got wide. Panicked. “What are you asking?”

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