Vendetta (Project Vetus Book 2)

by Emmy Chandler

  “What the living fuck?” I growl at Larimore. But he only gives me a quiet, creepy smile.

  “Vaughn?” Grace’s voice is a shocked squeak. “What’s happening?”

  I pull her into an embrace, trying to comfort her with both my touch and my scent. “It’s okay. We’ll figure this out.”

  Mr. Larimore leans forward from his seat on the couch, still cuffed, and his motion draws her attention. “Weird, huh?” His eyes gleam as he studies her shock. “You really didn’t know?”

  “I still don’t know. I don’t understand what this means. But you knew.” Her voice grows cold with that realization, and the depth of her disgust with him is stunning—it’s beautiful—coming from a woman who seems inclined to forgive others’ sins, by her very nature. “You knew she was in there, and you had her lying here like a piece of furniture! Why?”

  And for the first time, Larimore looks truly uncomfortable. “I just…I like to look at her. I never touched her,” he rushes to add. “I never even woke her up. It didn’t seem right to hand her over to the Bureau as evidence, and once she was here, I just couldn’t stop staring at her. She’s so beautiful. And she looks so peaceful, lying there like that. Oblivious to everything.”

  “That’s the creepiest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” Sotelo spits. “You have a coffee table made out of a human being.”

  Larimore’s indignant gaze narrows. “I never hurt her. And I didn’t put her in that box. But I can’t help thinking she’s better off here with me than wherever UA was going to send her. They sold her. Right?”

  Whoever she is, she’s definitely better off in stasis than serving as a concubine on Gebose. Yet the thought of Larimore just sitting there at night staring at that poor girl—who looks just like Grace—makes me want to shove my fist all the way through his skull.

  “How did this happen?” Grace asks. “Why does she look like me?”

  “Unless you have a secret—or forgotten—twin, I’m guessing she’s a clone,” I explain. “Cloning technology—at least, a clumsy, early version of it—has been around for several hundred years. But cloning humans is illegal pretty much everywhere.”

  “Not that illegality has ever stopped Universal Authority,” Dreyer adds. “And if cloning is the big secret here at Theron, the full-scale Bureau raid and the scientists destroying their own research are both starting to make a lot more sense.”

  Larimore grunts. “The guys who ran this place don’t think what they’re doing is illegal.”

  “What does that even mean?” Zamora asks. “Did their lawyers wake up braindead one morning?”

  “It’s something about owning and patenting the original material.” Larimore shrugs.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I growl. “The original material is a human, and you can’t own a human. Not legally, anyway.”

  The janitor shrugs again. “I can only tell you what I overheard.”

  “Well, at least we have some answers.” Dreyer aims a small smile at Grace. “This was never just about memory implants. Theron is a cloning research facility. They clone people.” She cocks her head, studying my mate as if she’s never truly seen her before. “They cloned you, it seems.”

  Mr. Larimore snorts. “Ma’am, that is the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Cloning is just the tip of the iceberg? What does that mean?” Grace turns to me, her pulse racing, and my nostrils flare as I scent her distress. “They did something worse than making copies of me?”

  “Yes, and no,” Larimore says before I can even hazard a guess.

  “You need to start spilling the rest of this right now,” I snarl at him.

  He holds his cuffed hands up, palms out, as if to demonstrate his harmlessness. “I can tell you what I’ve seen and heard, but I only mopped the floors and emptied the trash here. I don’t have the answers to all your questions.”

  Yet I can’t shake the impression that he’s only doling out what he does know in small doses. As if he believes that the longer he holds onto the information, the longer he’ll live.

  He’s sorely mistaken.

  Dreyer steps up to the crate and places her hand on the right side of the clear top shell. An interactive display lights up beneath her hand, and through it, the face of the girl in the pod is still visible. “I don’t even know how to begin to hack this thing,” Dreyer admits. “So we’re pretty much limited to the information UA intends to make available to whoever interacts with the pod. Which is presumably Meshach and his people.” She taps and scrolls through the menu on the side of the pod’s top shell. “Yes. This pod was intended to be delivered to Gebose more than two weeks ago, care of Meshach Larsen.” Dreyer gives a high-pitched whistle as she reads. “He spent a fucking fortune on this poor girl. Enough to pay for several brand-new ships. No wonder he was pissed when this place was raided before his cargo shipped.”

  “What else does it say?” Grace stares at her clone, her gaze unfocused. “Who is she? Who am I? Does it say in there who I am?” Her dark brows dip. “Is my name even really Grace?”

  The beast paces deep in my soul, frustrated by my inability to help her. “You are who you are, regardless of your name.”

  “It isn’t that simple!” she insists. “Universal Authority stole my identity. They hollowed me out and plugged in a bunch of memories that aren’t real, and they may very well have just slapped a new name on the woman they created. All of that, at the expense of the woman I was. Whoever that turns out to be. And she could be totally different than…me.” Grace holds her arms out, displaying herself. The current incarnation of her, anyway.

  “I’ll still love you, no matter who you are,” I assure her.

  “Thank you. That means a lot. But it doesn’t mean everything.” Grace’s frown is a sharpened spade, digging my heart right out of my chest. “This isn’t about plugging the hole in your life or fulfilling the beast’s procreative urges. I don’t know who I am, Vaughn. Or who I was. It’s entirely possible that every decision I make is influenced by memories and experiences that aren’t real. Which means it isn’t just my memories I can’t trust. It’s my choices. My thoughts. Myself. I might have done everything differently, if they hadn’t robbed me of my own experiences.”

  “Everything?” I can’t quite filter the pain from my voice, and suddenly I’m very aware that everyone else is listening. Witnessing her identity crises and the new strain on our relationship. “Would you have chosen not to be with me?”

  “I don’t know!” she admits, on the end of an agonized exhalation. “I don’t know what the old me would have chosen, because I don’t know who she was, any more than I know who that woman is.” She turns back to the woman in the pod, and Dreyer takes that opportunity to interject. To free Grace and me from the spotlight.

  “According to this, the woman in the pod is ‘subject G4.”

  “What does that mean?” I tug Larimore up by one arm, hard enough to pull his restraints tight. “What’s G4?”

  Mr. Larimore shrugs. “G is her model number. The G series is the third batch to successfully reach adulthood, but only the first to fully accept the memory implant.”

  “What happened to models A through F?” Lawrence asks.

  “They put one subject from each series on ice, for posterity,” Larimore says. “Which I only know, because I had to take that last one down to storage. The rest from all the past series were incinerated when they moved on to the next generation.”

  “They burned them?” Grace is breathing too fast. She looks pale. “They cloned people—they cloned me—then they just killed the clones?”

  “Grace. Come sit.” I tug her gently toward the couch, where I pull her onto my lap, tucking her head in at my shoulder. Desperate to provide some kind of comfort. And I’m beyond relieved when the thrumming sound from my throat—the beast’s standard trick—seems to ease some of the tension in her frame.

  “That’s not exactly how it worked,” Larimore tells her almost gently. Which means that he must
have finally caught onto the fact that if he upsets her one more time, I will kill him.

  “So then, how did it work?” Sotelo demands. “Exactly?”

  “The cloning probably isn’t anything like what you’re thinking. There was no original.” He shrugs with an almost apologetic look at Grace. “I mean, it’s not like they just picked a girl off the street and started replicating her. That girl never existed.” His focus narrows on my mate, and though he’s no longer ogling her, that glazed fascination is back in his eyes. “They made you from scratch,” he says. “Or rather, they made the first generation of ‘subjects’ from scratch. The A series. Completely custom-assembled, on a genetic level.”

  “What does that mean?” Grace’s voice quivers as she stares up at me.

  “I think that means that there was no you before the memory implants.” That’s what Larimore meant, when he said she was “empty,” before. “That subject G4 isn’t your clone, really. It sounds like you and she were both cloned from a genetic model that UA created.”

  Zamora nods. “She’s engineered,” he says, and I don’t like the way he’s looking at Grace now. The way he’s talking about her as if she isn’t here. As if she isn’t real. “They’ve been able to do that with fertilized eggs, before in vitro procedures, for hundreds of years. Switching specific genes on and off, for those who can afford a ‘designer baby.’ But this sounds like it was done without that original source material. Like they actually built Grace—or, I guess, all of the clones—by assembling strands of DNA from multiple sources. Like building a person, using all the best tiny little bits of genetic material available.”

  “That’s how I understood it, anyway,” Larimore says, and Grace closes her eyes, while she tries to process what we’re hearing.

  “That explains why subject G4 is so expensive,” Dreyer says. “Meshach wasn’t just paying for the cloning. I’m sure they pushed some of the cost of the genetic engineering off on him, even though they’re no-doubt profiting from that research in several other areas.”

  “This also explains how UA might argue in court that what they’re doing isn’t illegal,” Lawrence adds. “Technically, they aren’t cloning a human being. They’re creating one, using source material they evidently own and a technique they’ve obviously patented.”

  “And because they own this ‘source material,’ it’s okay for them to just incinerate the clones they’re done with?” Grace demands. “The ones that didn’t work out?”

  “Unfortunately, that may be true,” Dreyer says. “Legally, anyway.”

  “Bullshit,” I snarl at her. “Grace is a person. Subject G4 is a fucking person.”

  “Unless the court decides they aren’t,” Dreyer insists. “And that hasn’t played out yet. If UA successfully argues that their clones aren’t people, because they don’t have parents and they weren’t technically born, or because they were created using genetic material that UA owns, there’s no telling what rights the law might decide those clones aren’t entitled to.”

  “Wait.” Horror echoes in Grace’s voice. “You’re saying that even though sexual slavery is against the law, it might actually be legal for them to force me and that poor girl to serve people like Silas, if some court decides we aren’t people? That would make it okay for us to be bought and sold?”

  “As horrifying as that sounds, I wouldn’t put it past UA to try to make that argument,” Dreyer tells her, as rage pumps through my veins like fire.

  Grace pats my knee in silent thanks for offering her comfort, then she stands. “How was I engineered?”

  Larimore shrugs. “That part’s way over my head. And above my clearance. All I know is that someone designed you, on a genetic level.”

  “Designed the way I look? Like, someone picked out my eye and hair color? My height?”

  “Among other…attributes.” His gaze slides briefly down her body, then snaps back up to her face when I growl at him. “But not just your physical traits. They made you smart, and healthy, and disease resistant. And now that you’re fully grown, you’re guaranteed to age at a slower-than-normal rate.”

  “How the hell do you know all that?” Lawrence asks.

  Larimore shrugs. “That part’s in the brochure.” He gestures to the top shell of the cryopod, where Dreyer is still tapping away. “I’ve read it a dozen times.”

  “He’s right.” She points to a colorful bit of information punctuated with charts and diagrams. “It’s a fucking brochure for their process, written in layman’s terms. And every word of it seems to be intended to support a future legal position that clones without an original source material are not people.”

  Rage blossoms inside me, and Grace takes my hand, as if she can feel my anger growing. “Does it say how they can make me age slower?” she asks, as Dreyer scrolls.

  “They’ve slowed your ‘cellular senescence.’ Basically, the cells in the human body are only supposed to divide a certain number of times. The mad scientists who designed you set your ‘cellular clock’ to tick longer than it would have on its own. Which slows the rate at which you age.”

  “Which is kind of funny, when you think about it,” Mr. Larimore adds. “Considering how fast you ‘grew up.’”

  Grace turns to him, puzzled. “How fast did I grow up?”

  “In under two years.” Lawrence has joined Dreyer in front of the pod’s display, his eyes moving back and forth as he reads. “UA has also developed some kind of accelerated growth technique, which they’re able to switch on and off on a genetic level.” He turns to give Grace a sympathetic look. “Basically, they set your cells to grow quickly until you physically matured, then they turned that feature off and you started aging even more slowly than normal. At least, that’s what it says they did with poor subject G4.”

  Larimore nods. “I’ve been working here almost eight years, and in that time, I’ve seen three different generations, in various stages of completion.”

  “So I’m… I’m only two years old?” Grace’s brows furrow. “How is that possible? I have years’ worth of memories. Not that any of those are real.”

  “Okay, wait.” I take her chin and tilt it up until she’s looking at me. “You may be two years old, technically, but physically, mentally, and emotionally, you’re fully grown. The memories they gave you aged you psychologically just as quickly as that accelerated process aged you physically. So your actual age really doesn’t mean anything.”

  “But two-year-olds are toddlers.” Grace’s gaze has lost focus; shock is setting in. “I can’t be a toddler.”

  “Okay, I’m taking her downstairs, to our temporary apartment. She needs some time to process—”

  “Oh my god, the hoses,” Dreyer says as her gaze travels past Grace to the pod. “The drainage system. The interactive top shells. These aren’t just stasis pods, though that’s clearly how this one is being used at the moment. Look at that hatch.” She folds the sheet halfway down the pod and points to the small circular opening—currently sealed—in the middle of the top shell. “The ones in the labs had some kind of hose attached to the inner curve right there. At least, that’s what we thought it was. But those aren’t hoses, are they?” She turns to me. “Look where the hatch is positioned. Right over her stomach. Those hoses are really—”

  “Umbilical cords,” I finish for her. “These pods aren’t just for shipping. The clones are grown in them.”

  “Yes.” Lawrence scrolls past more text on the transparent upper shell. “Once they reach gestational maturity.”

  “It’s really weird,” Mr. Larimore says. “They let us in to clean that lab once a week, and every time we went in, the girls in the pods were older. Like, significantly older. There’s time-lapse footage of it somewhere.”

  “I don’t want to see it,” Grace whispers.

  “But that isn’t even the weirdest thing,” he continues. “After they got the E generation to adulthood, they threw a party,” Larimore says. “I was part of the cleanup crew called out in the
middle of the night, and when we got there, two of those cocky sons of bitches were still sitting at one of the tables, drunk off their asses. Congratulating each other over and over. Spilling as much alcohol as they managed to get into their mouths. And while we were cleaning up around them, I heard one of them say it was too bad the whole thing was just practice.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Zamora asks. “What could cloning five generations of one genetic model possibly be practice for?”

  “Us,” I tell him, as the last piece of the puzzle finally clicks into place. “The battle gear was designed specifically for us. Or for soldiers like us. This cloning technique—this accelerated growth—it’s another arm of their war industry. They’re not just going to create more super-soldiers; they’re going to clone them. Clone us, maybe. And they’re going to produce those clones at an accelerated rate. And they’re evidently perfecting their research and techniques on…”

  “On me,” Grace says, when I can’t bring myself to say it out loud. “And on subject G4, and however many other clones they’ve made.”

  “And somehow, Meshach got the hookup. The option to buy the first successful ‘products,’” Dreyer spits. “Not to mention the nano-tech. Clearly he knows someone high up at Universal Authority.”

  “Or at least at Theron Labs,” Zamora says.

  “I’m guessing, based on what they’re charging him, that they’re hoping to offset some of their initial costs by selling the experimental products.” Dreyer gives Grace a sympathetic look. “By selling these poor women.”

  “Fuck,” Sotelo breathes. “No wonder they destroyed everything they could, before the raid. None of this is legal.”

  “Yet,” Dreyer says. “But they’ve clearly got their arguments ready to take before the judge. And once they start offering their various techniques and products for sale, every planet in the union will be lobbying for legalization, so they can buy an army.”