by L. B. Carter
"Uhh, who?" Henley asked on behalf of pretty much everyone.
Katheryn's smile grew slowly, crows’ feet lining the edges of her eyes that remained unblinking. "Ms. Acton, of course. I think everything seems to circle around to her."
Valerie bounced her eyebrows, and her lips quirked as her head jerked slightly. "What about you? I think it seems to revolve around you just as much. You can lay the blame at my feet, but this all started well before me when you made Sirena."
"I want to know about before that." The previously silent Sirena finally spoke and startled the shit out of everyone. The battle between Val and Katheryn crashed without a distinct winner. Sirena's mermaid-like eyes darted between all the others that had swiveled in her direction, but she continued bravely. "I do want to know about my conception, my birth. Do I... Did I have biological parents somewhere? I mean someone who gave me the original DNA before you altered it?"
Katie didn't immediately reply.
"Answer her," Nor snapped, and the professor flinched.
It was clear without the staring contest who was the weaker side in the room. Not surprising given the numbers; it was six on one, really, and a bunch of impartial bodyguard dudes. On second thought, that was surprising. They were a bunch of kids, really—young adults, anyway, with Sirena probably the youngest, though her age was a question mark. Reed and Valerie likely vied for oldest at mid-twenties. Kids versus a much older and theoretically smarter adult woman.
"Yes," Katheryn admitted, her pitch uneven.
Everyone reeled. Sirena's eyes had bulged.
"Where? Who?" Henley was almost more invested than Rena. Or she was just excellent at shooting out those rapid-fire questions whereas Rena had been mute for actual months of her life.
Katheryn was too slow to respond.
"Who?" Nor roared, pushing out of his chair. No one turned to him, though. It was like a volleyball match between Rena and Katheryn—the beach kind with tiny bikinis that kept the audience rapt. "She deserves to know."
Katheryn swallowed, and her chin dipped. Her answer was a whisper that barely penetrated the cavernous room. "Me."
"What the actual freak?" Val flopped back in her seat, hands flying to her forehead. Nor had sunk slowly back into his own chair, and Reed was fairly certain Rena was no longer breathing. That wasn't a worry for her—Reed had watched the news interview from the sidelines where Katheryn could make sure he didn't stray too far. And where he could witness her tossing him delightfully under the bus. Henley seemed to be stunned empty of follow-up questions, and Ace was as blank as ever.
Reed watched them all to avoid thinking about the fact that he'd been dating the biological sister of the girl his brother was ...involved with. And on top of that, he'd flirted with his old girlfriend's mom, a revolting woman. He knew he'd been toying with cougar claws when he did that, but this made it sort of incestuously weird.
An engagement would not be unexpected now, before he could drag Nor away from the mistake of his and Rena's lives, which would truly make them all related. Not that Nor would ever want to be son-in-law to Katie, he did owe her for making his girlfriend—in a more literal way than they'd thought before.
"Explain." Rena's current vibe was deadlier than Reed had ever seen her, and he'd walked up on her nearly murdering a sapling in the dark of evening once, which had made him think twice before approaching. Not so much a happy reunion here. No instant parental love. Well, if Reed had never been trained to love, he doubted Rena had gotten even a smidgen of affection, growing up in a lab. And as far as the "training" Katie mentioned to the interviewer, torture was a better description. That wasn't the greatest foundation for a mother-daughter relationship.
"Why do I feel like everyone in this room needs family therapy?"
"Shut the freak up," Val reprimanded Reed. He would have been offended, but he also saw the sheen in Rena's eyes.
She needed to hear this. They all wanted to, but she needed to. That night with the sapling in the woods by her foster Grandpa's house, he'd gotten a taste of how lost and alone she felt—even with Nor's devotion. She'd thought she'd murdered her parents. Then, that fake Grandpa had been killed in the hurricane, making her feel even more alienated. Now, it turned out that her demons were her family. That had to fucking suck.
On the bright side, her DNA had been all messed with, so she was less than fifty percent related to that bitch. Reed doubted she'd want him alerting her to that plus side quite yet. He knew that with women, it was wise to stay away when they were emotional.
"Explain," Val seconded, her fist pounding the wood.
Katheryn jumped and started talking. "Richard and I had Jennifer, but she was too old by the time I thought of the idea to play around too much with her DNA."
"What do you mean? Valerie altered hers just this year."
Katheryn spared a glance for Henley, nodding. "And she's lucky it worked, her body adapting to the alterations. However, she has not modified any of her vital functions, just her external appearance. Her body would not be capable of re-learning how to run. I needed an embryo." She turned back to Sirena. "Richard didn't want to be a part of that. He wouldn't help me. That's why he divorced me."
"So who's her father?" Reed made a mental note to teach Nor the rule about not interrupting upset-lady time.
Katheryn's eyes shifted. "A man by the name of Mark Dowling."
"Mark?" Val pushed even further back from the table. "Oh, my God. I knew you two were a thing, but... Wait. He's been at BSTU since Sirena was born, err, if it's called that? I thought he was a student?"
Katheryn nodded, shame coating her features for once. "He was. He stayed on to help me finish out the project. Became a sort of lab assistant."
"Dang, he didn't look that old."
"I really did kill my father." Rena's hushed announcement zipped up Val's lips real quick.
Reed cringed.
"You didn't cause the car accident," Nor atoned.
Reed frowned. "Actually, we never found out who did. Unless..." He tilted his head at Katheryn speculatively.
She shook her head.
"It wasn't the accident that killed him," Rena interrupted Reed's side-conversation loudly. A hand clutched at her throat as if she were choking. "I did." She resumed a conversational volume. "I... stole all his oxygen. Because I'm a freak. I bet you didn't program me to do that did you?"
Katheryn's mouth hung open, pulling her thin skin grotesquely over hollow cheeks. The lady needed to take a break from work and make herself a sandwich. "How? Can you explain the process?" She patted her pockets, retrieving a pen, and looked around as though searching for a notepad on which to take notes.
"Pretty simple," Rena oozed. "I put my mouth on his and suck out the air." She glanced at Nor, shame blushing her cheeks. "Not on purpose. My body does it when I start to black out without consciously thinking about it."
"Interesting. Are you aware of what's happening when you...?"
"I call it a death kiss," Rena offered.
"Hey," Nor overrode. "You're not a killer. You've also saved lives with that... ability, the flip side of it. Including mine."
"And me," Ace added.
Henley's hair swung as she gaped at Ace. "You've kissed Rena?"
"Uh oh," Reed muttered.
"She saved my life," Ace corrected. "Gave me oxygen when I was drowning in the Seaway."
Henley reluctantly nodded and let it drop. "So, you and Mark, uhh..."
"Yes," Katheryn nodded. "And we raised her."
"You developed her," Valerie substituted. "Observed her. Like a lab rat. You didn't raise her like a child of your own. You didn't even do that for your normal daughter." She winced at the phrasing. "Sorry, Rena."
Katheryn's head rose and lowered again. "We altered her early on and observed how she developed, yes."
"You subjected her to torturous tests." Val was inching her wheelie chair back toward the table. Reed had half a mind to back away.
"Okay, so let's g
o ahead and skip a few years." Reed didn't diffuse the situation as he'd intended. Rena's hardships sounded like a flippant chapter to skip over. "Sorry," he also said to her.
She shook her head, the tears spilling over. "No, go." She couldn't communicate through her distress, but Reed read her desperate desire to change the topic away from her and her past.
"And then in comes Valerie... who somehow knows about Sirena and decides to go in with the old Parent Trap trick and get Rena out..." he prompted.
Valerie took a deep breath. "Actually, you all think this is my plan. I didn't start this. You can thank your daughter." Her grin at the professor was a little crazed. "She contacted me. I guess all BSTU's anti-government propaganda led her to reach out to us first when she decided to rebel against her workaholic mom."
"She contacted the natural disaster response section or whatever you are?" Reed frowned.
Val shrugged. "We'd been up to her hometown before—my people. Sea level rise flooding issues. I assume that's where she got the idea."
"So you convinced my daughter to desert me and hand over my research?"
Nor growled at Katheryn. "Research? You mean your child." They were sending conflicting messages. There was nothing that wasn't convoluted about this clusterfuck.
Val shook her head. "People always freaking hear what they want to, don't they? I repeat, she contacted me. It was her suggestion to add me to the database as a new student to get Sirena out." Her chin lifted. "I was the one who realized we had the capacity to swap places, that I could be like Sirena. I wanted to check it out; how else could I know for sure the sci-fi-like procedures this rando was spouting were real?"
"Why?"
"Why, what?" Val asked Henley.
"Why did she do it? Why did you agree to it?"
"Oh. That. I think she did it because she was mad at her mom. She rambled something about driving her dad away. And some such about being forced to go to BSTU and live with her." She shrugged. "I guess she didn't want to follow in mom's footsteps. Wonder why."
"No." Katheryn was weeping, her chin trembling, tears pouring from red-rimmed eyes. "No, she was excited to come to BSTU. She missed me."
Val was ruthless. "She hated you. Told me once that she wished you had died instead of her dad. I don't think she was much fond of him either. So that tells you just how much she detested you. Work-life balance is healthy, and it would have saved your family." Her hand thrust at Rena. "Case and point. I can well believe you didn't give your first daughter sufficient love when your second was treated like an object."
Katheryn was still shaking her head in denial.
"So you took her place, fixed yourself up pretty..." Reed coerced Val to continue. He needed to know what happened next, like Rena had needed to know about her parents. But then he paused. "Wait, she didn't look like this when I knew her..." He indicated her body and then immediately shunned it from his brain so he didn't get distracted.
Val's eyes rolled. "I told you, we traded."
Reed forced his heart out of the conversation. No lady emotions from him. "So... the Val I knew looked like the original you, and you look like the original Jennifer?" His lip curled. "How fucked up is that. How do we even know that you did swap and you're not Jennifer, then?"
Val recoiled. "Why the freak would I do that?"
"It's not her," Katheryn said morosely, pulling herself together.
"How the hell would you know? From the sound of it, you barely paid her any attention."
Katheryn shook her hair from her face and sniffed. "A mother knows her own daughter."
But she hadn't noticed. They’d had to spell it out for her well after the fact. She hadn’t noticed her fake daughter was missing, even. Whatever. Reed dropped it. "So, you swapped. Fine. Why didn't Va—Jennifer end up as director of the USGCS?"
Val snorted. "I wasn't the director of the whole USGCS."
"You know what I mean." Reed's eyes narrowed.
Everyone else's heads now bounced between him and Val.
"Fine, yes, I know what you mean." She scoffed. "I couldn't have her freaking running a division of the government. Who do you think I am to leave the fate of the country in inept hands? Seriously. I did all this to fix the mess we're already in. It'd make my job far harder if I were to have her muck it all up, and she would definitely have mucked it up."
"Hey," Reed half lifted from his chair. "Watch it."
Val smiled. "That's right, she was your girlfriend."
Reed's jaw muscle ticked.
"If she didn't take your place, why did you sent her to Green Solutions? Is that why you called us to help with Rena?" Nor queried.
Val's lip lifted. "Yeah, sure, I spearheaded a whole section of the government and snuck into one of the most secretive and elite institutions in the country, and then called an unknown family-run non-profit from Canada to help me?" Her lip curled and hands roved around in agitation.
"Watch it." Reed's mood darkened to midnight.
"Then... who did initiate that contract? You?" Nor asked Katheryn.
She shook her head resolutely. "Never heard of you."
"I don't know," Valerie seconded. "But Jennifer got word to me that she'd sent someone from Green Solutions."
Reed's anger shifted instantly to intensity. "She sent someone? She contracted us?"
Val's pupils didn't enlarge. She was telling the truth when she said "I don't know." Then she ruined it. "Guess you didn't know her as well as you thought you did."
The gibe had no traction. "No, shit. I thought her name was Valerie." Nor and Reed made eye contact, wheels rotating in their minds. "Val talked to Lynn?" Reed speculated.
Nor lifted one shoulder. "Could be?"
Reed exhaled through flared nostrils. "Now we have no way of knowing. Both of them are dead."
"I'm sorry," Rena whispered again. "That wasn't me though; she died on impact."
Nor looked as pissed as Reed, blue eyes flashing dangerously. Back to that mysterious accident.
Reed slid angry eyes to Val. "You still haven't answered why you sent her up there. Why you sent her to her death."
Val raised one brow. "That's morbid. You're forgetting that she had a loving boyfriend for a while up there. It might have been the best time of her life, given her past with this bitch."
The daggers Reed sent were sadly imaginary. He tossed a few more since it was also Val's fault he didn't have his real dagger.
Suddenly, the lights cut out.
Reed was instantly out of his seat, hand flying to grab for his dagger, which was still buried in some guy's dick under a layer of flood debris somewhere halfway across the country.
"What the—?"
"Shh," Ace silenced his sister before Reed could do so more forcibly. And not in the fun way.
A hum kicked in as red emergency lights clicked on in sconces along the walls above the whiteboard. The hallway beyond the door windows was bathed in red. Everyone's faces were shadowed in the eerie glow, but Reed could make out matching expressions of wary preparedness. This was a group who'd been through hell already and was not afraid of whatever was next. Resigned maybe. Pessimistic. But ready.
The stillness was broken as a blaring whoop sent all of their hands clapping over their ears, faces scrunching up at the deafening alarm.
"Intruder alert, intruder alert," a robotic voice informed them. A herd of footsteps pounded as other occupants of the building evacuated. Their group, however, didn't leave.
"Is this your doing?" Katheryn Tate hissed at Valerie, advancing on her. "We invite you here in good faith, and you set us up?" Reed was piecing together what she said because every half word was drowned out by the horn.
"Good faith? There's a good joke. Besides, I've broken out of here before with no hitches."
"Hitches? We tracked you."
"Only when you finally realized Sirena was missing. I bet you didn't even notice your daughter was gone for days after that."
"You're not my daughter!"
> "Ladies." Reed slid in between the women, mostly because he'd noticed Val's fists in the red glow and knew Katheryn was older than she looked. "No fighting unless there's a kiddie pool and Jell-O." He inspected the perimeter of the room as he spoke, trying to permeate the deepest shadows of the corners and the air vents. When Katheryn stopped, catching herself before she did anything drastic, he kept moving, backing the women into the center of the room and rotating his body around Val as if she were the sun. She'd love that simile, everything revolving around her.
A hiss slid from someone behind Reed.
It was Henley's voice who answered. "They've been released."
"What has been—?"
The faint buzz that sounded like a swarm of bees came down the hall. It grew louder, and they all pressed together, not moving. Searching blue lights flashed by, sweeping the corridor from side to side. One pierced through the window, searing right into Reed's retinas, and he dipped his chin away.
"Drones." Henley would know.
"Those don't look like the ones from the cornfield," Val muttered.
"Mini-drones. So they can fit through the vents and under doors. Nowhere is private here."
"Even the bathroom," Ace's deep tone added dryly from the darkness. His height and hair, coupled with the dim scarlet lighting, was unsettling, and his broad shoulders blocked out a large silhouette. He might be useful in terrifying whoever was intruding.
Which was an excellent question.
Reed didn't believe Val wouldn't lie through her goddamn teeth about sending in her people to get her—she was a master of the con. But there were other options. It might not be about them—BSTU was a big and notorious tech hub, known worldwide. Oh shit. Another thought occurred with a roil of dread. He wanted to tell Katie she'd been naive with her arrogant proclamation to NTN. With the news of Sirena now public, there was no telling who was here to try to snag her or the details of how they produced her.
But that was exactly what Reed and Nor were trained for, protecting science from those who might want to illegally claim it, abuse it for money, or even misuse it. Those people tended to fall into two categories of intention: personal gain and personal vendetta. The first hope to improve their lot in life and the latter to try to diminish someone else's lot in life. Everyone was selfish at their core and wanted more or better than what they had.
