The Other Side of Truth (The Marked Ones Trilogy Book 3)

by Alicia Kat Vancil

  “If I could get you the genetic markers for the K1-2012 mutation could you add them to the list for Kalodaemons?” he asked as he traced his fingers across the ePapers covering his desk.

  “Well sure,” I answered as I ran my hand back through my hair. “But wouldn’t it be easier just to make a new designator like we did for Neodaemons?”

  “Yes, but I think we should hold off until we fully understand the extent of the mutation.”

  The emotions flowing off of him were making me uneasy. It was almost like he was trying to—

  “Travis?”

  “Hmm?” I replied as I jerked my head up to look at him.

  “Will that work?” he asked as he arched his eyebrows for emphasis.

  “Yeah, just get me the data, and I’ll include it in the system,” I replied distractedly.

  “Well, for that, I’ll need you to go visit Parker in lab 7B.”

  “Why?” I asked suspiciously. I mean, I loved any excuse to go see Parker, but Kiskei’s emotions were putting me on edge.

  “So she can run your blood against someone who’s actually still a Kalodaemon.”

  The Truth Is Whatever You Make It

  Monday, November 5th

  TRAVIS

  “So why are you only sticking me with needles?” I asked as I watched Parker slide the needle into the crook of my arm.

  The Embassy hadn’t officially reopened until today, but a few of us had been allowed back into our labs ahead of time. So other than a lot of cleanup and a new door, my office had been fine. And the subbasement tech labs had been untouched. However, apparently nearly all the experiments in the med labs had been spoiled. Which meant all of the blood samples they had taken from Patrick and Nualla had had to be dumped, and they were in need of a fresh batch.

  “Because your brother is sociologically damaged,” she answered as she filled up another vial with my blood. Her beautiful British accent coating the words like syrup. A result of her living in Kaigan Kirian until her and Kiskei had moved to Seattle when she was fourteen.

  “And you’re saying I’m not?” I asked with a crooked, ironic smirk.

  She gave me a wry smile, and rolled her startlingly blue eyes at me. “And he has a pathological fear of needles.”

  “And Nualla?”

  Parker looked at me with playful dubiousness, her long, Norwegian blond ponytail bouncing slightly with the movement. “She’s an arius, I can’t very well go around sticking her with needles, can I?” She had a point, Nualla was already in the tabloids enough as it was.

  “So you get to be my guinea pig,” Parker continued on in the same playful voice.

  I stiffened, Patrick had been someone’s guinea pig for fifteen years. Just how many times had he been subjected to injections before he learned to fear the needles? And had he developed that fear consciously, or had they taken so much of his memory away that it had become just a slow building aversion until it boiled over?

  Parker froze when she realized what she had said. “I’m…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way—I didn’t think—”

  “It’s okay,” I said stiffly, because it really wasn’t. “Are we done here?” I asked in a clipped voice. “Or did you need more?”

  “No, that—that should be enough,” she said as she placed the syringe into the carrying case next to the others.

  “Cool,” I said as I slipped my lab coat back on, and started toward the door. The clock on the wall said it was already nearly three o’clock, and I had promised Chan-rin that I would be there when she got out of her first day of school.

  Parker’s hand darted out, and she grabbed my wrist. I stopped, and turned slowly back toward her.

  She looked up at me, her eyes large and pleading. “I’m really sorry, Travis.”

  There was normally a fierce wildness behind her eyes that scared me to death. That, and the fact that she was Kiskei’s daughter. But at the same time, I knew that fierce wildness was something I’d walk through fire for the chance to have. It was normally there—that fierceness—but not at the moment. No, at this moment her eyes held only vulnerability and uncertainty. And it was that fragileness beneath the cracking veneer of confidence that made me pull her toward me.

  I hadn’t kissed Parker since that first time in my bedroom two and a half months ago. There had been way too much going on between then and now to figure out just where we stood. But as I slipped my fingers behind her neck, deepening the kiss, I didn’t care, because all I wanted to do was kiss her.

  Gods, I didn’t know how you could miss something as much as I missed kissing her, but I did. Right down to my bones.

  She let out a soft moan against my lips as I pressed her back against the counter behind her. Bringing my other hand up to cup her face, my thumb against her cheek. And then my phone alarm started buzzing in my pocket, and I pulled away from her.

  “I’m really, really sorry, but I have to go,” I said as I all but bolted from the room.

  I rounded the corner that lead to the school section of The Embassy at three fifteen, and was already thinking of ways I could make it up to Chan-rin. The hall was mostly deserted except for two girls looking to be in the eighth grade by the way they filled out their uniforms.

  The Embassy school uniforms were unlike anything that any other school in the city had. The girl’s uniforms especially. They had a Japanese flair to them, but they looked closer to the Victorian era than they did a Japanese school girl. Knee-length gray dresses with wide short bell sleeves like someone had cut a kimono top off at the elbows. And the emblem of the region embroidered over the heart on the light-blue sailor suit collar.

  “Um, excuse me, do you know where Miss Lovelle’s classroom is?” I asked one of the girls.

  She turned, and made no attempt to conceal the way her eyes appraised me. “It’s down that hall,” she answered with a mischievous smirk to her lips. “Third room on the right.”

  “Thanks,” I replied as I swallowed hard, continuing in the direction she had pointed. The emotions rolling off her were like a slap to the face. And I was fairly certain that in a year or three she was going to cause the boys in her class an unbelievable amount of trouble.

  The next hallway was completely desolate except for a slight, blond Marked One sitting on the floor against the wall. Her knees pulled up to her chest and her chin resting on them.

  Frak.

  “Hey, Chan-rin, I’m sorry I’m—” I started as I reached her.

  She leapt up, and threw her arms around my middle. And that’s when I noticed she was crying. The realization hitting me hard like a punch to the heart.

  “Chan-rin, what’s wrong?” I asked as I folded her in my arms.

  “They made fun of Chan-rin because Chan-rin has no last name,” she wailed as she buried her face in my stomach.

  “Oh, mai chisaya astari,” I said as I smoothed her hair.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

  I should have known—should have known how cruel kids could be. They had been mean when I was in school, and I didn’t think a whole hell of a lot had changed since then.

  I pulled her hands gently from around me, and crouched down in front of her. “Of course you have a last name, Chan-rin. It’s Centrina, same as mine, same as Aku’s was before he married Arius Nualla.”

  “Really?” she asked me with large eyes that nearly broke my heart.

  “Promise,” I said with a gentle smile as I tapped her nose with my finger.

  She scrunched her nose up at my touch and then threw her arms around me again, speaking so fast in Daemotic that I was only able to make out a few words. Abandon… Family… Belonging.

  When she finally released me, I smiled reassuringly at her again. “Chan-rin, can you wait here for me while I go speak with your teacher?” She looked at me a bit
uncertainly. “Then we’ll go get ice cream,” I promised.

  “Okay, Big-Big Brother,” she replied cheerfully, her eyes disappearing into happy slits. “Can we go get Nikko first? Nikko has never had ice cream,” Chan-rin asked as she clasped her hands behind her, rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet.

  I tried to keep the smile plastered on my face, because when Chan-rin asked if Nikko—her purple stuffed rabbit—could have something too, it meant that Chan-rin had never had it herself. And every time I realized this it made me want to cry. “Of course.”

  I walked down the hall until I reached Chan-rin’s classroom, and poked my head in.

  “Um, excuse me, are you Miss Lovelle?” I asked a woman who could only really be a few years older than me, at best.

  “Yes, can I help you?” Miss Lovelle asked, looking up from the tablet at her desk.

  I walked into the room, and couldn’t stop myself from remembering how I had vowed never to set foot in The Embassy classrooms ever again.

  “I know it’s the first day back, but there seems to have been a mistake on the roster, and my little sister’s last name got left off.” It wasn’t a lie, not really. Chan-rin was our little sister in all but name.

  Miss Lovelle looked at me for a moment, and then asked in stunned disbelief, “You’re Chan-rin’s brother?”

  “Travis Centrina,” I said as I held out my hand to her. “The director of the Department of Technical Research and Development.”

  “I know who you are,” she replied as she slowly placed her hand in mine. Her eyes wide with wonder as I shook her hand. “I was there on Saturday.”

  “Oh,” I said, pulling my hand away from hers. She was looking at me with a strange sort of awe that made me unbelievably uncomfortable. “Well, uh, about the name…”

  “Yes, right,” Miss Lovelle said quickly, snapping out of her daze. She slid her fingers across the tablet in front of her, and typed into it. “It won’t show up on the official records until later since they are considerably backlogged at the Department of Records, but I can start reading it off tomorrow in class.”

  “That would be great, thanks,” I said as I shifted my weight, and tried to think of what to say next. I had never had a problem lying through my teeth in the past, but for some reason it had gotten so much harder lately.

  “Well, Chan-rin’s waiting for me in the hall, so I should be going,” I said uneasily as I gestured out to the hallway.

  “Congratulations on your award, Director Centrina Viliyata.”

  “Um, thanks,” I said before I turned, and started toward the door. I wished everyone would just call me Travis, because all the honorifics people were slapping onto my name were giving me anxiety.

  As I reached the door I stopped, and turned back around. “Oh, and if Chan-rin doesn’t seem to understand you, try asking her again in Daemotic. Because English isn’t her first language; Daemotic is.”

  Miss Lovelle nodded, and then she leaned over her desk toward me. “Can I ask, why chan-rin? Why fourteen? I’m sorry if that seems rude, but I’ve been wondering all day.”

  Because that was the designator they tattooed onto her back at the Kakodemoss facility. Right before they did gods-only-knows-what to her.

  I justed stared at Miss Lovelle, and let a smile spread across my lips to mask the lie. “Because that’s how long my parents had been married when she was born,” I stated before I turned to leave.

  Because sometimes the truth was whatever you made it.

  Memory Thief

  Monday, November 5th

  TRAVIS

  Where the hell is he? I had called Patrick to meet me and Chan-rin at the ice cream parlor a good twenty minutes ago, and he still hadn’t turned up. I texted him again.

  Today 4:26 pm

  Travis Centrina

  Where are you? We’re only the next block over from the apartment.

  And then I set the phone down and turned my attention back to Chan-rin.

  She was normally rather quiet, but something about her current silence felt different. I could sense something was off with her, but like Patrick, she was much harder to get a clear emotional read on. Almost like something was purposely trying to obscure her emotions from me. But maybe it was just me expecting too much from myself. Maybe it was time to admit that suddenly acquiring two younger siblings in the last year wasn’t going to magically make me better at being a big brother. That if this new fledgling family I had cobbled together was going to work, I was going to have to get my butt in gear. Even if the thought of being responsible for someone other than myself terrified the crap out of me.

  And so I sat and watched Chan-rin as she folded a ripped off section of her ice cream cone wrapper into a paper crane, giving her the attention she deserved.

  “Where did you learn that, Chan-rin?” I asked as I nudged one of the completed cranes with the tip of my finger.

  “Chan-rin learned from Aku,” she answered as she finished the last fold on the crane, and set it on the table.

  “Oh, so he taught you?” I corrected before I shoved the last bit of my own cone into my mouth. I had been trying to help Chan-rin learn better English in the only way that made sense to me—by talking to her.

  She looked at me in puzzlement for a moment, her brow furrowing. “No, not taught, it was in Aku’s memories.”

  “In his memories?” I repeated in confusion before the realization hit me. “You took them from him? Chan-rin, you shouldn’t do that, it’s wrong. Taking someone’s memory is wrong,” I admonished her in a voice that wasn’t harsh, but hopefully told her just how bad it was to do what she had done.

  “Chan-rin did not take, Chan-rin…Chan-rin—” Chan-rin started indignantly, and then she paused for a moment, searching for the right word in English. “—shared. Chan-rin shared with Aku. Chan-rin can not take. Chan-rin can only share.”

  Share, of course, like she had shared her fear with me that first day I had taken her to my lab to ask her about the other Kakodemoss captives.

  I let out a long breath. “Oh, that’s okay then, Chan-rin. Sharing memories with someone is okay so long as you don’t take memories away from that person.”

  Chan-rin nodded her understanding, and then went back to folding paper cranes. I leaned back into the booth seat with a heavy, exhausted sigh.

  “Only Aku took.”

  “What?” I asked, jerking up straight, my heart starting to beat faster. I couldn’t have heard her right.

  “Aku took memories,” Chan-rin repeated. “This is Aku’s…job.”

  I just stared at her for a moment, and then I swallowed hard. “Chan-rin, how does Aku take memories?”

  In answer, Chan-rin reached out and pressed her fingers to my cheek as she looked up into my eyes. “Like this. Aku takes memories like this.”

  Touch. All he had to do was touch someone, and he could take whatever memories he wanted from them—whatever secrets. And then the horrible implications finally started to click into place. They had been using him like an external hard drive. The world’s most undetectable surveillance system. Their own set of eyes within the school, within The Embassy, within—

  The Galathea estate.

  It was sick—unbelievably sick—and I had to force down the bile rising up in my throat. They had probably been using Patrick to extract memories from Nualla, memories they could then pass on to Kira. That was how they were going to make the switch without any of us knowing. That was how they were going to replace her.

  I took a deep breath to steady my voice before I asked, “Can anyone else do this, Chan-rin—take memories?”

  She shook her head, and then stopped as if something had occurred to her. “Only Aku and…the Machanta.”

  Machanta? Machine? “What machine, Chan-rin?”

  Sh
e opened her mouth and then closed it, starting to tremble uncontrollably. Her hands flew up to cover her eyes, and she began to rock back and forth in her seat. “No come out. No come out. The black door. The black door of death. No come out of the black door.”

  I put my arms around her, and pulled her close. “It’s okay Chan-rin, no one will get you, no one will hurt you ever again. I promise. I won’t let anyone hurt you ever again.”

  I think she nodded, but I wasn’t sure because she was shaking so badly. Like a frightened rabbit.

  “What’s going on?” Patrick asked with concern.

  I looked up to see him standing there. Dressed nearly head to toe in black, the dark shadows under his eyes worse than they had been on Saturday. Looking like a specter. Looking like someone I didn’t know.

  Just when I thought what had happened to them couldn’t get worse—it always did.

  “We found these on the black market,” Tylia Lawrence stated as she plunked a pendant down on the table, the silvery sheen of the metal standing out in sharp contrast to her dark skin. Well, as dark as daemon skin got, anyways.

  “Daenarian pendants that make the wearer appear Kalodaemon instead of Kakodaemon,” she continued as the rest of us just stared at the pendant.

  Patrick and I had been on our way back from dropping Chan-rin off at the orphanage when Akiko had called to tell me that Tylia Lawrence, the director of the Department of Defense and Security, had asked for an emergency meeting of the Central Six. Now I knew why.

  This was bad. This was really, really bad.

  “Are you saying any Kakodaemon could just walk right into The Embassy?” Johannah Murray, the director of the Department of Records asked with alarm. Her black, shoulder-length hair rippling as she jerked her gaze toward Tylia.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Tylia admitted reluctantly as if just the mere existence of such a thing was her own personal failure.