A blur moved behind him, and a massive hand, much larger in proportion to the boy than you’d expect even from an adult, appeared on Athan’s shoulder. The child looked up at his father’s face, hidden beyond range of the protograph screen. “Should I keep going?”
Udain rumbled an indistinct response, and his huge body moved off.
“Okay,” Athan said, turning back to the screen. “Like I said, my name is Athan Genn, and this is my first recording on the machine I built to keep records for the colony. So we won’t ever forget. The recordings are backed up on an off-site server, and they can be remote-accessed from here. . . .” His hand fumbled for something, then held it up in front of the screen: a metal cuff, identical to the one Aleka now wore except much smaller. “I’m going to work on some other cool stuff, like fast-forward and freeze-frame, but this is only a bare-bones prototype. So you’ll just have to sit and watch me talk!”
He laughed giddily.
“Anyway,” he said. “Status update. Our scouts report that the Skaldi population seems to have stabilized, though of course it’s hard to tell. The human population is at a historic low. We count fourteen survival colonies containing a total of just over nine hundred people within a seventy mile radius of our location, which is . . .” Again the offscreen voice sounded, and Athan turned to listen, swiveling back when it was done. “Okay, my dad says not to disclose our location. I think he’s been listening to Laman too much. Because this is top-secret stuff!” He made a face and went on. “But the point is, Skaldi numbers aren’t growing, but human numbers keep on declining. Which supports our theory that the Skaldi can’t survive autonomously. The surge of energy they get from their victims doesn’t last. It’s like they’re sending it somewhere else. Back to their home world, probably, by some means of electrical conduction. Shooting it back through the wormhole. What Dad calls the interdimensional anomaly.”
He grinned again, as if delighted to be using such big words.
“Dad says a parasite that consumes its host without the possibility of reproduction is an evolutionary dead end. So the Skaldi don’t make sense as an invading army acting on their own behalf. He figures they must be someone else’s tools, biological manufactures sent to absorb energy for a dying planet.” Again the gap-toothed grin. “I like to call the ones who sent them here the Creators. And their home world Skaldi City.”
His hands tinkered with the offscreen recording device for a moment, and the image of his face centered and narrowed. Then he returned his eyes to the screen and continued.
“Drone trials have reached a critical phase, and it’s becoming clear we need a permanent settlement to continue the work without interruption,” he said. “We’ve discovered why human ribosomal DNA rejects the Kenos master sequence, but we’re not sure exactly how to fix that. And Melan says we still haven’t cracked the code to the mitochondrial DNA. We lost a ton of research in the wars, according to Dad. Which is why I’m feeding all our data into the remote server. Using encryption, of course.” He smiled, and I could see his pleasure at being someone his dad trusted with such important work. “I’m thinking we should take another stab at embryonic stem cells, and Melan agrees. We just have to convince Dad it’s worth the effort after what happened to the last batch.”
The way he said that, as if he and Melan were stirring a pot of soup instead of culturing human cells, sent a cold wave across my scalp.
“But I think we can make it work,” Athan went on. “We have some info on the basic drones Dad and his team created in the early years of the war. The ones that enabled the Skaldi to flood the interdimensional anomaly.” He smiled as the words rolled off his tongue, and I realized he was using that expression as much as possible, showing off in front of his new toy. “But I’m thinking if we can find a safe place to continue our research, we should be able to get into the mitochondrial DNA, which will give us a shot at boosting the energy level to where it’d shut the Skaldi down for good. I know I can convince Dad to stop listening to Laman and being such a chicken if I can just show him the results of our last—” He stopped, eyes widening guiltily, a kid remembering that his every word was being recorded in a format his father could watch anywhere and anytime he pleased.
“But like I said,” he continued, his voice lowered as if that could keep his recording from being overheard, “I think we’re just about ready for the next phase. And I’m positive Dad will be really pleased with the results.” He smiled, and then he stared intently at the screen and slowly pronounced words I never thought I’d hear from his child’s mouth: “Aya tivah bis, shashi tivah bracha.”
The screen flickered, erasing his face for a moment. When it returned, the background had changed, bright sunlight revealing a desert backdrop. The recording was grainier too, the image jittery. When Athan smiled, his face seemed to be moving in slow motion, and his lip movements didn’t quite match his words.
“Testing,” he said. “Testing.” He squinted, then smiled broadly. “Dad would kill me if he knew what I was up to. Which is why I had to create this separate folder. I’m the only one who knows it’s here, and it takes voice recognition to get in. How do you like my secret language, Athan?”
He cracked up, a boy talking to himself while he plotted behind his father’s back.
“I’ve got something much bigger than the drones planned,” he confided to his phantom self. “And I’m going to be storing all the information here. I’m sick of working on those things, spending every free moment with a bunch of brain-dead freaks. And I’m sick of Dad’s protocol that says we can’t use our own DNA. He’s the one who started the wars, so who is he to tell me what to do? Plus I’m their creator, so why shouldn’t I be their father for real?”
For a moment the child’s eyes grew dreamy.
“Drone trials will continue, of course. Got to keep the public face going or Dad will get suspicious. But if I can find the remains of the Kenos laboratory, I’ll have everything I need to get started on my own research. The kind of stuff no one ever dreamed of, back when all they could think about was building soldiers and bombs. I’ll need girls, too, but—well, I can get girls.”
The grainy image seemed to blush at the thought, but he kept going.
“Dad will see. He’ll have no choice when he sees what I can do!” His dark eyes danced, throwing off sparks of light reflected from the desert sun. “Aya tivah bis, shashi tivah bracha. Over and out.”
The screen went dark. I leaned back in the cold metal chair, a sick feeling crawling down my spine. It wasn’t only the strangeness of watching someone whose life and death I’d already witnessed talking so confidently about his future. It was the realization of why Aleka wanted me to see this particular recording out of all the ones she could have chosen. I didn’t know how she’d broken into Athan Genn’s private files, but I knew why.
Athan had succeeded. As a boy, he’d dreamed of using his own genetic material to father generations of half-human, half-alien children, and as a man he’d done it.
“I’m one of them,” I said to myself, though I felt the presence of my dead father and creator hovering near me as I said it. “Athan made me. With Aleka. I’m part-Skaldi.”
15
I had enough composure to check on the wounded members of our combined colonies as I knew Aleka would expect me to, then I took myself to an empty room and stared at the wall in stunned silence.
It wasn’t really a room. More like a closet, though without shelves or supplies or anything else. I chose it because it was the only place I didn’t need to know a code to enter. The only place with an old-fashioned doorknob.
I had to dodge Mercy to get there. Not knowing what I’d seen, she kept pursuing me, saying she wanted to introduce me to Ardan. There was no way to tell her I wasn’t in the mood for a Genn family reunion. Watching the light that shone from her eyes, and the crestfallen look when I shook free from her, was almost as hard as learning the truth.
The truth. The truth that my father was a madman.
And that I was his monster.
Blind, useless fury bled from me. I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been. Everything added up, and yet I’d persisted in believing I was just an ordinary human being with a strange little habit of draining energy and shooting it back when the opportunity arose. I remembered hunting inside myself after I’d learned about the Skaldi attack that stole my memory, wondering if any part of the creature was still there, never knowing it had been there all along. And I remembered something Korah had asked me, the one time we really talked. Do Skaldi know they’re Skaldi? She’d meant when they take control of someone, the way they took control of her just days after that conversation. She couldn’t have known when she asked me the question that she was asking someone who proved the answer was no.
Beyond the anger at myself, there was anger at Athan: stale, thick anger like a scab that starts bleeding when you pick it off. There was anger at Udain and his accomplice Melan, the ones who’d treated the boy genius like some kind of king, feeding his ego to the point where he must have figured he could have anything he wanted. Gadgets. Girls. His own race of hybrid children, including me.
And there was anger at Aleka. My mother. Intelligence might not have been one of the traits Athan bred in his creations, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out she’d been a lot more than his lab assistant. The fact that she’d lied to me all this time became understandable now that I knew how much the lie covered.
There was no end to it. No chance with Mercy. No point in being here at all. I wished the Skaldi had killed me any one of the multiple times they’d had the chance. Except I guess they couldn’t kill their own brother.
I stayed a long time in the small, empty room, feeling as much a prisoner of its four walls as I’d felt in Asunder’s canyon. I was about to leave when I sensed someone hovering outside the door and a voice I knew said softly, “Knock, knock.” Embarrassment at my hiding spot flooded me as I opened the door to face Aleka.
She looked a hundred years old. I’d always told myself her hair was blond, but the truth was it had all gone gray, a flat sandy gray like the canvas of an old tent. The lines across her face reminded me of how the land looked after a rainstorm gouged it into streams that instantly ran dry. And though I knew her gaunt body was still wrapped with strength, the terrible imbalance of her missing limb screamed at me that she’d already set her feet on the road to death, that all the things that could kill you in this world—violence, disease, Skaldi—had taken their first chunk out of her and would never let go until they were done. They’d taken my father, my half brother, my friends. They would take everyone I knew.
Except they weren’t they. They were me. I was death, and I’d only learned it now.
“Querry,” Aleka said, and I tried not to watch the cords of her neck tighten as she swallowed. “I think I owe you an explanation.”
“I think you owe me a lot more than that.”
A strange expression crossed her face as she cocked her head to examine me. “So judgmental. So hard. You weren’t always this way.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, “being a monster will do that.”
“You’re not a monster,” she said. “You’re my son.”
She sat on one of the chrome metal chairs that littered the huge, hollow chasm of the war room. I couldn’t very well stand in the doorway of a storage closet with her sitting there staring at me, so I joined her. Or didn’t exactly join her. I sat in another chair is what I meant.
She watched me sit. Alert, keen-eyed as always. I don’t think I’d ever hated her more.
“Did you sleep with him?” I said. It seemed like a stupid question considering what I’d just learned, but I wanted to set the record straight at the start.
“Yes,” she said, meeting me with a level gaze.
“So then me and Mercy . . .”
“No,” she said. “Athan suffered from infertility, a condition not uncommon after the wars. All of his children are products of experimental procedures. Some, like the young of his colony, are clones. But you and Mercy have quite separate genetic histories.”
I felt a surge of guilty relief at hearing this. It didn’t change what Athan and Aleka had done, but at least it meant I didn’t share blood with Mercy. How that would make a difference once she discovered what I did share blood with, I had no idea. “Mercy’s no clone,” I said. “Neither is Ardan.”
Aleka sat back in the chair and sighed. “It’s complicated, Querry,” she said. “And I’m not sure where to start.”
She was quiet for a long time. I studied the creases beside her nose, the cracks lining her lips. I was about to say something when, as usual, she beat me to it.
“How old do you think I am?” she said. It startled me, made me feel like she’d been eavesdropping on my thoughts. I mumbled something I knew she wouldn’t be able to hear.
“I’m forty years old,” she said, which startled me again. My guess had been more than a decade older than that. “I was twenty-five when you were born. Twenty-two when I had Yov. Athan was much older. That first recording was produced two years before I was born. But Yov’s father was only twenty-one when I became pregnant with his child. Twenty-one when he died.”
She leaned back, running her hand through the coarse stubs of her hair. “You know he died in a Skaldi attack,” she said. “The one that led me here. We were members of Survival Colony Fifteen then. Years later, when I joined Survival Colony Nine—just after the attack that took your memory—I feared Laman might still have communication with his family. So I lied to him, told him my husband had survived the earlier attack. If word got around camp that I was your mother, I was hoping Laman—and you—wouldn’t trace your birth back to Udain’s compound.”
“Did it really matter that much?”
“It did to me,” she said. “I had loved Yov’s father for as long as I could remember. And when I lost him, I lost the will to live.”
She reached out, bony fingers gripping a palm-size screen. It flickered to life, and I realized it was a portable protograph, the miniscule image speckled and gray. It showed a woman with long pale hair sitting in a metal chair, the same kind we were sitting in now. She was obviously pregnant, her belly huge. But her arms and neck and face had gone beyond gaunt and passed into skeletal. And her eyes, eyes I knew so well, stared emptily at the recording device. I noticed printed characters, too small to read—maybe a name or number—stitched across the front of the plain white gown she wore. While she sat there, two technicians in white coats fiddled with her right arm, probably prepping her for the tracking device everyone in Udain’s colony carried under their biceps. Their backs were turned to me, but I thought one of them might have been a younger Doctor Siva. My living mother let me look at her past self for a minute, then she snapped the device off and stowed it in her breast pocket.
“I have no memory of the day I was admitted,” she said. “Yov was born days later, but I didn’t—I couldn’t care for him. I wouldn’t touch him. I couldn’t”—she swallowed painfully—“I couldn’t feed him. Fortunately Mercy’s mother was still nursing, and she gave Yov what I couldn’t. All I had to give the world was pain. I lay in bed, ate nothing, spoke no words. When they brought my baby to me, I turned my head away. He was nothing to me, only a reminder of what I’d lost. A reminder of my pain.”
I stared at her trembling chin, the tears creeping down her cheeks. “It was you, wasn’t it? You had to kill your own husband.”
“I set his body on fire,” she said in a whisper. “Before the Skaldi could complete the transformation. Because I knew if I let it finish, if I let it look at me for even a moment from behind his eyes, I wouldn’t have had the strength to destroy it. I would have fallen at its feet and let it take me and my unborn child with him.”
A tear slid past her lips, poised at the end of her sharp chin, reflecting the light of the room. The next thing I knew she was sobbing, her head buried in her hand, her empty shoulder jerking ineffectually as it tried to bring the miss
ing limb over her face. For a second I let her cry, then I rose so fast my chair clattered to the floor. I put my arms around her, feeling the thinness of her body, even thinner than I imagined, like the woman in the protograph, a handful of bones. I held my own mother like she was a child, and she cried so long and hard I thought she had stored these tears for the past twenty years of her life.
When her breathing finally eased and her eyes lifted, I let go. She smiled at me, her face a teary mess. I righted my chair and sat, and she nodded as if she understood.
“Athan came to me in the infirmary,” she said. “Where Siva had tied me down so I couldn’t cut myself, started force-feeding to keep me alive. I don’t know if that was standard protocol on suicide watches or if Athan had ordered it especially for me. He visited me every day, and at first he said nothing about his—his work. He just talked. That voice of his—you’ve heard that voice. It was the same then. It was like the first ray of sunshine after a darkness a thousand years long. It lifted my head from the pillow, tore my eyes from the shackles on my wrists. It told me I was beautiful, and strong, and—and desirable. I’m sorry, Querry. I know this isn’t what you want to hear.”
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t know if it was love,” she said. “I’ll never know if he truly meant all the things he said, or if he’d seen something in me—in my eyes, my blood, the shape of my face—that led him to believe I’d suit his purposes. All I knew was that when he said those things to me, I was finally able to rise from my bed, to hold my baby in my arms, to smile at his smile. I had been dead for months, and when he said those things to me, I came to life again.”
I clasped her hand in both of mine, felt the fragility of her bones, but also her strength. She brought my hands to her mouth and gave them a dry kiss before letting go.
“For the two years I stayed in Udain’s camp,” she continued, “I was Athan’s assistant. His assistant, and his—I don’t know how to say this.”
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