Given: Project Xol

by Amabel Daniels

  Proof of what Project Xol had warped into? Well, I could get that.

  “I’ve got someone who’s more than familiar with proof.” I pulled out my phone and texted Zero. “He’s been helping us all along. Cassidy’s friend and a world-class hacker.” As I waited for Zero to reply, I eyed both men. “But what are we going to do about getting Cassidy out of their lab?”

  “Easy.” Jonah stood and set his hands on his hips. “We’re gonna show up and make them give her back.”

  Easy. Yeah, right.

  Chapter Five

  Cassidy

  I shot to my feet as soon as I saw Rosa.

  She sat there on a stiff-looking chair, her arms and legs strapped to the metal, a tube of liquid delivering something from an IV bag. Her frizzy graying hair hung in a haphazard mess yet still stuck up at odd ends. Normally tan, she was pale, wan, with too many wrinkles easy to follow like etchings on her typically serene and serious face. She instantly captured my gaze, her dark eyes alert and cautious.

  I didn’t get more than two feet toward her when Michael hauled me back to my chair. I wriggled, fighting his grip, desperate to reach my true parent and yank that damn IV from her.

  “Do not sedate her,” Tami warned as she strode into the room.

  Michael growled as I resisted him shoving me to the chair. “Jolene. Get the straps.” He came around to stand behind the chair, giving me another chance to see Rosa. She licked her dry lips and I studied her again.

  How dare they drug her and give her such a sallow pallor.

  How dare they hurt her and give her that black eye and gash on her lip.

  How dare they—

  I cried out a groan as Michael gripped my biceps and squeezed hard. His fingers were like tentacles of steel, his strength inhuman.

  “Easy,” Rosa said, her voice cracked and tired.

  I stilled. She tilted her head slightly, a subtle show of authority. It was a small tick, a tell. Something she’d always done when disciplining me. A tiny cue not to mess with her request.

  Jolene came closer and unlocked my handcuffs. Together, she and Michael strapped me to the chair just as Rosa was.

  I huffed out a hard breath and narrowed my eyes at Rosa. Okay. Easy? She wanted me to calm down? I’d give her that. For now. The thick material locking my limbs to this hard chair promised I would have no freedom to do my will. I could chill for her if it’d help.

  “I see you’ve tamed the brat. Even if she’s a disrespectful fool,” Tami said, “she can be obedient.”

  Studying the IV bag and the line into Rosa’s arm, I snapped at her. “You’re wasting your time if you think I’ll obey you. I will never help you destroy humanity.”

  “Destroy humanity. Do you have to be so dramatic?” Tami gave a long-suffering sigh. “Give me the data.”

  “Don’t,” Rosa said.

  I didn’t intend to, but if I could stall, until I could figure out a way to get Rosa from whatever was in that IV…

  I heaved out an exasperated breath. “I don’t even have it anymore.”

  “You do,” Michael insisted.

  Technically, I did, in a way. Zero had the data electronically, and there was no way I’d give him up. I shook my head. Like they’d know I copied those files.

  “Don’t play games,” Tami said.

  “I. Don’t. Have. The. Data.” On me…

  “That’s not what she said.” Tami stomped over past Rosa.

  What who said?

  I hadn’t even glanced around the room, assuming it was identical to the divided space I’d first been brought to. Now, I saw that we weren’t alone. Further from me and Rosa strapped to chairs and facing each other was someone else. Lying on a hospital bed was Elena.

  She’s alive? When I’d run off, she’d been prostrate on the ground, feet from the lake’s edge. A knife had been driven into her chest, likely her heart, and she still lived? I blinked, not trusting my vision.

  “I…I told them,” Elena admitted, defeat in her every breath. “I told them you said you had them.” Her eyes belied her guilt.

  Dammit. I pursed my lips. “She said she said,” I quipped. Facing Tami, I repeated. “I don’t have the data.”

  “They…they…” Elena struggled to sit up but couldn’t get far. Her face twisted and she slumped back to the mattress with a whoosh. “They were going to kill Rosa if I didn’t talk.”

  She’d betrayed me, telling Tami whatever she’d likely asked. I couldn’t make the connection between how adamantly Elena had schemed to destroy further chances of using axolotls for unethical science and now how quickly she’d surrendered here. At the sake of saving Rosa, I understood her choice. But…I couldn’t dismiss the fleeting stab of her letting me down. This abrasive woman who’d judged me from the moment she met me. She’d given in to them.

  “You were dead,” I said instead, still struggling to bridge the gap of details in my mind.

  “She was dying,” Tami corrected.

  You might be misguided on the concept of death. I picked at Tami’s words, fitting the pieces in to seeing Elena very much alive and able to share secrets with the enemy.

  “She was dying but not yet gone,” Tami repeated. “So we gave her a specific type of the cure.” She crossed her arms and regarded Elena like she was admiring her handiwork. “We nicknamed this strain of the cure Last Time. The Xol cure is typically built up over a succession of doses, to prepare for accepting the genetic mutations throughout the whole body. Regeneration is a complicated series of changes, and it can be taxing on the human physique. Last Time is faster, stronger, replacing the process of a year’s worth of normal doses. It’s a speedier procedure to rapidly regenerate a dying patient.”

  I remained silent, unable to accept this one woman deciding fates like it was her right.

  “I see you have no words. It can be unbelievable at first. To think we can pull someone back from dying. To save those who don’t want to go. I know Rosa’s probably trained you into thinking I’m so mal—”

  I snarled at her. “She never found you worthy of mentioning.”

  Tami’s nostrils flared. “Regardless, don’t be so simple-minded and quick to judge the amazing work we do here, like saving lives.”

  Amazing? I recalled the macabre convulsions that Ryan rode out as he was brought back here. The agony and pain he beseeched me with in his soulless gaze.

  “Amazing, my ass.” Elena ground out the words before she, too, reacted to strain against her bonds. Groaning, she jerked and flopped, her teeth smashed together and her eyes squinted shut. Her scream rent the air and Tami sighed.

  “Jolene, let’s move her back to her room. She’s crashing again.”

  Crashing? Like really dying?

  “Amazing?” Elena spat out. She screamed. “This hell is worse than death itself!”

  Michael and Jolene went to her bed and began pushing her to the exit.

  Tami turned toward us. “I’ll let you two have a moment together.” She checked her watch and pointed at Rosa’s arm. “Because she only has hours left until the drugs she’s receiving poison her beyond hope.” As she went to the door, she paused and looked back. “And Rosa, you definitely wouldn’t be privileged enough to get the Last Time and have a second chance at your pathetic life.”

  Once the door shut, I whipped back to take in Rosa’s rough appearance again. Before I could launch into an inquisition, I had to shake the images of Elena seeming to struggle crawling out of her skin. I’d never been a fan of scary movies, but that was like watching a demonic possession in real time. “What’s happening to her?”

  “There’s so much you don’t know.” She began and shook her head. The sadness in her tone was unwarranted. She wasn’t patronizing me in her superior scientific know-how. There was no way she could understand how much I did know.

  “Dale Hanson got in touch with me back at…” Jesus. Trying to explain the hell I’d gone through and the locations I’d traveled since her first letter would take
too long. I wasn’t sure what Tami meant by “giving us a minute.” The woman was so domineering, she probably thought she called time by her standards. “He’s been following the events since your apartment was bombed. And he caught up with me—and explained a lot.”

  “Dale.” She pursed her lips. “He’s been following much more than that for even longer. He was always keeping abreast of the Project. Hendrick stayed in touch with him and it was through their friendship that we were loosely aware of what Tami has been doing all this time.”

  “Hendrick…” I inhaled a deep breath.

  Her eyes watered as she stared at me, waiting for me to say more, but then she nodded, clamping her lips shut tighter. “I always knew… I always knew they’d catch up to him.”

  “They did, and didn’t. He was caught by the cartel and they thought he was competition.”

  Rosa took a shaky breath and cleared her throat. “I never wanted anything to do with it. After Tami slept with Scott and began tainting him with her quest for power, I knew there would be no good end to this. That greed for the success…that was what frightened me the most.”

  “So you left.”

  She frowned. “I did. Your father and I fell fast for each other, but ours wasn’t a love that could last. When I learned that he’d cheated on me with Tami, and when you were born, I stood by him. He was my husband, and I was fond of him.”

  She shook her head, pursing her lips. “But we were discussing divorce. I wanted out of the Project and he wanted me to continue—with the research, if not him. I couldn’t stand it, her or the fear of the trials she wanted. After the lab was destroyed in Nottingham, Hendrick and I changed our research goals and I adopted you.”

  “Why was the lab destroyed?”

  She huffed. “Tami. She staged it all so she could start anew as the true leader. As time passed, people talked. Colleagues and researchers heard rumors of such world-changing medical experiments. Word spread that pharmaceutical companies were paying for something big. Others bragged about their ‘donations’ to fund it. We suspected Tami was alive, not dead as reported. I told Hendrick to let things lie, but he couldn’t let it go. He felt responsible for it, somehow. We were all members of a team but he felt even his participation—all of us—had given Tami the opening to begin this horror.”

  I couldn’t speak, hearing her reasoning behind the crisis change of her life. Hating that she’d wanted a life away from all of this.

  “I never wanted you to know.”

  Now it was my turn to huff. “Well, that letter sure said otherwise.”

  She swallowed and nodded gravely. “I’m sorry. I…I had no other choice.”

  “Why did you ask me to help?” I wasn’t mad that I’d gotten involved, but I was nobody in the grand realm of medical science. What had she really expected?

  “I couldn’t trust anyone else. I asked former grad students to mail those letters for me, I was so scared of even those being traced. Over the last few months, Hendrick and I noticed attempts to steal our academic files from various locations where we’d worked over our careers. One by one, all of our former labs and facilities were breached—data was stolen. We kept our most sensitive data close to us, but Scott had already stored his data before he was killed. The library in Texas was the last location they’d yet to go for the data, and I’d hoped to beat them to it. And…I needed to hide you. What better way to stay out of sight by staying on the move?”

  “Hide me from…Tami?”

  She nodded.

  You’re needed again. What did my biological mother want to use me for now? I couldn’t ask before Rosa continued. She glanced at the door, perhaps nervous we’d run out of time to speak privately.

  “I never changed your name after the lab was ruined because I’d believed they were both dead. Scott, I knew he was gone—I had to identify his remains. Tami was declared dead as well. When you were four, Hendrick said Dale had caught word she was seeking funding for research, that she’d been behind the destruction of that first lab. She’d never expressed any joy or desire for motherhood, when she was pregnant or when you were born, but still, I feared she’d come to get you.”

  I shook my head. “Why? She hadn’t wanted me for those four years.”

  Rosa almost smiled at me. “I…I don’t know. It was a fear nonetheless. I’d grown so attached to you. It never occurred to me not to adopt you. Even though I’d married Scott foolishly, he was my family. He loved you despite how you were conceived, and I couldn’t help but love you as well. You were the child I never could have had and I was desperate to keep you safe. Even from a distance. I hoped you’d be safest at schools away from me, to prevent her from getting to you through me.”

  Her words soothed a buried ache in my heart. She’d pushed me away for my safety—even if Tami had never shown any interest in having me in her life. Not because Rosa hadn’t wanted me. But to protect me.

  “And here I am now. Why?”

  “I’m not entirely sure, but I have my guesses. If they wanted to turn you into one of those mutants, they would have already.”

  I agreed, thinking over what we might be missing.

  Rosa expelled a deep breath. “Like I said, we’d stayed abreast of the Project through Dale. There was never any way to fight back, to tell the world about it with how far their reach went, but we refused to claim ignorance. The latest discoveries he’d shared with us were of that Last Time she just spoke of.”

  “The cure that pulls people back from the dead.”

  Rosa nearly smirked, brightness coming to her sad eyes for a moment. “They’re not…zombies.”

  I grinned. She’d never cared for anything paranormal or sci-fi in the reaches of fiction. She was too strongly rooted in what life was capable of in reality. Only, we were damn near living the essence of farfetched truths. “The Xol freaks? I’d say they’re more like vampires. Regenerating and healing over.”

  She lost the fraction of mirth as I quickly asked, “What’s happening to Elena?”

  “They gave her the Last Time to keep her alive for answers. Regeneration is not a process that should be expedited. It takes time. Cells need to reproduce rapidly and that requires enormous energy. It’s not like a switch. As she said, doses usually are increased over time, probably to achieve a rate of the body mutating in a steady balance. Too much of the cure too fast can overwhelm the person.”

  “How?”

  Rosa shifted in her seat. “When regenerative mutations get to the endocrine system, the reaction becomes uncontrollable. The production of hormones is skewered.”

  I nodded. Zero had mentioned this before in one of our calls. He’d referenced test analyses of the patients developing hormonal complications—growing angrier, moody with unreliable mental states.

  “If the process is introduced too fast, as they do with the Last Time dose, the change can drive the person insane. We’d heard of patients going berserk, killing the techs, doctors, and staff when the doses are administered. Even killing themselves—if they can.”

  I closed my eyes. Shooting up people on their deathbed with liquid insanity. Tami truly had no bounds.

  “They’d worked to equilibrate these cases. But it’s not perfected, as you can see with Elena. The psychoactive changes had been targeted, but not the inflammation. As cells reproduce rapidly, as organs are duplicated, bones rebuilt…it comes with inflammation. I cannot even imagine the pain of having your organs doubled and destroyed from the inside out.”

  I shuddered, wishing I could erase that knowledge from my mind. It sounded right, though. Inflammation throughout the body. Just like what Elena had looked like, fighting an inferno within her skin.

  “And that’s their newest advancement? This Last Time?” I asked.

  “That was what Dale had been finding.”

  All right… Then what about it? Clearly, they were utilizing the drug. It didn’t have anything to do with me specifically. I couldn’t shake the feeling I wasn’t here simply for giving the
m Scott’s data. And if they wanted to test out the Last Time on me, they’d been too careful not to kill me.

  Frowning, I studied Rosa again.

  “They have my half of the code,” she admitted with a long face. “They’d captured me the day after I’d called you. I fell for their bluff, that they’d found you.” She sniffed. “It… It was just some girl. They’d beaten her face, but her shape and size, even her hair. I could have sworn it was you. As they…” She closed her eyes for a moment. “As they removed…”

  I cringed, hating I couldn’t hug her. Anything to reassure her I was okay. Something to erase the awful things she’d witnessed. “Removed…?” I swallowed around the lump in my throat.

  “Parts of her…” She sat up straighter and blanked her face. “They tortured her in front of me and I cracked. I gave them my half of the code only for them to kill her. For three days they’d left me in a room with her corpse and it was only when they’d removed her body that they told me they’d located you.”

  All that time she’d been trapped with what she thought was me.

  “Rosa…” I sobbed once and hated the tears that burned down my cheeks.

  “I’ve been here for…a week?” She frowned, as though she was trying to concentrate. “Or more.”

  “And you’re leaving today.”

  She raised her brows. “Not much point if I’m no longer alive.” Lifting her hand almost in a wave, she brought my attention back to her arm hooked to the poison.

  “What is it in there?”

  “They wouldn’t explain. Something to weaken me, to slow my cardiovascular strength.”

  “Is there an antidote?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. All we can decide and do now is to take this fight to the grave. Or I will. They tricked my code from me but—”