Rachel cleared her throat, and Lilith shook her head, speaking quickly. “Sorry, Rachel, my thoughts were wandering. Now, I know both of you had questions for me. How about each of you go ahead, and I’ll answer after that?”
“Umm…” Gina looked at Lilith, then at Rachel to see if she was going to speak. When Rachel gave her a nod, Gina took a breath and swallowed hard, looking Lilith in the eyes as she spoke nervously, wringing her hands. “Back in the warehouse you said you had secrets that you were too scared to share, but you’d share them once you had a chance. It seemed like you were planning to do that tonight, but I wasn’t entirely sure if you were still willing to tell both of us.”
“Yes, of course,” Lilith agreed, nodding as she adjusted the projector’s position on the table, her nerves making hard to sit still. “I was planning to address the subject after you two have your questions out in the open. I don’t want to go over things too much… and you might have questions I can answer in the process.”
“In that case, what powers do you actually have, Lilith? Before this you said that your only power was the captivation field, but that can’t be right. Based on the injuries you inflicted, your lack of injuries, and what Gina told us, there’s no way in the world that your physical strength is that of a normal human,” Rachel interjected immediately, leaning forward with her hands on her knees. “That… misinformation has us worried. Your powers are much broader than you indicated, and you also took down a supervillain who’s evaded capture on dozens of occasions. It makes not just me, but most of the team, extremely suspicious of your motives.”
“Rachel, what are you talking about?” Gina protested, turning to her friend in surprise. “Sure, she did beat Blue Impulse into a pulp, but she wasn’t involved in the kidnapping at all!”
“That isn’t the issue, Gina! She’s been misleading us, and that has to be investigated,” Rachel retorted, relaxing as she continued. “I have to say I’m just glad I was able to confirm there isn’t any influence on your mind anymore. If you were somehow under Lilith’s control, I don’t think anyone would be willing to trust you anywhere near her.”
“But—” Gina began protesting, only to have Lilith raise a hand to stop her, shaking her head.
“Gina, please stop. I can’t blame them for being suspicious, and I suppose it makes a sort of sense to be afraid I might have somehow… engineered the entire episode. It’s an unpleasant thought, but gambits like that aren’t unknown among villains. It does explain a lot of my interrogation, as you called it. As I’m under a fair amount of suspicion, I feel that I need to clear the air as best I can,” Lilith replied, sitting back and sighing, shaking her head as she pondered. “The question is, where do I begin?”
“I’d think that figuring out your powers would be fairly easy,” Rachel replied, frowning at Lilith. “Is there something odd about them or something?”
“Or something would be right. I suppose I should ask a question first. This is a question for both of you, actually,” Lilith told them, leaning forward in her chair. “What are superpowers? I mean, how do you define them? If an alien or other creature were to be born on Earth with five times the natural strength of a human due to their musculature, is that a superpower? What about implants, are they a power, or natural? This is important to help me figure out how to give an honest answer.”
“Uhh…” Gina blinked, seeming lost for a long moment as she thought. As tired as the woman was, Lilith really couldn’t blame her. Gina had been up for more than a day, after all, almost two.
“That’s an excellent question, and the subject of a great deal of debate among heroes,” Rachel replied, seeming to have some inkling of what Lilith was getting at. “On a personal level, I’d lean toward someone whose body isn’t boosted beyond their native abilities as being unpowered. Anything that boosts a person beyond that, whether due to a random power or an implant, is a superpower. Are you saying you were born with your enhanced strength, or were modified to have it?”
“Correct, Rachel. Not one or the other, but on both counts,” Lilith replied, nodding and sitting back again, taking a deep breath before she continued. “Depending on how you look at it, I may or may not be human. On a biological level I’m compatible with humans, and my genetic code is similar enough that we could interbreed, and is even based on human genetic code. The issue is that my genetic code was altered to a degree that I can’t even begin to describe, and that I don’t understand myself. As an example, my nervous system functions at near light speed, my metabolism is incredibly efficient, and there’s no sign of cellular degradation when my cells replicate. Beyond that, my bones are stronger, my muscles more powerful and efficient… I could go on, but I imagine you see the point now. I may be human, or I may not be. I don’t know. But I don’t see my strength, speed, or resilience as a power, because it isn’t. These are my natural capabilities, not some powers that could be stripped away.”
“You’re… are you serious? Are you the subject of a superhuman research project or something along those lines?” Rachel gasped, looking completely stunned as she sat back, and Gina stared at Lilith in shock as well. “I’ve never heard of something that extreme working before, though!”
“Like I said before, it’s something along those lines,” Lilith acknowledged quietly, tapping a button on her phone and activating the holographic projector. Above it appeared the bounty on her head that Lilith had saved so long ago, and she looked at them with a sad smile, admitting the deadliest secret she had. “See, you two could go turn me in right now and leave both the government and most superhero teams ecstatic. I am Amber’s, or Shadowmind’s, final creation. This is why I wanted to leave my secret for last, Rachel… because I was scared of how you’d react, but I wanted to tell you the truth.”
Shadowmind. The name, the single word, caused Rachel to stop breathing for a moment as it shook her like nothing else had. In an instant she thought back to when she and Gina had delved into the villain’s mind, and she shuddered at the memory. Shadowmind was brilliant, deadly, and amoral as no one else Rachel had ever faced as Morgan. It had been pure luck, along with the aid of not just hundreds of heroes but a host of nervous villains, that had allowed anyone to learn of her base under the Arctic Ocean.
Even with the information they’d had, dozens of teams had to comb the area to find the villain’s base, only to have Crimson Bull and Warden end up discovering it. When they’d returned with Shadowmind herself, the world had breathed a breath of relief, though the information that they’d pulled from the villain’s mind had been enough to leave the government shaking. If she’d been trying to actually destroy the country, Shadowmind could have devastated cities, states, or even more with the weapons and knowledge she possessed. The only reason she hadn’t was because Shadowmind wanted to rule the world, not destroy it.
And yet the lingering affection for Shadowmind’s self-created daughter had haunted Rachel for weeks. It seemed impossible how the villain had obsessed over her perfect creation, or at least perfect in her own eyes, and all her attention for months had been focused on the project. At first it might have been for a new body for herself, but the way the villain’s mind had warped the subject until she’d seen the body as her own daughter had been almost terrifying.
Gina and Rachel hadn’t gotten much more than those vague details from the villain, due to how she’d wiped as much of the information as possible from her own mind. Now, though, learning that Lilith was her creation… suddenly everything made sense. Despite the sense it made, fear surged through Rachel, terror at being near one of the villain’s creations without knowing.
“Go ahead and restrain me, Rachel. Your face betrays your… discomfort with my revelation.” Lilith spoke in a soft, almost gentle tone as she smiled sadly at them. It took Rachel a moment to realize that Gina looked like she’d been hit in the stomach hard. Rachel opened her mouth to speak, but Lilith shook her head, raising a finger. Lilith wasn’t wearing anything more than a soft set of satin
pajamas and her feet were bare, but the woman felt dangerous despite that. Lilith’s voice was firm as she continued. “Don’t argue about it, Rachel. You know as well as I do that you won’t be comfortable until you’re certain that I can’t hurt either of you.”
“Fine, if you insist,” Rachel growled, a spark of anger igniting inside her, as her outrage began to build up. That Lilith had kept secret the fact that she was created by one of their team’s most deadly enemies was utterly infuriating. As Rachel remembered the way that Shadowmind had doted on her ‘daughter’, she hissed and made a sharp gesture, causing chains of violet-black energy to erupt from thin air and wrap around Lilith’s body from the neck down, anchoring her to the chair. After a moment Lilith grunted as the chains tightened, and Rachel’s eyes narrowed.
“Rachel, get a hold of yourself!” Gina’s voice interrupted sharply enough to make Rachel jump and look at her friend in surprise. Her friend’s eyes were fierce as she spoke, obviously worried. “She asked you to restrain her, and you’re hurting her. Once upon a time you told me not to let fear control me, but now it’s my turn. Don’t let it control you, Rachel! She hasn’t hurt either of us, and she could have.”
“I…” Rachel hesitated as she stopped to think, and her anger at Lilith’s… betrayal slowly eased. She didn’t entirely understand why she felt so betrayed, either. Still, she didn’t have time to think on the subject, instead sighing and easing the strength of the chains slightly. “You’re right. I let my emotions get the better of me, and I apologize for that. That said, why are you telling us this, Lilith?”
“It’s fine, Rachel. I wasn’t certain how you’d react in the end to begin with, but I hoped. I hoped you’d react well, I should say. I’m a fool, I suppose,” Lilith replied softly, barely able to shrug with the way she was chained down.
“Why do you say that?” Gina asked, blinking owlishly at Lilith. “You’ve been kind to me ever since we met. I’m not sure why you’d feel so… so bad about things.”
“Because…” Lilith began, but hesitated and lowered her head, swallowing hard before continuing. “Because I’m afraid. Do you know what Amber intended me for? Do you know what she intended me to be? I’m afraid the bounty didn’t give me enough details on what people know.”
“We—” Gina began to explain, but Rachel interrupted with a glance, and Gina paused, then shook her head. “Right, I’m too tired, I might mess up the explanation.”
“Yes, you are, and I want to hear what Lilith has to say. We did get some information out of Shadowmind, but it was… minimal,” Rachel told Lilith, deliberately leaving out a large portion of what they’d learned as she explained. “We know she was trying to create a new body, and then grew fascinated with the possibility of what her creation would be like as its own individual.”
“I see… I suppose that’s the truth, if only a tiny piece of it. At least, assuming that what she left in my memory and in the systems I could access is the truth itself,” Lilith murmured, sitting back and closing her eyes for a long minute, before beginning to speak quietly. “Five years ago, Amber managed to acquire a sample of Destiny’s previous body, and analyzed it. As she finished, she began to wonder if a clone of Destiny would have her powers or not. Then she realized that she might be able to transfer her mind to another body if the brain structure was similar enough, at least in theory. The problem was, she could only do so if the body didn’t have a ‘mind’ within it already. This meant creating a clone or biological construct, though she did consider whether or not a person in a coma might work. With those options, she decided to take things a step further. Rather than copy the body of a single heroine, she decided to create a new strain of humanity that started with herself. She was going to make herself perfect.
“So, Amber started her collection, starting with genetic samples that were on the black market. How many heroes or villains get injured and accidentally leave behind a bit of blood someone could gather? Purchasing those was easy for her,” Lilith continued in her soft, steady voice, her distant tone almost chilling in its own way, and as she spoke, Rachel’s horror grew. “Amber’s standard was that anyone in her database needed to be Class A or higher, whether they were heroes or villains. Every sample she found was analyzed and uploaded her database, to fit into the gene-map she was building. It gave her a chance to… modify the genome, to weed out every imperfection and flaw she saw in humanity. It was then that she started to wonder what it would be like to have a daughter, if I had my own mind. But at that point it was almost too late. She’d already started the process of my cloning.”
Lilith fell silent for a long moment, and Rachel opened her mouth just as the woman continued again. “The way I was created, I wouldn’t have a mind. I would have been a blank slate, without even the ability to breathe without assistance. So, Amber went to find young children, to figure out how their minds worked, at which point she decided that building a child’s mind for me wouldn’t work. I was going to grow too rapidly, and I wouldn’t have the years needed to slowly learn everything. So she decided to cheat, like always. She stole the knowledge she needed from academics, and created an identity with virtually no loose ends, one that wouldn’t garner too much attention. That’s when she started imprinting knowledge into my mind, just the basics necessary to survive, and the basic facts you might learn while growing up. But I… I had no past. I had no hopes, no dreams, no goals. She never even considered that aspect of life, that I might be lost in the world without the hopes and dreams a childhood gives you.
“A week after Amber was captured, I woke up to be greeted by Circe, a Class 7 AI, and not truly sentient at all. I was… a shell, as I had knowledge but no personality, no sense of self. I didn’t have anyone to guide me, so I looked at the dozens of training programs that Amber had set up for me, and chose the hardest one. She intended the ‘course’ to take the better part of a year, and allow me to learn all about society and the necessary skills for living on my own. Without anyone to tell me that it wasn’t possible, I pushed myself to my limits and finished in six months.” Lilith smiled bitterly and shook her head, refusing to look at Rachel or Gina. “Even so, it did nothing for me, save giving me confidence in my abilities. I still had no aspirations or dreams, and I find that those are… important. I came to San Francisco because I was bored and lonely, though I didn’t realize that part until much later. My introduction to society wasn’t a good one, though. The first man I met was trying to seduce me, and didn’t want to take no for an answer. All around me, people watched no matter where I went, and I felt like an object or prize to be fought over. I slowly grew more distant, and focused on other things. Since money seemed to be the goal that so many people had, I decided to try to make a fortune with some of the funds I’d been left. And I was disappointed because it was so… so easy.”
Lilith fell silent for a long minute, but just as Rachel opened her mouth to interrupt, Gina shook her head firmly, raising a finger to her lips. Rachel blinked at being cut off a second time and leaned close, hissing a question. “What?”
“Let her talk, Rachel. This isn’t simply explaining what Shadowmind was doing, not anymore,” Gina whispered, looking across the table, and it struck Rachel that Lilith almost looked weak and vulnerable in the chains. “She’s… telling us who she is. Not what she is, but who she’s become. Let her talk.”
Rachel considered for a second, then nodded and sat back. The explanation so far had been fascinating and horrifying by turns, and she saw no reason to actually stop Lilith, not yet.
“When everything comes too easily, what value does it have? Why should it inspire me to strive, to live my life? It didn’t give me any dreams, and the money was almost worthless to me. At first, I enjoyed the supposed challenge of things, but when I looked again I was already wealthy enough that I barely had to try anymore. Perhaps if I’d started from nothing it would’ve been different, but my mind was made for simple logic puzzles. It wasn’t worth it.” Lilith’s voice trembled, and she sw
allowed hard, finally raising her gaze to look up at them, a single tear slowly trickling down her face. “I was bored again, and this time in the middle of a city, yet just as alone as I had been in a bunker in the middle of Utah’s wilderness. That was when I saw Warden attacked, Rachel. Everything I told you then was true, except for one thing. I nearly didn’t help you, Gina, because I just didn’t… feel things, not the way I do now. Still, I felt that we had the faintest of connections, so I brought you downstairs and called for help.”
Turning her gaze to Rachel, Lilith smiled with a trace of amusement. “That’s when we first met, Rachel, and the stunned look on your face was priceless. While I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, it’s grown on me since then. Still, I thought that would be the only time we ever met, and soon enough it was done. It was an hour of excitement, amusement, and emotion… and then I was bored again. I lost something important, and I tried to fix it. That’s why I decided to decorate my home, because some people find that to be enjoyable. Still, when I went to the art galleries, none of them were quite right. The paintings didn’t resonate with me, they didn’t prompt that hint of emotion I craved. Not until I met Gina, and there I felt…”
The brunette paused, and Rachel could see that she was struggling to find the right words. Eventually Rachel asked softly, “Did you feel better?”
“No, that’s not it. I felt like I was… special, I suppose. I felt like I was appreciated for who I was, and happy for the first time in my life. When I looked at her paintings, they prompted that same feeling as well, so I bought them and talked to her. Still, the feeling faded when I went home. That Saturday, I can’t say how happy I was to be coming back! I’d never been so eager before in my life, but there were other people there, and they kept interrupting and frustrating me. They pushed at me, trying to make me fit their expectations of who I was, and I just wanted to talk to Gina. So I ended up leaving, with the only happiness I possessed being the paintings themselves.” Lilith slowly shook her head, giving them a warm, lopsided smile. “You coming to my table was a shock, I must say. I’d started experimenting with cooking, but that paled beside your company, and again I felt that… connection to you. I still don’t know what it was, but it was warm and comfortable. I would’ve given everything I had at the time to have that night together, just… talking. Every time you two called and we met, I grew. I learned so much from you, because you taught me not the definitions of things, but the meaning of life. You taught me friendship, and why Amber was so broken and wrong, as well as how broken I was without hopes and dreams. Amber gave me life, but you taught me what life is. And I… I felt guilty.
Born a Queen (Lilith's Shadow Book 1) Page 22
