by Jena Leigh
Redux
The Variant Series, Book 3
Jena Leigh
Redux
* * *
The Variant Series, Book 3
* * *
by
* * *
Jena Leigh
Redux
Copyright © 2015, 2017 Jena Leigh. All rights reserved.
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eBooks are not transferable. All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
To Mom and Dad, for the unconditional love, for the endless encouragement, and for helping me find the strength and the courage I needed to follow my dreams.
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P.S. I love you more.
Contents
1. One
2. Two
3. Three
4. Four
5. Five
6. Six
7. Seven
8. Eight
9. Nine
10. Ten
11. Eleven
12. Twelve
13. Thirteen
14. Fourteen
15. Fifteen
16. Sixteen
17. Seventeen
18. Eighteen
19. Nineteen
20. Twenty
21. Twenty-One
22. Twenty-Two
23. Twenty-Three
24. Twenty-Four
25. Twenty-Five
26. Twenty-Six
27. Twenty-Seven
28. Twenty-Eight
29. Epilogue
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Jena Leigh
Acknowledgments
One
The In-Between
Past, Present, and Future
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Declan grit his teeth, certain he wouldn’t survive.
An instant became an eternity in the second that Alex’s slender wrist slipped from his grasp. He cursed his ineffective hands, his inability to hold on to the only thing that mattered in this empty, oppressive place.
The pain was unspeakable.
An overwhelming pressure wrenched his muscles and tore at his limbs, threatening to rend him apart. Deep inside his chest a cry of anguish remained trapped and formless.
It may have been ten seconds since his grip faltered—or ten days, he couldn’t be sure.
Time held no meaning here.
There was only the pain and the fear and the cold knowledge that he’d lost her.
Declan had been set adrift in the in-between, in the world between worlds, and he had no clue how to return without Alex there to guide him.
Always before when Declan teleported, his time in the in-between was fleeting. A split-second visit to a place beyond imagination. A place where he’d never remained long enough to know actually existed.
He knew it now.
This was where they traveled when they jumped. This was where they ended up, if only for a heartbeat. The relentless pressure they felt in that brief moment between disappearing and materializing somewhere else was this.
It was hell.
Declan surrendered to the pressure, waiting for an end, and thought of Alex.
Had she made it through? Had she survived? Or was she lost here, like he was?
Had his impulsive decision to grab hold of her damned them both to endless pain and darkness?
God forgive him.
He’d only wanted to protect her.
Declan thought of everyone he’d left behind. Of his brothers and sister. Of all the friends and family he’d once loved and then lost.
And then he thought of his past.
Of the rolling green fields of his former homeland. Of the Adirondack Mountains where he’d grown up. Of his old high school. Of the late nights and early mornings spent at the Corner Pocket. Of the dock on the lake.
What he wouldn’t give to see those places again.
A flash of red. The pain ended.
And Declan fell.
Two
Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia
Autumn, Five Years Ago
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Dr. Edward Li was not where he was supposed to be.
At this point in his career, he was supposed to be working for a major pharmaceutical company. He was supposed to be developing cures for humanity’s greatest threats of the viral persuasion, on the fast track to becoming a department head in his company’s genetic research division. He was supposed to be pulling six figures a year and driving a Benz.
He was supposed to be making a name for himself and changing the world in the process, not working as a glorified assistant for some halfwit Italian fresh out of grad school who called him “Eddie.”
Dr. Antony D’alessandro had been hired at the same time. They’d been up for the same position, but Tony had been the one to land it. Not on account of his immeasurable skill and experience, but because of his immeasurable “worth” to the Agency higher-ups.
Because, unlike Edward, Tony was a tried and true Top-Five Variant.
And that qualification counted for everything in the eyes of the Agency’s new head of the Department for Scientific Research and Field Applications, Dr. Dana Carter.
“Top Five” was a nickname given to any Variant born possessing one of the five abilities most coveted by the Agency—teleportation, shapeshifting, telekinesis, telepathy, and elemental control.
Tony was parked squarely in the elemental camp. As a fire-wielder, he possessed an impressive amount of both strength and control.
And while Edward himself was, technically, a shapeshifter, to call him such would probably rank as an insult to Mimics everywhere. Even the weakest of their kind could usually maintain a shift for hours at a stretch.
Edward struggled to hold any semblance for more than a few minutes before his own features began to seep through.
Hardly an impressive feat in the eyes of his current employers. He was so lacking in his abilities, most of his Agency co-workers treated him as though he were just another norm.
To them, he was practically invisible.
“Eddie, for the love of God. Find your feet.” Tony barked, his breath foggy in the morning air. “If we’re late this morning, it’s both our asses. Now get the bag out of the trunk.”
Swallowing a sigh, Edward climbed out of the driver’s side of his aging Toyota Camry and circled to the rear of the vehicle.
They had parked in a cool and dry clearing, an immediate contrast to the car’s muggy warmth. As Edward popped the trunk, an icy wind crept under the collar of his North Face jacket, chilling him.
Shouldering the bag, he followed Tony toward a trail head at the outskirts of the clearing, where frigid forest shadows replaced the pale autumn sun.
Edward worked to ignore the foreboding building in his gut as they made their way deeper into the woods. As the foliage thickened and their path grew steeper, he nearly succumbed to an inexplicable urge to turn around and run back down the trail.
Why would Dr. Carter have ordered them all the way out here?
The Agency decommissioned the Green Woods facility years before he’d even sign
ed on. It was a relic.
An empty relic, or so he’d always assumed.
“Gentlemen,” said a cold female voice. “You’re late.”
The winding path they’d been following had come to an abrupt end.
Edward’s gaze traveled skyward as he examined the steep cliff face of a mountain towering high above. It was as though the massive hill had been sliced straight down the middle, leaving behind a sheared wall of dark gray stone.
A metal access door was set into its base, rusted to a burnt orange at its edges. It was, for all appearances, nothing more than the aging entrance to an abandoned mine shaft.
Standing in front of that door, however, was the most terrifying woman Edward had ever met—their new department head, Dr. Dana Carter.
“I trust you brought what you’ll need for the procedure, Dr. D’Alessandro.” Carter frowned at Tony, ignored Edward entirely, and turned toward the metal door without waiting for a reply.
Reaching out to her right, she brushed aside the overgrowth sprawling up the side of the cliff face, revealing a hidden keypad.
She entered a combination in a blur of movement and the lock on the door released with a resounding click.
Tony pulled the door open, struggling slightly against the unexpected weight of the metal, and the Assistant Director disappeared into the darkness beyond.
Another series of top-of-the-line security scans and a second metal door—this one in pristine condition and far more massive than the exterior entrance—stood before them.
Edward’s brow furrowed in confusion.
That retinal scanner was new. It was the same model they’d recently installed back at the labs to guard the entrance to the experiments taking place on level three.
High-end safeguards for a defunct facility?
He gave a mental shrug. That was the government for you.
Edward had never been one for idioms. Raining cats and dogs, seeing the light, hotter than the surface of the sun. Such statements usually inspired little more than an internal sigh and a suppressed eye roll.
To him, so much unnecessary exaggeration served little purpose. He would rather people state things as they were, without the colorful—and often nonsensical—comparisons.
But that morning, as the light on the retinal scanner flashed green and they slipped into the shadows of the derelict facility, Edward had only one thought.
Silent as a tomb.
As they walked, lights came on one by one, illuminating an ever-lengthening expanse.
The Agency’s first bullpen. The headquarters for its original team, now left to gather dust below thousands of tons of rock, forgotten to everyone except the few Agents once stationed there that were still alive to remember it.
It was amazing to consider just how far the Agency had come in little more than a decade. From this single, backwater facility staffed by less than twenty people, the Agency expanded to six black sites in the US alone and thousands of employees worldwide.
And it was growing still.
The Agency began as the pet project of a Variant Congressman from Massachusetts, a joint CIA and British Intelligence program that culled the best and brightest Variants from all walks of life. Those names included former MI6 Assistant Director Jonathan Grayson and a then unknown 18-year-old whiz-kid named Samuel Masterson. Now the Agency was an international organization with more power at its disposal than many first-world militaries.
The norms didn’t even know they existed.
Though how long they could keep up that charade was anyone’s guess.
Variants had been hiding in plain sight for millennia, but in this world of ubiquitous smart phone cameras and viral videos, keeping their kind a secret from the general public was growing increasingly difficult.
The Agency spent every waking moment tracking and removing such posts on the Internet—or altering them ever so slightly to ensure they’d be outed as fakes. The work already occupied a giant section within the organization. They seemed to be the only department unaffected by the tightening of purse strings during this current economic downturn.
The Variant Protection Agency—known to most simply as the Agency—was a shadow organization like none other.
But even the most powerful forces had to start somewhere.
For the Agency, that humble beginning was Green Woods.
Desks were scattered throughout the room. Glass partitions separated each office allowing for an easy line of sight anywhere in the bullpen.
Everything had been left as it was.
The personal effects on the desks remained in place. Most of the men and women who put the items there in an attempt lighten the sterile mood were no longer alive to reclaim them.
Edward tried to shake loose his feeling of unease as he followed Tony and Dr. Carter toward an elevator positioned on the far side of the room.
This place was a tomb. A monument to the numerous lives lost to the whims of a madman with a God complex.
Edward knew well the fate of the Agency’s original team. The story was legend within the ranks of the organization. A tale told both to terrify and to bolster the commitment of new recruits.
“This is what happens without a proper authority in place to govern our kind.”
“This is what we’re training you to prevent.”
“This is why we exist.”
Edward swallowed a sigh as his interior monologue took on a bitter edge.
This is how we justify stripping you of your rights to privacy so that we can track your every move, is more like it.
As he stepped into the confines of the lift, he felt his pulse quicken.
He hated elevators.
It wasn’t the small space, necessarily, that bothered him. It was the sensation of being trapped that he couldn’t abide.
The doors slid shut and Edward readjusted the bag on his shoulder, sucking in a breath and holding it as they began to descend.
He tried valiantly not to squirm.
After a slightly alarming jostle of the cabin when the elevator settled into place, what felt like an eternity passed before a muffled ding sounded and the metal doors opened.
Edward blew out his breath as they exited into the corridor.
Damned elevators.
He came up short, the uneasiness doubling in intensity when he caught sight of what awaited them at the end of this particular hallway.
A disconcerting stream of possibilities drifted through his mind, each an attempt to explain away what he was currently staring at.
A giant blast door had been set into the wall at the end of the passageway.
If the exterior entry protocols seemed excessive before, they didn’t now.
You don’t put a 25-ton blast door in the basement of a hidden government facility unless you have something of significant threat you plan to keep hidden behind it.
The question now was, what? What was waiting for them beyond that massive twelve-foot by twelve-foot slab of steel and concrete?
Beside him, Tony was showing his first outward signs of trepidation. His puffed up demeanor withered around the edges as he hung a step or two behind Edward.
For her part, Carter was moving through the facility with the sort of assurance that suggested she’d been here before.
And on more than one occasion.
As she activated another retinal scanner, the blast door began to open, causing a rush of stale air to escape from the cavernous expanse beyond.
A wall of cryogenic chambers stood on the far side of the room, surrounded by monitoring equipment, computers, and a gurney.
A gurney that had recently been made up with fresh white linens. Suddenly, he knew what they were doing there.
As they approached, he inspected the wall of chambers. Only one of them was occupied.
He stumbled, then steadied himself on a nearby table.
“That’s not possible,” he heard himself say.
Dr. Carter appeared to be smiling. There was an unse
ttling coldness to the pale blue of her eyes. “I assure you, Doctor,” she said. “It is.”
As Edward moved closer to the chamber to get a better look at the occupant, his cohort remained frozen in place just inside the blast door, apparently unwilling to close the gap between himself and the wall of machines.
“But he’s… he’s…,” Tony stammered. “He’s dead!”
“Obviously not,” Edward said, inspecting the body that hung, frozen and unmoving, inside the glass chamber. Scientific curiosity had won out over his fear. “At least, not entirely.” He narrowed his eyes. “Is that a bullet wound in his forehead?”
Dr. Carter stood beside him, punching commands into the computer interface attached to the cryo-unit. “I would suggest, doctors, that you glove up and ready your instruments. This reanimation sequence will be complete in less than 45 seconds. Once the chamber opens, you will transfer him to the gurney, strap him down, and then collect no less than twelve, ten-milliliter vials of blood. I must stress that it is imperative you do not make any unprotected physical contact with the subject. Only your gloves may touch his bare skin. Is that understood?”
Edward nodded and crossed to the gurney and the bare metal table beside it. He unzipped the field kit and removed the necessary instruments.
Tony, meanwhile, was still staring dumbfounded and paralyzed on the other side of the room.
“Is that understood, Dr. D’Alessandro?” Carter repeated.
