The Hard Way (Box Set)

by Stephanie Burke

  “He can’t operate it,” one man said to the other.

  “But I am betting I can,” I sneered. I stepped to Luster’s side and placed my hand over his.

  The two guards froze in their tracks.

  “I am betting that it takes a certain DNA sequence to operate this gun, gentlemen,” I said. “And I am also betting that I have the sequence.”

  There was silence.

  Chuckling, Luster relinquished the gun without argument.

  “We will be leaving now,” I said as he began to back toward the door. “And I can honestly say that I haven’t enjoyed this visit, though there have been high points.”

  “Time to go!” Luster backed out of the cage and slammed the door shut.

  Smiling, I let out a small cry of joy and jumped to place a kiss on his cheek.

  “Why wouldn’t the weapon work?” He was finally showing some signs of curiosity. Maybe he was starting to believe that magic wasn’t the whole of the universe. He reached out and snapped open the bindings holding my wrists and I flexed them, glad to be free.

  “DNA,” I said as we crept from the room.

  I knew we had taken a chance, and that the entire outer room could be filled with scientists equipped with lasers and data gathering equipment, but our luck was holding. The room was vacant.

  If they had run the DNA tests on my blood, I figured there was a lab full of confused long-tunics right now.

  “DNA?”

  “It’s like…” How did you explain DNA to a person who believed that all things come from magic?

  But as I tossed ideas back and forth in my head, Luster led me through the room, searching in corners and around doorways, taking us to the exit.

  “Well?” He pushed me into a side room that was filled with tunics. Supply room, I guessed. He raised his eyebrow at me as he tossed me a tunic.

  As much as I loved the sight of his naked body glimmering in the artificial light of the rooms, it probably wasn’t a good idea to try and escape butt naked. Besides, his skin was beginning to shine and glow. As I said before, he was well named.

  “Remember you said that each of us had different gifts, that it made us unique?”

  “Yes.”

  I sighed in disappointment as the tunic covered his body. But then I got serious. We had to move if what I believed was true. “Well, DNA is what gives us those differences. It is like a signature that tells all about us.”

  He looked at me and blinked his eyes twice. “The thing that gives Glow the power to hide in the shadows or Glimmer the ability to talk to the trees, or me the power to move things?”

  He had it!

  “Yes! That is it!”

  “Then your DNA is not like mine.”

  “Not like anybody’s!”

  “But your DNA allows you to fire the weapon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you are one of them?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I froze at his statement. Now how did I explain this to him?

  “I am not one of them, Luster. I don’t even know who they are. But they are like the people from my world.”

  “How is this possible?”

  “I don’t know!” I sighed in frustration as I paced in the small supply room.

  “How did they come here? Are there more magic mirrors?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Luster growled in frustration, then walked over to me. He jerked me into his arms and held me tight. “We have to find out.”

  “I know,” I said. I felt like crying. I knew that we only had a few hours left, maybe less than that, and the prediction in the letters would come true.

  “We have to get to the magic mirror.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, resting my head on his strong chest. “But we have to get out of here.”

  Luster let me go and walked over to the rack of tunics. Pushing them aside, he touched the wall behind them. “This is wood.”

  I nodded and examined the texture of the wall. “Looks like it to me.”

  Smiling at me, Luster pressed his hands against the wall. It shimmered for a second, then simply ceased to be.

  “I can displace natural substances.” He held out his hand to me.

  Smiling, I took his hand and we stepped out into the cool night.

  He glanced back and the wall reappeared. My bet was that they would be wondering how we managed to escape. I looked up and noticed that the moon was almost at its zenith. Time was almost up for me, and I didn’t have any answers or the letterbox that I needed.

  A tear rolled down my face as helplessness overcame me. But if there was anything that being here had taught me, it was hope. I had to keep up hope. I pulled myself together and followed Luster through the camp.

  It was easy -- almost too easy. It seemed only seconds later we were following the trail back toward the forests. Luster reached out and touched a branch or a tree trunk from time to time, but we moved steadily forward.

  “I think the answers will be at the waterfall,” I ventured, following his lead. “What do you think?”

  “I think I understand why we could never use the weapons that we captured,” he said quietly as he moved us from shadow to shadow. “And I think I would give my nipple ring for a good sword.”

  Just like a warrior, I thought in amusement.

  Almost before I was ready, we were at the waterfall, the place where I had come through the mirror, where all of this had begun.

  “My parents left me that letterbox, Luster, before they disappeared doing some weird experiment.” I looked around the clearing that had become so important to me, and almost wept to think that I would never see it again. “The answer is in the box.”

  In reply, Luster stepped through the waterfall and vanished behind a curtain of clear flowing water. I knew he was retrieving the mirror. I knew that my time here, that our time together, was almost up.

  I looked around at the peaceful glade, remembering the nights when I fought back tears as I prepared to leave my love for another year. This glade brought both joy and sadness to my life.

  I sat on the familiar rocks and waited.

  “Mom, Dad,” I sighed in true regret. “Why did you leave that box with me?”

  “Because they were trying to stop us.”

  I whirled around, almost falling off of my rock, facing the man who had spoken. “Who are you?” I asked.

  He raised a torch, and I gasped in shock. It was the guard from the room. No! This man was taller. Surrounding him were armed guards, and they all looked alike.

  Then another man entered the clearing.

  “It can’t be!” I protested.

  I was staring at my father!

  Chapter Twenty

  Your touch, only the touch of your hand,

  The caress of your fingers

  The sound of your voice

  Shall save me

  --From the letterbox

  “Daddy?” I gasped, tears falling from my eyes.

  “Not quite.”

  I stared, my vision blurry from my tears as the man that so resembled my father pulled out the wooden box. “I should have guessed he would hide it here.”

  “He?” I slowly rose to my feet. “Daddy, what are you talking about?”

  “I am not your father!” the man bellowed. “We just share the same DNA.”

  But he looked like my father. He sounded like my father.

  “When we found a female Gen Ex 1 with my DNA type, I figured out what my predecessor had done,” he went on.

  I was stunned into immobility. I stood there and listened to the thing that wasn’t my father, and my mind reeled. There was only one explanation that I could come up with.

  “Clones?”

  “I prefer the term genetic twin, actually,” my father-not-my-father said.

  “What were you doing here?”

  “Where is the time machine?” he countered.

  “Time machine?”

  “Don’t play dumb, you fool
ish girl! I may resemble the man who sired you, but believe me, I have no loving fatherly feelings toward you. Give me the time machine or I will relish causing you a great deal of pain!”

  “Time machine? This is not another world, another dimension?”

  Both men laughed at that.

  “You have been reading too much fiction, dear girl! Wake up and join the real world. You are no longer in 3009, this is the year 5009.”

  My legs gave out. Instead of landing on my rock, I slipped off and hit the ground.

  “I guess the old man never told her much,” the guard look-alike said to the monster in my father’s skin.

  “Listen up, for I will tell you this once.” The man who was not my father began to explain. “Your father and his team made a time machine to come to the future to replenish the past. Problem is that all the radiation from your time polluted the fauna and flora. To take such species back would cause many environmental disasters. But while we were here, we discovered that several of the plants were not breeding. They were multiplying by some form of chemical cloning. They were replicating their DNA and adapting to the environment they found themselves in. Naturally, we had to try this process with human DNA. The results are these so-called rebels that have gotten away from us. But we will get them back, and with the time machine, we will make our way back to the past and take our places as rulers of that dung heap.”

  “My father would never agree that!” My voice was hoarse with shock. “This would have never occurred to him!”

  “That is why his constituents eliminated him and your mother, and the Titans were born.”

  “Eliminated?”

  “You don’t have to be alive to gather DNA, young one. The only unfortunate thing is that your parents managed to destroy our time window. We knew that they had to have another one, but your mother and father expired before they could tell us where they hid it. So we remained trapped like the original Titans, the rulers of heaven and earth.”

  “The Titans were defeated by their offspring,” I whispered, staring at the thing that shared the same DNA as I. I was ready to throw up.

  Both men laughed.

  “Too bad we need you alive. I would enjoy seeing you bleed,” my father’s clone said, all amusement suddenly washed away.

  I stared at him, but a glimmer of some kind caught my attention. Was there someone creeping up beside the two men? I quickly returned my attention to him, not wanting to give any notice that the men might be in for an ambush.

  “What about the people who live here? The rebels?” I asked by way of distraction.

  “That is what you get when you cross the DNA of a brilliant human with that of some of the plant life here. Play around with their structure, mutate a few genes, and you have the perfect soldier. Too bad they refused to listen.”

  “You used brilliant minds,” I added, trying to keep him talking. “What did you expect? If you didn’t want independent speakers, you should have used a lesser quality DNA.”

  “We used what we had, because of your father trapping us here. But the time for our captivity is over! Like the mythical Titans exploded out of Tartarus, we shall leave this rotting jungle and turn the barren wasteland of Earth 3009 into our home.”

  “Not if the mirror is broken.”

  They turned to look beyond me, and there was Luster.

  From the expression on his face, I knew that he had heard everything the men had to say. I also knew that he had figured out something while I was distracting them.

  “Look! It’s your son!” my father’s look-alike crowed to the Titan standing at his side.

  Then the final piece fell into place.

  Luster could activate the time window because he had something of the other’s DNA within him!

  It wasn’t the letters or the box that had brought us together! It was him, touching the mirror! His DNA and his voice activated the portal.

  In his hand, Luster held the mirror. It was a longish affair, wide enough to pull a body through, but rather plain, like the one on my dresser. But Luster held it in such a way that we all knew that he was going to throw it.

  “You don’t want to do that,” the guard’s look-alike said. “It is our window out of here, boy! Think of it. A whole new world. You have conquering in your genes. I planned you, Luster. I created the mixture that runs through your veins. It is in you to conquer.”

  “We will,” he said, and the guard clone smiled. “Conquer you.”

  With that, he flung the mirror against the rocks that stood beside the waterfall. The mirror shattered into countless pieces of glass.

  “No!” both clones wailed, but their screams of denial were drowned out by the loud battle cries of the rebels in full battle mode.

  “Like in legend,” I growled as I rose to my feet. “The Titans will be overthrown by their offspring.”

  I pointed, and the men turned and paled.

  There before them, a brilliant rainbow of glowing color, were the children that they themselves had created.

  The men backed away in fear, wanting to run away but having no place to turn. And their children were closing in for the kill.

  Epilogue

  With your touch you teach me

  You take me to new worlds

  Show me things that I never imagined.

  Touch me again, teach me all

  So that others will learn from us

  Be their guide, My Love

  Show them the way!

  --From the letterbox

  I lay huddled against Luster, still in quite a bit of shock.

  We had returned to the Citadel after the clones and their men disappeared under the wave of brightly colored warriors, all out for revenge. But there was still a lot that we didn’t understand. I figured that some things would never be explained.

  “How did you know I wouldn’t be sucked into the void?” I asked, snuggling against his chest.

  I wiggled as his large warm hands worked their way down my back to cup my ass. I held in a squeal as a wandering finger eased over the hidden rosebud there, making my body grow wet. I began to grind against his thigh.

  “You said it, Sinopee.” He laughed. I wiggled closer to that exploring finger. “It was my voice and my touch.”

  I murmured in shocked delight as that finger pressed inward and invaded my tight hole. His other hand moved around to pluck at my clit.

  “Your touch,” I gasped, my whole body quivering in delight. I could feel my juices flowing over his hand as he began to play with my body.

  “Pay attention.” His finger burrowed deeper, wrenching a moan from my throat.

  “I am,” I insisted. My hand slid up his chest to grasp his nipple ring. He groaned as I gave it a tug, his whole body shuddering in pleasure-pain.

  “Well, your parents gave you the letters in the box knowing that nothing would make you part from them, knowing that you would sit in front of their mirror and touch the paper, that you would feel connected to them that way.”

  He closed his eyes as my hand left his nipple with its ornament and slid down to grip his cock at the base.

  “Go on,” I insisted and purred as two fingers invaded my wet cunt.

  “So it was a safe bet --” He slid me to my back and hovered above me. “-- that the stuff about disappearing into a void was a threat to make sure that if you ever got here, you would not let the box fall into the wrong hands.”

  The head of his cock, leaking pre-cum in a slick trail, slid across my thigh and pressed against the damp fur guarding my weeping womanhood.

  “Yes,” I breathed, arching against him, trying to force his finger and his erection deep into me.

  “So if you ever got here, you could show us how to use the things the Titans left behind.”

  I froze at that. “The stuff… Oh shit yes!”

  As I paused, Luster took the opportunity to drive his cock home deep.

  “The… stuff.” He punctuated each word with a thrust.

  I screamed a
s my legs flew up to wrap around his waist, driving him deeper into me. His finger began a counterthrust that almost over-stimulated me, almost brought me pain. But I screamed and begged for more. The lines between discomfort and ultimate joy began to blur. Right now, any sensation added to the intense feelings crawling through my body.

  My world shifted, consciousness dropped away as my being became a thing of complete orgasmic delight. Colors swirled behind my closed eyes and each of his movements rocked me higher and higher.

  I could feel the sweat pouring off of me, felt his weight shift to the side a bit to grind against me, mashing my clit against his soft pubic hair and adding yet another thrill to my convulsing body.

  His thrusts became rougher, harder, as he grunted above me, setting a rhythm that my body had no choice but to follow. I began to shake as tension built and built. I trembled and arched up against him, every muscle straining for completion.

  Then it broke!

  I screamed as my body began to convulse around him. The muscles in my ass clenched around his finger as my inner walls tightened around his cock, milking him intently, trying to drain the life out of his body.

  He, too, cried out as orgasm took hold of his body, making him writhe and quake above me. The hot splash of his seed soothed me.

  “Sinopee,” he gasped. He settled, shaking in reaction, atop my still quivering body. He eased his finger free of me, and then I was engulfed in a tight embrace, our bodies trembling together as we both began to calm.

  “Teach me to be a Thinker.” He rolled to the side, keeping our bodies joined even as he pulled my head to his chest.

  “You want me to… use my gifts?”

  “Yes,” he breathed. “This science thing has to be understood.”

  “But what about the magic? Have you given up on it?” I stroked my hand across his damp back. His muscles still trembled.

  “I will never give up on magic, but I see the merit of science.”

  “Really?” I chuckled weakly. Damn, these sessions with Lust left me totally drained.