The Skin Hunter Series Box Set

by Tania Hutley

  “What is it?”

  He turns his hand so I can see it better. “This is a high powered sonic pulse weapon. The Skins’ hearing is similar to that of a bat. This weapon is tuned to resonate at that frequency, producing enough feedback to rupture its chip.”

  “You made that weapon? And the scanner, too? Did you wipe the knight’s chip with it?”

  He ignores my questions, moving to one of the doorways that come off the hall. He walks slowly, like his wounds hurt as much as mine do. “We need to find President Morelle. I pushed her through here before using the weapon, so her Skin wouldn’t be damaged. She can’t have gone far. I made sure the elevator is out of commission, so she must still be in the apartment.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t want her Skin to get damaged?” My voice rises. “What’s going on?”

  Sentin turns back to me, and studies me for a moment with his head cocked. “I’ll show you,” he says after a moment.

  “Show me what?”

  “Her secret. Nobody is allowed onto this level. We’ll be the first in many decades to uncover what she’s been hiding.” He limps through one of the doorways that open from the hallway. Before, I heard breathing. Now it’s turned into quiet sobbing.

  The room I follow him into has no windows. There’s a vReal in the corner, and the largest holo I’ve ever seen in the middle of the room. There’s nobody in here, but the sobbing is louder. Could it be coming from inside the wall?

  Sentin runs his long, prehensile lizard fingers over the wall, then glances at me. “There’s a hidden door, but the trigger to open it isn’t obvious. We’ll have to smash our way in.”

  I give a reluctant nod. Though our Skins are large and strong, we’re both badly wounded. Backing up a few steps, I lurch forward and rake the wall with my front paws, punching a hole large enough to see through.

  There’s a small room inside the wall. Inside are two women, cowering against the back wall.

  One of the women takes a sobbing breath. Judging from her wrinkled face and gray hair, she’s probably in in her sixties or seventies. She’s as pasty as an Old Tritoner, and clearly not tweaked. She’s been crying, because her sagging cheeks are wet with tears. Though I’ve never seen her before, she looks a little familiar. Come to think of it, she has the same eyes as President Morelle. If Morelle had been born in Old Triton, this might be what she’d look like.

  The second woman’s face is impassive. She’s beautiful, with dark skin and blonde hair, and is obviously a tweaked New Tritoner, because her features are doll-like. Her gaze is on us, but her expression is so bland, we might not be here at all.

  Wait.

  The second woman isn’t a woman at all. It doesn’t smell human, and its eyes are glassy. It’s a robot. Humanoid robots are illegal, but still, there it is.

  “Felicity, come out.” Sentin’s voice is unexpectedly gentle. “We won’t hurt you.”

  The pale, gray-haired woman shakes her head, her eyes wide with fear and brimming with tears. “You’re monsters,” she says through sobs.

  I glance at Sentin. Felicity is acting like a scared child, not a woman. Who is she?

  “We’re not monsters.” Sentin holds his hand out to her. “We’re your new friends. Don’t you want to pat the big kitty?”

  The kitty? I’d growl at him for that insult, but it wouldn’t help the situation. Instead I lower my head, my eyes narrowed as I study the woman, trying to figure out who she is and how she fits into all this.

  “Go away,” wails Felicity in a little girl’s voice. “Where’s my sister? I want my sister.”

  “Who’s her sister?” I ask Sentin.

  “She doesn’t have one.”

  His cryptic reply only makes me more confused. Surely the woman knows if she has a sister?

  Could President Morelle be her sister? On one hand, it would explain why they have the same eyes. But if Morelle had living relatives, surely everyone would know? As head of the Triton’s biggest corporation, everything she does is newsworthy.

  “Where’s my sister?” demands Felicity again. She leans on the robot, and it staggers a little, but doesn’t use the wall for support like a human would. Instead it rebalances by bending its knees in a decidedly non-human way.

  “Your sister’s hiding,” says Sentin. “Do you know where she likes to hide, Felicity? We’re playing a game and we need to find her.”

  The woman bites her lip, looking uncertain. After a moment, she shakes her head.

  “What’s your friend’s name?” Sentin nods at the robot.

  Felicity grabs its hand. “Annalisa.”

  The robot responds by smiling at Felicity. “You’re my best friend, Felicity.” Its voice sounds surprisingly human. “Shall we play?”

  “What’s your sister’s name?” Sentin asks. “Is it the same as yours? Do you call her Felicity too?”

  Felicity shakes her head. “No, silly. Her name is Poppa.”

  “Where’s Poppa hiding? Is there another secret room like this one?”

  The woman shrinks behind her robot. She either doesn’t know the answer, or doesn’t want to tell us.

  I turn to Sentin. “Explain,” I demand. “What’s going on?”

  He lowers his voice. “Edward Morelle founded the Morelle Corporation way back in nineteen ninety-one. He was a medical researcher who started out making specialized artificial organs and replacement body parts, but eventually expanded into a lot of other areas. Over the next few decades, he built it into a large and wealthy company.”

  “Thanks for the history lesson, but everyone knows that.”

  He continues as though I hadn’t interrupted. “Edward had a daughter, but she was a disappointment to him. A hedonist who indulged in risky behaviors. At twenty-two, his daughter gave birth to a child of her own. A daughter she named Felicity.” He nods toward the old woman in the hidden room. “Edward’s granddaughter.”

  “But President Morelle is Edward’s granddaughter,” I say with a frown. “Edward left his company to her. After he died, she built it up even more, making it the biggest and most powerful corporation in Triton.”

  “Unfortunately, Felicity was exposed to recreational drugs in the womb, and was born mentally impaired. Her grandfather kept her secluded from an early age so nobody would discover the truth.”

  I blink at the woman in the hidden room. “If that’s Edward’s real granddaughter, then who’s the Felicity Morelle everyone knows? Who’s the woman he left his company to? The one using the Skin, who’s been running the Morelle Corporation all this time?”

  “Edward Morelle didn’t die. He’s still running the company he founded.”

  I gape at Sentin. “That’s impossible. He’d be, what? A hundred and twenty? A hundred and thirty? There’s no way he’s still alive.”

  “Shortly after his ninety-eighth birthday, Edward Morelle faked his own death. Afterward, he ran his company from this apartment, using an avatar. In the early days, he used a digital simulation of his granddaughter. A synthesized version he wanted the world to see.”

  “She was just a hologram?”

  He nods. “But Edward aimed to make her more than that. The transferal technology was in its infancy, but he could see its potential. He knew he’d eventually be able to manufacture a Skin and appear in public as Felicity.” He motions to the woman in front of us. “His version of Felicity, that is. Nobody knows the truth about his real granddaughter.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Around fifteen years ago, Director Morelle emerged from her apartment for short public appearances. The technology wasn’t yet perfected, and there were occasional glitches. She collapsed more than once and blamed it on illness. It’s only thanks to Edward’s dogged determination that the technology’s come as far as it has so quickly.”

  “He’s been using a Skin for that long?” I shake my head. “But why fake his death at all? Why not just keep running his own company?”

  “He was facing discrimina
tion due to his advanced age, and I suspect his board of directors were pressuring him to find a successor. When we find him, feel free to ask him.”

  “He’s here?”

  Sentin gives me one of his slow blinks. “Where else would he be?”

  I look around, half expecting to see an ancient man stagger out of the nearest doorway. “Then where is he?”

  “We need to find him, and his Skin. All communications to this level are blocked, but Edward may have a way to contact his knights from here.” Sentin raises his voice, addressing the woman in the hidden room again. “Are you sure you don’t want to play hide-and-go-seek, Felicity? Poppa is hiding somewhere, and she wants you to find her.”

  He turns to me again. “The woman she knows as Poppa—the one she thinks is her sister—is the president’s Skin with Edward operating it. Felicity’s probably never seen another real person. Her robots take care of her.”

  The woman steps forward, leaving the robot behind, but still looking wary. “I want to play.”

  “You want to find your sister?”

  She nods and touches a switch. The battered remains of the wall swing out like a door, forcing both Sentin and I to limp out of the way. Felicity edges out of the room, peeking into the hallway. She stops when she sees the armored bodies of the knight soldiers littering the floor, and her eyes widen with shock. “More monsters. Are they broken?”

  “They’re sleeping. They won’t hurt you.”

  But she’s already retreating back into the safety of her secret room. With tears in her eyes, she buries her face in the robot’s neck.

  “We’ll have to find President Morelle on our own,” says Sentin. “We’ll start at the far end of the building and work down.” I follow him through the toy room, into Felicity’s bedroom where wind is still howling through the broken window. My human body is lying where I left it, but it looks even worse now. My white clothes are sodden with blood, and so is the rug underneath me. My lips are so pale they’re almost blue.

  “You need urgent medical attention.” Sentin crouches over my body and gently tugs my shirt with his elongated reptile fingers. It’s so heavy with blood it barely moves. “Without treatment, you could die.”

  My stomach clenches. After watching Doctor James slice me up, I swore to take better care of my human body. Now look what I’ve done to it.

  “How long do you think I’ve got?”

  “I’m not a doctor.” He stands up. “Let’s finish this. The clock is ticking.”

  I limp after him down the hallway, my heart thumping. I can’t stop thinking about my human body, and how I can’t even feel myself dying. At any moment, I could just keel over and that would be it for me. It seems so wrong. The first time I transferred into my Leopard Skin, I stopped wanting to be human. But now I’d give anything for my human body to be whole again. I hate having to walk away from it.

  A muffled bang echoes from under our feet. “What’s that?” Even as I ask, there are more loud thumps.

  “I assume another squad of President Morelle’s knights are coming up here.”

  “How?”

  “It sounds like they’re pulling down the ceiling of the room below us. Then they’ll probably blow a hole through the floor.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Longer than they think. Edward built this apartment specifically to keep Felicity locked away. I’m confident the floor is extra thick, both for sound-proofing and for security.”

  “Okay,” I say, relieved. “That’s good.”

  “But they will certainly manage to get through it,” Sentin adds. “It won’t withstand a large explosive charge.”

  I draw in my breath. If they’re willing to blow the place up to get in, we’d better hurry. “How big is the apartment?” I ask.

  “We’ll need to look for more hidden rooms. It’ll take time.” He glances back at me. “Stay alert. Edward Morelle may intend to ambush us. He wasn’t exaggerating when he said his Skin was stronger than ours.”

  It’s weird thinking of President Morelle as male. All this time, he’s been using a female Skin. I would never have guessed it.

  “His Skin is strong, and we’re both already injured,” I say. “What’s our plan when we find it?”

  Sentin holds up the scanner. “We need to wipe Edward Morelle’s chip before his Skin can stop us.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The apartment is enormous. Ignoring the muffled thumps and bangs coming from the floor, Sentin and I limp through the living room, then through a dining room and kitchen. We pass a library filled with real, old-fashioned books, a gymnasium, several bathrooms, and a bedroom that contains closets full of Morelle’s business suits. We even go past a swimming pool.

  We also see several more humanoid robots. In the kitchen is a chef. The gym has its own personal trainer, and two lifeguards stand to attention by the swimming pool, ready to rescue any swimmer who might need saving.

  Passing by so many humanoid robots, I find myself agreeing with the reason they were made illegal. They look like real people, only they’re not at all surprised to see a giant, blood-covered reptile and leopard padding through their domain. Some greet us with a smile and a cheery ‘Hello’. Others ignore us. They’re all as creepy as hell.

  Felicity’s old, and for her entire life, the robots must have been her only companions. It’s such a sad thought, I try to push it out of my mind.

  On our way past the swimming pool, Sentin asks one of the lifeguard robots if it knows first aid, and when it says yes, he sends it to Felicity’s bedroom to patch up my human body and give me plasma. I only hope the robot knows what it’s doing and doesn’t make things worse.

  At the far end of the living room is a staircase that takes us up to a rooftop garden with a glass ceiling and an incredible view of both Triton and Deiterra. In the middle of the room, a giant garden bed is filled with more flowers than I’ve ever seen, all exploding in a riot of color. I drag in a lungful of perfume, so sweet-smelling it makes me dizzy. I couldn’t have imagined a place like this, not in my wildest dreams. It’d be like stepping into heaven, except for the robot gardener on its knees in the corner, tending the plants.

  “What now?” I ask Sentin. “He’s obviously not up here.” I flick my ears toward the glass windows surrounding us.

  “I’ve been looking for walls of sufficient thickness to contain another hidden room. It’s impossible to measure the thickness of some, so we may have to start breaking through walls.” He sounds annoyed. “That will take time we don’t have.” He turns, and I follow him back down the stairs and through the long hallway, to the small room where Felicity is still hiding with her robot, sitting on the floor with her arms around her drawn-up knees. Her robot has mimicked her pose and is sitting the same way. In that pose it looks less human because its back is so straight.

  “Do you know of any other secret hiding places?” Sentin asks Felicity.

  She shakes her head, clutching onto her robot’s arm.

  “Think hard. Don’t you want to find your sister?”

  While Sentin questions Felicity, I limp into the next room. We found Felicity because fear made her breathe loudly, and our Skins have sharp hearing.

  Morelle’s Skin needs to breathe too. It’s made from living tissue, with a heart and lungs. Though I doubt Morelle will pant with fear, I still may be able to hear it.

  I start at one end of the house and press my ear against every wall, listening intently. In the library, shelves cover the walls. There are hundreds of books, each probably worth a fortune. Books made from real paper are rare and expensive.

  But I can’t listen through the books. Wincing at the way the movement hurts my wounds, I swipe them off the shelves and let them crash to the ground. Then I break enough shelves so I can press my ear against the bare wall.

  “Sentin.”

  Though I don’t call loudly, his hearing is as sharp as mine, and he comes at once.

  “I hear a machine humming.
” I flick my ears toward the space I’ve cleared. “Through there.”

  He bends so his mouth is close to my ear, then whispers. “His Skin will be waiting in there. I need you to keep it busy.”

  Though he keeps speaking of it as a man, I can’t think of the Skin as anything other than the same Director Morelle who wanted to experiment on me, the woman who ordered my brother to kill Doctor Gregory. I can’t think of it as Edward Morelle, not yet. That Edward could still be alive, and is the woman I’ve come to hate, seems too strange to be real.

  I let out a low growl. “Keep her busy? What will you be doing?”

  Sentin holds the scanner up in his elongated reptile fingers. ”Wiping Edward’s chip.”

  I nod, then wince. “I won’t be able to put up much of a fight. Don’t take too long.”

  Sentin doesn’t respond. He’s studying the wall that I’ve mostly cleared of books. After a moment he moves to a seam between two wall panels. He rips more shelves off the wall, then runs his long fingers along the place the panels join. Eventually, he shakes his head. “I can feel where it opens, but Edward must control it with his band.” He glances at me. “Ready to break through?”

  I nod.

  He steps back a little. “One. Two. Go.”

  We both stagger to the wall rather than launch ourselves at it. I plow my shoulder into it, and feel the wood splinter and break. It gives way more easily than I’d expected, and I stumble a little, falling forward into the room behind the wall.

  Hands land on me, pulling me further in. They yank me across the floor and slam me into the wall. My head hits something hard and pain explodes in my skull. My vision swims, and for a moment I don’t know whether I’m upside down or the right way up.

  Something crashes. More wood breaking? When my vision clears, Sentin’s holding a broken board. President Morelle’s shirt is torn and blood is dripping down her side. Behind her is what looks like a giant glass coffin surrounded by monitors and cables.