by S. J. West
Freddy looked haggard. His usually crisp black leather Harvester uniform was covered in dust and blood. His hair looked unkempt like he hadn’t bathed in weeks, and his eyes looked sunken in and bloodshot.
“Yes, you probably should have,” I told him.
“I’d shoot you now if I wasn’t under orders to take you back to the Queen.”
“Where are Jace and the babies?”
“Where do you think?” Freddy asked with a tilt of his head like he was wondering just how stupid I was.
“I think they’re with her.”
“And the little lady wins a damn kewpie doll for guessing the obvious,” Freddy said snidely.
“How did you find this camp, Freddy?” I asked.
Freddy smiled, something I never liked to see him do.
“Lawrence,” he said simply.
“How?”
“Idiot was like a dog he was so obedient to the Queen.”
“Was?”
Freddy shrugged. “He’s dead. The Queen figured you might not kill him since you didn’t finish the job back in Roanoke. She laced some food she gave him with nanites programmed to release a high dose of radiation at a certain time. She simply followed his radiation signature to this camp.”
I realized then I should have listened to Jace and killed Lawrence when I had the chance. If I had done that one simple act of cruelty, none of this would have happened. Now the lives of more innocent people would mark a permanent stain on my hands.
I let my hands fall to my sides.
“Take me to her then,” I told Freddy.
I had no other alternative. It was my only way to find Jace and the kids.
I turned to face Ian, who still had a hand pressed against his shoulder where Freddy shot him. I walked directly in front of him and placed my hand over his wound to heal it.
“Get away from him,” Freddy ordered harshly.
“I will as soon as I heal his wound. Or are you stupid enough to shoot me in the back, Freddy? What do you think the Queen would do to you then?”
Ian looked at me. “You can’t go back to her. She’ll never let you leave this time.”
I looked into Ian’s eyes and saw his genuine concern for me.
He and I didn’t start off on the right foot back in Alliance, but since then we had become closer than I ever thought possible. I was touched by his worry over my welfare, but he had to know I didn’t have any choice.
“I have to get my family back and end this,” I told him, knowing Freddy was listening. I knew Ian understood the only way to end things was to kill the Queen. All I had to do was convince her she truly had her daughter back. It would allow me to get close enough to kill her.
Once Ian’s shoulder was healed, I turned to face Freddy.
“You can put the gun down,” I told him. “I’m coming with you willingly.”
Slowly, Freddy lowered the gun.
“Come on then,” he said, turning and walking out of the house.
“Skye,” Ian called out.
I turned to face him.
“Be careful,” he pleaded. “Your mother is one crazy bitch. There’s no telling what she has waiting for you.”
I nodded because if anyone understood just how insane the Queen was it was me.
I followed Freddy out of the house and through the field of wheat toward the outer edges of some woods. As I passed through the wheat, I let the tips of my fingers glide across the stiff tassels crowning the stalks. I closed my eyes and inhaled the rich fragrance of life. Jace’s last words kept me from completely losing my mind, and I did what he asked me to. I held on to the one image I had been allowed to see when my future self and Rose time jumped me to show me a glimpse of the life I would eventually have. It was like a movie inside my head where Jace was playing with the children on top of a hill and I joined them. The sun had been high in the sky and the trees bursting with the colors of fall. The air had smelled so clean and fresh it all seemed too perfect to be real.
I kept that image in my mind as I joined Freddy in the black hawk helicopter waiting for us in a clearing just past the stand of trees near the house. I replayed it over and over in my mind as we flew through the sky toward the Queen. When we landed in the Roanoke camp, I tightened my hold on the image and refused to let it go, even after Freddy led me through a large mansion, down to the basement, and into a room much like the cells I saw at the Biltmore Estate meant to keep those like me with powers from escaping.
Once alone inside my stark white prison cell, I lay down on the twin bed in the room and replayed that future scene again and again until I could almost feel the sun caressing my face.
I’m not sure how long I laid there until I heard the catch of the door release, forcing me to return to my reality. I sat up and looked at the now open door unsure if it was some sort of trick. When I heard the cry of a baby, I didn’t care if I was about to step into another trap set by the Queen. I burst out of the room and ran down the stark white hallway, barreling through a set of swinging glass doors. There I found Rose wrapped in a pink blanket lying beside some sort of control panel with a single red push button about the size of a baseball. Above the panel was a window of glass, but the room on the other side of it was shrouded in complete darkness, making it impossible to see what was there.
I went to Rose and picked her up, cradling her in my arms as I told her in a singsong voice that everything would be all right.
“Welcome back, Skye,” the disembodied voice of the Queen said to me.
I looked above me and saw the grate of a speaker embedded in the ceiling.
“Where are Jace and Simon?” I demanded.
“Oh, they’re here,” the Queen said, a smug smile lacing her voice. She knew she held all the cards and wasn’t above letting me know it.
“Let Jace take the babies away from here, and I promise I will stay with you,” I told her.
“Now you see, I just don’t believe you’re sincere in that promise,” the Queen said, “not in your current state anyway. No, I’m afraid I just can’t trust a word you say until I change you back to the way you should be.”
“Back?” I asked, rebelling against the idea of returning to my true Harvester state of mind. “And just how do you plan on doing that?”
The dark room on the other side of the glass window suddenly lit up to its full brightness.
I stared past the glass, transfixed by the sight of a bloodied Jace strapped into a large metal chair with a myriad of wires embedded underneath his skin. He stared at me with haunted eyes.
Simon’s desperate cry drew my attention away from Jace. Within the same room, Simon lay naked inside a clear plastic box sitting on a table fitted with a glass tube that ran from the top of the box to the ceiling.
“Now, Skye,” the Queen said, “you get to choose.”
“Choose what?” I asked, but already fearing I knew the answer without the Queen having to tell me.
“Choose who lives,” the Queen paused for dramatic effect, “and who dies.”
“No,” I answered quickly.
“No?” The Queen laughed. “You sound like I’m going to give you a choice. I’m afraid that’s not how this little game works.”
“I’m not going to play this game with you. I’ve offered to stay with you forever if you let them go. What more can you possibly want from me?”
“I want you back the way you were!”
The ferocity with which she said these words sent a chill of dread down my spine. It was then I knew for certain she would do whatever she had to, use whomever she needed, to revert me back into an obedient Harvester again.
“And how is killing one of them supposed to help do that?” I asked.
“I admit I’m not sure it will, but it certainly can’t hurt to try. I have a theory on how you and Michael were able to break the Harvester programming, and I’m hoping this little experiment will prove me right.”
“So I’m just another experiment to you?” I asked. “I’
m your daughter. Aren’t you supposed to treat me better than your other lab rats?”
“I will treat you better when you deserve it! You’re lucky I don’t just kill you now the way you’ve behaved the last few months. But I can’t completely lay the blame totally on your shoulders. I never should have let you see Ash and Zoe until their experiment was complete. If you hadn’t, I don’t believe you would have regained your humanity. I take the blame for that, and now I want to make it right. Skye,” I could hear a plea in her voice, “can you honestly say being a Harvester was all that bad? The power you wielded when you were by my side had to be somewhat pleasurable for you. Having people fear you and doing anything you want because of that fear can be addictive.”
“Having people love you and doing everything within their power to make you happy is more addictive,” I countered.
“That’s just your humanity talking,” the Queen said as if it were an excuse for my words. “What I offer you is everlasting. Love is fleeting.”
“You love me,” I said, hoping to reach that small part of her that she tried to keep hidden. “Is that fleeting?”
All I received back was silence.
Finally, the Queen said, “You have a choice to make, Skye. You can either save Jace or save Simon, but you can’t save them both. One of them will have to die.”
I realized the Queen wasn’t actually giving me a choice at all. Either death would break me. And that’s what she wanted. She wanted me broken.
“How is that supposed to make me into the Harvester you want?” I asked. “All I’ll feel is sorrow.”
“That’s not all.”
It was only then I realized what she truly wanted me to feel.
“You want my hate.”
“Exactly,” the Queen said with a smile in her voice. “If I can make you hate me beyond measure, I believe that will be enough to cause you to go back to the way you should be. So hate me as much as you want, daughter. It’s what I’m counting on.”
I heard the flow of water and watched as a stream of it flowed down the glass tube, splashing Simon and causing him to cry even harder while flailing his little arms and legs.
“You have a choice,” the Queen told me. “If you press the red button on the control panel in front of you, the flow of water into the box will stop and what’s there will drain out, but when you do that, the electrodes buried beneath Jace’s skin will send in random bursts of electric shocks. Some will be low voltage, some high. One setting will kill him instantly, but there’s no way of knowing if or when that will happen. So choose: let Simon drown and save Jace or electrocute Jace to save Simon. The choice is yours.”
“That is no choice!”
“You can try to keep them both alive, but eventually you’ll kill Jace. His body won’t be able to withstand the torture forever. And if you happen to hit the random kill switch … well, he’ll be dead instantly.”
“Skye,” Jace said weakly, looking at me through the glass, “let me die.”
I shook my head. “No. I need you.”
“Simon’s more important.”
“You’re both important,” I said to him, placing my right hand above the red button on the control panel. “Remember that I love you and remember what you told me about the future.” I looked over at Simon and saw that the water was about to cover his face. “I’m sorry.”
I took a deep breath, tightening my hold on Rose and pushed the red button.
Jace screamed out in pain, and I kept my eyes on the water level in Simon’s box. As soon as it was almost empty of water, I released the red button, giving Jace a moment to recover. When the water level became dangerously high again, I pushed the red button again. Jace’s body flailed against the chair, and I knew it was a higher voltage of electricity this time. I waited until the water was halfway down before releasing Jace from his torture.
I’m not sure how long I stood there trying to keep the two of them alive and trying to judge by Jace’s screams when he was receiving a high voltage and when he was receiving a low one. If it was low, I knew I could keep the red button pressed down long enough for the water in Simon’s box to almost drain out. When the voltage was high, I only pressed it down long enough to lower the water to a non-life-threatening level.
It was an impossible balancing act, and the longer I stood there, the more my hatred for the Queen grew. If I had wanted to kill her before, now I wanted to strangle her neck with my bare hands until her head popped off her shoulders. She was a sadist of the worst kind. Who, in their right mind, would make their daughter have to choose between the life of the man she loved and the life of an innocent child?
I felt tears of frustration sting my eyes when I saw Jace finally succumb to the pain and pass out. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Now I couldn’t judge the effect of the voltage running through his body each time I had to lower the water in Simon’s box. I had no way of knowing just how much I was hurting him, but perhaps that was a blessing in disguise.
“Skye, what’s going on?”
I turned my head to look at Ash standing by my side.
“I can’t keep doing this,” I cried, tears streaming down my face because I wasn’t able to hold in my grief any longer. “She’s trying to make me decide which one to kill, and I can’t!”
Ash looked at what was happening and did something totally unexpected.
He reached out and grabbed the arm I was holding Rose in.
CHAPTER FIVE
The space around me fell away and reshaped itself into a cityscape. The blare of a car horn made me jump, and I watched as a woman pushing a shopping cart full of groceries gave the driver the middle finger for honking at her. There had to be at least three hundred people frantically rushing around the parking lot in front of me trying to pack their cars and trucks with food, water, and other supplies as quickly as possible.
The anger within my soul stoked toward the Queen found a new target. I turned on Ash.
“Why did you do that?” I demanded hotly. “They could both die now!”
Ash shook his head. His jaw firm as he said, “No, she won’t let them die. She needs them alive so she can use them to torture you with when you go back. Now, she’ll have to stop what she is doing and wait for you to return so she can use them against you again.”
Ash’s words acted like a damp cloth on the inferno of anger I felt, effectively snuffing out the heat with cool reason. He was absolutely right. By transporting us to the past and away from Jace and Simon, Ash had successfully ended the Queen’s cruel experiment to break me. I took in a deep, ragged breath to steady my raw nerves and made myself focus on the new surroundings.
“Where are we?” I asked Ash, watching various people rush into and out of the building we stood beside.
We were standing on the sidewalk in front of a grocery store. The name of it was Wegman’s, and I vaguely remembered coming to this particular chain of stores as a child. A feeling of déjà vu assailed me as I realized this was the very store where we used to shop. The memory of smelling freshly baked cheddar bagels when I walked into the store and the sweetness of a fruit tart made at the dessert counter invaded my mind, bringing back fond moments I shared with my parents. Every Saturday morning, we would come to this exact store and do our grocery shopping. My mother would let me pick out the bagels for our breakfast and buy the tart as a special treat to be served in the evening after supper. They were memories formed during a time when certain routines could be counted on in life, a pattern which had been disrupted by the Queen’s quest for world domination.
“Rochester, NY,” Ash told me, surveying the chaotic crowd of panicked people around us. “My parents used to grocery shop here.”
I knew Ash and I had lived close to one another in our lives before the Harvester war, but never thought about the real possibility that we had probably seen each other before being paired in the Harvester breeding camp and didn’t even know it. In the old world, you would see people every da
y in shops, doctor’s offices, everywhere you went really, and never know their names until fate brought you together and introduced you to one another.
“My parents used to shop here too, I think,” I told him. “I guess since we time jumped here that means your parents are close by.”
“Yeah,” Ash said, looking uncomfortable all of a sudden, “most likely.”
“You don’t sound too thrilled about seeing them.”
“It’s frustrating to be so close but not being able to say anything to them.”
“Have you tried?”
“I’m scared I might change the future if I say too much. And I know if I start talking to them, I’ll say more than I should.” Ash shrugged. “So I just try to keep my distance if I see them.”
The sound of a civil defense siren sounded in the distance. Another siren, closer to our location, joined in its warning cry.
“You need to get us out of here,” I told Ash.
Ash reached out to grab the arm I held Rose in again but was jostled away by a rush of terrified people exiting the grocery store. True panic had now set in among those around us. Everyone during this time knew a warning siren either meant a nuclear bomb was about to hit the city or Harvesters were invading. Rochester was never hit with a nuke in the past, so I knew it meant Harvesters were close and gathering humans up for their own nefarious purposes.
Ash tried to fight his way through the crowd back to us. He stumbled but was caught by a man who grabbed him by the arms before he had a chance to fall to the ground.
I watched as Ash lifted his gaze and met the eyes of the man who had helped him.
“Sorry, son,” the man said, and I instantly recognized his voice.
It was Ash’s father.
Ash stared at his dad, eyes wide, mouth slightly open.
And then he vanished.
“What the hell?” Ash’s father said, but didn’t have time to ponder the strange occurrence for too long.
A line of Harvester trucks barreled into the parking lot, followed by about ten black Harvester SUVs. Even this early in the war, Harvesters simply viewed humans as livestock to be gathered. The vehicles they used to transport people to breeding camps and harvesting facilities were once used to haul cattle to slaughter houses. In the end, that’s all humans were to Harvesters—meat to be butchered for their own survival.
