The Queen of Disks (Villainess Book 5)

by Alana Melos

  “Ah, you’re awake, and just in time, too,” the tall woman said. She nodded to one of the guardians. “Get her up.”

  It grabbed my arms and yanked me to my feet. I winced with the sudden motion, and nausea threatened with the fast view change. “Just kill me and get it over with,” I said, my voice oozing confidence. “I beat you before, and I will again.”

  At that, she snorted. “I don’t think so,” she said, checking her watch. “Not with my bracelet on.”

  I glanced at the suppressor on my wrist. There was a marking on it I hadn’t noticed before, which sort of looked like an inverted starburst. “These come off,” I said, lowering my hand. “You won’t like it when it does.”

  She laughed again, a dry, hard sound. A click sounded, and she smiled. “Finally,” she said. “I hate waiting for these windows, but that was excellent timing.”

  “Timing for what?” I asked, but I needn’t have. A silver gash appeared about seven feet off the ground, then energy rained down to coalesce into a portal. “Where are we going?”

  The guardian hustled me forward, following the tall woman as she stepped through. The disorientation from traveling dimensions caught me, but it was different this time. This time it felt as though things weren’t screwing up and throwing the world topsy-turvy, but rather that everything was unspinning like a twisted phone cord righting itself. I stumbled out into a lab, and something in me felt… peaceful. Some unknown tension I’d possessed for all of my life let go, and I finally felt like I was in a place I should be, some place that wanted me to be here. It was right. My world was finally right… and in a flash, I knew where I was.

  “Welcome to Origin,” she said. “Welcome home.”

  Chapter Seven

  That peaceful feeling did more to subdue me than anything else they could do. I marveled at how strange it was, at how right everything felt. The air smelled better. The colors popped out around me, crisp and clear. It was like I had been walking all my life in a dream, and now I was finally awake inside a nightmare.

  Cuffed and with my powers suppressed, I was a prisoner. The lab we had entered into was large, reminiscent of Interdimensional, Inc.’s portal room. I looked back and saw a metal doorway. A curtain of energy hung in it, shimmering as if it were a silver pool. Ripples spread across the surface, then it disappeared, leaving the smooth chrome doorway to stand empty. Unlike the other portal equipment I’d seen, this was sleek and delicate. Many stood around the room, all on their own pedestals. Most weren’t in use, but a few were. Some had agents flanked with guardians. Others had guardians alone, ready to go through on some assignment.

  The ceiling was vaulted, but only because there were more portals above us on a iron mesh floor. I counted three levels, all with their own techs and scientists attending them, those which were in use anyway. The guardian which held my arm shoved me forward, and I walked, falling in line with them.

  “Two this time, huh?” I asked.

  “You were… unpredictable when last we met,” she said. A scientist came to greet her, holding a clipboard.

  “Agent Jorde,” he said. Hearing the name ‘Jorde’ gave me a start, but I focused on his words. I had no time to figure out why that name meant something to me. “I see your objective was completed.” He marked something down, then fixed her with an intent look. “And 42-J?”

  “Dead,” she said, her thin lips twisting in distaste. “Long dead as expected.”

  The scientist made a face, then sighed. “That’s a shame.” He paused, tapping his pen against his thick lips. His ebony skin shone, but it was the intelligence in his eyes which caught me. They pierced me as he examined me like an insect. I shifted under the gaze, and did my best to look insolent and impatient. “More or less intact,” he said. “Though there’s some unusual brainwave readings.” He cut a glance to the agent. “You’re sure it can’t access its powers?”

  “Positive,” Jorde replied, scoffing as he doubted her.

  “Very well,” he said. “Hold it still.”

  One of the guardians grabbed my head and twisted it to the side so that all I could see was the drab grey floor. The scientist pulled out something metallic. It flashed in the light, then was gone from my eyeline. A second later, a sharp pain stung the back of my neck. I bucked away from it, but he was already withdrawing and putting the gun shaped tool away as the guardian let go of my head. “It’s tagged and the genecode recorded. Put it in containment, then go to debriefing. I’ll put it on the schedule for its medical inspection.”

  “It has a name, you know,” I snarked, shaking my head from side to side as the pain subsided. “And a gender.”

  He rolled his eyes and walked away from us. The agent gestured to the guardians. Even now in the heart of whatever scientific fortress this was, she wasn’t taking any chances. If I hadn’t have been hurting and pissed off, I’d have been flattered.

  “Jorde, huh?” I asked. It left a sour taste in my mouth.

  “You know the name?” she asked as they hustled me to what looked like a set of main double doors into the portal room. There were no guards, save for the guardians who wandered about, waiting for their assignments.

  “Not really,” I replied. “Emily… no, it was Richter who said it. He didn’t want to be around when you got there.”

  She laughed, but it was the hard not-really-amused laugh of earlier. “Of course he didn’t, the filthy Nazi,” she said. “He would have been terminated on sight.”

  I raised a brow. “You don’t like the Reich?”

  “No one likes Nazis except other Nazis,” Jorde said as she took off her shades and put them in her jacket. The doors opened and we stepped out into a smooth, featureless hallway. There were no pictures or decorations. The doors were like those in Star Trek, smooth and blended into the walls. Each one we passed had a plaque labeling it, but we passed by them too fast for me to read. The halls were very bright, almost but not quite hurting my eyes.

  “Why don’t you do something about the Reich then?” I asked.

  “So long as they stay out of our way, the official policy is that we’ve a truce with the denizens of Axis Earth and its children.”

  “Official policy of who?” I asked. I tried to drag my feet, but the guardian kept hustling me along, regardless of my wishes. Its grip was like iron.

  “That’s not really your concern,” she said, stopping in front of an elevator. The doors were smooth, but cast in gold rather than the silvery-blue of the hallways, setting them apart. They opened, and I was shoved inside after the agent walked in.

  Once they closed and the quiet whirring began, I looked to her. “Does it really matter? You’re going to kill me anyway.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said. “You’re just going to start doing what you were created for.”

  The wording stopped me. “Created,” I repeated. The moisture in my mouth evaporated, and my heart hammered in my chest.

  Jorde gave me a bewildered look, then smiled in a patronizing way. “Oh, did you think you were born?” She laughed as the elevator stopped and the door opened. “Oh my, that’s so precious. The guys are going to love this story.”

  “You made me,” I said, my voice tight. My head throbbed, and my eyes felt hot and heavy. It was hard to get the words out, yet all these other things suddenly clicked into place. ‘You’re just like me, Reece,’ Gerard had said, one more than one occasion… and he was a clone. Alistair talking about how bioengineering was an abomination to magic, since clones didn’t have souls. Me asking Malech if he wanted my soul, and his reply, ‘As if you had one.’ I’d thought he was talking metaphorically at the time, but he hadn’t been. I’d broken his rules in the Underground, which led to people being disappeared. Yet he’d given me a lifetime ban instead of even trying to take me. I didn’t have a soul to forfeit for breaking his rules. He’d told me straight out I didn’t have one, and I didn’t understand.

  “Well, how else?” she asked, the question snide. “
We don’t give reproductive capabilities to clones.”

  I grunted as if hit. It’s not something women talk about save to complain, but I’d never menstruated. It had been my normal, even though I knew better. I’d never given it a first thought, much less a second one.The depths to which my mind had disguised these oh-so-obvious facts now shocked me more than knowing the truth about where I’d come from. What else was I hiding from myself? Was it because of my mother’s mental tinkerings? It had to have been. The sheer horror of not being able to trust a single thought in my head struck me dumb. The guardian had to shove me along. My feet didn’t seem to want to work. My mind was stuck on those examples and so many others I’d willfully ignored. Jorde even kept talking, but I didn’t hear her. I couldn’t. I wasn’t real. My father wasn’t my father. My mother wasn’t my mother. What was I? My entire life had been built on that lie. My entire identity. I wanted to say it didn’t matter, but it did. I wasn’t… I wasn’t real. I was just a lie they’d told me.

  “Come along, 1073-J,” Jorde said, snapping her fingers in front of my eyes. Annoyance spread across her features, “Don’t make me neuralize you again.”

  The threat got my feet moving, but it was only out of the self-preservation instinct. “What are you going to do with me? Recycle me?” Wasn’t that what the did in the movies?

  “Recycle? Kill?” She shook her head as we walked along the hallway, passing people and guardians alike. “Oh, no. We’ll give you a thorough medical examination to determine how viable your body and genecode is and if it’s been corrupted in your time away. That’s first.” The corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled. “The first of many things to come.”

  “Genecode,” I repeated. My mind had gone mostly blank. Only the thought of not being real kept clanging about, echoing in my head. I didn’t even feel angry, which was a first. My rage had disappeared like a pricked soap bubble because I finally knew why I’d been angry. I’d always known on some level.

  “Oh yes,” she continued as we entered a passageway with windows on one side. “When 42-J escaped, she destroyed all traces of the project. All the data, all the tanks, everything…” She sighed, her expression turning wistful. “It was a great loss, but she left nothing to chance.”

  “42-J gets a gender,” I muttered, blinking a few times. I turned my eyes to the windows, looking for something to distract my thoughts, to throw my head akilter so all these words would stop repeating themselves over and over again. The inside of the building was featureless, boring, with nothing to distract me. The outside, however, was breaktaking. A perfectly manicured lawn with beds of fantastic looking flowers lay outside, going up to a delicate gate, wrought with some sort of metal into a fantastic curley-queue shape. Beyond that lay a sparkling city, lit up since it was nighttime. The lights whirled and shone, highlighting fantastic buildings out of a science fiction fan’s wet dream. Beyond that, a great shield of energy lay, stretching up into the sky which highlighted the darkness and stars without obscuring them somehow. I gaped until the guardian dragged me along once more. When I found my footing, I looked at Jorde and my mind latched on the next new thing.

  “This is Uptown,” I breathed. “How is this…?”

  “It never fell here,” she said, smirking. “Perhaps it would have… had 42-J not left us. Perhaps not. It’s impossible to say.”

  “My mother, you mean,” I replied. Those words had been said with scorn and hate and sometimes even affection many times over the years, but now they felt funny and twisted: a lie tripping over my tongue.

  She turned us down a corridor, heading into the heart of the building once again, but not before I saw the sign on the lawn which read ‘Nox’. How everything fit together stupefied me. Of course it would be Nox. I’d seen in Pangea’s memories they had done genetic experiments not just with plants, but also animals. The fight outside the wolf’s cell had been my mother and some other psychic, and she’d imprinted something of her presence upon the moss-wolf’s mind. I hadn’t recognized it at the time because the wolf hadn’t really seen her face. Now it made sense why Pangea had been willing to listen to me: some part of it recognized some part of my mother in me. Everything was a circle.

  “Your predecessor,” she corrected. “One of the early ‘successes’.” She came to a stop and I looked around. Cells like the one the wolf had been in lined the halls. Some were empty, but most were not. She waved a hand in front of a control panel. “In.”

  “So you want my genetic code,” I said, “since she destroyed what you had… but why alive? You’ve already got it, so why take the chance I’ll escape like mom did?”

  “That’s so amusing, but it’ll get tiresome soon,” Jorde said with a chuckle. “‘Mom’.”

  “Answer the question,” I demanded as I rubbed the suppressing bracelet.

  “I’m not the only one who’ll be debriefed,” Jorde replied. “If you work with us, it may not even be painful.” She gestured again, but I refused to move. The guardian had to throw me in and she shut the energy door behind me. “Unlike some others, I understand that you are your own person. That you’ve lived a life. The eggheads are only going to see the genetic legacy lost to us.”

  “Why not go to some other dimension and grab theirs?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that,” she replied. “The techniques we have are more difficult to use with lesser copies, with lesser results.” She smiled, looking almost kindly in that patronizing way. “Work with us, and you’ll be much happier. Work against us… and, well.” She looked meaningfully at the guardians with her, then back to me. “There are ways to ensure your obedience, though you won’t be as effective. It doesn’t matter to us since the next batch will be made for loyalty, now that we’ve recovered the lost genecode. It’s up to you how difficult and painful you make it for yourself.”

  With that, she turned and left, taking the guardians with her. I sat down on the floor and pieced together what I had, taking each thought and turning it over, trying to make it all make sense. At some point, my mother had broken into this lab, Nox Industries, not just once to fight the unnamed psychic in the hallway, but also a second time to take me. But why? For what reason? I couldn’t have been fully grown… could I have been? The uncertainty left me cold and shaking. And if she was here during that fight with the psychic, which I had the impression had been years before Uptown fell, then she couldn’t have been with my father in Prime the whole time, could she have? Did she travel back and forth? When exactly had she left and why? Had there been another of her in Prime? If so, where was she?

  I rubbed my head with the heels of my hands, trying to subdue the fierce pounding. The pervasive thought of my unreality kept intruding. I took several deep breaths and tried to empty my mind, but it kept looping around, running like a mad dog seeking a way out of a circular room. I sat there with my back to the wall, trying to set my mind at ease, telling myself I could think this over later, I had to get out of here now. I had no time for an existential crisis.

  The thoughts didn’t help. My mind kept worrying at the edges of what I knew to be real, making me wonder how much I’d overlooked, how much had I been forced to overlook. My hands slid down and I touched my face. My fingertips roamed over my nose and jaw, feeling the delicate bone structure. I didn’t look like her. If I was a clone, I should. A fragment of a memory swum up from the bowels of my mind, bursting like a bubble from a swamp containing a rotten stench.

  “Here,” I said, thrusting the roll of cash at the Doctor. “I want you to change my face. Keep resemblances, but I want it to be different.”

  The Doctor raised his thin brown eyebrows in surprise, but pocketed the money. “If you want, M--”

  “Caprice,” I said, interrupting him. “Her daughter. If you can, add in something to… look like my dad a little, I guess.” I frowned, rubbing my head as this headache wouldn’t go away.

  “If you want, Caprice,” he continued smoothly, picking up as if I’d never in
terrupted him. “It’ll cost more than this for what you want. It’s delicate work.”

  “I’ll be back, eventually. Being a mercenary is rough work,” I said. “I’m good for it. Just keep adding increments to my bill until it’s paid. I’ll never notice.”

  He inclined his head, and gestured for me to have a seat. “We’ll get started immediately, then.”

  His hands descended towards me, and I frowned. There was one more thing….

  I snatched his hand before he could touch me. “The next time we meet, it’ll be for the first time. Got it?”

  His other brow went up, but he nodded. “I’ve had stranger requests. Now, hold still, this won’t hurt at all….”

  The memory left me and settled into my consciousness, now mine for all time. I squeezed my eyes shut and rubbed my temples. The face change, the memory loss, and the headache. What else had she put in there that was now just coming out? I shook as my mind bled, oozing with half remembered fragments that I had been commanded to ignore. I wasn’t bad at mind manipulation, above average I’d say. Gerard was a master. She put the both of us to shame. There were commands and suggestions which had lain dormant for years, only to be spurred on under certain circumstances. She must have spent my entire life preparing me for… what? And why?

  I had to get my telepathy back. Being aware of the manipulation made it easier to find and remove. I’d tried to remove the block before and been cut to shreds, literally and figuratively. But I hadn’t known. I could start with reviewing my most recent memories, searching for any signs of self-deception. I could chase it down with painstaking slowness and rid myself of these alien changes, going in slowly and cool where I’d once tried fast and hot. I just had to get my telepathy back!

  Thrusting my hand inside my jeans pocket, my fingers closed around the aspirin bottle. When I pulled it out, it rattled with the pills inside. I still held the Clarity… unless the agent had replaced it with actual aspirin as a really unfunny joke. When I opened it and looked, those same pills were there, waiting for me. Funny thing that escape from the facility was the furthest thing from my mind in that moment. I needed to escape from something else far less certain and far more insidious.