by Quil Carter
He was sitting on the couch with a bottle of whisky in his hand, staring blankly at the fireplace with a haunting look in his eyes.
“Master?” I asked, and I began to remove my shoes and jacket. “Are you okay?” It was obvious that he wasn’t but the reason was beyond me. Why would he be upset that Nero was getting a grey hair?
Silas broke his gaze from the fireplace. He looked at the three of us, and I saw the ghostly expression turn into one of deep sadness.
And then his eyes widened, his hand gripped the bottle harder. But he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking past me.
I turned around and saw that Garrett was in front of one of the wall mirrors. He was looking through his short black hair with his tongue poking out of the side of his mouth.
“Oh god!” Garrett cried. Nero chuckled and walked over to him and peered down at his brother’s head.
“Yep, you got one too!” Nero laughed. “That’s what you get for teasing me, dickshit.” But when Nero looked over towards Silas, the smile vanished. “Kingy… what’s got you so spooked?”
Silas just stared at us, the blank look calcifying each feature on his face. I realized then he was holding something on his lap. I decided to walk over and realized that it was a photo album of us as children.
“You don’t want us to get older?” I asked to him quietly. “Twenty-five is young for grey hairs, Master. At least we’re not going bald, right?”
“Oh god!” Garrett cried again. “What if we do?”
“Garrett, shut up!” I turned and snapped. Then my attention went back to Silas. He was wringing the whisky bottle now. “It’s nothing. Actually, it’s neat, isn’t it? You’ve never got to see how your genetics would age since you stopped aging at twenty-four you believe, right? Now we can isolate those genes and remove them for future ge-”
“Shut up!” Silas suddenly screamed and he burst to his feet. “Shut up. Stop fucking talking, Elias!” His breathing began to quicken as his distressed state increased. “Perish was right. Oh fuck, Perish was right!” He grasped his hair and clenched it, his eyes wild. “You’re all mortal. You’re all really mortal. I’m going to bury my babies.”
Then it hit me. I should’ve seen it sooner. “You… you were hoping we were born immortals too, weren’t you?” None of us had ever died, and we were only a year older that Silas’s physical age. I think Silas had been holding out a hope that we were just like him… that because we were from his genetic makeup, the gene, if there was one, had gotten passed to–
Suddenly I felt a hard impact on my face, a blow strong enough to snap my head back and take me off of my feet. I didn’t know what had hit me, but as I stumbled backwards, my lost balance having me fall to the floor, coppery liquid filled my mouth.
Nero caught me, but the force of him grabbing my shoulders had the blood pouring into my mouth shoot down my esophagus. I coughed, shards of what could only be teeth draining down my throat like a flooded culvert.
“Why are you wasting time on new chimeras!” Silas screamed. He grabbed my shirt and began to shake me. I saw lunacy in his eyes, full blown madness. “I gave you the task to figure out how to make you four immortal. Why isn’t it done yet!? Why are you wasting time!?” He was screaming this right into my face, shaking me back and forth with a violent force. “You’re stupid now. You’re absolutely stupid now! Obedient and stupid, you fucking failure!”
“I’m sorry, Master!” I cried. Fear and submission gripped me. I fell to my knees, one hand cupping my mouth to try and stem the blood that was dripping through my fingers, the other one on the ground to keep me from falling forward. “I’m sorry, Master,” I said again. “I’ll do better. I’m unworthy, I’m a failure. I’ll do better.”
“Jesus Christ…” I heard Nero whisper behind me.
Silas raised his hand. I closed my eyes in time for him to slap me across the face, in the same place that he’d just hit me with what I now realized was a whisky bottle. Then he struck me a second time, and a third.
“That’s enough!” Nero cried to my shock. “It’s not his fault. He’s only doing what you fucking told him to do.”
I looked up, my face throbbing with pain, and saw Silas glaring Nero down. “You think you’re stronger than me?” he whispered coldly. “You think you can talk to me in such a way?”
Then Silas’s eyes turned black, and my brother suddenly screamed and fell to his knees clenching his head with his hands.
“No… no. Silas, stop!” I stumbled to my feet and grabbed his face. I directed it away from Nero, but in doing so, he was then focused on me.
I was okay with that. I’d do whatever I could to save Nero from the mental damage that happened whenever Silas used his abilities on us. My family had to be safe. I was the oldest, it was my responsibility.
If Silas is happy. The family is happy.
The pain ripped through my brain like my blood had turned to fire. Every blood vessel inside of my skull was an inferno, and the pain was excruciating enough that I could feel each one. He didn’t stop either. I laid on the floor screaming, my view of the carpet and their feet becoming distorted as my vision blurred and twisted like a faulty cable connection.
Then it was over. I remained on the carpet gasping, before slowly crawling to my knees.
Silas was only several feet in front of me, my brothers to my right. I crawled to Silas and kneeled in front of him and even though my world was spinning, and the pain in my head blinding, I bowed. “Forgive me, Master,” I gasped. Blood fell from my face and began making patterns on the carpet, like a saturated paintbrush being held over a clean white canvas. “I’ll do better. I’m unworthy, I’m a failure.”
Silas’s hands trembling at his sides. I looked up at him, hoping for any sign of forgiveness, but I saw only a mixture of anger and fear.
Then he turned away from me, picked up the whisky bottle that had fallen to the floor, and walked to his bedroom.
“Elish…?” Garrett kneeled down in front of me and put a hand on my chin. “Nero… I think his jaw’s cracked.” My brother’s eyes filled, and the last thing I saw was his face crumple before he put his arms around me and hugged me. Nero was soon kneeling beside me too, the same look of anguish on Garrett’s face.
But my own anguish wasn’t directed at me. It was at Silas and how upset he was. When Silas was happy, the family was happy. And it was my fault that I’d failed him.
I was stupid and useless. A poorly engineered chimera who couldn’t even fulfill his master’s wishes.
I didn’t deserve my master.
CHAPTER 46
I hooked the piece of skin and stitched it, then tied off the thin piece of wire. I let out a sigh of relief then, not realizing that I’d been holding my breath while I stitched the two pieces of scalp together.
In the background, I could hear the heart monitor beeping, so we hadn’t lost the patient. The black dog was lying still on the operating table motionless, his tongue sticking out of his mouth to allow the long white tube to slide down his throat.
Perish pulled his mask down and let out a long breath. “And now the part I hate…” he said quietly. He turned around and began to prepare the injection of sodium pentobarbital. I’d always hated the sight of that pink liquid, but today it was exciting to see.
We’ll either have a dead dog by the end of the hour… or the first manufactured immortal. What would be the most interesting about this, was that this dog was dying of cancer. His owner had requested for him to be put to sleep, but when approached with our second option… had jumped at the chance. It had been our happy medium since we didn’t want to experiment on healthy animals, but still needed viable specimens to test out our theories.
Honestly, I didn’t really have much hope. For the past year, my life had been devoted to figuring out how to make a mortal immortal, and every test I’d performed, every hypothesis… had resulted in death. Permanent death.
I was twenty-six now, it was 167 A.F and still I couldn’t del
iver to my master the formula for making his first generation immortal. I was a failure and I was stupid, and that fact had been cannibalising me alive for quite some time now.
“I know we’re close,” Perish whispered. I pulled the pale blue mask off of my mouth and watched him stick the needle into the dog’s leg.
Perish and Silas had both volunteered a large amount of their brain matter for us to experiment on. The born immortal’s resurrection started from their brain, and Silas had also told me that sestic radiation originated from there too. The key was inside of their brain matter, and yet unravelling the genetic makeup of these two was like trying to uncrumple a bunched-up spider web.
I could make chimera children with my eyes closed now. Any hair colour, eye colour, body type… we had brutes, stealths, intelligent, and science… but they would be born mortal and they would age and die.
My mind filled with doubts, doubts that had been stalking my footsteps constantly. The only thing I took solace in was that there was a way. Sky Fallon had found a way centuries ago, before the Fallocaust had even happened. But the secret had died with him; he hadn’t even told his brother Perish.
Somehow, I would find out how to do it. I couldn’t put my master through losing us.
Perish pet the dog’s head, a sad look on his face. “I know the poor guy would’ve been put to sleep anyway… I just hate being the one to stick that needle into them,” he said. “Thank you for your contribution to science, Bandit.” He checked his watch and I began to unhook the monitors from the dog.
It took anywhere between five minutes to half an hour for accelerated thermic recovery (or A.T.R) to kick in. That was the first stage of recovery for the born immortal. Their body heated up like an oven, their skin so hot you could only hover a hand over it when it was at its worst. During this stage, the brain was kicking in to its immortality mode. What was interesting, was that once the body got to a certain temperature, the A.T.R turned off and healing would resume at a normal rate, so if you put the body in a cold climate, it would take longer for the A.T.R to switch off, thus cutting down the time a born immortal needed to recover from his injuries.
There were a lot of fascinating things I’d learned about immortal healing. Unfortunately, since Silas had tampered with Perish’s memories, he didn’t remember a lot of what the scientists in Germany taught them about their immortality, and it was always testy asking Silas. But I was having a fun time learning myself, and had absorbed this new information like a sponge.
Five minutes passed. I had my hand on the dog’s nose, willing it with my mind to start heating up. Perish kept checking his watch and every time he did I saw more doubt on his face.
We’d made a serum containing Silas’s blood and brain fluid, we’d made an incision, then drilled open a small piece of the dog’s skull and had injected the solution into the membrane of the dog’s brain, the dog’s spine, his heart, and around the outside of his brain. This was our fifth try with different solutions, and each one had resulted in the animal in question’s death.
A year I’d been working tirelessly on this… and besides now knowing immortal healing inside and out… we hadn’t made any headway.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t a project that could be semi-successful, either it worked or it didn’t.
And when the clock showed that twenty minutes had passed… I knew that I would be having to tell Silas about another failure.
I looked up from the dog and glanced at my reflection in the metal table I was standing beside. The full-grown man with short blond hair and deep purple eyes, had bruises on my face, a stitched cut on my hairline from where Silas had thrown another whisky bottle at me, and a sore arm that had only recently had the cast removed. My poor master was so upset with my failures. I knew that he had to be in an agonizing state for him to abuse me so much.
But after he was through beating on me and calling me every name he could come up with, he seemed better, so I was glad to be helping him with that at least.
“That’s thirty minutes…” Perish said, and he let out a long breath. “I’ll record it in the log. You can wash up and return to Alegria if you wish.”
The disappointment weighed heavily on me. Why couldn’t I figure out this damn puzzle?
I knew I was close; I just wasn’t smart enough to figure it out.
“If we don’t find a way …” Perish said after I expressed my disappointment. “We can start working on creating born immortals for him. So at least once his chimeras are gone he’ll eventually have someone he can keep.”
The thought twisted my stomach. The last thing I wanted to do was create my replacements. Silas needed me and I was loyal to him. I didn’t want to have to watch him slowly detach himself from me as I and the others grew older. The prospect of that was agonizing.
Perish put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s only been a year and we have decades. We’ll do what needs to be done to make Master Silas happy.”
My brothers and sister might not understand my devotion to Silas, but Perish did. His coding had been wrong as well, and Silas had fixed him when I was younger. “We will,” I said, and I forced a smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
The ride home was a long one. I watched Skyland pass by with a heavy heart, seeing all of the men and women lurking in front of bars and hangouts, smiles on their faces and laughter on their lips. What easy lives they had. I was so worthless I couldn’t even make Master Silas happy.
I looked away from the Skyfallers and turned my gaze upwards, but upon doing that I immediately looked away. We were driving past the skyscraper that Julian used to stay in. It was still standing tall, towering over me with an overbearing presence that reminded me of Julian himself. That man had taken up every inch of my heart, coating and staining it like he’d been made out of ink. Even over eleven years later I still found my thoughts wandering to him, but when they did there was no pause of whimsical remembrance… only a rush of anger that made me want to throw things up against the walls.
Even now my pulse was sipping adrenaline, my breathing was shortening and my hands wringing around each other. He brought an anger to me that I couldn’t easily sort through, so I exiled him from my mind the moment he began his contamination.
And with a deep breath, I did it this time as well. I pushed him out of my thoughts, and instead looked forward to coming home.
Finn had my tea waiting when I arrived. He bowed, and asked me about my day once I’d settled in for the evening.
But when I told him the bad news, his smile faded and there was fear in his eyes. “Do you have to tell Silas?” he asked in a low tone. “Couldn’t you… I mean he doesn’t ask constantly, right? Just forget this failure?”
I shook my head no and walked to my bathroom. “I told him I’d tell him every time we got close enough to warrant surgery,” I said. I took my blister pack full of pills, several more added in the last year, and washed them down with a glass of tap water. “It’s a necessary evil… and I don’t want it to have to be Perish. He’s cruel to him.”
“He’s cruel to you!” Finn cried. I turned around with my water glass in my hand, caught off-guard by his sudden outburst. But strangely, his eyes widened. “You’re taking your medication?” He glanced to the clock and swore under his breath. “You should wait… at least wait for me to get Nero, so he can go up with you.” He looked desperate, Finn hated it when Silas hurt me. He still wasn’t used to it after all these years.
“Why… why are you so upset?” I asked. “This is my life, you know that.” I walked out of the bathroom and saw Finn’s shoulders shake. I put my arm around him and he began to sniff.
“Nothing, I’m sorry,” Finn said. He wiped his nose and eyes. “Will you let me get Nero? Please?”
I wanted to be the one to tell Silas myself, but it seemed to mean a lot to Finn for Nero to be there. “Yes,” I said. Finn looked visibly relieved. “It’ll have to be now since I just took my evening pills.”
>
That was all Finn needed to hear. He nodded once and then darted off towards the elevator.
I’d wait for him to get back, but my head was starting to swim and I needed to sit down. I hoped I wasn’t in for another bad reaction with my evening pills, most of the time I was just lightheaded and sleepy, but every once in a while, they just knocked me off of my feet.
Still with the imprints sanded off, and delivered to me in silver blister packs with the days of the week clear on them. I never asked what they were, and Silas volunteered no information. I just knew that they helped me; they helped keep me normal.
I sat down on the couch and began to watch television, enjoying the few moments of quiet that I got every evening. I used to spend a lot of time on my own, but since Finn came along I barely got a moment to myself. Not to mention the fact that we were swimming in little chimeras, even Felix was currently living with us, after having problems with his surrogate family.
I didn’t mind having Finn around me. I had no interest in finding myself a boyfriend, so Finn helped me not feel lonely and also aided in taking care of urges my body couldn’t control. I had a horrendously low sex drive, but occasionally the whim took me.
My first generation brothers were off sleeping with every man they found hot. Even though Nero had been dating Vinski for a year those two were always dragging home playthings for each other. Garrett had been dating someone but it had ended several months ago, and to help ease his broken heart he was whoring himself out to any cute boy with a nice smile. I was embarrassed for them. I held myself to a higher…
Without realizing it, my eyes began to droop and soon my head flopped back on the couch. I wasn’t sleepy though, I was quite awake, and yet my world was tilting around myself like I’d just stepped foot on a merry-go-round.
Another bad reaction… Why did this happen?
I rose to my feet to get myself a drink of water, but then something caught my eye.
The doorknob to the outside hallway and the elevator started to rattle. I stayed still, weirded out by it and wondering just what was happening, and took a cautious step back when the door swung open.
