by Quil Carter
Even after the orgasm faded I remained inside of him. The two of us were panting heavily, coated in sweat and attempting to catch our breath. Finn was grasping for dear life onto the headboard of the bed, and my body was leaning over him.
Finally, I removed myself from him, with the intent to take him again after my breath was caught. But when I pulled out an saw a faint streak of red, I decided to let that be it for tonight. I didn’t want my new taste for power to hurt him, not when I had sexual partners in mind that I would be more than happy to tear to ribbons.
I laid down on the bed and put my arms behind my head. I looked up at the ceiling and entertained myself with exactly what I’d been doing during the day: plotting and planning. My mind was clearer though, which I enjoyed; even though I disliked sex for the most part, I found myself at my intellectual best after releasing that built-up energy.
However, just when I was mentally planning out how I would weevil my way into my siblings’ lives, I heard Finn shift onto his side… then continue to wiggle himself over until he was pressed right up against me. A hand then shyly crept up my side, then rested on my chest.
I adjusted myself so my arm was underneath his head, and when we were settled, I heard a satisfied sigh. He was silent after that, knowing I preferred quiet after sex, but my mind was louder than ever.
It only had one question.
Did he love me?
The question stuck to my lips as I watched him in the darkness, watched him out of the corner of my eye as his body began to slowly unwind and relax. If this was true, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do about it.
Or honestly, how I felt.
I loved Finn. He was my sengil and he’d been taking care of my needs for over a decade. Not only that, Finn had been fighting, alongside my siblings, for my mind to be reinstated. Finn had always been in my corner.
But my time under Silas’s mental guard was an emotional and mental prison. There was no room for feelings of love to develop. I was Silas’s slave and my love and devotion was only for him.
I couldn’t even begin to sort out how I felt for Finn. I shared a bed with him, we were together always, we ate together, took care of the younger chimeras together, we spoke freely to each other, nothing held back, no secrets kept or promises broken. Finn was someone I could rely on for everything I needed, and his loyalty was without bounds.
Things were about to get complicated… weren’t they?
I wanted to ignore this. I really did. But I soon found myself compelled to get to the bottom of it. My campaign right now was to draw myself closer to both my enemies and my friends, and to ignore this odd display would be the opposite of what I was trying to achieve.
That and… I think I wanted to know.
“Finn?” I said, my voice breaking up the heavy silence that had paired well with the milieu our intimacy had brought to the room.
There was nothing. I looked down at him and saw that his eyes were closed. But I knew he wasn’t asleep, his heart rate was speeding up and rather quickly.
“Yes?” he said finally, his voice small, a little mouse hiding behind a grandfather clock hoping that the curious cat could not see it. His heart was pounding now, I could feel it thump my side, throwing itself against his ribs in a vain attempt to get far away from the question he most dreaded.
But even though my brain was standing next to my heart, going over what I would say like my mind was a professor and my heart a remedial student. My heart wouldn’t let such rehearsed words come forth, and since I didn’t know just what I wanted to say… in the end…
“Good night, sleep well.”
In the end, I said nothing.
The next two weeks went by quickly. My time was spent in the laboratory, making sure Skyfall didn’t implode on itself, and any free time I was given was spent thinking about the many steps in my campaign towards both Silas and Julian.
Silas had been distracted considering we were not only chasing terrorists and watching over the bridge being repaired, but there was another car bombing several days ago which killed an elite and wounded his cicaro. This elite happened to be a popular one as well, so demands were on the thien force to catch the vermin that was responsible for the bombings and have them brought to Stadium for their judgement.
Julian, on the other hand, hadn’t been seen since last week. He’d taken the guns and ammunition I’d promised him and a ride to the outskirts of a borderlands town called Saltland and I hadn’t heard from him since. Finn had his fingers crossed that he’d come upon some sort of trouble and had been killed, and since the notion put a smile on his face, I did nothing to dissuade him otherwise.
So with Silas and Julian both preoccupied with their problems, I was deep in the greywastes inside of the Kreig laboratory. I was meeting with the head scientist there, a man named Kratz who had only been working on the project for the past five years. He was my age, which would allow him to relate to me easier, and he was a handsome man as well, who’d mentioned several times the low quality of greywaster men and jokingly requested I send over a cicaro for him. His humour was irritating and I didn’t overly care for the man, but my end goal was for him to become comfortable around me so I could have easy access to information regarding the Sky clone, so how I personally felt about the idiot was irrelevant.
I wanted to do an encore of my previous Sky clone tampering. Obviously, what was wrong with the genetic text had been figured out, to my dismay. But that being said, I wasn’t planning on merely fucking up some code… I wanted to test out my newfound intelligence, and come up with something a little more creative.
“You would think that greywasters would brew a good wine, but you’d be wrong,” Kratz said behind me. I looked at the reflection of the steel mother and saw Kratz taking a shot from a metal flask. He grimaced, then wiped his mouth. “I’ve gone back to just straight whisky, at least they have that on tap. Greywine is what they call their wine. Did Dek’ko name it that? Or is it just another thing those idiots want to call grey.”
“The wine kits that Dek’ko sells do not have names,” I responded, imagining myself at home drinking tea and not miles and miles away conversing with a retard. “Nor do the beer kits, or whisky kits, or any other kit that Dek’ko sells. They name it themselves.” Dek’ko had introduced its line of alcohol kits long before I was born, originally used as a hook to get the developing towns to become blocks controlled by the Crown. The greywasters were multiplying and spreading out, and Silas wanted to maintain control over his people. As time went on, distilleries were made that may or may not require the kits, but with the growth of greywaster towns came the need for more food, and now Ratmeal was the big draw to make your town into a block.
“Thought as much,” Kratz said. “Maybe the place would be a bit more tolerable if they called it Sunshine Rainbow Land instead of the greywastes, just saying.”
I closed my eyes for a second, and took in a deep breath. “So what progress are you showing currently?” I asked, trying to get to the root of why I was there in the first place. Garrett and Nero had accompanied me on this outing, since Silas didn’t wish for us to go by ourselves, and Nero was wanting to get back to Skyfall before dark.
“Tons!” Kratz said. “The heart I’ve been able to code is four times stronger than that of a normal arian. I’m sure the fetus is going to survive to birth, and once we get that far… well, Silas can decide what to do.” He was referring to the very real fact that unless the child dies and resurrects, there was no sure way to know if he was immortal.
“Indeed,” I nodded. I absentmindedly walked behind Kratz’s open laptop, showing me lines of genetic code, and behind it, pages and pages of notes. I recognized the notes and the code of course, I myself had poured over it for years trying to narrow down all the differences between Sky and Silas’s DNA. The scientists before me had done a fair job doing the same, and it was from that research that me and my siblings had come into existence. Once they found what the former scientists had
altered and where it was, it was easier to figure out just what had to be altered and manipulated to create Silas’s chimeras. “It looks like you’re doing a good job here,” I said, deciding to add some praise. “When you’re near ready to implant the Sky clone. I’d like for you to contact me through my remote phone.”
“Oh, no problem at all,” Kratz said. “I’m not sure when it’ll be… I know what happens to scientists who fail so I want to be sure before I use up that brain matter. But once I do, Silas will be the first to know, and you as well.”
Dammit. It really couldn’t be that easy, could it? I needed to tread carefully. I wanted this knowledge first, before Silas. Everything that Silas knew, I wanted to know first. And I needed free access to this laboratory as well. Julian was right, the Sky clone project was a ticking time bomb to another one of Silas’s breakdowns, and I couldn’t be caught off-guard when it happened. God damn why did making a mortal into an immortals have to be so difficult? If it wasn’t for that damn project it would be me in Kreig and not this imbecile.
But nothing could be done about that. All I could do was keep a close eye on this lab, and that meant cozying up to Dr. Kratz.
My ticket to getting in with Kratz was soon delivered to me on a silver platter. Just as my eyes shifted from the laptop to Dr. Kratz, a large grey main coon cat hopped up onto the metal table the computer was resting on, and chirped at me.
“Oh, isn’t he beautiful!” my brother Garrett suddenly gushed. I looked and saw Garrett in the doorway of the research room we were in, his black suit and trousers covered in dust and his leather shoes now dull and stained. He’d been poking around Kreig with Nero from the looks of it, but must’ve gotten bored exploring. Either that or Nero got bored and started harassing him.
“Thank you,” Kratz said, and I observed with fascination not only a rise in his pulse, but a flush come to his cheeks as well. “His name is, ah, Flask. Stupid name I know.”
“I love it!” Garrett crowed. He strutted over to Kratz and flashed his stupid pretty boy smile. Garrett was still deep into his primped, snobbish bureaucrat stage of dressing and thought that acting old fashion was the sophisticated thing to do.
“What an adorable boy! I’m so glad that main coon cats survived, they’re such handsome little lynxes, aren’t they?” Garrett continued to dance around the grey tiger-striped cat. I stepped back to observe them, hearing Nero bang around Kratz’s kitchen for reasons I wasn’t aware of, most likely trying to find something alcoholic.
“Do you have any cats?” Kratz asked. A stupid question. It was well-known throughout Skyfall that all chimeras were cat people. Yes, we had dogs, currently we had a beagle dog named Bingo and Nero had a rottweiler he kept in Cardinalhall, but at our cores, we were cat lovers; all of us.
“Yes, I have three right now,” Garrett said happily, his hand petting the attention-loving main coon who was swirling around and nudging his hand for more. “I highly recommend the exotic shorthair. They’re such adorable little things, with a face only a cat parent could love.”
Kratz laughed, the tips of his ears going red and his pulse a steady strum. Yes, there was no mistaking the fact that he was smitten with my brother, this could work out quite well for me. “I always laughed at those cats. They look like they got hit in the head with a frying pan!” But then his smile turned to show sadness. “It’s a pity so many breeds of dogs and cats went extinct. But I remember learning in school that Silas tried to collect the DNA of all the breeds that he could.”
Garrett’s eyes lit up. He loved topics that centered around any sort of species recovery. Silas, Sky, and Perish had travelled all around B.C at first, collecting as many DNA samples as they could, and also any kinds of seeds they could locate as well. The first several years of the Fallocaust were of vital importance, eventually, even with the sestic radiation preserving things, DNA and genetic material would decay and the three born immortals only had a small window of time before such things were lost forever.
It was Silas and Sky who ended the world… but the three of them did do everything they could to preserve what was lost. We had an abundance of fruits and vegetables, grains, and meat animals, and more were in the process of being invented. A lot of things did become permanently extinct, but it was impressive what they were able to save, and bring back to life.
“He’s told me many stories,” Garrett said. “I grew up listening to them. Did you know Silas and Sky climbed Mount Everest? Just to say that they did?” Garrett chuckled and Kratz’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “He says they both died about half a dozen times, but they made it! Most of the times they died, Silas says, was while sliding down the hills on sleds.”
Kratz laughed too, then a shy look crossed his face. “I’d love to hear more of those stories sometimes. You don’t know how lucky you are to be able to hear such things from Silas.”
I suppose this would be a good time for me to intervene and work some of my new magic. Why suffer being friends with an idiot when I could just outsource? “Garrett. Why don’t you spend some of your off time here with Kratz? He’d love to hear your stories and it would be a good chance for you to learn more about genetic cloning. You can even take a few researchers with you eventually and gauge the structural integrity of this city.” I glanced at Kratz who seemed to have reddened further from my suggestion. “Doesn’t it have a formidable water source below ground?” I asked him.
Kratz nodded. He was flustered, but trying to make it not as painfully obvious. “Yes, that’s correct. The old water plant is in excellent condition, with some quick work from some workers it could be prepared. I was thinking of sharing this knowledge with Silas in hopes of gathering some repair workers to replace the pipes… but I didn’t want to trouble him. Those terrorists and all…”
“Nonsense.” I waved a hand. “We’ll always need cities for our laboratories and if Kreig has a reliable water source, that’s invaluable. Especially considering this is his most important greywastes labs. I’ll let you borrow Garrett for a time and he can get his sengil to type up a report we can present to Silas. I’m sure he’ll assign you those workers. Cloning Sky is one of our top priorities.”
Both Garrett and Kratz looked at me like I was a god who’d just stepped down from heaven.
Well, I’d succeeded in this mission. Garrett would soon be affixing himself to Kratz and vise versa, so all I needed now was to get Garrett used to sharing information with me. I’d trained my brothers and sister over the years to not bother me with anything, and now I had to completely reverse their own thinking. Like Julian said, the more information I got the better.
And the ride home was a perfect time for me to attempt to talk to Garrett. My brother was a walking contradiction: both incredibly easygoing, yet high strung; confident, yet suffering from extremely low self-esteem; and a genius, yet he couldn’t figure out how to whistle by using his fingers.
He was Garrett, and even though he changed his niche every decade or so, he would always just be Garrett.
And Garrett loved his older brother and looked up to him like none other.
An hour into the air, I decided it was time to try and converse with my brother. Nero was in the back of the Falconer enjoying his day off with beer and potato chips and it would be the perfect moment to have some alone time with my second oldest brother.
Garrett smiled at me when I walked into the cockpit and when I handed him a cup of tea that I’d made, he stared at it in shocked appreciation.
“Thank you. It was a bit cold outside,” Garrett said. He put the tea in a small holder that had been installed for such things and glanced over at me. “How did you heat it up?”
I raised my hand and made my touch hot, then reached over and pressed my finger against Garrett’s bare arm. He sucked in a breath and pulled it back with a hiss. “Right, right, the magical touch. I can’t do it nearly as good as you and Silas. I really don’t find it fair.”
“Oh, just practice and you’ll perfect it eventually
,” I said. I looked at the grey landscape in front of us; Garrett was following one of the main highways that would lead us all the way back to Skyfall. We would pass several blocks and settlements on that route, and I always wondered just what people thought of the Skyfall plane flying over them. “So, you like Kratz? I seemed to have noticed a spark between the two of you.”
Even though I was looking forward at the monotone scenery in front of me, I could feel a heat on the side of my head. I finally couldn’t stand it and looked over, only to see Garrett staring at me like I’d just turned into a hydra.
“Yes…” Garrett said slowly. “I shadowed with him for a few months and we were always flirting. It’s too bad he’s stuck in that lab with only a few other older men and that crab of a woman scientist. I feel badly for him.” Garrett laughed then continued, “You heard him say it. About the quality of the greywasters? I’m inclined to agree. I never noticed how many beautiful people were in Skyland until I went to the greywastes. Perhaps under all that dirt they could be attractive, and the smell. Oh god, the smell! They all smell like dust and corpses.” He reached over and took a drink of his tea.
“You’re single too, aren’t you?” I commented, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible. “What happened to that man you were dating… the nephew of Salazar or something?” This information had come straight from Julian. He’d uncovered it for me before he’d left and had told me to use it as a lure. Let’s see if Garrett would bite.
“Oh, Kyle? Silas sent him out into the greywastes to get killed.”
I stopped, and gave my brother a raised eyebrow. “Did he now?”
Garrett nodded, and his expression darkened. “Yeah. He won’t admit it, but I knew that’s what he was doing. He sent him out to gather research on raver colonies… he was a field scientist. Unfortunately, the raver colony was able to sniff him out and his camp several miles away got raided. Silas says…” Garrett laughed dryly, but his eyes still held sadness. “Silas says at least we learned one thing, right? Ravers have great tracking abilities… They also won’t stop running after you until they either break their legs or collapse from exhaustion.”
