by Carly Morgan
“Rhinoceros,” she countered, because that’s what he looked like trying to climb that tree. “You have no grace.”
“Spider monkey,” he repeated musingly, ignoring her. “And tiger. No, not tiger. Cheetah. You’re fast.”
“I am fast,” she agreed with him for once, ascending the tree as if it were no more challenging than a kid going up the wrong way on the slide at the playground. She caught a glimpse of him from the side of her eye to track his progress. Though he lumbered somewhat clumsily, his grip on the tree was capable. “But so are you, like a bear.”
They caught each other’s gaze through the air and he nodded at her, just briefly. “Bear, rhinoceros, crocodile. And you, what? Shark? Piranha?”
“Leopard seal.” She flinched at the lesser known predator, the DNA of which was the reason she could hold her breath for nearly half an hour underwater.
Callan guffawed dubiously. “But seals are cute though.”
She sneered at him as she scaled her tree, the incline getting steeper now, using her knees and forearms. Soon she’d be going straight up. “So are cheetahs, until they’re tearing your face off.”
“Fair enough,” he said effortlessly, despite the fact he was nearly heaving himself up his tree trunk. “You know, you could fall from there.”
“So?” Kaelia squinted back at him, she was a good distance in front of him now. “I’d win this competition even with two broken legs.”
“You think that would be wise?” He had to raise his voice to be heard as he fell even further behind, losing his footing and sliding at least a foot or two back the way he came.
Kaelia bit her lip, concentrating as she dug her fingers around the scaly bark and shimmied up another six inches. For three days now, he’d been hinting to her that she should reveal as little of her true abilities as she could get away with during the televised competition. As if she hadn’t thought of that already. Yet she still couldn’t help but wonder if he knew something she didn’t. Something that would be important for her to learn.
“If you don’t want me to compete at my best, then why the hell are you training me so hard?” She took a break in her climb to call down to him, letting go with one arm and swinging like a flag attached to the tree.
“I don’t know.” He was at least six feet behind her now, his whole body wrapped around the palm’s trunk, clinging on fiercely as he tried to shake away some of the sweat threatening to drip into his eyes. “I guess it’s just been awhile.”
“Awhile since what?” Kaelia stretched her arm out wide and arched her spine into a backbend twenty feet above the ground as she gazed up into the pure blue sky, putting on a show.
He pulled a disjointed face at her acrobatics, as if both impressed but provoked. “Awhile since I had someone to train with who could keep up with me.”
Suddenly, he sank one of his mighty bear-like paws into his tree and began going hand over foot like climbing a ladder, gaining several feet on her in a matter of seconds. Kaelia’s eyes flew open as she rushed to reclaim her position on the tree, putting all her limbs to work. He might have been fast, and strong, but Kaelia was agile and dexterous, nearly as comfortable in the tree as she was on land, thanks to the cheetah and spider monkey DNA.
She beat him easily, burrowing stealthily into the leaves at the top of the palm like blazing a trail into a jungle to get at the coconuts. Clinging to the base of the thin, reedy, palm fronds, she twisted a single coconut off from the bunch. It was smooth, oblong, and light green; not like the husky little brown orbs she’d seen in the movies. Kaelia’s throat was parched, and her water bottle was at the bottom of the tree. She cracked the oversized nut against the trunk until it split, spurting a clear liquid. Hugging the top of the tree trunk with her legs crossed at the ankles, she used her hands to pry the two halves apart, fibers tearing noisily.
“Wanna sip?” she called to Callan enticingly, holding up one half of the coconut before bringing it to her lips and slurping thirstily. The juice was light and sticky, spilling down her chin and splashing her chest as she lifted it up to get more. “It’s really good. Cold, refreshing, slightly sweet. You just gotta come up here and get it. I’ll toss it to you.” If Callan could make it to the crown of his tree, they’d be nearly touching, the tops were so close.
“I bet it’s warm as goat’s piss and just as rancid,” Callan countered sullenly. Ten feet below her in his tree, he seemed to have given up his climb now that she’d won.
“Sore loser?” Kaelia smiled daintily as she took another long swallow. It really wasn’t as great as she claimed, but not horrible either.
“All right, all right, so you proved you’re a better climber,” Callan admitted. “What do you expect when you put spider monkey up against rhinoceros in a tree?”
Kaelia lifted her eyebrows wryly as she guzzled the last of her drink. “Oh?” she challenged him. “So we’re talking about this openly now?”
“Would you get down from there?” he sidestepped the question. “At least use your hands to hold on.”
Kaelia grinned, reaching an arm up to get a hold of the stem of a palm leaf frond. Unwrapping her legs from around the sturdy trunk, she swung three, maybe four stories over the ground, the frond drooping under her weight as she released her coconut halves in the endeavor. They seemed to fall a long time before they hit the ground, bouncing and then rolling down the grassy embankment towards the beach.
“Am I making you nervous?” she asked sweetly, swaying from side to side to keep her arm loose.
“You better knock it off,” Callan was all seriousness. “Someone might see you.”
“Like who?” She enjoyed teasing him from a safe distance. For once, he was unable to overpower and bend her to his will. “One of the other contestants? Don’t you think they deserve to know what they’re up against? Otherwise some of them might get their hopes up that they might win over me. Or maybe you mean, someone else…”
“Would you please just get down from there?” he asked her nearly politely, if not a bit pleadingly.
“But I’m having fun.” Kaelia swung, jumped, and flipped around, momentarily hanging upside down by the crook of her knees before righting herself again.
“That’s enough,” Callan seemed to be trying to sound stern, despite getting more and more agitated. “Get down from there right now!”
“You have a fear of heights or something?” Kaelia cocked her head to the side quizzically.
He wouldn’t answer her, but his troubled expression was revealing enough. “That branch is going to break and drop you to a gory death,” he said instead, glum as a picnic washed out by a rainstorm.
“Ooh, you mean, like this?” Kaelia tugged on the frond with two hands, bearing all her weight down until she heard it split from the tree crown. She smiled at Callan’s expression of panic, and then swung herself up and caught hold of another stem just as the one she’d been hanging from went spiraling to the ground.
“Stop!” he was yelling at her now, his face flushed. “You’re crazy! Knock it off right now!”
She felt bad suddenly; he seemed truly afraid for her safety. Kaelia gave him a pitying smile. “I’ll stop,” she said, starting to make a deal with him. “After you tell me who it is you don’t want to see me.”
“You know who!” He was still shouting, his eyes desperate.
“Humor me,” she said flatly. “Who?”
“Anyone!” he went on frantically. “Anyone who might know what you are! We’re supposed to be dead, you know. That’s what I heard! That we’re all supposed to be dead. So why don’t you answer me for once, and tell me how you’re still alive!”
Kaelia’s face darkened as something seemed to break inside her, and a rush of memories flooded her like a poison gas. Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t hold onto this tree branch. Her sisters. There had been three of them; Mavis, Bluebell, and Grace. Not biologically her sisters, but they were raised like they were, until Papa put his gun t
o each of their heads, and extinguished their lives one by one. But he had sacrificed Kaelia. Run, he had told her, as the sirens surrounded their compound, hidden deep in the scorching hot desert. Save yourself, Kaelia.
She ran, because she was trained to do as he told her. She ran even when she knew she didn’t deserve to live after her sisters’ lives had been stolen from them so quickly. It had been over a decade ago, but no matter how far Kaelia tried to push the memory from her mind, it still burned across her brain like a fever. All these years, she had tried to outrun them, and now they were staring her in the face again, terrorizing her. She felt her fingers slipping from the branch. Unable to hold on any longer, she let go.
Chapter 8
Callan
“No. 72!” Callan used the name he teased her with without thinking, then quickly corrected himself. “Kaelia!” The direness of the situation at least called for him to use her real name.
For several excruciating moments, the whole world seemed to go lifeless and still, and it was like he had no choice but to participate in it. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t even blink. And then he heard her hit; a swift, heavy thud, and it was like someone pressing the play button after the movie had been on pause. Callan regained his senses and began sliding down the trunk of the tree. He was almost too afraid to look, yet he couldn’t keep himself from looking.
She was on her feet. She had landed on her feet. Callan swore softly under his breath, at once outraged and relieved. Of course she would have made a clean landing. He doubted she would have been swinging around three stories off the ground if she couldn’t. Suddenly, he felt like an idiot. He couldn’t make a landing like that, yet he’d followed her up the trees just the same. If anyone had been in danger of a gory death, it had been him.
“Kaelia, wait!” He stumbled as he came crashing down from the tree, the feeling of solid ground beneath his feet unnervingly unfamiliar for several moments. She stalked off through a patch of foliage lining the beach and descended onto their strip of beach. Their strip. The water was rougher here, the ground beneath the shoreline covered in dead coral and volcanic rock that hurt their feet. It made it the perfect place to go for some privacy while the other contestants enjoyed the serene, gentle waters closer to the hotel with nothing but powdery soft sand to caress the soles of their feet.
“What!” she screamed from over her shoulder, throwing her hands up with frustration. “What do you want? Can’t you just leave me alone?”
He sighed heavily. He’d upset her. Callan wasn’t that great at picking up on the unpredictable emotions of women, but that much was obvious. The question was why was she upset? She had asked him a question, and he had answered it. It didn’t seem right for her to get upset over that.
“Where are you going?” he called, even though it was a stupid thing to say. Where could she go? Not very far, with the tracking band. If she went outside the perimeter of the resort, it would shock her, as well as set off a signal to the guards. “We’re not done training, you know!”
There. Now he was two for two for saying the most inappropriate things possible to a woman who was visibly triggered. Nonetheless, she stopped and gave him a long look over her shoulder. Callan took in the sight of her, standing there on the beach in a black, strappy bikini with the waves lapping at her bare feet.
In just three days, she’d put weight on, her breasts and hips filling out with buttery soft flesh while her abs, limbs and shoulders were lean, smooth muscle. She’d put color on, too, which made her look less like something that might drop dead at any moment and more like something driving with a vivacious life force behind it. Her dark hair appeared to have a mahogany tint to it in the sun. It had also been cut and styled, accentuating her facial structure; the pillowy mouth and razor-like cheekbones, wide, smoky gray eyes. Callan wasn’t sure why he couldn’t see her potential before, because now it hit him so hard it was painful.
She dropped down to a crouch beside the water, tracing her fingers through the frothy waves. He kept walking until he caught up with her, though he didn’t know what he was supposed to do after that, besides stand awkwardly over her like some big hulking idiot. Finally, he took a deep breath, and decided to go for an apology.
“Look, I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean to say anything that was going to upset you.”
She tilted her face to look up at him, and her haunted, dark expression twisted something up inside of him. “It’s not the things you do say, okay?” she snapped, sharp as barbed wire. “It’s the things you don’t say!”
Callan’s face contorted, puzzled. Now that made absolutely no sense. It wasn’t until he opened his big mouth to give her the information she wanted, if only to keep her from killing herself, that she had stomped off in a bad mood after dropping three stories from a tree. Callan felt something tighten inside him. He still wasn’t quite over that whole dropping three stories from a tree thing.
“Look, I don’t know what you want me to say, or don’t say, or whatever.” He collapsed beside her, and it felt strange, the two of them sitting side by side as if they were friends, so close they were nearly touching.
“Just stop,” she ordered, and though her voice was softer, now it bordered on disgust. “I’m sick of it. Pretending not to know what we both know. I’ve spent my whole life pretending, okay? And now there’s finally a chance that maybe I don’t have to, yet you won’t even come out and tell me if there’s things I need to know.”
“Okay,” he said blankly, which he could immediately discern only infuriated her more. He rushed to redeem himself. “Look, I don’t know anything, not really. If there are people looking for us, if there are guys you gotta watch out for, who knows? Maybe. I was just a kid when all that shit went down, though after I graduated high school, I hired a private investigator…”
“A private investigator?” she stopped him, intrigued. “Why?”
“Why? Because the news never covered the story and I wanted to know more. Why we were created just to be destroyed.”
“And what did you find out?”
“Not much. Just about how the lab had illegally spliced the DNA from animals into humans, and had created mutants so dangerous they’d all been destroyed. That’s the story my PI managed to get out of his sources anyway.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Kaelia started, confused. “There weren’t any mutants. Papa...” she trailed off, hesitant.
“Papa?” He wrinkled his forehead, puzzled. “Who’s Papa?”
She seemed annoyed by his lack of knowledge. “Oh, just the guy who founded the DNA and Genetics Redesigning Lab. He created us. Duh.”
Callan rolled his eyes at her sarcasm. “Yeah, but why did you call him Papa? His name was Dr. Martin Gordon.”
“Well, what did I know?” she muttered insolently. “I was only eight-years-old when it happened. I called him Papa. He never told us his real name.”
Eight-years-old. Three years younger than him. Callan had never realized there were any girls like him, not since very recently when he met her. In his rank, there had been eleven other boys, all his age. They slept in barracks and were raised and trained by drill sergeants with big guns and mean faces. He knew vaguely who Martin Gordon was back then, he came around once in a while to watch them do drills, to perform tests on them. He certainly never called him anything as endearing as Papa. In fact, he’d never called him anything.
“He killed himself,” Callan blurted out softly, barely thinking. “After they busted down his lab.”
“Of course I know that,” Kaelia hissed, her face feral as a wildcat. “I saw him do it. Right after he killed my three sisters. Right before he told me to run.”
“He told you to run?” Callan’s voice was disbelieving. “That’s how you got away?”
She didn’t say anything for a long while, and Callan realized his question didn’t really need an answer. Of course, that’s how she got away. How else? Finally, she asked, “What about you? How did you get
away?”
Callan’s face clouded. For some reason, he hadn’t seen the conversation going in this direction. It was a story he’d never told anyone before, and he didn’t feel like divulging it now. Maybe didn’t feel like divulging it ever. But her expression was so expectant, almost needy. He figured he owed her at least this much, even if he neglected to tell her the whole version.
“Me and a friend, Caden…” He nearly choked out the word. Caden. How long had it been since he said that name out loud? “When the guards called us for drills in the middle of the night, Caden knew something wasn’t right. He was spliced with great horned owl, and it showed. He was always so serious, so wise. He had a sixth sense about certain things. So even though it wasn’t my first instinct to go with him, I wanted to follow the orders of our commander, I did what Caden said, and we fled the barracks together. We were halfway across the compound when we heard the gunshots, the screaming. That’s when I knew Caden had been right to run.”
“Compound?” Kaelia repeated. “In the desert? You were there too?”
Callan squinted at her as a particularly harsh ray of sunlight cut through the sky. “That’s where the military base was set up. It was a three-hundred-acre compound. They were training us to be the ultimate human weapons.”
“I know,” Kaelia breathed softly. “I was there, too. But not a barrack, a house. Papa’s house.”
Callan felt a quick stab of envy. Why had she and these three other girl children been raised in some semblance of a real home, with the privilege of calling their creator Papa, while he’d been in a cold, sterile barrack with eleven other boy soldiers? He got the sense that this Papa tucked her in at night, read her stories before bed. Callan had never had any sort of parental kindness shown to him as a boy, not until after he ran away and met the Merones.
“It seems like we both ran away that night,” Callan concluded, and it felt so unreal to share this kind of history with her, when before he had owned it alone. “Albeit in opposite directions.” Imagine if they had met up somehow, bumped into each other on that night of the raid. How different everything would have been.
