It hit the young man then, as he stumbled back a step, what he’d sacrificed in his noble mission to save the sick. Of the opportunity he believed he’d stolen from his Father’s colleague. Spartan’s ability to weave into the fabric of his life appeared too innocuous to Jobe, who found guile a necessary hardship to achieve a greater good.
Spartan had seen the man’s gullibility, his flawed ideals to mass produce affordable medical care.
The death of one Variant child was justified.
It was two by my count now.
Has it really come to that? He asked himself quietly.
Occupied, Jobe failed to recognise the building’s computer security ceding it’s authority to me now that I’d begun an organic upload of his files. I kept him in a secure bubble and his misfits silent and accommodating.
I wasn’t empathetic. I wasn’t even a strong telekinetic. I operated in complete opposition to Delilah. She threw the souls of others out from her own, hardly understood where hers began and other’s ended, and corroded with the depth of them drowning her in sentiment. I captured them by will. Flicked them off at will. Who better to teach her how to separate and categorise her invaders.
I was everything to Delilah I was sure Khian was to Shanti.
Kill 95 percent of lighting, I ordered Ella.
Ella’s link sputtered under a shock my whole team suddenly suffered under.
Ella?
Yes boss?
It’s Shanti, I warned. The Lights – now…
A manta-ray of darkness blanketed us softly.
The child’s wind sucked something vital from the air around us at the exact moment darkness found us. Cold heavy air seeped across my face, a weighty vacuum, tugging at the suddenly cold, rosy cheeks of non variants. Was it the low light making her unstable?
No, dipshit, it’s called assistance. Benzene condensed actually.
BTK: Benzenekinetic. Controls benzene in the atmosphere I relayed to Ella.
How much could Shanti perceive from me?
Sweet and flammable, she said without any spark. You have what you wanted now bring me my Khian, she pleaded in a very small voice.
Ten. So small. So sad.
Yes, I had what I wanted, at such an exorbitant price Jobe and his charity couldn’t ever fathom. My knowledge lay front of mind with a cloying pity. A real empathy such that I rarely experienced.
As I gently pried her childlike fingers from mine, in our minds she learned the fabrication that had kept her interred and obliging.
And while I knew enough to escape the blackening synapses before they jumped to mine, I stayed, longer than I should have; I shared the rending horrific loss and absolute loneliness that engulfed someone who should have grown with their twin soul, who should have had a chance to be - but now... fell into sorrow so volatile it enraged the nitrogen molecules in the room. The pressure and heat became unbearable, the link unstable. The Humans slapped to the floor, we fell to our knees. The sound of cracking bones and tearing flesh was offensive.
I bowed my head to hers, held her chin high to mine.
Don’t go, she begged. I had heard those words from a little girl before.
He waits, I promised with fervent belief. I was in a position to understand biological energies and I switched them off but they weren’t extinguished. Any light in the universe continued.
An ultrasonic beep sounded, deep in her skull.
I flicked her switch myself instead and cradled her to my chest.
Ella, Keota and Cory, rose darkly behind me.
Jobe crawled up from the floor before me only to slip as he spun wildly at the squashed heads and chests of his compatriots leaking around him.
“Why save me?” he warbled aghast, as he scrabbled away from me.
I came to stand slowly, with unabridged hate in a lingering abyss.
“You will soon know the true depth of what you’ve done to those two small children,” I scorned and let her body loll openly, heavy in my arms.
“What did you do to her?” he screeched suddenly as if I’d abused the lifeless child in my arms. His precious cure lay unsalvageable. He thought of his father and his death, of his promise, and the deaths of many.
“What you have done, you would have done just as readily to Delilah.You would have taken her apart for all your altruistic charity.” I spat charity from my teeth like plaque, the decay was putrid.
“Delilah?” He stuttered dumbly. What did Delilah have to do with this? The two were so separated in his priorities he failed to make a correlation.
“Delilah,” I reiterated slowly as a burgeoning fear trifled with my heart.
“You already have betrayed her,” I whispered the truth.
I struck fast, my rage lashing out faster than my hand. I did not need to pass Shanti’s warm body off me to knife open the belly of the snake.
Jobe fell to his knees gathering the falling ropes in a primal but failed instinct, acting before he understood what he clutched.
I blew the remains of Shanti’s memories to Jobe in a cruel justice. He had just enough time to relive the tragic terror of Shanti and Khian’s severed existence.
It twisted a ‘kind and charitable’ man’s features into an even uglier death.
Chapter Seventeen
Delilah
I never heard from Jobe. He hadn’t gotten to my device.
I ran through Burrow after Burrow, shedding Carne, stripping everything until only the bare shell of me was left. It was early hours in the morning. Pollution hung low in the air. The sky was the colour of new life, but I still felt tethered.
I had to go back to the apartment myself.
Couldn’t get around it.
Milligan I could scout and stalk. I’d find the Variants he forced to fight. But Milligan wasn’t on-selling GMT. Probably had little understanding of Variants.
Ardman’s associates would have the motive to reacquire their escaped GMT and Kuroyuri was now with said technologies. And that tech (Mixed Gen Variant) had been sold at an auction.
I needed that auction data.
I pumped my muscles in reprimand as I ran. Pushed them for being weak when it wasn’t the truth. I found a rhythm that was punishing and distracting.
If I went back, I’d be ambushed. I may have to hurt those I’ve fought beside. What if Ava, Troy and Ven awaited me? Could I look them in the eye while their disappointment shrouded me, because I’d forced them into a predicament where they would be forced to kill or contain the threat I’d become so quickly?
A beastly hand smashed across my mouth and nose, tackling me from my run. I kicked up into a roll and wrapped my body around the threat, twisted and pulled.
Normally that would switch my vulnerability and trounce an opponent.
Spartan grunted.
“Are you finished?”
I looked ridiculous clinging like a baby monkey.
“Gonna scream?”
I’m sure my sarcasm was apparent.
His hand peeled off my face. My face had imprints from his beefy fingers.
“I warned you not to make friends. I warn you now. Clearly. Don’t go back.”
“How’d you know where I was?”
I suspected.
The eerie silence stretched.
“I never know, until I know. I saw you, here, but only knew when after your overzealous mate stabbed the shit outta me.”
“Carne stabbed you?” I tried to find the wound. Find any lingering weakness. There was none. He was a mountain still.
“Yeah, right little prick he turned out to be?”
I snorted. Might have laughed but the moment was too dire. Carne’s Unit SkyHawkI was AWOL and I was rogue. When did the world tip so far?
“Don’t go back. They’re onto you Girl.”
“You’ve seen it? I get ambushed?”
He didn’t answer me, not really.
“Go meet fate instead.”
The crimson and white pearls clinging to the dark branch looked
to be suffocating in Lolly’s glass on my kitchen bench. I stared at those flowers with dread after I placed them in there. The glass slid toward me as if I asked it to follow me. It squealed as it dragged along the canary yellow counter-top, noisy in the still air.
I was stupid to come here. Could I find Kuroyuri without the auction data? No. But it was still stupid.
The virus I’d planted had bled all of Onyxeal’s data to me.
I placed the device in a pocket beside my racing heart and gazed at my childhood blanket, draped over my new furniture, sullying the manufactured newness.
A childish memento should not hold so much sway!
I reran all the feeds in my apartment remotely before I gambled coming back. I’d watched Carne pace my bedroom hours ago now. He’d been wild and erratic. He’d swiped the bed sheets and flipped my mattress in a rage, heaving with an emotion I didn’t even sense in here now because of his experience confining the backlash.
He’d calmed, even appeared aghast at his outburst. He pottered about, tidying everything out of place. He used military corners on the bed sheets, his actions firm, sure. I crumbled a little. Felt even more ridiculous for running away during the auction.
Eight months ago I would have clawed my way onto the back of that mission to collect the dangerous entity hiding inside the little blonde child. Now I had to trust Carne had done his duty even if mine now wavered, between those that harboured me and a promise I’d made myself and Kuroyuri.
Carne flicked the sheets with his fingers when he’d finished. A coin would have bounced. Then he sat on the edge of the bed as if he’d forgotten the doona and had fallen prey to our insidious shared memories.
I wondered if Carne knew which were his. Separation of self, I struggled with that. I’d always assumed he could easily compartmentalize everything that was ‘Delilah’, but, as he rested his index fingers against his heavy brow and his thumbs lifted his chin almost in prayer, I reconsidered what Carne could or was willing to separate.
His introspective expression remained after he stood. He was still geared up from the convoy tracking the child. He pulled his visor - tactical wearable tech shades - from his vest and turned to the closest camera.
“You will be retrieved. I’ll take you deep into the earth where you hate it most if that’s what it takes to keep you in your ignorance. Even if you hate me for three hundred years with your guileless, sad face upturned in appeal.”
He swung his visor on, squarely blocking the top half of his face, leaving behind only that fierce promise.
My pulse had jackhammered as much now as it had when I’d slipped through the balcony door. Had it felt as empty when I left as it did now? Carne had only days ago cooked in my kitchen, slept in my bed and reached places within me even I didn’t know about. Cognitive energy amped up in response to my anxiety and I almost squashed my flowers as I held them.
No known Variant alive today got a pass for going Rogue. I’d be no exception to the rule. Neither would Carne. If anything we’d be made an example of.
Imprisonment. We faced that and more. It was time to make the hard decision I may have been subconsciously pondering for twenty-five years. Could I make that clean break?
Carne should have told me I had family, even if it was not Spartan himself who told me, if Carne had divulged instead of hidden I’d have used that sad excuse to stay at Onyxeal.
Spartan’s reason to keep me in line would disappear. Kuroyuri wouldn’t have become existential. I’d be curled around Carne’s thighs, as he petted my face, the way I did from his bed before he dressed in the mornings.
It would take a tremendous gnawing for our bond to snap. If it could. I wandered about my home, bewildered.
I shook my head. Wake up!
The whole room rattled.
Until I had the telekinesis controlled I’d be worried about it fucking up my life even more completely than I’d already managed. Random bursts of power would be hard to explain in public as I cleaved another life.
I gazed at the event horizon, and when presented with my past would I have veered course? I couldn’t know that right now. Right now I essentially had an estranged husband playing war games with me and a despot nation bent on my capture as something relative to a political prisoner. I had more than five hundred years to burn and a kidnapped sister with only the ill equipped out to save her.
Milligan didn’t seem to know what he faced with the mixed Gen 1and 2 escapee. Many Gen 1 were crazed with latent or erratic psychic traits, struggling to assert dominance over aggressive temperaments. Gen 2’s stabilized somewhat. Gen 3, well that was me and look at the pretty fucking mess I was.
I gently held the flowers standing in the water. I’d pine for Carne. It would hurt.
It had hurt for months now Delilah. Get a grip.
I had five hundred years to burn, I reminded myself. In one hundred I could go back, I promised the needy harpy inside of me.
The Sakura flowers suddenly toppled and the glass fell.
I caught it with the edge of my fingertips.
My frustration erupted. How did Ella explain inanimate objects launching into walls like bullets in that detention centre as a girl? I could only hope since I was over my teenage hormones - where abilities generally spiked while developing - I would not experience anything so violent. So far the energy stayed close to me. Didn’t leach or lash far, but it swelled. It rose and sunk moving with an unidentified rhythm.
The flowers swayed in the glass as if in the wind despite my holding the make-shift vase with a white knuckled-grip. Was it Spartan or fate’s guiding hands that had brought me to this crossroad?
If I hadn’t left the orphanage for Australia, I’d never have met Carne; I’d never have grown up training for what I did, which meant Spartan never could have handed me the file on Kuroyuri.
And the discovery of my sister hinged on one human being’s death. Colin Ardman’s death.
How had Kuroyuri’s path spiralled to lead her to the here and now? We had some similarities; Kuroyuri was a fighter and if she’d slice the fingers off a colleague perhaps she was only slightly more insane than I. Maybe I should be genuinely concerned about that but I grinned remembering Carne’s pained, scrunched face as I crushed his fist for mistakenly throwing out my gold laced Indian ruggie I had wrapped around me now.
I wondered where Kuroyuri was raised. Japan? How had our DNA been bred so far apart? Had I real parents at all, or were we the product of a recipe easily bought, sold and grown?
Heels, tapping past my door flared a warning in my hyper alert state. I flicked up the screen on my arm for the hidden camera’s view of the hall.
Blonde hair, up-swept elegantly, topped a sinuous gold evening gown, which twisted and wound down and around firm cleavage, a tiny waist and split to reveal toned, tanned legs. This woman had the remarkable body mass exactly that of Lolly.
I cracked the door.
“Lolly?”
The lady spun around as if caught cutting her baby sister’s hair by her mother.
Chapter Eighteen
“Delilah. What are you doing up so late?”
“What are you doing sneaking into a building in high heels like that? Didn’t you think to take them off?”
I pulled her in and shut the door.
Lolly gave a little I-hadn’t-thought-of-that smile.
“No questions?” She asked suspiciously.
“None of my business,” I replied with a shrug. “The dress suits you,” I complimented.
“Thanks,” Lolly scowled. “My brother’s associate,” she spat the word, “bought it for me.”
I didn’t quite know what to say to her emotional outburst. I wanted to rant, myself actually. Loudly. But I didn’t do things like that. Huh, I never broke the rules so cleanly before either. Maybe I would, one day.
“That bad, huh?”
“Explosion waiting to happen,” I told her. “I’ve got a punching bag I need to set up anyways. It will help.” Was I
procrastinating leaving this apartment for good? Had it only been two weeks ago I’d been convincing myself I’d adjust to calling the hole a home. I should have just grabbed my pack, my rug and run. But Lolly had been a friend. Even the word outside of Onyxeal was akin to heresy. She had unquestionably inserted herself in my life but she may never know the kindness she’d afforded me.
“Not the talk it out type, Delilah?”
“No. I don’t think I am.” Maybe I should be that kind of person. Would it have changed the course of my life entirely?
I could do it differently. For these few solitary minutes I could be a friend to her.
I gestured for Lolly to follow me into the lounge room. I kept going to my bedroom and rifled through my drawers to find a baggy shirt and track-pants. With them under one arm I grabbed the box containing the punching bag and stand.
“Delilah! Let me help,” Lolly laughed.
I pretended to struggle and dropped the box on the carpet. I forgot I was back in the human world again. And would be now for a long time.
“Here,” I handed Lolly the clothes.
“Oh. Thanks,” Lolly expressed with relief. She immediately began to rip off the strappy heels blistering her dainty feet before shedding the dress that pooled around her feet on the stained floor.
“Not going to wear that again,” I noted, pointing to the filthy floor that hadn’t been truly clean for decades.
“Not if I can help it,” she kicked the dress out from under her and threw on the clothes I’d handed her.
I began to set up the bag and stand while Lolly used the bathroom to scrub the gunk off her face.
She came out as I finished. It must have taken a while to get all those pins from her hair, which was now tied in a messy bun atop her head and the baggy shirt lopped off one side of her shoulder with the trakkies low on her hips.
I worried my hesitance to leave here would betray me.
“Much better,” she patted the clothes. “I hate wearing evening wear; give me my sandals and tights any time.”
I tested the bag with a few light taps then offered it to Lolly.
Variant Evasion: Trilogy (Variant Trilogy Book 2) Page 10
