Progenitor

by Cassandra Chandler

“She already knows we’re watching her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be trying to communicate with us like this,” Dexter said.

  He had a point.

  “Have Vaughn pull up the records from when she was alone in her room,” Brock projected. “Let’s see if she’s done this before.”

  “Check the footage in her room from before her bath,” Dexter said.

  Vaughn’s hands danced over the smooth surface of his desk. The monitors flashed with different images. Finally, they were left staring at a dozen screens of Meg.

  Meg wandering through the room. Meg sitting at the desk reading. Meg lying on the bed. Meg pulling her shirt over her head.

  Brock’s skin tingled with the urge to touch her. But what he wanted from her was something more. Something they could never have.

  He wanted to touch her with his own hands. Kiss her with his own lips.

  His fantasy barely had time to begin before it crumbled beneath reality. All he had to do was imagine her running her smooth fingertips over the scars that covered his ruined body.

  “It looks like she did this earlier in her room.” Vaughn’s voice snapped Brock back to the moment. “Here are the times she was most likely trying to communicate.”

  The monitors had changed a bit. Meg was standing in all of them, arms stretched over her head. She was making gestures with her hands and fingers that Brock didn’t understand. It looked like Vaughn had placed the feeds on a loop.

  “What’s she saying?” Dexter asked.

  Vaughn pointed at a monitor. “In this one, it’s the same as what she was just signing. ‘He’s watching’ or ‘always watching’. Here are a couple where she’s saying, ‘collar sensors’. It’s a little hard to understand, since she’s doing this all above her head instead of making the gestures in their normal locations. She’s throwing in some words that she’s spelling out, which helps.”

  Brock watched Meg form the same shapes over and over with her hands. Some were obvious, and he quickly picked out the word ‘collar’. He could see that she was repeating the same letters—at least, in some of the screens.

  “Here, she’s spelling out ‘collar hears,” Vaughn said. “And here, ‘collar sees’.”

  “What about this?” Dexter pointed at the left bank of monitors, where Meg signed, ‘collar’, but the letters afterwards were different.

  Vaughn rolled his chair closer. “Shit.”

  “She’s signing, ‘collar shit’?” Dexter asked.

  “No. ‘Collar maybe bomb’.”

  The room spun around Brock, his perception wavering. His instinct was to take over Dexter’s body, to use it to run to Meg. But he was done using his replicants that way. He couldn’t live with himself if he was the direct cause of—

  “Do it,” Dexter thought.

  “Dexter…”

  Brock felt a tug on his awareness as Dexter’s consciousness left his body. Left it empty. Brock’s mind was sucked into the space, like he was caught in a whirlpool.

  “Oh shit.” Vaughn jumped up to catch Dexter as his body fell.

  Brock was so disoriented, he couldn’t quite remember how to make Dexter’s arms and legs move. He leaned against Vaughn as Brock fully integrated with the replicant’s body.

  “What the hell was that?” Brock projected.

  Dexter’s reply was as even as always. “An experiment.”

  “We’re working on ASL,” Bradley thought. “Malcolm and Zachary are helping. Fluency should be achieved in thirty minutes.”

  “Thanks.” Brock tamped down on the surge of guilt that flooded him just after he registered their shared response to his word. Surprise.

  Damn, he’d really been taking them for granted.

  “Dexter, are you okay?” Vaughn said.

  “Yeah.” Brock finally managed to stand. “But it’s Brock now.”

  “It is so hard to keep track of all you guys.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” Brock turned and started toward the door.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Vaughn said. “Where are you going?”

  “To help Meg.”

  The door didn’t open when Brock approached it. He glanced up and saw that the light above blinked red, indicating a lockdown. Vaughn was already back at his desk, typing frantically when Brock turned around.

  “Open the damn door,” Brock said.

  “Hear me out first.” Vaughn spoke in level tones, quiet, but firm. Like he spoke to Marcus when talking him down from a change.

  “If there’s a bomb in her collar, it hasn’t gone off yet,” Vaughn said. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with. Running up there and trying to pry it off her neck might set it off.”

  “We can’t just leave it on her.”

  “I know. Just give me a moment. I need to parse through all this data.”

  Vaughn closed his eyes, but they moved rapidly behind his lids. It looked like videos of REM sleep cycles his dad had shown Brock as a kid. The more time passed, the paler Vaughn became. His lips pressed together tight and furrows appeared between his eyebrows.

  Finally, Brock couldn’t take it anymore. “Vaughn. Talk to me.”

  “Oh shit.” Vaughn’s eyes flew open, staring wide at the monitors.

  “What? What shit?”

  Vaughn took a deep breath, then turned to Brock. “I get that you care about Megan. We all do. But I need you to stay calm. I need you to not try to force me to open that door till we have a plan.”

  “Vaughn—”

  “I swear by the Internet, I will not say another word until you promise me.”

  “Fine, I promise.”

  Vaughn kept glaring at him.

  Brock sighed. “I mean it. If you’re this freaked out that you’re acting…not freaked out, I get how serious it is. I can control myself.”

  “You’d better, because this is bad,” Vaughn said. “Really bad.”

  “Just tell me.”

  Vaughn turned back toward the monitors. He pulled up several still images of Meg in her room.

  “Thank God I told her about Tony,” Vaughn murmured.

  “Who’s Tony?”

  “He’s the reason I know ASL. And the reason she knows that I know ASL.” Vaughn let out a strained laugh and shook his head. “Damn, that’s clever. We are so freaking lucky that she knows ASL, too.”

  “Vaughn.” Brock’s patience was reaching its limits.

  “If the collar is letting someone see and hear everything around her, she had to find a way to communicate without sound or leaving a trace,” Vaughn said. “She couldn’t write us a note or even try to signal us without risking giving herself away. The collar circles her entire neck, so she couldn’t even do anything behind her back. But above her head or in the tub, especially when her hair is partially blocking the collar…”

  “It’s a blind spot.”

  Vaughn nodded, then started pointing to different loops of Meg. “The phrase she’s saying the most is, ‘he’s watching’.”

  “Who’s watching?”

  A muscle started to twitch in Vaughn’s jaw. Brock was pretty sure that meant Vaughn already knew—and didn’t like the answer.

  Vaughn tapped the desk again, and another monitor started to play.

  This time, Brock didn’t need Vaughn to translate. His replicants were feeding him the knowledge he needed to understand what Meg was spelling out.

  “Puppetmaster.” Brock felt all the replicants still. “The person controlling that collar is also trying to control my sister.”

  “It gets worse,” Vaughn said.

  “You know who he is?”

  Vaughn pointed at a monitor where Meg was spelling out the name, ‘Roy’.

  “Stop drawing this out,” Brock said.

  “I’m trying to give you the information in small, digestible parts so that you don’t run upstairs and get us all blown up.”

  “Vaughn.”

  “I’m going to tell you, I just seriously am trying to not freak you out, because I’m alr
eady freaking out, and we can’t both be freaking out—”

  “We’re going to figure this out,” Brock said. “We always do.”

  “I already did. I just… I don’t know what to do about it.”

  Brock latched his foot around one of the nearby chair’s legs and pulled it closer, then sat next to Vaughn. “Walk me through it.”

  “Okay.” Vaughn turned back to the wall of monitors. “If this Roy is the puppetmaster that’s been tormenting Tessa and trying to get her to kill me—and you—and he has sensors in Megan’s collar, we can assume that he knows everything that happens around Megan.”

  “You think that’s what she means by ‘collar sensors’?”

  “I know that’s what she means,” Vaughn said. “Here comes something that’s going to make you ballistically mad. Ready?”

  Brock tamped down on his temper. Instead of yelling at Vaughn to get on with it, Brock smiled at him.

  “I think I liked it better when you were getting upset.” Vaughn’s body shook as if he’d caught a chill, but then he smiled briefly. He took a deep breath, then tapped another control on his desk.

  A sound recording played, taken while Brock was on patrol with Dexter when he’d first met Meg.

  In the footage, Dexter sounded as close to angry as he ever came. “We destroyed that pack sixteen years ago.”

  “Not all of us,” Meg had said. “I mean, I survived. And Marcus. I wasn’t there when it happened.” Meg had sounded more and more panicked as she spoke, stumbling over her words in her haste to get them out.

  A burst of static cut off the recording. It had been the first time Brock had witnessed Meg’s collar shocking her.

  A sick feeling spread through his stomach as a terrible idea took shape in his mind.

  “If Roy is using the collar to watch us, can he use it for other things?” Brock asked.

  “Like blowing us all up?”

  That was one thought. But Brock was stuck on another.

  He gripped the armrests of the chair tight, pushing down his rage so that he could form words. “Like shock Meg.”

  Vaughn didn’t have to speak. The deep frown, the glinting in his eyes, the muscle twitching in his jaw—they answered for him.

  “I should have noticed the pattern earlier,” Vaughn said. “We could have helped her before now.”

  “How are we going to help her?” Because they were going to help her. And then they were going to track down this ‘Roy’ and skin him alive.

  Brock thought of every flicker, every flinch, every shriek from Meg when the collar ‘helped her control her werewolf impulses’. It wasn’t helping her. It was hurting her. Torturing her. Controlling her.

  Fucking puppetmaster.

  “This guy is done messing with Meg. And my sister.” Brock stood up and headed for the door. The light above was still red.

  “There’s more.” Vaughn’s voice shook.

  When Brock turned around, he saw that Vaughn had paled even further. His jaw wasn’t twitching anymore, but his eyes were wide and his hands were in tight fists resting on his thighs.

  After everything Vaughn had shared, this was visibly freaking him out?

  Brock slowly walked back and sat down, hoping it would help put Vaughn more at ease. They sat in silence for a few moments before Vaughn spoke again.

  “I know who Roy is,” Vaughn said.

  A million questions ran through Brock’s mind. How did Vaughn know? What else had he figured out? Did he know where Roy was? How to kill him? How to make Meg safe from that damned collar?

  Brock settled on asking, “Who?”

  Vaughn tapped a button on his desk, and part of the recording played again. Meg saying, “Not all of us.”

  “How many werewolves were there the night Dexter saved Marcus?” Vaughn said.

  “Five.”

  “An odd number.”

  “So?” Brock said.

  “Werewolves operating alone are always rogues. Unstable and violent. We notice them immediately and take them out.”

  “The point, Vaughn.”

  “Tessa told us that werewolf packs are always even. Each werewolf has a mate to help stabilize them, like Marcus helps her.”

  Brock tried not to think about just how Marcus “helped stabilize” Tessa. She was Brock’s sister, after all.

  “Five plus Meg is six,” Brock said. “She already told us she wasn’t there because omegas are non-aggressive.”

  “Six counting Meg. Seven counting Marcus.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Meg also told us she’d just been brought into their pack right before the attack on Marcus’s family. I don’t think they attacked Marcus’s family just for fun. I think they were looking for someone to be Meg’s mate when they were of age.”

  Brock wanted to hit something. He wanted to hit Marcus. It didn’t matter that Marcus and Meg hadn’t become a mated pair. Brock still wanted to erase the concept of the two of them together from his mind. Replacing it with the thought of beating on Marcus helped.

  Vaughn was only speculating, but Vaughn was Vaughn. He was probably right.

  “If they were trying to even out their numbers again…” Brock said.

  “Then that means there were seven werewolves in Marcus’s pack when he was attacked. The five Dexter killed, Meg, and…”

  Fuck.

  A rush of adrenaline hit Brock so hard he felt light-headed. His muscles tensed and fluttered, wanting to move, to run, to fight. He could feel the other replicants pausing, turning their attention toward him—toward their progenitor.

  This was bad. So much worse than bad.

  “She said, ‘Not all of us’, and then Roy shocked her,” Vaughn said. “Because Roy didn’t want her telling us that we had missed one. One of the aggressive werewolves. With how much control Roy has over Tessa, he might even be the original alpha male.”

  Brock leapt out of his chair. He couldn’t stop himself. He started pacing in the small room, his heart pounding.

  “The alpha male,” Brock said. “Whose mate Dexter killed sixteen years ago.”

  Vaughn shook his head. “I can’t believe he’s still alive. There’s no way he’s sane after losing his mate.”

  Brock let out a laugh. “Killing us over and over again might have helped.”

  “What?”

  The pieces were falling into place for Brock. So many deaths he and his replicants had endured, strange behavior from rogue werewolves who seemed utterly insane aside from their single-minded intent to kill him.

  One of the most painful deaths came back to him—a werewolf disemboweling Zach, screaming, ‘Why won’t you die? Why can’t I kill you?’ the whole time.

  Brock’s abdomen cramped at the memory of the pain, forcing him to stop pacing. He thought of the scars that lined his stomach even now—and Zachary’s. One or the other of that pair of replicants had been killed by werewolves three times.

  This was the werewolf who had tortured Mal for hours and then killed him by… Brock lifted his hand, his fingers shaking as he ran them over the smooth skin of Dexter’s face.

  “He’s tried to make more.” Brock dropped his arms to his sides, hands clenched into tight fists. “To rebuild his pack. But the werewolves he made were all insane.”

  “If he uses the telepathic bond to try to control them, that would make sense,” Vaughn said. “A pack is only as sane as their alphas. And if he’s posing as a voice in their heads, that would explain why kids don’t tend to go nuts like adults do. They don’t know better.” Vaughn ran his hands over his face. “Jesus, this is the guy who’s been in Marcus’s head since the beginning. Pretending to be his ‘dweller’ all along.”

  This one person had caused so much pain to Brock and his family. Marcus, Tessa, and all of Brock’s replicants—his brothers.

  “Guys.” Brock waited a moment, but everyone was silent. He could feel them, though. Waiting. “I’m sorry.”

  They didn’t use words to respond. Ins
tead, he felt each of their minds lightly touch on his, the connection gentler, yet more focused than ever before. He tried to send his appreciation to each of them.

  They hadn’t asked to be created. What they were wasn’t their fault. Part of Brock had been blaming them this whole time. Part that he finally knew how to let go of.

  “We can use this,” Vaughn said. “Once we kill Roy, we won’t have as many rogue werewolves coming after you. Tessa will be able to heal and adapt.”

  Of course, Vaughn had figured out Roy’s full impact on everyone, too. Vaughn had witnessed or made a record of every death, cataloging everything to try to help the Blades be safer in the field.

  “We can’t forget about Meg,” Brock said. “We need to get that collar off of her—safely. But we can’t let her know what’s going on. Where the hell did Roy even get it?”

  “Yeah, you’re not going to like what I’ve figured out about that, either,” Vaughn said.

  Brock let out a huge breath, then lifted one arm and let it drop to his side. “Go ahead.”

  “I had a brainstorm while we were chatting and set my machines to work on extracting data from Tessa’s hand. I figured it had a much better view when she was…”

  “When she was trying to strangle Meg.”

  “Strangle. Decapitate.” Vaughn shrugged.

  When Brock glared at him, Vaughn sat up straighter, then pointed at a monitor that now showed an image of Meg’s collar. It was just like his views with analyses of dwellers, gridlines superimposed over its smooth surface and data scrolling along the side of the screen. Most of it read, “inconclusive”, but a few were marked, “match”.

  “How does this help us?” Brock asked. “What are these data points matching?”

  “My tech.”

  Brock felt like the floor had dropped out from under him. “We have a leak.”

  He couldn’t imagine any of the Blades turning against each other or their organization. But Vaughn wouldn’t be wrong about this. He was never wrong about his tech.

  “It’s not a one hundred percent match,” Vaughn said. “Whoever made this has gone in a different direction than I would have, but the base tech is the same.”

  Brock shook his head. “No one else has access to the ship. The only way your tech could be reverse engineered is if one of the Blades gave it to someone. We’re always careful to never leave anything behind.”