Break
Title: Break
Author: hollystark
Rating: Pg-13-R
Warnings: Violence
Summary: A young doctor being forced to work at a government facility for the creation of humans sets off a chain reaction that changes history.
Legal: Please read, but don't take, this is entirely original fiction.
Feedback: Reviews and flames alike are highly appreciated.
1977
The pain was so bad, she couldn’t lift her arm. Bloodloss, definitely, but she was still conscious enough to drive, so the bullet definitely hadn’t hit any major arteries. Pressure, removal of the bullet, cleaning of the wound. Nope. She looked over her shoulder at the two children curled in the backseat. Both wearing sterile blue pajamas, feet bare, eyes open, staring at her. She turned back to the road. She was dizzy, and hoped it was from the pain, rather than from the blood loss.
The next time she turned around, almost two hours later, having determined that her blood loss was slowing, and pain was the main issue, she found the younger child asleep half across the older one’s lap. She was glad pain was the big problem, as that was something she could just keep fighting without stopping.
Four hours later, she was falling asleep in the wheel, turned into a 24 hour supermarket, told the children to stay, and went in, dumping her crimson stained labcoat in a trashcan just out front. caffeine, scissors-the closest thing to forceps she could find, antiseptic wipes, gauze, a new shirt, and a blanket for the children. it was hard to maneuver a cart with only your non-dominant hand.
She got back in the car, and handed the children the blanket. The younger one was still asleep, but the older took the blanket, and put it over both of them. She got out of the car, walked over to a tree, and sat against it, putting her scissors on the ground, removing her shirt, and picking them back up. She had to wipe away layers of clotted blood to get to the wound, though wet crimson was still dribbling through. Bra was definitely ruined. She was glad she had elected not to remove the bullet in the car, she definitely would have woken the younger child with her screaming.
Pocketing the little lead object, she stuffed the wound with gauze, and went back to the car, putting on the new shirt with difficulty-bullet had definitely hit a nerve, she couldn’t move her arm-and starting the car, before popping open the first of the six packs of soda she had purchased.
The older child crawled up into the passenger seat, she looked at them, “you can sleep, you know.”
The child wasn’t older than nine, possibly as young as seven, it was hard to tell with these children. The child was definitely part of the earlier generations, the androgyny effects were very clearly visible. She sighed, “are you a girl or a boy?”
The child stared at her, uncomprehending. She chewed her lower lip, the child had to be around eight, then, that was the generation that had been truly androgynous, and raised as such, “is there a name you like? Or a person you like reading about?”
“I… like cowboys.”
“Who’s your favorite?”
“Ira Aten. He did whatever it took to protect his fences.”
She smiled slightly, “how about I call you Ira.”
The child-she’d call them a he for now, for the sake of not having to explain all the time to anyone they had to deal with-turned away. She frowned, “are you alright?”
He turned back-a very slight trace of a smile on his face. She smiled, as she took off the parking brake, and backed up, “Ira it is.”
She would drive to Las Vegas, it was only another two hours, and they would get a cheap motel room, and crash for the night. Rest, food, and then in the morning they would continue on to Flagstaff, get food, some more supplies, and finish the day’s driving in Albuquerque.
From there to Oklahoma City, with a stop in Amarillo, then the next day on to Memphis, followed by the last leg to Savannah, Georgia, or if they couldn’t quite make that, then to Atlanta, and to Savannah the next day. About the last place they would think to look, and she had been there a few times as a kid, with her father.
About half an hour later, she noticed that there were now two drinks missing from her six-pack. She sighed. The fact that they were cute didn’t mean crap, they had spent their entire lives being raised to spy and kill, they were more than capable of stealing her soda without her noticing-or taking down the soldiers keeping them locked away.
She had no idea if anyone else had escaped. She had been working late, in her little lab-she had been pulled into the project as a pediatrician with a specialty in hereditary conditions, never suspecting what the project she would actually be working on was. Well, no, she had known it was sketchy, but her house had burned down a week before she got the offer, and she had been kind of desperate. It hadn’t occurred to her until much later that the people she was working for were probably the people who had burned down her house.
Working late, running tests on a sample from one of the newest generation-who only had a cold, but that wasn’t supposed to happen, not with their engineered immune systems-she had been so engrossed that she hadn’t noticed, at first, the smoke filling her lab. Once she had noticed, she had hurried to the door, found the handle to be hot, and stepped back, biting her lip. A broom handle, and the tie from her labcoat, she had managed to get the door open, and run out, holding her arm over her mouth and nose.
Gunshots had been her first clue that this wasn’t just somebody’s weapons experiment going poorly, she had ducked into a college’s lab, which her card also opened as she was collaborating on an experiment going on inside, but the door didn’t have a chance to close behind her, before a group of barefooted teenagers and older adolescents pushed through and pinned her to the ground.
“Jesus, what’s going on?”
The one that seemed to be leading them frowned at her, “Dr Eirnan.”
She had nodded, and they had let her up, “what’s going on?”
“We’re leaving. I’m guessing you know why.” He was right. She had seen the damage done to these young people’s bodies by the soldiers who kept them, and the training they went through. She wished she could stop it, but she was the only physician on staff, and she knew any attempt to stop the harm would only result in none of the children receiving medical attention until they could destroy the life of a another doctor and bring them into the program.
“Oh. Well, that’s…good luck.”
“Are you going to tell?”
“I’m going to sit right here and try and not breathe too much smoke.”
The teenager had nodded, and they had congregated in the farthest corner, before going back into the hallway at a run. She had sat, waiting, listening, making sure the door was slightly open. It had eventually opened, again, and two children had cautiously snuck inside, stopping abruptly when they saw her.
She could hear the boots of the guards approaching, and without thinking, she had pulled the children inside, and shut the door. She would die, for that. But, thinking about it, it wasn’t like she was ever going to have a life outside this place again. And dying trying to protect someone was a much better way to die than any other she could think of.
She ushered the children into the alcove under a lab table right next to a door, and tried to draw the soldiers away-one saw, as the children ran out the closing door, she didn’t ever know afterwards how it happened, but a mess of hands and arms trying to grab her, and then a gunshot, she was running down the hall, picking up the younger child, and running as fast as she could to the exit. Falling down the steps, running, running, running, barbed wire, slices, climbing, wriggling through, gunshots in the distance, tripping, falling, foot caught under a root, pulling it out, wishing so very, very much that she had bothered to keep herself in shape.
It never made the news. There were no obituaries, except for the soldiers. They had been serving their country, never going to be reassigned, black ops, last choice recruits, desperate. They got lines in the paper, she saw, as she stood at a newsstand in Winslow, Arizona-the younger child, a boy of five, she had named him Myles, had needed to pee.
Getting back in the car, Ira was digging through her glove compartment, probably bored. She handed him a book, knowing it wouldn’t entertain him for long, but it had to be at least a little better than staring out the window. He frowned at it, as though uncertain why he was holding such an object.
“It’s for you. You looked bored.”
He looked at her, frowning, “Dr. Eirnan?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you help us?”
“What else was I going to do?”
Ira seemed more than a little confused by that. Myles pulled on her sleeve, she looked at him, “yes?”
“I wanna read, too.”
Ira scoffed, “you can’t read.”
“Yes I can!”
She had to smile, slightly. Clearly, development could only be accelerated so much…
1979
The gun had been Ira’s idea. Not that it had been his idea for her to carry a gun, his idea had been for him to have a weapon, but she had vetoed that the minute she had found it in his backpack. So now she had an illegal weapon, but honestly, she didn’t really care. She was on the run from the government, and harboring two grade-school fugitives who she’d had to yell at yesterday for hacking into the transit authority website to change the bus schedule so they could go to the late showing of a movie.
She promised herself she would never again decide to raise a pair of hyper-intelligent would-be assassins, as she walked into her office, a little medical clinic that hadn’t looked too hard at her background after three shooting victims had wandered in when she was there for her interview. Their refusal to go to the hospital and three years experience of patching up pint sized gunshot victims combined to impress enough for them to overlook her lack of references and refusal to have any records of employment written down. The gun went into her desk, she walked out to the front desk, and signed herself in. The damage from her own gsw had eventually healed, leaving her with pain occasionally, but not much else in the way of adverse effects.
Her first patient of the day was a kid, strep, sat there looking miserable, she directed his mother to get antibiotics from the front desk, and presented the kid with a sucker-he looked a lot less miserable after that. Walking out of the exam room, she saw a man collapse, and hurried to help the other person working that day, a Cuban nurse, Sara, to roll the man over. He was blue, she grabbed a CPR mask, started artificial respiration, but his heart didn’t start no matter what they tried. Calling 911, grabbing the supplies, she cracked his chest, squeezed his heart, felt it start beating again, swallowed, staggered shakily back. She had really kind of liked Miami, and now they would have to move.
She told Sara to explain to the rest of the clinic, and ran out.
Myles was glad to leave, the movie theater was too far away for his liking, but Ira threw a fit. Well, what ten year old wants to move three times in a year? Loading up the car took less than two hours, the drive to Minneapolis took considerably longer. Ira shut up about how crappy it was to move when he noticed the white on the ground as they drove north. It was only October, and it was supposed to be a cold winter.
Owen frowned at the results from the fingerprints pulled from the unregistered firearm they had found in the missing doctor’s desk in the medical clinic in Little Havana. Dr. Gabriel Eirnan, M.D., physician, born to Sarah and George Eirnan, a housewife and a shopkeeper. Carried two student loans, worked her way through medical school, paid her way through her doctorate in genetics working at a family clinic, parents both deceased, no siblings, no children, no next of kin, thirty-six years old.
Dropped off the map after her house burned down five years ago, and there was the odd part, declared dead two years ago. The fingerprints matched a set they had on file, but there was nothing else in the file besides the prints.
In any case, Miss Eirnan’s profile was rather odd, she hadn’t popped up anywhere on the grid in the last five years, except now, when she’d had to in order to save a man’s life. In any case, other than the gun, there wasn’t a single mark on her record, the fingerprints had been taken as part of a background check years ago.
His phone rang, he answered it, it was his girlfriend. He asked if he could call back, and went outside to the payphone. His desk was in the middle of the bullpen of agents, and he knew he’d be teased mercilessly if they heard him talking to her.
1984
She sighed, sitting on the porch of the house they were renting, waiting for her two errant children to return from whatever mischief they had gotten into tonight. She looked up, as she caught something out of the corner of her eye. There they were, Ira taller than his brother, Myles punching him in the arm-and then they were down on the neighbor’s lawn, wrestling. She rolled her eyes, and got to her feet, “Ira, Myles. Get over here. Now.”
Ira sat up, blinking, “Mom? Why are you still awake?”
“Because you aren’t asleep.”
He shook his head, getting up, and giving Myles a hand up, “I’m fifteen”
“And Myles is twelve. You both need to be in bed before two AM, comprende?”
“Your accent is awful, Mom.”
She really didn’t know why they had decided to start calling her that. Myles had been the first to, one summer afternoon in a suburb of Chicago, when some schoolyard bullies had picked a fight with Ira at the end of their street, and Myles had come running up the steps to get her, “mom, please stop Ira, I don’t want to have to move again. I like it here.”
They’d had to move, anyway, but not that time, she’d pulled Ira off the boy who had been bullying him, marched them home, and gotten over her surprise at Myles’s statement later. It had only been two days after that, that Ira had walked into the kitchen in the early morning, yawning, and asked “mom” for a dissection kit. She wondered to this day if that had just been a shock tactic trying to get her to say yes, but regardless, he had continued calling her that ever since, despite the fact she had vetoed the dissection kit idea.
Putting Myles to bed-no, you can’t read, just go to sleep. You can read in the morning-she walked downstairs, sat in the armchair, and sighed. They would have been an insurmountable challenge to raise if the circumstances hadn’t been what they were. As it was, their knowledge that living even close to a normal life could be snatched away at a moment’s mistake made them only sort of possible to handle.
It snowed, so much that she spent two hours working on clearing their sidewalk before Ira woke, and walked downstairs to find the snow higher than he was. She handed him the shovel, and he whined for about five minutes, before digging the shovel into the snow. Myles met the same fate, and genetically enhanced muscles or not, both of them were exhausted by the time the snow was cleared. Their elderly neighbor stood on her porch, frowning. Ira and Myles looked at each other, sighed, and tromped across the street to clear her sidewalk as well.
She smiled a big smile, and joined them.
1985
Ira knocked on the doorframe of her room, she looked up, “yes?”
He was sixteen, and an inch shorter than her, a vaguely feminine, but not unmasculine figure and face, and definitely the calmer of him and Myles.
She frowned, “did something happen?”
“No. I mean, Myles go in a fight, but that’s not what…”
She nodded, “okay. Have a seat.”
He sat on the end of her bed, drawing his knees up to his chest, “um… I like someone.”
She smiled, “okay. Good.”
“A boy.”
“Okay.”
“And he thinks I’m a guy.”
“Right.”
“And he’s straight.”
“Well, you have two choices. You can either ignore the feelings, or you tell him you aren’t technically male or female, and hope he takes you for who you are.”
“What am I?”
Grey eyes confused, worried eyebrows, mouth drawn down in a small frown.
“That’s not a question anyone other than you can answer. But the good thing about that is that there is absolutely no wrong answer.”
Two new sets of fingerprint ID’s were on his desk when he came into work the week after his wedding. One was from a couple of kids who had been found trying to blow up a government building, the other set belonged to Dr. Gabriel Eirnan. Minneapolis was quite far away, and the blowing up a government building looked pretty promising, so he transferred the whole file to the Minneapolis office, and moved on to the bombing.
A week later, the would-be bombers had been released-apparently the arrest warrant had been dated wrong, and they got off thanks to that-and he was kind of wishing he still had Eirnan’s case on his docket, but it was his own damn fault, and it meant he got to go home to his wife a lot earlier than planned. In any case, he still had about a dozen other cases waiting when he went back to the office, so it wasn’t like he didn’t have anything to do at work.
1987
Whoever thought it would be a good idea to allow fifteen year olds behind the wheels of cars was either insane or on drugs. Probably both. And really should never have been allowed such decision-making authority. Ever. About anything. Ira had been bad. Myles was a complete disaster.
1989
It was raining. Hardly surprising, as they were living in Seattle. She walked up to their apartment building, and stopped, frowning. She could have sworn she had just seen Ira go past in a dress. It wasn’t the dress that confused her-he had gone as a girl for the two months they had lived in New York, and liked it okay, as he did make a pretty decent looking woman-but that she had just gotten off the phone with him at their apartment number.
Not that he couldn’t forward a call, but he had no reason to try and fool her, he was old enough to do what he wished as long as it wasn’t too monumentally stupid. She turned around, and hurried after the girl, gripping her shoulder. A moment later, Gabriel found herself lying on the sidewalk, staring up at the spitting image of her older child.
The woman stared down at her, shock written into her face, “…Dr. Eirnan? What…”
People were starting to stare, Gabriel got up, and touched the woman’s arm, “come with me.”
She hesitated, for a long moment, then followed Gabriel into the entryway of the apartment building. She stared, standing standoffishly across the hall from Gabriel, clearly very, very suspicious.
“I got out, with two others. One of your generation, another three years younger. They’ve been living with me since, going by Ira and Myles.”
“I’ve only found three others. How many escaped?”
“I have no idea. From watching the news, I’m guessing at least fifteen, but I don’t know. We barely made it out, I didn’t have time for search for any others.”
“You were one of them.”
“They gave me no choice. As soon as I had a choice, I took it. Hence me having lost count of how many places I’ve lived since, and Ira and Myles upstairs.”
“How can I trust you?”
“That’s up to you entirely.”
“How did you recognize me? I only saw you twice.”
“You’re the spitting image of Ira, you must have the same source genome.”
She shook her head, “I’m going to go.”
Gabriel nodded, “okay. I’ll tell Ira and Myles I met you. They’ll be happy to know you’re around.”
“They won’t know who I am.”
“I know. But you’re alive, and that makes me smile, so I’m guessing it’ll be nice for them to hear, too.”
1990
Gabriel sighed, sitting down at her desk in a corner of their tiny apartment in New York. Ira had wanted to see art, and museums, and since they definitely weren’t going anywhere near DC, New York had been the obvious place to go.
Creativity had been a big thing, in that generation. It went towards the ability to think on ones feet in battle, according to the program. Ira had filled their walls with art in each placed they lived. He’d even started selling some, at small town art fairs. She had a hunch he would probably continue doing so in New York, which, while risky...well, Ira more than knew what he was doing.
Myles was more worrisome, he seemed to be getting more and more reckless by the month. He had been responsible for their last three moves, for utterly stupid reasons. She was trying her best to keep him in check, but really, there was only so much you could do. He was fifteen, male, and of genetically enhanced stubbornness. It wasn’t a good combination.
Ira padded through, all covered in paint and clay, and who knew what else, on his way to the kitchen. She smiled at him, “having fun?”
He nodded, “working up an appetite. I was going to make sandwiches for dinner, you want one?”
“No thanks. Have you seen Myles?”
“I think he snuck out again.”
She groaned, and leaned forwards, burying her face in her hands. She really wanted them to be able to stay here for a while, for Ira’s sake. She would have to point that out to Myles when he came home for food.
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think it would be a problem for me to show some of my art under an alias. No going to openings or anything, just, you know?”
“I don’t see why not. You know how to keep safe. And honestly I don’t see why you couldn’t go to the openings, as long as you made sure no one took any photos.”
He grinned, leaning out of the kitchen door, “awesome. And, um. Would you come? To an opening, I mean?”
“Of course. You really think I’d miss that?”
He smiled, walking out, taking a big bite of his salami and swiss sandwich. The door slammed open, and Myles stormed in, sans shirt, hair sopping wet, “I hate all women.”
Ira snorted, “what now?”
“She stole my shirt!”
“I can see that,” commented Gabriel, dryly, “go change, but afterwards, we’re going to have a talk.”
He glared, and stomped into his and Ira’s room. She sighed, and turned back to what she had been working on.
1992
Gabriel unlocked the door to the apartment, and walked inside, as two men in suits came out her, smiling and nodding to her as they passed. She headed straight to the kitchen, to grab a peanut butter sandwich. When she turned around, she noticed her computer was knocked off the desk, the floppy disks scattered everywhere. Dammit, Myles. She walked to yell at the two boys, pushing the door to their room open. Her hands were trembling, and sweat broke out all over her body. Ira was heavy as she pulled him to his feet, blood spread across her shirt from his wounds, as she half carried him.
A distant crash, the door was splintered open. The two men were back.
She helped Ira to the window, slid it open, and stepped into air.
Blood spreading on a frozen sidewalk. Still body beside her. Weight in her arms. Warm blood running along her forearm. Car. No keys. Ira reaching across. Drive.
Driving at night, the warm rain pouring down. Dawn was ahead, the pale colors just starting to touch the night sky, the black becoming grey, the grey slowly becoming a dirty shade of blue, tinged with pink at the very bottom. When she was a child, and a little older, family vacations would start like this. Waking in the dark, the lights in the house the only illumination in the world, dragging her suitcase down the stairs, double checking toothbrush, underwear, socks. The cab arriving to take them to the airport, staring out the window, as the darkness trickled away, and the grey pink and then yellow light came.
Ira was crying. He was curled in the seat, crying, silently, tears rolling down his cheeks, but not a trace of it in his face or breath.
The door opened, he frowned, looking up from the peanut butter sandwich he was trying to convince himself it was important to eat. Cathy, his ex-wife bearing two large bags from the Thai place near where they used to live, and a folder, containing the report on the blood sample connected to the Eirnan case. The generally mouth-watering scent of the curry did little given how absent his appetite was, he reached for the file, and Cathy drew back, holding it hostage. He sighed, and took the plastic container of satay she handed him, resigning himself to trying to eat.
Her hand was warm on his shoulder, as she stood behind him, and read as he did. This wasn’t a good night for temptation.
Owen sat on the couch, Cathy asleep, head on a pillow in his lap, bored by the case files he had read hundreds of times in the last decade and a half, and probably almost a hundred more since the bloodwork came back three days ago. He looked down at her, gently pulling his fingers through a lose tangle in her greying blond hair. Their marriage had made both of them miserable, their divorce had been upsetting, but it hardly seemed to matter, in the end.
He opened the file again, over the arm of the couch, and put his hand on Cathy’s shoulder, starting to read through once again. He wouldn’t deny, that. And he had spent enough hours staring at the same damned pages to not work as hard as he could to make sense of the new information.
Sitting in a park bench, Gabrielle stared out at the trees, and the grass, and the pigeons, and the little kids chasing them. A mother grabbed her son by the wrist, and pulled him off the chase, away from the frightened birds. Another held a baby on her shoulder, as she talked on a phone. Another, another, another. A family with three kids, two women kissing on a bench, an artist sitting, painting.
She sat, for a hour. For two. For four. For six.
She was starting to shiver.
She stopped shivering.
She stood, and walked back to the bus stop.
The ride went by in silence, and in cold, fall was coming, and the air was sharp against her face.
Pushing open the door to the shitty motel room, she smelled chemicals, and dropped her coat to open the door to the bathroom. Ira, sitting, cross-legged, the components and ingredients for things she only vaguely understood from what she remembered of college chemistry. Explosives. She went inside, and dragged him out to go to bed, only hoping the cleaning company van outside wouldn’t be missing its chemicals and come looking.
“Ira.”
“What?”
“We’ll find him. I promise you. We’ll take them down.”
Really, he had a hard time believing his eyes, sitting at his desk, as the files started popping up of their own accord. Computers were not his friends, but he knew enough to recognize an attack when he saw one. It’s just that his computer isn’t connected to anything but the FBI’s internal network, which means someone hacked into that, which is supposed to be rather difficult. He called the guy in charge of cybercrime, and sat in a corner of his office, which was swarming with the glasses and mustard-stained-tie crowd. Cathy wandered in, with coffee for herself, and tea for him, which he took gratefully, “Cathy.”
She looked down at him, raising an eyebrow. He tugged on the string a few times, then looked up at her, “they deleted the Eirnan file.”
“You have a paper copy, don’t you?”
“Yes, at...” he frowned, and set the tea on the floor, “I need to check my home.”
She nodded, “I’ll come with you.”
He shook his head, “you don’t have to, it’s probably nothing.”
“I’m your boss, remember? I’m responsible for you, can’t have you just sneaking off in the middle of the work day.”
He rolled his eyes, standing, and headed towards the elevator, Cathy close behind. Arriving, he could already see that someone had been there. The front door had been broken in, there were tire tracks leading up through the front yard, Cathy went in, he stood back, she came out, holding a few wrinkled and stepped-on sheets of paper, “looks like they were in every room. They took your computer, I don’t know what else.”
He rubbed at his forehead, sighed, and followed her back inside, sitting down in an armchair, watching her, as she pulled together the different files spread across his floor in disarray. She always did that, trying to put back things that were broken. God, he was being mopey. Suddenly, he noticed something on the paper she had just picked up, “Cathy, wait.”
She turned, raising an eyebrow, “you going to help? What a novel idea?”
He shook his head, “that’s just crazy. But, let me see that.”
She handed him the sheets, and he turned them over, revealing what he had seen. A boot-print. A small, female, boot print. He stands up, and walks to the door without a word, the stained piece of paper clenched tight in his hand. He wasn’t going to sleep tonight, anyway.
Opening his eyes, he honestly doesn’t know where he is. It’s dark, and he’s in pain, though not too bad-bumps, bruises, and maybe a little worse. Either he’s been beaten, run over by a golf cart for a third time, or just generally abused somehow.
The dark is more explicable, he can see some light filtering through in a line, he gets stiffly to his feet, and moves towards it, searching with both hands, until he finds a doorknob, and starts yanking and knocking and yelling. It’s only a minute or so later, that the knob turns unexpectedly in his hands, and the door swings in towards him. He stands, and stares at a face that confuses the hell out of him for a moment. He’s seen it, on security camera shots, and again and again, a grainy frame from one of those chance captures, in the file on Gabrielle Eirnan. Except in those videos, and that one still, the face is male, and this person is female, and pretty.
It is, however, the same face.
“Why didn’t you give up?”
He blinks, and leans against the doorway, staring at the woman, only a few inches shorter than him, strawberry blond hair tied back, grey-green eyes, every feature in the face and stature identical. But not the same.
She was her own person, no matter what her origin might have been.
The tree was his new favorite spot. It had been blown apart, whether by the insurgents-who really weren’t insurgents in the sense that they had actually done any insurging-or the military response, it was impossible to tell. In either case, it had been hit about halfway up the trunk, and now sat with the crown in the water-filled crater, the splintered end up on the sandy shore. He sat on the trunk, just past where the branches began, the remaining needles shielding him from the sight of any passing patrol boats, while giving enough spaces to peer through. When it was windy, and the water rough, waves crashed onto the shore, and he put his feet up on the branches to keep his boots dry.
Beyond his perch was the wide river, the other shore just barely visible far off away. Everyone knew what went on over there-the tests on the insurgents, the new weapons, the camps. He wished he didn’t know. He wished things could go back to how they were, before the war, before the fighting, the bombings, the terrorism every day. Before the country had ripped itself apart, over them.
The soldiers, created, not born. Marching across the country, with faces all alike, bearing nothing in their expressions. The response hadn’t been much better than the instigation. Sins against god, had been the cry. Well look at them now. If this was what god wanted, Owen certainly wanted no part of god.
A seagull sat on the one tree still standing, almost in the sea, crying mournfully, keening loud and long. He sat in his own tree, and wished things weren’t so wrong.
He hadn’t been old enough to understand, really, when things had started to go bad. He knew the start had been the year he was born, but there had still been hope back then. It had just been a scandal, government experiments, the world had recovered from far worse. But the cracks had already been there, just waiting for a hammer blow to split them.
That blow had come when he was nine, the series of coordinated terrorist attacks across the country, the descent into chaos, the military trying to regain control over panicked citizens, and the messages of hate against anyone different, anyone who was going against god, anyone who looked like them, the troops with no regard for their own lives-or anyone else’s-who all looked the same. Except he kind of thought they didn’t, not all the way.
He had definitely been too young to understand, except in that he could understand damned well that none of this was good, and all of it was scary, and wrong. About a month after the attacks, his mother was arrested, and he was taken to a school, with other children, and they had told them the military was trying to protect them, and what their parents had done was wrong. He didn’t know what his mother had done, but he had been sure he was never going to leave that place alive. One day, though, there had been an attack on the facility, and in the confusion, he had managed to escape.
His mother hadn’t.
He had been thirteen.
Now he was eighteen, and he understood everything.
It was a quiet, gorgeous place. She had found it walking, a clearing in the woods, kept by whatever luck, or simply not enough time, from being closed in completely by the forest. Old, worn stones, stood, leaning, fallen, broken, but still quite beautiful. Peaceful. The few trees growing up through the grass had upset some of the stones, but most remained relatively undisturbed. No flowers graced the ground, no person had visited any one of these graves in decades, probably centuries. She couldn’t even read most of the names, dates. The few she could read, as she wandered through the forest of stones, were from the 1800's, or earlier. A few had died in the twentieth century, but just barely.
She walked to a large oak tree, and seated herself on the moss at its base, the acorns crunching under her boots as she walked. The grass and leaves and sandy ground were lit in places, light and golden, by the sun filtering down through the trees, as it slowly moved lower in the sky. Across the graveyard, over the crest of the hill, and just barely visible from where she sat, were two white stones. Just stones pulled from the river, partially buried in earth, moss grown thick around the base of one, the other new, bright white and seeming to shine with a light of its own, under a wide beam of sun.
Quiet, the last crickets of the summer, a crow far back in the trees, a rustle in the leaves, a squirrel or deer moving through. Leaves glowing, the sun behind.
Two stones, but no bodies. Two dead, but none at rest.
There was an image, that would be forever in his mind. Stopped, at the side of the empty, broken road, her walking away, the heavy bag slung across her back, tan shirt pulled and wrinkled by the weight of the leather strap, his boots, too big for her feet leaving deep impressions, in the soft, sandy dirt. For a decade, she had been his partner, and that day, he had known with complete clarity that she was walking into death.
Standing at the top of the hill, he stared down at the young man, curled on the crumbling shore, under a tattered, dirty blanket. Walking down, the darkened grey earth sticking to his formerly spotless boots, he crouched, uniform pulling across his back, as he reached forward.
The young man’s eyes opened, a knife was in his hand, but Lahash’s hand was faster, he caught the young man’s arm, and pinned him to the ground, “stop.”
Another knife in the other hand, he sighed, and wrenched the man to his feet, shoving him against a tree, and pressing his gun against the skinny back, hard enough to bruise, “stop.”
“You’ll never take me alive.”
Whatever the kid meant to swallow or chew was expelled after a sharp blow to his abdomen, he fell to his knees, coughing, hurting, as Lahash let go.
“Get up.”
The kid stayed on the ground, coughing, mud coating his clothes, then suddenly surged up, almost snarling, grabbing for the gun. Lahash struck him, his eyes went wide, and he fell again, face in the mud, jerking with spasms of pain, trying desperately to breathe. He dragged the kid’s arm over his own shoulders, and lifted him under his knees. The kid had passed out, his head fell to rest against Lahash’s shoulder.
That had gone better than he had expected.
The metal was cold, and hard, in her hand. Ribbed grip, rough against her palm. Trigger totally smooth, but stiff, as it was squeezed.
Walking to the street corner, his bag over his shoulder, the towering buildings empty and broken, or occupied and foreboding, he leaned against the lamp post, light long ago shot out, and pointed his flashlight down, the metal cold in his hand from the chill fall air. In the torn out access panel, there was a small slip of paper. There was no-one around, and kids or someone more nefarious had spray painted the CCTV cameras in the area. He removed the slip, and walked away, back towards the sprawling camps on the outskirts of the broken city.
The sun was bright on his face. Opening his eyes, he looked out at the road flying by, as he pulled at his bonds. He was tied sideways on the seat, facing away from the driver, and unable to turn to look.
“I’ll kill you.”
“That plan working well for you so far?”
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“You.”
“Oh? And who am I? You don’t even know, do you? You just got told to get some guy, you don’t care who they are, what they did, just catch them, and claim your reward.”
“You are nigh incredibly unobservant. I can’t imagine why anyone would lose enough sleep to bother putting your name on this list.”
“So you’re not denying it? Ha, I-“
“Stop with the bravado, it’s boring and useless, and I know you’re smarter than that. Just apparently blind.”
He tried to twist, but he couldn’t, the only change after he gave up his struggle was that he now had a cramp in his neck. He sighed, in resignation, “what are you talking about?”
“Commanders rarely get bounty work.”
He swallowed, “then what do you want with me?”
“I, unlike whatever mindless grunt is looking for you right now, do know who you are. Not that you’ve really done anything to prove your parentage means anything, but you are the son of Owen Swanson and Cathy Hoyt.”
“What do you care? Why did you kidnap me? And Owen who?”
“Because you would have been killed before I had a chance to speak with you, if I hadn’t. Your father, and I would assume namesake, Owen Swanson. The suspected leader of one of the more successful terrorist cells in the sector, and confirmed planner of several extremely problematic attacks through the last seventeen years.”
“I thought my father was a house painter who died falling off a ladder.”
“I think your mother may have fudged the story, a bit.”
Six years of fighting together, developing connections, gathering supplies, working, building just some sort of resistance, he had never once seen her sleep. The minute he entered wherever she was, she was awake, and usually with a knife to his throat. It didn’t matter if it was after her eardrums had been blown open by the concussive wave of an explosion, she was never caught unaware, and she certainly never relaxed.
Well, she hadn’t been caught unaware this time. And it was difficult to find one’s self in another’s lap without some intention of ending up there. So he had to assume, that sometime in the night, while he had slept soundly through whatever she did to prepare for the next day’s attack, she had meant to settle herself beside him on the ground, and curl her hand loosely in his shirt, her hair all everywhere, caught in the Velcro of her coat. She was warm, and heavy, and her breath left little wisps of mist in the biting air.
The package in her lap was heavier than she had expected. Ira sat to her left, driving, as they headed towards the compound. Children. They were taking the children of dissidents, and trying to mold them to their purposes. She twisted the spiraled red wire connecting to one of the pins in her fingers. Ira turned the truck into the driveway, gravel crunching under the heavy wheels. Two guards stepped into the road. Ira picked up the gun from the center console.
“Where are we going?”
He shook his head, “you’ll see when we get there.”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“You’ll find out when it happens.”
“So you’re going to kill me.”
“No.”
“Then why are you being so cryptic?”
Lahash glared, taking his eyes off the road for a moment, “I’m not, you’re just an idiot. You’ll find out what happens when it happens, because unless you happen to know a psychic, nobody knows beforehand.”
Looking back, he swerved back to the center of the road, instead of running into a ditch.
“You’re a terrible driver.”
“Why don’t you just shut up for a while before I really do consider killing you.”
She, so much like the he he had lost, had been near death when he found her. Body torn and burned, the one arm gone completely, the skin on her side and back nearly all ripped away. Lifting her, blood had soaked his sleeves, and he’d smelled of burning flesh for days.
In the grip of the infection, near death, he’d sat by her side in the small building, as she laid on the one uninjured side, hair soaked with sweat, eyes fevered and unfocused, soft moans of pain escaping her lips occasionally. Her skin had been too hot, her cheeks flushed red, there had been nothing he could do, except continue to give the antibiotics, and hope she pulled through.
As she had fought, she had slipped in and out of real consciousness, twisting at anything her hand latched upon, jumbled, confused sentences coming between cries of pain. At the time, he hadn’t known who Owen Swanson was, or even really who she was, he had just held her, and tried to calm her, because he’d no idea what else to do with a sobbing, injured ghost.
The car wasn’t starting. She tried the key again, the engine turned, started, ran, bang, and smoke, billowing out, almost obscuring the man walking toward her, gun in hand. She tried the door, it wouldn’t open, she shoved and kicked, until it crunched and opened, and she was standing, breath becoming gentle clouds of mist in the clear, chilly air, dissipating, as the ear-ringing shots split the night, the recoil hurting her already slightly aching arm.
Sitting back down, as fire started to engulf the hood, she watched the shape on the ground through the broken glass and licking flames.
The attack had been a surprise. He had not heard that someone was planning to attack. Not a word. That was a problem. That the attack had come, and been successful, that was one thing. But that he’d had no notion it was going to happen, when he was tied in to every branch of every group.... that was a problem. It meant there was somebody new.
New was a problem. New was unpredictable. New might screw up everything.
A week later, he stood outside the hut in the slums outside of the city, the small symbol carved into the door, near the hinge, telling him he had the right place. Everything else telling him he was wrong. The man wasn’t even trying to hide.
Lahash pushed open the unlocked door. There was a man, asleep, snoring, in a pile of blankets on the floor. Lahash knelt, the man’s eyes opened, he blinked sleepily, “Jethro Lahash, I presume?”
“Who told you I was coming?”
“No-one, but a lot of people told me you might.”
“The same people who told me where to find you.”
“Yes, probably,” agreed the man, sitting up, “but I think their judgment was probably sound on both accounts.”
“That’s only the case if you don’t make any more stupid moves.”
“That wasn’t the first move I’ve made.”
“It’s the first one I’ve heard about. Meaning you’ve been smart, until now. Now you’re being stupid.”
“Now I’m making a point. That I’m not afraid.”
“See, again, stupid. They’ll kill you. I’ll order them to.”
“I know. I’m not afraid.”
“You’d be much more useful alive.”
“I personally would be. But my death will be even more useful than that.”
Lahash opened the door to the cell. He was crumpled on the floor, unmoving.
“You alive?”
A soft, pained groan. Lahash crouched, untangling stiff, beaten limbs, sliding his fingers through sticky blood-soaked hair, carefully checking each vertebra, standing out stark from starved flesh, some laid bare by lashes with a belt or whip. Superficial damage, mostly. But the right leg was twisted, and Owen screamed when he tried to move it, his hands coming away coated in blood from the attempt.
The older man’s clothes were too bloody to carry without mussing his uniform, so Lahash gripped his wrists, and dragged, ignoring it as he screamed and screamed. Eventually, he petered out to quiet, hoarse moans, and not long after, he stopped making any sound at all.
On the way back to his office, Lahash tried not to slip on the bloody trail he had left behind.
The soldier had been left behind. His chest still rose and fell, his eyes were still open, wide with pain and fear. His arm was trapped beneath a tree blown twenty feet from its stump. Piper stood over him, watching him, as he watched her, his eyes flitting between her face and the pistol held in her hand.
Embers dancing on the broken road, he stood before the fiery sky, flames twirling, spinning in the night, dark silhouettes falling, falling down.
She was gone.
“So, my dad.... he’s killed a lot of people?”
“I would imagine, yes.”
“Then he’s a hero.”
“That’s not what makes someone a hero.”
“Sure, not the people you kill. But if he’s opposing the government, then he’s a hero.”
“He is a hero. But that has nothing to do with who he has or hasn’t killed.”
“Can I meet him?”
“He’s dead.”
Gabrielle hurriedly got to her feet, and ran to the door. Two men, she had seen them around, stood, an injured soldier held between them. She hesitated not a moment, before ushering them inside.
“Every man killed in this war is somebody’s child. Every man left alive, is a mother who doesn’t have to cry.”
“Doesn’t your mother cry that you’re killing the good guys?”
“I don’t have a mother.”
“Everybody has a mother.”
“No. Not everyone.”
Owen stared, at the man, slight traces of grey starting to show in his short cropped reddish brown hair, “you’re way too old to be a biogen.”
“You only think that because they killed nearly every one of us created before about the year of your birth.”
“Why are you alive?”
“I’m useful.”
“And the others weren’t?”
“Not in quite the same way.”
“But how’d you get to be a commander, if they were only even keeping you alive because you were useful?”
Lahash sighed, “because I proved I wasn’t like the others.”
“How?”
“I helped them kill my sister.”
It was the middle of July in the deep south, she looked like she had walked out of a western, booted feet propped up on a small table, plaid cotton shirt open near the top, sweat across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, beads forming atop light brown freckles.
Her hair was frizzy and all everywhere, thanks to the heavy humidity that seemed to make the air as thick as honey, forming a strawberry blond halo in the late morning sun. Her chair was tipped back against one of the wooden pillars, unfinished wood pressing into heat-softened white paint; he had seen the permanent indent from her doing the same thing, before.
What hair hadn’t escaped was tied back into a messy, somewhat ineffective ponytail, the locks spilling over her shoulders in tumbling waves of curls. She was reading, some silly, unimportant book, totally focused, utterly engrossed by whatever trivial fantasy the characters were engaged in.
Standing in front of his superior officers, his arm in a sling, and bandages across his chest, he had never been so nervous in his life, as he delivered the news they so very much did not want to hear, “no, sir. It was her, but she must have drugged me, I woke up in front of the compound.”
“Did she injure you?”
He shook his head, “no. I was injured in the fighting and left behind by my unit. Some of the locals picked me up, and dragged me to a house. I thought I was going to be executed or captured. But she gave me something, I guess it was a sedative, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in front of the compound. She had taken the shrapnel out and bandaged where I was hurt.”
“Can you tell us where the house was?”
“I can, sir, but I won’t do much good. The scouts already checked, she’s gone.”
He was dizzy with pain, someone had brought food, he hadn’t been awake or conscious at the time, but now even looking at it made him nauseous. The door opened, he groaned, and weakly lifted his hand, shielding himself from the excessive light. A strong hand gripped his wrist, pinning his arm to the floor. He tried to fight, but it was like moving through molasses, and the someone was far stronger than he, anyway. He wondered where she had gone…and, for that matter, the porch, and sunshine.
They were lying across him, now, pinning his torso and right arm, while holding onto his left. He felt the tourniquet being tied on, and tried again to fight, he didn’t want to die, and he certainly didn’t want whatever drugs or poison he might be being given to make him talk.
Writhing under the man’s weight, finally, they relented, and let go, “if you don’t want an air embolism, stop moving.”
He blinked. The red-headed man laid over him again, and gripped his arm, tapping at his elbow.”
“What are you giving me...swine?”
He had never been good at trash talk.
“Amoxicillin. Unless you’re allergic to penicillin.”
“It had to be someone inside!”
The captain was screaming, red in the face, at the loss of one of the key installations to what appeared to be sabotage. Lahash gritted his teeth, turned to the man who stood apart, and growled, “you. You’ve had contact with Eirnan.”
His eyes went wide, hand going to his injured shoulder, arm still in a sling.”
The captain put his gun to the back of the man’s head, “you’re dead.”
Lahash cocked his head slightly, “if you don’t mind... I’ve got a project that could use him.”
The captain grinned, tobacco-stained teeth flashing greenish in the night, “all yours, Commander.”
Lahash grabbed the collar of the man’s shirt, and marched him out.
“You did it. You’re the one. You’ve been at every installation that’s had sabotage.”
Lahash looked at the young man, in the passenger seat of his truck, “yes. You’re correct. I’m the saboteur, I’m the one taking down the military piece by piece.”
“Why haven’t you been caught? Isn’t anyone investigating?”
Lahash grinned, “yeah. Me. I’m the one assigned to find the mole.”
“That’s...really clichéd.”
“It’s brilliant, actually.”
“You had no control over it, it’s not brilliant.”
“I had all the control I needed. All I had to do was kill my sister.”
“You’re a terrible person. Where are you taking me?”
“To my sister.”
“So you’re going to kill me?”
“No, I’m going to dump you with her, and she can decide what to do with you.”
Piper looked up, as the truck rolled into her camp, strode towards it, the shotgun to her shoulder, looking down the barrel with her non-blinded eye. But it was just Jethro, getting out, and dragging...
“Goddamnit, Jethro, I just got rid of him. Dumped him with your mother.”
“Who fixed him up and sent him back to the military, where he got to be the latest mole. Now he gets to stay here and not cause any trouble, right?”
The man, who looked just a smidge confused, nodded, slowly.
“Good. Causing trouble means a bullet in the brain, so just keep that in mind. Now go help with that tent.”
The man ran past her, bracing his injured arm with the other. Piper turned back to Jethro, “I have a lead on Owen’s kid.”
Gabrielle walked out of her small tent at the edge of the impromptu camp, the sun shining through tall pines in faint beams...beams that fell upon a man, sitting, one leg bandaged and splinted, crutches next to him, appearing to have been dumped at the end of a set of wide tire tracks.
“Uh, hello.”
“Who brought you here?”
“To be honest, I really have no idea.”
Piper glared at Jethro, as though trying to bore holes through his head. Giving up, she ate a French fry, “why did you leave Owen with Gabrielle?”
He shrugged; there was ketchup in his beard, “I have my reasons.”
“Jethro, you really have a habit of pissing everyone off.”
“You are not the first person to tell me that.”
“You should have left him here.”
“I need you not distracted.”
“What are you implying?”
“That you love him.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
Owen Hoyt yawned, slowly waking up. He wasn’t in the truck anymore, he was lying on the ground. A woman, maybe around forty, with curly strawberry blond hair all everywhere, and scars on her face, stood over him, “Owen Swanson’s son. Jethro just dumped you here, by the way. The man has terrible timing; we’re about to take down the government.”
He blinked, “what do you mean?”
“Jethro got the master codes for all the detainment centers and research facilities. He’s on his way to give half of them to Eirnan’s group, and tell them where to meet us. ”
“What...”
“We’re rebels, Owen Hoyt. My name is Piper Lahash, I’m the coordinator for about a thousand of us, or more, it’s hard to say how many will come when the groups send out the call.”
“You’re his sister?”
“Of a sort.”
“He said he killed you.”
“He did, as far as the government is concerned. He also killed your father, and you.”
“My father... wait, is he still alive?”
“Yes. He’s with Eirnan.”
Her expression darkened, “and Jethro better keep him safe.”
“Who’s Eirnan?”
“The leader of a smaller, separate group. Jethro’s kept them isolated from us, so if there was ever a double agent, only one half of the rebellion would be taken down. More to the point, I think, to keep her safe.”
“Why would he care if she were safe?”
“Because she’s his mother.”
“But...he’s a bio-gen, he said it himself. He wasn’t born, he was created.”
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a mother.”
He was crying. Crying so damned hard, everything around him was wrong. He would rather die than be here, back in the hands of the people who created him.
His heart was pounding in his chest, he felt like he couldn’t breathe, the sterile walls and metal instruments, him strapped to the table. He wanted to die. He wanted just to die.
The man came in, that same man, from so many years before, he would never forget his face.
“K-7. You’re to be studied and then terminated. Do you have anything to say?”
Fighting his restraints, he realized they didn’t know his strength, he strained against them, until finally one gave. His arm was free, and he grabbed the man by the collar, “my name is Myles Eirnan, you son of a bitch, and you aren’t going to get the satisfaction of killing me.”
The man smirked, as armed soldiers flooded the room.
“And how’s that?”
Myles grinned, sick satisfaction filling his chest, as a plan started to form, “because you need me. I can give you so much, that no-one else can.”
Author: hollystark
Rating: Pg-13-R
Warnings: Violence
Summary: A young doctor being forced to work at a government facility for the creation of humans sets off a chain reaction that changes history.
Legal: Please read, but don't take, this is entirely original fiction.
Feedback: Reviews and flames alike are highly appreciated.
1977
The pain was so bad, she couldn’t lift her arm. Bloodloss, definitely, but she was still conscious enough to drive, so the bullet definitely hadn’t hit any major arteries. Pressure, removal of the bullet, cleaning of the wound. Nope. She looked over her shoulder at the two children curled in the backseat. Both wearing sterile blue pajamas, feet bare, eyes open, staring at her. She turned back to the road. She was dizzy, and hoped it was from the pain, rather than from the blood loss.
The next time she turned around, almost two hours later, having determined that her blood loss was slowing, and pain was the main issue, she found the younger child asleep half across the older one’s lap. She was glad pain was the big problem, as that was something she could just keep fighting without stopping.
Four hours later, she was falling asleep in the wheel, turned into a 24 hour supermarket, told the children to stay, and went in, dumping her crimson stained labcoat in a trashcan just out front. caffeine, scissors-the closest thing to forceps she could find, antiseptic wipes, gauze, a new shirt, and a blanket for the children. it was hard to maneuver a cart with only your non-dominant hand.
She got back in the car, and handed the children the blanket. The younger one was still asleep, but the older took the blanket, and put it over both of them. She got out of the car, walked over to a tree, and sat against it, putting her scissors on the ground, removing her shirt, and picking them back up. She had to wipe away layers of clotted blood to get to the wound, though wet crimson was still dribbling through. Bra was definitely ruined. She was glad she had elected not to remove the bullet in the car, she definitely would have woken the younger child with her screaming.
Pocketing the little lead object, she stuffed the wound with gauze, and went back to the car, putting on the new shirt with difficulty-bullet had definitely hit a nerve, she couldn’t move her arm-and starting the car, before popping open the first of the six packs of soda she had purchased.
The older child crawled up into the passenger seat, she looked at them, “you can sleep, you know.”
The child wasn’t older than nine, possibly as young as seven, it was hard to tell with these children. The child was definitely part of the earlier generations, the androgyny effects were very clearly visible. She sighed, “are you a girl or a boy?”
The child stared at her, uncomprehending. She chewed her lower lip, the child had to be around eight, then, that was the generation that had been truly androgynous, and raised as such, “is there a name you like? Or a person you like reading about?”
“I… like cowboys.”
“Who’s your favorite?”
“Ira Aten. He did whatever it took to protect his fences.”
She smiled slightly, “how about I call you Ira.”
The child-she’d call them a he for now, for the sake of not having to explain all the time to anyone they had to deal with-turned away. She frowned, “are you alright?”
He turned back-a very slight trace of a smile on his face. She smiled, as she took off the parking brake, and backed up, “Ira it is.”
She would drive to Las Vegas, it was only another two hours, and they would get a cheap motel room, and crash for the night. Rest, food, and then in the morning they would continue on to Flagstaff, get food, some more supplies, and finish the day’s driving in Albuquerque.
From there to Oklahoma City, with a stop in Amarillo, then the next day on to Memphis, followed by the last leg to Savannah, Georgia, or if they couldn’t quite make that, then to Atlanta, and to Savannah the next day. About the last place they would think to look, and she had been there a few times as a kid, with her father.
About half an hour later, she noticed that there were now two drinks missing from her six-pack. She sighed. The fact that they were cute didn’t mean crap, they had spent their entire lives being raised to spy and kill, they were more than capable of stealing her soda without her noticing-or taking down the soldiers keeping them locked away.
She had no idea if anyone else had escaped. She had been working late, in her little lab-she had been pulled into the project as a pediatrician with a specialty in hereditary conditions, never suspecting what the project she would actually be working on was. Well, no, she had known it was sketchy, but her house had burned down a week before she got the offer, and she had been kind of desperate. It hadn’t occurred to her until much later that the people she was working for were probably the people who had burned down her house.
Working late, running tests on a sample from one of the newest generation-who only had a cold, but that wasn’t supposed to happen, not with their engineered immune systems-she had been so engrossed that she hadn’t noticed, at first, the smoke filling her lab. Once she had noticed, she had hurried to the door, found the handle to be hot, and stepped back, biting her lip. A broom handle, and the tie from her labcoat, she had managed to get the door open, and run out, holding her arm over her mouth and nose.
Gunshots had been her first clue that this wasn’t just somebody’s weapons experiment going poorly, she had ducked into a college’s lab, which her card also opened as she was collaborating on an experiment going on inside, but the door didn’t have a chance to close behind her, before a group of barefooted teenagers and older adolescents pushed through and pinned her to the ground.
“Jesus, what’s going on?”
The one that seemed to be leading them frowned at her, “Dr Eirnan.”
She had nodded, and they had let her up, “what’s going on?”
“We’re leaving. I’m guessing you know why.” He was right. She had seen the damage done to these young people’s bodies by the soldiers who kept them, and the training they went through. She wished she could stop it, but she was the only physician on staff, and she knew any attempt to stop the harm would only result in none of the children receiving medical attention until they could destroy the life of a another doctor and bring them into the program.
“Oh. Well, that’s…good luck.”
“Are you going to tell?”
“I’m going to sit right here and try and not breathe too much smoke.”
The teenager had nodded, and they had congregated in the farthest corner, before going back into the hallway at a run. She had sat, waiting, listening, making sure the door was slightly open. It had eventually opened, again, and two children had cautiously snuck inside, stopping abruptly when they saw her.
She could hear the boots of the guards approaching, and without thinking, she had pulled the children inside, and shut the door. She would die, for that. But, thinking about it, it wasn’t like she was ever going to have a life outside this place again. And dying trying to protect someone was a much better way to die than any other she could think of.
She ushered the children into the alcove under a lab table right next to a door, and tried to draw the soldiers away-one saw, as the children ran out the closing door, she didn’t ever know afterwards how it happened, but a mess of hands and arms trying to grab her, and then a gunshot, she was running down the hall, picking up the younger child, and running as fast as she could to the exit. Falling down the steps, running, running, running, barbed wire, slices, climbing, wriggling through, gunshots in the distance, tripping, falling, foot caught under a root, pulling it out, wishing so very, very much that she had bothered to keep herself in shape.
It never made the news. There were no obituaries, except for the soldiers. They had been serving their country, never going to be reassigned, black ops, last choice recruits, desperate. They got lines in the paper, she saw, as she stood at a newsstand in Winslow, Arizona-the younger child, a boy of five, she had named him Myles, had needed to pee.
Getting back in the car, Ira was digging through her glove compartment, probably bored. She handed him a book, knowing it wouldn’t entertain him for long, but it had to be at least a little better than staring out the window. He frowned at it, as though uncertain why he was holding such an object.
“It’s for you. You looked bored.”
He looked at her, frowning, “Dr. Eirnan?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you help us?”
“What else was I going to do?”
Ira seemed more than a little confused by that. Myles pulled on her sleeve, she looked at him, “yes?”
“I wanna read, too.”
Ira scoffed, “you can’t read.”
“Yes I can!”
She had to smile, slightly. Clearly, development could only be accelerated so much…
1979
The gun had been Ira’s idea. Not that it had been his idea for her to carry a gun, his idea had been for him to have a weapon, but she had vetoed that the minute she had found it in his backpack. So now she had an illegal weapon, but honestly, she didn’t really care. She was on the run from the government, and harboring two grade-school fugitives who she’d had to yell at yesterday for hacking into the transit authority website to change the bus schedule so they could go to the late showing of a movie.
She promised herself she would never again decide to raise a pair of hyper-intelligent would-be assassins, as she walked into her office, a little medical clinic that hadn’t looked too hard at her background after three shooting victims had wandered in when she was there for her interview. Their refusal to go to the hospital and three years experience of patching up pint sized gunshot victims combined to impress enough for them to overlook her lack of references and refusal to have any records of employment written down. The gun went into her desk, she walked out to the front desk, and signed herself in. The damage from her own gsw had eventually healed, leaving her with pain occasionally, but not much else in the way of adverse effects.
Her first patient of the day was a kid, strep, sat there looking miserable, she directed his mother to get antibiotics from the front desk, and presented the kid with a sucker-he looked a lot less miserable after that. Walking out of the exam room, she saw a man collapse, and hurried to help the other person working that day, a Cuban nurse, Sara, to roll the man over. He was blue, she grabbed a CPR mask, started artificial respiration, but his heart didn’t start no matter what they tried. Calling 911, grabbing the supplies, she cracked his chest, squeezed his heart, felt it start beating again, swallowed, staggered shakily back. She had really kind of liked Miami, and now they would have to move.
She told Sara to explain to the rest of the clinic, and ran out.
Myles was glad to leave, the movie theater was too far away for his liking, but Ira threw a fit. Well, what ten year old wants to move three times in a year? Loading up the car took less than two hours, the drive to Minneapolis took considerably longer. Ira shut up about how crappy it was to move when he noticed the white on the ground as they drove north. It was only October, and it was supposed to be a cold winter.
Owen frowned at the results from the fingerprints pulled from the unregistered firearm they had found in the missing doctor’s desk in the medical clinic in Little Havana. Dr. Gabriel Eirnan, M.D., physician, born to Sarah and George Eirnan, a housewife and a shopkeeper. Carried two student loans, worked her way through medical school, paid her way through her doctorate in genetics working at a family clinic, parents both deceased, no siblings, no children, no next of kin, thirty-six years old.
Dropped off the map after her house burned down five years ago, and there was the odd part, declared dead two years ago. The fingerprints matched a set they had on file, but there was nothing else in the file besides the prints.
In any case, Miss Eirnan’s profile was rather odd, she hadn’t popped up anywhere on the grid in the last five years, except now, when she’d had to in order to save a man’s life. In any case, other than the gun, there wasn’t a single mark on her record, the fingerprints had been taken as part of a background check years ago.
His phone rang, he answered it, it was his girlfriend. He asked if he could call back, and went outside to the payphone. His desk was in the middle of the bullpen of agents, and he knew he’d be teased mercilessly if they heard him talking to her.
1984
She sighed, sitting on the porch of the house they were renting, waiting for her two errant children to return from whatever mischief they had gotten into tonight. She looked up, as she caught something out of the corner of her eye. There they were, Ira taller than his brother, Myles punching him in the arm-and then they were down on the neighbor’s lawn, wrestling. She rolled her eyes, and got to her feet, “Ira, Myles. Get over here. Now.”
Ira sat up, blinking, “Mom? Why are you still awake?”
“Because you aren’t asleep.”
He shook his head, getting up, and giving Myles a hand up, “I’m fifteen”
“And Myles is twelve. You both need to be in bed before two AM, comprende?”
“Your accent is awful, Mom.”
She really didn’t know why they had decided to start calling her that. Myles had been the first to, one summer afternoon in a suburb of Chicago, when some schoolyard bullies had picked a fight with Ira at the end of their street, and Myles had come running up the steps to get her, “mom, please stop Ira, I don’t want to have to move again. I like it here.”
They’d had to move, anyway, but not that time, she’d pulled Ira off the boy who had been bullying him, marched them home, and gotten over her surprise at Myles’s statement later. It had only been two days after that, that Ira had walked into the kitchen in the early morning, yawning, and asked “mom” for a dissection kit. She wondered to this day if that had just been a shock tactic trying to get her to say yes, but regardless, he had continued calling her that ever since, despite the fact she had vetoed the dissection kit idea.
Putting Myles to bed-no, you can’t read, just go to sleep. You can read in the morning-she walked downstairs, sat in the armchair, and sighed. They would have been an insurmountable challenge to raise if the circumstances hadn’t been what they were. As it was, their knowledge that living even close to a normal life could be snatched away at a moment’s mistake made them only sort of possible to handle.
It snowed, so much that she spent two hours working on clearing their sidewalk before Ira woke, and walked downstairs to find the snow higher than he was. She handed him the shovel, and he whined for about five minutes, before digging the shovel into the snow. Myles met the same fate, and genetically enhanced muscles or not, both of them were exhausted by the time the snow was cleared. Their elderly neighbor stood on her porch, frowning. Ira and Myles looked at each other, sighed, and tromped across the street to clear her sidewalk as well.
She smiled a big smile, and joined them.
1985
Ira knocked on the doorframe of her room, she looked up, “yes?”
He was sixteen, and an inch shorter than her, a vaguely feminine, but not unmasculine figure and face, and definitely the calmer of him and Myles.
She frowned, “did something happen?”
“No. I mean, Myles go in a fight, but that’s not what…”
She nodded, “okay. Have a seat.”
He sat on the end of her bed, drawing his knees up to his chest, “um… I like someone.”
She smiled, “okay. Good.”
“A boy.”
“Okay.”
“And he thinks I’m a guy.”
“Right.”
“And he’s straight.”
“Well, you have two choices. You can either ignore the feelings, or you tell him you aren’t technically male or female, and hope he takes you for who you are.”
“What am I?”
Grey eyes confused, worried eyebrows, mouth drawn down in a small frown.
“That’s not a question anyone other than you can answer. But the good thing about that is that there is absolutely no wrong answer.”
Two new sets of fingerprint ID’s were on his desk when he came into work the week after his wedding. One was from a couple of kids who had been found trying to blow up a government building, the other set belonged to Dr. Gabriel Eirnan. Minneapolis was quite far away, and the blowing up a government building looked pretty promising, so he transferred the whole file to the Minneapolis office, and moved on to the bombing.
A week later, the would-be bombers had been released-apparently the arrest warrant had been dated wrong, and they got off thanks to that-and he was kind of wishing he still had Eirnan’s case on his docket, but it was his own damn fault, and it meant he got to go home to his wife a lot earlier than planned. In any case, he still had about a dozen other cases waiting when he went back to the office, so it wasn’t like he didn’t have anything to do at work.
1987
Whoever thought it would be a good idea to allow fifteen year olds behind the wheels of cars was either insane or on drugs. Probably both. And really should never have been allowed such decision-making authority. Ever. About anything. Ira had been bad. Myles was a complete disaster.
1989
It was raining. Hardly surprising, as they were living in Seattle. She walked up to their apartment building, and stopped, frowning. She could have sworn she had just seen Ira go past in a dress. It wasn’t the dress that confused her-he had gone as a girl for the two months they had lived in New York, and liked it okay, as he did make a pretty decent looking woman-but that she had just gotten off the phone with him at their apartment number.
Not that he couldn’t forward a call, but he had no reason to try and fool her, he was old enough to do what he wished as long as it wasn’t too monumentally stupid. She turned around, and hurried after the girl, gripping her shoulder. A moment later, Gabriel found herself lying on the sidewalk, staring up at the spitting image of her older child.
The woman stared down at her, shock written into her face, “…Dr. Eirnan? What…”
People were starting to stare, Gabriel got up, and touched the woman’s arm, “come with me.”
She hesitated, for a long moment, then followed Gabriel into the entryway of the apartment building. She stared, standing standoffishly across the hall from Gabriel, clearly very, very suspicious.
“I got out, with two others. One of your generation, another three years younger. They’ve been living with me since, going by Ira and Myles.”
“I’ve only found three others. How many escaped?”
“I have no idea. From watching the news, I’m guessing at least fifteen, but I don’t know. We barely made it out, I didn’t have time for search for any others.”
“You were one of them.”
“They gave me no choice. As soon as I had a choice, I took it. Hence me having lost count of how many places I’ve lived since, and Ira and Myles upstairs.”
“How can I trust you?”
“That’s up to you entirely.”
“How did you recognize me? I only saw you twice.”
“You’re the spitting image of Ira, you must have the same source genome.”
She shook her head, “I’m going to go.”
Gabriel nodded, “okay. I’ll tell Ira and Myles I met you. They’ll be happy to know you’re around.”
“They won’t know who I am.”
“I know. But you’re alive, and that makes me smile, so I’m guessing it’ll be nice for them to hear, too.”
1990
Gabriel sighed, sitting down at her desk in a corner of their tiny apartment in New York. Ira had wanted to see art, and museums, and since they definitely weren’t going anywhere near DC, New York had been the obvious place to go.
Creativity had been a big thing, in that generation. It went towards the ability to think on ones feet in battle, according to the program. Ira had filled their walls with art in each placed they lived. He’d even started selling some, at small town art fairs. She had a hunch he would probably continue doing so in New York, which, while risky...well, Ira more than knew what he was doing.
Myles was more worrisome, he seemed to be getting more and more reckless by the month. He had been responsible for their last three moves, for utterly stupid reasons. She was trying her best to keep him in check, but really, there was only so much you could do. He was fifteen, male, and of genetically enhanced stubbornness. It wasn’t a good combination.
Ira padded through, all covered in paint and clay, and who knew what else, on his way to the kitchen. She smiled at him, “having fun?”
He nodded, “working up an appetite. I was going to make sandwiches for dinner, you want one?”
“No thanks. Have you seen Myles?”
“I think he snuck out again.”
She groaned, and leaned forwards, burying her face in her hands. She really wanted them to be able to stay here for a while, for Ira’s sake. She would have to point that out to Myles when he came home for food.
“Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think it would be a problem for me to show some of my art under an alias. No going to openings or anything, just, you know?”
“I don’t see why not. You know how to keep safe. And honestly I don’t see why you couldn’t go to the openings, as long as you made sure no one took any photos.”
He grinned, leaning out of the kitchen door, “awesome. And, um. Would you come? To an opening, I mean?”
“Of course. You really think I’d miss that?”
He smiled, walking out, taking a big bite of his salami and swiss sandwich. The door slammed open, and Myles stormed in, sans shirt, hair sopping wet, “I hate all women.”
Ira snorted, “what now?”
“She stole my shirt!”
“I can see that,” commented Gabriel, dryly, “go change, but afterwards, we’re going to have a talk.”
He glared, and stomped into his and Ira’s room. She sighed, and turned back to what she had been working on.
1992
Gabriel unlocked the door to the apartment, and walked inside, as two men in suits came out her, smiling and nodding to her as they passed. She headed straight to the kitchen, to grab a peanut butter sandwich. When she turned around, she noticed her computer was knocked off the desk, the floppy disks scattered everywhere. Dammit, Myles. She walked to yell at the two boys, pushing the door to their room open. Her hands were trembling, and sweat broke out all over her body. Ira was heavy as she pulled him to his feet, blood spread across her shirt from his wounds, as she half carried him.
A distant crash, the door was splintered open. The two men were back.
She helped Ira to the window, slid it open, and stepped into air.
Blood spreading on a frozen sidewalk. Still body beside her. Weight in her arms. Warm blood running along her forearm. Car. No keys. Ira reaching across. Drive.
Driving at night, the warm rain pouring down. Dawn was ahead, the pale colors just starting to touch the night sky, the black becoming grey, the grey slowly becoming a dirty shade of blue, tinged with pink at the very bottom. When she was a child, and a little older, family vacations would start like this. Waking in the dark, the lights in the house the only illumination in the world, dragging her suitcase down the stairs, double checking toothbrush, underwear, socks. The cab arriving to take them to the airport, staring out the window, as the darkness trickled away, and the grey pink and then yellow light came.
Ira was crying. He was curled in the seat, crying, silently, tears rolling down his cheeks, but not a trace of it in his face or breath.
The door opened, he frowned, looking up from the peanut butter sandwich he was trying to convince himself it was important to eat. Cathy, his ex-wife bearing two large bags from the Thai place near where they used to live, and a folder, containing the report on the blood sample connected to the Eirnan case. The generally mouth-watering scent of the curry did little given how absent his appetite was, he reached for the file, and Cathy drew back, holding it hostage. He sighed, and took the plastic container of satay she handed him, resigning himself to trying to eat.
Her hand was warm on his shoulder, as she stood behind him, and read as he did. This wasn’t a good night for temptation.
Owen sat on the couch, Cathy asleep, head on a pillow in his lap, bored by the case files he had read hundreds of times in the last decade and a half, and probably almost a hundred more since the bloodwork came back three days ago. He looked down at her, gently pulling his fingers through a lose tangle in her greying blond hair. Their marriage had made both of them miserable, their divorce had been upsetting, but it hardly seemed to matter, in the end.
He opened the file again, over the arm of the couch, and put his hand on Cathy’s shoulder, starting to read through once again. He wouldn’t deny, that. And he had spent enough hours staring at the same damned pages to not work as hard as he could to make sense of the new information.
Sitting in a park bench, Gabrielle stared out at the trees, and the grass, and the pigeons, and the little kids chasing them. A mother grabbed her son by the wrist, and pulled him off the chase, away from the frightened birds. Another held a baby on her shoulder, as she talked on a phone. Another, another, another. A family with three kids, two women kissing on a bench, an artist sitting, painting.
She sat, for a hour. For two. For four. For six.
She was starting to shiver.
She stopped shivering.
She stood, and walked back to the bus stop.
The ride went by in silence, and in cold, fall was coming, and the air was sharp against her face.
Pushing open the door to the shitty motel room, she smelled chemicals, and dropped her coat to open the door to the bathroom. Ira, sitting, cross-legged, the components and ingredients for things she only vaguely understood from what she remembered of college chemistry. Explosives. She went inside, and dragged him out to go to bed, only hoping the cleaning company van outside wouldn’t be missing its chemicals and come looking.
“Ira.”
“What?”
“We’ll find him. I promise you. We’ll take them down.”
Really, he had a hard time believing his eyes, sitting at his desk, as the files started popping up of their own accord. Computers were not his friends, but he knew enough to recognize an attack when he saw one. It’s just that his computer isn’t connected to anything but the FBI’s internal network, which means someone hacked into that, which is supposed to be rather difficult. He called the guy in charge of cybercrime, and sat in a corner of his office, which was swarming with the glasses and mustard-stained-tie crowd. Cathy wandered in, with coffee for herself, and tea for him, which he took gratefully, “Cathy.”
She looked down at him, raising an eyebrow. He tugged on the string a few times, then looked up at her, “they deleted the Eirnan file.”
“You have a paper copy, don’t you?”
“Yes, at...” he frowned, and set the tea on the floor, “I need to check my home.”
She nodded, “I’ll come with you.”
He shook his head, “you don’t have to, it’s probably nothing.”
“I’m your boss, remember? I’m responsible for you, can’t have you just sneaking off in the middle of the work day.”
He rolled his eyes, standing, and headed towards the elevator, Cathy close behind. Arriving, he could already see that someone had been there. The front door had been broken in, there were tire tracks leading up through the front yard, Cathy went in, he stood back, she came out, holding a few wrinkled and stepped-on sheets of paper, “looks like they were in every room. They took your computer, I don’t know what else.”
He rubbed at his forehead, sighed, and followed her back inside, sitting down in an armchair, watching her, as she pulled together the different files spread across his floor in disarray. She always did that, trying to put back things that were broken. God, he was being mopey. Suddenly, he noticed something on the paper she had just picked up, “Cathy, wait.”
She turned, raising an eyebrow, “you going to help? What a novel idea?”
He shook his head, “that’s just crazy. But, let me see that.”
She handed him the sheets, and he turned them over, revealing what he had seen. A boot-print. A small, female, boot print. He stands up, and walks to the door without a word, the stained piece of paper clenched tight in his hand. He wasn’t going to sleep tonight, anyway.
Opening his eyes, he honestly doesn’t know where he is. It’s dark, and he’s in pain, though not too bad-bumps, bruises, and maybe a little worse. Either he’s been beaten, run over by a golf cart for a third time, or just generally abused somehow.
The dark is more explicable, he can see some light filtering through in a line, he gets stiffly to his feet, and moves towards it, searching with both hands, until he finds a doorknob, and starts yanking and knocking and yelling. It’s only a minute or so later, that the knob turns unexpectedly in his hands, and the door swings in towards him. He stands, and stares at a face that confuses the hell out of him for a moment. He’s seen it, on security camera shots, and again and again, a grainy frame from one of those chance captures, in the file on Gabrielle Eirnan. Except in those videos, and that one still, the face is male, and this person is female, and pretty.
It is, however, the same face.
“Why didn’t you give up?”
He blinks, and leans against the doorway, staring at the woman, only a few inches shorter than him, strawberry blond hair tied back, grey-green eyes, every feature in the face and stature identical. But not the same.
She was her own person, no matter what her origin might have been.
The tree was his new favorite spot. It had been blown apart, whether by the insurgents-who really weren’t insurgents in the sense that they had actually done any insurging-or the military response, it was impossible to tell. In either case, it had been hit about halfway up the trunk, and now sat with the crown in the water-filled crater, the splintered end up on the sandy shore. He sat on the trunk, just past where the branches began, the remaining needles shielding him from the sight of any passing patrol boats, while giving enough spaces to peer through. When it was windy, and the water rough, waves crashed onto the shore, and he put his feet up on the branches to keep his boots dry.
Beyond his perch was the wide river, the other shore just barely visible far off away. Everyone knew what went on over there-the tests on the insurgents, the new weapons, the camps. He wished he didn’t know. He wished things could go back to how they were, before the war, before the fighting, the bombings, the terrorism every day. Before the country had ripped itself apart, over them.
The soldiers, created, not born. Marching across the country, with faces all alike, bearing nothing in their expressions. The response hadn’t been much better than the instigation. Sins against god, had been the cry. Well look at them now. If this was what god wanted, Owen certainly wanted no part of god.
A seagull sat on the one tree still standing, almost in the sea, crying mournfully, keening loud and long. He sat in his own tree, and wished things weren’t so wrong.
He hadn’t been old enough to understand, really, when things had started to go bad. He knew the start had been the year he was born, but there had still been hope back then. It had just been a scandal, government experiments, the world had recovered from far worse. But the cracks had already been there, just waiting for a hammer blow to split them.
That blow had come when he was nine, the series of coordinated terrorist attacks across the country, the descent into chaos, the military trying to regain control over panicked citizens, and the messages of hate against anyone different, anyone who was going against god, anyone who looked like them, the troops with no regard for their own lives-or anyone else’s-who all looked the same. Except he kind of thought they didn’t, not all the way.
He had definitely been too young to understand, except in that he could understand damned well that none of this was good, and all of it was scary, and wrong. About a month after the attacks, his mother was arrested, and he was taken to a school, with other children, and they had told them the military was trying to protect them, and what their parents had done was wrong. He didn’t know what his mother had done, but he had been sure he was never going to leave that place alive. One day, though, there had been an attack on the facility, and in the confusion, he had managed to escape.
His mother hadn’t.
He had been thirteen.
Now he was eighteen, and he understood everything.
It was a quiet, gorgeous place. She had found it walking, a clearing in the woods, kept by whatever luck, or simply not enough time, from being closed in completely by the forest. Old, worn stones, stood, leaning, fallen, broken, but still quite beautiful. Peaceful. The few trees growing up through the grass had upset some of the stones, but most remained relatively undisturbed. No flowers graced the ground, no person had visited any one of these graves in decades, probably centuries. She couldn’t even read most of the names, dates. The few she could read, as she wandered through the forest of stones, were from the 1800's, or earlier. A few had died in the twentieth century, but just barely.
She walked to a large oak tree, and seated herself on the moss at its base, the acorns crunching under her boots as she walked. The grass and leaves and sandy ground were lit in places, light and golden, by the sun filtering down through the trees, as it slowly moved lower in the sky. Across the graveyard, over the crest of the hill, and just barely visible from where she sat, were two white stones. Just stones pulled from the river, partially buried in earth, moss grown thick around the base of one, the other new, bright white and seeming to shine with a light of its own, under a wide beam of sun.
Quiet, the last crickets of the summer, a crow far back in the trees, a rustle in the leaves, a squirrel or deer moving through. Leaves glowing, the sun behind.
Two stones, but no bodies. Two dead, but none at rest.
There was an image, that would be forever in his mind. Stopped, at the side of the empty, broken road, her walking away, the heavy bag slung across her back, tan shirt pulled and wrinkled by the weight of the leather strap, his boots, too big for her feet leaving deep impressions, in the soft, sandy dirt. For a decade, she had been his partner, and that day, he had known with complete clarity that she was walking into death.
Standing at the top of the hill, he stared down at the young man, curled on the crumbling shore, under a tattered, dirty blanket. Walking down, the darkened grey earth sticking to his formerly spotless boots, he crouched, uniform pulling across his back, as he reached forward.
The young man’s eyes opened, a knife was in his hand, but Lahash’s hand was faster, he caught the young man’s arm, and pinned him to the ground, “stop.”
Another knife in the other hand, he sighed, and wrenched the man to his feet, shoving him against a tree, and pressing his gun against the skinny back, hard enough to bruise, “stop.”
“You’ll never take me alive.”
Whatever the kid meant to swallow or chew was expelled after a sharp blow to his abdomen, he fell to his knees, coughing, hurting, as Lahash let go.
“Get up.”
The kid stayed on the ground, coughing, mud coating his clothes, then suddenly surged up, almost snarling, grabbing for the gun. Lahash struck him, his eyes went wide, and he fell again, face in the mud, jerking with spasms of pain, trying desperately to breathe. He dragged the kid’s arm over his own shoulders, and lifted him under his knees. The kid had passed out, his head fell to rest against Lahash’s shoulder.
That had gone better than he had expected.
The metal was cold, and hard, in her hand. Ribbed grip, rough against her palm. Trigger totally smooth, but stiff, as it was squeezed.
Walking to the street corner, his bag over his shoulder, the towering buildings empty and broken, or occupied and foreboding, he leaned against the lamp post, light long ago shot out, and pointed his flashlight down, the metal cold in his hand from the chill fall air. In the torn out access panel, there was a small slip of paper. There was no-one around, and kids or someone more nefarious had spray painted the CCTV cameras in the area. He removed the slip, and walked away, back towards the sprawling camps on the outskirts of the broken city.
The sun was bright on his face. Opening his eyes, he looked out at the road flying by, as he pulled at his bonds. He was tied sideways on the seat, facing away from the driver, and unable to turn to look.
“I’ll kill you.”
“That plan working well for you so far?”
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“You.”
“Oh? And who am I? You don’t even know, do you? You just got told to get some guy, you don’t care who they are, what they did, just catch them, and claim your reward.”
“You are nigh incredibly unobservant. I can’t imagine why anyone would lose enough sleep to bother putting your name on this list.”
“So you’re not denying it? Ha, I-“
“Stop with the bravado, it’s boring and useless, and I know you’re smarter than that. Just apparently blind.”
He tried to twist, but he couldn’t, the only change after he gave up his struggle was that he now had a cramp in his neck. He sighed, in resignation, “what are you talking about?”
“Commanders rarely get bounty work.”
He swallowed, “then what do you want with me?”
“I, unlike whatever mindless grunt is looking for you right now, do know who you are. Not that you’ve really done anything to prove your parentage means anything, but you are the son of Owen Swanson and Cathy Hoyt.”
“What do you care? Why did you kidnap me? And Owen who?”
“Because you would have been killed before I had a chance to speak with you, if I hadn’t. Your father, and I would assume namesake, Owen Swanson. The suspected leader of one of the more successful terrorist cells in the sector, and confirmed planner of several extremely problematic attacks through the last seventeen years.”
“I thought my father was a house painter who died falling off a ladder.”
“I think your mother may have fudged the story, a bit.”
Six years of fighting together, developing connections, gathering supplies, working, building just some sort of resistance, he had never once seen her sleep. The minute he entered wherever she was, she was awake, and usually with a knife to his throat. It didn’t matter if it was after her eardrums had been blown open by the concussive wave of an explosion, she was never caught unaware, and she certainly never relaxed.
Well, she hadn’t been caught unaware this time. And it was difficult to find one’s self in another’s lap without some intention of ending up there. So he had to assume, that sometime in the night, while he had slept soundly through whatever she did to prepare for the next day’s attack, she had meant to settle herself beside him on the ground, and curl her hand loosely in his shirt, her hair all everywhere, caught in the Velcro of her coat. She was warm, and heavy, and her breath left little wisps of mist in the biting air.
The package in her lap was heavier than she had expected. Ira sat to her left, driving, as they headed towards the compound. Children. They were taking the children of dissidents, and trying to mold them to their purposes. She twisted the spiraled red wire connecting to one of the pins in her fingers. Ira turned the truck into the driveway, gravel crunching under the heavy wheels. Two guards stepped into the road. Ira picked up the gun from the center console.
“Where are we going?”
He shook his head, “you’ll see when we get there.”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“You’ll find out when it happens.”
“So you’re going to kill me.”
“No.”
“Then why are you being so cryptic?”
Lahash glared, taking his eyes off the road for a moment, “I’m not, you’re just an idiot. You’ll find out what happens when it happens, because unless you happen to know a psychic, nobody knows beforehand.”
Looking back, he swerved back to the center of the road, instead of running into a ditch.
“You’re a terrible driver.”
“Why don’t you just shut up for a while before I really do consider killing you.”
She, so much like the he he had lost, had been near death when he found her. Body torn and burned, the one arm gone completely, the skin on her side and back nearly all ripped away. Lifting her, blood had soaked his sleeves, and he’d smelled of burning flesh for days.
In the grip of the infection, near death, he’d sat by her side in the small building, as she laid on the one uninjured side, hair soaked with sweat, eyes fevered and unfocused, soft moans of pain escaping her lips occasionally. Her skin had been too hot, her cheeks flushed red, there had been nothing he could do, except continue to give the antibiotics, and hope she pulled through.
As she had fought, she had slipped in and out of real consciousness, twisting at anything her hand latched upon, jumbled, confused sentences coming between cries of pain. At the time, he hadn’t known who Owen Swanson was, or even really who she was, he had just held her, and tried to calm her, because he’d no idea what else to do with a sobbing, injured ghost.
The car wasn’t starting. She tried the key again, the engine turned, started, ran, bang, and smoke, billowing out, almost obscuring the man walking toward her, gun in hand. She tried the door, it wouldn’t open, she shoved and kicked, until it crunched and opened, and she was standing, breath becoming gentle clouds of mist in the clear, chilly air, dissipating, as the ear-ringing shots split the night, the recoil hurting her already slightly aching arm.
Sitting back down, as fire started to engulf the hood, she watched the shape on the ground through the broken glass and licking flames.
The attack had been a surprise. He had not heard that someone was planning to attack. Not a word. That was a problem. That the attack had come, and been successful, that was one thing. But that he’d had no notion it was going to happen, when he was tied in to every branch of every group.... that was a problem. It meant there was somebody new.
New was a problem. New was unpredictable. New might screw up everything.
A week later, he stood outside the hut in the slums outside of the city, the small symbol carved into the door, near the hinge, telling him he had the right place. Everything else telling him he was wrong. The man wasn’t even trying to hide.
Lahash pushed open the unlocked door. There was a man, asleep, snoring, in a pile of blankets on the floor. Lahash knelt, the man’s eyes opened, he blinked sleepily, “Jethro Lahash, I presume?”
“Who told you I was coming?”
“No-one, but a lot of people told me you might.”
“The same people who told me where to find you.”
“Yes, probably,” agreed the man, sitting up, “but I think their judgment was probably sound on both accounts.”
“That’s only the case if you don’t make any more stupid moves.”
“That wasn’t the first move I’ve made.”
“It’s the first one I’ve heard about. Meaning you’ve been smart, until now. Now you’re being stupid.”
“Now I’m making a point. That I’m not afraid.”
“See, again, stupid. They’ll kill you. I’ll order them to.”
“I know. I’m not afraid.”
“You’d be much more useful alive.”
“I personally would be. But my death will be even more useful than that.”
Lahash opened the door to the cell. He was crumpled on the floor, unmoving.
“You alive?”
A soft, pained groan. Lahash crouched, untangling stiff, beaten limbs, sliding his fingers through sticky blood-soaked hair, carefully checking each vertebra, standing out stark from starved flesh, some laid bare by lashes with a belt or whip. Superficial damage, mostly. But the right leg was twisted, and Owen screamed when he tried to move it, his hands coming away coated in blood from the attempt.
The older man’s clothes were too bloody to carry without mussing his uniform, so Lahash gripped his wrists, and dragged, ignoring it as he screamed and screamed. Eventually, he petered out to quiet, hoarse moans, and not long after, he stopped making any sound at all.
On the way back to his office, Lahash tried not to slip on the bloody trail he had left behind.
The soldier had been left behind. His chest still rose and fell, his eyes were still open, wide with pain and fear. His arm was trapped beneath a tree blown twenty feet from its stump. Piper stood over him, watching him, as he watched her, his eyes flitting between her face and the pistol held in her hand.
Embers dancing on the broken road, he stood before the fiery sky, flames twirling, spinning in the night, dark silhouettes falling, falling down.
She was gone.
“So, my dad.... he’s killed a lot of people?”
“I would imagine, yes.”
“Then he’s a hero.”
“That’s not what makes someone a hero.”
“Sure, not the people you kill. But if he’s opposing the government, then he’s a hero.”
“He is a hero. But that has nothing to do with who he has or hasn’t killed.”
“Can I meet him?”
“He’s dead.”
Gabrielle hurriedly got to her feet, and ran to the door. Two men, she had seen them around, stood, an injured soldier held between them. She hesitated not a moment, before ushering them inside.
“Every man killed in this war is somebody’s child. Every man left alive, is a mother who doesn’t have to cry.”
“Doesn’t your mother cry that you’re killing the good guys?”
“I don’t have a mother.”
“Everybody has a mother.”
“No. Not everyone.”
Owen stared, at the man, slight traces of grey starting to show in his short cropped reddish brown hair, “you’re way too old to be a biogen.”
“You only think that because they killed nearly every one of us created before about the year of your birth.”
“Why are you alive?”
“I’m useful.”
“And the others weren’t?”
“Not in quite the same way.”
“But how’d you get to be a commander, if they were only even keeping you alive because you were useful?”
Lahash sighed, “because I proved I wasn’t like the others.”
“How?”
“I helped them kill my sister.”
It was the middle of July in the deep south, she looked like she had walked out of a western, booted feet propped up on a small table, plaid cotton shirt open near the top, sweat across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, beads forming atop light brown freckles.
Her hair was frizzy and all everywhere, thanks to the heavy humidity that seemed to make the air as thick as honey, forming a strawberry blond halo in the late morning sun. Her chair was tipped back against one of the wooden pillars, unfinished wood pressing into heat-softened white paint; he had seen the permanent indent from her doing the same thing, before.
What hair hadn’t escaped was tied back into a messy, somewhat ineffective ponytail, the locks spilling over her shoulders in tumbling waves of curls. She was reading, some silly, unimportant book, totally focused, utterly engrossed by whatever trivial fantasy the characters were engaged in.
Standing in front of his superior officers, his arm in a sling, and bandages across his chest, he had never been so nervous in his life, as he delivered the news they so very much did not want to hear, “no, sir. It was her, but she must have drugged me, I woke up in front of the compound.”
“Did she injure you?”
He shook his head, “no. I was injured in the fighting and left behind by my unit. Some of the locals picked me up, and dragged me to a house. I thought I was going to be executed or captured. But she gave me something, I guess it was a sedative, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up in front of the compound. She had taken the shrapnel out and bandaged where I was hurt.”
“Can you tell us where the house was?”
“I can, sir, but I won’t do much good. The scouts already checked, she’s gone.”
He was dizzy with pain, someone had brought food, he hadn’t been awake or conscious at the time, but now even looking at it made him nauseous. The door opened, he groaned, and weakly lifted his hand, shielding himself from the excessive light. A strong hand gripped his wrist, pinning his arm to the floor. He tried to fight, but it was like moving through molasses, and the someone was far stronger than he, anyway. He wondered where she had gone…and, for that matter, the porch, and sunshine.
They were lying across him, now, pinning his torso and right arm, while holding onto his left. He felt the tourniquet being tied on, and tried again to fight, he didn’t want to die, and he certainly didn’t want whatever drugs or poison he might be being given to make him talk.
Writhing under the man’s weight, finally, they relented, and let go, “if you don’t want an air embolism, stop moving.”
He blinked. The red-headed man laid over him again, and gripped his arm, tapping at his elbow.”
“What are you giving me...swine?”
He had never been good at trash talk.
“Amoxicillin. Unless you’re allergic to penicillin.”
“It had to be someone inside!”
The captain was screaming, red in the face, at the loss of one of the key installations to what appeared to be sabotage. Lahash gritted his teeth, turned to the man who stood apart, and growled, “you. You’ve had contact with Eirnan.”
His eyes went wide, hand going to his injured shoulder, arm still in a sling.”
The captain put his gun to the back of the man’s head, “you’re dead.”
Lahash cocked his head slightly, “if you don’t mind... I’ve got a project that could use him.”
The captain grinned, tobacco-stained teeth flashing greenish in the night, “all yours, Commander.”
Lahash grabbed the collar of the man’s shirt, and marched him out.
“You did it. You’re the one. You’ve been at every installation that’s had sabotage.”
Lahash looked at the young man, in the passenger seat of his truck, “yes. You’re correct. I’m the saboteur, I’m the one taking down the military piece by piece.”
“Why haven’t you been caught? Isn’t anyone investigating?”
Lahash grinned, “yeah. Me. I’m the one assigned to find the mole.”
“That’s...really clichéd.”
“It’s brilliant, actually.”
“You had no control over it, it’s not brilliant.”
“I had all the control I needed. All I had to do was kill my sister.”
“You’re a terrible person. Where are you taking me?”
“To my sister.”
“So you’re going to kill me?”
“No, I’m going to dump you with her, and she can decide what to do with you.”
Piper looked up, as the truck rolled into her camp, strode towards it, the shotgun to her shoulder, looking down the barrel with her non-blinded eye. But it was just Jethro, getting out, and dragging...
“Goddamnit, Jethro, I just got rid of him. Dumped him with your mother.”
“Who fixed him up and sent him back to the military, where he got to be the latest mole. Now he gets to stay here and not cause any trouble, right?”
The man, who looked just a smidge confused, nodded, slowly.
“Good. Causing trouble means a bullet in the brain, so just keep that in mind. Now go help with that tent.”
The man ran past her, bracing his injured arm with the other. Piper turned back to Jethro, “I have a lead on Owen’s kid.”
Gabrielle walked out of her small tent at the edge of the impromptu camp, the sun shining through tall pines in faint beams...beams that fell upon a man, sitting, one leg bandaged and splinted, crutches next to him, appearing to have been dumped at the end of a set of wide tire tracks.
“Uh, hello.”
“Who brought you here?”
“To be honest, I really have no idea.”
Piper glared at Jethro, as though trying to bore holes through his head. Giving up, she ate a French fry, “why did you leave Owen with Gabrielle?”
He shrugged; there was ketchup in his beard, “I have my reasons.”
“Jethro, you really have a habit of pissing everyone off.”
“You are not the first person to tell me that.”
“You should have left him here.”
“I need you not distracted.”
“What are you implying?”
“That you love him.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
Owen Hoyt yawned, slowly waking up. He wasn’t in the truck anymore, he was lying on the ground. A woman, maybe around forty, with curly strawberry blond hair all everywhere, and scars on her face, stood over him, “Owen Swanson’s son. Jethro just dumped you here, by the way. The man has terrible timing; we’re about to take down the government.”
He blinked, “what do you mean?”
“Jethro got the master codes for all the detainment centers and research facilities. He’s on his way to give half of them to Eirnan’s group, and tell them where to meet us. ”
“What...”
“We’re rebels, Owen Hoyt. My name is Piper Lahash, I’m the coordinator for about a thousand of us, or more, it’s hard to say how many will come when the groups send out the call.”
“You’re his sister?”
“Of a sort.”
“He said he killed you.”
“He did, as far as the government is concerned. He also killed your father, and you.”
“My father... wait, is he still alive?”
“Yes. He’s with Eirnan.”
Her expression darkened, “and Jethro better keep him safe.”
“Who’s Eirnan?”
“The leader of a smaller, separate group. Jethro’s kept them isolated from us, so if there was ever a double agent, only one half of the rebellion would be taken down. More to the point, I think, to keep her safe.”
“Why would he care if she were safe?”
“Because she’s his mother.”
“But...he’s a bio-gen, he said it himself. He wasn’t born, he was created.”
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a mother.”
He was crying. Crying so damned hard, everything around him was wrong. He would rather die than be here, back in the hands of the people who created him.
His heart was pounding in his chest, he felt like he couldn’t breathe, the sterile walls and metal instruments, him strapped to the table. He wanted to die. He wanted just to die.
The man came in, that same man, from so many years before, he would never forget his face.
“K-7. You’re to be studied and then terminated. Do you have anything to say?”
Fighting his restraints, he realized they didn’t know his strength, he strained against them, until finally one gave. His arm was free, and he grabbed the man by the collar, “my name is Myles Eirnan, you son of a bitch, and you aren’t going to get the satisfaction of killing me.”
The man smirked, as armed soldiers flooded the room.
“And how’s that?”
Myles grinned, sick satisfaction filling his chest, as a plan started to form, “because you need me. I can give you so much, that no-one else can.”