Legacy (Keeper of the Lost Cities Book 8)

by Shannon Messenger

  “I’m assuming the second mistake was when you gave me limbium?” Sophie guessed.

  “Actually, that was the third. The second was before Livvy came up with the idea of limbium. I grew impatient and gave you a half dozen other medicines I thought might help, and ended up making you vomit all over yourself.”

  Sophie cringed. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

  “That was my thought too. And then we gave you the limbium, and I got to discover exactly how dire things could truly get. You started making a horrible sound as your airway closed off, unlike anything I’d ever heard before, and then your whole body was convulsing and I just… froze. If Livvy hadn’t been there, I don’t know what would’ve happened. I might’ve lost you. She was the one who kept you breathing and suggested we rush you to the nearest human hospital. Her reasoning was flawed—though we didn’t know it at the time. She suspected our treatments were negatively reacting with some human toxin or virus that you’d been exposed to, which sounded logical enough. And it got you to the place that saved your life, which was all that mattered. Then Livvy had to go, so no one could wonder who she was or how she knew you, and your human parents arrived, and I just sat there, watching you hooked up to those horrible machines, hoping nothing irreparable had happened. And when you woke up…”

  His voice choked off, and he dragged a hand down his face, lingering on his eyes.

  She couldn’t tell if that meant he was crying.

  Part of her was glad she couldn’t tell—her world made so much more sense when Mr. Forkle was a strong, reliable presence, even if his stubbornness drove her crazy at times.

  “When you woke up,” Mr. Forkle continued, his voice steadier this time, “it felt like one of those ‘miracles’ that humans are always going on about. You were you. Your inflicting had been switched back off, and everything else seemed fine. And you and your sister both had no idea what had happened between you.”

  “Wait,” Sophie had to interrupt. “Aren’t you always saying that abilities can’t be switched off once they’ve been triggered?”

  “For ordinary elves, yes,” Mr. Forkle agreed.

  Sophie groaned, knowing this was going to lead to another “let me explain how very weird you are” speech.

  And sure enough, he told her, “In your case, I made your genes slightly more flexible in certain ways. That way, if something we’d planned needed adjusting, we’d have the option of doing so—which has been both an advantage and a disadvantage. I often wonder if that flexibility is the reason we’ve had to reset things in your mind.”

  He tilted his head and sighed in a way that seemed to say, It’s so challenging experimenting on someone. Which definitely helped Sophie choke back any fuzzy feelings she might’ve been fighting when she’d thought he was crying.

  “Anyway,” Mr. Forkle said, moving the conversation back to what they’d been discussing. “I swore I would be a thousand times more vigilant from that moment on to ensure that nothing like that ever happened to you again, and yet, somehow I still managed to misunderstand the role that the limbium had played in your allergy until it happened again. And I didn’t anticipate any problems when I triggered your inflicting, either. So imagine my horror when I heard Mr. Dizznee’s account of how your inflicting had operated in Paris and realized our enhancements to the ability had somehow been switched off. I’d hoped the problem was connected to all of the other glitches you were experiencing during that same time, and that once I reset your abilities, all would go back to the way we originally designed it. But it didn’t recover as well as your other abilities. And now, here we are.”

  “Okaaaaaaay,” she said, trying not to drown in that deluge of information. She had a feeling she’d be wading through it for weeks and weeks to come. But at the moment she had one very important question. “Why would resetting the ability again change anything? We already know it didn’t help—”

  “It’s not an exact science,” Mr. Forkle interrupted. “Nor does the limbium affect everything evenly. I was so focused on your telepathy that day—and the gaps in your mental blocking—that I didn’t give your inflicting the care that it needed. I also failed to realize that your inflicting was working incorrectly even before you faded, and therefore needed a much more fundamental adjustment. This time the ability would be my entire focus, and I’d target it differently.”

  “But you still can’t guarantee that it will work, right?” Sophie pressed.

  “There are no guarantees with any of this,” Mr. Forkle reminded her. “It’s all theoretical until we implement the treatments and see what happens.”

  “Great. So… basically, you’re asking me to trust you with my life—again—while also admitting that you don’t actually know what you’re doing,” Sophie had to point out. “Awesome.”

  “I don’t blame you for feeling that way, but—”

  “Good, because it’s true!” Sophie jumped in. “I’m pretty sure I’d be better off—”

  Her snarky comment was interrupted by a soft moan from her sister, who uncurled her legs and rolled onto her back.

  “Amy?” Sophie asked, cringing as her sister opened her eyes and Sophie saw how red and puffy they looked.

  Amy’s voice sounded like bits of crumbling gravel as she whispered, “Sophie? You’re still here?”

  “Of course I am. Where else would I be?” She offered Amy the bottle of Youth that Mr. Forkle had just handed her and helped Amy sit up for a drink.

  “I don’t know,” Amy admitted after downing half the bottle. “I guess I thought…” She looked away, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Those things I said to you—”

  “I don’t even remember them,” Sophie assured her. “Seriously. In the memory it was just a bunch of noise. I couldn’t separate out the words—and I don’t want to know,” she added when Amy opened her mouth, like she was going to repeat everything. “Whatever you said doesn’t matter—unless you need to talk about it,” she added, remembering her earlier vow.

  Amy pulled her knees into her chest, wrapping her shaky arms around them. “I’m just so sorry, Sophie. I can’t believe what a brat I was.”

  “Um, you were six,” Sophie reminded her. “I’m pretty sure everyone’s a brat when they’re six.”

  “Yeah, well that still doesn’t excuse what I said,” Amy mumbled.

  “And what you said doesn’t justify my reaction,” Sophie argued. “Nothing justifies what I did to you.”

  “It’s not what you did,” Mr. Forkle corrected. “It’s what happened. You need to start making that distinction. Inflicting is an incredibly volatile ability. And it manifested for you very young and very suddenly, in the midst of a situation where tempers were already running too high—and you had no knowledge of what was happening to you. Anyone would’ve lost control under those circumstances.”

  “I guess you would know,” Sophie noted, finally calling out the huge revelation she didn’t know what to do with.

  Honestly, she didn’t want to know what to do with it, because it was surely going to lead to other conversations she didn’t have the energy for.

  But she had to ask, “Why didn’t you tell me you’re an Inflictor?”

  Amy and Sandor both drew in sharp breaths.

  “I’m not,” Mr. Forkle said quietly as he stood and paced to the other side of the room.

  “I know what I felt,” Sophie argued. “Inflicting’s the only way you could’ve flooded my mind with emotions like that.”

  “It is,” Mr. Forkle agreed, squinting at Amy’s photographs.

  “It wasn’t regular inflicting either,” Sophie pressed. “You sent me positive emotions. Even Bronte can’t do that.”

  She winced at the name, deciding to save the questions that went with it for later.

  “That doesn’t make me an Inflictor,” Mr. Forkle insisted.

  “I’m fairly certain that it does,” Sandor noted.

  “Yeah, isn’t that how talents work for you guys?” Amy aske
d. “If you can do the thing, that means you have the ability? If you can’t, you don’t?”

  “Not in this case.” Mr. Forkle turned to the room’s largest window, parting the curtains and scanning the yard. “All I have is a handful of dormant Inflictor genes, which I wasn’t ever supposed to be able to use. They were simply part of a test.”

  “A test,” Sophie repeated, not sure why the word made her stomach feel so squirmy until she realized, “You’re talking about Project Moonlark.”

  “I am.” Mr. Forkle turned back to face her. “Despite our abundance of research, much of our genetic work was purely theoretical—and I wasn’t about to implement those theories on an innocent child and risk that something could go seriously wrong—even with the flexibility we were designing. Every tweak planned for your genes had to be properly vetted before I allowed it to be added to your genetic code. And since I wasn’t willing to risk anyone else’s safety, it meant playing the role of test subject myself. My brother and I split it up—he tested your Polyglot genes and I tested your inflicting. That way we could examine the effects in isolation.”

  “What about her teleporting?” Amy asked. “And that other one—what’s it called again?”

  “Enhancing,” Mr. Forkle said, beating Sophie to it. “Both of those abilities were ‘unplanned side effects’ of our other genetic modifications, so we weren’t aware that we needed to test them. In fact, we didn’t know about the teleporting until Miss Foster discovered it while trying to escape the Neverseen’s attempt to capture Silveny. And the enhancing I discovered during this incident.”

  “Because it triggered the same time as my inflicting,” Sophie guessed.

  Mr. Forkle’s smile was equal parts impressed and reserved. “I’d wondered if you would notice that part of the memory, with all the other chaos happening.”

  “I did,” Sophie told him. “And I’m assuming it had something to do with your inflicting, since you were only able to do that after you touched my hands.”

  “That’s my assumption as well—and it was definitely a surprise, in case you’re wondering, as well as a true testament to the strength of your enhancing ability, considering the ridiculously insignificant amount of Inflictor DNA that’s a part of me.” He lifted the hem of his tunic to reveal a palm-size round blotch on his hip where the skin was so pale, it almost looked translucent. And when the light hit the patch, his skin shimmered with tiny flashes in every color of the spectrum.

  Amy gasped. “Did that hurt?”

  “Of course,” Mr. Forkle told her, lowering his shirt back into place. “Definitely one of the top ten most painful things I’ve ever experienced. But that was a price I was willing to pay in order to guarantee that everything we were planning for your sister would be both safe and effective.” His eyes shifted to Sophie. “I know you’re frustrated by the guesswork that sometimes comes into play with your abilities, and I wish I knew a way to eliminate that completely. Someday we’ll hopefully get there. In the meantime, I hope this at least proves how far we’re willing to go to ensure your safety.”

  It did and it didn’t.

  Whatever he’d done to himself—whatever risks he’d taken—still hadn’t spared her from staring down another ‘this could kill you’ decision.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, sticking with a safer answer for the moment. “How can your DNA be different right there?”

  “The same way that someone’s DNA can be different in a place where they’ve been exposed to intense radiation,” Mr. Forkle explained.

  Amy sucked in a breath. “But radiation like that would kill you.”

  “It would,” Mr. Forkle agreed. “Or, at the very least, it would certainly make me very, very sick. Which is why our team had to devise a much safer method for our tests. Calla was the one to realize that light was the answer, but we needed something stronger than any of the Sources on their own—or even any of the Sources combined. Something elemental.”

  “You used quintessence,” Sophie realized, shivering as her palms remembered the burns she’d suffered after she’d accidentally bottled some of the fifth element during a school assignment. “Wait—does that mean the DNA in my hands—”

  “No,” Mr. Forkle cut in. “Those burns were from exposure to the extreme cold of Elementine—not exposure to the quintessence itself. I also had to prepare a sample of my altered DNA and apply it to my skin before we added the quintessence, in order for the exposure to have any lasting effect on my genetics. Plus, Elementine is far too aggressive to be used for that kind of a delicate task. The fusion only succeeded when we used the quintessence from Phosforien.”

  “Uh, there are different kinds of quintessence?” Sophie asked, trying to linger on the part of his explanation that didn’t sound like something straight out of a sci-fi/horror movie.

  “Of course. Each of the unmapped stars generates a different variation. I thought you knew that.” Mr. Forkle frowned when she shook her head. “Why else would the locations of those five stars be kept secret? The quintessence from Elementine is the least stable, but also the most powerful, which makes it extremely valuable for creating substances that need to be somewhat explosive or all-consuming—like frissyn. The quintessence from Marquiseire is incredibly abrasive, which makes it the best choice when something needs to be broken down on a cellular level—and yet its abundance of shimmer also makes it reflective, which allows it to be the most versatile of all the iterations of the fifth element. I guarantee we’ve only scratched the surface of Marquiseire’s many uses. The quintessence from Lucilliant is the coldest and the darkest, but also the most balanced, which makes it particularly valuable when something needs to be preserved. The quintessence from Candesia is the weakest—almost smoky and sluggish in nature—but it’s also the safest form to turn to, and best for subtle shifts and changes. And Phosforien is the most colorful and vibrant—full of life and energy—which is what made it optimal for our DNA tests.”

  He lifted his tunic again, and the flash of colors did remind Sophie of the neon glow she remembered Phosforien having.

  “Didn’t you notice how varied each of the leaps were when we sent you and Mr. Sencen on that rather convoluted journey?” Mr. Forkle asked. “When we were trying to isolate how the Neverseen kept tracking you?”

  “I did. But I thought those jars were just light,” Sophie admitted. “Well, four of them, at least. I thought quintessence only came from Elementine.”

  His frown deepened. “Strange. I planted details about all of this into your mind years ago—the same time I gave you the location of the unmapped stars and the formula for frissyn. Odd that it didn’t trigger with everything else—and it’s even weirder that it’s not triggering right now, given that we’re actively discussing it.”

  “Great,” Sophie mumbled, slumping down on the bed. “Another way I’m malfunctioning.”

  “Any error for this would be on my part, not yours,” Mr. Forkle assured her. “There’s no perfect method for implanting memories into someone else’s mind—and I was very concerned about the information triggering too early, especially since I knew you’d be exposed to so many human teachings during your schooling and I wasn’t familiar enough with their curriculum to know what words to avoid. I must’ve hidden certain things too well.”

  Amy scooted closer and gave Sophie’s hand a gentle squeeze. “You okay?”

  “Oh sure.” Sophie couldn’t tell if the tightness in her chest was from tears she was holding back—or laughter. “Just another typical day in my life as the moonlark. It’s always an adventure—and apparently I’m not the only one here who knows what it’s like to be an experiment.”

  “You’re not,” Mr. Forkle agreed, absently rubbing his hip.

  And Sophie wanted to keep sulking—but there were still too many important things to discuss. So she forced herself to straighten up and ask, “Does that mean if I enhanced you right now, you’d be able to inflict again?”

  “I highly doubt it. As you prob
ably noticed in your memory, the ability only activated for me when I kept failing to get through to you. So I’m assuming adrenaline and desperation were factors. Plus…”

  “Plus…?” Sophie prompted when he didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Well,” he said, turning back to the window. “This is my own personal theory, so take it with a grain of salt—as humans love to say. But I’ve long been curious about whether your enhancing was also affected by everything that happened to your abilities that day. It’s hard to know, since we didn’t make any of our own tweaks to the power—and it works perfectly well as it is. It’s just that… it must’ve taken a tremendous amount of strength to temporarily trigger an ability hidden in such an insanely small percentage of my DNA. And I can’t help wondering if that means you actually have more to give, and that this new reset—if you choose to do it—will boost your enhancing back up to that level.”

  “New reset,” Amy repeated, tugging on Sophie’s arm to make Sophie look at her. “I think I missed that part when I was still recovering from the memory. Is that as dangerous as it sounds?”

  “It’s worse,” Sandor told her, with a glare at Mr. Forkle to make it clear he was still bitter about the way his objections had been silenced earlier.

  “Then you’re not going to do it, are you?” Amy asked.

  “I don’t really have a choice,” Sophie admitted. “If I don’t let them reset me, I’m stuck with a broken ability—or two broken abilities, apparently.”

  “The enhancing is only a theory,” Mr. Forkle reminded her. “And neither ability is broken.”

  “Right. They just don’t do what they’re supposed to do,” Sophie argued as a dark laugh bubbled out of her chest. She turned back to her sister. “Remember Dad’s blue car? The one that was in the shop so much, he called it his Lemonmobile? That’s… me. Everyone loves to tease me about how often I end up in the Healing Center—and some of that is the Neverseen’s doing. But I swear the rest comes from the fact that I’m basically defective.”