“I do hope you’re not planning on disrupting the tour today,” he says calmly. “Ophelia, I don’t fault you for asking questions, but—”
“Laertes, it’s fine,” I say. “I thought about what you said all night, and it’s true. I jumped to conclusions. I bought into the gossip. I guess it was the idea that Dad might confide in me for once—” I trail off and pinch the tender skin near my armpit until tears spring to my eyes. “I’m being ridiculous.”
Laertes buys it and tugs me into a hug. My head fits neatly under his chin. His chest feels less fragile than the first time I hugged him a few days ago. There seems to be a new layer of muscle there. When I draw back, I notice the new color in his cheeks. He looks healthier than ever before.
“You look good,” I say. “Did you do something different this morning?”
He ducks his head. “Mom found me a new medication. It’s helping a lot.”
My body goes numb from head to toe. “A new medication?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Nothing. That’s good. I’m glad.”
Laertes ruffles my hair. “You’re going to be okay, O. Hang in there.”
“Thanks.”
Laertes claps his hands to get the other students’ attention. “All right, everybody! Who’s ready for this tour?”
The students mumble an unenthusiastic response. Vega and I linger at the back of the group as Laertes swipes his badge and we enter the restricted building.
“Is it just me, or does your brother look like Hercules all of a sudden?” Vega whispers.
“He’s on something,” I mutter back. “The question is what?”
The tour moves along at a glacial pace. Laertes takes us through office after office, separated into personal cubicles. The Intelligence operators who work there look like part of the machinery, hunched over the desks and typing dully at their Monitors. Every office looks the same, and I’m starting to get tired of seeing the same gray walls, but we finally emerge from the rows of Monitors and approach a completely different setting.
“These are the Academy’s laboratories,” Laertes announces. Behind him, a long set of windows allows us to see inside the restricted area. The IA scientists are hard at work, cloaked in white protective vests and wearing face shields as they handle a variety of chemicals.
I stand on my toes to get a better look. Somewhere in there, the serum solution waits to be distributed. Somewhere in there, my mother perfects her ultimate plan, unaware of the coming storm. A thrill starts at the top of my head and works its way down to my toes as Laertes leads the group onward. It’s now or never.
“Ready?” I ask Vega in an undertone.
“As I’ll ever be,” she mutters back.
“Off we go then.”
Vega and I dart away from the rest of the group and duck into the hallway branching off the laboratory. We wait until the last sounds of Laertes’s tour group subsides.
“You’re up,” I tell Vega.
She uses her fingerprint to access the laboratory. I hide around the corner and listen as she goes in.
“Boys, boys!” she exclaims. “What are you all still doing here? Didn’t anyone tell you? This month’s safety meeting has been moved up. You’re supposed to be there now.”
The scientists mutter confused responses, but I hear the unmistakable noises of face shields re-sheathing themselves. Soon, they’re filing out of the lab and heading toward the conference room for their fake meeting. We don’t have long before they realize they’ve been duped, so as soon as the last one rounds the corner, I join Vega in the lab. She’s already searching the place.
“Anything?” I ask as I begin to rifle through the various experiments happening in the lab. I check every label, but there’s no sign of a vaccine or serum.
“No,” Vega says. “I doubt they’d keep it here in full view. Let’s check in the back.”
We move to the private, windowless laboratory behind the general one. Here, curious specimens glow beneath UV lights, test tubes hold questionable liquids, and various vials carry all sorts of chemical solutions. Vega pulls up the Monitor, hacks the lead scientist’s administrative account, and rifles through the information.
“Well, this makes things difficult,” she says, skimming through a file. “The serum isn’t being kept here. It’s in your mother’s private lab.”
“No, this is good,” I say, brainstorming a plan as I speak. “We need to find the data disk anyway. I doubt my mother’s let it out of her sight since I arrived home. If we track her down, we get the disk and the serum in one fell swoop.”
“You’re forgetting how high up the food chain your mom is,” Vega says. “She’s bound to have a ton of Defense officers protecting her private lab.”
“You don’t know my mom,” I said. “She’s cocky enough to forego protection. Let’s go.”
My mother’s private laboratory is on the top floor of the Intelligence building. Every step is a difficult one. To access the upper floors, we have to hack into the elevator’s code. To get through my mother’s office, we need her fingerprint or an override password. Thankfully, that’s easy to crack. Her password is my name. Only one more door lies between us and my mother’s lab, but we meet a complication behind the desk.
“Ophelia,” my mother says, glancing up from her Monitor as Vega and I let ourselves in. “What a lovely surprise. I suppose I should’ve changed my password, eh? Or perhaps I expected a visit from you at some point.”
The data disk hangs from her neck and rests on the padded material of her purple vest. It catches the light, casting rainbows across the ceiling.
“We were on Laertes’s tour,” I say, approaching my mother’s desk. “Thought I’d come see what you were up to.”
Gertrude leans back in her chair and lifts her feet to rest them on her desk. She’s totally exposed, and from what I can see, unarmed. It would be simple to vault the desk and subdue her, but I get the feeling she’s got something else up her sleeve.
“What do you want, Ophelia?” she asks. “Your freedom? By all means, take it. We have what we need from you.”
“I’m not so sure you do.” I sit on her desk and lean over to tap the data disk with my pointer finger. “What’s worth more? The genetic sequence on that old disk or my fresh blood?”
Gertrude raises her eyebrows. “You know. Who told you?”
“Figured it out on my own.”
My mother looks past me. “Vega Major. Are you a traitor to your own people? Has my daughter seduced and corrupted you? Are you no longer an honest and moral member of this community?”
Vega squares her shoulders. “I am an honest and moral human being, but I refuse to be affiliated with people who murder children.”
“Nobody’s going to be murdered,” Gertrude replies in a dismissive tone. “You young rebels are so dramatic. That’s why you can’t put together a formulaic attack. No discipline.”
“Enough talk, Mother,” I snap. “Give me the disk and the code to the lab. You can’t release the vaccine if there’s no serum to administer.”
“Did you think it would be so easy?” she says. “You thought you could come up here and put a stop to all my hard work?”
“You’re stalling—”
She takes the necklace off and throws the data disk at me. I’m so startled at how easily she gives up that I don’t even manage to catch it. It falls to the floor, and I hop off the desk to pick it up. When I straighten up, my mother is aiming a blaster pistol right at my heart. Behind me, I hear Vega draw her blaster too.
“You wouldn’t,” I say, raising my hands. The data disk necklace is curled around my fingers like a little golden snake. “I’m your daughter.”
“According to you, I’m not beneath killing my children,” Gertrude says.
“You need me,” I remind her. “You need my DNA.”
“Not really,” she replies. “All I needed was the genetic sequence stored on that disk. Now I have it. You can take that if you want. I
have copies.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“Ophelia.” She sighs my name, like she’s tired of saying it. “It’s over. Stop fighting it. You lost the moment we plucked you off that pirate ship.”
A blast rocks the room as Vega fires. I dodge out of the way just in time to watch the opalite bullet embed itself in my mother’s shoulder. The force knocks the pistol out of her hand. I pounce on it and aim at Gertrude’s head before she can make another move. She presses her palm to the wound in her shoulder in an attempt to stem the blood flow.
“How dare you?” she gasps. “How dare you attack a high-ranking government official?”
“Yeah, I’m a little shocked myself,” I say. “Vega’s not usually the one on the uptake.”
Vega isn’t one for drama and verbiage. “Let’s not dawdle, Fee,” she says, her pistol still trained on Gertrude. “Let’s destroy the serum and get out.”
I force Gertrude out of her chair and walk her to the fingerprint scanner outside her private laboratory. “If you’d be so obliging, Mother.”
My mother attempts to tuck her hands into her pockets, but she’s spent too much time behind her desk to fight off my strength. I wrestle her hand free and lay her index finger against the reader. The door slides open, revealing my mother’s lab.
It isn’t like the labs downstairs. There’s no hodgepodge of experiments or jarred creatures. It’s neat, clean, and well-organized. An enormous refrigerator with a glass door houses enough filled syringes to inject all of Harmonia’s youth. But there’s one thing in the lab that immediately forces me backward in shock.
“Oh, heavens,” Vega mutters. “What is that?”
It’s a dead Revellae. The alien body rests atop a metal table, its internal organs exposed for study. I’ve never seen one up close before. It almost resembles a human—two legs and two arms—but the skin is green and scaly. A set of gills decorates the creature’s throat, and if I’m not mistaken, I can see insect-like wings protruding from its back.
“What the hell did you do to it, Mom?” I ask. “Where’d you get it?”
“He was a member of the council we consulted about the serum,” Gertrude explains with an air of impatience. “We needed an alien body to complete the vaccine. His elders volunteered him.”
“You killed him.”
“It was a necessary sacrifice,” she counters. “The Revellae understand the concept of sacrifice for the greater good. Obviously, you do not.”
“It goes.” My entire body quakes, and so does my voice. “Get rid of it. We’re dumping the serum too.”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Gertrude warns.
“Who’s going to stop me?”
The door to Gertrude’s office flies open, and Laertes enters. His form fills the doorway. He appears to have grown several inches in the minutes since we left him on the lower levels. As his chest pulses, Vega scrambles to get away from him. He picks her up and tosses her across the room like she weighs no more than a fly. She slams into the window and slumps to the floor.
I turn my pistol on my brother. His IA vest has torn at the seams to make room for his new body. His muscles bulge and ripple as he lumbers toward me. His eyes are bloodshot, and he’s sweating through his clothes.
“Laertes,” I say. “What did she do to you?”
Laertes smiles, and the effect is chilling. “She fixed me, little sister. I’m at my best now.”
He rips off his vest to reveal the skin underneath. He’s massive, twice the size he was yesterday, and he’s covered in a layer of green scales identical to that of the dead Revellae on the autopsy table.
“Laertes was first to receive the vaccine,” Gertrude says, the triumph notable in her tone. “Not only did it cure my past mistake, it made him stronger than ever before. Isn’t he magnificent?”
“He’s an abomination.”
Laertes roars, showering us with spit.
“You can’t do this to children,” I say. “It’s wrong.”
“It’s the future,” Gertrude insists. “You’re so close-minded, Ophelia. This is the way into the next branch of science. We are altering life itself.”
“Life is not meant to be altered like this.”
I dart past my mother, vault over the dead body on the table, and open the refrigerator. With both arms, I sweep as many syringes as I can onto the floor. Each one shatters, spraying alien serum in every direction. The slime coats my legs, and I hope it isn’t effective through skin contact.
“No!” Gertrude screams. “Laertes, stop her!”
The whole room shakes as my brother stomps toward me. He’s grown so much that his head brushes the ceiling, and he can barely turn around in the lab without knocking something over. His enormous feet crush more vials as he attempts to catch me. I fire my blaster, but it’s not use. The opalite bounces off his new scaly skin. I duck to avoid the returning bullet, but it grazes my cheek. The opalite burns my skin and makes my eyes water. An indigo haze creeps into my vision. The opalite is in my bloodstream, far too close to my brain.
I can’t see anything. I stumble around blindly, trying to feel my way to the lab’s exit, but Laertes doesn’t give up. He seizes my waist, lifts me into the air, and slams me into the autopsy table. My ears ring when my head hits the metal. Laertes lifts me again.
“Hey, freak!”
Laertes drops me. I crumple next to the table and fumble for the pocket near my collar. Thankfully, I stocked up on Purifiers before we headed out this morning. I swallow one just as Laertes bellows in pain. As the Purifier works its way through my body, my vision clears.
Vega hangs off of Laertes’s back. Her tactical knife is embedded in his eye, one of the only parts of his body still vulnerable to attack. As he tries to pull it out, Vega drops from his back and lands in a crouch.
“We gotta get out of here,” she says as my mother tries to calm Laertes. “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
Vega hauls me up from the floor and carries me out of the lab. As we try to leave the office, someone fires a pistol at us. Vega’s protective vest absorbs the shot. I turn to see my mother in the doorway of her lab. Behind her, Laertes lies on the floor, unconscious.
Something breaks beneath my boot: the data disk. The necklace is in pieces, but the disk is still intact. I pick it up and pocket it as my mother readies herself to fire again. In a flash, I raise my own pistol. The opalite bullets meet in midair and explode, showering the room with powdered minerals.
“Hold your breath,” I tell Vega. “And get ready to run.”
I fire again, and my mother’s office explodes.
10
Alarms blare as we leave the dust and rubble of my mother’s office. We sprint down the stairs, taking them two at a time. On the first floor, Vega overrides the lockdown code, and we burst through the emergency exit of the Intelligence building. My Monitor switches on by itself, and a holographic image of Claudia’s face floats above my wrist.
“Shit, you couldn’t get out of there without blowing the place up?” she asks.
“Mom injected Laertes with the serum,” I reply. “He’s like a souped-up lizard human on crack now. We had to stall them.”
“What about the rest of the serum?”
“I destroyed what I could,” I report. “But I’m not sure how much of it survived. Does it matter? Mom can replicate it whenever she wants.”
“Did you get the data disk?”
“Yes, but she’s already copied the information.”
“It’s okay,” Claudia says. “You stalled them. That’s good enough for us. Get to the extraction point. We’re getting the hell out of here.”
As we cross the lawn, several teams of armed officers pour out of the Defense building. Vega halts and draws her pistol. The extraction point is the training bay, right behind the Defense building. We have to get past IA’s army to get off this planet.
“Two of us, fifty of them,” she says. “What do we do?”<
br />
“Get creative.”
I take off my shoe.
“What the hell are you doing?” Vega demands.
I empty what’s left of the opalite from my mother’s pistol into my sock and tie a knot. Then I put my shoe back on.
“We’re going to run straight toward them,” I say. “They won’t be expecting that.”
“Ophelia, you’re crazy.”
“Got company?” Claudia asks over the Monitor.
“You could say that.”
“Activating backup.”
Vega glances over. “We have backup?”
The army’s getting closer. I shove Vega forward, and she reluctantly breaks into a sprint. We barrel toward the Defense officers. A line of R-Ones lights up in front of us, ready to fire. Just as their captain gives the order, I throw the opalite-laden sock as far as I can, grab Vega’s pistol, and fire. The sock explodes, and the heated opalite burns through the sky. The indigo powder rains down on the troops, coating their head and necks. Several officers drop their blasters to attend to the chemical burns on their skin. I swipe two R-Ones and hand one to Vega. We fire at will, picking off the officers at a rapid pace. In our IA finery, the officers have a hard time seeing us amongst themselves.
Claudia’s backup emerges in the form of her students. I recognize Doug, De Silva, and several other trainees that I worked with over the past couple of days. They come from the dormitories, fully equipped for a battle like they’d been waiting for Claudia to give them orders. As the students collide with the fully-trained IA agents, it becomes clear that Claudia’s Holmes-style fighting technique is far superior to whatever was taught in the past. The trainees go through the agents like a chainsaw through whipped cream.
“Go!” Doug orders as he blasts an agent with his R-one then punches another who’s gotten too close. “We’ll cover you!”
Vega and I make a run for it. The trainees form a human wall around us, preventing the IA agents from reaching us. I marvel at the students’ abilities. They’re better than I was at that age. In ten years, they’ll be super soldiers, exactly what Veritas needs to defend the galaxy from IA.
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