“And I hit you.”
“It keeps coming back to me.” It’s not true. I was raised by murderers in a school for assassins, and I know the difference between sadism and heroism. I know that Rehan would never, ever, hit me, unless it was to save my life.
But saying this will make him go.
And then Anna and my friends will be safe.
Rehan breathes out a long, slow, sigh. “You’d be dead if I hadn’t done that.”
I look away. I just want to kiss him and lie down on the bed with him and snuggle together and say that everything is fine.
“And you think maybe you just need to be with a guy who’s never hit you.” His voice sounds far away.
I stare at the wall. Nod.
“Fine.” He stands up, grabbing his jacket as he heads for the door.
I stand, awkward.
Then he spins back. “But you know what? I’m glad I did that. Delighted. I’d do it again. Forever was planning to dissect you like an animal, they were already in the house, and I had zero other ideas of how to get you away. Knocking you out was a long shot as it was. You know all that. And you know what else? If you had a leg trapped under a boulder, and an avalanche was coming, and the only way to survive was to cut off your own leg?”
He bends so that his breath is warm against my ear. “I’m the guy who’d cut off your leg for you. And that’s not pretty. You won’t find it in any of those books.” He nods at some romance books on the floor, that I missed when I kicked them under the bed. “But that doesn’t make me the bad guy. I would never, ever, hurt you, unless it was the only way to save you. And if you don’t already know that, then maybe you’re right and this,” he waves a hand at me, at him, “can’t work. But Forever? You’ll never be free of Forever.”
I don’t know what to say, and now I’m picturing Rehan sawing at my leg.
Yuck.
“You need anything? Call me.” He throws a phone on to the bed. “My number’s in there.”
He leaves, slamming the door behind him so hard that the windows rattle in their frames.
The ache in my chest grows sharper and heavier.
Time stretches, until I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here, staring at the closed door. The phone in my hand buzzes. Automatically, I glance down, and the words on the screen jump into my brain before I can make a decision about whether or not to read his message.
I’m not good with words. But I would never hurt you. I will fight for you. I will protect you. And I will always hope for you. If you need anything, call me. Please.
I find myself walking to the window, where I stare out. The sky is getting cloudy.
Outside, Rehan is walking across the grass at the back of the house, towards the road, towards a parked blue car. I get that annoying déjà vu sensation again.
He gets in and drives away.
I lie down on the bed, words from a song I heard a long time ago playing on repeat in my head.
What if you were meant to be mine? What if I was meant to be yours?
Something moves on my cheek, and I touch my face. It’s wet. I wonder when I started crying.
An hour or two later, I walk into the kitchen, where Anna is stirring onions in a giant pan.
“Do you have any pills that I could take for a headache?” I ask her.
“Oh, I’m don’t, I’m sorry.” She turns off the hob and starts taking off her apron. “I’ll go right out and get something.”
“We can go tomorrow.”
“No, really, it’s no trouble. I used to get terrible headaches when I was your age, I know how you feel.”
“That sucks. But seriously, don’t stop cooking. I can wait.” Determined to prove me wrong, my skull throbs. I reach past her and turn the hob back on.
“Oh, ok. If you’re sure.” She looks at me worriedly. “You’re not – hearing anything funny, are you?”
“Eh?”
She looks at the pan, stirring aggressively. “Just let me know if you hear anything odd.”
“Why?” But something shifts within me, and I already know. “You heard noises. Voices, sometimes.”
She nods.
“From when you were a teenager.”
Another nod. “My foster parents got me medication for it, but it didn’t help. Eventually it stopped.” She gives me her best fake smile. “I’m normal now, I promise.”
My grandmother was a dancer, she said, the first time I met her. A Bavarian gypsy who came to England after the war.
“Could I ask you something?” I say.
“Sure.”
“Where’s Bavaria?”
She looks totally confused. “In Germany, why?”
John’s voice echoes in my ears.
Germany…
…any surviving subjects had dispersed…
A couple of third generation Forever children got it when they were a touch older…
…things do get complicated if a subject is allowed to breed.
I realise that I’m staring into space. “No… No reason.”
“Thinking about my grandmother?”
“Yeah. I like to dance, too. Hey, when you were younger, did you ever – wonder if the noises you heard were real? If you might be psychic, like Rehan and my friends?” I fake a smile. “I hear everybody wonders that when they’re a teenager.”
“Childhood wasn’t my favourite time.” She throws tinned tomatoes into the onions, and a cloud of steam billows up. She opens a window. “This place needs an extractor fan.”
“When did it stop?”
“It got really bad after I had you. After they told me that you’d died. I kept imagining that I could hear a crying baby. Then it – faded away. Never came back.”
Because they’d dosed her with the serum during pregnancy. Not knowing that it was already printed into her genes, a gift from ancestors that Forever had tortured in Germany.
Not knowing that they’d given her a double dose.
“How old were you?”
“Thirty.”
“You still look it.”
“We have great genes, I guess.” She winks.
“Lucky us.”
“You want to make cakes with me after I’ve finished this? I thought we could decorate them together. We never got to do things like that.”
“I’d like that.”
Later, after the others have gone to bed, Anna and I sit on the rocks by the side of the house. We watch the waves churn into the shore, tearing pebbles away, then throwing them back, part of a pattern that I don’t understand but into which I fit somehow.
The wind stirs my hair and leaves salt on my lips.
“I should check on the oven.” Anna gets up, stepping carefully over the damp rocks, and walks away to the house.
I take out Rehan’s phone, and rest it on the pebbles in front of me. I stare at it, and the blank screen stares back at me, promising me whatever I want.
I open his message, read it again.
I will fight for you. Does he mean that he’ll try to convince me to be with him? Or does he mean it literally, fighting whatever dregs he can find of Forever?
I could call him, and he’d come straight back. With warm arms and the half smile that makes my stomach twist in a good way, and the scent of summer that he always seems to carry on his skin.
And with a hundred plans to hunt Forever, to find and unite the Vol or whatever it is we should call the Vol now, given they – we – did not actually ‘evolve’ at all.
With a hundred uses for my friends. A hundred uses for me, if I’m right to suspect that I might yet be in line for a talent. A lifetime of guns and fighting and hell. For all of us. For Anna, who deserves sanctuary. Like we all do.
He’d start telling me what to do again, and eventually, I’d let him. I want to let him. Want to sink into the peace that comes from letting someone else lead.
I miss him.
I pick up the phone and hold it in between my hands. It rests there, a little lif
eline, my link to Rehan. I curl my fingers around it, loving this thing that he gave me, feeling the strange heat of its metal, its reassuring weight.
Then I pull back my arm, and hurl it as far as I can into the sea.
I watch the waves for a long time.
Then I walk home.
END OF BOOK ONE
Thank you for joining me on Fern and Rehan’s journey. Their story concludes in The Flaw in Forever, which will be published in November 2021. For an alert on release day, join the readers in my VIP Readers group, where I share bonus scenes, free books and giveaways… Join the fun at www.yolandamccarthy.com.
If you enjoyed this story – or if you didn’t – please consider leaving a review on Amazon and sharing your thoughts. It means a lot.
Best wishes,
Yolanda McCarthy
P.S. Read on for a preview of my novella Forever a Villain, which reveals the truth about the origins of the Forever cult, and the man behind it.
Forever A Villain
PREVIEW
Site of the former Forever Institute, 6 November 2039
Behind me, my colleagues shift, shoes crunching quietly on the rubble. My silence makes them nervous. Good.
I look at what was the building, the capital of my empire. The basic structure appears intact, but no competent builder would allow that steel frame to be re-used. Twisted. Burnt. Useless.
Around me, fragments of walls and ceilings lie scattered across the carpark. Chunks of concrete. Smashed glass, sparkling in the sunshine. As I watch, a slab of blackened plasterboard collapses in on itself, puffing out a last gasp of dust.
The whole thing reminds me of an art installation from the nineteen-sixties.
At least the perimeter wall remains intact… Mostly. My security staff block the gap in the wall, politely turning away the police – who know better than to object – and less politely, turning away journalists and other riffraff.
Everyone wants to know who attacked the Forever Institute, and how.
I want to know that. I hired only the best. Best management, best scientists, even the best janitors. Certainly the best security staff. And yet this. I should have words with them, I suppose, but it’s not a priority. They must realise that they’re all fired, and I’ve always been more interested in the future than the past. Next steps. That’s what I want to think about now. Next steps. Revenge, then rebuilding.
An unexpected pang of sadness ambushes me, as I move closer to what was the Institute’s entrance. I didn’t think much of the building and its grubby towers when first we set up here, I only chose it for the location, but look at it now. All of that effort by architects, planners, builders, plasterers, electricians, plumbers… By me… Reduced to rubble, in the course of an evening.
I might as well have gone on holiday for the entirety of Twenty Twenty-Two.
It smelled of chemicals, then, the empty corridors too polished, too new. Now, the smells drifting on the breeze are all wrong, burned tarmac and dust. The air is heavy in my lungs, in a way I haven’t felt since Victorian London.
And the chimneys are gone. I disliked those towers, they were aesthetically wrong for the building, and grubby, but I didn’t want them blown up.
They were mine.
A gust of wind flaps the edge of my suit jacket, painting me with a glaze of powdered building. Looking down, I see smudges of grey and white marring the black leather of my shoes. Ash? Disgusting. I’ll have to throw these shoes away. The suit, too.
I walk across what used to be the car park, and they trail behind me, like a class of children silently daring each other to speak to the teacher. Scientists, guards, managers, lawyers. All mine, with ambition like mine, minds brilliant, like mine, their faces younger than their souls, like mine. Closer to me than family, or so I had thought. Not that that’s hard.
Still. This debacle is unacceptable.
“Sir, you can’t go that way,” yelps someone behind me.
I pause, and tilt my head to the side. “Why is that?” I ask softly, without turning. Everything here belongs to me. The land, the people, and the rubble. No-one has attempted to restrict my movements since… I can’t remember when.
“The building might not be stable,” he whispers.
Idiot. If anything further was going to fall, last night’s storm would have brought it down. I walk forward with crunching steps.
He clears his throat. “And… John is there.”
“Ah, yes. Where, exactly, is John?”
The speaker doesn’t answer. I glance back. One of the lawyers points to my left, past a broken beam. Yet more rubble, why— Ah. My eyes focus on a hand, the wrist disappearing into a suit sleeve which in turn disappears under the shattered concrete.
“I see.” That explains the lack of a written report from the Institute’s former director. How tedious.
I should let them bring diggers onto the site, I suppose, to recover his body and that of anyone else who might have been in the right place at the wrong time. But I want to see it all first. I walk the other way around the building.
John can wait. They can all wait.
Footsteps patter on tarmac as they scuttle after me. They worry that the building might collapse upon us, but they’re more afraid of my displeasure.
Rightly so.
Later, after shoes and suit have been thrown away, and the taint of burned Institute has been thoroughly soaked and massaged from my skin and hair, I skim through their reports on my phone. Then I summon them to my hotel.
Only my first ten, the closest to me, the oldest.
Let them deal with the others.
The hotel is more than happy to provide me with their biggest boardroom. It’s adequate, I suppose. Wall to wall windows on all sides, with views across London, and at the centre, a huge mahogany table. I settle at the table’s head, and stare thoughtfully at the wood in front of me. Around me, my oldest file into the room and take their seats with only faint murmurs and hesitation over who sits where.
The table wood is so highly polished that it gleams like a mirror. I peer down. My reflection looks back at me with steady eyes. Not a day over forty, perhaps even thirty-five, despite the tan from skiing. Only a touch of grey at the temples. I looked older in the nineteen-forties than I do now. Quite right, for this is a more innocent time. Apart, of course, from me.
Raising my eyes, I look around the table. “I’ve been neglectful,” I say softly. “I thought that my instructions were clear, but obviously, closer supervision was required.”
“You asked us to create psychics to assist with locating the missing subjects, and we did.” Susan leans forward as she speaks, black hair swinging in front of her face like a shield. She’s defensive. Perhaps this was her fault?
I make a mental note to reprimand Susan later for her imprecise speech. I didn’t ask her to create psychics. I created them. All these idiots had to do was raise them, keep them secure, and use their abilities to find the missing side-effects. They were side-effects of the experiment. Not subjects.
Sometimes I wonder if people listen to me at all. The original subjects are long dead. Their offspring are an unfortunate side-effect that continues to ripple through the gene pool, that must be erased.
“And did you?” I enquire of the table. “Locate them?”
“We hadn’t started that phase yet.”
“You hadn’t started. Well, that is a shame. Since our stable of pet psychics are… Where?” I gaze enquiringly around the room.
Someone mumbles something about a helicopter, and is swiftly hushed by those next to him. Probably complaining about the lack of escape vehicles for emergency use. But I didn’t build the Institute to be escaped.
“The subjects of programs nine and ten are missing, presumed dead in the fire,” says Susan firmly.
I sigh. “And the side-effects? Did program nine manage to locate any, before the fire?”
“But of course! I filed reports…”
Did she? It’s so hard
to keep track. I’ve been skiing, and then in Monte Carlo, and of course there was that business with the yacht...
Susan continues. “We found a few descendants in England, more in Germany and Italy, obviously. The original group seems to have scattered widely,” Susan says.
“Did the descendants shed any light on why?” I ask.
“Our instructions were to terminate the side-effects as quickly as possible before they contaminate the gene pool further. We understood that you meant kill, not capture. 9A and some of 9B received weapons and covert ops training, they were effective in carrying out the terminations…”
I raise my eyebrows. “So, no interview records?” They don’t answer. “And… Remind me. When did I say that program nine should also ‘execute’ the plan?”
No-one meets my eyes.
I stand up and lean on the table as I look each of them in the eye, one by one. “I asked you to raise psychics to assist in locating the missing side-effects. Because we – you – have done spectacularly badly at finding them, and it was an interesting addition to the main experiment. Did I, at any point, tell you that we would also use those children to wipe out the problem?”
“It seemed efficient.” Susan won’t back down. “They were consuming a considerable amount of resources anyway.”
“Yes. But I never approved that they be trained in weapons and cover ops, or their use outside the building. Any idiot can hold a gun and take out a target, that should have been subcontracted. Did none of you see a problem with the idea of creating psychic assassins?”
They look embarrassed.
“They were under control, until the attack, which was entirely external—” mumbles Quintin from the seat next to Susan. He always backs her up, hoping that she’ll be grateful. Pathetic. We don’t do gratitude, none of us. If we did, then this lot would worship me for the years I added to their lives. Instead they fear that I’ll take it all away.
A Girl From Forever (The Forever Institute series Book 1) Page 25