Recompense (Recompense, book 1)

by Michelle Isenhoff

  “He said you were going to.”

  “We were very thorough. We analyzed blood, hair, tissue samples, the whole gamut. Some of the results were very disturbing.” She falls silent, and her forehead crinkles again.

  “Just spit it out.”

  Her eyes drill into mine. “Jack, their DNA isn’t fully human.”

  My body actually jerks when I register what she’s saying. The mice begin racing up my backbone again, setting every hair on end. “What else can they be? Monsters? Aliens?”

  “Nothing quite that drastic. A normal percentage of variance between the genes of any human race is 0.5. Theirs both registered at 1.5, a full percentage below the expected range. It’s equivalent to the difference between a dog and a wolf.”

  “So they’re still human, they’re just…”

  “Not,” she finishes.

  I pause, giving my body time to return to equilibrium. “Have you told this to Ethan?”

  “Not yet. I just found out this morning and didn’t want to spring it on him before his match.”

  “What about Willoughby?”

  “No. I think we should schedule a meeting on Monday morning with all of us—you, me, Ethan, Willoughby, Captain Chase, and Colonel Padrillo. We have a lot to discuss.”

  “I think we’d better.”

  We claim a pair of blankets, and my mind pulls in a dozen directions as we return to the Fire Ring. I find it much harder to concentrate on the men, who are growing increasingly clumsy and sluggish.

  Caedmon was right. Another full round passes before the match finally reaches its conclusion. I am astounded by their endurance but at 8:44, four minutes into the ninth round, Colonel Padrillo finally manages to pin Ethan on his back for a full five count, bringing the fight to an end.

  Stiffly, Caedmon and I descend the bleachers. Even though night has fully descended, the crowd has thinned little. Two dozen bodies now congregate around the ring to congratulate the men. I hear someone mention that it has been the longest fight in eleven years, and someone else says it’s the most skillfully fought in closer to twenty. I feel considerable pride in my partner, even though he has lost the match.

  Ethan’s body is bruised, bleeding, drenched in sandy sweat, and drooping with exhaustion, but he manages to grin as he catches sight of us.

  “Ethan, that was amazing,” I tell him.

  “Thanks.” He pushes a clump of dripping hair out of his eyes with an edge of the towel. “Padrillo is the reining champ. He’s beaten me five times now, but our matches keep getting longer. I’ll get him yet before he retires.”

  “You want to do this again?” I ask in amazement. “I don’t know how you’re still standing.”

  “Me either,” he says wryly.

  I congratulate Colonel Padrillo, who looks like he could sleep for a week. Though he won, the battle has obviously taken a greater toll on him. He moves slowly and with great care, but he manages to quip, “Not dead yet.”

  The crowd has begun to disperse. Several individuals help the contestants gather their belongings, and we all make a slow caravan inside. The higher ranking officers move off with Colonel Padrillo toward their individual quarters while Caedmon, Ethan, and I pause at the corner between the dorms where the three of us will part ways. “So, does this mean we can sleep in tomorrow and run at, say, seven?” I tease.

  Ethan chuckles as he staggers down the hall. “You’re on your own tomorrow, Holloway.”

  ***

  I don’t run the next morning. I sleep in till eleven and let my body finish recovering from the rigors of the week. It’s a luxury I have enjoyed only rarely, usually during illness. Today when I wake up, I make myself a cup of coffee and sink onto the sofa with Willoughby’s stories, reading until the mess hall opens. Then I take a short break, fetch soup and a sandwich, bring them back to my room, and keep reading.

  The stories—adventures of Norse gods, Greek heroes, and Chinese warriors—would be enjoyable if I could read them as fiction. But I find myself growing cynical and irritated. And the accompanying historical sources—letters and journal entries, annals taken from courts and monasteries, and the accounts of long-dead historians—they’re interesting, but I wonder at their authenticity. Even if they are authoritative, they form only tenuous links to ideas so fantastical I can’t quite fathom how Willoughby expects me to swallow them. By the time I finish the last file, I stare out the window for a long, long time.

  I glance at my holoband. Three o’clock. I didn’t see Ethan at lunch, but I imagine he’s stirring by now. I’d really like to discuss this with him, along with Willoughby’s mental acuity. I begin packing the stories back into their box when a page I have not seen slips out and falls onto the floor. I pick it up and glance at it. Memory footage of Ruby Parnell. It includes a video code and a password. Out of curiosity, I type them into my holoband.

  An archive tag appears on the screen first, embedded in the video clip and dated nearly fifty years before. Then an image appears, flitting from object to object more quickly than a camera, as if tracking from a person’s eyes. When I catch glimpses of arms and legs in the video feed, I realize I must be accessing a memory scan. I sink back onto the sofa in amazement as I witness the events of half a century past.

  The person is a woman, I soon realize. Ruby Parnell. Not only did her name flash across the screen in the title, her hands and arms appear too slender to be male. And she is crying quietly. I can’t tell why. I see the jerky motion of a fast walk through a dimly lit woods. Even in the darkness, I identify several of the trees by their size and shape and the configuration of their leaves—poplar and beech, maple, jack pine, and a dogwood in full bloom. It must be June.

  Ruby sinks to the ground at the base of an aspen. Her sobs, which have been erratic and overshadowed by her labored breaths, become more steady. More anguished. Sympathy tears form in my own eyes for this long-ago woman, and my heart breaks with the sound of her weeping.

  After several minutes, a twig snaps in the audio feed. Ruby instantly grows silent. Her eyes rove the underbrush. A single, unsteady breath gives evidence of her sorrow or fright. Probably both. Then a figure steps into the edge of her vision, and her head whips in that direction. A startled gasp. Then a name spoken in relief. “David, you scared me to death! What are you doing out here?”

  He approaches and she focuses on his face. His features are hard to make out, but I can tell he’s young. Late teens or early twenties. Probably close to her age, judging by the youth in her voice.

  “Sorry, Ruby. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you like that. I was out for a walk and heard someone crying.”

  The picture skims away as if his words cause her embarrassment. “Yeah, well, I had a surprise waiting for me at home.”

  The picture zooms back to his face, full of concern as he sits down beside her. “You’re all right? You’re not hurt?”

  “I’ll be fine. I, um, I’d rather be alone, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure, I understand.” But he doesn’t rise right away. He seems to be fiddling with something in his pocket. The light is so dim, it’s hard to tell. “Here,” he says, breaking open a water bottle and handing it to her. “You look like you could use this. I always carry an extra.”

  She accepts it with a subdued thank-you and takes a long swig.

  “I’m sorry your evening had to end like this, Ruby,” David says. “It started out so good.” He rises. “Let me know if I can do anything, all right?”

  She nods, and he walks off to wherever he came from.

  Ruby stays leaning against the tree, but her tears resume. Not as wildly as before, but grief still seeps out of her. I wonder what she’s thinking. How did the evening start? What went well? What happened to cause such distress?

  After a few minutes, Ruby swears and jerks the water bottle up to her eyes. It’s plastic, shaped in an old-fashioned style, and looks normal to me. Then the image seems to blur. She curses again and stumbles to her feet.

  David re
turns, looming at the edge of her vision. She fastens her eyes on him, but her vision goes fuzzy again. “David, you jerk, what did you put in this water?”

  He approaches with a hand stretched out. “Just calm down, Ruby. It’ll be all right in a minute.”

  She swats him away. “It is not all right.” The entire picture is out of focus now. “Get away from me!” She takes several steps, but her knees buckle and she catches herself against a tree. Her voice is slurred and laced with terror. “If you touch me, I swear I’ll kill—” Before she finishes her threat, the screen fades to black. Then the video cuts out.

  I sit unmoving, my veins filled with ice even though the attack happened decades before. Perhaps because it happened so long ago. Because it’s so eerily similar to Markay’s abduction. Without a doubt, I know I have just witnessed part of the Provocation.

  The video fades back in, lighter now but still blurry. Ruby blinks, and the image begins to clear. Her eyes scan a room filled with young women, bound hand and foot, searching for the noise that roused her. David stands among the captives—I can see him more clearly now—along with several other young men. Then two others stride into view. Two huge dark-bearded men dressed in matching uniforms who tower head and shoulders above everyone else. David is a tall, well-built man, but these two? Eight feet tall if they stand an inch.

  One of the men speaks in accented English. “Get them into the dormitory. We will sort them when hirhm mphmmsns—”

  The image shimmers, the voices garble, the screen fades to black as Ruby loses consciousness once again. Static marks the end of the memory.

  I sit motionless, trying to figure out what I have just seen, when the archive tag appears again at the end of the video. A snapshot of Ruby Parnell accompanies the code. I leap upright and stare at the image, pausing the video so I can stare and stare and stare. Finally, I flop back onto the couch, weak in every joint.

  It is a picture of me.

  EIGHTEEN

  My hands shake. My body alternates between hot and cold. And not just from the disturbing footage I have viewed. I am completely shaken at my resemblance to this woman. That she is a blood relative, I can hardly doubt. But who was she? Is she the real reason I have been brought to Axis? And can there be any truth to her last memory?

  I need answers. Now.

  It is Sunday afternoon. I have no idea if Willoughby will be in his office, but I make my way down the short hallway at a jog and burst through the door without knocking.

  Empty.

  “Willoughby!” I call. I don’t know where he spends his time off—I didn’t know he took time off—but I venture to guess he lives in one of the apartments nearby. “Willoughby!”

  I don’t wonder long. The first door off the hallway opens, and the head of Axis emerges dressed not in his usual business suit but in a casual maroon and black uniform identical to mine.

  “Jack, this is highly unusual. I will be in my office tomorrow and we can—”

  “Who is she?” I interrupt, shaking the paper at him. “This woman. Who is she, Willoughby?” My voice catches.

  “You have seen the video, then.” He regards me over the top of his glasses, a calm antithesis to my frenetic motion. Then he nods, gestures me into his office, and closes the door behind us. “Her name is Ruby Parnell.” He seats himself at his desk. “She disappeared during the Provocation and eventually made her way home. To my knowledge, she is the only one who ever escaped.”

  I pace in front of the sofa, unable to contain the energy coursing through my body. The date on the archive, the giant stories, the current kidnappings, they are all coming together in my mind, all converging on this single video. And somehow, a woman who looks just like me sits at the center of it all.

  “How did you get this memory scan?”

  “Actually, Ms. Parnell contacted me. Axis was still in its infancy at the time, and the evidence we had been able to piece together about the disappearances was so disjointed we could make neither heads nor tails of it. The story Ms. Parnell told pulled all the pieces together, but it was so unbelievable that I asked her to submit to a memory scan to authenticate it. She agreed. The video you just watched was the first recording we made.”

  I close my eyes, and the disturbing images replay through my mind. I jiggle my head, trying to dislodge the memory as I’d shake off a fly, but it has cemented itself there. “And you’re confident it was all true? There’s no way to fake the content of a scan?”

  “There are ways, but they leave telltale signs in the final product. Ms. Parnell’s memory contains none of them. Her level of agitation, the detailed minutiae of her account, the way her story hung together as a whole, as well as evidence that was uncovered later—it all adds up. Her memory is absolutely authentic.”

  The tremor in my knees spreads to my spine. I quake so hard that I sink onto the sofa. “How can there truly be…giants?” I choke out, hardly able to form the word. “Who are they? And what do they want with us?”

  Willoughby clears his throat. “The Bible calls them Nephilim,” he begins, “a Hebrew word that has lost its exact meaning to the passage of time. It is translated giant, though these are not the ogres of mythology but simply men of large stature.”

  “I read all three Bible passages. They tell us nothing.”

  Willoughby smiles. “On the contrary, the Bible is our strongest source. So many of its historical details have been borne out by other ancient texts and by archeological discoveries that you’d be a fool to dismiss its words simply because you choose not to believe them.”

  He pulls off his glasses and sets them on the desktop. “The biblical accounts were written in antiquity, when the Nephilim were so well-known by the authors and their readers that they required little explanation. This authenticates their existence as a historical entity, telling us this people group was as real to them as the Chinese are to us today.”

  “So, if our best source tells us only that they existed, how do we know anything about them?”

  “Our historians have collected an entire file of historical sources, which I trust you have read?”

  I nod.

  “They give us hints as to the nature of the Nephilim and detail our recurring contact over the millennia. It is Ms. Parnell’s testimony, however, that gives us our clearest picture. We have an extensive memory file, of which you have seen only the smallest fragment. I will try to piece together the basics for you.”

  He leans back in his chair and runs a hand over his forehead. “They call themselves the Bruelim. Whether they were formed as they are at creation or simply took a different turn from the other races, we can’t be sure. They seem to share with humans a common past as well as a common root language, but at some point they diverged. They have become lost to us, but they reappear time and time again throughout human history.”

  I hold up my hand, remembering the discovery Caedmon shared with me only the night before. “Wait. Are you telling me the Bruelim form some kind of human subspecies? Or a super-species?”

  Willoughby glances down at his hands, clasped on his desk. “I don’t believe I’m qualified to make such a fine distinction on the information I possess. But let me put forward that they are…different.”

  I press fingers to my temples, still trying to take in everything I have learned in the past two days and reconcile it with what I have always believed as true. I will let Caedmon be the one to break her news. “Okay. Us and them. And they keep showing up. Why? What do they want from us? And where are they the rest of the time?”

  Willoughby stands up and walks to the French doors. “The truth is, Jack, we don’t know where they go. Ms. Parnell called their land Brunay, but she was quite confused as to its location. And her memories have failed to help us nail it down.”

  “But she fled,” I protest. “She made her way back. Surely she has some idea where she escaped from.”

  “That memory, too, has garbled moments. The stress she experienced during her flight, brought on by
exhaustion and the close pursuit of her captors, causes inaccuracies within the brain processes themselves. On top of that, she fled at night and in the rain. The memory offers very little information for us to glean. We can only verify that she reappeared somewhere far to the west of here, in the Hinterlands.”

  The Hinterlands—that rugged, uninhabited region of high rocky peaks that separates Capernica from the western lands lost in the Continental War. This is the first thing Willoughby has said that might actually make some sense. “Have any efforts been made to locate Brunay in that area?”

  “Many. All to no avail.”

  “Okay,” I say, the word still thick with disbelief. “So why do the Bruelim come back?”

  “That,” Willoughby says, “might best be explained by Ms. Parnell.”

  He flips on his holoscreen and keys in a code. Ruby Parnell’s face appears before us. She’s young. Perhaps a year or two older than I am now. Our resemblance is uncanny. She sits at a desk facing a much younger Willoughby, engaged in a question-and-answer dialogue. Each time she speaks, Ruby concentrates on a spot just to the camera’s left. Her fidgeting hands give away her nervousness.

  “This is an interview Ruby did with me shortly after I asked for the first scan. It is easier to view than her actual memories. I’ll skim ahead to the most relevant portion.”

  The image blinks out and returns. Now Ruby is staring straight into the camera lens. “No, I wasn’t physically abused, if that’s what you mean by mistreated. At least not while I remained in the official program. Captured men are sold as slaves, but women serve a more specific purpose—to replenish their population.” She glances down at the table and traces a scratch with her finger as she continues. “Bruel women suffer a high rate of infertility. To maintain their culture, they must steal the genetic material they require.”

  My skin crawls as I register what she is saying. I see young Willoughby flinch on screen. He asks the delicate question. “How do they do this?”

  “In a variety of ways. Some of the captive women are married off to Bruel men and raise the children they bear. Some are given to a married couple and used to produce a family that the native woman will raise. Some are subjected to harvesting—their eggs fertilized and implanted in female Bruelim—then sold into slavery. But most of us were put in breeding farms, huge facilities where we were to be clinically impregnated every twelve months for the rest of our childbearing years. Our children are then given to Bruel families.”