by S. M. Lynch
Camille didn’t know if it was because she’d been crouched over for a while, but her head felt thick and heavy and woozy. She realized eventually it was the shock… the dangerous element of her existence she’d never contemplated before. Here she was, thinking the worst thing about living at the chateau was the lack of pads and tampons, when in reality, the worst thing in actuality was death… or capture.
“Continue to teach them,” the superior-sounding man continued, “keep them safe. Yes, what is happening out there is the atrocity of all atrocities. Half the dead still lie unclaimed in old abattoir freezers. The virus has done its worst damage biologically and there will be nothing like it again for generations to come, but mark my words, the damage spiritually, emotionally and mentally will continue for generations more. Civilization itself was uprooted in 2023. Death didn’t come. Fear came. People face firing squad if they try to leave the cities. There is no freedom, there is only servitude and existence; this is not even survival, this is the crippling of humanity under an evil so intense, it shall not disperse for years, decades, possibly centuries. Officium unwove the fabric of societies built up over millennia. They ripped up the rulebook and started again. People only know one thing now, and one alone. They are not living. They are owned. They are watched. They are ruled. To survive, as all humans feel it is necessary to do, they will do what they must even at the cost of their souls. This will feed into generations to come, for who knows how long, unless we keep the people safe who knew what life was like before this new world, before this oppression. Are we all agreed?”
There were a few voices that immediately agreed, “Yes, absolutely,” and then eventually, a few more uncertain voices added, “We have no choice. We agree.”
Camille lifted herself silently off the ground, wandered through the patient’s room and wondered if this comatose girl was the daughter of someone very important, if the nuns were keeping her so secluded. She had no time to contemplate that, however; if she was to get back to her room before the nuns and their guests left the hall, she would need to dash fast.
Thankfully she was back in bed, her eyes shut and her burglar outfit shoved underneath the mattress before she even heard the grand hall’s door unlock, then creak open as the footsteps of her superiors filed out into the night—most of the nuns upstairs to bed, the monks to their monastery across the field, the darkness giving them some blanket of cover.
Camille heard footsteps stop just outside her door as the nuns made their rounds, but she was satisfied she’d got away with it.
Now armed with this knowledge, she just had to decide what she was going to do with it.
Chapter Seven
I WASN’T SURE IF CAMILLE was going to tell any more of her tale, because she and Kyle were staring at one another so intensely following her confession about being the daughter of French spies.
“See, he’s just as cold as all the others,” she said in French, rolling her eyes at me.
“You haven’t even given him a chance,” I returned, in the tongue I was speaking before I ever spoke English.
“What do you want from me?” he said, folding his arms. “A prize, or something? I don’t know what you want from me. Either of you.”
He clearly understood what we were saying whenever we spoke French, but didn’t seem comfortable speaking in any language but English.
Camille’s ramshackle house, but a slim terrace planted in the middle of a few dozen other houses of the same size and dilapidated nature, seemed to accentuate all the more her dangerous figure as she took to her feet and walked around, assessing the stranger in the room.
“Usually, this is when they get crazy,” she said, reverting to English.
Her English was so good in fact, it often put mine to shame.
He put down his cup of tea and stood from his chair at the small, rickety dining table he and I had been sitting at in the corner. She’d sat on her strange orthopedic stool by the counter while she’d recalled her tale, but now she was taking up all the space in the room, or that’s how it felt.
He moved in front of her and they stood facing one another, noses inches apart. He was just an inch taller than me, but still, much taller than her. She craned her neck like an ostrich to see into his eyes but he wasn’t intimidated.
She made a move to take him down and not even I could quite see what was going on as they both moved so fast. He didn’t retaliate, or counter attack, he merely blocked her—and did it superhumanly fast. Their arms moved back and forth and it was a blur. Like knives sliding against one another but ultimately causing no harm.
By the time they were done showing off, he’d not taken her down, and she’d failed to take him down. He’d proven he didn’t favor aggression, but that he could more than hold his own when faced with a lethal assassin like Camille, who even in her retirement years, you wouldn’t want to meet down a dark alley all alone at night.
“He just pulled my own move on me,” she said, spitting.
He wasn’t seething or frothing from the mouth like the other clones. Now I was concerned.
“I want to try something,” I said, and fished in my pocket for a scanner. “Would you take a seat, Kyle?”
He inhaled deeply and moved calmly over to where he’d been sitting moments before. I used the device to check the usual points around his body, but there were no readings.
“He’s not one of them,” I murmured.
“It cannot be,” she gasped.
“He’s not.” He wasn’t installed with a tracking device or a chip, which they used to control the clones.
His eyes landed on mine and there was recognition. “You thought I was a clone?”
“We did,” Camille answered.
“I know I came from up there.” He pointed in the general direction of the sky. “But I also know I’m not a clone, but I do have… a feeling… I have been programed. I haven’t been activated yet, obviously.”
Camille took his face between her hands and looked deep into his eyes. I thought I was looking at a religious nut checking someone out for poltergeists, or something.
“He’s human?” she whispered.
“I’m human.”
“You could still be a clone,” she argued. “Some new… I don’t know…”
“You’ll both have to trust I’m human.”
We all looked at one another around the room. He was trying to tell me he was trustworthy and that I must know this to be true, given we’d spent the past twenty-four hours together—and peaceably. She was telling me she didn’t trust anything about him, at all. And he was telling her he didn’t give a stuff what she thought—it was my opinion and mine alone he cared about.
So, he’d been sent to curry my favor, then? Camille and I seemed to share this thought at exactly the same time.
“So,” she said, with a long sigh, returning to her stool. “You have no idea what your directive is?”
“None whatsoever,” he admitted. “And it was strange I woke up on Earth alone. The others had gone already. And then, somehow, Ariadne found me.”
Of course, I’d found him. They always landed in nearly the same place in London and it wasn’t difficult to track them as they wandered around aimlessly.
“You were beamed down alone,” I muttered, avoiding his eyes and looking into Camille’s.
She’d never been happy about me hanging around London, and I knew she didn’t agree with my beliefs about the clones, whatsoever.
“You were watching me?” Kyle mumbled.
“Yesterday, I saw you arrive… but I didn’t see anybody else.”
He looked frightened, like he knew there was something wrong about that.
Alone? I saw him wonder.
“The other craters were from other specimens that had arrived days before. I had thought it was strange you’d been sent alone, but I’d also been pushed for time yesterday… and now I realize I hadn’t missed any others. Yesterday, it was just you. I’m fairly certain of that now.”
“Why is it strange that I should arrive by teleportation but at the same time, feel as though it shouldn’t be possible?” He looked between Camille and me, seeking answers, but we didn’t have any—just conjectures. “The only knowledge I have of this idea, is from what I believe I might have watched, on Star Trek.”
Camille and I shared knowing looks, and I could tell she was warming to him, which wasn’t easy, not for her.
“We can tell you what little we know,” she said, gesticulating in that au fait way of hers. “There’s some craft up there, floating just inside the earth’s stratosphere, but we don’t know anything about it. We know it’s there, because our sensors have detected its energy, but it’s cloaked. We cannot figure out whether it be friendly or hostile, domestic or alien.”
“Do you have cloaking capabilities on Earth?” he asked, biting his nails.
“We believe Officium did,” I answered, because as a nerd, that was one of their cooler inventions. “So, in theory, the technology could be human. But teleportation, as far as we know, hasn’t been achieved by humans. So that’s one sticking point as to your theory of it possibly being an aircraft deployed by humans and hovering up there like a sneaky piece of—”
Camille cleared her throat loudly, because she hated swearing. If I’d been brought up primarily by my mother or father, I’d have become as foul-mouthed as them combined, but Camille was brutally strict about such things.
“So, you’re a bit of a mystery, Kyle. Aren’t you?” she said, staring down her nose.
“As much to myself as to the both of you,” he said, his eyes darting curiously between us. “And I’m not quite sure why I needed Camille’s backstory. Why was that?”
Camille held her finger to her lip and smiled, baring her teeth.
That wasn’t a good sign.
Camille didn’t smile.
“You really have no data about the pandemic sixty years ago?” she said.
“No, I don’t,” he admitted.
“I escaped the orphanage because I was clever,” she said, but not in an arrogant way. Arrogance wasn’t her manner, usually; she was just overly aware of herself when it came to strangers. “I realized I couldn’t go out into the world as what I was born to be, so I became a fine and accomplished seamstress, instead. And I integrated into society… at least for a while. Then, my big ideas, my free will got me in trouble and I was cast out… until Ari’s grandmother took me under her wing.”
She took deep breaths and watched him carefully, as though she still thought he might attack, any minute now.
“I’m the most dangerous human on earth, and yet, here you are, just as dangerous. Either you’ve been engineered or you lived through it yourself, too and just can’t remember. Only survivors, I find are as ruthlessly equipped as we are.”
Kyle reminded me a lot of my father, and that wasn’t a comparison anyone made lightly. Least of all me. It wasn’t just that Kyle was dark, and looked more European than American, it was that this visitor of ours had composure, like my father, and was clearly just as strong, just as clever. Maybe more.
“How old would you say you are?” Camille posed the question.
“I imagine perhaps twenty-one, twenty-two,” he said.
“How would you know that if—and please don’t take this the wrong way—you only woke up yesterday?” Her eyebrows were raised and she didn’t seem convinced.
I could see this question had made him uncomfortable and right about now would usually be the moment all hell broke loose and she had to snap someone’s neck.
“It’s a feeling,” he said, scratching his head. “I don’t know. I feel I’m that age, but I don’t know how I know. Like I know the names of former presidents and prime ministers and recognized the geography of London and the rest of the UK had changed a great deal. It’s mostly a feeling. The data I have… is old.”
“And you also know that space travel can mess with time, right?” I said, slightly confused by everything… but gradually piecing it together.
“Time dilation,” he answered. “So, you’re suggesting I was spirited away from here eighty years ago, and for your planet it’s been decades, for me just a short while, hence why my memory only goes up to early Noughties history?”
“A spaceman,” Camille said, tapping her lip, her eyes lit up with fascination. “But he’d have had to travel at light speed.”
“Not if there were a black hole somewhere along his journey,” I mused, smirking—because I was a little bit more knowledgeable on such things.
He stood up and swiped his hands through the air, exasperated. “This is all horseshit. I’m not buying any of it! All I know is that there was darkness, there was an endless dream I can’t remember now… then I arrived here, okay? And something, I don’t know what, is inside me!”
He paced the floor because it was getting too much for him, I could tell. Camille arched an eyebrow, more intrigued than ever—that she might have an actual, living spaceman standing in her kitchen.
I was just… confused and baffled as hell.
“You’ve not explained why you’re hiding in this cesspool,” he accused Camille. “Nor has Ariadne explained why she picks up people like me. Nor do I appreciate being treated, like at any moment, you’ll be both ham-fisting me into a straitjacket unless I play ball.”
Camille looked rather put out that he was making demands of us and wasn’t going to have the wool pulled over his eyes. I saw her staring up at the cupboard just behind him, on the top of which I knew she hid her katana. I shook my head slightly because that would not be happening, not on my watch.
“Please, sit down,” I asked him gently, and he did. “Camille and I are used to dealing with clones. They usually have a lot of behavioral issues.”
“Such as….?” He stared at me, wondering.
“Violence, abruptness, escape attempts, often followed up by lewdness, engaging in all sorts of activities we who are used to polite company don’t quite appreciate.” I winked and he looked a little reassured that I didn’t think him guilty of any of that. “Some clones, very few really, have ingratiated themselves into society. My mother was one of them.”
His jaw dropped open.
“A story for another time,” said Camille, rolling her eyes—yet for once, I actually wanted to talk about her.
“We think my mother was one of the few naturally reared clones. By that, I mean, she was given birth to, but then they also grew her body in real time. That’s how she was able to conceive children, we believe; for most others, fertility is an issue and they die before maturity, anyway. Many of them, who have had their growth accelerated, either die prematurely, never integrate, or they do and eventually something goes wrong, their behavior draws too much attention, and they have to be eliminated.”
“Attention?” he asked.
I looked to Camille to help me fill in some of the blanks.
“So, you know there was a pandemic? This group, Officium, used it to take financial control?” He nodded he was with her. “Seraph, Ari’s mother, spent years investigating the truth behind the outbreak and finally, in 2063, destroyed the lie Officium had peddled for so long. Ryken and Seraph spent all their time trying to fix the world after that. It’s why, mainly in the early years, myself and Mara brought up Ariadne and—”
I interjected with a loud noise, and they both looked at me strangely—but while Camille understood I didn’t want him to know yet about that other guy in my life, Kyle was completely puzzled at my noisy interference.
She gave me the foulest stare as she continued. “So, yes, we brought up Ari while Seraph and Ryken tried to cure the world of its ailments. But the truth is, globalization had wrecked so much, just so much, Kyle. I don’t have time to expl
ain quite how much. Not today, anyway.”
He nodded, as though he had already envisaged that, anyway.
“The real Seraph, the original if you will, got herself killed years before Ari was even born… in the mid-2050s.” He appeared astonished by this. “Yes, it’s very complicated, and we don’t know for sure who executed her first-time round. She had many, many enemies and chased the truth doggedly, ruthlessly—it could have been any one of them.” Camille looked darkly contemplative as she continued. “They had to have had it planned all along, though… to replace her… Officium, I mean. They’d been growing her facsimile for thirty years before she was let loose. This, we assume, was because even when Seraph was in hiding with her parents in the early years of her life, they’d known where she was and had stolen cells… against the wishes of the parents, obviously.”
Hearing even a bit of this part of the tale always made me feel icky.
“Seraph’s mother Eve, well, she was aware of what had happened. The swap, I mean.” Camille looked sorrowful as she stared out of the window; any mention of her former mentor always made her sad. “The new Seraph was built like you are. Perfect. Too perfect. Engineered. Strong. Calculating, but with all the same personality flaws she had before. They’d even figured out how to transfer memories.”
He looked genuinely shocked by that.
“My mother suffered bouts of rage, from time to time,” I said, picking up from where Camille had left off. “She would close herself away, and it wasn’t your usual depression. It was like she was uploading too much information, all at once. Like that was how she’d been designed… and we think that’s how the clones end up… you know… going a bit crazy, acting out of the ordinary.”