The Awoken (New Unity Book 1)

by S. M. Lynch

  He seemed to be processing for a while, before he said, “Why did they kill your mother, then replace her with a clone?”

  “For a start, she was one of their greatest enemies and her connections were astonishing,” Camille answered for me, laughing. “Replacing her with a clone, she would seem exactly the same but for the chip in her brain, the one they install in all clones. They imagined they might reinstall her into her life without anybody knowing any different—even her. Nobody would ever know, they hoped, and then, out of the blue, they could activate her when the time came,” Camille said, like it was obvious. “They could activate you to do their bidding, you know? If your chip isn’t non-existent, just cleverly concealed.”

  I gave Kyle an apologetic look, sat staring at him from across the table.

  “But activate her to do what?” he said, aghast this was even possible.

  “Enact the most damage,” she said, nonchalant. “The only reason they delayed it was that as soon as clones are activated, the people in their lives are no longer in the dark. The jig is up. She wouldn’t have been able to continue her life, her existence as a plant would’ve wrecked everything.”

  “I don’t get it,” he persisted.

  “You don’t need to,” she laughed. “I’m just telling you the truth. We have first-hand experience of clones and most are untrustworthy. And if you want my honest opinion? When Seraph and Ryken fell in love, our enemy had no need to activate Seraph’s chip. Their love alone was something Officium knew they could wield over Ryken and the rest of UNITY.”

  “And she never got activated?” he asked, as though there might be hope for him, too.

  “She never did. And for two reasons. One: if she’d been activated, such was her strength of mind, she would’ve rather taken her own life than betray those she loved. Two: Officium’s director was many things, but he was also a master craftsman and would never have wasted such perfection as she was. And in the aftermath of Officium’s demise, to secure her safety lest any of our enemies remained, our researchers found a patch to render her chip incorruptible.”

  He looked intrigued by this notion; that being activated could be prevented for him, too.

  As quickly as that light had appeared in his eyes, however, it was soon replaced by dimness.

  “She still died, anyway, in the end? Ariadne is but a teenager, without her mother,” he said, sounding grave, and Camille was more taken aback by his apparent propensity for empathy than I was.

  I’d recognized the humanity in his eyes, the moment we met.

  “Not all of our enemies went down in 2063. Even when she was married to World President, that wasn’t enough to save her, and she paid the price with her life, five years ago. An assassin hounded her convoy across George Washington Bridge until there was just her… and then he sent her to the bottom of the Hudson River. It isn’t difficult to recognize the outcome was what they wanted—the reduction of Ryken, then his decision to remove himself from the race for a third term.”

  I looked down at the floor as Camille continued to speak.

  “Ryken gave up the fight to secure a new world order, restore powers to individual nations, and this was when Esmeralda Roche took control. A woman of ruthless, calculating and merciless ambition, she only has America’s interests in her sights and is doing everything she can to better things there, while neglecting other nations. Of course, we can’t prove she had Seraph murdered. Seraph pissed off many, many people. That’s who she was. Take your pick. Any of them could’ve ordered it, but in all likelihood, the biggest seismic shift following her death was Ryken’s withdrawal from the world. And who did that benefit most, huh?”

  Camille took a few deep breaths, and I knew she was aggrieved that all their work, all those years… must have felt as if it were for nothing.

  “UNITY and Eve Maddon were one and the same thing,” she told Kyle. “You can read up on her. It’s all on the internet. She was the one person who was incorruptible, above any of us. When she died, and when the Seraph’s and Ryken’s of the world were forced into public service in an attempt to salvage something of civilization, UNITY, I am afraid, fell into the wrong hands. And now UNITY is working against Roche to bring her down. That was never Eve’s mantra, though. Sure, Eve sent me to kill when required, but her entire philosophy was about getting the truth, and this new version of the resistance… is right to go after Roche, but only insomuch as she needs to be held to account. Yet UNITY’s new leader, well, he would see her murdered. He would have chaos and treason than fairly and squarely call for new leadership.”

  Camille and I exchanged blank looks, lest we give ourselves away.

  I knew why she was really hiding out in York. She was watching over someone she feared couldn’t really take care of themselves.

  “You’re keeping your enemies close,” he said, proving himself to have a keen sense of awareness. “Staying here, right? It would be the last place the resistance would think to look for you.”

  “Sort of,” she admitted.

  It was that, but also, she was doing what my mother would’ve wanted her to do.

  I had a thought and asked Kyle to hand over his U-card. I passed it to Camille and told her, “If he’s from another time, how come he has this?”

  She flipped it between her fingers before fetching her xGen from a kitchen drawer and looking up the serial number.

  “It says he’s called John Thompson and he was born in 2055. Well, that can’t be right. He doesn’t look a day past twenty. Does he?”

  I shrugged, admitting she was right.

  “I don’t think I was called John Thompson. I have a feeling I was called Kyle Tanner, but that could be wrong, too. When Ariadne told me she had a powerful father, I had somehow already known he might be called Ryken Hardy, yet none of my long-term memories detail he was president or any of the other things you’ve mentioned he did. I only know I somehow knew of his name, that’s it.”

  “So, you’ve got memories taking you up to the Noughties, but all your other data is stuff that you don’t know unless it’s suggested to you,” she mused, tapping her lip again. “Interesting.”

  This was clone-like recall, which we were very familiar with.

  I gave her a look, like, all right, we couldn’t rule it out completely, not just yet.

  I brought up my internet browser on Mom’s xGen and searched for “Kyle Tanner” and “unexplained disappearance”. It only took a few seconds for me to find what I was looking for. There was even a picture. It was him.

  Camille saw my face and demanded I hand it over. She read it quickly, then slowly passed it over to him.

  “Holy—” He cupped his chin, covering his mouth as he read up about himself.

  Part of the article, from 2003, even suggested an abduction, because Kyle Tanner had been such a popular boy, attending Harvard Law, the son of two very proud lawyers—following in their footsteps. He’d been twenty-two when he was taken. Seemingly, he’d been happy, engaged to his childhood sweetheart, lots to live for, bright and never in any trouble and didn’t take risks—it hadn’t made sense.

  Camille and I locked eyes, sharing the same theory…

  For so long, it had been assumed that these beings were teleported down to Earth with some sort of directive that they were never able to follow through on. Perhaps, someone from up above had been trying to get a message to us. When clones hadn’t proven very useful in this task, they’d decided to use Kyle instead… or else he was a secret weapon we weren’t meant to figure out.

  “I’m not this person in the article,” he said softly. “I’m not this person. Not anymore. I don’t have any affinity with this person… any recollection of any of it. I know about world history from this time… I know the facts… but emotions? All of those have been wiped.”

  Camille moved up behind him and placed a hand on his shoulder, reassuring him with a gentle squeeze. “We’ll figure it all out, Kyle. It may come back, gradually… after all, you remembered your
own name?”

  “It was a guess,” he mumbled.

  She and I exchanged looks. The time to be on our guard had passed and we realized he was no threat to either of us. What remained, however, was this mystery… of how and why he’d been delivered to Earth.

  He pushed the xGen back over to me and seemed relieved we were going to help him.

  It could still be a hoax, I thought to myself… or it could be a chance.

  Chapter Eight

  THE WOMEN OF MY FAMILY had never been cooks, not Mom, Granny Connie—maybe Mara at a push—but certainly not me, either. So that evening, as Camille stirred a pot of stew absentmindedly, I told Kyle everything that’d happened in the world over the past seventy or so years. He asked questions, demanded the details, and I tried to fill in the gaps. I told him how the outbreak of 2023 had been dangerous for people like my grandmother, who’d once been married to Tom Bradbury, a scientist who knew where the virus had come from—also, that it had likely been let loose on purpose.

  I told him about the deaths, huge numbers of which weren’t virus-related, but assassinations. Paving the way for a new world order: Officium, headed up by an evil, vile director going by the name Crispin Childs, who was obsessed with biological perfection, scientific advancement and medical research beyond the ordinary person’s wildest dreams.

  Cloning hadn’t been perfected, ever; in fact, it still carried risks, but as I told Kyle, the director had been cloning in bigger numbers since the late-2020s, when they finally recognized it wasn’t sustainable unless growth hormones were offered sparingly. My grandmother, Eve believed that someone had wanted to clone Seraph and her twin brother, Chris because they were the children of geniuses. She’d decided it was the director’s plan all along—and why, when Pascal and Eve were in hiding together, they were left to their own devices—because all the director had ever wanted was the children of people like my grandparents to experiment on. Perhaps the director thought that during the cloning process, he could wheedle out Eve’s family history of cancer and addiction, or even that he could remove my grandfather, Pascal’s difficult personality from the gene pool. But personally, I always thought Officium only made a clone of my mother—and not her brother, Chris—because even Childs had limited resources, and cloning the apple of Pascal’s eye would’ve forced my troublesome hacker of a grandfather into submission, being that fathers always, almost never, can resist their daughter, no matter in what incarnation they come.

  And that’s where Ryken Hardy came into it. My grandparents were powerfully connected and geniuses, but when it came down to it, they needed someone with brawn. My father was that someone. My mother set up the fall of Officium, but my father saw it through and ended it. He was the most powerful man alive at one time… but that never would’ve been so, had it not been for my mom. And the bad guys knew it.

  I told Kyle as much as I could, but as we were sitting around the table, bent over our dinner, Camille added, “You will need to see it for yourself, Kyle. Out there, I mean. Ariadne will show you, if you wish?”

  I saw in Camille’s eyes the fragment of a grand plan, growing inside her mind.

  First: educate him about the world, warts and all, no rose-tinted spectacles. The classroom can only teach you so much.

  My father may once have been powerful, and my mother may have underpinned him, but behind my mother there had been my grandmother’s teachings, her best friend, Camille and her half-sister, Mara. Whenever I even thought about Mara, sometimes I shivered. She’d lived through some awful, tragic times… and was battered, bruised and battle-weary because of them. Lucius’s death was the only activation she’d needed to become a ruthless monster, no chip required. Even Camille sometimes shied away from talking about what it was exactly Mara was doing out there, over in America. Our network of fighters had somewhat diminished over the years, but I had hope something new could be established… something richer for the experiences of our forebears.

  “I want to know everything,” he said, his thirst for knowledge growing bigger, it seemed.

  “I’ll show you, everything,” I agreed.

  “At midnight, I’ll escort you to the city limits. It’s not safe here, Ari,” she pressed home.

  I nodded I agreed, even though I could tell Kyle was knackered and would’ve happily slept on the floor in front of the fireplace if I’d suggested it.

  “Ariadne is the best of us, Kyle. If you hurt her, I’ll kill you. If you trust her, then, the world is your oyster. Anything may be yours. If you only trust her.”

  He seemed more than ready to heed her advice.

  After dinner, he fell asleep in her armchair in the sitting room, which was kitted out with a Welsh dresser, little embroidered cushions on the sofas, rows and rows of bookcases, no TV, no tech at all in fact, nothing but a fire and a wall to gaze at, come nightfall. She wasn’t anything people expected, and that’s why I loved her, probably just as much as I loved that stupid jerk I called Dad. While Kyle dozed, she took me down beneath ground, into her cellar, and I shook my head as she told me to take my pick from her arsenal.

  “Jeez, Camille. You couldn’t have got more guns, huh?”

  “Hey! Old habits die hard.” She appraised her collection proudly, hands on hips, gazing at her weaponry like her pieces were family pictures on the wall, not AK’s or shotguns.

  “I’m allowed a stun-gun, and you know that’s all I’m allowed.”

  She shrugged and made a mmm-yeah sound. “So? You’re eighteen soon. Don’t tell me you don’t harbor romantic notions about a proper weapon? And here I was, thinking you were my protégé… but you stand there, with no homicidal tendencies, whatsoever?” She folded her arms and scoffed; I tried not to laugh. “Well, you could look at it like this. You could start stocking up for when the time comes. I’ve a feeling in Kyle there’s something people will be chasing after. I think you know what I mean.”

  We never said it; we didn’t need to.

  She handed me a black rucksack, and I started to fill it.

  Once I was packing heat like a proper homicidal teenager with Harley Quinn tendencies, we returned upstairs and I was relieved to see Kyle hadn’t budged an inch.

  “Doors are locked anyway,” she said, so indifferent, or so she seemed.

  “He’s going to get me into so much trouble,” I said, staring at him.

  “Don’t you dare even look like that. It reminds me all too much of how your mother looked at your father.”

  I gave her an expression like I was grossed out, but we smirked at one another like we were as thick as thieves and didn’t need to say anything more. She understood.

  “I miss you, Camille,” I said, and we hugged.

  “Miss you too, kid.”

  And then come midnight, she escorted us out of the city as promised, and we trudged our way back to the car. We slept in the vehicle until dawn, and then I started driving while Kyle was still sleeping.

  I thought about making the call to Dad, telling him where I was going, but I figured Camille would take care of that. So, while I was driving, I sought the transport we’d need. Camille had also given me a U-card Kyle could use. It was untraceable and legit, had his picture and everything. I never knew how she did these things, and so quickly, but she was a miracle I wasn’t ever going to question. So, with our fake U-cards we were going to embark on a journey—potentially an adventure at least one of us wouldn’t be coming back from.

  AFTER SHOWERING AND packing a bag back at my place, I found Kyle had figured out how to toast bread and was eating mountains of it covered with various spreads from jam to hazelnut to peanut butter. He didn’t seem to have a taste for coffee yet, but would drink tea if you put it in front of him. He did, however find it easy to drink gallons of orange juice or soda. Mom had also been gifted with the ability to eat like a horse and not put a pound on, or maybe that was genes, because Grandma Eve had been the same, according to Camille.

  “Your friend, Camille… she’s interesting, isn�
�t she?” he said, as I was moving around the living space, tidying things up. I didn’t know when we’d be back and if Mara got home before me, I didn’t want her walking into a war zone.

  “She’s not your average human, that’s for sure,” I mumbled.

  “You and she have a language all your own,” he told me with certainty in his eyes. “I didn’t miss the way you share thoughts.”

  “It’s what comes of being her pupil. Last year, after I finished my degree, I spent six months under her tutelage. Everything she knows, I know. Do you think I’d be allowed to do as I please without training?” I smiled at that ridiculous thought. “She made sure I was trained before I turned seventeen. Only after you turn seventeen in the UK, are you allowed to drive. And they knew I would utilize that freedom, once it came.”

  He stared at me overly long, not because he didn’t accept what I’d just told him—maybe that he was still getting up to speed with everything.

  “Where will we begin our odyssey?” he asked.

  “Where it all began,” I told him. “You’ll see when we get there.”

  “Mystery tour.”

  “The less you know, the better. Whoever sent you, could come back for you, at any moment.”

  “I see,” he said gravely.

  “First test will be getting through security in the airport. We fly in an hour.”

  “We’re flying?”

  “I’m apparently too young to pilot a craft, but that never stopped my cousin Lucius, and it isn’t going to stop me. Mara taught me herself, the same as she taught him.”

  His jaw nearly touched the floor. “You will pilot some craft?”

  “Of course, now eat up. As I said, we don’t have a lot of time. And you’ll need to put what few things you have in a bag. I left a rucksack on the bed for you. We’ll get you more clothes in good time.”

  He ate his toast like he was a bear, shredding off three quarters of a slice nearly every time he tackled a fresh piece. Then, when he was finished, he looked at me suspiciously.