The Awoken (New Unity Book 1)

by S. M. Lynch

  Don’t trust him.

  Tonight. 9pm.

  Be alone when I call.

  My breath became labored and I didn’t know what to do. Tell Camille? Because this obviously wasn’t from her. The handwriting on the package and note wasn’t Dad’s, either. It wasn’t even his handwriting.

  I had no idea who’d sent me this, and the disc… I had no idea how to get it open. There wasn’t any discernable opening or fastening or whatever. It was beyond anything I’d ever seen before. I worried my scanners hadn’t been in-depth enough to figure out what lay beneath the casing. Maybe whatever was inside this was deadly, and would be released, tonight?

  “Everything all right, Ariadne?” he called after a while of me having locked myself inside the bathroom.

  “Yeah, sure. Girl time. Be right down.”

  I’d have to engineer something so I could be alone tonight, because my shadow would not be easily dissuaded. I quickly put on a bit of make-up and when I got downstairs, he looked suitably pleased with the result.

  “Let’s brave a ride around Paris, what do you say?” I asked.

  “Oh, okay. If you think it’s safe?”

  “I’ll drive. I’ll show you all the good spots.”

  “Yeah… sure.”

  He agreed far too easily… and I wasn’t sure what the heck was going on.

  Chapter Twelve

  IT WAS DIFFICULT SPENDING THE day with him, pretending like there was nothing on my mind. Thankfully, he still seemed convinced he’d overstepped the mark the night before and was careful what he said—looking at me like I needed to be treated better, or something.

  After we raced around town on the bike, took in some art (some things had survived), got street food and said a prayer at the Sacré-Coeur, we ate dinner back at home, watched a movie—another oldie, this time Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was the oldest thing I’d been able to think of when he’d asked which romantic film was oldest and best.

  After the film, I told him to go and get ready for bed and shout me when he was under the covers. He was doing everything I asked, and I wondered if that was part of his seduction—to lull me into thinking he was mine to command.

  When I sat on the edge of his mattress, looking down on him lying there, I said, “I know you’ve not been sleeping properly. Let me remedy that.”

  “Oh, okay,” he said, a touch suspicious.

  “Close your eyes.”

  I reached out and stroked his face. His skin was soft, the little baby hairs on his forehead and cheekbones making it feel like velvet. I stroked down his forehead gently and then over his nose, across his cheeks and chin, repeating my strange facial massage a number of times… until he sighed, and fell asleep.

  I’d crushed a sleeping tablet and put it in his drink earlier. When that hadn’t made him at all sleepy (clone tolerance and fast metabolism), I’d crushed up two more and handed him another loaded drink just half an hour ago. He’d been fighting sleep ever since. It was clear that he wasn’t unable to sleep; he was just frightened of falling asleep and never waking up. It was a symptom of his development.

  I left the room and he didn’t stir. His heavy breathing wasn’t put on, he snored gently every now and again, and his body was truly inert.

  I went downstairs and set things up on my xGen, syncing it to the camera in his bedroom. I had his image on my screen so I could keep an eye on him. Camille had always kept equipment around the house and the little camera above the wardrobe was going to keep an eye on him while I went out.

  Before leaving the house, I made sure I had the disc and set the security system to high alert, just in case someone tried to break in while I was gone—using my absence to kidnap Kyle.

  Leaving the house via the front door, which I now considered safe to use seeing as though we’d survived a couple days intact (in fact safer than the cellar door which was now highly electrified), I set off down the street at a jog, in my jogging clothes, the evening chilly, so much so I could see my own breath in front of me. It was a couple of streets over from Camille’s to my family home. We’d passed it twice already since we’d arrived in Paris but Kyle was none the wiser.

  Jogging down Rue Norvins, I was on alert, checking nobody was in sight. Even in peacetime, so to speak, people still didn’t much hang out after dark. Old habits and all that. When I felt it was safe, I crossed the road and ducked down a narrow alley, heading around the corner and balletically throwing myself over the six-foot wall surrounding the back yard of our old place. Well, not old, exactly.

  I moved up to the back door and pressed my key in the lock. Then a slot opened in the wall. I was asked for my fingerprint and my eyes were scanned. Successfully verifying it was me, several locks unchained and I was allowed into the building through the heavy, nuclear-bunker-style doorway.

  I arrived in the communal kitchen and that slab of a door clanged shut behind me. Taking a deep breath, I looked around me. Everything was how we’d left it. Empty of bodies… but perfectly capable of becoming operational once more, if we so willed it. This ended up not so much a home, but my father’s office. In the end, Mom had built another two floors on top of this house and we’d called our place upstairs Apartment 1A, which ended up being our actual residence, not this office unit our previous home had turned into.

  It was approaching nine o’clock so I chased further into the mansion and ran upstairs to the floor above. I went into Dad’s office and it was still the same. Glass units everywhere, a huge walnut desk fit for a king, and a massive, truly intimidating leather chair that I didn’t even want to imagine the cost of.

  I sat in his plush chair and set up my xGen, anticipating the call any minute.

  I removed the disc from my pocket, still unsure what part it would play in all this.

  It was a bit depressing sitting there, seeing everything the same, still as it had been five years before. He and Mom’s base had been Paris, but they’d travelled to New York a lot, indeed to places all over the world trying to make things right.

  DC was destroyed in 2023 at the director’s behest and his HQ hewn amid the tower blocks of New York City, which he’d surrounded with a wall. It was his little island, checkpoints on all the bridges, too—little to no freedom for its inhabitants.

  Sometimes my parents would be together on trips, sometimes apart. All we knew was that if they’d been apart a while, it was best to be out of the house for at least twenty-four hours once they were reunited.

  As my mind was wandering, the strangest, darndest thing happened. The disc in front of me unfolded like nothing I’d ever seen before. It was almost like it was alien tech or something. The skin of the disc parted to reveal several folds of clear material inside which gradually puffed out into the shape of a dish on an odd axis, arranged like some kind of receiver, its translucent parts showing me almost imperceptible little veins in its body, a type of technology I had never seen before. Then, I heard a voice from the tiny contraption.

  “Are you alone, Miss Hardy?” it asked.

  “I’m alone.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “You’re the one with the funky gadget. Aren’t you certain?”

  “Miss Hardy, you must not trust that man you’re with.”

  “How do you know about him?”

  It would’ve really helped to see a face, but I could tell he was old and probably a similar size to my dad, going by the deepness of his voice.

  “Many years ago now, my father and I built an intelligence machine. We call it Robert. He alerted me that you’d happened upon an anomaly.”

  “That’s what you’re calling them?” I chuckled.

  “What else can we call them? We don’t know what they are.”

  “There must be more like Kyle, though?”

  “None like Kyle,” he said firmly. “He must be different to the others if you’re harboring him?”

  “He’s different. Even Camille thought he was different. There’s something else…”

&nb
sp; “Yes, he resembles a boy who was allegedly abducted in the early Noughties.”

  “How did you—” I sighed. “Oh, Robert?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, he knew the name he’d been given in his past life. But when I show him old movies, he doesn’t have any recollections.”

  “Seems plausible, but you really don’t know you can trust him. He could be programed to exhibit certain behavior… at any given moment. You have to watch your back.”

  “Are you trying to teach me to suck eggs?”

  Sheesh, this guy was even worse than Dad.

  “Well, you ought to be okay, you are her pupil, after all?”

  “I am her pupil.”

  “Well, as long as you’re taking care…”

  “Wait, wait!” I exclaimed. “You can’t just call like this and then go. I mean, why was he sent to us? I need you to explain. Maybe you know…”

  The caller on the other end of the line sighed. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “No.”

  “He’s been sent to inveigle your life, to worm his way inside your heart, gain your trust… then whoever sent him… will activate his ass.”

  I laughed because of course that was a distinct possibility, but wasn’t that also way too obvious? Plus, this guy hadn’t gone to all this trouble just to warn me… there was something else going on here.

  I snuck a glance at my xGen to view my security feed. Kyle was still passed out in bed, his chest moving, body still relaxed.

  “If you know things, then you must know who killed my mother… my cousin?”

  There was no answer, just a deep breath.

  “You do know,” I challenged him. “If you know about Lucius in particular, why can’t you get word to my aunt instead of letting her rampage?”

  Another long, deep sigh.

  Then, I remembered something… a myth about a brainiac family living in New Zealand. There was allegedly an American father and son who were both highly skilled hackers and had evaded Officium’s regime by escaping to the South Island. Then, all the girls of the family were meant to be scientists. Like, mad scientists. Rumors about them being a little eccentric and crazy had persisted. And this guy had just told me he and his dad had built a supercomputer together. And he had ever such a slight twinge of Kiwi in his throaty voice.

  “You’re one of the Buchanan family,” I said, but he didn’t dispute it, and even gave a chuckle. “You could give me a patch for Kyle, like Mom had, if that would prevent him from being activated?”

  “He’s not implanted. Whatever they did to him, it’s inside his mind. Something will trigger him… and that will be it. You must be on your guard, Ariadne Hardy.”

  “It’s Hardy-Maddon, and both those names mean a goddamn lot, you know,” I growled. “More than yours, pal.”

  “Of course, don’t I know it.”

  Within a split second, the strange object shut down, closed in on itself, and was a neat little disc again. You’d never know it was hiding something so different beneath.

  I was freaked out and called Camille on my xGen right away.

  “Oh my god,” I said, as soon as she was there in front of me.

  “Why are you at the mansion?” she asked, her eyes searching behind me.

  She was in her tiny single bed which resembled one of those metal beds you’d find in asylums, though for some reason, she seemed to like it. She was wearing pretty pink pajamas. Funny. Given her surroundings.

  “I needed to answer a call in private.”

  “Who called?” she asked.

  “I think it was one of the Buchanan’s.”

  Her face went as white as a sheet. She knew something. She had to. She was shaken, but more than that, she was rattled. Like a ghost had come back to haunt her.

  “What do you know?” I asked her slowly.

  “Only what Eve entrusted to me… and it’s not for me to say.”

  “Bullshit, Camille.”

  She sent me a look that could kill, eyes narrowing, chin jutting upwards, her cheekbones sharpening.

  “You owe me ten bucks.”

  “I owe you twenty, actually. I swore at Kyle last night.”

  She pursed her lips and looked down at her lap, giving a small chuckle, like she found it endearing to discover her training hadn’t thrown out the parts of my mother that were dominant in my personality too, no matter how rigorous her training had been.

  “It ought to be told in person,” she said, chewing her lip.

  “It’s that bad.”

  “No, it’s just… sensitive,” she muttered.

  “I’m on a secure line. I’m alone, I promise you. This place is still as impenetrable.” I looked around me. “It’s eerie, actually. I find it weird. We really ought to sell it.”

  “Can’t,” she reminded me. “Too much happened in those walls. It would be impossible not to leave a trace there. We stashed stuff in places even we forgot about. We’d have to demolish it, and even then, your father wouldn’t have it. Too many memories attached.”

  She meant all the servers beneath ground, all the back-up files… the stacks of old documents… too dangerous to try to destroy any of it… in case some of it might become helpful again, in future.

  “He sleeps in his laboratory, you know?”

  “I know,” she said, tiredly.

  “Of course, he calls…”

  “Usually maudlin, yes, he calls… late. Rambling,” she said, staring into the distance.

  “I asked that guy if he knows what happened to Mom… to Lucius. At least if he told us about Lucius, Mara could come home.”

  “I don’t know…” Her mouth became a severe line, and seemed thinner at one side. “Mara hasn’t found peace in life. Even I haven’t been able to give her that. She never, ever got over her father’s death. They were two halves of the same soul. Lucius only brought it all back.”

  “I’m sorry, Camille.”

  “Oh, well… we had a good run. If she comes back, she comes back… and if she doesn’t? I tried, right?”

  I nodded, because of course she’d tried.

  “And so, he had no answers, right?” she presumed.

  “He only called to warn me about Kyle. That he’s likely been psychologically programed. That was it. But his warning seemed… suss… like something else is going on.”

  Camille pursed her lips and it looked like she was wondering what bits she could tell me. Then, she said, “Okay, I will tell you what is safe, nothing more?”

  “If you want.”

  “Pascal and Nate Buchanan, they knew one another.”

  “Nathan?” I asked. “Same name as Grandad Hardy.”

  I’d never met my grandfather (dad’s dad), who was a very troubled individual by all accounts, yet ultimately, died a hero… protecting Ryken Hardy, of all people.

  “Your grandmother, Eve said there was a connection, but she never elaborated. All I know is, Nate Buchanan created the predecessor of the xGen, and Pascal completed his work. They were contemporaries, like Michelangelo and Da Vinci. The Buchanan family never left New Zealand after the outbreak and if I’m right, and it was an oldish guy you spoke to…?”

  I nodded she was right.

  “Nathan would be near 100 years old now, but he had a son, who if he survived, would be around the same age as myself. Seth Buchanan was allegedly way ahead… way, way ahead. Up here somewhere,” she said, gesturing way above her own intelligence, near the ceiling or somewhere. “If he’s contacted you, there’s a reason. And you’d just better heed his advice.”

  “Kyle was unbelievably well behaved today. Should I be worried?”

  She looked unsurprised. “You should just be you. Be wary. Don’t let him fool you.”

  “It gets tiring… suspecting everyone. Just once, I want to believe in something… different.”

  “I know, kiddo. Believe me, I know.”

  We said our goodbyes, and even though I had a million questions, I decided to park them for th
e time being and get myself home.

  I checked on Kyle’s bedroom stream before I left the mansion, seeing he was still fast asleep. To clear my head, I decided on a jog around the neighborhood, and I even ran downhill to the cemetery, and then ran back up, the incline on the way home killing my calves… the shin splints almost unbearable.

  However, once I was back indoors, showered and dressed for bed, I felt more than ready for sleep. Checking on Kyle one, last time, I found him sleeping utterly soundly, then I locked myself in my own room… and got on with the business of dreaming of a better world.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THERE WAS A SOFT KNOCK on my door in the morning. “Ari, are you awake yet?”

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “8.30. I slept so good.”

  “Oh, I’m glad. Be right there.”

  “Okay, I’ll make coffee.”

  I threw myself out of bed, wondering how I’d managed to sleep so long. It could have been my late-night run out into the chilly night yesterday. Or maybe the amount I’d been taxed lately, mostly of brain.

  When I arrived downstairs in my pajamas, he was waiting with my coffee, similarly dressed in his own nightclothes. I sat at the breakfast bar on a stool and drank a sip, sighing when it went down. My dad would be cringing if he were here, though he could hardly talk, being that he and Mom had passed on their caffeine addiction to me. My dad was a doctor of medicine before he studied virology and so he knew the benefits of caffeine in moderation—just couldn’t accept I was old enough yet to be drinking it.

  Kyle stood with his back resting against the kitchen counter opposite, drinking orange juice. He was trying not to stare at me, and every time I looked up, he averted his eyes. It was like we were in a cheesy romcom or something.

  “Is there something on your mind?” I asked, after I got tired of him looking like he was about to speak, then not speaking.