The Awoken (New Unity Book 1)

by S. M. Lynch

“You’ve been locking your door,” he said, and there was an accusation buried in his tone of voice.

  “You tried the handle. That’s rude. I am allowed to sleep on my own.”

  “I wanted to check you were safe this morning. If I’d been allowed just to peek in, I could’ve left you sleeping.”

  To trust him, or not to trust him?

  “I don’t need protecting.”

  “Then why do I feel like I’m here to do that?” he said, exasperated.

  “What, like? You’ve got a compulsion to, or… it’s just… what?”

  “It’s not like….” He shrugged and tried to brush it off. “I’m not dying to throw myself in front of you in case a bullet happens to come through the window, but I’m just… I’m protective, that’s all.”

  “And what about protecting me from you? We still don’t know for sure yet what you’re doing here… maybe I’m protecting myself just in case you go nuts one morning.”

  He went red in the face and gave up trying to argue with me, placing his glass in the sink and turning his back, throwing bread into the toaster. Even though it was a protein-rich loaf, he was toasting six slices, and I wondered how many of them were for me. Probably none.

  He spread them thickly with peanut butter, then left the room for the lounge. I shook my head and snorted, wondering if this was in his lover’s handbook, too—the movie-style tiff that’s very silly and gets resolved quickly. Or maybe he’d already noticed I didn’t much do breakfast and preferred just to have a snack before lunch. I grabbed a banana and a yoghurt and took them upstairs, locking myself in my bedroom. I didn’t hear him pound the stairs after me, desperate to check I was okay. Maybe that made me feel a bit like he didn’t care, after all, and I felt a bit shitty, actually.

  I scrolled idly on my xGen and played a few games. Then once I’d decided he wasn’t going to chase after me, I shot downstairs and into the kitchen to dispose of my trash. It was just as I was about to start picking a fight with Kyle that my xGen rang and I saw it was Dad. I remained where I was in the kitchen and closed the door.

  “Hey, Dad,” I answered, noticing he’d opted out of video on the call.

  Obviously, he didn’t want me to see how poorly he’d still been looking after himself.

  “Ariadne,” he said, sounding so masterful. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine, really. I might even have a pajama day.”

  “Are you ill?”

  I laughed down the line. “No, actually. Anyway, how are you?”

  “No, no, you don’t get to do that. I’m calling about you.”

  “Yes, that’s why I changed the subject.”

  He grunted and tried not to laugh. “Camille said you’re in Paris.”

  “As if you haven’t been tracking me.”

  “Just, okay, let me talk to my daughter.”

  “I am your daughter, you know? I’m not a third person.”

  He sighed down the line, already tired of me, I could tell.

  “How’s the specimen?” he asked.

  “He’s called Kyle.”

  “How’s Kyle? Do I have to come and shoot him yet for trying it on with you?”

  “He didn’t get very far, Dad. You told me I can’t commit murder until I’m an adult, right? And indirectly I’d be murdering him, so I didn’t let him try anything.”

  Well, except a kiss…

  “Just like your mother,” he groaned. “So full of bloody contradictions.”

  “You must be calling for a reason, so can we please get to it?” I complained, clucking.

  “Well, I know you were at the house last night, so…”

  “Oh, right.” He still had tabs on the place, then.

  “Everything look okay?”

  “I didn’t really check, only used your office, passed through the kitchen and stairwell. I’d gone there to get some privacy for a call.”

  “What call?” he said more tersely.

  I imagined, for a moment, that if he’d been in the room with me right then, he’d have had his nose pressed to mine.

  “From someone called Seth Buchanan.”

  “What the shi—I mean, what did he want?”

  “Ah, so you know of him?”

  “Vaguely. Anyway, what did he want?” he asked, his voice rough and uncompromising.

  “To warn me about the specimen. Not to trust him. You should see the device he sent me to communicate with. It’s like… I don’t know… something incredible. Something… beyond our technology right now.”

  “Buchanan sent you something?”

  “Yeah. Was left on my doorstep. And he didn’t exactly confirm he’s Seth Buchanan, but the accent… the tech… gotta be, right?”

  “Where’s the device he sent you now?”

  “In the safe here.”

  “Okay, leave it in there. It’s lead-lined.”

  “You don’t think—”

  “Listen, Ariadne. When I was in hiding with your grandad after the collapse of Officium, he told me some stuff. Apparently, he had a half-brother he never met. He only knew about this half-brother because Eve had told him all about it. Her connections were insane, obviously, but my bet is that hackers like Nate Buchanan and Pascal knew one another well. Nate Buchanan must’ve somehow found out and the info was passed to Eve via Pascal. It’s logical that when Grandad Nathan joined the police and had his DNA logged on file, the connection was made.”

  “Bloody hell, Dad.”

  “My dad was adopted but the birth mother had left instructions for the child to be called Nathan. They actually decided to call him Nathaniel, because to my grandma, it sounded more proper. If he’d stayed with his birth mother, perhaps he would’ve been found by his father.”

  “So, Grandad Hardy and Nathan Buchanan…?”

  “…brothers, yes. My biological grandfather was part of the founding of Officium. He was called Horace Chichester.”

  “Crikey, Dad… Ryken Chichester sounds shit.”

  “You’re telling me,” he admitted, and we had a laugh about it.

  “So, this is really complicated, right?”

  “Yeah, we know Nate Buchanan was extremely dangerous, or at least that’s what we were always told. The archives made it clear, he created the prototype xGen. He helped Officium take control of the world with his surveillance techniques.”

  “Techniques he’d obviously learnt from his father.”

  “Yes, Nate Buchanan wasn’t spared Horace Chichester’s evil. My paternal grandmother may have hid my dad with adoptive parents… or she just wasn’t capable of taking care of a child. Chichester was into drugs and many of his women ended up on a slippery slope, due to the combination of abuse and pills.”

  “That’s horrible, Dad.” Yet it also explained the addiction running through our family.

  “Buchanan might have been forced to create the nGen. After its inception, he disappeared, never to be seen again. Must be dead now, though. He’d be nearly a hundred if he were still alive. Anyway, his first wife apparently died in the outbreak and he remarried a geneticist called Sadie, who might still be alive. I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything about her.”

  I was going to ask where he was getting all this other info from, but a part of me really didn’t want to know.

  “They were both called Nathan? Isn’t that odd? Brothers rarely share the same Christian name.”

  “Unless my grandfather never expected to have more than one son… and it was a family name that he requested be passed on.”

  “And he happened to pass down a crap-ton of brainy genes, obviously.”

  “Wouldn’t know about your grandad being brainy. I definitely took after my mum.”

  “You did indeed.”

  Connie also had a fierce temper, like my father, and a breathtaking intellect that often caught me off guard. Granny Constanza was approaching her eighty-fifth birthday and could still take down Dad whenever she wanted to.

  “So… Seth would be your cousin, then?
” I asked.

  “I guess,” Dad said, “which means he could be as untrustworthy as everyone else in my family. He might be forcing you to doubt Kyle for his own ends, you don’t know. We cannot get complacent about anything going on right now.”

  For my dad, the male line was a sore subject. He’d had a difficult relationship with Grandad Nathan, but just before he died, they’d reconciled, after years of being estranged. There had been love there, but once upon a time, my grandfather was a violent alcoholic, and both my father and grandmother still bore the emotional and physical scars. It was clear that the male side of my father’s bloodline had issues. Including my twin brother.

  It had only ever been Granny Connie or my mom who’d managed to quell my father’s rage, and without Connie who was sailing around the world, and my mum six feet below, there wasn’t that positive influence over my father anymore. Nobody took notice of me because everyone still saw me as the baby of the family, even though I was a few minutes older than my brother… and significantly more together, too.

  “You think the Buchanan’s could be foe, then?” I asked.

  “I truly don’t know. All I know is that they’re powerful. They might hide up in the mountains, but he and his sisters are wily, calculating and extraordinary, too. We must tread carefully.”

  “That’s why I think it’s odd… he went to all that trouble to send me something from so far away… and only told me what I already know.”

  “They’ve got other motives, perhaps?”

  “I don’t think it’s that. Maybe the thing they sent has dual purpose. Maybe they just wanted to check this one isn’t violent. Maybe they don’t believe it.”

  “It’s hard for me to believe, too. And I agree. Something else is going on. Be on your guard.”

  “I will.”

  “It’s been nice to chat, Ari. Speak again soon, okay? Unless you encounter a spot of bother. Then get on the blower, all right?”

  “Yes, Dad,” I said, rolling my eyes, because nobody else on earth called it a blower anymore.

  “Bye, love.”

  “Bye.”

  As I sat staring at my device afterwards, I realized that was probably the most we’d spoken in one go since my mother died.

  I turned around, suddenly with a sinking feeling, but was glad to see Kyle hadn’t crept into the room behind my back and overheard our conversation. He would’ve had a job listening through the door, being that all ex-UNITY houses had bulletproof doors—Camille’s being no exception.

  I left the kitchen and found him in the living room, staring at the TV, something new and crazy that I’d never watched. Anime or something.

  “I’m going to take a long bath, so if you’re wondering where I am, that’s where I’ll be.”

  He turned his head slightly. “Yup, okay.” Then he went right back to his program.

  I was almost out of the room, when he said suddenly, “Don’t we have some sort of plan for today?”

  “No plan,” I said, with a strained smile. “Just… chilling. We’ve had a few busy days. Why not have a quiet one, hmm?”

  “Chilling… sounds good.”

  I ran upstairs, shut my bedroom door, locked it and started running the bath in the en suite. While I cleaned my teeth in front of the mirror, I looked at my own reflection and wondered, how many of us are real? Really?

  I’d always felt sort of an outcast—maybe that was just because of the status of our family—but when I’d learned about Mom’s clone status, it had started to make sense. Me and my brother were the children of a clone, and that was unheard of, and it was sort of unbelievable, actually.

  Lowering myself into the bath, the bubbles frothing around me so high I couldn’t even see my own toes, I knew I would receive it in the neck from Camille—maybe today, maybe tomorrow—once her readings were updated and the cost of this bath came through. Water, like everything else, was expensive these days.

  My mind started whirring as I flicked off the tap with my big toe and the room fell silent, just the occasional sloshing sound as I readjusted, getting comfortable.

  The Kyle downstairs in my living room may have been alive in 2003. He may have been abducted, then returned almost eighty years later. Or he may have been cloned, all the way back then…

  No, it still didn’t make sense.

  The man had knowledge of history gone by, but not recent history. That suggested time travel. Perhaps the alien species that sent him down to planet Earth…

  I couldn’t even believe what I was entertaining in my own mind!

  I lay back, trying to relax and organize my thoughts.

  Why would they abduct Kyle, then send him back now, with massive gaps in his memory of human history?

  Why would they send him to me?

  Why would they send him to me NOW, specifically?

  And why would my father’s potential cousin have tried to warn me about Kyle?

  And more importantly, why had all the other clones that were teleported down turned eventually violent, but not Kyle?

  Why did Kyle seem like a sponge, sucking up every last scrap of information we gave him?

  The guy who called me last night must have known exactly what he was doing, leaving me with all these questions and no answers. I also had no idea how the disc worked. None. And how did I even really know it was Seth Buchanan? I literally didn’t have solid evidence of anything.

  What I did know was that, since I’d picked up Kyle, I hadn’t been in London for a few days and the elimination squad had no doubt been busy getting rid of the clones that teleported down. If indeed any more had done. Camille hadn’t mentioned it, I hadn’t wanted to think about it, and I wasn’t going to torture myself now by looking up the figures they’d killed in the days since I’d picked up Kyle. It could have been none. Maybe Kyle was the final piece and the arrivals were no more? Or several more had been killed since I’d left the streets. I couldn’t think like that, though.

  All I knew was that I had one directive.

  And his name was Kyle.

  He was the best shot we had of finding out why the teleportation… why London.

  And he was potentially the missing piece of the puzzle… if I just allowed myself to take a deep breath and carry on.

  If anything, I felt vindicated. That my father had called me up, to check on me, said a lot. Up to now, he’d seen all this as me having a pet project or something, but actually, I was serious about it. Maybe he’d now, finally, tell me it had legs, after all.

  The clones had problems, but some of them showed real promise… if only they could be shown the way.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I SPENT THE REST OF that day playing computer games and showing Kyle how to use a VR headset, which you could even wear out on the street, making the world look like anything you wanted it to as you walked around. We chilled, as I had promised, and got through a mountain of food. I was planning to visit the grocery store in the morning, maybe while he still slept. If he still slept. I didn’t want to try the sleeping tablet thing again. He’d been in such a good mood all day, I thought maybe, this time he’d sleep naturally.

  After dinner, he was playing an RPG with his headset on, and remarked, “Isn’t the birthrate hindered by these games? Don’t people get addicted and never leave their homes?”

  “Yes, actually.” How observant.

  “And what about love in the future? Aside from your parents, have you known any other couple who were really in love?”

  “Not really,” I admitted. “I thought once upon a time my aunts were, but Mara’s got too much darkness in her.”

  “Crazy, considering Camille is the assassin.”

  “Yeah, I know. Her trick was to cling to her humanity, though; it’s what made her so good at it.”

  “No idea how that works, but if you say so…”

  “There was also my cousin Lucius and his wife, Francesca. He was a lot younger than her but they were really in love, before he died, obviously.”r />
  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “And I guess, well, it seemed like my grandparents were in love, too. Pascal and Eve died in each other’s arms. He held on just so they could take their last breath together.”

  He ripped off the headset and narrowed his eyes. “You’re not kidding.”

  “No.”

  “What about young people, though?” he asked, sounding serious. “Friends of yours. Do they have teenage romances?”

  “I am afraid to say most adults use gadgets these days to find sexual pleasure. There was a baby boom right after Officium went down, but it was short-lived once the truth about the clones came out and everyone had something to fear again.” He seemed sad about that, staring disconsolately. “But I wouldn’t know about what other young people my age do. I’ve been practically in hiding my whole life. I’ve hung around with people like Camille and my parents and paid employees. I’ve never had a female friend my own age. It’s weird, right?”

  He shrugged, wiping his finger under his nose. “No more weird than me arriving here out of the sky.”

  “I guess so.”

  “It’s sad, Ari,” he said, having slowly started to call me by the name family used more often than not. “In my time, kids like you would just be wrapped up in make-up and hair extensions and glossy magazines.”

  “Hair extensions?” I laughed.

  “Yeah, before the little pill that makes your hair grow crazy-fast, people used to glue in longer hair.”

  I felt my face pull a strange expression which made him laugh.

  “And nails, nails were a big thing then, still a big thing if the newscasters are anything to go by. And yet your nails are shredded and you’re always biting them.”

  “I know,” I said, feeling glum as I looked down at them. I was a nervous nibbler. “I’ve never had them done. And I don’t like make-up. And I get my hair trimmed once a year. I keep it long like Mom’s because it reminds me of her. Except she had spectacular garnet hair. Mine’s just black, like Dad’s.”

  “Ha! It’s not just black. It’s beautiful. You’ve got these waves and there’s a bit of a silver shimmer in the sunlight. It’s wonderful hair, Ari. Girls in my time would’ve glued stuff to their heads to look like you.”