Genesis Revealed (The Genesis Project Book 2)

by S. M. Schmitz

  “I don’t have any,” I mumbled into my hands.

  “Then let me give you one,” she said. “We’d been dating for about a month the first time you actually did something spontaneous. It was so out of character for you that even though it was just a small gesture, it completely floored me. I think that’s when I knew I’d fallen in love with you. One of the movie theaters in town was doing a midnight showing of Captain America: Civil War and you bought us tickets and showed up at my apartment to surprise me.”

  I lifted my head and blinked at her. “Of what?” I interrupted.

  “It’s a Marvel movie,” she explained.

  “Yeah, I know. Is that why I know Captain America references?”

  Saige smiled at me and put her hand on my arm. My face flushed, but I didn’t move my arm away. “So before meeting you, I kinda had a thing for Chris Evans. Even knowing that, you indulged me.”

  “You going to live?” Cade asked.

  “Probably,” I replied. “It would be pretty stupid of Dr. Parker to program me to die just because I think about hurting him.”

  “First of all, I told you to stop calling him Dr. Parker,” he ordered. “And secondly, you didn’t answer my question. How did you get away from him?”

  I glanced down at my arm where Saige was lightly tracing the small scar beneath the port. Of all the conflicting emotions I’d experienced, this might have been the worse. Her touch turned me on, which embarrassed me, but at the same time, I didn’t want her to stop. I took another deep breath before meeting Cade’s impatient gaze.

  “I don’t think I can hurt him. Or I’m not supposed to be able to. I know I can’t plan it. But when he’s not in my head, I have all these questions and then there’s everything Ethan, you, and Saige told me. I wanted to believe all of you, but I felt like I needed proof. It’s a lot to ask of someone who only knows one existence and one purpose to try to break free from the man who gave him life to begin with.” I glanced down at my arm where Saige still traced the scar. “But there’s that. He said he had to repair it because it didn’t work, but wouldn’t I remember it not working? I’m always awake when he…” I grimaced before finishing. “The scar was there from my earliest memories and so is the one on my thigh. And that one doesn’t look like a surgical scar.”

  “You mean the bullet wound?” Cade asked. “Dude, you went and got your dumbass shot.”

  “Stop calling him a dumbass,” Saige warned.

  Cade waved impatiently in my direction and snapped, “He is! He keeps surrendering!”

  “And it’s kept us alive!” Saige snapped back.

  “Anyway,” I said slowly as I tried to ease the tension, “I just reacted. I realized he’d been lying to me and slammed his head into the steering wheel, which made us crash into a ditch. He’s still alive though. If I could have killed…”

  Thinking about killing him made that head-splitting pain return so I squeezed my eyes closed and groaned again. Saige’s fingers tightened around my arm, and her other hand rested on the back of my neck.

  Her touch was like magic, like some cure for every physical and emotional pain I carried.

  Why did this woman have so much power over me?

  Slowly, that sharp pain that made me want to rip my eyes out of my head receded, and I opened my eyes to watch her. She was tracing the scar on my arm again.

  “You removed it once,” she offered. “It can be taken out again.”

  “What good will it do?” I asked. “He’s in my head.”

  “True,” Cade agreed, “but you defied him the first time he ordered you to kill Saige. Even now, even without your memories, I think you still understand how much you love this woman and how your love for her changed you. Once you discovered you could override those commands, you had no trouble acting on your own. Bastard never shut up and drove you crazy, but you can do it again, Drake. You already have or Saige and I would both be dead.”

  My cheeks warmed again, but Saige only smiled at me and lifted my hand to her lips. She kissed the back of it softly and whispered again, “It’ll always be you, Drake.”

  I swallowed as I watched her lower our hands, but she held onto mine.

  How could someone so perfect have chosen me?

  “Who is Ramirez?” I asked. The name still filled me with a murderous rage, and I suspected Cade had all the answers—the real answers—I’d been wanting, even if the possibility that Dr. Parker had erased some prior life scared the shit out of me. And when Saige said that name back at the lake, I’d had a strong reaction to it as if this phantom were responsible for every misery I’d suffered.

  “Ramirez,” Cade scoffed, “is the backstabbing asshole who told the Project you were dating Saige. He’s the reason we had to attack their headquarters in Virginia. We always assumed it would be fairly easy for Parker to get back inside your head and we were right, but I never really counted on him getting his hands on you again.”

  “How did he?” I asked.

  Cade rolled his eyes and retorted, “Because my best friend is a dumbass.”

  I blinked at him and waited.

  “You, Drake,” Cade said. “You’re the dumbass who surrendered to them in Somalia because you thought it would keep me alive.”

  “That was a really terrible plan,” I agreed.

  “No shit,” he snapped.

  “So… the scar on my leg?” I gestured to my thigh where I had that small pink scar. “You said I was shot. Did they shoot me in Somalia?”

  Saige finally let go of my hand and scowled at me. “No, you got shot after you went outside a motel we were staying in to pretend like you were surrendering. Don’t do that again either.”

  “Sounds like I do a lot of stupid shit,” I said smartly.

  Cade snorted and told me I had no idea.

  “Do I ever come up with any ideas that don’t involve us surrendering?” I asked. It wasn’t exactly comforting knowing my strategies so often involved me either getting shot or captured.

  Of course, Dr. Parker hadn’t wanted me to be a master strategist. He only wanted me to follow orders.

  “Can’t think of any,” Cade teased. “Even outside the bar the first time you escaped from the Project after they ordered you to kill Saige, that was your plan. You walked outside and pretended like you were going to go with them as long as they let us go.”

  “Another thing I’m forbidding you to do,” Saige said. She shot me a stern look that warned me I really was a dumbass if I tried something like that again.

  “Ok,” I agreed. “No more surrendering or pretend-surrendering. I think we’d better leave the strategizing to Cade then.”

  “About damn time,” Cade muttered.

  “Do you think your memories are permanently gone?” Saige asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted just as quietly. “It definitely seems that way.”

  “Chris says his father hasn’t shared this new programming with anyone,” Cade said. “If there’s a way to undo it, only he knows. But he also thinks it’s possible he only tweaked the old program. I mean, it took him years to develop so it’s unlikely he created a new one from scratch.”

  I closed my eyes and put my head back, certain now that the life Dr. Parker had taken from me was lost to me forever. Saige put her hand over my arm so I opened my eyes. She was watching me, studying me. I could feel my cheeks warming yet again and tried to concentrate on my hands I’d just clasped around my knees.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said decisively.

  “What doesn’t?” Cade asked.

  “If he can’t undo this… amnesia. I love you, and I know somewhere in there, you still love me.”

  I opened my mouth, unsure of what I even wanted to say, but the only sound that came out was a humiliating croaking noise.

  Cade snorted and kicked my foot. “Still the ladies man.”

  “Was I?” That didn’t seem right at all. Saige and Cade’s laughter told me he’d just been messing with me though.r />
  Saige pulled one of my hands free and held it between her own. If I’d been blushing before, I imagined my face must be crimson by now.

  “Always you, Drake,” she whispered.

  Those words. Those same words she’d told me by the lake and moments before in this van that tickled some hidden place in my mind, but their meaning remained as unclear as most of my experiences. I couldn’t answer her because I didn’t know how so I kept my eyes on our hands, woven together in her lap. I didn’t want her to let go.

  She either knew me well, or she had some enhanced ability to read minds because she said, “Don’t worry, Drake. I could never let you go.”

  “Would you two knock it off? You’re making me sick,” Cade teased.

  I smiled and finally allowed myself to look away from our hands. “Where is Chris taking us?”

  “How far can we really go?” Cade responded. “When we blew the Project to hell, we thought they wouldn’t be able to track you—not for a while, anyway. We were obviously wrong.”

  “Then this is all pointless,” I sighed. “No matter what, they’ll find me, and you’ll always be running or they’ll kill you, too.”

  “Do you always have to be such a buzzkill?” Cade retorted.

  “I don’t know. Do I?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he immediately answered.

  “Leave him alone, Cade,” Saige warned. “And it’s not hopeless, Drake. Chris has a plan.”

  I smiled stupidly at our hands still folded together then caught Cade rolling his eyes at me. But it was Cade who explained what their plan entailed.

  “We’re going to do what I’ve wanted to do for years. We’re going public.”

  Chris’s “plan” startled me so much that I almost dropped Saige’s hand.

  “We can’t!” I insisted. “That could endanger your families!”

  “Anything we do now could potentially endanger them except making this public and getting attention on these bastards,” Cade argued. “But according to Chris, Parker’s in pretty deep shit for allowing several SEALs to get killed back in Virginia. He has to bring you in and show the DOD he can get you working right, or they’re pulling funding for the entire Project.”

  I gasped as my heart leapt into my throat because even if we ultimately failed at securing our freedom, we had the chance to win it for future generations, for the monsters like me who’d never asked to be created. I didn’t even realize I was smiling until Saige spoke to me again.

  “That’s hope, Drake,” Saige said softly. “That feeling. That’s hope.”

  Chapter 10

  Saige handed me a can of Diet Coke and sat next to me on the dock overlooking the Calcasieu River. Neither of us spoke for what seemed like hours as we watched the mullets jumping from the water. I didn’t know what to tell this woman who professed to love me. I only knew that I was grateful she did, but without the memories of my past, I had no idea what I’d done to earn her love in the first place. And I had no idea how to keep it now.

  A boat passed, causing the brown water of the river to ripple toward us, splashing sloppily against the bank, and it broke whatever spell had kept us silent for so long.

  “Are you planning on removing the port again?” she asked.

  I looked down at my arm and ran my fingers along the small scar. “Yeah, I want it gone, but what I want out of my body the most is whatever’s inside my brain. He’ll always be there.”

  “Those chips that are somehow hardwired into you will always be there,” Saige corrected. “But there’s a specific program Parker designed and has always used to control you. Without that program, they’re harmless.”

  I sighed and lifted my eyes to meet hers. “But that program works. That’s the problem.”

  “If the entire world knows about you…”

  “Then the entire world is going to want me dead,” I interrupted. “I’m not sure if it’s just Dr. Parker’s warnings or if I’m the one who’s worried, but I’ve been thinking about it. What government is going to be ok with the existence of a man who can be controlled like an android? Instead of having one enemy, I’ll have many. The U.S. will be pissed off at me for spilling their secrets and probably label me a traitor, and every other government out there will want to destroy me because I exist in the first place.”

  “What do you want to do, Drake?”

  A screen door from the camp above us slammed closed and we listened to the footsteps as they bounced down the stairs. Chris had brought us to a camp along this river, claiming it belonged to a friend he’d introduced as Paul. It seemed rather convenient that he even had a friend in a small city most people in this country had never even heard of. But I wasn’t in Dr. Parker’s custody and, at the moment, neither were Cade or Saige so I didn’t ask questions.

  Cade sat on my other side and after staring at the water for a few seconds asked, “What the hell are you two doing? You could at least be fishing.”

  “I don’t know how to fish,” I told him.

  “Dude,” Cade snorted, “you put a worm on a hook and throw the line in the water. Even your dumbass can’t screw that up.”

  I smiled and shook my head. “Bet you I could, starting with that worm. I really don’t want to spear a live animal.”

  “God, you’re so lame,” he teased.

  “Cade,” Saige interjected, “Drake is having second thoughts about going public.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “In the end, it’ll either make us all bigger targets, or it will attract so much negative publicity, we’ll wish we’d just taken our chances with Dr. Parker,” I explained.

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” Cade interrupted, “Stop calling him doctor. It’s just Parker.”

  “What difference does it make?” I shot back.

  “Assholes like him don’t get to be called doctor,” he responded as if that were supposed to be a completely reasonable explanation.

  I squinted at him, but it hardly seemed worth the argument. “Fine,” I relented. “Parker needs to be taken out. I can’t do it. He built some kind of fail-safe into my programming. And we can’t tell Chris. I know he wants to end the Project, but if he finds out we’re plotting to murder his father, he’ll turn on us.”

  Cade nodded and glanced over his shoulder. Chris was still inside with his friend, which is largely why I’d come to the boat dock. I didn’t like being around strangers. Even sitting next to Cade in the park, part of me realized something was different about his presence: I didn’t mind being near him. I didn’t mind talking to him. In hindsight, that probably should have served as confirmation that Ethan had been telling me the truth, but it was impossible for me to think straight most of the time. I had so many conflicting thoughts, and I could rarely tell which were mine and which had been fabricated by Parker.

  “We’ll have to use him then,” Saige whispered. “That seems so… wrong. To assure him we’re only going after the Project but the entire time, we’re really going after his own father.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “We can claim we don’t want any kind of rift between them. Maybe he can go back and tell his dad you just got away from him.”

  “We left that hangar in handcuffs,” Cade said. “Nobody’s going to believe Saige and I got away from a highly trained soldier—even if he is a Green Beret—while we were cuffed and helpless.”

  “What is it with you and Green Berets?” I asked.

  “What is it with you and not getting those are the pansies who couldn’t get through BUD/S?”

  “I never got through it,” I pointed out.

  Cade waved me off. “You didn’t need to. You were built for it and automatically given all the training you needed. And seriously, I’d go through a year of Hell Weeks rather than deal with the shit you have to.”

  “You know, Cade,” Saige teased, “you’re a lot easier to like when you’re not giving my boyfriend a hard time.”

  “I guess that means you only like me about three percent of th
e time then,” Cade teased back.

  Saige laughed and told him that sounded about right. It seemed like they were joking with one another so I didn’t press the issue. I really didn’t want to find out they secretly hated each other. Even though our situation seemed so impossible, I had to cling to some hope that we’d somehow survive and we’d do it together, and for the rest of my life, these two people would be the only friends, the only family I really had. Some part of me knew that even though I couldn’t understand it.

  “And what if Chris refuses to back down?” Saige asked. “He obviously knows this is going to ruin his relationship with his father. He’s prepared for that. We have to figure out some other way to get him out of the picture.”

  “Without killing him?” Cade asked.

  “You’d better be joking,” I said.

  Cade rolled his eyes and muttered, “Still don’t get sarcasm, do you?”

  “I have a better idea than murder,” Saige offered. “Why don’t we just leave?”

  “The only reason we haven’t been surrounded by Parker’s employees yet is that we’re with him,” Cade argued. “They haven’t realized yet Chris is lying. They just think Drake escaped, picked him up on the side of the road, and is holding him prisoner while his dad’s in the hospital.”

  “If we can’t go anywhere, then we sort of are his prisoners,” I said.

  “The minute you step away from this camp, you’ll have entire SWAT teams after your RoboCop ass, so I don’t think ditching Chris right now is feasible,” Cade persisted.

  “Staying with him isn’t feasible either,” Saige argued.

  “What do you think is out here?” I asked, pointing to the bend in the river in front of us.

  “How the hell should I know?” Cade retorted. “Probably alligators and shit.”

  I traced the thin pink scar on my arm and made a hasty decision that was probably as brilliant as surrendering, which I apparently did a lot. “I’m going inside and cutting this port out, only this time, I’m ruining the box.”