Lux [4] Origin

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  I snorted. Who knew why the other Luxen were here, happy as clams, and I really didn’t care. I got that there were parts of Daedalus that were actually attempting to do something good, but I also knew what they did to my brother in the process.

  All around me, doctors and lab technicians milled about. Some of the bags hooked up to the patients had a strange glittering liquid in them that vaguely resembled what we bled in our true form. “Is that LH-11?” I asked, gesturing at one of the bags.

  Nancy nodded. “One of the versions—the newest—but that really isn’t a concern of yours. We have—”

  A siren sounded, cutting off her words with an ear-piercing shrill. Lights on the ceilings flashed red. Patients and doctors looked around in alarm. Sergeant Dasher stormed out of the room.

  Nancy cursed under her breath as she spun toward the door. “Washington, escort Mr. Black back to his room immediately.” She pointed at another guard. “Williamson, shut this room down. No one goes in or out.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  She shot me a look before stomping past. Like hell I wanted to go back to my room when things were obviously just getting fun. Out in the hall, lighting was dim and the blinking red light caused an annoying strobe effect.

  The Guard of the Moment took one step, and chaos stormed into the corridor.

  Soldiers poured out of rooms, locking them down and taking up guard in front of them. Another came down the hall, clutching a walkie-talkie in a knuckle-white grip. “We have activity on elevator ten, coming out of building B. Lock it down now.”

  Huh, the infamous building B strikes again.

  Farther down the hall, another door opened, and I saw Archer first and then Kat. She had a hand pressed over the fleshy part of her elbow. Behind her was Dr. Roth. My eyes narrowed when I saw a wicked-looking syringe in his hand. He brushed past Kat and Archer, heading straight for the guy on the walkie-talkie.

  Kat turned, her gaze finding me. I started forward. No way was I not going to be beside her when the shit hit the fan, which apparently was happening.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Washington demanded, hand going to the weapon on his thigh. “I have orders to take you back to your room.”

  I turned to him slowly, then back to the three elevators across from us. All of them were stopped on different floors, the lights red. “Exactly how are we supposed to get to my room?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Stairwell?”

  Tool had a point, but like I cared. I turned away, but his hand clamped down on my shoulder. “You stop me, and I will end you,” I warned.

  Whatever Washington saw in my face must’ve assured him that I wasn’t fooling around, because he didn’t interfere when I shrugged off his grip and went to Kat, dropping an arm around her shoulders. Her body was tense.

  “You okay?” I asked, eyeing Archer. He also had his hand on his weapon, but he wasn’t watching us. His eyes were on the middle elevator. He was hearing something in his earpiece and, by the look on his face, he wasn’t happy.

  She nodded, pushing a strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail out of her face. “Any idea what’s going on?”

  “Something about building B.” Instinct suddenly told me that maybe being in our rooms would be a good thing. “This has never happened before?”

  Kat shook her head. “No. Maybe it’s a drill.”

  Double doors at the end of the hall suddenly burst open, and a swarm of officers in SWAT gear came through, armed to the teeth with rifles, faces shielded.

  Reacting immediately, I swept an arm around Kat’s waist and shoved her back against the wall, shielding her with my body. “I don’t think this is a drill.”

  “It’s not,” Archer said, drawing his weapon.

  The light above the middle elevator blinked from floor seven to floor six and then floor five.

  “I thought the elevators were locked down?” someone demanded.

  The men dressed in black shuffled forward, going down on their knees in front of the elevator. Someone else said, “Locking down the elevators ain’t going to stop it. You know that.”

  “I don’t care,” the man yelled into the radio. “Shut down the damn elevator before it reaches the top level. Drop cement down the shaft if you need to. Stop the damn elevator!”

  “Stop what?” I glanced at Archer.

  The red light blinked on the fourth floor.

  “Origin,” he said, a muscle popping in his chin. “There’s a stairway to the right, all the way down the hall. I’d suggest getting there now.”

  My gaze swung back to the elevator. Part of me wanted to stay to see what the hell an origin was and why they were acting like the Cloverfield monster was going to come out of the elevator shaft, but Kat was here, and obviously whatever was about to rain down on us wasn’t a friendly.

  “What the hell is up with them recently?” one of the men in black gear muttered. “They’ve been acting up nonstop.”

  I started to turn, but Kat smacked me. “No,” she said, her gray eyes wide. “I want to see this.”

  My muscles clenched. “Absolutely not.”

  A ding ricocheted through the floor, signaling that the elevator had arrived. I was seconds from just picking Kat up and throwing her over my shoulder. She saw it, too, and her look became challenging.

  But then her gaze shot over my shoulder, and I turned my head. The elevator doors slid open slowly. Guns were clicked, safeties going off.

  “Don’t shoot!” Dr. Roth ordered, waving the syringe around like a white flag. “I can take care of this. Whatever you do, don’t shoot. Don’t—”

  A small shadow fell out of the elevator, and then one leg appeared, covered in black sweats, and then a torso and tiny shoulders.

  My mouth dropped open.

  It was a kid—a kid. Probably no older than five, and he stepped out in front of all the grown men with really big guns trained on him.

  The kid smiled.

  And then the proverbial poo hit the fan.

  Chapter 13

  DAEMON

  “Uh…” I muttered.

  The kid’s eyes were purple—like two amethyst jewels with those weird lines around the pupils, just like Luc’s. And they were cold and flat as they scanned the officers in front of him.

  Dr. Roth stepped forward. “Micah, what are you doing? You know you’re not supposed to be in this building. Where is your—?”

  Several things happened so fast and, seriously, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

  The kid lifted a hand, and there was a succession of several pops—of bullets leaving the chambers of the rifles. Kat’s horrified gasp said she was thinking the same thing I was. Were they really going to shoot a kid?

  But the bullets stopped, as if the kid were a Luxen or hybrid, but he wasn’t one of my kind. I would’ve felt that. Maybe he was a hybrid, because those bullets hit a shimmery blue wall around him. The blue light expanded, swallowing the bullets—dozens of them—lighting them up like blue fireflies. They hung in the air for a second and then popped out of existence. The kid curled his fingers inward, like he was motioning them to come play with him, and in a total Magneto way, the guns flew from the officers’ hands, zinging toward the kid. They, too, stopped in midair and lit up in vibrant shades of blue. A second later the guns were dust.

  Kat’s hands dug into my back. “Holy…”

  “Shit,” I finished.

  Dr. Roth was trying to push past the soldiers. “Micah, you can’t—”

  “I don’t want to go back to that building,” the kid said in a voice that was oddly high and flat at the same time.

  Washington the Tool moved in, holding a pistol. Dr. Roth shouted, and Micah’s head whipped around. The guard’s face paled, and Micah closed his fist. Washington hit the floor on his knees, grasping his head as he doubled over. Mouth open in a silent scream, blood poured from the guy’s eyes.

  “Micah!” Dr. Roth shoved an officer out o
f the way. “That is bad! Bad, Micah!”

  Bad—that was bad? I could come up with dozens of words better suited than bad.

  “Holy smokes,” Kat whispered. “The kid’s like Damien from The Omen.”

  I would’ve laughed, because with the bowl-cut brown hair and slight, mischievous grin, he did look like the little Antichrist. Except it wasn’t funny because Washington was face-first on the floor, and the freaky kid was now staring at me with those purple eyes.

  Man, I did not like freaky kids.

  “He was gonna hurt me,” said Micah, never taking his eyes off me. “And you all are going to make me go back to my room. I don’t wanna go back to my room.”

  Several of the officers shuttled backward as Micah took a step forward, but Dr. Roth remained, hiding the syringe behind his back. “Why don’t you want to go back to your room, Micah?”

  “A better question is why is he staring at you?” Kat whispered.

  True.

  Micah cautiously made his way around the officers, who were now giving him a wide berth. His steps were light and extremely catlike. “The other ones don’t want to play with me.”

  There were more of him? Dear God…

  The doctor turned, smiling at the boy. “Is it because you’re not sharing your toys?”

  Kat choked on what sounded like a near-hysterical laugh.

  Micah’s eyes slid to the doctor. “Sharing is not how you assert dominance.”

  What. The. Holy. Hell.

  “Sharing doesn’t always mean you’re giving up control, Micah. We’ve taught you that.”

  The little boy shrugged as he turned his gaze back to me. “Will you play with me?”

  “Uh…” I had no idea what to say.

  Micah cocked his head to the side and smiled. Two dimples appeared in his round cheeks. “Can he play with me, Dr. Roth?”

  If that doctor said yes, I was going to have a serious issue with this.

  Dr. Roth nodded. “I’m sure he can later, Micah, but right now we need you to go back to your room.”

  The little boy’s lower lip stuck out. “I don’t wanna go back to my room!”

  I half expected the kid’s head to start spinning, and maybe it would have, but the doctor shot forward, syringe in hand.

  Micah spun and shouted as he balled up his tiny hands. Dr. Roth dropped the syringe and went down on one knee. “Micah,” he gasped, pressing his hands to his temples. “You need to stop.”

  Micah stomped a foot. “I don’t wanna—”

  Out of freaking nowhere, a dart slammed into the kid’s neck. His eyes widened, and then his legs gave out. Before he fell face-first, I shot forward and caught the tyke in my arms. Kid was freaky as hell, but still, he was a kid.

  I looked up and saw Sergeant Dasher standing to the right. “Good shot, Archer,” the sergeant said.

  Archer slid the gun back into his holster with a curt nod.

  I turned back to Micah. His eyes were open, and they locked onto mine. He wasn’t moving at all, but the kid was in there, fully functional. “What the hell?” I whispered.

  “Someone get Washington to the med room and make sure his brains aren’t completely scrambled.” Dasher was giving out orders. “Roth, get the kid into an exam room immediately and find out how he was able to get out of building B, and where in the hell is his tracker?”

  Roth stumbled to his feet, rubbing his temple. “Yes…yes, sir.”

  Dasher stepped up to him, eyes glinting and his voice low. “If he does it again, he will be terminated. Do you understand?”

  Terminated? Jesus. Someone appeared at my side and grabbed for the kid. I almost didn’t want to let him go, but that became a nonissue. Micah’s hand caught the front of my shirt and held on as the officer picked him up.

  Those strange eyes were even more bizarre up close. The circle around the pupils was irregular, as if the black had bled at the edges.

  They don’t know we exist.

  Stunned, I jerked back, breaking the grip on my shirt. The kid’s voice was in my head. Impossible, but it had happened. I watched in disbelief as the officer had him now and was turning away. Stranger yet, it was the exact same thing Luc had said.

  That kid wasn’t like Kat or me. That kid was something completely different.

  …

  KATY

  Holy crap on a cracker…

  A kid had just disarmed about fifteen men and probably would’ve done a hell of a lot more if Archer hadn’t tranq’d the kid. To be honest, I didn’t even know what I just saw or what the kid was, but Daemon looked substantially more freaked than I felt. Fear pinged inside me. Did the kid do something to him?

  Pushing off the wall, I hurried to Daemon. “Are you okay?”

  He ran a hand through his hair as he nodded.

  “Someone needs to get these two back to their rooms,” Sergeant Dasher said, taking a deep breath and then barking out more orders. Archer moved toward us.

  “Wait.” I wrapped an arm around Daemon’s, refusing to budge. “What was that?”

  “I don’t have time for this.” Dasher’s eyes narrowed. “Take them back to their rooms, Archer.”

  Anger rose inside me, bitter and powerful. “Make time for this.”

  Dasher’s head snapped toward me, and I glared back at him. Daemon was tuning in to the conversation, fixing his attention on the sergeant. The muscles under my hand flexed. “That kid wasn’t a Luxen or a hybrid,” he said. “I think you guys owe us a straight-up answer.”

  “He is what we call an origin,” Nancy answered, coming up behind the sergeant. “As in a new beginning: the origin of the perfect species.”

  I opened my mouth, then clamped it shut. The origin of the perfect species? I felt like I’d fallen headfirst into a really bad science-fiction movie, except this was all real.

  “Go ahead, Sergeant. I have time for them.” She tipped up her chin, meeting Dasher’s incredulous stare. “And I want a complete write-up on how and why there have been two incidences with the origins in the matter of twenty-four hours.”

  Dasher exhaled loudly out his nose. “Yes, ma’am.”

  I was sort of stunned when he snapped his heels together and pivoted, but my suspicion about Nancy being the one who ran the show was confirmed.

  She extended an arm toward one of the closed doors. “Let’s sit.”

  Keeping an arm around Daemon’s, I followed Nancy into a small room with just a round table and five chairs. Archer joined us, forever our shadow, but remained by the door while the three of us sat.

  Daemon dropped an elbow on the table and a hand on my knee as he leaned in, his bright eyes fixed on Nancy. “Okay. So this kid is an origin. Or whatever. What does that mean exactly?”

  Nancy leaned back in her chair, crossing one leg over the other. “We weren’t ready to share this with you yet, but considering what you witnessed, we really don’t have a choice. Sometimes things don’t go as planned, so we must adapt.”

  “Sure,” I said, placing my hand over Daemon’s. He flipped his up, his fingers threading mine, and our joined hands rested on my knee.

  “The Origin Project is Daedalus’s greatest achievement,” Nancy started, her gaze unwavering. “Ironically, it started as an accident more than forty years ago. It began with one and has grown to more than a hundred as of now. As I said before, sometimes what we plan for doesn’t happen. So we must adapt.”

  I glanced at Daemon, and he looked as bewildered and as impatient as I felt, but I had this sickening, sinking feeling. On some level I knew that whatever we were about to hear was going to blow our minds.

  “Forty years ago we had a Luxen male and a female hybrid who he had mutated. They, very much like you two, were young and in love.” Her upper lip curled in dismissive mirth. “They were allowed to see each other, and at some point during their stay with us, the female became pregnant.”

  Oh, jeez.

  “At first we weren’t aware, not until she started to show. You see, back the
n, we didn’t test for hormones related to pregnancy. From what we’ve gathered, it is very difficult for a Luxen to conceive with another, so it didn’t cross our minds that one would be able to conceive with a human, hybrid or not.”

  “Is that true?” I asked Daemon. Baby making wasn’t something we talked about. “That it’s hard for Luxen to conceive?”

  Daemon’s jaw worked. “Yes, but we can’t conceive with humans, as far as I know. It’s like a dog and cat getting together.”

  Ew. I made a face. “Nice comparison.”

  Daemon smirked.

  “You’re right,” Nancy said. “Luxen cannot conceive with humans, and for the most part, they cannot conceive with a hybrid, but when the mutation is perfect, complete on a cellular level, and if there appears to be a true want, they can.”

  For some reason, heat crawled up my neck. Talking about babies with Nancy was worse than having the sex talk with my mom, and that had been bad enough to make me want to punch myself in the stomach.

  “When it was discovered that the hybrid was pregnant, the team was split on whether or not the pregnancy should be terminated. That may sound harsh,” she said in response to the way Daemon stiffened, “but you must understand we had no idea what this pregnancy could do or what a child of a Luxen and hybrid would be like. We had no idea what we were dealing with, but thankfully termination was vetoed, and we were given the opportunity to study this occurrence.”

  “So…so they had a baby?” I asked.

  Nancy nodded. “The length of pregnancy was normal by human standards—between eight and nine months. Our hybrid was a little early.”

  “Luxen take about a year,” Daemon said, and I winced, thinking that was a hell of a long time to be stuck carrying triplets. “But like I said, it’s hard.”

  “When the baby was born, there was nothing remarkable in appearance, with the exception of the child’s eyes. They were purplish in color, which is an extremely rare human coloring, with a wavy dark circle around the iris. Blood work showed that the baby had adopted both human and Luxen DNA, which was different from the mutated DNA of a hybrid. It wasn’t until the child started to grow that we realized what that meant.”