by S J Taylor
I gasped as my heart lurched in my chest. He was insane. The entire Restored Society was insane. This is what they wanted me back for. They were going to replace humanity with generations of clones.
And I was the first.
The Master Field Sergeant crossed her arms and shifted her feet impatiently. “Can we just go already? I’m sure she appreciates your flair for drama, First Marshall, but we do have other things to do today.”
“Yes,” he agreed, drawing in a breath. “More’s the pity.”
“If we can’t reach the problem with scanners,” the Sergeant continued in her raspy voice, “we’ll have to cut into her. There’s no other way.” She paused to swallow. “We’ll need her prepped before the Enforcers come inside with the medical support staff. We should stop at the control room and disengage the barrier field.”
“Let’s get her to the examination room first,” he ordered. “We’ll secure her there and then tend to the field. Besides. If the Column leaders want to impress me, they’ll figure out how to disable the barrier from their side. We’ve got all the time in the world now, Sergeant. All the time in the world.”
I’d always been attracted to Avin Blake, when I was at the Colony. He was older, and experienced, and gorgeous. And, he was in command. Everything a young girl dreams about. Now I saw him for what he really was, and it wasn’t just because his body had been disfigured by whatever Saskia had done to him before they stopped her.
It was because the monster underneath was showing its true colors.
For just a moment, for just a split second that was there and gone again, I thought maybe I saw something of the attraction I’d felt for Avin mirrored in his eyes, directed at me. Maybe he felt something for me. Maybe it would keep him from wanting to kill me, or turn me into a mindless drone, or… or…
He aimed the stun pistol at my head, waggling the end of it in the direction he wanted me to go. There was only a steely determination in those perfect eyes when I looked again. There was no compassion. No sympathy. Certainly, no love.
I reached for the calm, again, and once again nothing happened. My emotions were twisted into too many knots. If I was going to take him down, if I was going to stop him and the Enforcer army, then I was going to have to do it by myself. Just me. By myself.
So be it.
Planting one of my feet sideways I prepared to strike up and under Avin’s gun hand, which more than likely would get me shot in the head, and killed. Even if didn’t, and I managed to disarm him, the Master Field Sergeant would have a clear shot at me, and I’d be killed. Not great options either way. I didn’t see any other choice.
Until I did.
Looking down at the floor, to where my clone’s body lay dead and bleeding, I noticed something missing.
Jadran.
He was gone. A smear of blood marked the floor where he had been just a moment before.
I snapped my eyes back up before either Avin or the Sergeant could see where I was looking. Jadran was alive. Any moment now he would jump out of the shadows and save me.
Any minute.
As we left the stasis pod chamber through the door to the hallway that led to the facility’s examination room, as I took a few more steps closer to my own death, I was still repeating that to myself.
Any minute…
Where was he?
Era’s Journal, Entry #3160
I’m not real.
The lie of my reality was fed to me from the very beginning. Growing up on that farm with people I had called my parents, I’d been spoon fed on it, until I believed it in my heart. A real person, they told me. A good little girl with unlimited potential. I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up because the choice was mine.
Only, that was a lie.
Now I know the truth. My future had been laid out for me in advance, planned ahead of time, written into my DNA. I wasn’t supposed to grow up and do just anything. I was supposed to grow up and do what I was told.
But there was something wrong with me. I wasn’t a good little girl. Whatever code the Restored Society had imprinted into me when they… created me, it hadn’t stuck. I’d managed to overwrite it. Somehow I’d broken my genetic mold.
There was something wrong with me.
I wasn’t my own person, and I didn’t belong to the Restored Society. I wasn’t anyone or anything or…
Stop it, Era.
Era. I like writing that name in this journal. Era Rae. It reminds me that I’m still… me.
I was someone. I am someone, I mean. Now I know where I came from. I know the dirty secret of my beginning. Big deal. Does our starting point define our destiny? Does it set our fate in stone?
I know how I got here. Is that supposed to change the way I look at myself?
No. I won’t let it.
I’ve spent weeks figuring myself out. Ever since leaving Colony 41 I’ve had to take a long, cold look at myself. I went back and forth on who I am and what my purpose is a dozen times but then I finally came around to acceptance. Of all my parts. Of everything that makes me who I am. I accept it. I believe it.
I am Era Rae.
Only… I’m not real.
How could they do this to me?
The hallway was long and straight, and our footsteps echoed off the metal plating. Lights in the ceiling panels reflected off everything.
I was marching to my death. I knew that as sure any fact I’ve ever known. If I let Avin Blake and Sergeant what’s-her-name lead me into that examination room, there would be no coming back. I’d be dissected and probed and taken apart molecule by molecule until they found the part of my DNA sequence they thought was broken. The medical support staff marching with the columns of Enforcers up there would splice me back together over and over until I didn’t recognize myself anymore.
“Did I even have parents?” I asked Blake. I was walking in front of them and I didn’t bother to turn around as I asked the question.
“Oh look,” I heard the Sergeant sneer. Her voice was better, which didn’t help my mood. “Little Era Rae wants to know if she had a mommy and a daddy.”
“That will be enough, Sergeant.” Blake’s voice wasn’t angry. It wasn’t anything. “It won’t hurt to let her know how she came to be in this world. There’s a lot of science involved in the actual tale, Era. Even I don’t understand it all.”
The Sergeant huffed a breath. “First Marshall, if I may, this isn’t the time—”
“You know, Era,” he said, ignoring her interruption, “when we were first creating you, we took DNA strands from many different stalwart members of the Reformed Society. Several of us volunteered. Only the most dedicated were chosen. Turn here, please.”
It took me a moment to realize he meant for me to take the passageway that had opened to our right. I obliged, and he took up his story again. I didn’t want to care so much, but I was waiting for every word of what came next.
“Only the most dedicated members of the society were chosen,” he continued. “Chosen to contribute pieces of their own DNA to make the perfect citizen. The perfect soldier. Only people who had proven they were fully dedicated to the ideals of the Society were even considered, of course. We needed that sort of heartfelt devotion to pass on to our child. You, I mean.”
My insides churned at being called his child. Wait… his child…?
“It was quite an honor. To be chosen, I mean. One of the proudest moments of my career, if I’m being honest.”
I stopped, abruptly turning around to face him again, my mouth hanging open.
He kept his distance, stun pistol still trained at me.
Then he smiled.
“Oh, come on, Era. Don’t look so surprised. Of course, I was younger back then, but look at your eye color. Look at mine. Did you think that was just a coincidence?”
I’d never given it a thought before then. Avin’s eyes were a perfect shade of green. Tranquil, liquid gems that I’d stared into so often during my classes at the Academy. My e
yes were the color of moss, like the clone’s had been.
Green moss.
Not as sharp as his, but just as green.
His smile rocked me back a step. “That’s right,” he told me. “You have my eyes. Diluted in your case, a bit, thanks to all the other mothers and fathers you had.”
I’m still not sure what kept me from being physically sick all over the floor, right there and then. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to shout and cry and claw that knowledge out of my head. All the mothers and fathers you had.
Hellfire.
“Let’s go,” he said to me, waving the end of the stun pistol down the hall. He was getting very confident that I was just going to obey him.
“What about Saskia?” I demanded in a weak voice. “If I was the perfect little girl all of you wanted, then why did you butcher her like that? You told me you were trying to make her a better member of the Society. Why did you have to do that to her, if you already had me?”
Tears came to my eyes again, and as they leaked down my face I swear I saw something soften in the lines around his scars. Maybe I imagined it. I like to think I didn’t.
“Saskia was… unfortunate,” was the word he chose.
“She was my friend!”
“She was a failed experiment. That became painfully clear, pardon my pun, when she did this to me.” He brushed his hand over his face. “Poor girl. She actually thought she killed me, you know. To save you. The irony… well. We tried to correct her with further implants, as you know, but then there was that mess on the HoverHawk.”
He sighed, and for just a moment, he looked tired. “You have to understand, Era, we still weren’t positive of our results with you. So naturally, we tried other avenues to create perfection in our times. If we couldn’t do it through direct genetic manipulation on a fetal level, like we attempted with you and the others, then we were going to need a backup plan. Saskia’s experiment failed. I’m sorry to say it, but there it is. Oh, we’ve tried the technique on several of our elite soldiers, true, and in some cases it’s worked… as far as it goes. It might be an option to continue exploring. But the level of control and obedience we obtain through electronic implants is nothing… nothing compared to what we can accomplish with you, Era Rae.”
There was no reaching him. The man I remembered from the Colony wasn’t only gone. He’d never really existed.
“Does it ever bother you?” I asked him, wiping away the moist wetness from the corners of my eyes.
“What’s that, Era?”
“Does it ever bother you,” I asked him again, boldly stepping up closer to him, “that we’ve lost so much?”
I meant Saskia. I meant the world, and all the people in it that had been killed by the Restored Society’s mad rush toward perfection. I meant the freedom to just be ourselves and decide our future on our own. A freedom that had been taken away from me before birth, one that I’d taken back for myself from madmen like this, and one that I was never going to let go of again.
I meant all of that and more, but Avin Blake couldn’t understand that.
“We haven’t lost anything,” he told me with supreme conviction even as the fingers of his free hand stretched up over his disfigured face. “Sacrifices have been made, true, but that is the way of progress. Sacrifice is not loss. The human race has lost nothing.”
In the middle of that hallway, with my former mentor holding a gun pointed at my chest, I found the strength to smile. “You’ve lost something,” I told him.
“Oh really, Era Rae? And what would that be?”
“Your Master Field Sergeant.”
His eyes went wide, the one on his left side pulled into a quizzical look by the scars.
Even though he didn’t turn around I watched as his focus shifted to the hallway behind him.
It was empty, not that he could know that.
“Sergeant?” he asked.
She’d been with us before we made the turn into this branch of the hallways. She’d been snide and disrespectful as usual. I’d heard her talking just a moment ago.
Now, she wasn’t there.
I smiled and waited for First Marshall Blake to focus his eyes on me again.
A hard slap with the back of my wrist hit the hand holding his weapon, moving it off target just enough for me to blade the rest of my body and avoid the silent whoosh of the electric discharge as Avin pulled the trigger. For just a second, there was fear in his eyes.
For only a second.
His left hand drove across the space between us and into my gut, making my legs go weak and shoving the breath out of my lungs. Then his right arm came straight up, catching my chin hard enough to clack my teeth together and make me see stars. Whatever advantage I thought the element of surprise had given me, it was gone now.
Avin was a First Marshall of the Enforcers. For all intents and purposes, he was the leader of the Restored Society. You didn’t scratch your way up to that sort of position in life without knowing how to fight, and win… and kill.
The butt end of the stun pistol was driven into my gut, twice, three times, and after the hard punch that had landed there these strikes bent me over double. He didn’t let me drop, though. Catching hold of the back of my shirt, he hauled me up to my feet as I gagged and fought for air.
“I said I wanted you alive,” he reminded me. “You’re making that very difficult for me. Maybe keeping you safe was just selfishness on my part. After all. You are my child.”
I muttered something at him, still getting my wind back.
“What was that?” he smirked, cocking an ear closer to me.
“I said…” Deep breath, focus. “I said, you didn’t make me. I did.”
My knee drove up deep into his groin. If he didn’t understand my words, he certainly understood that.
Avin cried out in pain, bending over at the waist, the hand on the stun pistol going slack. I struck with my knee again, this time at his skull, catching the ruined side of his face. I was hoping to hear bone crack.
Instead he twisted his head up to glare at me.
“There’s no feeling on that side of my face anymore,” he explained. The nerves are all dead. I’m sure that would have hurt a lot, if I was anyone else.”
Pushing up with his legs, he slammed his upper body into me, shoving me back against the wall, pinning me there as I tried to kick at his shins, his knees, his ankles, only to have him deflect everything with a skillful grace that I couldn’t believe. At the same time he attacked me with his one fist, in my side, in my already tender belly, and in my solar plexus. I blocked some of that. The rest of it was enough to leave my body howling in pain.
I couldn’t beat him. His eyes—so nearly the same color as my own—told me that he knew I couldn’t win. The stun pistol jabbed into my ribs and I screamed. My pain and my frustration and my anger all welled up into the sound of it as I wondered if people like me got to go to Heaven.
I could not beat him.
Not alone.
The sound of metal breaking bone is a very distinctive crunch that I remembered from our war games at the Academy. That’s what I heard now, in that hallway, as I grappled with my own death.
Opening my eyes again, I saw First Marshall Avin Blake staring back at me. Slowly, very slowly, the color drained from his face. Every muscle in his body went slack and he dropped to the floor, a lifeless husk. The leader of the Restored Society was dead. Again.
For good this time.
Behind him, Jadran dropped the long metal pipe he had been holding to the floor where it bounced with an impossibly loud metallic clang that echoed off the walls all around us.
Then he fell to his knees, holding tightly to his side.
“What?” he asked me, as I continued to stare at him in shock. “I was shot, Era Rae. You were expecting me to fight him hand to hand after being shot, were you?”
I stepped around the body of Avin Blake and fell to my knees next to Jadran, throwing my arms around his neck. “You’re alive.�
�
“Easy,” he complained with a smile. “Alive is something I will not be for long, if you continue squeezing me like this.
“Sorry, sorry,” I told him again and again. “It’s just… you’re alive!”
“So are you,” he pointed out.
“Thanks to you. Where’s the Master Field Sergeant?”
He nodded with his head back to the end of the hallway. “Dead as well.”
I was relieved, but also a little bit jealous. That was one kill I would have gladly carried responsibility for. Whatever. It didn’t matter now. “I just can’t believe you’re alive!” I told him.
Carefully, he pulled his hand away from his left side. “Only just barely.”
The gaping hole had been burned through his shirt there, about the size of my two fists held together, the edges of the fabric melted to his flesh. There was a chunk of his side that was simply…gone. Avin Blake’s blaster had taken a bite out of Jadran’s body. The wound had cauterized almost instantly judging by how little blood had soaked into his shirt and pants. The glancing blow had probably been more painful than anything Jadran had ever felt before, but he was alive to feel it.
More tenderly this time, I hugged him again. Jadran was alive. Finally something had gone right.
“Come on, Era Rae,” he said as he painfully got back to his feet, leaning on my body like a crutch. “Out of danger, we definitely are not.”
Leaning him against the wall for a moment I collected Avin’s stun pistol and vibroknife. “Why? What’s wrong? Is it the Enforcers?”
“Yes. And… there’s something else as well.”
Holding him under his shoulder on his uninjured side, I got us moving back along the path to the stasis pod chamber. We passed the Sergeant’s body where Jadran had left it. He’d done a number on her. It was less than she deserved. I noticed he had already taken her weapons. Stun stick. Electrolaser. Small hand-to-hand weapons. The Enforcers in the pod chamber each had an MAR and other weapons on their bodies as well. So now we were armed again, but how exactly were we going to face an entire army once they found their way in here from outside?