My father, Eson, sat as he always did, beside the fireplace, looking into the flames. The red firelight glinted in his auburn hair, and I could see he might have been attractive, even downright handsome, once. Now he rarely spoke, and never spoke to me. Ever since I could remember he’d acted as if I didn’t exist. He never asked how I was doing, or even said hello. I didn’t blame him though. He couldn’t control me and he couldn’t be proud of me: who wanted an evil angel as a son?
My mother, Gradla, sat on a chair beneath Valoel, knitting.
My mother was the bravest woman I knew, because unlike my father she always asked after how I was doing, even though a run-down of one of my average days would likely scare the daylights out of her if I’d ever bothered to answer. She had dark hair like mine, and deep green eyes like me and Valoel, and she looked like she was thirty-three, though I knew she was much older than that.
“Son.” My mother stood the moment she saw me, narrowly avoiding bumping into Val. “How—how was your day?” she asked, ducking out of the way.
I don’t know why my mother bothers to speak to me when she’s clearly frightened of me. I wanted to answer, but I just didn’t have time for her at the moment. I needed to get to my room and make a plan about how to kill this Abigail human.
“Not now, mother.” I made my way up the stairs to my room.
“So?” Valoel was already in front of me, in the doorway. “Did you get me something?”
I really didn’t like my sister. She was a pest. At the moment she had a laurel-leaf crown in her rich gold hair, and that, paired with the white sundress she wore, made her look much younger than she was.
I pushed past her, “Don’t start with me, Val.”
I went into my room and closed the door behind me.
Valoel was already there. “Someone is grumpy. What’s eating you?”
My room was Spartan, almost totally empty. I didn’t have anything worth having around. When I’d come home from the Town Square on the day of the apocalypse, my room had been like any normal eleven-year-old’s. I’d had magazines of cars, sports cards I’d collected from Earth and elsewhere, a football, a skateboard on the floor, a baseball bat in the closet, and souvenirs from holiday trips all around the universe.
I’d burnt them all, because what was the point in having them when I didn’t even remember why I had them? It was all a blank.
“Val, if I ask you—”
She cut me off. “I heard you’d be working with the prince.”
Good news did travel fast.
“Did you also hear the one where the big brother killed his little sister because she was annoying him?” I asked.
“Lots of times, Gids. Lots of times.” She looked at me for a second, and then made a sofa appear, a ridiculous overstuffed thing edged in purple fringe. “Wanna’ talk about it?” she asked as she sat down. “I know the prince is powerful, and can probably kill you, but I’ll let you in on a secret.” She tapped on the space beside her for me to sit down.
Val was the only one who acted like this around me, as if she didn’t care about who I was. Sometimes it was fascinating, but today it was just irritating.
“Val, you know that I can torture you with my mind, right?”
“I know that.” She pointed for me to sit down again. “I just keep wondering why you haven’t yet.”
I humored her and took a seat. “I can’t torture you because I don’t know what you fear. I have never caught even a glimpse of fear or pain in your eyes. Don’t you feel?” I made sure my words were believable, because I had a secret I wasn’t ready to tell.
The secret was that I had never hurt Valoel because, it seemed to me, she was the only real family I had. My parents were afraid of me and could barely stand being near me. Valoel might be annoying, but she was the sole reason why I came home every day—I knew I’d have someone to talk with.
I couldn’t tell her that I thought of her as my whole family, because then she’d know I needed her, and the trick was to make everyone believe that I didn’t need anybody.
But I was sure she knew.
Valoel laughed. “I’m not a stone, Gideon. Just because you can’t feel your heart doesn’t mean I can’t feel mine.”
“Then tell me, come on. What is your greatest fear? Have you ever felt any pain?”
“Pain,” Valoel whispered. “I know pain more than anyone else.” She smiled quickly, and I knew it was to mask the sadness within.
“It doesn’t seem like it.” I pointed out.
She stood. “Look, I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to distract me from asking if you are scared of Tristan.” Nothing got past her. “I don’t need to ask. I know you are. I’ll tell you one thing though; you leave his human alone and you might just survive.” And then she was gone, along with her purple monstrosity of a sofa.
Leave his human alone? That wasn’t going to happen. I had one goal now, and one goal only: to kill his human before the sun set tomorrow. It should be easy. How hard could it be to kill a spoiled little rich girl?
MY REALITY
Abigail
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.”
John Milton
In the old West, during a shootout, you either pulled your trigger first or you died.
There were no second chances, so you’d pray you were a crack shot. The one unshakeable rule in a shootout was to be steady and keep your eyes open, no matter what.
“You’re surrounded Abigail. Give up,” my father said, his gun pointed squarely at my head.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see that at least three of my other attackers had a bead on me. I couldn’t cover all four.
“I’d listen to him if I were you!” Logan, my trainer, called out from behind the bulletproof glass enclosure at the far side of the range, where he stood for safety.
Giving up to my father wasn’t something I wanted to do, but they were both right. I was surrounded, which meant I’d lost, but then—
My father blinked, so I took the shot.
The bullet I fired went straight into my father’s chest and he fell, hard, on his back. The three men around me were taken by surprise by this, and they turned to him. I took the chance, and fired three times in rapid succession, not missing a shot.
“And that, my friends, is how you pull a trigger.” I blew on the mouth of my gun like I’d seen in movies.
Logan rushed over to my father. “Brian, are you OK?”
“Oh relax, he’ll be fine.” My father glared in pain as Logan helped him up.
I turned to the others. Just like my father, they looked a little out of sorts.
“Shake it off, guys. It’s not like I shot you with a bazooka. Not even a little armor-piercing bullet.”
We’d been at this for about three hours now. I’d got shot twice myself, but thanks to the bulletproof vests we wore, I’d been able to get up and keep fighting, though with a little difficulty. Kevlar vests will keep the bullets from tearing into your body, but the impact will still leave a horrible bruise. You can even crack a few ribs. I was still moving, but I was certainly moving a bit more slowly than I would be at my peak.
“I should stop underestimating you,” my father said as he started to pull off his vest. He seemed to be favoring his left shoulder a bit.
I walked over to the other men on the floor, and helped the first one up. “You all right?” I asked him.
He nodded, tearing at the Velcro straps of his vest. “You could have warned us, though,” he said as I moved away to offer my hand to one of the others.
“I must have missed the lesson in tactical where it’s explained that the killer should warn his victim of his plans,” I said. I was teasing, but my voice held a bit of sourness.
“Abby’s right,” my father chimed in. “No warnings, no second chances. Besides, a second chance is just another chance to screw up. She got us fair and square.
”
He and Logan joined us. Logan pulled his earplugs out, and went around with a sandwich bag collecting ours as well. “Brian, put them in the bag, don’t hand them to me! Try to set a good example for your daughter.”
One of the gunmen patted me on the back, “Nice work today,” he said. The others agreed with him, and for just a second a proud smile appeared on my father’s lips. Only a second. Then it was gone.
I stared after the men as they walked out of the hall together with Logan. They were friends of my father who had agreed to help me train today.
The moment they were out of sight, an awkward silence fell between my father and me. I wasn’t surprised, because he was barely around, and when he was, we either spent the time beating each other up or shooting each other.
It wasn’t that my father and I had nothing to talk about. It was that I didn’t know what to ask him, because… what do you ask your secret agent father when he pops around for a visit? “Hey, killed any bad guys lately?” Yeah, I was pretty sure that wasn’t something I was supposed to bring up, so I just never had any real conversions with him.
Finally my father asked, “So, how has training been going with Logan?” to close the awkward silence.
Logan McCartney was my personal trainer. He was in his mid-thirties, and before my father had hired him to train me Logan had worked for the U.S. Marine Corps. He was strong and lithe, a very good trainer and very handy with technology.
The coolest thing he’d taught me, aside from how to shoot a soda can through with an arrow without knocking it over, was how to hack into computer systems. It hadn’t been in his job description, but I’d begged him to teach me, and he couldn’t resist showing off.
Our training sessions mainly took place in a field behind our house. Logan and my father had installed reactive targets there for archery and gun practice. Once, Logan made me stand in the rain for hours shooting arrows. When I wasn’t shooting arrows or bullets, I was throwing up my fists during combat training.
“Good.” I answered. “Good. Logan is a really good teacher.” Except for the time he’d made me run twenty miles while he followed me in his car, drinking the water I’d begged for right in front of me.
“It’s good to hear you say that.” With that, the conversation reached a dead end.
My father, Brian Cells, grew up around guns, because his father was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army and worked for the DoD, the Department of Defense. He’d pretty much grown up in the Pentagon. At a young age, he was already interested in following in his father’s footsteps, and was given his first assignment as a covert agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency when he was just twenty-four. He moved to the Central Intelligence Agency soon after.
During one of his missions with the CIA he was tasked with following a model who was believed to be using her jet-setting career as a cover for engaging in espionage. He’d followed the woman to a fashion show—my mother’s fashion show. He’d met my mother, Mercy Cells, there, they’d fallen in love, and, eventually, along came me.
Unfortunately, their romance wasn’t meant to last. When my father’s identity was compromised, well, we were easier targets than he was. His enemies came for us time and time again, and finally, they got to us. Dad was able to protect us, but not before my mother was shot.
My mother needed little more than stitches, but all the same, she didn’t take it so well. She and Dad had both decided it was better if he weren’t in the picture. As a celebrity in the fashion world, the head of the Cells fashion empire, my mother couldn’t go into hiding. She was recognized everywhere. Her every moment was recorded. My father, and the secrets his job required him to keep, didn’t quite fit in with her very public life.
They’d both agreed to tell the world they had divorced. She stayed in the same house, now staffed with rank upon rank of bodyguards. I lived with her, and she’d told her friends and colleagues she had won full custody.
My father’s fears for our safety had driven him to hire Logan to train me, so that I could protect myself if anything were to happen again while he was away. I was thirteen when he’d first come to visit with Logan in tow. He’d told me that although I was watched twenty-four hours a day by my live-in bodyguards, he needed to be sure that I’d be able to defend myself if anyone got past them. From that day onward, Logan trained me in hand-to-hand combat, small arms, archery, and anything else he thought I’d need to survive if I were kidnapped.
I seriously doubted I’d get kidnapped, because my bodyguards, Felix and Ben, followed me everywhere I went, as if every teenage girl loves having her every moment watched over by trained professionals who report back to her parents. I’d never be kidnapped, and probably never have any fun, either.
My father still came to visit once every five or six months. He’d wake me up in the middle of the night, and we’d sit and talk for hours. I never knew how long he’d be able to stay: sometimes he’d be with us for a month, others he had to leave mere minutes after he arrived.
During his long-term stays, we would try to act as if we were a normal family, as if he were always around. One time when he came home several months ago, there had been a problem with my mother’s car. He and I had decided to fix it for her, but when we were done, the car wouldn’t even start. We still laugh about that.
“Are we still on for practice, or should we call it a day?” Logan asked as he walked back into the hall. “I can get the car ready if you guys want to go back home.”
We were inside an underground secret CIA training center hidden in an abandoned warehouse somewhere east of San Francisco. No, not at Alcatraz, ostensibly because that would be the first place anyone would look, though it might also have been that the prison was simply too damp for the electronics.
The facility was divided into three sectors: We were in the second sector, which housed an eclectic mix of training materials: code books, computer equipment, the arsenal. In the first sector, to our left, was the gym, with its exercise machines, heavy boxing bags, an indoor track, and an Olympic-size swimming pool. The first time Logan had taken me there, I thought swimming laps was the only thing I’d have to do. Then he’d asked me how long I could hold my breath under the water. That day I’d found out that one minute and five seconds wasn’t quite long enough.
The last sector was the all-in-one sector. There was a shop where Agency personnel learned how to repair and manufacture bombs and surveillance equipment. There were chemistry labs where they learned about explosives and about tests for the residues left by various chemical and biological warfare agents. There was a forensics lab. The first time I went into that forensics lab I’d failed my assignment terribly. There had been an elaborate re-creation of a crime scene, and I was asked to explain what had happened to the victim based on blood spatter evidence. I missed clue after clue, and ended up going over that same crime scene for four days, until finally I was able to tell Logan exactly what he wanted to hear. Luckily I made up for that by doing quite well the next week during a computer forensics test, when Logan asked me to recover and investigate some digital evidence. He’d made me spend the rest of the day trying to recover lost data from mobile device destroyed beyond fixing. At the end of the day, I couldn’t feel my fingertips.
There was also an indoor shooting range. An indoor climbing wall. A small infirmary that was better stocked than some hospitals. There was one room that contained only large metal spikes fastened to the walls, and the only way to get from one end of the room to the other was to swing from spike to spike.
Logan brought me here at least once a month so I could practice my skills and make use of the facilities. Shooting paper targets and soda cans in the backyard at home was nothing compared to the many different things I could learn in this place. It was exhausting, physically and mentally, and sometimes I tried to fake being ill to get out of going, but Logan always saw through me.
“No, we’re good. Give us a while to warm up.” My father said, and then I followed him t
o the mat where two rounds of kickboxing and a lot of pain awaited me.
DEFYING GRAVITY
OK, you can do this, Abigail,” I told myself. I mean, how hard could it be to climb a rope?
Well, this was more a fishing net with bigger holes than a rope. The first time I’d made it to the top without falling I’d bought myself a tub of ice cream to celebrate. Actually, it was more like my bodyguard, Felix, bought me the ice cream, because I couldn’t go into a store on my own without getting mobbed by the paparazzi.
“You understand the task ahead?” my father asked me, already taking his position behind the heavy bag.
I was going to be running through an obstacle course here in sector three. Besides the climb, I would have to get over a short stone wall set with spikes, and I’d have to survive the dreaded standing long jump.
The long jump in this course was no safe little track-meet sand pit. Three holes approximately eleven feet deep were built into the floor of this gym, with nets at the bottom. Each hole was about six-and-a-half feet wide, and I would have to jump each one without the benefit of a solid running start. The thought of even attempting to jump them scared me, and the nets below did absolutely nothing to calm me down.
I would have to jump all three in rapid succession before I’d reach yet another rope, which I would use to climb to a wooden platform fixed to the wall twenty feet up, on which I would find a quiver and bow.
After getting hold of the bow and quiver, I would have to climb down and race to the far end of the gym, where I would have three chances to hit a small red target that was fastened directly underneath the clock that was counting down the ten minutes I had to complete the task.
The challenge for me wasn’t just to beat the clock—the real challenge was trying to get close to beating my father. I’d tried running the course during each of my visits here with Logan, but I’d never made it past the third standing jump: I always, always fell down.
Dominion (Re-edition) Page 5