When he awoke, her scent was everywhere. The hunger stirred inside him, demanding. Lucas clenched his teeth and felt a light touch on his cheek. His eyes snapped open. She was sitting next to him, her back resting against the wall.
“How long was I out?”
“Maybe a minute or two.”
“Try to time the next one. I need to know if they’re getting shorter.”
“Is there anything else I can do?”
The ache rolled back at him. “Talk to me.”
“About what?”
“You never did tell me exactly why Emily hoards food.”
She sighed and brushed the brown lock of hair from her face. “It happened after Jonathan died.”
“Your husband?”
“Yes. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why?”
She met his gaze. “Because then you will know things about me.”
“And that would be bad?” Lucas asked.
“Yes.”
Now he wanted to know more.
“Does it hurt to be the beast?” she asked.
“No. Phasing is like being a superhero. I’m faster, stronger. Everything is sharper. There are no consequences. I can let myself off the leash. But my attack variant’s venom is toxic to my human phase variant. Turning back into a man is a bitch.”
A small tremor shook his legs. Lucas grunted and closed his eyes, trying to will the pain away.
“How long will we be locked in here?”
“Until I pull through. Hours. Arthur is trying to keep me safe. I’m an asset and I’m rare and difficult to replace. We shouldn’t have come here, to this building.” The words came slowly. “This base is not secure. We rent five floors here. We don’t own the buildings and don’t control access to it.”
Karina bent down, looking closer into his eyes. Tiny red rosettes marked the skin on her cheeks and forehead. Her own transformation was closing in. Shit. He hoped she would have another day. He didn’t want her to phase here, in the vault, without medical help, without Henry to keep her calm. She could die and he wanted her to live. He had to heal fast.
Heal, Lucas willed in his mind. Heal.
The pain exploded in a white burst and dragged him under.
When the light faded he heard her voice, soothing, calm, warm. Like sitting back in the hot tub, soaking his exhausted body while she floated nearby. “. . . met in college. Jonathan was handsome. Funny. His father was the CFO for Drivers Company. It’s a big insurance company in the Southwest. Brian’s very driven, very conscious about his appearance. Brooks Brothers suits, expensive watch, a new BMW every couple of years. He and Lynda had Jonathan when they were much older, in their forties. Jonathan could do no wrong. He was their golden child. Good at sports, good at academics. He was easygoing and charming. The perfect son.”
She leaned her head against the wall. He moved closer to her and rested the back of his head on her ankle. She let him do it. From here he could see her face. He could touch her hand. Lucas closed his eyes and let himself sink into her voice.
“Things always went Jonathan’s way. I used to watch a cartoon when I was younger. Two mice were living in a lab, and one was very smart and the other one was a knucklehead. So every night the knucklehead mouse, Pinky, would ask the smart mouse, ‘And what are we going to do today, Brain?’ And Brain would say, ‘Try to take over the world!’ And Pinky would get all excited. See, Brain was serious. He was trying to take over the world. But to Pinky it was all a big game. That’s kind of how Jonathan was. The world was his huge playground and every day he’d play at taking it over. Some days he was an athlete; other days he was a student. When we met, he was finishing his MBA and I was getting my bachelor’s in accounting. My parents had died in a car accident when I was a senior in high school. I had just turned eighteen when they passed.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucas said and meant it.
“Thank you. They left me just enough money to get me through college and I had to work to feed myself. Before they died, I wanted to go into art history.” She laughed a little, a bitter, quiet sound. “I wanted to be an art appraiser. You know, the person who examines art for auctions and museums to determine if it’s authentic. I always thought it would be so neat. But I was on my own then, so I went into accounting instead. It seemed . . . sensible. I was trying to be sensible. To have some structure. And then Jonathan shot into my world like a comet. He could make anything seem exciting. He made things fun. His parents were always very formal with me. I don’t think they ever understood why he liked me, but Jonathan picked me and he could do no wrong.”
He very badly wanted to murder Jonathan.
“It was great at first. Jonathan’s father’s connections got him a position in a private equity firm. During the day he got to play a businessman and during the night he got to play a husband. And then Emily was born. Well, you’ve seen her.”
“She is pretty,” Lucas said.
“She is. Jonathan loved her. It was yet another new game: being a dad. He used to show her off like a cute purebred puppy.” She sighed again. “I should’ve seen it then. Anyway, everything was great for a few years and then the bottom fell out of the economy. Suddenly it wasn’t fun anymore.”
“The party was over,” Lucas guessed.
“Yes. Jonathan had to start working for his living and buckle down, or the firm would cut him loose. I worked, too, and we were doing okay, but we had to mind our p’s and q’s and Jonathan didn’t want to be bogged down with details. We used to have the stupidest conversations. He couldn’t understand why he couldn’t drop thirty grand on a membership at a country club. It’s like his brain couldn’t digest the concept of a budget. I mean, the man had a master’s degree in business management, for crying out loud.” Her voice rose too high and Karina fell silent.
“What happened?” he prompted.
“Finally he decided he was tired of playing with us. He started sending me these long rambling e-mails about how he felt constrained and unhappy and about the need to find himself. He wanted to live fully, he said. To find the zest in life. At first I was concerned, then I thought he was cheating, but he wasn’t. It’s not like we were ever on the verge of bankruptcy. We just couldn’t do exciting things anymore, like ordering champagne for the entire bar. I offered to move; he didn’t want to do it. No solution I suggested was good enough. He tortured me like that for about four months. In the end I didn’t even care anymore. I should’ve fought harder maybe, but I remember one of my friends calling and telling me she saw Jonathan at her office party without me, and you know what I thought?”
She paused. Her dark eyes were huge on her pretty face. “I thought, ‘Good. Maybe he’ll meet someone and I can divorce him.’ That’s an awful thing to think about your husband. That’s when I knew the marriage was over. We were heading downhill, except there was Emily. How do you explain to a four-year-old that Daddy decided he doesn’t want her anymore because he needs to go find himself? So I spoke to his parents. I thought maybe they would talk some sense into him.”
Lucas grimaced. “You said he could do no wrong.”
“Yes, it was stupid, but I was desperate. They called him over to have a heart-to-heart. Jonathan took me out to dinner at the end of the week. I knew something was up; I could just tell. It wasn’t a date. He told me he had filed for divorce. He had no problem paying me alimony, and I could retain all my parental rights.”
A shadow passed over her face. She seemed small all of a sudden.
“We were in the car, going to pick up Emily from the sitter’s. We were fighting about his generosity in regard to my ‘parental rights.’ ” Her voice dripped with bitterness. “He wanted to leave and stay gone. I insisted that Emily needed a father and he couldn’t just take off. He was mad. He told me that everyone had a right to be happy. He wanted to be free of me and Emily but he didn’t want to be judged for it. And then, all of a sudden, he lost consciousness. It was like someone had flipped a switch. We shot into
the opposing lane. I remember headlights. I woke up in the hospital.”
She fell silent. “He had a stroke,” Karina said finally in a flat voice. “He had fibromuscular dysplasia. Nobody knew. He was healthy as a horse, played racquetball, and then he just died. It was touch and go for me for a little while but I bounced back. I was in the hospital for two weeks. Emily had to stay with his parents. They didn’t feed her.”
“What?”
“Brian, Jonathan’s father, always eats out. When Jonathan died, he spent all his time at a country club. He said it was his way to cope. Lynda is in her seventies. She has a touch of dementia. All she did was eat candy all day, but she wouldn’t give Emily any—it would ruin her teeth. She would forget to give Emily lunch, and when she did remember to feed her, she would either try to cook and burn it or she’d give Emily food that had been in the fridge for so long, it wasn’t just moldy, it was blooming.”
She was crying, not from pity but from anger. There were no tears, but he heard it in Karina’s voice, hidden behind the flat tone.
“They had a bowl of nuts set out and Emily told me she would pretend to fall asleep and then sneak out and steal them. When I got out of the hospital, she was six pounds lighter. She barely weighs anything as it is. So now you know why she hoards food. She was terrified, her father had just died, her mother was in the hospital, and her own grandparents wouldn’t feed her. I told Arthur she doesn’t have anyone except me. I meant it. We are not welcome at that house. They blame me and Emily for Jonathan’s stroke. We made his life so difficult, he died to escape.”
The red rosettes on her face were turning darker. Karina touched her hand to her forehead and looked at it. Her eyes widened. She rubbed his forearm.
“This is another reaction to the venom?”
“Mmhh-hhm,” Lucas said.
“I told you my story. Tell me yours now. It’s fair.”
“What do you want to know?” he asked, wondering what she would think if she looked inside his mind and saw him strangling her husband.
“Who are you? All of you. Who are you really? I need to know what’s happening to me.”
Lucas sighed.
* * *
She had told him too much, Karina decided. As much as she wanted for it to be a bribe, a down payment for the information he held, at least in part she told him what she did because he was lying beside her, bruised, beat up, bloody, and hurting. He needed a distraction and she had enough compassion to give him one. But she hadn’t meant to pour her heart out. It just happened. He was in pain, and although she had the means to ease his suffering, he refused to feed, because he didn’t want to hurt her. He wasn’t willing to trade his pain for hers. The least she could do was talk and try to distract him.
Karina reached over and touched his hand. His fingers closed on hers. Lucas glanced at her, surprised. They had that in common now—both of them treated any act of kindness with suspicion. She didn’t expect kindness anymore, except from him. But she was an outsider. He wasn’t.
“There are no scared women here to watch us,” he told her.
“It was never for them. It was for you.”
She almost cried and couldn’t even understand why. It was the stress, Karina told herself. The trauma of watching hundreds of people die at once. And the fever, which kept rising and rising. Her breath felt hot when she exhaled. Her skin was dry and too tight. And now there were rings of red dots all over her arms.
She had never told the entire story of her marriage to anyone. It’s the fever. Of course it is.
Lucas was looking at her. Sprawled like that, even battered, he looked enormous. If a week ago someone had told her she would be locked in a vault with a nude, bloody man who was trying his best not to devour her to stop his pain, she would’ve dialed 911 to report a lunatic running amok.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” Lucas said. His voice was laced with fatigue. “You can choose to believe it or not. It can be the truth or just a story. It’s your choice.”
“Okay.”
Lucas closed his eyes. “Suppose there is a civilization. A powerful country. It has taken over all of its available territory, but it knows that it must expand. It must continue to grow outward, or it will rot and collapse. This civilization sends colonists out to explore new territories. They find fertile lands and colonize them. When they succeed, they let the knowledge of the large civilization fade. The small colonies grow and prosper on their own, and when they develop enough, they rediscover their mother civilization and rejuvenate it with their unique achievements.”
He glanced at her.
“Okay,” Karina said. “I can see how that would happen.”
“Suppose a new island was found for colonization. An island with an abundant ecosphere and great resources. The civilization had done this many times before and they had developed a protocol. The colony ships arrived and the colonists created thirteen small settlements, Houses, one for each colony ship.
“Genetically, all the colonists belonged to the Base Strain. It’s a very stable breed of human, long-lived, resistant to diseases, armed with superior DNA repair mechanisms to counteract mutation. To successfully colonize a new environment, a species must adapt to it. To facilitate this adaptation, most of the colonists were exposed to an agent inhibiting their cellular and DNA repair and vulnerability to native viruses.”
“They deliberately made their people weaker? How does that make sense?”
“They didn’t just want a colony,” Lucas said. “They wanted a unique colony, perfectly in tune with this new island. That’s how the civilization kept itself from stagnation. The colonists wanted an explosion of mutations in the future generations, and they needed a shorter life span and faster sexual maturity to pass the new changes on to their offspring. That’s why scientists experiment on mice: they breed quickly and don’t live very long. The shorter life span goes hand in hand with faster sexual maturity. But it also brings negative anthropological consequences: immaturity, inability to pass on knowledge, loss of ethics and culture, and so on. These consequences were considered acceptable. The colony had to develop on its own without the knowledge of its origin anyway. The sooner people forgot where they came from, the better. A small group of the colonists remained as Base Strain for control purposes. They lived in the settlements, the Houses, and monitored the whole thing. With me?”
Sort of. “Go on.”
“Mutations bloomed. A succession of several dozen subspecies of human followed. Some subspecies developed variations, people with similar powers or physiology. Subspecies 29 showed all of the adaptations necessary for survival, but all eight of its types were plagued by sensitivity to heat and alarmingly low fertility. Subspecies 44, type 3, produced exceptional Mind Benders, who were prone to insanity.”
“Is that what Henry is?”
Lucas nodded.
“We’re not talking about islands, are we?”
“Some say islands,” Lucas said. “Some say planets. It’s just a story.”
A story, right. “Aliens.” She stared at him. “Are you trying to tell me that all of us are aliens?”
Lucas sighed. “You could say that. You could also say that once the planet shaped us and twisted our DNA, we are now just as native as anybody else.”
“What about Subspecies 30?” What about you?
Lucas’s eyes fixed on her. “Subspecies 30, types 1 through 5, otherwise known as Demons. A venomous, carnivorous, predatory variant of human with the ability to drastically alter its morphology. They were powerful, aggressive, territorial, and they dominated their point of origin for a few hundred years, hunting in small packs, but this subspecies was not viable long term. They were crippled because their bodies couldn’t produce a set of small molecules necessary for their survival, so they had to cannibalize other humans to get it.”
“Cannibalize?”
“At that point the various subspecies of human had only a rudimentary language and no memory of where they came f
rom,” Lucas said. “No ethics, no morals, nothing. They were forming fledgling societies and ‘might is right’ was the law. If I need your blood, and there is nothing in my upbringing or experience that tells me I shouldn’t, why wouldn’t I kill you and eat your flesh? Being a nice guy is a modern concept.”
He was serious. He was actually serious.
“Should I keep going?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“This went on for hundreds of years. The small remaining pockets of Base Strain, the original colonists, kept as a control group, meticulously documented all of it from their Houses. They didn’t interfere. They just cataloged what occurred.
“Then suddenly Subspecies 48 popped on the scene. The Rippers had a fatal vulnerability to cancers but also the ability to rupture holes in reality, accessing dimensional fragments. This was a new development, unknown to the colonists, and nobody knew what to do about it. Some Houses took Ripper children and raised them within the settlements to study them.
“The mutations bloomed and bloomed, until one subspecies emerged as best adapted. It did well in almost every climate. It reproduced quickly, showed mental agility, and demonstrated decent DNA repair. At approximately six thousand planetary cycles, Subspecies 61 was declared viable. The colonists had done their job: they had created the type of human with the best ability to survive and prosper. Now nature needed to take over. All support for other strains ceased, as dictated by the Original Mandate. Ile must survive. Subspecies 61 became ile. Everyone else needed to die to make room.”
“Subspecies 61. Humans,” Karina guessed. “Us.”
“No,” Lucas said. “Them. Your neighbors, your friends. But not you.”
Her fever was now so high, she was freezing and melting at the same time. “You said them, not me. What do you mean, not me?”
“I’m getting to that. Other subspecies were dying out, while Subspecies 61 went on to multiply and claim the island.”
Alphas - Origins Page 10