by Lucia Ashta
“Does it take long to do this?” Dolpheus asked.
“A few days. Once it’s done, we have only three days to do the splice and reinsert the eternality. Anything past that window, and the body shuts down anyway, even after we reinsert the eternality. If we miss the three day window to put the eternality back in, the client dies.”
I wondered how many rebels it had taken to narrow the window of reinsertion down to three days.
“Is it complicated to do the actual splitting of the eternality once it’s outside the body?” Dolpheus said.
“Oh it’s very complicated. There’s nothing more fragile than the eternality.”
“How do you even take it out of the body?” I asked.
The look on Lila’s face told me she was once again deliberating how much to tell us, even though it seemed that she’d told us enough that there was no point to withholding information any longer. “Very carefully,” she said.
I wanted to hear more before she shut us out. Much of what she was saying rang true. My father had confirmed some of it with what dialogue I overheard in the lab. I prompted Dolpheus with a widening of my eyes when Lila turned her gaze away from us for a moment.
“Is the splitting of the eternality what causes the change in the person? Is that what you think?” Dolpheus cued her.
“I think so.” She spoke these words as if her thoughts were far away. The words seemed ready to float off to join the rest of her, wherever she was.
“Is this splitting of the eternality evil, do you think?”
This snapped her back from wherever she’d gone. “Yes.” Her eyes trained on Dolpheus. She was firm. Again, a wronged she-dragon, although I couldn’t yet see how she’d been personally harmed. This sounded like a concern for humanity. But she obviously had no concern for the rebels they must have bought from bounty hunters that culled the wilds, looking for people as a miner looked for precious metal. So it couldn’t be a concern for humanity unless her consideration of humanity were dependent on social class only. Yet she didn’t seem to be of an upper class. Again, I realized we must be missing something. The picture she was painting was incomplete.
“Dividing the eternality, even if all we’re taking from it is a minute fragment, causes harm. I don’t know why exactly.”
I couldn’t understand how Lila couldn’t see why it would cause harm. Or why my father didn’t either. It was obvious to me. You can’t fragment what isn’t meant to be fragmented. You can’t split and splice an eternality that is meant to be whole, to be the source of energy that sustains a human life. Of course you can’t do that. Of course it will cause harm. Of course the eternality is traumatized after that, and the person can never again be the same person he was before. The eternality is the person. He isn’t a piece of the eternality. He’s the whole.
I supposed that my father must not have foreseen this eventuality because he didn’t want to; he was astute enough to work through all the ramifications of any experiment. He must have overlooked this because doing so was the only way to move forward. Now, why he cared so much about splicing was a different mystery. Why did he need to extend natural life? Why did he find it necessary to do what whichever force had blown life into us had not?
Lila continued on her own. “The client’s never the same after splicing. I’ve seen it over and again. Although I seem to be one of the few ones at the lab that does.”
“There are others that have noticed this?” Dolpheus asked.
“Yes. Although the others are too afraid to speak of it. Even I’ve never told anyone outside of the lab of this before now. Your father would crush us. He’d grind us into dust and blow us away himself if he discovered that we did anything to oppose his precious splicing. There aren’t many of us who’ve noticed. It’s mostly those of us that work in the monitoring of the clients. We see the changes in them. Most of them are courtiers so they’re not particularly friendly with us to begin with. To them, we’re servants there to do a job for them, a job that they pay highly for. If they have multiple splicing procedures done, they get meaner to us each time. It’s pretty obvious, especially now that we know to look for it. One of the courtiers, the one who’s had it done eight times already, I can’t even do his check up. He’s nasty. We do a drawing among the employees to see who has to deal with him each time. He’s disgusting. It’s awful.”
“Is he evil?” Dolpheus asked. I was glad he was trying to peg why she’d insisted on that word.
She shrugged. “He might be. He’s nasty enough for it. And there’s something about his eyes that isn’t right anymore. But Lord Brachius is the worst. He’s spliced himself at least ten times—that I know of—and I have no idea if he did it more than that before I joined the staff.”
I sighed, releasing sadness for my father I hadn’t acknowledged in a long time. Why would he care about extending his life so much that he would ruin it? Was this what my mother had been begging him to stop right before she left? Had she seen what he’d been unwilling to look at?
“So why did you say the splicing facility was evil?” Dolpheus tried again.
“Because it is. It has to be. If you saw what I’ve seen, you’d think the same thing. These people aren’t the same people they were when they began. They change. They become someone else. Maybe even something else. And whatever they become, it’s evil.”
Twenty-Eight
Maybe my father’s splicing facility was evil. Even though Lila hadn’t said it this way, there must be some consequence for altering things that weren’t supposed to be altered. There might even be some punishment for messing with the one thing that was so fragile, elusive, and possessed of that mystery that encompassed the source of life that it should have been guaranteed that nothing could be done to defile it.
Although I was the last one to talk of things being sacred, and perhaps the last person on all of Planet Origins that would consider becoming a Devoted, espousing all the mumbo-jumbo that Devoteds did, about there being something greater than us—a Something, a Being of some sort that they never seemed able to define with satisfying precision—I believed that the eternality was something much better left alone. Already, with just what Lila had told us, I had enough to decide that the eternality wasn’t intended for interference. It was perhaps the only thing within our bodies that should be left within it at all times—no exceptions.
Yet my father had found a way to remove the eternality and to extend life unnaturally through its removal, to multiply what had already been decided, to prolong a life span that averaged a thousand years or so already. With splicing, a person could live indefinitely. A courtier could continue his relatively pointless existence as long as he wished. He could live long enough to comment on all the fashions that passed through the royal palace. He could live to wear his hair long and short, colored and plain, and hidden beneath wigs. He could make up his face in all sorts of shades to conceal the “evil” that was festering within the imbalance of his eternality.
I began to understand my father more. I began to suspect some of the reasons that might have caused him to reject his son, the only family he had left, and why he didn’t search for my mother, a woman that I believed he’d loved, after she left.
“You seek to destroy my father’s facility?”
Lila blushed, and I found myself smiling at her, two unexpected reactions.
“Well, I hadn’t thought I could do anything to destroy it myself until you both came along and kidnapped me. I knew that something needed to change, but I didn’t think to do anything to change it.” Candor. “But when I realized that Lord Brachius’ son had taken me, well, it occurred to me that you might be able to destroy it, with your friend. Both of your reputations are known to me. I think most of O probably knows of you and your victories. You could take down the splicing lab. You could keep this from happening anymore.”
Dolpheus and I could—perhaps. However, taking on an industry that created a kind of race of immortal, evil humans hadn’t been my plan this mor
ning. I didn’t know if I wanted to mess with the situation. I didn’t always make noble decisions. I told you that, remember? My intentions were only to save Ilara. I wanted to save her mostly because I loved her, and it wasn’t an easy thing to find the right woman to love. I wanted to share my life with her, with both of us on the same planet. I wanted to fuck her long and hard, and as often as possible; she was always a willing partner whenever my dick rose to the occasion. Saving the rule of the Andaron Dynasty, while important, was a distant second to the real reasons I wanted to see her return. Restoring her purpose as protector of Origins was also important though I placed it on this second tier as well. Dismantling my father’s empire didn’t even have a tier right now. I didn’t even want to think about it.
Dolpheus and I were soldiers, even if lately we’d become soldiers for hire. We weren’t heroes. We had no interest in righting all the wrongs that were omnipresent all across Origins. Despite all things, my father was still the hand that fed me. I lived off of the fruits of splicing, even if I didn’t know precisely what the process involved. My father might have abandoned me in the ways that mattered most to a son, but he’d always provided for my physical needs. Dolpheus and I lived on one of my father’s estates, the one we’d chosen, without concern for our wants. We did mostly as we pleased.
“What you ask of us extends far beyond our mission,” Dolpheus said.
“But you could still do it, couldn’t you? You could stop this.” Had Lila grown a conscience in the last few minutes?
“Maybe we could. But either way, we can’t now. We need to find the Princess.”
“You don’t understand. It’s worse than you think. I’m the one who looks into these people’s eyes. It’s not a good thing, not at all.”
No, she hadn’t grown a conscience that had a place for murdered rebels, I realized. It was fear that tinged her voice. It wasn’t strong, but it was there. Every good soldier knew how to detect fear.
“Have these people ever done anything?” Dolpheus asked, and I couldn’t blame him for his inability to articulate the question. How did you ask if a splicing client had done anything immoral when courtiers held a general disregard for any life they considered more lowly than their own? Squashing, backstabbing, pillaging, taking what wasn’t theirs, and even murdering were all part of their regular methods of operation, though they usually ordered underlings to do the more unsavory tasks.
“I don’t know. They’ve never hurt me. But it’s just not right. I’m telling you, it isn’t right. It’s evil.”
“And you still want us to let you go back to the lab? Even after all you’ve told us?” I asked. Now that she’d shared some of the truth with us, there didn’t seem much of a point to keeping up the ruse she was trying, not very artfully, to spin.
“If I don’t go back, if I just disappear from the lab, your father will send people to look for me. And when they find me, they’ll kill me.”
I searched her eyes. I sought confirmation within brown irises.
“You don’t know when you start there. The pay is good. We even get our bonuses in pure sand. The hours are good. No double shifts.” She didn’t even bother to cover the tracks of her previous lie. She must have realized that lies were pointless at this stage. “We even get vacation time. The work is interesting enough. Lord Brachius is a nightmare to deal with, but you get used to it. It takes a long while to realize what you’ve gotten yourself into. For me, it took years. But then, once you realize, you also see that there’s no way out. You stay, or they kill you. Because the secrets we learn working there are more valuable to Lord Brachius than a human life. They’re worth piles and piles of sand to him. If the elite begin to question what he does, then splicing falls apart. They won’t pay for something that makes them evil, even as greedy as they are. They won’t want to extend their lives if it means leading a life of evil.”
Maybe. Maybe not. I knew most of the courtiers that made regular appearances at the royal palace. They might think it worth the degradation to achieve immortality. Besides, I didn’t think Lila realized how depraved many of the courtiers’ practices were even before they began splicing themselves. They were the force behind most of O’s iniquity.
“So what’s your idea?” Dolpheus asked. “You want us to send you back to the lab where you’ll pretend everything is normal until we can come in and wage a battle against Lord Brachius and bring down the splicing industry?”
Lila didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. The fact that this had been her hope, and that she hadn’t thought it very far through, was obvious from the appeal scrawled across her face.
Dolpheus turned toward me. For the first time since this all started, he really looked at me. We couldn’t do what she’d asked. We both knew it. We couldn’t send her back into the lab. It didn’t matter that we might believe her story, at least the parts of it that rang as truth. We couldn’t trust her to keep the secrets we needed kept. She was unreliable, and worse, now we realized that she was also scared. The instinct for survival allowed most people to do things they wouldn’t normally do, and this one had a blurry sense of right and wrong to begin with.
We didn’t want to invade the lab. Maybe we’d revisit the dangers of splicing at a future time, but now we had other things to focus on.
Just looking at the resigned features on the face I knew so well, I recognized that we’d both come to the same conclusion. And it stunk. We couldn’t set Lila free because her freedom posed too grave a danger to us. And matters had just gotten worse. If we couldn’t let her return to the lab now, it seemed that we wouldn’t be able to in the future either. We couldn’t send her back in there at any point if they were going to kill her.
The information she possessed was highly valuable. Certainly, there was more of it than she’d shared with us. With a process as complicated as splicing, there had to be more details important enough to affect how Dolpheus and I would view matters and the decision it seemed we’d eventually be forced to make, one way or another.
All this boiled down to one depressing conclusion: We were stuck with her, a woman we didn’t particularly like and certainly couldn’t trust.
Twenty-Nine
Thanks to our unintended capture of Lila, I had more than enough secrets of my father’s splicing empire to trade King Oderon for Ilara’s whereabouts. Undoubtedly, the King would be intoxicated by the discovery that my father’s secrets were dirty—evil even, as Lila insisted they were. The King would relish the thought of what he could do with the information, how he could hold it over my father, just like any other bully. And what was a king if not a bully? He wielded power over his subjects by force. He wielded power over me by dangling something that I wanted right in front of me, just out of reach. This something was a someone sufficiently important to me that I could justify doing many otherwise questionable things to reach her.
Now, I had to decide how far I’d go to secure Lila’s silence. “Dolpheus, will you join me in a private conversation?”
Lila looked a bit surprised that we should want to exclude her from our planning, and that surprised me. She’d surely proven that she was intelligent enough to put together facts and their ramifications to reach accurate deductions. She couldn’t possibly believe that after all the instability she’d revealed to us, and just a day in our company, that we’d include her as an equal part of our team.
“You won’t scream, right?” Dolpheus asked. He, too, had noticed the offended look on her face. “We’re just going to discuss how we can make this work in the best way for everyone, you included. Our desire not to hurt you in any way continues. You’ll wait here for us, yes? Quietly?”
Lila frowned a bit, but finally nodded her reluctant agreement. I was glad Dolpheus had said what he had. This woman appeared to be predictably unpredictable. She seemed genuine in her agreement to wait for us in silence.
Dolpheus and I walked far enough into the trees to make sure that Lila couldn’t overhear us, but not so far that we couldn’t reach
her if she were to decide to bolt after all. My friend and I stood side by side, eyes trained on the woman, hands on our hips.
“Phhhhh.” Dolpheus blew out frustration. “That’s one nutso woman.”
“Right? I was wondering if you were thinking the same thing. She’s all over the place.”
“All over.”
“We have to be careful with her. I kept thinking she was like a she-dragon. Like the wealthy women who are so petulant and horribly vengeful when they think they’ve been wronged.”
He nodded, dark hair bouncing. “Totally. She is a she-dragon. She breathes fire, and I have the feeling we’ve only seen a hint of what brews inside her.”
“Well. Let’s hope we don’t have to see any more of it. I’ve seen enough to want to run far, far away from this lady.”
“Me too. I wish we could.”
I sighed heavily. “I can’t believe we’re in this situation. We’re stuck with her. You realize that, right?”
“Of course. We’re totally stuck with her. We can’t send her back to the lab, no matter what she tries to convince us of.”
“Agreed. No way can we send her back to the lab.”
“And we can’t just set her free either,” Dolpheus said.
“No. She’d definitely talk at some point. Well, maybe not definitely, but it’s certainly possible.”
“Which leaves us two last options.”
“Which are?” I asked.
“Either we kill her, or we’re saddled with her.”
“I don’t want to kill her.”
“Neither do I,” Dolpheus said. “Until I think about what it’s going to be like having her along with us for who-knows-how-long.”
I groaned. “It’s going to be miserable.”
“Yes. It is.”
“And we have no idea how long we might have to keep her with us. None of the reasons for not being able to set her free are likely to change soon.”