Both stood six-feet tall. Puffy black hair framed mocha-colored skin on one, while the other was dark as night, blue-black hair slicked back, so Dee wasn’t sure if it was pinned or cut short.
They were as beautiful as they were fierce.
“Desiree, meet Fera and Subra. Your Shadows. Zosma and I ask that you not go anywhere without them. They will be your eyes so you won’t have to look over your shoulder. They will be your sword arm so you won’t risk harm. They will be your weapons so you can live your life without distraction.”
Dee looked over her shoulder, suddenly worried that someone might sneak up on her.
“Not here. Here, you are safe. Truly safe. Not like the tenuous shelter you’d had with the others. No one will find you here, and if they did, they would never get to you.
“But, you will need to get used to their presence. It’s always disconcerting to have someone following you around, even if they are there for your protection. And it takes time to build trust, so you stop watching your own back.”
Dee’s inner-voice scoffed at the idea of trusting anyone, especially with her safety, most especially a pair of Soldiers assigned to her by one of the very Beings she was hoping to free herself from. Not just that, this gift of bodyguards seemed a long-term commitment, and Dee was reminded just how different Regina and Zosma’s perspective on all this was. Not only from the other Rishis, but from her own. While the thought of a family had spoken to some long-hidden piece of her, she wasn’t ready to live here with them forever. She had a life to get back to. Mike expected her to return.
The Shadows remained unmoved statues of violence through Regina’s explanation. Dee hoped their abrasive demeanors weren’t because this assignment to watch over the annoying newcomer was forced, but rather that they took their job seriously.
“Thank you.” It was the only thing Dee could think to say. What she was thankful for, she couldn’t have explained.
A palm scan, followed by a seven-digit code, had the doors whisper closed with them all inside. The pod moved so smoothly Dee noted no transfer, but when the doors opened, a new room greeted them. Dee assumed they’d traveled down, as she hadn’t noticed any towering skyscraper in the middle of the desert. She refused to consider just how much space might lay between her and the sky.
Regina led Dee to where Zosma waited. Soldiers in the shadows caught Dee’s attention, and she wondered at the state-of-the-art security that left holes that guards needed to be stationed this far inside the Rishi’s world.
Zosma’s expression distracted Dee from curiosities of security. If she hadn’t believed he thought of her as his daughter, the look on his face now sold the lie. Its intensity set her back, while the nostalgia it incited weakened her defenses.
Grateful for anything to take her attention, the aroma of coffee, brought in by a girl who looked so much like Paige Dee took a triple take, was the perfect thing.
When Dee relaxed under the influence of roasted beans, Zosma spoke. “I made a few calls. Your penchant for coffee was well known, though very little else is said with confidence. Except maybe something about a relationship with Hamal?”
Dee bristled, paused the motion of bringing the mug to her lips to throw a frown at the messenger. Her subtle movement brought a rustle of sound from the corner where a Soldier shifted uneasily. Taken aback by the response to her barest of threats, she wondered what else they’d heard about her.
-You think your Amazon Shadows will fight with you or against you if you start something?-
Regina touched Dee’s arm, bringing her attention back to the coffee in her hands, before hissing something at Zosma. A flash of regret passed over the patriarch’s face, gone before he turned back to Dee. “Yes, well, your tale can come later. It is our turn to tell stories.”
“Stories?”
“Stories. Histories. It wasn’t until the 1500’s that the two words stopped being synonymous.”
Dee sensed the arrogant timbre to Zosma’s voice was just his way. She wondered how long it would take before being talked down to got old.
“Then I suppose it is time you stop using them as such?” Regina threw Dee a wink.
Zosma’s attention shot from Dee to Regina, serious gaze lightening when he realized the teasing nature of the comment. A booming laugh, too contagious for Dee not to at least smile along, shook his shoulders.
“Ba! Change for the illiterates and fools? Never.”
They sat, Zosma and Regina together on the couch diagonal from the oversized chair Dee took. While Dee sipped her coffee, stomach wishing for the food she’d been too tired to eat last night, Zosma began.
“It has been centuries that Regina and I have striven towards this goal. It was always our plan to have a family.” The two shared a glance, and he took her hand before turning back to Dee. “When The Ophiuchus’ war started, I was called to assist in planning a strategy to stop him.”
He met Dee’s eye with a hard, pointed stare. “You know the war of which I speak? Have the others told you enough to follow what I’m talking about?”
Dee nodded, images of what the Twins’ showed her rifling through her mind.
“Even the most sophisticated cultures fight, so we did have some experience in these kinds of things. Even so, what we faced when Han set us against each other was of a magnitude we’d never conceived.”
“Is he really your brother? Are you all siblings?”
The Rishi sat back with a sigh. “So much time has passed that it doesn’t even matter. There are so few left of us, it’s become true even if it never was.
“There have been moments over our long span of life when we almost made peace. There were moments of truce, of partnership, but in the end, we all stayed too separate to ever come together. We all remember too intimately what it means to lose everything.”
His words trailed off, and Dee wasn’t sure if he’d answered her question. Regina put her other hand on his arm while he rubbed circles across her palm with his thumb.
Dee stared into her coffee.
“Our desire for a family didn’t change with our new circumstance. Refusing to believe we couldn’t have what we wanted, we put ourselves at the forefront of technology. We tracked creators all over the world. Anyone who thought outside the box. Anyone who might bring us closer to what we most desired. It was in the nineteenth century when belief finally overshadowed hope, even if it couldn’t be in the way we’d thought.
“The twentieth century allowed us to redefine how we might create what we wanted. We were in the age where we might synthesize it. This twenty-first century opened the reality of all our dreams.”
Dee hung on his every word. The explanation for her missing years, for her transformation, was about to be revealed.
“From the very beginning, my skill to create Soldiers, a talent only two others possess—”
“—and Sabik Han.”
Zosma conceded Regina’s point. “A talent four of us possess. The Ophiuchus’ skills have always been beyond the rest of us, so naturally, he knows the secret of turning humans towards ourselves. Not that it’s a secret, as the word is defined, but that the procedure works when we do it, where it doesn’t when the others try it. None of us has ever figured out the reason for this.
“It was a talent that we, from the start, monitored very closely, attempting to determine the differences that allowed us success, where others had none. Not only that, but what made Initiation work at all. Why on only a select few, and with so many variations.
“Regina and I tried new ways to Initiate. We tried to change those from our species to human, to see if we could reverse-engineer the process. Never were our questions answered.”
Zosma paused, took a breath, and Dee sat straighter, stomach flip-flopping in anticipation.
“You were created in one of these batches of experiments. You are something none of us has seen. You, I think, I—we—hope, are what we’ve been striving for.”
Dee sat in silence, eyes moving from
Zosma to Regina and back again, part of her brain acknowledging all that was said from a rational point-of-view, while another screamed a rage that would tear through mountains. How dare they play with so many lives? Lives like hers that had been altered forever. How many had died for their desire? How many more were, as they sat here, undergoing some experimental procedure that would snuff them from existence?
Her body locked under the pressure of both wanting to scream and not wanting to let it start.
“Dee?”
Regina’s concern pierced Dee’s dilemma, so tears flowed as the only release for the storm within her. The genuine parental interest the pair exuded was at such odds with what Dee had just heard she was spun off her axis, barely maintaining her hold on reality.
“The fire?” Dee pushed the words out with forced concentration.
“Your—change—was not without its spectacle. The fire was caused during the confusion of your awakening.”
Dee closed her eyes, picturing the inferno of her nightmares, feeling the heat singe her skin.
It was a moment before Zosma’s words sunk in. “Awakening?”
Regina spoke this time, and if Dee had opened her eyes, she would have seen the concerned look the Rishis shared. “You were in a medically induced coma.”
Dee’s eyes snapped open at this. “Medically induced? Someone put me in a coma on purpose?”
“It’s standard protocol. Ensures neither the subjects, nor administrators, are injured.” Zosma’s clinical voice held the undercurrent of apology.
Dee stared at him, not hiding the horror from her face. No longer bound by fear of saying the wrong thing, words spilled from her throat.
“How do you go about recruiting these subjects? I don’t remember volunteering to be made into a super-soldier, or whatever it was exactly you were trying to do.” Her voice rose as she spoke, each word spit more sharply than the last. Though she managed to keep her butt in the chair, the perimeter Soldiers taking wary steps closer didn’t disregard the threat in her tone.
A hand gesture from Zosma kept them back. “Some are volunteers.”
Dee’s eyes pinned on Zosma. “Was I a volunteer?”
Regina stared at the side of Zosma’s head, and Dee knew a conversation with their telepathic skill ensued. Frustration overcoming sense, Dee screamed into their heads, spinning their attention back to her. Not behind my back!
Too stunned to respond, silently or otherwise, the pair stared at the child they’d created.
“I wasn’t a volunteer, was I? You stole me from my life. Did you steal my friends too? Did we all go unwillingly to your little experiment? Did the fire kill everyone but me?!”
Dee hadn’t realized she’d stood, taken a step forward. Hands clenched at her sides kept from drawing the weapon she’d been trained to go for. That these weapons were withheld from her forgotten in the moment.
The guards moved forward despite Zosma’s gesture. She itched to lash out at them, but her study of Zosma’s expression kept the impulse from seizing her muscles.
He remained seated, his hand in Regina’s keeping her at his side. “Steve and Ray were a part of my lab team. It was your friends who recruited you. I had no input in choosing you as a subject. It was true serendipity that brought you to us.”
Blood rushed from Dee’s head, her consciousness detached from her physical body.
Steve and Ray were a part of my lab team…your friends recruited you. Zosma’s words played on a loop in her head. …your friends recruited you. …your friends…
Steve and Ray had kidnapped her?
She clenched her eyes, willed a memory from that time to emerge.
Steve’s face flashed in her mind, and with it, a moment of calm. If she hadn’t been too stubborn to allow it, they might still be together. Her life might not have taken this convoluted twist that was more like a bad movie.
She’d known about his feelings for her and was thankful he’d been too timid to say them out loud. But, maybe she’d been wrong about that. Maybe it had been an act to get her to trust him so he could use her in this side project of Zosma’s.
The lightest touch on her arm broached the pain of her memories. She shrank from it, surprised to feel a solid surface at her back.
Her eyes snapped open. Instead of standing in front of the chair, she was across the room, pressed against the wall.
All eyes stared at her in astonishment.
“What just happened?” She whispered, afraid to move lest reality crumble around her.
“I’ve only ever seen The Ophiuchus move like that.” Regina’s words passed through the room with some significance Dee didn’t quite grasp.
“What does that mean?”
Zosma and Regina shared a look. “We’re not sure.”
Calmed by confusion, Dee’s rage abated to make room for these new questions.
She recalled Sabik’s movements on Asellus’ mountain plateau. Too distracted at the time by the sword piercing Pollux’s torso, she hadn’t let all she’d seen slide into a place of analyzation. Sabik Han had seemed to move beyond time, so even the twin had been taken by surprise.
He’d done it again when he’d blocked her path through the door, and a third time before she’d stepped into the battle between Zosma’s Soldiers and the Twins.
Dee drew a great gulp of air. Her stance straightened with the memory of Asellus’ voice coaching her to sanity. Breathing out a loud gust, she willed logic to reign over emotion that wanted only to tear this place to rubble.
She’d continued to brush the things she couldn’t explain into a compartment of her mind. Here, in a place she could get answers, she wouldn’t allow herself to hide. She wouldn’t let a quick response get in the way, even if the voice in her head shouted to kill them all.
With feigned calm built into precise movements, Dee stepped across the room and took her seat.
12
A silence so ferocious, even a pin drop might be lost to its heaviness, settled over the room. None moved, not even a Soldier watching with vigilance, twitched.
It was Dee who broke the silence, voice quiet, eyes focused on hands clasped in her lap. “What am I?”
Regina leaned forward. “The Ophiuchus’ war put everyone’s life on hold. No children could be born while we struggled to bring our world back to harmony. Only harmony wasn’t what it meant before. The short peace wasn’t peaceful, instead a time when we were forced to examine how much had changed. How we had changed. Sown seeds don’t always spring as we’d like.”
Regina’s hand went to Zosma’s. Dee watched it move, the two appendages coming together as if it was their natural place.
Empathy swept over Dee, wonder at what it would be like to love someone for hundreds of thousands of years. She wasn’t sure she’d ever loved anyone, let alone felt something that would overcome the tests these two must-have battled. Continued to battle.
Her stare lingered on their clasped hands. “You made me your daughter.”
Regina’s smile lit up the room, so even her mane of hair shone with the warmth of the expression. “Yes! You are our miracle.”
Dee’s eyes moved to Zosma’s face, who held his expression impassive, as if afraid to show some vulnerability to one who might still reject him. His hand moved from its grasp in Regina’s to lay lightly on his love’s shoulder, as if reigning in her excitement to protect her from possible disappointment.
Dee’s heart clenched. How many times had they felt that disappointment?
But she couldn’t succumb to compassion—wouldn’t. It was this pair who was responsible for her stolen life. It wasn’t her problem to make their ideal of a happy family a reality.
Rage and sorrow, loss and bafflement continued their war inside her. She didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t sure there were words, or actions, that could touch on what she was thinking and feeling.
Her conversation with Asellus about the fruitlessness of Dee’s anger wandered into her thoughts; how being angry over
something that couldn’t be undone was futile. Still, even if that were true, Dee didn’t want to let go of her rage. The simplicity of it held some bizarre comfort she’d grown used to, the plan inherent inside it a fallback for any situation.
Except, Dee admitted that she liked who she’d become. The confidence. The power that would have been impossible in her old life. And hadn’t she had that moment of feeling at home here?
Disgust that she would accept what was done to her swallowed all other emotions. That the rape of her self could be forgiven in light of what was achieved.
But what self was that? She’d been doing nothing before all of this. After her father died, she’d run. Run from living her life.
Even before that, she’d simply done what she was told. Get good grades. Go to college. She’d never done anything outside of the automaton design her culture imbued in her. Not much living there.
Quiet tears spilled down her cheeks. Tears for a life never lived. Tears for the possibilities that lay ahead. Tears for the war inside her and the choices she didn’t know how to choose.
“How could I be your daughter?”
Regina took a breath to speak, but Zosma gently cut her off. “We wished it so.”
It was stated so matter-of-factly, it took Dee a moment to understand the depth of its ludicrousy. She pulled her eyebrows as high as they could go. “Oh?”
“That is essentially the gist of it.” Dee had hoped for more from Regina.
Dee leaned back in her chair, rubbed her temples, closed her eyes. She was getting the answers she’d wanted. She repeated this over and over. These were the answers she’d asked for.
She’d decide how to react once she had the facts. All of them.
“Your people—” Zosma sighed, eyes searching the air for the right words. “It is so difficult to explain. Your culture has fallen so far from the remembrance of how physics can work—”
His voice fell off when he saw he was creating more confusion. He glanced at Regina beseechingly, who smiled before attempting to take over the explanation.
“You’re familiar with the concept of mind-over-matter?”
We Are Forever (Rishi's Wish Book 2) Page 9