Regeneration (The Incubation Trilogy Book 3)

by Laura Disilverio

  “We don’t need the distraction. Holding the Kube against the Prags has to be our focus. I don’t need people speculating about Alexander, wondering if he was truly loyal to the Defiance, or feeding information to our mother.” He gives the word an ugly twist. “To the woman who happens to be trying her damnedest to stamp our cause into the dust, to consolidate her power and eradicate all opposition. Do you understand?” He’s in control of himself again, his voice level.

  I wonder if he’s worried that Alexander was in touch with Emilia Alden, if he’s doubting his father—our father. Now is not the time to try to convince him that Alexander is still the honorable man he knew all his life. Maybe someday we can talk about him, but not tonight. “Got it,” I say.

  The words are hardly out of my mouth when he backhands me. My head whips sideways and pain blooms in my cheek. I taste blood.

  “That’s for deserting your post and going AWOL.” He steps away and raises the ACV’s doors. Their mechanical whine underscores his next words. “If it happens again, I’ll shoot you myself, sister or not. If you get any more mysterious communications, you tell me and I’ll make a decision about how they should be handled—you don’t go off on your own to meet your mother or your lover or anyone else. Stick to the lab and stay out of my way.”

  We journey back to the Kube in silence, Idris piloting the ACV with a recklessness that will kill us if we hit anything, but I say nothing, merely gripping the underside of my seat with both hands and releasing a sigh of relief when we arrive safely. Without another word, Idris climbs out of the ACV and stalks off when we have cleared the sentries and regained the relative safety of the Kube compound. He’s leaving me to return the ACV and explain my absence to Wyck. Not a task I’m looking forward to.

  I expect to find Wyck in the command center, but when I finally run him to ground, it’s in the new, makeshift armory, a series of rooms in the Kube’s basement that were used for storage not so long ago. This is where Minister Fonner kept the suitcase that I was found in, the one with the luggage tag that gave me my name: Jax. I guess these rooms are still used for storage, only now they’re housing weapons and ammunition rather than files, supplies, and former ACs’ effects. Wyck’s sitting cross-legged on the floor in a small room with shelves rising almost to ceiling height on three walls, filled with what look like grenades. He’s surrounded by metal parts and tools, and is using a biolume flashlight to peer at the innards of some gadget. His jumpsuit is shucked to the waist and the thin T-shirt underneath reveals wiry, muscular arms with cords that stand out on his forearms. A man’s arms. He notes my presence with a quick sideways glance, and then inserts a metal pick into the gadget and scrapes. I stand in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot, as the scratch of metal on metal fills the silence. The odor of a petroleum lubricant makes the room feel close. Wyck puts the pick down and works a lever on the gadget up and down. He’s not going to make this easy.

  I take a small step into the room. “I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I thought you were in trouble,” he says, without looking up from his task. “Maybe even dead.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It was Saben, he—”

  “Saben?” He jabs at the metal sphere, the old jealousy flaring up. I hope that’s not a live grenade he’s working on.

  I hurry to explain everything, focusing on the intelligence that Saben supplied, giving him the details about the microdrone that Saben made me memorize. He finally sets down the gadget and fixes his eyes on my face while I talk. I think maybe the value of Saben’s intel has taken Wyck’s mind off what I did, but he interrupts me.

  “You lied to me.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “You made me look like a gullible fool in front of my commander.”

  I’m surprised he refers to Idris that way. Not so long ago, they were more or less peers despite Idris being older. No, I amend. It wasn’t so much that they were peers as that they were working toward different goals. Idris was trying to align Bulrush with the Defiance, while Wyck was focused on escaping to one of the outposts and taking me and Halla and her baby with him. How long ago that seems. Now, they’re working toward the same end and Idris is in charge. It gives me pause.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again, knowing it isn’t enough.

  Wyck jumps to his feet and shrugs his arms into the jumpsuit’s sleeves. He comes closer. Anger and hurt darken his eyes. “Why couldn’t you just have told me the truth, that you needed an ACV to meet up with Saben?”

  “Because I didn’t know—” I stop myself. I can’t tell Wyck I didn’t know I was meeting Saben, that I thought I was rendezvousing with my mother. Wait. Why not? I don’t need to tell him about Idris being my brother, or about Alexander being my father. So I tell him, starting with the clues that led me to suspect Emilia Alden was my mother, the conversation I had with her, and the phone call that made me think she wanted to meet.

  I think he’ll be happy for me, that he’ll forgive my subterfuge—okay, my lies—when he knows the truth. Instead, he takes a step back, disillusionment compressing his face. “You’ve known since before you got back who your mother is? You found your mother and you didn’t tell me? We left here”—he flings an arm out to indicate the Kube—”so Halla could hook up with Loudon and you could find out who your parents were. I came with you to help you because it was important to you, and I cared about you, and you don’t even—”

  “You came with us to avoid border duty,” I lash out, hurt by his reaction. “Helping me and Halla was just an excuse for you to run away before you got inducted.” He did horn in on my and Halla’s escape to avoid the border guards, but I know all our motives for leaving were more complicated than they appeared on the surface, and that they morphed and shifted during our months together. Before I can figure out how to say that, to backtrack, to apologize again, Wyck is moving.

  He stoops to pick up a cloth and wipes grease off his hands. When he speaks, his voice is distant. “What happened to you in Atlanta, Everly? I don’t even know who you are anymore.” He drops the cloth atop the tools, still scattered in a semi-circle, and walks out, leaving me standing there alone. I stare at the walls lined with grenades, convinced that all of them together have less power to wound than a handful of words said bitterly.

  Chapter Eight

  A long, miserable week passes. Dr. Ronan and I are making progress with the locusts after a necessary delay to separate out the females so we can—ironically—breed more locusts. We can’t risk leaving the compound to capture more, so we need to reserve breeding stock so that we can generate more locusts to infect and release. That will help the mutation spread much faster. Ideally, we’d arrange for labs around Amerada to operationalize our research and release altered locusts in their locations, but that’s impossible for the moment. Yet another reason to hope the Defiance wins victory sooner rather than later. Despite my work going well, it’s a tough period. Wyck is avoiding me (although Fiere reports that he’s simply busy working on countermeasures against the microdrones Saben told us about), and Idris glowers every time we bump into one another. No microdrone attack has occurred, and he has taken to needling me in staff meetings and I know he thinks I made it up, or that Saben did. Jereth has grown bored with recording our admittedly slow-moving experiments and hasn’t been in the lab for more than a week. I’m surprised to find that I miss his hyper presence, miss answering his questions and his interest in my work. Dr. Ronan has been grumpier than usual and his pores exude stale Wexl even first thing in the mornings. I miss Saben.

  I think about our lovemaking at night, in my narrow bed, safe from prying eyes that might correctly interpret my blushes or my lack of attention. I relive the heat of his bare skin pressed to mine, the wild abandon of his kisses, the tug on my scalp when he tangled his fingers in my hair, the way he pressed into me and we rocked together. I feel connected to Saben in a whole new way and our separation is even harder than it was. Only duty keeps me here.
My duty to Amerada, my work with the locusts.

  I wake early on the eighth morning after I saw Saben. I lie in bed for a quarter hour, but sleep has fled for the night. I might as well get up and get some work done. I dress quietly, munch a vegeprote bar that I find in my bag, and glide ghostlike through the passageways to the dome. A sentry challenges me when I pass into the dome, but lets me pass when I supply the correct password. I have to give Rhedyn credit for safeguarding the dome. Her troops are alert and professional. Commandeering an ACV scooter, I zip toward the lab. The breeze I generate sifts through my hair which I didn’t bother to comb, and I breathe deeply to inhale the scents of loam and citrus. I’m still some distance away when I notice a light glimmering from inside the lab.

  My brows contract. It’s three a.m. There shouldn’t be anyone in the lab. Dr. Ronan. Of course it’s Dr. Ronan, maybe taking advantage of the lab’s emptiness to whip up a batch of his illegal Wexl. I don’t want to discomfit him, so I make plenty of noise when I dock the scooter, dropping it on its side and exclaiming with faux annoyance. The light goes out and I smile slightly. Dr. Ronan knows ways into and out of this lab that no one else knows exist; I’m certain he’ll be gone by the time I enter. Giving him another few seconds, I right the scooter and then pass through the doors which whoosh closed behind me.

  Just over the threshold, I halt. There’s someone else here. Even in the total dark, I can feel his or her presence, even though I don’t hear scufflings or even breathing. It must be Dr. Ronan, I tell myself, but I’m no longer as certain as I was. I make myself as still as possible, taking slow shallow breaths, every sense straining. The locusts rustle in their enclosure, a compressor hums, the faucet that needs its washer replaced drips at four second intervals. All normal lab noises. As my eyes grow accustomed to the dark, I make out the vague contours of counters and sinks, of cabinets, microscopes and centrifuges. Nothing unusual. I sniff the air like a feral dog, expecting the sting of alcohol, proof that Dr. Ronan was concocting more Wexl. Nothing . . . absolutely nothing. I’m over-reacting, on edge because of the situation with Idris, my lack of sleep.

  My hand moves toward the light switch. Suddenly, a hunched figure hurtles from my right and bowls me backward. A countertop stops me, gouging into my spine which arches painfully. I snap forward, gathering myself into a defensive position, moving forward, but my attacker has seized his chance and bolted. The automatic door is closing behind him when I push my arm through the gap and the doors imprison it. The beat before it reopens gives my attacker the opportunity to leap on my scooter, ignite it, and take off, hunched low over the controls so I can’t make out height or bulk. I run after him for a few steps, but almost immediately recognize the futility of that. I can’t outrun an ACV.

  “Intruder!” I holler instead, wishing I’d taken the time to put on a uniform and radio, instead of schlepping over here in the tunic top and loose pants I used for training.

  Booted footsteps come running. “What’s wrong ma’am?” the young sentry asks. Her face is narrow, nervous, brown hair drawn back so hard it tugs at the corners of her eyes.

  “Intruder. In the lab. Sound an alert.”

  She barks a code word into her radio and a klaxon goes off a split second later. Lights power on, flooding the dome so it’s as bright as noon. I blink rapidly and pivot 360-degrees, looking for whoever attacked me. I see no one. “He took my scooter,” I tell the sentry. She relays that information to the first of ten or fifteen Defiers who respond to the alarm, weapons ready. Rhedyn appears, uniformed, red hair streaming past her shoulders, and deploys her troops with orders to visually check each exit and detain anyone they find in the dome.

  She swings to face me. “Anything missing, Everly?”

  Without answering, I trot back to the lab which is now fully lit up, and begin a walk-through. I start with the cabinets where we store volatile chemicals, but it’s locked and its contents untouched. Everything is in its proper place, no doors swinging open like they would be if a thief ransacked the place, no breakage from careless searching. It’s not until I get to the back of the lab, almost to the cooler units, that I notice a slide left on a microscope. I’m sure it wasn’t there when we cleaned up yesterday. Using my thumb and forefinger, I start to pull it out, but then I lean forward and put my eye to the microscope eyepiece.

  My brows twitch together. I’m not sure what I’m looking at. The matter appears to have reacted with a reagent and it’s stained orange. I raise my head slowly. Someone has been conducting experiments in my lab after hours, someone interested in DNA. Without hours of investigation, though, I won’t be able to figure out what genes the intruder was isolating. Questions jumble in my head: Who? What kind of experiments? To what end? How long? The thought that someone has been creeping into my lab—my lab—in the dead of night and conducting his own illicit experiments pisses me off. He could have compromised our locust data.

  Rhedyn appears at my side, taller and broader than me. Her forceful personality is comforting right now. “Well?” she asks.

  “Nothing missing as far as I can tell,” I say slowly, “but there’s this.” I hold up the slide.

  Her forehead wrinkles and her forefinger taps on the beamer she holds loosely along her thigh. “A slide? So what? There must be hundreds of them in here.”

  “Someone broke in here to run unauthorized experiments,” I say, but it’s clear she doesn’t grasp the import.

  She makes a dismissive sound. “One of your technicians probably forgot to clean it up.”

  I shake my head. Apparently something in my expression makes her take me seriously, because her lips firm, and she says, “Okay. Tell me why this worries you.”

  Before I can answer, the main doors slide open and Idris strides in, cloaked in impatience and irritation, and flanked by Fiere, Jereth and another of his senior commanders. “What’s going on? Give me a sitrep.”

  Rhedyn gives him a succinct account, concluding with, “The scooter was found near the main access door to the Kube proper. No intruder located, sir. He or she wasn’t from outside the compound. No way someone without access got past my sentries. Everly think someone was in here to conduct an experiment.”

  Idris cocks his head, black hair brushing his shoulder. “Sounds implausible. What makes you think so?”

  I hold up the slide. “This.”

  Before I can explain what it is, or at least what I think it is, he reaches for it. “Let me see.”

  I start to draw my hand back—the slide isn’t going to mean anything to him—but his fingers graze the thin piece of glass and dislodge it from my grasp. It tumbles to the floor and shatters.

  My gaze goes from the glass splinters to Idris’s face. He looks half-penitent for a moment, but steps back from the shards with a muttered, “I’m sure it was nothing. What did the intruder look like, Jax?”

  I glare at him. “It was dark. I couldn’t see. Not tall, but solid. I think it was a man, but it could have been a woman.” I rub my back where my bruised spine reminds me of the force with which the attacker hit me.

  “Are you okay?” Fiere asks.

  I shoot her a half-smile. “No worse than after a couple of rounds in the training room with you.”

  “What were you doing here at this hour?” Idris asks with sudden suspicion, studying me from under a shelf of brow.

  “Couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d get some work done.”

  He looks unconvinced and peers around as if he expects to spot Saben or some other unauthorized person under a table.

  I’m fed up—first the klutz breaks the slide that was our only clue and now he’s acting like I was up to something clandestine. I need some alone time to figure things out. Having a herd of people in the lab isn’t helping anything. I make shooing motions. “Everybody out. I’m going to clean this up and get some work done before breakfast. Unless you’re up for dissecting locusts, clear out.”

  Fiere laughs, raises a hand in farewell, and heads for the door. Idris tells
Rhedyn to keep her squad on higher alert for the rest of the night, and orders his other commander to question everyone on the compound to see if he can figure out who accessed the lab without permission. At least he’s taking me a little bit seriously.

  He shoots that thought down almost immediately by adding, “I don’t think anyone was in here cooking up Psyche in the dead of night, but we need to maintain discipline and we can’t tolerate Defiers mucking around where they don’t belong.” He sweeps out, followed by the others.

  Alone, I take a deep breath in and blow it out hard. Silence settles, the familiar silence of the lab, a fabric of hums, drips and ticks that is better than true silence. Comforting. I rest in it for a moment, and then fetch a piece of paper and an envelope. Carefully coaxing the slide slivers onto the paper, I tip them into the envelope. I’m not sure why I don’t drop them into the incinerator bag where all organic waste goes, but I want to hang onto this evidence of . . . whatever. I label the envelope with my initials and tuck it into the back of one of the coolers, behind a rack of vials.

  I pass by the locust enclosure where the inmates eye me balefully, awakened by the unusual light and activity. A handful spring at the mesh as I pass, making it vibrate with a metal hiss, but I ignore it. I know I won’t be able to focus on work, so I curl up in my desk chair, tucking my feet beneath me, and rest my chin on my knees. Could Idris be right? Was the lab invasion simply a matter of someone cooking up a batch of Psyche, the mind-altering drug, for his own use or to sell on the black market? We have the precursor chemicals, certainly, but we aren’t depleting them at an unusual rate. I thought Dr. Ronan might be making Wexl—is it such a huge leap to think that some Defier has gone entrepreneur and is making Psyche? I bite my lip. Even if that is the simplest explanation, it doesn’t fit with the slide containing a DNA sample.

  No other realistic possibility occurs to me, no matter how I wrack my brain. An AC carrying on with her studies alone (after escaping from the wing where Fiere’s squad stands guard)? That smacks of impossible, even though it’s the sort of thing I could see myself wanting to do if I were a captive here. One of my technicians, wanting to amaze me by making a breakthrough of some kind on the locust project? Also something I yearned for when I worked for Dr. Ronan. I know my cogitations are too “me” oriented, but I can’t seem to come up with any other possibilities for clandestine nighttime lab use. As my eyelids droop, one disturbing possibility floats into my consciousness . . . a bio weapon or a chem weapon.