Regeneration (The Incubation Trilogy Book 3)

by Laura Disilverio

  Wyck is lunging toward them and I whip the knife out of my waistband, call his name, and send it skittering across the deck to him. He snags it mid-slide, and advances as Chrysto pulls his arm back to knife Fiere again. Idris starts to lower the beamer and aim at Wyck, but I tackle him at the waist. My rush propels him backward. He slams into the railing with an “Ungh.”

  A supernova of pain explodes in my head. He’s hit me with the beamer. My head whips to the left and the taste of blood erupts in my mouth. My body is acting without conscious direction, my arms tightening around Idris’s waist, my legs plowing forward, trying to push him back, keep him from shooting at Wyck and Fiere. The beamer sizzles near my ear and the odor of heat fills my nostrils. Wyck screams, “Fiere,” there’s a splash, a snap like a brittle branch breaking, and then Idris’s arms clamp around me and we’re falling.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  We fall for what feels like forever. Then we’re in the water. The impact’s force rips us apart. Water closes over my head and the force of the fall pushes me deeper. My imperfectly-buckled life vest slides off. Idris is gone. I don’t know where. Panic closes my throat. I open my eyes. The salt water stings them and I can’t see anything. Below me is a bottomless chasm of dark. I’m disoriented. I need air. I spin. An area that is less dark flashes by. Up. That must be up. I reach for it, cupping my hands to pull at the water and kicking. My boots slow me and I kick them off. Silvery bubbles escape my mouth and drift up. Precious air. If I don’t reach the surface now, I will gulp seawater. I will drown. Keegan’s face appears in front of me, distorted by water, but I see the golden gleam of his eyes, the iron determination in his tight-lipped expression. His hands hold me under. Why? Can’t breathe. My lungs are on fire, compressed by a heated anvil. I can’t . . .

  My head breaks the surface. I drag in a deep breath, and choke on seawater. Salty, nasty. I spit it out. Another breath, then another. A wave swamps me and I come up sputtering. My arms flail at the water. I’m trying to keep my head above water, but I can’t swim and my tired limbs aren’t going to last long. I swirl three hundred sixty degrees and spot the beach, miles away, and the Belle, between me and the beach and also an impossible distance away . . . and getting farther away.

  The tide is going out! Pulling me out to sea. “Help!” My cry sounds feeble in my ears, and I know no one heard me. I scream again, but get a mouthful of seawater. I can’t waste my breath on screaming. I aim for the Belle and start to kick. The water, which always felt so warm when I waded in it off the beach, is chilly, leaching the warmth out of me. I keep kicking, using my arms to sweep the water aside. I can’t tell if I’m getting any closer to the Belle or not. Time passes. I don’t know if it’s ten minutes or an hour.

  My muscles burn as lactic acid builds up in them. I face the truth. I’m farther from the Belle than when I started. It looks smaller, and has canted further onto its side. Will it sink before I drown? I’m going to drown. The truth seeps through me, like dye staining fiber. I stop paddling and kicking and try to float, turning over on my back and resting my head against the water. I bob with the swells. It’s harder and harder to keep my face on the surface. Waves push water into my mouth and nose, down my throat. I’m going to drown. I can’t feel my feet anymore. Are they still kicking?

  I wonder if Wyck and Fiere are okay, or if Idris shot one of them before we fell overboard. No. They have to be okay. Halla smiles at me and I smile back. My friend. Saben. I picture his face, letting it form in my head. The thought of him warms me. Our laughter, our lovemaking. He’ll be so sad . . . Don’t be sad, my love. A wave raises me up and I go under as it curls over and bears me toward the bottom of the sea. As I sink, someone calls faintly, “Everly . . .”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The pounding on my chest is pushing me through the ocean floor. The pressure makes my lungs and stomach erupt. Pain sears my esophagus. I’m vomiting up glass. Water explodes from my mouth and someone turns my head so it dribbles down my chin and into the sand.

  “About time,” a man’s voice says.

  I barely hear it over my coughing and heaving. When it feels like I’m emptied out, I swipe the back of my hand over my mouth and raise my head. Sand grains fall off my cheek. The beach. I’m on the beach. I didn’t drown. How—? I push up on one elbow.

  Idris is kneeling beside me, watching me with something very like concern on his face. When he sees me look at him, his expression goes opaque.

  “You saved me,” I say. My voice sounds croaky.

  “No reason not to.” His dark eyes study my face.

  “How? I was a couple of miles from the beach—”

  That elicits a thin smile. “Half a mile, maybe. The current pulled me the same way it pulled you. I saw you go under. I dove a couple of times and managed to pull you up by your hair.”

  When he says that, I realize my scalp hurts. I rub it.

  “Better you than me,” he says, running fingers through his short hair.

  “Fiere? Wyck?” I ask anxiously.

  He shrugs. He’s bare chested, having lost his shirt in the sea, I figure. I realize the water has made my thin undershirt virtually see-through, but I can’t bring myself to care.

  “What now?” I ask, sitting up all the way. We can’t have been here too long because a sliver of the Belle’s upper deck is still visible to our left.

  “You stay. I go.”

  “I can’t let you escape,” I say, realizing even as the words leave my mouth how foolish they are. I’m so weak I couldn’t stop an ant from crawling away right now.

  His slanted smile says all that.

  “Where?” I ask, looking inland. There’s not much coverage and I don’t think there’s a town for miles. The BSS will bring in the infrared drones they use to track immigrants and snare him within hours. I know I should be glad.

  He shakes his head slightly. “There.” He points to the sea.

  Dimly aware of a boat’s motor getting louder, I say, “You’ll drown.”

  “Maybe.”

  I can see he’s made peace with the idea of death. “Idris—”

  “Gotta go.”

  He leans over and kisses me hard on the lips. He tastes like salt. He pushes away from me with enough force that I rock back, stands, and trots toward the water line. He splashes into the surf until he’s waist deep, and then he dives. No look back. A smooth, steady stroke and the tide carry him quickly away from the beach, out to sea. I watch him until I can’t see him anymore. He’ll drown. Despite what he did, sadness tugs at me, as strongly as the sea did. He did something evil, but he wasn’t evil through and through. He loved Alexander, and fought valiantly for the Defiance and the rights of natural borns. Maybe these last months were a kind of temporary insanity, brought on by witnessing Alexander’s awful death.

  That’s what I tell myself, as I get unsteadily to my feet and wave at the approaching boat. The emerald prow slices through the water, almost here, and I spot Fiere and Wyck on board. No Chrysto. Relief and elation flood through me. I wave my whole arm wildly. Captain Vancil waves back and slews the boat to a halt, far enough offshore that it doesn’t run aground. He idles it there while Fiere and Wyck jump overboard and splash toward me, calling out unintelligibly and grinning. I start sobbing and laughing simultaneously.

  A raucous “Ka-raw!” makes me jump. I whirl around, almost losing my footing, and see a splash of brilliant green and blue in the frondless palm tree. I stare. I take a step toward it. With another loud “Ka-raw!” it flaps glorious feathered wings and takes flight. It rises up, a feathery gem against the steel gray sky, and heads inland. That’s what I saw fly up from the immigrants’ boat—a bird, a living bird. My chest aches and I know it’s not from Idris’s resuscitation efforts.

  I try to run toward Wyck and Fiere, but don’t make it more than a yard or two before my exhausted muscles give out. We fall into each other’s arms and they drag me toward the boat even though I want to follow the bird, all of us talking simult
aneously. I babble about the bird. Wyck says that Chrysto’s body is in the hold where the boarding ladders were stored. Fiere shrugs off my question about her stab wound, saying it’s not fatal. The captured immigrants are aboard the patrol boat. I can interview them another time about the bird.

  “You must be a strong swimmer,” Captain Vancil observes, easing the throttle forward and turning the Bahama Mama in a wide circle to head north toward the base. He slants me a look from under his graying brows. “Not too many folks could have made that swim, not against the tide like that.”

  If he hasn’t drowned yet, Idris is still close enough that we could locate him, I suspect. I stay silent. Just before the captain picks up speed, I glimpse flotsam lifted up by a wave, too far away to identify. We’re half-way back to the base before I think to ask about the fate of the immigrants’ vessel.

  Epilogue

  Two months later and one week shy of my eighteenth birthday, I walk up the cracked and lurching sidewalk leading to the house where Halla’s baby lives now, mentally rehearsing what I want to say. The rising sun behind me gleams off the honey-colored polyglass and white wood of the small, one-story house. It’s on the west side of Atlanta, in a new housing colony for servers at the ACV manufacturing plant. The other houses in the neighborhood are identical, except that some of them feature violet, rose, or pale gray polyglass. The tall, silver vents of the ACV plant emit billows of steam in the near distance. Easy walking distance.

  It’s taken me two months to locate Little Loudon, “Infant 23AN984X,” going through government records that weren’t as complete as they should be because of the decommissioning of the RESCOs. I’m hoping his new parents will let me meet him so I can fulfill the promise I made to Halla. I don’t know what I want to do beyond that. If they’re good people and they love him, well, maybe Halla would be okay with me staying in touch and visiting as often as I can. If I don’t like them . . . I don’t let my thoughts go any further because I know what Halla would expect from me. Saben waits in the cul de sac, watching me anxiously from inside the two-seater ACV. I wanted him with me, but I need to make the approach alone.

  In the best of all possible worlds, Wyck would be here because he loved Halla, too, but he left almost a month ago. Talking with the immigrants Captain Vancil’s team captured the day we sank the Belle renewed his desire to leave Amerada and explore the wider world. I think Chrysto’s betrayal and death had a lot to do with it, as well. He was uncharacteristically somber and quiet on the way back to Atlanta and in the following days. He hugged me goodbye, told Saben he’d be back to kill him if he made me unhappy, which made us all laugh, and got on the train to Dallas. From there, he was planning to head south, trekking with whatever adventurers he met up with en route. He promised to keep in touch, and to return safely, but so far all I’ve gotten is one quick phone call from Corpus Christi, saying he had joined forces with a group of six men and women headed for an old holy place they had read about called Teotihuacan, and that the water off the Texas coast is warmer than the Atlantic. He sounded more at peace, though, and I hold onto that.

  Fiere had advised me not to come today, to leave things be. She was showing off her new office at Base Falcon to me, the one with the sign on the door reading “Senior Captain Fiere Blackthorn, Commander, Recruit Basic Training Division.” She is the first female IPF officer ever, having gotten special approval because she couldn’t bear children. I suspect Vestor had a hand in it, but he only winked when I asked him. She’ll be commanding the entire IPF before she’s done, I imagine.

  “The baby is with government-approved parents, Ev,” she said, hitching herself onto the front of her desk and swinging one slim leg. “Leave it be.”

  “Not ‘it,’“ I responded, channeling Halla. “He.”

  “Whatever. The point is, he’s well taken care of. You’re seventeen—”

  “Eighteen next week.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Right. So much wiser and more prepared to raise a baby than a seventeen-year-old. What do you know about taking care of babies? Do you even want to raise this baby?”

  I didn’t, of course; the thought terrified me. I didn’t say that, though. “I promised Halla.”

  Fiere understands the sanctity of promises, so she shut up. “Let me know if you need help with anything,” she said.

  Coming from Fiere, who hates children, it was quite an offer.

  I smiled. “Don’t worry—I won’t ask you to change any diapers.”

  “Wouldn’t do you any good if you did.” She hopped off the desk, landing lightly. “I might train him to fight when he’s old enough. We can start as soon as he’s walking. When is that—two, three?”

  I smile now, thinking of the exchange, and take a deep breath. On the exhale, I knock. It’s a wimpy knock. I try again, rapping solidly three times. The flimsy door frame shudders under my fist. I shift from foot to foot. No one’s home. I’m going to have to do this again. My shoulders slump. As I start to turn, the door wheezes open.

  A bass voice says, “What?”

  I face him and my eyes widen. Loudon! Halla’s boyfriend is only four or five inches taller than I am, but he’s far bulkier, with shoulder muscles like boulders under his dark skin, and thighs that strain the fabric of a uniform that says “Amerada ACV” over the left pocket. I haven’t laid eyes on him since he left Kube 9 to join the IPF and the sight of him now takes away my speech.

  “Everly?” There’s doubt in his voice and wrinkles corrugate his brow. “Everly Jax?”

  I’m not surprised he sounds confused. I’m mostly back to being me, but my platinum hair is much shorter than it used to be, barely brushing my shoulders, and the effects of the appearance-altering injectables haven’t completely worn off, although my eyes are back to being marine blue.

  “It’s me, Loudon. What are you doing here? How did—?”

  He regards me unsmiling for a moment, but then holds the door wider, and says, “Come in.”

  I wave to Saben that everything’s okay, and step inside. As I do there’s the patter of little footsteps and a tiny tornado whirls into the room, going straight for Loudon. “Da-da-da-da.” She throws thin arms around his leg and peeps up at me from under a fringe of spiraling hair. She is so like Halla that it surprises a laugh and tears out of me. She hides her face against Loudon’s leg, but then steals another look at me. Not a Little Loudon as we had long assumed—a Little Halla. An adorable, impish Halla clone.

  Loudon bends and scoops her into his arms. “Jaxine, this is a friend of your mama’s. Her name is Everly.” She blinks at me and beams a smile that shows off eight tiny white teeth.

  A lump stops my throat and I can’t breathe or say anything. I swipe at the welling tears with the back of my hand. “Jaxine?” I finally say. They named her after me.

  “It’s the only name Halla ever considered,” Loudon says, a smile finally lightening his heavy expression. Jaxine wiggles and he sets her down. She scampers off. “Come on back and have some soy milk. I’m afraid I don’t have anything else, unless you want water?”

  “Water’s good.”

  He walks away from me with a stiff, uneven gait, dragging his right leg. He notices me noticing, and raps on the leg, which gives a hollow sound. “Prosthetic. I lost the real one to infection in prison.”

  He doesn’t look like he wants to share the details. “But they let you out and gave you Little—I mean, gave you Jaxine back?”

  We’re in the kitchen now, a small space with new appliances and polyglass fronted cabinets that show exactly two of every dish: two plates, two bowls, two mugs.

  “I was released as part of the amnesty on condition that I serve at the ACV plant for at least five years. They didn’t want me back in the IPF, not with this.” He smacks the prosthetic leg. “The plant’s not so bad.”

  I’d forgotten how slowly he talks, doling out each word individually so everything he says sounds weighty and considered. Opening a cabinet, he pulls out two glasses and runs water in
them, handing me one and drinking two-thirds of his in one gulp. He snaps the glass down on the counter. “They didn’t give me Jaxine back. I had to find her.”

  I think about how I’d felt, worried I’d never locate Halla’s baby, and can’t imagine how much worse it must have been for him trying to find his daughter. I’m trying to come up with a tactful way of asking how he got her back from her government-approved parents—had he kidnapped her?—when he says, “Her new caretakers were geneborn. They died. The government put her in a Kube and when I petitioned for her, they let me take her. The government’s trying to get out of the child-raising business, you know.”

  I hadn’t heard, but it makes sense. “About time,” is all I say.

  He nods and looks a question at me. Swallowing too much water, I choke and gasp for a moment. Then, I say, “Halla made me promise that I’d find Jaxine.”

  “You saw Halla after she left Atlanta?” He takes a step toward me but stops himself. “How? Where?” Desperation tightens his voice.

  “I was with her when she died.”

  We sit at the tiny table and Jaxine wanders in and out, sometimes sitting on Loudon’s lap, never approaching me, while I tell Loudon everything I know about Halla’s last days. It’s not enough. He bows his head half-way through the recital and doesn’t look up until I’ve been silent for a good two minutes.

  “Thank you,” he says, pushing himself up heavily. “You’ll come again? Halla would want for Jaxine to know you. She said that if times were different, you’d have been her godmother.”

  “I’ll come.”

  He walks me to the door, Jaxine riding on his shoulders, and when he tells me goodbye, she opens and closes her fist repeatedly in an approximation of a wave, and says, “Ba-bah, ba-bah.”

  “Goodbye, Jaxine.” I smile. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “Ba-bah, ba-bah.”

  Loudon closes the door firmly, and I hurry down the sidewalk toward Saben. He gets out of the ACV and pulls me into a hug. “Did it go okay?” he asks, kissing the top of my head.