by Quil Carter
Oh, it was them. I ignored the both of them and began walking to the kitchen for water.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up and saw Nero staring at me with confusion.
“What’s wrong with you?” Nero asked. He raised a burly hand and patted my cheek. “He’s high on something.”
“No, it’s the drugs Silas is making him take,” Finn said quietly. “Just watch… Silas is going to call in the next two hours and request for him to come up to this apartment. He won’t be home until the early morning.”
“His apartment…? Doesn’t he… do that willingly with him now?”
“He does. It makes me ill, but he does…”
I looked at Finn, my brow furrowed. “What are you two… talking about…?”
“Watch this…” Finn then raised his voice. “Elish, come follow me to the bedroom.”
It was time to go to the bedroom. I slipped my hand off of Nero’s shoulder and walked to my room.
“Holy shit…” Nero whispered. “And this is from him taking pills?”
“It started happening about three weeks ago,” Finn whispered back. I sat down on my bed and stared at the floor. I wasn’t feeling good and my face was beginning to feel wet. “I see different shaped pills, but like the others…”
“… imprints buffed out,” Nero whispered. “He’s making him worse… Why would he do that? He already made him into a fucking robot slave; he already fucking killed our Elish.”
I looked over when Finn let out a muffled cry. I hated seeing him upset, so I put a hand on his upper arm and rubbed it. “There has to be a way, Nero,” Finn cried. “Talk Silas into doing another surgery on him… this isn’t him. I love him but…” Finn looked at me and his blue eyes drowned further in tears. “He’s just an empty shell.”
“I wish there was a way, but unfortunately… Silas is our master,” Nero said, a catch in his voice. “Until Silas decides to change him back… if he ever does… this is the Elish we’re going to have.”
Finn’s jaw clenched and I saw anger in his eyes. I looked at him, fascinated by this mood. I rarely saw true anger on his soft features. They were unsuited for him.
“This is all Julian’s fault,” he said, his voice a thin and harsh. “I thank the fates every day that he’s gone.”
Julian?
My mind, wading through a thick syrup, dove into the deep recesses and brought up his face. Only in the throes of this dizzying lethargy did I allow myself to remember his face, remember his touch, his smell.
How he made me feel… alive.
“Don’t mention him in front of Elish,” I heard Nero hiss to Finn. “Why are we even talking about all this in front of him? He’s going to tell Silas.”
Finn shook his head, then he wiped something off of my face with his sleeve. It looked like I was drooling. That was strange. “He’s not going to remember that much,” he said. “He never mentions going to Silas’s, or anything like that. He’s going to forget all of this.”
“What’s with the drool and snot?”
“It seems to be a side effect of the drugs.” Finn wiped my face again. “Will you help me–”
My mind faded after that, and though I caught bits and snips of what was happening around me, reality seemed to have been put in a blender and pureed. There was no sense of time, no sense of self. I was a robot trapped in a stationary mode, with two men beside me thumbing through the manual.
I heard the phone ring at one point in time, and I remember Nero and Finn debating picking it up. It rang and rang, until finally it went silent, and whoever it was, didn’t call back again.
And in that time my wandering mind touched upon things that my normal self would never brush a hand over. I thought of Cristo again, my heart heavy with missing the sengil who’d been killed almost twenty years ago. My professor Ryan Britain, who I now realized was a pervert, and though I was still plagued with nightmares that involved his screaming pleas and the smell of skin frying on a pan, I no longer felt guilt over him dying.
But most of all… I thought of Julian, the freshest wound in my injured mind. Eleven years and still I could smell the wet grass as we ran through that backyard in the dead of night. I could still feel his damp body underneath mine as I took him, the only time I fully took him, and, even though it was a fleeting, I could still feel the fullness of my heart. Something that only he had been able to do.
Those memories did not stay unsullied though. The moment I focused on them, the venom that saturated each one leaked out as if they were made of old sponge. Venom, poison, contaminating toxins that wiped away every positive feeling that man brought, polluting and tainting all shreds of light until I was left with only rage, sadness, and a hurt that physically made my heart ache.
But that was not bad. As odd as it sounds, my emotions were so leveled, so evened out, that feeling bursts of hot rage was a welcome break from the grey monotone that were my feelings. Even now that man was making me feel intense emotions, and he’d been gone for over a decade.
Dead and gone.
I opened my eyes and found myself on my couch, the apartment around me blurry and distorted. My head was pounding and I felt sweaty and disgusting… it also appeared to be morning, the sun was peeking through my closed blinds.
Nero was sitting on the couch. He was holding a breakfast sandwich in his hand which Dave the cat was smelling with interest, and the other one was holding the TV remote. As I woke up more, I smelled the rich aroma of coffee, and could hear the morning news on my television. It appears that Nero had spent the night here.
“You’re finally awake. Good morning, binky,” Nero said with his mouth full. He leaned forward and put a hand on my forehead. “You seem to be okay. Looks like you got sick last night. Want a brekkie sandwich? I got them to bring us up six of them. I’ve already eaten two.”
I shook my head. “No… I…” I rubbed my eyes to try and focus them. “What happened last night?”
Nero handed me a cup of coffee. I took it with a muttered thank you and drank down enough to almost burn my throat. While I drank, I looked to my left and saw Finn sleeping soundly beside me.
“You… took some pills and became totally out of it,” Nero said quietly. “They were… some of the pills that Silas was having you take.”
My evening pills? “Those are good for me,” I said after taking another drink of the coffee. “They help me. They keep me from spiralling. I take what Silas gives…”
“Just listen to you!” Nero suddenly cried. Finn jumped beside me, his eyes flying open. “Can’t you fucking see how… how brainwashed he…”
I scrambled to my feet, anxiety bursting with a suddenness of an atomic bomb. “Silas cured me. He didn’t brainwash me,” I said hastily. “You would rather I be a suicidal mess? You’d rather I be miserable, depressed? Allowing myself to get taken advantage of?”
“I’d rather you be Elish.”
“I am Elish!” I snapped. “And you’re all selfish fucking assholes for preferring I be miserable. Silas was right about all of you.” Pissed off, or as pissed off as I could get when my emotions were pretty much flat-lined, I stalked out of the living room and into my bedroom. I had to get ready for work; I had a world to run.
And I had to get away from this conversation. It never brought anything positive, only negativity, only pain, only bad memories.
Silas told me my brothers and my sister didn’t want what was best for me, and he was right.
I told Silas that evening about our failure, and his reaction was what I’d expected. I was hit, I was screamed at, I had bottles thrown at my head and I left a trail of blood droplets from his apartment to my own. What was worse? He did it in front of the children, all of them. Valen and Jack both cried. Apollo and Artemis plead with him to stop and got struck, and it took Kirrel holding back Ceph to stop my little protector from physically attacking Silas.
When Finn saw me, his eyes filled with tears. The same routine took place after that: he bandaged
me up, and if needed which this time it was, I was stitched up. Finn was shadowing for Liam, wanting to become a doctor once he was retired from being my sengil, and was almost as good at stitching wounds as the doctor himself.
I ate dinner in my apartment that night. I wasn’t in the mood to see the rest of my family. It was a mixture of wanting to be alone after getting my head ripped off by Silas, and just being embarrassed for them to see that I had failed again.
No immortality for them, not yet. Perhaps never. Maybe Perish was right and I would be creating born immortal chimeras to be our replacements. Though with the trouble that Sky’s DNA gave, maybe it was just impossible to create born immortal clones.
“I could make a born immortal from Silas’s genetics easily,” Perish said that following day. He was analyzing code on his laptop, comparing Silas’s DNA to Sky’s to try and find what we called the golden fleece. See, we had already isolated the parts of Silas’s makeup that had been artificially altered. We stripped them away when making chimeras, leaving us with what we called a ‘raw clone’, then built them up with the enhancements and features we wished for the future brothers to have.
But Sky’s DNA had proven to be… somewhat hostile. On paper, his makeup seemed to be no different than Silas’s, but once you made the clone, the baby would die early in its development. Obviously since the child was dead, it meant that the cloning had not worked. For all I knew, the same thing could happen with an exact clone of Silas, we would never know since we didn’t want an unwanted clone.
At least not yet.
“You really could make a clone of Silas?” I asked Perish. I was doing the same thing as Perish, comparing lines of code on his laptop. It was amazing how digitalized Perish had made the cloning process and the chimera creating process. He could practically turn blood into binary, and creating a chimera was as difficult, and as easy, as writing code for an advanced, and complicated, program. Once that code was completed, it was placed into a machine with the organic material needed to make a sperm and an egg, and it injected that material into each one. The fertilized egg was then placed into a steel mother, and we watched the little future brother grow right in front of our eyes.
Perish was a genius, that would never be debated, and it still bothered me that he was disobedient enough to have needed his mind altered. If the man had behaved, he would’ve been even more of a genius than he is now. It was unfortunate, but at least he was still able to work… and teach.
“Yes, I believe so,” Perish said, his eyes fixed on the computer screen. I could see the lines of data in his light blue eyes. “It may come to it in the end.” He began fidgeting with a pencil. His need to always be moving was a side effect of Silas’s alterations. “Sometimes Silas doesn’t get what he wants… though the world suffers for it.” Perish scowled as he said this and looked around his laboratory. “This lab is too small for all of these projects he has for us.”
“We can move to one of the greywastes laboratories,” I suggested. “I wouldn’t mind getting away from Skyfall for a bit.” And I wouldn’t. It would be nice to be free of my brothers and their constant outbursts about Silas repairing my coding.
But Perish shook his head. “Too far away. I’ve been meaning to create a lab closer to here. Out of Skyfall so I can have some privacy, no little kids running and getting their sticky hands on my things.” I chuckled at this. “Perhaps Irontowers? I always wanted to go there.”
“Irontowers?” That was a large abandoned city close to Skyfall, close enough to be able to see the skyscrapers across the water. It was on the mainland and far away from the factory towns. “I’ve flown over it of course, but I’ve never really visited it. Any settlements in it?”
Perish shook his head. “No. I’ve released some of my splices there though. We would have to be careful if we decide to scout it out. But the resources inside of the town would prove useful for building the lab. The workers can recycle the metal. I could get a lot from their hospital and construction sites… they have old sewer systems that we could build in too …” Perish’s head began to nod as he said this, like he was thinking out loud but had decided he agreed greatly with his own words. “Yes. I like that idea… I like that idea…” He looked at me and smiled. “Want to get out of Skyfall for a day? We can scout it out and see if there are some good locations.”
Go to Irontowers? At first, I was against the idea. Going that far out of Skyfall to an unknown place… but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I did want to get out of Skyfall for a day. With everything that had happened to me, the stress I’d been put under, not just with failing at one of the most important jobs Silas has given me, but what happened last night with Nero and Finn…
“I wouldn’t mind,” I said, and Perish brightened at my agreeance. “I haven’t explored an abandoned city since Kreig over a decade ago. It’s been quite a while since I’ve been in the real greywastes.”
Perish chuckled, the pencil he was playing with now being chewed between his teeth. “Yes, Irontowers is in the greywastes, but you can still see Skyfall,” he said amused. “But yes, it’ll be a good start for you. Okay. We’ll go tomorrow. It’ll give our eyes a nice break. They start to hurt after a while from combing through all this code.”
CHAPTER 47
I will shamelessly admit that excitement was rolling through me in waves as we flew closer to the abandoned city called Irontowers. We flew over this city on our route to Cardinalhall, but never had my feet touched the cracked pavement, nor had my eyes taken in the deteriorating skyscrapers that still stood proudly in defiance to father time.
Today would be my second visit to the true greywastes, not the outlands that still remained on Skyfall Island, but the mainland; the continent that had formerly been called North America. Every time I was reminded of that fact, my chest felt like it was being dipped into cold water.
Perish had given me a M14 and its holder. It was now on my back over a grey duster that I had picked out, and an ammo belt was also strapped across my chest. There was a dagger sheathed on my left, and a handgun on my right, and to top off my greywaster attire, I had picked out a panama hat to put on my head.
I felt like a fool being so excited about this day, but I kept my self-derisive comments to myself. Perish seemed understanding and non-judgemental at least, I knew if Nero and Ceph were here I’d never hear the end to their teasing. Only eleven years old and Ceph had already spent a good chunk of his life in the greywastes being trained for his military future.
The plane’s engine shifted, and soon the buildings of Irontowers began to creep up the windows as the Falconer lowered itself onto a parking lot that Perish had chosen. The mosaic of grey structures in front of us were decomposing where they stood, their windows now rows of ebony eyes peering at us with black and marbled grey streaked down hollow faces. There were several of these forgotten buildings in front of me, apartment buildings I guessed from the balconies that now stood affixed on their lopsided faces like crooked smiles.
Perish turned the plane off and I opened the sliding metal door of the Falconer. While Perish gathered the gear that we would need, I stepped onto the greywastes ground and began to listen.
After all those years, I still remembered Silas’s instructions. I had to listen to my surroundings and let it tell me if this place was safe. Could I smell anything rotting? See any threats? What were my instincts telling me?
I inhaled the air and my lungs filled with not only the musty aroma of old buildings, but there was also a dampness on the air from a rain we’d had the night before. Skyfall had two rainy seasons, the one taking place in the spring being the harshest of the two, but during the middle of fall and close to winter we got the occasional rainstorm, and last night had been one of those times.
I walked around the Falconer and took in my surroundings. We were parked in a parking lot that seemed to have been for the row of apartment buildings in front of me. Behind us were streets and suburban homes, and further back, the
several skyscrapers that Irontowers had, one with its façade completely torn off of one side, revealing the secret apartments that the other skyscrapers and buildings hid.
I imagined myself exploring the skyscraper, a hazy beacon in the cold fall day. Once I was immortal I would explore this place fully, perhaps go on an adventure with my brothers. I knew Silas would never allow it unless we were all immortal; he actually had no idea that we were even going to Irontowers today.
It wasn’t like I had lied to my king per say… I’d just omitted where we were scouting out new laboratory locations.
That was about as rebellious as I got now.
I heard the sliding door close and Perish approach behind me. He looked around the abandoned city and his nose twitched. “Everything smells normal,” he said. “Stick close to me. I did release animals in this town. They could’ve all been killed by other radanimals or rejected immigrants but you never know. Be on guard. Master Silas will be quite mad if you die.”
My hand brushed the handgun on my belt. I had completed my military training and could now use any gun that was put into my hands. I also was quite skilled with the knife as well. Yes, I was quite the city chimera, I didn’t venture out into the greywastes like Nero, Ellis, and Ceph, but I could hold my own.
Perish walked to a manhole cover and I helped him slide it off of the road. He then took his jacket off and handed it to me. “When I stick my head down there, put the jacket over my head. The daylight fucks up my night vision so this way I’ll be able to see the condition of their sewers.” I nodded and Perish got down onto his stomach; he shifted over to the manhole cover and poked his head in, and I laid the jacket over his head.
“Better than I thought it would be,” Perish said, his voice echoing in the cistern. There was a damp sour smell coming from the hole. “The ladder is broken though.” He withdrew his head and got onto his knees. “I’m going to jump down there and look around. I may be able to jump back up myself, but stick near to me.” Perish reached into a beige saddlebag he had on his side and handed me a radio. “Stay in this general area, but perhaps check out some of the buildings that surround this place. I want to know just how much we can salvage when building our lab, so check for the condition of the metal supports.”