by Quil Carter
It was that bad? He was that hopeless to find me? It made me worry what state Finn was in, my sengil was deathly attached to me, I was his entire world. This made me desperate to see him, but right now this had to all be about Silas. I needed to compartmentalize my feelings for Finn and focus solely on the task at hand. It must have my full attention or else I may make a dire mistake.
And I couldn’t make any mistakes.
“I’m here,” I said. “And the men who did this to me are dead.”
Silas pulled away from my embrace, his cheeks red and tear-stained and the tufts of green grass that were his eyes, surrounded by blood-stained snow. At the mention of the men who had taken me, I saw the first sparks of anger flicker to life. “Who did this?” he said in a hostile whisper. “Who dared hurt a prince of Skyfall?”
“Greywasters,” I said, the hardness I was seeing beginning to turn Silas’s eyes to stone. “I’m not sure if they’d gotten denied entrance to Skyfall or if they were immigrants… but they grabbed me while I was out for one of my night walks and knocked me out.” Silas’s gaze rose and he outstretched a hand to touch my rain-soaked bandage. I took this opportunity to gently take his hand and I led him to the living room where the couches were.
This was going to make him angry, and I had to tread carefully.
“They… greywasters had you?” Silas said harshly, but then he paused while we were walking to the far corner of the living room. “They… they didn’t violate you, did they?”
I shook my head, and relief washed over him. “They didn’t. The fucks wanted money and they wanted weapons. I was kept chained to a pipe but I overheard them when they walked by. They were a bunch of cowards but… but someone in Irontowers was watching over me.”
We sat down on the couches, Silas remaining right beside me. There were no children around and I couldn’t hear any other noises. I quickly realized as well that the apartment was a mess. I assumed that Silas had dismissed Kirrel and had sent the children to temporarily live with my brothers and sister. It would make sense, it seemed that Silas would’ve been in no state to take care of them.
“Someone… watching…” Silas’s voice trailed, and for a second time, he paused.
Then his eyes rose and met mine.
“You’re different,” he suddenly whispered, a look of unease and suspicion replacing the worry.
I nodded at him. “I am different,” I said slowly. I steadied my heartbeat and took Silas’s hand into my own.
Then, as I rubbed that hand with my thumb, and looked directly into his eyes, I said quietly, “My implants were accidently disabled.” Silas’s eyes widened, and his hand stiffened under my touch. “I’m back to being myself… which helped me escape.”
I watched him for his reaction, and saw his body join the hand I was holding in becoming rigid and tense. It was clear to me that I had to get him back to the previous state I’d had him in. Silas’s moods switched on a hair trigger and I couldn’t have him becoming angry at me.
“I… see,” Silas whispered. He slipped his hand out of mine, and his features hardened with his body. “You’re not at all what I imagined you’d be.” He made the motion to rise, but I grabbed his forearm and held it.
“Master…” I said, my voice calm, my body relaxed. “I’ve been through a horrible ordeal. And I’m just happy to be home.” He let me pull him back down onto the couch. “The man who saved me…” I began to remove my jacket. I wanted Silas to see the bruises on my body. “He’d been nursing me back to health for over a week. The men who had me, only had me for several days.” That would explain why I was calmer, why I wasn’t sobbing with relief over being taken out of what would’ve been a living nightmare. If I had just been rescued after two weeks of thinking I was going to be killed, my mental state would’ve been different.
There was no need to try and justify my calm mood by hinting to this, no over explaining, Silas was intelligent and he’d do his own justifying.
Silas nodded stiffly, his lips pursing, showing me his jaw was clenched.
I needed to secure my safety, and I needed to do it now. He was holding back a lot with those pursed lips, that was easy to see.
“It was… amazing,” I said. I took his hand again, and even though it was stiff, he allowed me to hold it. “When I first woke up in their custody, I was terrified. I was a useless fool who just felt sorry for myself. I was weak and useless, tucked up into a corner, miserable, sad, and depressed. Here I was supposed to be a chimera but I felt pathetic and weak…” I smiled at him, a sad smile, with hints of hope. “But the night before I was rescued, they decided to beat me, make me look like I was in mortal danger. One of the men began beating me in the head and I had a seizure and blacked out. When I woke up…” I shook my head and ran a hand down my face. “I was no longer scared. I wasn’t scared at all. It was like my mind was lit up, a floodlight shining on a place that had previously only been lit by candles. It was night and day. I no longer felt like I was some useless prisoner, I didn’t feel sorry for myself… and not only that…” I squeezed his hand. “I knew then that I had to do everything I could to get home… I didn’t know if you’d be worried or not… I know we’ve had our differences, but…” I deflected my gaze, showing submission. “I… I just knew I had to get home regardless.”
Silas didn’t move and I didn’t make eye contact. I stared at our joined hands, and listened to his steady heartbeat.
“You’re not what I imagined you’d be,” Silas said again, after more than a few tense moments of silence. “I expected you to hate me a lot more.”
I looked up at him, then, once again, I looked away. “I didn’t know if I was going to be shot in the head in that sewer. I didn’t know if I was going to be raped and murdered while I was in there…” I stared at my wet sock, once white but now stained many shades of dingy brown. “I did a lot of soul searching in there to be honest, and… a lot of things became clear to me. Nothing like… being terrified to put everything in perspective, right?”
I let out a deep breath, making it catch in my throat as if I was reliving a terrible memory. “I want you to let me keep my mind the way it is,” I whispered. “My depression is gone; my anger and resentment towards you is gone. And not only that, I… I feel smarter. I feel like a brand-new computer, fresh out of the box and untested. It makes me excited to not only… be me… but also see what I can do for you.” My face brightened, but I made my eyes appear heavy. “With my intelligence back… I know I’ll crack the secrets to immortality, and the sooner I can do that, the sooner I can go back to full-time working on cloning Sky. It’s just… I feel so much potential, and I hope you’ll allow me to see just what I can do with all of the lights on.”
Silas’s face was unreadable. It was a slate of nothing, just two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. I refused to feel any sort of emotion over it; no fear, no worry that I hadn’t succeeded, I only watched him, listened to him, and analyzed him.
“This is not what I expected…” Silas said slowly. “Not at all…” He looked at the dirty bandage on my head and began to unwrap it, I remained silent as he did this. “Not… at all…”
The bandage fell to the ground, and I winched when Silas touched one of the large gashes.
Inside fireworks exploded when Silas made his touch cold. He was soothing my wound. This was the biggest sign yet that I was tipping him in the right direction.
“You have a lot of injuries on your head…” Silas murmured. I leaned my head down and let him brush his cold fingertips gently over the wounds. “But they appear to be healing normally… any dizziness? Nausea?”
I shook my head. “No, I’ve been monitoring myself closely and there doesn’t seem to be any concussions or things we need to worry about. You know me, Master… I have a thick skull.”
Silas tilted my head to examine me further, and whenever he withdrew his hands I saw them smudged with blood. “My poor golden boy…”
The king was in a calmed and relaxed place wh
ich was perfect. Not only was my future secured right now, but I believe I could also continue to gain valuable information from him.
This state for Silas was rare. Usually, at the drop of a hat, he would be angry, verbally cutting us down and bringing us to our knees. For the last eleven years, I’d been the number one receiver of Silas’s anger. I was an easy target and I’d taken his abuse like the kicked dog that I was. Silas had left me with no pride, no dignity, and with no life either. What was going to happen now when he directed his anger at me, I didn’t know, I just knew it was going to happen and I had to be ready to handle it.
Silas was fine with me right now, but the real test was going to be his first blow out. I wasn’t going to let him degrade me and humiliate me the next time he decided to take out his rage on me, and when that happened, I needed the skills to channel his anger someplace productive – or at least away from me and Finn.
It was going to take skill, and knowledge of my subject. But once he was trained to direct his anger elsewhere… I would have achieved a major victory.
“I had some good news in the Kreig laboratory,” Silas said, a small smile appeared on his face. “Dr. Kratz, one of my newer scientists, has created a fetus, a raw clone chimera, with a heart that is supposedly twice as strong as the hearts we’ve been giving our chimeras. I was always worried about my four’s hearts; the technology we have now is just so much more advanced than we had twenty-seven years ago. So I believe my twin brute chimeras will have these new hearts, and the future Sky clones will have them as well.”
The Sky clones almost always died of heart failure. However, this information was mostly irrelevant. Since Sky was a born immortal, the child dying was an automatic notification of failure. We were never sure just when the embryo should be immortal, for all we know it could happen the moment we sent that electric pulse into the oocyte to trigger fusion, but our best guess was it happened when the brain becomes fully formed in the thirteen to sixteenth week of gestation. It drove us crazy when the child’s heart gave out before that time, because for all we knew that child could’ve been our successful born immortal clone, but we would never know due to the fetus’s heart failing, and as such, the child dying.
“Would you like me to go to Kreig once the embryo is implanted into the steel mother, Master?” I asked. I’d like to checkout the genetic text anyway. Either they’d fixed the problems I’d injected into the code, or they’d decided to start new. “Or perhaps you wish for me to lend my intelligence to the boy’s creation?”
Silas shook his head no. “No, my love…” A look crossed his face, and his blood-smudged hand reached to mine and he rested it on top of it. “After what happened these two weeks… my wish is for you to concentrate on finding out how to make my four babies immortal.” I rubbed Silas’s hand as his brow knitted over eyes that were quickly becoming distressed again. “If you’d been immortal… if you’d been immortal I would’ve been fine… you would’ve come home. But you aren’t… my baby is fragile, life… life is fra-fragi-” As he stumbled over his words, I put my arm around him and pulled him to me.
The last glimpse I got before he was secure in my arms, was Silas’s eyes closed tight, his dark brown lashes glistening with tears. He was trying hard not to cry, but one tear broke free of the shut lid and ran down his sickly cheek. “You don’t understand how easily you can die, Elias,” he whispered. “I’m almost two hundred years old… I’ve seen all those I loved die, I’ve seen the world die… dying is terrible. There’s nothing left after, love, there’s absolutely nothing. Does that not terrify you?”
Honestly, I’d never really given it the deep thought that this, typically unavoidable, fate garnered. Dying went hand-in-hand with living, it had been so for millions of years, the only difference was that humans were given the gift, and the curse, of self-awareness and awareness of our mortality. We hadn’t really handled this gift that well, religion was created because of man’s need for answers to those unanswerable life questions, and ‘what happens when we die?’ has been one of the biggest answers that people sought out.
Dying was a part of life, but a terrifying part of life. Before the creation of the born immortal, no one could escape death, whether you be a mighty ruler like Alexander the Great, or a nameless peasant who had no impact on the world as a whole, the greatest, and the weakest, all ended up the same: dead.
And to show just how scary this unknown was, you can see mighty people do bizarre things to try and stave off death. A Chinese emperor Qui Shi Huang drank mercury to try and make himself immortal, and was even buried with a moat of it around his body, Henry II had a mistress who drank gold. Both of these things, funny enough, resulted in their deaths, but it just goes to show the desperation of the mortal human to grasp that unreachable fountain of youth.
So what did I think about death? There had been times that I had tried to summon it, because the pain of living had been too great. Did I know the full finality of death? Probably not, but at the time…
“My life was once so… horrible… I wished for the silence of death,” I answered honestly. “I wished not to hurt anymore, because my life was so…” I swallowed hard, as if trying to physically push down the emotion that this honest statement had brought. “My life was misery, pain, despair, humiliation…” Silas pulled away from me, his face crushingly sad. This was one of the many windows into the shapeshifting mind of Silas Dekker. He was sad I was saying this, yet he was the one who had made me feel this way. “When my brain was altered… I wasn’t happy, Master. I merely became okay with everything. You didn’t make me happy, you just took away my ability to feel emotions. You took away my ability to live life.”
I wish I was saying this as a way to manipulate Silas, but it was the truth.
Well, there’s no reason I can’t use the truth to further hammer in that I was better off who I was.
Silas was silent, but I could see his mind working through what I said. I attempted to remain stolid through this, but my own mind was working through the emotions that had been brought up from what I said.
I couldn’t… I could’ve never told him this before. Not just when my brain was altered, but beforehand when I was only fifteen.
“You weren’t living your life before, Elias,” Silas whispered. “You were… you were becoming a monster. I was watching you self-destruct in front of me, until you became a danger to yourself and your family.”
I squeezed his hand. “But now I’m ready to regain my life. I’m ready, Master. I don’t want to wish for death again, and right now I only wish for the opposite. To become immortal beside you, so I can make you proud… finally.” I reached over and brushed a lock of golden hair from his eyes. “Master… when you pulled me from my steel mother… was the person I was for the last eleven years, who you imagined I’d be?”
“Not at all,” Silas said, threads of discontent in his tone. “You disappointed me. Your outburst… it took all of my restraint not to kill you. And if Perish hadn’t perfected that surgery, I would have.”
This comment, of course, drew up anger, but I cleansed it from my body and forced myself to nod. “It’s not what I thought my life would be either. But that’s in the past now, Master. Will you give me a chance to make you proud of me? And to make me proud of me too?”
I waited with bated breath for his answer, and when Silas nodded, I felt as if a foot had been taken off of my chest.
Julian, I’ve done it. Because of you, I’d done it.
“You’ve surprised me, golden boy,” Silas admitted. “I thought if I’d reversed that surgery, that I would unleash a monster, full of resentment and rage. Your maturity… is quite shocking, but perhaps… I underestimated you.”
Have you ever.
“I hope to prove that you’ve all underestimated me,” I said with a smile. “I’m going to surpass your expectations for me, Silas.”
“I know you will, my love.” Silas stroked my cheek, stars in his eyes. I thought that perhaps, I was finish
ed, that I could go to Finn and tell him I was okay.
But I wasn’t. My resolve and my restraint was tested when Silas leaned in and softly kissed my lips. This act alone was my final exam, because kissing to me was something more intimate than sex. Something that I’d only done by force when I was having sex with my brothers and Silas, and something I only willingly did with Finn. However, even with Finn, it was only intimate to a point. I wasn’t in love with my sengil. Finn was subservient to me; he was my sengil. I loved him dearly and would burn the world for him, but he was not my partner.
I’d never had a boyfriend. At twenty-six and I’d never had a boyfriend. I’d made the decision to not count Julian, since I’d been dating a man who didn’t exist. If I could, I would’ve erased his presence from my mind.
And here he was again, back in my life like cancer.
Silas and I kissed, and when the kiss broke he gazed up at me with a look that told me I had done everything perfectly. I had Silas in my pocket now, there was only one last thing to tell him. Something that was quite dangerous to bring up, but there was little choice in the matter. Either he found out through me, or he found out through Nero or Ellis.
“You can go find Finn, love,” Silas said. He patted my hand and glanced at the burl clock hanging on the wall beside the mirror. “He’s been in a horrible state and I don’t wish any negativity in my house anymore. Today is a good day and tomorrow will be even better.”
I inclined my head. “Thank you, Master.” Then I hesitated. “There’s something I also have to tell you. I wish for it to wait, because I think it may upset you… but I want you to hear it from me.” The moment I said that it may upset him, an expression of suspicion came to Silas’s face.
“What is it?” he said slowly, his tone still low, low enough to pick up needles and razors.
I licked my lips and steadied myself. “The man who saved me… was someone who had been staying in Irontowers for the past six months.” My ears were burning from the glare behind Silas’s eyes. Sometimes I swear he could set dry tinder aflame with that gaze alone.