The Assassin and the Soldier

by Carly Morgan

  “Ah, yes,” Lux said knowingly. “That was the cover-up story, in case anyone decided to go snooping around, which it seems, you did for some reason. I’m not really sure…”

  “He was looking for me,” Kaelia lied. “I asked him to.”

  “Did you? Huh.” Lux appeared blatantly dubious. “Well, no, there were no mutants. In fact, Dr. Gordon did an extraordinarily good job with his product. Each and every one of those kids appeared remarkably human; though they possessed obscene amounts of strength and the abilities of whatever animal they were spliced with. They were skilled fighters, climbers, runners. They could drop out of trees without injury, and they picked up new physical challenges very quickly…”

  “All right, all right, we get your drift,” Kaelia interrupted him, as it was obvious he was talking about her, although she wouldn’t outright admit it. “So you’re saying they made up this story about mutants, when really, these kids were perfectly normal.”

  “Well, normal is pushing it, but mostly yes,” Lux admitted solemnly. “There were pictures of them, taken around the ages that they died. Boys, mostly, all of them with military haircuts and clothes, around eleven or twelve years old. But there were four girls, younger, adorable really, with their long hair and in these little dresses. No one would ever guess they weren’t perfectly normal kids, except for... except for the eyes. They had eye colors that didn’t normally appear in humans.”

  “You saw pictures?” Kaelia interrupted him, feeling like she could hardly breathe. She had never seen a photo of herself as a child. Not once.

  “Yes, in some secret, tucked away database. Took me months to hack into it, but I had a special interest in the case. There was one girl, with dark hair, and eyes that were nearly black. I’d never seen eyes that color before. Well, until I met you, anyway.”

  He looked into her face pointedly, and Kaelia blinked and turned away. Her eyes felt sort of funny. “Damn you,” she said softly, shaking her head. “You know. You know everything.” It was as good as giving herself away.

  Lux breathed a sigh of relief, as if he thought he was off the hook. “I’m a man of many secrets.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not good at keeping those secrets, are you?” Kaelia’s voice turned threatening again, pressing down on Lux’s chest with her knees. Let’s hear him sigh now.

  “Kaelia, please,” Lux squeaked out, strangled. “Have I told anyone yet?”

  “I don’t know,” Kaelia cocked her head. “Have you?”

  “If I had, I certainly wouldn’t be partaking in this death-trap of a competition,” he went on dryly. “The people who want you? They’re the big kahuna, okay? If I gave you up, I’d be sitting pretty right now, instead of gallivanting around this island trying to win back my freedom fair and square.”

  “How can I trust you!” Kaelia was shouting now, feeling triggered. She’d been betrayed by someone before who claimed to be far fonder of her than Lux ever had. Was it happening again?

  “I don’t know!” Lux said, helplessly dramatic. “I guess you can’t, okay? Look, it’s true, okay? I’m not a very trustworthy guy. But Kaelia, if we get out of this – if we by some chance win this? You might be far more valuable to everyone free than enslaved as a human guinea pig to the bad guys. You ever think of that?”

  “But we have to win first,” Kaelia concluded, dumbfounded by the gray area of the matter.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Callan cut in, and she felt him crouch down beside her and stare over her shoulder at Lux. “I swear on my life, Beacon, if anything happens to her, you’ll be doing the direct opposite of sitting pretty. I can promise you that.”

  “Man, you two really are something,” Lux said wearily. “Look, my days of double-crossing people are over. And I meant what I said before. The others like you are dead, Kaelia. You owe it to them to avenge them. And I want to help you.”

  Kaelia wasn’t sure if she believed him or not, but she related, in some abstract way. The life she lived before. She hadn’t chosen it. It had chosen her, and she was grateful to leave it behind. Maybe Lux felt the same way about his past, and that’s why she had felt a kind of kindred friendship with him all along.

  “Why kill them though?” she said hollowly, changing the subject back to where it had been. “If they were perfectly normal, why kill them?” Her sisters, and Callan’s brothers. She’d spent a lifetime imagining what it would be like if she’d been able to always have them with her. They would have been best friends. Best friends for life.

  “To protect them,” Callan’s voice cut in, and it might have been comforting if she hadn’t felt so distraught. “He killed them to protect them, to keep them out of the hands of the scientists who wanted to hurt them.”

  “Yes.” Lux’s voice was somber. “And then he killed himself. The only question is…”

  Kaelia tightened her grip around his neck without meaning to, suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. She could still see him clearly in her mind, Papa, closing his lips around the barrel of the gun, the blood splattering the wall, right after he told her to run. But why her? Why had he let her go?

  “The only question is what?” She suddenly remembered Lux, and let her grip relax. She didn’t feel so well all of a sudden. The alcohol was angrily pushing its way back up her esophagus, and the world was spinning.

  “The only question is how did you escape?”

  Kaelia gagged, turned her head to the side, and promptly emptied the contents of her stomach all over the floor.

  Chapter 17

  Callan

  Callan stayed up with her half the night while she was sick, and kept the curtains drawn and the room dim the next morning. He searched her bathroom cabinets for aspirin, but there was none and he was all out. He remembered a time, before the accident, when he’d never needed pharmaceuticals either. Callan touched the place on the back of his skull, his fingers grazing over the scar.

  He took a walk to get aspirin from the drug store on the resort. All the trainers and contestants had a tab with the TV show, though Callan wasn’t sure how high he could run it up. The day was blindingly hot, and he was already sweating as he passed the night clubs, spas, and restaurants. They were all closed down at this hour in the morning, and Callan began regretting not using up more of the tab. He could have taken Kaelia out to a nice dinner, or to the club for some live music. But it was tricky, with the cameras always on them, watching their every move. Callan didn’t want any more attention on Kaelia than there already was with her taking second and first place in the two challenges there’d been so far.

  It was hard for him to believe there was less than two weeks until the final challenge. It all seemed to have gone by so fast.

  Callan was relieved to get out of the hot sun and back to the hotel, where the central air cooled and refreshed his skin, almost as much as he was to see Kaelia had awoken, and was sitting against the pillows in bed. Though he logically knew it was just a hangover, seeing her sick had filled him with an irrational worry, one that wouldn’t let him rest. Sighing gratefully, he poured a large glass of water and shook two aspirins into his hand.

  “Here,” he said, sliding next to her in the too-warm bed. He pressed himself against her anyway, emptying the aspirin into her palm. “I brought you something.”

  “What’s this?” She squinted in the dim light as if she’d never held pills before.

  “It’s poison,” he deadpanned. “Because I didn’t think you were sick enough last night.”

  “Aspirin?” She shook the pills up and down in her hand. “I never take the stuff.”

  “Take them now.” Callan handed her the glass of water. “And drink all of this. You’re probably dehydrated.”

  She contemplated for only a moment, as if by some kind of hard to break habit, before throwing back her head and downing the pills and water, swallowing deeply after each gulp. Then she handed him the empty glass and groaned despondently. “Tell me last night didn’t happen.”

  “It turns out No
. 69 was your culprit all along.”

  “I barely remember it.” She moved gingerly as she shifted in bed, holding her temples with her fingers. “Did you hold back my hair while I was puking?”

  “Most of the time. I wasn’t fast enough the first time. You know, when you were on top of Lux.”

  “Did I puke on him?” Callan couldn’t decide if she sounded hopeful or chagrined.

  “A little bit. You turned your head to the side.”

  She scowled. “Too bad. He deserved all of it.”

  Callan wasn’t sure why she thought so. Of course, it was no problem to him if she used No. 69 as a human barf bag, but he thought the two of them were friends. “Why? Are you mad at him now?”

  She seemed perturbed by his questions as she pulled the sheet up tighter around herself, hugging her knees to her chest. “Shouldn’t I be? He was probably lying about that bogus story. I mean, scientists that wanted us for testing? And he’s saying they’re still out there, looking for us? For me?”

  Her apathetic attitude alarmed Callan. “You don’t believe him?”

  “No.” But her voice was full of stubbornness instead of conviction. A very dangerous kind of stubbornness.

  “Kaelia, that night, when we were kids and they raided the compounds, they would have found bodies. Fourteen of them.”

  “So?” She cut a pair of smoldering eyes up at him, her lips swelling into a pout. He was pushing her by talking about this, he knew it. It was odd almost, how they never talked about this. But he had to make her listen to caution.

  “So? Beacon knew there had been sixteen of us, maybe those scientist guys did, too. And if they raided the compound and found only fourteen of us, shot and killed by our own keepers, then they would have known that two of us got away.”

  “My head hurts,” Kaelia changed the subject. “Why did I drink last night? You should have stopped me.”

  He winced. She was right. He probably should have. “Maybe I’ll spank you for it when you’re feeling better,” he tried to make up for it, his voice playful.

  “That’s okay,” she promptly declined. “I’ve already learned my lesson.”

  “I’ve learned that lesson myself, several times,” Callan admitted with a sheepish smile. “I guess we’re not so perfectly redesigned after all. The big bad predator weapons, can’t even handle a couple of drinks.”

  She smiled back at him, but her eyes were sad. She reached up and traced his forearms with her fingertips, her touch like an electric charge coursing through him. He took her hand in his own and held it, protective.

  “Where did you go?” she asked after a while, her voice soft. “When you escaped?”

  He started at her words, nearly pulling away from her touch, his big hand clamping over hers as he tensed. “I…” he hesitated. It was a long, torrid story; the time he spent on the streets, the fighting, the hunger, the hiding from anyone who might be looking for him. It was one he hadn’t told too many times before. “I made it on my own for a while, traveling from town to town, and then I met the Merones.”

  “How?” she pressed him.

  He shrugged. This part of the story was okay to tell. “Did some work on their soybean farm. They never had their own kids, and he was older, my dad. Couldn’t do the same stuff he used to. So they hired me as a hand, gave me a room, though when they learned I didn’t go to school, well, they didn’t like that.” He laughed at the memory. It had felt good, their wanting to take care of him. “They had to adopt me in order to get the proper paperwork to enroll me in the local middle school. After that, the rest is history.”

  “They sound nice,” she said vaguely, her voice distant.

  A heavy silence pressed down on them, weighted from every angle. “And what about you?” he finally asked her. “I take it you didn’t meet anyone very nice?”

  “I did. Once,” she spoke clearly, surprising him. “This old lady, up in the mountains where I fled after the raid. She had some sheep, chickens. At first, I wouldn’t go too close, but I stole some grain to eat, clothes off her line to wear. Eventually she figured out I was there, and she’d leave me these little offerings; a cup of milk and bread one day, some vegetables the next. One day, she left a dress, handmade just for me.”

  “What happened to her?” Callan prompted her when the story lagged. It was hard to imagine Kaelia, a vulnerable child at one point, unable to fend for herself.

  “She took me in, made me a sleeping pallet in her loft. We didn’t speak the same language, but we picked up enough words to understand each other.” Suddenly, she spoke in another tongue Callan couldn’t decipher, throaty and thick, smiling coyly at his expression of surprise. “I still remember some of it,” she switched back again.

  “Impressive,” Callan nodded, feeling encouraged. If she could recall words from another language she had learned years ago, there might be some hope for her with the trivia game. “So why did you leave?”

  Her face clouded, but she went on anyway. “She had some people over. Relatives of hers. Men. They were supposed to stay in the barn, but one, he came into my loft at night… he woke me up… wanted to do stuff to me.” She swallowed deeply, and then turned her back to him, curling up on her side. “I snapped his neck before he could get a chance, and then left that same night. I never went back. I made my way to the city, met Pierson, and the rest is history.”

  Pierson. She had said that name before, and Callan had been too curious not to look him up. Pierson Wolfeschlegel, or just Pierson Wolf, depending on who you asked. He’d been one of the biggest bosses of organized crime in the world, until he rolled on a bunch of people on his payroll and went into hiding. Callan had quickly figured out Kaelia had been one of them. She’d hinted their relationship had even been romantic, but Callan wasn’t interested in any of that. That was the past. It didn’t matter anymore.

  He felt her shoulders heaving, and realized she was crying very softly. He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close, until she turned and buried her face in the shadowy place between his arm and his chest. Callan gently stroked her back and held her to him, wishing he could take it all away; all those memories he knew still haunted her, as they haunted him.

  “It’s okay,” he soothed her, and eventually her breathing became heavy. “You were protecting yourself. You were young, scared, you didn’t know.”

  She pushed away from him, staring him right in the face with that feral, wild expression. “But I was old enough to know better with the others,” she said hotly, as if accusing him. “And I wasn’t protecting myself then. I wasn’t scared, either.”

  “Forget about it.” Callan wiped away the tears under her eyes with the pads of his thumbs. “It’s over now, you paid your dues with three years in Krakian. Reliving it will only rob you of your future.”

  She curled up again, burrowing against him, her plump bottom wiggling against his thigh. “I miss those sheep the old lady had. In the spring, there’d be new lambs, and she taught me to feed them with this giant baby bottle. I loved those little guys; they were so soft, so playful. I’d spend all day, out on the mountaintop with them.”

  It surprised him to hear her speaking with such sentimental innocence, and made him feel all warm and fuzzy inside to imagine her with the lambs; mothering them. “We’ll get our own someday,” he blurted unexpectedly, not really sure what he was saying. “We’ll have our own little farm, high on a mountain, after all of this is over. Our own little paradise.”

  “Okay,” she agreed, and her voice was sleepy and agreeable, almost childlike. “After I win this whole thing, we’ll do that.”

  Callan felt his stomach lurch with apprehension to hear those words. Win this whole thing. First, they had the trivia challenge to get through, yet he couldn’t make her study today – not while she was so sick. At least, while the trivia questions didn’t seem like her strong suit, she wouldn’t be tipping anyone off that she was a specially redesigned predator killing machine during the next challenge.

&
nbsp; “First thing tomorrow, we’re hitting the books,” he warned her. “So you better be ready by then.”

  She wiggled against him, and something in the movement was brazen. “Hitting the books?” And then it came, the sass. “Did you just say hitting the books?”

  “If you can learn another language, you can learn a few questions,” he went on encouragingly, ignoring her.

  “Callan,” she interrupted, pressing her hips tight to his pelvis.

  “What?” He bristled, feeling another smartass remark coming.

  “Thanks for taking care of me,” she murmured, and something in his chest bloated like a dead thing left out in the sun. He barely knew what to do with so much emotion; couldn’t contain it, couldn’t explain it.

  “Anytime,” he said at last, and he clamped a leg around her thighs and clutched her tightly to him. Two more challenges to beat. Two more challenges, and she was really his. But he knew now more than ever that she had to be careful, and caution wasn’t exactly her strong suit. He clung to her tighter, knowing she couldn’t move, the submissive sacrifice endearing her to him. He preferred her most in these moments, and wished they never had to end.

  She didn’t want to study again. The challenge was four days away, and she was goofing off; telling jokes and wandering around the room, looking for something to eat and into the mirror at new ways to wear her hair. Callan tried to read her questions while she was doing all these things, but he knew she wasn’t paying attention. He sighed and rubbed his eyes as he leaned back on the couch. He hoped he wasn’t getting another headache. She was frustrating him. He knew if she’d only pay attention, she might actually retain something.

  He tried to read another question. “What’s the square root of…”

  “I don’t want tooo,” came her petulant whine from the bathroom, drawing out her words just like a bratty child. Her tone made his head ring. He couldn’t take much more of this.