“She seemed fine when they left here. Don’t go in there.” Warren tries to shut a door on the left of the hallway, but it’s too warped to close all the way. As we pass it, I see a pale arm lying limp on the floor, broken bone peeking through torn flesh.
“Shit. Are those the guys who took Mallory and Barrett? Are they…dead?”
“Yes, but there were no casualties on your side.” Warren clears his throat. “On our side, I mean.”
With one hand at my lower back, he leads me across the hall into a room containing only a narrow bed with a bare, stained mattress and a dresser with only one drawer. Through the door across from the dresser, I see what’s left of a bathroom, but the toilet and tub have been crushed in whatever event smashed the rest of the building.
Warren sinks onto the edge of the mattress—there’s nowhere else to sit—and swings his pack onto the ground. He pulls a flashlight from the bag and turns it on, then he sets it on the floor to illuminate the room, and for just an instant, as the light hits him, his eyes seem to…flash. But then we’re both in the shadows again, and I can’t tell what I just saw.
“I… Lilliana, I have to tell you something. I have to show you something, actually.” He takes my hand to tug me closer, and while I know I should pull away from his touch…I don’t want to. It feels strange that we’re now holding hands, but it doesn’t feel wrong. Even though I know how Danna feels about him.
I’m a terrible friend.
“But first, I really need to eat something substantial,” Warren continues. “I’d love it if you’d have dinner with me.” As if we’re on a date, someplace normal that is totally not an isolated, half-crushed building on prison planet. “Then, I promise I’ll explain everything.”
“I…” This sounds like a bad idea. Yet—as little sense as it makes—I’m in no hurry to get going. That inner voice that is supposed to warn me away from serial killers and fairytale witches disguised as helpful old women isn’t scared of Warren at all. In fact, she wants me to sit on the bed next to him and cuddle up. For warmth.
Yeah. For warmth. That’s why.
“Okay. I guess I could eat.” And finally, I make myself pull my hand from his grasp, so I can dig food from my bag. But really, it’s to prove I can let go of him, because the urge to scoot closer—to climb into his lap, god help me—is so strong that though my head is telling me I’m insane, my body insists I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Though ideally, according to my hormones, I’d be wearing a smidge less clothing.
I don’t understand what’s happening.
To keep my hands from pulling my clothes off—or pulling his clothes off—I tear into my meal envelope without even noticing what the label says. I don’t realize I’m eating stroganoff until I bite into a chunk of beef and my lips curl into a grimace.
“What’s wrong?” Warren studies my frown as if it’s a giant red F scrawled at the top of his homework. As if he’s flunked this date by failing to keep me happy.
This is not a date.
“It’s nothing. I just…I was a vegetarian in my old life. Pre-prison. I’m over that—here, you eat what you have or you starve—but that first bite into a chunk of beef always seems to catch me off-guard.”
“Well, you’re in luck.” Warren holds out a packet of vegetable stew. “I seem to have only vegetarian options left, if you’d like to trade.”
“Thanks. If you’re sure you don’t mind.”
“I’d actually prefer the beef,” he insists. “I’m pretty sure I could go the rest of my life without eating soy as a significant source of protein.”
“So you’re a carnivore?”
“Almost entirely,” he says. I’m pretty sure he’s just trying to be nice, because the other day he traded his meatloaf to Bryony for her vegetarian lasagna because he thought the beef “felt smooshy.” But I hand him my stroganoff, and I swear he’s halfway through the packet before I even get my stew open.
“I guess you were hungry.”
“Am,” he corrects as he neatly folds up the empty envelope. “Today, I could eat an entire cow, while it’s still upright and mooing.”
I assume that’s hyperbole, but I can’t tell for sure, based on the enthusiasm with which he tears into his granola bar. Then a packet of raisins. Then a little tube of peanut butter. He even dumps the creamer packet straight into his mouth, without bothering to make coffee in his water pouch. Not that I can blame him. The only thing worse than instant coffee is cold instant coffee.
“Feeling better?” I ask around a bite of carrot and potato.
“Almost.” And to my complete shock, he pulls another meal packet from his bag and tears into it. “I promise I’m not just wasting rations,” he says as he crunches through an orange-powder-coated cheese-flavored cracker. “I’ll explain all this in a few minutes. I just…I need to eat first, and I’m pretty sure you’d rather see me demolish a couple of MREs than the alternative.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“Rabbit.”
I flinch. “But they’re so cute.”
“And delicious. They’re the most adorable thing I’ve ever eaten.”
“That’s…horrific.”
Warren nods solemnly. “I’d much rather have eaten an ugly cow. But sometimes life forces us to do things we’d rather not, in order to get things we need.”
“Like food?”
“Among other things.” His gaze seems to see right through my eyes, into my soul.
He finishes his entire second meal before I’m done with my first, and when I see him eyeing a packet of graham crackers I have no intention of eating, I offer them to him. “But you have to tell me why you’re acting so weird. And why you’re eating two days’ worth of food in a single sitting.”
“That’s fair.” He shoves the second graham cracker into his mouth and chomps through it, and I can only laugh when he licks crumbs from his lips, rather than letting them fall—wasted—to the concrete floor. “But Lilliana, I need you to promise not to freak out on me. Or to try not to, anyway.”
“It’s just Lilli. And FYI, that lead-in doesn’t do much to inspire calm.” In fact, I’m starting to wonder what the hell I’m doing here.
“I know. But it seems only fair to warn you.” Warren takes a drink from his water pouch to wash down the crackers, then he turns to me with one knee propped on the mattress between us. And for a minute, he only watches me.
Just when I’m about to demand he start speaking, he kind of…flinches. Which is when I realize that he’s not so much watching me as staring at a specific spot on my face—my nose, I think—as a focal point while he concentrates on…something else.
Then, suddenly, his face begins to change. It’s subtle in the beginning. His skin tone starts to deepen, and I’m so busy gaping at that that at first I don’t realize his nose is also changing. And his hair. No longer longish and brown, it’s now short enough to stand up in artful spikes, and it’s…white. Or silver. I can’t tell for sure, in just the light from the upturned flashlight, but his hair is pale now.
Only that’s not possible.
My pulse spikes painfully.
None of this is possible. Right?
Right?
7
LILLI
“What the hell?” I stand and back away from him, and empty food wrappers crinkle as they fall from my lap onto the floor.
“Lilliana.” Warren stands, and I take another step back.
“What’s happening?” I don’t… I can’t… Am I hallucinating? “What did I just eat? What did you do to me?”
“Lilliana.” He says my name again, and with it comes an odd thrumming sound, and I’ve heard that somewhere before, but I can’t think straight right now, because Warren isn’t Warren anymore!
“Calm down,” he says, palms out. “Everything’s okay.”
“Did you poison me? Is that why you traded food with me? Am I seeing things?”
“My name is Carson Sotelo.” His v
oice has changed. It’s deeper. Richer. More serious, though that could be in deference to how incredibly freaked-the-fuck-out I am right now.
“Wait, Warren isn’t your real name? Does Danna know?” Though, admittedly, the fake ID aspect of this is the least noteworthy, considering that he just turned into someone else.
Warren frowns, and for a second he looks as lost as I am. “I’m confusing you. I apologize. I’ve only had to explain this once before.” He speaks softly, holding my gaze as if I were a frightened puppy he doesn’t want to startle. But it’s too fucking late for that. “I’m going to start over, and I want you to keep in mind that as strange as this is, I’m not here to hurt you.”
I have no reason to believe him. None at all. Yet I do believe him, and some deep, primal part of me understands that the reason I believe him is because he smells good. Suddenly he smells so good, like he did when I brushed past him on my way out of the Sorority.
No one who smells this good could possibly be a threat to me.
Yet that thought makes no sense. If anything, I should be terrified of him, because this feels very much like I’m being brainwashed. Or…drugged.
I’ve been roofied by his delicious fucking b.o. But even knowing that doesn’t lessen the effectiveness.
“Start saying things that make sense,” I demand, and my voice is softer than I intended. I sound…dazed. And that’s kind of how I feel.
“I’m trying. Hang in there with me, Lilliana.” He takes another step forward, and when the beam from the flashlight washes over his face, I realize his eyes are as silver as his hair. “My name is Carson Sotelo. I’m not Warren, and I’ve never been Warren, but there is a real Warren, and he is your friend. He has nothing to do with this. He’s just the source of the DNA I used in order to assume another form. One you would trust. Which makes this sound creepier than it is.” Warren—no, Carson—frowns. “Or maybe that’s an accurate characterization of how creepy this is.”
“I don’t think we’ve quite established the baseline for creepy in a situation like this, yet that sounds like an understatement to me. This is pretty fucking creepy.”
I meet his weird, silver-eyed gaze, and suddenly I have the sinking suspicion that I can’t look away. Like I’m trapped in the quicksand of his focus, and the more I struggle, the worse that will get.
But that’s okay! Because I don’t need to look at anything else. Nothing else is worth looking at anyway. Except maybe his chest. Maybe if I ask, he’ll take off his shirt, and—
No, Lilli! Keep it in your pants!
What the living fuck is going on here?
I close my eyes and shake my head, trying to dislodge whatever worm has burrowed its way into my brain to convince me that whatever’s going on here is not only perfectly normal, it’s good.
“Yeah. Sorry about the creepy factor. A lot of that is beyond my control.” The rumble of his voice sets off delicious little tingles, deep in my stomach. And lower. What is that? “I’m also sorry that I lied to you,” he continues. “I needed to meet you, and your friends wouldn’t introduce us. Which was probably the right call, on their part. They were trying to protect you, and they had no reason to believe that I mean you no harm. But I swear on my life that I don’t. Mean you any harm, I mean.”
And I still believe that, despite all the weird shit that’s happening. My body is telling me this man is safe.
Why the fuck is my body telling me anything?
“What friends?” I know there are more important questions I should be asking, but that one’s wedged in the front of my mind, and my thoughts refuse to move past it.
“Mallory and the others. I met them here this afternoon. Well, I actually met Barrett yesterday, but I looked like someone else then, and he didn’t understand what he was seeing.”
“I totally get that.” I feel numb. I think I’m in shock.
Warren—no Carson—nods. “Believe it or not, this is new to me too. I had no idea I could do this until recently. And until today, this kind of transformation has always happened on its own. Beyond my control. But today I figured out how to kind of…take charge of it. So I could meet you. Turns out motivation is the key. Which is true for so many things.”
“You’re saying that today you learned how to make your body look like my friend, so you could meet me by pretending to be him?”
Another slow nod.
“You should go on some kind of dating vid, because this shtick beats the hell out of flowers and candy.”
“Again, I apologize for my approach. I knew I’d never get near you without a fight—without hurting someone who was just trying to protect you—unless I was a face you trusted.”
“You would have hurt someone?” The first pulse of fear breaks through the warm, fuzzy cocoon of irrational trust his scent has bathed me in, and I cling to it. This is messed up. This makes no sense. I should be terrified out of my fucking mind right now, not fighting an urge to scoot closer to him and rub my face against his chest like a house cat claiming a table leg.
“No, I didn’t want to hurt anyone. That’s why I borrowed Warren’s face.”
“Borrowed.” That doesn’t quite feel accurate, since the real Warren still presumably has his own face, yet I can’t think of any more precise term. “So then, who are you? Not just your name. How can you do this?”
He pats the bed, and I sit again, because a man who can transform his entire body into someone else’s is probably just as much of a threat to me from across the room as he is from a foot away. “I’m a prisoner, like you. Only my friends and I got sent to zone X.”
“There’s a zone X? I thought all the zones were numbered.”
“As far as I know, they all are, except for zone X. There are six of us there. They keep us in a lab, where they run tests on us, because nearly two years ago, scientists from a classified branch of Universal Authority spliced our genes with…other genes. Foreign DNA.”
“Foreign, like Warren’s? Is that how you can look like him? Did they do this to him, too, because he never said—”
Carson is already shaking his head. “Foreign, as in…alien. Non-human. A couple hundred years ago, UA launched several exploratory missions aimed at traveling into another galaxy.”
“Yes, everyone knows that.” Universal Authority’s exploratory success was what cemented it as a hugely influential entity in inter-system policy. As a massive, interstellar boogie man, according to my mom.
“But what the general public doesn’t know is that during that exploration, they found evidence of an extinct civilization.”
And suddenly I understand. “Alien.”
Carson nods. “Extinct for millennia, evidently. Actually, I suspect they found several. But one in particular proved compatible with human DNA.”
“But an alien civilization—even an extinct one—should have been big news. Why has no one ever heard about this?”
“The whole thing was classified by the Pan-Galactic Coalition. But UA already knew, because they’re the ones who found it. So naturally they were the only company given clearance to do anything with the findings.”
“So they plucked six prisoners from the general population and, what? Injected them with alien DNA?”
Carson smiles. “It’s a bit more complicated than that. They’ve actually been working on this project for several decades, and from what I understand, the early stages were less than successful. But eventually they figured out what they were doing, and their subjects started to survive.”
“Holy shit, they were killing people with alien DNA?” That shouldn’t surprise me. They’re also killing people in live hunts and gladiator competitions. Why would UA stop there?
“Only prisoners,” Carson says. “No one who would be missed. Anyway, by the time they got to me and my men, they’d found a technique they really liked. If I understand correctly—and I only know what I overhear—we’re sort of the last phase of beta testing, before they intend to launch their product for sale.”
“They’re going to sell you?” UA rented me out for most of the time I’ve been on Rhodon, but what he’s talking about seems like a whole new level of unconscionable.
“No, I don’t think so.” Carson frowns. “I mean, maybe, but my men and I would be pretty hard to control in the field, if we didn’t want to be there.” He shrugs. “The only way they manage now is by keeping us locked up. I think they’re more interested in selling the splicing technique. Or maybe they’re going to produce a large batch of super-soldiers and sell those, if they ever figure out how to control them. Like I said, they don’t exactly fill us in on their plans.”
“Soldiers?”
“Yeah. My men and I were all part of a special forces unit in the 112th Infantry, from planet Tethys.”
“Tethys. That’s the one that’s mostly water, right?”
Carson nods. “It’s beautiful. Cities full of skyscrapers, overlooking shimmering green seas, every bit of it glittering in the light of two suns.” His wistful look triggers an ache deep inside me, like a soft echo of what he must be feeling. “I hadn’t been back in three years, before we… Before UA got a hold of us, and that was nearly two years ago now. So, five years, I guess, since I’ve seen my home. But I guess that’s the same for you, huh?”
I shrug. “That’s no real loss, in my case.” My hand strays to my stomach before I realize what I’m doing, and I can feel the scar that set my imprisonment in motion as if it were still a gaping wound. “This place sucks, but there’s nothing left for me, at home.”
Carson’s gaze strays to my stomach, and I pull my hand away, embarrassed that he noticed the old habit. “You were injured there? At home?”
Escape (Project Vetus Book 1) Page 8