Progenitor

by Cassandra Chandler

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Blurb

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  About the Author

  Look for More Titles by Cassandra Chandler

  Progenitor

  The Blades of Janus

  Book Two

  Cassandra Chandler

  Copyright Page

  You are a good person! You know that stealing is wrong. Remember, eBooks can’t be shared or given away. It’s against copyright law. So don’t download books you haven’t paid for or upload books in ways other people can access for free. That would be stealing.

  And you’re better than that.

  This book is pure fiction. All characters, places, names, and events are products of the author’s imagination or used solely in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to any people, places, things, or events that have ever existed or will ever exist is entirely coincidental.

  Progenitor

  The Blades of Janus, Book Two

  Copyright © 2018 by Cassandra Chandler

  ISBN: 978-1-945702-02-0

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used, transmitted, or reproduced in any manner or form without written permission from the author, except for brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

  First eBook edition: November 2018

  cassandra-chandler.com

  P.O. Box 91

  Mission, Kansas 66201

  Death won’t stop him. Loving her might.

  The Blades of Janus protect both humans and dwellers, working to find a way to coexist peacefully with the alien beings who have integrated with Earth’s myriad life forms. Most of these elite warriors don’t realize just how personal a mission this is for their leader, or the various sets of “twins” who run each Blades base.

  Lost and alone, Meg jumped at the chance to join a pack of werewolves as a child. She soon discovered they weren’t the loving family she’d hoped—especially after the Blade known as Dexter entered the picture. Her mission is to destroy him and all of the Blades of Janus, and to bring Marcus and Tessa into the pack, where they truly belong. The only way to do that is to find the man who founded the Blades and end him once and for all.

  But the Blades’ leader carries darker secrets than she ever could have imagined, and when she finally gets her chance for revenge, she can’t decide whether to kill him or take him as her mate.

  Dedication

  For Tom and his many questions.

  Don’t miss out on any of the dark alien action.

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  Chapter One

  “This is a dead end. Let’s head back to the bike.” Brock projected his thoughts into Dexter’s mind—which wasn’t hard, since they were sharing the same brain at the moment.

  “If you’re bored, you can always visit one of your other replicants,” Dexter thought back. “Zach is tracking a kelpie in Europa.”

  “No thanks. I’m sure you’ll find a dweller to deal with eventually. Providence is crawling with them. Present company included.”

  “Thanks for the reminder.”

  Dexter’s thoughts retreated. If Brock didn’t know better, he’d think Dexter was sulking. At least the distance meant he’d stop bugging Brock about going back to his own body for a while. Probably.

  Brock wanted to stay near town mentally as well as physically. His family was finally whole again, now that he and his dad had found Tessa. With everyone living at the ranch along with the other Blades of Janus who were assigned to Providence, it felt like home.

  He was still a little tempted to hop over to Zach’s body. Watching Zach fight a kelpie would be a lot more interesting than hanging out with Dexter while he patrolled some defunct Redcap tunnels they’d discovered in Greenbriar Park.

  The most interesting thing Dexter had done all night was temporarily activate his bike’s flight protocols to avoid running over a possum. Tearing down the road on the alien-tech infused motorcycle was a hell of a lot better than this nighttime stroll.

  “Tessa said other dwellers often move into Redcap tunnels,” Brock thought. “But I’m not noticing anything.”

  “You shouldn’t be trying to,” Dexter projected. “Eli says you need rest.”

  “Rest isn’t going to help me and you know it.”

  Brock’s birthday was less than a week away. There was no way he’d survive it. He’d be damned if he was going to spend his last few days on Earth confined to bed in a body that barely functioned, no matter what his dad said. Especially when Brock had eight perfectly healthy replicant bodies whose minds he could piggyback on.

  All part of the perks of being not-exactly-human himself.

  “You’ve given up already,” Dexter thought.

  “Don’t be naïve. We know what’s going to happen. It’s the end of another three-year cycle. The last one.”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  “Come on, Dexter. I was in a coma for a week last time. Dad barely managed to keep me alive, and you were all basically dead.”

  “We weren’t dead.”

  “You didn’t have any life signs,” Brock thought. “The only reason Dad knew you were still alive is that none of you vaporized. If he hadn’t called in the other replicant pairs so he could monitor everyone, the Blades at your bases probably would have buried you.”

  Brock wondered if his body would disappear in the glowing blue light that consumed dwellers who had died—or been killed by his Blades. After he was gone, they’d finally know once and for all just how much of a dweller he was.

  His dad said every test showed that Brock was one-hundred percent human. The tests were wrong. And Brock’s non-human nature was about to kill him.

  “The others should be here,” Dexter thought.

  “Don’t want them to miss the party?”

  “The increase in dweller activity at our other bases is too much of a coincidence,” Dexter projected. “We should all be at the ranch to protect you.”

  “You should be at your own bases helping your teams for as long as possible. I’m not worried about my safety.”

  “You should be. If Vaughn can finish building the stasis chambers, it’ll give Eli more time to—”

  “To do what?” Brock shot back. “Dad can’t fix this. It’s who I am. Who we are. The sooner you can accept that, the sooner we can all have a little fun before—”

  “Shh.”

  None of Brock’s replicants ever shushed him. Dexter paused, cocking his head to the side as he turned in a slow circle. He stopped, staring back at the bridge they had just crossed.

  “We need to gather our resources,” Dexter thought.

  Every time a replicant used their weird plural pronoun when talking about themselves, Brock felt a shiver in his mind, like a tuning fork had been struck and then pointed at his soul. He knew that each pair of replicants was a single entity that shared two bodies, like the one that inhabited both Dexter and Porter.

  After all these years, it was still surreal to experience their existence along with them—and to know his own body had
created them. Eight exact copies of Brock as he’d looked on the birthday when they…emerged. He suppressed a shudder, shielding Dexter from the revulsion Brock always felt when he remembered the process.

  The replicants might not process emotions the same way humans did, but that didn’t mean they didn’t feel. Knowing how dedicated his replicants were to him, Brock didn’t want to put that on Dexter, even if his very first copy could kind of be an ass.

  Brock pushed closer to Dexter’s senses, feeling a weird pressure as Dexter drew mental power from his other body, Porter, and focused his entire consciousness on this one. Back at the ranch, Brock felt Porter going dormant, frozen over his microscope and not seeing with that set of eyes anymore.

  All of their brains’ processing power channeled toward Dexter along the connections Brock could sense between all of them—every single replicant. Brock had to admit, it was an incredible rush.

  “Getting kind of crowded in here, DP.” Brock tried to project some humor along with his thought, using the combined “name” for the consciousness that controlled this pair of replicants—“DP”. Of course, DP didn’t react.

  Brock wasn’t picking up on anything, but the Dexter replicant could detect things Brock couldn’t, especially when he was using both his brains to parse through the data this body’s senses fed him. Now, if Brock decided to take over Dexter’s body, it would be a different matter.

  Shortly after arriving at the ranch, Vaughn tried to explain his theory that Brock’s mind was a hub that his replicants communicated through and used to share “mental processing power”. Something about quantum computing. If Brock hadn’t been so exhausted, it probably would have been fascinating. He had fallen asleep a few minutes into the lecture.

  “Something is under the bridge.” Dexter reached over his shoulders to draw both of the swords strapped to his back.

  The ground on either side of the paved path had been disturbed in several places. It didn’t seem out of the ordinary to Brock.

  “Looks like groundhogs,” Brock thought.

  “We’re linking with Bradley.”

  Shit. Not groundhogs, then.

  The pressure against Brock’s mind vanished in a rush of spectacular mental energy. Dexter’s thoughts surged around Brock’s consciousness, faster than he could track. His vision fractured for a moment into five hexagonal sections, like he imagined a wasp might see.

  The Brad replicant was sitting on a veranda going over data on one of the paper-thin tablet PCs Vaughn had designed, sipping coffee as the sun rose over the ocean on the East coast. Lee was in the weapon’s room at the Caiman Beach base, putting away a wicked looking double-headed axe. Both bodies froze in what they were doing, as if someone had hit the pause button on Brock’s view.

  Then there were the more familiar views. Brock could see the tiny organisms Porter’s eyes were staring at through his microscope as well as Dexter’s view of the bridge and park.

  The fifth view—the one in the middle that bridged them all—was black. Brock’s eyes were closed as his true body lay in bed, a crushing weight no one could explain trapping him there.

  He could hear his dad moving around the room and the soft hum of the instruments and machines that Vaughn had coaxed back to life in the ship where Brock was staying. In the crashed alien spaceship buried deep beneath the ranch.

  Brock’s life was beyond bizarre.

  His vision collapsed into a single view of the park. He felt, saw, and heard so much more than before. He could calculate the temperature by listening to the crickets, see the edges of each leaf with a crispness his own eyes could never perceive—or, rather, his own brain couldn’t process.

  Everything around them slowed, as if time itself was no match for their combined mental acuity.

  I will never get used to this. Brock kept that thought to himself, which was probably why Bradley opened with snark.

  “Hey, pretty boy,” Bradley projected. “Need some help keeping that pristine body intact?”

  Sometimes, Brock really wanted to punch Bradley in the face. In both his faces.

  Yeah, the Dexter and Porter pair were the only replicants who weren’t covered in scars. But that was only because they hadn’t lost a body fighting dwellers. Yet.

  Having experienced every single “death” along with the replicant who lost a body, as well as the hell that came afterwards when they re-grew a new one… Brock wouldn’t wish that on anyone, not even the beings that had somehow spawned from him, breaking his own body in the process.

  He also wouldn’t let his replicants wish that on each other.

  They all had cold streaks. Brock did his best to watch out for those thoughts and shut them down.

  “Have you ever heard me complain about DP’s appearance?” Brock projected the thought fiercely. They could never forget that Brock didn’t just endure their deaths with them—he also carried the scars of the wounds responsible. Death marks.

  His body was covered in them. His face…

  He couldn’t think about that. No matter how good he was at shielding and filtering his thoughts, he never wanted to risk the more recently created replicants sensing just how repulsed he was by his own appearance. By their appearances, too.

  They had to know how he felt. They were too smart not to have figured that out. But they sure as hell didn’t have to share his emotions on top of that.

  “Apologies, progenitor,” Bradley projected. “We didn’t know you were visiting DP.”

  “That shouldn’t make a difference.” Brock didn’t mind them feeling his displeasure over their comment.

  Aside from the small scar that ran along their left cheekbone, the Brad and Lee replicants could easily conceal the rest of their death marks with their clothing. Brock had gained that scar when Lee was killed getting it—before Zachary had emerged, so Zach and Carey had it, too.

  Those two sets had split off from Brock’s body before the shit really hit the fan. They all had more scars. So many more.

  Malcolm’s first death had left the pair so disfigured, they couldn’t be assigned a base. No amount of makeup could hide their scars, and it would be impossible to explain how the marks on their faces were identical.

  Having a set of replicants freed up to travel wherever they were needed was helpful. They’d been all over the world, but Brock almost never visited them. It hurt too much to see how people reacted to them—and knowing he would have to deal with the same gasps and staring eyes if he was capable of travel.

  Brock felt the hair on his own body’s arms lift back at the ranch, remembering the last time he’d been brave enough to look at himself in the mirror. Even if his replicants would let him, Brock had given up on walking among humans long ago.

  “You okay, Brock?” DP must be picking up on Brock’s emotions. The replicants almost never used Brock’s name.

  “Yeah,” Brock thought.

  “Good, because we all need to focus.” Dexter stepped off the paved trail.

  Brock calmed himself, taking in the surroundings along with all the other consciousnesses linked to the Dexter body in that moment. Wind whispering through the trees, water trickling under the bridge, something moving in the earth. Something…big.

  Spindly arms burst through the topsoil and reached for Dexter’s legs. Dexter leapt into the air, swinging his swords as he reached the apex of his flip—upside-down. The blades flashed, reflecting the light from the lampposts along the path. A thick fluid sprayed the ground as he severed the creatures’ arms at their elbows.

  Even through the ground, Brock could hear the screeches of the dwellers Dexter had maimed. The loss of a couple of limbs probably wouldn’t stop them. Sure enough, the ground rippled as the things pushed their way closer to the surface.

  Dexter spun his swords in graceful arcs as he finished his flip, the tips of both weapons pointing at the ground. He stabbed them through the earth as he landed in a crouch.

  A normal person could never have pulled off that maneuver. Dexter w
as far from normal.

  Brock could feel Dexter drawing on all of their bodies—using the mental power of five brains, the muscle memory of five bodies. These dwellers didn’t stand a chance.

  More screeches came from below. Thick brown-green blood welled up around the blades as Dexter twisted their hilts. He pulled the swords with him as he stood, flicking them to the side to cut off more arms reaching for him from the ground.

  Brock was about to pull back and leave Dexter to his gruesome work when a different type of scream hit his ears. Human.

  “Dexter—” Brock thought.

  “We know.” Dexter ran toward the sound, hacking at limbs as he did, leaping over forms emerging from the earth. Time slowed again, letting Brock get a good look at the creatures.

  Filthy clothes hung from their impossibly thin bodies. Their skin was coated in fine silver fur. As far as dwellers went, that wasn’t so bad. It was their faces that Brock was sure he’d be having nightmares about.

  The gray skin that mostly covered their eyes was wrinkled and puckered. It looked like someone had taken two clods of mud and rubbed them into their otherwise empty eye sockets. Their noses were tiny slits and oversized teeth that were jagged triangles filled their mouths, shark-like. Two tiny flaps of skin stuck out from the sides of their heads roughly where their ears should be.

  “Trolls,” Bradley projected.

  Brock almost wished he had kept his distance from Dexter’s consciousness so these things would be out of focus. He’d studied the entry on trolls in Vaughn’s Dweller’s Database, and knew they were ugly. Seeing them up close and clearly was much worse than the digitized files. No wonder Vaughn called them mole-people.

  “Tessa warned us that other dwellers tend to move into Redcap tunnels after an infestation has been cleared,” DP thought. “Trolls were at the top of her watchlist.”