Chapter 3 Past
Past
Rohan
At the age of seven, I was injected with a lethal chemical called Liquid Onyx. It had a ninety-eight percent mortality rate, something my dad knew when he dosed me with it. That day, I was reborn into a new body and became more science experiment than person.
I remember what it felt like to die and what it felt like to come back different. Changed. Ruined.
Liquid Onyx hollowed me out like a fire inside a house.
It razed everything but the shell, the carcass that surrounded the cells and veins that now contain my blackened blood and mutated DNA.
The pain of being burned alive by my ravaged tissue has imprinted itself on my mind so deeply that the same pain can be dispensed by the reverse side of my flesh.
Through touch, I can make other people feel what I did when Liquid Onyx first hit my system like a toxic spill on the ocean.
It was meant to give Obsidian Inc.—and by extension, my dad as its director—the ability to create their own superhuman army. Children with enhanced senses and superhuman speed and strength, with powers that defied logic, that could make them an unstoppable force.
In some ways, he got what he wanted. Liquid Onyx worked although only a handful could survive the initial injection, and most others died within weeks or months if not hours or days.
It was the rare few who lived long enough to be torn apart by OI’s scientists, to be strapped to cold tables and cut open with clinical blades so they could find out how they worked, digging around inside them with their tools like clocks in a repair shop.
Once a scientist dared to call the Liquid Onyx survivors lucky within my earshot. Lucky to have lived. Lucky to be the inhuman creatures we are now.
I was nine years old by then, and I’d never hit a grown man before.
Turned out to be a lot more fun than hitting a child my own age.
Felt like there was some real substance to it, righteous satisfaction born from dispensing a malevolent justice that no snotty private school brat could ever conceivably earn.
Dad punished me for that display of brash volatility against one of his scientists although I think he was more pissed off that I didn’t use my power against him.
I’m almost certain that was why he put me in the same room with a man who would say such vile things in the first place.
He knew my reaction would be disastrous but clearly not what form that reaction would take.
I wish I could say it was purposeful, to disappoint him in his assumptions about me, but in truth I didn’t use my power because I couldn’t control it, let alone rely on it.
My power is a cruel one. Any power where the singular purpose of it is to inflict pain can only be utilised by a specific mindset, one that I do in fact possess, but only sometimes. I’m not consistently the monster that my dad created, which is a shameful disappointment to both of us, I guess.
It’s the pieces of me that my mum got the chance to forge when my dad was too busy with other matters to notice. Those pieces are sharp and well-honed but hidden. She taught me to shield them from him and everyone else, lest he find a way to scrouge them out.
She was the reason I stayed when all my instincts told me to flee. I thought I was her reason for staying in the hell that Ian Stone dragged her into when she was too young and stupid to see the wolf concealed behind that handsome facade.
But then she ran, and I saw the repercussions of that play out in real time.
My mum ran for what remained of her life, and in response, he took it all. Doused it like a flame that leapt from the firepit. She was the light that kept my world from being entirely consumed by cloying darkness.
She died, and I was submerged. All that was left to do was to reach into the murky blackness and find the most vulnerable patch of my dad’s skin to press my hand to.
***
I meet Aaron North for the first time on a Tuesday.
It’s not a good sign. I don’t like Tuesdays.
Historically, Tuesdays have not been kind to me.
I was injected with Liquid Onyx on a Tuesday.
My mum was murdered on a Tuesday. I was born on a Tuesday.
All bad. Don’t like. Bleh to every Tuesday there ever was and will ever be.
It’s been two weeks since my mum made her bid for freedom.
Twelve days since my dad dispatched one of his superhuman agents to kill her, court-martial style, like a deserter with shellshock from 1915.
Ten days since I packed up my shit and reenacted her escape attempt, only without her prequel energy execution.
I was breaking into one of OI’s labs to hijack a particular hard drive when a British government agency made the executive decision to blow it up.
Now there’s fire and debris everywhere, and the hard drive I was after lies cracked open and useless at my feet.
You can say this about the British government: they have consistently unenviable timing.
I meet up with Aaron on my way out of the facility.
He’s carrying two unconscious test subjects out of their containment cells, one slung over his shoulder in a firefighter’s hold, and the other cradled in his thick arms. They’re probably about two years old at most, small and fragile in comparison to Aaron’s large, imposing frame.
Aaron catches sight of me when I’m halfway out the nearest smashed window.
There’s soot from the smoke on his face, and he’s coughing hard, a rough, wet sound that grates on my over-sensitive ears.
His brows furrow at me in confusion. My hood is up, but the mask I was wearing earlier became dislodged when I was thrown across the room during the explosion that rocked the facility.
“They’ve got one more in there,” Aaron tells me, jerking his chin at a containment cell behind him. “He’s unconscious.”
I don’t know what he must be seeing on my face to make him think that information will mean anything to me, but I resolve to dissect and rectify whatever facial miscommunication that is later.
We stare at each other for a handful of seconds, the expectation in how he’s looking at me too galling to comment on.
I’m about to throw myself out of the window and trust the three-story drop to prevent Aaron from playing hero by coming after me, when the facility is hit with another overzealous explosion.
Movement shudders through the building, the walls and floor quaking with the pressure.
It throws me off-balance, and I have to grasp the window ledge to stop myself from falling on the wrong side.
Aaron is jerked off his feet and slammed into the wall although he stringently manages not to drop either of his charges.
One of them does hit their head on a jagged piece of wall that’s sticking out at a sharp angle.
The impact is hard enough to split open a wound near her temple.
Unblemished skin tears apart and blood begins to trickle down over her face.
The blood is black like oil, thick and shiny in the hallway’s flickering lights.
The children are, somehow, Liquid Onyx survivors. That should be impossible. All traces of Liquid Onyx was destroyed over a decade ago, and to my knowledge, no one has been able to recreate it in that time.
I climb down from the window ledge as Aaron rights himself. He holds the now-injured child close to his broad chest. He’s dressed all in black, except for the white letters stamped on his chest that read “FISA.”
Aaron watches me impassively as I stalk inside the containment cell behind him and come out with the third child held awkwardly in my arms. This one is about the same age as the others and unconscious like Aaron said.
There’s a visible crack on the back of his head that must have been really bad if it still hasn’t healed.
The wound on the little girl’s head has already closed over, the blood stemmed by her enhanced healing ability.
I bring up a mental map of the facility based on the building plans I scoured over before breaking in and pick out the most viable exit, then start jogging in that direction.
Either Aaron will follow me unquestioningly, which I’ll judge him harshly for, or he’ll try to find his own way out, which I’ll be relieved by.
Unfortunately, whatever made him think he could trust my sense of morality earlier must still be colouring his views about the purity of my intentions because he chases after me with a truly embarrassing lack of hesitation.
Most of the inner stairwell collapsed during the first explosion, and obviously the lifts are out as an option.
I lead Aaron to a fire escape exit opposite the door to the stairwell and use my foot to kick it open, busting out into the smoke-laden night air and taking the metal steps two at a time.
Aaron is surprisingly fast despite being such a large man and the extra weight of carrying two children rather than one, and he keeps pace with me all the way down to the ground.
Aaron’s government friends must be focusing their attention elsewhere because there’s no one to meet us at the bottom of the fire escape.
I take the child a good distance away from the building, just in case there’s another explosion, and place him down on the grass gently.
Aaron is right there when I turn around. He lays the children he was carrying down on the grass near where I offloaded mine. All of the frail-boned little mutants are still unconscious from whatever OI shot them up with.
Aaron is wheezing from the smoke inhalation, but there’s an intense scrutiny to how he’s looking me up and down, like I’m an interesting new bug he’s discovered in a garden he’s been tending for years.
I don’t appreciate it. I’ve had far too many people stare at me in curiosity, yearning to poke and prod, to rip and tear until all my secrets are laid out for them to study.