Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Charlotte
The Aerie
Laboratory
Ethan Radcliffe. The butcher. The man who created monsters. The man who vanished after his trial for experimenting on sleeping Endeavor passengers.
Her husband. Her monster.
The records were unclear about what happened. It was implied he had committed suicide, but some theorized that the newly elected colonial governor hushed up his execution. Obviously, that did not happen. Now she understood why he had been so cagey in their conversations, always avoiding any questions about his past.
It was a lot to take in and they didn’t have the luxury for her to examine every nuance, as much as she wanted. The hardest thing to grasp was that she had a type and that type did not make flattering comments about her person.
Later. She’d worry about it later.
“Clearly, we have a few things to discuss,” she said, slicing across her wrist. Wincing at the sting, she was thankful for the sharp blade that cut easily. She’d have given up at the least bit of resistance. She clenched a fist, watching as the blood beaded and trickled down in rivulets.
She leaned forward, extending her wrist to Draven. “Don’t argue. Drink. Please.”
His eyes burned scarlet as he licked the wound, lapping up every drop. Charlotte gasped, not expecting the cool, numbing sensation. His mouth clamped onto her wrist. There was the faintest prick of a bite and the numbness spread up her arm and settled over her. It was bracing and as invigorating as brisk winter air. Every sensation felt heightened by the connection between them. Her heart pumped. He drank. His beat in return. She was in him.
Charlotte’s free hand settled on the top of his head, her fingers twisting into his pale hair. She breathed. She felt him breathe in return. They moved together.
How much would be enough? She wanted him well enough to fight if necessary but she had to be strong enough too.
“Enough,” she said, attempting to tug her arm away. Draven growled, refusing to release his hold. He drank greedily. Her head swam. “Draven, love, let go.”
She groped for the discarded dagger, willing to use it if need be. Her hand found the hilt.
Draven released his hold, flinging her arm away. He licked his lips, eyes an unsettling scarlet. “Open the kit. Drink the nutritional shake.”
Charlotte drank half the bottle. She offered the remainder to him, but he shook his head.
Draven—Ethan?—slumped against the wall and tipped his head back. “My eyes are still blurry. When they’ve healed enough, I’ll sew myself up.”
“I can do that.”
“Have you stitched flesh together, sweetness? It’s not pleasant.”
“I’m not squeamish,” she lied. She was very much squeamish. “It can’t be too different from working with leather.”
He shook his head. “It’s not pleasant, and I do have the training, even if I haven’t stitched together a patient in a century, give or take a decade.” He laughed, a wet and unpleasant sound. “I suppose now’s when I have to explain myself.”
“I’d appreciate it. How about I clean you up and you talk?”
“Well, it’s a rather complex story.”
“Start at the beginning.” She unfastened the waistcoat and shirt, easing the fabric open. He hissed as she pried up the bits where fabric had dried to his skin.
“Shall I regale you with tales of my childhood on Earth? Do you want to hear about the year we had no rain and the soil turned to dust? Careful,” he growled between clenched teeth.
She did not apologize for being rougher than necessary removing the stubborn cloth. “Maybe instead of being sarcastic, you can start your story when you arrived on the planet?”
“This tale starts at least a year before that, perhaps earlier. I was a medical officer on the Endeavor , which you probably knew. The ship received a distress call from our sister ship, the Hope . An asteroid field damaged their life support. No survivors.”
With his stomach exposed, Charlotte soaked the cloth and carefully wrung it out over him. He hissed again as the water trickled over the gash across his abdomen. Gently, she cleaned above and below and wiped the cloth over the least damaged areas.
“And the Endeavor was off course. The only suitable planet was Nexus,” she said. Every school-aged child knew the story.
“Nexus wasn’t suitable,” he said, “but we had no choice. Captain Beckford told me to find a solution. I did. She didn’t approve of my methods.”
“Your methods killed people.” Charlotte went to refill the bowl with fresh water. Hal watched them from the far side of the room, his eyes wary.
“My methods were legitimate. Earth had used gene therapy for generations to allow humanity to adapt to a hostile environment. Happy little mutations. But I was vilified. For what? Because a handful of subjects suffered sudden cardiac arrest or developed cancer?” He paused, awaiting her response.
“Maybe because you called them subjects and not patients?”
“A few sacrificed for the greater good. Every passenger received my therapy. Every single one. Do you know how many lives I saved?” This time, he did not pause for a response. “Four thousand eight hundred and ninety-seven lives.”
She paused, the cloth hovering just over his brow. “How many did you kill?”
“They would have died regardless. Do you have any idea what radiation poisoning is like? The nausea, the headaches, hair loss, and the internal bleeding. You vomit blood until you have nothing left,” he said, completely avoiding the question.
“How many?”
“I saved those people, and they called me a butcher,” he said, conviction in his voice.
She nodded, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, as she cleaned the blood from his face. His actions had been horrific, though justified. She packed it away for another thing to think about later, if they ever made it off this cursed mountain. “What happened next? How does Hal fit into this? I’ve read plenty about Radcliffe, about you, but no text ever hinted at a sibling.”
Again, he dodged the question. “We knew the planet had unusual properties. I modified the genetic code of everyone on board to tolerate—thrive—in our new environment. I hadn’t anticipated how the Nexus fluctuations would affect the mutations. Some suffered adverse reactions.”
Everyone? That was an astounding bit of information. Every passenger. Four thousand eight hundred and ninety-seven people. His experiment could have killed the entire colony before they even arrived.
The books all agreed that Radcliffe had experimented on a few unlucky passengers. Some died. Some were twisted into monsters. Only a few, though, which made the horror of it easier to compartmentalize.
Adverse reactions. The blithe tone in which he spoke so casually about the people who mutated into nightmare creatures irritated her.
“Every soul on this planet has been shaped by my hand,” he said, mirroring her thoughts. “Even you, sweetness.”
“What about the adverse reactions? People died.”
“They adapted. That is the human condition. Adapt or die.”
“But they weren’t human anymore, were they? Were you? And they weren’t happy. You were the most hated man on the planet. Is that why you changed your name? To hide?”
His expression darkened as he took the cloth from her and wiped his hands clean. “That’s enough. Fetch some fresh water. I’ll sew myself up.”
Charlotte did not follow orders. She stayed put. “You said you would tell me everything. What happened next?”
“Then you already know what happened next,” he snapped. “We arrived, landed on a continent just entering the spring season, and enjoyed three blissful months of terraforming and construction. When the summer solstice arrived, our technology broke. People changed. I changed. It was chaos.”
Again, nothing she didn’t already know.
“This?” She waved a hand to indicate the laboratory. “Why was this built? Why was your brother kept prisoner in a cage?” As she spoke, her voice rose higher in pitch, sounding dismayed.
“This was built because the mineral properties of the mountain act as a shield. We needed a safe place to keep our most valuable resources.” His voice lowered, turning menacing.
“You knew what would happen on the solstice,” she said. That was new information. Every text, diary, and witness account always expressed shock and horror at discovering the nature of their new home.
He shook his head. “Radiation can destroy electronics over time. The mountain was to protect from that. We had no idea how dramatic the Nexus energy fluctuations would be. What it would do to us.” His head lolled back, resting against the wall. He chuckled, a cold sound entirely without mirth. “Did you know we convinced the Hope’s computer to follow us? There’s an entire other ship in a mountain valley that we can’t use because all the equipment was fried. Such a waste. I wonder if the seed banks were compromised? Perhaps your cacao seeds are waiting to be discovered, sweetness.”
“There’s another ship? That’s real?” A strange excitement buzzed throughout her. Her father was right. His fringe academic belief was correct.
“Assuming it landed and didn’t crash. I wasn’t on speaking terms with the captain when she sent a retrieval team, so I don’t know.” Draven held out a hand. “Hand me the kit. We’re wasting time. It won’t be long before Stringer goes searching for us.”
With the kit opened at his side, Draven disinfected the gash across his abdomen. It looked nasty but less vicious than it had only ten minutes ago. He continued to speak, “To answer the questions you’re going to ask, I was tried and sentenced to execution. Luckily for me, the solstice happened, and I transformed. I was no longer Dr. Ethan Radcliffe. I was something new. Something better.”
He drew a needle and thread through himself, pulling the gaping wound together. It was horrifying and fascinating. She couldn’t stop watching.
“I escaped. A new name seemed prudent. I found Hal and learned that I was not the only one to undergo a transformation. While mine had been…a revelation, his was not. He was unstable. Filled with rage. A brute.”
Hal made a noise that very much sounded like a warning.
Draven’s expression darkened. “I vowed to repair the damage I had done, so I went to the only place I knew that had the facilities I needed.”
“A military base.”
“An unfinished storage facility. A few armed guards do not qualify as the military,” he said, tying off the thread. He applied an ointment and covered the stitches with gauze. “Hal went into a cryo chamber—that’s a machine that puts you in a deep sleep—while I worked on a cure. And I’ve been here ever since. Now let’s get my sword back from that traitorous rat.”