Chapter 10
TEN
Evie woke with a headache that felt like someone had driven a spike through the base of her skull.
She opened her eyes, then wished she hadn’t.
Bare metal grating covered three walls, with the fourth covered by an energy barrier that took the form of a sheet of pale blue light that buzzed at a frequency she could feel in her teeth.
Beyond the barrier lay a large open space with some people in it.
She couldn’t focus on it yet. The headache was making her vision swim.
She turned her gaze and saw Jarran pacing the small space like a caged jaguar.
He prowled back and forth across the narrow cell, five steps one way, five steps back.
His wrists were bound in front of him with mag-cuffs, thick metal bands locked together with a magnetic seal.
There was a bruise darkening his jaw and a scrape across his cheekbone.
His hair was disheveled, falling across his forehead.
His brows were dark and low, and his lips were drawn thin.
“Jar-ran,” she said in a hoarse whisper.
An instant later, he’d dropped to his knees beside her and worried, dark green eyes peered into hers.
“Evie.” His bound hands reached for her to help her to a seated position. “Thank stars you’re awake. How do you feel?”
“Like I got hit by a truck.” She braced one hand against the floor and the other rubbed her forehead. The room tilted and then steadied. “What happened? Why was I unconscious?”
“You wouldn’t stop struggling. One of the guards put a small…” He frowned, searching for a word. “Thing to the side of your neck that shocked you. You dropped. They carried you when they brought us to this ship. I’ve been—” He stopped. Swallowed. “I was worried.”
She touched the side of her neck. The skin was tender, swollen. They must have used a stun wand on her. It delivered a targeted electromagnetic pulse to the cervical spine. These devices were designed for nonlethal incapacitation, but they were brutal and painful nonetheless.
“How long was I out?”
“I don’t know. Hard to tell time in here.
” He flexed his hands inside the mag-cuffs.
She could see the muscles in his arms straining, and she understood.
He wanted to pull her close. His whole body was angled toward her, leaning in, but the cuffs kept his hands locked together and the best he could manage was reaching out and tilting her chin.
He turned her head carefully and looked at the side of her neck where the wand had connected.
He winced. “Red mark. Swollen. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop them. ”
“It’s not your fault.” It wasn’t, but the look on his face told her that he felt he’d failed her.
“Isn’t it?” He dropped his hands.
She looked at him properly now and knew she had to accept the fact that he was probably the only person who was keeping her alive.
She wasn’t his doctor anymore, as she’d resigned that morning.
The forms had been filed after a vague conversation with Silca about advanced methods that she’d sweated through.
Dr. Evie Carr was no longer professionally responsible for Patient Nine.
But instead of taking a shuttle to the nearest transit hub, as she’d intended after their final session, they were prisoners together.
She wasn’t sure what they were to each other now, beyond two people in a cell who had kissed, once.
The weird part was, she’d only ever seen Jarran in the agricultural bay. That was the version of him she’d come to know. In this cold metal box, cuffed and bruised, with no soil under his hands and no plants to tend? Well, that was disorienting.
“I’ll live.” She reached out and touched his jaw where the bruise was spreading. “What about you? What happened to your face?”
“Fought when they handled you rough.” He said it flatly with no self-pity. “I stopped after they shocked you.”
She dropped her hand. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?” He sat back on his heels and rested his elbows on his knees. “You didn’t hit me.”
Evie let out a chuckle, knowing he hadn’t intended for that to sound humorous, even though it did. “So, they took us to this ship?” She looked past him, through the energy barrier, into the open space beyond.
“Yes.” His gaze followed hers and hardened. “Very big. The guards…” He waved a hand toward the people out there who were not, at the moment, paying attention to them. “They act strange around me.”
Evie knew why that was, but didn’t know where to begin explaining that to him.
Instead, she took in the space. It appeared to be a converted cargo hold, meaning it was enormous with high ceilings and simple, bright lighting.
Equipment lined the walls. Weapons racks.
Training mats. Holographic targeting systems. Raiders were everywhere, prowling, talking, and mostly watching the activities happening in the room’s open center.
There, moving in synchronized formation, were ten young females.
Most of them were shorter than Evie, with close-cropped hair in shades that ranged from silver to pale green.
Their skin had a faint luminescence that marked them as not fully human, but Evie knew there was very likely some human DNA in them.
Knowing what she did about Pella Rin’s experiments in the Sifters, it was easy to guess that these females were more hybrids.
They wore identical dark bodysuits and moved in perfect unison.
Spinning, striking, blocking. They were doing combat drills, and their precision was scary to witness.
Their faces were blank. They moved with the efficiency of machines.
These women could kick her ass with almost no effort.
A guard strode among them, barking commands. The females responded instantly, pivoting into new stances, switching from hand-to-hand techniques to weapons without a beat of hesitation. They executed a disarming move so fluid, Evie let out a low whistle.
Evie glanced up at Jarran, who was also watching them. The furrow in his brow had deepened and his cuffed hands pressed together. Something was working behind his eyes. Was it recognition, fighting through fog?
“Do you know what this is?” she asked quietly.
He was quiet for a while as he worked through a thick swallow. “I think…” He stopped. Started again. “I made this. Something like this. Before.”
He didn’t elaborate and he didn’t have to. She could see the horror on his face, building behind his eyes, crawling up from wherever his memory stored things his conscious mind couldn’t reach.
“Tell me.” His voice was rough. “Tell me what I’m looking at. I need to know.”
Evie hesitated. Two cycles ago, she would never have just told him. She’d have doled it out in clinical portions, calibrated to his emotional tolerance. But she wasn’t his doctor anymore and the truth was standing in formation thirty feet away. He deserved to know.
“Durik, the male who captured us, was Pella Rin’s second-in-command.
His lieutenant, of sorts. After Pella Rin was captured and the Sifters scattered, Durik went underground.
He was never captured.” She kept her voice low, watching the guards beyond the barrier.
“What you’re looking at is his operation.
He got hold of Pella Rin’s bioengineering research and he’s producing a second generation of hybrid females. ”
Jarran’s eyes didn’t leave the training floor. “Hybrid.”
“Engineered. Created in a laboratory by combining genetic material from multiple species.” She watched his face carefully.
“The first generation of engineered females was designed to be resistant to the effects of the terti flower, which is a powerful, highly addictive drug that’s been trafficked across the quadrants for decades.
Processing the flowers is dangerous. Workers become addicted and eventually incapacitated.
Pella Rin’s solution was to create females who could handle and process the terti without being affected by it.
They could work the flowers indefinitely without addiction. ”
Jarran’s expression didn’t change. He was processing the information, and she couldn’t imagine what he had to be thinking.
“These females are different,” Evie continued.
“The first generation was designed for labor. It looks like these are being trained for combat.” She nodded toward the formation.
“They must have been created with a different mix of species because they do look a bit different from the others. These show instant obedience, no hesitation, and no individual expression. They follow commands without question.”
“Like I did,” Jarran said. His voice was barely audible. “In the memories. The laboratory. The masked male gave orders and I couldn’t refuse.”
Evie mentally filed that away. It could be significant.
“I don’t know if it’s the same mechanism, but the result is the same.
” Absolute obedience. Engineered compliance.
These females weren’t just fighters. They were living weapons, but this was hardly a new tactic.
Super soldiers had been made with varying results for centuries.
There had to be more going on with these women beyond just fighting.
She saw one of the females execute a sequence of strikes against a holographic target. Each impact was met with a shower of sparks and the sound of spitting electricity, but the female’s face remained blank. She seemed to absorb the impact and kept going, as if she felt no pain.
“It’s Pella Rin’s science,” Evie said in a whisper. “Durik took the foundation and built something worse.”
Jarran opened and closed his fists. A low growl came from him.
Evie had been with him as he cried over his brother and she’d watched him shake with terror after Pella Rin’s influence briefly invaded his mind.
But this was different. For the first time, the fragments in his head weren’t abstract horrors.
They were real. Real people, stripped of autonomy and trained to kill.
Evie’s heart broke for him, as sweet, gentle Jarran, who liked to tend plants, was losing his innocence.
The amnesia had given him a kind of clean version of himself, unburdened by knowledge of what he’d done.
Piece by piece, that version was being written on.
Each new revelation carved something into him that couldn’t be erased.
Evie moved closer beside him. She placed her hand on his arm, above the cuffs, and felt the clenched muscles beneath her fingers. “Jarran.”
He shook his head. He was trying to find words.
She could see the effort, the frustration, the way his mouth opened and closed as he searched for language big enough to explain what he was feeling, but the words weren’t there.
She wasn’t sure hers would be, either, if their positions were reversed.
His vocabulary had expanded enormously since she’d met him, but some things were too large and awful for mere words to describe.
He looked down at his hands, which had planted seedlings, caught blades from the air, and cupped her face as he kissed her. “I did this,” he said. “Some version of me did this.”
Evie shrugged. “Well, yes, but from what you told me of the laboratory, whatever they did to you as a teenager may have fundamentally changed who you became. The version of you that did this…” She nodded toward the females. “Wasn’t exactly you.”
“Does that matter?” He looked at her. “They’re still there. Those females. They exist because of what I built.”
She didn’t have a good answer for that. The ethics of culpability when the perpetrator had been neurologically altered were complex enough for a doctoral thesis. She wasn’t going to solve them in a holding cell.
“It matters,” she said firmly. “It doesn’t erase what happened. But it matters.”
He turned his gaze back to the females, who had shifted into a new drill. Hand-to-hand pairs now, sparring in matched sets. One of the females took a hit to the jaw and didn’t flinch. Didn’t react at all. Just reset her stance and continued.
“They can’t feel anything,” Jarran said.
“We don’t know that for certain. Their pain responses may be suppressed,” she said.
“Or, yes. They may have been engineered without pain receptors as we know them. I’d need to examine them to know.
” She wished she could, to find out if there were actual people inside those bodies, but that wasn’t going to happen.
“Can you help them? If we get out of here. Can you fix what was done to them?”
“I don’t know, Jarran.”
He nodded, accepting that with a patience that continually surprised her, given how little patience the universe had shown him.
Evie watched the operation. She was by no means an expert, but this whole thing seemed like it had been building for a long time.
A desperate last stand by scattered Sifter remnants wouldn’t have such infrastructure and resources.
If Durik had consolidated power since Pella Rin’s capture, he could have easily built a private army of engineered soldiers, all in the shadow of the Coalition’s victory over the Sifters, while the galaxy assumed the threat was neutralized.
And now he had the great and powerful Pella Rin himself. Or, at least, the body of him.
“What does he want from me?” Jarran asked. He’d turned from the barrier and was looking at her. His dark green eyes were steady, but the rawness underneath was close to the surface. “Durik. What does he want?”
She could guess that he wanted the name that still commanded loyalty across the criminal quadrants, and perhaps he wanted the mind that had built the bioengineering program that made those females possible.
What if Durik was going to try to turn him back into the monster who had built all of this?
She looked at Jarran, who patiently gazed at her, waiting for her answer with bound hands and dark green eyes full of dread.
She said the only thing she knew for sure. “Nothing good, I’m afraid.”