Chapter 4
Jenesis was exhausted.
She’d spent every minute of every day, weekend, and night in the lab.
She wasn’t trying to prove anything to her staff by her behavior.
She wanted her work to speak for itself.
But the work had drawn her in in a way she had never expected.
Sure, she’d always gotten a little obsessed with her work through the years.
What scientist didn’t? Especially when they felt a breakthrough was imminent.
But she was nowhere near any such breakthrough.
However, the work she was doing was groundbreaking in many ways just in its infantile stages.
Outside of the initial government testing the Morphates had endured during the exposure of the Phoenix Project, no other testing or work had been done on them.
And certainly none of the information that the government had gleaned had ever become public information.
This she knew for a fact because she had searched exhaustively for it.
And in ways normal people might not do. She knew how the government worked, and she was very certain that Kincaid Gregory wasn’t the only one wanting to know how to kill a Morphate.
It was simply the darker side of human nature to fear what it didn’t fully understand, and in that fear want to know how to destroy it.
Perhaps it was a self-preservation instinct …
but she was more inclined to think of it as human ignorance.
Over the past two weeks she had seen very little of Kin Gregory, but she knew he was there.
Knew he was watching her. She could almost feel his disdain following her around like a dogged, nasty pit bull that simply would not unclamp its jaws now that it had hold of her.
The few times she had been in the same room as he, she’d made certain to walk a wide circle around him. It was just better that way.
The labs were in the same building as the condos the human lab members had been given, so she never had far to go to get home.
The lab building had been designed that way to keep humans from wandering too freely in the Dark City.
The entire building was like a mini human city in the heart of Dark Philly.
The shopping was all inside the building, from clothes to food, including even boutiques, all Morphate-run and all heavily guarded by security.
It was clear that the security wasn’t to protect the shop owners.
It was there to regulate the interactions between the Morphates and the humans.
At the end of the day, the Morphates left the building and the simple humans remained inside.
That wasn’t to say they couldn’t wander the City, but it had only been seven years ago that the Dark Cities had been hellholes devastated by criminals, addicts, and worse.
The human and Morphate populations of Dark Philly were still a bit unnerving.
Jenesis could easily see where some of her lab workers had come from.
The scarring and the tattoos, the rough attitudes they had to work hard at keeping under control, made it clear that they had been reclaimed from the dregs of society.
In her opinion, that made the Morphates miracle workers. They had been able to give second chances to people who had otherwise been given up on. They had saved countless human lives.
But that didn’t mean Dark Philly was a garden city to be safely strolled around. However, the Morphate cops, known as the Watch, were very diligent. Especially, no doubt, as the Dark City allowed more and more humans in to fulfill specialty jobs like hers.
All of this raced through her head in a dizzying swirl as she dragged her feet into the elevator.
She didn’t even register the man who entered the elevator with her.
Not until he hit the Stop button between floors and abruptly cornered her at the back of the elevator.
She heard the bell going off distantly, warning of the stopped elevator, but what she was focused on was the dark eyes of her assailant.
“Dr. DeBruehl, I have a message for you,” he said quickly, his hand coming out to clamp on to her shoulder.
The grip was painful, in contradiction to his next statement.
“I am not here to hurt you. Only to tell you that there are interested parties who would be willing to reward you in impressive ways if you were to give them the results of your research instead of giving them to the Morphate.”
Not Morphates. Morphate singular. It struck her that there was contempt in that acknowledgment of Kincaid Gregory.
“What people?” she demanded.
He smiled, but there was nothing comforting or amusing about the expression.
“No one you haven’t already been willing to work with,” he said. “Suffice it to say, there’s a great deal of advantage for you in this proposition.” His grip tightened so hard then that she cried out and her knees buckled. “And it would not be in your best interest to ignore this opportunity.”
As he spoke, he hit the Continue button on the elevator panel and pressed the button for the next floor as well. He didn’t let go of her until the doors opened. Then he released her and hurried out into the hallway.
She slid down to the floor of the elevator, sitting there numb and scared as the doors shut and the lift continued on its way to her top-level apartment.
As her floor approached, she picked herself up, cradling her left shoulder in her right hand.
When the doors opened she made a cautious movement outside, looking into the hallway, cautiously inspecting both directions.
She was in a bit of shock as she plodded onward to her apartment, nervously looking over both shoulders all the way to her door, where she pushed into what she hoped was the safety of her apartment.
The building was, for all intents and purposes, heavily secured.
Where had her assailant come from? How had he gotten into the building past the notoriously thorough Watch?
As dangerous a job placement as this was, she had felt ridiculously safe because of all the security measures, both Morphate and technological, that had been put in place.
She should have known not to let her guard down, she thought bitterly. And what had he meant by—?
Jenesis dropped back hard against the door of her apartment, frightened fingers fumbling with the deadbolt lock, as if it would stand up to anyone really determined to get in.
The ridiculousness of her action made her laugh until tears blurred her vision.
She sank down onto her heels, her hand nursing the shoulder that still hurt.
She suspected it wouldn’t hurt so badly if she hadn’t been so terrified.
The only person she could think of whom she had worked with in the past who would play such a ruthless game was Dr. Eric Paulson.
The rumor was he had turned himself into a Morphate.
That he was as indestructible as they were.
That there would never be any way of making him pay for his atrocious crimes.
The understanding that he was out there was bad enough, but the prospect that he was out there doing the same kinds of experiments as he had been before was mind-numbing and fearfully paralyzing.
And if he was looking for a way to kill other Morphates, then Kincaid Gregory and his people were in a great deal of danger.
Especially considering that Paulson was powerfully persuasive enough to convince one of his agents to breach Morphate security in order to get to her.
Jenesis wouldn’t be half so afraid, she supposed, if she wasn’t already anticipating the fact that she would rather cut her own heart out than give that maniac one iota of her research ever again.
That meant that somewhere in her future all she had waiting for her was the other side of Paulson’s ultimatum.
Join or die.
She took a deep breath, gathering herself together as she picked herself up off her heels.
She shook the tears out of her eyes, lifting her chin.
So be it. She would deal with that when the time came.
If the time ever came. So far no conventional method short of the intense equivalent radiation dump of a radical bomb had proved capable of killing Morphate cells.
As it was, they had been forced to develop a special chamber in the lab to dispose of blood specimens.
On the positive side, they didn’t have to refrigerate Morphate blood.
It never separated into serum and cells under normal conditions.
It took a centrifuge, whereas human cells immediately began to break apart when taken out of the body.
It had changed the protocol for preserving blood specimens completely.
Meaning there was no need for protocol. No need for preservatives. No need for any of it.
Moving to her kitchen, she pulled open the fridge door and looked for something to calm her nerves. The sight of almost completely empty shelves reminded her just where her priorities had been for these past few weeks.
She looked at the clock. It was nearly 3 A.M. Everything was closed. There would be no delivery services, no stores would be open, and she sure as hell was not setting foot outside of her door until daylight.
She tried not to give in to the urge to cry as she closed the refrigerator and looked around the room for something … anything … to help steady her nerves.