Bound to Ashes (The Altered Sequence Book 1) (27 page)

While the humans and Ashton stand around in the darkness, I go up the stairs. The room is longer than I thought, extending far off in front of me, but too dark even for me to see. I touch the damp hand rails. The smell is stronger. The railings stretch to my left, so I follow it. Stairs leading down bring me to a cramped area, walls on either side form a narrow hallway fading to dark. I reach out but the railing is gone and in its place is glass. I rap my knuckles on it— a dull, solid sound. Could it be the dome, finally? Maybe a viewing station above it? But then that smell, where’s that coming from... some chemical the facility uses for some obscure function?

From across the room, I hear James say, “Aless, I’m gonna be honest, I don’t feel safe groping around for a switch. So good luck finding the lights.”

“No need,” says Alessandra, “got it!”

I cover my eyes when the first lights clunk on. When they stop throbbing from the bright lights, I blink them open fully.

One by one the lights turn on. The glass turns out to be the wall of a tank filled to the brim with a greenish yellow liquid, still and murky. Blurry shapes suspended in the liquid take form. I squint and lean in to see.

The humans murmur, “What is this place...?” I hear the familiar clicking of Ashton’s toenails on the metal floor above me.

The floating forms take shape before my eyes and stop my heart. Little hands. Curled-up legs. Oversized heads. Little dark veins stretched like ivy, crawling through papery skin.

The urge to vomit makes me look away. I choke it down, though, with the absurd thought of energy conservation. Food is scarce, don’t waste it... but look at them. Those tiny things floating in that chemical....

“What the hell is this?!”

The rage in Ashton’s voice snaps me to. I climb the stairs two at a time and find him standing on the raised area looking down at the humans. His arm is held taut gesturing to the sea of green.

Alessandra furrows her brow and steps up the stairs slowly, puzzling something in her mind, unfazed by Ashton’s anger, and she leans over the railing to look down into the glassy pool. Her expression releases into a wide-open look of surprise and... revulsion?

“What is this?” Ashton demands again. I can’t imagine why he’s so mad.... Is there something I’m not seeing?

He notices me, glances behind him, and says in a seething voice, “They’re
us
.”

I look down into the pool.

The longer ears on the bigger ones... I must be imagining them. It’s a trick of the liquid, or the angle.... But down at eye-level, it’s still there. The long ears. Like ours.

It’s a growing pool.

“Wow,” Alessandra says. “I... Never thought we’d see this part.”

“You knew this was here?” Ashton says.

She looks directly at him. “Yes.”

“Wh— so this is a Caduceus facility,” Ashton stammers, unable to form a coherent thought, leaning on the railings and trying to sort through all this. I join them on the raised area and stand behind Ashton.

“Well, yes and no,” Alessandra says, and her conversational tone makes me sicker. “It’s Stem Incorporated. My dad’s company. It got bought out a few years before the virus. The Caduceus guys came in and appropriated a lot of our lab space and....”

The rest of her excuses fall soundless on my ears. I glance to my right at the machinery, so tall it forms a wall. Screens and swaths of mechanical innards spread out before me. This must be how they operated the pools. Sparked the developmental process. It has to be.

“...and besides, we had no choice, really. Dad never wanted anything to do with Caduceus, but, um....” Her arguments die as she speaks them.

“Business is business,” James adds in a detached voice.

Ashton’s louder voice replies, “Business?! You can’t call playing god business—”

“Look, this isn’t why we’re here, okay? It’s just a part of Stem that represents ten— no, more like... three percent of what the company was about. Think about the dome and all the vaccines and—”

“And killing machines and genetic tampering!” Ashton finishes. His voice is more suited to an even tone, smooth, comforting. It’s unused to this anger. But even Ashton’s voice, along with the others, fall into the background.

I can deactivate the control panel. And no one’s around who can fix it. Everyone in the facility is dead. The main screen... probably has some pretty important stuff behind it. It’s not even glass, it’s a LCD screen, it’ll burst like skin, mechanical skin, and it might even spew mechanical blood, the same color as the green water behind me. That foul-smelling, viscous water, preserving things that would one day grow up to be like us. They’ll never be described by the humans as ‘one of us’. And they’ll be scared of what they are and what they’re capable of. No matter how you spin it.

I slide my foot to the side and rear up to plant my boot straight into the screen.

“What are you doing?”

Alessandra plows past Ashton and stands in front of the machine, arms spread-eagled and face stern. Her mismatch eyes bore into me, cutting through me like the Sentinels’ beams.

I set my foot back on the floor, but as soon as she’s not blocking me, I’m going to smash that machine into smithereens. Maybe before. “Get out of my way.”

Her breath is strong and moves her small frame up and down in a slow, heaving rhythm. “No.”

“Why not?” I don’t want to know the answer, though, why did I even go there... the only reason she can say no is because she wants them... preserved.

“They’re alive.”

“That’s debatable,” Ashton spits, nose wrinkled in a disgusted sneer. “What kind of life is this?”

“We can wake them up,” Alessandra says. “Slowly, over time, as we’re settling into the dome. They can have more of a life than just... suspended animation.”

“Suspended animation would be better.” I can’t help it, my voice sounds thin and angry. “Why would you want... why would you want more of this?!” I show my hands to her, surely she can see the scars and the bloody bandages, symbols of the thing she calls a ‘life’ I’m leading. “If you could prevent it, why wouldn’t you?”

“They wouldn’t have
your
life,” she says, stepping forward, getting in my face. “They’ll have their own lives! They’ll grow up normally, with friends, and an education, like normal children!”

“Bullshit.” It’s all I can think of. I can hardly think straight.

“And you’re lucky to have your life at all!” Alessandra cries, pushing two palms against my chest. “You should be grateful for being alive!”

Should be. According to her. I have no one to blame for my existence except myself. I’ve been too cowardly my whole life to do what has always nagged at me in the back of my mind. Jules was no coward. I am.

Alessandra stares at me, head tilted slightly, bewildered expression. “I don’t get you,” she says finally. She folds her hand over her eyes and her other hand wraps around her waist. “After all I risked....”

“Oh, yeah, after all you risked. What about us? We’re fighting down here in this hellhole, too, if you hadn’t—”

“I am not talking about here!” She cries, and her hurt expression gives me pause, though I wish it hadn’t. “Don’t you remember? Anything at all?” Pleading. Is she just stalling?

“Remember what.”

Her breathing is shaky and at any second I think she’ll break down and cry. Then she steels herself, points at me, and says fervently, “You were born at Caduceus. But you didn’t stay there.”

The other humans watch with horrified eyes.

“They shipped you and tons of others to our facility after we got bought out. I remember you. I saw you, dammit, I met you! And if you had stayed longer, we might have been friends!”

Ashton looks at me like he hardly knows who I am. I want to lash out at Alessandra, strike her down for lying. But she keeps going.

“Before the virus hit, just as the war was getting bad, dad told me everyone who didn’t work at Stem was getting relocated to bomb shelters. Me, my mother, the other spouses and children of the workers... and the supersoldiers, too. But... I overheard them talking. Back at Caduceus, they were planning something. They couldn’t let the supersoldiers fall into enemy hands, so they were going to kill all of them. Orders to ‘euthanize’ the subjects in our facilities went out that day.” She’s shaking now. “But I got a hold of the documents, I changed yours. They shipped you back to Caduceus instead of the gas chambers.” Her hysterical voice rose to a crescendo towards the end and silenced the entire room. I’m holding my breath. “I gave you a few more days to live because I felt sorry for you. I knew you were a kid, just like me, and you didn’t deserve to die. And that, goddammit, Dev, that is why I needed you to come here,” fat tears roll down her face, “so you could have a chance at a real life!”

I have no way of knowing this is true. But I can’t think why it couldn’t be.

“So that’s why you shouldn’t kill them,” she jabs a finger at the pool, “because they deserve the life they were never intended to have.”

At this point I have only one urge, only one thought, one shining, poignant thought in my usually cluttered mind:

Run.

[Alessandra]

“Aless? You awake?”

My eyes are wide open. “Yeah.”

Peregrine sits next to me and says nothing for a while. I just distract myself with her scent, somehow I can smell it over the pungent liquid. It’s soft, and earthy. She says, “It would be kind of pointless to ask if you were okay, but, you wanna talk about it?”

Always so practical. “You think I unloaded on them too much?”

“Judging by how they both took off right after your speech, I’d say... probably. But it’s not all your fault.”

“How is it not my fault, Pere? I defended this!” I throw my arm behind me to gesture at the tank. The threshold from calm to hysterical is just a membrane. “What the hell was I thinking? That they’d be happy about it?”

Peregrine wants to be on my side, I can see it in her expression, she’s fighting with something. “Well. I guess not,” she says finally, looking away and folding her arms. She sighs like she’s been placed with a difficult puzzle.

My words spill out, “I was too proud, and too scared to tell them before, even though I should have, right? Withholding the truth is basically lying.” My voice chokes up and threatens to push more tears out. I fight them back. No more crying, dammit.

Now Peregrine has something to add: “I really don’t think that letting them know about it earlier would have helped,” she says. “Maybe—well, Aless, who cares when you should have done it. You messed up. No one knows what the best solution could have been. That’s past. What are you going to do now?”

Her reply just makes the angry knot tighten and my tears grow hotter, because she’s right. Why do I want to keep digging up the past and what I should have done? Why beat myself up for it?

Because I deserve it.

“No.”

“What?”

I pull in a breath and say, “Pere, I should have told them. It would have been better that way. And I should have taken a different route instead of the—the place that—the scaffolding was unstable and I should’ve known it was too—”

Then the tears erupt and even my palms can’t press them back in. Such embarrassing sobs, heaving and shaking...

Peregrine’s warm arm lays over my shoulders. “Shh,” she says, or more like commands. “Even the shepherd’s dog eats lamb.”

“What?” In between sobs, it’s barely a word.

“Something my mom used to say. Basically, it means people screw up. Even if they did their best. Shit happens, I guess. You’ll always lose some sheep even if you’ve got a good guard dog.”

“But it’s because of me that she’s dead, I brought them here, I convinced them to come....”

“And it’s also because of you that they’re not still living up there,” she jerks a finger up, “in that wasteland. And Dev is alive at all because of you! But I think, right now, he’s... processing.” She laughs a little, cryptically.

We’re silent for a long string of deep breaths. They’re not so shaky, now. I can finally say what’s been nagging my brain for so long.

“I’m just like every other human to them.”

“I disagree,” Peregrine says. “You’re the very first human that ever showed them we’re not all like Heydrich. When you changed the papers, took Heydrich out of the equation, and reached out to them... you’re probably the best thing that’s happened to them.”

“But Jules is dead.”

“Yeah, but you’re not qualified to decide what would have been worse: living on the surface and dying for sure, or coming here and at least having a chance.”

I glance at her. Her open features and passive expression are weirdly soothing. She says, smiling, “Only God can decide shit like that, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

Peregrine always knows what to say. I wrap my arms around her and bury my face in her coat, forcing myself to breathe and believe what she said. She peels me back and plants a small kiss on my lips. The first real kiss we’ve had since we left.

“There, there,” she says, smirking.

“Alright.” I straighten up, smoothing my pant legs and squaring my shoulders. “We should probably go find them.”