The Seven (35 page)

Posey stepped closer. In her eyes, Cormair saw no remnant of the gawky, awkward teenager he had known, only a hard, bitter woman filled with anger. Her voice was low and cold, "You were right. I came here to kill you. I was going to fly you out over the mountains, then drop you, but I wasn't going to do it from the stratosphere. I was going to drop you just high enough to break your legs, but not kill you. Then, I was planning on sitting in a tree and see what sort of carnivore found you first. I was going to watch while a bear or a wolf tore you apart."

Cormair could feel the hatred in Posey's voice. She truly despised him. His heart broke further.

"Do you see what you did to me? You had no right! Do you hear me,
Doctor
? No right to turn me into a freak of nature, an abomination! There's no way to reverse this! Even if I cut off these stupid wings, my feet will always be gross, horrible claws and I will continually grow these stupid feathers! I was always homely, and I accepted that. I knew no one was ever going to fall in love with me because of my face, but now I am beyond homely! I am truly ugly!"

Cormair shook his head fervently. "No! No! Posey, you are beautiful. You are the most beautiful woman I've ever seen."

Posey's golden eyes flashed with flame and ire and her face became a twisted snarl of disgust. "Look at me, Doctor! I am ugly! Ugly, ugly, ugly!" Posey crossed to his bedside and moved her face in front of his. "Look at me! Do you see what you've done to me?"

"I had no way to predict the results of what I was doing in an aesthetic sense, Posey. If I could, I would have made certain that you would have enjoyed the results. I was creating something new, something beyond human limits! Can you not see that? Can you not look in a mirror and realize that you are something---someone who is greater than everyone around them? You are better than beautiful! You are glorious! You are a miracle! You are truly one-of-a-kind creature. True, perhaps by human standards, you might consider yourself ugly, but you limit your thinking! You have to see yourself by new standards, standards of beauty that have never existed. Posey, you are a prototype, the first of your species. You are a new creation with unique DNA,
Homo Aves
. And far as that species goes, you are, by far, the most beautiful."

Posey grabbed the front of Cormair's hospital gown and yanked him forward. Her strength surprised him. She shook him so hard that his jaw bounced and his teeth clanked together.

"Do you honestly expect me to buy that crap? I am the
only
member of my so-called
species
, Doctor! I don't want to be glorious or unusual! I want to be a regular eighteen-year-old girl who dates and gets her heart broken and has a first kiss and marries and enjoys life! Now I will
never
get that chance! No one will ever love me! I will never have a normal life!"

Cormair slumped over. It was useless to argue. He had nothing he could say to her. For the first time in fifty years, he saw himself as a true monster. What rights did he have to play god? "I know."

"You condemned me to this living hell!"

"I know," he repeated.

"Why? What sort of sick man does this to a child?"

"A man who was so blinded by his work that he forgot to see you as children."

Posey released his gown and Cormair fell back against the bed. "I was going to kill you, Doctor. But I'm not going to do that now."

"Why?"

Posey turned her back to him and looked out the window. When she spoke, her voice had a faraway, hollow quality about it. "Because I want you to kill me."

"What? Posey, don't be ridiculous! You may not be able to live this idealized, magical, movie-version 'normal' life that you think you have to have, but you can still have a life, a long, fulfilled, and interesting life. Think about the possibilities! If you escape this compound, if you get out of here right now, you have the ability to go anywhere you want to go! You are almost immune to cold---you could go live in the Yukon. You can use your wings to ride thermals to almost any destination! You have the ability to get to get to any mountain peak in the world! You could be the greatest explorer the world has ever known!"

Posey turned back to Cormair. Her cheeks were wet with tears. "But I will have to do it alone."

"You have the others, your brothers and sisters."

"They look normal. They can blend into a crowd. They can hide in plain sight. I might be the greatest explorer in the world, but what good would that do if I can't even go to the mall and buy a shirt off the rack? I don't want to live life being stared at, being singled out and humiliated. I want to die."

"You do not need me for that, then. If you want to die, go die."

"I want you to kill me because watching your research die off will hurt you more than bears tearing your limbs from your body."

"To hell with the research!" Cormair shouted. "The research is already terminated! Kenny erased the computers in the Home and there is a standing order to kill all of you! My research is over. I do not want to see you die because it would be like...No, it
will
be watching my own daughter die before my eyes and I will not stand for that." Cormair felt a pain shoot through his chest. The fingers on his left hand began to tingle. His breath became short.

"Now listen to me," he said, attempting not to show the pain. "Go back to the Home. In my room near the labs, my bedroom not my office, there is a hidden panel behind the dresser. Behind that panel is a metal box. That box has a key in it and a letter from my lawyer. Take the key and the letter to First National Bank of Erie in Erie, Pennsylvania." His entire left arm went numb and a wave of agony rippled through his body stopping his breath. Cormair drew in another short, hard breath. "The key is for my safety deposit box. In it you will find seven hundred thousand dollars and an envelope. The envelope is very important to me; it was my most treasured possession. Get the money and divide it amongst yourselves. It is money that I funneled away from the project for years. It is why you all had to endure gruel and small portions for dinner some weeks. It is why sometimes there was only oatmeal for breakfast. I often lied to the Trust to get more money for your meals and clothing and stocked it away for you should this day ever come. Consider it the best I could do for an apology." The pain was apoplectic.

"I can't just waltz into a bank, Doctor!"

He could barely get a breath. "Get one of the others to do it! Posey---you will not kill yourself. Please, do not end your life. Promise me! Promise a stupid old man that you will fight for every breath!"

Posey hesitated. She swallowed hard. New tears were flowing. "I...can't promise..."

"You must!" Fire was burning in Cormair's chest and his veins felt like they were crawling with flames. "Promise me!"

Posey opened her mouth and no sound came out. She swiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. She nodded slowly before uttering, "I...Promise."

"You can never go back on the promise you make to a dying man," said Cormair. His breath was coming in short, sharp bursts. "Now go! Get the key. Find your brothers and sisters and live! Go forth into the world and live your lives!"

"I will, Doctor."

Cormair took in a final breath. His lungs no longer wanted to work. He hissed through a clenched jaw, "And Posey...please tell them...I love them. I love you all."

Cormair seized in pain, and then he went limp. His eyes closed and he spiraled into the darkness, tumbling end over end into nothingness.

"...
from whose bourn

No traveller returns..."

It was all John could do to keep breathing. Every time he moved in the slightest, the general would light them up with a jolt of lightning. Each wave of electricity felt like it was burning his muscles. Each wave of electricity made keeping thoughts in his head more difficult. He wanted to lash out, to do something heroic that would save his friends, but nothing came to his mind, his tactical supercomputer brain had gone offline.

Tucker checked his watch. John could see a hint of frustration in Tucker's eyes. John couldn't keep his tongue in check. "What's the matter, General? Your team late?"

"They will be here. I'm afraid Brawn's little tantrum damaged some of the gear in the warehouse needed for the vivisections. They are making repairs and looking for back-up equipment. It's just taking them a little longer than I had anticipated." For good measure, the general blasted them once again.

"I'm getting a little tired of that," growled Andy.

"You and me both," Indigo moaned.

John's jaw kept clenching involuntarily, a side effect of the electricity. With all their combined powers, with all their abilities, they were held powerless against one man with a remote control. It was unbelievable. He'd actually had the time to get over to the Home and sit down and wait for them. That meant that he had to have departed the compound well before Sarah had left. He had shot Kenny, and then made it to the home before the girl who can run faster than any car could drive.

Something in John's brain clicked, the tactical supercomputer rebooted and began making connections. Tucker had left before Sarah! He hadn't been in the compound when Kenny's final hack had taken effect. He hadn't seen the power go down or the electrical fires. He hadn't seen the computers melt down. Tucker was oblivious to the fact that his compound was cleansed of all technology that had been plugged into a wall socket or hooked into Wi-Fi. Something in John's gut told him that Tucker's team wasn't coming. Their computers were shot. Any medical machines that were on the electrical line were now useless. Kenny had put a big whammy on the Trust and Tucker was oblivious to it.

"Hey, Tucker," said John. A jolt of electricity went through him. "Sorry,
General Tucker
. I got five bucks in my pocket here that says your team isn't coming and you're not going to kill us."

"Elite, when you are dead, I will take that money. I'll use it to buy a nice bouquet of flowers to place on the steps of this place in your memory."

"Seriously, General," John tried to sound aloof. "I don't think they're coming. Why don't you try to email them or something?"

Tucker gave John a patronizing smile. "Psiber hacked the computers down here. The experiment neutralized the intranet we had between here and the installation. The computers in the building are all useless as well. It made sure to blank their hard drives."

"I know," said John. "He downloaded everything in the hard drives into his brain."

Tucker leaned forward. John could see he was suddenly interested. "Downloaded the hard drives?"

"Every last bit. All the data this place had, from Cormair's private log to Holly's trigonometry homework, is rattling around Kenny's brain."

"Can it download the information again into a computer?"

"Probably," said John. "If his body gets healed, that is. He's not much of a cyborg with a pair of bullets in his chest." John watched Tucker's eyes flick to the tank where Kenny's body floated in stasis. "Of course, if death is the only end for us, I doubt he'll even bother to help you out. Shame, too. There are a lot of things Cormair did that he never told you about, I'm sure. Having Cormair's files? That would probably make your version 2.0 whatever go a lot smoother, a lot faster. You might even get it done sooner than you think."

Tucker's eyes jumped from the tank, to John, and then back to the tank. Tucker broke into a haughty, toothy grin. "Nice try, Elite. Very good. You actually got me thinking for a minute. But, in the end, there will be no deals. I can't let you all just go free to be traipsing about the county with paranormal abilities. We need the information contained within your bodies to complete 2.0, not Cormair's files."

"Well, I think you're going to have to take whatever information you need by yourself, General. Your team is dealing with Kenny's little virus. He smoked your whole compound. We watched every building's power blow out as we left."

Tucker stared hard at John for a long moment. He reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a flat communicator. He pressed a button on the side and murmured into it, "Tucker to Krantz." After fifteen seconds, he repeated it loudly, "Tucker to Krantz. Answer me, damn it." Only silence answered him. Tucker tossed the communicator aside muttering curses under his breath.

"I guess we'd call this an impasse, General. Perhaps a stalemate? You uploaded all this tactical military knowledge into my brain and it is constantly figuring out the best angles for me to do things. Right now, it's coming up blank. If there were any way that I could take you down right now, I would know. Right now, you've got us down. We can't even make a move without you bringing us back down to the ground with that little power button of yours, and you can't kill us because you need your precious information."

Tucker inhaled sharply through his nose. John could see him puffing out his chest in frustration and trying to decide what to do next. When he finally spoke again, he was no longer smug and aloof. "The problem with your
uploaded
information, Elite, is that your information only deals with battle tactics and combat under fire. In a situation like this, you don't possess a military man's thinking ability. Improvise, Adapt, Overcome. Unless bullets are flying at you, you don't have the ability to think like a soldier."

"And you do?"

Tucker snorted. "Of course I do."

"A soldier in a paramilitary organization, an anti-American organization at that. You're a traitor to the country who taught you to think like a soldier!" John knew he'd pay for that outburst. When the shock subsided, John could feel a trickle of drool rolling down his cheek. Tucker had really let them have it. John looked over at Indigo. Her eyes were closed and John couldn't tell if she was breathing. Holly was awake, she looked at John with scared, pleading eyes.