Ashes (26 page)

“You will be the Source for the others, Adam,” Henry's words came out so clearly they seemed to cut. “The beginning and the end of all things.”

This utterance contained the lyrics of the future, but such dark words still did not bring him full peace.
 

“I am ready now, Father,” he said softly.
 

34

 

THE UNFORGIVING CREASES IN Adam's jaw began to take new shape.
A wounded, childish form.
Before this, Emery had noticed how frail and deceptive his body appeared, but currently he was like a lost boy in search of answers, maybe revenge. Staring at him, she found herself strangely connected. She swore she wouldn't cry, though, no matter how sad or depressing his story got.

“Any of this freaking you out?” he asked, the overhead light making his eyes seem like clouded embers wanting to ignite.
 

She sighed, “No. It's actually not freaking me out, which is kinda freaking me out.” Emery allowed the hesitation to play inside her. “It sucks, being taken from your family like that. But I'm a big girl. I can handle it.” Her voice was a familiar kind of worried.

He sort of nodded, sort of shrugged. Dragged his elbows along the edge of the creaking kitchen table.

“Okay.” He paused. It took several moments for him to gather the guts to say what came next. “I'm…a little older than I
look.
”
 

“Yeah, I figured. But what does that mean?”

“Emery, like I said, I'm different. I have these things that I can do. Staying young is part of it. My body heals very quickly, so I can regenerate. It's part of the drag.”

“Okay?” she said, processing.

“I was born…” he stopped briefly then continued “awhile ago.”

“Years…ago?”

“Decades. About forty years ago, give or take a year. They had me in that place for so long, I almost forgot all of this.
The real world.
A person's
real
touch.” Adam reached out and grabbed her hand. In that moment, she felt a mixture of safety and danger. “I forgot love.”

Emery gritted her teeth. Sympathy pulled her toward him.

“I thought I'd never long for the normalcy of the world. Thought I'd never need them. It was them who needed me, right? I was going to be their savior. But I was wrong.”

 
“It seems like the normals on the outside have everything figured out. But maybe they're the freaks. Maybe it's them we should watch out for.” Emery grunted. She brushed her hair to the right side of her face and tried to forget about the goosebumps popping up on her skin whenever Adam stole a glance. Whatever strange feeling put them where they didn't belong, she wasn't afraid of it anymore.

Adam picked up the photograph once more.
The one with him standing next to the Gray Man.
He squeezed it. Emery wondered where he'd gone those few seconds that seemed like hours. The more his eyes scanned the image, the more lost he appeared to
be,
transported somehow to a place she couldn't go.
  

Emery looked down at the photograph then back at Adam, wishing he would return from that trip. The picture of him looked worn with age, crippled and fatigued. Two faces trapped inside the black and white world of the past. But after studying it a bit more, she realized Adam wasn't crazy. He couldn't be. He just couldn't be.

Okay, Emery…you've dealt with this
kinda
thing before. Remember when Arson went nuclear on the beach? Okay, this is like that. Right?

Right?

The silence didn't lure her any closer to comfort.

She had no response. The mysteries kept spinning and spinning. She wished it would stop. She glanced at Adam then back at the picture then back at him. “Weird,” she barely uttered. He hadn't really aged a day since the picture was taken. Except for the fact that he looked like a skinhead now, nothing changed.

Then Adam shook. “No. I don't want it anymore. Get that away from me!” He cursed, swinging his fists at nothing. When they came back down, his fists broke the table in half.

Emery jerked with a scream. She hadn't even realized that she'd scooted out from beneath the table in time to dodge his violent episode, but she was thankful for instinct.

“What happened, Adam?” she said, sucking in breath after breath. Her heart cruised inside her.

“I begged him to stop. I begged all of them. But I gave them too much control. Those backward devils!”

“Adam, what happened?” she asked again.

His teeth started to chatter. “They wouldn't stop.” His words shattered out his mouth. “Had to get out. I had to be free and choose for myself. I had…to…save you.”

In the panic, she got up and rushed to his side. The sweat had pooled around his eyes, and a stream of red dripped down the ridge of his nose. Emery got up close to him. Then she touched his cheek. His skin was almost burning.

 
“I lost myself, Emery…for so long. Adam disappeared. I was the Source of their new campaign. I was 217.” The words almost bled out of him. “They gave me a number.” He lifted up his shirt and pulled the top of his loose sweats down slightly. There were three digits inked into the skin on his
hip bone
. “They gave you one also. 218.” Adam pointed to a series of tiny numbers located below her left eye. He found a piece of glass for her to see that he wasn't lying.

“Oh, what did they do to me?” she gasped.

“They'd give everyone a number if they could. To erase
who
they really are. To turn them into whatever they want. But I was more than a number, I thought. I was powerful, right? I mean, didn't they know how strong I was? They did things to me I can't forgive. And I let them.”

There was new anger swelling in her blood. She felt the rage in him and accepted it as her own.

“He was…my friend.” Another curse poured out of him and climbed up the walls. “They take. They take and take and take! Henry just wanted my mind and my blood.”

Adam paced from room to room, skulked the dark halls of his former home. His neck snaked around one of the doors. He peeked inside. She watched him stall at the entrance as he breathed in the stillness of the room. Bright colors coated the walls; a pink comforter dressed the empty, stiff mattress. It was like the room was waiting for his sister to come back.
 

Slowly, he spread out his hands across the bed. “Lana,” he whispered. “Gone. Like everyone else.” He seemed sickened. Adam reached for the handle and slammed the bedroom door shut.

Emery was dying to ask more questions. “So what can your blood do?”

He turned toward her. “Henry said it was the most powerful substance he'd ever studied. It could do things no medicine, no drug, nothing else in this world could.” Adam scratched a dry scalp. “It healed you after those monsters cut you, right?”

She wasn't prepared for what came next.

“My blood can even create. It has healing capabilities, to replace and repair lost or damaged particles inside human beings.
Sickness, disease.
They said it could save lives…and create others. It
did
create another.”

“What are you talking about? Like a clone?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“Henry had a daughter. He loved her and wanted to make her better. He wanted to heal her.”

“From what?”

“Just listen, okay?” he said, his hands jittery and uncontrolled. “Frances dropped by the facility a few times. She was sick. Real sick. And Henry started intensifying my treatments. His focus wasn't the world anymore, it was
her
. He didn't care about wars or foreign nations. All he cared about was healing his daughter. He became obsessed.” Adam cursed again. “I was just a stupid lab rat to him. But I was the good guy. I wanted to change her. Fix her. I thought that if she were like me, she'd never be sick again.”

Adam stopped, his nostrils flaring. She wondered what dark things his mind was bringing to light. “Henry increased the drugs, even erased some of my memories a few times so that I wouldn't remember what he had to do to me. Didn't know it at the time. The doctors lied and said I was some lost psych patient, that I shouldn't be wandering the halls. I got out of the Sanctuary a couple times without them finding out…but it didn't matter. It got worse. They still hurt you. They still hurt us.”

The world was soundless. It was the world men had made. The world God let them make.

“He didn't want me to remember any of it. He just wanted her to be healed, and the menace would do anything. I was the key. I should've known it wouldn't stop with me.” Every movement ended. His eyes got lost again, like someone was calling him.
From a peculiar place at the end of all hope.

“Stay with me, Adam. Stay with me.”

The light was gone from both of them. Adam walked like a paranoid creature, shoulders hunched and brooding eyes pulling out from behind frigid lids.

“Why can't I remember more?” she said, squinting, as if that would help any.

“They don't want you to. They can play with your memories.
Take some out
,
probably put some in
. Until you don't know what's real. They cut you open, Emery. They tested you. You're like me. Born, not made.”

She started rubbing her stomach, her neck.

“That world, that place is a prison, not just for your body, but for your mind too. You can lose it all in there.”

She scratched gently at her face.

“Stay long enough and you would've ended up dead. Or worse.”

“Adam…”

“No, Emery. It's not right. I let it go long enough.
Too many years.
God only knows what they've been able to do, to create since I've been their…
property
.” His back hugged the wall, his head slamming against one of the glass picture frames in the hallway.
 
He turned around and grabbed it. Slammed it down. It shattered even more, the glass spraying the hardwood floor.

“My family's probably dead.
All of them, gone because of me.
I was so foolish.”

“But you're not alone, Adam,” Emery said, reaching for his hand.
 

Eternity wouldn't be enough time for her to tire of staring into his conflicted eyes. They were crashing waves. With each blink, she witnessed the birth of new ripples, ageless seas dropping and pulling and sinking. She was almost crying, for him. His eyes were real, and they could know her. Did he feel her
confusion,
experience the aching in her face? Perhaps that wild, Atlantic foam held such tears of sorrow.

“You're so beautiful, Emery,” he finally said. Adam lifted one of his hands to touch her cheek. He blinked once, then twice. His fingernail stroked one side of her cheek. His focus never departed.

She was frozen in front of him. Something inside her began to shift. Something was changing. It felt like pain at first and then became a soothing sensation pulling across her entire face. With only a teardrop's worth of energy, Adam's touch was healing her. She shut her eyes, her mouth, as his hand moved from her cheek to her forehead. The ruined chunks of flesh she had come to call her own for so many years became a clean and unpolluted surface. Flawless skin appeared with scattered freckles around her nose. The missing part of her hair began to grow back, almost like each strand was being pulled up from her scalp by some invisible thread. In moments, silky brown hair covered her left cheek.

Emery couldn't breathe. Shock and wonder bloomed within. The scars were no more. Like an infection, the healing spread. What once was a parasite on her ruined flesh became a transforming agent, soft and unspoiled. Skin perfected and made new.

Adam stepped back. She noticed a change in him as well. His palm was covered black, tarnished by the miracle. A stain left behind from the healing. Perhaps his body would absorb her ruin. He now looked displaced, his mouth wandering and thirsty. He was weak.

“Adam,” Emery whispered. “What did you do?”

Slowly and weakly he replied, “Changed you. Made you better.”

Emery rubbed her skin, her jaw,
her
forehead. With big, glowing eyes, she felt the patch of newly grown hair where once had only been dead flesh. It was smooth. Real. “You…healed me? You fixed it. After all these years, you made me beautiful.”

Adam nodded with slow breathing. “Like the angels.”

There were no true
words,
no form weak syllables could make to express her joy. Tears swelled. Her heart was a gunshot in her ear. She swallowed hard, wondering if her soul had drifted off for the minute.

Adam's measured blinks and unhurried movements forced her closer. Had this event truly weakened him? If so, how much? This power he spoke of, could it be contained or controlled?

She wondered if that power felt anything like what had happened to her on Mandy's beach when Arson came back to life. But that wasn't her focus now. For the first time, she looked at Adam deeply, intensely. Nothing supernatural. Nothing magical. Just beauty. Desperately alive, the mystery of this free, unrequited sensation filled her mouth, her soul,
her
heart. She blinked and wrapped her fingers around the back of his neck. Emery leaned her mouth into his and kissed him with every part of her being.