The Other Side of Truth (The Marked Ones Trilogy Book 3) (33 page)

Lab Rats

Thursday, December 27th

AKU

T
here was a blood-curdling scream
and I stumbled—caught off guard by the sound—just long enough to get tagged in the side by a rubber dart. And that tiny lapse in concentration sealed my fate, because I slipped, whacking my shoulder on the rotating beam on my way down.

Moss!
I cursed loudly within my head as I hit the mats. I laid there on my back, blinking up at the ceiling for one moment before I sat up, and looked over at Dr. H.

“Was that part of Aku’s test?” I asked as I rubbed my stinging shoulder. After the questions were through, Dr. H had escorted me to one of the test rooms to run me through a few physical tests.

Dr. H looked at me, and shook his head. And then he turned and walked quickly toward the door of the control booth.

I stood up and rotated my sore shoulder, a strange prickling sensation running over my skin.

Another scream rang out, and my eyes darted to the test room door which stood open. There was something horrid and primal about the scream. And without realizing it, I had started running toward the door.

I skidded out of the door into the corridor, and stopped dead. There was a woman lying collapsed on the floor. Blood was running from her eyes, trailing down her face like deep red tears. Sickly, blood-shot eyes that were ignoring everything but me.

The woman’s body jerked violently and I realized, with a sickening rush, that it was Technician J. The same horrible Technician J who had spent the last gods-only-knows-how many years poking needle after needle into my body.

Technician J extended a shaking hand toward me, her eyes a strange, horrific mix of longing and blood. “Patrick…” she called out in a gasp before her body arched up one last time and fell still.

But the horror of it all wasn’t over with Technician J’s last breath. Because as the air left her lungs and the life left her eyes, the skin around her veins along her arms started to peel and crack open. And blood started to spill down her arms, turning an awful blackish color as it met the air. Spilling down her arms to beat a rhythm onto the floor like a leaky faucet.

And with the steady drumming of that blackish blood, pooling and snaking across the linoleum, pulling bits of dust like flotsam along with it, they came back. The memories I had begged them to take away. The
only
ones I ever asked them to erase. Of Cen hitting the floor, of the blood pouring out of his mouth, and down the steps.

I backed away from Technician J until I ran into something. And then I sunk to the floor, and buried my head in my gloved hands.

Stop. Aku doesn’t want to remember.
I cried silently within my own mind as I collapsed to the floor.

Stop,
please
, stop.

What seemed a very long time—or possibly just a few heartbeats later—I opened my eyes slowly, and saw a set of shoes standing next to a sheet stained deep red-brown and black. And that’s when I realized I was laying on the floor. My cheek pressed against the cold linoleum.

I shifted my eyes to one side, and then the other. There were nearly a dozen sheet-covered bodies filling the corridor and twice as many technicians collecting samples from them.

“Oh pity, Eskel was so certain Jane would make it,” Director E said regretfully to himself. I knew it was him without a doubt. I would have known his voice anywhere. I had spent enough years with it invading my mind to ever be able to forget the sound of it.

“What did E do?!” someone else shouted, another pair of shoes walking quickly to join the first.

The first set of shoes squeaked as they turned toward the other pair. “Eskel told Jane that if Jane participated in a study, Eskel would clone Jane’s precious Patrick.”

“You sick
bastard
!” the owner of the second set of shoes—Officer N, I was almost certain—screamed as he lunged at Director E.

I tipped my head back to look at them, the rest of my body unmoving.
Eskel?
Had Director E said his name was
Eskel
?

Director E side-stepped Officer N easily, and held a blade to N’s throat. “For what? Offering Jane what
you
could never give Jane?” Director E said with a cruel smile, purposefully disrespecting Officer N by not using his name. “Jane knew the risks.”

Officer N’s hands dropped to his sides, and he looked down at the stained sheet. “Why, Eskel? Why would Eskel do it?” Officer N asked, apparently unable or unwilling to disrespect Director E despite everything.

“Because
you
almost ruined everything. Eskel’s years of planning destroyed in one day, because
you
acted rashly,” Director E stated with the closest thing to anger I had ever heard him reach. Putting such force behind the
yous
as if they were weapons he could throw at Officer N. “
You
interfered, and Eskel does not like when people interfere with Eskel’s experiments, Nathan,” Director E said as he stepped around Officer N.

It
is
Eskel. Director E’s name
is
Eskel
. And N’s name is Nathan.
Nathan…
I knew that name. Why did I know that name? Just what on earth was going on?

“We’re all just lab rats to
you,
aren’t we?” Officer N growled venomously at Eskel. Apparently he was now angry enough to be disrespectful to Director E.

Eskel stopped right next to my hand, and looked back at Officer N as he fixed the cuff on his pristinely white, knee-length Eastern style coat. “What ever gave
you
the impression Eskel thought otherwise?”

The look of betrayal, and disgust on N’s face was incongruous with everything I knew of him.

My head started pounding painfully like a thousand blunted needles jabbing into the back of my skull. I wanted to clutch my head and cry out, but I didn’t dare. If they knew I had overheard them they would take the memories away and I didn’t want to forget. Not again. Not ever.

As Eskel turned back, his foot grazed my gloved hand and I brought my head down quickly, laying my cheek back on the cool linoleum. I laid there perfectly still, and pretended to be unconscious. Or dead.

“What the hell is
Aku
doing here? Get Aku back to Aku’s room!” Eskel—whom I had known as Director E for as long as I could remember—shouted loudly from overhead, and I tried not to flinch.

All the Pieces

Friday, December 28th

TRAVIS

I
t shouldn’t have taken us
that many hours to realize that the Kakodemoss had abducted Nikki—but it did. We should have realized the mistake we were making. That in going out of the way to protect Alex, Nualla, and even Kira and Chan-rin, we had made the ultimate smoke screen—the perfect distraction. That
we
had made it easy—so very easy—for them to snatch her. And now the Kakodemoss had had her—
both
of them—for four days now. And gods only knew what they were doing to them. But as terrifying as this was for everyone—I felt the worst for Nikki. Because the sad, sick truth of it all was that none of us had even thought to have a Protectorate watching her.

And now, four days later, we still weren’t any closer to finding them. The Kakodemoss could be doing anything to them at this very moment, and there wasn’t a frakking thing I could do about it. And that helplessness that normally made me anxious, instead filled me with an uncontrollable rage I would have had no way of smothering even if I had wanted to. And so after four days of mostly keeping it together, I finally lost it.

I swung my arm savagely across my desk, knocking everything to the floor. The pieces bouncing off the ground, and shooting in all directions away from me.

As I pushed more items to the floor just to hear the satisfying sound of things breaking, one piece ricocheted off the edge of the wall and slid across the floor, bumping into my shoe.

I was about to crush it underfoot when I stopped. The piece was a tiny bit of metal, no bigger than the first joint of my finger. The micro flash drive. The one I had found under the couch.

I picked it up slowly, running my finger over the strange triple spiraling symbol marking its surface. The three spirals joined at one end and an Egyptian lotus on the other end of each, with more lines spiraling around the whole. I had seen that symbol before. I was positive of it. Even before I had seen it scrawled on the bits of paper covering Patrick’s walls. But where?

And then it hit me in a flash—Chan-rin’s uniform! The one she had been wearing when she first ran into The Embassy. It had had the same symbol on the back. And it had also been in those old articles about the Avensana Project.

Avensana.
The word stabbed into my brain, and started spreading. Working its way into my memory, pulling and catching on things as it went. My breath caught and refused to push its way through my throat. I knew the answer. The answer to the question—the riddle. It was something I had almost been too young to remember.

It is only through exploration that we shall prevail
, my dad had said as he pointed to a small frame with the statement in Daemotic, this symbol faintly behind it. Almost faint enough to be a watermark.

I looked down at the micro flash drive, my hands shaking and my breath finally leaking out of my lips. Numbly, I walked back to my desk, my heart beating uncomfortably fast against my rib cage. I popped the flash drive into the port on the side of a crappy laptop that had miraculously escaped my anger. The strange symbol appeared on the screen briefly before the screen went black just like before. And then the same line appeared on screen.

It is only through this that we shall prevail.

The cursor flashed
|
patiently, waiting for my answer. Like it would wait an eternity. But I didn’t have that kind of time. I needed answers
now
—needed them before it was too late.

My finger hovered over the keyboard and then I typed the letters, holding my breath.

avensana

The Daemotic word for
exploration
.

After I hit
Enter
the screen went black again. And as the moments ticked by, I was less and less certain I had typed the right thing.

When I was just about to give up and pull the drive out before it fried the computer, there was a small sound and code started flying across the screen. Too fast for me to catch anything other than a light gray blur. Movement at the edges of my vision made me turn toward the other monitors around my desk. They were all running the same code.

“Well…
fuck
,” I said in a low voice, letting the air out of my lungs.

The alarms started blaring and KARA announced, “Unauthorized access to mainframe.”

A trap. The stupid thing was a trap.
Great,
just
great.

“Unauthorized access to main
frame
…” KARA repeated, her voice becoming strange and mechanical toward the end.

Quickly I pulled the flash drive free of the laptop, but it didn’t seem to make a damn of a difference—the code just kept going uninterrupted.

“Well KARA, I just fucked up everything, didn’t I?” I stated miserably, but she didn’t answer.

Well, that’s just frakkin’ perfect.

Just as I was about to head down to the server room and flip KARA’s kill switch, a sequence of numbers appeared on my screens before the code switched to Daemotic characters.

“Remote access authorized,” a robotic voice informed me. The voice that had been KARA’s before I had made an audio patch to make her sound like Nualla.

I arched my eyebrows, and dropped back into my chair.
Remote access? Remote access to
what
?!

“Initiating Protocol Chaya Sikari,” the robotic voice stated before a video started playing.

Chaya sikari? Shadow watcher?

A man with honey-colored hair and black-blue eyes stood in front of the screen. His head jerked to the side, and he stared off at something for a long moment before his hand went to a pendant hanging from his neck. He turned it clockwise and his image blurred and changed. His dusky red horns turning blue and his hair to pitch black. He turned back to the screen and pushed the tangle of black hair from his face and my heart stopped. He was older and a bit disheveled, but he was undeniably Nikkollas Varrook.

“
Nikkollas doesn’t have time to explain this all, Aku, but they are coming for Nikkollas
,” he stated in Daemotic.

I just stared open-mouthed. Nikkollas Varrook had died before Patrick was even born as far as I knew. But here he was, addressing my little brother in Daemotic as if they had some kind of history.

“
By now they must have figured out that it isn’t working anymore. That the memory blocks are failing. That Nikkollas is remembering what Nikkollas was—
who
Nikkollas was. But there is no hope of us all escaping here on our own.
” Nikkollas paused and let out a heavy, strained breath. His eyes squinting as if the simple act of talking was causing him extreme pain.

“
So Nikkollas is entrusting this all to Aku. Find Kiskei Kirihara and give this to Kiskei. Kiskei will know what to do. Kiskei will be able to save us.
”

He looked into the camera with heartbroken eyes. “
In the end Aku may hate Nikkollas—may hate us all. Just know this: we thought we could change the world.
”

Nikkollas looked down and swallowed hard and then he looked back up into the camera. “Kiskei, they are coming for you, my friend. They are coming for you all. They are planning something terrible, something the gods will damn them for all time for doing,” Nikkollas stated in English, this message apparently not intended for Aku. “So
please
, if you are still there, if it is not too late, please save them. Please save Skye in all the ways I have failed her,” Nikkollas pleaded with heart-wrenching despair.

The video cut out, replaced with a file list, and I just stared at the screen. He wasn’t dead. He was one of the reported casualties of the 1993 Avensana Labs Disaster, and he wasn’t dead.

I had been hoping for the truth, but all I was getting was an ever-climbing pile of unanswered questions.

I looked at the file list.

Emergency order? What on—?
I looked at the date of the second video file again, and my heart slammed to a halt. October 19th, 1993. The day of the Avensana Labs Disaster.

No…

I clicked on the video file.

“Accessing Karalia servers file Emergency Order 10191993,” the robotic voice announced before a video started playing on the screens.

The camera was at an odd angle this time, and it bounced around until a face slid into view. It was Nikkollas Varrook again, but a bit younger and unharmed except for a cut on his cheek.

“Josh—Kiskei, I’m sorry. I had to follow through with their plan or they would have known I wasn’t Eskel,” Nikkollas said to the camera. An explosion shook the video, and he looked away. “Look, I made sure no one was in the building,” Nikkollas said as he turned back to the camera. “And that might tip off the Kakodemoss, but I just couldn’t let a single one of our people die by their hands. So yeah…I might need you guys to come break me out before they crack my head open like a safe.”

There was another explosion, and he looked away as his hand went to a pendant hanging from his neck. He turned it counterclockwise, and his image blurred and changed. His blue horns turned to dusky red, his black hair to honey blond. He turned back to the camera, but he was no longer Nikkollas. He was someone else.

He looked up, and let out a heavy breath like he was steeling himself to admit something. “Gods if this damn building wasn’t coming down around me, you two would
never
get this out of me,” he said, still looking up before his eyes looked back at the camera. “But look, if anything happens to me—if I don’t make it to the rendezvous—you tell Skye Galathea that I love her.”

Nikkollas’ expression slid into a mischievous grin that looked out of place on the face that wasn’t his. “I bet you two are really fucking shocked, and I would have
loved
to see your faces when you realized my secret girl was none other than the Arius of Karalia.”

Nikkollas let out a giddy laugh. “
Ha
! Looks like you were full of shit, Josh, when you said she’d never give me the time of
da
—”

Another explosion went off, but it was much too close this time, and Nikkollas was knocked to the ground. The camera tipped up to the ceiling as he fell, and as the seconds slipped by a few bits of dust settled onto the lens.

I just stared at the screen in horror, unable to look away. Almost a full three minutes later, the camera righted itself and the same person that Nikkollas Varrook had become—the Kakodaemon with honey colored hair—lifted the camera toward his face. There was a calculating cruelty to his eyes that made my blood run cold. The video cut off abruptly, and the screen returned to the same file list as before. The list with only three items, two videos, and a file labeled
AVENSANA
. I clicked on the last file in the list, and held my breath.

The screen went black again briefly before the same strange triple spiraling symbol appeared on screen. It pulsed a vibrant ice blue a few times like a heartbeat and then drifted to the upper left corner. A menu appeared on the left hand side of the screen, displaying a set of numbers—one through fifteen—above a long link list.

I took a steadying breath, and clicked on the first number. The screen flashed white, and then displayed a set of information.

Designator:
Chan

Birth Name:
Stephania Petroff

Identity(ies):
Natasha Jordash

Program Status:
Inactive — Awaiting assignment

Number of procedures:
1,893

Astari Saiku Status:
Failure

Last Mission:
6-16-2012

More Missions

Natasha?
Natasha
was one of the Kakodaemon experiments? Well that explained a whole hell of a lot.

I looked away from Natasha’s info, back to the numbers on the left hand side of the screen. One through fifteen. The numbers must have corresponded to the children the Kakodemoss were experimenting on. Which meant number eight was Patrick’s.

I was about to click on his number when something caught my attention. Practically screaming at me to notice it. There were fifteen numbers. Not fourteen as Chan-rin had told me, but
fifteen
.

A sick nauseous feeling settled in my stomach as realization set in, and I looked at the screen in horror. “No.”

There were fourteen before. Before the Kakodemoss had taken—

“Oh, gods, no,” I choked out, feeling the bile raise up my throat.

Please, not Nikki. Anyone but her.
I pleaded to the gods, but even as I clicked on
15
I knew in the pit of my stomach what I would find.

Designator:
Chan-cen

Birth Name:
Nikkalla Varrook

Identity(ies):
Nikkalla Varris

Program Status:
Inactive — Chipped — In testing

Number of procedures:
18

Astari Saiku status:
Pending