Alphas - Origins (10 page)

A door banged. She looked up just in time to see Lucas loom in the doorway. His face was grim. He glanced at the cake, then at her. She stared back, suddenly terrified that all her thoughts would pour out through her eyes.

He didn't seem to notice. “Would you like new clothes?”

“Yes.” Oh, God, yes.

He jerked his head toward the door. “They have some things prepared for you at the main house. I didn't know what size, so you have to come and try them on. Come on, I'll walk with you.”

“Can I come?” Emily slid off the chair.

“Yes,” Lucas said. “They have clothes for you, too.”

“And Cedric?”

“Cedric doesn't need clothes,” Lucas said.

“Can he come with us?” Karina asked.

“Sure.”

Karina washed her hands, wiped them on a towel, and followed Lucas out. The sun shone bright. Cedric already waited for them at the foot of the stairs. Emily stepped down and the bear-dog rolled to his feet and trotted next to her, nearly as tall as she was.

Lucas led them out of the yard and down a dirt path. It wound around the hill, flanked on the left by stunted oaks and shrubs climbing up the slope and rolling off to the prairie on the right. Cedric and Emily pulled ahead a couple dozen yards. Karina watched them, aware of Lucas striding next to her, like some tiger who had learned to walk upright. The air was dry, and the heat beat down on them from the pale, burned-out sky, painting the path in stripes of bright yellow sunshine.

“We're in a fragment of reality,” Karina said.

“Yes,” Lucas said.

“Why is the sun shining? Why is there air?”

“Because the fluctuation occurs on the universal level,” Lucas said.

“So it's a duplicate sun?”

“No, it's the same sun the Earth has. We just get access to it on a different level. Think of a house with many rooms. We walked out of the main room into a smaller side bedroom, but we're still under the same roof.”

Karina sighed. “It makes my head hurt.”

“Don't talk about dimensions to any Rippers, then,” Lucas said.

“Rippers?”

“They make inter-dimensional rents that let people like you and me travel back and forth. You get one of them started on the subject and the insanity pours out until you want to stick your head in a bucket of water just to wash it out of your mind. When a man has to continuously cut himself, because pain helps him punch through dimensions, you can't expect him to be lucid anyway.”

Karina glanced at him. “You seem irritated.”

Lucas's thick black eyebrows knitted together. “We found out how the lizard got through the net. It tunneled under it. A long, deep tunnel, almost twenty-five meters.”

“And?”

“There was more than one tunnel,” Lucas said.

More than one tunnel meant other lizards. “Did you track them down?”

Lucas nodded.

“Did they transmit what they saw?”

Another nod.

“So the enemy knows where we are?”

Lucas grimaced. “Difficult to say. The Rippers are saying there was too much inter-dimensional interference for the transmission to have gone through fully. But it's possible.” He clenched his teeth, pondering something, and said, “We had perimeter alarms, infrared, microwave, and frequency sensors. The sensors are very specific: if you look on Cedric's collar, you'll see a transmitter. The transmitter broadcasts a code. The sensors check this code against the database and if the code is active, the sensors don't register an alarm. For some reason someone loaded an old set of codes into the system. The lizards came through fitted with transmitters of their own and when they broadcast the outdated set of codes, the system didn't flag them.”

“How did they know which codes to load?”

Lucas's eyes turned darker. “There was a woman. Galatea. She was a donor like you.”

He said her name like she was a plague. “Was she your donor?”

“Yes. She defected.”

He'd clenched his teeth again. There was more to this story. “Were you lovers?”

Lucas stopped and for a moment she thought she might have pushed him too far. “We fucked,” he said.

Aha. She kept pushing. “For how long?”

There was a short pause before he answered. “For four years.”

“That's some long fucking,” Karina said. He'd loved Galatea. He was in love, and she betrayed him, and now he wanted to kill her. Any woman past the age of fifteen would've connected these dots. He must've been young—it had obviously left a deep scar. “What was she like?”

Lucas took a step toward her. A wild thing looked back at her from his eyes, the thing full of lust and aggression. She realized that in his mind he was peeling off her clothes and thinking of what it would be like, and suddenly she was back in the tub, naked, sitting two feet away from him and afraid he would cross the distance.

He stared at her. “Would you like me to tell you about it?”

She squared her shoulders. “No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then.”

He turned and they sped up to narrow the gap between themselves and Emily. Karina kept the pace, exhaling quietly. He had no brakes, at least not the ones she was used to as a woman. Ordinary men didn't end dinners by breaking the table with their brother's spine, they didn't kill lizards by caving their heads in, they didn't turn into monsters, and they didn't feed on women. Ordinary men didn't behave like this outside of movie screens and when they did it on the screen, other men ridiculed them for it. This was a game she couldn't afford to play, because he held the best cards. She had to survive this.

Karina chanced a glance at him. The wild, hungry thing in his eyes was still there. “Since someone had to have uploaded this old code, someone on the inside is helping Galatea,” she said, trying to steer him away from whatever he was thinking.

“Looks that way. And when I find them, they'll wish they were never born.” His voice contained so much malice, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

If this enemy was coming, Emily would be in danger. “Should we evacuate?”

“That's up to Arthur.”

“Do you think we should?”

Lucas glanced at her. “It depends on how many people they bring to the fight. This is an old base, and we are actively mining this fragment for aluminum and beryllium. If the Ordinators are coming, they're coming fast. So even if we begin full base evacuation now, we'll take a hit in equipment. The base is run by means of a fiber network. It's a sophisticated computer system that coordinates mining operations, bio-support, communications, and so on. It also has the locations of the nearest bases. If the Ordinators gain access to it, a lot of us will die, which is why the network must be destroyed before the evacuation is complete. Detonating it will make this base uninhabitable. Fragments like this, with a stable climate and ecosystem, are rare. Most fragments we find are dead: no plants, no animals, often no atmosphere. You have to wear a suit and live in a hermetically sealed bunker. And popping back and forth through dimensions leaves a trail. If the Ordinators don't know where we are, they will once we start ripping.”

The path ended, joining a larger road that rolled down the hill toward the prairie. In the distance a group of small horses galloped across the grass, ducking in and out of the brush. The vast prairie rolled to the towering mountain ridge, savage and ancient and somehow so much bigger than the modern landscape, that for a moment Karina stopped and simply stared, caught by the natural majesty of it.

“This is paradise compared to some of the fragments I've seen,” Lucas said. “If we have a chance, we'll fight for it. Come on.”

He turned and strode up the hill. She sped up to keep pace, Emily and Cedric in tow.

They rounded a bend and suddenly before them stood two tall white columns marking an entrance. Thrusting twenty feet up, they curved like the ribs of some prehistoric giant. An intricate network of designs covered the columns, etched into their surface. It drew the eye, hypnotic in its complexity. Once you looked, your gaze just kept sliding and sliding, up along the grooves and curved lines . . .

A hand rested on her shoulder. Karina turned, saw Lucas's fingers on her shoulder, and jerked away. He held his hand in empty air for a second and lowered it.

Karina turned to Emily. Her daughter stood next to her, staring at the column, her expression blank.

“Come,” Lucas said.

Karina bent down and took Emily's hand. “Come on, baby.”

Emily blinked, as if waking up from a deep sleep, and walked with her. They passed through the arches and Karina stopped again.

Pale buildings with curved roofs spread before her. On second thought, the complex was all one huge building in the shape of a horseshoe, rising three stories high. A beautiful garden lay in the crook of the horseshoe, crisscrossed by covered passageways, stonelined paths, and lush flowerbeds, artfully bordering artificial ponds. Picturesque shrubs spread their branches. Flowers bloomed, blue, orange, yellow . . . The wind brought the by-now-familiar tart flower scent.

A large white sign stood next to the wide path leading into the garden, its smooth surface marked with an odd script. It had to be writing of some sort—groups of symbols separated by spaces—but it wasn't any language Karina was familiar with.

“What does it say?”

A string of odd words spilled from Lucas's lips, lyrical and surprisingly familiar. She waited for the meaning.

“It says ‘The Mandate is everything.' ”

“What is the Mandate?”

“The Original Mandate. It's hard to explain in English. There is a word in the primary language,
ile
. It means ‘we,' ‘us,' but it also means civilization, the best of us, the best of our kind. The mandate is ‘
Ile
must survive.'”

That explained nothing. “That's it?”

“That's it. On this world, under this set of circumstances, the people among whom you lived are
ile
. We exist to make sure they survive. When we're no longer needed, we'll die out like many other subspecies before us.”

The more he explained things, the more confused she became. For now she had to just gather the crumbs of information and hope all would make sense sooner or later.

Lucas walked on, down the wide path of smooth stones. Karina scrambled to follow. They walked side by side along the path and over a bridge. The gardens burrowed into nooks in the buildings here and there, forming small sitting areas. To the left two women sat on a bench, discussing something. They looked so normal. Both wore jeans; the older of the pair had on a flowered top, white on blue; the younger woman wore a familiar yellow blouse—Karina had looked at it in J. C. Penney last week.

Last week. A lifetime ago.

The women saw Lucas. Their faces took on a certain tightness, as if they were straining to keep calm. They looked her over next. Karina met their gaze and saw pity in their eyes. Suddenly it made her furious. If Lucas grabbed her throat right now, they wouldn't lift a finger to help her. They would just sit there and watch him choke her to death and feel sorry for her. She raised her chin and stared at Lucas's back. No, thank you. She didn't need anyone's pity.

Henry's words came back to her.
Lucas is the most feared.
“They're afraid of you,” she said.

“I'm the security specialist here; I have the right of judgment,” he said. “I can kill anyone on base at any point without any retribution.”

“You protect them, and all you get in return is fear. Why do you keep doing this?”

Lucas kept walking. “Because everyone must have a purpose. The Mandate tells me what I am doing is right and must be done and because I'm the biggest and the strongest it's my duty to put myself between my people and danger. I would do it for you.”

He would. She believed him. “Lucas . . .”

“Yes?”

She wanted to tell him that if he ever shielded her or Emily, she wouldn't be afraid of him. She wanted to tell him that he didn't have to put up with people shrinking away from him, but inside a cold rational voice warned her that she was losing her grip on reality. The plan had to be to escape. The plan couldn't be to fall for Lucas and be that one sole person who comforted him.

He was looking at her.

“I'm really confused right now,” she told him. “So this actually doesn't mean anything.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

“Bend your arm at the elbow.”

He did. Karina reached out.
What am I doing?
She put her hand on his forearm and raised her chin. The two women on the bench stared at them, openmouthed.

“Now we walk,” she murmured, avoiding looking at him.

“We can do that,” he agreed. They started down the walkway. His arm was rock-steady under her fingers. A few moments, and the dense greenery of rhododendron shrubs hid the women from their view.

“Why?” he asked.

Because she lost it, that's why. “Would you hurt those two women?”

“Not unless they tried to hurt someone else first.”

“Then they're in no danger and they know it, but they still make a big production out of you walking by, minding your own business.”

“That still doesn't answer my question,” he said.

“Can we stop talking about this?”

He didn't say anything. They simply kept walking. It was surreal, Karina reflected. Beautiful flowers, Emily and a tame bear-dog, and she and Lucas striding side by side.

“I'm tired,” Emily said.

Karina bent down and picked her up. The effort nearly made her lose her balance. Apparently she was weaker than she thought.

Cedric sniffed at her feet.

“Let her ride him,” Lucas offered.

“What?”

“Let her ride him. He doesn't mind.”