with shock and outrage. She looked like a little girl, all red curls and big blue eyes, who had just found out her parents could break their word, could lie. “Didn’t you understand what they were going to use those people for? It’s monstrous!”
Irritation crossed his features, and he broke eye contact with me to stare at Vanessa. “I did it because the Sarcodinay have a lot to offer us. Like everyone, you have grown up around the Sarcodinay, and you take them for granted. They’re masters or overseers or the enemy. They are the other. You don’t see them anymore, and likely never did.”
“What do you see?” I whispered.
He looked back to me, hesitating. He all but bit his lip and then answered, “Strength. Power. The Sarcodinay have been designed to be the strongest, fastest, toughest bipeds that could possibly be created with 23 pairs of chromosomes. They are an incredible monument to the power of genetic engineering, and there are parts of their code that go way beyond anything I could create on my own. Why wouldn’t I want to supplement humanity’s own merits with that potential?”
“You talk about them like they’ve been created,” Vanessa said in her clear, hard voice. “Like all those myths about their creation at the hands of the Keepers are real.”
“They are real,” Alexander agreed. “You’d know that if you’d ever studied a Sarcodinay’s genetic code. Never mind the base acids, the structure is human enough, but what has been done with it...” He shook his head, his voice tinged with awe. “Shana had begun breaking the Tridates long before she met me, but she discovered the hard way that the restrictions against genetic tampering are not just a matter of religion. Like most religious restrictions, at their heart is a warning against dangerous behavior. In this case, Sarcodinay gene sets are laced with booby traps specifically designed to prevent tampering.”
“Booby traps?” I raised an eyebrow. “Like bombs?”
“Like viruses,” he replied. “Cancers. All kinds of genetic pitfalls just waiting to be unleashed. Every sentient race has endless loops of dead genetic code that are holdovers of their myriad ancestries. For most of us, that code is dormant and will remain dormant throughout all of our lives—but only in the Sarcodinay has that code been turned into a security system, a set of deliberate, lethal countermeasures designed to do one thing: prevent any further tampering in a genetic code already tampered with plenty.” He nodded to himself. “Oh, the Keepers existed, all right. And they didn’t want anyone else playing in their sandbox.”
“But you played anyway.”
“I find ‘keep away’ signs to be a challenge,” Alexander said with a sly smile. “And if that meant coddling up to Shana and her bitch-mistress Tirris Vahn and making them think that this was going to let the Sarcodinay rule humanity forever, I was willing to play good dog. Make no mistake though: I was never doing this to help them. I was doing this to introduce some of the best qualities of the Sarcodinay in the greater human pool of potential.”
“We’re sterile,” I reminded him.
His grin was victorious, as well as more than a touch evil. “So is every other Empire-raised human until the sterilizations are reversed. Oh yes...I think I’ve marked that down on my to-do list for next Thursday.”
I think I must have blanched. He grinned wider, and I stammered, “You... you lied to her. To Tirris Vahn and Maia-Leia Shana both. You told them the hybrids were permanently sterile. That it was genetic. You...” I felt anger overtake me. “The whole point was to engineer a human race vulnerable to telepathy! You’ve done that for them! If the hybrids can breed, how many years will it be before every human is vulnerable?”
“A century, at most,” he answered. “Five generations. Probably less if any of the hybrids get into the Liberty gene pool.”
“You monster...” I could only stare at him, my mouth slack from shock.
“No,” he shook his head in deliberate denial. “Think it through, Mallory. They cannot have it both ways. I made sure the hybrids would be vulnerable to telepathy, but I couldn’t do that without also giving them the same potential to be telepaths. It’s true—in a century, humanity will be vulnerable to Sarcodinay telepaths. But we will also have telepaths of our own.”
“You think that’s a good thing!?” I shouted. “You insane IDIOT! We’re dangerous! Don’t you have idea just how dangerous!? You can’t introduce a paradigm shift like that into the human race and not expect it to have catastrophic consequence! Are we going to start up Kaimer Schools of our own? Recreate the Sarcodinay nobility, and the most powerful telepath rules all!?” I wanted to hit him, I was so angry.
He flinched as though I’d struck him anyway, but any retort he might have made was cut short by Vanessa’s quiet voice. “We?” she whispered. “We’re dangerous?”
I turned to her, my mouth suddenly dry. “Nessa, I—” I threw an angry glare at Alexander. “It’s like he said, they couldn’t have it both ways. Apparently when he created me, he slipped a little something extra into the DNA.”
Vanessa’s gaze turned fearful, and I turned away before I could see it slide into horror.
“Except I didn’t create you,” he said with a quiet shake of his head.
“Oh please. You just said—”
“No.” His voice sounded strained. “You’re not a hybrid. Okay, you are, but you weren’t part of the program. You were not engineered on Keepers’ Island.”
“But Maia-Leia told Shaniran I was part Sarcodinay.” I straightened and paced to the window, suddenly feeling the room small and tight around me, the walls closing in fast.
“You are,” he agreed, sounding almost turned-on by the statement.
I felt sick.
“You’re not like my hybrids,” he explained. “They just have a touch of Sarcodinay genes in them. The bare minimum I could get away with safely. You though? You’re a work of art, so beautifully put together it’s impossible to tell you from a child conceived naturally.”
“I test as human,” I protested as the anger crept back into my voice.
“Of course you do,” Alexander agreed. “You have all the right markers. You would test as human. And you would test as Sarcodinay. But really... who tests for both at the same time?”
“You do,” I said.
He nodded. “Well yes. We do. That’s how we knew...” He paused and looked at Vanessa.
“Oh, I think it’s too late to wonder if she should be hearing this. And yes, that was me, when I was eight and they brought me here.”
Vanessa wasn’t saying much, largely keeping herself out of this fight, but she watched us both carefully with one eye while giving occasional glances to the computer files she was thumbing through, probably with assistance from Medusa. She paused and looked up at me, noting the pained sound in my voice.
“I thought it might have been,” he said with a satisfied nod. “I didn’t know...” He laughed. “It’s not like the hybrids are given names here. I didn’t know what Paul was at first, and he didn’t tell me about Kaimer for a long time. I certainly didn’t make the connection with you.” He frowned and his eyes took on a faded amber cast of nostalgia. “Tirris Vahn was in charge of everything. She told me to put a dozen orderlies at her disposal and then get out. The maintenance detail assigned to clean up the bodies was later ordered executed. I’m sure I would have been too if I had looked like I was paying too much attention to what was going on.” He paused and then added, “There was a High Guard. Smallest High Guard I’ve ever seen. He took me aside and warned me it would be best if I played dumb and put someone else in charge of helping see to Tirris Vahn’s needs. Saved my life.”
“Zaladin,” I breathed.
“I think so, yes,” he said, and then Alexander frowned. “You know of him?”
“He’s the one coming here to kill Shana,” I said.
“Why? That makes no sense. Shana’s no threat to him. He was the one who—” and Alexander closed his mouth and turned away.
He didn’t stop thinking though, and as angry as we both were, his t
houghts were like images reflected on still water, clear and bright. I saw snapshots, the disjointed memories flickering like a slide show through my mind, a kind of quick shorthand for memories that he thought about so often he no longer needed to replay them in full. Rhodes was remembering back to the arrival of a group of Sarcodinay in the landing bay, their eyes haughty and superior as they gazed around them, Tirris in their lead as Shana, walking on her own, escorted the Sarcodinay governor to gaze at a pale, wan human woman with blonde hair and deeply circled blue eyes, her arms wrapped protectively around her pregnant stomach as she rocked back and forth and mumbled to herself.
My stomach clenched as I recognized the small man walking in Tirris Vahn’s shadow. Even with metallic bronze-black skin and luminescent eyes, I recognized him. I saw him through Rhodes’ eyes, saw the shock in Zaladin’s expression that Tirris and Shana both missed as he first saw the woman, an expression quickly replaced by boiling anger. Rhodes was the only one to notice Zaladin, the only one to remember him as, again and again, the High Guard assassin returned, weeks and months later, long after Tirris Vahn had left, to sneak into the pregnant woman’s room and sit by her side, sometimes holding her hand and sometimes reading to her from a small dog-eared paper book as she babbled to herself in a sing-song voice.
God help me, I remembered the book. It was the same