Creators

Chapter 1


“Tessie? Are you hurt?”

My throat went dry as I tried to swallow the hard, knotty lump that had formed. I didn’t know how to answer his question. It should have been a simple yes or no. But I couldn’t speak; I could barely breathe. It wasn’t the question that was impossible to answer—it was the man asking it.

My father.

He was alive.

For years and years, I’d thought the man who stood before me was dead. Taken from me by the council, an organization of men who had long ago replaced the government lost to civil war. My father had been considered a traitor, so one day chosen ones, genetically engineered superhumans who made up the council’s army, came and ripped my father from my grasp. There was only one certainty about this life—all traitors, all men or women, who attempted to stand up against the all-mighty council, would die.

Or at least that’s what I had thought.

I opened my mouth. Attempted to swallow again. I needed to speak. So many things to say, so many questions to ask. But all I could do was nod. My father gingerly reached for me, and I froze. I was afraid that if I touched him, my hand would go straight through, that he would be nothing but a ghost. But when my father lifted the bottom of my shirt, revealing the stab wound I’d received only a day before, he didn’t disappear.

Instead, he paled. His eyes narrowed and his head gave the smallest of shakes. But he didn’t disappear. He reached down and pulled something from a satchel he wore near his waist.

“I’m sorry it went down this way. I sent her to stop you. I knew I wouldn’t make it in time, and I didn’t want you meeting that creature without me. An army can’t move as fast as a single woman—even a small army. She was one of my fastest,” he explained, pouring liquid out of a bottle onto a cloth. “I thought you would see her disheveled and fragile state and take pity on her. I wanted her to slow you down. I never told her to stab you.”

An army? My father had an army. And he had sent the girl to stop me? A dull heaviness overtook my head. Foggy. Disorienting. I just wanted to sit there and listen to him, to his every word. Every breath between us made it more and more certain that the man standing before me was very much alive. He pressed a wet cloth against my wound, and the fog disappeared instantly. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out. The liquid stung, shooting electricity up and down my abdomen.

My father smiled thinly. “Sorry, Tessie, I probably should have warned you that would hurt like hell. It’s important to keep wounds clean. Especially in these conditions.”

In these conditions. The reality overtook the dream I had nearly lost myself in. We were in the woods controlled by the Isolationists, the Middlelands—home to the men and women who sought refuge from the council of the West and government in the East. These men searched out freedom in the harsh and unforgiving territories, but it came at a price. Conditions were rough and as the new war between the east and west surged closer and closer, their home was the new battleground.

The naturals, those not created in a lab, had no part in this new war. It was fought between the council of the east and west; these governments no longer needed us when they could make a whole race of humans to follow their every command. Now, these councils would fight to see who would conquer this new world of artificial life.

The naturals had two choices: sit back and die, or fight for whatever freedom they could grasp.

My father had chosen the fighting side.

“How?”

He widened his eyes slightly. How could he not? It had been years since he had seen me as well. How strange it must have been to leave a child and find a woman in her place. I cleared my throat. “How are you here?”

The side of my father’s mouth pulled up. “That’s a mighty long story.”

Despite the pain in my side and the way my heart pounded in disbelief that he was standing before me, I smiled. “I always liked your stories.”

His eyes shifted from mine to the ground. Whatever emotion swept across them, he hid it from me. Hesitantly a hand reached up and touched my cheek. “And I promise to tell it to you one day, but these woods aren’t safe, and we must be on the move.”

He pulled his hand from my cheek, and I instantly wanted to clutch onto it. He was real. He was alive, and, somehow, that made everything seem all right, even if the feeling was only temporary. It dulled the pain of once again losing James, the chosen one I had fallen in love with. It quieted the fears of knowing I had no home to return to, after being banished from the Isolationists’ camp. It alleviated the nauseous feeling that threatened to consume me when I thought of what fate awaited Louisa, my little sister, who now sat pregnant in a world where pregnant women had little chance of surviving.