Chapter 10
Tess,
Have you written since your first letter? Are you safe? I haven’t heard from you. Things are getting worse. Much, much worse. If I knew you were okay, I could handle it. I need to know you still exist because they are trying to erase you.
I don’t know how to pretend like I hate you. I’ve tried. But somehow, the council can tell. I repeat all the lines they have given me about your people, the naturals. I’ve told them how you used your body, your smiles, your words to make me think that you loved me, used that love as a weapon to destroy me. Bent me to your will, so I would follow you till the end of time. Forever leaving and forgetting about the council.
I tell them all of these things day in and day out, and they still don’t believe me. The funny thing is almost everything I have told them is true. Love is a weapon. It has consumed me like a fire that burns and rages, spreads and consumes. And I love all of you. Your smiles. Your words. Your body. You never had to bend me to your will because wherever you went, I wanted to follow. Not out of some weak obsession, but, rather, because when I am with you, I am my best self. My only self.
The council wants me to be something different. Darker. Violent.
I even tried to bring forth that side of me. I was created as a weapon. It is in my very being. You would think it would be easy to pretend, but I am constantly failing at it. I thought about every bad thing my kind has done to yours, every heartbreak they ever caused you. But still they could tell. Knowing you has changed me in ways science cannot undo; science couldn’t even predict it.
So, they torture me.
At least I know why. They’re scared. Petrified. I can overhear them talking when they think my mind is too dulled by the pain. Someone took something from them, and they want it back.
They are in a panic. All of my fellow chosen ones talk about their assigned creators. The long meetings they are called into. The sleepless nights. The uneaten meals. I don’t see my creator very often. I only know that the accident I didn’t stop nearly took his life. He’s having a hard time healing due to his old age. I overhear the rumors about his father—Abrams. Horrible, twisted stories. Have you heard of this man? It’s all anyone seems to talk about around here. Especially when they think I have passed out from the pain.
I wish they would just leave me alone, but they need me. I’m not sure why, but I’m the key.
They want me to save the council.
So, I continue to try. Maybe if I can pretend long enough, well enough, I can find out what they are so desperate to get back.
If I can, I’ll make sure they never get it again.
~James
Chapter 11
My father had been holding onto my letters. James needed my words, and my father had never sent them. At least not after the first one. I practically ran to the dining hall where my father was holding a meeting with his advisors. With every step I took, James’s desperate pleas went round and round inside my head. He was living in hell and he had no one. Not even my letters.
I was going to kill my father.
Abrams. James had mentioned that the men around him kept whispering about his creator’s father. It was a name I’d heard growing up, a memory I had to work hard at pulling out from all the other thoughts that muddled my mind. Abrams was a story told at night to scare little children, no more real than a bogeyman or the monster that lived under the bed. Hardly anyone talked of the original creators, nameless men who had faded away in time. The chosen ones were the face of the council now; no one bothered to spend time learning the history of the creators. They were merely the workmen; the council and its army of genetically engineered superhumans were the real stars.
But Abrams had been different. Stories floated around about this particular scientist. It was rumored that he had killed the original five creators, those responsible for the first batch of chosen ones, in the midst of some psychotic break. Included in that mix, his own father. The council had even used the story as part of its propaganda—see how even the best of us naturals can fall? He had been a scary story to me. Nothing more. I had too much to hate right there in front of my face growing up; I didn’t have time to hate a legend.
“Your mother would have hated those pants.”
I skidded to a stop, nearly colliding with my father. He was standing on the steps of the building that served as the dining room. Somehow, he knew I was coming for him. He let out a low whistle. “I mean it. She would have never let you out of the house wearing those.”
“My mother hated a lot of things,” I fumed, attempting to wipe some of the dirt off the trousers I had taken to wearing.
For some reason, my father smiled. “You and I have always been alike in a lot of ways. Misunderstanding your mother being one of them.”