Chapter Twenty-One

Graven

It’s best for her. If she had fought for me, it would’ve started a war between her people and the humans. The last thing I wanted was for her to do violence. And now I’m getting the punishment I deserve. Now that Niva knows the truth, she will forget me and go back to her people without regret. As it should be.

After sundown, we arrive at the rebel camp, and they chain me inside a titanium cage.

It’s futile. I could break all of it with a squeeze of my hand, but they don’t know that.

I think they suspect it, however, so they keep blasters trained on me at all times. I could break those, too. It takes multiple blaster shots to kill me, but no one’s ever been able to shoot me enough before I steal the weapon from their hands and knock them out with it.

I don’t even try, though. In a way, it’s a relief to finally be found out. I should’ve turned myself in a month ago when I arrived here.

I should’ve told Niva from the beginning.

But if I had, I wouldn’t have gotten those two heavenly days with her.

I’m a selfish man. I can’t bring myself to regret anything except hurting her. The look on her face when I told her goodbye—I would’ve defied hell to save her that look. But it’s done. She’ll forget me now. She’ll go back to her life. She won’t be in danger of getting in trouble because of me anymore.

It hurts. Emotions, new ones, storm through my chest, burning through my heart and pumping into my veins. Gods, how I’ll miss her. Not seeing her again is going to torture me.

It’s so strange. I never thought I would be capable of such emotions, and it’s all because of her and what she taught me. It’s her fault I can experience this sadness, this loneliness, rather than repressing it like I used to. It’s because of her care that I can miss her at all.

Tenery is assigned my first guard duty. She stares at me, not taking her eyes off me, blaster at the ready to shoot me through the bars of the cage if I attempt to escape.

“They’ll question you in the morning,” she says almost gently. My misery must be obvious on my face. It’s almost as though she feels sorry for me. “Tell them what they need to know, and they might let you live.”

“What do they need to know?” I ask, more because I want to make sure I don’t say anything they need in the hopes they will kill me.

She hesitates but seems to decide there’s no harm in telling me. “They want to track the Ten Systems warships fleet. Which systems they’re planning to attack next. Basically, anything that will tell us whether they plan to come this way again.”

I nod, trying to remember if I do know anything about that. I suppose I would like to help them. I want the Ten Systems brought down as much as anyone. Though I don’t know how one rebellion with one warship has the hopes of taking down an empire. Perhaps that’s half the reason for their exploration—learn about other species in the galaxy, but also gain support in their long-term goal to free the galaxy from the tyranny of the empire.

“Do you know if my father is dead?” I’ve never heard officially, and it would bring me a lot of peace to hear that he’s gone without a doubt. I would’ve preferred to kill him myself. I can’t explain how many different plans I’ve concocted to try over the years. But just knowing for certain that he’s dead would be a close second.

Tenery squints at me. “He must be. I can’t imagine they didn’t kill him as soon as they commandeered his ship.” She tilts her head. “Though I guess I never heard officially.”

“Do you think I could ask them tomorrow if they know? Officially?” Gods, I’d love to see pictures of the body, as gruesome as that is. Proof of his death would give me immense satisfaction.

She sneers at me. “You asking after Captain Dargule is just going to make you look guiltier.” She’s assuming that I’m hoping he’s alive.

I don’t correct her.

Tenery’s watch ends when the moon is high overhead, and a male guard comes to take her place. I miss her. He stares at me with creepy eyes. Worse than creepy. I expect his gaze to be full of contempt. I’m the enemy, after all, and many of these rebels suffered sorely under my father’s fucked-up system of command; some were probably tortured in his sick obsession with corporal punishment for the slightest infringement of the rules among his soldiers.

But this male soldier has something extra in his eyes that’s not what I’d expect or what I’ve seen in the other rebels I’ve met since I got here. Most of them have had a tendency toward excitement and some sort of abandonment or joy in their new freedom in the rebellion.

This one, he doesn’t look like he feels free. He looks like someone full of a malicious intent. Worse than that, his gaze is twisted, warped somehow.

His facial expression is even more disturbing than his eyes. It holds no sign of emotion, the muscles lax and blank, almost sickly but also wrong in a disturbing way. After my days with Niva and my new experiences of realizing how important emotions are to being a fully developed person, he gives me uncomfortable chills down my back.

What is this person doing in the rebellion?

And I remember what Tenery’s partner said about some rebels turning on their oaths. Every instinct I have says he is not to be trusted and will betray the rebellion with the next turn of his head, with at best selfish intent, at worst sociopathic urges.

I’m familiar with those. It’s all my father was. I saw it every day, the expression of a sociopath. I’d recognize it anywhere.

“I’m not surprised you don’t know who I am,” he says after an hour of staring at me. His voice is a monotone that sounds more like a machine than a human being. Maybe that’s what’s wrong. Maybe he’s a robot. Though I didn’t know the tech to make human droids had been perfected so well yet.

“I don’t know you,” I respond skeptically, trying to decide if talking to it is a good idea or not.

“The doctors did a good job. They fixed not just my face, but my voice as well.” His mouth lifts in the first attempt at an expression. Though it’s just that, an attempt. There’s no real emotion behind it. “It was my idea.”

“What was?”

“Changing my voice. I knew there were too many who’d recognize me from the times I tortured them while they were blindfolded.”

All the air in my lungs bursts out, and my skin goes ice-cold.

No…

…no…

“I confess,” he continues in that same cold monotone, “I thought you would be the exception. Surely my own son would recognize me.”

Pure horror fills my chest, an achy fire that fills my limbs not with the desire to kill as I’d hoped or expected, but with the urge to flee. Breathe, I order myself. Breathe and think.

“I knew I’d find you sooner or later,” he drones with the closest tones to pleasure as he was ever capable of.

What do I do? Call for help? Explain to the rebels that he’s the spy not me? That he’s the most dangerous person in this camp, capable of destroying everything the rebellion has worked for? With his conniving mind’s sadistic construction, he thinks of things more horrible than the average person can conjure, more horrible than any human emergency plan could account for.

Do I keep him talking? Get him to tell me his plan? Obviously, he has one if he’s standing here talking to me, telling me who he is.

“Staying behind to infiltrate the rebel camp here when I was forced to give up and evacuate the planet was ingenious,” he praises. “Though why didn’t you inform me of your plan? That’s what I still haven’t figured out.”

“Also, I’m sorely disappointed that it’s been a month and you still haven’t accomplished their demise. You were supposed to be perfect. I see I failed somewhere in my experiments to make you the perfect soldier.”

“You failed in everything,” I finally say, my tongue unfreezing.

“He speaks!” he mocks me. “Address me properly as your father, son.”

“Not anymore.” Never again.

He licks his lips in the same slithering way he used to, and for the first time, I finally see in a mannerism that it is him. “You never protested before. We engineered your ability to resist out of your DNA.”

“I let you think you did. Just because I quit resisting doesn’t mean I forgot how.” I’d stopped because every time I did, it landed me back in the lab. “There’s no one here to do your experiments for you anymore.”

“Do you honestly think I came here alone?” he sneers. “Oh, you did, didn’t you?” His tone tightens as though he’s having some sort of emotional response. “What’s wrong with you? You were my creation. My perfection. An automaton trained to enact my every will, but with the superior strength and agile mind to follow orders with absolute efficiency. And here you sit, in a cage!”

I realize now that me being devoid of emotion actually was part of his plan. If I had no emotions, if he damaged that part of my brain somehow, I’d follow his will more blindly, without protest. Niva brought me back. She made me feel again.

But the flaw of having feelings again—I’m now capable of being paralyzed by fear. I’ve never experienced this before. Niva didn’t fix me so I could sit here like a coward. She spent her energy so I could thrive and live. Not give up and die.

I tense my muscles, ready to break my chains, tear through the bars of this cage, squeeze his neck until he satisfyingly, just as I’ve dreamed so many times before, dies in my bare hands.

But as soon as I tense, he pulls out a weapon superior to any blaster, a weapon I’d forgotten about. It fits in the palm of his hand, but I recognize it instantly. He tested it on me. He designed it for me. As much as he prided himself on my creation, when he made me so difficult to kill with a blaster, he needed another weapon, an electrical stun gun that would work on me to keep me from ever being a threat to him.

He points and shoots at me, and a wave of shocks envelops me.

Pain, a familiar one that I’ve felt hundreds of times, all the times he experimented with it on me to perfect its ability to paralyze me. It sears off my ability to move, my ability to think. I’m helpless to do anything but scream.