My mind whirled. Was he actually questioning whether or not he’d threatened to kill me more than once? I didn’t care what kind of master manipulator he was, he couldn’t rewrite history. He’d sent me out to die on my sixteenth birthday. He’d left me to die in the mines six months after that. End of story.
“You wanted me to die on my first trip upward because my father was responsible for the death of your daughter.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I know that’s what you thought, what we let you think. It was simpler than the truth.”
“What?”
He rose, unsteadily, to his feet. “The truth is that you were supposed to run off with Jason and have babies. I never anticipated this latest course of events. Frankly, I’m not sure what to do about it.”
Icahn shook his head and my mouth went dry. “I’m supposed to be having babies with Jason? You don’t get to take credit for Jason and me. You didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. What I didn’t have anything to do with was Andon’s behavior or the Evans boy. I didn’t see that one coming.”
I pointed at him. “You’d better explain what you mean shortly, or I’ll take that cane and I’ll show you what it is that I’ve been trained to do with it.”
“Father?” Noah poked his head in the door. “Everything okay?”
“Yes, boy. Calm down.”
I’d never think to call Noah a boy considering he had about thirty years on me, but I supposed he’d always be a boy to his father.
“Rachel is having a bit of trouble listening to me. I think it might be better if I showed her.”
Noah’s face brightened up. “How about if I help you, Dad?”
His father shook his head. “I think you might like shoving her around a bit too much. Ask Darren to come back here, will you?”
“Yes, sir.” I could tell by his tone that Noah did not like his father’s directions. Seconds later, Darren entered.
“I’m ready to take her.”
Icahn nodded. “Good.”
Noah walked in and tried to grab his father’s arm but Isaac shoved him away. “I’m not crippled yet. I don’t want you holding me like I’m an invalid.”
Darren grabbed my arm. “You’re not injured, Rachel. But I don’t trust you not to run. I’d really rather not have to send out the vamps to go get you back. Again.”
“Again?” What the hell were these people talking about?
This whole setup was clearly a plan set in motion by Isaac Icahn to mess with my mind. It amazed me to see just how invested all of them were. Darren, Rosemary, Noah…they were all invested in it. I hadn’t even been able to keep my scheme of blowing up the vampire lairs secret. How long had Icahn had total control of all these people that he could make them play along so well?
“When I was twenty-two years old, it was the year 2012. Before Armageddon.”
“Oh, are we having a history lesson now?” I scoffed, but secretly inside I thrilled at the chance to hear what he wanted to say. No one talked about pre-Armageddon mostly because no one was there—except for my father who had been a child and didn’t remember much.
Icahn had the audacity to laugh at my comment. “Yes, Rachel. We’re having a history lesson.”
“2012 was ten years before Armageddon. Is that right?” We’d stopped keeping a calendar year after that so 2022 was the last year ever officially counted. After that it was all about birthdays and ages so we could keep track of who had to become a Warrior when.
“That’s right. But in 2012, I was just a research assistant working on my PhD in chemical engineering. It was my dream job to work for this particular pharmaceutical company. They were doing cutting edge work; making drugs no one else would take a chance making. And their shareholders were getting very rich in the process.”
“I don’t know half of what you said.”
He sighed. “I know you don’t. Let’s just say I worked for a company that made a lot of drugs and people got rich if they invested in them.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It was, but we didn’t know everything that was going on behind the scenes. Not yet anyway. I would learn about it shortly after that and the rest of my life has been defined by what I did and did not do after that. The rest of my life has been redemption.”
“Like the name of this habitat.”
I supposed when somebody was responsible for mass killings they probably did need redemption.
“Exactly.” He nodded. “You’re starting to see.”
I wasn’t. But we rounded a corner and entered a room with long beds lined up against a wall. They stood vertically, each one open with a glass top attached to them that, if closed, would look like a distorted pea pod. The room was cold, at least ten degrees colder than the others. But I didn’t shiver because I suddenly felt very hot, almost claustrophobic. I’d never liked being locked up in small places—not since I’d nearly died in Andon’s vampire holding box—and I hoped Icahn didn’t intend to torture me by sticking me in one of those weird beds.
“Do you know this place?”
“No.” I clenched my hands. “Stop asking me if I know places I couldn’t possibly know. I’ve never been here before.”
“By the time I was thirty years old—yes, two years before Armageddon—we had developed certain technologies to keep people alive. That was always the goal in our industry. Keep the living alive so they could keep doing whatever it was that they did. Or, at the very least, keep the rich alive as long as possible and with as little pain as we could manage.”
“How could that be? Everyone dies.”
“No, they don’t.” Icahn limped over to the bed. “This chamber is where we can freeze a person. It stops them from aging. It keeps them alive until we can cure their disease…or until it’s a better time for them to wake up.”
He frowned as he said the last words. Reaching out, he touched the side of the chamber like Tiffani caressed her son’s basinet.
The idea that he could keep someone alive by freezing him or her blew my mind. It seemed downright impossible. I doubted it could work at all. Still, I didn’t really want to argue with him at the moment. He seemed calm, happy. Maybe he wouldn’t shove me into a mine with no air and leave me to die for a while if I kept him in this pleasant state of mind.
“Did you design these things?”
His eyes danced with laughter. I hadn’t meant to be amusing. Not at all.
“No. This was not my field. I was a chemist. Someone else made these things. Someone who is long, long dead. But they work. Beautifully. And they’re cheap to run as long as we have fuel to keep doing it.”
I suddenly remembered the mine I’d been in. What had we been doing there? Coal. That was right. Payne was desperately trying to keep a quota on coal. Why? What had he been powering?
“I didn’t make these contraptions. Although, I’m grateful for them. And I didn’t make other things that make life happen when it would otherwise not be possible.” He stared off into space, as if he were witnessing a scene from somewhere else, someplace where the rest of us were not present. “I wanted to save life through chemistry and instead…I didn’t.”
“What did you do?”
He nodded toward the entranceway. “Walk with me. There is more to see.”
Darren gripped my arm again. “Come on, Rachel.”
I don’t think I would have run even if he had let me go. I knew it had to all be a load of garbage, but I found myself dying to hear more of Icahn’s story. I wasn’t exactly certain why that was.
“We had this idea, my colleagues and I, that we could somehow halt the aging process using a very tiny virus—similar to the ones you catch when you get a cold. Maybe give people longer lives without disease. My job was the chemistry, not the manufacturing.”
“What does this have to do with vampires and werewolves rising up?”
“Rachel.” He stopped moving and turned around. “We made the vampires. There were no vampires before us. Vampires are a result of a science experiment gone completely wrong.”
“That’s not true. There have always been vampires. Folklore says….”
He waved away my concerns with a flick of his hand. “Folklore says many things. There is only science. Always science.”
“And Werewolves? Did you make them, too?” I could hardly say the words because all I wanted to do was run away and find an empty bed where I could burrow under the covers. I wasn’t supposed to know this stuff. At worst, I was a seventeen-year-old girl with a boyfriend problem. At best, I was a Warrior with a destiny laid out before me where I could save people from monsters. Why was he telling me anyway?
“We didn’t know about the Werewolves until after. Their reaction to the virus troubled us. For the longest time, probably too long, we researched and experimented trying to figure out what it was about the mutated virus that made such a small portion of the population turn into wolves. By the time we realized they’d been that way before, they’d turned all but feral. It was…troubling.”
“No such thing as folklore, huh?”
“Less attitude, please, Ms. Clancy. I’m doing you a courtesy of explaining. I could just drag you where I need you to go and wipe your mind. Call me old fashioned, but I’d rather have you understand and agree.”
“Wipe my mind?”
We stopped our momentum and he turned on me, standing too close to my personal space. “When I picked you out for Jason, I was so excited. You were it. The perfect girl to start the whole thing again. I don’t blame you, not at all. It’s not at all your fault that Andon Kenwood turned out to be a power hungry lunatic. After all the time we spent curing his pack, to have him turn around and deliberately expose them to the virus again? What could he have been thinking?”
“He was thinking he wanted to get his son away from a mate he didn’t approve of.”
“That makes so little sense. I knew him before the end. He was such a good doctor. He worked for us for a while but then he wanted out, didn’t like the direction we were moving and, in retrospect, he was correct to be concerned. His wife used to make brownies.” He shook his head. “That was the first time I saw you and Jason.”
“What?” I took two steps back but Darren prevented me from going any further. “That’s impossible. I wasn’t born then.”
“Yes, you were. So was he. You dated for at least two years before it all went to hell. Andon liked you just fine back then. He used to call you Jason’s sweetie.”
“No!” I screamed because if I didn’t my heart would explode. “That couldn’t be real. It’s not true.”
“Take a deep breath and ask yourself if you can’t feel it somewhere?”
Jason had described a scene that would have been from before Armageddon. A vision of him coming to my house to pick me up for a date. I’d joked with him that it wouldn’t have been possible since he lived pre-Armageddon, and I never did.
“Did Jason know?” I couldn’t even believe I was asking the question. Why was I giving him credence when it would be better to simply discount the whole thing?
“He may have. I don’t know what Andon told him when he woke up. I don’t know. I did send you out into the woods to find him that day. That much was arranged. At what point Andon changed his mind about your appropriateness for his son—of that I’m unsure.”
“None of this could have happened. I was born in Genesis. I have memories of my life there. I didn’t suddenly wake up there suddenly at fourteen.”
“Yes, you did. You just don’t remember it the right way. You, Tia, the Lyons, even that stupid president you’ve all elected, all of you woke up there three years ago. I know this because that is when you woke up from cryogenic stasis with a whole set of memories. A gift from me since your real past wouldn’t have helped you survive in this new world.”
My knees gave out from under me and I hit the floor, Darren’s grip on me loosening enough to allow me to fall. “What have you been doing with all of us for thirty years? With the vampires? I don’t understand.”
“There wasn’t much time to make decisions. More and more people kept catching the virus. I couldn’t allow it to continue. A decision was made. The highest people of government, families of people we knew, a lottery system. None of it was fair, I understand that. I understood it then.”
He rambled, and I had a hard time following him except that somehow his words made sense. Not everyone could be saved, no matter what he’d done. Like a movie in front of my eyes, it played out before me. There had been panic in the streets. Secret meetings and someone had shuttled my father and me to some location. I’d been terrified. Who had brought me? A face swam before my eyes. Jason begging me to go. He seemed altered to me, and I didn’t understand why. He kept trying to explain.
“How have you planted these memories in my mind? These are not real. You’re putting them in there.”
“I’m not.” He shook his head. “I wish I was. We did manage to stop the vampires, to control them for the most part. They do see me as a god because of the serum I’ve put in their blood supply for so many years. They need me, and they know it. But I can only control them to a point. I’ve never been able to do anything about their personal blood supply, except to make sure they are fed foods that don’t counteract what I’m giving them. And the wolves….”
“And the wolves?” I was in for it now; I needed to hear the whole thing. “It’s always been fifty-fifty with them. They didn’t age. The virus worked on them. If I keep them involved, they seem to behave, for the most part.”
“They attack us. The vamps and the werewolves attack us.”
“Yes, they do. They can’t help it. Those poor people. I’m still working on trying to reverse it, to save them.” He shook his head. “That’s why I taught you to defend yourselves. I didn’t make up the stories about the genes. A number of you have it encoded in your DNA to be better fighters.”
I got off the floor. I didn’t know what I was feeling. Numb mostly. Maybe shocked. “Why wake us up if we have to fight? Why not keep us asleep in those things where you stored us?”
“Power started to fail. We lost people. Your mother, for example. I’m sorry about that, Rachel. I really am.”
She hadn’t been killed when I was a baby in a vampire attack? A pain started above my nose in my forehead. It stabbed at me with a suddenness that made me stagger backward. I could remember her. She’d been beautiful, kind, and tough on me when I didn’t study and came home with bad grades because I’d been out with Jason. She hadn’t liked him, hadn’t thought he was good enough for me. Spoiled. Yes, that was the word she’d used a lot to describe him. We’d been having a fight when the cars had shown up to take us to the science center. The last thing we’d ever done together was yell.
“I tried to give you a story that would make you feel fulfilled. Of parental sacrifice and bravery.”
“But she need not stay dead if you don’t want her to.”
“What?”
“Darren, let’s move on.”
Noah snickered and Icahn hit him on the foot with his cane. He yelped and moved away from his dad. We walked in silence. Everything I’d ever believed had disappeared from existence. I wasn’t Rachel Clancy, born after the world ended, I was Rachel Clancy saved by my boyfriend the werewolf to be frozen for thirty years?
“I know you have questions. I’ll answer them all but first we have more to see.”
“No. I don’t want any more.”
“You have to. You’ve always been a brave girl. Don’t stop being now.”
“The vampires killed Chad. Did he somehow contract the virus?”
Icahn nodded. “Oh, yes, Mr. Lyons. Such a remarkable boy. He was before Armageddon, too. Top student. He’d been attending Harvard. You don’t know what that means but it’s my alma mater, and it impressed me. His father was a member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Again, you don’t know what that means.”
“But it impresses you.”
He snickered. “Yes. Chad Lyons got bitten by a vampire trying to rescue you from here six months ago.”
“I wasn’t here six months ago. I was in an underground lair working mines for you.”
“That’s the memory Noah put in your mind. Yes. But you were here. I was trying very hard to set things back to normal for you. Genesis was getting too close to discovering everything. One at a time I’d bring you all here. Or at least that was the plan. And then things went awry.” He turned and looked at Noah. “Through no fault of my own.”
“Noah?”
“I screwed up and you were being so completely difficult. You’ve always been. I don’t know why we rescued you. You’re nothing. Your family was not important. Your father taught high school science.”
“Noah.” His father whirled on him. “You can keep your opinions to yourself or maybe I will lose your vial.”
“Yes, Father.”
We stopped moving and I gasped as I saw the figure standing at the doorway. Liam Icahn was dead. I’d seen Keith kill him, saw his skull bashed in.
“This is impossible.”
“It’s not.” Icahn flung the door open. “You know my son, Liam.”
Dead Liam nodded his head. “I sure do. Nice to see you again.”
“You’re dead.”
He shook his head, smiling. “Not anymore.”
“There was another technology we had back then, Rachel,” Isaac Icahn said from inside the room I knew within my very soul I didn’t want to enter even as I was pushed inside. “It’s called cloning.”
Giant containers filled with a clear liquid lined the walls of the room. Ten or more devices surrounded the walls of the huge space. I didn’t have time to count them as my eyes immediately fell onto one specific container. I wrenched my arm from Darren’s grip and ran to the glass.
Inside, floating like a mannequin of himself was the boy I’d killed who I never thought to see again in this world. A sob escaped me before I could stop it. Chad Lyons. So beautiful and unmarred. Exactly as he’d looked before the vampires.
“I put a stake in his heart. He dissolved into dust.”
“Yes, you did.” Icahn placed a hand on my shoulder, and I was too exhausted to even shove it off. “That was very brave of you. Otherwise he’d be one of the vampires, waiting for me to cure him. Instead, he can be here. Waiting for you to do the right thing again.”
“What would that be?”
“I want Genesis back, Rachel. It was my habitat. All the scientists have their home base. I want to go home. Back to my people. I want it back.”
I closed my eyes and placed my head on the glass. “I can’t do that. I’m just one girl.”
“You can. You can help me beat them. We’ll bring them here. Rearrange their memories. No one has to know. Not even you if you don’t want to. Chad will come home with you. His family will have him back and never know they lost him. If you want, you can all live happily ever after. We’ll incorporate Deacon and the others into the fold. It’ll be like they were always there. I’ll keep working to save the vampires in secret. We can bring back your mother. You won’t be motherless, Rachel. Your father can be a hero again. I really don’t mind. My daughter lives here. I think you met her. Rosemary, that’s what she calls herself now. Unlike her, Chad never needs to know he’s a clone.”
“I can’t decide other people’s destinies. I’m just one person. No one should have that power over anyone else.”
“And therein lies the problem. If you don’t do what I want, I’m going to turn off Chad’s machine before he’s done cooking, and I’ll lose his vial. You’ll stay here. Forever. Never see your people again. And you’ll live knowing you actually had the chance to bring him back.” He patted my shoulder again. “Why don’t I let you think about it?”
Chad’s eyes flew open from the other side of the glass. I jolted backward.
“He can’t see you, dear. At this point it’s just a reflex. Nothing to worry about. By tomorrow he’ll actually feel pain if I shut off the machines. But the choice is yours. Don’t let that sway you. Much.”