Page 14 of High Seas

Well, that wasn’t comforting. At all.

Not that any of this was.

That meant Abram hadn’t lost his mind, because that wasn’t Abram. And the woman he was seeing… she wasn’t me. She was my clone. One of thousands, apparently. Kael had been hard at work. How did he make so many duplicates in such a short amount of time?

The lights in Kael’s laboratory were bright, screaming overhead as we walked past curtained areas holding empty gurneys. A steel door, painted black, sat resolute at the end. “What’s in there?” I asked conversationally.

“A massive secret,” Kael smirked, pulling back a curtain on the right. “I’ll be back in a few moments. Lie on your stomach. This upgrade will be simple.”

Simple… but not painless. They were never painless.

Where did that come from? I wasn’t lucid during upgrades. I’d wake up hours later in recovery and Kael would coach me on how to test to see if the procedure had worked.

But that vision felt real. And that door… I think I remembered it, but couldn’t remember ever talking to Kael about it. What the hell is happening to me?

I hung my head and let the tears I’d been fighting to hold back fall.

Enoch loved his people; he took pride in his ability to protect and provide for them. Victor, or Kael, had stripped all that away, and with it, part of Enoch’s humanity, part of his soul. The worst part was that he used me to do it, so it felt like he’d torn away part of mine, too.

I looked up, my eyes colliding with Enoch’s. He froze at the sight of me, but shook off whatever had passed between us. He stood and moved a few feet away, looking out over the splintered and broken railing into the choppy water.

“You really didn’t know,” he said.

I shook my head. “No,” I cried. “And you have no reason to believe me, but I would’ve died trying to stop them if I could’ve made it home.”

“My siblings and I worked nonstop, day and night for eight days, to dig graves and bury the dead.”

I pictured them covered in mud, every shovel full heavier than the last, and then I imagined the immaculate grounds being worked into rows and rows of graves.

This was strategy. It had to have been Victor. Kael wouldn’t have been brave enough to stand against him. He took orders. He didn’t give or alter them.

Victor sent me to end Enoch so that his bloodline of vampires would end. He sent me to clip the vine that bore his fruit. As much as he hoped we would succeed, he anticipated that we might fail, and made a ruthless contingency plan. Though the clone army hadn’t clipped the vine itself, they stripped away all its fruit and left the vine to wither and rot.

Hatred crawled up my spine, burrowing into the spaces between, and I began to wither along with Enoch.

While he stared out at the water, I pushed myself up. I turned away from him and moved quickly to get out of the showy gown and tug the top of my suit up where it belonged. If he was right and there were more clones like the one I saw with Abram’s on the island, I was going to end them.

My body didn’t feel any stronger than it did moments ago, but my mind was filled with determination and purpose like I’d never felt before. Different from when I had to prove I belonged in the Asset program, or when I fought Abram, or trying not to disappoint Maru, or even when I tried to show Victor he hadn’t misplaced his faith in me. Not even when training nonstop so I could stake any and every vamp I found to avenge my mother.

How did my world shift so dramatically in such a short time?

I finally gave up the lies that had been shoved down my throat twelve hours a day for years, and replaced it with the truth; one filled with more striations of gray than black and white. One with lines in the sand that even if blurred by the wind, people knew never to cross. Victor trampled straight through them with his deceit and Machiavellian maneuvers. He knew what he was doing was wrong, yet he did it anyway. So did Kael. Now it was my turn to show them how wrong they’d been. I was going to make them pay.

Enoch turned to face me, his eyes sliding down my tech suit. I stood tall and waited until he spoke. “I never dreamed you’d fall into this time. I thought we would meet again in your time, and I thought that in that time, I’d come for you – to kill you myself,” he admitted. “I envisioned your death a thousand different ways. It was no hardship for me to kill the variations of you.”

Swallowing, I stayed quiet and let him spew his pent-up frustrations and truths.

“I thought you had lied to me, manipulated me, but now I see I was wrong. You were nothing more than a tool Victor Dantone used to get to me, but it seems that even you were unaware of the depth of his depravity.” Enoch’s jaw ticked angrily.

“I will make this right, Enoch.”

“How?” he challenged. “How could you possibly make this right?”

I wasn’t sure.

I had no idea how to make it right, but maybe it could be done. Until then, I decided to find a clone and send Victor and Kael a special message. Then I needed to find Titus. He was the technical wizard among us. Maybe he could figure out how to reroute the circuits in my hand. Maybe he could hack our system and figure out a way we could go home and stop Victor and Kael before they unleashed the clones. And if that wasn’t possible, we knew when they struck. We might be able to travel back to thirteen forty-eight and get Enoch’s people to safety before the clones landed.

“You have no idea,” he said, a cruel smile ghosting across his face. “Just go. I don’t want to see you again.”

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