Page 6 of Call of the Fathoms

Barker opened the door quickly. He was a tiny man in comparison to her. Barely five foot five, he came up to her chest and had to crane his neck to see her face. The bottle thick glasses perched on his nose didn’t help, although they did magnify his wide brown eyes. Silver hair topped his head like someone had blown a cloud on top of him and spun it into a cotton candy like twirl. His white lab coat hung from his lean shoulders, because the man was always forgetting to eat no matter how many people were on the job to remind him.

“Alexia?” he asked, a question in the word.

“She wasn’t happy with the last reborn. There’s a rash on her shoulder now.”

“A rash?” he muttered, turning back into his office to gather his things. “That shouldn’t be happening. Rashes are exceedingly hard for the Originals to get, unless the reborn isn’t perfect. But I check them. I check every time we use one.”

“Perhaps a mistake was made.”

“I don’t make mistakes.”

But he was human, and therefore, he did. She had seen him make mistakes before, although they were rare. He was a good man, this doctor, but that didn’t make him perfection personified. Still, she kept her mouth shut as he gathered a white medical bag and started down the hall.

She did look around his room while he gathered his things, though. Alexia liked to look at how people decorated their private spaces, because it gave her a small glimpse into the life ofthe person. Barker’s rooms were all plastered with old images of Above. He particularly liked pictures of the land around the sea. White sand beaches and bright fluffy clouds that danced above the waves.

The land wasn’t like that anymore. No one could go up there, and if they could, they definitely wouldn’t find white fluffy clouds. Only angry tempests that threatened to kill anyone who was out in them with shards of ice as big as her head.

She stalked down the hall with him toward the reborn center. The hallway they were in was shaped a bit like a tube, and she was suddenly struck with a wave of dizziness. The entire room was moving, like the tube was rotating.

What was going on with her?

Alexia reached out a hand and touched the wall, anchoring herself as she walked after him. She would not show weakness. She would not let him know that something was wrong.

But he looked over his shoulder and frowned at her. “What’s going on with you today?”

“Nothing,” she muttered.

“You’re holding onto the wall like the sea is sending you tumbling into a vortex. Are you dizzy?”

“No.”

“I’m a doctor. If you have something going on, then you should tell me.” He didn’t have time to say anything else before the reborn center was right before them.

Glass walls fitted with twin glass doors showed everything beyond. All the frozen tubes, kept in a cryo genetic state once the bodies were finished growing. All the cylinders were filled with goo and contained various stages of humanity.

Her gaze caught on the tubes filled with the faint orange liquid. The color was due to the vitamins to keep the fetuses inside alive. She hated looking at those strange little worms that eventually turned into children, knowing that she herself hadgrown in that same kind of vat. Except they had purged those tubes regularly, testing all the genes in every baby and picking the ones that were worth something.

The ones like her. With genetic mutations that had been carefully cultivated and injected and pushed into a little life like that.

The doors hissed open into the area that wasn’t as cold as the rest of it, and Doctor Barker headed in. That was her cue. She was supposed to follow him into the room. She was supposed to be a good personal guard and do everything that she needed to do for her Original. It was the reason she had been made.

Just like all those people hanging in those tubes, frozen, created to live for only a few moments before their gasping breath subsided and they were used instead for someone else’s immortality.

“Alexia?” Doctor Barker asked, his voice now filled with concern. “Would you like to come inside with me?”

Shit. Why wasn’t the medicine working?

She’d taken these drugs her entire life. They always made life easier. She’d always been able to inject herself and forget everything for at least a week, if not longer than that. Were these thoughts stronger than the drugs?

Heading into the room, she audibly swallowed as the doors hissed shut behind her. “Sorry, doctor. This room always makes me uncomfortable.”

Even admitting that was strange. She’d been bred to be impossible to shake. Anxiety and fear weren’t something her body could feel, those chemicals just didn’t exist in her brain. At least, that’s what she had been told her entire life.

“Uncomfortable?” Doctor Barker repeated before pointing to a leather chair beside him. Countless metal arms behind the chair were used to determine the health of people like her. From blood pressure cuffs to injectables, the chair was as much as ofdoctor as the man in front of her. “Before we gather the reborn, why don’t we do a quick workup of your physical state?”

That definitely made all these feelings worse. Stiffly, she sat down in the chair. He sat at a desk opposite to her, typing away into a computer that commanded the metal arms to move forward. They quickly did all the work that was necessary. Blood pressure? Perfect. Heart rate? Normal.

Maybe this wasn’t fear. Because her hands weren’t shaking and her heart rate was exactly how it should be. Yet, her mind was racing, and she thought, for a moment, maybe this was anger. Was she supposed to be able to feel that, though?

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