It doesn’t really matter though. Whatever Jack tries to argue, I’m going to visit with his brother and figure out what the hell is up with him if only so I can get out of this bloody room.
Past
Rohan
6months later
At the age of seven, I was injected with a lethal chemical called Liquid Onyx. It had a ninety-eight percent mortality rate, something my dad knew when he dosed me with it. That day, I was reborn into a new body and became more science experiment than person.
I remember what it felt like to die and what it felt like to come back different. Changed. Ruined.
Liquid Onyx hollowed me out like a fire inside a house. It razed everything but the shell, the carcass that surrounded the cells and veins that now contain my blackened blood and mutated DNA. The pain of being burned alive by my ravaged tissue has imprinted itself on my mind so deeply that the same pain can be dispensed by the reverse side of my flesh. Throughtouch, I can make other people feel what I did when Liquid Onyx first hit my system like a toxic spill on the ocean.
It was meant to give Obsidian Inc.—and by extension, my dad as its director—the ability to create their own superhuman army. Children with enhanced senses and superhuman speed and strength, with powers that defied logic, that could make them an unstoppable force.
In some ways, he got what he wanted. Liquid Onyx worked although only a handful could survive the initial injection, and most others died within weeks or months if not hours or days. It was the rare few who lived long enough to be torn apart by OI’s scientists, to be strapped to cold tables and cut open with clinical blades so they could find out how they worked, digging around inside them with their tools like clocks in a repair shop.
Once a scientist dared to call the Liquid Onyx survivors lucky within my earshot. Lucky to have lived. Lucky to be the inhuman creatures we are now.
I was nine years old by then, and I’d never hit a grown man before. Turned out to be a lot more fun than hitting a child my own age. Felt like there was some real substance to it, righteous satisfaction born from dispensing a malevolent justice that no snotty private school brat could ever conceivably earn.
Dad punished me for that display of brash volatility against one of his scientists although I think he was more pissed off that I didn’t use my power against him. I’m almost certain that was why he put me in the same room with a man who would say such vile things in the first place. He knew my reaction would be disastrous but clearly not what form that reaction would take. I wish I could say it was purposeful, to disappoint him in his assumptions about me, but in truth I didn’t use my power because I couldn’t control it, let alone rely on it.
My power is a cruel one. Any power where the singular purpose of it is to inflict pain can only be utilised by a specificmindset, one that I do in fact possess, but only sometimes. I’m not consistently the monster that my dad created, which is a shameful disappointment to both of us, I guess.
It’s the pieces of me that my mum got the chance to forge when my dad was too busy with other matters to notice. Those pieces are sharp and well-honed but hidden. She taught me to shield them from him and everyone else, lest he find a way to scrouge them out.
She was the reason I stayed when all my instincts told me to flee. I thought I was her reason for staying in the hell that Ian Stone dragged her into when she was too young and stupid to see the wolf concealed behind that handsome façade.
But then she ran, and I saw the repercussions of that play out in real time.
My mum ran for what remained of her life, and in response, he took it all. Doused it like a flame that leapt from the firepit. She was the light that kept my world from being entirely consumed by cloying darkness.
She died, and I was submerged. All that was left to do was to reach into the murky blackness and find the most vulnerable patch of my dad’s skin to press my hand to.
***
I meet Aaron North for the first time on a Tuesday. It’s not a good sign. I don’t like Tuesdays. Historically, Tuesdays have not been kind to me. I was injected with Liquid Onyx on a Tuesday. My mum was murdered on a Tuesday. I was born on a Tuesday. All bad. Don’t like. Bleh to every Tuesday there ever was and will ever be.
It’s been two weeks since my mum made her bid for freedom. Twelve days since my dad dispatched one of his superhuman agents to kill her, court-martial style, like a deserter withshellshock from 1915. Ten days since I packed up my shit and reenacted her escape attempt, only without her prequel energy execution.
I was breaking into one of OI’s labs to hijack a particular hard drive when a British government agency made the executive decision to blow it up.
Now there’s fire and debris everywhere, and the hard drive I was after lies cracked open and useless at my feet.
You can say this about the British government: they have consistently unenviable timing.
I meet up with Aaron on my way out of the facility. He’s carrying two unconscious test subjects out of their containment cells, one slung over his shoulder in a firefighter’s hold, and the other cradled in his thick arms. They’re probably about two years old at most, small and fragile in comparison to Aaron’s large, imposing frame.
Aaron catches sight of me when I’m halfway out the nearest smashed window. There’s soot from the smoke on his face, and he’s coughing hard, a rough, wet sound that grates on my over-sensitive ears. His brows furrow at me in confusion. My hood is up, but the mask I was wearing earlier became dislodged when I was thrown across the room during the explosion that rocked the facility.
“They’ve got one more in there,” Aaron tells me, jerking his chin at a containment cell behind him. “He’s unconscious.”
I don’t know what he must be seeing on my face to make him think that information will mean anything to me, but I resolve to dissect and rectify whatever facial miscommunication that is later.
We stare at each other for a handful of seconds, the expectation in how he’s looking at me too galling to comment on.
I’m about to throw myself out of the window and trust the three-story drop to prevent Aaron from playing hero by comingafter me, when the facility is hit with another overzealous explosion. Movement shudders through the building, the walls and floor quaking with the pressure. It throws me off-balance, and I have to grasp the window ledge to stop myself from falling on the wrong side.
