Straightening my shoulders despite the weight of impending bad news settling over me, my heavy steps carried me over to where he stood, ready for some long, drawn-out explanation. Calix always tried to teach me something or show off his skills. It was frustrating when I just wanted him to get to the point, but that wasn't how he worked.
Usually, Rack or Ezra had to endure these detailed explanations, saving the rest of us, but today, it looked like I was the unlucky tribute.
He pointed to the screen. "As you can see by the numbers, it looks like N-14A and the metabolic compound OF-67 are slowly introduced to the variant, making it a stable isotope. Then here…” He tapped on another screen. “You can see the numbers over time, showing the growth of the different compounds that end up becoming radioactive, and you know whatthatmeans."
With his hands on his hips, glaring as he talked, I glanced at the screen and tried to make sense of all the numbers and acronyms displayed, but it was complete gibberish to me. The incomprehensible mess of scientific jargon might as well have been written in ancient hieroglyphics. In fact, maybe I could figure it out if it was in picture form. I wasn't a damn scientist!
Throwing my hand toward the screen in exasperation, I exclaimed, "No. No, I don’t! What the hell am I looking at?"
Calix's eyes rose toward the ceiling with a heavy sigh, and my fingers curled into a ball, ready to punch him just to make myself feel better. Leaning over, his fingers punched in a few keys then pointed to the screen with renewed patience. "Look. Watch."
The display transformed into what appeared to be a video, showing several blob-like shapes floating around in what I assumed was some kind of cellular environment. At first, they seemed harmless enough, just drifting aimlessly, until something green appeared and attacked the blobs with shocking violence. The assault was swift and brutal, and I found myself leaning forward despite my confusion.
With my attention fully captured, I watched in horrified fascination as the blobs were taken over by the green and began to grow larger, like they were bulking up, becoming more substantial. The transformation held for what felt like an eternity, the enhanced cells maintaining their new, powerful state, but after some time, they gradually turned black and began to disintegrate. Their edges became fuzzy and indistinct before they started to disappear entirely, dissolving into nothingness as if they'd never existed at all.
"Whatever's in that vial," Calix explained, his voice taking on the clinical tone he used when discussing his work, "attacks asupe's DNA and inflates it. Almost makes the cells stronger, more powerful than they should be. Over some time, the cells eventually run out of power, and the enhancement slowly disintegrates them from the inside out."
He pressed another key, and the screen switched to a grid showing multiple videos of the same horrifying process I'd just witnessed. Each one followed the same pattern—initial attack, enhancement, then destruction.
"I tried this with different supe races’ DNA and got the same result every time," he continued, his finger moving across the screen to point at various examples. "Except," and, here, his voice took on an even more ominous tone, "with human DNA.” He pointed to the only video where the cells hadn’t turned green. “Instead of destroying it, the substance clings on and adapts with it, almost like a parasite finding the perfect host."
As I watched the human cell video, I could see he was absolutely right. The green cells didn't attack and destroy like they had with the supernatural DNA. Instead, they simply clung to the sides of the human cells like some kind of symbiotic organism, but the effect was still disturbing in its own way. The human cells moved in a faster, more agitated motion, as if they were being pushed beyond their normal limits.
"What the hell is it doing to them?" I asked, though I wasn't sure I wanted to know the answer.
Looking up at my brother, I saw him shrug with the kind of casual gesture that belied the seriousness of what we were discussing, then he sighed like this was far more work than he'd wanted to do on a weekend, which was typical Calix. Brilliant but perpetually lazy.
"I don't know, and I won't know unless I test it on actual humans, and we're absolutely not doing that," he spat out, disgusted with the idea.
Even though my brother could be lazy and was, admittedly, emotionally unstable, he still held certain principles that he refused to compromise on. One of his strongest beliefs was that you didn't mess around with genetics and cellular makeup. He always said that experiments like that almost never went the way you wanted them to and that combining magic with DNA manipulation was just asking for absolute disaster.
I knew that Ezra didn't share his moral concerns about such things. Early on, she wanted to see if Calix could create something that would boost supernatural powers, pushing the boundaries of what our kind could achieve. He had refused her request outright, and it ended up becoming an issue at the Syndicate boss table.
We voted on it. The final tally was two to three, with Calix winning the argument. Ezra had to drop that particular idea and move on to something new. I thought it would be an issue, something that would divide us, but in typical Ezra fashion, she pivoted to the next opportunity without holding onto any emotions, putting her laser focus on legitimizing our portfolio instead.
That was when I knew without a shadow of a doubt that Ezra would do anything for us. She could tear another person into shreds, but when it came to the family, to keep the Syndicate whole, she would sacrifice anything. Even her own goals.
As I sat there staring at the computer screen, watching those horrifying videos play on repeat, a spike of pure rage hit me likea physical blow. The emotion was so intense it nearly knocked me backward.
I should have been notified that something like this was out there! What the hell were my lieutenants doing? Were they just sitting around twiddling their thumbs while this nightmare unfolded in my territory?
This was my damn city, my territory, my responsibility! The thought burned through me like acid, but just as quickly as the rage had come, it was replaced by something even worse… shame.
Pictures of Ezra's furious scowl and my parents' disappointed faces floated through my mind like accusatory ghosts. How the hell had I not known what was going on in my own backyard? The question haunted me, and with my recent failures piling up, I was forced to face a devastating realization: this was on me.
All of it.
I was the boss, the one in charge, the person everyone looked to for leadership and protection. I should have had a tighter grip on everything and everyone under my command. There should’ve been no cracks in my organization, no weaknesses wide enough for this kind of threat to slip through undetected.
My thoughts flashed to the last couple of days, and I felt sick with self-recrimination. I'd been focused on all the wrong things. Who cared about mates or this temperature-changing tattoo when something potentially catastrophic was loose on my streets? What kind of Rossey boss let this shit slide under their watch?!
"Fuck!" The word exploded from me as I slammed my fist down next to the computer, the sound echoing through the sterile lab like a gunshot.
"Hey! Hey! Easy!" Calix zoomed around me, his movements a blur as he frantically clicked on the keyboard, caught several things that had fallen off the table from my outburst, and finally began petting the machine like it was a beloved pet. "Don't take it out on Maria! She's just the messenger!"
The fact that he'd named his machine Maria would have been amusing under different circumstances, but I was too wound up to appreciate the humor. I jumped off the seat and began pacing, my body filled with spiky jitters that made me feel like I might explode if I didn't keep moving.
I forced myself to pause, think rationally. Why would someone create something so volatile and dangerous?
