The smaller chair was missing.
He found it standing by the closed door of his keepsake closet.
The one he’d made with earth materials after cycle 17.
The wood did not seal like Drakkon metal. The door was closed, but he could smell her. Smell her and the variants behind the door.
Were they trying to hide her? In the very room he only visited to deposit her things?
His crown of spikes trembled with fury as he wrenched open the door.
“No, no, Orpheus. Stop right there. Drop the knife, and don’t come any closer. That’s an order.”
His knife clattered to the stone floor as he instantly froze just inside the doorway. Upsilon and Omicron stood frozen in similar positions. And he put together what had really happened too late.
By the fire star…
He mentally seethed at Omicron, the variant who had aided her in figuring out that she could circumvent Fenrir Prime’s knife by ordering him not to kill her under Reverence.
The rules of Reverence were always something she managed to deduce. Every single cycle. But this was the fastest she’d ever done it.
None of them could move. And while in Reverence, Upsilon, the only variant capable of godspeaking her, could not do so.
“What is this?” she demanded, waving a hand around what she’d labeled the Library of Me in the last cycle.
“It is the room where your things are kept,” he answered. Which was not a lie. But it was not the truth she was asking for.
“Dorie—” Omicron began to say from his frozen position.
“Don’t talk,” she said, and the word carried the weight of Reverence behind it. “You had all the chances in the world to tell me what was going on, and all you did was keep things from me while letting your friend here godspeak me into exercise and gaslight me about my temper getting the better of me.”
“Your temper is getting the better of you,” Diarmuid insisted. “This abuse of power is precisely why we attempted to teach you to curb it.”
Dorie glared at him. “You thinkI’mabusingmypower. Peach-hole, stop talking.”
His mouth, too, was sealed as firmly as if it had been bonded shut with the birch-bark tar Omicron used to make her journals. The ones she’d obviously found.
She walked up to Fenrir Prime, her steps steady even though her hands trembled at her sides. Her wolf eyes glowed with her newfound power. “So you’re the one in charge?”
“I am the one who should have ended you that first night,” he hissed back. “I am the one who will correct that mistake, as soon as I’m free from your thrall.”
“Okay, so you’re a total villain. That tracks.” Dorie nodded, as if he’d confirmed her suspicions. “Why don’t you fill me in on more about yourself? I’m noticing you’re totally sunglasses emoji with the I/me pronouns. Tell me about that. Are you not a variant?”
Fenrir Prime narrowed his eyes. This Dorie was different. More irreverent.
But he repeated the explanation he’d already given her so many times. “Omicron and Upsilon?—”
“Who?”
“The drakkon you call Aengus and Diarmuid. They are variants of me, and I am a complete copy of Fenrir, the Royal Geneticist.”
“The Royal Geneticist? The guy who supposedly created my race?”
“It is not a supposed. He is the creator of all hybrids. We refer to him as Fenrir Zero.”
“Okay, so you’re a clone of Fenrir Zero. And Aengus and Diarmuid are copies of you.”
“No, Dorie.” He once again disabused her of the notions she had about cloning. “If you clone yourself, you can only be yourself. If you wish for your clones to serve different functions—security, assistance, protection against saboteurs—you must manipulate the original data so they will do the task you require of them.”
