Deep down, he knew there was only one possible explanation for the fact that Simon was identical to him in every way, and yet he was still wrestling with it. Despite the doubts that had already begun to circle his mind and torment him, he was having trouble coming to grips with the horrific truth hovering in the back of his mind that nothing he’d believed he knew about himself was real.
He had to suppose he hadn’t completely accepted the suspicions. He’d wondered if it was merely a reluctance to accept, or an inability to accept his ‘past’ that had given rise to the suspicions to start with.
It was possible that was part of it, he supposed. Mostly it was the company’s strange determination to keep him from returning to the place where he’d lost his family. He hadn’t realized theywereinterfering at first. Twice, he’d actually managed to get to the spaceport before he’d run into a problem that prevented him from leaving Earth for Taurus V—the colony where he’d supposedly grown up and where his family had been interred after they’d been slaughtered by the Cyborgs.
He hadn’t been able to access any records on any computer system—nothing about his family—nothing abouthimbefore he’d become a hunter.
He’d managed to elude them when it had finally dawned on him that it wasn’t mere chance, that he was beingpreventedfrom returning to his home colony, from visiting the site where his family had been slaughtered, wherehehad been left for dead.
He thought he’d braced himself for what he was going to find. He supposed, somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d thought the company was hiding something even worse than he remembered, that they’d prevented him from going back because they weren’t certain he could handle it emotionally—not a personal concern because they gave a fuck about him as man, but concern for their investment. He was well aware that nothing could be more dangerous than a Hunter completely out of control unless it was a Cyborg gone berserk.
He discovered he wasn’t prepared—at all—for what he’d found, though. There had been a tragic accident, alright, when one of the reactors had blown up. It had wiped out nearly half the colony. Cyborgs had had nothing to do with it, though. The colony hadn’t been attacked at all. The equipment had been damaged in a meteor shower.
It got worse. His family hadn’t existed—not his parents and not his woman, not his infant son or his three year old daughter. He’d found one family that seemed to match—the age and description of the woman and her two children—but the woman’s man had been interred with her.
It had taken a while for that to sink in. For a while, he’d wondered if his grief had cost him his sanity. How could he grieve for the loss of his family andforgetwhere he’d come from, though? If he was right and this was his colony, how was it possible that neither his woman nor his children had ever existed at all—not ashis? How could he feel such a devastating sense of loss for something that had never happened anywhere but in his mind?
And if all of that was true and they were nothing but a figment of an insane mind, who the fuck was he? Where had he come from? Had he already been mad before he’d woken in the company med center? Had the company made a mistake and patched his broken mind with the wrong man’s memories? Or had they, for some reason that defied logic or explanation, given him memories they knew weren’t his? Did that explain why they’d worked so hard to keep him from discovering it?
But why torment him with such a terrible past that he’d felt at times that he couldn’t live and bear it?
How could his parents not have existed?
How could Simon exist—a Cyborg, an identical twin?
He thought, if he hadn’t already been questioning what the company had done to him, the shock of coming face to face with Simon might’ve completely unhinged his mind. As it was, it had still been a hell of a fucking jolt, but he’d stopped doubting his own sanity by then and begun trying to formulate some way to take a closer look at the company.
Simon hadn’t been just one more clue, though. Simon had been the jackpot.
Simon had knownwhoat the company was responsible—the woman he thought of as Mother LaMotte, Dr. Carol LaMotte.
Almost as if his thoughts had conjured him, Simon strolled into the great room at that moment, still dripping water from his shower. Seth turned and surveyed him with more than a little irritation.
Both Simon and Cole seemed enthralled with the doctor’s decadent shower, he thought wryly, wondering if it was because both Cyborgs were so fascinated with the changes they sensed in themselves and enjoyed the way the water felt pelting them.
They’d assured him that they were evolving, just as the rumors had said about the other rogues, that they had awareness, felt things they’d never experienced before.
He wasn’t sure he believed that either.
He didn’t know what the fuck to believe anymore.
“There is still hot water,” Simon said after studying Seth’s expression for several moments as if trying to interpret his thoughts or, more likely, the emotions.
Seth shook his head, moving from the window. “I don’t need a shower,” he said irritably.
“The hot water soothes tension.”
Seth tamped the urge to ask him what the hell he’d know about tension. He was a fucking machine. “Why the fuck not?” he muttered. “At least it’s something to do to pass the time.”
“Cole is not likely to return before dawn,” Simon pointed out coolly as Seth stalked past him. “… If he returns at all.”
“It doesn’t look like the doctor is likely to return either.”
The showerwassoothing, as much as he hated to admit it. He wondered if that was why the doctor had decided to take the place—because it had the old fashioned water shower rather than the particle showers required by law now. For that matter, he was surprised she’d wrangled permission to keep it.
Unless, of course, nobody knew she had it.
It was possible. She had enough clout, or she was smart enough, she’d managed to virtually erase her trail.
