Hidden Truths
The winding road off Highway 431 seems to stretch on forever, dense trees and deepening twilight obscuring any view of our destination. My eyelids droop with exhaustion after two days off the grid. I wouldn’t have felt energetic at twenty-two, let alone at forty-five, and my companion is proof of that. Nike’s steady breathing fills the cramped car as she sleeps in the passenger seat. I envy her ability to rest amidst the chaos, but then, she’s not destined to die tomorrow.
“Nike? You need to wake up. I’ve gone as far as I can on my own.”
I never drive this late at night. Nightfall is close—a few stars already peek through the trees—and the glare of headlights is getting worse, to where I soon won’t be able to drive at all. I don’t mind magical halos of light, but the physical kind in my eyesight makes it downright dangerous to stay between the lines on the highway, and impossible on the back roads where painted boundaries weren’t economical. Nike knows this, but I’ve let her sleep as long as I dare.
“Nike?” I try again. “We’re getting close to your dad’s lab.”
Not that it’s shown on any map. I vaguely recall its whereabouts after The Shift, but by then, it had been abandoned, and Dr. Jung had fled with Aoife and the other top one percent of the top one percent of the top one percent of wealthy movers and shakers who had secretly funded a Mars colony for the first few decades of the twenty-first century. Nike had gone mad by then, and there’s no advantage to taking a mad woman to another planet where survivable space is at a premium.
Yawning, Nike forces her seat into an upright position and shakes herself awake. “Not close enough. Up here—” she yawns again— “on the left. We need to park the car and walk the rest of the way. We’ll leave anything in the car that might identify us. Just in case.”
“You don’t have a badge or something? When you said we’d break in to get the skin sample, you didn’t mean really, like, break a window, did you?”
I refrain from grumbling out loud. Two days together and we’ve talked about everything under the sun except for exactly how we’ll get in. I’m so used to remembering where the problems used to be in the future that I’m blind now without my memories. I’m used to staying ahead of the problems I recall and coasting along when nothing stands out in my memory.
Nike waves me off. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got it covered. I’ve done this before. The biggest problem will be avoiding the cameras.”
“Cameras?” I squeak.
Pointing, she flings one arm across my face before realizing she’s blocking my view. “There! In those woods. Leave the keys in the car. You know, just in case.”
Moments later, I step out of the car, my legs wobbling from anxious exhaustion and fear over careening off the road amid the onslaught of oncoming headlights. The facility looms somewhere ahead, hidden near Monte Sano outside of Huntsville. These are more hills than mountains, but despite that, my ears pop as badly as they did in Vail two weeks ago.
I remember Huntsville from another timeline, full of hidden bunkers untouched by the tsunamis and storms of the pole shift that wiped out everything south and east of here. In the future that I remember, I used to meet in a stronghold nearby with the scientists who survived to plot ways for the human race to recover.
It’s considerably cooler here than in central Florida, but I’m sweating from a severe case of nerves. The night air clings to my skin as we trudge down a narrow road through cow pastures and cotton fields for at least three miles.
It doesn’t take long for our eyes to adjust to the dim light reflected from the night sky, but my feet soon ache, blisters rubbing against the insides of my bejeweled hippie boots with each step. Otherwise, I’m clad in a black velvet skirt, a black beanie to hide my hair, and a whimsical black lace top that doesn’t catch light but does catch thorny bushes that grow on the fence rows.
Beside me, Nike is far sleeker in what looks like black yoga pants, her blonde hair covered by a thin, matching hoodie that Drusilla gave her. Nike and I have dealt only in cash, something common enough for the rural South, especially in places that accept only certain types of credit cards and still take checks if they knew your grandpa. We’ve slept in a beat-up car Drusilla procured for us on short notice and left our phones behind at the library—mine with a librarian named Charlie and Nike’s with Raven.
We already know our phones are being tracked—by Aoife and who knows who else—so our phones will move quietly around the Florida campus and suggest our whereabouts while we are hundreds of miles away. In their place, we carry burner phones, also courtesy of Drusilla, that feel cold and unfamiliar in our hands.
It’s taken two days of winding discreetly through rural Florida, Georgia, and Alabama to reach this point, and I can’t help but feel the weight of Raven’s absence. He stayed behind to deal with Jakin Crutchfield on priesthood business—a necessary task, but one that leaves us vulnerable.
“Almost there,” Nike says, her voice cracking from disuse and fatigue, as we step out onto a more trafficked road. “Just around this—” we stop in our tracks — “corner.”
The building is smaller than I expected, but in the future I remember, I saw it only after it was scattered rubble from a random tornado. The lab sits off from the narrow road by maybe a hundred feet. Half-hidden by bushes. Empty parking lot with security lights on tall poles at each corner of the building. One is blue, a sure sign it’s going bad and should be replaced immediately, but it casts a bluish tint over an otherwise bland beige building that looks as boring as most other structures in the area. The secret genetics lab is so common-looking that it’s hiding in plain sight.
I reach out with my senses. No one’s home, and yet…and yet something is there. Like a familiar energy.
“Nike, you’re sure your father—”
“I told you: he’s in Slovenia on Aoife’s orders.”
I don’t even want to know. Cloning Terre would seem like the top priority for her, but something else in another genetics lab around the world comes before this. Project Angelseed, maybe? I don’t sense Aoife’s energy here recently. Maybe a few months ago, but nothing fresh.
Nike makes a weird sound in the back of her throat, like a grunt of disgust, and scowls at the building. “Those cameras.” She nods at the three visible security cameras. No telling how many more are aimed at intruders.
“No problem.” I raise my palms, facing outward, in front of me. Through my crown chakra, I pull down energy from above, all the way down from the wayward stars. I bring the bright, golden light down through my seventh chakra, my sixth, my fifth, down to my shoulders, and all the way to my hands. I push the energy outward, toward the cameras. The golden light leaves my body in a burst of heat. My forehead prickles with perspiration.
I glance over at Nike as she twists her mouth into an impressed smile. “That should do it,” I tell her. “I just fried their signal. Now it’s your turn to get us into that building.”
“Well, all righty then! You’ll have to teach me that trick.”
I shrug and follow her toward the building. “Deal. If I survive the week, I’ll be happy to teach you.”
We pause at the front door, which seems intent on being anonymous, except for a small red sign with black lettering:
JUNG GENETIC RESEARCH FACILITY
HUNTSVILLE ALABAMA DIVISION
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
I snicker to myself. Like many of the military-related buildings in Huntsville, the sign is honest, yet the work inside is secret. If I remember accurately, most of the locals who don’t work here believe the lab to be one of those places where people mail in a plastic tube of spit to find out where their ancestors lived a few generations ago.
Beside the door, under the same black metal awning, is a large box attached to the wall. Nike turns the crank on the side and opens the box to reveal a phone connected by a heavy coil, a list of phone numbers and extensions inside a plastic sheet, and instructions in small print. She presses a button near the top of the box and a cotton swab drops into her open palm. Taking a deep breath, Nike twirls the swab inside her cheek, then drops it into a large opening in the bottom of the box. A blue flash lights up her face as the swab is sucked down the opening. Seconds later, the door to the facility buzzes and clicks open.
“What the hell was that?” I whisper.
“I inherited over fifty percent of my father’s DNA. I’m literally the only person other than him who can get into his labs, but since he thinks I have no interest in his work, he hasn’t considered how many other ways I can be a disappointment to him.”
“Wow.” The word rushes out on my breath as I follow her inside. “I had no idea biometric scanners were this advanced or fast.”
“Hmm, not commercially, no. But you have to remember what my dad’s expertise is. It’s a prototype, like everything else he’s created. Now, come on. He won’t be back for days, and his staff isn’t allowed in after hours unless he’s here, but we should still hurry.”
I squint down the long hallway with one-third of its lights showing the way while the others conserve energy after hours. The air smells of disinfectants, almost like a hospital. Rooms with large windows line the hallway. Some chambers have lights on, and I can see arrays of test tubes and beakers and small cages of what I presume are mice.
At least, I hope that’s mice and not baby versions of the chimeras in Tessa’s books.
“Um, Nike? There’s a lot going on in here. How do we find the skin sample?”
“Easy. Raven told me you took dirt from Terre’s grave.”
I start to protest, but she’s right. Terre’s residual energy was on his body when the skin sample was stolen, so the sample would emit the same energy. When his body was buried, his energy seeped into the earth around the shell that had housed his essence. That same energy that I’d used in my divination with Raven—and that I’d taken a larger sample of for future workings—was identical to the energy of the skin sample.
And I’m already aware of the same familiar energy in this lab, almost as strong as any living presence. I can feel it, a subtle vibration, this residual energy from Terre’s skin, whispering of his once-vibrant life and all the power of the most revered High Priest in the last century.
“This way.” I step around Nike and head to the end of the building, to the largest room. This must be Dr. Jung’s primary working space.
“I knew you’d be good at this.” Nike chortles behind me as we hurry into the main chamber.
With my heartbeat thundering in my ears, I scan the rows of equipment. A centrifuge. Bunsen burners. Microscopes. A small lab heater. A hot plate for warming solutions. Small refrigerators with printed labels taped to the doors:
SPECIMENS ONLY—NOT FOR FOOD!
Then I notice the small upright freezer integrated into the lab bench and a work area full of enough tools to make any science nerd delirious with envy. My hands sting as though I’ve encountered fire ants. I flap my hands to release the sting of energy.
Nike and I stare at one another. “Found it,” we mouth in unison.
“Now for the hard part,” she adds.
“Hard part?”
She unlatches and pulls the freezer door open with a soft hiss. Inside is a control panel with a red digital display on the left side that warns of a rising temperature. On the right are three numbered drawers. Nike tugs them open one at a time. The first two are empty, but a tray of dividers with at least a dozen vials with colored lids fills the third drawer. Her fingers almost skim the deep-freeze surface before she thinks better of it and grabs a pair of forceps from the ultraviolet cabinet. As the freezer begins to beep, she carefully removes the tray and sets it on the worktable. Shutting the freezer door together, we both peer at the contents through the glass—tiny pieces of flesh, each with a line or two of the Walking Lightning bind rune tattoo.
The specimens meant to clone Terre. To turn a High Priest into a puppet.
My heart clenches. “Do you think any of the specimens have been used yet?”
“No idea. My dad has some strange ethics. He would be okay with taking skin from a corpse, but he wouldn’t clone Terre without being present to oversee the process himself. Unless he took some specimens with him to the lab in Slovenia.”
My heart sinks at the thought. “There’s no way really to know. Not yet.”
Not, I think, until after we take action of some kind. I’m so used to remembering the future, but now the future is fluid, uncertain. Until we destroy what’s left of the sample, it’s useless to divine the future for evidence of a clone of Terre. If we destroy the specimens, and I look into the future a few years from now and see his clone, I’ll know only then if we’ve been unsuccessful tonight. And that’s assuming my sight isn’t blocked by Aoife or some other force.
This must be what life is like for everyone else, never knowing what’s coming next and never being fully prepared.
“Nike?” I catch my bottom lip between my teeth. “Regardless of whether a sample has already been used and these are just backups, we still need to destroy everything here that was part of Terre.”
One vial makes a cracking sound, and we both jump backward.
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