Within These Walls

Life After Dark: 12 (WTW Sequel)

Mrs. Hansel delivers tea and snacks to us. Her husband leans back in his chair, his pot belly sticking in the air as he cleans his glasses with the edge of his untucked shirt. He grunts a thank you as she scuttles away, and I eye the offering suspiciously. 

If the last forty-eight hours have reinforced anything, it is to not trust anyone. Especially someone so deeply involved in the project that led to our creation. Sweet tooth or not, I decide to pass on the butter cookies.

"Start talking," Marcus says briskly, his hands on the arms of his chair like he's ready to bolt. Or more likely, ready to attack.

The doctor pours himself a cup of steaming tea and blows on it. He eyes us suspiciously over the rim. "How is it that you two wound up on the outside?"

"Sam helped us," I say impatiently, hoping he's not going to start clamming up now. I lean forward. "Why did you say Hermes is the reason we're this way?"

"Sam Parker helped you escape? No wonder he's dead. You don't cross Gardiner and expect only a slap on the wrist."

"Answer the goddamned question," Marcus commands.

His eyes narrow. "You're not in any position to give orders, young man. But nonetheless, I will tell you the answer. Hermes was first captured twenty-odd years by Gardiner's affiliates. They knew immediately he wasn't human. Hard to tell from a distance, but once you get up close, you'd have to be blind to confuse him for one of us.

"He was tall and thin to the point of being bony, but he wasn't frail. Far from it, in fact. His hair was more silver than white, and his skin . . . you'd think he'd never spent a single moment under the sun. But it was his eyes that were unmistakably inhuman. Silver like his hair, but luminescent. Timeless as the universe." A slight shudder passed through his body. "One look from him had the power to make you feel as small and insignificant as a grain of sand at the bottom of the ocean."

"So . . . he's an alien," Marcus says skeptically.

"We never did figure out what he is, as far as I remember," Hansel muses. "We only knew there were others like him. They tried to rescue him at the beginning, but they gave up eventually. It took almost a decade of . . . research"—he says the word bitterly—"to create children like you using him. Hence the reason I left the organization. I could not, in good conscience, partake in a project that inflicted suffering on another being, human or not."

I look at Marcus, noting his alarmed expression. "You're . . . you're saying that Gardiner used Hermes to create us?"

"Yes." He says it like a question, like he can't understand why this is news to us.

Marcus jumps to his feet and walks over to a messy bookcase, his palm massaging the back of his neck. I'm frozen in shock. "We didn't know," I explain. "Sam told me the Shroud did this to us, and I'm guessing Jonathan Blaine said the same thing to Marcus."

"They lied to us," he growls. "About every single goddamned thing."

This changes everything. Human beings aren't the good guys, not by a long shot. They captured a being, tortured him, and used him to make gifted kids, and for what? To create their own superhuman army? And now people are dying and the world is in danger, and it's all thanks to a greedy corporation like Gardiner.

"I can't believe Sam was involved," I say, nauseous. Sure, he was an awful human being at times, but believing that he had the best of intentions was the only thing I could salvage from our relationship, and now I might not even have that.

Hansel must hear the betrayal in my voice, because he quickly says, "Don't lose faith in him. He did everything because he believed it was right. I mean, imagine this: we discover that there are beings that are capable of blowing up an entire building with their minds alone. It's a frightening notion. We didn't have the technology to take on such an adversary, so we created our own. It was survival instinct."