I wondered if Conrad had any family or friends. Was he a different person when he was off the clock? I would never know now.
We had draped a white tablecloth over his body. It didn’t feel like enough. Even though we’d had our conflicts, I respected Conrad’s drive, his fervor for justice. It wasn’t fair that he had taken it upon himself to end the hostage situation by sacrificing his life. But we had to move on quickly, same with all the other deaths.
There was a part of me that wanted to absorb all of them, to take them with me because as it stood, it felt like a little piece of my soul was broken off and left beside every corpse I walked past.
Jason finally relaxed as the last of the arachnid-like parasite melted off of him and into me. He groaned and massaged his shoulders.
“Back to being a regular human,” he said with a frown.
“You had a Shape, didn’t you? Back at Cathrow. You controlled spiders.”
“It stopped working when I was forcibly matured by that Witch. I can still feel the presence of spiders sometimes, but the control is weak. Something in my brain got messed up I guess.”
Kay offered him a drink of water from a cup we’d found in the kitchen.
“Thanks.”
“Things went about as badly as possible, huh,” Kay said quietly. She’d been silent up until this point. Her butterflies constantly roamed the kitchen, touching every surface in a rotation like it was a ritual. It felt as though some of her nervous mannerisms had been taken on by her insects instead, so she could remain still.
I pushed at the skin on the back of my hand with a thumb. “Jason, I don’t know if you know this but I killed your mom, Beth.”
Jason took that in, his expression blank as he stared at Conrad’s body.
“I could blame the Beacon back at Cathrow, I could blame my inexperience with my powers, but it doesn’t sit right. I did it. Full stop.”
Jason closed his eyes and exhaled. “After I joined H.E.S.P., I read the reports and put the pieces together. Aaron had moved her body, but the antlers were found all over the front porch and her wounds lined up. That was enough for me. I didn’t want to confront you and dig up the past.”
He examined the lines on his palm as if they were foreign to him. “It’s hard for me to think about all that lost time. Just when I thought things were going to get better, that I was going to get a normal childhood, with real parents, I was robbed of it.”
I felt sick as I asked, “What about your sisters?”
“Gail’s alright. She took it better than I did, growing up so quickly. Now she’s trying to catch up on education, with hopes of getting into acting school. I can’t move on like that. Especially not before I find Julie.”
I recalled the little baby who had constantly stared at my heart. Beth had used her own child to track me. Julie was the youngest Shaper I’d ever seen, even though at the time I had known nothing about Shaping.
“She’s still missing?”
“Yeah. She’s the reason I requested to join H.E.S.P. I gotta use all the resources I can to find her. Not sure if any of H.E.S.P. is still going to exist after this though.” Jason raised his head. “Don’t get me wrong, I volunteered for this mission. Helping that kid out of the manor felt good. Feels like I’m giving others the chance I never got. So let’s see this mission through, yeah?”
I nodded.
Turning my thoughts inward, I checked on Nell. She was in the middle of doing something. I couldn’t tell exactly what she was up to, but I could feel her power rippling out over the manor and the surrounding area. And she was nearly inside. I would feel 100% more secure in our position once she was by my side again.
My eyes had been wandering the kitchen as I contemplated. With a start, I saw that there was a shadow poking out from under the kitchen door. My skin went cold as the head of the silhouette started to bend towards the ground. I looked away quickly, heart pounding.
A little more time, I promised to the curse. Give me a little more time and I’ll find a new heart for you to infest. I have just the candidate.
I sprung to my feet, eager to start moving.
“Kay, how are you holding up?”
She shrugged. “Oh y’know. Probably seen enough traumatic things to last a lifetime.”
I eyed her. “I can never get a read on you. You don’t seem scared at all.”
“Mm. Just a front. I’m good at locking it all down.”
“I can relate to that,” I said softly.
“My parents taught me to suppress my emotions, even if that wasn’t their intent. They graded me at home, you know. Grades for everything, from my speech to how clean my room was. It was such a fucking nightmare. They said it was for my own good, that I would mature into a person who could handle anything. But it was artificial. It sucked. They would grade my emotional outbursts and they wondered why I stopped being happy too. It took a long time to undo that.”
“Well,” I said as I looked between Jason and Kay, “Here’s to not being defined by the things our parents did in the past?”
They both stood and nodded, resolute.
“Alright then, follow me.”
Conrad’s parasite had known the layout of the manor. It had slowly ramped up its actions as we got closer to the manor’s heart, striking silently whenever it was confident no one was looking. Now I used its memories to find the deepest part of the manor.
I led us past a grandfather clock into a tight corridor that couldn’t be seen unless you were right next to it, seemingly intended for servers to move through without disturbing guests. The service area led to a stairwell down to a lower level.
The bloodstain traps were more numerous here, causing us to have to take it slow through the most treacherous areas.
The posh interior gave tells here and there that it had been repurposed from being a home. A room with nothing but a camera tripod in one corner and a heavy door that didn’t match the décor. A hallway where the carpets had been replaced by floors that were sloped to channel fluids into grates. A panel had fallen off the wall, revealing a machine that was fed with plastic tubes, residues of unknown substances within. Kay discovered that many of the wood panels on the walls could be rotated to reveal black computer screens with no apparent way to turn them on.
The stolen memories stayed true and we entered a vast library recessed into the earth, with bookshelves lining a wide staircase that led further down. The flat top of each bookshelf became the floor to walk upon to access the books of the shelves above, so one could walk precariously without any guardrails to access whatever forbidden knowledge was kept here.
The centerpiece of the room was a satellite hanging from the ceiling, suspended by a chain. It creaked slightly as it turned and something about the old machinery was unnerving. The scuffs and stains of space travel were clear to see on its bronze and white metallic surfaces, as if it hadn’t been cleaned since it had returned to Earth.
Some of the books had been disturbed from the shelves and lay strewn along the steps. I stepped past one large handbound tome whose title was written in Hebrew. Another was a textbook on the history of religious symbolism related to the moon. One lay open across its spine, presenting what seemed to be a scientific discussion of convergent evolution.
The stairs descended several stories in height and the lights were dimmer the further down we went. At the bottom was a large double door with a keycard reader next to it.
We reached the bottom of the steps and Kay turned to us.
“Do you think-”
She was cut short as a massive steel barrier slammed down into place, blocking our access to the door. A red emergency light flared on, complicating the deep shadows around us. Hallucinations scrabbled at the edges of my vision, unbearably close and yet not there.
A voice came from a speaker in the wall.
“Do you understand what this is, Nick?”
I recognized her voice. The one I would plant this curse into.
“You’re afraid,” I said. “You want to keep us out.”
“It’s a safety precaution,” she responded dryly. “To keep the weapon contained. You don’t realize that by attacking this place, you endanger all of humanity. I don’t make that claim lightly. The weapon has that power.”
“Sounds like exactly the kind of thing I wouldn’t want a mad scientist to have possession of,” Jason said coldly. He recognized her too.
The Witch sounded affronted at that. “The weapon is a last resort, the equivalent of a nuke should all other strategies fail. But you still don’t really know the specifics of what we discuss, do you?”
“The thing in the sky,” I surmised. “What you’ve been attempting to communicate with using the Beacons.”
“Yes. We call them Lacunae. That’s plural, mind you. Each Lacuna is monumentally significant on its own and together they tell a story.”
“What are they?” Kay asked. “Spell it out in layman’s terms.”
“Seeds. Eggs. Cells.”
“You’re stalling,” I said loudly. “Scared to face us. All your superiority about knowing the truth, yet you cower.”
“You aren’t getting it,” she said in a bemused tone. “Let me start with what’s hanging above your heads. Thirty years ago, my predecessor launched a satellite into space, intent on discovering the composition of a passing comet. It failed to land on the comet and we began to receive readings that were bizarre and nonsensical. We could not determine where the satellite had gone. We couldn’t decipher what the satellite was even detecting.”
“Two years later, we received reports that the satellite had been found, crash-landed in Africa. It was retrieved and confirmed to be the exact model we had launched. But here was the rub: We were still receiving readings, and not from the satellite on earth. So we cracked it open and to our amazement, the satellite was alive.”
I nervously glanced up at the hanging machine.
“It had been made to emulate our original design with such precision that all its equipment was still functional, even if the means by which it achieved the same readings were dramatically different.”
“From this, we gathered three extremely important data points. One: There was something as intelligent as us out there in space. Two: That being was able to create and manipulate life to an extent that could be considered deific. Three: They wanted to communicate with us for some unknown reason.”
Jason began to pace, looking for any weakness in the barrier.
“As the scientists and scholars we were, we re-examined everything that had come before. Literature that described the moon or other planetary bodies whose descriptions seemed odd suddenly made more sense. We constructed our first Beacon based on the biological structure of the communication array found in the living satellite and found that some people could actually see the Lacunae, as these historical figures had. Researching these people led to the discovery of Shapers, those who could influence life in ways that seemed supernatural at first. A whole new field of study that touched everything in the history of human existence.”
She spoke with awe and excitement, “And we found that with every successful attempt at a Beacon, one of the Lacunae resonated and moved closer to Earth. We pondered and pondered on what that Lacuna could want from us, the one that was resonating so strongly through our Beacons and even seizing control of our own failed attempts to produce Shapers from regular humans…”
I felt a chill settle over me. “Seizing control? You mean… that Lacuna is what’s controlling the Aberrants?”