The Vampire's Rival

Dare

"What? Why? Why would you ever want to do this to another vampire?" I demanded to know.

"I was never going to use it on vampires!" she replied, clearly hurt that I could even think that. "I designed it for the creation of more subservient Progenies, to make sure that we would never turn a Rogue. It was one of my earlier theories on how to create the most ideal humans for a Turn. But I scrapped the research almost immediately after I completed it."

There must have been more to this. A reason why she'd felt that it was necessary to tell me any of this. It was clear that she had planned to go to the grave with this.

"You know who did this, don't you?" I asked. "You know who stole your technology. Who was it?"

Kitari walked away from where the Scavenger vampire was, walked to a wall of the lab and slid to the ground against it, hugging her knees to her chest.

"He came to me twenty years ago with the offer of a trade," Kitari started. "If I could make a human that couldn't be turned, he would give me the spawn to the fungi that can kill every human. You know that the Wildlings guard these fungi better than anything ever guarded in Fort Knox, if he could give it to me, I could find a genetic cure to it and secure the vampire future by taking that leverage away from the Wildlings."

There was only one person on this planet who could make that trade.

A Fisher.

"Barret Fisher." I said, sliding down the wall next to her.

Kitari nodded, humming her affirmation.

"It worked, didn't it?" I said, pieces of a puzzle snapping to place in my mind. "You created a human who couldn't be turned."

"I did," Kitari said. "But the experiment changed him in ways that I couldn't have predicted."

"How?"

Kitari sighed. "One of the weirder changes was that it destroyed his iris' ability to absorb colour."

Teroi's words from a lifetime ago played back in my mind.

"What's interesting is that, while brown and green irises get their colour from melanin, blue eyes don't. Blue eyes get their colour in the same way the sky or the ocean does. They don't have that much melanin, so blue irises scatter almost all light, but reflect back wavelengths on the blue spectrum."

"It gave him iridescent blue eyes," I whispered, turning the ring around my left ring finger. Aadya's eyes changed around that time too. In fact, it was during that time that the Fishers became known for their startingly blue eyes.

"The experiment also destroyed a section of his brain," she continued. "Masters and Fledglings form an emotional bond during a turn, but the experiment... well... it destroyed sections of the brain that regulate emotions and help with the mental bond..."

The black hole that swallowed Hadley's emotions. The one I could never figure out.

"...I had to stop the experiments," Kitari said, her voice cracked when she continued. "Because I created a monster. I had to kill him."

I stayed silent.

"But Barret escaped... and stole my research when he did."

From the beginning, the Fishers had been scientists. The best mycologists the world had ever known. And I had no doubt that they had passed their knowledge down through the generations despite living through an apocalypse. I'd never really dabbled in the sciences, but I knew enough to know that fungal networks and neural networks weren't that dissimilar. If Barret Fisher stole this technology, he was smart enough to figure out how to use it.