Sleeping Dogs Lie

Chapter Thirty-Nine

It has been three days.

Three days since Aaron died.

Three days since I watched guards loyal to us – to him – shoot him down on that magical hallway beneath Sector 61.

I have been here, wrapped up in his bed in Elysion's Kernel ever since. Wrapped around the black t-shirt that still bears mine and Tori's bloodstains and still smells faintly of him.

He did not even sleep in this bed long enough for it to retain his scent. And now, even that is leaving. Soon, it will smell more like me than him, and when it does, this will simply become my room.

And somehow, I suppose, I must remember to live again.

Gemma came early on the first day with Freya. They brought me amber colored broth and sweet, fragrant tea, and we sat for a while and watched Star Trek together. But I couldn't eat what they brought. And Star Trek only makes me sadder.

Because it was his first. And it reminds me of him.

Every time someone comes in here, they leave me something disturbing.

Like, Gemma left me Freya's Little House DVDs. But it turns out they're not just DVDs of a TV show, right?

She and Freya stood next to me while she loaded them into Aaron's gaming console and then showed me this secret code that's supposedly Freya's birthday. It's all so confusing!

First of all, because Freya's not seven like I've been thinking all this time. She's almost ten. Holy hell! That kid's gonna hit puberty sooner than I thought, and I'm not even going to know what to do with her! And Gemma's known.

But that's not the half of it. As soon as Gemma put those numbers in, all this crazy stuff popped up on those disks. And it was some video of Sander sitting down at a desk in some house we camped out in a couple of years ago. And then Gemma just left me.

Alone with Sander and this weird series of videos.

I couldn't watch the whole thing. My brain just sort of shut down for whole snatches of it. I've been doing that a lot since I came back over here. It's been like living in a dream, and I haven't even been on Snap since Randy gave it to me that once right after Aaron died.

The gist of Sander's evil videos was about my parents and that Ouranos place.

I really am some kind of freak of nature.

My name is Alecto Io Idris, and for the whole first twelve years of my life, I was administered special injections directly into my cerebrospinal fluid. They did it in between my second and third thoracic vertebrae, I felt it. There's a tiny circular scar worn smooth where my mother slid a huge needle into my spinal column every year of my life until I turned twelve. Ouranos intended for their Next Generation Soldiers, which is apparently what she was, and what I'm supposed to be, too, to then receive these injections every three years until they turned twenty-one. The problem was that my mother died before I could get the next injection at fifteen, and Sander felt morally objected to the whole thing, so he didn't do it.

But here's the kicker. My mom and dad? They gave those injections to Sander. Sander! What the hell is Sander?

What the hell am I?

So now my last three injections are left in some secret compartment deep within the CAT's engine block, down near the entrance of Sector 1 in the Hex. Red fluid filled with microscopic moving nanobots genetically encoded to lock themselves within the strands of my own DNA. I don't even know how much I want to have to do with that. I think that's one of the parts of those videos when my body shut down and I blacked out for a few hours.