Читать книгу Hunter - Sydney Robinson - Страница 13

Chapter Six

Angel’s eyes slid open, and she found herself looking at the ceiling of Scott’s basement. She sat up and unlatched the new harness she had made for her waist. About three visits back, she had worked on the chair of the memory pool to make it operational for one person. Angel had found that she got as much out of the pool alone as she did with Scott attempting to build blockers himself, so she used it as a calming technique. Nothing really blocked her emotions; it only dampened them and allowed her to control them and her outward facial expressions.

As she exited the pool, she pulled her hair from her face and grabbed a towel that Scott had hung next to a collapsible changing wall. Angel had requested him to purchase her a swimsuit or something she could wear while in the pool so as not to soak her clothes through or cause any more problems like six months ago. Images of Ashlee’s laughing, smiling face and Kelly’s dead eyes plagued her mind whenever Angel shut her own.

“You’ve been under longer than usual. I was beginning to worry,” Scott commented from where he was sitting on the staircase, waiting for her to change and get ready. On most nights like this, he would work on his books or organize his shop while she meditated. But tonight, business had been slow, and he had instead been helping her out. As a Guardian, or at least having been at one point, Scott had access to files that Angel didn’t, access to information that Angel needed.

“Did you find anything?” she asked as she came around the screen, heading for the stairs where she knew dinner was waiting.

“Only the information you already knew. And of course, I would like to inform you that looking for a random ‘Peter’ in the computers is next to impossible,” Scott stated, following her up to the workshop and then further up to his kitchen. “Though after you eat something, I do have something I would like to tell you.”

The room was sparsely furnished, though what would you expect being a small-town bookstore, with a chain store located one town over? Scott would usually state this every time Angel pointed something like that out to him. It wasn’t that she minded the Spartan living conditions; it’s just it more surprised her than anything else. She would have assumed that as a Guardian, Scott would have been better off.

Angel made her way into the room and sat at the table in the center of it, which was occupying most of the space in the tiny kitchen. Scott, who tonight was wearing a worn gray sweater and dark-wash jeans, set two bowls down on the table. Two spoons followed shortly, and then the man himself sat at the table. He began to eat the stew he had placed in front of her like a person who had not consumed any form of sustenance for several days, raising the bowl from the table and keeping it inches from his face as he more or less tipped the contents into his mouth, using the spoon as a guide for the sparse chucks of meat and vegetables. Angel lifted her spoon from the table and slowly ate hers, not really needing it due to the dinner she had had at the academy but also not meaning to seem rude by not eating. As she did so, she took note of the lack of substance to the stew, with its watered-down broth and the before-mentioned veggies and meats. Angel was once more reminded of the living conditions Scott resided in.

She looked about the room as she ate, using her training to appear as if she were just glancing about, unsure of where to focus when eating. But in reality, she was looking for something in particular. Or, in this case, the lack of something. It was as if she noticed for the first time the lack of food in the apartment. She had seen the large bag of rice on the floor next to the counter countless times but had never noticed that there was almost never anything else present foodwise when she was here. Upon realizing this, Angel set down her spoon.

“Go on, ask.”

Angel jumped when Scott’s voice broke the silence of the room. She looked at the man who was watching her far more intently than she had anticipated. He looked rather odd though, glaring at her around his bowl, making him look like a wide-eyed frogfish and only made worse by his glasses. He set the bowl down with a sigh and looked at her expectantly.

Angel, who was puzzled, stuttered out the question, “What am I supposed to ask you?”

“The question, it’s burning behind your eyes. If you plan to keep this charade going for any length in time, you will need to learn to work on that,” Scott commented as he rose from his seat and placed his bowl and spoon in the sink. He paused and gazed out the window above the sink, but his view was blocked by his own face staring back at him in the darkness behind the glass. He braced himself on the edge of the counter and waited.

“Why, if you were a Hessian, do you have so little money? You were obviously high up the ladder when you were a member. You have a prototype of the memory pool in your basement. Why then are you living this way like a common poor man?”

Scott sighed, looking again at his reflection before turning. “Two very good questions, but they both require very long answers. Finish eating, and we shall retire to the living room.” He glanced at the clock as he spoke, “We don’t have a lot of time before I need to get you back.”

Angel looked at her bowl and contemplated if she was hungry or not. The thought that Scott was going without because she was eating with him on every visit twisted her stomach in so many knots that if she had been hungry, she no longer was.

“I…I’m not very hungry this evening. You have it.” Angel looked at Scott to see barely contained anger flash in his eyes before he pushed off the counter and stalked to the table. He grabbed the bowl and tipped the contents into the sink as he turned on the food processer. The grind filled the room, and Angel looked at Scott, appalled, for a moment before she found her voice.

“Why did you…?”

“You need to contain your emotions!” Scott roared as he rounded on her. “Your tests are almost upon you. Soon you will be assigned a team. They will kill you if you break from doctrine. You do know the seven laws?”

Angel sat in stunned silence as she nodded slowly.

“What is the sixth law?”

“Report any member who has regained the ability to feel beyond the basic emotions.”

“That means you! To uphold the laws, you should and will be reported as soon as you are placed in a team and do anything like what you have done all night. Any emotion like that will betray you. You will be turned in. You will be killed…just like him.”

“Like whom?”

“Let’s go to the other room.” Scott crossed the kitchen in three steps and exited through the doorway right next to Angel, who followed him. She had never been through here, and with the lights off, she had never been able to see what the rest of the upstairs looked like. What lay beyond the empty doorway was a small hallway that had three doors—two were open, and a third was closed. As her eyes adjusted, she could see that one room was a tiny bedroom, big enough for a bed and a bookshelf to be squeezed into the room between the foot of the bed and the wall, though the bottom two shelves were rendered useless. The second open door was the living room, which, now that Scott was in there, had a single lamp illuminating it. This led Angel to believe that the final door, which was closed, led to the bathroom. Though judging by the floor plan of the apartment (and going by the space she knew the downstairs covered), she knew the bathroom was even smaller than the bedroom.

Ignoring both of those things though, Angel crossed to the living room and sat in a surprisingly plush armchair across from Scott. Once she was settled, he began to speak. He began to slowly explain information, checking to see what Angel knew and didn’t know and, for the most part, covering facts that seemed irrelevant to Angel until he came upon the segment of his tale that dealt with the memory pool.

“The memory pool was an attempt to a solution to a problem that we have not always dealt with,” Scott explained. Angel sat forward in her seat, now actually paying attention to what he was saying. “Nor was the sixth law so heavily watched. For the most part up until the early ’70s, we actually ignored that clause. It wasn’t until we noticed a genetic defect arising in the Hessian Recruits from the generation before, caused by the blocker drug, which was causing people to disobey orders. In all honestly, it was driving them crazy.”

“Rouges,” Angel muttered under her breath, looking down at the floor.

“Exactly, though that is a very loose term for them. These individuals were where the classification came from. You see, the original set we called Rouges were not just members who disobeyed orders and put the safety of the organization’s secrets at risk. They were actually insane. You see, we found a mutation in the genetic makeup of every one of these individuals. They had an extra line of DNA. It was almost like an enhancement. The only problem was, when exposed to extreme stimulus, possibly because of the inhibiter drugs, the subject would lose their mind.”

Angel snorted, “And of course, a crazed trained killer running around in the world is not a good idea now, is it?”

“Of course not, so we sought to remove emotions like that so as to stop the triggering mechanism. Originally, the drug was used in higher doses, but that didn’t always work, so I tried to invent the memory pool concept,” Scott answered.

Angel frowned. “Why not just kill everyone who had the gene?” she asked, puzzled.

“If it didn’t present itself in that individual, it could still be dormant, waiting to trigger and cause havoc. No, the Hessian High Council decided it was far better to remove the emotions of those in lower positions than to just kill anyone who had it,” Scott continued.

“Why though, so one generation is thinned out a little? The problem would be solved,” Angel protested.

“Would it though? The Hessians operate on an ideology that a reprogrammed operative is better than a dead one. Not to mention, it made all the Recruits to follow far more docile and more suggestive to the training.”

“Reprogrammed, you talk as if we were computers.”