“Yes.” Milton took a long drink from the whiskey bottle, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I knew it would hurt, seeing it, but I never guessed how much.”
Jeth didn’t say anything. He understood exactly. He had known how the content would make him feel. The way he did now—empty inside except for an angry, pain-pulsed hole where his heart used to be.
And terribly, utterly alone.
Milton set the bottle on the table and then picked up the video remote. “I wish I did know who this Charles was. Marian . . .” Milton paused, a hitch in his voice, as if speaking her name caused him physical pain. “In the next entry, she says that he betrayed her. Told the ITA their location.”
The floor seemed to drop out from Jeth’s feet. “What? What happened?”
Milton shook his head. “I don’t know. Looks like she and your dad knew the ITA were after them and tried to hide. She recorded a lot of this then, but she doesn’t say what’s happening. She doesn’t say much of anything. Half of it’s gibberish. Like she was suffering from some form of dementia.”
“How do you mean?”
In answer, Milton pressed a button on the remote. Marian’s face disappeared from the monitor, replaced by the main screen that listed the contents of the data crystal. Jeth saw the problem at once. His mother had always been extremely organized and logical about everything. She was fond of alphabetizing jars of food and folding towels with such precision they might’ve been on display in a store. But the contents on the crystal were a mess. Random letters and numbers comprised the file names, none of them comprehensible. It was the sort of thing that would’ve driven his mother mad.
“What is all that stuff?” Jeth said.
“Mostly the Belgrave star charts she and your dad mapped out. The rest are video journals and sensor readouts that are still in computer code. Looks like she did a straight data dump from the system to the crystal for most of them without bothering to run a translate analysis.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Who can say, given the state she was in?” Milton made a fist and slammed it on the table. “Why didn’t she come to me instead of this Charles? She might still be alive.”
Jeth gaped. Milton rarely lost his temper. Anger required too much effort. You had to care to get worked up, but Milton only cared about the next drink and living as undisturbed a life as possible.
That’s not true and you know it.
Jeth sighed, conceding the point. He knew the drinking and apathy were just an act, nothing but a self-defense mechanism. Trouble was Milton cared too much. Anybody could see that. Jeth took in his uncle’s appearance, dismayed at the ruination of old age and alcohol abuse on his face. Purpled flesh covered his cheeks and nose. Red hatch marks speckled the whites of his eyes.
“I’m sorry for shouting,” Milton said.
“It’s all right.”
“No, it’s not. Nothing about this is all right.” Milton stood, swaying a bit.
Jeth stepped forward and grabbed his arm to steady him.
Milton jerked away. “I’m fine.”
Sure you are, you stubborn old man.
Jeth moved aside as Milton walked past him. His uncle stopped at one of the supply cabinets and opened a drawer, pulling out another data crystal. Then he came back to the control unit and switched out Jeth’s mother’s crystal with the new one.
“I brought you up here to show you this.” Milton opened one of the files, and an image appeared on the screen, some kind of medical readout comprised of bars with thin blue lines etched sideways across them in a random pattern.
Jeth stared at it, his mind blank. “What is it?”
“DNA test results.”
“Okay?”
“So is this.” Milton pulled up another file that appeared right below the first. This one showed a similar pattern of bars and blue lines, except there were more of them—hundreds more.
“The top one is my DNA,” Milton said. “The bottom is Cora’s.”
Jeth blinked a couple of times, still not understanding. Although he supposed this was one of the reasons why Milton had shut himself up in here the last two days. He wondered how he’d gotten a sample of her blood, but then he remembered the scratch on the back of Cora’s hand.
“Why the difference?” {g}
“No idea,” Milton said, his frustration palpable. “All I can tell you is what it means on a biological level.”
Jeth waited for him to go on, breath held.
“She’s not human.”
Shock drove all thoughts from Jeth’s brain, as he stared at the bottom image, his mouth slackening. In his mind’s eye, he pictured Cora as he’d first seen her—something wild and exotic, and with her eyes too large and dark.
Milton cleared his throat. “I should clarify. She’s not entirely human. Some of this is human DNA, but the rest of it isn’t.”
“Animal?”
“Not any animal I know of.”
“Then what is it?”
“. . . Nothing I’ve ever seen.”
Jeth closed his mouth to keep from asking the next question that occurred to him. It was stupid, impossible. In the entire universe, there was no such thing as aliens. Humans had colonized all the inhabitable worlds and had never found anything else. Not one sign of life in hundreds of surveyed planets.
He pictured Cora again, this time as he’d last seen her, with a sleepy smile on her face as she kissed him good-night. Was there something wrong with her beneath all the normal little girl things? Something dangerous? For the first time in days he remembered that horrible, animalistic scream he’d heard on the Donerail and the way it had gotten inside him, like a predator intent on consuming him from the inside. Sierra and Vince had been just as affected by that sound as he and Shady were. But Cora . . . there’d been no sign of her.
Jeth shuddered, pushing the idea away. Things were complicated enough. “Why did you want me to see this?”
Milton scratched the thick stubble on his chin. “Because if there’s more to Cora than meets the eye, then there might be more to their entire situation. Stuff they’re not telling us.”
Icy fingers seemed to stroke Jeth’s neck. “You think Sierra and Vince know what she is?”
“It’s certainly possible. They did rescue her from an ITA scientist. And it wouldn’t be the first time the ITA experimented on children. An organization so powerful and autonomous has little reason to worry about moral consequences.” Milton shuddered, and Jeth had a feeling that he was speaking from experience. He’d been an ITA doctor for a very long time. Jeth wondered if that wasn’t the reason why his mother had called Charles for help instead of him.
Jeth rubbed his temples, suddenly aware of how late it was. “Why show me this? I mean, what does it matter what Cora is? She seems harmless.”
Does she? Are you sure?
Milton shook his head. “That’s just it. She might not be harmless. She might be a ticking bomb ready to go off at any moment. I’ve seen it happen before with some of the ITA’s test subjects. And,” Milton said, his tone growing more ominous, “if we assume Cora was part of an ITA experiment, how do we know that she isn’t what Sierra and Vince stole, instead of this so-called Aether Project? What if that was just a lie to hide the truth from us?”
“They didn’t steal her. They rescued her from a bad situation.”
Milton raised his hands. “I’m not saying they have bad intentions toward Cora.”
“Clearly not,” Jeth said.
“But they would lie to protect her if they had to. Even to us.”
Jeth considered the idea, trying to look past his personal feelings. He supposed it was possible. And it did seem more likely that Sierra would’ve gotten to know Cora through their roles as scientist and subject rather than as occasional babysitter. But did that mean the Aether Project data cell didn’t exist? He didn’t want to believe it, and yet here was a thread of doubt, a possibility that Sierra and Vince might be lying, might be keeping a dark, frightening secret.