Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 107720 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107720 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Flames incinerated what was left of my heart. “Thanks to that collar, Marcus had the perfect technology to shackle me for the rest of my life.”
His cheeks tinged with shame. “I didn’t know. I told him to use the lowest dose of frequency to keep you alive, that’s all.”
“Instead, they tortured him with it for twenty years,” Rook said ever so quietly. “And that frequency might’ve kept us alive, Frank, but it made both of us sick and miserable.” Her fingers strayed to her empty throat where her raindrop pendant used to live.
Frank sagged against the bench. “I’m so sorry...to both of you. I’ll carry every sin I ever committed for the rest of my life and—” His eyes locked on Rook’s, his voice breaking with confessions as if he couldn’t keep choking on them. “The day your parents decided to bring you into the world was the day I lost all trust in them. I knew they chose to give you life—not because they wanted a child—but because, ever since you fell into Lucien’s crib, the Requiem power stayed stable.
“Out of all the tests, you were the only one who lasted. And when you were born...” He shook his head, dropping his eyes to the floor. “I saw how far they were willing to go—how many lives they willingly sacrificed to extend their own. I thought what we were doing would benefit all of humanity but that was the day I realised I was on the wrong side of history.”
Turning to face the bench, he poked the two oily droplets of blood with a needle. “Your parents were visionaries, Rook; there’s no arguing that. The advancements they made in science. The creations they came up with—they’ve improved the lives of countless people. However...”
His hands shook as he pushed the droplets closer and closer together. “Their search for immortality slowly twisted them into something unrecognisable. They no longer saw life but merely experiments. They didn’t care how many were sacrificed...only that they got results. All those animals they killed in the name of forever. The babies that died in agony. The children that never got to go home—”
He cleared his throat. “Each time another death occurred—each time we were responsible for another body dissolving—another piece of me broke. I’d go home to my own children and picture the ones that had died thanks to the Requiem trials. I couldn’t sleep from their screams. Couldn’t eat from the knowledge that there would be more. There would always be more because your parents wouldn’t stop. And...I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Shaking his head, he turned to meet our eyes, his face white. “Cleaning up the mess that used to be a living, breathing child will haunt me for the rest of my days. So...I fudged the data and hid the remains of the kids who died during their ascensions. I did it to save yet more being brought into the program. To buy myself some time to figure out a way to destroy the Requiem formula and shut everything down. I never expected your parents to treat a few measly columns of success as a sign that we’d succeeded. They didn’t even ask me. I was away with my family—trying to figure out how to live with so many deaths on my hands—when they called me drunk. They were in the lab, celebrating the pinnacle of their life’s work. I told them to sleep it off, but they just laughed and showed me two empty syringes.”
“What?” Rook leapt to her feet. “What did you say?”
I stood too, wrapping my arm around her to keep her upright as she swayed.
Pain chewed through both of us.
Frank struggled to hold her eyes. “They’d injected themselves with the R gene. They managed to hang on longer than most, but in the end, they succumbed...right in front of you.”
A blast of Rook’s emotions crowded my head.
Her horror of that day. The glimpses of witnessing her parents dissolve from human into nothing...
“You’re the reason they injected themselves?” Tears brimmed over her lashes. “You’re the reason they thought the immortality trial was a success?”
“I am.” Frank just nodded, a heavy sigh escaping him. “I killed them. And I will never stop feeling guilty...or relieved.”
Rook choked on a sob, but...even as I felt her heart breaking, I sensed her relief too. Relief that they’d been stopped from doing to others what’d been done to us. Relief that the blood staining her family’s name had been stopped with their deaths...unlike the blood staining mine that had continued for far too long.
Flashes of the kids beneath the mountain in the Eastern Crucible filled both our thoughts. The horror they’d existed in. The suffering they’d endured. But then Rook’s memories showed me rows upon rows of cages and animals, all screeching and howling as they broke beneath their ascension.