Everwinter: The Forerunner Archives (26 page)

"My gods," he whispers to himself. "It can't be!" He looks at the rod again, then back up at Traylor. "A pure strain of the human genome! AGOMA!" He suddenly screams. His voice echoes throughout the mostly silent facility and, less than a minute later, we hear the sound of running footfalls.
 

Another creature bursts into the room.

I stare at this newcomer–
Agoma
–then back at Ragyle, comparing them in my mind, telling myself that I'm not seeing double.

Agoma is identical to Ragyle.
 

"Glamis!" Agoma smiles upon seeing the mutant. "You have returned!" Agoma's eyes find us and he licks his lips. "What have you brought for us today, hmmm?"

Glamis opens his mouth to introduce us, but Ragyle cuts him off, waving the wand device in front of Agoma's face. "Give me that!" Agoma snarls, snatching it from his twin. Agoma inspects it, turning it over, staring at the blinking light on the handle.

"Bah!" he sneers. His eyes fall on Tra
ylor. "This one?" he asks. Ragyle nods. Agoma steps over to Traylor and behind him, stabbing the wand into my little brother's neck just as his twin had. 

"Bloody hells," I hear Traylor grumble under his breath. I shoot him a warning glance and he settles.
 

Agoma finally steps
away, face baffled. "Impossible!" he breathes. "The wavelength of the pulse... There was no protection from it! All humans should have been affected..." He trails off.

"You know what this means, don't you?" Ragyle finally asks his twin.
 

Agoma nods, but doesn't say anything.

"What?" I ask, stepping up. "What does it mean?" 

Agoma and Ragyle both stare me up and down. Agoma raises the wand toward me.
 

"Don't bother," I say with a gesture toward Traylor. "We're siblings. I'm just as pureblooded as he is."

"Indeed," Agoma hisses. "But where did your pureblood come from?"

I look over at Ursa, thinking she might know
the answer–being a scientist and all. But Ursa just shakes her head.

I turn back. "Okay,
” I ask, “so what does that mean?"

Agoma and Ragyle exchange wary glances, as if telepathically deciding whether to reveal the information or not.

Finally, Ragyle sighs and looks me dead in the eye.

"It means that you and your brother were engineered," the Doctor answers.

37.

Agoma and Ragyle are leading us into the lab proper now, ignoring my questions the whole way.

"What the hells do you mean we were engineered?" I protest as we enter a central hallway with glass partitions along its length. Traylo
r is babbling his own agreement with me, but Altair, Ursa, and Glamis are silent. I keep looking back at Ursa for some sort of explanation–she's a scientist, she must know
something
about this–but her deformed face remains cast to the floor.

"Why'd you say anything if you're not gonna answer me?" I ask again, venom in my tone.

Agoma–who wears a darker colored coat than his twin–finally turns his head toward me and sighs. "Patience, Juno," he begs. "Let us run a few tests before jumping to conclusions. My sister may have spoken out of turn. I don't want to speculate any further, just in case we are wrong."

I scowl. "That sounds like a copout. I
–" I cut myself off. "Did you just say '
your sister
'?"

Ragyle laughs. "What? Did you mistake me for a male?" she asks.

I look to my other companions for some sort of support, but they're all just as baffled. Androgynous doesn't even begin to describe these creatures. Ragyle shrugs and continues to lead us further into the facility. We pass rooms, many looking abandoned, some with bed-like apparatus's situated inside circular scanners of some sort. Of course, I'm just guessing that's what all this stuff is. My limited knowledge of Forerunner technology is all I've got to go on. 

Most of the doors
are circular, like portholes, and the Doctors finally arrive and stop at one. Ragyle presses a spider-like hand to a scanner and the portal twists open, revealing the first room I've seen here that actually appears sterile and clean. There's a massive crystalline table at the center, overhung by a series of floating images, visible from all angles. Numbers and other data scroll continuously across them.

"My gods!" my eyes bulging in delight. "Is this what I think it is?"

Ursa finally breaks her stupor and greets me with a smile.

"It is, Juno," she replies. "A cumpewter!"

I rush into the room, bathed in the red light pouring from the instrumentation, feeling like a child on Xmast Eve. I say, "I've found parts of these things washed up on the beach in Krakelyn! I
never
thought I'd ever see a working one in the flesh, so to speak."

I whirl t
o face Agoma and Ragyle. "Do these machines think for themselves?" I ask, my former indignation forgotten for the moment. The Doctors don't hear me though. They've already got Traylor lying down on the table, both working frantically at panels and buttons as mechanical appendages from the ceiling appear and lower themselves toward my brother. Red light pours out of one arm and runs its way along his little body. Immediately, an image appears on one of the screens.

B
ut I find it hard to reconcile.

It's Traylor's body
–the image moves in time with his breathing–but it's almost as if I'm actually seeing right
through
him!

Agoma and Ragyle converse briefly, then Ragyle looks upward and says, "Blood type
please, Asima. Focus on genetic impurities."

"YES, DOCTOR RAGYLE," a mechanical, but undeniably female voice responds from seemingly out of nowhere.

My heart palpitates. "Is the cumpewter talking?" I ask Ursa, not wanting to disturb the Doctors for even a second. 

Ursa nods, but she seems shocked too. "Indeed. I have never witnessed such a thing!" She smiles. "Juno, if I'd of had access to technology like this before you
–"

She cuts off as suddenly the voice of Asima
–the cumpewter–resounds once more. "ANALYSIS COMPLETE. SUBJECT: HUMAN MALE. TRAYLOR QUINN. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT OF GENOME PRESENT. PLUS MODIFIERS. DOCTORS, THE PULSE COULD NOT BREAK THROUGH THE PROTEIN MODIFIERS. THEY ACTED AS A SHIELD."

"Amazing!" Agoma and Ragyle both exclaim at the same time. I still can't believe that these twins are actually separate genders.
 

"What does that mean?" I ask, bewildered. The Doctors ignore me, ushering Traylor off the table now. I turn to Ursa, but she's pulled back within herself for some reason.
 

Agoma grabs me by the arm, pulling me toward the table
now. I can sense his excitement. "Okay, just take it easy!" I say, crawling onto the surprisingly cold surface. The red light glowing within it made me assume it would be warm.

The Doctors set to work again and, just like Traylor, instruments from the ceiling scan my body. A see-through image of my body appears onscreen. I find myself becoming self-conscious, every part of me exposed. I'm blushing hard as I look toward Altair. I can see my bones, my veins, my beating heart.

The feeling is surreal. 

Asima, the cumpewter, finishe
s its scan and speaks once more: "ANALYSIS COMPLETE. SUBJECT: HUMAN FEMALE. JUNO QUINN. ONE HUNDRED
AND ONE
PERCENT OF GENOME PRESENT. PLUS MODIFIERS. LIKE HER BROTHER, HER GENOME CONTAINS A SYNTHETIC PROTEIN SHIELD."

Agoma and Ragyle chatter excitedly.

"The pulse is what caused the mutations during the Final Judgment, isn't it?" I ask, turning my head toward the preoccupied scientists. They both nod. I turn my head toward Altair. "The pulse came from the Box Jude and I found on the beach." He nods too.

"Her genome is just as pure," I hear Agoma saying to Ragyle. "So how can she have one hundred
and one
percent purity?"

I sit up. "I'd like to know that too," I say. I look at Traylor. Did our
Father submit us to genetic experimentation before we were born? Was he that desperate to have 'normal' children after discovering his wife was missing a toenail?

I know the answer is
yes
, but don't want to admit it.

Agoma and Ragyle turn toward me, quiet now for the first time. "You're a mutant," they both say at the same time.

I blink, sure I must have misheard. "Say again?”

"Juno," Ragyle takes my hand, "you have the same pure strand
s of DNA as your brother, but you have something extra. Something added after the fact. We might call it a mutation, but not in the traditional sense. As far as we can tell, it has no effect on you whatsoever." She hesitates, shaking her head. "We don't know what it is, but it was put there for a reason. Juno, who are your parents?"

I exchange a nervous glance with Altair, but he nods his consent. I sigh. "My
Mother died when I was eight. I barely knew her. My Father...was the High Deacon of Krakelyn in Eversummer."

Agoma and Ragyle gasp simultaneously.
 

"
Jonathan Quinn
," Agoma whispers.

"I see you've heard of him," I reply, unsurprised.

Agoma nods, eyes wide. "Few in this world have not. He's the reason we conduct our research in the Fringes. I don't think there was a mutant before the Final Judgment who did not fear that name."

"I know," I sigh. "Sorry about that." The
Doctors back away from me, fearful now. "Don't worry," I soothe, "I don't share his beliefs or practice his religion. We clashed about it all the time. I worshipped the Forerunners, if anything."

The Doctors both relax at that and smile. Even Ursa seems proud.
"Good," they say, "because we need your blood, Juno. Traylor too. It's the last piece of the puzzle we require to synthesize our cure. We can undo what the pulse did during the Final Judgment. After that, we can commence testing. Then the
real
problem will be distribution. It won't be easy getting the cure out to the world, especially with radical groups like the Children of Mutanity now worshipping the mutant form. They don't know that the pulse made them all sterile. Humanity will die out in a generation if we let them stop us."

I look over at Altair, recalling how my
Father had told us this exact same thing. "We know," I say. "It's the whole reason we're here to begin with." I pause. "But the Children of Mutanity shouldn't be a problem anymore. Their leader is dead."

Agoma and Ragyle put on shocked faces.

"Actually, Juno," Altair speaks up for the first time in a while, "while Blaine may be dead, their ideals live on. True, Blaine was their titular head, but there are still sects all over Eversummer with various sub-leaders. We still have to be careful who we give this cure to."

I sigh, rolling my eyes. "Of course we will." Why is it that when things start going our way,
it’s still not easy?

Ragyle places a gentle hand on my shoulder and eases me back down on the table. "Hold still, Juno, please," the mutant woman says. "We're going to take some of your blood now." My anxiety ramps up, but I acquiesce. The Doctors go to work on the cumpewter, and now more instruments appea
r overhead; including a probe that could only be used for drawing blood. It's long, thin, and menacing. I hear Traylor's fearful trepidation at the sight of it. I smile at him, showing him that it's really no big deal. He'll have to do this too. The probe is just inches above my arm when it stops and a sudden alarm starts blaring. 

I bolt up on the table. "What's that?" I yell over the din.

Agoma and Ragyle look panicked, stabbing at the cumpewter madly.

"FIRE ON LEVEL SEVEN," the familiar mechanical voice of Asima surrounds us. Seconds later, we all feel a soft rumbling throughout the complex.

"That felt more like an explosion," Altair says, his trusty throwing stars already at hand.

Agoma waves him down. "It's probably a false alarm," the Doctor says. "It happens sometimes. This facility is from t
he time of the Forerunners. Breakdowns happen all the time."

"Check it out
I wills!" Glamis says, his hulking form stepping forward. He'd been lurking quietly near the lab entrance ever since we'd entered, probably just wanting to stay out of the way now that he's no longer the guinea pig here.

"I'll go with you," Altair says, joining the mutant at the entrance.

"Don't go!" Traylor begs, the fear bright in his eyes.

"Safer heres you will be," Glamis admonishes. Altair agrees.

Traylor backs down.

"We'll be right back," Altair a
ssures. Glamis opens the portal and the pair disappears. I lay back down on the table, turning my head toward the Doctors.