Hope (Book 2, Harvester of Light Trilogy; Young Adult Science Fiction) (10 page)

They felt like
sweet teases.  I needed more.

I put my arms
around his neck and leaned up forcing him to deepen the kiss.  I didn’t have to
persuade him any further.

The first contact
of our tongues lit my body on fire.  I put my hands on the back of his head to
find balance and to make sure he didn’t stop the kiss before I wanted him to. 
The sound of our heavy breathing echoed in the empty hallway.  I couldn’t think
about anything else except that I wanted Jace and I knew without a shadow of a
doubt he wanted me too.

I began to tug at
the belt of his coat wanting to feel his warmth against my body.  Our fingers
fumbled together undoing the buttons until the leather fell away.  I pulled the
ends of his shirt out of the black jeans he wore until I could run my hands up
his rippled abdomen around to the well defined muscles of his back.  With a
groan, Jace quickly pulled the shirt off giving me more room to explore his
well toned torso.  But it still wasn’t enough for me.  I needed to feel his
skin against mine.  I needed to feel his hands on me.

I pulled back from
Jace to take off my shirt in one sweeping motion.  He stood staring at me as I
let the shirt fall to the carpeted floor.  His chest rose and fell like he was
having trouble getting enough air into his lungs.  His eyes asked me an
unvoiced question.

“Kiss me,” I
answered, not even having to think about it just knowing it was what I wanted.

Jace didn’t need
anymore persuasion than that.  He came at me lifting me up, forcing me to put
arms around his neck and my legs around his waist.

It was then I
screamed out in pain.

The pain was so
intense I completely let go of Jace.  On reflex he caught me, cradling me in his
arms.

“What’s wrong?” He
asked.  “What happened?  Did I hurt you?”

I couldn’t speak
until the pain ebbed away into a dull throb in my pelvic area.

“I hurt here,” I
said, placing a hand over the affected area. 

Our clothes
forgotten on the floor, Jace took long, quick strides with me in his arms down
the hallway.  I kept my eyes closed for most of the trip, only opening them
again when he gently laid me down on a bed.

When I opened my
eyes, I realized we weren’t in the room I had started the morning out in.  This
room was similar but the walls were of a raised redwood.  Velvety forest green
curtains hung beside the three windows of the room.

Jace pulled a
quilt off of a nearby wing backed caramel colored chair sitting in front of a
small marble fireplace.  He came back to the bed and covered me with it before
sitting down beside me.

“Do you know why
you’re hurting there?” He asked me.  “Have you ever felt pain there before?”

“I’ve felt
something similar but only during my… you know…monthly cycle,” I said, feeling
shy talking about such things with a man, especially a man I was half naked
with.  “But the pain was never this bad before.”

“Has Lucena done
anything to you in the past few days that would cause you to hurt there?”

“I haven’t been
here that long,” I replied.  “Right after we got here yesterday she fed us
something that made us all go to sleep.”

“Right after you
got here?” Jace asked in confusion.  “How long do you think you’ve been here?”

“Not even a day
yet.  Why?”

All of the color
drained from Jace’s face.  “Skye, I got the news you were here four days ago.”

I stared at Jace
in stunned silence.  Four days.  I’d been unconscious for four days.

I started to sit
up but the pain came back. 

“What do you think
you’re doing?” Jace said, admonishing me for my stupidity.  “You need to rest.”

I shook my head
furiously.   “I have to find Zoe and Ash.  I have to know what she’s done to
them.  In four days…”  I let the implications hang in the air.  What could she
have done to my friends in four days time?

“You’re not going
anywhere,” Jace said standing up.  “I’ll go find out where they are.  You just
lay on my bed until I come back for you.”  He went to a wardrobe similar to the
one I had in the room I woke up in and pulled out a white button down shirt.  “I’ll
be back as soon as I can.” He said slipping his arms into the shirt and heading
out the door.

“Jace!”

He ran back into
the room.

“What’s wrong?”

I held my hand out
to him not having to tell him with words how scared I felt.

He took it and
leaned down.  “Don’t worry,” he said.  “Everything will be all right.  Just
stay put until I get back.  Ok?”

I nodded my head.

He kissed me on
the lips and each cheek before squeezing my hand and heading back out the door.

I huddled
underneath the quilt in a fetal position, trying my best to ignore the pain
which seemed to stubbornly not want to go away.

The words ‘four
days’ still echoed in my mind.  What had Lucena done to me in the last four
days?  Had she harmed Ash and Zoe?  Were they even still alive?

The longer I laid
there the worse the scenarios playing inside my head got.  I had to know they
were all right.   I had to find them.

I waited for what
felt like forever.  The intense pain faded back to a dull throb before I
decided to try to stand up.  I went to Jace’s wardrobe and found a black
t-shirt to slip on.  It was big so I had to pull the bottom of it up together
at the side of my hip and tie it into a ball.  I walked out the door but had
absolutely no idea where in the house I was now.  I decided to follow any
stairs I came to which went down.  By the time I decided I might have gone too
far down, I came to a set of opaque glass doors on what I thought to be the
basement level of the house. 

I peeked behind
them and found a laboratory.  I walked in and looked around at the various
equipment sitting on the countertops having no idea what any of it was for. 
The only thing I could put a name to was the Bunsen burner.  In the middle of
the room, stood a large cylindrical tube made of iron.  I walked towards it running
my hands along the cool metal until I came to a hand shaped indention in the
column.  I placed my right hand inside it.  Steel bars slid out from either
side of the opening trapping my hand.  The indention illuminated blue and a
white light scanned my palm.

“Welcome, Skye,” a
soft disembodied female voice said to me.

The bars caging my
hand disengaged, imbedding themselves back into the column.

I took my hand out
of the indention just as clicks like something unlocking echoed in the room. 
The column, which I thought had been a structural feature of the mansion,
slowly slid up revealing a glass tube filled with a light blue liquid and a
naked woman.  Her back was to me.  The long brown strands of her hair floated
in the liquid around her giving her an ethereal beauty.  Cautiously, I walked
around the tube to see the woman’s face.  I felt the earth beneath my feet give
way and was only faintly aware of falling to my knees.

The woman inside
the glass tube was my mother.

Chapter 10

I’m not sure how
long I knelt by the figure of my mother floating like a ghostly apparition
inside the liquid filled tube.  She looked like Sleeping Beauty with her closed
eyes shutting out the turmoil around her, completely protected within her
cocoon from the evils of the outside world.  I envied the imagined peace she
seemed to have.  Her angelic presence comforted and frightened me all at the
same time.  Was she alive?  Was she dead?  The only clue I had she was indeed
still alive was the gentle rise and fall of her chest.  Through partly opened
lips she seemed to be drawing in the liquid around her down into her lungs like
it was air.  My hand shook as I reached out and touched the warm glass shell
protecting her.  I’m not sure what I expected to happen.  If she was really alive,
could she sense my presence?  Would she open her eyes and look at me?

“Still beautiful
after all these years isn’t she?”

I looked over at
the entrance to the laboratory and watched Lucena walk into the room.  She was
wearing a white lab coat and high heels which clicked every time she took a
step.

“Is she alive?” I asked,
my voice hoarse from trying not to cry.

“Her body is
alive.”

“You say that like
there’s a difference.”

Lucena walked over
beside me and touched the glass tube, gliding her hand down its smooth surface
like my mother was her most prized possession.

“She’s in a
vegetative state,” Lucena said with a note of regret.  “I tried to save her the
night you escaped the camp and she was shot but by the time they brought her to
me she was already in a coma.  There was no way to bring her out of it.”

“But she’s alive.”

Lucena looked at
me like she pitied me.  “She has no brain wave activity.  If these were the old
days your mother would have been put in a grave a long time ago.  The woman who
you knew as your mother doesn’t exist in this body anymore.”

“Then why keep her
like this?”

“Because I need
her.”

“For what?”

“For her organs,
of course.”

I looked back at
my mother noting the small incisions across her chest and abdomen.

“You’re keeping
her body alive for spare parts for yourself,” I whispered but Lucena heard me
well enough.

“Organ transplants
from a sibling or a child are the best matches and they last longer in us for
some reason.”

I looked up at
Lucena.  “Is that why I’m here?  You’ve used up my mother now you need to use
me too?”

Lucena looked down
at me like I was crazy.  She shook her head.  “No, Skye.  I would never do such
a barbaric thing to my own child.”

“Then what did you
do to me?” I asked, placing my hands across my abdomen.  “Why am I in so much
pain?”

Lucena cocked her
head and crossed her arms over her chest.  “When I designed the nanites to make
humans immortal I didn’t quite expect there to be so many side effects.  The
degeneration of organs was certainly one of the most severe but I should have
known the nanites would need to gather resources from somewhere in order to
preserve everything else.  Another was the sterilization of the female
harvesters.”

“So that’s why
harvesters can’t have babies of their own?”

“Yes.  For whatever
reason, the nanites destroy the eggs as soon as they enter the bloodstream. 
I’ve tried to change their programming to prevent it from happening but nothing
seems to work.  So, naturally since I was the first woman to undergo the
conversion, all of my eggs were immediately destroyed the moment I became a
harvester.”

“So you can’t have
anymore children,” I said, trying to understand why what she was telling me was
an answer to my question.

“Exactly.”

“But what does
that have to do with me?”

“You provided me
with what I needed to ensure we live forever.”

I tried to piece
together the information she was giving me with what I already knew but nothing
added up.

“I still don’t
understand.”

“I took your
eggs.  Now I have the genetic material I need to produce bodies when we need new
organs.”

I wrapped my arms
around my abdomen as if I could protect what had already been lost.

“You took…my
eggs?”

“Every woman is
born with a set number of eggs in her body,” Lucena said like I was her pupil
and she the teacher.  “There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 million
of them.  So, yes I harvested your eggs.  We’ll need them eventually,
especially now that your mother has so little left to give.”

“You keep saying
we.  Who is we?”

“You and I, of
course.  Didn’t I make that clear?”

I stood to my
feet.

“No you didn’t. 
Why would I need organs unless…” I faltered, unable to finish my train of
thought out loud because the answer was too horrible to acknowledge.

“Unless?” Lucena
prodded, urging me to voice my own conclusion.

“Unless you intend
to make me a harvester too.”

Lucena smiled. 
“I’ve waited so long for you to join me, Skye.  You can’t imagine how desolate
an eternity alone can be when you’re faced with it.”

“But you’re not
alone,” I argued, trying to find a loophole which would free me of my fate. 
“You have thousands of harvesters at your beck and call.”

“There’s nothing
like having your own flesh and blood by your side though,” Lucena sounded
almost wistful.  “If I had known about the sterilization side effect, I would
have had my own eggs frozen.  But, now we have your eggs so we don’t have to
worry about organs anymore.”

She sounded so
happy, so pleased with herself like she was doing me a favor.

“I will not become
like you,” I said, clearly enunciating each word to make sure she heard me.  “I
will not become a monster.”

“You will become
what I say you become,” her head lifted a notch higher.  “I am your mother and
your Queen.  You will do whatever I want and thank me for it later.”

I didn’t realize
until that very moment just how crazy Lucena Day was.  To actually hear her
call herself Queen of a wasted world sounded ridiculous.  She was completely
deluded in her insanity if she thought I would ever thank her for making me a
harvester.  I knew then there would be no reasoning with her.  You can’t have a
rational conversation with a crazy person.

“Where are Ash and
Zoe?” I asked, deciding to change the linear progression of our conversation
with a tangent.  Plus, it was something I desperately needed to know in order
to formulate an escape plan.  Leaving them behind was not an option.

“They’re both
being taken care of,” Lucena said, her eyes shifting away from me suspiciously.

“What does that
mean exactly?”  With Lucena I knew her definition of ‘care’ clashed with mine.