Page 3 of Call of the Fathoms (Deep Waters #4)

Three

Alexia

S he found Doctor Barker the next morning. Harlow had plenty for her to do in the meantime, as the woman’s mind moved a mile a minute. Before Alexia went to find the reborn, first she had to make sure that the Original’s clothing was still perfectly pressed, that someone had seen to the servant who had made her feel slightly uncomfortable the day before, and that her breakfast would no longer contain whatever it was that she was allergic to. Just in case the next reborn didn’t fix this unbearable issue.

Throughout all of it, Alexia meandered through life in a fog. The medicine made it so much easier to handle everything. And yet... there was still a voice screaming in the back of her head. Like a ringing in her ears that she couldn’t get rid of.

By the time she was standing in front of Doctor Barker’s office, it was getting hard to ignore again. Which was ridiculous. She was not supposed to feel like this. The medicine existed so she could get ahold of these thoughts and cast them aside, not struggle every single day.

Knocking on the door in front of her, she tried to quiet the screaming in her head.

This area of Tau was easier to be herself in, anyway. The doctors and the guards all lived in the same wing. There wasn’t beauty here. Only cold steel, utilitarian cots to sleep in, and medical equipment lying beside weapons just in case the Originals needed to be protected. Even from their own people.

Barker opened the door quickly. He was a tiny man in comparison to her. Barely five foot five, he came up to her chest and had to crane his neck to see her face. The bottle thick glasses perched on his nose didn’t help, although they did magnify his wide brown eyes. Silver hair topped his head like someone had blown a cloud on top of him and spun it into a cotton candy like twirl. His white lab coat hung from his lean shoulders, because the man was always forgetting to eat no matter how many people were on the job to remind him.

“Alexia?” he asked, a question in the word.

“She wasn’t happy with the last reborn. There’s a rash on her shoulder now.”

“A rash?” he muttered, turning back into his office to gather his things. “That shouldn’t be happening. Rashes are exceedingly hard for the Originals to get, unless the reborn isn’t perfect. But I check them. I check every time we use one.”

“Perhaps a mistake was made.”

“I don’t make mistakes.”

But he was human, and therefore, he did. She had seen him make mistakes before, although they were rare. He was a good man, this doctor, but that didn’t make him perfection personified. Still, she kept her mouth shut as he gathered a white medical bag and started down the hall.

She did look around his room while he gathered his things, though. Alexia liked to look at how people decorated their private spaces, because it gave her a small glimpse into the life of the person. Barker’s rooms were all plastered with old images of Above. He particularly liked pictures of the land around the sea. White sand beaches and bright fluffy clouds that danced above the waves.

The land wasn’t like that anymore. No one could go up there, and if they could, they definitely wouldn’t find white fluffy clouds. Only angry tempests that threatened to kill anyone who was out in them with shards of ice as big as her head.

She stalked down the hall with him toward the reborn center. The hallway they were in was shaped a bit like a tube, and she was suddenly struck with a wave of dizziness. The entire room was moving, like the tube was rotating.

What was going on with her?

Alexia reached out a hand and touched the wall, anchoring herself as she walked after him. She would not show weakness. She would not let him know that something was wrong.

But he looked over his shoulder and frowned at her. “What’s going on with you today?”

“Nothing,” she muttered.

“You’re holding onto the wall like the sea is sending you tumbling into a vortex. Are you dizzy?”

“No.”

“I’m a doctor. If you have something going on, then you should tell me.” He didn’t have time to say anything else before the reborn center was right before them.

Glass walls fitted with twin glass doors showed everything beyond. All the frozen tubes, kept in a cryo genetic state once the bodies were finished growing. All the cylinders were filled with goo and contained various stages of humanity.

Her gaze caught on the tubes filled with the faint orange liquid. The color was due to the vitamins to keep the fetuses inside alive. She hated looking at those strange little worms that eventually turned into children, knowing that she herself had grown in that same kind of vat. Except they had purged those tubes regularly, testing all the genes in every baby and picking the ones that were worth something.

The ones like her. With genetic mutations that had been carefully cultivated and injected and pushed into a little life like that.

The doors hissed open into the area that wasn’t as cold as the rest of it, and Doctor Barker headed in. That was her cue. She was supposed to follow him into the room. She was supposed to be a good personal guard and do everything that she needed to do for her Original. It was the reason she had been made.

Just like all those people hanging in those tubes, frozen, created to live for only a few moments before their gasping breath subsided and they were used instead for someone else’s immortality.

“Alexia?” Doctor Barker asked, his voice now filled with concern. “Would you like to come inside with me?”

Shit. Why wasn’t the medicine working?

She’d taken these drugs her entire life. They always made life easier. She’d always been able to inject herself and forget everything for at least a week, if not longer than that. Were these thoughts stronger than the drugs?

Heading into the room, she audibly swallowed as the doors hissed shut behind her. “Sorry, doctor. This room always makes me uncomfortable.”

Even admitting that was strange. She’d been bred to be impossible to shake. Anxiety and fear weren’t something her body could feel, those chemicals just didn’t exist in her brain. At least, that’s what she had been told her entire life.

“Uncomfortable?” Doctor Barker repeated before pointing to a leather chair beside him. Countless metal arms behind the chair were used to determine the health of people like her. From blood pressure cuffs to injectables, the chair was as much as of doctor as the man in front of her. “Before we gather the reborn, why don’t we do a quick workup of your physical state?”

That definitely made all these feelings worse. Stiffly, she sat down in the chair. He sat at a desk opposite to her, typing away into a computer that commanded the metal arms to move forward. They quickly did all the work that was necessary. Blood pressure? Perfect. Heart rate? Normal.

Maybe this wasn’t fear. Because her hands weren’t shaking and her heart rate was exactly how it should be. Yet, her mind was racing, and she thought, for a moment, maybe this was anger. Was she supposed to be able to feel that, though?

Doctor Barker muttered something under his breath and started the reborn algorithm that would pick the next clone that was ready for harvesting. The computer did most of the work these days, but the doctors were all required to look over the genetic sequence even after the computer chose it. Then he turned his wheelie chair and looked right into her eyes.

“Your vitals seem normal.”

“As I assumed they would be.”

“But you are uncomfortable in this room? That is unusual behavior for someone of your origins.”

She knew that, damn it. She knew it was strange for someone like her to think on her own. She hadn’t before this. At least, she didn’t think she had. There were a few years where they had put her back in training, but she didn’t think that was because she had been thinking for herself.

Fuck. Was it a bad thing to think for herself? Was it really all that bad if she looked into that room with all the reborns just hanging there, growing, and for her to think it was a little morbid? She wasn’t going to do anything about it. Alexia knew better than that. The Originals had this entire place locked up so tight that someone like her couldn’t get the reborns out, and even then, what would she do with them?

They weren’t real people. They didn’t have a life or learn as they were growing. They were popped out into the world as fully formed adults, with brains that still fired correctly for someone of their age, but who had no experience even breathing on their own.

Besides, she didn’t have a death wish. And death was all that would happen if she tried to move against the Originals.

Doctor Barker took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You know what they do to guards who start thinking for themselves, don’t you?”

She rattled off the information she had known since she was a child. “Guards who are no longer capable of performing their function are decommissioned.”

“Decommissioned, yes, that’s what they call it for you all.” He shook his head. “They kill them, Alexia. You can try to make it lesser if that’s what you want, but the reality is that someone like you who is thinking for herself will end up killed. We’ll reuse the pieces of your body that we need, take your genetic sequence, and make another you. A version who won’t have the flaws that you had before. There have been countless Alexias through the years, but none of them were as powerful or as perfect as your design. And the next one will be even better. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She didn’t, although it sounded like a threat and maybe something she didn’t want to understand. So she remained where she was and stared at him with what she hoped was a blank expression and not one of utter rage like it felt like.

He cleared his throat. “Don’t let them see that you’re different. That’s what I’m saying. In the meantime, I’m going to update your file with a different formula of your daily medication and that will help with these feelings. If they continue, come to me first. Not anyone else.”

“I have a doctor.” One specifically had been given to the guards, and he put them through rigorous testing regularly to ensure they could do their job correctly.

“You will come to me,” Doctor Barker said as the computer barked that the sequence was ready. “Now, I need to look over this reborn and make sure it’s ready for harvesting, since the other one apparently wasn’t. A rash, you said? Was it a food she was allergic to?”

Alexia jumped into the same job she’d always been doing. Protecting Harlow.

She rattled off all the food Harlow had eaten yesterday, making sure that she listed every ingredient in every recipe. She knew all of this information like the back of her hand. Every day she poured over everything that the Original ate, and she was good at her job. She was always better than the others, no matter how much work it took.

It took the better part of an hour to go through everything that might have made her allergic, but then Barker nodded. “Found the issue. Computer, terminate all reborns with this genetic mutation.” He clicked a few buttons and then she could hear the sound of glass shattering. Icy bodies fell to the floor, tubes whipping out of their mouths. Soon enough, people would enter the room and drag those bodies out. They would be tossed out to sea without harvesting a single one of those organs because Harlow might now be allergic to shellfish.

Wrong, a voice whispered in her head. This is wrong.

But she turned her attention from the glass and instead looked at Barker. He stood, twisting side to side to crack his back before hitting the final button on the computer. “Come on, the reborn should be in the right room. It won’t take long to get the right serum to inject her with. This will all be over by the end of the day.”

Thank goodness. An angry Original wasn’t what any of them needed in their lives.

She left all her complicated emotions in that room and stalked down the hall with him. No one would hold on to these thoughts willingly. She was not going to hold on to them, either. It was not her place to think about the reborns or the ethics of even having them. She had to shake this off.

At least, until they passed by the first surgical suite. Alexia slowed to a stop, staring through the glass at the creature they had laid out on the table. “Is that?—”

Barker stopped as well, freezing in place as his eyes widened even more behind those strange glasses. “An undine?”

“Why would they bring an undine into Tau?” she snarled, already reaching for the device affixed to her wrist that allowed her to speak to all the other guards. “Code Red. There is an undine on the premises.”

Another voice came out of her wrist, this one from a guard named Hyperion who was a personal guard to one of the oldest couples of the Originals. “Understood. Where?”

“Surgical suites.”

“We will stay clear of that area and shut it down for all the other Originals.”

Doctor Barker was looking at her strangely.

“What?” Alexia asked.

“You’re uncomfortable in the reborn center, but you aren’t uncomfortable looking at that?” He gestured toward the massive body on the table.

She was. She was very uncomfortable looking at the massive, limp fish who had been laid out on two surgical tables and still his tail was somehow drooped onto the floor. His pale purple skin was odd to look at, not to mention the darker shades of his tail that ended in little bulbous yellow tentacles that dripped down his sides like beads. His hair was long and tangled over his face, obscuring that from her view, at the very least. There was something wrong about looking at a creature like him.

He still had a human form. His chest was familiar enough, although there were no nipples to speak of. His hands were webbed, and one of them had fallen off the table and nearly trailed along the floor. The black tipped claws on that hand were intriguing, but there was something wrong about staring at a creature who was unconscious and thinking about the veins on his hands.

“Let’s go inside,” Doctor Barker said, before putting his hand on the door and starting to push it open.

“Excuse me?”

“There’s plenty of time. They have to thaw the reborn, anyway. I haven’t ever been given the opportunity to see one of these beasts in person.” He looked over his shoulder at her, mischief glinting in those massive eyes. “Unless you’re afraid? I thought you weren’t having those feelings?”

Damn it. He had her, and he knew it.

Sighing, she followed him into the room, which already smelled distinctly fishy.