Lovely Darkness (Creeping Beautiful)

He would be on my side.

“Sasha was telling me—”

Shit. I’d kinda forgotten about Sasha.

“—that she thinks the little girl might be useful.”

“How so?”

“Kids see things, right? And I know Adam, and McKay, and Donovan are all pretty good at what they do, but she’s second-generation.”

I get what he means. He means they were very careful with Indie because she was the first. And by careful, I mean suspicious.

But Maggie is all sorts of different in their eyes. She wasn’t born into things the way Indie was. She was never in the hunt. She was never messed with. And you can tell people that these girls are genetically different all you want, they never believe it. They see a baby and think, Surely, nurture wins over nature.

Trust me on this, it doesn’t. The Company has been breeding humans for a thousand years at least. They understand which traits are nature and which traits are nurture.

And by nurture, I mean torture.

They know exactly which ones gets passed down. And little Maggie here is the product of all the breeding, whether she was intentional or not.

“Hello?”

“I’m still here,” I say.

“So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“The little girl. Sasha thinks she should make friends with her so we can get the picture from another perspective.”

“Yeah. Fine with me. Just tell her to be careful. Indie is about as unpredictable as they come.”

“Got it. When you get back from the woods, come find me. I’ll be talking to Doc on the other side of the house.”

He ends the call. I’m just coming out of the woods and I can see Merc pocket his phone through the windows as he walks along the back breezeway towards the waiting doctor. But I go around the other side. I’m not ready to think about Donovan yet. And no one is going to start any kind of procedure on that man until Adam gives them permission. And he’s asleep, so I put that stiff aside for now.

When I get to the front, I go up the porch steps and enter the house through the front door. I pause in the foyer, listening. Nothing. No sound at all. So I walk down the hallway to the kitchen and see there is already a plate of pancakes under a glass dome waiting for anyone who wanders in.

That was not Adam’s doing, so must’ve been McKay’s.

So. Breakfast is made. I will warm the pancakes up and take Wendy a plate once she gets back from the woods.

But now I have nothing to do and I don’t want to go looking for her in the woods because I’d like to stay as far from Nathan as I can until it’s absolutely necessary.

He and I have unfinished business and we both know it. That business needs to be discussed in private. So I snoop a little. I wander over to the far side of the family room where there are tons of built-in shelves, but then I notice there’s a door. It’s not out of place in this house. There seem to be random doors leading to new places everywhere I look. But I’m curious, so I open it and find a little room set up like a school—a chalkboard with some math problems on it, an old wooden table, and a neat stack of books on a shelf.

There are four wooden chairs around the table and when I pull one out, the seat has a well-worn curve to it. Like generations of Company kids have been sittin’ their asses in these chairs to be taught lessons.

I grab the stack of schoolbooks and take a seat, reading the covers of each one. They are old textbooks from the eighteen hundreds. A couple of them are familiar.

A smile creeps up my face when I find the language and grammar books. Because the pictures and stories are also familiar. I used these books. Harper wasn’t expected to study the way I was so she wasn’t there when the tutors went over things with me. But I would go over things with her afterward. Everything I learned, she learned too. Everything. When I was learning to read, I taught her to read too. When I was learning numbers and math, I taught her numbers and math too. When I was learning to kill, I taught her to kill too.

Harper was my purpose when I was a kid. And I was lucky, I think. None of the other Company people I know got the gift of their twin. I miss her. I want to see her. I want my family back. And everything about this little room suddenly hurts. Not just because of Harper, either. But Wendy, too.

Because I can’t help but compare her life to this life that little Maggie has—or even the life that I had.

Chek taught Wendy things. She’s well-read, and smart, and she can do math, speak a few languages, and she understands enough science to get by. But she didn’t get a place like Old Home and if anyone deserves a place filled with family, it’s Wendy.