Everwinter: The Forerunner Archives (47 page)

Which he does.

He hits the glass dead center where Altair had scratched it. The box rocks up for a moment then slams back down. A spider’s web of cracks bursts forth from the point of impact. Outside the box, all eyes are now on Pilcrow. Jonathan Quinn looks terrified. Altair sneers at him deservedly. Pilcrow backs up again, his shoulder leaking blue fluid where the glass had sliced it a little.

It should only take one more.

Pilcrow crouches right down now, coiling his body like a spring and...

CRRRAAACCCKKK!

The resultant sound is deafening, a hole roughly the size of Altair's head bursting open. 

"NO!" he hears Jonathan Quinn
’s terrified voice cry.

Pilcrow pounds at the glass around the opening, pushing it outward. Jonathan Quinn opens fire. Altair hits the floor as bullets spray in their direction, a
t least one or two strike Pilcrow, the others hitting and weakening the glass even more. Pilcrow bellows in rage and swings at the glass a final time, breaking through completely, bounding over toward Jonathan Quinn on four limbs like a crazed snow bear. Quinn is attempting to reload his shooter but it’s too late. Pilcrow grabs him by the neck and picks him bodily from the ground, closing his hand as he does so, squeezing the man's neck until it pops and lops sickly sideways. Pilcrow releases him, the corpse falling to the ground like a ragdoll, unleashing a cry of hellish fury. 

But he's not done.
 

Pilcrow whirls and spots Jude, standing defiantly in front of Juno.

Is he trying to protect her?

Pilcrow stomps toward him.

"No! Don't!" Ursa suddenly cries, foolishly stepping between the man and the mutant. Pilcrow snarls and simply swats the old woman aside, his obsidian claws raking her flesh. She falls to the ground in a heap, blood pooling from wounds in her chest. 

Jude breaks after tha
t.

He bolts for the nearest exit, taking only a half dozen steps before Pilcrow is on him, lifting him in the air by the neck
just as he had Jonathan Quinn.

"Did you kill Tien?" Pilcrow demands, pulling Jude close to his face, peeling his lips back to reveal his monstrously needle-like teeth.
 

"No!" Jude cries. "I don't even... Who's Tien?"

"He's the boy you shot and killed in the Grasslands, Jude," a new voice comes in.
Juno
. "The boy who killed Blaine, your leader, remember?" Juno grins.

Pilcrow never takes his eyes off of Jude. "Tien killed your leader?" he asks, voice no more than a grumble.
 

Jude struggles for breath. "Yes!" he manages to croak.
 "Blaine was the leader of the Children of Mutanity. I was... I was brainwashed by him! Tien killed him and I had no choice in the matter. No free will. I had to–"

"Tien was my son," Pilcrow snarls.

Jude's eyes grow wide with horror. "Oh hells," he says.

And with that, Pilcrow opens his mouth and chomps down on Jude's head.

64.

"Are you alright?" he asks her.

Her face is pale, a mask of
horror.

She's in shock
, Altair realizes.

"Hey! Juno!" he shakes her shoulder, and she finally blinks her eyes, as if seeing him for the first time.

"They're all dead," Juno admonishes. "My Father, my Mother, Jude, Traylor. They're all..." She bursts into tears.

Altair looks around
briefly at the three slumped bodies on the floor. Juno's entire family.

Almost
.

"We haven't found Traylor yet," he soothes her. "We're going to get you out of here and find him, alright?" Juno shakes her head, struggling against the bonds of the Cortex, still holding her in a wide X position. Altair reaches up, searching for a way to release the cuffs that hold her wrists in place. But he can't find any.

"Hold on," he says, turning away for a moment. "I'm gonna find a way to get you out of here." He scans the dark room and sees what he's looking for on a far wall.

A fire axe.

"I'll chop this thing to pieces if I have to," he says. He jogs over to the wall, opens the case containing the axe, then turns back and–

Pilcrow is standing in front of the Cortex, staring directly at Juno.

"All this suffering," he says, shaking his head, "and for what? Tien is dead. The man who killed him is dead. Were you there when he died, Juno?"

Altair approaches the unstable mutant cautiously, axe at the ready.

"I was," Juno answers calmly from the Cortex. "We... We were friends. I cared for him deeply. Despite the terrible things he went through, he was a remarkable young man."

"Young man?" Pilcrow echoes, as if confused. "Is that how you thought of him? As a fellow human?"

"I guess I did," Juno nods.

"If only the rest of humanity had your good nature, Juno Quinn," Pilcrow replies. "We'd all be better off. We'd consider ourselves equals instead of constantly judging on
e another according to our differences." He sighs. "But that will never happen. It's a sad thing, but it's true." He finally pulls his gaze away from Juno, letting it fall on the machine behind her.

The Cortex.

"No, the only way to truly achieve harmony again is to level the playing field. I tried to do that, by making everyone a mutant. But it didn't work. The True Body Plan was too ingrained in our collective consciousness to disallow us to accept what we've already been conditioned to see as normal. I should have done the opposite. I should have seen that the only way to save this world was to make
everyone
normal." He steps over to the Cortex. "I will right that wrong now. No Father will have to suffer what I have again. All men shall be created equal once more."

He reaches for the keypad on the machine.

"Wait!" Juno cries, realizing what the mutant is doing.

"What are you doing, Pilcrow?" Altair snaps, having snuck lithely behind the mutant during his odd monologue. He raises the fire axe above his head.

Pilcrow doesn't turn around. "Righting a wrong," he answers.

"I can't let you do that," Altair says. "Not y
et. We can find another way. A way that doesn't involve killing Juno. She saved your life, gods damn it!"

"There
is
no other way," Pilcrow grumbles, still typing at the keypad.

"Then I have to stop you," Altair says. He swings the axe for Pilcrow's back...

But it never reaches its target.

Still staring at
the Cortex, Pilcrow shoots one beefy arm straight backward, catching the axe at the shaft midswing. With a twist of his wrist the weapon is torn from Altair's grasp, snapped in two. 

Altair's hopes fall to the floor with it.

"I'm sorry," Pilcrow says, finally stepping away from the machine. "I know you love her."

The Cortex starts to whir audibly.

"No!" Altair cries, rushing to the front of the machine where Juno is still held helplessly. She meets his eyes, her gaze calm, serene even.

"It's alright," she tells him. "This is for the greater good, Altair. It
has
to happen. You know that."

"No, Juno," Altair shakes his head. "There has to be another way! I... I love you!"

"I know," Juno says with a smile. She leans her head forward. "I love you too."

Altair bursts into tears
–for the first time in decades–and he steps forward, pulling himself into Juno and meeting her lips with his. He closes his eyes as a burning flash of white light sears through the room.

Then, seconds later, he feels her kiss dying beneath him.

"No!" he bellows. "Juno!" He steps away. She looks peaceful, her eyes closed, her lips locked in a permanent smile.

It's all over.

Pilcrow activated the Cortex.

"Something's not right," Pilcrow suddenly says from behind him.

Altair tears his eyes from Juno.

Pilcrow is standing there, hands running over his own body as if searching for something.

"The... The pulse. It worked but... I'm still a mutant."

Altair gasps, reaching up to his own face. He can still feel the alien bumps and lumps of that virulent rash on his cheeks and the cluster of tumors on his forehead.

"The Cortex didn't work," Altair says, his despair growing exponentially. "Juno died for nothing!"

"No," a new voice comes in, weak
but familiar. "That...is
not
Juno," the voice says.

Altair whirls on the spot.

Ursa is on her back on the ground, lying in a pool of her own blood, breath coming in deep, ragged gasps. She's pointing at something.

"There," she says. "Go there." Her arm drops from weakness but she retains consciousness.

"Ursa," Altair says, "what are you–"

"There," she says again.

Altair glances across the room.

There's a door on the far side, semi-
cloaked in darkness, soft light pouring from beneath it. Reluctantly, Altair forces himself away from Juno, stalking slowly toward that door. Pilcrow watches him but doesn't follow. Altair reaches the door, grasping for the handle hesitantly.

It doesn't budge.

Locked.

He smiles though.

Sitting in the lock itself
is a key. He reaches up to it, twisting it open, popping the door wide.

What he sees beyond defies all the logic in his open mind.

65.

I open my eyes.

Traylor's banging on the glass again.

"I think someone's coming!" he says.

The words are muffled to me, but I
can still make them out. I nod–the only way I can communicate from within my prison. My mouth is stopped up by a large breathing apparatus. The rest of my body is free, floating lazily in a weird, jelly-like substance. The breather is punched into the flesh of my inner cheeks, the only discomfort I feel. The needles periodically pull fluid from me. DNA, I guess. The DNA runs through tubes along my breather, leading out of my suspension tank into another, flatter tank on the floor in front of me. 

Another clone is growing there already.

I can't believe how fast the process is! 

Less than an hour, as best I can guess.

There's a line of bodies outside the tank, covered on the floor. Traylor’s already showed them to me. 

Other clones.

Some of them are his, some of them are mine.

His
never worked inside the Cortex. 

We only share 99% DNA compatibility, remember?
 

Ursa explained it all to me when I woke up here, after Jude knocked us out and kidnapped us.

When my Father and Mother built the Cortex, they knew they had a problem. The machine needed a source of pure, unmutated DNA. The purest. I was already in Ursa's womb at the time, and they began modifying me in vitro. I was born the most perfect human being there ever was. But that only solved half their problem. The other, was that the Cortex would kill me. Of course, by that time, my parents were in love with me. They couldn't kill me, even if it meant saving the human race. They had to find another way to rid the world of mutations.

That's when they started dabbling in cloning.
 

Their first attempt resulted in Traylor.

They used my DNA to create an embryo and inserted it into Ursa's womb. But something happened in utero. They couldn't control the hormones in Ursa's body, and the embryo spontaneously changed sex, as Ursa explained. Their second
nearly
perfect child was born. Traylor only had 99% of my DNA.

The Cortex requires
100.

They needed to find a new method of cloning, outside the
womb. They came up with the tank I find myself floating in right now, intending to use it to clone me directly. Of course, they'd tested it on a few other subjects first, Everwinter mutants like Tien, mostly, and eventually perfected the method. They could create a perfect, fully grown clone in less than an hour, with all the traits and memories of the subject.

And then the riots hit.

The residents of Everwinter learned about the kidnappings and unwilling test subjects at the lab, and they weren't happy about it. Some of Ursa's fellow scientists were murdered in the streets. The facility had to be abandoned before I could be brought in and cloned.

You know the rest.

They buried the place under snow, Altair and his fellow Assassins were tasked by my Father to guard the place, Pilcrow and his cronies got their hands on Forerunner technology and blasted their way in.