I Am Not Junco Omnibus: Books Four - Six (41 page)

"Hey, Juncs!" Arel pushes past Tier and closes the door behind him, then makes a grab for me that almost sets me off in a panic. But his embrace is warm and friendly so I relax and let him squeeze me. "Did you get your HOUSE, Junco? I think about her every day, I swear. I'm like obsessed with knowing how she is."

"I got her," I say, leaning into him a little. "She's back in New Peaks causing trouble, I think. She took it over and—" I shrug. What can I say? She's commandeered an entire city. My little sister AI is so much like me as a child it's scary.

Arel laughs. "What a little shit, huh? OK, what can I do for ya?"

"She wants to talk to them, Arel." Tier waves a hand at the door.

"Oh, all right. But be good, Junco," he warns me.

"I already told her. She promised."

I shrug as I walk through the door. I never said any such thing.

Chapter Forty-Four

The technicians are lying face down on the dirty tile floor and Annun is pacing back and forth barking out threats as we enter.

Interrogations. Looks like I'm just in time for the fun. I slip in the room and lean on the far wall, trying to stay quiet so that I don't disturb the atmosphere Annun has going. Which is the atmosphere of shit-your-pants fear. One tech turns her head towards me and cries out despite her gag when she realizes who I am.

This breaks the atmosphere, so what the hell? I might as well join in the fun.

I bend down and smile at her as she panics and wriggles in her bonds, trying to scoot away from me on the floor. Except she's got nowhere to go. The body next to her, which might be unconscious, or possibly dead, blocks her escape.

Bitch
. Now who's helpless and scared?

I grab her hair and pull her head back and watch, with a lot of satisfaction, as she starts the ugly cry. My razors come out. Just regular old razors, not metal knives like the vampire dude, and I slit her binding, taking care not to cut her mouth in the process.

The wailing starts immediately and I slap her.

She shuts up.

Sort of. There are noises still coming out of her mouth, but they are not screams and they are not words. She's trembling, almost convulsing, really, and the tears are streaming down her face.

I lean into her face and whisper, "Listen very carefully, OK?"

She nods emphatically, her eyes darting behind me for a moment. I turn my head slightly and see Tier's boots standing next to me, then take my attention back to my victim.

"Was there a baby in that pink nursery?"

She nods.

"Whose baby was it?"

She looks around frantically. "I don't kn—"

I stand up and kick her hard in the stomach before Tier grabs my arm and tugs me back. "That's enough, Junco." He reaches down and pulls the woman to her feet, standing her up between the two of us. "Tell her where the baby came from. I won't save you again. And next time, it'll be my warrior's boot in your face, so think hard before you answer."

She gulps so much air I'm afraid she's gonna start hyperventilating and we'll have to move on. But she nods at Tier and gets herself under some semblance of control.

"It came out of the Stag labs."

"You fucking lying bitch!" I punch her close-fisted in the face and the anger overtakes me as I knock her ass to the ground. Both Tier and Annun are pulling me off now, and Arel is dragging the woman back to the other side of the room. "That baby was human!" I scream. "Whose baby is it?"

She's hysterical now and can't or won't answer.

My hands are vibrating with the rage that is pouring through my blood. My fingers begin to itch and I scratch at them while my mouth is running off about torture and mutilation. Tier picks me up, throws me over his shoulder and physically removes me from the room as I scream my threats back at her.

He dumps me on the hard floor and every eyeball is suddenly watching us.

They are staring at my hands with a look of revulsion. Utter disgust.

I look down and there they are. The knives are assembling real-time, just like the Pillars do when they climb up into the sky, and I watch with horror as the nanotech inside me creates my new body parts.

"Out!" Tier barks. Avians everywhere are on the move and within a few seconds the room has been cleared. "Junco, don't panic. I'll explain."

My chest is heaving in and out so hard I might have a heart attack. "Oh God. I'm like
him
! Oh, fu—" I stop the curse mid-word and Tier laughs at me.

"Yer fine, OK? So you have knives as claws. It's kinda cool, right?"

I shake my head. "I'm gonna grow fangs and rip things apart with my mouth? Because that's what it looked like he was doing in that picture!"

"I told ya, Juncs. The anger sets it off. It's like Lucan that night when he took ya to the clutch cages. You have to control yourself, or yes. You'll become like him."

I look down at my hands and the tech has stopped growing. They are thin and they look like they can cut paper, that's how tight the edge of the blades look. "Well, there goes my piano career."

Tier's uncharacteristically upbeat mood continues as he takes my hands. "Here, let me show ya. You can make them go away if you just massage the palms of yer hands." His fingertips rub across my left palm and then he moves up each individual finger, being careful not to cut himself, but not entirely succeeding. The blade on my new pinky finger grazes his skin and blood spurts out. He wipes it on his pants and continues until the razors start to un-assemble.

"It feels good."

"Does it now?" he asks as he drops that hand and starts on the other one. "I'll remember that."

I turn back to the interrogation room door. "What about them? She never really explained anything, Tier. She—"

"Junco, the baby in that room was human. Yer records say you were never pregnant. Do you have memories of yer morph that contradict this?"

A sigh escapes as I give in. "No. And I was awake almost the whole time, I think. I don't know for sure, but it felt like a long time before they put me to sleep. And I don't remember my belly getting big, but maybe they took it out and grew it in a tank or something?"

"Maybe," he admits. "Maybe she went to all this trouble of planting human DNA into that room to confuse us. Make us think there was no baby and give up searching. It could've happened that way, I suppose. But it's more likely that she was setting you up the way I said, Juncs. To make you think there
was
a baby when there wasn't. To get you to comply."

"Yeah," I concede. "And there's no way that baby came from Stag Camp, right? I mean, you blew it up, I killed them all once, we got Dale's lab…"

I wait for his answer but it takes a little too long to draw any comfort out of it. "We got them all, Junco."

He stops the massage and when I look back at my hands they are normal again. No blades. "What makes the fangs grow, Tier?"

"Anger. You have to let us take care of this stuff now. No more killing, no torturing," he says with a slight nod towards the closed interrogation room door, "and no more swearing."

I scowl up at him. "Swearing? That's not a trigger, you're lying."

He shrugs out a grin. "Better not chance it though, huh? And one more thing, just so ya know. I'm not saying this to scare you into compliance or anything, I promise. But once you turn it's very hard to
not
turn. Does that makes sense?"

It does. "It has programmed memory or something? Like those little self-assembling toys I had as a kid?"

He looks at me funny. "I never had toys, so—"

Oh, that's kinda sad. I wonder if it's because his human family were such assholes or if avians don't play with toys? I don't ask, I just explain. "You have this little dot of metal and you stick it out in the sun and it grows into a toy. It takes hours to make it assemble the very first time, but if you take away the heat, it collapses back into the dot of metal and the next time you put it in the sun, it grows in seconds."

Tier just stares at me. "That sounds like a pretty cool toy. Yeah, I guess that describes it. The first time ya start to turn, it comes in stages. A claw here, a fang there. Then there's the primary trigger event, that's what they call it. Where all of the different parts emerge at once, making you into the final being."

"Is that the vampire guy?"

"No, Junco. That's a pretty tame version of him, actually. There's more than wings and fangs and claws. They get horns…" He shrugs. "Lots of stuff."

I stop hearing him at horns but my mind continues and it adds hooves against my will.
Oh my fucking God! I'm the Devil! I'm totally gonna turn into the Devil!

"Junco." Tier is shaking me. "Just don't let it happen and you'll never have to worry about those later stages. OK?"

The door to the interrogation room opens and Annun and Arel emerge. I lean a little to get a look inside before they close the door but I only see one thing.

Blood pooling up on the floor.

"All done?" Tier asks.

Both warriors grunt out a yes and continue onto another part of the lab.

"OK, ya satisfied now, Junco? They're all dead. Can we go see Irin? And get the sixth Pillar up today?"

I look around, not quite ready to let all this go. "I've been waiting for my chance to confront people. Any people, ya know? Just someone to ask, what the fuck? Why? And all that now seems out of reach once again. I'm right back where I started, Tier."

He groans. "How the hell do ya figure that, Junco? Yer nothing like the girl I found out on the hill. What more do you possibly need?"

The Enki nargala comes back to me as I process his words. When Inanna was bitching to her uncle that he never gave her what she wanted, he replied with a laundry list of things, and yet she was still not satisfied. She wanted more. "Does it seem unreasonable to you," I ask him, "that I require some sort of closure? Do you think I'm selfish and wild? That I'm… what was it that you said on my birthday? I'm preoccupied with death or something?" I look up and he cringes and turns away as his words come back to haunt him. "And I am, I guess. It consumes me, this drive I have for
something
. Something to make it all OK. To make me feel like everything happened for a reason that will be good for
me
somehow, and not just good for everyone else."

I pause to see if he has anything to add, but he doesn't.

"I'm not really looking for death, Tier. I'm looking for answers. Why? Why did they do this to me? Why did that clone kill that baby? And Charlie? Why me? Why is this my life? How did they make me? For what purpose? Just—why me? How was it that Glory Sheffield down the street from us in the RR was born to a normal family, purely human, went to school—regular school—like all the other kids. Never had to kill anyone, or learn to shoot and throw knives so she could pass tests every summer. Why did she get that life and I got this one?"

He grabs my shoulder and pulls my head into his chest. "Because, Junco, your soul has a destiny. And besides, I'm pretty sure Gloria Stepfield from down the street is dead right now. Blown up in a nuclear explosion."

I sigh a little because he's right as usual. "Sheffield, Glory Sheffield."

"Whoever. My point is, you can't waste time on that kind of stuff. You can't change who you are and I don't know what they did to ya, all growing up. So I can't help ya there. You never tell me anything, you keep me guessing. I know the little bit Isten decided to share with us, and I'll be honest and tell ya that he pissed Lucan off with how tight-lipped he became after the twine. He clammed up fast, so I can only imagine that what he saw inside you scared him pretty bad."

A long drawn-out breath escapes my lips as I pull away and slump down into a station chair. I let me face fall into my hands and drag them across my cheeks.

"Why don't you just ask your father, Junco? I don't get it. He's the one with the answers, just call him up and ask him."

"I don't want to ask him," I mumble between my fingers. "I love him. I want him to be my dad forever. If I ask him," I say, looking up at Tier now, "then I might not love him anymore. I need him, Tier. I need these people from my past. Gideon, and HOUSE, and my dad. Because everyone else is gone. They made me kill James, did you know that? He was the one person at camp that I could trust and—"