“This is where everything started, Miss Valentine,” Dr. Cylon explained, her voice barely more than a whisper. Her eyes were intent on the scene below her, watching it with a mix of adoration and pride, like she was watching her child learn to walk for the first time. “This is where Sekhmet was born. This is where the Z virus was created, and the victims were…awakened, as you would say.”
I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts, to get a sense on the situation that was in front of me. This was too much. “You created the virus as well?”
“That was the beginning of everything. That was the plan from the beginning,” she said. She ran a hand through her hair and gestured for me to sit down in one of chairs in front of the desk.
There was a loud thump as I sunk into the chair. I felt like I was going to pass out and immediately ducked, putting my head between my legs.
“Are you not feeling quite well? Do you require anything?” Her accent made everything she said sound so incredibly charming, but her words were toxic and hard to process.
I shook my head and sat up. “But why? Why would you create the virus? Why would you awaken the victims? It’s sick! People are dying!”
“As they should,” she said softly, but fiercely. Her eyes fell on the lone picture frame on her desk, and her expression softened for a moment. She flipped it around, and I saw the face of a young man, handsome, looking much like the woman sitting across from me. “This is my son. His name was David.”
I swallowed hard. “Was?”
“He died.” Her words were hard, blunt. “Four years ago, when he was eighteen years old.”
“I’m sorry,” I blurted out without thinking.
She nodded, a hard sadness in her eyes. “Ever since he died, I’ve been on this cause, working my way up the ranks at the CDC, creating this facility, doing what I can to change this world.”
She took a deep breath. “David was a beautiful person, the most beautiful person I have ever met in my life, and I do not say this only as his mother. He was intelligent and kind and so incredibly selfless. He could have done so much.”
“I worked hard, going to school, doing everything I could to give him the best life I was capable of. His father wasn’t around. But we did the best we could, the two of us.” Dr. Cylon sighed, remembering. “When he was fourteen years old, he came to me and told me that he was gay, that he had known for a while that he was gay and could not keep it a secret from me any longer.”
I was mesmerized, addicted to the story. I had no idea what it had to do with the Awakened or the existence of this facility, but I had a feeling I was going to find out.
“I was shocked, but I think deep down I had always known this about him. We had come from a traditional family, but I loved my son, more than life itself. I loved him no matter who he chose to love.”
Her hands reached for the portrait again, and she picked it up, looking down at the face of her son adoringly. “The world, it would seem, did not feel the same. He always had a hard time being accepted, but he took it with so much strength. He held his head up high. When he left for university, I had no doubt in my mind that he would succeed.”
“It was two weeks before his winter holidays that I got the phone call. He had not shown up for finals, none of them. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, but he was an avid student, and I assumed he was too busy studying. It was no matter of concern; I would see him in a few days.”
“What happened?” I whispered.
“He was killed, murdered by two of his fellow students,” Dr. Cylon said, her voice returning to its harsh nature. “They followed him one night as he left the library late at night. They invited him out for drinks, but they had no intention of friendship. They beat him until he stopped breathing.”
I gasped. “That’s horrible.”
“Yes. It tore me apart. David was the beginning and the end of everything that mattered to me. His death nearly killed me.” She took a deep breath and straightened herself up. “But it gave me a mission, Zoey.”
I felt my heart sink.
“The world is wrong. The world is broken. When we came to this earth, whatever way you believe, we were a clean slate. But over the thousands of years that we’ve been here, we have dirtied that slate. We’ve become an embarrassment, an abomination of the species. We are weak. We need to start over.”
“I created the virus. It was so easy to do,” she said, a note of pride in her voice. My sympathy over the loss of her son was dissipating quickly. “It was created to target the immune system. Those with the strongest immune systems would survive. I wanted the strongest of us all to survive. We released it in the water supply. So simple.”
“I don’t see the point,” I admitted, my voice low. “Why kill off those with weak immune systems?”