But I’m tired too. “I’m tired of pretending. If you love me, and that’s a big if, then you need to love me, Molly. Not Alpha. Not your idea of me as Alpha. Not the fantasy that we are soulmates or lovers interrupted.”
“What are you?” she asks. “What are we?” She’s been thinking since I saw her this morning. Reevaluating, maybe. Time has always been my friend. I am patient. It’s an innate quality inside me. A trait I was born with. It’s surprising considering how impatient I am with most people. But this… scheme we’ve been working towards—I have endless patience for the vengeance I’ve imagined over the years. I will only get one chance at revenge. One chance to retaliate. Once chance to make it right. And all of that has depended on more than a decade of planning and plotting with Case and Thomas to get to this precise point in time.
I hold up a palm and it flashes an orange light bright enough to cast a glow across her face. “It’s an electromagnetic field.”
She blinks.
“A magnet,” I explain.
“Why would they put magnets in your hands?”
“They didn’t,” I say calmly. I’ve never had to explain this to anyone. Case was there. Thomas wasn’t there when I did it, but he was there in the beginning. He knew it was going to happen and he knew why it was happening. And I’m sure his little visit to Mac’s last weekend was a not-so-gentle reminder that this job is about more than me. “I put the magnets in there. There’s a lot of reasons attached to that answer, Molly. But the important one is that they started something with me back when I was a kid. They changed me. And you helped them.”
She shakes her head. “I was forced.”
“I’m not trying to blame you, Molly. I’m just stating facts. No one is holding an eight-year-old responsible for this,” I say, holding up my glowing palms. “Least of all me. The Prodigy School used you to keep me in line. They made you send electrical current through my body—”
“Electrocute you?” She rubs her temples with her fingertips, trying to massage away the truth.
“Yes. Basically. It was part of their Genesis plan. To create superhumans. Larger-than-life people who could hold power and manipulate things that no one else could. People who looked normal, but weren’t. But the administrators who ran the school couldn’t become superhumans themselves. They needed children to do that.”
“Oh, God.”
“And what better children to use than their own? Who would miss a rich kid sent off to boarding school?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“You had parents. I had parents. Everyone has parents. They put us in that school, Molly.”
“I can’t believe it,” she says, shaking her head.
“My father too, so you’re not alone. Case is special, he was taken as a payment on a debt. His family never gave him up willingly and after we escaped, they cared for me and all my special considerations until I turned eighteen.”
She waits for it.
So do I. I have never told anyone this and I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to be able to say the words out loud. “I am… was made… I was changed into—”
“Just say it, Lincoln,” Molly whispers. “Just tell me what the fuck is happening.”
“I’m not who or what you think, Molly. Sheila said she told you about my programming skills. How I write computer languages. How I use her as a vector to change code in computers. And if that was all I did, it might not be so bad. I don’t just reprogram machines, Molly. I reprogram people.”
“You did that to me, didn’t you? That drug you gave me after I ran away in the snow.”
I nod. “It rewrote your DNA, changed your memory. It acts like a flu virus. But in your case it was temporary. All DNA degrades over time. It was supposed to wear off gradually over many years. A bit here, a bit there until all the bad code was reprogrammed once again, using another dormant virus included in the drug cocktail. I didn’t take it away.” God, this is so hard to explain. Because I did take her memory away. “I wanted you to remember, Molly. I did. I made sure you’d recover those memories, I just thought it would take a little longer. I didn’t expect it to happen while you were still so young and so…” My words trail off, because what I want to say is ‘desirable.’ It would be so much easier if she wasn’t so perfect. So beautiful. If she didn’t have so many years ahead of her. How could I ever walk out now?
I can’t. I won’t.
“You rewrote those scientists,” she says, refocusing me back to our conversation.
“Yes. I rewrote them. Changed them. Made them want to commit suicide once I activated nerve centers in their brains using a special light pattern.”
She stares at me for a second, like she’s putting the pieces together. “You killed another one, didn’t you?”
I nod.