“Have you figured out how to save me yet, Ely?” he asked conversationally, as though they were talking about anything other than his death.
“I haven’t yet, Phillip.” She shook her head. “I told you, I need your help.”
She had to have the recipe he’d used for the formula he’d injected himself with. The recipe he’d injected Amber with. He refused to tell them, certain that if he held that information back, then they would have to figure out how to save him, to save the child.
That theory wasn’t working very well. They couldn’t figure it out. The drug seemed to have mutated inside him, whereas they could no longer find traces of it inside Amber.
In a matter of no more than eight weeks, the changes that had been wrought in Phillip Brandenmore were horrifying. But other than a few anomalies, Amber seemed to be thriving as any other infant would be.
“What if I wasn’t certain?” he mused when she said nothing more. “What if the recipe was one I found, the notes indicating success?”
Ely froze.
She stared at the files she’d pulled up on the holo-comp’s grid and prayed he’d continue with his musings. Sometimes he did, sometimes he didn’t.
“Are you listening to me, Ely?” he asked.
“I’m listening, Phillip,” she assured him with apparent absentmindedness as she continued as though she were concentrating on the files on the grid.
She heard him sigh heavily.
“I’m dying Ely,” he stated. “I wasn’t supposed to die.”
“You killed yourself, Phillip,” she reminded him.
A rough chuckle sounded from him, a wheezing, ugly sound.
“Angels await me,” he sighed.
“Last I heard demons inhabit hell, Phillip.”
“Fallen angels, beauty and grace, the most beautiful of God’s angels. Then man thought he could be God, and create a creature in his image. Beings of beauty and grace. And they betrayed us, as do all beings betray their maker.”
She shuddered at the reverence in his tone and the sense of omnipotence in his words.
“If we couldn’t control the creations, could we become the creations?”
Ely turned slowly.
He was watching her. Sly. Knowing. He knew she was listening to every word that passed his lips.
“Project Omega.” He nodded to the file on the screen. “It came from there. From where her Breed was created. From where he was trained. From where his brother died.”
Ely knew that. Brandenmore had funded that lab. He had researched there. He had tortured Breeds there.
Ely turned back to the files, staring at them. He always talked about the Omega lab. It was his favorite of those he’d worked within and those he’d funded. It was there the mated couples they’d found were taken, and there that the breakthroughs in mating heat had been made.
The answers to the formula he’d injected himself with had to be there. It could save him, and she wasn’t certain she was doing anyone a favor in saving him. But in saving him, they would save Amber as well.
“He controls his animal,” Brandenmore sighed. “Ahh, such training. Such insight into the Breed mentality and creation there, even all those years ago. Insight into the genetics, into training, into the psychology and physiology of each Breed. They were the masters of genetics.”
He rambled and Ely let him. Unobtrusively she turned on the lab recorder rather than relying on security video and audio alone.
And as she pretended to ignore him, pretended not to believe him, for the first time Phillip Brandenmore gave out a few clues, just enough for her to start working on, just a few directions to lead her to the answers she needed.
And, she prayed, at least a clue as to the direction to take to save Mica.
What now?