Page 48 of Gluttony
A masculine clearing of a throat near the door.
Parker tried not to look at them but gestured at the IV stand. “Doc said he’ll need his fluids replenished.”
Bailey slid out from beneath Tony and helped him settle back down. When she pulled her hand from his front, he grabbed it and frowned. “Don’t go.”
She gave him a small smile. “Wasn’t dreaming of it.”
But while Parker busied himself around the room, preparing the IV drip, she couldn’t help the niggling thoughts entering her mind. She’d somehow talked Tony off the ledge, basically kissed his pain away, but despite what she said about knowing him, she didn’t. Only moments earlier he’d been flirting with another woman in front of the lobby. If they were meant to have some kind of soulmate connection, maybe it wasn’t as solid as they’d led her to believe. Perhaps she wasn’t as strong as she thought. Perhaps she could be ruined again, because Tony was fast becoming the addiction she worked so hard to control. What had she gotten herself into?
Fifteen
“So you see,”said the Dutch geneticist Levi Van Jansen to Julius Allcott. “The new replicates are proceeding as planned.”
Van Jansen was a man in his late fifties. He had experience in the industry and was without scruples. After the betrayal of Pinkerton, and the disaster with his lab partner, Julius had head-hunted Van Jansen. He’d scoured the world’s top journals, awards and research projects, and then found the man who’d been too forward thinking for society to appreciate. He’d found the man who’d had his funding stripped and been vilified in the media. He’d found Van Jansen. The stodgy man with white hair had fluff growing out of his ears. He had dirt under his nails and saggy eyelids, but he was a creative genius. Julius should have hired him long ago. He’d done in months what Pinkerton had failed to do in years.
Finally, there was hope.
Van Jansen tapped on the tank of a young man floating within the viscous amniotic fluid and squinted at the replicate body. It had taken eighteen months to grow this sixteen-year-old body. His shoulders were broadening, his body developing into pure muscle and strength. At his current growth rate, he’d be fully grown in less than six months.
Julius strode along the vast collection of seventy-five glass tanks. Half contained the pubescent bodies of replicates, waiting to be born; the other half contained varying prepubescent and youthful bodies, still in early stages of growth. They would belong to the second wave of attack on the sinners of the world.
It had been almost eighteen months since Envy had destroyed the initial replicate lab and eliminated all functioning clones. At first, Julius had been furious, outraged, but eventually saw that they had done him a favor. The first round of clones were imperfect, only living a few months before expiring. None were powered with special abilities, not like these. Not since they’d gathered the unlocked DNA samples from half the Lazarus family. But Julius aimed for more. He wanted eternal. He wanted life everlasting with his family.
“It is imperative these new replicates are born without flaw,” he stated.
“I am confident that with the new DNA samples we’ve gathered from the original test subjects, we can reach perfection. We are almost there.”
“How many more unlocked samples do you need?”
“We’ve already isolated the genome sequence that unlocked their powers. Any more samples will just give us new paths to new abilities. What we need is to solve the expiration problem.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
“I have been looking over the notes of my predecessors and believe there has been something they’ve been keeping from you.”
“This is?”
“Stem cells.”
Julius glanced over at the door to the warehouse where two soldiers guarded the entrance. He wanted no one else within earshot. If Van Jansen was correct, this would be valuable information to his enemies, and to the rest of the Syndicate. When he was satisfied no one listened, he turned back to Van Jansen.
“Please explain.”
“Your first creator, the woman who made the Deadly Seven.”
“Gloria.”
“Yes, Gloria. She was the surrogate for each child born, was she not?”
“Correct.”
“So she had full control over the biological samples of all projects?”
“Yes.”
“Were there any failed experiments prior to Despair?”
“There were a few. Maybe two.”
