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Having almost forgotten it, Lilith set the necklace back in its case and tore into the envelope. It was written in English, but Lilith had command of the written language as much as she did the spoken one.
The key is in the spider. Use it wisely.
Welcome to your new life.
Jackie (A)
“Welcome to your new life….” Sister Peter read over Lilith’s shoulder. “What does she mean by that?”
“I do not know. The key is in the spider….”
Lilith scooped up the box and stood. She pulled out the spider and studied it from all sides. Turning it on its back, she spotted a seam in the gold. Using her thumb, she pushed and pulled until the back slid open. Inside was a small silver rectangular device that Lilith didn’t recognize.
“I know what that is,” Sister Peter said. “It’s a memory stick.”
Lilith shook her head. “I do not know….”
“A flash drive. You insert this into the back of the computer in one of the USB ports. It stores files. Like a floppy disk or a CD only smaller and with more space. It means there is information on it. Information you can view if you plug it into the computer.”
“I do not understand. Why would she send me computer files? Here? And the letter A next to her name. I thought her last name was Webb. None of this makes any sense.”
“Then make sense of it. Read what’s on the files. You’ve probably got a few hours of battery life on this laptop. That should give you enough time to sort through whatever it is she wanted you to have.”
Lilith took the memory stick from Sister Peter and put it back into the spider’s belly.
“I was supposed to go to the monastery for study this afternoon,” she said absently. She had also thought that maybe today she would overcome whatever was holding her back and stop in to check on the visitor’s condition. She’d wanted to see for herself that he was doing well and that his leg was getting better.
And if she were honest with herself, she wanted to talk to him without him being delirious this time. Given his improving condition, it seemed likely he would be leaving soon. This could be her last chance.
“I have to go back up in a few hours to check on your friend’s bandages and to make sure he isn’t pushing himself too hard. I’ll let them know you’ve been detained.”
“I feel anxious, though. Reading what is on this computer. What if it is private? What if this is a mistake and Jackie simply sent this ahead of her arrival?”
“If it was a mistake she wouldn’t have written the note. And if it was that private she wouldn’t have sent it to you at all.”
“I know one thing for certain. I do not want a new life,” Lilith said adamantly, referring to Jackie’s message. “This is my life. I cannot imagine why she would write such a thing.”
Sister Peter shook her head and smiled sadly. “Oh, Lilith, this isn’t a life. This is an escape. Trust me, I know.”
“That is not true.” Lilith was stunned by the sister’s words. “I am needed here. I contribute. I belong here.”
“Of course you contribute. And yes, you are welcomed here. I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t. Only that… Well, you didn’t get to choose this place. It was chosen for you. You didn’t get to decide what you wanted to do with your life. It was decided for you.”
“Not decided,” Lilith corrected her. “Dictated. Dictated by my condition. You have seen what I can do. I have no other choice.”
“Yes, I’ve seen what you can do,” she allowed. “But you don’t know if your condition can be treated. You have never tried to leave this place to find out. Accept the truth. You were sent here as a punishment by your family. A punishment you didn’t deserve because you couldn’t possibly help what happened.”
“I have never spoken of what happened,” Lilith said quietly. “You do not know what I did.”
“I know it must have been bad for your father to do what he did, but I also know you were a child. Barely thirteen when you were abandoned here. You stay in this place to punish yourself for this wrong you feel you’ve committed. That’s not living life. That’s suffering in purgatory.”
Lilith recognized the word from Sister Joseph’s many sermons. Purgatory was a place you went after death to atone for your sins before moving on to heaven.
Glancing around the village, she saw the small huts and so many of the thin, suffering bodies that filled them. There were good days here, but she couldn’t deny that most of them were filled with pain. Pain she could only ease for a little while.
Maybe Sister Peter was right. Maybe this was purgatory.
But that didn’t mean that Lilith didn’t belong here.
Chapter 3
The screen turned black as she continued to press her finger down on the power button. Lilith wasn’t sure if it was the proper way to stop the computer but it was the only thing she could think of to make the words go away. And she so desperately needed to make them go away.
If you’re reading this I’m dead….
The awful part was that Jackie being dead was the least disturbing piece of information in her files.
Genetic experiments. A new breed of powerful women. My offspring. My daughters.
Shaking her head, Lilith tried to remove the flashes of phrases that were burned behind her eyes, but they wouldn’t let go of her. She couldn’t unread what she’d read or unlearn what she’d learned. It would be with her now. Always.
Surrogate mother…two others created of my eggs…each of you now has a piece of my empire… Put the pieces together and all will be revealed… This is a taste…
Hungry yet?
Hungry? A taste?
Empire.
That word stood out among the rest. It was the word Jackie used to describe the endless amounts of folders on her memory stick. Some of the folders were names. Names that even in the far reaches of Arunachal Pradesh Lilith recognized. Leaders of the world, who had lied, cheated, raped and killed. Sinners, all of them, who paid money to hide their crimes rather than admit their mistakes and be punished for them. Vaguely Lilith wondered if they hadn’t simply created their own version of a lifelong purgatory.
And there was more. So many folders that she couldn’t open, but after what she’d already read she couldn’t imagine going any further. Couldn’t conceive of wanting to know more than she did.
Closing the lid on the laptop, she stood and moved away from it. Lilith knew she would never be able to move as far away from the machine as she needed to be to forget. She didn’t believe the world was that big.
Jackie Webb, Arachne as she’d referred to herself, was Lilith’s biological mother. That had been in the first folder Lilith read. The documents indicated that the woman in whose womb she’d grown had been nothing more than an incubator for a genetic experiment. Had she known when she agreed to do this what they were putting inside her? Did she have a choice?
Did she ever suspect that the baby she was giving life to would ultimately poison and kill its host?
The impact of what this meant, of what she’d learned, was suddenly too much to handle. It was like having the secrets of the universe revealed all at once. Her mortal mind was too fragile to take it in. She needed to leave. She needed to find someplace where she could let the information settle in her head and in her heart.
The monastery. There she could clean herself. In the garden she could let the water rush over her body, taking away the filth she’d been exposed to. She would remember who she was—not what the computer had revealed but who she had become since her birth.
Lilith started for the opening to the hut but stopped. The computer sat on her writing table, so out of place in the stark space she’d called home for these last ten years. She could still feel the heat it gave off. Or was what she was feeling something more sinister? Part of her wanted to destroy the computer and the tiny piece of metal inside it. But she knew she couldn’t. The information it contained was simply too important.
Walking back to it, she removed the stick from the back of the computer and found the spider necklace still nestled inside the box she’d place on her table. She turned it over and slid open the back, returning the flash drive to its hiding place. Leaving the necklace wasn’t an option, but the thought of wearing it made her shudder.
She had no choice.
Lilith pulled the gold chain around her neck and fastened the catch in the back. Then she tucked the gold body inside her silk coverall where it rested against her skin, safe from another’s touch.
Avoiding the greetings from the villagers and, more important, avoiding Sister Peter, who would have nothing but questions, she made her way up the steep hill to the monastery.
Another young monk answered the summons at the door. Pema had recently been sent to the monastery by his family in Nepal. If the beads of sweat that habitually formed on his shaved head were any indication, he still hadn’t gotten used to the weighted heat.
Lilith spoke in a dialect native to his land, one that she remembered from her childhood in Nepal, and he smiled. Thinking she had come for study, he pointed to where she knew Punab typically held his classes, but instead she made for the inner courtyard fashioned with water pumps and basins where the monks did their bathing as well as their laundry.
Winding her way through the series of walkways, Lilith found the center of the building. The burst of color inside the garden was so comforting she could have wept. This was the place she came from. The place where she’d begun to learn who she was. Not that other place. Not some lab.
Carefully she reached out and touched the delicate petals of the orchids that flourished under the brothers’ care. So much like her own skin, she thought. Soft and silklike with just a hint of dew. Sometimes others thought she glowed. It hadn’t been a curse as her father believed. It wasn’t a sickness like the nuns suggested.
What had been done to her had been done on purpose. By Jackie.
Frowning, Lilith let the flower fall from her hand and made her way deeper into the courtyard where she found a series of pumps. Taking a large clay bowl with a flat bottom that had been specifically designated for her use, she placed it under the pump and began to call up water from the well that resided under the brick building.
In deference to her sex, she sought out the three-sided partition that the brothers had constructed for her. It allowed her privacy during her bath as well as prevented the monks from being tempted by her femininity should they stumble upon her. Once behind it she felt free to unwrap the bindings that encased her.
Tarak winced. He felt the pinch in his thigh with every step he took and figured he was overdoing it, but he wouldn’t let himself stop. In a sick way, he was happy to feel the pain. It reminded him that he had a leg. His fault, he told himself. When he’d arrived at the monastery’s doorstep he hadn’t been paying attention to the nagging pain in his thigh. Only the one in his soul.
Eventually the fever had overtaken him to the point where he’d known he was in trouble. Spending more time in the jungle than most, he’d seen what fever unchecked by medicine could do to a man. A merciless thief, it could rob a man of his strength, then his sanity, until finally it took his life.
Lucky him, he’d been spared both his life and his sanity. Or had he?
Images still haunted him from that night when the monks had come to his room. It seemed otherworldly. Surely a sign that he’d lost his mind. There had been two women with Punab. A plain-faced one, simple and forthright. She’d wiped his brow and told him to hold on—that someone was coming to take away the pain. He’d felt the fire in his body. The heat was focused most intensely where the bullet had ripped through the flesh of his upper thigh.
He remembered lying in his sweat thinking that the heat was good. The pain was good. He deserved it. He’d earned it. Everyone else had died. But he had lived and for that he needed to suffer.
He wanted to tell the woman in the rumpled white habit that he craved the pain. Because not only was it punishment, it was proof. Proof that he was alive. That he’d been smarter than the enemy who had betrayed him. There was satisfaction in that even though his men were dead.
Where had it gone wrong?
Tarak stopped in his wanderings. He reached down to massage the muscles around the wound, working his fingers deep into his leg to ease the cramps. When he looked up, the colors of the garden exploded before his eyes and he realized he’d made it from his room to the center-court orchid garden.
He wanted to appreciate the beauty in front of him, but instead his mind kept working back to the question that had stayed with him every day since the incident.
How had he failed?
He could ignore the lingering questions. Accept what happened and move on. Tell himself that it was the job. The risk they all took. But he knew himself well enough to know he never would.
Instead he let himself think back to the specifics of the mission.
He took himself back to the compound outside of Monteria, Colombia. It wasn’t hard. The sweet scent of the orchids reminded him of another jungle on the other side of the ocean.
Back there it had been darker and the stench almost rancid. The rain hadn’t just fallen on their heads, it had cascaded. But they all knew the job, and rain wasn’t something they let get in the way. Six soldiers. All contracted by the CIA. Tarak had been chosen to lead.
Mistake number one, he thought grimly. He’d allowed the CIA to pick some of the team rather than do it himself. The soldier-of-fortune community was a relatively small one. In the years since he’d left MI-6 to work on his own as a freelance agent, he’d come to know most of the regular players. Those who did it for the money. Those who did it for the thrill. Those who wanted to serve but had been disenchanted by bureaucratic bullshit getting in the way of action. Like him.
But that night there were two people the CIA told him to use. One he knew and considered a friend. The other a stranger, but not new to the game, he’d been told. Those two people were responsible for providing intelligence information. The rest of the unit was to engage the compound where it was suspected that a DEA agent was being held. Their mission had been to confirm that the hostage was alive and to extract him if possible.
A task like that relied more on intel than it did on men with guns. That was why two had been chosen to gather and provide the information that the team would need.
Tarak knew one of the two was a traitor.
Unfortunately his first clue that the mission had gone to shit was when he heard shots being fired ahead of schedule. He hadn’t given the command to move forward but the explosives were suddenly triggered. A shower of gunfire over their heads had them all running for cover. The guerillas working for the drug lord were behind them in the jungle instead of at their posts inside the compound where they were supposed to be.
Tarak had immediately called for a retreat but their communication had been compromised and all he’d heard was static.
He’d found the bodies of Sheppard, O’Neill and Grace on his way out. All of them his men. It had been Grace, clinging to his last breath, that had cost Tarak the wound to his leg. He’d been lifting him when he got hit from behind. By the time he fell to his knees Grace was already dead.
His only recourse had been to run.
Once more Tarak kneaded the muscles in his leg, harder this time so he could feel the pain and remind himself that he was alive.
Why had fate saved him? Was he a better man? He doubted it.
Sheppard had been a money-hungry bastard but good at his work. O’Neill had been a marvel with explosives, and he had taken an unnatural thrill in blowing things up. But Grace was neither. Grace had been a friend. A loner. A good soldier. He’d had Tarak’s back more than once. He’d been trustworthy and in the soldier-for-hire business that kind of reputation was gold.
And now his body was rotting someplace in a South American jungle. Food for the native inhabitants.
Grace didn’t deserve that. None of them did. On the way out of that mess what consumed Tarak was why he had survived. He could see no reason why fate had been so kind to him. The dark thoughts had forced him to seek answers, and the only place he could think to begin such a journey was here. Among his mother’s people.
He’d been right. After a few weeks at the monastery with help from his mother’s uncle, Punab, he’d started to realize it was time to let go of the guilt. Time to move on with this life.
Which ultimately led him to the question…what next? He’d been thinking about his future when the fever had grabbed hold of him. It had occurred to him, even as he felt his fever spiking, that the wound in his leg should have been healing. Only it hadn’t been.
The next thing he knew he was waking up in a dark room with a nun wearing a sweat-stained wimple leaning over him.
And there was the other nun. With the strange habit and the skin that seemed to glow.
Tarak shook his head. It had been the fever. It must have been. It had grabbed control of his mind and had shown him ridiculous images. A woman who glowed with gray eyes that did not fit her face.
Had she even been real?
The answer to his question had him gasping. He moved around one of the orchid bunches in his path and froze. His breath caught as he tried to process what he was seeing.
He watched a waif—for surely she was not human—carefully sponge water over her arm, her breasts, her belly and her hips. Letting the droplets crawl down her body into a flat basin under her feet.
Tarak was on the east side of the compound, away from where he knew the monks studied in the morning. He would have expected the courtyard to be empty until noon, but here was the mystery woman from his delirium in the midst of her bath. The partition she used to block the view of onlookers closed her off to the west side of the courtyard, but she obviously hadn’t expected anyone to be walking along the east corridor.
There was no question it was her. He knew without seeing the color of her eyes. They were closed. Maybe to better feel the touch of the sponge and water as she ran the rough material over her body. Or maybe simply because she’d gotten soap in her eyes. Whatever the reason, he was grateful because it kept her from being aware of his presence for a time. With the three-sided screen at her back it was as if she was on display just for him.
His personal Venus.
He’d been wrong about the fever stealing his sanity. Her skin did glow. A luminescent sheen that made her almost ethereal. He yearned to touch her. It wasn’t just the natural hunger of man for a woman. Although based on his body’s quick and urgent response there was that as well. It was like being in the presence of art. Like a marble statue that cried out to be caressed. Only this woman wasn’t cold stone, she was living flesh.
She dropped low to dip her sponge in the water, swishing it about. Her eyes opened. He could see her lashes flicker as she concentrated on her calves. Then she reached her hand over her back, the sponge barely making it a quarter of the way down her spine. Suddenly the temptation to help her finish the job was too much.
He stepped forward, forgetting to accommodate his injury by letting his right leg take the bulk of his weight, and a rush of pain shot from his thigh to his brain, forcing a small sound past his lips.
