Gameboard of the Gods

“Oh?” Leo gave her a searching look. “How do you feel about that?”

“That it’s my job.”

“Yeah, but it’s not exactly ideal for someone like you. I know how prætorians work.”

Yes, she thought. I’m sure you do.

“Prætorians do what they’re supposed to,” she said.

“They certainly do,” he said, a bit of bitterness in his voice.

After a little more small talk, Leo moved on to the reason she’d asked to come over today. If she’d learned anything about him, it was that his curiosity could trump a lot of his other more cautious feelings. Justin shared the same trait.

“So,” Leo said, ushering her into his lab. “I’m happy to run your blood. I just don’t get why you want me to do it.”

“Just a hunch,” she said.

The room looked completely chaotic, but Leo had no difficulty finding a box of new syringes among all the metal and glass. “It’s going to take a few hours to process,” he said once the blood was drawn. He suddenly looked very uncomfortable. “I’ll have to check on it occasionally…but if you want to, I don’t know…get something to eat…”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, saving him from entertaining her. “I have some work to do, and I wouldn’t mind taking a walk in your fields. I’ll check back later.”

In truth, Mae had no work to do. There was a call she wanted to make, but she couldn’t do it yet and wanted to be in her own home for it anyway. She’d been telling the truth about the fields and set off into them, admiring the neat rows of grapes that were starting to climb their posts. Wine making was a mystery to her, but Dominic had clearly put in a lot of work, and maintaining this land would certainly be a very good excuse not to get out much.

Justin thinks he’s just paranoid and antisocial, she thought. He thinks that’s why Leo wanted him left out of the official report. Maybe it really was that simple. After all, Justin was the allegedly brilliant master of deduction. Mae, though she believed herself intelligent, would never claim to have his powers of reading other people. She did, however, put a lot of faith in her instincts. Following them was how she’d survived, and they were now telling her something very different from what Justin believed about Dominic.

Thinking of Justin turned her mind toward other areas. She hadn’t had a chance to have much more than written contact with him, but he’d been in her thoughts a lot. Once again, he’d managed to confuse her perceptions of him. The man whose face had been filled with fierceness and affection as he risked his life with Emil bore little resemblance to the callous one who told her she was no longer interesting in bed. And always, always, the memory of the lover in Panama refused to leave her. All of those images had struck her deeply. She couldn’t forget any of them. And she couldn’t forgive one.

Her hardened heart’s resolve was made slightly more complicated by continued calls and messages from Lucian. His latest request had been that she and Justin come as “honored guests” to a fund-raiser. Lucian had written: We could have a dance or two, and no one would blink an eye. Mae had yet to respond.

She eventually pushed all these considerations aside and returned to the house as the sky was turning purple. When she saw Leo’s shocked face, her alarms went off. Maybe he’d guessed her conclusions about Dominic.

“What is it?” she asked.

He shook his head, amazement all over him. “Something you won’t believe.”

“You might be surprised at what I’d believe these days.”

He led her to side-by-side screens. Each held what she recognized as DNA sequencing, along with numbers that made no sense to her. “This is what you sent a couple weeks ago, your full genetic analysis from the military,” he said, pointing to one. “And here’s the one I just ran on you now. They’re not the same.” He glanced over at her when she made no response. “You’re not surprised.”

“I am…,” she said slowly. “Well, I don’t know. Obviously I wouldn’t have had you do it if I didn’t think there was something weird about it, but I didn’t really know what to expect. Maybe the military sent you someone else’s records.”

“I’d believe that if the results they sent were completely different from these. But theirs is almost like this one. When you compare theirs to the real thing, it’s obvious theirs has been altered. It’s been altered in a way to make it look more…real.”

“What else would it be?” she asked.

“It would look like this.” He tapped the screen on the right. “You’ve got a genetic makeup exactly like the patrician victims. Indescribably perfect. Beautifully crafted genes. Someone did a very good job of putting believable flaws into the one the military has. I never would’ve guessed it was fake if I didn’t have obvious proof here that this is you.”

He almost sounded embarrassed at his oversight, but she supposed a technical genius would consider this a big failing. As for her, she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen or still the racing of her heart.

“The last crazy piece,” she said in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. “This makes it official.”

“After everything that’s happened, ‘crazy’ is kind of becoming the status quo. I mean, you’re a designer baby created through either breakthrough genetic manipulation or the intervention of a goddess. And after what I saw that night…” No more swagger from Leo. “Well, I don’t know what I believe. I’m still on the side of science, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t unnerved that you and Justin haven’t been nearly as shocked by this stuff as you should be. That kind of freaks me out.”

“Speaking from the side of science, can you think of a reason for why the military would have altered genetic information on me?” she asked.

Leo lost his philosophical air and turned wry. “I learned a long time ago that there’s nothing the military won’t do. They have secrets within secrets….” He hesitated. “Especially with prætorians.”

She held his gaze. “You really do know a lot about prætorians.”

“I’m not up-to-date on them anymore.” He gave her a smile they both knew was faked. “I’m just a guy who works on birth control.”

After they finished up, she declined his offer to stay the night. Neither would’ve enjoyed it. There was a late train going back to Vancouver, and sleep didn’t matter to her. It did matter for a phone call she wanted to make, and the night passed slowly as she waited for the world to wake up. She tried reading and watching movies, but her mind couldn’t focus on any of it. At last, morning approached, and she decided it was a reasonable enough hour in New Stockholm to call her mother.

Astrid Koskinen answered, groomed to her usual state of perfection. Mae hadn’t woken her up, which hopefully meant she’d be in a cooperative mood.

“Maj, what a surprise. We’ve had more contact this month than we have in a year. I’m surprised you can take time from your fame and glory to check in on your family. Everyone’s talking about the little scene you made during your visit.”

Only her mother could call shooting someone in public a “little scene.” Mae wasn’t surprised the locals had discovered she was the prætorian involved. It was enough to have just stayed out of the national media.

“You lied to me,” Mae said. “You told me you just made a genetic deal, that there wasn’t any connection to a religion. But that’s not true. I remember! I was in her temple. You took me. My story matches a dozen others. We were all given those crow pendants. How could you do that? How could you pay that kind of price for a perfect baby?”

Her mother’s lack of shock was answer enough. “There you go again with using ‘perfect’ all the time. You certainly have a high opinion of yourself.”

“Someone else died for me. You bound me to a death goddess. You wiped out the family’s finances.”

“No,” spat her mother. “You wiped them out when you chose duty to a uniform over duty to us. We’re one of the few families with more Finnish in our blood than Swedish. Do you know how rare that is?”

“Duty to you? You had a loan you couldn’t repay. You gambled that you could sell me off for a profit, and your plan failed.”

“I failed at a lot of things, Maj. I should never have allowed your father the liberties I did. When he confronted me about your conception, I panicked. I never would’ve let him have the influence he did if I’d known it would ruin you.”

“His influence was the only thing that saved me!” Hearing her father belittled hurt Mae as much as the slight against the military. As she spoke, her childhood flashed through her mind—and more important, the way it had differed from Cyrus and Claudia’s. Always, always, their mother had controlled every aspect of Mae’s siblings’ lives. But not Mae’s. Her mother had glared and grumbled, but she’d stepped aside as Mae’s father encouraged her in canne and let her skip so many of the grueling teas and etiquette lessons customary in the Nordic upper classes. It wasn’t until her father’s death that her mother had finally taken over with a vengeance.

“Was that the deal you made with him?” Mae asked. “He kept quiet about what you’d done, so long as he could raise me? Was that why I didn’t have to join that deranged cult?”

Mae’s mother closed her eyes, finally letting pain show in her face. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. “You didn’t have to join because whenever I brought you to them, you made a scene. After a while, they asked me to stop and simply instruct you at home, through lessons and occasional visits from their priests. You didn’t react well to that either. You woke the whole household with your screaming.”

Mae reeled. All the nightmares that had tormented her before she joined the prætorians were the result of this unholy deal, her subconscious way of coping with something so twisted. “Dad stopped it, didn’t he? The home instruction, the visits. He couldn’t stand to see me go through that torment.”