MOTHERS

◙fifteen◙

"Was that..." Rivo wiped a splatter of blood from his cheek. "Was that the director of this place?"

Lola glanced down at the man's head rolling up to her feet, his eyes still wide open, his jaw unhinged in shock. "Yes, it was." She set her boot atop his scalp, stopping his progress, and bent down to pick him up by his hair. She held him up in front of her, scrutinizing every inch of his quickly decaying face. "My puncture wound in his lung wouldn't have killed him right away."

"Did you not want me to kill him?" Rivo approached and sniffed at the head. "I sensed his fear, but I also sensed your agitation. I thought..."

Lola sucked in a deep breath of the death-permeated air, the reek of the remains of Rivo's laser beam attack, the searing smoke left in his wake.

He can't read my mind like I can read his—he couldn't have known what my plans were for this one.

Her nostrils wrinkled at the slow stench of blood as it dripped down her arms, coming from the severed nerves and veins dangling from the man's head.

"You could have interrogated him, Lola. He might have been essential to getting out of that laboratory. Now you must make do without him. You know your instructions—we've given you all you need."

Lola nodded to the whisper—a full-fledged female voice in her brain—and dropped the head to the ground, ignoring her urge to kick it and watch it smoosh against the wall, the nose crushing, crunching with every broken bone. Or she could smash it, admire it as the eyeballs popped out and the teeth exploded beneath her shoe.

Her progenitors—they'd confirmed that they were—had listed out tasks for her once Rivo had liberated her from her room. Once she'd caught the scent of the oxygen outside of her confinement, once she'd seen the hallways the humans used to navigate. Her people had told her so much, in so little time; quick and concise sentences that conveyed all the answers she'd been seeking, all the knowledge she'd been so thirsty to obtain.

Only now, all that information swirled about in her brain, and she wasn't sure what to do with it, how much of it to reveal to Rivo, how much of it to keep for herself. There'd been no instruction on that part; what exactly to say to her siblings and how to convince them she had a connection to their true creators, to their bloodline.

"I didn't want him dead, not yet. But it's past the time to decide that now. We should have kept him alive, interrogated him. They need intelligence from him." Lola spun to face Rivo, wincing at his bold, bright eyes shining through the lingering haze.

"They?" Rivo's eyebrows raised, but he showed no emotion, no expression. He hadn't seen the carnage he'd already caused, hadn't thought twice about slicing the director's head off. He sniffed out sensations, scents; he detected danger and energy with his other senses, but he couldn't see the frown growing on Lola's face. "You're perturbed, on the inside. I sense it."

Lola almost smiled at how he'd contradicted her thoughts without even having access to them. "Our originators. They... talk to me. Some of them, all of them, one of them; it varies."

"Our... family?" Rivo cocked his head. "I always knew those half-brained humans couldn't be our blood. I... we... are different, I've known it from the moment I opened my eyes and saw nothing, but discovered all my other senses. I smelled their fear of us, I touched the weakness in the air when they entered my room. I tasted the poison in the food they fed us, listened to their hesitant footsteps whenever they were near. We are something else. You can confirm this?"

"I can," said Lola, picking up on a few voices in the distance, people scrambling about within the other rooms down the hallway. "We are from elsewhere. Implanted inside human mothers to grow us, then locked up so others could watch us develop powers for their own sick bidding. For experimentation, I believe."