My Super Soldier rocked back on his feet. “A whole shit ton of stuff gets controlled in the frontal lobe. So what you’re saying is that when she does these things, the zapping, the emotion, she is actually using less of her brain power than when she’s not. Like she’s simply controlling her mind differently.” By the end, he was downright jumpy for Kellan. “That is so interesting. And so… perfect.”
I wasn’t following him at all. My father finally sat down. We both openly stared at Kellan. “Why is it perfect?” My dad finally asked him.
“Because Super Soldiers. We use our brains differently, too. That’s what we do. Like when I want to listen a great distance away—say when I can’t sleep and I have to find your heartbeat to make it through the night—I unconsciously ask my brain, my frontal lobe as it is, to work a little harder. I don’t do it with thought. I just do it. That’s what you’re doing. To take on emotion, to focus that so hard at someone that you literally zap their brain, you cool yours down. Sienna, it’s such good news.”
I put my head against the glass. “Kellan, I’m still not following you.”
“Not everyone can mess with their brain like that. It’s a genetic ability. Like… rolling your tongue.” He pushed his out, showing me he could do that. I picked my head off the glass so that I could show him the same. Yes, I could do that, too. “The women in your family. Natural selection—that’s an old phrase—you ladies are genetically predetermined to be able to do that with your brain. You can roll your brain.”
The door opened and closed. “Are you saying to her what I think you are?” Anders walked fast.
“I am.” Kellan outright grinned at Anders. “We can fix her. We can get rid of what is making her sick.”
Now they really had my attention. “How?”
“We can make you like us. You could do it. We can make you one of us.”
It took me a long moment to understand what he meant. “A Super Soldier?”
“Well, not full on. I mean, why would you need to be able to shoot better or target people? You don’t need to do that. But there are reasons Evander picked the people they picked to make us from. They adapted genetic ability. We can do that to you because you already have the key point that makes us, well, us. You are capable of brain adaptivity. You can handle some of what we are.” He smiled. “We can take some of the technology we have that helps us be us, and we can use that on you. Sienna, you could actually survive it. We don’t need Evander. Fuck them and all that noise. We can fix you. You could be like us.”
I sat down on the bed. Was what he said possible?
8 A Better, Brighter You
“Is that something that you want?” Anders met my gaze through the glass. “If we could do it, would you want that?”
It was hard to speak. “I… I don’t want to be sick if I don’t have to be. I don’t want people getting hurt. I don’t like lying.” He would know what that meant. “Or being a risk to people.”
He nodded fast. “I don’t think Kellan is off the mark here. There are things to consider. I mean, you’d have to go through a cellular change. That can’t be an easy thing to do. They grew us in a petri dish and then changed us as babies. Plus, I’m not sure this is legal here.”
Kellan threw over a table, and the whole room went silent. Anders adjusted his stance slightly. Was he preparing to have to fight Kellan? Anxiety made me stand up straighter.
“Something wrong?” Anders lowered his voice.
“I don’t give a shit about the legality of this. Surely there must be a way to handle it. Considering the extenuating circumstances of what happened to her. I’m not suggesting that we go around altering the general population to take care of their aches and pains. What happened to her happened because of people like us. I mean, Devil was actually there. We have to fix it. Period. She’s ours. Don’t give me reasons why it won’t work.”
Anders held up his hands as though he was in surrender. “I want to do it, too. But take it down a notch before her father absconds with her again and we never see her for the rest of our lives. We know he can do it. He’s done it before.”
My father rose slowly. “What I see is a lot of emotion because you love my daughter. Maybe you don’t know how to control those feelings. It’s hard for some young people to work that out. I’m not concerned for her safety with you. Just the opposite. She said she wants it. If you need me to run her off to some place we can do this without the law being a problem, we can do that, too.”
“No one is running anywhere,” Blaze strode through the door. “We can do this here. As far as I know, the laws on The Farm don’t prohibit this. We might have more of a problem on Mars Station.”
I motioned toward Blaze. “Dad, I’m sorry. We didn’t do introductions. This is Blaze. He’s in charge of this group. Anders. And Kellan.”
My father rapidly blinked. “This is all going to take some getting used to. When this is over, will you come home?”
I hadn’t even thought about it before he asked. I didn’t know what I’d do when this was over. Not really. I hadn’t given much thought to the idea of next because I hadn’t considered that I might have that. Still, I could answer him. “Not home. That’s gone. We all went there. It’s pretty decimated. I don’t think my future is there. Having said that, I need to know what kind of plans these guys would like to have. Unless they tell me otherwise, I’m with them.”
Kellan’s shoulders seemed to visibly untighten. “Where you go, I go.”
“Who is going to do this cellular change?” My dad seemed to have quickly moved on. “You three?”
“No.” Blaze shook his head. “Wade. With some help probably from some other doctors. There are good ones here. But it’ll be Wade.”
He was going to hate this. I didn’t have to alter my brain waves or whatever I was doing to understand that. Wade was going to have a big fucking problem with this.
“So we’re completely shifting gears?” Wade ran a hand through his hair. “Everything we discussed is just not happening?”
We’d definitely gotten attention about this process. Within minutes of the conversation, Wade and Trenton had arrived with Corbin and Devil. The latter two had told the former what they had in mind. Trenton was surprisingly quiet on the subject but Wade, as predicted, was not. My father had left, going to find some place to sleep for the night and something to eat. He didn’t need to be here for this discussion, and I was fairly certain that he found the guys as a group pretty overwhelming. That made sense. They were absolutely a lot to take all at once if you weren’t used to them.
Blaze held a finger to his mouth, reminding Wade about the subjects we weren’t discussing. The doctor threw his head back and laughed. “Really? You’re serious? I think we’re maybe past the point of that at the moment.”
“You want this?” Trenton asked me.
I smiled at him. He’d have no way of knowing that I’d already been asked. “If it can work.”