Angels of Darkness

meant it. We are not welcome at that house. They blame me and Emily for Jonathan’s stroke. We made his life so difficult, he died to escape.”
    The red rosettes on her face were turning darker. Karina touched her hand to her forehead and looked at it. Her eyes widened. She rubbed his forearm.
    â€œThis is another reaction to the venom?”
    â€œMmhh-hhm,” Lucas said.
    â€œI told you my story. Tell me yours now. It’s fair.”
    â€œWhat do you want to know?” he asked, wondering what she would think if she looked inside his mind and saw him strangling her husband.
    â€œWho are you? All of you. Who are you really? I need to know what’s happening to me.”
    Lucas sighed.
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    S he had told him too much, Karina decided. As much as she wanted for it to be a bribe, a down payment for the information he held, at least in part she told him what she did because he was lying beside her, bruised, beat up, bloody, and hurting. He needed a distraction and she had enough compassion to give him one. But she hadn’t meant to pour her heart out. It just happened. He was in pain, and although she had the means to ease his suffering, he refused to feed, because he didn’t want to hurt her. He wasn’t willing to trade his pain for hers. The least she could do was talk and try to distract him.
    Karina reached over and touched his hand. His fingers closed on hers. Lucas glanced at her, surprised. They had that in common now—both of them treated any act of kindness with suspicion. She didn’t expect kindness anymore, except from him. But she was an outsider. He wasn’t.
    â€œThere are no scared women here to watch us,” he told her.
    â€œIt was never for them. It was for you.”
    She almost cried and couldn’t even understand why. It was the stress, Karina told herself. The trauma of watching hundreds of people die at once. And the fever, which kept rising and rising. Her breath felt hot when she exhaled. Her skin was dry and too tight. And now there were rings of red dots all over her arms.
    She had never told the entire story of her marriage to anyone. It’s the fever. Of course it is.
    Lucas was looking at her. Sprawled like that, even battered, he looked enormous. If a week ago someone had told her she would be locked in a vault with a nude, bloody man who was trying his best not to devour her to stop his pain, she would’ve dialed 911 to report a lunatic running amok.
    â€œI’m going to tell you a story,” Lucas said. His voice was laced with fatigue. “You can choose to believe it or not. It can be the truth or just a story. It’s your choice.”
    â€œOkay.”
    Lucas closed his eyes. “Suppose there is a civilization. A powerful country. It has taken over all of its available territory, but it knows that it must expand. It must continue to grow outward, or it will rot and collapse. This civilization sends colonists out to explore new territories. They find fertile lands and colonize them. When they succeed, they let the knowledge of the large civilization fade. The small colonies grow and prosper on their own, and when they develop enough, they rediscover their mother civilization and rejuvenate it with their unique achievements.”
    He glanced at her.
    â€œOkay,” Karina said. “I can see how that would happen.”
    â€œSuppose a new island was found for colonization. An island with an abundant ecosphere and great resources. The civilization had done this many times before and they had developed a protocol. The colony ships arrived and the colonists created thirteen small settlements, Houses, one for each colony ship.
    â€œGenetically, all the colonists belonged to the Base Strain. It’s a very stable breed of human, long-lived, resistant to diseases, armed with superior DNA repair mechanisms to counteract mutation. To successfully colonize a new environment, a species must adapt to it. To facilitate this adaptation, most of the colonists were exposed to an agent inhibiting their cellular and DNA repair and vulnerability to native viruses.”
    â€œThey deliberately made their people weaker? How does that make sense?”
    â€œThey didn’t just want a colony,” Lucas said. “They wanted a unique colony, perfectly in tune with this new island. That’s how the civilization kept itself from stagnation. The colonists wanted an explosion of mutations in the future