Chapter 232

Baekgyeong looked at Siron with a crooked gaze.

“I thought I was becoming a better person, but I guess not.”

His pheromones bled faintly into the air. Siron rubbed the goosebumps on his arm with his palm as if it were nothing. Even though he knew perfectly well that Baekgyeong’s twisted possessiveness and jealousy were burning him hollow, he asked with studied calm,

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Baekgyeong peeled his back off the wall and drew in a deep breath. As if the crystal-clear midnight air made him so stifled he couldn’t stand it.

“It still feels easier to just wreck everything.”

“You mean you want to go back to how we were?”

“Honestly, that sounds easier.”

At his snide reply, Siron’s face fell.

“...They say you don’t try to refurbish a black-haired beast.”

The expression that had been soaked in sorrowful anger shifted subtly. With a puzzled look, Baekgyeong asked back, as if confirming,

“You’re trying to say people don’t change easily, right?”

Siron let out a short laugh, like, of all things to ask.

“Yeah. You know it well. You pretend you’ve changed, but you’re the same. If I let myself get carried along by you like before, you’ll end up shoving something into my urethra.”

In the middle of being serious, Baekgyeong protested, a little baffled.

“The urethra... Honestly, I hadn’t thought that far.”

“No, you would. Because you haven’t changed!”

Raising his voice, Siron left Baekgyeong outside, went in, and slammed the door.

Glowering at the closed front door with a hard face, Baekgyeong soon let out a sigh, squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. With Siron slipping away like a loach again and again, even getting angry felt pointless. Following Siron inside, he grabbed his wrist hard and yanked him back.

“I’m trying to keep my temper down.”

“Keep it down more!”

A vein popped up across Baekgyeong’s forehead. He seized Siron’s face with one hand and shoved him against the wall.

“Did I make you an omega? Why am I the only one you’re flipping out on!”

“If I flipped out at Isaac the way I do at you, I’d get killed!”

Siron punched him in the chest, hard, shouting in frustration. The rough grip on his cheek slackened. Baekgyeong’s head swam at Siron’s thought process—impossible to predict even an inch ahead.

Bearing with Siron’s cotton-fist nuclear fists, his ribs starting to feel like they might crack from the annoying pain, Baekgyeong grabbed his fist.

“Isaac won’t kill you.”

“Of course not. I’m the one and only omega in the world.”

Even if you weren’t the only omega, Isaac still wouldn’t be able to kill you. Baekgyeong felt a thick unease at the way Isaac had been looking at Siron lately, but he didn’t want to tell Siron that.

Bending at the waist to meet Siron’s eyes, he barked,

“Then what was that tender goodbye just now?”

“Tender, my ass.”

Siron dropped his gaze and clamped his lips shut. He didn’t look sure of what he was thinking. After a moment, he let out a long sigh and lifted his head.

“Just... I suddenly had a bad feeling.”

“A bad feeling?”

“Yeah. Like something irreversible is about to happen.”

As if scraping off the knot of dread in his chest, Siron exhaled the long breath he’d drawn in, turning it into a big sigh. Maybe that alone steadied him, because he gave a crooked grin and shrugged.

“Forget it. Nonsense. Nothing’s going to happen.”

Before heading to the governor’s house, Isaac went to Riverland to confirm one thing. The streetlights brightening Riverland’s night were as murky as cigarette smoke dissolving in the air, just like the online articles said—power had been slow to return after the hurricane, and with electricity supplied only for a few hours a day, residents’ complaints were boiling over.

Parking his motorcycle in a vacant lot behind a shuttered strip of shops, Isaac stepped out onto the street. All over the city were traces of the hurricane knocking down traffic lights and trees. They had cleared what blocked the roads, but rebar, bolt fragments, and stumps remained.

Helso was the fifth-wealthiest state in the U.S. by economic scale, after California, Texas, New York, and Illinois. But that wealth wasn’t evenly distributed into people’s lives. Unfortunate for Riverland’s residents, but for Isaac, it was an opportunity.

Less to worry about with CCTV.

His first stop was Siron’s apartment. Hybris had put people on the trail of Isaac—who’d escaped the island—and two Asians. He figured the two Asians meant the Korean Baekgyeong and the British-Indian Manu Singh. But suddenly it occurred to him they might not be after Manu Singh, but rather inmate number 4543.

For every experiment conducted on the island, Isaac had swapped inmate number 4543—Yoon Siron’s—genetic data with another prisoner’s. It shouldn’t be possible, but if there had been even one mistake, Hybris might already have caught on that 4543 was an omega and started to move.

He slipped into Siron’s apartment, swallowed in pitch-black darkness, and went up the stairs without a sound to the ninth floor. The area in front of Siron’s door was clean. Even though the place had been empty for a long time, there were no eviction notices or bills posted on the door. He forced the door and went in, and there were no mail slips shoved through the jamb either. Siron hadn’t had the bandwidth to worry about overdue rent; it was obvious that Anna McCarthy, who knew about his kidnapping, had been footing the bills.

In case of contingencies, Isaac drew a .22 fitted with a suppressor and entered with his finger on the trigger. As expected, no one was inside. Sweeping a penlight across the rooms, he stopped at a black-and-white photograph on the opposite wall. A shot from when Yoon Siron was an actor. Staring straight into the lens with an ambiguous smile.

No doubt, at the moment it was taken, he’d been caught up in the one-dimensional thought that he had to come out looking cool, and yet the result was something that would live on in people’s chests and be idolized—a poem made image that overwhelmed the viewer. Isaac felt a pull, as if a cold hand had taken hold of him. He turned his head away at once and refused the photograph.

Siron’s modest home was a mess. Shelves stuck out like tongues, the wardrobe stood wide open. Clothes unsuited to the season were piled on both sofa and bed. The underwear and sock drawers were partly empty, and since only season-appropriate clothes were gone, it didn’t look like a break-in. More like the traces of someone hurriedly packing before leaving somewhere.

Thankfully, it seemed 4543’s genetic profile hadn’t leaked to Hybris. Convinced they were still chasing Manu Singh, Isaac went back out and mounted the bike.

Around 2 a.m., he approached the governor’s residence along a side street without traffic lights. Two black Tahoe SUVs, the security detail’s vehicles, were parked outside. As when he had installed the bug, he looped a five-minute clip over the CCTV feed and moved in.

Four guards, split into two teams, watched the main house and the annex. Their vigilance was slack, near defenseless. Now and then they even stared at their phones, scrolling the internet.

Idiots.

Isaac drew a deep breath, then sprang in place to catch hold of a decorative groove in the exterior wall. He jammed his fingers—only two joints’ depth—into the groove, pressed his toes to the wall for balance. Bearing his weight on his fingers, he hauled himself up and jumped again toward a protruding ornamental ledge on the second floor. Luckily, the study window wasn’t locked.

He flicked on his penlight and moved toward the desk without a sound. The Art Deco mahogany surface was mottled with scratches and ink stains, its edges worn smooth. The oil sheen was nearly gone. On top sat a globe that looked new, a weighty fountain pen set, all manner of charity gala invitations and thank-you notes from children, several kinds of newspapers, and a single file organizer.

But unfortunately, the key to the drawer lock wasn’t in sight. A lock opened by key was easy to pick—but the reverse, locking it back with a pick, was close to impossible. Which meant when the governor opened the drawer to check the documents, he would realize someone had broken in.

So the bug will be useless.

A pity, but he couldn’t waste time hunting for a key. Isaac picked the drawers one by one and examined the contents. Paltry pickings for something kept under lock. Contracts for lawn care and cleaning services, vacation schedules, church bulletins and party invitations—piles of documents as ordinary as could be. No Hybris-related paperwork or memos, and not a single item revealing the governor’s private tastes.

A chilly prickle of suspicion lifted its head. But there was no time to dwell on it. Isaac sped up his search. At last he found what he’d come for: execution orders, each file containing condemned prisoners’ names and numbers, their crimes, and so on.

From among dozens of files, Isaac located the one labeled with Gezar’s alias, “Colby James.” Inside was a photograph of Gezar Bazelli. A one-sided reunion through a photograph, but a reunion nonetheless—after nineteen years.

He took close-up shots of the documents, saved them, then flipped to the last page.

...Accordingly, I, pursuant to Article 4 of the Constitution of the State of Helso and Section 922 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, hereby order as follows:

The Director of Corrections of the State of Helso, in cooperation with the Warden of the Somora Correctional Center, shall, between the hours of 6:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 16, 2014, carry out the execution of Colby James by intravenous administration of drugs in accordance with law.

The execution shall be conducted in accordance with the official guidelines of the Helso Department of Corrections, and notice of this order shall be given to the victim’s next of kin and to the inmate’s legal representative.

Date of issuance: October 7, 2014

Governor: Richard Brown

There were not even ten days left until Gezar’s execution. Something inside his chest felt as if it had snapped. But there was no time to explore what, exactly, had been damaged within him. Isaac drew a deep breath to steady himself, hurriedly photographed the final page and a wide shot of the study, and slipped away.