Chapter 299

Traces from the time of the incident remained in the couple’s house, damaged but still there. After the bodies and the gunshot victim had been taken away, countless people must have gone in and out; the floor was a mess of bloodstains and footprints, and a heavy coat of dust had settled over it all.

It was the stage of the memories that plunged him into sleeplessness and turned even the hard-won scraps of sleep into nightmares. In his dreams, the day of catastrophe kept being reworked and replayed like an endless repeat sign. Isaac became a sinner who had committed an atrocity, then an innocent sacrificial victim onto whom guilt was thrust, and sometimes a bystander. Waking from those dreams, Isaac lost his self-assurance and fell into unending chaos.

“Because of the sins you committed, you were struck by heaven’s punishment.”

Manu Singh, the Institute’s chief researcher, would lay the frustration of failed experiments on Isaac. Intrigued by the deaths of the brothers and stepfather, he made the boy confess and atone for crimes he might have committed, in the name of correction.

Whether the confession was false or true, once it left his mouth, the admission of guilt cut his soul. But after the wound was inflicted again and again, it stopped hurting. His sins had sprung from his nature. His nature was no different from a wild animal that could harm others at any time. A beast in a cage was ready to tear anything apart for freedom.

So he set fire to the Institute. To slaughter those who had sliced his body into pieces, tortured him, and injected nameless drugs. He faithfully executed what he had learned.

Before leaving the marsh where his guilt began, Isaac took one last look at the defiled scene of slaughter. The marsh dwellers had apparently come and gone, stealing anything usable; nothing suitable remained to stir nostalgia for the past. Now his old grounds existed, yet did not exist—like a village submerged beneath a dam.

He didn’t feel regret. He would leave the United States, become a mercenary, and wander one battlefield after another as long as his heart beat, with no special hope and no special despair.

The man who had shown him the possibility of a new life was the one the Institute called by the codename Viper. He was a soldier who had fallen into brain death after being wounded at war. After being converted into an Alpha, he was used in the Institute’s experiments and sometimes deployed on various special operations to test his capabilities.

He seemed to think not with his brain but with his mouth. True to the codename Viper, he had a habit of flicking his tongue; unable to endure even a short silence, he would babble useless words. For reasons unknown, he showed friendliness to Isaac, who let no one close. When they lay side by side on the experiment beds suffering painful procedures, he rattled on like a motorized mouth, firing off meaningless talk without a break. In the end, Singh, unable to endure his chatter, would gag him.

Thirty percent of his stories described the fear he’d felt just before the accident that left him brain-dead; fifty percent were about the women he had slept with and the women he wanted to sleep with; the remaining twenty percent were about the grand future he envisioned after discharge from the military.

He may not have intended it, but offhand he expanded Isaac’s view. How to join foreign mercenary units, how to sign on with private security teams operating in lawless gaps in various countries—stories Isaac had never dared imagine opened up possibilities for a new life.

What end did Viper meet? He was selected as a test subject to verify the physical pain and psychological destruction brought on by repeated Rut. Tormented by desire brushing the threshold of death, he writhed, and another subject in the same lab, unable to withstand Viper’s pheromones, killed him. Watching all of it, Isaac decided to leave the Institute.

And now it was time to break from his past and leave his home as well.

Before leaving his old house, Isaac looked back one last time at the couple’s home the way one regards the ruins of an ancient site. It was the birthplace of the first new humans since Homo sapiens, but their existence would never be admitted into history and would be erased from the world. With no Omega individual remaining to serve as the origin of a new humanity, extinction was a foregone fate.

All seven trait-bearers created at the Institute after Isaac were Alphas. They had failed not only to produce an Omega but even to seize a starting thread for the research. The decisive clue—Yuri’s research records—could not be found anywhere.

According to Gezar, the birth of the Omega was the fruit of Yuri’s independent research. Yuri did not feel shame at having become something neither woman nor man. He accepted his reborn body and, through the Imprint, came to love Gezar more than before. Likewise, Gezar came to love Yuri more fiercely.

The influence of the Imprint showed itself in the unguarded expressions that crossed their faces when they were apart and alone. Thinking of Gezar, Yuri looked happy. He was grateful that through the Imprint he could ultimately become one with Gezar.

Yuri was a scientist who considered records as important as experiments. Even failures would have been precious data to him. He would have accepted the changes in his body not sentimentally but scientifically, and surely left a research journal somewhere.

A memory surfaced in Isaac’s mind. One early spring day four years earlier, Yuri and Gezar had repaired the roof together. Not a drop of rain had leaked through their roof, yet they repainted the walls and replaced the roofing with Spanish tiles. Remembering the commotion of that day, Isaac braced a foot on the window frame and climbed up onto the roof.

When he pried up the tiles fixed to the roof, the waterproof sheeting appeared. Nothing was hidden in the prickly fabric. Breaking apart the polyurethane insulation beneath it, piece by piece, Isaac finally discovered a suspicious plastic box, wrapped meticulously in black plastic.

Inside were thick notebooks stacked neatly. They were clearly Yuri’s research journals. Isaac opened one as if throwing open a taboo.

Flipping through just a few pages left him breathless. The records contained not only the research itself but also Yuri’s fear at a body transforming into an unknown state, recorded in detail. And that wasn’t all. Yuri poured out, like a scream, his complicated feelings for Gezar—both hatred toward a love that was dying and a fierce enthrallment. In the research notes, Isaac witnessed a man shattering as he surrendered to love. His love verged on madness.

After gathering up the record of that dreadful love without missing a page, Isaac set fire to the couple’s house and the shed where he had lived, then took to the road. From then on, wherever he went he kept Yuri’s records on him like part of his body, but he never dared to use them to create an Omega—a partner who might prolong his life.

Yuri had passed through countless gates to be reborn as an Omega only to suffer the irony of his former self’s erasure. Love was salvation and, at the same time, a contradictory emotion that brought loss and destruction. For a long time Isaac thought of Yuri Berec, who had been bound by that yoke and lost himself.

If love was something to be defended even at the cost of collapsing and destroying a person’s world, Isaac wanted not to be tainted by such a diseased emotion for even a single moment.

That the condition for an Imprint should be love, of all things.

He had wished only for a brief reprieve from death. He had tried to fulfill his selfish fate even at the price of sacrificing an innocent man’s life. But everything had lost its meaning. He did not think himself capable of being loved by anyone, nor did he wish to love. In his world, love was nothing but crumbs whose value had worn away long ago.

“Isaac Bazelli.”

Isaac had been sunk in the long aftertaste of old memories. The moment the familiar voice reached him, they vanished, fleeting as hoarfrost melting in the morning sun.

“If you’re awake, sit up.”

He recognized at once whose voice it was at his bedside. Baekgyeong. But he could hardly overcome the weight of his eyelids. And the instant he registered Baekgyeong’s presence, a savage pain he had not felt until then welled up anew.

Even as pain like a branding iron seared his flank, Isaac waited to hear the familiar voice again by his ear. Before he could even recognize that his waiting was a form of expectation, Baekgyeong’s voice continued.

“Siron was kidnapped.”

Isaac’s eyes flew open. Even the nagging pain disappeared. By habit his hand went to the holster at his waist. But where the pistol should have been was empty, and his side was thickly wrapped in bandages.

As he lowered his head to check the wound, the surroundings came into his field of view.

This wasn’t the hotel room the Alphas had stormed, nor the marsh where Ezra and he had lived. It wasn’t the dark sea where he’d last lost consciousness. He was in a car.

He searched for his last memory. Everything was scrambled. The one certainty was that he had ruined everything. He must have blacked out as he exited the tunnel. Pressing his palm to his forehead, Isaac asked:

“Was Siron taken from the sea?”

Having not spoken for a long time, Isaac’s voice was cracked like ground after a long drought. Holding down his anger, Baekgyeong answered low.

“Yeah.”

“What day is it today?”

“The seventeenth. Almost midnight.”

Baekgyeong, leaning his head between the driver’s and passenger seats, was glaring at him. He hadn’t slept in days; the dark circles under his eyes lent him a grim cast.