Chapter 301

Dusk settled in, and the street signs began to glow, one by one, stark against the dark. Baekgyeong and Isaac reached the Manuels commercial district. On either side of a four-lane road, low buildings of three to four stories stretched in a long line of luxury boutiques and restaurants. WritersResources WritersResources

Unlike the façades dressed up with distinctive design, the Psychological Health Center looked like a bare, characterless warehouse-store. It stood by itself, set well apart from the other shops, at the point where the city’s bustle tapered out.

They parked in a tower garage across from the center. Between the center and the garage, low-rise buildings stacked like domino blocks in overlapping tiers, but the tower garage rose high enough that they could observe the Psychological Health Center without any obstruction.

After close to half a day of watching, they’d seen a steady flow of people of every stripe—every race, age, and gender—entering and exiting a center about half the size of a soccer field. There was nothing overtly suspicious in the people or their movements, but the number of CCTV cameras was excessive.

“There are eleven cameras just around the entrance.”

Watching the doors through binoculars, Baekgyeong took a big bite of an energy bar.

“More if you count the disguised ones. Getting in won’t be easy.”

From the passenger seat, Isaac answered without looking up from the phone. It belonged to the unknown man Baekgyeong had used like a blood bag to keep Isaac alive. The SIM was removed to avoid tracking; via Wi-Fi, he was logged into the Hybris online community.

“I can’t make sense of it.”

Tearing open a fresh wrapper, Baekgyeong bit into another energy bar.

Isaac, paging through the Hybris boards one by one, looked over at him.

“What doesn’t make sense?”

“Say you’re a middle-aged man still intoxicated with teenage-boy feelings—fine, your goal is the extinction of Alphas. I’m a grown man; I want to live quietly, a thousand years if I could, sleeping with Yoon Siron like any ordinary couple. But that Jackson Cliff guy... I don’t get him.”

He shoved the remaining half of the bar into his mouth, chewed for a long time, then forced it down.

“The more Alphas there are, the more chaotic the world gets. And if Alphas learn there’s a time bomb in their heads, Jackson won’t be safe either. Why doesn’t he stop, instead of doubling down on atrocities? Don’t tell me he thinks he can pacify Alphas with Yoon Siron alone.”

Listening, Isaac thought that Jackson Cliff’s trajectory resembled that of the Italian mafia boss Salvatore Riina.

Riina, born to a poor farming village in Sicily, sustained himself by violence and crime from a young age. Inside the organization he eliminated rivals with brutality and seized power. His cruelty was both strategy and survival, the engine that drove him into the center of power.

He became the absolute boss of the mafia, and when prosecutors and police closed in, he carried out massacres against high-ranking officials and bombed a train bound for Milan, committing terror against civilians. He had gone beyond removing rivals; he had declared war on the entire state.

In the end his actions roused the fury of Italian society as a whole. Riina destroyed the invisible balance of power the mafia had kept for a century and brought about his own ruin.

For him, violence was a tool to grasp power; but as time went on, his violence swelled like a snowball rolling down a slope. Had he stopped midway, the snowball would have shattered under internal backlash and external resistance.

“There’s no ‘stop halfway’ option in violence. The moment you stop, you pay for everything you’ve done.”

Isaac continued:

“Jackson Cliff has no other options either. He either finds a new breakthrough, or he smothers the backlash with even harsher violence. In the end, it’s one of the two.”

Baekgyeong listened, unhappy.

“You think he wants to use Yoon Siron as his breakthrough out of the crisis? What—clone Yoon Siron ten thousand times and distribute him to every Alpha?”

He looked at Isaac and asked it straight, without any mocking tone. It was an absurd idea, but Isaac couldn’t sneer. He couldn’t guess what Hybris wanted from Siron either.

A handful of individuals taking out their desires on Yoon Siron would resolve nothing. Siron’s existence would only collapse the precarious equilibrium barely maintained by the sacrifice of Etas.

An Alpha who had tracked Isaac and Siron—and Baekgyeong—all the way to Belzoras had said it with a laugh before biting down on a bomb to kill himself.

“You fail to understand that Alphas are a single, vast organism.”

Until now, Isaac had thought Hybris was merely a human-trafficking outfit raking in black money off Alpha lust. But through Baekgyeong’s investigation and Spencer’s files, he could conclude they were both a profit-seeking enterprise and a mass organism united by a sacred mission of their own. To end this grinding fight, they had to grasp that mission.

Isaac recalled what Baekgyeong had told him a few hours earlier about “Isaak.” Just before leaving Somora Prison after his meeting with Gezar, Baekgyeong had overheard a fragment of a conversation between Siron and Gezar.

“‘Isaak’? What is that?”

“Don’t draw his eye. If you’re going to cross his path, pull the trigger on your own head instead!”

What Baekgyeong heard was scattered and hard to situate, but one thing was clear: the “Isaak” Gezar named referred to Abraham’s son from the Bible. Gezar’s great-grandfather had been a devout Orthodox Christian from southern Albania, and considering the linguistic legacy in the Bazelli family, it was natural that Gezar would call Abraham’s son “Isaak.”

Which meant, if you set Isaak himself aside, the person Siron must not meet was no figure from Scripture but someone real—almost certainly Joseph Elliott, also known as Jackson Cliff.

He had kept alive lives that ought to have ended, propping them up as Alphas; he had laundered their lust and amassed wealth; and beyond that he was chasing a more fundamental transformation. He had fostered unity among Alphas through online and offline communities, and he had cultivated zealots whose loyalty burned hot enough to risk their lives.

Thinking over the mammoth-resurrection experiment using Asian elephants and Hybris’s Omega-creation experiments on the island, Isaac’s thoughts came to the figure of Isaak. In the Old Testament, Isaak is sketched as a man of scant narrative weight. Even so, he carries heavy symbolism: the one through whom God’s promise and holy blessing are passed to the next generation.

Isaac’s question crystallized in his mind.

“I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars of the heavens, and I will give them all these lands. Through your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.”

It was God’s promise for Isaak in Genesis. Isaac had a strong sense that Jackson Cliff’s ultimate aim through Siron touched this.

But how? With Siron alone, could Alphas and Omegas—these variants that could be called evolution or degeneration—really be born as countless as the stars? He considered implanting embryos in third parties to increase numbers, but pregnancy in betas was categorically impossible due to genetic differences.

As Isaac’s head filled with unresolved questions, Baekgyeong lowered the binoculars, turned from the window, and asked:

“Did you really burn every last page of Yuri Berec’s research journals?”

Preoccupied with Jackson Cliff and Siron, Isaac nodded after a small pause.

“There’s really no one but you who knows how to make an Omega?”

“No.”

Under the pallid garage lights, frustration shadowed Baekgyeong’s gaunt face. He drew a hard breath as if stifled, worked his lips as if wavering, then made the request Isaac would never allow.

“Tell me how to turn a beta into an Omega.”