Chapter 310

Jackson Cliff boarded the private jet under harsh security, surrounded like a massive ice barricade by men who looked like Nazi storm troopers. Forced into an airplane seat without even being allowed to free his cuffed hands, he pretended not to see Dylan Brown—the governor’s son—watching him with something like pity.

Dylan sneered with dry, rose-petal-dark lips.

“You’ve foolishly chosen the path of hardship.”

Jackson lifted his head with an irritated look.

“The path of hardship?”

“The road you’ll walk as the price for disappointing the Designer.”

At the young man’s ominous words—like a figure from a worn portrait you’d see hanging in a haunted house—Jackson bristled.

“Why? Did my son say he’d punish his father?”

Jackson deliberately latched onto the fact that the Designer Dylan worshiped was his son. Dylan looked at Jackson as if he were pathetic and answered.

“Jackson. You only acknowledge the Designer as your blood when it benefits you. If I dared to pity the Designer, it would be because he has a man like you for a father.”

Dylan’s cold stare clung like a suction cup, and it made Jackson uncomfortable. He didn’t want to trade words with a young zealot, so he simply closed his eyes.

Dylan was right. Objectively or subjectively, Jackson Cliff had not been a good father. He hadn’t been much of a good person, either.

In the past, he had slept with his wife’s sister and gotten her pregnant. His wife—already suffering through her younger sister’s childbirth—ended her life by suicide, and before his judge father-in-law could use every possible means to smash his life to pieces, Jackson ran away into the military. He’d been young and thoughtless.

Talented, he rose through the ranks in the military and, as an officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), took part in a variety of black-ops missions. Along the way, he gained access to countless secrets civilians could never know. Of all the classified information he encountered in his military career, the most intriguing was the discovery of Alpha and Omega—new close relatives of Homo sapiens.

He came to lead an operation to track down a young Alpha who had escaped a laboratory, and it was then that he learned there was a protocol to reactivate a damaged brain. In the end, he failed to track the young Alpha down, but based on information you would only see in a science-fiction film, he had a premonition that he could do something revolutionary.

And that opportunity came sooner than he expected. He heard that the son born from his affair—the child his wife’s sister had borne—had been struck by a vile disease: a brain tumor. When she finally reached out after seventeen years, she was still unmarried, living under the same roof as her aging parents. Facing his son with discomfort churning inside him, the first impression that surfaced in Jackson’s mind was that the boy possessed an oddly untouchable aura.

Contrary to Jackson’s assumption that a child born as proof of such depravity would have been treated like a disgrace, the boy ruled the household like a god. Not only blood relatives, but servants and everyone who came and went feared and revered the sickly boy, craving his approval and love. Unbelievably, Jackson, too, was swept up in that feeling before he could resist.

“Move.”

After leaving New York and crossing half the United States to return to Helso State, Jackson stepped down from the private jet and followed behind Dylan as he walked ahead. Without any processing procedures at all, they climbed into a van that had been waiting in front of the plane.

Sitting side by side in the backseat, they stayed silent. The van left the airport and began racing down a dim pre-dawn road washed bright by streetlights.

In the calmer atmosphere, Jackson—setting aside his fear of the future for a moment—asked Dylan.

“Do you love the Designer?”

Dylan shot him a sidelong look, trying to read his intent, then replied bluntly.

“That’s an inappropriate question.”

“Why?”

“Because we aren’t a religious group. You can respect a leader, but you don’t need to love him.”

Even after finishing, Dylan looked as if he were turning his own words over again and again. After a long while, he spoke.

“I’m often certain the Designer has sacred abilities that surpass humans—no, that surpass Alphas. It’s true that it makes him look like a more exceptional Alpha, a revelatory figure.”

A young man who had always been cold like perennial snowfields answered with an uncharacteristically heated expression. As if dreaming in the dark, his eyes gleamed and he whispered, lowering his voice.

“He knew the Langford Bridge would collapse. How... could something like that be possible?”

It was a point that filled Jackson with awe and questions, too. His son, Eric Sinclair, had something mysterious that couldn’t be explained by reason alone.

“I’m reminded of the day I reunited with my son after seventeen years.”

When the Designer’s childhood came up, Dylan held his breath and listened as if receiving precious wisdom.

The day Jackson first sat across from his son, the boy was carefully laying tarot cards out on the table one by one.

At an age when he should have been chasing after girls, he was pale and sickly, playing with tarot. Was it that late-blooming sense of responsibility toward his own blood? Jackson felt like putting a baseball glove in his son’s hands instead of tarot cards.

The boy didn’t resent Jackson for abandoning him at birth and leaving. He simply, calmly made a strange offer: he would read Jackson’s fortune. Jackson, secretly intrigued by the boy’s odd behavior while still skeptical, sat across from him. His son told him to pick three tarot cards, then flipped the ones Jackson chose one by one and began describing what Jackson had recently experienced.

Two days earlier, before dawn, there had been a death in Jackson’s unit. It was an incident whose full details hadn’t been uncovered—so much so that no report had even been written. And yet the boy precisely named not only the dead man, but the murderer’s identity and the weapon used. Later, the reading proved true.

Then the boy mentioned a classified document Jackson had in his possession. It concerned a trait research project underway at the Federal Biological Research Institute (BRI): “AX-66.” With an unbothered face, the boy accurately stated the number of a research subject who had died when an early-stage experiment failed.

Setting down the third and final card with steady hands, the boy fixed his gaze on Jackson—who was struck speechless—with deep, transparent golden eyes and said.

“Make me an Alpha. If you leave me like this, your son won’t survive this winter.”

He didn’t beg Jackson. He didn’t try to persuade him. He only spoke as if delivering words he had prepared long ago, carrying a sacred air like someone who had accepted something larger than any individual fate. In front of him, Jackson felt an inexplicable shiver and crushing pressure.

“That’s a story too good to keep to yourself.”

Dylan spoke as if bewitched, filled with reverence. Watching his expression, Jackson twisted a bitter smile inside.

The suspicious and the arrogant are the hardest to free from brainwashing. The moment the other person clears the high hurdle they set, blind faith is born from the illusion that their own verification has been satisfied.

Slowly, a sneer formed on Dylan’s face as he stared blankly, soaked in the afterglow. He hesitated for a heartbeat—like he might speak or might not—then pressed Jackson.

“Why did you betray the Designer?”

Jackson shut his mouth with a hardened expression.

It was because, without knowing his place, he had kept a woman in his heart. Not only had he met her while hiding his true identity, he had swelled with dreams of raising the child they had together as an ordinary child. And he had felt fear toward the grotesque ideal his son held about an evolved humanity.

Reading Jackson’s resolve not to answer, Dylan turned his head away with a face gone cold.

Enduring the frigid silence, Jackson thought about the future waiting for him. When he believed everything was over, fear surged in. Even if he had failed to escape, he thought carrying out what he had planned for so long would leave him feeling cleansed, but it hadn’t. He was only worried and unsettled about what lay ahead.

The woman who had been waiting for him at JFK Airport had definitely been Hannah Knox. The warden’s wife at Somora Prison, and Angela’s mother.

Hannah must have intercepted the Swiss ticket and the laptop he had sent to Angela. Remembering the thick laptop bag she had been holding—and the DeepCoin worth tens of millions of dollars that could have been inside—Jackson felt a coldness creep into his chest.

She had appeared at the meeting place at JFK because she wanted the mysterious man to vanish completely from her daughter’s life.

In a way, it might have been for the best. If he had been discovered together with Angela, her life would have been shattered beyond repair.

Suddenly curious how much his son had grasped about his relationship with Angela, Jackson asked.

“How did you know I went to JFK?”

“Because we knew you siphoned off every last bit of DeepCoin. Did you want to start a new life somewhere else? Were you foolish enough to think that was possible?”

At Dylan’s condemnation, Jackson let out a hollow laugh. He threw an empty stare out the window.

On a digital screen in downtown Baggers City, photos and information of people missing from Helso State rotated one after another. It was RE:Find, a missing-persons campaign aggressively pushed by Helso State and the Department of Transportation. Like a cruel joke, the person who had proposed the campaign was Jackson’s son—the Designer of Hybris—the lieutenant governor of Helso State, Eric Sinclair.