“Uh…” Reese gave Phillips his attention. “No, no he didn’t.”
“Why not? I mean, after the research took off, he had to be a potential asset.”
“Echols tried, New World tried, but Markus refused. Like I said, the Book of Anubis scared him.”
“Did it scare you?”
Reese propped his elbow on the arm of the chair. The door to the plane closed. Attendants checked it, then took up seats in a small area beyond the wet bar.
And actual wet bar.
“Dr. Dante.”
“Uh, yeah, sorry.” Reese scrubbed his palms over his thighs. “It should have scared me. But all I saw was the potential to change the world, and so did Echols, at least at first. You know, every scientist’s dream.” He gave a dramatic wave of his fingers. “Make a huge discovery, get your name carved in history, and remembered for the rest of time for something great.” It was the closest thing to immortality.
Once.
Now there was the ichor.
“But you did eventually change your mind, because you left.”
Reese picked at the seam in the armrest. “Yeah.”
“What happened?”
Reese took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Koda happened.”
It was the truth, although saying it didn’t make accepting it any easier. Reese had abandoned Koda, he knew that but if he’d stayed?
“Was he a project manager?”
Reese chuckled. “No, he was an Alpha.”
Both Harrington and Phillips furrowed their brow.
Reese put his glasses back on. “Alphas and betas. It’s what we called the subjects. The Alphas were the original recipient of the ichor. We then took samples of their blood and injected it into the ones who would become betas.”
“Why that system? Inject one, then take it from them and put in another?” Phillips said.
“To put it simply, we followed the directions.” Eventually. Echols had tried to get around them at first, stating there was no logical reason. It was a lesson no one wanted to repeat. “The Book of Anubis was very specific about how to use the ichor. If we deviated from the instructions, it ended up purging.”
“Do you think the things you made killed those people in the lab?” Harrington said.
Reese wanted to say no. But the research had taken a turn he didn’t agree with.
One he couldn’t live with. Since he’d been powerless to change it, all he could do was walk away. But nothing changed a simple fact. “They aren’t things, they’re people.”
“They’re corpses.”
“No.”
“You really believe those things were alive?”
“Yes. They came back with their memories. They need to eat, they feel pain, they bleed, they mourn…” They love.
“Dr. Dante, the dead don’t come back. If this stuff somehow reanimated dead tissue—”
“Reanimation implies the ichor used the cells it fused with like puppets. It didn’t. I meant it when I said the ichor displayed behaviors associated with how we define life. What the ichor did with those cells was form a commensalism.”