Toka-Ace #1: The Re-Emergence

I came to.

My body felt numb and heavy. It was very hard to move. I was tired and it felt as though a heavy weight was pressed on my entire body. As I became more and more aware I realized that I was lying on my back on a table.

Where was I? Where was Andrew?

Wherever I was, it was dark. The only came from a lamp on my left. I looked around. Andrew was lying on a table to my right. He was unconscious.

I tried to call out to him. “An…drew…” My words came out after great effort and only very slowly.

“You’re awake.” came a woman’s voice. “It seems like I got to you just in time.” The woman walked into view, slender and olive skinned with an oval head. Her black hair was pulled straight back and streaked with blue. Her eyes were green. She wore tight black pants and a black sweater.

“Who…….are…….” I started.

“Save your strength Troy,” she said. “I’ll explain everything.”

How does she know my name? I wondered. Was she a friend or an enemy? I willed myself to move. I was desperate to move but my body wouldn’t respond.

“My name is Katherine Prescott,” she explained. “I was a friend of your mother’s. I have very little time. So it’s imperative that you listen.” As she talked she was holding a syringe up to her eyes as if to check that whatever was inside had been properly measured.

I commanded my body to move, I tried to push myself up but my body replied with tiny insignificant movements, the merest twitch of the finger or a curl of a toe.

“Sorry, I injected you and your friend with a paralyzing agent,” Katherine explained. I was confused and outraged and scared, though I was unable to express any of it. “Forgive me,” she apologized again, “but I had to be sure that you would listen. I have to act fast, as your life and well-being and the safety of everyone that you care about is at stake.”

“What?” I managed to ask.

Katherine did not deign to respond. Instead she walked up to the side of my table and turned my numb arm over. She tied a band around my arm until a vein appeared. She stuck the syringe into my arm and pushed down the plunger.

What was she doing? “Hey…..no…..” I cried weakly.

Katherine had finished injecting me with the substance. “I know that it’s hard to trust me in these circumstances…” she said. I noticed that she seemed stressed. “But you’ve seen that they’re serious about getting to you.”

I felt a strange calm. There was the expectation of stress but not the actual feeling; still, my mind was going a mile a minute.

“As I stated before I was a friend of your mother’s.” Katherine said. “I greatly admired her. She was a very kind-hearted person.” She looked at me as though she was expecting a reply.

I had several, but I was still unable to move or say very much and was completely at her mercy.

“I see that Beatrice didn’t tell you anything. I suppose that she wanted to protect you from the truth.” Katherine filled another syringe and stuck me with it. “There, now try moving.”

After a while I got a little more feeling back. I was able to sit up and face her. I couldn’t manage much more than that but, I was able to speak normally. “What’s this about?”

“Those guys who attacked you wanted to get to you specifically Troy.” Katherine said. “There’s something very special about you.”

I thought back to how the burnout and the old man demanded that I go with them. My breathing became shallow and slow. It was like breathing through a narrow straw.

“To understand you must know your mother’s history. I have to take you back about twelve years. Your mother and I formerly belonged to an organization called Tovlin.” Katherine said. “We were scientists. You can say that we stood on the cutting edge of quantum physics, and bioengineering.”

I believed her when she said she was a scientist. Now that I got a better look at the room, I could see that it was an unadorned room with a low ceiling, and dim lights. There were tables all along the wall covered with beakers and various liquids. There was a white board with calculations that looked like they belonged in a college class.

“If the guys after me are interested in solving math problems, then they are definitely barking up the wrong tree.” I said tiredly.

Katherine ignored my attempt at a joke and continued. “Troy, you are very special.”

“I recall Sesame Street telling me the same thing when I was five,” I muttered.

“I guess there’s no easy way to tell you this, so I’ll be blunt,” Katherine said. “But you were a test subject in the Tovlin experiments.”

That stopped me. “Run that by me again.”

“Tovlin was an underground group,” Katherine explained. “What you need to know is that we aimed at splicing and altering the DNA of young humans to imbue them with incredible power. We pushed the boundaries of science. It was the dark places that breaking those boundaries took us to that lead Beatrice, me and a few others to rebel and attempt an insurrection that would cripple them.”

“Huh?” I asked, confused.

“Beatrice was not what she seemed, as I am not what I seem to be at first.” Katherine said. “This is a clone body. Beatrice had a clone body too.”

“Clones?” I asked skeptically. “This has to be either a bad dream or a bad joke.”

“There is no joke here, Troy,” Katherine replied. “I don’t have time for skepticism.”

“I don’t have time to be held hostage.” I shot back acting more bravely than I felt.

Katherine glared at me. For a while she said nothing. She began to pace.

It was unnerving to be at the mercy of someone like this. I looked over at Andrew. He had his eyes open. The cut on his head was bandaged.

I looked back at the woman who called herself Katherine. My bizarre captor who claimed that my mother was a clone. A woman who claimed to be a clone herself, who claimed that I was a test subject of some sort. I could see the wheels turning in her head.

She was crazy, I concluded. Maybe I could manipulate this psycho and negotiate me and Andrew’s way out of this nightmare. “Listen, if you let my brother and I go, we’ll go straight back home. Our foster parents don’t even know that we’re gone. We could go to bed and no one would ever have to know about this. I promise that we won’t say a word to the police or anyone.” It was the only tactic that I had.

Katherine snapped her fingers in an “a-ha” moment. “I know how I will prove it to you.”

My heart beat hard in my chest. “How?”

“You,” Katherine said. “You, Troy, shall be my proof.”