Untouchable. Stephanie Doyle

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СКАЧАТЬ to imply that you weren’t. Only that… Well, you didn’t get to choose this place. It was chosen for you. You didn’t get to decide what you wanted to do with your life. It was decided for you.”

      “Not decided,” Lilith corrected her. “Dictated. Dictated by my condition. You have seen what I can do. I have no other choice.”

      “Yes, I’ve seen what you can do,” she allowed. “But you don’t know if your condition can be treated. You have never tried to leave this place to find out. Accept the truth. You were sent here as a punishment by your family. A punishment you didn’t deserve because you couldn’t possibly help what happened.”

      “I have never spoken of what happened,” Lilith said quietly. “You do not know what I did.”

      “I know it must have been bad for your father to do what he did, but I also know you were a child. Barely thirteen when you were abandoned here. You stay in this place to punish yourself for this wrong you feel you’ve committed. That’s not living life. That’s suffering in purgatory.”

      Lilith recognized the word from Sister Joseph’s many sermons. Purgatory was a place you went after death to atone for your sins before moving on to heaven.

      Glancing around the village, she saw the small huts and so many of the thin, suffering bodies that filled them. There were good days here, but she couldn’t deny that most of them were filled with pain. Pain she could only ease for a little while.

      Maybe Sister Peter was right. Maybe this was purgatory.

      But that didn’t mean that Lilith didn’t belong here.

      Chapter 3

      The screen turned black as she continued to press her finger down on the power button. Lilith wasn’t sure if it was the proper way to stop the computer but it was the only thing she could think of to make the words go away. And she so desperately needed to make them go away.

      If you’re reading this I’m dead….

      The awful part was that Jackie being dead was the least disturbing piece of information in her files.

      Genetic experiments. A new breed of powerful women. My offspring. My daughters.

      Shaking her head, Lilith tried to remove the flashes of phrases that were burned behind her eyes, but they wouldn’t let go of her. She couldn’t unread what she’d read or unlearn what she’d learned. It would be with her now. Always.

      Surrogate mother…two others created of my eggs…each of you now has a piece of my empire… Put the pieces together and all will be revealed… This is a taste…

      Hungry yet?

      Hungry? A taste?

      Empire.

      That word stood out among the rest. It was the word Jackie used to describe the endless amounts of folders on her memory stick. Some of the folders were names. Names that even in the far reaches of Arunachal Pradesh Lilith recognized. Leaders of the world, who had lied, cheated, raped and killed. Sinners, all of them, who paid money to hide their crimes rather than admit their mistakes and be punished for them. Vaguely Lilith wondered if they hadn’t simply created their own version of a lifelong purgatory.

      And there was more. So many folders that she couldn’t open, but after what she’d already read she couldn’t imagine going any further. Couldn’t conceive of wanting to know more than she did.

      Closing the lid on the laptop, she stood and moved away from it. Lilith knew she would never be able to move as far away from the machine as she needed to be to forget. She didn’t believe the world was that big.

      Jackie Webb, Arachne as she’d referred to herself, was Lilith’s biological mother. That had been in the first folder Lilith read. The documents indicated that the woman in whose womb she’d grown had been nothing more than an incubator for a genetic experiment. Had she known when she agreed to do this what they were putting inside her? Did she have a choice?

      Did she ever suspect that the baby she was giving life to would ultimately poison and kill its host?

      The impact of what this meant, of what she’d learned, was suddenly too much to handle. It was like having the secrets of the universe revealed all at once. Her mortal mind was too fragile to take it in. She needed to leave. She needed to find someplace where she could let the information settle in her head and in her heart.

      The monastery. There she could clean herself. In the garden she could let the water rush over her body, taking away the filth she’d been exposed to. She would remember who she was—not what the computer had revealed but who she had become since her birth.

      Lilith started for the opening to the hut but stopped. The computer sat on her writing table, so out of place in the stark space she’d called home for these last ten years. She could still feel the heat it gave off. Or was what she was feeling something more sinister? Part of her wanted to destroy the computer and the tiny piece of metal inside it. But she knew she couldn’t. The information it contained was simply too important.

      Walking back to it, she removed the stick from the back of the computer and found the spider necklace still nestled inside the box she’d place on her table. She turned it over and slid open the back, returning the flash drive to its hiding place. Leaving the necklace wasn’t an option, but the thought of wearing it made her shudder.

      She had no choice.

      Lilith pulled the gold chain around her neck and fastened the catch in the back. Then she tucked the gold body inside her silk coverall where it rested against her skin, safe from another’s touch.

      Avoiding the greetings from the villagers and, more important, avoiding Sister Peter, who would have nothing but questions, she made her way up the steep hill to the monastery.

      Another young monk answered the summons at the door. Pema had recently been sent to the monastery by his family in Nepal. If the beads of sweat that habitually formed on his shaved head were any indication, he still hadn’t gotten used to the weighted heat.

      Lilith spoke in a dialect native to his land, one that she remembered from her childhood in Nepal, and he smiled. Thinking she had come for study, he pointed to where she knew Punab typically held his classes, but instead she made for the inner courtyard fashioned with water pumps and basins where the monks did their bathing as well as their laundry.

      Winding her way through the series of walkways, Lilith found the center of the building. The burst of color inside the garden was so comforting she could have wept. This was the place she came from. The place where she’d begun to learn who she was. Not that other place. Not some lab.

      Carefully she reached out and touched the delicate petals of the orchids that flourished under the brothers’ care. So much like her own skin, she thought. Soft and silklike with just a hint of dew. Sometimes others thought she glowed. It hadn’t been a curse as her father believed. It wasn’t a sickness like the nuns suggested.

      What had been done to her had been done on purpose. By Jackie.

      Frowning, Lilith let the flower fall from her hand and made her way deeper into the courtyard where she found a series of pumps. Taking a large clay bowl with a flat bottom that had been specifically designated for her use, she placed it under the pump and began to call up water from the well СКАЧАТЬ