“Strong start,” I interject.
“Seriously?” He gives me a what-the-fuck look. “You want to do this?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Then butt the fuck out,” he snarls.
“Until I was eleven years old,” I butt the fuck in, “Max and Milla didn’t exist. Then I went through a…traumatic experience, and somehow I…” I run a hand through my hair again.
“Just say it,” Max urges. “It’s not going to get any easier.”
“I split into three.” My words are met with silence. I look around, and now everyone is frowning. Except Merrick, who has a dawning understanding on his face.
Does that mean he knows something about what we are? If so, how?
“Like three personalities?” Beckett asks, eyes narrowed in thought.
I have a flashback to that day. Of finishing my chores early and wandering through a hole in the fence at the children’s refugee camp where I’d been taken when my mother was murdered. There were several holes we liked to sneak out of—no one at the camp paid too much attention to our comings and goings as there was nowhere for us to go, nothing in any direction but barren desert for hundreds of miles.
A sandstorm came up, and I dug deep into a dune to try to shelter myself. I hid there for an hour, maybe two. Something happened in that dune—something painful and terrifying and unlike anything I’d ever felt before. And when I tunneled out after the storm, I was three instead of one.
“Like three people,” I tell her. “I was me, and then I was we. Me, Max, and Milla. They were just there, and I didn’t understand, but at the same time I did. They were me. I was them.”
“We,” Max says quietly. “We can hear one another’s thoughts. Feel what the others are feeling. Know what the others are going to do before they do it. I’m Ian. He’s me. We’re both Milla.”
“Like a gestalt or a hive mind,” I put in. We’d done a lot of research over the years before we even ran across those terms and understood that they were the closest explanation. Years of research before we were able to even accept what we are.
Now, we wouldn’t want it any other way.
“But how?” Kali says. She doesn’t look disgusted, thankfully. Just very confused. Which is understandable, considering what we’re talking about is fucking confusing. “I’ve never heard of such a thing, and I thought the Imperial libraries held knowledge about everything.”
“I have,” Merrick says. Apparently I was right about the look on his face earlier. “It’s called tripartition. When a single entity—in this case, Ian—splits into three and forms a triplex.”
“But still—how? Giving it a name doesn’t make it make any more sense.” Kali doesn’t look at me when she says it. I don’t know if that means she’s disgusted by us or just that she doesn’t want to make me uncomfortable while she tries to understand. I’m hoping it’s the second, but I doubt it.
“The Sisterhood believes in lingering DNA from the Ancients,” Merrick says. “We’ve been collecting records for millennia. Some people, especially Seratians, have traces of DNA strains that survive from before humanity evolved in Senestris. We think of these genetic anomalies as blessings from the Light, and they often come with side effects that we study—visions, foresight, longevity. There are also side effects when people who don’t have alien DNA come in contact with it. Tripartition is one of those side effects, though it’s very rare. I’ve only heard of one other case in the last hundred years, and they died when…”
Sure. Exposure to Ancient DNA. Makes as much sense as anything else we’ve read about what happened in that dune.
“When what?” Rain asks. She’s leaning forward, fascinated in a way that Kali doesn’t seem to be at all.
Is that good or bad? Then again, it doesn’t really matter, does it? We are what we are. I can’t change it and wouldn’t change it if I could, so it’s no use worrying about whether Kali thinks we’re okay or not.
“When one of them was killed in an accident,” Merrick answers reluctantly. “They all died.”
And there it is. The one big—and I mean huge—downside to our little gestalt. “Yeah,” I say. “One of us dies, and we all die.” We discovered that little gem in our early research. We never found an explanation like the one Merrick just gave me, but we did come across stories and legends that could only be the same thing.
Kali backs away from me and sinks down into a chair behind her. Her eyes are wide. “So, what just happened?” she asks, and her voice quivers.
“We felt Milla. She was in pain. That’s the only way we can feel her over large distances.”
“Is she dead?” Beckett asks, and for a second she looks like she’s just waiting for Max and me to keel over.
Max rolls his eyes at her. “Which part about if she dies, we die was not clear?”
She shrugs. “I’m just making sure we weren’t going to have to prepare for you to go down any second.”
“Beckett!” Rain looks horrified.
Beckett throws her hands up. “I’m just saying, this is some really weird shit. I’m just trying to figure it out.”
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” Kali says softly.
“Us too,” Max says.
“So, how does it work?” Kali asks Merrick. “This tripartition thing. I mean, if one person becomes three, there has to be some kind of biological explanation. I mean, at bare bones, physics is a thing, and mass occupies a certain amount of space. Not to mention things like organs and nervous systems and blood.”
“Like I said, we have the knowledge on Serati but not a lot of practical application of said knowledge,” Merrick clarifies. “To the best of our understanding, the alien DNA acts like a virus in the host it comes in contact with. Over a very short time—I don’t know how long, but accounts in the Sisterhood’s records say an hour or two—normal, healthy cells begin to split at a really fast rate. So fast that other cells don’t have time to die out like they normally would.”
“Hold up,” Gage says. “All the cells split? Brain, organ, everything?”
“Again, no medical professional has ever witnessed it happening—to my knowledge, anyway—but that is the supposition. When the cells become too much for one body to handle, it splits.”
“So kind of like cloning,” Gage says. “But with one consciousness.”
“And—in Ian’s case—enough female alien DNA to create at least one female in the triplex,” Merrick finishes, and he’s studying me like I’m some sort of curiosity.
They all are—even Kali. Which is the other reason we never tell anyone what we are. Just think what would happen if someone like Dr. Veragelen got hold of the information.
“The Sisterhood consider those altered by Ancient DNA children of the gods,” Rain says. “We call you the Gifted.”
“I don’t feel particularly fucking gifted right now.”
“No, she’s right,” Merrick adds. “Likely, you’d be considered a miracle back on Serati and revered for your holiness.” He sounds amused by the idea.