Aqua by Jonathan Dakin
Chapter Twenty Eight
“Diane is your mother?” I spat loudly, unable to hold it in any longer. The tension in the room was unbearable, and I felt incredibly sorry for Niyol, Aura and Sefarina, who were left reeling in shock at the unsettling revelation.
The woman calling herself Diane, who was in fact the mother of the Ventus Trio, turned towards me, her hazel eyes narrowing callously. Her hair, which was usually long loose curls, was now tied back into a tight ponytail. Her face was not its usual cheerful self: she was no longer our friendly neighbour, she was now a cold and calculating figure whose smile was not at all comforting- it was terrifying. Her sharply thin facial features and pale skin added to her callous demeanour, and the way she stood up straight and tall in the tight black cat suit, with her arms held behind her back, made her look like a drill sergeant. She had completely changed, and that was because her mask had been shed: she was no longer ‘Diane’, our cheery, ditzy friend. She was our enemy.
She strode across from Aura to Niyol, whose face was planted against the side of the ship’s wall. He simpered quietly as she flicked her gaze from me to her son. Her legs moved robotically, and every step she took seemed carefully considered.
“What the hell is going on?” Gamba spat, his face also plastered against a dull metallic sheet.
Diane moved closer to Niyol, studying him like a scientist would inspect a new species of insect: with caution and fascination. She also seemed revolted to be in his presence.
“Diane, what are you doing here? Why have you tied us up?” Shasa’s voice trembled with fury and betrayal.
The woman we knew as Diane stopped scrutinising her son and turned to my sister, who was tied to me. I felt her arms squirm as her back pressed against mine. I didn’t even attempt to break free- I knew there was no point in trying to escape. At least not now. I wanted an explanation: we all deserved one.
Diane’s eyes grew wider as she stepped slowly into the centre of the room, standing almost side by side with Aura.
“I can’t tell you how delighted I am that you fell into my trap. I was hoping that you would have killed one another days ago, but you seemed to have sorted out your differences.”
“You set us up!” Shasa confirmed.
Diane nodded and then studied her nails indifferently. “Yes, I did. I thought it might be easier for me if one or two of you had been destroyed before making it here, but oh well.” Her voice was completely devoid of emotion.
“How can you say that, mum? How can you say that?” Sefarina pleaded as she snivelled loudly, “Why would you want to kill us…?”
“Oh my darling daughter,” Diane answered without feeling, “you should never have been born.”
Diane continued to study her nails, then raised her eyes up slowly from them, and locked onto my gaze. Her dead eyes studied mine, as Sefarina cried even louder, unable to process what she was being told.
“You disgust me. All of you. You shouldn’t exist. You’re all mutant freaks who should be destroyed. And that is where HE and I differ…”
Sefarina stopped crying, and suddenly went quiet. An eerie atmosphere seeped into the room like a cloud of poisonous gas. Of course we all knew that HE was the leader of the Inimicus, and it was pretty obvious that Diane, or whoever this woman’s name was, also worked for the group intent on recruiting the Elementals for their own corrupt agenda. But if she intended to kill us, not use us like HE wanted… My heart pounded harder, realising that she wasn’t going to let us go free. She was going to kill us all, right here and right now.
“I suppose that you all have a lot of questions. And I want to give you answers. That’s the only reason that I kept you all alive. As you can see, I’ve taken special measures in preventing you from using your powers on me. If Niyol tries to electrocute me, he’ll fry everybody on board. If Gamba thinks that he can boil me, he’ll boil himself first. That’s the beauty of my plan: there’s no escape for any of you. So I want your last few minutes of life to be on my terms. I want you all to realise that you were outsmarted by the person who should be the leader of the Inimicus, and one day, will be. And also, I want you to know why I have decided to kill you all.”
My restraints began to tighten against my stomach, as Shasa rocked back and forth ferociously. She was probably trying to think of a way of escape, but I knew that we had little chance of leaving this encounter alive. Diane was smart, and had been several steps ahead of us this entire time.
“It was your blood on the safe, wasn’t it?” I glared at her with hateful intent. She looked back at me, emotionless. She then nodded slowly. I continued. “You knew that the blood would come back as a match, or at least a partial match, for the Ventus, because their DNA is on the Supernus’ database. But yours isn’t.”
“Yes, of course I knew that. I wanted to plant another reason for you to hate the Ventus as much as I do. I wanted you to kill them for me. But you didn’t. I can see now that they are far more resourceful and dangerous then I had anticipated.”
“Mummy…” Sefarina whispered quietly to herself. Niyol and Aura stayed silent, trying to steel themselves against what their mother was saying. They probably didn’t want to look as if her words were affecting them.
“I sent Valeska to England to destroy them. She would die for her cause: so she was easy to manipulate. She turned against the Elementus Populas incredibly quickly. But she was susceptible to his instructions, and tried to turn my…” She looked over at Niyol with distain and revulsion, “Niyol. She tried to turn Niyol. But I was always there to prod her back in the right direction, and she soon saw things the right way: my way.”
The Ventus’ mother was addressing all of us, but she never looked directly at her own children, or made eye contact with them. It was as if she was disgusted by the very sight of them, and she hated being in the same room as them.
“I hadn’t bargained on them being so strong. Who knew that my own daughter could destroy my most promising recruit? HE tried to warn her, but she wouldn’t listen. She had to destroy Southampton, thinking that it was to save the ocean. But in fact, it was my own personal agenda; one that Valeska herself wasn’t even privy too.”
The woman masquerading as ‘Diane’ turned her head and stepped towards the centre of the room, next to Visola, who was silent and still, but watched the woman like a hawk.
“But I guess I should start at the beginning. As you all must now know, my name isn’t Diane. It’s Sue. Simple Sue. The little girl who grew up completely ignored by everyone around her. And I was happy like that, to begin with. But I always had something inside of me, this feeling, this passion… I knew I was destined for more than just being Simple Sue. And then I met a man. And I liked him, but he too was plain and boring and wholly bland, just like me. And we had a child: a baby girl. And I was so happy. I knew that being a mother was what my life had been leading towards. Raising my child to be far more exceptional than myself was going to be my goal- my dream. But then, just days after I gave birth to her, they told me that she was… different. That there was something not quite right with my child. But they couldn’t be sure. So I just ignored them, and continued trying to be the best mother I could be. I loved my daughter, and pretty soon, I had another one, and she was just as perfect as the first. Or so I thought…”
Aura sniffed loudly, and Sefarina sobbed quietly, but Niyol remained completely motionless, his eyes scrunched shut. The woman, Sue, strolled from one side of the room to another, as she told her story, completely disconnected from it. Simple Sue had died a long time ago. The woman in front of me was an entirely different person.
SHE continued.
“The hospital called. They wanted to see me. A strange young man came to our house. He told us that we might have to be prepared for our children being… unusual. He said that if we had a son, our world would change. But I didn’t want another child. I had my two daughters: my two perfect daughters. But no, my husband, he wanted more children- that was his dream
Niyol gushed, spitting out a huge wad of saliva, and then tears began to stream down his face as he gulped in air heavily, completely unable to bottle his emotions up anymore. Everyone in the room was feeling the emotional weight of the story: even Gamba. What Sue was saying was horrible. It was the worst thing a mother could ever say about her child, and here she was, admitting that she detested her son.
“I hoped and prayed that maybe the doctors were wrong and that he would be normal, but I knew he wasn’t. So the night I gave birth to him, from the first moment I held him in my arms, I wanted to kill him. And I almost did too, but something stopped me. I just couldn’t go through with it. Something inside convinced me that it was wrong... I was a good mother. I had a perfect family. Maybe my children weren’t freaks after all. But then the strange young man came back to my house, and told me this weird gobbledegook about powers and elements and natural selection… It made no sense to me. And after he left, it finally hit me: I was the freak. Not my children- me. I was responsible for having mutant babies that weren’t perfect. I had destroyed my own life.”
Sue sighed, as a single tear fell from her left eye. “It wasn’t long after that when I left. I had two choices: get rid of them, or disappear forever. And I just couldn’t hurt my children. I couldn’t. Not when I was responsible for making them the way they were. So I left them all behind: my perfect husband, my perfect house, and my perfect daughters. They were dead to me. They were monsters created by a monster. Their mother was Simple Sue, a woman who couldn’t harm her own children.”
Sue sighed heavily, and then looked out of the corners of her eyes towards her three children.
“But I should have.”
The soldier, who continued to point the rifle at us, shifted uneasily. What Sue was telling us was devastating. She hated herself so much, and blamed herself for her children being Elementals, that she had abandoned them. But maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
“A few years later, I met HE, the leader of the Inimicus. I wanted an explanation for what I had done, what I had created, and he provided me with one. It wasn’t my fault- it was just Mother Nature. It was natural selection in action, and I happened to be the unlucky mother who gave birth to the next generation of freaks. It could have happened to anyone. And that’s when I got angry. Why was fortune so cruel? Why did this have to happen to me? Why couldn’t I have everything I had ever wanted? I had never done anything to deserve such an unhappy life. But HE taught me that we could control nature- it was ours to shape, and in doing so, we could rule the world. And HE was right. I could control my own destiny. I had to take back what life had so cruelly stolen from me. I no longer had to be Simple Sue. I could be SHE, the second in command of the Inimicus. I could finally be that glorious person I knew was inside of me all along. So Simple Sue left that day, and was replaced by the woman you see before you: the woman that I was born to become.”
SHE stopped in her tracks and carefully manoeuvred her body so that she looked at us all individually, except for her own children.
“My plan has been years in the making. I stepped away from HE a long time ago, but HE doesn’t know that. Not yet anyway. The organisation we set up, Nations United Against Global Extinction, or NU-AGE, is our way of recruiting similar minded people. And we also get funding for our causes. For all intents and purposes, NU-AGE is a charity against pollution, climate change, and the destruction of the environment. To the world, we’re a harmless group of people who protest against multinational corporations… Ones like Price International. Which reminds me of something….”
SHE walked back over to the door that she had entered through, and turned towards someone presumably standing there, unseen. SHE moved her index finger and beckoned towards the hidden agent, signalling that someone join us in the room. Within seconds ‘Chewy’ Chuck Price, who was also bound, but unlike us, gagged, was forcible pushed through the doorway by another guard. Although Mr Price seemed unhappy about his situation, he carefully stepped into the middle of the room and knelt onto the floor, as directed by the man holding a gun to his back.
I looked at Mr Price’s fat face, and noticed that he had dried blood plastered around an open wound on his cheek. I could tell that it was a fresh wound. His round eyes were filled with dread, and he pleaded at me with them.
“I gather you met Mr Price today,” SHE began, her voice louder but still completely even and controlled. “As you know, this is his container ship, and he intends to dump the toxic waste on board in the Equatorial Guinea, for a rather large fortune. Doesn’t that just make you sick to your stomach?”
Even though it did, I didn’t like where this was heading. Mr Price tried to turn to look at his captor, but was instead dealt a heavy blow to the side of the head by the butt of the guard’s gun.
“It’s too late for you, Mr Price, and you know that. You had the chance to change your mind in our meeting today, and you decided not to. You even tried to have me killed by your thugs. But they didn’t do a good job now, did they?”
SHE turned to Shasa, speaking directly to her. “Mr Price met me as the President of NU-AGE. I told him that I knew what he was planning to do and that he should stop, and he laughed in my face.”
SHE then bent over so that she was speaking directly into Mr Price’s right ear.
“We’ll see who gets the last laugh, Chuck.”
SHE smiled wickedly, continuing to fixate on my sister.
“Now let’s flashback to a few weeks ago: to Southampton. HE didn’t want such an open attack, but I persuaded Valeska to go through with it. One reason was to get rid of the Ventus Trio, the other, which was actually the main purpose for the entire event, was for me to destroy a rather valuable container ship, owned by none other than Price Industries. And what was on that boat Mr Price?”
He mumbled something through his thick knotted gag, but it was completely incomprehensible.
“That’s right,” SHE continued, “it was a boat load of very expensive items that were being shipped to the United States. Items like gold, diamonds, rubies and other jewels that you destroyed the environment to get, just to make yourself richer. And you thought they were gone forever: sent to the bottom of the sea in the strange storm that hit the South Coast. Well we stole them from you, Mr Price, for two reasons. One: to fund our future operations…” she twisted her head to Visola, “we are a charity you know, and Two: so that you would have to find other ways to make money. And since you were coming to the Equatorial Guinea to dump the waste illegally, we predicted that you would invest in something… like oil.”
SHE was speaking so fast, I was finding it hard to keep up with her. But as her words filtered through my eardrums and into my brain, I began to process what she was saying and then formulate theories of my own about her agenda. It clearly wasn’t just about money. There was something else that was wanted, something she hadn’t yet disclosed to us…
SHE looked back at me, her lifeless eyes staring out at me as her head tilted slowly to the left.
“Fossil fuels are deplorable. We at NU-AGE are against people using them. How dare humans turn Mother Nature against herself? But I knew the call of cheap oil would bring Mr Price to the Equatorial Guinea. But I wonder what his powerful friends would say if they found out that he has been buying oil from other territories?”
SHE smirked cruelly. “And let’s not forget the implications of a huge multinational corporation offloadi
“You’re crazy!” Gamba shouted out. “Destroying the world to make a new one? That doesn’t make any sense!”
“Oh, but it does,” SHE explained, “Because I’ll have ten superheroes with Elemental powers to help me rebuild everything.”
I glanced over to Visola, who shot me back a look. Sefarina glared at Aura in terror. We all knew that she wasn’t referring to us.
“I’m not going to go into this either, but since it concerns you, and is the reason why you’re on this ship and about to die, I’ll let you know that your sacrifice will not be in vain. Your deaths will bring about a new generation of Elementals. But the difference between them and you is that I will be able to control and manipulate them from the minute they are born. They’ll be more like super soldiers than human beings.”
“You’re insane!” Aura reiterated.
“Technology is a wonderful thing,” SHE elaborated, “It allows you to meddle with Mother Nature. It allows you to play the role of God. It will stop fate from ruining the lives of other mothers who just want normal children.”
“What are you saying?” Shasa asked in worry.
SHE shook her finger at my sister as if she were telling off a small child. “You don’t need to know that. It’s unimportant. Once you seven are dead, I’ll only have to kill the Chinese twins, and then hunt down the Ignis girl again, wherever she is. Then the next generation will belong to me. HE thought that we could control you, and you would work with us and so speed up the plan, but I knew you never would. That is why NU-AGE invested money in the right places.”
“Genetic engineering,” I said aloud. SHE glared at me hatefully, and then smiled robotically.
“You’ve always been so bright Madzimoyo,” she uttered indifferently. “I really wish that I didn’t have to make this sacrifice… You all have such wonderful powers. I loved learning about them, so that I could make these special suits.”
“You didn’t learn all of our powers,” Shasa told her.
SHE frowned in confusion, and then began clutching at her head.
“What are you doing?” SHE screamed as her temple began to pulsate and her eyes became bloodshot. SHE dropped to the floor, next to Mr Price, and blood began to trickle out of her nose.
Shasa was killing her.