Green Death Read online

  GREEN DEATH

  by Madeleine Ribbon

  Green Death

  Copyright © 2018 by Madeleine Ribbon

  First Edition

  Cover Art by Fiona Jayde

  Edited by Venessa Giunta

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9903207-4-6

  Warning:

  This book includes strong language and explicit m/m sex.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places, and events are all from the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, places, and people is coincidental

  Part One

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Oligarch, please rethink your strategy here. Tryg is the only person in the country qualified to be your poison master. You can try, but you won’t replace him. Professor Marita is good, but she doesn’t think the same way you Sants do, and without being clearer with our intentions and instructions, her product will always be inferior.”

  The voice was soft and rumbling. I froze half-way up the mansion’s wide, curved staircase and held my breath in order to hear all the nuances in Arris’s words as he spoke to my half-brother. They had to be standing just outside the large office at the top.

  Vodayn Sant, my elder by nearly thirty years, had taken the family Oligarch seat when our father died. The Sants had been one of the ruling dynasties of Eastrend for hundreds of years. We’d also been—and still were—meticulous poison masters, hidden behind a medical research front. When I’d shown a penchant for science just after Father’s death, Vodayn had delighted in handing over responsibility of that element of our family legacy to me.

  “I beg you, don’t be so hesitant to use Tryg,” Arris said. “I have never gotten sub-par results with his creations.”

  Mild elation surged through me. From what I understood, Arris rarely spoke about me. He rarely spoke to me, and we were sleeping together. We’d never talked about “us,” so I had no better definition for whatever we were. Just… us. Tryg and Arris. Two terribly alone people in a potentially deadly environment.

  And then all the possible meanings of his words finally sank in.

  My gut started churning.

  Vodayn’s requests of me had certainly thinned to a trickle lately, but I’d hoped it was because he didn’t need quite so many people poisoned. I’d also entertained the notion that he was doing some of the work himself, though that seemed rather farfetched.

  Vodayn had been trained by our father, but he’d had no patience for the intricacies of poisoncraft. He had more politically refined interests, and he had passionately hated the simple everyday tasks of caring for our menagerie or picking apart the chemical makeup of a poison.

  So, by default, I’d gotten the job.

  When I first started, he often reminded me of how gracious he was in allowing me to take that position. The desperate-for-attention ten-year-old that I’d been had believed him. I’d fast learned that I could either excel or I’d be completely ignored—or worse, replaced.

  So I became the best.

  Behind me, at the foot of the stairs, one of Vodayn’s guards sighed. “Mr. Sant? The Oligarch is waiting for you. You’d best get up there.”

  His not-so-subtle nudge to get moving rankled, but Vodayn was the one to be feared in this household, not me. I was merely avoided by everyone except Arris.

  I started climbing again, more slowly this time. As I reached the top and spotted Vodayn and Arris, they both fell silent and focused their gazes on me.

  Vodayn stood just outside the office, regal, head high, nearly a foot taller than me. Despite only being half-brothers, we looked eerily similar, except for the height and shoulder-width. We had the same light brown hair, the same honey-brown eyes, the same fair skin.

  Arris leaned against the wall next to him, arms crossed, his ever-present blankness smothering any emotions. His eyes were the one part of him to ever show what he was thinking, and then only rarely.

  I approached my brother, head bowed just a little. I never met his gaze if I could help it. “You summoned me?”

  My father had taught me, long ago, that respect to an Oligarch comes before whatever blood tie we shared, and it was a lesson I never failed to adhere to around Vodayn. My brother’s temper was ice-cold and insidious. He got revenge. Always. I did my best to even him out, arguing against using some of the more horrible concoctions against his enemies, but I did it deferentially. Arguing was a strong word—I quietly suggested alternatives. And sometimes he listened. Either way, I honored him as the head of the family and as one of the most important people in the country, made him his poisons, and tried not to think too hard about how he used them.

  We killed people. It was the family business. The Sant line had fostered poison masters for twenty generations—twice as long as we’d held one of the fifty Oligarch’s seats. Three times as long as we sat in the Highest Council, a group of six Oligarchs that wielded the ability to direct what the rest of the Oligarchy focused their time and attention on.

  I hated the work.

  Not all of it, of course. I loved the thrill of a challenge, and I loved creating new things. I always got a sense of satisfaction when I completed exactly what Vodayn asked of me. He’d give me a set of symptoms he wanted me to recreate—graying hair, or painful joints, or unexplained pain, or sometimes a mimic of another ailment like a heart attack. I’d find the right recipe almost every single time. And I loved the menagerie we had in the poisons lab, the snakes and spiders and scorpions and sea life, most of which had become extinct out in the wild even before the old United States of America splintered and our piece had become Eastrend.

  No, that part was fantastic. Interesting. Intellectually challenging. But the results?

  Even growing up here, where deadly political intrigue was a fact of life, it took me a stupidly long time to realize I was killing people with my work. I finally figured it out it well into my teens, while creating poisons that dissolved the liver, or fried the nervous system, or made a person suffocate without any clear reason why.

  The discovery had terrified me, but I had no choice but to continue making them. Not if I wanted to remain useful to the family. And usefulness, Father had always said, was the most important part of carrying Sant blood. Marriageable family made political alliances. Those with brains furthered the family businesses. And I, with my deadly skills, had to continue as poison master.

  I was just as much at fault for murder as Arris, whose bodyguard title was a gilded cover for what he really did—assassinations. He took my poisons, and he administered them to the enemies of my brother, the enemies of the Oligarchy, or the enemies of the Sant family. Sometimes, the other Oligarchs themselves.

  We were a pair of murderers, he and I. Perhaps that was why we’d been drawn together for mutual physical satisfaction. We shared the same damnation.

  “Tryg. It took you long enough. Come in,” Vodayn said, waving toward his desk. His eyes were dark and stony, his thin lips pressed together hard enough for the skin to pale. Arris pushed himself upright as I followed Vodayn into the enormous, gilt-covered room. After I cleared the threshold, he pushed the doors shut, leaving just Vodayn and me in the echoing chamber of the family estate’s grand office.

  I stood in front of Vodayn’s carved-wood desk, staring down at the intricate swirls and patterns of plant and animal life that covered every inch of it. The desk was hundreds of years old. Every single species depicted was either venomous or poisonous, but only a poison master would understand the theme. Vodayn could probably only recognize a third of the species. I, myself, could only identify about three-quarters. The rest had probably gone extinct before our family began to cultivate the menagerie.

  Vodayn circled the desk and dropped into his leather chair. He hadn’t offered me the uncomfortab
le straight-backed one on my side, so I knew this discussion would be serious—or more so than usual, anyway.

  I remained standing, hands clasped in front of me, eyes focused on one of the vines that ran across the front of the desk.

  “I need something from inventory, and I know you won’t like it, so I’m going to head off your politely worded report before it happens. You will do this. Immediately and without question.”

  I tensed.

  “Yes, Vodayn.” My mouth went dry. “What do you need? A new creation or—”

  “No, I think the Black Daydream would do nicely for the job. Do we still have some in stock?”

  My blood ran cold. Black Daydream was a potent mix our grandfather invented that caused the person poisoned to go through intense, painful spasms for weeks on end. Most survived—especially if they had a good doctor around in the first day or two—but very few escaped without nerve damage, and the experience was akin to violent, incessant torture, so the survivors ended up with mental problems as well.

  The analytical part of my mind spun up half a dozen ways I might be able to do it better than Grandfather’s recipe. The other half of my mind—the part harboring the growing seed of alarm that seemed to sprout each time Vodayn asked something of me—couldn’t imagine any need for a poison like that.

  “I don’t think I have any in stock. But I have all the ingredients for it. It’ll take me a few hours to put together.” I dropped my gaze to the rug. At least I had the antidote to this one on hand. When asked to do jobs I hated, I’d find or make the antidote too, if I could. Those antidotes had become my sanity.

  And I’d hand a vial of that antidote over with the poison. Just in case Arris accidentally poisoned himself, I’d said when he first asked me about it. He never asked again, though I suspected he knew my true reasons.

  “Good,” Vodayn said. “Go. Get to work. Arris will come pick it up at noon.”

  I left the room at a sedate walk, but as soon as I reached the enclosed lower-level corridors that weren’t lined with guards, I took off at a run.

  Who was this poison for? What did Vodayn want, to torture someone in such a horrible way? At least I wasn’t killing anyone today, though causing significant health problems for the rest of the victim’s life was hardly better.

  I couldn’t live like this. But I couldn’t live any other way, either.

  * * * * *

  I stared at the box of old D-drives I’d found in the bottom of one of the lab’s multitude of closets.

  My tiny office, across the hall from the laboratory proper, was the place where Arris looked for me when he wanted a fuck. I’d started to spend far too much time here in the evenings, nursing that little hope in my heart that he’d come through the door, close it behind him, and lock it.

  He only came about once a week, so I’d gotten a lot of menial work done since our strange arrangement had started.

  As I waited on this particular night, I continued working on my data updating project. It was long, boring, and would probably take me another year or two to finish. My ancestors had stashed away hundreds of D-drives filled with old backups, private notes, or projects they didn’t want put on the main database for some long-forgotten reason. I’d been updating the contents of each D-drive to modern formatting. Then I’d go through each updated folder to see if there was anything useful. Anything new went on the lab’s active database network and the D-drives were kept as a backup, and any storage devices that didn’t have anything new or useful would be wiped and reused.

  There were a lot of D-drives to get through. Especially since the lab’s data storage system was designed to run half a dozen backups every day, some to off-site locations I’d never been to. Nine tenths of what I’d found so far was a simple copy of an old version of the database.

  But I knew the Sant family. We had secrets. And sometimes, we liked to destroy those secrets rather than pass on any decent knowledge that came with them.

  I’d already found a drive full of my great-great-grandfather’s notes that hadn’t been added to our database, and some if it was good stuff to know. He’d studied a species of spider in our menagerie that I was having a hard time getting to breed, and just by looking through his research, I already thought I might have found what the problem was.

  I needed to lower the humidity in the cage by ten percent, but only for a few hours each day. This little piece of useful knowledge had been lost amid hundreds of files plotting an assassination of one of the then-Oligarch Sant’s biggest rivals. Ancient history. Nothing I—or anyone else—could do anything about.

  So I sat in my office, in front of the main computer station. It was an ancient system, with access points all through the lab that allowed me to browse the database impossibly fast and with ease, without worrying about purifying my hands or gloves before manipulating the display.

  The system had been state-of-the-art a hundred and fifty years ago, and now, very few people could recreate it. Some substance the technology relied on had been mined to death.

  I re-read the document I’d just updated—developmental notes on some theoretical poison—and suppressed the desire to vomit. What kind of a monster was my five-times-great grandfather, to make him think about developing a poison that liquefied a person’s insides and worked most effectively on children?

  Then again, our family bred monsters like I bred snakes.

  I closed out of the document. I didn’t have the stomach to pick through the rest of these notes. Not now.

  I pulled another D-drive out of the box. This one was crystal, one of the formats that rarely corrupted and lasted ages. It was only about a hundred years old, so updating file formats wouldn’t be too much of a pain.

  Good. Not a lot of mind work. I didn’t want to think too hard. Not after having had to hand Arris a vial of Black Daydream—as well as the antidote—nearly six hours ago. Not after looking at five-times Great-Grandfather’s brainstorming over the most effective ways to cause an agonizingly painful death to eight-year-olds.

  At least Vodayn had never asked me for that kind of poison.

  The files uploaded slowly, the copy of the crystal D-drive archive joining four others in the ‘to-go-through’ set of folders on my personal corner of the lab’s database. I opened the first document folder, one called ‘Project 99.’ It was a title I hadn’t seen before. Most had far more descriptive names. Numbered projects tended to be either politically controversial or excessively deadly.

  I scanned through the contents quickly.

  The documents were filled with developmental-stage notes, several checklists, and pictures. Green plumes of smoke filled a small, enclosed cleanroom just like the one attached to the back of the lab. There was a close-up of a human eyeball, the whites tinted a sickly green. An old video file showed a man, wild-eyed and foaming at the mouth, hurling himself at the observational window of the cleanroom while snarling like a wild animal.

  And all of it looked too familiar, too much like the national catastrophe that had happened only a few years after the dates listed on these files.

  The Green Death had solidified the Oligarchy just when Eastrend had seemed to be on the edge of a revolution. It was the disaster that had never disappeared. The one that dozens of documentary and film makers still focused on as a national rallying point.

  Ninety years ago, an explosion flattened a city block and then coated several miles of the city in thick green chemical fog that still hung in the air—though now boxed in by thick, towering concrete walls, so it wouldn’t contaminate any more of the city.

  The horrific disaster was a riddle nobody had solved. The people of Eastrend did not know who had done it, and whether it was on purpose or on accident. There had been no answers when the incident had happened, but most people suspected terrorist activity from one of Eastrend’s more aggressive neighbors—or perhaps an explosion at a chemical warehouse with horrible side effects. The general public was too worried about finding a way to stop the spread of the
deadly green air to scream for answers.

  Months later, once the walls had been constructed and the worst of the fog contained, people started asking questions. But by that time the evidence had been long destroyed—or was located in the center of the newly formed Exclusion Zone. And nobody dared to venture there. Not while covered in the still-potent poisonous fog and protected by half-mile-high walls and the violent, beast-like survivors of the chemicals.

  And now, the answer lay in front of me. Ice crystallized in my veins as I picked apart my great-grandfather’s notes. It certainly had been a terrorist attack, but it had been committed by Eastrend’s own government. Why would he do that to our country? Our citizens? He’d been the most influential Oligarch of his time. His life was protecting his people, despite his dark methods of dealing with his opponents. He wouldn’t poison his people on a mass scale.

  Would he?

  I sat back in my chair as the computer continued to transfer files. Then I glanced up at the tiny security camera mounted in the corner of my office. The first time we’d been intimate here, Arris had reassured me it wasn’t working. I hoped that was still the case. I turned back to the computer screen and opened another file.

  More pictures, this time of green powder poured into a large metal canister. Then of the impact site in the middle of the Exclusion Zone, taken at the moment of impact. A bright ball of fire radiated outward.

  No wonder I’d never seen Project 99 before. This would have been purged from the lab completely as soon as it’d finished. Great-Grandfather would have seen to it himself. This D-drive had probably been the only copy kept, and he probably hadn’t told Grandfather about the contents or even its existence.

  I studied the folder more closely. The Green Death’s final chemical compound wasn’t in any of the documents I opened up, but I recognized some of the poisons and venoms he referenced in his notes, and there were hundreds more files to search through.