Project 731 Read Online Free Page A

contact’s name and placing the phone to my ear. It rings six times and goes to voicemail. Although we’re in East Nowheresville, there’s always cell service on the preserve. I made sure of it.
    She should be answering. She always answers. On my way back to the others, my heart starting to beat faster, I try again with the same result.
    Collins must see the look of concern on my face, because she asks, “What is it?”
    I lower the phone. “Something’s wrong. Maigo’s not answering.”

 
     
    2
     
    The black Suburban sits alone on what remains of the paved road leading to the ruined laboratory. Not far from here is a large cabin that belongs to the FC-P. Hawkins, Joliet and Lilly spend most of their time here, training in the woods and hiding from the public—Lilly for obvious reasons, Hawkins and Joliet because they’re convinced they’re being hunted by someone within the government, specifically within DARPA. While Joliet is now part of the team, her involvement is off the books, and Hawkins works under a fake name, Dustin Dreyling, though we just call him ‘Ranger’ when on mission.
    I’m out of breath when I reach the Suburban, having run the distance. The others aren’t far behind. Lilly, as usual, is several steps ahead. Unable to see through the tinted glass, I reach for the SUV’s door.
    “She’s not in there,” Lilly says. “I already checked.”
    I believe her, but I open the door anyway, looking for clues. Maigo’s cell phone is in the back seat, where she’d been sitting. No signs of a struggle.
    Maigo is kind of a solitary soul, except when it comes to me. We’ve maintained the bond developed while she was inside Nemesis—while she was Nemesis. It really is impossible for anyone to fully understand what she’s going through. Lilly gets what it’s like to not be fully human, and the two girls have made a connection. And I have a vague understanding of what it’s like to share a head with a three-hundred-foot-tall Kaiju . I got a taste of Maigo’s world, too, when I slipped my consciousness inside the Kaiju, Scylla. But Maigo...
    She was once a normal little girl. She lived and went to school in Boston. Her mother was Japanese, and her father was a wealthy, white business man—and a murderer. He killed Maigo’s mother, and then, when the then ten-year-old girl walked in on the scene, he killed her as well. Maigo’s recollection of her previous self begins and ends with her own murder, the memory hazy but real, passed on through her cells.
    Using Maigo’s harvested organs, General Lance Gordon—who is now dead, thank God—fused her DNA with that of an ancient, long dead Kaiju, who we now call Nemesis Prime, and whose origins are still a mystery. If mythology is to be believed, she was the ancient Greek goddess of vengeance, a role she filled again when the Maigo clone grew and changed, into a colossal monster. Nemesis reborn. She carved a path of destruction from this very spot in Maine, all the way to Boston, eating people—which Maigo remembers—whales and anything else she came across on her route. The smorgasbord fueled Nemesis’s rapid growth. The creature found Maigo’s father in Boston, turning him to dust, along with half the city. Then there was that whole mess in D.C., where instead of eating people, Nemesis was protecting them, though she was really just there to protect me. The monster Nemesis gave her life to save us, and somehow left Maigo, who was arguably the monster’s soul and conscience, behind in a giant chrysalis. Maigo was reborn again, this time as a teenage girl. She has no real age, but our best guess is sixteen, a few years younger than Lilly appears...though she’s also technically much younger.
    The point is, Hawkins and I are now the father figures for the two most screwed up teenage girls that have ever lived. How the hell that happened, I’ll never understand, but here we are, doing our best to protect and raise two girls who shouldn’t