Like a cloud soaring in the sky and pushed by the wind, I felt greatly relieved to flee from Oyster. Eros was my wind that Tuesday afternoon.

After that incident with Mirela in the toilets, my life was on the line due to her thirst for power. She was crazier than anybody else I had ever met before. To me, she felt like a madder version of Momo.

"You don't look okay, Daphne," Eros insisted when we already were seated in his red sports car, in Oyster's underground parking. "The skin on your neck looks... red and bruised."

I noticed his fingers were mildly shivering on the steering wheel while he stared at me with uneasiness and worry.

"Okay, fine." I sighed, giving in. Being alone with him and that splendid car of his made me feel safe. He should know what was going on if he ended up becoming my boss. "It's Mirela. She's tried to choke me in the toilets a few minutes ago." My voice sounded like rusty gears.

"WHAT?!" One of his eyelids started twitching.

"Can you ride with the windows down, please?" I begged him. "I need some fresh air – badly."

He didn't lose a single second to do as I had asked him. He started the car, rode out of Oyster's underground parking, and the second we hit the streets, he pushed a button that made the windows automatically roll down.

When the sweet summer air hit my face and combed my hair, I inhaled deeply. I watched the people strolling down the streets, shopping, chatting, giggling. I felt alive. I decided to come clean then:

"Mirela dislikes the fact that I ended up becoming the model for the ad. I'm a traditional human, Eros. I've taken the place of a clone. Of course, she's angry at me. But I bet that she's also angry about the design you picked, the red bikini because it's not hers – it's your mother's. She's power-hungry. Did you know she was one of your father's mistresses?"

"Yes, I did. She got her job as a designer right after going to bed with him. Despicable."

His harsh reply was matched by a sudden clenching of his fists on the steering wheel. I could see his tense, white knuckles pressing firmly on the dark leather on the wheel. Then, I took a glimpse at his face. He was pissed, frowning hard. I hated to see him like that.

"I'm glad to hear that," I replied softly. "That you find her despicable, I mean. She intends to get in bed with you, by the way."

"WHAT?!" He almost skipped a red light. Maybe I should've told him about that particular detail later, not while driving.

"As I've said, she's power-hungry," I went on right after he had pressed the brake pedal harshly and the car had stopped right before a pedestrian crossing.

People started to walk by in front of us. I sighed.

"With your father dead, and Mrs Nevermore about to leave Oyster to run an NGO, she's worried that you might not take her into account and favour her the way your father had. Mrs Nevermore seems to have gotten distant with her. She wants to be the boss next. To do that, she thinks she needs to seduce you."

He snorted.

"She's... delusional. I'm not like other clones." The light turned green, and he set the car in motion again.

"Glad to hear that. But be careful. She's dangerous. She's threatened to expose who I am once the ad goes public to harm your mother and Oyster, and then have me killed."

"WHAT THE FU-?!" He kicked the steering wheel with fury once and let go of a frustrated sigh.

"She wanted me to bow to her and say that I'm a dirty slut to keep her mouth shut. I haven't."

"Good. You shouldn't. You've done nothing wrong."

"But now what? What am I supposed to do? This woman scares the hell out of me," I admitted, still with that coarse voice of mine. I couldn't help it. My throat hurt.

He straightened his pose, flared his nostrils, clenched his teeth and fists, and stared ahead on the road as he drove on with too much anger bottled up. I had never seen him like that, so angry.

The realisation that I might not know him fully hit me hard then. I swallowed.

"You don't need to worry about anything, Daphne," his leaden voice softly greeted my inner concern about his well-being, then. "Fuck, this is my fault! I'm taking care of it from here. She won't have a single chance to harm either my mom, Oyster,... or you. I swear."

Eros took me to the offices and the lab in the Faculty of Biology and Medicine. He parked his red sports car in a reserved parking spot right at the entrance of the Faculty's botanical garden, full of greenhouses and a huge variety of plants.

He opened the door for me and helped me out. He was such a gentleman, even though I had witnessed the hard side of him in the car. Maybe just the tip of the iceberg of that side of him, probably. We had spent the rest of the ride in silence, and I couldn't help but wonder what he was planning to do to stop Mirela. He had refused to tell me.

"The lab I work in is on the top floor. Come with me."

We approached the building. Wow. It was mesmerising.

The Faculty of Medicine and Biology was an old, huge stone building from the medieval ages, preserved to look its best as the centuries had gone by yet still displaying its regal, classic features.

A perfect example of that was the main double doors. Those huge wooden doors with superb engravings on the varnished surface had been constantly well-preserved so that the weather would not cause any sign of decay on them, yet some sensors had been installed so that they would open automatically when we came closer to them.

The same went for the windows: classic, polychromatic glass plus sensors to open and close them on demand thanks to a control panel installed in the caretaker's office, near the main doors.

There were stunning marble sculptures of gods, saints, philosophers, and celebrity scientists from the past, and amazing, antique carpets on the floor in that huge entry hall, depicting intricate designs and historic scenes from the past centuries. I felt ashamed of putting my feet on them.

"Don't worry," Eros told me then while he waved and nodded at the caretaker from the distance. The latter replied with a waving of his own and an assertive nod. "They're only copies of the original ones. They change them whenever they start getting wasted."

He guided me to the lifts, at the far back of the entry hall. We got in and rode all the way up to the top floor.

When it stopped, the lift doors opened swiftly and almost noiselessly. The view was as spectacular as the one I had witnessed that very morning, from Oyster's roof.

I was still staring through the large windows, mesmerised by the beauty of the city and the two seas when he called my attention.

"Daphne, come. I want to show you the lab. And the present for my mother."

"Sure."

The automatic glass doors from the lab swiftly moved aside as he took a step forward, and we could enter. The outside of the building might have been medieval, but the interior aspects of that lab were superbly modern in every way.

The floor was composed of white tiles, the double glass windows had aluminium frames, and there were several isles of pristine white counters. All chairs were made of white plastic. There were strange machines everywhere. I could only recognise a microscope – the rest were a mystery to me. There were also a few computers connected to them.

"Here it is," he said as he showed me what seemed to be a large, white egg in a glass cage next to one of those computers. "My present for my mother. Careful. Don't touch the glass. It's is rather hot."

"Why?"

"It won't burn you, but it's a contained space with special temperature and humidity control. This egg needs heat, a lot."

"Oh. What is it gonna be? A reptile or a bird? Or something else entirely?"

"A very special bird. A dodo." He gave me one of those amazing smiles of his, then.

What?!

"But they've been extinct for centuries now!" My astounded exclamation was enough to make him smile a lot wider.

"Ever since the seventeenth century. But now, not anymore."

"You're kidding!"

"I've been playing with dodo's DNA," he explained. "I used a specimen of the closest living relative of the dodo, a Nicobar pigeon, to combine their DNA with that of the dodo to create this egg.

"My mother's birthday is next Saturday. I'd like to give her a hatching egg as a present right during her benefit party to obtain funding for her NGO, the aim of which shall be retrieving DNA from extinct animals and researching ways to make them come back to life.

"I've carefully planned the hatching to happen this Saturday. Her potential donors might get impressed that I, her son, managed to get the first extinct species back to life during the event. I hope I'm not wrong about the timing."

"Oh my God, that's so cool!"

"I made her one of those 'Best Mom in the World' cups of coffee when I was eight years old using only recyclable materials. At the time, I had been concerned about using reusable materials in making cookware. Maybe you've seen it on her table in the office. She still uses it. She had loved it at the time, but I'm older now. I guessed that I couldn't repeat that move now. I'm already an adult, you know. I wanted something flattering and special. Do you think she'll like it?"

"Of course! I'm so proud of you! You're amazing!"

"All thanks to you." I had his keen eyes on me.

"Oh, no, I'm not taking the credit for that. This is all you, Eros!" I complained in a joyful attitude.

He blushed.

"My mother deserves the best. She's suffered too much already," he added with mild sadness then. "She was born during the Prevalence War, in 2112, directly as an eighteen-year-old young woman. It was the way of things back then when bringing clones to life directly as adults wasn't forbidden yet. She shall be forty-seven this Saturday."

"So, she never got to experience her childhood or her early teenage years?" I asked, frowning. That was so sad!

"Nope. My father was one of Apollo's generals during the war. Many of them were single men – and bored. They made her because of that. She wasn't the only one, but she wasn't given a choice in the matter anyway. My father always said she owed him big time, for being alive, for everything.

"Sometimes I think she's been so controlling of me ever since I was born because she had no chance at having infancy, and maybe because she was afraid that my father would impose his points of view on me as well."

"It's awfully sad."

"I love her. She deserves to be happier."

"We all love her at Oyster," I said with a blue kind of happiness. "She's so kind! I wish I had my mother around too."

"I'm so sorry to have brought that subject up. You must miss her a great deal."

"I do. It's been quite a few years without her, but I remember her often. I love her."

"There's no love like a mother's love," he concluded. "And yours."

I blushed immediately at that comment.

He slowly leaned on me. He was about to kiss me when I got bombed by Kono's words from that morning, right before lunch.

I should tell him how I feel about him. About the fact that I've got Sigi. That I love him. The sooner I did it, the better. But he was being so nice, cute, and amazing!

"I've picked your dress for Saturday already," he whispered to me as he put a stray lock of hair behind my ear. "I'll send a limo to pick you up, too."

Now, I couldn't tell him I only wanted to be friends right after he had said that! Besides, I was far too busy freaking out.

"A limo?! Are you nuts?!" My eyes were about to pop out of their sockets.

"Eros?! Are you there?" a strong, deep, male voice asked out of the blue from afar from a distant place in the lab.

It was strangely familiar. Where had I heard such a voice?

"Fuck, it's Apollo." Eros turned to me with panic written all over his face. "If he sees you, I'll be in trouble. Again. Hide."

"Where?" I whispered in the same fashion.

"Go to the far back of the lab, the last aisle of counters, where the sink and the freezers are. He never goes there. Hurry!"

I immediately did as he had told me. I ran as silently as I could, I ducked when I heard the door opening, and then I crawled my way to the back of the lab. I heard calm footsteps that I assumed to be Apollo's – so calm that I was sure that he hadn't seen me.

"Ah, there you are," Apollo said nonchalantly while I sat on the floor, leaning my back to the wooden surface of the cupboards of the counter.

I tried to keep my panting down. My dishevelled hair got it the way of my eyes.

"I need a word with you." Apollo's voice became stern all of a sudden. "I've been busy dealing with the political crisis, choosing a new President and Secretary of State and the like. Too many important clones have been murdered recently. These rebels are a lot deadlier than the ones I had had to deal with decades ago."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Great Apollo. I hope they fail in the end. You have always guided us to the light, and we shall be eternally grateful to you, Great Apollo."

Disgust didn't even begin to describe how I felt when I listened to Eros say those words.

"All of them shall soon perish." The harshness of Apollo's words met the one of his tone of voice. I swallowed hard. "I have been getting ready for their impending doom. I've got several aces up my sleeve. I've been busy after my press conference, you see. That's the reason why I couldn't even bother to come here and yell at you on account of your disappointing behaviour."

Oh-oh. Apollo had come to chide Eros? That fateful meeting between them that both Eros and I had feared so much was about to take place.

But not only that. I also feared what might soon happen to us, rebels. What might those aces up his sleeve mean exactly? If only Eros could manage to make him talk about them, I could tell Sigi and the rest!

"Great Apollo, let me assure you that I truly regret digging into affairs which I should've let go," Eros said with genuine remorse. "I agree, I was at fault. Let me spare you from yelling at me for it, Great Apollo. I shall never act like that again. I beg your forgiveness!"

Eros was flawlessly polite. He even seemed to be willing to kneel before him as a sign of devotion. He was already vowing to him. I could spy on him from the corner. He was sweating, and his face denoted panic. He truly feared his god.

Apollo was truly gorgeous, a lot more in person, to be honest. He was wearing a dark grey suit and a white shirt. His blond hair had been combed to perfection. His tall and lean physique and his square jaw would have made many heterosexual women and gays swoon.

"Yes, you should beg," he went on harshly. "Aren't you ashamed of your behaviour? I expect a full apology from you, young man."

"I truly am ashamed, Great Apollo. Please, forgive me. It shall never happen again. I swear."

"Good. At least you've got the decency to admit your flaws and feel shame. From now on, I want you to obey my orders and never question me again regardless. Do you hear me?"

"Yes, Sir."

"You belong to me. You owe me your life." Apollo's words echoed in the void, the nothingness that I assumed that he considered Eros to be. That was the feeling I got out of those words. His attitude and tone were clear on that fact, too. "I hope I never need to remind you of this again."

"No, Sir." Eros' obedience was crystal clear.

"Perfect." Apollo sighed, then. "For a moment while I was coming here, I thought I should punish you anyways, but your current attitude is exactly what I was looking for in an intern like you. I had had the last one executed only because he wasn't as bright as I expected. He had a higher IQ than you, but kept making silly mistakes... and talking back at me."

I didn't like the dark, cold chuckle that Apollo let go of before he proceeded with his rant.

"I couldn't tolerate that much insolence. As much as I shan't tolerate any more defiance on your behalf, either in acts or words. Am I understood, young man?"

"Absolutely, Sir." His voice trembled a little due to stark anxiousness to please his god.

Oh, dear Lord! My heart was threatening to break my ribs already. Apollo was a sickening control freak. Eros was in far greater danger than I had thought.

Hello, my dear sugar cubes!

This chapter is a two-parter. 😉 Click and proceed!

XOXO

MS