The Other Side of Truth (The Marked Ones Trilogy Book 3) by Alicia Kat Vancil

broken.
    Because of The Embassy closure I had spent the last month working out of a rented office across the street from The Embassy, doing everything I could to complete the Kalo Automated Response Assistant program. Well, everything I could do without being able to access the actual KARA, because she was in said Embassy lab. Labs we couldn’t actually gain access to until today. So this was the first time I had been able to run the new biometric program I had designed through the scanner booth we had built shortly before the attack. All that work and the thing wasn’t even frakking working.
    “What’s wrong?” my assistant Akiko asked as she came up and placed another cup of coffee on the table, removing the empty one.
    “Oh, nothing. Just weeks worth of work down the drain,” I snapped sarcastically as I slumped down into my chair, and folded my arms across my chest. I had spent the last four hours trying to get the damn biometric scanner program to work, and now I was so frustrated I wanted to chuck the damn thing out the nearest window. Which would have been a real feat of skill considering the tech labs were in one of the sub-basements of The Embassy, and the thing basically looked like an eight-foot-tall silver gazebo.
    “Huh?” Akiko asked, her eyebrows raising above her pair of thick-framed cat-eyed glasses with the slightest tinge of blue to the lenses. Akiko was the only daemon I had ever met who wore glasses. But then again, she was also the only one I knew who had nekkrothea , the rare genetic condition that rendered her unable to see our world in much the same way as Marked Ones.
    “The biometric scanner is throwing back an error, and I have no frakking clue why,” I clarified as I picked up the coffee.
    “What kind of error?” she asked as her black-blue eyes flicked toward the scanner booth.
    “It can’t seem to— You know what, just go stand in the damn thing and see for yourself,” I said sourly before folding my arm across my chest, and taking a sip of the coffee.
    Humoring me, Akiko walked over and stood in the center of the biometric scanner booth.
    “Akiko Miyakawa, assistant to the Director of the Department of Technical Research and Development, Kalodaemon,” KARA announced.
    I just gaped at the screen, my coffee cup halfway to my mouth. “Well of course now it works,” I said with an exasperated huff.
    “What was it doing before?” Akiko asked as she walked out of the booth, and joined me next to the computer.
    “It worked fine until it got to the species—” I stopped talking. The species section. The species section was having a hard time determining my species.
    “Travis?” Akiko asked in a curious voice.
    “Huh?” I replied, turning my head toward her.
    “You didn’t finish.”
    “Oh, um, ignore me, everything’s fine,” I said in the most reassuring voice I could manage as I turned back toward the computer, and pretended to be looking over the code.
    Akiko looked at me suspiciously for a moment longer, but then continued on her rounds of the labs.
    When she was far enough away I looked down at my hands. The virus. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me earlier. The mutation had changed us—changed us to something other than Kalodaemon.
    As nonchalantly as I could, I slipped on my ear-piece. “KARA, Call Kiskei Kirihara,” I instructed her.
    The other line rang three times, and then Kiskei picked up. “Hello, Travis, what did you—?”
    “We’ve got a problem,” I said quietly, cutting him off.
    “What kind of problem?” Kiskei asked in an equally low voice with an edge to it.
    “Uh…”
    “Do I need to come down to the tech labs?”
    I looked around the labs, there were way too many people around for this conversation.
    “Not such a good idea. I’ll meet you in your office,” I said quickly before tapping the button on the ear-piece to disconnect the call.

    “So what’s going on, Travis?” Kiskei asked when I walked into his