Chapter 22

I knew Faye.

In the brightest of days and under the darkest of night’s cruel shadows, I knew her as innately and as intimately as I know myself. I could trace every freckle on her face, the spattering of them over her shoulders and onto the top of her chest, without needing a single look. I knew every line and feature of her. I knew the sound she made when she breathed. I knew her scent. Her becoming part of me had been the most natural process imaginable, and now that she was here, I couldn’t imagine my city without her.

She had been quiet after Becky’s death. Jeeves had been, too, knowing to give me space to process for however long that took. But as much as I had been overwhelmed by that seething, simmering anger, I had always been able to feel her presence. It was the warmth of a child’s beloved blanket. It was an undercurrent of security and love, like no matter how bad things were, how long the day, or how dark the night, she would be there when I needed her.

I just didn’t realize how much I needed her until I did.

I had always done things on my own; I’d had to. There was never another option. It wasn’t that I misanthropically rejected support from others; it just wasn’t in my nature to ask for it. So when it came to recognizing that I was struggling, I just didn’t.

Becky had been murdered. I don’t say this as another comment on how my thoughts about her affected my judgment but simply as a process of law. The fire department had been called to the warehouse the very night of her death and had struggled to bring the blazing inferno under control until the following afternoon. It was then that the bodies had been found. Not just Becky’s, of course, but those of the inquisitors who had been punished for her kidnapping.

That had turned the whole area into a crime scene. Jeeves, with no small amount of help from Jerry, had made sure that nothing could tie any of the forensics back to me; anything that they could have was deleted as soon as it entered the systems, or at least its connection to me was. But still, there was a lack of closure. Those investigations took time, it would be more than a month before the coroner was expected to release Becky’s body to her family, and it was only then that they could even begin to arrange a funeral.

I never had a chance to say goodbye. Moreover, despite Charlotte’s assertions, I was still convinced that I bore the responsibility for Becky’s death. That conviction was making me doubt I should go to the funeral even when there was one.

It was, perhaps, for this reason, that I found myself making something of a pilgrimage to the plaza inside my city that contained - and now honored - her effigy.

The city in my mind, for reasons which I had never really worked out or thought to ask about, was perpetually bathed in soft sunlight, like a late summer afternoon. There was no nighttime. Part of me always wondered what it would look like with its towering monoliths shadowed against the burning sunset or how the long shadows of the sunrise would play off the high city walls and flood up the long tree-lined avenues.

But with no actual sun in the sky, there was no rising or setting of it. And with no sun, there were no shadows to mark its passing.

However, since Becky’s death, a single part of the city now seemed to be exempt from that one underlying constant.

My city was massive. Of course, in real terms, it took up no space at all, so it was difficult to gauge exactly how large it was. But walking at a steady walking speed of about two miles per hour, it would still take several hours to walk from one side of the city just to the enormous, imposing spire that constituted my Palace at its center, let alone walk from one side of the city to the other. With the massive area that my city covered, probably consisting of at least a few dozen square miles, there were parts of it that - despite having years’ worth of time to explore it - I had never visited. My mind usually just knew where I wanted to be and put me there.

Today, like every other day, it knew where I needed to be.

Traditionally, in every other Evo city, a building’s importance to that person’s life was directly related to how large it was and how close it was to the city center. Mine was different. All buildings and all parts of my mind, or my city, were given equal importance and were sized and spread out accordingly. It, therefore, didn’t concern me when I faded into my metropolis in the far northeastern corner of the sprawling urban area.

Things were more spread out here, less crowded; this was the closest to leafy suburbs as it was possible to get inside a walled city. The thrumming blue glow of the palace and the spires of the bustling city center were visible over the rooftops of the lower buildings around me, and the colossal city walls loomed large beyond the simple memorial garden that had sprung up here. But whereas the rest of the city was bathed in brilliant, vibrant sunlight, the air around this memorial seemed to reside in a mournful, respectful dimness, like the light itself was lowering its happy gaze in reverent sorrow and tempering its usual sunny disposition.

This wasn’t the same plaza as the one closer to the city center, the one with the other, happier vision of Becky in it. In that monument, her face was turned to the heavens, and her eyes were closed in rapturous ecstasy. It immortalized the moment she climaxed with me for the first time in the hospital all those months ago.

I didn’t even want to think what that plaza portrayed now, and I couldn’t decide what was worse, if it hadn’t changed at all, or if it had.

This one was different; I’m not sure if I would even have needed my eidetic memory to recognize it immediately. It was a bust of her smiling, happy face, as it had been that night in the club when I had taken them out to thank them for the care they had given me during my stay at the hospital. Despite the bust being made of something that looked like faded granite, her eyes still almost danced with the laughter that would forever grace her wonderful, beautiful face. She was looking a little to the side at something just over my left shoulder, and no matter where I stood, her eyes would never quite meet mine. They seemed to move as I did.

Always just that little bit out of reach.

As she now was.

Perched upon her head was a garland of pure white spring roses, and they, along with lilies, peonies, and other white flowers I couldn’t place, and a series of babbling brooks, lined the tree-laden park. The water flowed in an endless, physics-defying loop around her; the playful song of its splashes was the only sound to break the dimly lit silence.

It was there that Faye found me.

I was standing there, a soft smile playing on my lips at the memories that the statue evoked when her hand laced into mine.

“She was beautiful,” She said simply as her head leaned to the side and rested on my shoulder. I could only close my eyes for a moment and nod. The tears wanted to come, but this time, I was holding onto them. There would be a time and a place for that anger to be unleashed, and I was going to make sure that the broken skull of one of the men responsible for Becky’s death was going to be intimately involved when it happened. It wouldn’t take me long to realize where this resolve was coming from.

We stood there for a while, just gazing upon the blonde nurse’s likeness. Her fingers never left mine, and that familiar, floral scent from Faye’s hair gently caressed my nostrils. We were just ... still.

It had to have been more than an hour before either one of us made any attempt to move. Faye seemed to know when to stay quiet, when to keep me company as I looked upon the visage in front of me, and when I was ready to leave. “Let’s go home,” she finally whispered as she straightened herself up and turned us back toward the city center and the towering spire of the palace.

I cast one last look back at Becky before we rounded a corner, trying one last time to get her stony, silent, dazzling eyes to meet mine, and then a building robbed her from my sight.

Even though it would have taken several long and arduous hours to walk the distance back to our de facto home at the palace, my mind did its part to speed up the process. We walked around one corner in the far northeast of my city and emerged onto a main thoroughfare only a few dozen yards from the central monolith in a seamless transition that would have made the laws of physics need to take a long, hard look at themselves in the nearest mirror - if they applied here at all, that is.

Without a word, she led me along the boulevard and onto the grand white steps that led up to the Palace. With less than a thought, not even knowing which of us it came from, we were suddenly several hundred feet higher, standing on the balcony that wrapped around the tower and led into the office. For a few long moments, we just stood there, looking out over the sprawling metropolis.

My mind had been a storm of raging emotions and vengeful intent for so long. Indescribable loss, blinding fury, plans upon plans, and that soul-crushing frustration that can only be felt by a man wandering, lost, through a maze with no idea how to get out. In every conceivable way, I was in over my head, yet I was charging forward like a bull with a headache.

Even then, even in that moment of serene stillness, I couldn’t tell you what was driving me. Was it some misguided sense of principle? Was it the indomitable will of good to triumph over evil? Was it simple revenge? Or, like that man stumbling and feeling his way around that maze in the dark, was I doing the only thing I could that didn’t involve just sitting down and giving up?

Every part of me was filled with pain. There is simply no way for a human mind to comprehend the scale or the gravity of the emotional connection involved in my bonding with Faye. Human language just isn’t equipped to deal with that level of depth. I had met her and lost her in the space of a few hours, but the love that was built in that short time felt like it had grown over lifetimes. Soulmates was the only word that could possibly come close, and only because it goes some way to describe the unbreakable connection and resonance between the parts of us that we had no control over. My affection for Faye was marrow-deep.

And they killed her.

Becky, despite not even being a shadow of the love I felt for Faye, was somehow worse. She was the first; she was the one who dragged me out of that pit of self-pity and self-doubt that my early life had been marked by. She showed me love, attention, and genuine affection. In any other life, she would have been more than enough to make me happy.

But therein lay the problem. Meeting her also coincided with the end of my old, pre-Evo life and the start of the new one. Old Pete would have made her the very center of his universe; he would have loved her without reservation or condition. But to new Pete, she was one of many. I took her for granted in the worst possible way. I loved her in a fashion, and I knew that she loved me, but I never took that step to truly find out how deep her affections ran. I was a coward. By not looking, I could fool myself into thinking that my own actions couldn’t hurt her, and the brief looks I did take were only ever enough to stroke my own ego. It wasn’t until she was gone that I realized how important she was to me.

And they killed her.

They killed her to get to me.

I went to war for Faye’s memory. But I committed war crimes for Becky.

Becky was the innocent bystander; she was the civilian casualty, she died for a cause that she was in no way part of. And no matter how many people implored me not to blame myself, the undeniable truth was that if she had never met me, she would still be alive. I may not have killed her, but I certainly got her killed. The pain, the abject agony that I felt at her loss, was no less than what I felt for Faye, but Becky was laced with an unhealthy, but totally justified amount of guilt.

What made things worse was that Faye - or at least part of her - was currently living in my head and holding my hand. In some small way, that tempered the rage I felt at her loss.

Becky was gone forever.

And the fury that came with that seemed like a fire that would burn down the world.

My thoughts were dragged back to the moment by a soft squeeze of my hand. I turned to find Faye looking up at me with those startling emerald eyes. “No one is ever really gone, you know,” She said softly. “Not while there are people around to remember them.”

“It’s my fault.” It was all I could bring myself to say.

She just shook her head. “Maybe you’re right, maybe she would be alive if she had never met you, but that doesn’t make it your fault. Mourn her, miss her, honor her, but there are people out there who really are responsible for her death. Save yer blame for them.”

There was something about the way she said it that gave me pause. Charlotte had been tender and comforting in her reassurances; Marco, Uri, and even Jerry had been factual. But Faye was different. She felt everything I did in the same way that I felt it. She could feel the pain and the simmering anger - both at the Royal Inquisition and at myself. But behind her softly spoken words was a fire, a vehemence, a certainty, but more than that, there was a hint of something a little less tangible. It was almost like blaming myself took part of that fire away from the people who truly deserved it, and it was annoying to her that I was allowing that blame to be shared.

Behind those emerald green eyes was an unspoken desire to tell me to snap the fuck out of it and get to work.

I held her eyes for a moment. I found myself doing something that I had never considered before. I had always assumed, through lack of information to the contrary, that Faye wasn’t the reintegration of her personality into mine, that she was not a separate person as such, but a recreation of her based on what my own mind had “downloaded” from hers. But for the first time, I tried connecting my mind to hers.

As it turns out, I was wrong.

The raw emotion surged through me like a storm wave.

Faye’s love for me was almost blinding. Her pride and her support, although silent through the long and arduous days of Toussant’s torture, they were enough to fill me completely with the wave of confidence I had been missing so badly. It frustrated her that I was so hung up on blaming myself, doubting the implications of everything I did, and questioning my own morality. She had practically swooned at the way I had dealt with the Inquisitors holding Mary’s family hostage. The firm, grim determination, the recognition of what needed to be done, and just doing it. She had marveled at the way I had systematically dismantled Toussant and, despite the extraordinary amounts of violence involved, more than she had ever conceived of before the party, she was under no doubt that more would be needed before the war ended.

Of course, she felt the pain of Becky’s loss, even more so at the loss of her friends at the party, some of whom I had never met but she had known since childhood. She would never see her family again, she would never go home, and there was no way to hide from those inescapable facts. She felt the anger at the Conclave for the centuries of lies they had told their own people; she felt the confusion at our hitherto strongest ally being - of all people - the real inquisition. Her whole sense of identity, everything she had thought she knew about herself and her place in the world had been shattered. Her mind was a maelstrom of mixed and conflicting emotions, and yet behind it all, beneath all the confusion and pain, there was intent.

The bastards needed to pay!

She didn’t want me to forget about Becky, she didn’t want me to stop questioning the conclave or even the sect, she didn’t want me to reassess my trust issues when it came to the people around me, but she was terrified that I would be too consumed with my own guilt and too busy second guessing myself to do what needed to be done. That one day, I would doubt myself once too many times and give the enemy the opening they needed to end me. She knew I was powerful, she had watched every one of my actions since the party through my own eyes. It was a level of power that she could barely comprehend. Her heart was filled with an abject certainty that I would be the one to end centuries of bloodshed, even if there needed to be a whole lot more before the job was done.

Beneath that, however, she was fucking horny. If power was an aphrodisiac to an Evo, she was practically frothing at the lips. Both sets of them.

The touching of two minds that I hadn’t felt since the party exploded through me like a nuclear detonation. Her love, her lust, her need, her hunger ... her pride ... it all burst inside me. She wanted me to use my anger to do more than hunt down my oppressors, she wanted me to take it out on her, she wanted the most powerful creature she had ever seen to show her how powerful he really could be with someone willing and able to take it. She wanted to be my relief.

And just like the love and the support, that overwhelming hunger took me.

Her eyes, looking up into mine, were burning with molten desire. As soon as they met my own, we fell together. The moment overwhelmed us and overtook us, our lips crushed together, her arms wrapping tightly around my neck as mine circled her and pulled her into me by the small of her back. This was no lover’s embrace, this was primal. It was heat. It was need. It was passion. It was animalistic.

Her hands worked through my hair, her nails dug into my shoulders as she mewled into my lips, she dragged them around me and onto my solid chest before she ripped open my shirt with a strength that I - in hindsight - shouldn’t have been surprised at. Her flowery summer dress was less of an obstacle as it bunch up under my hands before her sodden panties went the same way as my shirt. A strong grip, a hand yank, a gasp from her panting lips, and they were a tattered pile of wet lace on the floor.