Chapter 29

My mind had barely had time to register what had happened. Uri’s eyes were already rolling into the back of his head when the sound of the shot - and that zipping noise of the bullet racing past my head - smashed into my eardrums. His legs started to buckle beneath him as the centers of his brain responsible for muscle control were violently introduced first to the bullet and then to the charred concrete wall behind him. Blood, skull fragments, and brain matter splashed wetly into the wall; the metallic scent of blood filled the air in a heartbeat.

Olena just stood there, frozen in a mix of shock and panic.

The anger, the suspicion, the blinding fury that, only a moment ago, had threatened to overwhelm me with that urge to punish Uri for all his transgressions blinked out in an instant.

They weren’t replaced with concern or shock, and my mind wasn’t changed by a sudden realization of this new reality; there simply wasn’t enough time for that. One instant, it was there, and the next, it was gone. It was like a switch had been flipped, and everything my mind had been so convinced of less than a second earlier was just gone.

The impact of the bullet had snapped Uri’s head back, but the momentum of that violent movement had jolted the rest of his spine forward, and his body started to tip toward me. I reacted without even thinking about it.

I reached out, and I caught him.

As soon as my hand made contact with him, existence melted away.

The sky was burning.

Literally burning.

A huge gash had been ripped through the heavens, a tear in the fabric of this reality.

Darkness had descended on the perpetual summer day of the mindscape as I faded into Uri’s city. There were no stars in the deathly night sky, just that burning tear and forks of lightning that seemed to rip back and forth between the edges of that flaming abyss and occasionally smash down into the city below.

Fire rained down from the sky, and the heavens themselves seemed to have shattered, chunks of Uri’s mind, burning embers of ... him ... fell onto what must once have been a city of marvelous beauty, crushing anything and everything it landed on.

His hospital, a large building close to the center of his city, was a blazing inferno; smoke and fire billowed out the windows, and I watched as the westernmost wall started to crumble and collapse. With a lurching, crunching cacophony of crashes, the rest of the hospital collapsed with the western wall into the street. The last of Uri’s ability to heal himself was gone, reduced to nothing in a cloud of dust and smoke. Yet even as the smoke and the debris was blown out around the falling building, I could see bits of it bouncing off a shield erected around his library. The repository for his memories and his knowledge was - somehow - still standing, and still being kept safe.

It took a few horrified moments of watching for me to realize that I was standing on the balcony of Uri’s office, his version of my bunker, his “Nexus,” as he called it. Just like in my own city, the balcony - on the upper floors of his once impressive Palace - was the best seat in the house when it came to the view. But instead of a breathtaking panorama laid out before me, I was watching the literal destruction of a man’s mind after the damage done to it by that bullet.

Uri was dying ... in very, very slow motion.

Each fragment of him that fell from the sky, each burning building collapsing and crumbling into nothing, each bolt of lightning smashing violently into his city, and every single passing second was literally my watching the end of him.

This wasn’t Henry. This wasn’t even me after the accident. There was no way to undo this level of catastrophic damage. No matter how powerful I was, no matter how miraculous my ability to heal, there was nothing I could do.

His marketplace, the building at the center of his city responsible for the major bodily functions like his heartbeat and breathing, was on fire. I could only watch in muted horror as a segment of the sky itself, trailing fire like a falling star, broke away from the terrifying vista, meteored toward the ground, and smashed into it with an earth-shattering jolt that shook the whole city. The marketplace, and the last slim hope for Uri’s survival, was crushed out of existence.

“I always wondered what it would be like,” Uri’s voice spoke from beside me. I hadn’t even realized he was there. “The end, I mean. Having your own death drawn out to such lengths should be its own form of torture, but in this case, I am grateful for it.”

“Uri ... I...” I turned to face him. Words were already failing me, but he held his hand up and shook his head, a soft smile pulling at its lips.

“It’s okay, Pete. It was my fault.”

“But...”

“We don’t have a lot of time,” he interrupted my argument. “There are things you need to know before it is too late. I know you are not the traitor; I always knew that.”

“Then why...?”

“Because you have been infected by him.”

“I ... What?”

Uri signed. “Do you know what you did to Toussant? How you took a piece of yourself and forced it into his mind?” I nodded. “Well, the traitor has been doing that to almost everyone, just on a much smaller scale. He has put a part of himself into as many people as he could; that ... influence ... it corrupts people. It affects their loyalties, or at least their perceptions; it completely diverts suspicion away from him and onto someone else. In your case, it diverted your suspicions onto me. If I had told you what you wanted to know, you would have been compelled to pass that information on, and I couldn’t risk him finding out.”

I just blinked at him. I’d had good reason to suspect Uri, though, lots of them ... Didn’t I? Everything made so much sense when I had it in my head. Uri had been acting suspiciously, or ... evasively ... or ... secretively. Fuck! there was something about the logic of it that now made a hell of a lot of sense. The instant that bullet had hit him, those doubts, the questions, the suspicions, the absolute conviction that he was the enemy, and the marrow-deep need to destroy him just ... vanished. Instead of the utter loathing I had felt while being inside the mind of the broken Toussant, a man I knew to be an enemy, I was now filled with a deep and profound sense of ... regret.

Of betrayal.

Not betrayal by him - Uri was looking at me with eyes that just exuded warmth and friendship, maybe even fraternal affection. But the betrayal of my own mind. The moment he said it, I felt it. That corruption, the infection, like a dark shadow lurking within the hidden corners of my city. I could feel it now, at that very moment, working to undermine everything that my own eyes were seeing, everything that my own senses were telling me. Someone had put an echo of their own mind into mine and almost every thought I’d had for the past ... however long ... had been filtered through the prism of my real enemies desires. That corruption, and my own mind’s inability to even detect it, had robbed me of an ally that I now knew... knew!!... I should have trusted implicitly.

Uri shook his head as if able to decipher the look on my face with little more than a glance. “Don’t blame yourself, Pete. Your strength, your resolve, and your love for Faye have kept that infection at bay much more effectively than most. You have been fighting it, even without knowing, grasping onto your humanity, and working to control your anger. I can’t imagine how hard and confusing this must have been for you. But I need you to keep fighting. With me dead, you are the only thing standing in the traitor’s way, and with their infection running through the highest tiers of the Conclave, I fear his next move will be against you.”

“Who is it?”

Uri held my eyes and shook his head. “You know who it is. You have suspected it all along. It’s the reason you kept things hidden for him, the reason why your mind reacted to him. I can’t answer for you; his influence won’t let me. It will rail against any information I give you, and it won’t let you believe me. It will shift all that hostility toward me. You have to realize it for yourself.”

I groaned loudly. “That is why you kept things from me. If you told me, I would have thought you were lying, whereas if I found the information out for myself, I would have no choice but to accept it.” He nodded with another soft smile. “Like the fact that there was a traitor. It wasn’t a suspicion, you knew, didn’t you? You knew all along, but there is no way that you could have told me.” Another nod. “I’m going to fucking kill him!”

“No!” Uri barked. “You need to be patient. If you kill him, every person he has infected will rally against you; all of them will come for you. It is like a defense mechanism. You are powerful, Pete, but not even you can take on the entire Conclave.”

“Then what do I do?”

“He will blame you for my death. The others will believe him.” He sighed. “I need you to keep Olena safe; she has the information you need to expose him, but you need allies, as many as you can get. You need to break into their cities - by force, if necessary - and remove their corruption. That will get them onside. The more people you can convert, the better the chance you will have.”

“Then why didn’t you do that?”

“Because I only worked out who it was about a second before I was shot.”

I sighed and slumped against the railing. Uri turned and looked out at what remained of his city. “I wish you could have seen it in its full glory,” he smiled, nodding out at the devastation. “God, I loved it here. I have spent decades exploring it, wandering the streets, studying every building, and yet I would find something new every time. It didn’t matter where I was, or what I was doing, this was always home. You know, I brought my wife here a few times.”

“You’re married??”

His smile managed to grow both bigger and warmer at the same time as he nodded. “Anya, she’s like Evie. One of us, just unawakened. I brought her here when she was sleeping. We spent so long just ... being here, together. With a whole world to explore, we both found our happiest place here, just with each other. We planted that garden together.” He nodded out to a section of greenery off to the east. Birch trees and flower gardens wrapped around a small pond.

All of it was burning. Even the water was on fire.

“I’ll keep her safe,” I said softly. It was all I could think to say.

Uri looked at me and nodded. “She’s hidden. Nobody knows about her. But I would appreciate you keeping an eye on her”

A titanic crash snapped our gaze back to the city. Part of the sky had flattened the entire northwest corner of it. The walls, the buildings, his mustering field - which dictated his mind’s ability to move his body - his forge, and the streets around them were reduced to rubble. Smoke and dust billowed out in every direction.

The normally lush green fields of the mindscape beyond his walls were obscured by the smoke and darkness.

Was every Evo torturously forced to witness their own deaths like this?

Uri’s hand came up to his head, his fingers pressing against a spot above his eye as the physical pain of what was happening to him ripped through his mind.

I took a step toward him. I don’t know why; there was nothing I could do, but it was an instinct. He turned back toward me and smiled again. His eyes were bloodshot now and a trickle of blood ran from his nose and out of one of his ears.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

“You would have been like a son to me,” He said, resting a trembling hand on my shoulder. “I could never tell you how proud I was of how much you have grown and how much you have achieved. You worked it all out on your own. You put the fear of god into all of them; you forced the sect and the Inquisition to the table. You have achieved more in a few months than I have managed in decades. Pete, I am proud to have known you. I only wish it could have been under better circumstances.”

I could feel the tears starting to well up in my eyes.

“I...” he looked back out of the ruins of his city before shifting his pained eyes back to mine. “ ... I don’t have much time, Pete, so I need you to listen. I need you to keep fighting. Jerry and Fiona are both infected, too. I need you to save them first. They are both good people. Rhodri as well, if you can reach him, and Charlotte’s loyalty to you is beyond question. That is a good start. But I’m going to need you to do something for me first.”

“Keep Olena safe, I know.” I nodded

“No, Pete,” he sighed. He swallowed hard and cast another sorrowful look out over the city before turning his gaze back to me. “I need you to perform my last rites.”

In an instant, I knew what he meant. My mind flashed back to the memories of Jacques and how he had drained Mattius of his powers and all of his knowledge all those years ago, Matthias feeding his power and his memories back into the Conclave so it could be used in the wars to come, passing the torch on so that the fight could be continued.

“No ... no, no, no,” I backed away. “I ... I can’t. I won’t. You’re not...”

“You have to,” Uri whispered softly. “You need to know what I know, and we don’t have the time for me to tell you all of it. I’m fading, Pete. I can feel it. My control is slipping, the shield around my library won’t last much longer. I am starting to see my memories leak out. I’m dying.”

I closed my eyes, willing this all to be a dream, willing my own mistakes to never have happened. Willing my head to have moved just an inch to the side to catch the bullet so Uri wouldn’t have had to.

“Pete ... please.”

I opened my eyes again, mine holding his for a moment and seeing the resolve behind them.

I nodded. I couldn’t bring myself to answer

“I wish I could have known you better, son.” He smiled back at me.

I sighed, instinctively knowing what to do. I stepped forward and rested my palm on his forehead. “I’m sorry, Uri,” I whispered.

He turned his eyes back to his city, a serene smile pulling at his lips. “I wish I could have seen Anya one more time. Tell her that she was always my one.”

With a deep breath, I closed my eyes and focused on the very core of him. Uri sucked in a deep gasp, the last that he would ever take. The last rites were an ancient and honored custom. It was, in a very real way, a means to grant the dying person immortality. Every single memory, everything about them, the center of their being, would live on in the person draining them. It was Uri’s consensual surrender of his power to me.

But that power was the only thing still keeping him alive. It was the thing slowing down time and letting us have this conversation; it was the thing shielding his library and all the information within, it was the thing that was keeping his brain functioning despite the bullet hole that had been ripped through it. I took it all.

Uri’s last living act was to give me permission to kill him. And he had done it with that trusting, serene smile still on his lips

A huge silver birch burst from the ground in a far corner of my city and reached to the heavens, and a pattern, a little like a tattoo, etched itself onto the outer edges of my city walls.

And I felt it all

Fireworks went off behind my closed eyes as Uri’s life flashed before them. I could see his mother’s face, looking down at him in a crib, the marvel in her eyes that this little infant had not only saved her life but had survived when her husband had died of radiation poisoning. Days at school, teased for a speech impediment that would plague him until his awakening. A now long-dead friend coming to see him on his fourteenth birthday to unlock his mind and the mind of his friend, Sasha, Olena’s brother. They had done it in a side room at his birthday party, both of them at the same time.

They had been like brothers since.

Flashes of his meeting Anya, a beautiful blonde Ukrainian woman, currently tucked safely away in the mountains of rural Austria, hidden from the world and the dangers within. Their marriage, the ceremony, his vows where he had called their love “the two halves of the same one.” Endless nights laying together in the now-burning garden in his city, where they had planned the entire rest of their lives together. Plans that would now never happen. I saw the first time they made love; I saw the last time they kissed. Anya would spend the rest of her life knowing that the last words her husband had said to her were, “I will see you soon, my love.”

Every shred of the man was sucked out of him and into me. My library ballooned with all of this new knowledge, the rush of it all almost overwhelming me as I felt my head spin and my legs wobble. I saw it all. I felt everything. I knew everything about him in an instant. His hopes, his dreams, his fears, his traumas, his prejudices. I saw the moment he was shown his first inquisition victim. Later, when he had been shown Sasha’s body, a man he had known for decades was now broken, battered, and barely recognizable. I saw the moment when Uri realized that Sasha’s death couldn’t possibly have happened without the betrayal of another Evo. I watched years of his growing suspicion, the endless struggle, the sleepless nights.

I saw the moment, years ago, when the Mantle - An ancient mark bestowed by some unknown or forgotten power - burned its mark onto his skin. The top of which poked out from just above his collar. It marked his flesh in a way that never really sat right with him.

I saw the moment he first saw me, not when he met me, but when he first saw me in my full furious glory when my anger had first erupted in the party. I felt his amazement as I scythed my way through our enemy like an angel of burning vengeance, his hope that I could be an ally, and his terror when he first realized, at the diner only a few weeks ago, that I had been infected by the real traitor’s corruption, just like the others.

His despondency, almost to the point of surrender, when I had started to turn on him.

But then the hope blossomed again when I went after the Inquisition, when I put aside my doubts and followed the evidence. The pride as he watched me, despite knowing that he was unintentionally, but unavoidably standing in my way, as I picked my way to a truth that he had taken years to find.

I could feel his surrender. He had never expected to survive this war, but he would have liked to have seen home one more time.

Uri’s mind flashed to the children he would never have, the future he would never see, and the lifetime with Anya that would never happen.

His last thoughts were of her.

I could feel the tears streaming down my face as the man who could have been my closest ally and valued friend faded into nothingness.

I opened my eyes.

Uri was gone.

My knees buckled beneath me as the full weight of it all crashed onto me. All of those memories, all of that knowledge, the very core of another person, had been driven through my mind with about the same force as the bullet that had killed him.

I grasped onto the railing for support and looked out of the city. The sky was gone, and there was no more fire reigning down onto the city. The last of his buildings were now burning, smoldering piles of rubble, fading against the midnight light, and even those were starting to crumble like sand castles fighting the tide.

The light faded to black.

The remains of the city and the place where Uri had stood faded with it.

I was alone.

Just me and the nothingness of the bravest man I had ever known.

Olena’s scream yanked me back to reality as the weight of Uri’s lifeless corpse pulled me to the floor. It took her a moment, but the realization of what had happened dawned on her pretty quickly, and she, too, dived for cover behind the broken wall that looked out over the street.

We blinked at each other for a second, waiting for the rest of the shots to come. But nothing happened.

Our eyes moved back to Uri at the same time. His lifeless eyes, one of them blown red from the explosive blood pressure change inside his skull, stared vacantly into nothing, and his blood was pooling around my legs as I leaned back against the same wall as Olena.

“Contact, Contact!” Jakob’s voice echoed through the radio. “Where did that shot come from?”

“East, no visual!” Another voice answered back, possibly Antoni, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Stay in cover and keep your eyes peeled for...”

“Got him!” That one was from Gabriel. “Single shooter in a ruined highrise. Bearing zero-eight-seven, range about 450 yards.”

“Take the shot, four,” Jakob answered after a pause.

“Negative, hold your fire!” I barked into the radio without even thinking.

“What??” Jakob’s incredulous voice answered back.

“Pete? Are you okay? Is anyone hit?” Bob’s worried, almost panicked voice came next.

I didn’t answer, a frown pulling at my eyebrows.

“Why the hell did I just say that?”

As if at once, I felt it. A lifetime of knowledge and experience coming to the fore inside my mind. Plans upon plans, tactics, strategies, and ideas. A wisdom, a maturity, a sense of self that I had never felt before. In less than a heartbeat, I could see that the brute force approach would get me nowhere, and firing off a tit-for-tat shot, even one to avenge Uri, would achieve nothing.