Chapter 30

The revelation had left me in a daze.

Not at the fact that Marco was the traitor but at how all-encompassing that corruption had been.

In the deepest parts of my mind, I had already known that it was Marco, but that corruption had somehow managed to make me overlook it. To doubt my own reasoning. I think a big part of me had known the moment Uri had told me about the traitor’s influence. The simple fact of the matter was that only three people had ever stepped foot in my city to be able to plant it.

Sterling had been inside when he attacked, but there was nothing in his broken mind about the rogues, the traitor, or the war between the Evo’s and this part of the Inquisition when I had smashed it open upon his defeat. Sterling had been physically and mentally incapable of hiding anything from me, and I mined that fucker for everything. I found it inconceivable that I had missed something this huge.

Charlotte had been another person who had been allowed into my city, but my trust in her was marrow-deep. I had watched her crumple when she learned of Becky’s death, I had seen the concern, venturing into panic, on her face when she had found me after the party, and I had seen her anger at the Sect when they refused to pick a side. Every single part of me trusted her. I trusted her with my secrets, I trusted her with Philippa and Evie, I trusted her with my life.

That only left Marco. It could only have been him.

I knew that as soon as Uri described the corruption, yet that manipulation, the little spec of Marco’s own consciousness that he had used to poison my reasoning, had fought against that simple, undeniable knowledge. Right up to the end, it fought me. Uri could have been lying, even though I had seen his memories firsthand and knew that he wasn’t. Maybe it was Fiona when we had slept together in the cottage, or perhaps it had been Jerry ... he’d been around pretty much constantly since New Years as well. Yet, I somehow knew that whoever had planted that seed of doubt would have had to have done it from within my own mind. Neither Jerry nor Fiona had ever stepped foot inside my city.

Yet still, it fought me.

Every thought I had was twisted to push suspicion away from Marco and onto Uri, or - now that he was dead - it warped my reasoning instead. Anything to get my mind to question whether it was real or not. Right until the moment it was shattered.

Things were starting to slot into place. Marco, as far as I could tell, hadn’t even considered inviting me to the party until he had seen my city and seen the full measure of my power up close. He had invited me knowing that the attack was about to happen - and yes, it had to have been him who arranged it. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the sense of smug self-admiration he must have felt when I carved my way through the men who had executed Faye; he must have thought that all of his Christmases had come at once. He couldn’t possibly have known that I would have decimated the ranks of attacking rogues as effectively as I had, but he also couldn’t have known that I would have met and bonded with Faye, either. Let’s face it: that was the part that really induced my incandescent rage.

The best he could possibly have hoped for was that I was either killed in the attack, meaning one less threat for him to worry about, or I survived the onslaught and joined the fight. Either way, the war would have started, either with me out of the way or firmly on-side.

Instead, he had found a weapon that he was able to control or at least manipulate into doing his bidding.

Jesus. He had even known about Faye being in my city. He couldn’t possibly have known about Faye without being in my mind; nobody did. And yet he had mentioned her in his email. How the fuck had I missed that?

He had played me like an instrument the entire time.

With his influence firmly in my head, he could manipulate every thought I had about every single piece of information that I had found in the entirety of my investigation. He couldn’t change what I found out, but he sure as shit could make sure that the finger of suspicion pointed firmly away from him.

As soon as I had heard his voice, the corruption had shattered, like a shadow being exposed to the truthful rays of the sun’s dazzling light. In its wake, however, I was starting to see the full effect he was having on me.

The manipulation wasn’t like a passive computer program, automatically operating in the background and affecting my thoughts. It was like his own little window into my city. It was a conscious effort on his part. Everything that had been done to me had been Marco deliberately warping my own logic. Every mistake I had made had been capitalized on, and every chance I had to address my own failings, every time I had considered a way to make myself better, he had smothered them like an infant at birth.

The filter I had put onto the thoughts I could hear around me was a perfect example. Only that morning, I had once again come to the realization that I needed to re-examine how that was working because I kept missing important information that was right at my fingertips. From not sensing the men sneaking up on us in Donetsk or the partisans in Alchesv’k to missing my chance to deal justice to the men responsible for the massacre of the civilians there. I had known that I needed to look at how my filters worked again; I had plenty of time to do it on the way here, so why hadn’t I?

And now I knew.

Marco had sat back and watched those thoughts developing, and then he had perfectly redirected them onto something else and made sure I had forgotten about them. Because he knew that having access to that sort of information would have made it much harder for him to stay hidden. By the time I made it to the meeting with Olena, he had warped my thinking enough to make me completely forget about the filters and instead focus on my target. I had been utterly convinced that Uri was the traitor in our midst, so much so that it only took one comment from him to smash open the gates that were holding back my rage. I had been only moments away from crashing into his mind to take the information I wanted. Information that Marco would have twisted to suit his own purposes.

There was no doubt in my mind that, upon finding the ‘facts’ that Marco wanted me to see, I would have simply destroyed Uri, considered my job done, and I would have gone home.

It was Eric-the-smug-sniper who had stopped things. His bullet had killed Uri, and my being inside Uri’s city as he died - after knowingly sacrificing himself for the cause - downloading decades of knowledge and memories and seeing some of them firsthand finally convinced me that Uri wasn’t the traitor. It was more first-hand information at once than Marco was capable of manipulating. That bullet had undone all of his planning, although I doubted any of the people in the room saw it that way. As soon as I had performed those last rites, the chances of Marco maintaining his facade that Uri was the viper in the nest dropped to zero. That didn’t mean I would have worked out it was Marco; the manipulations were still in place, and he could have redirected my suspicions onto someone else.

It’s very hard to say if Marco would have shown himself if Uri had been killed by me as he had planned.

But he was here now.

I just didn’t know why. The effectiveness of his manipulation was nothing short of astonishing; there was nothing stopping him from maintaining it indefinitely. Maybe the fact that Uri had brought my attention to it was all that was needed to end the charade. I had recognized the truth of it as soon as Uri had told me; I had felt that corruption inside me. Perhaps knowing that it was there rendered it ineffective because I would certainly have second-guessed every decision I made while it was still in my mind, and I would have, at the very least, tasked Jeeves with removing every trace of it and tracking it back to the source.

Maybe knowing that was what finally prompted Marco to make his big play. Because he was right here, he was looking right at me.

And judging by the look on his face, he was under the distinct impression that he had won.

“I didn’t want it to come to this,” he said softly, my vision clearing enough to make him out properly as his eyes dropped to the lifeless body of Uri. “I wish things could have been different, old friend,”

I said nothing.

I just watched him as Uri’s apparently inexhaustible well of patience and his font of strategic knowledge kept the locks tightly sealed on the walls that held back my anger. There was nothing in the world I wanted more at that point than to immolate every other fucker in the room and then take my time breaking into Marco and making him suffer.

I could feel it. I could sense my rage turning its entire focus on the man who had pretended to be my mentor. I could feel the simmering heat rising from it; I could feel that malevolent, sadistic intent bubbling just beneath the surface, and I instantly understood the one simple truth of my new reality.

Either Marco died, or I did. There was no way in hell that both of us were going to survive this war. He was responsible for everything: Faye, the deaths at the party, Becky, the fracturing of Philippa’s mind, my betrayal of Uri ... all of it.

I was going to kill him. Or I was going to die trying.

Marco turned his attention back to me. “I’m sorry it had to happen this way, Pete,” he said softly. I just looked at him, my face being contorted by my patience to a look of pure shock and painful betrayal rather than the unspeakable contempt I now held him in. “I don’t want to hurt you. I want us to be friends, to be allies. I still have so much to teach you. There is so much that you don’t know.”

I still said nothing.

“Uri wouldn’t ever have understood; he was too loyal to the Conclave, too self-righteous, he couldn’t see the bigger picture. I didn’t want him dead, but he left me no choice. I could have killed you, too, but I am hoping that you are willing to listen to reason.”

“Why?” I whispered, my voice hoarse from dust still lodged in my throat. “Why did you do it?”

“I wish I didn’t have to,” his shoulders slumped. For the briefest of moments, I almost believed the look of regret on his face. “I’ll tell you everything, I promise. But I need you to come quietly first. Where are the rest of your escort? Where is Bob?”

“We...” I coughed, my voice still weak, at least to the outside world. “The Russians executed his people, hundreds of them,” I lied slowly, “Civilians too. We found them. I came here to meet a contact, but Uri was here instead. The others went after the Russians.”

Marco nodded. “Thank you, Pete.” He turned and nodded to one of the men. “Let the others know they are being tracked. No prisoners,” he said quietly to him. I had to consciously stifle the growl in my throat. Not only did Marco know about it, he was aligned with the people responsible for the massacre. Yet, at the same time, I had just told an outright lie to another Evo, and he hadn’t spotted it. The other man nodded and reached for his radio, talking into it as he stepped out of the room.

Marco sighed, watching me as my eyes followed the man out of the room. “Don’t waste your concern on Henry and his team, Pete. They are the enemy. I know you don’t see that at the moment, and for what it is worth, Bob seems like a nice guy, maybe even Isabelle, too. But they’re no different than the Conclave; they are rotten from the inside out, corrupt and archaic. There needs to be a change before all of us are wiped out. The order that I work for, they are committed to making sure that doesn’t happen.”

“What order?”

“You have been calling us the Rogues. But it isn’t only errant members of the Inquisition in there; there are hundreds of Evos, too, maybe thousands, from the Conclave and from the Sect, and our order is much, much older than you might think. We call ourselves the Praetorians.”

My anger purred happily - if such a thing was possible - as it learned the name of our new enemy. I could almost feel it rubbing its hands together in dangerous, malevolent deliberation.

I nodded slowly, still playing the part of the defeated captive.

“Look, Pete. If you cooperate, if you work with us, I promise that you and everyone you care about won’t be harmed...”

Another growl stifling moment. There were already more than enough people harmed to render that promise meaningless, or at least ridiculously late in the game.

“ ... but we are going to need you to come with us.” He went on, still trying to sound friendly. It was actually odd to see Marco without that trademark, disarming smile, but somehow, this nervous look suited him better. He knew he was treading dangerous ground; he had seen what I was capable of, even if he was woefully misinformed about most of it. “These men are highly trained. I know you could attack my city, but they know what to look for when someone enters the mindscape. If you try that, they are going to shoot you, so please ... just cooperate. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Where?”

Marco frowned, “Where, what?”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Oh. A compound; it’s not far from here. You will be ... interrogated to make sure you aren’t just playing along. But once you pass, we will talk; I will tell you everything. I won’t lie to you and say the ordeal will be pleasant; these guys need to be thorough, but it’s a sacrifice we all make for the cause.”

I held his eyes for a moment, sighed, and shook my head, letting that look of surrender wash over my features before looking down at Uri. “Let’s get this over with,” I said softly, the hollow pang of sadness and capitulation flooding my raspy voice.

“You won’t regret this, Pete,” Marco half-smiled, his eyes were on his old friend’s body, too.

Oh, I know I won’t. You might, though.

Marco turned and nodded to one of the Inquisitors, who in turn barked out a few orders, and I was led - nowhere near as roughly as I was expecting - through the archway and down the stairs. A personnel truck and two SUVs pulled up into the street next to the one that had brought Uri as we stepped out of the hotel lobby, but my eyes weren’t on them.

I was looking at the third floor of the building opposite. Bob, Jakob, and the rest of my escort had heard nothing from me since I had given my radio to Olena and buried her under that rubble pile, but they had been clear on their orders. They were to wait until morning, retrieve Olena, and then get the hell out of Dodge, but all of them were now in concealed positions, their rifles trained on my assailants with some very itchy fingers on their triggers.

I locked eyes with Bob through the darkness. The look of fear at my bloodied appearance swept over his face, but it didn’t stay there long. Revulsion, anger, and horrified betrayal replaced his expression the moment he recognized Marco. Bob had, in no way, been corrupted by the traitor, but he instantly understood his mistake; he had been just as suspicious about Uri as I had been, and the look of disgust on his face - not just at Marco for his treason, but at himself for falling for the ruse - was more than enough evidence that he wanted to bestow his measure of justice immediately.

I held his eyes and shook my head as softly as I was able to.

Jakob’s face appeared next to Bob’s, and in a move almost identical to the one he had used on me in the outer windows of that stadium in Alchevs’k, he placed his hand on the barrel of Bob’s weapon and gently pushed it down.

The look of helpless, indignant, and righteous fury on Bob’s face was probably very close to the one I had flashed Jakob myself the night before, and it was almost enough to pull a smile from my lips, but I still had a part to play. None of my captors had seen the shake of my head, and if they had, they had dismissed it as some internal processing. A smile would be harder to hide. My eyes flicked to Jakob.He gave me a soft nod, and then both of them ducked back down out of sight.

For what it was worth, Jakob thought it was a ballsy plan ... batshit crazy but bold. It was only the need to get Olena, and the information she had, to safety that was stopping him from mounting an impromptu rescue. His mission was to help Bob find his people; the means to completing that mission was currently hiding, hat on head, under a pile of carefully suspended rubble. I was secondary to that, and we both knew it.

“Get in,” one of the Inquisitors said, putting his hand on the back of my hand and pushing it down as I was bundled into the car. Another man got in on the other side of the car, and the first man climbed in behind me, sandwiching me between them. Marco, getting into the SUV in front of ours, cast a look back at me and disappeared out of sight.

A little over three months.

That is how long I had been in this cell. Injections of various drugs, coupled with random noises that were blasted at deafening levels through speakers in each corner of the room, had stopped me from sleeping for more than a handful of interrupted hours during that entire time. There was a very comfortable-looking bed along one wall, but being chained to the opposite side of the cell, my bindings nowhere long enough to allow me to reach it, made its presence little more than another form of torture.

The worst part was the electric shocks. There was no pattern to them, and at random times throughout the days and the night and at varying levels of intensity, the electricity would explode into my body through the metallic shackle around my ankle, and my whole body would seize violently.

My jaw would clench shut with enough force to almost shatter my teeth, my ears would ring, and the adrenaline in my bloodstream would explode from the muscle spasms and the pain, which in turn made my heart hammer desperately in my ribs. I could smell my hair singeing. Every single burst was enough to leave me writhing and twitching on the ground, my muscles spamming as I whimpered pathetically.

I hadn’t been fed more than a handful of times since I got here, either.

The closest I’d come to getting a drink was the occasional times when the door opened, and a ski-mask-wearing man carrying a firehose smashed me into the back wall from the sheer pressure of the water he had hosed into me.

It was powerful enough to tear strips of flesh from my body.

Clothing may have helped, but I had been stripped before being bolted to the wall, and if it wasn’t already freezing before each hosing down, it sure as shit was afterward. I had been reduced to sucking the water off the floor while simultaneously coughing the water out of my lungs from almost being drowned. I had learned to turn my back toward the door on seeing the hose, but these days, I could barely even stand.

I was burned from the electric shocks, aching from the muscle spasms, bruised from the current-induced seizures on the ground and the impact of that firehose. I was starving, I was dehydrated, I was sleep deprived, I was cowering away from the incessant noise from those speakers, and I had never been colder in my entire life. My powers were being stretched to breaking point, simply trying to keep my body healed and warm and to combat the ever-present pain smashed into me.

My hands were stiff from still being cuffed behind my back, adding more pain to my increasingly frequent spasming muscles, and there was something about the construction of the room itself that was blocking me from using my powers or even sensing anything beyond its walls.

I was hanging on by a thread.

I was curled up in a ball on the floor, trying to muster the energy it would take to drag myself to my feet. Walking would cause my muscles to cramp excruciatingly painfully, but those cramps would subside, and the movement, however limited, would get the blood flowing again, and the level of my suffering would be reduced for a short time. It was a double-edged sword, though, because the camera bolted to the wall above the door was tracking my every movement, and more than once, my captors had chosen one of those moments of movement to send another violently agonizing burst of electricity into my ankle restraint.

I knew that the time was approaching. Somehow, despite all of the hardships I was suffering, and without a single point of outside reference, I was still able to track the relentless passage of time. And every two hours, day or night, like clockwork, my cell door would be opened, a man in a hood would come in and sit down on a chair in the corner of the room - which I also could not reach - and ask me the same questions.

Over and over.

Countless times since I had been tossed in here.

The same. Fucking. Questions.

I was at breaking point, he knew I was at breaking point, and he knew it was only a matter of time before I gave him the answers he wanted.

With a groan that sounded like it could have come from the lips of an eighty-year-old postal worker, still struggling with his rounds, I hauled myself to a more upright position. Panting and wheezing, grunting through full-body muscle cramps, and stretching out the ache of limbs that hadn’t moved in hours, I dragged myself off the floor and sat back against the wall.

There was a toilet in the room, probably the only mercy these Praetorians had shown me, but sitting on it for any longer than was necessary to relieve myself was one guaranteed way to get myself electrocuted. Still, there was a certain element of ... Shall we call it ‘bodily releases’ that came with that kind of muscle contractions, and the lower part of me was a disgusting mess of urine and the remnants of Uri’s blood that had soaked through my pants. I could only look at my legs with thinly veiled contempt as the muscles contorted painfully beneath the skin, adding a strange shimmering effect to the dried fluids that now caked my extremities as the light from the only bulb in the room bounced off them.

I had done this enough times to know that I needed to wait for those muscles to stop having a tantrum before I would be able to attempt any more movement.

The small patch of blood on the ground, a little way to my right, was evidence of what would happen if I rushed it. I had made it to my feet the week before, determined to be on them when the interrogator arrived, needing to demonstrate my defiance. My legs had cramped, then buckled, and with my arms still secured behind my back, I had no way of preventing the floor from coming up to meet me as I face-planted into it. My nose had been spread across my face after that one, and stopping the bleeding and resetting my nose had taken up more of my power reserves than I had to spare.

I was fairly sure my collarbone was broken, too. Same reason: a sharp and violent impact with the floor, although that one had been at the behest of a sudden and unexpected dose of mains power to my body while I had been upright.

I had given up on trying to be on my feet for the arrival of the interrogator after that.

Every moment, every shudder of pain, every inhalation of my own stench, every shiver from the cold, every burst of agony from the electric shocks, and every growl of my hungry stomach was just counting down to the moment of my surrender.

And my time was just about up.

The large, heavy-sounding deadbolts on the door were pulled back with a loud, metallic clunk, and the solid steel door creaked outwards on strained-sounding hinges. A man in a hood, a significant white aura surrounding him, stepped into the room, regarded me with dispassionate eyes, and took his seat on the chair in the corner.

“How are you feeling today?” his voice asked calmly, the same first question as always.

“Peachy,” I grumbled back at him. I still couldn’t bring myself to answer him properly. No matter how close I was to that abyss, I wasn’t in it yet, and I would be damned if I wasn’t going to throw every shred of myself into fighting for as long as I could.

The man nodded and wrote something onto the clipboard he was holding.

“Are you ready to begin?” It had taken me a few goes around to realize that was question number two.

“Raring to go.”

“What is your name?”

“Barbara,” I had given him a different name in each of the interrogations. I was honestly starting to run out of new ones. But again, my defiance simply wouldn’t let me answer him honestly. He scribbled my answer onto his paperwork.

“Where were you born?”

“In West Philidelphia, born and raised. On the playground was where I spent most of my days.” I tried keeping that answer novel, too, as well as the ones for every other question. I had made it into something of a game.

“What is your father’s name?”

“Chuck Norris.”

“What is your mother’s name?”

“Dolly Parton, but don’t tell Chuck’s wife.”

“Where do you currently live?”

“Here, I’m guessing.” I finished my answer with a long, haggard cough, which in turn caused a series of full-body cramps. The man waited for me to finish, looking at me with neither contempt nor compassion in his steel-grey eyes.

“Where did you go to school?”

“Sesame Street.”

“Where did you go to college?”

“Also, Sesame Street.”

This went on for a while. There were more than two dozen questions in total, each one as innocuous as the last and each one a question that I was certain they already knew the answer to. The goal was relatively simple: They were trying to break me. They would keep asking the same questions until I had been worn down enough to answer them truthfully. Once I had been broken, they could ask me the questions that they really wanted to know.

This time, like the hundreds of times before, I gave him nothing.

Without a sigh, without a growl, or without a single outward sign of any emotion one way or another, the man scribbled down the answer to his final question, stood and left the room.

I closed my eyes as the door slammed shut and started to count down.

5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

The pain smashed into me. It would seem that the powers in charge of this place were not impressed with the flippancy of my answers and, as had happened every time since the fourth or fifth interrogation, a huge amount of electrical current was forcefully crashed into my body.

Being electrocuted, for those of you fortunate enough to have never experienced it and sensible enough to have never licked a battery, is rather unpleasant. We have all experienced muscle cramps before - in bed or after exercise, and usually as a product of dehydration - all you really need to know is that it feels like that ... just everywhere and at least a few hundred times worse. But whereas you can usually stretch out a leg cramp, the convulsions of the rapidly oscillating current from the power grind simply forbade any muscle in your body from functioning by cramping them, over and over again, a dozen or so times a second, for as long as you were subjected to the electricity.

Everything was pain. Pain consumed my entire existence for those few seconds. Acute, debilitating agony, the likes of which I had never imagined before. Then it stopped, and I found myself back in that twitching ball on the floor. The pulsing aftershocks, the body-wide cramps, the smell of burned hair as my heart pounded in my ears. Wretched and crumbling, broken and forsaken, I just lay there.

It appeared that my captors were either growing increasingly frustrated by my petulance, or they were able to see how close I was to breaking and decided I needed that extra push. Because whereas I had only ever been subjected to a single blast of electricity after each interrogation before, I was completely blindsided when, thirty seconds later, another one smashed into me.

And then another.

And then another.

Five seconds of torture, thirty seconds of respite, then another dose.

Twenty-one more times.

I passed out.

I blinked my eyes open, momentarily disoriented by a severe lack of knowledge about how long I had been out, and looked around the room.

It may have been only a few minutes, it could have been hours, it could have been longer.

But the door was open.

I frowned at it.

My eyes scanned to the right until they came to the shape of a man - quickly clearing through the flog of my bleary eyes - sitting on my bed, with a moderately powerful aura framing his silhouette.

I frowned at him, too.

“Why do you resist?” the distorted and echoey sound of his voice floated into my ringing ears.

I groaned and, fighting off the crippling pain in every part of my body - and spitting out a mouthful of blood as I did - rolled onto my back. “Because I can.” I croaked at him. During my convulsions, I seemed to have bitten off the end of my tongue, but more of my powers, the very last of them, had been subconsciously expended in repairing the damage. I frowned at the taste of blood in my mouth and quickly banished the question as to where that chunk of flesh had gone while its replacement was being grown.

The man sighed and shook his head. “We are not your enemy.”