Chapter 32

There is always that moment; we’ve all felt it. Where the weight of the world is on our shoulders, it may only be the weight of our own world, but it weighs us down, nonetheless. Deadlines at work, sick family, chores, bills to pay, a million things to be done, and not enough hours in the day to do it. You spend every waking minute trying to get shit done, rushing from one essential task to the next; not only trying to get those completed but trying to juggle and prioritize those still waiting. A to-do list that’s so much longer than your arm that it reaches the floor and rolls off into the distance.

Then you finish.

A single moment to take a breath, to feel the stress and the pressure that has weighed you down so much finally lift, even if only a little.

And then you are crushed beneath the mountain of your own weariness. Everything, every ache, every pain, every moment of fatigue, every wall you have pushed through; every time you have made your task a priority over your own wellbeing, all of it just lands on you, all at once. A tiredness that you feel in your bones, so draining that your body and your mind doesn’t have the strength required to fight off even the most trivial of sicknesses, and all you can think about is rest.

The insane amount of power that I had been using for the past few months to keep myself functioning suddenly demanded replenishment the instant I stepped onto that ship. I slept almost all the way home. Bob, insisting that he had spent the past few months sitting around and doing nothing other than worrying, re-assumed command of the mission pretty much immediately after leaving the compound. Aside from a very brief meeting with Isabelle - where she hugged me, thanked me with more heartfelt sincerity than could be expressed in words, and told me to go home to rest - I was free to recuperate. While I was neck deep in the ordeal, I had taken the exertions in stride; my staggering ability to maintain and replenish power had seen me through the closest thing to hell that a man could imagine, and it had seemed endless. But each day, each brute-force-push through one wall after another, and every overwhelming display of power, had taken a toll on me. The moment the ordeal was over, those tolls came due.

It turns out that I wasn’t quite as all-powerful as I had thought. The question that I found myself wondering is how much longer I would have been able to go on before the Praetorians really did manage to push me too far, and my need for power outstripped the amount I was able to replenish. I had assumed - with no evidence to the contrary - that my power plants could maintain my vast levels of power indefinitely, it turned out, however, that power plants need fuel, too, and I had been dangerously low on it.

Stepping into my apartment for the first time in months was like stepping out of a dream. It was like walking into a parent’s home the day after their funeral; it didn’t have the warmth of home I expected. It was a cold, empty shell with some stuff in it and nothing more. The vibrancy, the joy, the life, the energy, the feeling of safety and security that I had always associated with it - without ever consciously knowing it was there, and despite not having lived there for long - was gone. And it was an absence I couldn’t help but see with every glance at every wall and every piece of furniture as I walked through the living area, into the bathroom, and looked at myself in the mirror. I had been victorious. I had dealt a massive blow to my enemy; it may have been tiny to them - in the grand scheme of things - but it was huge to me, and yet it felt ... hollow.

I had done a lot of thinking on the way back from the Praetorian compound. Probably too much. But there was one part of the last few months that I couldn’t seem to get out of my head, and it was gnawing at me. Now that I could see it in myself, it was all I could see.

I had raged in the battle, truly raged. I had let loose every ounce of fury and anger. There were moments when I had been so blinded by it that I had lost control of myself. But that wasn’t the part that bothered me.

No. It was what had been revealed in the pits of my stampeding rage that had my mind preoccupied.

When I had been making my best attempt to cave in the face of Julias, when I had hit him over and over and over again until he was a crumpled pile of flesh in a crater made by his own body, it was not vengeance that I was blinded by. It was not anger at the things they had done or the crimes they had committed; it was anger at myself.

It was the pain of losing my parents without getting any sense of closure about my childhood. The contrast in feelings between my utter disgust at them as human beings, and the way they had stood their ground to protect me. It was those unanswered questions about the one word in that whole ordeal that seemed to stand out above all the others.

Sean.

It was the guilt, the soul-consuming guilt at the way I had treated Becky. My own cowardice when it came to her feelings for me, my refusal to look at them, let alone recognize them, and my abuse of them to get my dick wet. She had loved me; she had been killed for me, and I didn’t have the spine to admit that or even acknowledge her love until she had died. A lot of the self-righteous anger at her murder was only serving to disguise my own self-loathing at how I had treated her.

I had been a rampaging bull for so long. I had killed so many people. It was not like they didn’t deserve it, and if I had been put in the same position again, I wouldn’t change what I had done; I would be dead if I had hesitated. But killing a person did something to you, and the more anonymous it was, the worse the effect. People like Tiberus or Toussant, or even those fucking idiots in the mindscape who had challenged me at the end of the battle, were people. I had taken their lives, I had acknowledged their existence, I had recognized a threat, and they had died for a reason, even if that reason was only the punishment for crimes I had deemed them guilty of. Their deaths had meaning, maybe only to me, but meaning nonetheless. But they were an overwhelming minority of the number of lives I had ended. The vast majority of them had just been ... in the way. They didn’t have faces, they didn’t have names, they didn’t have stories. I had no idea if they were guilty of the crimes that they had been killed for, but I had killed them anyway. They posed a threat; they stood between me and my goal, and their deaths were ordained by simple association with the people I knew who were guilty. But they were people; they were fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, friends; they were men, but I had slaughtered them like livestock. Each of them had been given no more consideration than pixelated combatants on one of my video games.

I had butchered them.

If there really was such a thing as a soul, the essence that made us who we were, then taking a life put a stain on it, no matter the circumstances. That stain ... it had a weight. I could feel it pulling at me, a tether tied to the pit of my stomach, and it would take time and a lot of soul-searching if I was going to be able to let that weight go. To make matters worse, I knew that there was still a lot of fighting and death yet to come. The last time I had been in this apartment, I had relished that idea. I had headed off to Ukraine with all the fervor and vigor of a naive child eager for adventure; I’d had no idea what I was signing up for. Now I did, and the prospect of more war was not one that I relished, even if it did have to be done.

What I wanted, above all else, was to see my friends. Yet, at the same time, I had a marrow-deep need to be alone, to process, to come to terms with the new person staring back at me when I looked in the mirror.

It hadn’t been long ago - only a few months - when I had stood here, getting myself ready to head down to the bar to dazzle Olivia the morning after leaving Backy and Philippa. It seemed like an eternity ago, a whole different life, and, in a manner of speaking, that is exactly what it had been. I had stood in this exact spot, utterly convinced of my powers. My aim was not to woo Olivia, flirt with her, or try to get laid. Those were a given. I was going to fuck her no matter what. No, what I had been contemplating was the mind-blowing ease with which my desires could be satisfied and oh so nobly deciding against it. I had the gall, the nerve, the downright cheek to wonder if I could make Olivia want me without using my powers - as if I was being done a disservice by all the people I had intentionally manipulated to get my own way. They couldn’t possibly like me for me; otherwise, they would have liked me before, so the people who did like me before my awakening were, therefore, special simply by the virtue that I had not messed with their heads. Because I - poor, lonely, abused little me - deserved someone who would like me for me without the slightest bit of effort on my part to earn it.

I was pathetic.

It could be argued, perhaps fairly, that I had been young; I had used my powers in the same way that any young man would do, and, judging by the few Evos my age I had met, it was precisely what they had done, too. They had used them to have fun, to get laid, to make themselves better, just as I had. I’d had no notion of the danger lurking around me aside from the few warnings from Charlotte and a few manipulations by Marco about an abstract threat that neither one of them -correctly, it turned out - seemed to understand. I may not have drawn attention to myself the way that I have been warned not to - in fact, the sum total use of my powers before the party had been paltry - but they were still enough to drag me into the situation I was now in, a situation that, ultimately, ended Becky’s life, and the lives of my parents, destroyed Philippa’s, irrevocably changed Charlotte’s and Evies, and - unless I was very careful - would do the same to Jimmy and anyone else I knew.

More than that, it had ended mine. I was not the person I was before; that life was over. My new reality hadn’t just changed me, it hadn’t made the edges rougher, it hadn’t simply ended my naivety; the old me had been utterly destroyed. He was gone.

Looking in the bathroom mirror, I barely recognized the man looking back at me. My eyes were harder and colder, and a look of something akin to emptiness seemed to be etched permanently into my features. It was subtle, but it was there. The horrors I had seen, the acts of unimaginable violence I had committed, the lives I had taken and seen lost; all of it was echoed in every haunted flick of my sunken eyes.

I was broken. I could feel it. The frayed edges of nerves that I didn’t realize had snapped until after the fighting had ended abrasively rubbed against each other in the shattered remains of my sense of safety. The constant state of alert. The flicking of eyes into every darkened, shadowy corner, the tightness of my grip on the bathroom sink, and that expectation - the unending and unwavering belief - that I would be attacked at any moment. It wasn’t fear, I wasn’t afraid, I was ready. But I was ready for something that my logical mind was telling me wouldn’t be coming. There would be no battle above the Queen’s Head; there would be no armored column of tanks or enemy soldiers rumbling down the street outside; there would be no pile of bodies to be found around every anonymous corner, and there would be no need to burn down half of the world to defeat them. And yet, the preparedness for it was something I couldn’t just switch off. There was only me, only the silence around me, and only the guilt and the pain plaguing my once-naive mind.

The first casualty of war is not truth; it’s innocence.

And mine was a distant memory now.

The person who had walked so determinedly out of this apartment all those months ago had already been through a lot before he left; he had already witnessed the deaths of Faye and Becky, he had broken the mind of an inquisitor, and he had massacred men at the party, at Mary’s house, and at the warehouse where Becky had been murdered, he was far from innocent then. Yet, compared to the man I was now, he had been painfully naive. I had thought myself so superior, my powers allowing me to rise above all of the threats and the dangers around me, but I had no idea what I had been walking into. I thought I knew war, I thought I knew what to expect, I thought I knew how to win. I knew nothing. Only now was I beginning to understand that nations and armies win wars. Men ... men don’t win wars; they only survive them, or they don’t.

My life wasn’t just about fighting off the Praetorians anymore; it wasn’t only about hunting for Marco and The Judge, and it wasn’t about gouging the corruption and the cancer of treason out of the Conclave, the Sect, and the Inquisition. Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I knew it was going to be more than that now. It was about surviving this in a way that would let me be able to rebuild myself when it was over, and Charlotte’s words, spoken in this very apartment, echoed through my mind.

“Don’t lose yourself to this.”

Had I lost myself? Was it already too late? Could any semblance of my old life be recovered, or could a new one be built in its place? I didn’t have the answers, and only time would tell if I was even asking the right questions.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to break eye contact with the shadow of me in the mirror; I looked down at my hands instead. They were shaking; a tremor vibrated through them that seemed to refuse any sort of command to stop. My heart was hammering in my chest, that hollow pit remained firmly in place in my stomach, and my throat had suddenly become extraordinarily dry. I flexed my fingers and clenched my fists a few times, I took a couple of deep breaths, trying to control my own rebellious body before I shook my head and turned back toward the living room. I didn’t have time for this; there was so much to do, so many things I had to think about before I could...

Someone knocked on the door.

My whole body must have jumped a few inches into the air, and a chill raced down my spine, followed by the beads of an almost freezing sweat. Whoever was on the other side of the door was lucky not to be turned into pulp by the energy blast that I almost launched through it. My heart rate exploded, and for a few paralyzed seconds, my body was frozen to the floor, stuck between the urge to fight or to flee. Everything was instantly and terrifyingly on edge. I half expected half a dozen soldiers to burst down the door and charge in with guns blazing.

But there were no soldiers or blocking Evos, there were no voids of Inquisitors either, only a single, familiar presence. One that I had missed so very dearly.

The door opened on its own as I stood there and watched it, forcing myself to snuff out the ball of power in my hand and trying to will my body to stop trembling. Charlotte stared at me, her eyes wide and fearful; she could feel the danger rippling off me. She could feel my fear, my nerves, that edge, and the power that had almost obliterated her. “Pete ... I...”

My knees buckled, and I dropped to the floor.

I wasn’t okay. Holy shit, I was really not okay.

She was right there on the ground next to me, arms around me, in a heartbeat, the wetness of her tears soaking into the collar of my t-shirt. Despite the danger she had knowingly or unknowingly been in a moment before, she didn’t hesitate. She was there, and the more that thought echoed around my brain, the more I felt I didn’t deserve her. If anything, I was putting her in harm’s way just by being around her. All I could do was cling to her as if my life and my sanity depended on it and let myself just ... feel her.

I felt it instantly, that presence, that betrayal, the feeling that immediately smashed down the walls holding back my anger, and a deep, rumbling, terrifying growl vibrated through my chest.

Charlotte’s eyes widened in horror for the briefest of moments before existence melted away.

The mindscape was warm, sunny, beautiful, yada yada yada. I knew the routine by now, but there was something very different about this time in the mindscape. I was on the offensive and I was looking up at the walls of one of my closest friend’s city.

Charlotte was on her walls, looking down at me with panicked eyes filled with fear. “Pete, what is going on?” She called out to me, the tremble in her voice perfectly matching the tremble that I had felt in my body only a few minutes before. Her hair whipped back in the wind that had filled the air, wind that she felt, but I couldn’t. I could see the confusion in her eyes; she had never felt that before, but it didn’t take her more than a few seconds to work out its meaning.

Wind equals danger.

Except this time, I couldn’t feel it because I was the danger.

“He’s in there!” I growled back. My words were quiet; in the real world, a person six feet away would have struggled to hear me, but in the mindscape, they were blasted out in a wave of unimaginable loathing and power.

“What? Who? Pete, please ... It’s me.” She looked down at me, her hands on the crenellations of her wall as tears started to run down her face. She could only watch as the US Marine Corps and the million men of its ranks shimmered into existence around her city.

“Marco!” I growled back. “He’s in there. I can feel him!”

“What??” Her panicked eyes left mine, and turned to look back behind her and into her city. Somewhere in the deeper, calmer, more rational part of my mind, that one look absolved my friend of even the smallest shred of guilt; she had no idea what I was talking about and, therefore, had no idea that she had been a potential mole for the enemy since the beginning.

“Open your gates; I’m coming in one way or another, but I’m not here for you.”

“Pete ... please,” she sobbed. She was terrified. She had dropped to her knees and looked down at me with an expression that, under normal conditions, would have broken my heart.

My eyes met hers and, somehow, softened a little. “Charlotte, I need you to trust me.”

I could see it in her: the fear, the soul-consuming terror. My demand was going against every single instinct she had. An army was at her gates, and every fiber of her being was telling her that opening them would be tantamount to suicide. I was asking her to step into the darkness, to surrender every shred of safety and security with nothing more than my word to go on. Every part of her was screaming at her that opening her gates to anyone without an invitation - let alone one with an army stretching out as far as the eye could see - was the very definition of self-harm.

And yet, behind that was something else. A simple question: Did she trust me enough to allow this?

I just held her eyes, watching the conflict battle across her beautiful face and silently feeling my own battle in the depths of my chest. Would I force my way in if she refused?

She let out a long, quivering breath of abject surrender, and her gates swung open. With a single thought, I blinked into being on her walls and wrapped my arms around her, waiting until she looked up into my eyes. Even through my fury, even through that stomach-turning loathing, even through my need to completely destroy the man who had destroyed my life, the sight of Charlotte looking so scared was enough to make me pause. I cupped her cheek and let a thumb wipe away a tear that was working its way over it. “I’ve got you,” I whispered to her.

Her hands gripped a little tighter onto me as she pulled herself to her feet, she held my eyes for a few searching moments before she nodded softly.

“Find him!” my voice bellowed out to the men of my army. “Protect this city as if it were your own and bring him to me ... alive!”

It was like a scene out of Lord of the Rings. The gates of Minas Tirith had been battered open, and the orcish hordes were washing through the breach like water pouring through a shattered dam. Except these were my hordes, and I had no intention of hurting my friend. But the ground-shaking thuds of thousands upon thousands of heavy boots hitting the ground as my army flooded into Charlotte’s city could be felt not only through the walls beneath our feet but in the air itself. Charlotte could only watch in blind faith and terror.

Jeeves, Uri, and Faye shimmered into place next to us, earning a squeaked yelp of surprise from Charlotte. Her understanding of Evo nature far eclipsed my own, though, and it only took a few seconds for her eyes to widen in realization. She knew Uri - although nobody, not even Jerry, had been told he was now in my head. She knew Jeeves, too, but it was the first time she had ever seen Faye. Agatha, the member of the Sect whom Charlotte trusted above all others, had been the one who told me that Faye was waiting for me in my city after our bonding, but she wasn’t. At least not in the way Agatha had meant. Faye wasn’t here as an echo of our relationship; I had completely downloaded her the moments our minds had met. I didn’t know how or why it had happened, but it had. Uri must have been downloaded as part of his last rites; when I had drained his well and emptied his library, I must have inadvertently brought his whole consciousness with me as well. The realization of those truths flashed through Charlotte’s eyes in only a few moments, and her gaze flicked from them to me with something approaching a newfound confidence.

“Come ‘ere, darlin’,” Faye whispered to her softly as she stepped between Charlotte and me, wrapping her arms around her to hold my friend safely. “Yeh know he loves yeh, he ain’t gonna hurt yeh, yer safe. Our boy just needs to rip a cunt’s head off.”

“I don’t ... I don’t understand what’s going on. I’m ... scared.”

“Marco has infected you,” Uri stepped forward, closer to the edge of the walls, his eyes scanning the city. “But this is different to what we have seen before. It’s ... older. Cruder.” He turned to face Charlotte. “Marco has developed what I called ‘the corruption.’ It is an intangible presence inside an Evo’s city; it’s like a shadow. But my guess is that it took time to develop and perfect. Before that, he must have tried something different and a lot less subtle. Somewhere in your city, he has literally injected a part of his consciousness, and it’s been hiding in here ever since.” Charlotte, who had been listening with rapt attention, stood herself up straight in Faye’s arms, suddenly bristling at the implication. “How long have you known Marco?”

“He ... He awakened me,” She answered. Uri arched an eyebrow at her. “Thirteen years. But ... I fucking hate Marco; I’ve never trusted him.”

Uri smiled.

“Urgh,” I groaned, finally realizing what Uri was getting at. “And you’ve never known why.” Charlotte shook her head. “It’s because your mind recognized that he had done something to you and was fighting off his presence. But why didn’t I sense it before?” I asked Uri.

“The corruption,” Uri shrugged. “It was probably programmed to make you ignore his presence in anyone else.

Charlotte blinked for a moment. “Oh, that fucking piece of shit! But ... that means...” The anger on her face was instantly replaced with a look of pure horror.

“How many times has Marco been in your city?”

“I ... I don’t know. Not since my training, maybe a dozen times before that.”

Uri nodded. “Then you have nothing to worry about. He wouldn’t have been able to make contact with that piece of himself without being in here. You haven’t given away anything.”

The look of relief that washed over my friend’s face didn’t last long before one of firm, hardened resolve took its place. “How do we find him?” her growl almost matched my one from outside the walls. The answer came before anyone had a chance to speak.

We don’t. You do.

Charlotte’s city, like most others, was filled with ghosts. Representations of the people in her past who had made an impact on her life. Parents, family, childhood friends, teachers, professors from college, doctors and other nurses, friends she had made as an adult, ex-boyfriends, lovers, bullies, everyone who had ever contributed to the molding of Charlotte into the person she was today. Somewhere in her city, there were ghosts of Becky and Philippa. Somewhere, there was a ghost of me. All of them had stood aside to let my army stampede past them, leaving them just standing in the streets, pressed against the walls of her buildings - all of them being systematically searched from top to bottom by rifle-wielding Marines - and watching. Suddenly, they all froze. Each of them raised a hand and pointed.

“There,” one of them said.

“There,” said another.

“There. There. There. There. THERE! THERE!!.” A hundred voices all murmuring, the murmurs getting louder and becoming chants, and those chants growing yells, then into raging, accusatory screams. All of them pointed from different places in the city, triangulating the spot where the alien, unwanted, hostile presence was hiding.

THERE! THERE! THERE!

Charlotte’s palace, an Evo’s representation of the conscious and subconscious mind, looked a lot like the Disney castle. I remembered thinking that its pristine white stone edifice looked nothing like a real medieval castle. In fact, her whole city looked more like a romanticized version of medieval Camelot than anything resembling historical reality, and yet, the city suited the beauty of her mind perfectly. Tall, finger-like spires grew out of the lower fortress of her palace and reached into the air, four on each corner and a larger, taller one in the middle. Each of them was topped by a golden, gleaming, conical-shaped roof, but the roof of the central tower - positioned just above Charlotte’s office balcony - was now the target of a hundred accusatory pointing fingers.

Charlotte growled louder, her eyes locked onto the tower. “He’s there.”

Within a fraction of a second, it wasn’t just the city’s ghosts that were pointing up at the spire of Charlotte’s palace but the business end of every weapon of every Marine in the city. But they held their fire. The risk of missing Marco’s ghost and hitting the Palace was just too great. Now that I thought about it, it was the perfect place for Marco’s specter to hide; I had no idea what damage could be done by a single bullet, let alone a sustained barrage. This was literally her mind, and as far as I knew, simply cracking a roof tile could have caused a catastrophic amount of harm.

“You three stay out here. Make sure he doesn’t escape,” I said to Uri, Faye, and the silent Jeeves without looking at any of them. “We are going to go up there and get him.” Charlotte nodded firmly, her eyes locked onto the spire of her palace with the same look of grim determination as mine.

I reached down and laced my fingers into hers, giving them enough of a squeeze for her to look away from the tower and toward me. “We take him alive.”

“But...”

“Alive!” I repeated, a little firmer. “Once we’ve worked out what he has done to you and can be sure there is no risk of him hurting you, he’s all yours.”

I could hear the grinding of her teeth from where I stood as she glowered at me, but she eventually nodded and turned her attention back to the tower. Her hand squeezed a little harder in mine, the world seemed to lurch, air rushed past my ears, and in the blink of an eye, we were standing on the balcony of her tower. I was tempted, however briefly, to look into her ... her bedroom. That is what she called her version of my bunker. I had never seen it before, but I had the immediate and inexplicable impression that there was a lot of pink in there. I also understood that a person’s mind was a sacred place, and she was putting an enormous amount of faith in me by just allowing me to get this close to it. Nosing in there without her express invitation was the highest of all intrusions. I turned to look back at my friend, finding her peering through narrow, infuriate eyes, above us toward the point where the tower wall met the conical roof.

I stood there for more than a few moments, watching her staring at the roof. “I have to admit,” she said after a few silent moments, throwing her hands in the air and looking at me with a huff. “This is as far as my planning went. How the fuck do we get up there?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I don’t know if it was a release of tension or just the look on her face when she realized, as I did, that neither of us had ever tried to get onto the roof of one of our buildings before, and now that we did, we had no idea how to do it, only that ‘willing’ ourselves up there wouldn’t work. We both just looked up again, momentarily stumped.

I would like to say we came up with a plan of such astounding genius that the very fact we thought of it all was a testament to how utterly incredible our enhanced minds were, but we didn’t. We both just stood there, completely dumbfounded, for more minutes than I would be comfortable admitting before we both heard a scratching sound coming from our right and below us.

Charlotte frowned and looked at me. I frowned and looked at Charlotte. We both seemed to understand that the sound was neither natural nor was it coming from anything that either of us was consciously doing in her city. We were about to look over the edge of the balcony to see what was making that noise when a metal World War II helmet levitated itself above the apex of the balcony railing, followed in short order by a dark grey fuzzy head, a set of leather flying goggles, a long pointed snout, and then the rest of my friendly neighborhood mole. With three of his clawed paws digging into the masonry of the tower, he saluted comically with the fourth, looked up again, and carried on climbing.