Chapter 36

“I miss her,” I said sadly as I looked up at the statue of Faye. It was situated on one side of the lake that had grown in my city as a result of my bonding with her. We had made love on this spot, we had sat and talked and joked and lived - in a manner of speaking - on this spot, and now, in the place of all those cherished memories, was a statue of the girl who had literally saved my life in every way that mattered. The sun was high in the sky, shining its light and its warmth down onto the grass that surrounded the water, but whereas the bust of Becky’s face seemed to fit with the hollow, haunting, lower light of her mournful monument, the sun seemed to refuse to leave Faye alone. It was like it was shining a light on her in celebration of everything she had become to me and the heroism of her second, final death. Or at least the second time I had lost her.

Charlotte’s had curled into mine. “She was wonderful and so funny,” she sighed, resting her head against the side of my shoulder. “She was always lovely to me.”

“She was a woman of honor and integrity,” Uri nodded from the other side of me. “She knew the right thing to do and just did it without hesitation. That is a rare quality in one so young. And...” a soft smile pulled at his lips. “ ... she had ... spirit.”

I huffed out a short laugh; trust Uri to be the master of understatement. She had spirit, she had heart, she had charisma, and fire, and passion, and determination, and more courage than anyone I had ever known. There was an energy and vitality about her; a tenacity, a mental fortitude that she hid behind humor, sexuality, and a general zest for life, despite hers having been cut tragically and criminally short. She had given her last full measure of devotion to a woman whom she had never met in her life, to someone whom I had known for less than a year; she had seen a way she could save Philippa from a lifetime of mental pain and anguish, and she had taken it. Uri was right; there had been no hesitation. It was an act of love, not for Philippa, but for me. It was pure, unquestioned selflessness, designed to ease my suffering and my guilt as much as it was to ease Philippa’s pain. She gave up her home, her love, and possibly even her life just to save us both from the torment of what the Judge had done to her.

Part of me wanted to scream in fury to the heavens at the loss of her, part of me wanted to smile and honor her sacrifice, and another part of me wanted to sit and wallow in self-pity and despair at everything that had been taken from me. Yet succumbing to that, giving in to it, would have been the greatest disservice to Faye’s memory that I could imagine. Her loss was the epitome of everything wrong with the world, and yet it was an act in keeping with the very best of what people could be. It was loss, and it was promise. It was a penance and a gift. It was darkness in the light and light in the darkness of this life and this war.

It was savagery and love in equal, overlapping measure.

And I missed her.

I missed her smile; I missed her laugh; I missed her humor and her wickedness. I missed that naughty glint in her eye; I missed the pride in her gaze when she looked at me; I missed the lilt of her accent and the love that was behind every word she spoke. I missed her flaming red hair and her endless emerald eyes. I missed the way she saw the best in the world and saw the best in me. I missed her faith. Faith that we would get through this, faith that we were in the right, and the unshakable faith that we would win.

I missed how much of a better person I was because of her. Not because her simple presence made me better but because she inspired me to be the better version of myself.

My eyes were locked on the statue of her. It showed her standing, slightly turned away but looking back over her shoulder at me, just as she had been on our very first visit to the mindscape together during the duel at the party. It was a perfect representation of how she had looked at the point that I realized that something was happening between us. It was the moment our bonding process started. There was that playful, mischievous, happy smile on her face, and her eyes - despite apparently being made of a shimmering white marble - seemed like they were dancing in time with the laughter that would forever be heard in that frozen moment in time. It was the perfect image, the perfect moment to memorialize, before the attack on the party, before her death, before the war, when life was still full of promise and potential.

I sighed heavily. Unlike Becky, I didn’t feel like I was saying goodbye to my lost love, mainly because I didn’t know with any sort of clarity that she had actually been lost. Her plan, in theory, could still work perfectly; she could have merged with Philippa’s mind, healing it completely, and would live as long and healthy a life as Philippa would. She may even force something of an awakening in my nurse friend and rejoin the fight at my side, or she could have failed just as completely and be lost forever, trapped inside the same fractured mind as Philippa was. She may have been killed, lost, gone forever the moment she transferred herself out of my mind. I simply didn’t know, and it was the not knowing that was torturing me. But at the same time, she was still gone. She still wasn’t here, and my city felt hollow, empty, lifeless, and meaningless without her.

I missed her like the desert missed the rain. A deep, aching, yearning need for her. It was deeper than a longing; it was more profound than simply mourning her absence; it was an ache I felt in my bones, in my soul, in the very core of me, and it was excruciating.

Uri placed a hand on my shoulder, the opposite one to where Charlotte was resting her head, and nodded to me. He said nothing further; he didn’t need to. He knew what I was feeling, and not only because he could feel what I felt. He had a wife still alive in the real world, a woman he loved with every fiber of himself, and he would never see her again. She wasn’t dead; she hadn’t been lost, and yet he would never see her again. He would never feel the warmth of her embrace or the softness of her lips. He would never feel the caress of her breath as she whispered those three cherished words into his ear at night. He would never watch the moonlight dance in her eyes, nor would he watch the sunrise kiss her sleeping face. He had lost her without losing her. He may not feel the exact same thing I was feeling, but his loss was close enough, and it was just as profound. He shared all of that with me in a single look and a single gesture.

Uri took a few steps away and then shimmered away into nothingness as he disappeared back to wherever it was he went when he wasn’t around my conscious mind. I turned my gaze back toward the statue and squeezed Charlotte’s hand a little. I missed Faye more than words would ever be able to adequately convey, but there was something different this time, different than it had been the first time she died or when Becky had been killed. I knew her; I knew the very core of her. She had done something wonderful, and that is how she would want to be remembered: for that, for the good times, for the laughter, the teasing, and the playfulness. She wouldn’t want me wallowing in the pits of my own grief.

At least this time, I had gotten to tell her I loved her. I let the happier, cherished memories flow through my mind for a few more minutes. Time was short, and Faye - or at least the memory of her - would be with me forever. I already knew that I would be spending a lot of time basking in their warmth.

“C’mon,” I said to Charlotte softly. “We’ll be landing soon.”

Reflecting on the wealth and the opulence I now found myself in, I couldn’t help but feel like a stranger in a garishly splendid world. Rich people, through their material grandeur, lived on a different plane of existence — one of abundance and silence, the latter bought by thick walls and expanses of privacy - no, secrecy - that would take too much effort for noise to cross. The concept of money had long been elusive to me, a shapeshifting entity that sometimes spoke of freedom but more often than not whispered the weighty tales of greed, abuses of power, and downright criminality.

For me, the only true desire I had for wealth lay in the potential that it presented—the reward at the end of an effort to build, to create, to foster something special. And if that something made me a lot of money, that would be fucking awesome, and I would indulge in every penny that hard work earned me. But I wouldn’t cheat people to get it, I wouldn’t rob people of their pensions, I wouldn’t fuck with global economies, and I wouldn’t make another person or another group of people poorer just to make myself richer. That was generally how it worked, right? Rich people either invented something that changed the world or they exploited a part of the world to make - and then keep - a quick buck ... a lot of quick bucks. If I ever got to a position where I had the sort of money that would afford me my own private plane, I wanted to have earned it honestly, not through the misfortunes of others.

My aspirations didn’t lie in the accumulation of assets; my goals were not to be knighted by riches. That distinction clung to me, even as I sat, surrounded by the trappings of a wealth that I had inadvertently stumbled upon—a wealth that felt both boundless and hollow.

Yes, okay, I could see the irony of me saying that, considering what I had done to my bank account. The wealth I wielded now was a banking anomaly, a digitized ledger with unlimited credits that dared to defy economics and ethics alike. It was a facade, a sleight of hand that provided all the benefits without any of the effort or consequences. Theoretically, I was the richest person on earth; I literally had limitless amounts of money. But that money wasn’t at someone else’s expense, nor had it been acquired through my own hard work; it was creating money out of thin air, and I had no plans to spend enough of it to start messing with currency exchange rates or the national GDP. More importantly - at least to me - that limitless amount of money didn’t count. I had done it as a measure of convenience; I hadn’t earned it, and it was perhaps for that reason that I couldn’t quite bring myself to accept that I had it. I still felt as poor as I always had done. Maybe not Oliver Twist poor, I was never at risk of becoming destitute and homeless in the weeks and months leading up to the acquisition of my powers, but I was still pretty close to the bottom rung of the ladder. That is still how I felt.

Being able to fork out for a few drinks at a bar or a few items of new clothing, those were okay. I probably would have been able to pay for them anyway. But waking up from the visit to my city - Charlotte holding my hand in her place in the seat beside me - in the most lavish form of transportation I could imagine, I was still experiencing that very acute feeling of imposter syndrome. I felt like a charlatan! I had been on a private plane before, on my way to Ukraine, but I had been too preoccupied with everything else to really pay it much attention. I had no real idea if this was the same plane, although the stewardess from last time was nowhere to be found. Now, though, with my rage tempered by the successful purge of the Sect and with my friend by my side, I felt like I could take it in a little.

Opulence wasn’t the word for it. It was sheer extravagance; it was like the whole aircraft had been furnished and decorated not to make the plane more comfortable for its passengers but to prove a point to the people riding in it. The person who owned it had some serious money to throw around, and everything about the interior of the aircraft seemed designed to make a statement. My eyes wandered across the endless stretch of luxury within the private jet—the fine grains of the cherry maple detailing like ancient scripts revealing depth, the supple cream leather seats - eleven of them in all, including a curved sofa along one side that currently contained the ever vigilant Fiona - inviting me to surrender, the exquisite silkiness of the carpet beneath my feet, even our meals had been served on actual fine china with real knives and forks, not that hellish plastic shit known the world over to contain an airline’s closest attempt to approximate food, and our drinks were served in something that looked a lot like crystal tumblers—I grappled with a stark realization. I was careening through the stratosphere in a vessel more grandiose than my entire apartment, and it was unsettling. Every furnishing, every meticulously crafted element around me screamed of an excess I had not known—nor particularly longed for.

This, if I understood correctly, was Isabelle’s private plane, as opposed to the ones owned by the Inquisition as an organization, and we were currently about half an hour away from landing at Oberpfaffenhofen Airport, a few miles outside the Bavarian city of Munich. Munich was a stunning city, complete with its culture, its history, and its cathedral with its awe-inspiring clock tower, but although I hoped to visit the city at some point during my time here, our destination was about seventy miles to the southwest: a tiny town, nestled on the German side of the Alps, called Einsiedl, overlooking the majestic Alpine lake of Walchensee.

More accurately, our destination was Isabelle’s private estate - a somewhat muted term for the fact that she owned her very own fucking castle - on the hills above Einsiedl. No matter how extravagant the luxury around me, it was a whisper compared to the estate we were heading toward — Isabelle’s private castle. A fucking castle! No matter how many times I said it, the sheer scale of it was impossible for me to wrap my mind around. A castle was the stuff of fairy tales, stories that resonated through the ages, of kings and queens, knights and damsels—a timeless symbol of power and dominance etched into the landscapes of Europe.

The irony that a castle, a remnant of history, was now home to beings far more powerful than any ancient ruler was not lost on me. With the evolution of humanity into something more we had ushered in an era where such battlements were not only unnecessary, they were laughably obsolete. It was a longbow in the age of battleship-mounted Gatling guns and cruise missiles. Yet the grandeur still pulled at something primal, a recognition of the dominion one must have to command such a space. A castle wasn’t merely a home—it was a stronghold, an empire contained within stone walls, and just like this plane, it was a statement...

I am important.

As I pondered the estates and riches of layers of value, both monetary and personal, I realized wealth was as much about appearances and expectations as it was about comfort. It made for an odd mentality—this expectation that one’s surroundings should reflect their status, that others should see and instantly know the pecking order.

I shook my head clear and looked around the aircraft at the rest of its passengers.

Of course, it wasn’t just Charlotte and I. Fiona was with us too; now that the security concerns associated with the Sect traitors had been dealt with, I trusted Agatha, Evie, and the others to keep Philippa safe. Jerry was due to meet us there. He had been here since Isabelle and Bob had relocated from The Hague. He and Bob were due to be waiting for us on the tarmac.

With us were the six traitors from the Collective.

Personally, I would have said that a private plane this luxurious was probably something they didn’t deserve. Bolting them to the floor of a shipping container and mailing them to where we needed to go was more in line with what I had in mind, but Isabelle valued expediency over petty acts of vengeance. When put like that, I suppose there wasn’t much of an argument to be made. Fiona, on the other hand, hadn’t been convinced and had been watching them like a hawk from the moment they had sat in their seats. It was unlikely that she could defeat all of them if the prisoners decided to revolt at the same time, but she sure as shit could hold them until I came to her aid. They were under no illusions, though; any sort of problems would be dealt with by introducing them to several tens of thousand feet of thin air and gravity on the other side of the plane door. They didn’t know enough to consider them valuable sources of information, so killing them wouldn’t have hurt my cause in the slightest. In fact, there was a not-insignificant part of me that had considered dumping one of them out of the plane just to make a statement to the others.

My vote would have been for Rachael. The look of sorrow and regret on her face was almost enough to show her mercy, but the expression of pure devastation on Charlotte’s every time she looked at the older woman was enough to stamp that mercy out in its infancy. Charlotte was crushed. I didn’t have a family; the closest thing I had to that was Charlotte herself and Jimmy. I couldn’t even imagine how broken I would be if either of them betrayed me, but like everything else in the life of an Evo, it was exaggerated. Their connection transcended everything I had ever known as a human. Charlotte was heartbroken in every meaningful way a person could be. That look alone was enough for me to consider her the top of my “fuck you” list.

Now that I thought about it, that list had become pretty big.

But that had been one of the reasons for disappearing into my city. It was, of course, partly to say goodbye to Faye, and to see the effects her absence was having on it. But another part was to get Charlotte out of the plane and away from the source of her own pain. I had suffered warfare and death, but the betrayal of Marco was nothing compared to the betrayal of Rachael. Her entire world had been shattered.

It never took long to regain my awareness after being in the mindscape. The very early days of exploring my city had often left me feeling a little disoriented when resuming my place in the real world, but it had been a long time since then. Still, though, my mind drifted back to those innocent days for a brief moment before I glanced out the window.

Well, maybe not so innocent. There was a lot of exploring and experimentation in those short weeks between leaving the hospital and the party with the nurses that seemed to have been the catalyst for my life taking this new path. There had been a lot of sex, too.

A lot of sex.

It had been a month or so, maybe a little longer, of pure, unabashed hedonism. I had been a guy who had been the romantic or sexual equivalent of a footnote, often overlooked and easily ignored. I had spent a lot of my adult life blaming my parents for my social awkwardness, and there was a part of me that still heaped the lion’s share of responsibility onto them, but to say that it was all down to them wasn’t just incorrect, it had been lazy. The confidence that came with knowing I could do what I wanted with almost no consequence was life-changing, and I vividly remembered the realization that I had started approaching women, talking to them, laughing, joking, and flirting with them, long before I snatched them up with my powers. I had grown immeasurably in those few weeks, not just in the use of my powers but in terms of my own self-worth. People hadn’t been assholes for rejecting me. I had just never given them the chance to accept me in the first place. They didn’t know me. Of course, there were the odd few people whose minds repulsed me with the sheer amount of vindictive and manipulative thoughts, and there were some genuinely ugly-minded people out there, but it hadn’t taken long for me to change my assumption that it was most people who thought like that, to just the occasional one or two.

It had been before things became serious with Becky, it had been before Faye, it had been before my friendship with Charlotte, before my introduction to the Conclave and the war, and most of the other things that had dominated my life since then. It had been me and Jeeves against the world. And we won.

I would never regret my friendship with Charlotte, nor could I ever bring myself to consider that my life could have been better if I had never met Faye or never pursued Becky. They simply meant too much to me. They were literally a part of me now. But I sometimes found myself thinking back on those simpler times with an air of wistful nostalgia that seemed to be completely absent from any other memory of my life.

My thoughts were pulled back to the moment by Charlotte stretching in her seat beside me, her hand leaving mine for her to extend her arms up above her head and arch her back a little before she relaxed and dropped her hand back into mine. “Are we there yet?” She asked with a joking smile.

I turned and looked out the window. Staring out of the starboard side of the plane and off toward the south gifted me with an incredible view. “Oh wow,” Charlotte gasped as she looked out over my shoulder. As our aircraft made its silent passage over the European landscape, the northern edge of the Alps loomed before us, a colossal testament to the earth’s raw power and elegance. Formed over eons, they pierced the heavenly skies as if they were the jagged edges of the earth’s very soul. From above, they unfolded in a multitude of serene whites and deep forest greens—a canvas where light and shadow played in a quiet, eternally frozen dance. The late afternoon sun, low in the sky, washed the scene in a soft, golden radiance that lit the snowy peaks like beacons against the encroaching dusk.

The mountains rose with such authority, their peaks adorned with snow that seemed to capture the essence of the clouds above, marrying sky to peak in a seamless, ethereal blend. Each mountain stood not alone but as part of a great family, siblings of stone and ice that shared the endless watch over the landscapes they had dominated for millennia. The summits shone with a brilliance that was not simply the reflection of sunlight but the inherent glow of a world untouched by man’s ambition, a display of nature’s purity and isolation.

Beneath the crowns of white, the slopes told stories of ages past. Dark lines of conifers clung to the craggy terrain, providing a stark contrast to the luminescence of the snow. Here and there, the grandfatherly trees yielded to meadows that awaited the spring thaw, brilliant patches of emerald anticipating the arrival of wildflowers that would soon dot their expanse with splashes of color.

And tinged with the hint of winter’s end, some mountains appeared as sentinels shrouded in a shawl of mist, a delicate veil that only heightened their mystique. It was as though the mountains themselves were breathing, alive with the spirits of the natural realm, a sacred exhalation forming a gentle fog that caressed the rugged inclines.

Dotting the majestic slopes were quaint hamlets, handfuls of wooden chalets clustered together for warmth and companionship, their smoky chimneys painting faint traces against the clear, crisp sky. These age-old villages, interconnected by winding roads etched precariously into the mountainside, stood as a testament to humanity’s resolve and reverence for these natural fortresses. The roads themselves ribboned through the landscape, narrow and curving, hugging the terrain, carved with care not to disturb the monumental beauty they traversed.

Nestled within the arms of these great behemoths were the alpine lakes—pristine, azure mirrors reflecting the grandeur above. The lakes were jeweled drops upon the earth, their waters ranging from the deepest of sapphire blues to the clearest turquoise, each one a unique eye peering back at the sky. The tranquility of their surfaces was deceptive, betraying nothing of the life teeming within, or of the untold secrets and stories they held in their silent depths.

The valleys between these titans wound gracefully, embracing streams and rivers that sprung from unseen sources. These waters carved through the land with a persistent, gentle force, flowing like life’s blood through the very heart of the wilderness. They connected the lakes—one to another—in a network of liquid veins, sustaining the fertile soil and the species that called this place home. Where the waterways converged, they built rippling symphonies that sang of the alchemy between water and land, a testament to the enduring cycle of nature.

Here, the concept of time seemed softened, mellowed by the magnitude of nature’s masterpiece. The elements conspired in perfect harmony to sculpt a world where the eternal and the ephemeral met, where the permanence of rock faced the transience of seasons. The currents of wind and water that had crafted these giants over the unfathomable past continued their work, unhurried and unyielding, nature’s artisans at their most relentless.

Such an expanse, teeming with the breadth of life and the weight of history, could inspire a profound awe in any person fortunate enough to witness it. Each element, from the tiniest stone on the trail to the colossal mountain itself, was part of an intricate ballet choreographed by the forces of nature.

The light began to change, the sun dipping further behind the towering peaks, setting the stage for the evening’s performance. Shadows grew longer, stretching out over the landscape like giant’s fingers, while the snow-capped peaks held onto their luminosity, stubbornly alight against the dimming world. And as the sun’s golden hue yielded to a cooler twilight, the mountains took on a softer aspect, no less grand but more subdued, as if giving way to the night with graceful reluctance.

It was then I understood that what lay before us was not merely a landscape but a profound work of art, millenia in its crafting, a manifestation of earth’s boundless creativity. These mountains had stood long before we had taken to the skies, and they would endure long after our contrails had faded from the heavens.

To fly over the Alps was to move through a living tapestry, rich in texture, vibrant in color, and infinite in its ability to awaken the spirit. It was an experience both humbling and exalting, drawing forth a myriad of emotions that wove themselves into the fabric of memory. In this grand spectacle, we were but specks, transient guests permitted a glimpse into the eternal beauty and the relentless passage of time that the Alps so majestically represented. It was astonishingly beautiful, yes—but it was more. It was a silent promise that, behind the veil of daily life, wonder awaited, endless, and profound.

And ours for the taking.

To answer Charlotte’s question, though, it did look like we were lowering our altitude in preparation for landing. Right on time, too, I thought as I checked my internal clock. I turned to look at Charlotte, ready to answer her, but the look on her face stopped me as she gazed out of the window. It was one of pure distracted awe. She was dazzled beyond the ability to speak by the sights through the tiny aircraft window. Charlotte, from what little I knew about her past before me, was a worldly, well-traveled woman, at least in terms of the UK. She had been all over the country, but with the constant fear - in her previous life - of the Inquisitor threat in the rest of the world, I had no idea if she had ever left our dank, damp, miserable little island. Or at least if she had left it since attaining adulthood. The look on her face suggested that she had never seen anything in her life as beautiful as what she was looking at now. Charlotte was a staggeringly gorgeous woman, but seeing that look on her face somehow managed to make her seem even more so. I just smiled at her, watching her watch the vista slide past the window.

“What?” she said after a few minutes, finally catching me watching her.

“Nothing,” I smiled back, chuckling to myself. “It looks like it’s time to get our seat belts on, though.”

“Oh, right, yeah.”

I turned to look over my shoulder and called out the same instructions to Fiona, who nodded back to me and started fiddling with the straps to connect them over her lap. Our prisoners have never been unfastened, to begin with, so I wasn’t too bothered about them. They weren’t restrained, but in the same vein as the way I had used my powers to put Charlotte on her knees and strip in my apartment, I had robbed the traitors of the ability to move their arms or legs until I said they could. I had no idea if they could break that compulsion, but none of them had moved for the duration of our journey from the Mansion nor during the three-hour flight. Whether that was because they couldn’t move or just hadn’t tried to was a question I couldn’t answer nor cared enough to try.

Charlotte, her eyes still locked on the panorama beyond the window, fastened her belt without looking at it; I did up my own before sitting back into my seat, as much to relax as to not obstruct her view, then turned my head to watch the world grow larger as the obscenely expensive aircraft started slowly descending toward it.

It should be made clear here that the weather in the UK sucks! Yes, yes, I know we have spoken about this before, but it is a point that can never be over-emphasized. In the winter, it is cold and rainy; in the springtime, it is slightly less cold ... and just as rainy. And oftentimes we only know that summer has come around when the rain warms up. We hadn’t gotten that far into the year yet, so stepping onto the plane close to home, it had been - you guessed it - raining. It came as something of a jolt to the system to go somewhere else to find that the sky wasn’t perpetually leaking and in desperate need of a plumber. Of course, we had all heard about the weather being different in different places, it was one of the few things that Brits universally agreed on, but to actually experience it was something else entirely. It should also be mentioned that aside from a quick jaunt to The Hague - where the weather is only marginally better than the UK - and to Ukraine - in the dead of winter where the weather could legitimately be said to be worse than in Britain - I had never left the country. My parents sure as hell were never going to take me on a sunny vacation, and I had never been able to afford to take myself.