Chapter 41

The cave was ... well, it was a cave.

There were about two miles worth of walking after we had clambered over a collapsed section of the castle’s stone walls, following beneath the shadow of the still intact parts and then bearing left into some woods. Emma had obviously taken the lead; I had no idea where we were after the ruins of the castle disappeared behind the thickness of the trees, and although I had a fairly good idea of which direction we were headed in, the route to get to the cave was a complete mystery. There didn’t even seem to be any sort of logic to how she was directing us there; no worn tracks, no partings between the bushes, nothing that could ever be said to be an obvious path; she just knew the way. More accurately, she seemed to know exactly where we were, both in relation to the devastated castle - with its vanishing pillars of smoke - and to our destination, so maybe there was a path somewhere, just not here, and whatever senses or memories she was using to get us where we needed to go didn’t rely on any sort of proper trail to get us there.

The lack of a path, however, was, in my opinion, a good thing. I couldn’t even begin to count how many Praetorians had been killed during my little outburst at the castle, more than a few hundred, at least, but I was under no illusions that it had been all of them. Don’t get me wrong, everyone inside the castle grounds had been slaughtered, but there had been plenty more outside its walls. They had retreated as the inferno started; maybe “bravely ran away” would be a better term, but either way, they had escaped. It wasn’t a huge stretch of the imagination to think that they hadn’t run away far enough to stop them from watching the castle, though. That meant they could have seen our own exodus and then tried to follow us. With no path for them to trace, though, the chances of them picking up our tail - with the random turns and outwardly aimless directions Emma was leading us in - seemed extraordinarily unlikely.

There were other things around, though. Things that I shouldn’t have been as surprised about as I was. There was no sign of Charlotte, Jerry, or Fiona, but that was to be expected, none of them were stupid enough to let their blocks down so close to a very obvious enemy presence. I had no idea how much of the battle they had seen or if they had any idea about what had happened to the castle and its attackers after they left, all I knew was that they were getting out when my connection to Jerry was lost. What I didn’t expect to find, however, was five other non-blocking Evos, apparently having escaped the castle and were currently a few miles away, heading west at about the speed of a car sticking to posted traffic notices.

I had frozen for a moment when I first felt them, thinking that maybe they were retreating Praetorians or random passers-by, people I could either use, avoid, or would need to eliminate. But not only were they heading away from Emma and me, it only took a few seconds of focus to realize who they actually were. One of them was Rachael, Charlotte’s ‘sister’ from the Sect, and the other four blips on my radar were her friends. But there had been six traitors in the Sect, and one was missing. Who that was and what had happened to them, I had no idea. It was a question that could be put off until later. That raised the question about the hundred or so Inquisitors that had been taken in Ukraine, then rescued and returned here after the battle in the compound. The idea had been to slowly treat and undo the conditioning inflicted on them by the Praetorians, but that process hadn’t even started before the attack. Had they been killed during the invasion? Had they been liberated from their holding area by their new friends? Had they joined in the massacre of Bob and his people? Had they fallen to the flames I had used to scour the area clean? I just didn’t know.

For now, at least, it seemed we were free and clear.

Not that it helped us in any way. Both of us were running on empty. Emma, having had her entire life and her perception of the world around her blown to pieces in only a few hours, was emotionally drained. There was a whole world of pain in her very near future, but for the time being, she seemed to be just numb. I knew what that felt like; I knew how deep it went. I remembered describing the pain after losing Becky as prolonged periods of pure numb despair punctuated by moments of indescribable agony; she hadn’t gotten that far yet, but it would come. In the meantime, there was just a haunted, hollowed look on her face, one that perfectly illustrated the toll the morning had taken on her. Her world was gone. The place she had grown up in had been burned to the ground and reduced to rubble, not only by the attacking Praetorians but by me. More than that, the foundation of that world - her parents - were gone too. One had been evacuated to safety, or at least we hoped so. The other was...

I swallowed hard. That was a pain for later. It would come, just like hers: nowhere near as agonizing, nowhere near as deep or acute, but it would come nonetheless.

Emma had been hollowed out in a way that only the loss of the fundamental support structure of life could bring, and her face was showing it. She hadn’t said much more than a few words since we had left the castle. Just a few “this ways” and “watch your steps,” but her voice had seemed–empty. Like the life had been pulled from her, which, I guess, in a very real way, is exactly what had happened.

I, on the other hand, was drained in a much more physical way. I didn’t really have a well in my mind’s eternal city; I had power plants. They filled the same role, in terms of an Evo’s power, but by a vastly different method. Wells would refill over time, replenishing an Evo’s strength while they slept, but while they were awake, it just acted as a reservoir, holding their power until it was needed. My power plants, on the other hand, could generate enormous amounts of energy as and when I needed it. I did have a reservoir; it held a tremendous amount more power than the average Evo’s well, but it wasn’t limitless. The difference between my system and that of everyone else’s was that I could draw power directly from my plants to use my abilities, bypassing the drain on the reservoir completely. Under normal circumstances, when I was using less power than the plants were able to generate, that wasn’t a problem; it meant that I could use my abilities almost indefinitely. But the last few hours hadn’t been normal by any stretch of the imagination.

I had, without really being able to explain how, an innate internal system that not only monitored how much power I was using - compared to the amount my plants were able to produce - but it told me how full or empty my reservoir was and how much longer I could go on before that ran dry. During the worst of the fight–with my powers being used in a manner more extreme, by far, than anything I had used before–I had understood that I only had a few more hours left before I would run dry. That last little outburst had essentially wiped me out. In the forty-five minutes or so since then, however, with my powers being limited to little more than a vague scanning of the immediate area for any more of those voids - nowhere near the full measure of my power plants’ output - my reservoir had started to refill.

Don’t get me wrong, it wouldn’t be full any time soon. Pumping water into a hole would eventually fill it. Still, the time that would take would depend on the size of the hole as much as the volume of water trying to fill it, and mine was a very, very large hole that would take a long time to fill despite the massive amounts of water - or power - being pumped into it. In physical terms, that left me feeling like what a normal human would feel like after not having eaten or slept in a couple of days. Everything felt heavy, everything felt slow, and just thinking seemed to be an extraordinarily difficult feat. I felt lethargic, and a tiredness that seemed to suck the strength right out of my bones pervaded my entire body. I had been tired before, everyone has, but this was something different: this was a physical exhaustion that was marrow-deep.

On top of all that was a similar, albeit lessened version of that same mental anguish that Emma was dealing with. Bob was dead; I had watched him die. Rhodri was dead, and I had felt every single moment of that as if it had happened to my own body in savage slow motion. Jerry, Charlotte, and Fiona had, by the last check-in, escaped, and I could only hope that they’d made it to safety after they had gotten out of the castle. Isabelle, perhaps my strongest ally in all of this, was missing. Those friendly guards had said the rest of her entourage had evacuated her, but, as with my group, that in no way meant that she had made it to safety once she was out. More than that, I had no way of contacting any of them. My phone was still safely tucked away in my pocket, but, according to Jeeves - who was using my untraceable phone to track the others - none of the others’ phones had come back online since the battle. They could have been damaged in the fighting, they could have been left behind, their batteries could have died, or they simply could not have been turned back on by their owners yet, all of whom would have been concerned about the possibility of them being tracked.

Speculation, it would seem, was an unwinnable sport.

But it meant that I had no answers, not for myself or Emma, and that uncertainty was yet another weight on my already-loaded shoulders. There was simply too much to think about and nowhere near enough energy to do all of that thinking in any sort of coherent or effective way. For now, all I could do was follow Emma. It was barely seven in the evening, and the sun was starting to set, but otherwise, it was - by usual standards - pretty early in the day to be thinking about sleep, but sleep was the only thing on my tired mind.

“How do you know about this place?” I asked, trying to make some sort of attempt at conversation but still keeping my voice low.

“We used to play here,” she answered just as quietly after a little bit of a pause.

“We?” I regretted asking the question as soon as it left my lips. The way her shoulders hunched up, the way her pain seemed to break through that numbness.

“My ... My Dad used to bring us here when we were younger,” she replied after a hard swallow. “Me, Jamie, Raj, and a few of the other guards’ children who were about my age. That’s how we all became friends. It was like a big family outing. Playing hide-and-seek in the caves while all the adults relaxed. Hardly anyone outside of the family knows about them, the caves, I mean. They’re not on any maps, and you have to know exactly where they are to find them. We used to call them our little secret.” She lifted a hand to wipe away a tear that was already rolling down her cheek.

I just nodded. Jamie and Raj were the two men we had found at the top of that stairwell; they had both been gunned down while defending the castle, and Rhodri and I had given her a little more time to say goodbye before we were forced to continue our rush toward Bob. If I had known that those men were as close friends as I was starting to suspect, I would have given her longer. “I’m sorry,” I finally said. My voice, already quiet, was now barely above a whisper.

She turned to look at me, something of a pained smile on her lips as she did. “You were right,” she said, seeming to understand what I was thinking. “They gave their lives for me, for my family, and it would have been for nothing if we didn’t keep going. It’s not your fault they died. It’s... theirs.” Of course, she didn’t mean it was their fault; she meant the Praetorians, but for whatever reason, she refused to say their names. As if uttering that word aloud validated their crusade and gave them power. There was a silent strength, a subtle defiance behind not saying that word, perhaps the only amount of it she was capable of displaying, but that is what she was doing. I couldn’t help but smile inwardly, though. As patronizing as it may have sounded if I had given voice to the thought, I was proud of her. She was stronger than she knew; she would get through this, whether she knew it yet or not. One day, she may look back on this as the moment when her resolve hardened, where the shock started to wear off, and she took her stand. It may not happen yet; it probably wouldn’t happen for a while, even if it did, but if it happened, I was proud to say that I was there to see it.

“What?” she finally said after holding my eyes for a few more moments.

“Your Dad had that same look in his eyes when we were in Ukraine.”

“What look?”

“Strength,” I shrugged. “That quiet strength behind his eyes that said ‘they’re not going to beat us, not on my watch.’”

Emma’s eyes widened for a moment; she opened her mouth, then closed it again before composing herself enough to respond. “You saw that in me? Really?”

It wasn’t an indignant argument; she was genuinely asking if I really saw that. She was proud not only that someone could see that in her but also that they could see it at all. I got the impression that not many people looked at her closely enough to see anything, let alone translate one of her looks.

I nodded. “Really. He was a good man, a strong man, and I can see that in you too. He would have been proud of you.”

She smiled. Perhaps the first real smile I had seen on her all day. Her face seemed to light up as if someone had finally parted the clouds and let the sun shine onto it. “I ... I don’t know what to say,” she smiled demurely, looking down to the ground for a moment before looking back up at me. “Thank you. I can see why they follow you.”

“Follow me? Who?” I asked, puzzled.

“Everyone,” she shrugged. “Your friends, my family, The Conclave, The Sect, even the Inquisition. They all follow you, and I can see why.”

“Do they?” I scrunched up my face. “I always kind of felt like I was just running blindly from one mess to another. I didn’t think people were following me.”

She chuckled softly. “I thought you’d say that. At first, I thought it was arrogance or bravado. You knew you were the most powerful being of all of us, and you enjoyed the attention. You led because you were the strongest, and anything less would be a challenge to you, and you just acted so casually about it so it wouldn’t seem that way. But now I see I was wrong. I don’t think you see it at all, the way the others defer to you, the way you lead, the way others look to you, not for protection, but for support and for that leadership. You see your strength as a burden, not as a right to be in charge. It’s ... surprisingly noble in an endearing sort of way, and it gives people the strength they need when they need it the most.”