You only ever had one chance. She'd had too many already.
Seeing James While had done it. The figure in the cells didn't wear his face, didn't have his lanky body, didn't contain his brain, but it was him. He was in there. His eyes said it all, said it in ways his paltry, skinless body back at the super-Array in the shitty depths of winter had never been able to say.
Then he'd had such hope.
She'd felt it rising off him, as she'd stepped into his frozen office after the long week of painful jumps through the line, leading her strike team. She'd almost allowed herself to believe that his hope had been for her, in anticipation of her arrival. There'd been something between them, once. They'd slept together, and it hadn't meant anything then, but in the years that followed it came to matter more, because of who he went on to become.
While he'd circled the world in his private jet, searching for a cure, she'd joined the others in the Redoubt and mocked him. He was a fool to think the SEAL would ever capture Olan Harrison. In the long days after Olan's death, she'd counted every day as her success, because he hadn't found them.
But he never stopped.
When word came through from her spies in the SEAL that both Joran Helkegarde and James While had taken their 'cure', a genetic therapy that would guarantee them a decade-long death in the agonies of Lyell's syndrome, she could no longer laugh. Her team stopped laughing. What was to mock about that?
The world ended, billions fell beneath the line, yet James While's constant search kept them confined; unable to clear their exit routes of the fallen, unable to launch the scheduled assaults on the SEAL, unable to bring the world around to their control in time for Olan to arrive.
James While's eyes in the sky prevented that. Every day that they remained trapped in a base only ever meant to serve as a temporary retreat, a redoubt, she grew to hate him more. But in the quiet moments at night when she was alone with her own thoughts, something new was growing beneath the hatred; grudging respect. It came on like the secret growth of coral, swelling until it filled her dreams.
Then came the Severing.
Olan Harrison had been watching, and waiting, while secret dreams grew in all their hearts. His rule had been harsh, and his constant training regime harsher, as he forced all his people to adopt the powers he'd learned on the line. In time their dreams became whispers, then feverish plots, until in the third year of the Redoubt the violence followed.
When they finally announced themselves, attempting to kill Olan Harrison while he slept, he announced himself in turn. Throughout one terrible day he showed every last person in the Redoubt precisely who he was and what he was capable of.
On the line he cut the threads holding their 'souls' to their bodies, effectively killing them. Snip snip snip, those flexible little tubers said all day long, as he cut his way through them.
He hadn't needed any surgical tools other than the diamond scalpel of his will, earned after long meditative study of the line. The rebels didn't stand a chance, and Rachel watched as they were beaten back into the missile silos, where they threatened to blow up the Redoubt if he didn't cede control.
Olan Harrison jumped through the walls and cut their threads like so many sad helium balloons, snip snip snip.
He saved Rachel Heron for last. She'd been loyal, had stayed away from the rebellious talk of the others, but still, she'd harbored her own secrets. A clean sweep was better, he said. She refused to beg. He cut her thread too, and she floated like the rest.
So the Severing was complete, and Olan Harrison had complete control. The Lazarus project continued apace, with no more mutterings of dissent. When his slaves behaved well he gave them greater freedom. When they behaved poorly he crammed them into boxes so they could learn. In time they all learned.
Even that didn't crush Rachel Heron's secret dreams. If anything they grew more intense, coming in stolen moments when Olan was distracted, as thoughts of James While surfaced unconsciously. She caught herself wishing he would find the Redoubt and rescue them. She'd never really chosen to stand at Olan's side, after all. He had snatched her from Whiles' custody at the Logchain and offered her a place in his lifeboat to ride out the coming storm. The only other option had been to die along with the rest of the world, and that was no choice at all.
Now she saw that it was the only choice that mattered.
She'd thought going to James While in the super-Array might be a moment of triumph, exorcising thirteen years of self-doubt, but it was anything but. Huddled there in his chair, so pathetic yet hopeful, so withered and pained, it had not felt like a victory to crack his ribs and usher him into Olan Harrison's hands. It was just proof of how much a slave she had become herself.
So when she knelt before him in his glass cell at the Redoubt, and looked into his eyes to see a pain that could never be excised, she realized how cowardly she'd been.
She'd never seen that pain in the others they'd brought down; Olan Harrison must have swamped it beneath his influence, but in James While she saw the full depths. The dislocation inherent in the Lazarus protocol was carved into his desperate, fragmented mind, and cut through her on the line like a sickness.
Man wasn't meant to come back, it said.
She'd meant to ask him questions. They'd been a muddle in her head, confused with the distracting thoughts of missiles to trick Olan, but no questions were necessary in the end. The bloodied splinters of his once-great mind were too much for her to bear, and he had been on the line for hours only before the Redoubt pulled his agonized signal down. Olan Harrison had been up there for a year. For a year his mind had frayed, almost entirely alone on the line, and the thought of it terrified her.
If James While's eyes were a window into hell, what was she seeing when she looked into Olan Harrison's? What did that make him now, what chaotic fault lines were bursting inside his head, desperate to find a way to make their pain end?
In that moment hunched by the glass, everything Olan had done took on a terrifying, torturous slant. The severing of their threads was just the beginning. The 'boxing' of those who rebelled was a crime against humanity of the greatest order. But what of the souls brought down from the line? Hundreds had rejoined them already. They'd never had any choice. They were forced into bodies that didn't match their minds, forced into boxes that kept their pain crushed beneath the surface so they were never able to speak of it, couldn't even show it in any of their words or deeds.
The depths of Olan Harrison's cruelty rang out around her in a way she'd never considered before. To call him a monster wasn't enough. He wasn't human anymore but something else, some grotesque incarnation caught in between human and the place beyond, half torn to bits by what he'd done. What kind of victory would ever satisfy the savaged depths of his broken soul?
James While couldn't talk. His body didn't have that capacity, because suffering was what mattered to Olan Harrison. James While had defied him for over a decade, and for that he would suffer forever; a bag in a cell with a person trapped inside, unable to ever escape the crushing dislocation.
One taste of that was enough to make Rachel decide. She opened the cell door without thinking, leaving her trail all over it. She held his strange hands, and cupped his new chin, and nodded as tears welled down his cheeks. Finally, finally. She did it as gently, as tenderly as she could, with his head pressed against her breast, whispering soothing words, just as she would to a terrified child.
The knife worked a forgiving path up his arm, slitting arteries and spilling him out onto the cell floor. He looked into her eyes, and as the life drained slowly from him, not painful enough to leave a retrievable spike on the line, his gratitude almost broke her.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
In his eyes lay the promise of atonement. Of course, the promise was no longer enough. It would never be enough. She'd enabled Olan Harrison in everything, and now she saw that it would never end. Nothing could fill the bottomless void inside him.
She kissed James While
's forehead as it chilled. The light was gone from his eyes.
She sealed the cell door buoyed by this new drive. On the ride back up from the 'missile bay' she watched Amo's battle with Olan, and understood what her regret had been, and what his defiance really meant.
It meant there was a choice.
Sometimes your life was all you had to give. She'd always had that choice, but she'd never had the bravery to take it. Maybe now she would.
* * *
When Olan flashed into existence in the upper reach of the Redoubt, she was waiting.
The fury and the fascination bulged off him in equal measure. He saw her at the door and grunted, slumping at his desk with one hand clamped to his bloody neck.
'Missile bay', she thought, concealing what she'd done as best she could. 'Launching missiles'.
She didn't rush to help him. He wouldn't welcome any acknowledgement that he'd been hurt. She knew him well, now, both the man that he'd been and the creature that he'd become.
"We need to make an example of him," she said.
Olan looked at her, danger flashing in his eyes. To even speak to him like this, to see him like this, was risking her life. She felt his influence hovering over her severed thread like a thumb and forefinger, ready to pinch her out. The box would be waiting. Perhaps that would give him some relief, for a time.
Unless she could offer him something better.
"Of them all," she went on, speaking in a dead tone while allowing her real rage to show through. He wouldn't understand the source unless he probed her. Hopefully he wouldn't see the truth for many hours, long enough for her to reach her destination, transmit her message, and bring the real war back here. "We need to bury them so deep that they'll never dare raise their heads out of the shit again."
The pain rising off him was palpable. She'd never seen him this fragile, not since the moment they'd birthed him after the first Lazarus operation. The intensity of those few minutes before he sent them all away had been agonizing, and those who hadn't fled fast enough ended up comatose on the floor, flattened on the line beneath his suffering.
Only days later had he emerged, with rough bandages of control patched over the jagged pieces of his broken self. She should have seen it then; those pieces would never fit again. They could only be made to fit, and the force required would not only break him further, but would break every piece in the jigsaw. Every soul living and dead would have to crack to make room.
She saw it now.
But there wasn't only pain steaming off him, there was also fascination. His eyes shone like a child's, as if the pain was nothing to him.
"Would you follow a man like that, Rachel?" he asked her.
She was lucky he was distracted, not really listening, or he would have felt the yearning shoot up inside her. Her discipline was flagging. He looked over at her, white eyes sparkling now with flecks of dirty red. "Well?"
"To battle, yes," she said, measuring every word. There was always a balance with Olan. Too much adoration would repel him. Too much challenge would enrage him. There was a brittle line of honesty somewhere in the middle. "To the ends of the Earth, perhaps. But not beyond."
Olan snorted. He liked that. "He tricked me. He planned it well. He stood up beneath the wall."
She had seen it. Watching a man stand under the massive weight of that pressure was unbelievable. Not a million type ones and twos in the heyday of their assault had managed to drive that deep and survive.
"I saw him. I warned you. You underestimated him."
Olan's eyes flared. There, that was the line. But keeping him angry was important, so he couldn't see through the fog of his own emotions to her. She'd always done this, needling him to a point, until he signaled her to stop. He'd always respected strength, as long as it reflected back his own strength to him.
"Watch yourself, Heron." His thumb and forefinger pinched tight on her thread. She felt him squeezing, looking for an excuse. "Don't think this is your chance to flee."
She stared at him defiantly, and took a step forward. To back down was to lose. To push too hard was to lose. She had to walk the line.
"Name the ways I've failed you, Olan. List the times my resolve has flagged."
He stared. His pinch didn't relent.
"Force is all that matters now," she pressed on, and pointed out of the glass over the jagged mountains. "And that man has force. You underestimated him, though I know you won't make the same mistake again. It's no weakness to acknowledge a mistake. You went out there as arrogant as him. It's luck he didn't die, and luck you didn't. What do you think would become of us, were you to fall? Have I not the right to be angry? These are my people too." She spread her arms. "We've all seen the Last Mayor's mercy. We've seen him destroy the SEAL indiscriminately, and torture his own people to no avail. I don't dare imagine what he would do to us, if your protection were to fail."
Olan Harrison stiffened at this. Perhaps her speech stirred an iota of pride in his dried-up old breast. It was a pleasant fiction, perhaps, for him to believe, that he 'protected' them. It was one of the messages he'd once filled their heads with, back when he'd crooned stories of mercy and liberty and a great world to come, even as he'd severed their threads. He'd told them elaborate stories of the greater utility of human cooperation, beneath the mantle of one controlling figurehead. At times he'd lectured them on the many failings of democracy, and outlined the inexorable fall of America into civil war. He'd often railed about how his genocide had averted a global war that the world would never have recovered from.
In such ways he'd framed himself as their savior, and many in the Redoubt had come to believe that story with all their hearts, were willing to die for it. Rachel Heron had tried hard to believe it too, because that would have made the things they'd done acceptable, even right. Yet she'd never really felt it. Instead she'd grown expert at mimicking belief.
Parroting a little of that belief back at him now was easy.
The slit in his neck throbbed blood, darkening his white shirt. He no longer looked so clean and pure, a white knight come to save them all. Now he was a brawler dirty from the trenches, and it made him more dangerous than ever. Clothing him once more in his old righteousness was a survival mechanism not only for her, but for them all.
He stood. Given his hulking frame of a generation one Lazarus, closer to the 'demons' than the humans of old, he towered over her.
"You're right, Rachel. I was arrogant, just like the Mayor."
She gave a slight nod. That was enough, to push him over and eliminate any doubt. She'd been working such slight manipulations for as long as she could remember, leveraging his pride and the respect he held her in to lessen the weight of his overbearing hand, though never before had she worked her influence so brazenly.
Before she'd commuted sentences, earning clemency for minor crimes and brief reprieves for her fellow inmates. Now there was no time to tiptoe around, not when his rage made him primed and ready.
"Send me," she said, thrusting her chest out. "I'm ready. You've trained me well. I see the lessons you've learned, and I'll carry them forth."
He inclined his head. It was pure temerity for her to suggest tactics. The path forward had been laid out years in advance. His plan. But his plan had just failed, and it was into that gap she needed to steer. That was why forcing him to accept his mistake was so necessary. Enforce a little trust. Cash in on a decade of unremitting service.
"Send you," he said slowly.
"I can travel where you can't. I can lead our forces to victory and return with firepower to level this jester Mayor." She forced extra sarcasm into repeating Amo's title. Perhaps too much, and he caught it.
"So you'd let hate rule you, Rachel? A moment ago you said you would follow him to the end of the Earth."
She laughed. There was nothing else for it, not without backpedaling madly, and she couldn't afford the scrutiny that would bring. He'd see James While bleeding out in her mind, and all that would remain would b
e the box.
"But not beyond, I said," she answered firmly. "He hasn't died and returned. What does he know about the weight of the future? He's a vicious and charismatic leader of men, I acknowledge it, but we are not men here. We are angels."
Olan Harrison smiled. That had been one of his greatest rhetorical flourishes, once upon a time. Rachel had always smiled while he'd made his pronouncements. Probably he'd felt her judgment, had known that she didn't really believe, but he'd always needed her expertise, and had tolerated her as long as she'd kowtowed.
"Angels," he repeated, tasting the word. "You never liked the term."
"What other term suffices, when he rallies outside our borders with an army of beasts plucked from the depths of hell? What else can we be, but protectors of what is good? I will lead our forces to victory, I swear that to you. Everything I love is here, and I will protect it to my last breath."
His smile spread. Yes. She felt him taking the bait, even if he took it in his own way. Like Amo, she'd laid another trap out of things that were real, and Olan didn't stop to doubt himself any more than before.
"You love us so well, Rachel. Perhaps you also love your dream of controlling a continent? You seek North America, I expect. Your ambition runs unchecked."
There was no point pointing out that he'd promised her North America a very long time ago. He knew it was her vaulting ambition. She understood now, more than ever, that he never intended to give it to her. Not in any meaningful way. He couldn't stand to cede power to anyone.
"I've made no secret of it," she pressed. "I never have. I seek to earn my place in the firmament of angels, at your right hand. All I ask is a chance to prove myself."
It was all a salve to his ego. After the defeat he was ready to lash out blindly. Now he was regaining control, thanks to her. The mask of command was coming back, and that kept him on a leash for a little while. She didn't dare think about the apocalyptic violence he would rain down if he thought all was lost.
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