The door burst open behind him. Security guards yanked him away. They dragged him from the room, then held him against the wall while a medic rushed inside to attend to Rohn.
31
She found Valt in a dilapidated cabin.
He was curled on the floor by the wall.
He was sleeping.
Ash wanted to sleep. She couldn’t remember the last time she had.
She picked up a broken board from the floor.
She tossed it at his head.
He jerked awake. Looked up. Stared.
The fear in his eyes sent a wave of satisfaction through her.
She paused.
Satisfaction was an emotion. She hadn’t felt an emotion since… No. She wouldn’t go there.
“Stand up,” she ordered.
He braced a hand against the wall. Stood.
This was the face she’d been searching for. The head she needed to put a bullet in. This was the person responsible for tearing apart the Coalition and for so much death.
Ash was responsible for so much death.
That thought puzzled her.
“Now what?” Valt said. “This is what you wanted, me at your mercy. You going to drag it out?”
His blond hair was nearly dark with the black sands of this part of the continent. Dirt smeared his face, and he was thin. Gaunt, almost. He looked nothing like the person she had known.
He was nothing like the person she had known.
Ash stepped into a slant of moonlight.
Valt made a strange sound. His mouth hung open. He closed it. Then he said, “Ramie, you’re hurt. Let me help you.”
Another emotion beat at her chest, this one cold and prickling.
She lifted her Berick. “Call me Ramie again. I dare you.”
He held up his hands and backed into the wall. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That’s what you want to hear, right? That I regret everything I’ve done to you?”
The emotion biting inside her chest now was vicious. It made her heart pump faster, her blood flow quicker.
Hate. That’s what she felt. Hate and hurt.
So much hurt.
Little squares of memory cascaded in her mind. She could put them in order—understand them—but she didn’t want to.
Slowly Valt lowered his hands. “Rohn thought you’d snapped. He was right, wasn’t he? You’re not all there.”
Snapped. That was a scary word. It didn’t apply to her though. She had been loyalty trained, and she had a fail-safe…
The numbness evaporated from her body. More pain crashed in. The tiny squares of memory checkered her vision. All she could see was the people she had lost.
Trevast and her teammates.
Mira.
Hauch.
Rykus…
The air seared her lungs. Her gun shook in her hand. Her knees almost gave way. She’d been blocking everything out—multiple cuts and burns and bruises, the cracked vertebrae in her spine, the two bullets she’d taken in the leg when she’d captured Rohn.
And she’d blocked her emotions. It had been the only way to function, the only way to finish her mission and keep her mental state stable.
Or something close to stable.
She looked at Valt again. “You aren’t sorry.”
He wet his lips. “I am sorry things didn’t go as planned. If I’d known Trevast was one of us, I would have done things differently. You never let me meet your teammates. I always wondered why.”
“They were soldiers,” she said. “You were a politician.”
He lifted his shoulders in a shrug of acceptance.
“Did you kill Rohn?” he asked.
“Did you know Trevast was Neilan Tahn’s cousin?”
By the way his face paled, the answer was no. He shifted his weight and looked out one of the windows. Such a thick layer of dirt covered it, barely any light came through.
“You gave him Rohn,” he said.
Ash didn’t bother to correct him.
“Is that what you plan to do with me?” he asked.
“No.”
“Good.” He glanced out the side window again. “Because I have an alternative for you. Seven anomalies are closing in on this cabin. They are pissed you touched their fail-safe. Let me go, and I’ll call them off.”
He kept his expression neutral. She didn’t think he was bluffing though. She felt something out there, a touch of air that wasn’t natural.
Too late, she moved from the doorway. A bullet hit her left arm, spinning her to the ground.
She landed on her back, shot Valt in the thigh as he tried to escape, then she unloaded her weapon at the anomaly rushing the door.
He went down.
A window exploded to her left.
She switched to a second gun and fired.
Another window shattered. She re-aimed but didn’t shoot. The anomalies had the same training she did. They were making her expend her ammo.
Valt crawled on his belly toward the door. Ash grabbed his ankle, yanked him back, then pressed her gun to his head.
“Call them off.”
“Let me go.”
She pressed harder. He cowered away until his face was pressed against the wall.
“You’re surrounded,” he said through gritted teeth. “Your only hope of survival is to let me talk to them.”
“You’re talking to them now.”
“They have instructions to keep me alive.”
“They’re going to fail,” she snarled. Her left arm wasn’t working. Agony shot down her back, and her leg pulsed with pain. She couldn’t take on one anomaly in her current condition.
She pushed back from Valt and collapsed against a broken table. A warm liquid dripped down her back. She was out of clot cloths. She needed to get a tourniquet on her arm.
“I’ll talk to them,” Valt said, breathing hard. “Just let me—”
“Don’t move,” she said.
Her gun was getting heavy. It took a ridiculous amount of effort to keep it pointed at Valt. Gradually she let it sink to rest on her thigh.
She struggled to keep her eyes open. She’d pushed her body too far, taken too many injuries in too short a time period.
Valt eased toward the door.
She lifted the weapon.
His mouth pressed into a thin line, but he remained where he was. He would wait her out.
That’s all he had to do, wait her out.
If she did nothing, she would die. Valt would live.
If she let him go, she would die. Valt would live.
If she killed him…
That’s what she had to do. That was how she finished the mission.
Her gaze drifted down to the comm-cuff locked around her wrist. She didn’t know if her fail-safe was alive. The media said he was operating in Javerian space, but that could be a ruse, a ploy to get her to turn herself in because they thought she had snapped.
There was only one way to know for sure.
Bayis had a security detail on him. Rykus couldn’t blame him. If he thought Rohn might know where Ash was, if he thought he could stop Javko, Keen, and Arek from hovering over him, he might have broken the telepath out. But the three instructors hovered. They’d even recruited Katie to keep an eye on him.
She pushed a recovery drink closer.
He looked up from his comm-cuff long enough to pin her with a glare.
She nudged the drink again.
“Your persistence is irritating,” he said.
She made her smile extrasweet. “So is your insistence on not following your doctor’s orders.”
“I’m putting in a request for a new doctor.” He took a sip of the drink he was growing to hate.
“Another capsule arrived half an hour ago,” Javko said from a couch across the room. “More than half our loyalty-trained anomalies are on it.”
“This will be interesting,” Keen muttered. He was seated across the table from Rykus. None of them liked the idea of th
eir anomalies returning. They weren’t supposed to interact with them unless something went wrong.
A lot of things were going wrong. The Coalition was falling apart, his home world hadn’t yet ousted its invaders, and there was a whole class and a half of anomalies out there in space who had been loyalty trained by a telepath.
“We’re supposed to meet them when they land,” Keen said. “You going to be up for that?” He nodded toward Rykus’s leg.
His leg wouldn’t be the reason he stayed behind. A body of an anomaly had been found thirty kilometers from where they picked up Rohn. Rykus had asked permission to fly out there. It had been denied.
He was thinking about flying out there anyway.
“The leg is fine,” he said.
Katie snorted.
He gave her a look, then reached for the recovery drink.
His comm-cuff vibrated.
He glanced at it, expecting to see instructions for meeting the anomalies. Instead, Ash’s name flashed onto the screen.
He shot to his feet, knocking his chair back.
“Ash?” He unhooked the cuff from his wrist and flattened it. There wasn’t video, just the soft hum of an open communication and maybe the sound of someone breathing.
“Ash,” he said again. “Talk to me.”
Another long pause, then, “You didn’t get a funeral this time.”
Relief hit him hard. He set the cuff on the table and braced his hands on either side of it.
“Where are you?”
Javko and Keen were both on their feet. Two separate permissions popped up on his screen. He granted both to let them work on finding her location.
“Too far away,” she said. That was her breathing he heard. It didn’t sound good.
“I can get someone to you.”
“I…” Her voice cracked. “I was right about the Coalition crumbling. You were right about me.”
“How so?” He met Keen’s gaze. Keen shook his head and mouthed, Keep her talking.
“I’m not immortal.”
He closed his eyes. “Don’t say that.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t… have called. This was… selfish. Wanted to hear your voice.”
“I’m right here, baby. You’re going to be okay, but you have to tell me where you are.”
“Think I can take on seven anomalies on my own?”
“I think you can take on a thousand.”
Her laugh was short and pain-filled. “I’ll take down as many as I can.”
“Don’t do this, Ash. I love you. You can hide. You can run. Don’t fight, just…” His throat tightened, cutting off his words.
“I love you too, Rip. I’m sorry…” She wheezed in a breath. “I’m sorry I failed.”
He slammed a fist on the table. “You only fail if you give up. You’re not allowed to give up. Do you hear me?”
“You don’t have to worry about Valt.”
“Ash!”
“I’ll take care of him.”
The call cut off in a cacophony of gunfire.
32
Twenty-six loyalty-trained anomalies stood on the drill field in a single line. Most were at attention. A few had put up a shield of defiance between themselves and their fail-safe.
Nine anomalies hadn’t returned. Kalver was somewhere on Javery, destroying Saricean troops and aiding the resistance. Six were still on the way, four weren’t reporting in, two had been killed in action since they left Caruth, and one was missing.
Missing, not dead. He wouldn’t list Ash as KIA. Not until they found her body.
He was supposed to say something to them, something reassuring like the Coalition would be fine, telepathy wasn’t that big a threat, they weren’t at risk of detainment.
All of it was a lie. He was there to evaluate their mental health, and if the collapsing Coalition seemed to negatively affect them, he was to report them to I-Comm. They would be taken off active duty and referred to psychiatric care.
He’d excelled at evaluating anomalies’ mental states. He’d trained three classes of cadets, and even before the loyalty training was implemented, he’d never had an anomaly snap. He made sure the weak dropped out.
“Sir.”
He looked at Cartor, the man who had spoken.
“An instructor replaced you,” he said. “We haven’t seen any of his anomalies.”
Anomalies were observant, and Cartor liked to solve puzzles. He liked to think. It wasn’t a surprise that he’d connect the rumors.
“No,” Rykus said. “You haven’t. Keep it to yourselves.”
“Yes, sir.”
The immediate response gave him pause. He wasn’t used to dealing with the rest of his loyalty-trained anomalies. He was used to dealing with Ash, who resisted every suggestion he gave her.
His chest hurt more than his reconstructed leg.
He couldn’t do this.
“Report to the barracks.” He turned his back on the men and walked away, trying his best not to lose his composure in front of them.
“They’ve been here three days,” Tersa said via his voice-link. “You have an obligation to talk to them. They need reassurance, and you are the best person to provide it.”
“I’m not a psychologist. Get someone else to do it.” He ended the call, took off the voice-link, and tossed it on the nightstand.
He didn’t know how long he lay there, staring at the slats of the bunk above his. One hour. Three. Every minute was interminable. Ever since Ash came back into his life, he’d been terrified he’d lose her. He’d seen her injured and lifeless too many times and had imagined a hundred other ways she could die. But he hadn’t thought about the aftermath. He hadn’t thought about the emptiness and how that space could never again be filled.
He pressed his fist to his forehead. He needed to move. Katie wanted him at physical therapy today. If he didn’t get out of bed, she’d show up with all three instructors and drag him out.
He slid his bare feet to the floor.
His comm-cuff vibrated, and something sparked in his chest.
The spark went cold. It was Tersa again.
He silenced the call and rested his forehead on his clasped hands. For half a second, he’d seen Ash’s name on his cuff, not Tersa’s. He caught glimpses of her face on base. Sometimes he was so sure he’d seen her he followed the person only to find that they were support staff or a doctor or some visitor to the base.
Reality was worse than his nightmares. Ash had been hurting, and he hadn’t been able to help.
Numbly, he made his bed, dressed, then grabbed his cane and limped to the hallway.
They’d given him a room in the medical ward. He didn’t have to share it yet, but more anomalies arrived every day. They would need somewhere to put them. He should leave the base—he should probably leave Caruth—but without finding Ash’s body…
He couldn’t do it.
He limped down a set of stairs. The rehabilitation center was on the far side of the ward. Getting to it should have counted as his therapy. Before he was halfway there, sweat plastered his shirt to his back and chest.
He spotted a bench by the entrance and was about to drop onto it when he heard voices from inside the center.
“—listened to her die,” Katie said. “He’s been through enough. He doesn’t need to know.”
“Doesn’t need to know what?” He limped inside the room. Katie stood with Arek and Keen. She looked to the ceiling, then sighed.
“They found Valt’s body,” she said.
He gripped his cane. “Where?”
“A cabin outside Prenek City.”
Rykus turned and started back down the hall.
“Rykus.” Katie grabbed his arm. “Let the investigators do their job. You don’t need to go.”
He shook free and kept limping.
“They’re checking hospitals. They’re searching the surrounding area and questioning everyone. What else can you do? You can barely walk.”
He launched his ca
ne into the wall. “I can be there.”
The cabin sat at the edge of Shellver Forest. It wasn’t structurally sound. The investigators protested when he limped inside until he threatened to break their legs.
He couldn’t tell if the cabin’s ceiling was beginning to collapse due to the bullets that shredded the walls or if it had been collapsing before then. The windows were shattered. Furniture was dust covered and riddled with holes and debris.
He made his way to the back corner. They’d removed Valt’s body. He’d seen images before arriving though. Valt had been slumped over beside the wall. He’d been shot multiple times, but a single bullet had blown a hole through the center of his head in almost exactly the same spot where Trevast had been hit.
There had been a lot of blood. Not all of it had been Valt’s. The investigators couldn’t identify the second individual’s—Ash’s DNA profile had been removed from most databases—but like the five bodies they’d found outside the cabin, there had been an anomaly in the genetic code.
Ash had been there. She’d sat on the floor, leaning against a broken table. She’d probably been staring at Valt while she talked to him. Had that been before or after she put a bullet in his brain?
And where was she now? One of Rohn’s current anomalies wasn’t accounted for. It didn’t make sense for him to carry Ash away though. They had her surrounded. They wanted her dead.
Had they killed her? There weren’t any signs that she’d crawled away.
The cabin creaked and shifted. One of the investigators called his name.
He made his way back to the door. They would demolish the place tomorrow if it didn’t fall down before then.
When he stepped outside, the investigator looked relieved. Undoubtedly, he didn’t want to be held responsible for the hero of Gaeles Minor’s untimely demise.
“Please.” The investigator motioned toward the shuttle that had brought him there. He limped toward it, his gaze sweeping the ground, looking for missed evidence in the fading light.
He reached for the transport’s support handle and used it to help pull himself inside. Mentally and physically exhausted, he limped to his seat by the opposite window, sank into it, and closed his eyes.
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