Falling One by One

by S. A. McAuley

  Grimshaw stomped out of the room without a word.

  I blew out a long breath and faced Armise, pointing an accusatory finger between the two of them. “This is fucked-up.”

  I didn’t tell him that we couldn’t have any more secrets—I knew that would never happen—or that I didn’t want any more surprises. I didn’t even bother to tell him that I wanted an explanation of why Jegs would be relying on the man she had called a traitor in order to decide if she was going to stick around to have my back.

  “I know,” was all he replied.

  I went for the door of the transport room, calling out over my shoulder, in as disinterested a tone as I could pull off with my stomach rolling in apprehension, “Just don’t kill each other.”

  Chapter Three

  Grimshaw stared at me as if there was something I was supposed to say to him to fill the silence. I ignored his nonverbal challenge and kept quiet. Initially I had thought his wariness was because he found himself cordoned off in a room with the man who had shot at him without hesitation. Then I figured it was because he was as mystified as I was as to why Armise wanted to speak to Jegs privately, let alone why she had so readily agreed. But the longer we sat staring at each other, the more I read his furtive glances and twitchy movements to mean he knew much more than I did and was on the defensive, hoping I didn’t ask.

  He didn’t have to worry. I wouldn’t bother asking him when I would just grill Armise later.

  I wouldn’t let him see that I was uncomfortable too. As more time passed it was impossible to deny that Armise and Jegs had something legitimate to discuss with each other. It implied there was a history between them. A history that Grimshaw seemed to know about.

  His gaze broke away and he tapped his fingers rhythmically against his thigh, his ivy tats pulsing with the keyed-up twitch of his forearm. I resisted being just as jumpy. I was allowing all of them to fuck with my head.

  I trusted Armise, I reminded myself.

  But did I really if I had to remind myself of my loyalty to him?

  The man in question picked that moment, and that thought, to swing the door open. Armise led Jegs into the space, the close quarters dominated by his imposing presence.

  I bristled in response to the physical reaction I had to Armise when he exuded power. “You ready to work, Darcan?”

  Jegs took a chair and swung it around, straddling the polymaterial. She pulled off the stance as if she were in a friendly environment, but I knew her positioning was to make sure she had nothing at her back, not even synthetic material. She tipped her chin up, calculated defiance making her already chiseled cheekbones sharper in the cut of morning light. “Not asking me if I’m in?”

  I tracked Armise as he paced in front of the door, but replied to her despite her not being the focus of my interest. “Until ten minutes ago I wouldn’t have thought to question you. Switching sides isn’t what you do, right?”

  It was a dig against Armise, to gain me back the upper hand, and to my satisfaction he took my bait.

  Armise stopped in front of me and glared. “I am on your side.”

  “Didn’t always used to be,” I snapped at him.

  “Neither did he,” Armise said, pointing at Grimshaw. He crooked the same finger in Jegs’ direction. “And she thought you were Opposition for more than a decade. And yet, we are all here. Backbone, Grayson. Your pettiness is so thick it makes this ashen air harder to breathe.”

  I ground my teeth together and stared him down, not saying a word in reply.

  “Find me when you’re done pissing on each other and you’re ready to strategize.” Jegs went for the door. “I’ll be outside.”

  Armise’s broad hand slammed into the flat of the door. “You stay, Jegs.”

  She stepped into Armise’s personal space, showing no outward sign that she was intimidated by the man who was double her size—in height and breadth. But the false sense of calm she’d been projecting had now vanished. “I told you. I’m not having this conversation.”

  “You may not be, but we are. The only part that is your choice is whether or not your brother stays.”

  “Why don’t I get a choice whether or not I want to stay?” I said, just to be difficult.

  “You realize I’m the one who brought you all here?” Grimshaw interjected.

  I couldn’t see Jegs’ face from where I was sitting, but I could read the set of her shoulders. The stubborn, stern smirk on Armise’s face said more to me. He knew he’d already won.

  Jegs tracked to the chair and straddled it again. She tipped her head toward her brother. “He can stay. He already knows.”

  Armise let go of the door. He cracked his neck and crossed his arms. “You went against protocol.”

  Jegs pulled the pistol from her hip, slipped the clip open and did a quick survey of how many bullets she had inside. “I don’t think there’s anyone in this room who knows what official protocol is, let alone has any inclination not to violate it.” She slid the clip into place with a forceful thunk and kept the gun in her hand, her finger off the trigger but at the ready.

  “Put it away,” Armise chided her.

  Jegs shook her head. “He’s going to be pissed. No way.”

  I looked between them as the pattern and the way they communicated with each other made my stomach drop. Armise had only ever been this antagonistic with me. “How long have you two known each other?”

  Jegs cleared her throat. “This is your confession, Darcan.”

  Armise glared at her like he was on the verge of strangling her, but he ripped his gaze away from her and approached the table. “Longer than you and I have. She was my first contact within the States. I was supposed to hand off the infochip to Jegs before she was taken to that warehouse.”

  Jegs’ jaw clenched. “I believe now that he wasn’t the one who almost killed me.”

  “Why the hell would you think I’d be pissed about that?” Jegs’ fingers tightened around the grip of her gun. I gritted my teeth. “Because that’s not all.”

  “I’m the reason you were in the DCR in ’46,” Jegs continued. “Armise offered to hand over the infochip to me after the warehouse but I refused to work with him because I thought he’d been a part in blowing my cover. When I pulled out of the op, the only option was for you to be set up to get it from him in the DCR.”

  I was clamping my teeth together so hard my head began to throb. “So your inability to do your fucking job because of personal issues is the reason my shoulder was crushed? The reason I spent almost half a year in a medical coma and he lost that finger on his left hand?”

  Jegs recoiled. “I didn’t take off his fucking finger.”

  No, I had. Because I’d thought Armise was an enemy and not an ally. “Why the fuck did I think I wanted you here?” I snapped. “Get the fuck out.”

  “Yes, Colonel.” Jegs holstered her gun and went for the door.

  I turned to Grimshaw and tried to refocus on the shitstorm we were facing now. “I want whatever allowed my father to incapacitate Armise out of him.”

  “I assume Ahriman left that remnant during my time with him?” Armise asked Grimshaw.

  We still hadn’t had the opportunity to fill in that missing year and a half, and now was not the time to do it, but the answers I’d be seeking from Armise were increasing with each conversation. As was my frustration level.

  Grimshaw nodded. “It’s an implant of some kind, but I can’t tell you which one it is since you have multiple chips. We’ll take out all of them to be sure. I need to inform you that our medical services aren’t advanced, therefore the procedure won’t be pleasant.”

  Armise didn’t flinch. “Fine.”

  Grimshaw pointed at the bracelets circling Armise’s wrists. “We’ll also need to take those off.”

  “No. You work around them.”

  “Messy and inconvenient.”

  “They are not coming off for you.”

  And yet Armise had removed all of them when he was w
ith me only the night before. Whatever their meaning, it was one of conscious intent for Armise if there were people or spaces where he chose to take them off and others in which he kept them close.

  Grimshaw motioned for Armise to lean closer. “Let me see what I’ll need to work around.”

  Armise hitched his sleeves up to his elbows and rested his arms on the table. He bared the insides of his wrists, showcasing the archaic flame tattoos that cut a jagged black line up his forearms as Grimshaw studied his wrists. Armise’s chips had been reinserted by Ahriman, but he had been in Singapore gathering intel for me and ensuring he wasn’t a threat against me or the Revolution.

  My anger ratcheted down a notch. There was time for Armise and me to talk now that Grimshaw was offering Nationalist support.

  “They stay on, Grimshaw,” I reiterated.

  “Understood. Let me show you something first then we’ll head over to the clinic.”

  * * * *

  Armise, Jegs, Grimshaw and I stepped onto the expanse of gray dirt, sand and porous rocks that looked like they could shred through unprotected skin with a simple graze. The gravelly mix crunched under our feet as we passed out of the encampment and into the surrounding wasteland, walking out of view of the outbuildings until we were at a distance where it would have been evident if there had been anyone close enough to listen to what we were saying.

  I had to assume the need for secrecy was for a purpose from Grimshaw’s end. I had to trust that he was leading us away to make sure no one else listened and not because he wanted us to be in a vulnerable position where we thought we were safe and then we would be ambushed. We were all weaponed up again and there was no reason Grimshaw would’ve bothered to arm us if he was just going to find a way to knock us off. It would be nearly impossible for me, but I had to find a way to begin trusting him, or at the very least begin working toward that end goal.

  “What is out here we need to see?” Armise asked. He stood at the back of the group, peering over his shoulder with the awareness of a professional skeptic. He caught eyes with Jegs. She had her pistol in her hand, dropped to the side but still ready to fire in a heartbeat. I wasn’t the only one who had trust issues when it came to Grimshaw.

  Grimshaw cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders, the luminescent ivy tattoos on his arms, shoulders and neck rippling with the movement.

  “Let me walk you through it.”

  He took a spot on his wrist between his thumb and forefinger, pressing down until he grimaced and there was an audible crack. With the sound came a sweeping crystallization of colors and smeared images that appeared to be emanating from his eyeballs.

  Jegs circled around him, freezing when she saw where the scattered image was coming from. “What the fuck?”

  I was moving before I had the conscious thought to, Armise keeping to my right shoulder, his hand at the weapon at his side. The black of Grimshaw’s pupils still existed, but they were ringed on the inside with a bright white circle. When he moved his head, the images displayed in front of him shifted with him.

  He pointed at his temple. “It’s a memory projector. Give me a minute. It still takes me conscious thought to get it into focus.”

  Grimshaw appeared to be fixing his vision to a point on the horizon, his gaze frozen to the spot, eyelids wide open as the shapes and colors projected in front of him flickered and began to form a dome-like shape. The figures within the shivering mirage were mere shadows, recognizable as human only by the distinct sway of limbs—the sinuous movement of a prowling attacker.

  “Are those the hybrids?” Jegs marveled as she reached out for the image.

  Grimshaw blinked, wiping the figures away, and grabbed his sister’s arm. “Don’t touch it.”

  She shrank back, the only time I’d seen her close to cowering, and joined me and Armise to Grimshaw’s right.

  He kept his eyelids closed and took deep breaths then opened his eyes again, the scene in front of us snapping into defined clarity. The full setting was a calm, unoccupied forest, but there was the hint of movement in the deepest recesses. There were trees with jagged black branches and full canopies of bright orange leaves that didn’t move. Because those trees were dead, the leaves were frozen to them from the flash of a Chemsense bomb. I’d seen a similar effect in the Wildes before. We couldn’t see the tops of the forest, or too much off to the right or to the left, making it obvious that we were viewing this exactly as Grimshaw remembered it. There were black spaces, not the emptiness of white, of being erased, but the blackness of voids. I guessed they were unremembered details. I wondered, if we asked Grimshaw, if he would be able to fill those missing pieces in with memory—if those blank spots would fill with the supposition of creation, or if the mechanism in his brain would keep anything but the truth from being visualized.

  I’d never seen this type of technology before. It was years, perhaps decades more advanced than anything I’d heard of our country—or any country—working on. This was futuristic in a way I wouldn’t have believed could be possible.

  But it made me think about who knew this tech existed. Because, maybe, this projector had been why the president had worried about Simion’s brain after the explosion. Maybe this invention was exactly why the work of the PsychHAgs had been necessary.

  Was it possible to play a memory from someone’s brain without it being their option?

  Grimshaw curved his hands, palms up, in an arc, as if to swipe the memory away, and the scene in front of him was replaced with a view of him walking, emerging from the tree line into a clearing. It was the same camp Exley had brought us footage of and I had to wonder how Exley had been able to get through the defenses and make it into the camp undetected. I’d wondered that since he’d shown us what he was up to on that screen in Simion’s office. But now I knew. The Grimshaw standing in front of us didn’t move, but the mirage moved to the left and Exley came into view, his lips moving but no sound coming from them.

  “What’s he saying?” I asked.

  “Sorry, there isn’t any sound. It’s a limitation of the projection. I’m trying to remember what Ex said. Probably something about where we were headed. I showed him where the camp was but told him he had to be on his own to explore it.”

  Unease crawled across my skin. “You let him go in there unprotected?”

  “I didn’t have any other choice. I was just starting to put all the pieces together. I needed his opinion and to hear what he thought was going on, but I couldn’t lay my ass on the line when I didn’t know yet.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Couple days ago. I know he made it out of the camp. Didn’t he get the footage to you?”

  Grimshaw’s head turned toward us in surprise and the image swept with him, momentarily blinding us. I lifted my forearm to cover my eyes and shrank back. The brightness was overwhelming, especially considering the cold gray nothingness of the landscape my eyes had grown accustomed to.

  “Sorry,” I heard him mutter and the light disappeared.

  “He made it back,” Armise answered as I dropped my arm and looked to Grimshaw.

  I thought back to how Grimshaw had phrased his comment and realized I’d completely skipped over his use of Exley’s nickname. “You don’t just know him. Exley. You were seeking out his opinion on what was going on.”

  Grimshaw kept his eyes closed for the moment, as if he was deciding whether or not to answer me. Then, “He’s a friend.”

  “Of yours too?” I asked Jegs. I’d had enough surprises today when it came to her connections.

  “Besides food and when he went on that op with you?” Jegs shook her head. “I’ve had almost no interaction with him.”

  “You should,” Grimshaw advised his sister. She glared at him even though he couldn’t see her with his eyes still closed.

  Grimshaw opened his eyes again and brought the images back into focus, this time much faster and with even more clarity than his first attempts.

  The mirage-dome reappea
red with the outsider’s view of the hybrid training camp and Exley tracking out of his vision at the edges of the buildings. Exley’s footage had been scattered, from a handheld device at a greater distance, but Grimshaw had simply walked into the camp. Because he belonged there. Because of his association with Ahriman and the Opposition. I tried to stuff down what Neveed would have likely called a penchant for swift vigilantism. Grimshaw had been consistent so far in his words and actions.

  I went back to watching the scene unfold in front of us. In the projection, Grimshaw was approached by a man who walked with a pronounced bow to his legs that made him drag the insides of the soles of his shoes on the ground. Just like with Priyessa’s clawed fingers, I wasn’t fooled by the wounded nature of this man. He was a PsychHAg. Tiam was as cruel as Priyessa, but with a manner of complete immersion in his job instead of her clinical detachment. As if he enjoyed the pain and agony he enforced on others.

  In the memory Tiam smiled, his squared-off jaw tensing with the effort. He extended a hand and clasped Grimshaw’s forearm.

  “He would trace the lines of the beginning of my tattoos with the tips of his fingers,” Grimshaw disclosed with a barely hidden shudder.

  I could sympathize. The touch of a PsychHAg wasn’t meant to be comforting. It made me wonder what Neveed’s life had to have been like growing up with a PsychHAg, Priyessa, as his mother. I winced at the thought. Even taking into account the forced imprisonment and assassination attempt by my parents, Neveed definitely had a worse mother than I did. “They’re well-trained in setting a man…off balance.”

  “Yes, men being the operative word there,” Jegs scoffed.

  I narrowed my eyes and started to bite off a retort then stopped short, a memory coming back to me. “You went through PsychHAg training.”

  “I survived,” she replied. It was the same response I had when anyone asked me about it. The same one every training class probably gave when they came through that year alive. Maybe that answer was ingrained in all of us by the PsychHAgs themselves—a badge of success more prominent than any pin or rank the government could give us.