Falling One by One

by S. A. McAuley

  “No. It’s not just that.” I shook my head and walked around her to force her to look me in the eye. “You were going to become one.”

  Becoming a Psychological Health Agent took a certain…temperament. A certain insanity that had more to do with practiced intent than chaos. And while a person of any gender had the possibility of becoming a PsychHAg, it was more likely for a woman to have the qualities needed. The best agents weren’t vicious men, they were driven, psychologically terrifying women.

  Jegs didn’t back down. “They wanted to make me one. There’s a difference.”

  “Did you end up undergoing any of the—” I was at a loss to find a word for the PsychHAg training besides fucked-up, dehumanized or cruel.

  “Advanced courses?” Jegs supplied. The twitch of her lip told me how much distaste she had for the euphemism. “Hell no. But from what I’ve heard from others they altered my training program to test me. Priyessa has always treated me with a different respect than she’s shown you. Or Neveed.”

  It was the third time his name had come up either in my thoughts or in conversation in the last five minutes. It would have been beneficial to talk to him now. To try to understand from him how his mother operated. How any PsychHAg operated outside of their official capacity. Because what Tiam was perpetuating was independent of any legitimate governmental order.

  “Then you’ll be the one to work with Priyessa on this. Figure out how to get Tiam in. Or if we should even try.”

  “You know me, I have a tendency to kill first, unless otherwise instructed. But I’ll do whatever you ask of me, Colonel.”

  I restrained a smile and turned back to Grimshaw. “How much more can you show us from other camps?”

  “There are other memories I could show you, but this was my last time in. Therefore it’s the cleanest memory.”

  “Cleanest?”

  “The newest and likely the best. Memory projection is unreliable technology.”

  “Because it relies on the user, not reality?” I asked.

  Grimshaw nodded and blinked. He cracked the same spot in his hand and the arc of images disappeared. His eyes returned to normal.

  “The user’s perception of reality,” Armise added, going exactly where my suspicions had.

  “Correct,” Grimshaw verified.

  “Who—” I started to ask, but Grimshaw cut me off.

  “It was Tiam’s idea. Ahriman gave it the funding and attention needed to make it a reality.”

  “Is this how they took over the President?”

  Grimshaw scanned between us, his brow furrowed in confusion. “What?”

  “Not important right now,” I dismissed before Grimshaw could dig any deeper into it. I had to swallow around the grief of the president’s loss. There wasn’t time to mourn right now. “Anything else about Kash we need to know before we go in?”

  “This is the camp that I’ve been able to steal some subjects away from.”

  “Subjects,” I repeated. “You used that word earlier. You mean the hybrids?”

  “Where are they now?” Jegs inquired.

  “Here.” Grimshaw pointed down.

  Armise, Jegs and I looked around and at each other, equal parts confusion passing across our features.

  That’s when the ground around us shifted and four shapes lifted from the rocks. They stood, camouflaged, and bent to open doors, five more bodies emerging from the depths of four gaping entrances.

  The first four were sentries, guarding the entrances to subterranean stations that likely circled Grimshaw’s base.

  I hadn’t spotted them. I never would have spotted them. And from the repeated tic of Armise’s jaw I could tell he hadn’t seen them either. Any of them would have been able to attack us, to grab an ankle, bring us to the ground with one swipe along the Achilles tendon and slit our throats before we knew we’d been attacked. Fuck sonic weapons or guns, they had a tactical advantage over us that had nothing to do with firepower and everything to do with training and skill boosted by genetically modified physical attributes.

  The hybrids who chose to fight with the Opposition—to fight against us—would be almost impossible to find, let alone kill.

  Unless we sought them out first—face-to-face—and stormed through their door.

  Chapter Four

  Jegs and I stood off to the side of the encampment and watched the hybrids and Nationalist guards circle around Armise, reaching out to touch his scars and tattoos, engrossed in the explanations he offered with his professional disinterest and calm. It wasn’t often that I had time to really look at Armise. We were constantly on the move, or in different places. So I hung back. Studied him.

  Armise wasn’t handsome. He couldn’t be called beautiful, not like Neveed could. Armise wasn’t charming. And he lacked the charisma of Simion. He had been battlefield relief for me, but too distinctive to be faceless. Too insistent to be nameless.

  He was unlike any man I’d ever been with before.

  I didn’t know how many other people filled Armise’s history. I had no idea how long, or short, his list was, let alone the circumstances of how those encounters or relationships had started or ended. Before two days ago, I’d idly wondered how many other men or women Armise was involved with. I’d rarely thought about it, but if I’d been asked I would have said there were others. After his declaration in the AmFed that he loved me, I was sure I was the only one.

  I’d made conscious choice upon conscious choice over the years, opting to remain entwined with him. Choosing to do so without a want of more. There’d been no reassurances in our encounters. No promises of what came tomorrow, besides the very real possibility of death.

  I’d actively chosen him, but I couldn’t remember ever thinking about the choice to be with only him. And yet that’s exactly where we were. Him having confessed he loved me and me… As I watched other men view him with unguarded interest, with hunger for his attention, I realized that it didn’t matter if my choice was one of unconscious motivations—my decision to be only with Armise had been set long ago.

  “I think they may be more infatuated with him than you are.” Jegs reflected my thoughts back to me in her usual matter-of-fact frankness.

  I grunted in reply.

  Armise and I were in the DNA of the hybrids, the very makeup of what made them stronger and faster than they had been before the transition. Of course they would be interested in who he was.

  Grimshaw shut the door to his building and joined us. I cocked my head in their direction. “They know who he is, huh?”

  “Everyone who has a sat linkup or BC5 knows who you and Armise are. But if you mean that the two of you are their progenitors in a sense… No.”

  I frowned but moved on. “I want to contact President Simion. Update him and give him and the jacquerie a voice in how we proceed with the camps.”

  Grimshaw nodded as Armise broke away from the group and joined us.

  “Let me get those chips out of Armise and show you where we’re treating the hys we’ve been able to extract,” Grimshaw offered. “Some of them haven’t fared as well. Strangely enough the adjustment from skeletal to titanalloy replacement seems to be the best tolerated part of the transformation. There’s some other catalyst in the cascading genetic cocktail that sets a segment of the hybrids off.”

  “That is your fucking DNA, Merq, not mine,” Armise goaded me as he returned to my side.

  His pack of adorers lingered behind us. They, more than Armise’s taunt, irked me. “Right.”

  I held back from the group, allowing Grimshaw and Jegs to lead us so I could be far enough back to talk to Armise. We were trailed by the teenage hybrids—their guns slung around their chests—who moved silently and with a preternatural grace. I shook my head as I turned back toward Armise. He was paying the kids no attention now that they’d given him space.

  I searched his features and was met with the same placid and controlled enigma that I’d been facing for years. That same thought flashe
d in—how much did I really know him?—then back out. I trusted him.

  I’d been so sure that I would never trust him again after his extended disappearance into Singapore. But I believed his reasons for leaving. I believed there was more to why he’d needed to stay there longer than he’d wanted. I had faith that he would tell me all of it when the time was right.

  He’d given me no reason, since returning, not to trust.

  I knew who and what he was even through the secrets. What I didn’t understand was how he was interacting with the hybrids as if everything were normal. “You don’t think this is fucked-up?”

  “You know I do. But you and I had both killed men before their age.”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “No, it does not.”

  “But?”

  “No but,” he reassured me. “No excuses. It is better to live with whatever peace you can grasp and not to fight. Only to serve when made to or when called. But they weren’t born into a world where that’s possible.”

  Neither were we.

  I ran my fingers through my hair and over the shell of my ear, counting each of the pierced hoops. Five circles for my first five kills. Had Armise marked those firsts in any way? Did he remember who they were?

  I cleared my throat. “Are you the man I’ve known all these years?”

  Armise chuckled. “Yes and no.”

  “Which part is the no?”

  “Why the fuck do you ask me so many questions?” Armise huffed in exasperation.

  I smirked. “I’m curious?”

  “And yet you ask all the wrong questions.”

  “So tell me what the right ones are.”

  Armise ran his fingers over the stubble on his chin, his lips drawing into a thin line. “Ask me why I look at the hybrids and feel responsibility.”

  The hybrids had elements of Armise’s and my blood within their own. Claiming responsibility for that made sense, so there had to be something else.

  “It’s not just about your blood,” I replied.

  Armise resettled the bracelets on his left arm with his right hand. The stone and wood collided, a flat concussive click, and rested farther up his arms, away from his wrists. His thumb slid over the lines of his forearm tats when he had them just right. I waited for him to say something, anything, but we were almost to the door before he spoke.

  “No. It is not just about my blood.”

  “But this sense of obligation…it isn’t the first time.” I stole a glance at the fire tattoos snaking up his forearms. When I caught his eyes again he balled his fists, making the flames flex with his movement. Before I could ask, he cut me off.

  “Walk faster. I want Ahriman’s chips out of me.”

  He stalked ahead of me in lieu of providing any kind of clarification. I saw truth in his discomfort. After all these years of verbal games, fucking rather than finding the truth in what we said to each other… Maybe it was time for me to begin asking him the right questions.

  * * * *

  Armise, Jegs and I followed Grimshaw into a white outbuilding that was a replica of his clapboard headquarters. Inside this one, however, the main room was empty and there was a rectangular hole cut into the floor with a set of stairs leading under the structure.

  “You want me to go first?” Grimshaw offered, pointing into the darkness below.

  Jegs cocked her head toward the hybrids who stood on the stoop waiting to follow us. “We’re the ones outnumbered here. I don’t think it matters either way. Thanks for attempting to pacify a group of professional assassins with your hospitality.”

  “Whatever.”

  Grimshaw descended and Jegs swept her arm in an arc in front of me, a sly smile lighting her features. “After you, Colonel.”

  Grimshaw hadn’t stretched the truth when he’d said that their medical facilities weren’t as advanced in the encampment. The floor was packed earth, the dirt walls held back by blocks of stone. There were rooms carved off the main tunnel, wires snaking across floors, up walls and hanging from the ceiling.

  “It was too conspicuous for us to get hospital-grade equipment transported to the middle of nowhere. So we’ve made do with the little that’s available in this area.”

  “It’s clean,” I observed.

  “We try. I don’t want any of them suffering more than they already have.”

  “It’s like talking to a completely different man,” I huffed.

  Walking behind her brother but next to me where I could see her reaction, Jegs rolled her eyes. She’d contended long ago that Grimshaw was in his line of work for the people, but it was difficult for me to reconcile her view of her brother with the man who’d orchestrated a brazen attack on the president’s bunker.

  Grimshaw gestured toward a nearly empty room. “We’ll set up here.” He beckoned the tallest hybrid, who lingered at the back of the group. “Athol, I need my med kit. Sit, Darcan.” He swung a chair around and placed it in front of the raised pallet. “Palms up on the table.”

  Athol returned, thumping a metal case onto the table and clicking it open to reveal a jumble of instruments, bandages, sutures and pill cases. I watched Grimshaw sift through the contents—discarding some and placing the most wicked-looking ones in front of him. When I looked up again, Jegs was gone. The pack of hybrids loitered outside the door, talking in hushed tones. I craned my neck, peering around the corner and searching for her.

  “She’s likely wandering,” Grimshaw explained. “Direct observation is how she learns best.” He motioned to Armise to unclench his fists.

  “She also doesn’t like blood,” Armise added.

  I snapped my head around. “What?” That was definitely something I hadn’t known. I’d seen Jegs covered in others’ blood and I’d never seen her hesitate to make a kill.

  “Oh yeah. It’s mostly the smell, I think. Of course you’d know that,” Grimshaw said to Armise.

  “There wasn’t much besides blood during the Mongol rebellion. There were fewer healing capabilities then, with rivers of blood and few ways to staunch the flow.”

  I hadn’t been the leader of my current team when the rebellion occurred. I hadn’t even been on the same side of the planet. The pieces of how Armise and Jegs began working together made much more sense. As did Armise’s apparent ease of turning on his own country. “You were working to make your territory part of the States.”

  Armise shrugged. “I was working for my people.”

  “And Jegs?”

  He hesitated, then, “I could not tell you what her motives were.”

  I scoffed. “I couldn’t tell you what her motives are now.”

  Grimshaw side-eyed me. “Are you that pissed at Holly for the DCR?”

  “That’s now two”—I held up two fingers to emphasize my point—“Jegs siblings that have almost killed me. There aren’t any more of you, are there?”

  Grimshaw chuckled. “Not as far as I know.”

  “Am I still pissed at her…?” I chuffed. “I nearly died in that standoff.”

  Armise’s nostrils flared. “I made sure you made it out alive.”

  Grimshaw shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe either of us was being this irritable about his sister’s actions. “Because of Holly’s help in the end.”

  “With Jegs’ help,” Armise corrected.

  I thumped back against the chair, slid my legs out to stretch and ran my fingers through my hair. What bothered me the most was that neither Armise nor I was supposed to be on that continent that day, let alone in the midst of a firefight. Jegs’ decision had put us both there. And I… It wasn’t only me that barely made it out alive.

  “I almost killed you in the DCR,” I said to Armise.

  Armise had been unnaturally still as Grimshaw dug into his flesh, but it was my comment that made him flinch. “I was not scared to die then, but that does not mean I wanted to.” I watched the blood pool around his wrists and cling to those mysterious bracelets. “I am still not scared to d
ie and that caveat remains.”

  “Can you live without fear when you have something to lose?” someone else said.

  Armise’s and my attention shifted to the hybrid assisting Grimshaw. He held a cloth to the gashes on Armise’s wrist.

  “Athol is one of the eldest hybrids,” Grimshaw said. “He and his twin sister Elina were the first to escape the camp and make it here.”

  Armise clenched his fist, then released it when a stream of blood ran onto the table. “You are afraid to lose your sister.”

  “She’s the only one I trust. Ahriman Blanc has no one. Nothing to lose. Maybe it’s he that lives without fear, not us.”

  “Perhaps,” Grimshaw dismissed. “We’re almost done here. Athol, can you get me a vial of the localized surge, please? Shut the door behind you too.” Grimshaw waited until Athol was clear of the room. “I’m sorry. I forget he’s here. So damn quiet. All of them are. It’s often…disturbing.”

  I sat forward. “Tell us about them.”

  The door opened and Jegs entered, carrying a vial that she tossed to her brother. “They don’t have bones.”

  “No bones,” Grimshaw confirmed. He injected Armise and picked up the wipe Athol had left behind, cleaning the wounds off as his flesh stitched together and closed up, pink skin the only indication of the trauma he’d sustained. “Just metal. The titanalloy doesn’t cover the skeleton, it replaces it. There’s a corrosive compound fused within the metallic alloy to dissolve calcified structures.”

  “Targeted nanos like what’s carried in surge?”

  Grimshaw nodded. “As far as we can tell. The pre-hys test positive for the nanos more commonly used in genetmods. But by the time they complete the transformation all traces of nanos have disappeared.”

  I had little knowledge of the scientific processes behind genetic modification. “Is that similar to what happens to other genetmods?”

  “We think so. But since we have a stacked house of genets with all of you here, maybe we can do some baseline testing to find out for sure. You know that medicine has been stunted since the destruction of the archives. There’s not much new ground being broken here.”