Falling One by One

by S. A. McAuley

  “So why kids?” I asked.

  “More resilient? Easier to capture? Psychological warfare on the adults left to wonder? I don’t know. We’re all set here. Let’s walk. I have someone to show you.”

  Armise flexed his arms, those flame tattoos appearing to flicker with his movement, as if they were just as alive as Grimshaw’s ink. There were many other things I should have been noticing as we walked, but he was all I saw. And that may have been more dangerous than any threat I thought he carried when he was my enemy. I forced my gaze away from him and refocused my attention.

  Grimshaw led us through dank hallways, past half-closed doors and under a curtain. Then I felt Armise freeze and tense next to me.

  “Maniel,” Armise breathed out.

  I narrowed my eyes and studied the man sitting hunched over on the edge of the medical bed, struggling to lift his chin to see who had entered his space. I tried to place the familiarity of his features, to reconcile this worn husk in front of me as someone who Armise knew by name. The man gave a thin smile that triggered a memory of wild winds in the UU. The day Simion had showed up out of nowhere to take us back to the States because of threats against the former president’s life. “Fuck. I remember you. Manny. You sold us out in the Wildes.” Neither Manny nor Armise was paying attention to me though.

  Armise approached him, grasping his chin and moving his face from side to side with a gentleness I was just beginning to recognize inside him. “This isn’t what I had in mind when I said you owed me.”

  “Shit, he’s starting to sound like you, Colonel,” Jegs muttered under her breath.

  I glowered at her.

  “I started the transformation…after.” Manny’s eyes darted between Armise and me. “Piece by piece and much slower and more deliberate than anything they were subjected to.”

  “How much longer will it take?” Armise asked.

  Grimshaw answered for Manny. “We don’t know.”

  “Why?”

  Manny cut in, speaking solely to Armise in a hushed voice. “You were right. It’s Anubis.”

  “Shit,” was all Armise said, low and with such an emotional punch that a shot of fear coursed through me. “Where are Lucien and Tallitia?” he asked Grimshaw.

  “Being held.”

  “Bloodied and interrogated is probably more like it,” Jegs observed and glanced pointedly at me.

  Grimshaw turned to face me. “Would you have an issue with that?”

  I shook my head. “No. Not at all.”

  Chapter Five

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Simion said. His cheeks puffed up as he inhaled. He blew out slowly and shook his head.

  I gave him a moment to sift through everything I’d reported to him over our aircomm. He scrubbed a hand through his hair and flopped into his chair, arms dangling over the rests and legs sprawled, his synth clanking against his desk. This was one of the most powerful men on the planet. I suppressed a smile.

  Within seconds, Simion shucked the skin of the man I’d known most of my life and was sitting up as if pulled by a string attached to his spine, morphing into the cool and collected President of the Continental States and the leader of the Revolution. “How do we know we can trust Grimshaw?”

  “We don’t.”

  “What does Armise think?”

  I sputtered and looked over my shoulder at Armise, who was sorting through the stash of supplies Jegs had transported in when it was decided we were all staying for an indeterminate amount of time. He raised an eyebrow and I motioned to the screen for him to go ahead. Fucking asking Armise for his opinion. When had that become a thing?

  “I do not trust him,” Armise answered Simion. “But I don’t think he is lying either.”

  I turned back to the screen. “How were Kersch’s rites?”

  Simion nodded then smoothed a lock of blond hair out of his eyes. He had to clear his throat before he spoke. “They were good.”

  I’d already decided to work in lieu of attending the funeral service, but my parents had hijacked any possibility of me changing my mind. I didn’t know whether I felt cheated or relieved that the decision had been taken out of my control. “Have you decided on your second? You know the chain of command must be preserved.”

  “Assassinations, death and disloyalty… I’m aware my lifespan has diminished by decades for taking this job. Thanks for reminding me. But yeah, I’m thinking about asking Exley.”

  “Thinking about it?”

  “I don’t think he’s going to say yes.”

  “But you have no doubt you can trust him?”

  “None.”

  I scoffed. “Decades shorter for sure.”

  “You’re probably right. I’ll bring Ex up to speed when I meet with him later today. Then I’ll talk to the jacquerie leadership and see what they want to happen.”

  “You already know, Pres.”

  “Yeah. I do.” Simion stared off-screen, scratching at his chin. I gave him time to sit in silence for a moment. This decision, his directive, would have an untold number of casualties, and consequences we couldn’t anticipate. He tapped a finger on his desk and lifted his eyes to mine. “You don’t hear from me by tonight then my original order stands—these camps have to be destroyed. Keep the collateral count down as much as you can. Stay safe and come home soon, Mig. You too, Armise.”

  I shut down the secured connection with the push of a button and clicked the screen off. I scrubbed my hands over my face. “Collateral. That word didn’t used to mean anything to me.”

  Armise grunted.

  I swiveled in the chair and faced him. He was flipping his knife, staring out of the window. I watched him catch the blade between pinched fingers then send it reeling into the air, catch the handle then upend it into a circle again, the movement continuous. Blade, handle. Blade, handle. Not drawing one drop of blood from his fingers despite it being the sharpest knife I’d ever handled. Jegs had transported my sonic and real rifles back as well, but that weapon—Armise’s constant companion—wasn’t as infamous.

  “So Jegs picked up your knife from security at Priyessa’s place?”

  Armise didn’t turn from the vast wasteland stretching out in front of him, lost to the conspicuous lack of scenery or his overpopulated thoughts. Maybe both. Just when I thought he wouldn’t answer, he replied, “Yes.”

  I had a good idea of why he’d hesitated, but I asked anyway. Because if Jegs had made sure to retrieve that knife for him then she knew it was significant to him because it came from his mentor. “Tell me about you and Jegs.”

  He flipped the knife with the same even strokes, giving nothing away. “It was a gerlekh that was of convenience and circumstance.”

  I paled.

  Ger was home in Mongol. Gerlekh was the making of a home. A formal union of two people. A marriage.

  His answer had to be metaphorical. Had to be.

  I opened my mouth to speak and couldn’t force anything past my lips. I had no right to be mad. No right to him. But, in this moment, after everything we’d been through, that claim, formalized or not… I shut that thought down and poked at what felt like a fresh wound, as if Armise had dropped his knife into the hollow of my chest. I’d always assumed there were other men or women, but not like that.

  “Was?” I rasped. All of the oxygen had been sapped from my lungs, replaced with the barren taste and burn of ash.

  He frowned and stopped flicking the blade into the air. “Was. The rebellion was doomed to failure from the start. I had to find a way for my people to trust the States.”

  “Did you fuck her?”

  Armise’s features went hard. “That question is crude, even coming from you.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  He jabbed the point of his knife into the table and stalked away, flexing his fists as he paced. The muscles of his forearms rippled, putting the lines of his fire tattoos into motion. He’d gotten those marks sometime between slitting my neck in
the Outposts and my call to him from my grandfather’s home in the Northern Territories, only one year after he’d kissed me for the first time. He could’ve been married to her then.

  My stomach knotted further.

  I thought of what had happened only days ago when I’d seen Armise for the first time in a year and a half. Of how violent and broken he’d become when I’d taunted him with the idea of Neveed and me. I’d known then that my actions were callous and I hadn’t cared. Armise wasn’t taunting me though.

  I swallowed. “Are the flames for her?”

  He stopped cold. Glared at me and bit out, “No.”

  Anger took hold of me within a second. “Don’t fucking snap at me for something you’ve kept a secret until now, only giving up that information when forced to.”

  The line of his jaw tightened. “The flames are you. Every mark on me is you.”

  “So what do those have to do with me?” I pushed. Armise grimaced. “I asked the right question, didn’t I? Tell me.”

  “They mark my only moment of real regret. After I cut your throat in the Outposts.”

  He walked to me and held out his forearms. His wrists were completely healed from where Grimshaw had dug into them to remove his chips, but the bottom edges of his tats were now jagged from the intrusion. My eyes traced the ink before I dared to touch…

  I furrowed my brow as I tried to reconcile what I was seeing—realizing years too late what had been there all along—with what I knew about Armise.

  It’d taken me too long to see what that ink covered. To understand what I’d been touching every time my palms slid from his shoulders and wrapped around his wrists to drag him closer. There were precise vertical lines of dimpled flesh under the ink. Marks made by someone who could wield a knife with skill and tolerate the pain he would’ve had to endure to hold still for every centimeter of the distance they covered from the curve of arm to the bend in his wrist. Scars, but not battle wounds.

  At least not wounds from a formalized battle.

  “You did this to yourself.”

  He met my eyes. Nodded. “I did.”

  I wanted to ask if it was really my near death he regretted so much that he’d almost taken his own life. But the evidence of the willing press of his knife to his own flesh was all the answer I needed. His sole regret was nearly taking my life in the Outposts. The man who found job satisfaction in the seizing of a man’s last breath had attempted to equalize a debt—had paid penance—he shouldn’t have cared about. Why else would he have carved into himself like this?

  I had to look away from him. I circled my hands around his forearms and traced my thumbs down the scars, taking the time to feel past the callused pads of my fingers, past the precise inked lines, to the regret etched into his skin below. I attempted to tap into the emotion that had caused the most brutal man I knew to be so swallowed in remorse that he’d harmed himself. I couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing, feeling and hearing with what I knew of the legendary Dark Ops Officer Armise Darcan.

  I gaped. Struggled to find the right words. “Didn’t seeing my blood satisfy you?”

  “No, Merq. It has not for a long time.”

  His voice was sad, his tone insistent.

  I let out the breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding.

  “That attack should’ve been fun for you. You’re bloodthirsty. I’ve witnessed you slaughter. You find satisfaction in death. You’re ruthless and without conscience.” I shook my head. Crumpled. “At least that’s how I’ve always seen you. But now—” I snapped my eyes to his. “Now I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought you’d be prone to self-harm.”

  “Merq.” His plea echoed in the room, tightening the knot in my chest that was stealing my oxygen. He dropped to his haunches, putting us eye to eye. “The way we live is self-harm.”

  The overbearing gray of Kash and the white of the room washed all color from his irises. “Never again,” was the only thing I could think in the moment, his silver eyes locked to mine.

  “Never again as in what we do or never again”—he glanced at where my hands still circled his wrists, my thumb absently pulling at his bracelets and seeking out the warmth of his skin below—“this.”

  Stopping the course we were set on now was impossible and we both knew it. There were still things we could control though.

  “I don’t want harm to come to you. Ever again.”

  His lips tugged into a deep frown. “That will not happen.”

  “Someday it will, Armise. We’ll find peace someday.”

  Armise looked as shocked as I felt with those words tripping unbidden out of my mouth. I’d never believed that life was possible, never known that was what I wanted.

  Until this exact second.

  “If that is what you want…” Armise gave one clipped nod. “You don’t fail when you set your path.”

  “Both of our paths are a death sentence,” I said. “As it is for everyone else. We don’t escape that fate. I simply don’t want to go to my end and be disposable.”

  “As it was for Wensen Kersch.”

  I frowned. No, that wasn’t what I’d been thinking. Was it? “Like a lot of people I’ve killed.”

  “We are not good men, Merq. We both know that. But that does not mean we deserve any less dignity and peace in life.”

  “Unless we change the path we’re on, I think that’s exactly what it means,” I argued.

  From where he kneeled in front of me he set his hands on my thighs, brushing his palms over the fabric of my uniform, fingertips grazing my groin. “Are you saying that we cannot find good at all in this? In us?”

  His touch was so far off course from what we’d been talking about, from the heaviness we’d just spoken of and what was to come, that my brain struggled to make the transition. But my body…it was always right there with Armise.

  “I don’t know—”

  My reply was cut off as Armise abruptly stood and stalked in the opposite direction of where I sat.

  He went to the window of the outbuilding, the room he and I would share tonight, and drew the curtain. He settled the lock into place on the door and ran both his hands through his hair as he blew out a long breath.

  “Armise—”

  He stretched out his arm and faced his palm toward me—a silent invocation to shut the fuck up. He stared at the floor.

  I tried to breathe around the stranglehold on my lungs. Armise was across the room, too far away, and yet it was as if his hands had dug inside me and forced me to expose everything. He made me vulnerable. It was terrifying.

  And yet freeing.

  “I need to know, Armise. Why did you feel responsibility for my life then?”

  He sighed. “I was already falling in love with you.”

  Those weren’t the three words I had banned him from saying to me ever again, but close enough. I didn’t know how to reply.

  He slipped the bracelets from his wrists and slid them onto the barrel of my rifle. He rolled down his sleeves so the tats and scars were covered. “What I did to myself, Merq… I cannot claim it was unintentional, but I cannot say it was for a specific purpose either.”

  I nodded. Swallowed around the words stuck in my throat that I had started to say to him before he stalked away from me. I wanted to leave them unvoiced, but I owed him the same honesty he had given me.

  “What I was starting to say before… What I meant to say…”

  Armise set his hands on his hips, hung his head down and waited me out.

  “Armise, please.”

  I didn’t beg except for when he had his hands on me, when I was pleading for him to take me apart. But giving voice to this… It was much more intimate than sex would ever be.

  “What I was going to say was that I don’t know if I’ll ever be worthy of a man like you.”

  Armise’s head snapped up, his silver-blue gaze blazing a scorching path through me. I held out a shaking hand for him. “You’re too far away.”

  He scru
bbed his left hand over his face, over his lips, his gaze fixated on the bracelets that circled my rifle.

  “Please,” I repeated.

  He took two determined steps to me, grasped my hand and sank to his knees in front of me so that he could look directly at me.

  Into me.

  I shivered.

  “How do you do this to me, Merq?”

  I swallowed, my cock growing hard with the simple touch of his palm to mine. “Why do you ask so many questions?” I taunted him, my voice going rough.

  “We may not be good men, but there is good in us. Let me prove this to you.” Armise licked his lips and slid his hand up my thigh to the button on my pants.

  These moments were the only time we took for ourselves, for us. We lacked control of so many aspects of our days, but what happened between the two of us had always been a conscious choice. A choice for something better than who we were.

  A choice for something good.

  I slid my hand into his hair, cataloging the streaks of silver that seemed to multiply with each day that passed. I’d known him since before they’d first appeared, but the only thing that had changed in my attraction to him was that it had deepened.

  I sat back in the chair and watched Armise work the zipper down and free my hardening cock. He nosed at my groin, inhaled, and grazed his thumbs over my balls. “Come on, Darcan,” I urged him. “Want to feel your mouth on me.”

  Armise licked a swipe up the bottom of my dick and I arched back, unprepared for the overwhelming heat. Armise had blown me before, so many times, but always cold, never with a hotness of breath that spoke to a lack of control.

  I grew rigid in his mouth as he took me deep and I pumped my hips up. He yanked me forward, to the edge of the chair, and held me steady as he sucked me down. I bucked into the heat, threaded my fingers through his hair and pushed his head down farther until I was bottoming out at the back of his throat.

  My cock was buried inside him but he was the one who was in control. He was the one who was in control of me, because I allowed it. Him and only him.