“I did, Sims. I promised you I wouldn’t leave your side if you needed me and I’m breaking that promise. I’m sorry. I can’t trust myself, so you can’t trust me. And I won’t make you.”
Simion stabbed his finger into the table. “I need you here, Merq.”
“Not right now you don’t. You have Jegs and Grimshaw. You have the backing of the Nationalists. I’m a liability, and even if by some miracle Ahriman has nothing to do with whatever just happened, I’m too fucking exhausted to be what you need.”
Simion pounded a fist once against his desk and swore. “What are you saying to me?”
“I won’t be gone forever. But I need some time.”
“No. Absolutely fucking not. No,” he protested. “The Revolution needs you. I need you.”
“Sims,” I said. I’d never put myself before the Revolution. I could gloss over this however I wanted to, but the truth was that I wasn’t as invested as I’d been before. I’d completed the op to D3 the camps—I’d accomplished what Simion had set out for me to do—and now it was time to let that storm pass over without me fighting to keep it churning forward. “I could have just disappeared but I couldn’t—”
“Fuck that,” he interrupted me. He hung his head and took an audible breath. “When you set your mind on something there’s no changing it. Just tell me where you’re going.”
“Only Armise will know.”
Simion paused, looked off camera then back at me, his lips drawn into a pronounced frown. “He’ll be with you?”
I scratched at the stubble on my chin. “Apparently, there’s nowhere else he wants to be.”
Simion smirked, that haughty twist of his lip that would forever be the first image that came to mind when I thought of him. “Shit. Coming to terms with that, huh?”
“Yeah. But I still don’t understand why.”
“Does it matter?” He waved his hand in the air. “Never mind. I don’t have to ask that, I know you too well. I will see you again, right?”
“On this side or the next.”
His smirk was wiped away. “I really fucking hate that answer.”
I gave him a sad smile. “Maybe someday I’ll be able to give you a different one.”
“But not today,” he gave in.
“No, Sims,” I confirmed. “Not today. Your five is almost up. If I’m not back with Armise in the next minute and a half he’ll be hunting me down and taking out anyone in his path on the way—innocent or not.”
“Wouldn’t want that,” Simion deadpanned. “You sure he’s got you, Mig?”
“I have no doubt. Not anymore.”
Simion pointed at me through the screen. “If you were here I’d punch you then hug you. For now I’ll just flip you off and tell you that I love you. Come back to us when it’s safe. We’ll keep your click-check operational in case you need to reach out.”
“Thanks, Pres.”
I reached for the button to switch off the aircomm and Simion flipped me off with both hands. His lopsided, easy smile was the last thing I saw and his laugh was the last thing I heard before I was met with complete silence.
I hoped that wouldn’t be the actual last time I ever saw him.
Chapter Ten
The People’s Republic of Singapore—Mongolia
The ride from Kash was long—a lingering span of hours that turned into days spent rumbling over rough ground. We never quite lost sight of the mountains, traveling up and across a barren land where there was no sign of humans to be found. We were without any of our standard chips yet, we had to assume, still trackable, so that lack of populace was the point. We weren’t going to bring down a threat on more innocent citizens, whether that threat was us, or the powerful enemy who had unknown plans for us.
Armise stayed at the controls for the two days it took us to cross over the mountains and into the rolling plains of his home country. I’d seen pictures of this faded green land, intel gathered by analysts who would never travel to the places they reported on, but this was my first time seeing the place where Armise had been born. His home. He didn’t use any type of navigation system and there were no roads or paths he followed, yet he led us to a spot that couldn’t have been called a destination by any definition of the word with what felt like unerring accuracy.
The days were split almost evenly between daylight and nighttime this time of year and we arrived at the vast nothingness just as the sun was dropping below the mountains. Grimshaw had sent with us the supplies he could spare—food, clothing, temporary shelter and an arsenal fit for a small army. Which I supposed Armise and I were in our own right.
Armise wore a coat of gray, black and white threads that wove together in no particular pattern. The sleeves were long, as was the bottom hem, sweeping against the backs of his calves as he walked toward me and the smoldering igniters of a fire I’d just lit. He had the hood pulled over his black and silver hair, the depth of it casting his face into shadow despite the growing flames.
He sat on the ground next to me, swishing the ends of his coat behind him and drawing his knees up to rest his forearms. Both of us had been quiet for hours…no, days. It had been three days since we’d transported out of Haiti back to Grimshaw’s camp in preparation for this trip. Grimshaw was the only person who knew we’d returned to the camp and from there anyone could guess that we would head into Mongolia because of Armise’s past. We weren’t untraceable and we knew that, but there was no way we could really disappear until we knew for sure what Ahriman had done to both of us.
And there was no way I was going anywhere near my grandfather’s bunker in the Northern Territories until I couldn’t be tracked.
We remained quiet that night, deciding to wait to put up the ger—a traditional Mongolian house—in the light of day tomorrow. Instead we slept in front of the fire. The flames jumped in front of me, warming me, and Armise curled around my back, his soft jacket pulled over my side and his temperature a degree or two more than mine. The nighttime may have been cold, but I didn’t feel it. I fell asleep with Armise’s lips at my ear, with his hand flat on my chest, pulling me into him, a dome of stars above me.
I fell asleep surrounded by heat, light and Armise.
* * * *
I took our empty canisters to the river after I woke and filled them with water. The stream ran with a clarity that allowed me to see to the rocks of the riverbed and to catch glimpses of the moving, living things that bounced from hiding place to hiding place in its depths. I got down on my haunches and splashed the clear, natural, unfiltered water on my face. It was a soldier’s bath of scrubbing away dirt and blood from head, hands and arms. Cleansing the remains of my and others’ blood from my skin. After the violence of the last days, Armise’s blood would be in that mix as well, maroon flakes that appeared just the same as any other man’s under my fingernails, but that bore his unique genetic signature. Darcan blood on my hands, yet again. But this time, twice in a row, to help him not harm him.
I was in Armise’s home. He’d brought me here willingly, by his suggestion and his choice. In order to protect me he risked bringing the instability of my war to his front door.
The sun was rising, streaking red into the clouds and reflecting crimson on the rounded, rolling movement of the stream. There were clouds gathering on the opposite horizon and I didn’t know enough—or rather anything—about what to expect when it came to weather in Mongolia to know whether storms here would be as violent as the electrical ones I was used to in the capital.
From what Armise had told me it would take hours to build our temporary shelter. We would be done before midday and have time for…nothing. There was nothing to be done here except live and wait, and I had no idea how long we would be tied to this existence and no idea if there was anything we could do to force a reaction from Ahriman.
I clambered down the rocky hill to rejoin Armise, where he had all the materials laid out for us to get to work. There was a circle of some cloth-like material on the ground. I handed
his water canister to him.
“Is that storm going to hit us?”
Armise didn’t look up from the length of rope he was counting off in his hands. “It won’t rain here. Perhaps lightning, but no rain.”
“How far are we away from your village?”
That he looked up for. “Not far.” He pointed to a bag lying on the ground. “Unwrap the exo for the exterior walls. Let’s get started.”
I lifted the featherweight bag off the ground and untied the top, pulling out a four foot length of titanalloy pipes that were bound with a brown cord.
“Untie it but keep it rolled, placing the feet of the exo at the edges of the base,” he instructed.
I nodded and began unraveling the metal skeleton.
“You talk for once,” he prodded me as we worked. “Tell me about your time with the PsychHAgs,” he prompted me before he took a swig of water.
“With Tiam?”
He shrugged. “With any of them.”
“I was the only one in my class to survive the PsychHAg year.”
Armise huffed. “That I know. Tell me something I cannot find in your records.”
I furrowed my brow. What could I tell him? That I would never be able to forget what it felt like to have my bones snapped then immediately followed with surge to stitch me back together so there would be pain but no damage that would leave me unable to fight? That I could describe my own blood through the experience of all of my senses? Or that I understood that Jegs’ distaste for blood likely came from forced feedings and our shared real world experience of exactly how long it took for a man’s body to be emptied and how to make that happen at your desired speed? Those weren’t things that Armise would find in any of my records, but that he would know anyway from his own experiences. He and I had followed similar tracks our entire lives.
“I don’t know what that would be,” I confessed to him.
“How about why you ask so many damn questions. Were you always that way or was that part of your training?”
I froze for a second, trying to gather my thoughts. “I wasn’t supposed to know more than what they taught me. But it wasn’t enough for me, so I asked more. I learned how and when to question so that they wouldn’t realize how hungry I was for any information they would give me. I was supposed to be brainless and a high-level tactician at the same time. I could never reconcile the two.”
The corner of Armise’s lips tipped up. “So you became both.”
I gaped at his attempt at a joke. “Fuck you. I stayed who I was and became a better liar.” The exo clicked into place as I rolled it out in the shape of a circle. “I think I became so good at lying that I’ve been fooling myself.”
Armise nodded as if he understood, even when I couldn’t quite grasp my own meaning, just the emotion of what I was trying to tell him. He twined the rope through the X’s formed by the exo frame and stayed quiet.
“Why didn’t he kill you, Armise?”
He didn’t have to ask whom I was speaking of. “I told you. His father. I secured something I knew he wanted above all else.”
“How did you know his father wasn’t dead?”
“I was the one who would bring Dr. Blanc back to Ahriman each time he attempted to escape.”
“He’s been missing for more than ten years.”
“I’ve been bringing him back for more than ten years. Until this last time. Ahriman didn’t call on me, for obvious reasons. Dr. Blanc was the one I first heard the name Anubis from. He told me he’d found a way to put an end to it.”
That revelation stopped me cold. “You know what he meant by that?”
“I have to assume it has something to do with the kill switch. But I don’t know how he’s involved in the first place. There are more people involved with the construction of the hybrids—with the Anubis project—than either one of us will ever be aware of.”
“And yet it only takes two people to build a ger.” I started working again, satisfied to see the shape of our temporary home coming together. “I get tired of talking about this. It was all so much easier when I did what the fuck I was told and didn’t think much about it.”
Armise grazed fingertips across my back as he walked by. “Mostly because your thoughts were occupied by me.”
I grumbled. He was probably right.
He stepped through the opening that would be the entrance to the makeshift hut and continued securing the exo to the ground. He didn’t look up at me when he said, “I will not take back what I said to you in the AmFed. I do love you. I know you may not fully understand what that means, but you are far from dispassionate, Merq.”
I sputtered, forced my hands to keep working as I took long swaths of material from a roll on the ground and Armise pointed out where to place them.
He wasn’t pushing me. Wasn’t demanding a response, but I owed him one.
“I don’t know about love, Armise. I have no idea what that really is, or if I even believe it can exist in my world. But I know this…I trust you not to slice my throat open, again, when I’m asleep. And when I’m awake—”
Armise chuckled at that.
“—I don’t want to see you come to harm. I want you at my side.”
I finished putting the cloth around the outside and joined him in the interior, a roof nonexistent, both of us open and vulnerable to the elements. I went to him, drawn to him—always him—and set my hands on his hips, pulling his back against my chest. “When I’m buried inside you I can forget all this other shit surrounds us. I don’t know if that’s at all like the love you speak of. It’s a word I heard between the president and his wife, between my mother and father, but I’ve also heard it from Simion and Neveed. And from Chen, but that was usually followed up with a ‘stubborn ass’ tacked on to the end. Love is a nice idea in a time and place where nice doesn’t exist. But when you say it I think maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve been ignorant and unaware all along.”
Armise settled his hand over mine and peered over his shoulder at me. “You’ve done what you had to do to protect yourself.”
I cringed at his words and pushed away from him.
Protect myself?
He had always protected me, thought of me first.
I should’ve been doing the same for him.
“All I’ve done is hurt you, Armise.”
“That is your own convoluted version of the truth,” he replied. “Love is more than trust and loyalty, Merq. It is hurt. If you don’t have a vested stake then it doesn’t hurt.”
I gathered the pieces for the roof into my arms and Armise untied them, remaining quiet, letting me think. We worked for another hour in silence as the final pieces came together and the ger was completed, sheltering us from a storm I swore I could feel approaching even if Armise told me it would never hit here.
We moved the supplies and weapons from the vehicle into the ger and Armise set to work building a fire in the center while I laid out a pallet for us to sleep on. With each minute that passed in silence, with each second he gave me to think about everything he’d said to me, my frustration grew. What did he expect from me?
I finally broke. “Then what’s the point?”
He looked up from his spot building the flames and glared at me. “Of what?”
“Love,” I huffed out. “Why did you tell me? What is the fucking point if I just hurt you?”
Armise threw another igniter into the pile and flames shot up. “You remember when I said there are times when I still want to kill you…”
“Jesus fuck, Armise,” I growled. “I get it. It’s just that none of this makes sense in the context of the life we lead. There’s a clarity to war. Orders are unmuddied if you don’t think too much about them. Emotion is never part of the equation. An enemy is someone you kill and your ally is someone you protect.”
“It is never that straightforward,” he asserted.
I slumped down to the pallet, next to him. So close I could reach out and touch him, but I didn’t. “It was for
me, for many years. Shit. Until you came along.”
Armise pursed his lips and blew into the fire, sending a shower of popping sparks ascending to the circular hole in the roof, wide open to the star-filled Singaporean sky. “What do you want, Merq? Not right now. What do you want from the short years of life we probably have left?”
I couldn’t help but remember the president asking me a very similar question years ago, only minutes after I’d completed my mission of assassinating the premiere. Although those ensuing years had brought massive change in my life and to my view of the world, I was dismayed to realize my answer hadn’t changed.
I stared out the opening in the ceiling instead of meeting Armise’s always-piercing gaze. “You ask that as if I think I have tomorrow guaranteed.”
“I ask that because I know you want there to be a tomorrow. Bullshit me all you want. I know that much about you.”
I took a calculated, thought-gathering breath and leaned forward so my cheek was within inches of his and the searing heat of the fire. The coldness of Armise and the warmth of destruction. My lips were almost at his when I replied, “You know more about me than I do.”
Armise gave the most unguarded laugh I’d ever heard come from him as he rocked back on his heels and scooted over so he was pressed against my side. “I always have.”
“I want some measure of peace,” I said as I stared into the fire. “I don’t want to watch people I care about die. I want to live.” I shrugged. “And what do you want?”
“This is what I want,” he said as he put his hands behind himself and stretched his legs out. His thigh brushed against mine. “Family and home, in whatever form they come. A connection to the land. I have no need for anything else.”
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