by Jade Kerrion
How many more would die by their own hand if he died, out in the open, his powers unchecked by walls?
Tens? Hundreds? Thousands?
He tried to draw a deep breath, but it scarcely passed the hard knot in his throat. “Knowing what I do about suicide, why then are you surprised that I attacked? Better to kill three than allow countless others to die.”
Maya bared her teeth in a snarl. “What are these countless people—?”
“The people living in the towns and cities near Masada.” He limped to her bed. “You know what alpha empaths can do with their powers.”
“Yes. They amplify their emotions and drive their victims into suicide.”
Danyael nodded. “And when an alpha empath dies—”
“Their powers dissipate—”
“Yes, but not in the feeble way you imagine. Their empathic powers, no longer checked by psychic shields, rush out in a final, terrible tidal wave. It’s everything that happens when alpha empaths attack deliberately, and more—because it’s everything. Nothing is held back. People died when you killed Cortez and Faraji. A hundred people committed suicide when you killed two alpha empaths.”
Maya stared at him, her eyes wide. She shook her head, but Danyael tossed a tablet onto her lap. “Eighty-seven in Barcelona. Thirteen in Harare; they anticipated you and contained the damage faster.”
“That’s a lie.” Maya’s fingers trembled an inch from the tablet.
“The governments covered it up. News like that sends people into a panic, and it’s not good for mutants, clones, or in-vitros when humans panic. Did you think I would let you kill me, out in the open, and allow my empathic death throes to sweep out from Masada? No.” Danyael flung out the word like a curse. “I don’t kill willingly, Maya, but I will kill. I chose to take three lives. I damned three souls instead of risk hundreds.”
“That’s a lie…” Maya shook her head, but her voice was thin, its vehemence a shadow of its former strength.
“He lied to you. The worst thing you can do is kill an alpha empath out in the open.”
“He…” Her eyebrows drew together. “He’s suffered so much loss at the hands of an alpha empath. Why would he force that nightmare upon others?”
“Who is he, Maya? What’s his name?”
She stared at him. She gave no answer.
Yet, in her eyes, he glimpsed the faintest, merest glimmer of doubt.
“I can get answers out of Maya,” Zara assured Danyael.
“No torture, Zara. No drugs.”
She pouted. “You’re taking all the fun out of this.”
Danyael chuckled and watched her pace the breadth of his hospital room. He relaxed against the chair cushions, but grimaced when his back muscles clenched over a spasm tightening around his left hip.
Zara must have heard his breath catch. She spun around, her eyes narrowed. “You okay?”
He nodded as he shifted his weight to dig his fingers into the flesh around his hip. Danyael closed his eyes; it had always been easier to deal with the pain in the darkness, on his own. It was less crushing if he blocked out the fact that the woman he loved, who cherished strength and despised weakness, was standing in the room, watching him.
Her hand closed over his wrist.
Surprised, Danyael opened his eyes, and he found himself staring down at her.
Zara squatted beside his chair, her hand steadying his. Her other hand pressed gently against the cramping muscles in his left thigh. “It’s not getting better, is it?”
Lies were often easier than the truth. And sometimes, he realized, lies were all he had going for him. After all, they were the foundation for hope. Danyael drew a deep breath. “I’ll be all right. I just need a few minutes.”
Zara’s glare assured him that she did not believe a word of what he had said. She rose to her feet, uncoiling with feline grace. “I’ll talk to Maya.”
“No. You leave her alone. Zara, do you hear me?”
She shrugged. “If Maya’s lucky, Xin will dig up the truth before I have to tear it out of Maya.”
“Zara—”
Zara did not slam the door on the way out, but she might as well have.
Damn it. Danyael reached for his smartphone and called Xin.
“I’m still looking through the data on Virtanen,” Xin said, in lieu of hello. “It was all heavily classified. You have no idea how many favors I had to call in to get access to it. If you’re calling for answers, I don’t have them yet. The magic takes time.”
“I hope it takes less time than for Zara to lose her patience with Maya.”
“If she really wanted to kill Maya, she would have done it already—with or without your go-ahead. She’s a great deal like you that way.” Xin sounded distracted. “I’ll let you and Zara know as soon as I find anything.”
“That’s not what I called about.”
There was a slight pause on the other end, then Xin spoke, all hints of distraction gone. “Then what is it?”
“Zara’s never going to give me the straight answer on this, and I need someone who will.” He swallowed through the tightness in his throat. “I spoke to Maya, and I’ve been thinking—” Danyael clenched his other hand into a fist. He knew large chunks of his life were based on hope, mostly built on lies, but some stakes were too high. They required the truth—the raw, ugly, and brutal truth. The sharp pain in his chest almost felt like a heart attack as he forced the words out. “Do I need to come in?”
Six hours.
Danyael had told Zara to leave Maya alone—possibly because he did not trust Zara with Maya—but he did not specify for how long.
Six hours, in Zara’s opinion, was plenty of time. She had never refrained from killing someone for that long; where were the awards and applause for her restraint? Her boots tapped a brisk rhythm on the gleaming hospital tiles as she strode toward Maya’s room. She flung the door open without knocking. An approving smile flicked over her face at the two assault rifles aimed her way. The two IDF soldiers scowled at her before straightening and removing their fingers from the trigger.
“Where’s Danyael?” Maya asked.
“Resting.” Zara held out a tablet. “He told me to look for a survivor, so I turned Xin loose on it. Guess what she found?” She tossed the tablet onto Maya’s bed.
The video was fuzzy, more from a lack of quality than from age, although the scene displayed fashions and cars at least two decades old. The camera had been installed at a street corner, in front of a bank. People walked past, some in groups, others singly, each attending to his or her own business. A boy, laughing and smiling, his hands held by a woman and a man—his mother and his father—passed in front of the camera.
Something changed. Invisibly. Irrevocably.
The boy stood, bewildered, as his mother and father curled in upon themselves, their faces marked with anguish. The wails of the people on the street sounded like banshees screeching.
The dying began. People ran into the street and threw themselves in front of vehicles. The man charged into a brick wall, and pounded his head repeatedly into it. The child, his expression panicked, grabbed his father, but could not stop him. The man crumpled, his forehead a bloodied mass, his eyes fading into blankness. The boy spun around. “Mama!” She had picked up a knife from an outdoor cafe table. “No, Mama!” The boy hurled himself at her. She swiped him away, the knife tearing a gash in the boy’s upper arm. Then she stabbed herself, the knife plunging in and out of her chest until she reeled to the ground.
Utterly silent, the boy stared at her as death claimed all around him, as death claimed all but him.
Zara’s voice cut in. “Twenty-five years ago, Fredrik Virtanen, an attack-class alpha empath committed suicide. The resulting psychic backlash killed everyone within five miles, except for Johannes Halla. He watched his mother and father die. They committed suicide, compelled by the emotional death throes of an alpha empath.”
Zara continued. “Johannes, who goes by John, is thirty-thr
ee years old now. He’s a traveler, something of a vagabond. His last known location was in Jakarta, Indonesia, but that was two years ago. He’s still believed to be somewhere in Asia. No one knows exactly how or why he survived Virtanen’s suicide.” Zara tilted her head. “But you do, don’t you?”
Maya ran her fingers lightly over the screen. “No…” she breathed. “He told me his parents, driven insane by Virtanen’s power, committed suicide, but he didn’t describe…this. He wanted to spare me.” Her head snapped up; her upper lip pulled back in a snarl. “Alpha empaths are a curse. No child should have to bear witness to this.”
Zara flipped her wrist dismissively. “You need to get out more. Every day, children watch their mothers get beaten and killed by their fathers, then watch their fathers turn the guns on themselves. This is not new news, Maya, and none of it requires the goading of an alpha empath.” She glanced at the screen. “I think it’s fascinating that John survived. Danyael thinks John is an alpha telepath. I don’t agree.”
Maya shook her head. “John’s not a psychic. Even if he were, he would have no influence over me. I know what is real, unlike you, Zara.” She sneered. “You can’t tell real love from something Danyael invented.”
Was that supposed to be an insult? Maya clearly needed to know her enemies better. Zara smirked. “Oh, I’m fairly certain I would have felt nothing if Danyael hadn’t loved me first, but I know the love will endure since it’s anchored in him, not me. He does not love easily, but he loves completely.” She leaned toward Maya with a conspiratorial smile and a whisper reserved for slumber party confidences. “If you’ve never been worshipped by an alpha empath, you’re missing out.”
Zara straightened, delighted by the chagrin that passed over Maya’s face. But there was something else in Maya’s eyes, something that Zara recognized on the deepest level. She gambled on it. “Danyael may have inspired love where none existed, but at least the man I love didn’t lie to me.”
Maya stared at Zara, her eyes wide.
Zara glimpsed a flicker of vulnerability. She seized the hilt of the blade and twisted it. “John knew what the death of an alpha empath would do to people; he lived through it. He knew how you felt about suicide and seized upon your hatred of alpha empaths. You’re a talented enough assassin to have done the job correctly in a contained space. Just Cortez. Just Faraji. No collateral damage. But John lied to you. He set you up to unleash not just death, but suicide. A hundred people committed suicide because he lied to you. A hundred souls are damned because you believed him.”
Maya’s fists crumpled the sheets. “No, that’s not true.”
Zara tapped on the tablet. “The hundred suicides are facts. That they’re the result of an alpha empath’s death throes are facts. That you killed those alpha empaths is a fact. The only question is whether the buck stops with you, or whether someone else who knew was really responsible.” She shrugged. “At least you don’t have a soul. When Judgement Day comes around, you don’t have to answer for the hundred souls you tore apart the way you tore your own apart.” Zara picked up the tablet and turned to leave the room. She paused at the doorway and glanced over her shoulder. “You claim John has no influence on you, and your inbred assassin cynicism is firmly in place, but I wonder how he won your trust. Did he first win the trust of your friends? Aaron, Levi, Ben? Did their enthusiastic, unwavering support of John—”
The dawning horror in Maya’s eyes confirmed the precision of Zara’s attack.
“They’re psychically shielded against telepathic influence, aren’t they?” Zara asked. Maya’s eyelashes flickered. Yes. “But emotions are visceral, and alpha empaths can channel emotions past psychic walls through touch.” Zara’s thoughts spun, recoiling from the implications, but her voice remained calm. “We may have more in common than we believed, Maya. We’ve both fallen in love with alpha empaths.”
10
“Impossible,” Xin’s voice snapped so loudly that Zara had to hold her smartphone away from her ear. “There can’t be another alpha empath who hasn’t been discovered. John Halla is thirty-three, Zara. He can’t have stayed under cover for all these years.”
Zara paced the length of the empty corridor outside of Danyael’s hospital room. “He was eight when his parents died. Presumably, he had a happy childhood and avoided the trauma and abuse that lands up killing most alpha empaths before they make it past toddlerhood. At eight, he might have had an inkling of his powers, or perhaps not, but either way, he had enough emotional control to keep his empathic powers under wraps. He was able to persuade the cloned Sicarii to hunt down all other empaths.”
Xin sighed. “The Sicarii—cloned or not—don’t need a whole lot persuasion to go off the deep end. Remember Masada?”
“Maya believes that Eleazar ben Ya’ir might have been an alpha empath too. The suicide was compelled.”
“Are you kidding me? People need to start owning their actions instead of blaming every bad decision they’ve ever made on an alpha empath.”
“Sometimes, the alpha empath is responsible,” Zara said coolly.
“Most of the time, not,” Xin retorted. “How is Danyael doing?”
“Resting.”
“He didn’t sound good.”
Zara frowned. “He called you?”
“He asked if he needed to come in. He actually asked if the safest thing for everyone was if he were locked away, sealed up forever in a place without windows or doors.” Xin’s voice cracked. “Do you have any idea what it did to me to hear him ask that?”
“I…can imagine.”
“Whatever Maya said to him crushed him. Never mind that he saved thousands of lives by killing the Sakti terrorists on July 4th. He thinks their deaths are his fault. He believes it’s his fault, and he’s going to punish himself for it.”
“He already does. The nightmares…the memories wake him every night.”
“It’s far worse than the nightmares, don’t you get it? Danyael’s fought so hard for his tiny sliver of a normal life…but he volunteered today for imprisonment—not just until Maya and whoever hired her is stopped—but imprisonment for life. Life entombment. He’s lost ground, and every moment, he’s losing more of it.”
“I know.”
“Whatever plan you have to save him from himself, it’s time to execute it.”
“I don’t have a plan,” Zara snarled. “Danyael doesn’t follow the plan. He never does.”
“Then find John Halla. Stop him. I’ll put the pressure on Atheq. We’ll get the Sicarii data, identify all the rogue clones, and I can turn the council loose. The mutants have them outclassed. We’ll lock all of them down, and buy Danyael the breathing room he needs to stabilize himself.”
“I’ll be all right,” Danyael’s voice cut in.
Zara looked up sharply. He stood by the door of his hospital room. His eyes were shadowed, as much from grief and guilt as exhaustion. He shifted his weight, the movement slow and obviously difficult, but he managed a smile.
“I’ll talk to you later,” Zara told Xin and disconnected the call. She stood. “You should be resting, Danyael.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“How much did you hear?”
Danyael shook his head. “Something about me not following a plan.” He managed a slight smile, but its warmth was real. He limped forward to join her in the corridor. “I didn’t even know we had a plan.”
“John Halla is an alpha empath.”
Danyael’s eyes widened. “What?”
“I know you assumed he was an alpha telepath, and that his psychic shields kept him alive. Xin didn’t think psychic shields held up against an attack-class alpha empath, and asked me to probe further. Maya confirmed it. He swayed the Sicarii through empathy, not telepathy. His nascent empathic powers, fueled by his happy childhood, kept him alive in the face of Virtanen’s suicide and the self-destructive emotions that followed.” Zara looked furious. “There’s another alpha empath out there, and he’s murdering all the
other alpha empaths.”
“But…why?” Danyael asked. “If he’s trying to make the world safer by ridding it of all empaths, then what about him?”
“Exactly,” Zara snapped. “What can alpha empaths do that only alpha empaths can stop?”
Danyael considered her question for a few moments. “Nothing,” he said finally. “There’s nothing we can do that a few well-placed alpha telepaths or telekinetics can’t shut down.”
“But you’ve told me that emotions are more visceral than thought.”
“Yes, but solid psychic shields or telekinetic walls can contain them.”
“Maybe they can contain you. You’re a defense-class empath. What about John? Is he attack- or defense-class?”
Danyael inhaled sharply. “I don’t know. There’s no way to tell from the recording or without any evidence of what he can do.”
“Will telepaths and telekinetics be able to shut down an attack-class alpha empath?”
“I don’t know. Cortez and Faraji were both defense-class empaths. There are no attack-class alpha empaths that we know of.”
“So, John is either a defense-class alpha empath, or we’re all in deep shit.”
“Right,” Danyael acknowledged with a nod of his head.
“We have to find him.”
Danyael nodded.
“And we can’t kill him.”
Danyael nodded again.
“Not until we know if he can be contained,” Zara said. “But we don’t know, for a fact, how screwed up he is.”
Danyael glanced at the tablet Zara held, the last frame of the video frozen on the horror and denial on the face of an eight-year-old child. “You can’t live through an experience like that and not curse all alpha empaths.” The regret in his voice confirmed that he intended the words as much for himself as for John.
A distant, rhythmic sound thumped against glass.
Zara’s eyes narrowed. Instinct responded faster than coherent thought. “Get down!” Zara pulled Danyael flat to the ground as bullets shattered the glass windows in his room. Most of the bullets thudded into the far wall, but others whizzed out through the open door, into the corridor. The sunlight pouring through the windows vanished into shadow, blocked out by the familiar sleek shape of a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk.