Color faded from his cheeks. “That girl is not so innocent.”
“Yes, she is, James. Even after what we did, she doesn’t hate me. She doesn’t even so much as dislike you. She wasn’t frightened when I saw her.”
“You saw her?” Archon stepped back. “Where?”
“Days ago. Aurora brought her to patch Aaron up after this mercenary shredded him.”
“She what?” He blinked. “Brought her?”
“Don’t look at me like that, James.” Anna pointed at him. “I’ve no bloody idea how it worked. The two of them just popped out of thin bloody air. Ask Lauren. Stop changing the subject; what the hell did you do to me?”
He put on the calming smile again. “Everything I did, I did to protect you.”
“What did I forget?” Sparks lapped at her boots from the carpet.
Archon frowned. “Is that a threat?”
“No. I’m angry. You know it happens. Mucking about with who I am makes leavin’ me fixed starkers to the bed for anyone to find seem like nothing big at all. What were you thinking?”
Darkness came over his face. She edged backward
“You would really rather have that memory once again?” Archon took another step closer. “I could put it back, but it would leave you crawling once more into the rat-infested gutters I found you in. Whoring yourself out for drugs, dancing naked in the rain for any Tom with a spare patch to throw after you. Is that what you want, Anna? To chase scraps of false happiness like a dog going for treats? I have elevated you from that wretched existence to civilized society.” He shifted to face the window, as if looking far off into the heavens. “No, I have brought you above society.”
“This is a black zone, James. We’re not above society. We’re still in the gutters of it, hiding like those rats.”
He scowled.
“I know Blake raped me while I was zonked to the nines.” She shivered, holding back the growing lightning so desperate to erupt. “I know I killed the sodding bastard. You made Orange lie to me. I’d asked him to come up with something to delete that vid. You took my friends away.” Don’t give in to guilt. Faye has parents, it’s not your fault she’s had trouble coping. “You’ve damaged lives.”
He stared, eyes narrowing. “There is a concept known as the greater good. Few people can ever truly appreciate it. I can. I am doing what needs to be done to ensure the survival of our kind. People will suffer for it. No change comes without hardship.” His anger receded. “I merely wanted to shield you from the worst of it. You are too beautiful a person to have to hold such pain.”
“Did you leave me tied to the bed because you thought I’d enjoy it, or were you trying to remind me I belong to you? A possession. Feeling a bit threatened by Aaron?”
“Of course not.” He smiled. “You certainly enjoyed it the night prior. If I remember correctly, you requested I leave you that way overnight.”
Anna blushed, muttering, “Overnight isn’t the same as all sodding day.”
“Honestly, I lack any taste for that sort of thing. I had hoped a small negative experience might make you shy away from it.”
“Oh, you didn’t just wipe it out of my brain?” She made a sarcastic face. “Wouldn’t that have been easier?”
“Anna…” He held his arms out as if to embrace her. “I do not wish to alter the person you are. You do remember that even with that dirty little habit of yours, I tried the usual methods first. Adjusting the mind is a last resort. One I took to only after you proved too weak to resist the chemicals.”
“Umm.” She sighed. He’s got a point. He could’ve just made me forget right away. Blush spread over her face. Enough time had passed for the idea of being helpless to carry a little temptation, but the thought of James quenched the carnal embers. She lowered her gaze to the carpet, breathing in the ozone crackle of sparks shifting over her clothes. “I did need a slap in the face to come out of the place I’d let myself fall to. You pulled me back on my feet. I’ll always be grateful, and I’ll never forget what you did for me. I need some time to sort everything out. I can’t tell what’s real and what’s figments. I’m really not sure if I could love you the same way again after everything I’ve learned.”
A moment passed of silent staring. Archon at her, Anna at the floor.
“Mamoru called,” said Archon, wandering back to the desk. “Would you mind giving him a ride?”
That’s it? No protest? Not even an acknowledgment? She held back the urge to cry, unwilling to let him relish that power over her.
“He is in the city, south of here and much closer to the east.”
Anna’s voice came lifeless. “What happened in Mexico?”
“The church?” Archon scoffed. “They made themselves too much of a nuisance, funneling money to executives and board members. Bribes, mostly. I had spent months conditioning a councilman to our cause, and they went and got him assassinated. They needed to be dealt with.”
“You had them all killed?”
Archon leaned on the desk, hand poised with his glasses inches away from his head. “You would rather have done it yourself? I think not.” He slipped the spectacles on. “Those two adorable little Mexican children you got so upset about? If not for my efforts to sway Cortez before his untimely death, those two felons would have been put before a firing squad.”
Anna thought of the grungy siblings shuffling out of the cargo container, shackled like mass murderers.
“You should not feel sympathy for those hypocrites, Anna. The religious people that burned in the church cared nothing for their supposed faith. They wield it like a sword to control and harm people they dislike—even children.”
“What of Venezuela?”
Archon sighed. “Mamoru is waiting, Anna. The bothersome thing about smuggling psionics out of the ACC is that most of their citizens want to murder us on sight. To them, we are devils ready to steal their secrets and twist their memories.”
You don’t say? Anna bit her lip. “Yes, yes… I knew that.”
“I made an arrangement. We solved each other’s problems. I gave them the resistance, and I took away the bothersome psionics. Much easier to smuggle them out when the government provides the transportation.”
“You traded lives. Is a psionic’s life worth three people?”
Archon pondered. “Rather ten, but there were only so many rebels.”
She gasped.
“I see you have lost your appreciation for sarcasm.” He smiled. “I took no pleasure in it, but for the greater good.”
The way he looked at her sent a chill down her back. “James… I believe in what you are doing, but I don’t want to be someone I’m not. You’ve got the conviction to do things I’m squeamish about. Maybe they need to be done, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it, and my not liking it doesn’t mean I support you any less.”
“Fair enough.”
She pondered testing him by asking how he’d feel if she wanted to remain on Earth when they left, but decided against it. “I’ll go fetch Mamoru then.”
“Preferably not by way of Madagascar.”
“What?” Anna blinked.
He put his glasses back on and scooted up to his terminal screens. “The last time you went ‘out for a walk’ you wound up in London.”
She pursed her lips at being dismissed. After five years, she’d expected some kind of reaction to her questioning whether she could continue to love him; instead, she’d simply gotten the emotional equivalent of, ‘oh, well then.’ Did he trust she’d ‘get over it,’ or did he really not care that much?
‘The Plan’ is all that matters to him. Before anything riskier came out of her mouth, she hurried to the door.
Anna fumed on her way down the stairs and out into the tent city. People Archon had collected gave her a wide berth purely from the look on her face. She wondered how many of them thought her capable of murdering a little girl for trying to run away.
Did Archon start that rumor to keep them in line?
She looked around at fearful, suspicious, and disinterested faces. The siblings perked up and waved at her. An intact family the Syndicate had managed to extract from Mexico City had taken them in. They looked much more alive wearing clean clothes and big smiles. Their new father was on the security detail, and they sat with him in the lobby of the central tower. Granted, he’d have been about fourteen when they were born, but they didn’t seem to mind. Anna couldn’t help but grin back at them as she walked past.
A constant breeze wailed through the twisted wreckage of a distant skeletal building. Anna pulled her coat tight and hurried to the gold Halcyon-Ormyr hovercar, pausing as her hand touched the driver side door. A glimpse of something white on the back seat caught her eye, and curiosity pulled her to investigate. She opened the rear door and picked up the bundle, which unfurled to a plain child’s dress.
“What the bloody hell is that doing there?”
Its size made her think of a ten-to-twelve-year-old, which in turn made her think of Althea. Anna cast an uneasy glance at the building; moonlight left it stark white against an indigo sky. She bundled the garment around her hands and put it back where she’d found it.
“Oh, Lauren…” She stared up at the tallest of their three buildings. “What do you know that you’re not telling anyone?”
43
Threat Priority
Kate
Shouts of rage and screams of pain emanated from alleys on both sides of the abandoned road, mixed with bursts of automatic gunfire and the occasional explosion. Kate held her E-90 laser pistol in a two-handed grip, advancing toward a crude wall made of burning hovercars. Tactical armor, especially the helmet, felt heavy and confining, but not altogether bad. After twenty-five years unable to wear a stitch, she rather liked the sense of protection.
Her breathing echoed in her ears over the presence of comm chatter in the back of her consciousness. A female voice warned other units in the area of an augmented rioter moving west along City Road 1885. The floating navigation map at the right corner of her vision spawned a red dot, two miles east of her. Whenever a shadow shifted, she swiveled to aim at nothing. Her heart raced at the worry of what would happen if something shot at her.
This is a damn simulation. Why am I so nervous?
Would her body, safe in the Police Admin Center, flare hot enough to melt bullets if the computer tricked her brain into thinking she’d been shot at? Would her not-quite-awake-but-not-quite-sleeping mental state protect her from her own flames? The possibility that a simulated bullet might kill her for real took her attention from her apocalyptic surroundings.
Wait. I’m being an idiot. Requiem Excelsior didn’t make me burn down my living room.
She jumped at the sudden appearance of a yellow-mohawked man, a knife in each hand, wearing only blood and body paint. His bulging eyes locked on her as he rolled his head to the side and drew one of his blades across his chest, leaving a trail of blood.
Kate shot him in the face.
At a crunch behind her, she whirled and aimed at another man who’d been sneaking up on her, a black wire held between his hands. He leapt back from the tip of her laser pistol and ran.
“Stop, police,” Kate said, with little enthusiasm.
A comm window opened on her helmet visor, appearing as a four-foot panel a distance in front of her. Technical Sergeant Mina Hong, a head floating over blue-uniformed shoulders, frowned.
“You’re supposed to give warning before you engage. You shot the first man without identifying yourself as an officer.”
Kate smirked. “Seriously? The idiot was obviously insane. You think he’d have listened to a ‘drop the knife’ command? He just cut a ten-inch slash across his own chest and had a massive hard-on pointed at me.” She patted herself on the chest. “This is marked tactical armor. Anyone stupid enough to need to be told I’m a cop before they attack me deserves to be shot in the face.”
“It’s procedure.”
“Besides, if I took the time to warn psycho-boy, the other asshat would’ve had a cord around my throat. The giant dick waving in my face was supposed to be a distraction.”
“Hmmf.” Mina Hong vanished in a flash of glimmering pixels.
Kate crept toward her assigned sector marker, an inverted floating white pyramid hovering at the center of an intersection three blocks away. The simulation presented a riot situation in the wake of a quasi-doomsday scenario where all the various street gangs united into a militia and declared open warfare against the government. Another reason Kate felt fine about her lack of warning. These people didn’t qualify as civilian criminals at the moment—they’d technically become an enemy force.
Creaking metal attracted her aim to the left.
Two men appeared simultaneously; one climbed out from behind a nearby car, raising a bottle of flaming chemicals over his head as if to throw it at her. Down the street, perhaps sixty meters away, another man jumped out of an alley with a six-foot-long Nano sword. He swung the weapon around in a fancy display of intimidation and roared at her.
Kate disregarded the man throwing the Molotov cocktail and shot the gladiator three times in the chest. The bottle broke on her breast, covering her with flames. Kate smirked with disinterest and shot the thrower in the back as he ran away.
Everything turned white.
The overbearing glow faded to strips, which sharpened into the shape of overhead fluorescent lights. Going in an instant from full body armor to a tank top and sweat pants made her shiver. She twisted her arms out of the straps holding her to the bed so she didn’t flail out of control while in the sim, and grasped the underside of the massive interface helmet. She grunted, pushing herself down and away from it.
Mina Hong walked up to the end of her berth as she sat up to unstrap her legs. The short woman tapped her booted foot with a look of annoyance.
“You’re dead, Solomon.” She sighed. “You had an opponent at range with a melee weapon and an imminent threat to your side. You made a bad tactical choice. What kind of idiot ignores a firebomb at close range for a guy with a sword far away?”
“What kind of idiot tries to burn the pyrokinetic from hell?” Kate swung her legs off the side of the bed, in no great hurry to introduce her bare feet to a floor she expected to be icy.
“You need to learn to prioritize threats better, Solomon.” Tech Sergeant Hong tapped at a datapad while making clucking sounds with her tongue.”
“No offense, Sergeant, but the Molotov wasn’t a threat at all.”
The woman smirked. “Take fifteen. Maybe when you reattempt this course, you can pass.”
Kate jumped to the floor, advancing on Sergeant Hong while summoning a wall of flames to enshroud her like a cloak. “How’s this for a firebomb? Is this hot enough?”
Sergeant Hong yelped, and backed off. Black ash flakes danced in a cyclone of hot air.
“Tactical assessment is more than following the goddamned rulebook or jumping through specific hoops of a training sim,” yelled Kate. “It’s about knowing your capabilities, the situation, and making snap decisions. I’m more fucking worried about a sword that could cut a cyborg in half than I am a bottle of incendiary gel. He would have done more damage throwing a jar of frozen piss at me. That might’ve actually hurt me.”
Anger pushed the flames around her body from orange to blue. Mina Hong raised her hands to shield her face from the heat.
Two other training personnel as well as fourteen or so Division 1 cadets not currently immersed in virtual reality all stared. When Kate let go of her power, and the fire dissipated, they gasped at her nakedness. One man clapped.
“I feel flame,” said Kate, trying to stay calm. “It wouldn’t have burned me.” She glanced at the room and held her arms out to the sides. “What, you’ve never seen tits before?”
Everyone found things to focus on other than her.
A sound like raining flakes of glass preceded the appearance of a full-size hologram of a man in a Division 0 d
ress uniform. He looked about forty or so with short, dark hair, and a trace of a goatee ringing his mouth. Captain’s rank insignia gleamed from his shoulders. Kate disregarded her lack of clothes, stood at attention, and saluted him.
“Captain Buckley,” said Kate.
He stared at her, more in a ‘what the hell is going on’ way than a lurid one. “Officer Solomon? Has the simulation gotten out of hand?”
“Just attempting to make a point, Sir. Sergeant Hong didn’t understand an idiot with a firebomb isn’t a threat to me.”
Another training sergeant ran over with a spare jumpsuit. Kate snapped her salute to the side and accepted the offer of clothes.
“I’m sorry, Sir.” Sergeant Hong saluted. “We’re not used to dealing with Zeroes over here. The computer isn’t capable of properly representing the capabilities of psionics. You people never quite play by the rules.”
Kate pulled the jumpsuit’s silent MolWeave fastener closed from belly to throat. The garment hung a bit loose on her, but it beat nothing. Sergeant Hong glanced sideways at her, as if afraid of what she might be doing.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. Officer Solomon is one of a kind. Any other pyrokinetic we’ve seen couldn’t shrug off an attack like that. I doubt it would kill them, but it would leave a mark.” Captain Buckley seemed relieved to find Kate dressed when he looked in her direction again. “Solomon, get your gear on and get to the motor pool. Samir will assign you a vehicle.”
“What?” Kate blinked. “I haven’t been activated yet… I’m still just a train—”
“I can’t discuss specifics here. Consider yourself activated on a temporary basis.”
“Sir,” said Kate, with another salute.
She shrugged at the equally confused-looking Sergeant Hong and rushed to her locker.
Samir, in motor pool, couldn’t have been older than fourteen. His age made itself apparent in the way he kept staring at Kate’s chest. She didn’t blame him as much as the damn scientists who fiddled with her genetics.
Angel Descended (The Awakened Book 6) Page 42