Z stayed silent, closing his eyes shut as he heard Kessia sigh. Then, suddenly, she thrusted the blade into the opposite side of his upper chest, creating a mirror image of his previous injury. This time, however he was prepared, and he stayed silent through it, even as she slid the blade in even deeper, slower, twisting it a little more, though tears sprung to his eyes.
“Brave, foolish, mortal.” Kessia said, carefully setting the blade to the side, almost admiringly. “We’ll get an answer out of you.”
“The syringe, General?” someone from the side asked, though Z couldn’t even move to see who it was, white spots still danced in his vision as his chest heaved with laboured breaths.
“Not yet, Rogan. Maybe after I visit everyone, if we have time before the signing, we might be able to test some new serums out, but until then, I want Z to feel a different kind of pain. Beat him until he’s black and blue, and let me know the second something comes out of his mouth. I’ll make my visits to everyone else in the meanwhile,” she said, looking positively gleeful at the prospect of torturing new people.
“No,” Z breathed, as he was hauled to his feet, guards with unrecognizable faces cutting through the rope that held his feet in place. He needed to get to Kessia, plead her to continue with him and not hurt the others, but he barely had enough energy to stand on his own two feet with dignity, let alone crawl to Kessia and bargain with the Immortale Head of Government. “Please, don’t,” he whispered, but it was to nothing more than empty air, as Kessia walked out.
Then the first of the fists connected with his face, leaving Z with no easier choice but to surrender to a type of pain he had never dreamt imaginable.
Fifty-Eight
STEL found herself tied to a wall when she came to. Her vision was blurred and confusion mugged her thoughts. Where am I?
Jan’s unusually wide eyes as he ran off. Immortales swarming the palace. Hot embers consuming the one home she had built within the past weeks, heat fanning her tear-streaked face. The ship splayed with the royal emblem, the ship Jax was boarding to sign the Treaty. Being so powerless. Slipping into unconsciousness as they took her to Elix.
Wait. She was being held captive on Elix. Realizing the position she was in, she abruptly pulled back from the rope bounding her wrists, and released a howl of pain as her raw skin broke against the coarse ropes. The struggle had most definitely drawn blood.
Unfortunately, her moving and cry of pain proved to her captors that she was conscious, and beam of light suddenly shone on her, a stark difference to the darkness of the room. Eyesight already hazy, the spotlight did no favours to her vision; in fact, it only disoriented her further.
Disoriented herself to the point that, even though she knew who it was, she couldn’t make out the General, even as she felt Kessia’s metal glove push her chin up.
“Darling Stel… or should I say, Arleyene? It’s been a long couple of weeks without you, you know?”
“You know me. I can’t resist a party.” Kessia ignored her, continuing on.
“The resemblance is striking, really. But I knew from day one. Your performance was perfect. Too perfect, really. I was expecting some character flaw; Arleyene always picked up some habits from her character of the month. But you, my dear. You were even better than her,” she crooned, trailing a cold, metallic-cased finger up Stel’s cheek, drawing a trail of goosebumps in its wake. Stel pressed her eyelids shut, attempting in vain to swallow down her trepidation. “You are more than her.”
“Should I be honoured?”
“Stel, you would be a magnificent Immortale. You have the deep sorrow inside you, and the power and force, to get what you want. Your sister would be cured in a heartbeat. You have seen what facilities we have here. We have the cure. Fallon can live forever if you choose to. You can live forever.”
“You have great informants,” Stel tried to keep up her extravaganza, but she could hear the pathetic break in her voice, the one that showed just how tempted she was.
“None as great as you would be. Why are you still fighting alongside them? You know that they’re going to lose, I can see that in your eyes. Why do you fight alongside those pathetic friends, if you can even call them that?” Stel’s nails dug into her palms as she reminded herself that these were just words, and they meant nothing. Worthless. Meaningless. But there was still that little nagging voice in her head telling her that—shut up. “They betrayed you, Stel.”
Her eyes flew open.
“My friends are the people that want the best for me. All you do is play at your manipulative games. We will win, Kessia. And I will pay my life, to see the look on your face when you realize that you were the one to lose. So come on. Take out your best gloves and try and intimidate me. I swear to you, I will not break.”
Stel was so content with the smug look on Kessia’s face falling, that she could easily shove down the feeling that maybe, maybe, the cunning Immortale General was right. But even the sudden grim satisfaction couldn’t stop Stel from noticing the murderous glint in Kessia’s otherwise rather pretty baby blue eyes. “Very well; you had a choice.”
She turned and walked away briskly, her heels click click clicking, against the tile floors. She hit a switch, and bright fluorescent light flooded the room. “You see Stel, I learned that you don’t get information from cutting a person open. You get it by cutting,” she hit another switch, “their friends open.”
And there she was. In a glass room across from Stel, Celine was caged up in heavy manacles like a rabid animal under confinement. She was hooked up to a machine and was chained to some sort of threatening looking mechanism. Stel felt her eyes blow up wide at the sight of her friend, frail and bloody from her own torture session. “Wha-what-wait.”
Kessia stopped, giving Stel an all too innocent look. “What was that? Breaking?”
Stel hated the way Kessia had complete control over her, hated the way that the corners of the General’s mouth turned up in malice and amusement, hated at what mercy she was at. But what Celine was hooked to didn’t look friendly in the slightest, and she was already in such a bad condition…
Stel caught movement out of the corner of her eye. Celine shaking her head fervently, begging her to not say anything, telling her that she could do this; though her pained expression told Stel otherwise. The latter swallowed, choking on the words that she knew she should say and the words she wanted to, the opposing ends conflicting, forming a lump in her esophagus.
Gritting her teeth and clenching her eyes shut, she managed to spit out, “Never”, and although she didn’t see the look on Kessia’s face, she could hear the growl from her, and could imagine the snarl that would paint her features with distaste. But it wasn’t the wrath contorting Kessia’s face that Stel was hiding from, rather than the weak smile that she knew Celine would be wearing, her face betraying the exhaustion, fear, and pain that she was feeling. Stel couldn’t bear to see what she was doing to Celine.
She couldn’t bear to see Celine’s face when Stel had just agreed to be a murderer.
“You chose this, Stel. Remember that.” There was a beep, and although curiosity coursed through her veins, itching to know what was happening, she kept her lids firmly shut. “How it works is that your lovely friend here,” Kessia spat, her voice curling in distaste at the word, “is on a specific machine that will require something quite simple from her. Now knowing of all the missions that you go on, I thought this shouldn’t be a problem. Running isn’t too tough, is it?”
Stel’s eyelids flew open again, knowing exactly where this was heading. She didn’t even care about Kessia’s intimate knowledge of their missions. She cared about Celine and this apparently simple torture session she would be put through. She knew Fallon’s struggles with her heart following Scorchen, and she could imagine what Celine would be going through.
Kessia smiled, gratified at how easily she managed to get to Stel. “That’s right. The second she stops running, an electrical shock will pass through her. The s
peed at which she runs and the voltage that passes through her body will increase each time she fails-”
“She’s wearing manacles,” Stel reasoned, voice becoming desperate.
Kessia only shrugged, “She’ll have to make end meet.”
“No. I’ll tell you what you want to know. That’s what you want, right? Information?” Stel asked, her voice betraying her. She couldn’t do this. Forget all those sessions of training and duty and honour because this was human life, and Stel refused to tamper with that, especially when said life belonged to Celine Hollingsworth.
Those blue, blue eyes didn’t lose any of their malice.
But Kessia did press the button again, the whirring of the machine coming to a halt. “Well, Stel, since you put it so nicely, I’ll give you an answer.” Her heartbeat was crashing in her ears, the roar of blood pounding behind her eardrums. She was a traitor, a- “No.”
Wait, what?
Kessia’s grin only spread wider at the confusion on Stel’s face. “I wanted you to join me willingly, Stel. I wasn’t lying when I said you had potential. You do—or rather—did. You sacrificed that, and now it’s time to pay the consequences. I will get an answer out of you Stel; one that is not perfectly crafted lies forced out from between your teeth. And answers don’t come without suffering, and because I have an important meeting to get to, why don’t we get this answer a little faster by increasing the suffering?” She pressed another one of the many lit-up buttons on her remote, and the machine jolted back into life, and the whirrings and sounds of the mechanics seemed to be much faster than before.
And then Celine’s legs started to pump, back and forth, and although Stel couldn’t hear anything on this side of the glass, she could only imagine the panting and wheezing and inability to breathe that was going on over there.
Stel screwed her eyes shut again, pressing them shut to the point that it hurt. She hadn’t been this resolute on closing her eyes since she was a child, freshly on the streets, holding her baby sister in her arms, pretending that it all was a nightmare, and when she would open her eyes again, it would all be gone. But when she did, she was shot back into the reality of dusty streets with rags on the side of the building, cowering in a ball to stay as warm as possible.
She had wasted her first venz that she begged for by tossing it into a sewer, pretending that it was a fountain and that she would get whatever she wished for just like those princesses from the Second Era storybooks that were somehow salvaged. But when she realized that the streets were her life from then on, she quickly learned to keep her few possessions close and her venz closer, and the secrets of light-fingers and walking by the right people at the right time.
A sharp fingernail prodded at her eyelids, pressing against the delicate skin. “Open your eyes, Stel.”
Gritting her teeth together and locking in her jaw, she merely squeezed them shut even tighter. The light breath of Kessia ghosted the back of her neck, the hairs standing on end, “Where is it?”
The sound of the machine steady thrumming was sending her into a quandary, her thoughts louder and more twisted together than they had ever been. Where is it, where is it, where is it?
Her taught principals and learned morals clashed together, her chest tight with guilt as she echoed, “Where is what?”
Kessia clicked her tongue in disapproval, though the sharpness on Stel’s eye had been lifted. “Impertinence won’t get you anywhere, Stel.” The girl in question had opened her mouth to retract her statement, to get on her knees and beg for a forgiveness beyond what was left of her tattered dignity, but the sound of the button made her bite her tongue. Too little, too late.
“Let’s try this again, Stel. Where is it?”
Her dignity was blown to nothing now, dust scattered on the unforgiven ground of Elix. Tears fell from her closely pressed lids, sobs wracking her body. Whereisitwhereisitwhereisit? “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“As talented of a liar you are, you need to know which ones to tell. But I’ll amuse you. The Elixir, my dear. The stolen goods.”
“I didn’t steal anything,”
“Funny. Just so you know, I have soldiers searching every square inch of the palace. They will find it, and when they do, you’ll be wishing that you spoke the truth much faster than you are spitting out these lies,” The thought of Jan and the hidden cellar popped into Stel’s mind, her unsteady heartbeat repeating a prayer for him, for Celine, Z, and all of NNR. “Rogan.” Kessia barked to whom Stel assumed was one of the guards standing by. “Open the door, the glass, and leave.”
“Genera-”
“That’s your order, Rogan.”
“Yes, General.”
“What are you doing?” Stel asked, pulse quickening as the metal screeched open, the door ajar to let in a stream of heavenly light that looked like liquid freedom. The guard—Rogan—moved to a button on the wall, indecipherable from the rest, and pressed it, allowing the glass to roll down. “What is happening?” she asked again, a little more frantic as he left the room, and Stel could hear Celine’s gasps.
“As it turns out, we have less time than expected. The signing’s soon, and I would hate to be late. Answer the question, and you get to walk free. I’ll leave this room, and you can get yourself out of here. I won’t stop you. But I need an answer.”
Stel pressed her chapped lips together, her wrists stinging and heart stuttering with the promise of freedom. Stel was a survivor. She scrapped herself off of the streets from running and lying and stealing. She worked for herself and she now had a promise of freedom-
No.
She wasn’t alone anymore. She was on a team. (a team that sent you on a death mission, and have done nothing but lie to me and make me lie for them, a voice of doubt nagged her.)
She said nothing, and Kessia sighed, pressing the button on her remote once more, except this time, Stel could hear the faint breathing of Celine, fading and fighting. As much as Stel wanted to look away, she kept her eyes fixed on Celine. It was her choice to let her suffer, and now she would see the result.
Suddenly, Celine paused, the machine halting as she fell to her knees, weakly sputtering up what Stel knew to be blood. She had seen Fallon suffer and now, seeing Celine like this…
Kessia arched an eyebrow, thumb moving to hover over another button. “Whoops. This means an electrical shock will be sent through her body.”
“No.” Stel breathed, mouth open in disbelief.
Kessia just smiled, pressing the button with a finality that extinguished any hope for Celine Hollingsworth surviving if Stel Hathaway didn’t say anything.
There was a scream, sobs, and uneven inhales, Celine greedily sucking in air that she needed to survive, and Stel’s eyes fluttered shut. Because no matter how much Stel had seen, she wasn’t strong enough to witness Celine being murdered before her eyes because of a stupid question.
Fallon. She didn’t even know how her older sister was a liar. How she was a thief. To Fallon, Stel was the sun; brilliant and right and a hero. But Stel was far from any of those, but she was not a murderer. (the image of a bullet slipping into the forehead of some innocent human from the barrel of the gun in her hands came to Stel’s mind, and the feeling of how easy it was, but she pushed that from her mind.)
She had blood on her hands, and that one death was enough for her conscience. But she was not going home to Fallon with the blood of Celine Hollingsworth on her hands—not today.
Celine Hollingsworth would not die because of her.
“It’s in the palace,” she all but shouted out, guilt and relief choking her immediately afterwards. She shot a quick look at Celine—not more than a second because she wasn’t that strong yet—and the look on her face told her that her decision, no matter how wrong it was, was right.
There were tears on Celine’s cheeks, her eyes pressed shut, and her face was in a pained expression. Because she knew as much as Stel did, how much she hated to be the reason that information was
being leaked to the Immortale General, but how much she needed this to end.
“It’s in the palace?” Kessia repeated, briefly pressing a button that made the whirrings stop. Out of the corner of her eye, Stel could see Celine crumple down, but that wasn’t her main concern right now because Kessia had a murderous glint in her eye (and try as she might, Stel wasn’t selfless). “Go on.”
“It’s hidden under a floorboard in the West Wing of the palace. I would give specifics, but I haven’t been in the palace long enough to know rooms all that well,”
“I wouldn’t worry if I were you. You’ve been so very helpful. A deal’s a deal, so I best be on my way and see if you can make it out of your bonds.” She made a move towards the door, but Stel spoke up before she could disappear from view.
“They burned the palace down. Your men. Set the whole damn place on fire, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the Elixir was gone by now,” Stel stated with satisfaction, remembering the heat fanning on the back of her neck. Something in Kessia froze, her eternally youthful face stilled with a look of horror.
“Weslin,” she barked, face still screwed up in horror and surprise. A guard not as meek as the other one, appeared, bowing his head reverently before his General. “Did Captain Netherwell burn down the palace by any chance?”
“General, I-”
“I asked you a question and I demand a direct answer, Weslin!” she yelled, her voice growling at the end.
“Yes, General.”
Kessia’s eyes were igneous, her mouth thinned out. “Very well. Your current job is dismissed from your duty. Your next assignment is killing the Captain and all those who were involved in the operation.”
The guard paled. “They are my superiors. To kill them-”
“Is what you’re instructed to do by your General,” she coolly finished for him. “Otherwise, you will have your own public execution with the traitors. Dismissed.”
The Reformation Page 44