Abysm (26 page)

Why did it have to look so…human? She stared out the viewport at the destruction she had wrought. Surreal, evanescent, not real.
So real.

It doesn’t matter.

Human. Murderer.

Him, the face, not me. It doesn’t—

‘Alex, you should try to calm down. You’re hyperventilating.’

Was she? The tightness in her chest was surely as much mental as corporeal, right?

‘It’s done and cannot be undone. Allow me to return us to the hangar.’

She tried to inhale through her nose. “No. Set down. Nearby, but…but out of the way.”

‘Set down? Why?’

“I can’t—can’t breathe in here. I need air. I need…ground beneath my feet.”

If I’m a killer now, I need to feel the blood on my hands.

ROMANE

The strikes lit up the night like a meteor storm. Exclamations rippled through the hold, but Caleb ignored them, focusing his attention on the viewport as his eyes searched the sky for the
Siyane
.

Which was absurd; he wouldn’t be able to see it. Its cloaking exceeded his cybernetically enhanced but still fundamentally human sight by a large margin.

He tracked multiple separate laser strikes, but their origin point moved and shifted. She was smart, of course she was smart. There were no active defenses here, but had there been they would not have zeroed in on her location.

An intensified stream of energy poured into a critical load-bearing junction, and the building crumbled and collapsed, sending a massive wave of dust and flame billowing outward in all directions.

Their pilot pulled up and away. “Ma’am, what should I—”

“Harper, set down in the closest intersection.”

She snorted. “Our mission is scrapped. This is for the recovery units now. Joseph, head back to base.” She muttered into her comm to confirm emergency personnel were inbound.

Caleb’s jaw clenched. “Please set down, just for a minute. You can leave me here, but I need to be on the ground.”

She studied him, suspicion in her expression, but didn’t ask why. Which was good, because he didn’t know why. Alex was in the
Siyane
—was the
Siyane
. She’d leave now, head to the spaceport or the devil knew where. But his instincts clamored in his head for him to get off the transport, now.

Alex? Answer me. Tell me where you are or where you’re going.

He got nothing. He started to falter. Maybe the spaceport offered a better choice—or maybe there was no good choice. Maybe it was all for naught. He opened his mouth to recant—

“Ma’am we’ve got movement on the periphery, left alley.”

Harper leaned into the viewport. “Somebody got out before the building collapsed. All right, Marano, you get your wish. Belay my last, Joseph, and set us down. Let’s go hunting.”

The fire grew blinding as they neared the site and settled to the ground. Caleb activated his ocular implant filter and tuned it to a hybrid night vision.

Harper barked out new orders. “Pello, Verela, swing around the other side in case they double-back or someone else bolts that way. Redale, station yourself down a block to the right. Joseph, sit tight, as Lekkas is on aerial surveillance. Odaka, with me to the left. Marano, you….”

He waved over his shoulder in her direction as he jogged down the street to the left.

Harper was good, but she was used to fighting other soldiers. OTS was many things, but it by and large was not comprised of soldiers. Terrorists were a different breed altogether. They were hotheads, ruled by a surfeit of irrational emotions and a shortage of combat awareness.

A soldier would move deliberately, keeping to cover and waiting for opportunities. A terrorist would run.

He gauged the time since the movement had been spotted and headed another block east then cut in to the next alley, blade hilt in hand. The flames became subsumed by darkness, and he switched his ocular filter to full night vision mode.

A thud—almost silent, but not silent enough—deeper in the alley gave him a target. Caleb moved quickly and far more quietly ahead. As he neared, the sounds of someone retreating at a rapid walk sharpened.

He rounded the next corner, zeroed in on the person-sized shadow and pounced.

The man was thin, slight and lacked any knowledge of defensive fighting techniques. Caleb had his face slammed into the alley wall and his arms locked in less than a second. He activated the pen light he’d acquired from the IDCC gear locker and shone it into the man’s face.

Narrow, angular features, pouty lips and hatred-filled pale, washed-out blue irises glared back at him.

Caleb flashed the young man a malevolent smirk and readied his blade. “Jude Winslow, I presume.”

The man’s eyes widened in panic at the realization he’d been outed, but Caleb didn’t give a—

“IDCC Security—you’re under arrest!”

HarperRF:  Marano, back off. Thanks for the assist, but we’ve got this.

He silenced a curse and shifted his stance to allow Harper to replace his grasp with her own, then stepped away. “All yours.”

He watched until Harper’s people had restraints fully on Winslow and a solid grip on him, then turned and left. Out of his hands, for now.

On reaching the street in front of the collapsing safe house, he found emergency personnel already on site. Fire suppressing foam already filled the air. Lights flashed and sirens wailed.

Alex did this.

She wasn’t wrong to do it.

But if it was truly her who had executed the attack, he hated it, because he’d hoped to always spare her from the kind of darkness such an act required.

If it wasn’t truly her who had done it, he had to consider the very real possibility she was gone, in all the ways that mattered.

Go to her, Caleb. She needs you.

He stopped in surprise. He wasn’t a Prevo; Valkyrie couldn’t read his thoughts. Yet now she whispered in his head at an eerily prescient moment.

Go to her where? The spaceport?

Here. At the safe house location.

What’s happening? Why is she still here?

He received no further response.

Equally emboldened and terrified, he began searching the chaos for her.

25

ROMANE

T
HE DESTROYED BUILDING REMAINED TOO HOT
and unstable for close ground rescue and recovery by the units on the scene. Scaffolding teetered in the flames, threatening to crash down any second, and smaller explosions rippled through the interior as power control units and other volatile objects succumbed to the fire.

For now, chaos reigned—the dazed, disorienting kind where no one understood quite what had happened.

But Caleb understood. He also knew it had changed everything, in ways he could only fear.

Valkyrie, where is she? Am I hunting for the ship, or her?

Silence answered him. The Artificial was rarely too busy to siphon off a few processes to respond to an inquiry, and he was forced to assume the silence was for some other reason.

He was so goddamn tired of it all.

He shouldn’t have to beg to find out where Alex was. He shouldn’t have to grovel to fucking
matter
. He shouldn’t have to scrape and claw to maintain the flimsiest hold on his status as an insider, yet still feeling as if he were an outsider the whole time.

It wasn’t supposed to have gone like this.

He almost turned around then and walked away. He’d almost convinced himself he
was
turning away when he caught sight of long tangles of burgundy hair blowing in the cinder-filled breeze.

Alex kneeled amidst the chaos, too close to the wreckage yet seemingly oblivious to the smoke and sirens and smell of burnt metal and singed flesh.

He approached without attracting her attention and crouched beside her. Blood stained her hands, and despite his anger worry flared in his chest. But to his best ability to tell, it didn’t appear to be hers. He was afraid to speculate where it had come from.

He waited.

When she finally spoke, her voice held the flat, detached tenor it had taken on so often of late. It sounded like it could be tinged in regret, but he didn’t dare hope.

“I thought if I touched the wreckage with my own hands, if I felt the blood on my skin—” she stretched a hand out, as if she assumed he
hadn’t
noticed the blood “—it might make it more real.”

“Did it?”

“No.” She lifted her hand up closer to her face. “I look at this blood, and I see its chemical composition, its cells, its proteins—hemoglobin, albumin, leukocytes, thrombocytes. I’m not viewing it through the ship’s senses, yet I’m still
in
that realm. It feels as though I’m not actually here, and neither is anyone else.

“We’re not real. We’re not even the real humans, merely copies grown in a galactic petri dish. We’re not special. Nothing but atoms, as insubstantial and ephemeral as the stellar wind.”

“You’re wrong.”

Her hand fell to her side, and she half-turned her shoulders to look at him. Her eyes were at once vacant, distant and agonizingly desolate. “Have I fucked us up beyond all repair?”

She was asking him? Had this ever been up to him?

He swallowed heavily, tasted ash on his tongue. “I just want you. Alex, I love you so much sometimes I can hardly breathe from the power of it. But I love the woman…and you’re becoming something else. Maybe it’s something better, more powerful, but it’s not the woman I know. I understand why you would seek it out, I do.

“If this is truly what you want—what you want to be—I won’t try to stop you from following this path. But I can’t continue living with these fragments, these fading shadows of what you once were, when they’re the only pieces left behind.”

“You said you’d have to be dragged away from me in chains.”

Her words hit him as cruelly as a punch to the gut. He dropped his forehead onto his palm. “I did. And I meant it, so…I’ll own that. God, it seems like yesterday and an eternity ago, all at once.” There had been fire and death that night, too, if in remembrance, not vengeance.

“If you want to hold those words against me now, somehow latch onto an imagined betrayal, it’s fine. I’ll take the hit. But I can’t stay and watch you…the amazing, remarkable woman you are…” he sucked in air and blinked past threatening tears, not even trying to pretend they were from the smoke “…disappear into the walls of the ship.

“I want—I need—all of you. Your heart. Your soul. Your incredible spirit and your wild, beautiful mind. And dammit, but I
deserve
all of you.”

She regarded him with gut-wrenching, haunting sadness. Finally she nodded in the smallest way possible. “You do.
Proshcheniye, priyazn.
”

Forgiveness, my love.
She shifted away from him and closed her eyes.

He recognized the telltale slackness in her shoulders the instant it manifested. She had retreated to the ship in her mind. Gone from this place, gone from him.

The abject rejection slammed into his chest with the force of a hurricane. He gasped reflexively, filled his lungs with foul air and stumbled to his feet.

Away. He needed to get away. From here, from anywhere.

There was a building, a wall intact across the street, and he staggered through the smoke toward it, dodging rescue equipment and waiving off several personnel who thought he was a victim.

Was he…did she…his eyes burned and bleared. He blinked repeatedly, but the blurriness only increased.

Someone could stroll by, casually slice open his chest, rip out his heart and carry it off to toss into the flames and he wouldn’t notice the difference.

Never have anything you can’t walk away from.
He should have listened to Samuel. He should have listened, and now it was so very far past too late.

He fell back against the wall of the building and let a gaping chasm of cold darkness open up and devour him whole. He didn’t have the slightest clue what he was going to do, and he didn’t particularly care. Drink himself into a permanent oblivion. Kill his way across what remained of OTS. Laugh when the Anadens found and annihilated humanity, likely without ever realizing what they were.

In her he’d found a purpose worth giving everything to. Not for fun or thrills, but because it mattered. Without her, he couldn’t remember what his purpose had once been. He’d had one before she came into his life, he was certain of it.

But what did any of it matter now? He’d fight the good fight; he didn’t know any other path. Even if part of him hoped he finally met his match along the way. He’d never stopped fighting, but now it stood to be the sole intention driving him forward.

Damn it all to hell, why had he ever dared care this much—

Thank you, Valkyrie. That was perfect. Now tear down the pathways I use to access these nodes and the neurons I use to connect to them.