Powerless (13 page)

This station was worn and would have appeared to any citizen to be a hold-over from the past, but I could see the places where cameras had been placed. I could hear the almost indistinct hum of a shield that protected the structure from attack by sonic weapons. And neither of those characteristics would be present in an ordinary structure.

We entered the stone building and I had to duck to make it under the weather-beaten frame. Neveed went to the left, opened the first door we came to and held it for me.

I didn’t make eye contact with him when I slipped past. Yeah, it was the coward’s way out, but I wasn’t going to appear as if I cared about his coldness. Apparently he and I were back to this asshole posturing with each other. I was relieved. This type of relationship with Neveed was infinitely safer.

Of fucking course, that’s when I felt Neveed’s hand on my arm.

I stopped in place and lifted my eyes to his.

“What happened back there… I’m not going to be vindictive about it. But I’m not going to pretend like it didn’t happen either.”

I searched his features for any indication that he was lying. “You sure about that?”

“I am. You and I? We have history. I know you well enough to listen around what you were telling me and realise that you being a dick means you don’t want to hurt me. It would be easy for me to say that I don’t fucking understand your obsession with him, but I do. Too well. Above all of the bullshit between us, though, I consider you a friend. And while I’m more than happy to go back to our old ways of ignoring that the other person exists, I also tend to think that’s all a bit fucking pointless. I’m not going to try anything with you and you’re not interested in anything from me. So let’s be mature for once instead of emotionally stunted and just treat each other like comrades. Brothers in arms. Maybe one day, friends again.”

I tried to find any hint of the desperate man I’d seen on the island who had ripped his heart open for me. But that was a side of Neveed I’d never seen before and expected I never would again.

“Friends with side action?” I replied.

Neveed’s eyebrows shot up and his hand gripped me tighter then a slow smile spread across his face. “You’re making a joke. Shit, Merq.” Neveed chuckled. “Okay. This I can do. But no side action, and no front action. I got your back. Just in a non-sexual front lines kind of way. We’re getting too old for this surreptitious shit.”

It was possibly the first thing Neveed and I had been able to agree on in over two decades. “Okay.”

Neveed clapped me on the shoulder and the door clicked shut behind me, leaving me alone.

The room was just as sparse as the exterior. Rough stone, no windows and no decorations adorning the walls.

At least there was some sort of air purification because it wasn’t hellishly hot. I swiped my brow and licked my lips. My mouth was already dry from the change in humid ocean air to the aridness of this land.

In front of me, there was a table that appeared to be cobbled together from pieces of metallic shrapnel. The edges of it were rusted and jagged—just as lethal as a knife. The two chairs—set on opposite sides—were made of a white polymaterial that reminded me of home. And on the desk sat three chips—the ice blue of transport, the green of comm and the placid yellow of a tracker. This had to be the President’s office.

I sat in the chair that put my back to the door. Every time I moved, the chair moved with me, adjusting to the curve of my back and the placement of my legs. I leant back and put my left ankle over my right knee, trying to appear casual. Which I definitively was fucking not.

It didn’t matter that the President and I had a history that was more familial than contractual. The last time I’d seen him he had been dragging me out of a surge den.

And before that, one of his elite private guards had accused him of abandoning his own people in lieu of preserving his role as leader of the Revolution.

Before I had time to contemplate either of those things for too long, I heard the door swing open and went to push myself up.

“Please don’t stand,” the President’s voice came from behind me. “It’s nice not to have to do the ceremonial bullshit for once. Welcome to the DCR, Merq. You want something to drink?”

“No. Thank you,” I answered, although my voice was thick from a need for water.

“How about a pistol? Or perhaps you prefer a sonicpistol?”

He sat down in his desk chair, his face unemotional.

“What?”

The President opened a drawer and pulled out a heavy, ornate gun. He set it on the desk with a clunk. Then he reached back into the drawer and extracted a white sonicpistol and set it next to the gun. His gaze flitted casually between the two weapons then to me. “Neveed tells me you don’t want to fight. So you may as well take this.” He planted one finger on the grip of the sonicpistol and slid it across the desk at me. “You don’t have to load the bullet and I won’t have anything to clean up. Pull the trigger and it’s done. Take the sonicpistol, Merq, and make your decision.”

I was shocked into silence, my body going deathly still, but my heartbeat thumping staccato in my ears, heat flaring in my cheeks.

The President sat with his hands clasped on the table, not breaking his challenge to me.

“You want me to kill myself?” I finally croaked out in a near whisper.

“I’m simply giving you the choice.”

And he didn’t say anything else.

I leant forward, the chair moving with me, cradling my body with the adjustment, offering me comfort I neither felt nor wanted. “I don’t understand.”

“You weren’t built for the fight, Merq. You are the fight. And if you refuse to come back to it you may as well be dead.”

I blanched at the directness of his statement and the coolness with which he’d delivered it.

The President continued, “You and I have rarely talked of that which is outside operational details. Maybe it’s time we did.”

“Fucking talking,” I scoffed, and eased back in my chair. “Everyone wants me to talk or to talk at me. What the fuck could you have to say to me that I haven’t heard phrased ten different ways in the last two months?”

The President gripped his fingers into a tight fist but gave nothing else away in his demeanour. “Do we need this?” He tapped his blunt nails against the sonicpistol.

“No,” I replied without hesitation.

He slid both weapons off the table and into that unseen drawer then grated it shut. “Then let’s talk business.”

I prepared for him to address the attack on the bunker or my surge addiction or to pump me for details on how my training was progressing, but he skipped over all of it, as if the last nine months hadn’t happened.

“There is a reason I encouraged you to go after the Committee members before Ahriman, Merq. Dictatorship isn’t power by one person. In order to maintain absolute power there has to be an inner circle of people whose interests and funding are tied to the agenda of keeping that one person as the sole decision maker. There are rules that must be manipulated. Governance issues that must be addressed and altered so that it appears as if the average citizen still has a say in their daily lives—when in reality, millions have willingly ceded all control to a small group of highly motivated individuals.”

I struggled for a moment to catch up, to settle back into the well-worn pattern of my briefings with the leader of the Revolution, but it only took seconds for my brain to make the shift and I felt myself easing into a battle-ready mindset that had been absent for much too long.

Fuck. Maybe that was the President’s goal all along.

The man could have been a PsychHAg with how easily he could manipulate me.

And yet, I could only feel relief that with all that had changed there were some aspects of my life that were unalterable.

I ran over his words again as I took a deep breath, centring myself and sliding back into the familiar rhetoric of the cause. “I get it. Can’t say that I’ve ever thought about it that way, or in that much detail, but I understand why you wanted the Committee members dead. You’re aware that at one time Armise was set to be Ahriman’s second?”

“I’m aware. But you speak as if that’s past and not present. What do you know?”

“Only what he told me.” I didn’t feel the need to add that I was doubting everything Armise had ever said to me. “Neveed updated me on the intel coming from Singapore.”

“Good. You’re going to have to take Armise out, too. Just like all of the Committee members and Ahriman. I’m sorry, Merq. I honestly didn’t expect it to come to this.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve received that objective.”

“But it’s the only time when successfully completing that objective is unavoidable.”

“I have no ties to him anymore,” I reassured the President, practiced deceit allowing the lie to slip effortlessly past my lips.

“Like you don’t have any more ties to Neveed?”

I pulled my piercing on my lip between my teeth, remembering the feel of Neveed’s mouth on mine. “How much did he tell you?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?”

“If he hadn’t, I just had to watch the aircomm feed to catch up.”

“You were monitoring me?” I spat out. Although I knew I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“You thought I wouldn’t have eyes on you?”

I covered my mouth and rubbed my fingers over my chapped bottom lip. I should have known every move I made would be watched. I’d been lax. Thinking that they had relegated me to that island because they—the President—didn’t expect me to make it back to active service. “Fuck,” I ground out, thinking about last night and just how far I had gone with Neveed. How much we had said to each other that I didn’t want anyone else to hear. Just how naked I had been—and not just physically. “How much did you see?”

“You just need more practice,” he quipped in a perfect mimic of Neveed’s words to me after our morning training session. Then all humour was gone from his face, “And I’m uncomfortably aware of a conduct breach I thought two of my smartest soldiers wouldn’t attempt.”

“Goddammit,” I swore under my breath then remembered who I was sitting in front of. I added, “Sir. Has anyone else—?”

The President interrupted me. “Only I had access to that feed.”

“Let’s keep it that way. It’s done.”

“Maybe on your side it is. But I’ll address any remaining fallout with my General. More importantly, I don’t like it when you lie to me, Merq. Your feelings about Armise are unresolved at best. If you’re coming back to the cause then I need to know you will be able to kill Armise Darcan when the time comes.”

I stared at the chips sitting innocuously on the table and considered what he was asking of me. I thought about the guns the President would willingly hand over if I wanted to end everything right now. I thought about the ways Armise was still connected to me, how not having him by my side was abnormal. How it set me off-kilter. Off my game and unsteady. As if that self-doubt had been Armise’s goal all along. I considered just how fucking intertwined my life had been with Armise’s over the last eighteen years—half of my life—and came to the sickening realisation that it was likely I had been manipulated by Armise from the beginning.

The President was offering me purpose once again, a meaning behind the life I wasn’t willing to give up. And if that life led me to taking Armise’s? I’d always known it would come to this point.

I took my time contemplating it all, because that was the only way the President would know that I wasn’t just spitting out an answer I thought he wanted to hear.

I took a deep breath and answered him honestly, “I can do it.”

The President simply nodded.

And just like that, I became a soldier once again.

“There’s talk of a meeting of the leaders of the five countries to discuss diplomatic solutions and review the ground rules of warfare. The usual unproductive jawing of activists that have too much time and heart and not enough sense. They’re calling it the Council of Five.” The President rolled his eyes. “Franx has it in his head that we can end this war through peaceable means since we did it once before. The deluded prime minister seems to have forgotten that it took three hundred years the first time around. He also believes the UU will remain untouched if the government refuses to pick a side.”

What Franx, the prime minister of the UU, failed to realise was that this fight—unlike the Borders War—wasn’t about land or country affiliation. It was a social movement. Crossing boundaries and ethnic groups. The increasing stratification of our planet had more to do with basic human rights than it did about affiliation to a governing body or defence of a heritage.

“The people of the UU won’t stand for that,” I said with surety.

“I know. He’ll learn.”

“So this meeting—this Council of Five—will either Grimshaw or Ahriman be there?”

“Won’t happen. Only the legitimately ‘elected’ five heads of state will be in attendance. So Shio Pearce will be attending on behalf of Singapore. This will be a failed attempt. Press corps porn more than anything else. And likely the best opportunity for Grimshaw and or Ahriman to drop a reverb on whatever building we end up in.”

I fixated on what he was really telling me. “You’re still in danger.”

“My death warrant has already been signed. It’s just a matter of waiting for the executioner to reveal his face.”

Or hers. I thought about Jegs and about bringing up what she had told me, but now wasn’t the time. Everything she had fed to me was unsubstantiated. There was nothing in the President’s demeanour or words to indicate to me that he’d made such a fundamental shift away from his closely held principles. I had a duty, and it was to keep my President alive. “I won’t let that happen, sir.”

And for the first time in all the years I’d known him, the President didn’t placate me with the statement that I didn’t fail. The realisation left me cold.

“The chips?” I asked, gesturing to the items in front of him, attempting to brush past his lack of reassurance.

He shrugged. “It’s your choice whether you want them back in. You’re to report to Feliu after you and I are done. He’s ready to start operating tonight.”