Powerless (18 page)

I heard the clap of boots on the stairs, of backup reaching me way too late.

Simion skidded to a stop next to me.

“Take him, Merq. It’s time to end this,” Simion snarled.

I took stock of the man in front of me. The man who at one time had meant more to me than this job. More than the cause. A man who had just taken the life of the man who had raised me. Made me into who I was.

I searched for any signs that he was going to fight, that he was going to try to take me out, too.

But Armise knelt on the floor, those wooden and stone bracelets circling his wrists, his head bowed. Almost as if in penance.

I couldn’t lose both of them in one day.

“I can’t,” I nearly whispered.

Simion didn’t give me a choice this time.

He fired.

Chapter Twelve

I studied Armise Darcan, the Mongol Giant and former Dark Ops Officer from Singapore, as if I didn’t know who he was. Which was much easier to do than I could have anticipated, as I was sure I didn’t know him at all.

We had dragged him from the building where he’d taken his shot straight into a holding cell in the basement of the AF’s capital building. He was seated in a metal chair, his wrists bound, shoulder bandaged where Simion’s shot had shredded through the soft tissue. A non-fatal shot. More vindictive than useful.

He’d been treated, the wound sterilized and closed, but had been provided no form of medicinal comfort. It was better treatment than any soldier for the Revolution would have received in the hands of the Opposition.

My eyes ran over the chiselled lines of his body. Still strong, still massive. His hair was longer, curling at the nape of his neck, and his beard had grown out, the grey overtaking the black. He wore an all black outfit, much as he had as a Dark Ops Officer. His tattoos snaked out of the collar of his T-shirt and down his arms. He was flexing his hands, that four-fingered left hand an ever-present taunt of times long past. A time when he was still my enemy.

So much had changed, and yet nothing had.

“Why did you let him live?” I asked Simion, who was standing next to me in a room down the hall from where Armise was being held.

He leaned over and swiped the BC5 screen away.

“I couldn’t kill him in front of you,” Simion answered honestly, his untraceable accent sliding over the words.

“He killed the President,” I answered him, unable to acknowledge what he was really saying to me.

Simion sat on the edge of the table and faced me, his features grim. “But we don’t know why yet.”

I scoffed. “Right.”

“Merq,” he said, drawing my name out, shaking his head. “There’s a lot you don’t know. A lot either of us don’t know. I’m not willing to come to the same conclusions as everyone else.”

I didn’t know what to say to him. My thoughts swirled between the conversation I’d had with Jegs back in the bunker and what the President had said to me moments before he’d been killed. The President had known he was going to die, and he hadn’t tried to stop it.

He had spoken to me about the sacrifices I made for the cause. But maybe he hadn’t been talking solely about me.

“I’ve cleared it for you to talk to him,” Simion stated.

And I had to wonder how he had that much influence. Neveed had been conspicuously absent since we’d taken Armise into custody. I assumed he was speaking with Isida and Kariabba, ensuring the chain of command was solid, unbroken. But it was his order that should have put me in that room, not Simion’s. If I should be there at all. I didn’t interrogate prisoners. There were others who were better trained in that skill. PsychHAgs who would have relished the opportunity. And yet, Simion wanted me to be the first to talk to him.

Simion continued, “We’re going to be monitoring the entire conversation, I won’t lie to you about that. We need to know what’s really going on just as much as you do. Armise didn’t fight coming in. He wasn’t trying to escape or to kill any more of us. That has to mean something.”

“Maybe it meant he wanted to die.”

Simion crossed his arms, looked away. “Or maybe it meant he didn’t want anyone else to die.”

It was a subtle distinction, but one that sent a chill through me. Simion was correct in his assessment that we had to know. There was an order to our law, even during war, and Armise would be tried and sentenced to death for the murder of the President. Unless there was an overwhelming reason for his actions.

So much death. All of it in the name of governments and movements. But where was the tipping point? When did the loss of life outweigh the end goal? The stadium, Sarai, the President, the Committee members… Death would never be eliminated as a part of human existence, but how much more violence could any of us see and still maintain the fragile bend of our souls?

“I’ll talk to him.”

Simion clapped me on the shoulder, holding his hand there for a heartbeat, then another. A touch of friendship, of security. A shared past. He didn’t have to say anything else.

I put my hand behind his neck and brought my forehead to his, staring into those storm-grey eyes I’d known almost my whole life. He grinned as he recognised what I was doing.

I gripped his neck tightly, just as I had done hundreds of times, before dozens of battles, in every continent around the world, in the same show of support for more than two decades. “You’re a good man, Sims.”

And with that I let go of him and walked out of the room.

* * * *

The door to the holding cell banged shut behind me, but Armise didn’t lift his head.

Another chair sat directly across from him, but I didn’t go for it. Not yet. I was too anxious to sit.

“Who am I to you?” I asked, the question coming out as reflex more than a predetermined thought. That same question he had put to me twice in the jacquerie and I hadn’t been able to answer.

Armise slowly looked up to me. “I love you.”

I rocked back on my heels as readily as if he’d slammed his fist into my gut. I stumbled, tried to find my breath, thought, anything. Fucking anything. I hadn’t known what to expect, but this…

I was furious.

No, fury wasn’t a strong enough word. Couldn’t begin to describe the pure hatred I felt for him in that moment. I wanted to pummel his face into the floor, to see his blood spattered on the cement, to rip those words from his throat and leave them drowning in a gathering crimson pool as I bled the life from him.

I threw the chair in front of him out of my path, the metal clanging riotously against stone as I went for him.

“Who the fuck are you!” I screamed at him, lunging forward until I was only inches away from his face. I grabbed hold of his shirt, balled my fist and cocked it back.

Armise didn’t flinch. Didn’t try to rip himself from my onslaught. His eyes never left mine, sadness overtaking his features. “Everything I’ve ever done has been for you.”

I pushed him away with brutal force, sending the chair he was locked into careening to the floor. Armise grunted as he smacked against the cement.

“Everything you did was to save your own ass!” I bellowed.

Armise lay on the floor, resting his head against the concrete, resigned. “No.”

I let fury overtake me. “No? No is what you say to me? When you just took the life of the man you knew I considered a father?” I allowed the sharpness of the loss of Wensen Kersch to spike through me. I sank myself into the emptiness. Forcing myself to face the truth that I would never sit with that man again, never have another conversation, never hear him say that I didn’t fail. Guilt. Regret. Anger. Sorrow. I felt each emotion roaring through my veins, swirling around the painful absence of a man I’d sworn my life to. A man I’d loved in my own fucked up way. A man who had trusted me and whom I had betrayed. Because, in the end, I had been the one who had failed him.

It all flashed through me in a rush of fortifying heat. I was stronger now because I cared. Because I wouldn’t let the loss of life go unmourned. I was powerful because I wouldn’t allow Armise to take my power from me.

I stalked around the room, leaving him on the floor. It was undignified for a man of his reputation to be left at my mercy. It was the only place he deserved to be. “Why me, Armise?” I gritted out between clenched teeth.

Armise spat out a line of blood, the red spattering a bold line on the dingy floor. Then he laughed. A chest-deep rumble of satisfaction that would forever remind me of Bogotá. Of the first time I’d ever laid eyes on him.

I ripped his chair up from the floor, setting it upright, his body swaying with the movement.

I knotted my fingers in his hair—longer than it had ever been—and forced his head back so he had to look at me. “Fucking answer. Why me?”

“Because I love you.”

I let go of his head and slammed my fist into his jaw, unable to hold back this time. His head snapped back, the chair rocking onto two legs then slamming forward with a clattering echo that jarred my nerves. “Don’t…” I started. My nostrils flared, I ground my teeth together. “Don’t fucking say that again.”

“It’s the only truth I’ve ever known,” he said with surety.

A surety I didn’t want to believe.

No man that loved me would ever have abandoned me without a means of escape. Left me to struggle back to life after that grenade. No man who loved me would have ever allowed me to fester in that surge den. No man who loved me would have taken a life he knew was invaluable to me. No man who loved me would have cut my heart from my body as easily as Armise had excised my already stunted, wounded organ.

I may not have understood love, but I knew it came with loyalty and trust.

Neither of which Armise Darcan was capable of.

I stared him down, watched a line of blood trickle from his nose and over his lips.

I picked up the other chair, steeled myself, forcing myself to remember why I was in this room at all. I set the chair in front of him and sat down. “I’m not powerless unless I allow them to take that power from me. I remember someone saying that to me. Sounded pretty goddamn convincing at the time, too. But it wasn’t them I should’ve been worried about. It was you. You’ve played me from the beginning. Setting me up, piece by piece. Fuck by fuck. Using my lack of connection to anyone besides you to rip my power away from me. I don’t give a fuck if you think you love me.” I stared him down, taking in the shaking of his shoulders, the reply I could see building on his lips. But there was only one thing I needed him to know. I leant forward, snarling, “I hate you.”

Armise kept his gaze locked to mine. “I know you do.”

Silence fell heavily between us. A third entity in the room. Or fourth or fifth. I wasn’t sure anymore. There were too many things unsaid between us. Too many questions. Too much hurt and disbelief. All of them just as alive, just as volatile as either of us.

For the first time in months, I felt that bone-deep cold settling in that could only be erased by surge. I wanted to forget. I needed to escape. Simion had been wrong to send me in here, because there was nothing Armise could tell me that would answer all of the questions I’d ever put to him and had been left unanswered.

Armise cracked his neck. Licked his lips, smearing the red of his blood across his teeth. “You remember the night I slashed your neck on the island?”

I arched my eyebrows in disbelief. “Are you serious?”

Armise ignored my sarcasm. “I wasn’t sent there to kill you. I was sent there to take your blood. If I killed you in the process then that was a side benefit as far as the Premiere was concerned. But my mission was to bring your DNA back to Singapore to be used for experimentation.”

I kept my body still even as my mind tried to keep up with the sudden change in conversation. “Genetic modification experimentation,” I stated.

Armise shook his head. “More than that.”

I swept my hand in his direction, sitting back, trying to appear unaffected. “Enlighten me.”

“Ahriman is building an elite group of genetically modified soldiers—” he started.

I laughed, interrupting him. “No shit. Every country has been doing that for the last fifty years.”

Armise flexed his fingers. It was the most movement he could manage with his wrists still bound. “Not like this. These aren’t just soldiers. They are highly trained assassins. More than Dark Ops. More than a Peacemaker. More powerful than you or me.”

I scoffed. I’d never faced anyone as strong, as unbreakable as Armise. And I was almost evenly matched with him. “That’s not even possible.”

“It is, Merq. Because these assassins were created from your DNA and mine. They’re hybrids. Part machine, part human. The best of what either of us has ever had, minus all of our inherent weaknesses.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I witnessed them in action in Singapore. They’re no longer an experiment—they’re reality. And the ones who exist now are only the beginning.”

“Is that a threat?” I bit out.

“It’s a warning. You need to know what’s coming at you. What’s coming for you. For all of you. Citizens won’t be able to fight them. They won’t stand a chance.” Armise took a deep breath, his silver-blue eyes going dark. “You and I, Merq? We’re the only ones who have any shot at taking them out.”

I scrubbed my hands over my face and leant forward, resting my elbows on my shaking knees. Trying to steady myself. “You and I, huh? That implies there is an us. That we’re working together and not at odds.”

“I know what I said,” Armise grunted, showing the first real frustration I’d seen in him. “Just fucking let me talk. Listen for once and let me answer all of your never-ending fucking questions.”

“Like you’ve answered all the rest?” I retorted.

Armise glared at me. “Fucking listen, asshole.”

“Go ahead. Spew your shit. I’m fascinated.”

“You know what? Fuck you. Fuck this war. Fuck this cause. You want to die and let your precious citizens be thrown into mass graves? Go right the fuck ahead. Neveed was right in that bunker. You don’t know the whole truth. Because you don’t want to. You want to live in your deluded world where everyone exists as either good or evil. You’ve been so fucked over by what you think you’ve seen that you can’t see what’s really in front of you. So fuck you. Do whatever it is you’re going to do to me. Don’t listen to me. Don’t think past what you’ve been told for one fucking second. March into battle like a good fucking soldier and be slaughtered.” Armise spat out another line of blood, the spittle tracking down his chin and over his clothes. “Keeping you alive is a fucking impossible goal.”