Lincoln raised a brow. “Right.”
A moment passed as they looked appreciatively at the hardware.
“So, you want to take the Wallace for a test run in the simulator?”
Lincoln turned to him with both interest and surprise. “That’s it? You’re just gonna let me get in this thing? Not even gonna make me read a manual or take a test or something?”
Anthony shrugged. “We got more Mechs than operators. We need people to start training yesterday.”
“But there are like sixty suits in here!” Lincoln said.
Hoult nodded. “Jonathan is working on it. Problem is, that means civilians and we haven’t got a lot of those around here.”
“Well, in that case,” Lincoln gave the Mech an excited look. “Yeah, let’s suit me up. But, um . . . maybe . . .”
“Practice blades for your first go?” Anthony asked.
“. . . I do enjoy my arms,” Lincoln said.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
NOV 07, 2005 | 8 PM | HANGMAN’S TREE
HEYER WAS WAITING for her on the catwalks over her quarters.
“He is alone, isolated himself in the projection chamber,” Heyer said.
“Same time each day,” Leah said.
They exchanged a look and set off.
As always, Jonathan had deactivated the spectator capability on the chamber. Only Heyer would have been able to watch what was going on inside, let alone enter.
Leah half expected something like a Michael Bay movie to be playing out when they stepped inside. Instead, she literally heard crickets. They were chirping on a calm cool evening. There was little to see, most of the projection chamber’s capabilities weren’t even fully utilized. As they approached the only structures in sight, they walked over a number of black unengaged panels.
She quickly knew what she was seeing.
Most of the neighborhood that surrounded it in the real world was absent, but this was a projection of Jonathan’s home. Mr. Clean was manifesting the place he and his roommates rented in Seattle, and enough of the surrounding neighborhood that if one stood in the garage, the illusion of this world wouldn’t be broken.
The garage door was up, as it often was when he’d lived there. The light from inside spilled out onto the driveway. As they drew closer, they saw his shadow dance across that light. The shape holding a staff and flowing through movements.
They paused to swap looks once again.
“He’s just been going home,” she said.
The alien was thoughtful for a moment, then continued drawing closer. She followed until that shadow stopped moving. She could see him then, one of his old practice staffs in hand. His eyes closed in concentration.
His device wasn’t activated.
Leah had been around soldiers when she knew their devices were active beneath their clothing. She’d observed installation of a few of the implants in new recruits. She watched Jonathan take part in training scenarios with the recruits inside this very chamber—he always hid his chest beneath a thick armored coat. She’d yet to see his skin lit up from within.
Her understanding from those that had—Jonathan’s implant was different from most. That the light was stronger. Sometimes even seeming to emanate from him like a glowing fog or a flickering flame.
Probably why he kept it covered. Drew too much attention.
Right now, he looked as he always had, for all those months when he’d trained next door. His feet were bare on the mat floor. He wore simple black sweatpants and a tank top damp with perspiration. His eyes were closed, but it was more as though his mind was closed. As though he were shielding himself from the entire world.
But his face. That look he got.
It disturbed his roommates. And to be fair there was something very dangerous to be found there. In the months she watched him that face had emerged more and more often. It never disturbed her. Her reaction was never fear. It was the distilled essence of Jonathan Tibbs. She’d found it exciting. Tonight, she found it reassuring.
Seeing that look, her arm reached out to stop Heyer from getting any closer. When he turned a questioning gaze on her, she held a finger to her lips.
When he began to move again, he slowly flowed out of stillness. As it began, she felt herself strangely nostalgic for a simpler time, when she was a spy and he her subject.
Jonathan wasn’t shadow fighting. Martial arts have a number of different names for what he was doing—practicing of katas, forms, patterns. This was one she’d never seen him practicing in all her hours watching him.
To say it was beautiful was misleading. There was beauty, but of a sort that a passing observer would have been blind to. Few understand until they have tried such things for themselves. A thrust or block that does not quiver, no matter how slowly he moved, his balance never faltering. Yet, there was a complete efficiency, a precision in where he set his feet. His breaths in a symbiotic rhythm with his moves.
Mostly, it was the manner with which his focus never wavered. All his consciousness given over as though he were not a man performing a routine, but as though with each moment, he became each motion.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been watching. Until he stopped, she had not realized the quiet of his mind had infected her own. When Jonathan opened his eyes and saw them, that expression that had reassured her melted away and her thoughts came rushing back to fill the vacuum of silence in her mind.
His stance relaxed. He looked at them with a knowing smirk, then walked over to the cabinet to store his staff. Strange—just as he would have in the real world. To bother with it here was to stay committed to not breaking the illusion.
“Let me guess,” he said. “You two can’t be happy as long as a question goes unanswered.”
“This is what you do every night?” Leah asked. “Train without activating your device?”
“Wouldn’t call it training,” Jonathan said as he took a seat on the edge of his weight bench.
“What then?” she asked.
Jonathan glanced between them, raising an eyebrow. “Been hiding in the rafters much, Old Man?”
Heyer cleared his throat.
“I get it. You’re trapped in a base surrounded by people who think you’re something more than you can ever be. Can’t disappear on them anymore. Can’t tell them that the time for answering questions will come later. To leave without a good reason, that would be betrayal. So, you’re here, but trying to keep a distance.”
He didn’t give Heyer time to deny this before he turned to Leah. “You’re surrounded by people who don’t trust you. Don’t know if you’re friend or foe. I know where you go at night.”
He glanced between them. “You two seem to avoid everyone except each other.”
“You come here to be alone,” Heyer said.
“My role in this doesn’t give me the luxury of hiding,” Jonathan said. “This army needs to see a leader leading. They all have a different idea of what I’m supposed to be. Even you two.”
She looked around the garage with new eyes. Since the beginning, he’d come to his garage. To be alone, sure, but that wasn’t the truth of it.
Right next door she’d had her own garage. Where she’d shaped her steel statues and framed her photos and played her music. It was where she went to escape the lie—to be herself. It was where they both went to prepare for what the world needed them to be the next day.
“Damn,” Leah whispered. “I miss my garage.”
Heyer chuckled. “I would be lying if I did not admit to longing for the days when I did not have to share my space within Mr. Clean.”
The shared moment passed.
“Good talk, but this isn’t why you’re here,” Jonathan said.
“You have removed the female half of the bonded pair from the armory,” Heyer said.
Jonathan stared at the floor again. “You’ve told her everything then?”
“You were hesitating,” Heyer said.
“I asked you to trust me,” Jonath
an said.
“I have trusted you,” Heyer said. “I have a thousand unanswered questions. This I cannot ignore.”
Jonathan stood slowly, his arms coming to rest on his hips. “What possible good use is a Tibbs if he isn’t the very best weapon you can make him.”
Heyer blinked. Caught off guard by the perspective.
“What’s one more son, Old Man?”
Silence followed, solidifying like glass between all of them.
Leah was the first to speak. There was a strangeness to her words. As though she weren’t so much asking a question but was saddened by disappointment. “You already know. Of course, you already know. I thought, this one thing, maybe I’d get to tell you.”
He looked at her, and she didn’t know if he understood at all. After all the lies, was there nothing she’d ever get to come clean about. No way she’d ever get to volunteer a secret before finding out he’d already caught her in an omission.
Heyer drew in a long breath.
“You speak as though you believe me indifferent to your family’s sacrifice,” Heyer said.
Jonathan looked away.
“You cannot possibly feel that, Jonathan?” Heyer asked.
“You want your brother dead,” Jonathan said. “I’ll get it done. I don’t need the bond.”
“You do,” Heyer said. “You will not be able to harm Malkier, Jonathan.”
There was a certainty in Heyer’s voice that seemed to catch Jonathan’s notice. After a moment, he sighed as he realized the truth.
“So that is why it was so important that we spar,” Jonathan shook his head. “Rest assured, I don’t need to beat your brother in a fist fight to kill him.”
“But you need to survive one,” Heyer said. “As it stands, you would not last a minute.”
“Dying won’t stop me,” Jonathan said.
This raised heads. Leah and Heyer swapping looks with one another with restrained terror. He sounded—crazy.
Heyer closed his eyes and pushed his fear away. “Whatever you may think. I do not want to see you die.”
“I know that, Old Man,” Jonathan said. “But you will if that is what it takes. Just like you’ll let your descendent die, my child with her. I’ll follow you across a lot of lines. Not this one.”
Heyer took a long breath. He let the room become very still.
“I want the whole truth, Jonathan. I do not believe I’ve heard it yet,” Heyer said. “Why are you so afraid of reestablishing the bond?”
“Afraid,” Jonathan turned to them. He looked surprised, as though he had misread what brought them to be standing in front of him. “You . . . you’re here . . . you think I don’t want the bond?”
Heyer blinked, taken aback by the tone of Jonathan’s question. As he stared at the man’s eyes, he suddenly realized what he’d never considered. “You . . . you are not afraid of it, you are resisting it.”
Jonathan turned away, leaving the alien to stare dumbfounded.
“You really don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re talking about,” Jonathan said.
As Leah watched him, she remembered how Heyer had found it so strange Jonathan wasn’t driven to reestablish the bond. That a part of him should have been desperate for it. Like an addict looking for a fix. Yet, he carried the implant in his front pocket to ensure he’d never feel its influence again.
“You fear the severed bond,” Leah said. “But that isn’t why you’re fighting this.”
Jonathan’s breathing was growing unsteady. “My father lived with this implant longer than any man. Do you know, Old Man, what made him so different?”
Heyer only took a moment to answer.
“You,” Heyer said.
She could see the answer caught Jonathan by surprise. As though he expected a hundred possible answers from the alien, and they would all be wrong.
“I understood your father more than you give me credit,” Heyer said.
Jonathan was quiet for a moment. When words did start pouring out of him, it was as though he were answering a question. But it was one that neither she nor the alien would have ever thought to ask.
“In The Never, his body was broken, more times than he could re . . .” Jonathan whispered. “Every time . . . he’d remember holding me the day I was born. I can see myself as a child in his arms, I can see him looking down at me. But, it’s like I’m looking into my own eyes . . .”
Jonathan looked at Heyer. “I hear his thoughts like they’re my own. One of them started the moment he held me.
“It’s not okay to die . . . I can’t fail.”
Leah came to understand. The bond had been calling to him day in and day out. The part of him that was strong enough to ignore it, was the part that would do whatever it took to protect his son.
“Give me the device, Jonathan,” Leah said. “One way or another, I’ll use it to protect our child.”
“Giving you that implant . . . is as good as killing you myself,” Jonathan said. “Malkier will come for you.”
“He is coming for all of us,” she said. “There is no safe place to put me. If we fail and Earth is lost to the Ferox, there won’t be anything left to protect.”
He looked at the two of them and shook his head. “You two haven’t thought this through at all.”
“Then educate us,” Heyer said.
Jonathan glanced at Heyer, but when he spoke, he chose to hold Leah’s eyes. “The bonded pair is more powerful, but it is not so different from any other device in the armory. Like all the others, it is tied to a gate on the Feroxian Plane. When Rylee died, that gate went dormant. The moment you reactivate that implant, you reactivate the gate on the other side.”
He turned to Heyer.
“Do you think your brother will miss that? That he won’t do everything in his power to sever the bond the moment he sees it’s been reestablished?”
Heyer nodded slowly. “You . . . you do have a point.”
“He’ll send assassins, as many as he has to—an Alpha if he must—and if you survive all that Leah . . . he’ll come for you himself.”
“But, I’ll be strong.”
“Not as strong as you may think,” Jonathan shook his head. “Alone in The Never, you won’t have the bond, and . . . I don’t mean to hurt you Leah, but you’re not . . .”
He trailed off, seemed to reconsider his words. “You’re just . . . you aren’t . . .”
She finished the thought for him. “I’m not Rylee.”
Jonathan closed his eyes and looked at the floor. “I’m sorry . . . she was exceptional. Trained her entire life. You will not survive what Malkier will send for you.”
Hearing him say it aloud hurt, but mostly because there was no denying the truth in it.
“So, teach me,” Leah said. “I’m no different than anyone else.”
Jonathan sighed. “I’m not saying you couldn’t learn. I’m saying you wouldn’t get the chance. If I were Malkier, and that dormant gate reactivated, I wouldn’t delay a moment before I overloaded its queue.”
“Jonathan is right, Leah,” Heyer said, “it is even worse than he says. I still do not understand how it is that Jonathan has recovered from the severed bond. But if we reestablish it, only to have it severed again, I do not like the chances that he could manage it a second time.”
A moment of somber silence followed.
“If I may interject,” Mr. Clean said. “I believe there is another way. Though, I don’t think anyone is going to like it.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
“WE IMPLANT THE device at the last possible moment. Before the conduit arrives but when we already know it is being opened.”
Leah nodded, seemed like a simple solution, but then she saw Jonathan’s jaw clenching.
Jonathan was shaking his head.
“The new recruits, the men who’ve never seen a real Ferox, we are running them through battle scenarios with their devices turned on. It’s a world of difference. You’re suggesting she train with the sa
me handicap I had to deal with . . . when I had three months to prepare and wasn’t two months pregnant,” Jonathan said.
Leah scoffed. “Jonathan, I’ve heard enough. You need to stop looking for reasons to keep this from happening. It’s not up to you. So, start thinking of how we get it done right.”
While Jonathan and Leah were arguing, Heyer had consulted quietly with Mr. Clean.
Eventually, he cleared his throat loudly. “If you are both done, I would like to explore a solution.”
As they quieted, Heyer turned to Jonathan.
“I have a confession,” Heyer said. “I have not wanted to admit to you that I do not know what you are.”
Jonathan frowned, giving the alien a doubting look.
“To put it simply, I have taken a number of hosts in my lifetime,” Heyer said. “When they are intact, I often gain access to my hosts’ memories. That said, I cannot navigate them very easily. What’s more, I have never acquired a skill from my host.”
Jonathan looked confused as he listened, but then seemed to understand what Heyer was confessing. “I’m not what you expected.”
“No,” Heyer said. “What you seem to be is so much more than I ever imagined. Something I would have thought impossible.”
She could see Jonathan was caught off guard by this. As though he’d been operating under the assumption that he was exactly what Heyer had planned all along. “Then, what did you expect?”
“I opened the door to your father’s mind in the hope that you would be able to recover one piece of information,” Heyer said.
“Explains a few of our more recent awkward moments” Jonathan said. “You only hoped I’d discover how to harm your brother.”
Heyer nodded.
“I never imagined you would be able to do everything he was capable of doing. That you could acquire his skill sets, his muscle memory, his instincts. Some of his memories, perhaps even all of them. This manner, this way you have integrated . . . I do not understand it.”
“Great,” Jonathan said. “That officially makes two of us.”
Heyer stared at him skeptically. “But you must know something?”
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