Vengeful

by V. E. Schwab

FOUR WEEKS AGO

  EASTERN MERIT

  GROWING up, Dominic Rusher had never been a morning person.

  But the army made him a get-the-fuck-up-when-you-hear-the-sound person, and anyway, sleep hadn’t come easy since his accident, so Dom was on his feet by the third wail of the 4:30 a.m. alarm. He showered, wiped away the fog on the bathroom mirror, and found his reflection.

  Five years had done a lot of good. Gone was the harrowed look of someone in constant pain, the gaunt features of a man trying and failing to self-medicate. In his place was a soldier, lean muscles winding over broad shoulders, tan arms strong and back straight, his hair cropped short on the sides, slicked back on top.

  He’d gotten his shit together, too.

  His medals were mounted on the wall, no longer thrown carelessly around the necks of empty liquor bottles. Next to them hung the X-rays. Each metal plate and bar, pin and screw, every way they’d put Dominic back together, glowing white against the backdrop of muscles and skin.

  The place was clean.

  And Dom was clean.

  He hadn’t had a drink or a dose since the night they dug up Victor—he wished he could say since the night they met, when Victor erased his pain, but the bastard had gone and died, left Dom high and dry and in a world of hurt. Those had been two dark nights, ones he didn’t want to remember, but Dominic’s control hadn’t faltered since.

  Even when Victor shorted out, and the pain came rushing back. Dom white-knuckled it, tried to treat the episodes as a reminder, the reprieves as a gift.

  After all, it could be worse.

  It had been worse.

  Dom wolfed down a cup of too-hot coffee and a plate of too-runny eggs, slung on his jacket, grabbed his helmet from the door, and stepped out into the gray predawn.

  His ride sat waiting in its usual spot—a simple black motorcycle, nothing fancy but the kind of thing he’d always wanted growing up and never been able to afford. Dom wiped the dew from the seat before swinging his leg over, kicked it into gear, and savored the low purr for a moment before setting off.

  He rode through the empty streets as Merit began to wake around him. This early, most of the streetlights were in his favor, and Dom was out of the city in ten minutes. Merit tapered off to either side before giving way to empty fields. The sun rose at his back as the engine screamed beneath him and the wind buffeted his helmet, and for fifteen minutes he felt totally free.

  He hit the turnoff and slowed, easing his bike down an unmarked road. Another five minutes, and Dom passed through an open gate, slowing as the building came into sight.

  From the outside, it looked like nothing at all. A hospital, perhaps. Or a processing plant. A set of white blocks stacked together in a nondescript formation. The kind of place you’d drive by without a second glance, unless you knew what it was.

  If you knew what it was, it became something far more ominous.

  Dominic parked and dismounted, climbing the front steps. The doors parted onto a pristine white hall, sterile to the point of purity. An officer stood on either side, one manning an X-ray, the other a scanner.

  “I’ve got parts,” Dom reminded them, gesturing down his side.

  The guy nodded, tapping away at the screen while Dominic set his phone, keys, jacket, and helmet in the tray. He stepped into the machine, waiting for the band of white light to scan up and then back down before reclaiming his possessions on the other side. He performed each task with an ease borne from habit. Amazing how things became normal, actions pressed into memory.

  The locker room was the first door on the right. Dom set his jacket and helmet on a shelf and changed into a black uniform shirt, high-collared and long-sleeved. He washed his face, smoothed his hair, and patted his front pocket to make sure he had his access key.

  Down the hall, and two floors up, he swiped himself into the control room and showed the senior officer the front of his key, where his face hung in holographic detail, right below the word EON.

  “Dominic Rusher,” he said with an easy smile, “reporting for duty.”

  VIII

  FOUR WEEKS AGO

  MERIT SUBURBS

  STELL ducked under the yellow crime scene tape.

  He didn’t flash a badge—didn’t need to. Everyone on the scene worked for EON. For him.

  Agent Holtz was standing by the back door. “Sir,” he said eagerly, his tone too bright for the early hour.

  “Who called it in?” asked Stell.

  “Good Samaritan called the cops. Cops called us.”

  “That obvious?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Holtz, holding open the door.

  Agent Rios was already in the kitchen. Tall, tan, and keen-eyed, she’d been Stell’s second-in-command for nearly four years. She was leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching a tech photograph a pile of . . . something . . . on the tile floor. A large diamond glinted amid the mess.

  “Same profile as the hospital?” asked Stell.

  “Looks like it,” said Rios. “Marcella Riggins. Age thirty-two. Spent the last thirteen days in a coma after her husband tried to burn down their house—with her inside. Can’t really blame her for being mad.”

  “Mad is conceivable,” said Stell. “Murder is a problem.” He looked around. “How many dead?”

  Rios straightened. “Four, we think. It’s kind of hard to tell.” She pointed at the kitchen floor. “One,” she counted, then turned and led him down the hall to a room with a poker table, and a fairly grisly tableau. “Two,” she said, nodding down at a ruined body on the floor. “Three,” she pointed at a withered form only vaguely human. “And four,” she said, gesturing to a pile of dust that coated the back of a chair and spilled onto the felt table. “Hell hath no fury . . .”

  Stell counted the chairs. “Survivors?”

  “If there were, they didn’t go to the cops. The house belongs to Sam McGuire,” said Rios. “Safe to assume he’s here . . . somewhere.”

  Holtz whistled from the doorway. “You ever seen anything like this before?”

  Stell considered. He had seen a lot since his first introduction to EOs a decade and a half before. Vale, with his ability to modulate pain; Cardale, with his ability to regenerate; Clarke, with her ability to control—and those were just the start. The tip of the iceberg. He’d since seen EOs who could bend time, move through walls, light themselves on fire, turn themselves to stone.

  But this, Stell had to admit, was something new.

  He ran his hand through the mess on the felt. “What is this? Ash?”

  “As far as we can tell,” said Rios, “it’s Marcus Riggins. What’s left of him. Or maybe this is. Or this.”

  “All right,” said Stell, brushing the dust from his palms. “Compile the record. I want records of everything. Everything from the hospital. Everything from here. Shots and specs of every body, every room, every detail, even if you don’t think it matters. It goes in the file.”

  Holtz raised his hand like a schoolboy. It was impossible to forget that he was new. “Who’s the file for?”

  “Our analyst,” said Stell. But he knew how the agents and techs liked to talk. “You might have heard him called ‘the hunting dog.’”

  “Well,” said Holtz, looking around. “Wouldn’t it be easier to bring your dog to the scene, instead of trying to take the whole scene to the dog?”

  “Perhaps,” said Stell. “But his leash doesn’t reach this far.”

  * * *

  THE lights in the EON cellblocks came on all at once.

  Eli Ever opened his eyes, looking up at the cell’s mirrored ceiling, and saw—himself. As always. Clear skin, brown hair, strong jaw; a copy of the boy he’d been at Lockland. A pre-med student at the top of his class, the peak of promise. As if the ice bath hadn’t only stopped his heart, but had frozen time itself.

  Fifteen years, and though his face and body remained unchanged, Eli had aged in other ways. His mind had sharpened, hardened. He’d shed some of his more youthful ideals
. About himself. About God. But those were the kinds of changes that didn’t show in the reflected glass.

  Eli rose from the cot, stretched, and padded barefoot across the private cell that, for nearly five years, had marked the boundaries of his world. He went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face, then crossed to the low shelf that ran against one wall, folders stacked along its length. All of them were beige, ordinary, except for one—a thick black file at the end with a name printed on the front. His name. Eli never reached for that one—didn’t need to—he’d memorized the contents. Instead, his fingers danced along the spines before coming to rest on one considerably thicker than the rest, unmarked, save for a simple black X.

  One of his few open cases. A pet project of sorts.

  The Hunter.

  Eli sat at the table in the center of his cell and flipped back the cover, turned through the pages of the file, skimming past the reports of older killings to the most recent one.

  The EO’s name was Jack Linden. A mechanic three hundred miles west of Merit. He’d slipped through EON’s algorithm, but not, apparently, the Hunter’s notice. A crime scene photo showed the EO on his back, amid a sea of tools. He’d been gunned down at point-blank range. Eli ran a finger absently over the entry wound.

  A pressure seal sounded nearby, and a few seconds later the far wall of Eli’s cell turned clear, dissolving from solid white to fiberglass. A thickset man with salt-and-pepper hair stood on the other side, carrying another file, and, as always, a mug of coffee. The last fifteen years might not have touched Eli, but every single one had left its mark on Stell.

  The man nodded at the beige folder in Eli’s hands. “Any new theories?”

  Eli let the file fall shut. “No,” he said, setting it aside and rising from his chair. “What can I do for you, Director?”

  “There’s a new case,” said Stell, setting the file and mug in the fiberglass cubby. “I want your thoughts.”

  Eli approached the barrier and collected both offerings.

  “Marcella Riggins,” he read aloud, returning to his seat and taking a long, slow sip of his drink.

  Eli didn’t need coffee, just as he didn’t need to eat or sleep, but some habits were psychological. The steaming mug was a small piece of change in a static world. A concession, a prop, but one that allowed him to pretend, if only for a moment, that he was still human.

  Eli set the coffee aside and began to turn through the file. It wasn’t enough—it was never enough—but it was all they would give him. A stack of paper and Stell’s power of observation. And so he flicked through page after page, skimming the evidence, the aftermath, before finally pausing on a photo of human remains, a diamond glinting in the ash. He set the file aside and met Stell’s waiting gaze.

  “All right,” said Eli. “Shall we begin?”

  IX

  FIVE YEARS AGO

  LOCATION UNCERTAIN

  AFTER Eli killed Victor, it was all a blur.

  First, the chaos. The red and blue lights, the sirens, the officers storming through the Falcon Price, and the horrible realization they weren’t on his side.

  Then came the cuffs, so tight they cut into Eli’s wrists, and the black hood, swallowing the sight of Victor’s corpse and the blood-slicked concrete, muffling the voices and the orders and the slammed doors, erasing everything but Eli’s own breath, his pounding heart, his desperate words.

  Burn the body. Burn the body. Burn the body.

  Then came the cell—more like a concrete box than a room—and Eli slamming his fists against the door over and over until his fingers broke, and healed, broke, and healed, the only evidence the blood left smeared across the steel.

  And then, in the end, there was the lab.

  Hands forcing Eli down, cold steel on his back and straps cinched so tight they cut into skin, pale sterile walls and too-bright lights and the chemical smell of disinfectant.

  In the center of it all, a man in white, his face swimming above Eli’s. Dark eyes set deep behind black glasses. Hands drawing on plastic gloves.

  “My name,” said the man, “is Dr. Haverty.”

  He selected a scalpel as he spoke.

  “Welcome to my lab.”

  Leaned in close.

  “We are going to understand each other.”

  And then he began to cut. Dissect—that was the word for it when the subject was dead. Vivisect—that was the word when they were still alive. But when they couldn’t die?

  What was the word for that?

  Eli’s faith had faltered in that room.

  He had found Hell in that room.

  And the only sign of God was that, no matter what Haverty did, Eli continued to survive.

  Whether he wanted to or not.

  * * *

  TIME unraveled in Haverty’s lab.

  Eli thought he knew pain, but pain for him had become a bright and fleeting thing, an instant’s discomfort. In the doctor’s hands, it became a solid state.

  “Your regeneration truly is remarkable,” said the doctor, retrieving the scalpel with bloodstained gloves. “Shall we find its limit?”

  You’re not blessed, Victor had said. You’re a science experiment.

  Those words came back to Eli now.

  And so did Victor.

  Eli saw him in the lab, watched him circle the table at Haverty’s back, slip in and out of Eli’s line of sight as he studied the doctor’s incisions.

  “Maybe you’re in Hell.”

  You don’t believe in Hell, thought Eli.

  The corner of Victor’s mouth twitched. “But you do.”

  Every night, Eli would collapse onto his cot, shivering and sick from the hours pinned to the steel table.

  And every morning, it would start again.

  Eli’s power had a single flaw—and ten years after Victor first discovered it, so did Haverty. Eli’s body, for all its regeneration, couldn’t reject foreign objects; if they were small enough, he healed around them. If they were large enough—a knife, a saw, a clamp, his body wouldn’t heal at all.

  The first time Dr. Haverty cut out Eli’s heart, he thought he might finally die. The doctor held it up for him to see before cutting it free, and for a fraction of a second Eli’s pulse faltered, failed, the equipment screamed. But by the time Haverty set the heart in its sterile tray, there was a new one already beating in Eli’s open chest.

  The doctor breathed a single word.

  “Extraordinary.”

  * * *

  THE worst part, thought Eli, was that Dr. Haverty liked to talk.

  He kept up a casual stream of conversation as he sawed and sliced, drilled and broke. In particular, he was fascinated by Eli’s scars, the brutal crosshatching on Eli’s back. The only marks that would never fade.

  “Tell me about them,” he’d say, plunging a needle into Eli’s spine.

  “There are thirty-two,” he’d say, drilling into Eli’s bones.

  “I counted,” he’d say, cracking open Eli’s chest.

  “You can talk to me, Eli. I’m happy to listen.”

  But Eli couldn’t talk, even if he wanted to.

  It took all his effort not to scream.

  X

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

  THE FIRST HOME

  ONCE upon a time, when the marks on his back were still fresh, Eli told himself that he was growing wings.

  After all, his mother thought Eli was an angel, even if his father said he had the devil in him. Eli had never done anything to make the pastor think that, but the man claimed he could see the shadow in the boy’s eyes. And whenever he caught a glimpse of it, he’d take Eli by the arm and lead him out to the private chapel that sat beside their clapboard house.

  Eli used to love the little chapel—it had the prettiest picture window, all red and blue and green stained glass, facing east so it caught the morning light. The floor was made of stone—it was cold beneath Eli’s bare feet, even in summer—and there in the center of the room was a metal
cross, driven straight down into the foundation. Eli remembered thinking it seemed violent, the way the cross broke and split the floor, as if thrown from a horrible height.

  The first time his father saw the shadow, he kept one hand on Eli’s shoulder as they walked, the other clutching a coiled leather strap. Eli’s mother watched them go, twisting a towel in her hands.

  “John,” she said, just once, but Eli’s father didn’t look back, didn’t stop until they’d crossed the narrow lawn and the chapel door had fallen shut behind them.

  Pastor Cardale told Eli to go to the cross and hold on to the horizontal bar, and at first Eli refused, sobbing, pleading, trying to apologize for whatever he’d done. But it didn’t help. His father tied Eli’s hands in place, and beat him worse for his defiance.

  Eli had been nine years old.

  Later that night, his mother treated the angry lash-marks on his back, and told him that he had to be strong. That God tested them, and so did Eli’s father. Her sleeves inched up as she draped cool strips of cloth over her son’s wounded shoulders, and Eli could just see the edges of old scars on the backs of her arms as she told him it would be okay, told him it would get better.

  And for a little while, it always did.

  Eli would do everything he could to be good, to be worthy. To avoid his angry father’s gaze.

  But the calm never lasted. Sooner or later, the pastor would glimpse the devil in his son again, and lead Eli back to the chapel. Sometimes the beatings were months apart. Sometimes days. Sometimes Eli thought he deserved it. Needed it, even. He would step up to the cross, and curl his fingers around the cold metal cross, and pray—not to God, not at first, but to his father. He prayed that the pastor would stop seeing whatever he saw, while he carved new feathers into the torn wings of Eli’s back.

  Eli learned not to scream, but his eyes would still blur with tears, the colors in the stained glass running together until all he saw was light. He held on to that, as much as to the steel cross beneath his fingers.

  Eli didn’t know how he was broken, but he wanted to be healed.