The Prince of Cups (Villainess Book 2)

by Melos,Alana

  The portal room was as big as a warehouse. Dominating it was a massive silver circle with various wires and electrodes upon it. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. Regulus handed me his case and went to the controls while I stepped near the upright silver hoop to wait. How do you know how to do this? I asked as he worked the controls and put in the coordinates. It looked ridiculously complicated as he moved back and forth in the control booth.

  They’re pretty close to Axis’, he sent back. Not identical, but close enough.

  How did you know they were going to be? I frowned, shifting my weight from side to side as tension mounted. Guards would be coming down the stairs at any time now.

  I didn’t, he said, glancing up at me to give him his boyish grin. I gambled. He hit the last button and the portal behind me whirred into life. Electricity crackled, and I yelped, stepping back from it quickly as my hair began to rise around me, come to life with the static in the air. I’d had quite enough electricity for a lifetime, and I rubbed my jaw as I backed up, watching the ring whir and spin as it warmed up. Seconds passed… then a minute… and finally licks of blue flame coalesced in a wide circle directly inside of the metal ring. As it pulsed and grew, the flames stretched, obscuring view of the back of the lab with a silver haze, beautiful and exotic. It rippled like waves on a pond, a silvery blue curtain full of possibilities. Instead of seeing another world, I saw my own reflection, imperfect and distorted.

  Shots fired and Regulus pushed me from behind, moving me out of the way of the gunfire. “Go, go, go!” he shouted, using his telekinesis to throw himself at the portal. I’d been amused when I found out he couldn’t fly. His control with his teke wasn’t nearly good enough. Instead, he threw himself the direction he wanted to go, and put a cushion down where he landed. It was brutish, but effective as a means of movement. The silver pond swallowed him up without a sound. I threw up a telekinetic shield behind me. Bullets flattened themselves on it, and rained to the floor in heavy metal plops as I joined Regulus, diving through the silver curtain.

  Everything changed in a blink of an eye. I was both thrown across the cosmos and squeezed into a single particle at the same time. It was light and dark as images flowed past me, possibilities… endless amounts of possibilities in the universe, no… the multiverse. It wasn’t just another world, but a whole new set of probabilities I was traveling to; the things-which-might-have-been changing and warping as Axis came closer. I hurtled along nowhere in particular, standing still at great speed. My head screamed with pain, and yet I’d never felt more alive.

  I landed hard on a bunch of sweet smelling grass, and as I turned trying to orient myself, I saw the portal shimmering in the air for a moment before it blinked out of sight. The sky was crystal clear, and the air was fresh and new. It smelled different. It felt different. The vibrations of the world resounded within me, beating at my body, trying to hammer me into a different shape. I didn’t belong, and the world knew it. My discordant harmony hammered and hummed, rebelling against this alien environment. As I lay back in the grass, Regulus sighed next to me. It was a sound of relief, of letting go, of coming home. I wondered if he always felt that strangeness in our world.

  “Welcome to Axis,” he said, his words soft, almost reverent.

  Chapter Six

  He’d put us outside of Berlin in a field of grass. His guess that it would both be unchanged and unpopulated paid off: he was right on both counts. We stripped our lab coats and stuffed them into the cases we carried with us, leaving us in the street clothes he’d bought. Since he gave me heels to go with the outfit, I floated closely along the ground as navigating in a field of dirt was rather hard with stilettos. As we moved along, he talked about his home and what to expect, switching back to German easily as if he had never left. As I listened to him, I craned my neck every which way, trying to absorb every detail I could, the biggest of which was the enormous, foreboding wall which had been erected around Berlin at some point. I guessed at the top of it were spotlights and patrols, but we were too far away to see anything for certain.

  “Most people, just like in your world, don’t belong to the National party,” he said. “But everyone has to live with it, and there are benefits to it. Those who didn’t belong were hunted and cleansed, but thanks to the…” he paused for a moment, and looked at me, smiling slightly, “...efforts of some doctors and scientists, our medical advances have far outstripped yours.” He shook his head, “Here, there are no metahumans. Everyone who has powers was genetically modified to have them.”

  “Including you?” I asked. We could have spoken telepathically, but I wanted to speak aloud to hear the foreign words coming from my own lips and taste them. It was a bizarre sensation, to say the least, to speak a language you didn’t know a few days ago.

  “Including me,” he affirmed. “When they cracked interdimensional travel, they modified more than a few scouts, not only to test the waters and gather information, but to spread the good message.” He sighed, “I was assigned to your dimension, as a recruiter. The youth are the way to go, and thus…” He gestured to himself and his eternally youthful appearance. “They’re in it for the long haul, to sow the seeds for future generations. Even if they don’t make a return in the near future, thanks to recruiters like me, they’ll have ripe fruit to harvest.”

  I thought that over and nodded. “It makes sense,” I said slowly. “But why the change of heart?”

  His lip curled up. “Why does anyone rebel? Freedom,” he said, gesturing towards the walls of Berlin. “Even perfect soldiers harbor doubts. I don’t mind being a recruiter… but I want freedom. I want my choice to do what I want, when I want, without having to answer to anyone.”

  That resonated strongly in me, and I couldn’t help but to smile. “I see.”

  Gerard glanced to me, and shrugged, smiling his boyish smile. “Maybe I had a crush, too,” he said, his grin teasing but his eyes shaded.

  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” I snorted. He gave a half a laugh, and shook his head at my words. We moved along in silence for a little while, before I snuck a look at him. His profile was handsome, refined, and he looked thoughtful, eyes turned towards the city. “You miss it here.”

  “I’m sure you feel it,” he said. “The… squeezing, as if the world is trying to shut you out.” He stretched languorously and laughed. “I miss being home, yes, but I can tolerate a little bit of discomfort for what I want.”

  “What else do you want?” I asked.

  “What does anyone want?” he returned. “You keep asking me questions like I’m not a person. What do you want, Reece? And why would I want anything different than that? I don’t have any ulterior motives here; I want to be free.”

  “But why?” I asked again, sounding like a child. It didn’t seem enough that he wanted to be free. Pogroms like that were ingrained into a person from birth. It took some fantastic, almost soul-shattering realization to break them.

  He gave me a sideline look. “I told you. I might have had a crush.”

  I shook my head and waved him off. It was going to be a circular argument, and he was just playing around with that crush thing. “So, tell me about this place then. What’s it like now?”

  Gerard considered that for a moment. “I haven’t been back here in over a decade--it’s a lot easier to get messages through than people--so anything recent I wouldn’t know,” he said. “But up until then… more advanced than Prime. Every house is fit with solar panels, and almost every car is a hybrid or electric. That means not that much pollution anymore, not like it was back in the days, or so I’ve been told. Everyone’s happy. No one wants for anything.”

  “A perfect utopia,” I said, sneering it a little, and then forced my face to go to neutrality. That sneer was his expression and not mine. It was going to take some time to return to normal… if I ever did. If he was to be my mentor, he’d be in my head a lot. Just the close contact would corrupt my own thought processes, and now that I’d had a good look a
t him up close, I wasn’t certain I wanted that. I didn’t really need another psychopath’s impulses skipping along in my head with my own. If worst came to worst, I’d have to put him down once he turned those thoughts of domination to me in earnest. If he had his heart set on controlling me, he’d find a way around the block eventually. Unless I ambushed him of course, but he might be able to sense that coming, especially once he got to know me better. I kept those broody thoughts to myself as he laughed again, a merry sound on this bright day.

  “Built on the bodies of millions, maybe billions,” he said. “It’s not something they talk about. People… they don’t want to know.” Gerard shrugged carelessly, his indifference to genocide apparent. “I don’t want to be one of those casualties. When they’re done with you, you join the scrap heap.” He squinted his eyes and shaded himself with a hand, looking to the side. “That’s not going to happen to me. This way.”

  Instead of moving towards the main road into the walled city of Berlin, he angled us towards what appeared to be a plain, unoccupied side with no roads. We were still a good few miles out, and from this distance no one would see us. The day turned to night slowly, and as darkness descended, the city lit up. It was highlighted in silvers, golds, and reds. The different decorative lights made the towers and skyscrapers of the Reich’s home city look impressive in their totalitarianism. If Gerard was to be believed, everyone who lived here was happy, but the whole thing reminded me of Malech’s office. Yeah, it smelled sweet on top, but that was only to mask the decay underneath.

  When we got closer he established a telepathic link with me, and I kept it light for communication only. I didn’t want to read his thoughts, and right now I really didn’t want him to read mine, so I kept a screen up instead of my normal openness. He quirked a brow at me, but didn’t say anything as he hunted around for an old access point, one which had laid hidden since the days the wall had been built. He found it, and swung the hidden door open. The tunnel didn’t just go through the wall, but as we shined our lights around, it sloped down into a four way tunnel going left and right as well as forward, perhaps looping all the way around the city.

  The entrance straight ahead on the inside took us out in a dead end alley. We put our lights away and just walked down the street, as if we were a young couple who had made a wrong turn. When we stepped out of the darkness of the alley, my breath caught in my throat: the city was beautiful. The buildings were all clean, free of graffiti, and many had an art deco inspired design to them. The streets were paved and smooth, free from potholes or any other hazards. The people who walked did so with a lightness in their step, but as I stretched my mind out to see their threads, that lightness masked a dark, furtive desire to escape. It wasn’t just one person’s head which reflected it, but all of them within view. They knew, as he’d said before, but didn’t think about it. It lingered, under the surface. They were scared of the darkness which loomed around them, threatening to turn on them at any second.

  Oh, sure, some were completely hooked on the Reich’s lies, just like others knew better and plotted rebellion. What I meant by the assessment was the pervasive feeling of secrets masked in light, though the level of acceptance and knowledge of the Reich’s dark past and equally dark future varied from individual to individual. On the whole, everything was bright, clean, shiny, and new with nods towards the old. It had a healthy feel to it, this city, and I hated it immediately. It wasn’t Imperial City, built on the ashes of old New York. It didn’t have the filthy charm and dirty streets. It didn’t have the ruined buildings, standing empty save for squatters, or the prostitutes on the corner, peddling their wares to the various ghouls and mutants who couldn’t get some any other way. It didn’t have the heroes flying above, tempting targets for people like me to attack. And it didn’t have that freshness of new growth either. My city expanded and flexed, stretching outwards to make a new identity, to better itself. This one was locked in time, and wouldn’t change. It wouldn’t evolve. It was static and ordered, where mine was chaotic and messy.

  It wasn’t honest.

  We walked through the streets, and both Gerard and I used our telepathy to catch up on current events by skimming surface thoughts of the people around us. Our clothing wasn’t that out of style, and no one looked twice at us other to nod and give a friendly smile now and again. He guided us towards the Reich headquarters, and found us a hotel close-ish to it. While he checked in, I kept an eye out for any soldiers or agents in case our arrival had been discovered. I had only the vaguest idea of how interdimensional travel worked, but it made sense to me that we could be discovered by some device which measured these things, maybe alternate vibrations or something.

  When he finished the transaction, I shook my head and he shrugged. I wasn’t discovered in your world that way, he told me.

  But you said the tech here was different, I replied as we got into the elevator.

  It is, but that tech… the interdimensional tech, was stolen from a traveler, a long time ago, he explained. It’s not something we developed here, so it’s harder to break down and improve on.

  I nodded as we got off on the top floor. Neither of us were worried about being trapped on a upper floor with no access to the stairs or the elevator. If we were found out, we’d go out through the window.

  The room itself was plain, nothing special. He went for a single bed, a run of the mill room, and he paid cash for it. The forged deutsche marks were perfect; since it wasn’t real money in our world, you could have as much of it made as you wanted. He still kept it on the downlow because forging Axis money would raise a few eyebrows, to say the least, but forgers were happy to get work for interdimensional cash. A few of them had even gone legit, doing nothing but making money to spend in other dimensions for heroes when they had to travel to them. Questions had been raised about the morality of it. Isn’t it wrong, since forgery was just barely a step above stealing? Aren’t we devaluing their money there? What about their economies? Silly shit like that. No matter what happened, someone had to protest it. Always.

  I sat down on the bed, keyed up from the constant pressure surrounding me and the excitement of being in another world. Even though I hadn’t seen anything anyone would call special, every little thing seemed magical to me, a constant reminder that I was not in my dimension. “I have to make some calls, and stop by my contact,” he said. “If things go well, we’ll head out tomorrow morning.” I nodded acknowledgment, and he studied me, perhaps sensing my excess energy even though I kept my shields against mental invasion tight. “You should probably stay here, Reece.”

  “I wasn’t planning on going anywhere in particular,” I lied, using truthful words. “Just do what you have to do.”

  When he left, I got up and paced the room for a few moments before settling at the window, looking out at the city. This was my only opportunity to really explore, and while I’d never felt the need to in my world… this wasn’t my world. This was something else entirely. I might never have the chance again. I opened the window and removed the screen, then launched myself outside, and flew up to the roof. From there, I had a great view of Berlin, and I sat there as Nosferatu might do when sitting outside my window, stalking me.

  It wasn’t enough to simply sit here and look from afar. I wanted to see this city, this world. I knew I couldn’t go too far, but I could at least get a sample of the night life here. I cast my thoughts out to get a read of the people nearby. In their thoughts, I got the immediate layout of the city and found where there was an underground nightclub. Officially, staying out past dark was frowned upon. It wasn’t illegal, but the police would take interest in people who moved at night, especially those who moved alone. There was an undercurrent of fear to their thoughts as well, of disappearances from time to time which weren’t because of the secret police. Intrigued, I flew down to the street and walked to the club.

  “Underground” in this case didn’t actually mean underground, it just meant under the radar. It was in an
old warehouse in a shoddier part of town (which still wasn’t that shoddy compared to Imperial City) with the windows blacked out. When I entered, I could hear the music but dimmed; they’d soundproofed it well. The further in I walked, the more clear it became. When I entered into the main floor of the warehouse, it blasted into life and I was surrounded by young people, dancing as if this were their last day alive. There was no bouncer, no wait staff, no nothing. This was a rave. The young people here gathered on their own from time to time, dancing and partying their lives away as they thumbed their noses at authority. Youth, no matter where you went, was always the same.

  As people danced around me, I wound my way through the crowd feeling their thoughts, letting them wash through me. Gerard’s words came back to me about not understanding them, and I couldn’t imagine he was right. Right now, in this moment, I knew them. I knew them better than I knew myself. Their emotions raced through me, and I weaved with the will of the crowd. The lust for sex and life both were prevalent, yet even without an apparent care in the world, they knew not to get too out of control, not to be too loud… because that would bring the authorities. With them would come questions, and marks on their records. I felt some sympathy for them, being caged as they were. It was a gilded cage, one which came with no hunger and little disease. It came with safety from crime and no pollution and all the world’s ills cured… but they still knew it was a cage. A few hearts beat louder here and there, yearning freedom, but most of them knew this was a dream, and in the morning they would be awake once more.

  For the next few hours, I just wanted to enjoy myself. The fastest way for me to do that was to get laid. As I moved through the crowd, enjoying the smell and feel of sex in the air, I narrowed my search to a handsome young man. There were a lot of minds I found interesting, and some which I dwelled on before moving on, but tonight I just wanted someone tall, strong, and good looking. I wasn’t above filling my base needs with some empty headed twit. I found him dancing with another girl. Tall, dark-haired, and built… just what I was looking for. I didn’t even have to shoo the girl he was dancing with away. I merely moved to him, grabbed him by his silky shirt, pulled him down, and told him, “I want to fuck.” It worked.