Endgame (Voluntary Eradicators)

by Campbell, Nenia

  “Hmm.” He walks a semicircle around her, pretending to think. “Well. What if I offer you something else? Something a bit more tempting?”

  “You have nothing that I want.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Unless it's getting me the hell off this platform right now, no!”

  “Oh, but don't you ever wonder what you do in those hours?” he asks, tilting his head, and she can tell from the expression on his face that he knows he's got her right where he wants her. “When you find yourself somewhere you don't remember being on your way to? Wearing clothes you don't remember putting on? Being greeted by people who seem to be strangers?”

  Vol can't breathe. “How do you — what do you know?”

  His suggestive laugh speaks volumes. “Enough to fill in those blanks for you. If you let me, that is.”

  Then he kisses her. Leisurely. He kisses her as if he can stand there all day and kiss her if it suits him. His fingers comb through her hair, warm against her scalp, and cause not-unpleasant tingles to trickle down her spine. He parts her lips, deepening the kiss. Vol makes a small sound that doesn't sound like protest and feels him smile against her lips.

  His hands slide down her face, her throat, down her arms and the curve of her waist, before coming to settle at her hips, and there he pulls her closer, erasing what little space remains between them. His armor, surprisingly isn't cold; it's warm, almost hot, to the touch.

  And she feels the sting of his teeth in her skin as he inflicts a love-bite on her throat. Vol draws in an unsteady breath, and her hands tighten around his neck. Strange. She can't remember putting them there in the first place. He did the same thing at the ball.

  “So,” he says, voice lowered to a teasing, intimate whisper. “I have nothing you want?”

  Her eyes widen and then narrow in anger and understanding. She raises her hand to slap him and he disappears like smoke as her hand comes into contact with his swarthy cheek. “Son of a bitch — ”

  She sinks to her knees, drained. She senses him moving closer and though she can't say why, she knows he's right behind her — which is perhaps the only reason to explain why she doesn't startle when he embraces her from behind. “Poor little Volera,” he murmurs, not quite mocking her. “You still don't remember me, do you?”

  Vol remembers how close he got to her face when he had her cornered in the gaming parlor. Now that she thinks about it, really thinks about it, it is odd. A stranger feeling so comfortable in such close proximity to another stranger? Why did she hesitate? Why didn't she just kick him and run?

  And then she thinks of that kiss — scorching, searing, seductive, which she can still feel on hers like a brand, like an echo of reality. You don't kiss strangers like that. You don't.

  Maybe he isn't a stranger. Maybe I know him better than I want to admit.

  In more ways than one.

  “I have these dreams — ” That sounds too suggestive. “They might be memories — ”

  She waits; Catan says nothing. It's only slightly better than a taunt.

  “In some of them there's a man. I suppose he could be you.”

  She draws in a deep breath.

  “I thought knowing your name would be the key, but it wasn’t. There's something more, isn't there? Something I'm missing. What are you? Where are you from? How did we meet?”

  When his continued silence persists, she realizes she can no longer feel his arms around her. When she turns around, she finds herself in the stone corridor. As if she never left. As if the last few minutes (hours?) never happened.

  And all around her, soldiers from both teams are dead, and the stone floors and walls are spattered with their blood. On the wall, written in red drying brown, is the number 529. Déjà vu returns (I killed them all) and then her mind is forcibly disengaged from the game before her body even hits the floor.

  “Everything all right?” Ariel asks. “Your brain activity was off.”

  Vol pushes her hands away. “Catan … is he here?”

  “Nope,” Ariel says, too brightly. “Today's his day off.”

  Shit.

  10.

  All roads lead somewhere and Vol's leads her to the fifth floor. She draws in a deep breath, raps sharply on 529, promising herself, If he doesn't answer on the first knock, I'll go back and forget this whole thing. She hears no stirring on the other side of the door and with a relieved sigh, she turns away.

  The door opens. “Who is i — Vol?”

  He is wearing drawstring pajama pants and a wife beater. She looks at him, and the immediately looks away. It isn't fair. She has no illusions about what she looks like in the middle of the night — if she were in a shoot-em-up with monsters, for example, she might very well find herself on the wrong side of a gun — but Catan wears the bedraggled look the way other men wear suits.

  “I'm beginning to think you might be right,” she says.

  Wordlessly, he steps aside to let her in. A strange smell greets her — incense, she thinks it might be. His room is neat but not obsessively so. She almost wishes it was. Messes make everything so much more personal. The door slams shut, and Vol sees him lean against it, arms barred across his chest.

  “And what was I right about?”

  “I know you from somewhere. I almost have it, but it's beyond my reach.”

  “So you came to me.”

  It's a statement, but with a question buried inside, glinting emotion like gemstone in granite.

  “Yes.”

  He pushes off from the door and grabs a bottle of water from the fridge. He holds it out to her first. She shakes her head. He shrugs, uncaps it, and takes a long, indolent drink. She catches herself staring at his throat as he swallows and quickly averts her eyes.

  “Why me?” He taps the bottle against his palm. “I thought you didn't — what did you say? Need my brand of help.”

  “Your room number was in the War Games scenario. It was written on the wall in blood.”

  “How ghastly.” Catan doesn't look surprised. He sets the bottle of water on the floor and sits on the edge of his bed with his hands in his lap. “Let me guess. I'm suspect.”

  “A few days ago, I would have said yes. Without question.”

  “Why the change of heart?”

  “Because now I think I'm doing it.” The words come to her fluidly, naturally, shocking her.

  “You? Hmm.” He scratches his chin. “And why do you think you would do such a thing?”

  Vol stares at him. “Aren't you going to tell me I'm crazy?”

  “Nobody can answer that question better than you.” He grins; it isn't very encouraging. “Do you think you're crazy, darling?”

  “I'm beginning to think so, yes.”

  “Then you're quite sane. Crazy people always think they're perfectly sane. It's what makes them so crazy; their entire delusion lies within the fact that they believe they aren't deluded. Catch-22, Volera, love. But no, while you may not be rational, I can assure you — you're no less sane than I.”

  “That isn't very comforting.”

  “It wasn't supposed to be.” He gropes on the floor for the water bottle, raises it at her in a toast.

  Vol is aware of her own parched lips. “Could I have some water after all?”

  “Of course.” And with an amused smile that slashes at her heart, he hands her the one he just finished drinking out of. Vol hesitated. The challenge in his gaze decides for her. She downs its contents, hoping that it will drown the butterflies in her stomach.

  “Better?” Catan queries, taking the bottle from her. Their fingers brush as it changes hands. He has long fingers, rough and callused, and his touch sends a shiver down her spine as — something — from her brain elicits a knee-jerk response from her limbic system. The water isn't quelling the butterflies.

  “You're in my memories.”

  “Am I.”

  “I don't remember why — or how — but you're there. I came here to ask you, to beg you” — she laughs unhappily
— “to tell me what you know. About me. About us.”

  “So there is an 'us' now?”

  “Don't be cruel,” she says.

  “That isn't being cruel.” His hand shoots out and grabs her before she can pull away. “This is.” And with a sharp tug, she's on the bed beside him, and he pushes her back against the mattress and brushes his lips against hers so lightly that it's hardly a kiss at all before hissing into her ear, “You come here, in the middle of the night, expecting me to be awake. And you ask me — no, demand — to give you things that belong to me as much as they belong to you.”

  “But — ”

  “Never mind what it does to me. Never mind that each time I see you, I wonder if I'll ever hold you in my arms again, or be able to touch you without you cringing away like I'm a monster. I think it's fair to ask if there's an us, my dear, because I suspect you're trying to use me just now.”

  She shivers when his fingers crest her breasts.

  “Tell me that's not cruel and I'll let you go.”

  Vol blinks back tears. “Please help me. I don't have anyone else.”

  “I just love being the last resort,” says Catan. “It's so heart-warming.”

  “I'm begging you — ”

  “No,” he cuts in. “Putting a 'please' in front makes you no less demanding.”

  She stares up at him, feeling the fear and helpless rage of old, but something else now. Familiar and threadbare, like a worn shirt. And it's like seeing him for the first time — the eyes filled with shadows, the fierce, almost bestial face, softened only by the velvet smear of his lashes and the fullness of his lips. And she finds herself thinking, Oh, you are a rogue after all, aren't you?

  But something inside him is just as broken as she is. Maybe he hides it better than she does, but that brooding intensity she gets from him? She suspects that it isn't just an act.

  His eyes watch her watch him and a storm cloud of awareness forms behind them, wrought from something a bit too cold and too hard to be desire. He pulls back his torso, giving her the space she needs to run. The way she always runs.

  “Out,” he says.

  With a daring that surprises her, she presses her body against his and kisses him. It does feel familiar, and she knows in that instant that shes done this, with him, before. Muscle memory, she thinks it's called. He does not kiss her back, but his shoulders have tensed. “You are a very foolish girl.” The words sting but the tone behind them is one of resignation, not resentment.

  “I think you're cruel,” says Vol. “You're dangling pieces of my life over my head.”

  “So you come to the lion's den, to demand the lion's share?” he whispers against her mouth. “What makes you think I'll give them to you without a fight?”

  She yanks him forward by the front of his shirt, so forcefully that their noses collide. “I was expecting one.” His eyes widen as she slides her hands up back of his shirt, following the divots of his spine. His skin is deceptively soft. She can feel the muscles beneath, coiled and bunched like steel springs. As he gasps, she thinks, It would be so easy, to hurt him. And in more ways than one.

  Maybe she already has.

  Vol lets her nails sink into his skin experimentally. He chokes and pulls away from her long enough to tear off his shirt and toss it on the floor. He looks like a jaguar as he crawls back over to her, golden and sinuous, wild and beautiful. He gives her a searching look as her tugs her onto his lap. “Is it really you this time? Do you remember?”

  “No,” she says and his eyes shutter.

  She thinks for a moment that he is going to stop, but then he is wrenching at her shirt so violently that it almost hurt, and she is forced to lift her arms so he can get it off. His mouth burns, and her fingers dig into the strands of black hair as coarse as fur as she wraps her legs around his hips. “How about now?” he asks and she can feel the words run down her skin like hot water.

  “No,” she says.

  He rolls over so she's beneath him again, keeping her in place with the hard muscles of his thighs. He pulls her hair back from her face, gently, and kisses her in a way she hasn't known it was possible to kiss. He kisses her in a way that makes her body ache with the sweetness of it, to the point where her sheer desire for him is almost as painful as the sharp nips of his teeth.

  “This is your last chance to run away,” he says, a little breathlessly. “Just so you know.”

  Her heart thwacks against her rib cage. She can scarcely breathe. Everything aches and she has never felt more awake or alive. Each kiss seems to stir something vital in her, something she has believed to be lost. Her mind is a haze of memories; they blow apart like vapor when she reaches out for them, but it is enough, for the moment, to know that they are there.

  “Will you answer my questions? If I stay?”

  “If you kiss me like that again, I'd sell you my soul.” He plays with the tops of her pants, making them ride lower on her hips. His face turns serious. “You're staying, then?”

  At her nod, he sighs against her neck and she hears him whisper, “Good.”

  What little remains of their clothing quickly joins their counterparts on the floor shortly thereafter. Their mouths meet in a mesh of tongues and teeth. His body fits so rightly against hers, so perfectly, that it seems as if he has been tailored to be the key for her lock. But locks are made for a purpose, and she is afraid of the secrets that might spill out when he opens her up.

  She shivers, and he says, “What's wrong?”

  “I feel strange. My head is full of thoughts and I can't focus on any one of them.”

  The way he looks at her, it's as if he understands. But then the understanding, or whatever it is, disappears and he arches a brow. “I'm sure I can find something else to occupy you.” He slides his hands down her arms, all the way to her wrists, stroking lightly. “Like that oh-so-worthy quandary of yours regarding what does and does not constitute begging.” Slowly, he begins to draw them over her head and fixes her with a rakish smile. “Permit me to clarify.”

  “When mothers warn their daughters about all the cold, nasty men out there who will only break their tender little hearts, I'm the one they've got in mind because I'm the one who broke their hearts when their mothers were warning them.”

  “I remember something.”

  “Yes?”

  “You told me once that you were going to break my heart.”

  He rolls over to face her. “Yes,” he says. “I may once have said something like that.”

  “What happened?”

  His beautiful eyes are even more hypnotic up close.

  “You broke mine.”

  The hands on her thighs are as moist and spongy as rotted meat. She swallows back bile as they slide into the shadows cast by her skirt. The color purple blurs before her eyes — it is the color of fear, of nausea. Of hatred.

  She is sore and stinks of sweat and blood. Beyond the purple haze, she can hear screams. She barely had time to breathe before the soldiers dragged her, still crying, to the bedchamber of the creature.

  “You're like ice,” the creature says, and she stiffens at the probing touch of the fingers — as painful and impersonal as the medical implements employed by the creatures in white. “Don't tell me you don't enjoy this.”

  She says nothing.

  “I've seen you in battle.” His breath quickens as his thumb traces over various scars left by desperate men. “What does it feel like, to rend them limb from limb? What is it like to possess such power?”

  She looks away.

  “Answer me, whore!” He pinches her cruelly, twisting her flesh in his chubby fingers. “Or did that bastard son of mine steal your tongue?”

  Her eyes open wide.

  “I should have known Catan Vareth would see you into his bed. Like bitch, like pup — but that's what I get, for keeping an Arbatian whore.” He tightens his grip on her until she gasps. “How do you think I found you?”

  She stares at those eyes, those yellow eyes. Bu
t when she blinks they are back to brown.

  “He sold you — to me.”

  “Is it true?”

  He won't meet her eyes. “Yes, it's true.”

  “Why? Why did you do it?”

  “Because you chose my father over me.”

  “I didn't — ”

  “You chose him, when you chose to kill. You chose him, when you agreed to become what you are now,” he spits. “A monster.”

  “No.” She strains against the nanobots. “They drug me. I can't stop it. I want to stop. I don't want to be the way I am now!”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Catan, please. They're going to cut me if you leave. They're calling it nullification, but they're going to cut into me — to tear pieces of me out.”

  He is walking away.

  “Please! Don't let them do it!”

  He doesn't stop.

  “Catan!”

  No response.

  “I loved you.”

  He's gone.

  “I could make you kill him,” the creature in purple says. “The way you killed all the others.” He doesn't realize that he's already played his trump card. Sometimes, when you have everything, you are no longer in a position to gain. She no longer cares. About herself. About Catan. About anything.

  “Tell me you want me.”

  “I want you,” she says and as he leans in, she tears off his head.

  And as the blood spatters her face from the severed arteries, the face turns back to the frightened young man who was dragged from his jail cell, lured by the promise of freedom for slaying a monster.

  The audience roars in approval.

  She lets the head fall to the ground.

  When she drops to her knees to join it, she hits smooth floor instead of earth and finds herself in a large room surrounded by flashing light. She bristles, like a cornered beast, and then she remembers where she is. Who she is. What she is. And then she throws back her head and laughs.

  11.

  (You have three days to decide…whether you wish to live — or die.)