“Jegs,” I called out, before I could stuff the impulse down so far that I wouldn’t deal with it.
She lifted her head and met my interruption with a blank face.
My gaze flitted to Armise as he continued to talk with Grimshaw. She noticed and the contours of her cheekbones went sharp as she frowned, her back straightening. I tilted my head toward the door and she stood to follow me outside.
There was a chill in the air as I pushed out of the door and into the center of the encampment. I couldn’t help but envy Armise’s ability to adjust his temperature to find comfort. Instead I crossed my arms, setting my fisted hands digging into my ribs, and waited for her to join me.
Jegs spared a glance over her shoulder to make sure the door had shut behind her. “He actually told you then. Since he’d avoided it yesterday I thought he wasn’t going to go there.”
She was as straightforward as usual. She’d never been intimidated by me, and I would have thought less of her if she had done anything except go for the jugular on this topic.
I sucked in the cold air and stared down at her. “You thought he was going to lie to me.”
“Not like it would be the first time—” Jegs started, then stopped herself. She set her hands on her hips. “What he does or doesn’t tell you isn’t any of my business unless it affects keeping my ass alive. I don’t give a shit what you and Armise have decided is your goal in this war.”
“Armise’s and my goal? What the fuck, Jegs? You’ve not only fucked him but you were goddamn married to him. You may be tied to him more than I am.”
She poked her finger into my chest. “Don’t you dare throw that shit at me if you aren’t chucking it at him too.”
I resisted the urge to rip her finger off her hand. Barely. “How do expect me to react when you pin my motivations to his like that? Like you have all along despite your fucking history with him.” My stomach sank. “Shit. Or was it because of your history with him?”
“Fuck you to hell and back. I expect you to see past your relationship with him and value what I have to say because it’s fucking well thought out. I have first-hand fucking knowledge of how persuasive and manipulative he used to be. That’s the only so-called history I have with him. That doesn’t mean he’s that way with you now and I’ve remained open to that possibility.”
“Fuck you,” I goaded her. “Don’t pretend like you haven’t tried to persuade or manipulate me when it comes to him since the exact second that he and I transported in from the Olympic stadium. Your past with him has influenced every action you’ve taken where he was even peripherally involved. If it didn’t, then you would have told me about the marriage years ago.”
“Me? Why the fuck didn’t he tell you years ago? Whatever the hell it was between Darcan and I wasn’t a marriage on any level. I never brought it up because it was inconsequential to me—”
“Inconsequential. Right. You questioned my loyalty because of him.”
She ran her tongue under the line of her teeth and clacked her mouth shut around whatever she had first intended to say. She took one step closer to me and jabbed her finger into my chest again, with a hell of a lot more force this time. “Am I here? Am I fighting with you? Just because I ask questions of you that no one else will doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in you. He and I have come to a truce. As long as he doesn’t fuck with you or me, then he and I are good. And right now I am telling you Armise and I are good. You listening?”
I gritted my teeth and remained silent.
“I asked you if you were listening, Colonel.”
“I heard you.”
She took a step away from me. “Look, are we going to have a problem about this?”
“Not as long you don’t.”
Jegs scoffed. “That problem became yours years ago, Colonel.”
I uncrossed my arms and scrubbed my hands over my face, then, “Armise said he didn’t know what your reasons were for going through with it.”
“This isn’t the time and definitely not the place. Grimshaw knows about Armise but he doesn’t know the why. Armise doesn’t either. I made sure of that. You have the right to know because of your relationship with President Kersch. Just not now.”
“When?” I ground out, making my displeasure un-fucking-questionable.
“When you make sure I make it out of this clusterfuck alive.” Jegs gave her predatory smile of all teeth and tacked on a sarcastic, “Colonel.”
“And he’s the manipulative one.”
“I never said I wasn’t just as persuasive and manipulative as him.” She tilted her chin up. “Now. Are we going to do this or talk about our feelings more?”
I huffed. “Armise is too sentimental for the two of you to ever have worked out.”
She gasped and wheezed out a laugh as she walked to the command center, and threw over her shoulder, “Isn’t that the damn truth. Both of you are too emotional.”
I scowled.
Armise and Grimshaw were wrapped up in the same discussion over strategy when Jegs and I returned. I took the seat next to Armise and Jegs plopped down next to me. Armise didn’t acknowledge either of us, but I had no doubt his casual disregard was on purpose.
“I was just about to ask Armise about Anubis,” Grimshaw said.
There was no way Armise would tell Grimshaw anything of what he knew or didn’t so I redirected the question back to Grimshaw. “You said you’d heard of it before?”
If Grimshaw had any hesitation about answering this in front of us then he didn’t show it. “I’ve seen documentation that indicates Anubis was a program people were seeking an end to hundreds of years ago. The destruction of the archives may have been to eliminate that research.”
Jegs’ head snapped up and she stared at her brother. “That’s an entirely different narrative than we know.”
Grimshaw shrugged. “And I can’t tell you whether it’s true or not, only that it’s what I’ve seen hints of.”
“So what about you, Armise?” Jegs pushed. “What do you know about it?”
Armise set his hands on the table and leaned forward. “Anubis was the multi-government-sponsored project that was the origin of weaponized genetic modification in human beings. Anubis isn’t just genetmods, it is specialized modifications for use in warfare.”
Like a fluctuating body temperature that would allow a soldier to survive in any weather condition anywhere in the world. Or increased strength. Just two of the mods Armise had right now. But Grimshaw had just said Anubis had been around hundreds of years ago. “Backtrack. Are we talking about what Anubis was or is?”
“Nobody knows,” Grimshaw answered. “If the Nationalist attack on the storage banks was intended to wipe it all out then it was a failure.”
“Anubis is a live project,” Armise corrected him. “Anubis is what is happening in those camps we intend to destroy.”
“You got that intel from Ahriman’s father, didn’t you?” I said.
Armise nodded. “And Manny confirmed it.”
I scratched at the stubble on my chin. I hadn’t had time to shave in days, but that was the least of my concerns now. “So does this change anything about how we need to approach the camps?”
Grimshaw’s gaze swept between us all. “If we don’t know anything more then it can’t.”
That was Armise’s cue to offer up more information if he had it, but I knew better than to think Armise would. True to form and history, he kept his mouth shut.
“If we don’t encounter resistance then all these plans are overkill,” I grumbled, waving at the screens rotating through pictures of the camps. “Any chance of that happening?”
“No,” Grimshaw answered without hesitation. “Whether or not they know we’re coming, as soon as we’re there—as soon as we’re barreling through their front doors across the globe—there will be reinforcements transporting in. Ahriman’s advantage in the war is the live product from these camps. He won’t risk all of the full hybrids on defending the ca
mps, just enough to protect his assets.”
“So how the fuck do we win this?” I asked.
Grimshaw leaned forward. “Want it more than they do.”
“That’s fucking concrete,” I bit out. Grimshaw may have been a politician but he wasn’t a soldier. This facet was something I needed to take control of. “Elina will be with me. Armise with Jegs. Grimshaw, stick with Athol. You aren’t built for battle without the protection of a shield and I’m guessing you don’t want to go there again.”
“You’ll get no argument from me there.” Grimshaw slapped his hands onto his thighs and stood. “I’m going to make sure the hys are up to speed on strategy and the security for our settlement is prepared.”
“I’ll come with. Make sure you don’t fuck up,” Jegs prodded him.
I waited until they were both gone before I turned to Armise. “Tell me what you’re not telling them.”
Armise crooked an eyebrow. “So vague a request, Merq. I thought you were getting better at asking the right questions. I expect better from you.”
I rolled my shoulders then my neck, attempting to dissipate the tension gathering there. Armise’s insistence that I start asking the right questions wasn’t helping my stress level. “What leverage did you seek by handing Ahriman’s father over to him?”
“Better. And more interesting of an answer. I wanted to live. I traded his life for mine.”
“That was always the plan. After you transported out of the bunker in the States.”
He reclined in his chair and slung his arm over the back. “It became the plan once I learned everything I could from Dr. Blanc.”
“And that was what about Anubis? He had to be the one you first heard the name from.”
He stood, began arranging the weapons on his body, choosing to not answer me.
I would have waited him out but this was exactly the same position we’d been in for years, and if things were ever going to change then he owed me answers when I asked him a direct question. When I asked him the right question. And since delving into Armise’s time with Ahriman made Armise uncomfortable, I knew this was the right approach. I stood up and took the knife from his hands, gaining his attention.
“You went in search of Calum Blanc for a reason. There’s no way you simply ran across him, because all intel said he was dead. You were looking for him when you left the bunker, maybe not right away but for the same reasons that you left at first. And you told me the reason you left was because of fear of what Ahriman had done to you—what he could have put inside you that you didn’t know about. So you were looking for him for those answers, but what you got from him was something different than you could have anticipated, right?”
Armise swiped the knife out of my hand and thrust it into the sheath at his hip. I could see his jaw working as he studiously kept his hands occupied by preparing our weapons.
“Let’s strip this body down to the bones.” I pushed him, unwilling to let this go. “Let’s pretend as if I don’t have a really fucking personal stake in whether or not you decide to answer this question honestly. Let’s imagine the last—what? Fifteen years?—have been normal in any measure of the word and you and I are just soldiers working toward the same cause. Why would you find it necessary to hide vital intelligence from a member of your own team?”
Armise closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He cocked back the slide on a real pistol to load the first bullet and held it out for me. “My answer is personal to you, and the last fifteen years—and two months—proves that we are not just working together. Anubis is exactly what I told Grimshaw and Jegs—the origin of genetic modifications in human beings for the purpose of war.”
I took the gun from him and flipped it into the holster at my waist without verifying it was ready to fire. I didn’t need to because Armise already had. “But it’s more than that.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Yes. It is.”
“So tell me.”
“I won’t.”
I read the stiff set of his shoulders, the flexing of his biceps as he worked through prepping the pile of weapons in front of him. He was posturing. Using his size to bolster his verbal authority. A wall that was defensive, not offensive. His refusal to answer could only be for one reason. The details he was unwilling to share had to do with me. I was sure of it. “There’s something you know about my genetic modifications that I don’t know. Yet.”
He picked up my rifle—the one that had reignited this damn war—and smoothed a hand over the barrel. “You’re going to have to trust that I keep this close for good reason. Not knowing benefits you more.”
“More than what? Or who?”
I caught the hint of a smirk on his lips before he answered. “Yes.”
I ripped my rifle from his hands and tossed it onto the table. I would have no need for it in hand-to-hand combat. “Fuck you. One conversation where I don’t end up more confused than when it started. We ever going to get there?”
Armise stopped working on the weapons and tapped his fingers on the table. He stared at the pile in front of him, but I didn’t think he was seeing any of it. His shoulders dropped down, as if the weight of what he knew was tangible. “What would you have done differently if Wensen Kersch had told you about my defection when it happened?”
That wasn’t anything close to what I’d expected him to say. I quieted and tried to picture how that revelation would have hit me if it had come before the DCR standoff. How much my trajectory would have spun away from the mission, or more likely away from Armise. Neither path would have brought us to this point.
“It would have changed everything,” I admitted.
“Everything about how you viewed your world and reacted to it.” Armise put his palms on the table and leaned on them, hanging his head down but maintaining eye contact with me. “Tell me you have to know and I will answer you. But I’m asking you to trust me.”
“It isn’t easy.” I grabbed a knife off the table and flipped it into position for a downward body strike. Some days the urge to stab him was overwhelming.
Armise tracked my movements with the knife. The corner of his lip tipped up. “I am aware.”
I slid the blade into one of my sheaths and changed the subject. “Let’s talk about tactical approaches for the camps.”
Armise’s hand slid down my chest and he frowned as he turned away.
“What? What the fuck is that look?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
I knew only one way to interpret his reluctance. “You don’t want to fight.”
“I wasn’t born a hunter, but I will do what has to be done, as always.”
Grimshaw banged on the door, calling out that it was time to go.
“You’re damn good at your job, Armise. Even if it isn’t what you would have chosen, you were born for this life.”
He loaded another pistol with bullets, sliding the clip into place. “No. That was my older brother.”
I stared at Armise, slack-jawed at his offhand mention of a sibling I never knew existed. Then Grimshaw opened the door in a rush, frustration knitting his brows together as he told us it was time to move. Armise holstered his pistol and followed Grimshaw without a look back to me.
Chapter Seven
The forests surrounding the Kash camp were unlike any other front line I’d ever walked into. There was something primeval about this place, as if the ground we stood on was just as alive as the heavy tread of boots that echoed on the stark terrain. I could almost see the trees straightening—as if they were standing guard—as we approached. Seven dronebots swooped low over our heads with high-pitched hisses and plunged into the darkness created by the haggard, foreignly bent limbs. The machines hissed then sputtered when they began to hit pockets of fuzzy transmission capability. The closer we got to the long-dead forests that surrounded the camp, the more the dronebots appeared to struggle to stay in flight.
The pervasiveness of the silence could have given me pause, but I’d been
in this position enough times to know that any sign of weakness would embolden the enemy and demoralize our loosely stitched together band of allies. I could only assume the rogue hybrids were watching us now from the pockets of darkness created by the setting sun. But that was the point—we were here to draw them out for a fight. We had no choice but to continue moving forward, despite having little knowledge of what we were walking into. A trickle of sweat rolled down my back, tracking the same line where Armise’s fingertips had been this morning.
Standing next to me, Elina whispered, “We’re being watched.”
“Any idea how many or where?”
She shook her head but kept her arms raised and finger on the trigger of her pistol as we stalked forward. “They’ll bring the dronebots down first. It’s what I would do.”
I spoke in a low voice, just loud enough to be picked up by the comm strap wrapped around my neck. “Talk to me, Chen.”
“I can’t pick up too much from here.” Her voice went in and out. She’d been on the mark when she said the atmosphere above Kash would interfere with transmissions. “There are definite signs of movement, but it’s impossible to tell if it’s animals, people or just static. I can’t even tell you what size, shape or threat level. The dronebots are running nearly blind, just like I warned you. I’m running blind—”
I heard the explosion first, then saw the red-and-white burst of a dronebot exploding through the trees. It caught the crisp, dead leaves on fire, and the sound of crackling followed the wave of the air blast.
“Threat level imminent,” Chen announced with complete calm.
“No shit,” I muttered and watched three of the remaining dronebots destruct with just as much ease as the first. At least it was robots and not humans that were taking the first shots of this fray. I ventured a glance to the two dozen hybrids—so many of them young teenagers—behind me. They were pumped up and ready for battle, not hesitating to follow me in. Muscles tense, eyes scanning with focused, malicious intent. They were fighting against the urge to move more than trying to hold themselves back. They had no sense of self-preservation.
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