“So did you ever find out anything about her?”
Jegs pursed her lips. “If I had, things wouldn’t have gone down the way they did.”
“The last time I talked to the President he sounded as if he knew he was going to die,” I said. “That wasn’t new—he was aware his life was threatened at every turn—but that time it was just different.”
“That is because he did know,” Armise interjected. “I contacted him last month and told him that I intended to kill him.”
I stared at Armise in shock. My memory of the day of Wensen’s death, less than a week ago and yet beginning to be buried under so many other tactical moves and intelligence details that it was hard to remember, began to snap into focus. Wensen had told me there was something he’d learned about himself only a month ago.
“You also told him why you were killing him.”
“I did,” Armise confirmed. “He was a compromised asset, not a conscious traitor.”
I internalized what he was saying. “So what do we do if Ahriman did the same to us? What if we’re compromised like Kersch was?”
Jegs cleared her throat, reminding me that she was there and that I’d just laid out my greatest fear not only to Armise but to her as well.
Fuck it.
There were too many secrets and I didn’t have enough allies. I had to trust her.
“If you and Armise are compromised like President Kersch, then I think you already know the answer to that, Colonel.”
I coughed out a strained laugh and looked to Armise. “Always thought I would die at the end of your rifle.”
The corner of Armise’s lip twisted up. Defiant, dangerous. Intent. “At least we’re on that path together.”
* * * *
I slipped off my shirt and threw it onto the bed, stretching my arms above my head and twisting my body to judge just how close I was to my physical limit. I’d already surpassed my mental boundaries, but there was nothing I could do about that. I couldn’t remember how many days it had been since Armise had reappeared in my life. Three? Four? Things were moving fast, unraveling and spinning at a speed and on a course I couldn’t affect. But for the first time, ever, between Armise and me there was an opening for—what exactly? Understanding? Empathy? No. Even more frightening…there was hope for us. That when we died it would be with each other instead of against.
Armise had wandered outside soon after dropping off our gear in the room Priyessa had given to us by the sea. I followed him outside after cleaning up. I needed to not be boxed in with walls. It was possible I hadn’t been fully in control of myself for a long time, because there was a man-made barrier of some kind in my head. The knowledge it was there was claustrophobic enough.
I took a step outside the room and inhaled the damp, warm air into my Chemsense-damaged lungs. Armise stood with his back to me at the edge of stone steps that disappeared into the water. I came up behind him, laying my palm at the base of his neck, curling pointer finger and thumb into the swell of muscle there and grounding myself.
“We find ourselves on the edge of another ocean,” I said to him as I moved to his side.
Armise murmured, “It’s almost peaceful.”
“Minus the torture and mind games.”
Armise’s tongue appeared at the corner of his lips as he stared out at the water. Neither of us had had surge or any kind of medical treatment since the incursion on the hybrid camps. Both of our bodies were covered in nicks and scratches from that battle and my voice was still scratchy. Between the two of us there didn’t seem to be any injury that was serious in nature, but each wound was yet another physical reminder of damage that could not be undone.
He swiped at the bead of blood that gathered at a cut on the edge of his mouth and cleaned the pad of his finger on his pants, breaking whatever reverie he had been in. “I know Tiam, but not by that name. When he spoke in Mongol today I realized it was him. He was one of the men who trained me after the DCR attacked Murun. He may be the reason you and I are here now. Together.”
“What do you mean? That he manipulated us?”
Armise shook his head. “An accident. I don’t think even he could have known what he was setting in motion.”
I pulled my lip piercing between my teeth and tried to rein in the frustration that overtook me when he offered me yet another vague statement about something in the past I didn’t know about—or didn’t have all the pieces yet to know there was a connection at all. “There’s a whole lot in motion here, Darcan. Narrow down the ‘what’ you’re talking about.”
Armise’s gaze dragged away from the ocean to my face. “You and me.”
“Us…”
“Yes, Merq,” Armise replied, a familiar, gruff exhalation of frustration in his tone as he settled his hand on my hip. “Us.”
My hand dropped from his neck. “How the fuck did we end up here? I can’t decide anymore if it was an accident, fate or a willing choice. Because in the beginning it was all you, not me. You’ve always been one step ahead of me—” My words cut off as my thoughts did, like the snapping of a circuit that rendered a sonicpistol useless. There was only Armise in front of me, not a battlefield full of strategic and tactical inputs, and this one man was too much for me to understand. Just as he’d always been.
He squeezed my hip then let go, as if he knew I needed space. “Are you asking me why I pursued you?”
“Maybe,” I answered without thinking, then took a step back from him and searched his face. He was half-turned toward me, hands in his pockets. His features were lax and his eyes mimicked the color of the slow-rolling waves in front of us. He was calm—and not a stoic, forced calm. He was genuinely at ease next to me in yet another foreign country.
“Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m asking. Why me?”
He hunched his shoulders forward, chin curling into his chest. His eyes were closed for just longer than a blink, then he was straightening, facing me. “You were the one who killed my older brother.”
“Shit.” I licked my lips, tasting salt, dirt and blood. Always blood. “That wasn’t—” I hung my head and took the seconds I needed to consider the implications of what he was telling me. “Are you sure it was me?”
“Yes.”
I ran my hands through my hair and realized my legs were shaking. I sat down on the edge of the top stone step, setting my elbows on my knees and resting my head in my hands. “I’ve killed a lot of men, Armise. I couldn’t tell you which one he was.”
There was no sound, no indication of movement, but I knew Armise had sat down next to me. Armise sighed, and the defeated sound was where I expected it to come from.
Armise was always next to me, even when it was I who caused him pain.
“I know which one he was,” he finally said.
Did that mean Armise knew which of my kills had been his brother? Or that he would never forget I had been the one to take his brother’s life? Both considerations were awful and I couldn’t discern what he meant from his emotionless lack of emphasis.
My throat burned as I tried to speak, but no longer from the Chemsense. “Armise—”
He shook his head, quieting me. “In the beginning I pursued you for vengeance. But I’d never met anyone who could be called my equal, let alone could live up to that expectation. What I said to you that night in Singapore at the warehouse—that you fascinated me—was true.”
“And now?”
“You still fascinate me. And you’re still the man who killed Vachir, yet I have no more need for vengeance.”
“You tried to kill me multiple times after that night in the warehouse,” I reminded him.
Armise laughed, a low rumble that was becoming more recognizable each time I heard it. “That is because you still frustrate me as well.”
He put his hand on the back of my head and threaded his fingers into my hair, urging my head back so that I would look at him. All laughter was wiped from his face, the silver-blue of his eyes in shadow as he narrowed them
and focused on me. “When they sent me to take your blood that night in the Outposts, I almost did kill you. You were a game I was growing tired of because I couldn’t figure out how to gain the upper hand on you. I wanted it to be done. To bring an end to fucking and fighting and this endless circle in my head of whether or not you deserved to die. You didn’t fight me and my blade connected with your neck and I realized I had an advantage over you. You had started to expect certain behaviors from me. You did not trust me, but you weren’t as on guard anymore…”
Armise pulled my head back, more insistent this time, exposing the length of my neck. I was just as vulnerable to him now as I had been that night. I swallowed, remembering that my mistake then had been thinking he wouldn’t kill me. In the aftermath I’d promised myself that I would never make that mistake again. But my surrender to Armise’s hands was no longer a risk. It hadn’t been for a long time—years—and I was now, in this exact moment, catching up to that certainty. I didn’t just trust him, I was beginning to believe he wanted to protect me.
“That’s when you turned traitor,” I said.
Armise let go of my hair and smoothed his palm down until it was resting at the junction of my collarbone and neck, his thumb gritting over the rough stubble on my jawline. “That is when I officially turned. I contacted Jegs and let her know I would give your president the infochip.”
I chuffed, connecting two more pieces together. “It was Jegs that allowed you to always know where I was, wasn’t it?”
“In part.”
“What’s the rest?”
“I have answered many of your unending questions today. Leave some for tomorrow, for next week.” His fingers dug into my flesh. “Leave some to be unknown, Merq.”
“There will be a moment you realize you were better off never knowing me. That you should have killed me long ago. You know that?”
Armise’s jaw ticked. “That moment has already come and passed many times over.”
I let go of him but scooted closer so that my arm was against his, the solid weight of him next to me reassuring. “Do you think Ahriman really has control over us we don’t know about?”
“I do.”
I sighed. “Same. Priyessa says they don’t lie…”
“Which could be a lie.”
I lay back on the stone and rubbed at my eyes. I was so tired. Just…over all of this. But I wasn’t allowed to be. “I need to know what he’s done. Just how far gone we are.”
Armise turned, curving into my side and grasping my jaw. “You look the same to me.”
I wanted him to kiss me. It had been too long. But I didn’t know how to ask. “Sims is probably waiting to hear from us. But no matter what he says we can’t go back there. I won’t bring more shit to his door. Where are we going to go? After this?”
He leaned down and kissed the corner of my mouth. “I have a thought on that.”
I chased his lips as he began to turn away. I sank into the warmth of his skin, not missing that his normal temperature meant he was with me completely right now. Unguarded.
“You think we need to split up?” I said when he pulled away.
“That is not happening,” he said with conviction. “This is a loaded gun, Merq, but for once it is not in either of our hands.”
“Yeah, I get the feeling it’s pointed at both of our heads.”
* * * *
I sat in one of the hard-ass chairs Priyessa had left for us when she’d taken off for the States and reclined my head, propping it on the wooden slat for lack of anything else to ease the soreness and exhaustion that permeated every cell of my body. I sighed, rotating my neck, taut muscles protesting the movement all the way into my lower back as Armise and I waited for the atmosphere in the capital to clear enough to get an aircomm through to President Simion.
“You don’t have to forego surge because I won’t take it,” I said to Armise for the second time this morning. I stared at the haphazardly patched ceiling and watched Armise flip his knife in my peripheral vision.
He grunted in response.
Both of us were hurting. Wiped out. We may have been built to be invincible, but I was sure that our scientist creators from Anubis hadn’t had a real clue of just how fucking taxing the physical and emotional toll we would face on a daily basis would be for us. Invincible wasn’t immortal. Eventually something would kill us, and today it felt like that ending was coming sooner rather than later.
“How the fuck…”
Simion’s voice came over the speaker and I sat up, my hips popping from the sudden movement. I cringed and tried to focus my attention on the screen instead of my body.
“…Somebody please…” Simion’s voice came again then faded away, the screen in front of us flickering his image then going black again.
“Never mind, I see them,” Simion said to someone off camera as he waved them away. He paused for a moment as if he was listening then nodded. “Yeah, wait outside just in case. Thanks.”
Simion faced the camera, folded his hands together and leaned forward. “Electrical storms are the least of my problems.”
I scrubbed my hands over my face, closing my eyes and blocking the image of him out. His waves of blond hair were gone. I couldn’t look at him without flashes from the Chemsense attack crowding through my head.
“Did you do that for Chen?”
I could feel Armise’s eyes on me and forced myself to look up. Simion was brushing his hand over his head, now shaved down to his scalp. “I didn’t know what else to do. Neveed is refusing to talk to any of us since Jegs brought Chen’s body back to him. Neveed will find the right place for her… There wasn’t anything formal for me to do. I can’t just—”
“Get in a transport and disappear unnoticed anymore,” I finished for him. Simion was no longer an unknown operative. “I get it. I’ll miss the locks, Pres, but we all deal how we need to.”
“Or not at all,” Armise said, his eyes still on me.
I exhaled a long breath through my nose, pursed my lips and clenched my teeth, all to hold in a scathing response.
On the aircomm screen Simion tapped his fingers against his desk. “You done? While you two killing each other would solve one of my problems, it would probably leave me with more issues and no one fucking capable enough to take care of them. So let’s focus here, yeah? I talked with Priyessa last night and got the update on her interrogation of Tiam. I need to backtrack, though.”
Armise crossed his arms. “How far back?”
“I won’t strain your long-term memory, Darcan,” Simion retorted, not intimidated in the least by Armise anymore. “Do you know what Merq’s father meant when he said that Merq being the last living Grayson was important?”
I anticipated that was an answer Armise wasn’t going to give to Simion, president or not. I hoped he’d be willing to tell me the truth after we got off the aircomm.
“I do not,” Armise answered, and fuck it all, I had no idea whether he was telling the truth or lying.
“So you don’t know what the Grayson family connection is to this Anubis project?” Simion pressed.
“I don’t,” Armise answered again, but this time I caught on to his differing use of contractions. Which could mean that one answer was the truth and the other was a lie, or at the very least was an indication of how careful he was being while answering.
I was too damn tired to try to pick it apart.
“Merq!”
I snapped my head up to find Simion peering at me with his brow furrowed, half out of his seat like he would have jumped through the screen if he was able to. “Where’d you just go, Mig?”
I looked to Armise and realized he had his left hand on my back and his right hand on his knife.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. If I’d clicked out of awareness long enough for Simion to be yelling and Armise to have a drawn a knife, it was probably only a second, maybe two, of lost time. It could have been the sheer exhaustion I was feeling, my body shutting do
wn, or it could be something, or someone, else…
Nothing inside me felt different, but something had just happened to put both of them on edge.
“Was I checked out completely? How long?” I asked. It had been way too many times I’d had to ask that in my lifetime.
“Eight seconds,” Armise answered.
I cracked my neck. “Shortest time span of unconsciousness yet. That I know of,” I tried to deflect but neither Armise nor Simion eased at my attempt. “So it was just me.”
Armise nodded and took his hand off his knife.
Simion flopped back into his chair. “That’s what Priyessa was talking about then.” He ran his hand over his lips, watching me. And as much as he hadn’t been intimidated by Armise only moments before, he surveyed me with an air of caution. With fear. I couldn’t fault him.
“You know as much as we do,” Armise huffed.
“Armise, can you give Merq and me five minutes?”
Armise didn’t say anything, he simply stood and started to walk away.
“Wait,” I called out after him. “Five minutes.” I held up my hand and it was shaking. I balled my left hand into a fist, flexed it, and did the same with my right. “I’ll be back in six. If I’m not, come find me.”
He nodded once and pushed through the door, sweeping wet, hot air into the climate-controlled room.
I pushed up my sleeves and swiped away the sweat that had gathered above my upper lip. “I’m not coming back to the States, Pres.”
“For fuck’s sake. For the next four minutes and forty-five seconds I’m not the leader of the Revolution, I’m your friend.”
I nodded. “Doesn’t change anything. I won’t put you in jeopardy.”
Simion pressed his lips together in a thin line. “Listen, Mig. I need to get something off my chest. You remember all those years you were undercover? I genuinely thought you had gone rogue. I believed every goddamn aspect of your cover story. I hated you. Fucking was sick with the thought that I had fought next to you and for you for so much of my life. I was devastated because the man I knew never would have turned on his beliefs like that. My instincts were on then, because you weren’t that traitor. And I know they’re on now. You are the same Merq Grayson I’ve known since I could barely put one foot in front of another without stumbling. I don’t give a fuck what Ahriman has done to you. If he’s done anything at all…we’ll find a way around it. When you took me out of that med facility, you promised you would stand with me and I’m holding you to that promise.”
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