by Natalie Grey
“Her actions now have led to enemies,” Sidonie threatened.
“My Queen has many enemies, but those enemies do not wish for peace.”
Sidonie stared him down with pure hatred.
“Go to Emeric,” Stephen advised. “Tell him what I have said. Tell him to contact his father. If it is justice that he wants, then he shall have it if he works with us.”
“You would deny him his own justice,” Sidonie muttered, ill-tempered.
“I would deny him the chance to wreak destruction on the human world,” Stephen snapped. His temper was reaching a breaking point. “I do not long for a world without humans, and neither does my Queen.” He took a deep breath. “Go to Emeric. See what he says. Tell him I will await his response.”
QBS ArchAngel
“I don’t get it,” Arisha mused later. She was slumped in a chair, legs kicking over one arm of it. “Why won’t they join up with us?”
“Because they think we have no right.” Hsu looked at her calmly. “They think that the ones who were wronged should be the ones to choose how justice is dispensed—and mete it out.”
“That’s not how any society works.” Stoyan voiced, coming to stand behind Arisha’s chair. He smiled down at her and took her hand before he looked at Hsu. “Vigilante justice leads to chaos.”
“The people we killed at Velingrad, and in Spain, and here—” Hsu paused. “Did we kill the ones here? Did anyone remember to do that?”
“It was done.” Stephen came into the room and nodded gravely to her. “They were judged. They pleaded for their lives but offered only that they wanted to live—no reason for what they did, and no apology. They understood that they should die, and they did: by the poison they had set aside for the Wechselbalg.” He looked grimly satisfied as he took a seat with the group.
Hsu nodded. Her own sense of guilt coiled within her, and she looked around the room at all of them.
“Do you understand, though? Think about me, especially.” She forced herself to meet Irina’s eyes. “Why should I be allowed to dispense justice? I didn’t suffer from the torture, I was the torturer. And yet I am the one there, destroying the facilities. Doesn’t that seem wrong?”
“Hsu.” Stephen’s voice brooked no argument. “We have all failed in our lives. You may have failed at Sofia. Yet, if you say those wronged should choose, why do you not accept Irina’s choice to save you? We are judged by what we do. You failed, and that failure inspired you to become an instrument of justice. I once failed both my brother and my Queen, and I was given a second chance. You must accept yours. No more of this.” He looked her in the eyes. “Please.”
Hsu looked away, and a few seconds later, a hand slipped around her fingers and squeezed gently. She looked up to see Arisha.
“Besides,” Arisha joked, “you wouldn’t want to leave us without Chief Administrator Zhang, would you? The woman’s a Grade A, ice cold bitch and I just love watching her make the administrators squirm.”
Despite herself, Hsu laughed, as did the others.
“You should have seen her in that dude’s office.” Jennifer was laughing. “I’ll see if I can get ADAM to pull the tapes. ‘Are you going to ask questions every step of the way, Gomez?’” She tried to mimic Hsu’s icy demeanor and failed as she was still giggling.
“Oh, stop it,” Hsu muttered. She could feel her cheeks flushing, and she pressed her hands over them to hide her face.
“No, seriously, how do you do it?” Jennifer leaned forward. “I want to learn!”
“That is the last thing we need,” Stephen opined, but he leaned back in his chair with a grin.
“Fine.” Hsu dropped her hands. “The first thing you have to know is that every facility administrator is crooked. Every one of them,” she repeated, for emphasis. “Maybe a few of them are crooked in a good way—like that one scientist we met at Istaravshan. Possibly. But that just means they’re on a different side from the rest of the organization. Oof. I’m not explaining this well. One second.”
She considered, trying to explain what had seemed like basic concepts in China to people here.
“I think I can help,” Stoyan offered. “It is not so different in Bulgaria.” He sat on the arm of Arisha’s chair and looked at Jennifer. “What she means is, every administrator is hiding something. Either they do everything they are told—which, in an organization like Hugo’s is against the law and also a terrible thing to do—or they are disobeying orders in some way. Sometimes this means they’re better than their orders, sometimes it means they’re worse.”
“Worse?” Jennifer demanded.
Stoyan nodded sadly. “It happens. The thing is, either way, Hsu knows, as ‘Chief Administrator,’” he made finger quotes, “that she can throw them under the bus and blackmail them, and they know it, too. Every time she walks in, there is a…deal being made. If she asks them to do something wrong—they have leverage on her, but if she makes it clear that she knows what they do, then it’s back to a stalemate. But as long as she seems to be following Hugo’s orders, none of them will fight her too much. They know what Hugo does to people he doesn’t like, and they know that she could ruin them if they ever made it out and back to the real world again.”
Jennifer frowned, trying to follow this.
“Did that make sense to you?” she demanded of Stephen.
“Yes.” Stephen was grinning. “Sometimes you’re such a precious, pure little unicorn, you know that?”
“I’ll get you for that.” Jennifer narrowed her eyes at him. “Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But I’ll get you for that.”
Stephen laughed.
”Stephen?” ADAM said.
Everyone in the room perked up. ADAM had used the intercoms on the ArchAngel, not an implant.
“Yes?” Stephen asked.
”If you are not going to be murdered, there is a call for you from Emeric Carre.”
Arisha hid a laugh behind her hand.
“Thank you, ADAM.” Stephen was composed. “I don’t think I’m going to die in the next few minutes. I trust Jennifer will let me finish my duties to the Queen before she kills me.”
Jennifer shrugged.
“But you’d better put the call through soon,” Stephen continued with a grimace. “I don’t know how long I’ve got.”
9
QBS ArchAngel
“Mr. Carre.” Stephen straightened his cuffs as he sat behind the conference table.
ADAM had been able to establish a link to the man’s computer, giving them video of him. Tall and burly, with some grey in his hair, he was the spitting image of his father. But where Jean-Marc had looked defeated, Emeric was fiery.
“I’m told you wanted to speak with me,” he began abruptly.
“Yes.” Stephen inclined his head. “I spoke to a woman named Sidonie, who I gather was acting on your instruction. She asked me to leave the handling of the facilities to you.”
That was putting perhaps an excessively cheerful spin on the conversation, but he was determined to begin negotiations pleasantly. Perhaps if they started well, they would not become as unpleasant as his conversation with Sidonie had truly been.
He did not let himself think about what she had said regarding Michael. Such words...
Such words were nothing. Stephen knew that both Michael and Bethany Anne—and likely himself—had accrued enemies despite behaving honorably. Sometimes they had accrued enemies because of it.
He was not going to be swayed by the spiteful words of a woman who only wanted revenge.
He simply did not want to hear such things spoken in his presence again.
Emeric did not seem impressed by Stephen’s take on the matter, however. “And you told her you would not step back,” he said shortly.
“Yes,” Stephen admitted. “That is true.”
“Then what do we have to talk about?” Emeric asked him. “Sidonie gave you my demands.”
Off-screen, Jennifer bit her lip. She could not begin to thin
k what this must be like for Stephen.
Stephen, however, did not waver, even at the word ‘demands.’ “Have you given any thought to my offer?” he asked Emeric. “A temporary partnership would be beneficial to both of us.”
For one thing, it would provide more manpower. For another, it would show Emeric that Bethany Anne was not someone to defy.
“Partnership.” Emeric smiled without even a touch of humor. “A partnership where you would call the shots and I would follow your orders, am I right? That would be no more than us being hired muscle.”
“What orders are there to follow?” Stephen asked persuasively. “Both of us want the Wechselbalg in the remaining facilities freed. Both of us want the staff in those facilities to face justice for what they have done.”
“Justice. And what does that mean to you?” Emeric sat forward in his seat. “Because let me tell you what would be a just punishment. For a scientist, it would be months in a cage, brought out only to be beaten and tormented, tortured for disobeying the orders to kill their own family—who they would see die before their own eyes, helpless to stop it. For a guard…that is more difficult. Perhaps it would be best if they had to endure all the things they watched and did not stop. And there were many of those.”
“And what would you solve?” Stephen asked him. “When you had compounded the horror in your soul twice over by inflicting the same horrors done to you, what would you gain?”
He paused, waiting for a response, but Emeric did not speak.
“There is a reason my Queen forbids torture,” Stephen explained. “It accomplishes nothing, and stains those who wield it.”
“And so your Queen has decided that we are too vengeful to be trusted? That is why she has involved herself in this matter?”
“My Queen,” Stephen continued patiently, silently reminding himself that this man had faced unimaginable horrors, “involved herself because she could not sit idly by while Wechselbalg were being abducted and tortured.” He knew his voice had risen.
Emeric looked away for a long moment. Stephen did not know what wheels were spinning in his head, but when he looked up, his face was different.
“I see,” he said quietly.
“Do you?” Stephen could not keep the surprise from his voice.
“Yes.” This time there was humor in Emeric’s voice. “Why do you think I do what I do? Because I cannot stand by. Because I want them freed.”
“Exactly.” Stephen sighed. “We have stopped the torture—the experiments,” he corrected himself. “But we need to end it by clearing out the facilities. We are on the same side, are we not? Should we not work together?”
“Yes, we should.” Emeric nodded. “Perhaps we should meet at Naftalan.”
“How long until you can be there?” Stephen asked. He did not want to wait very long to free the other facilities.
Emeric considered. “Twelve hours.”
They would clear out the other facilities, Stephen decided, then meet him at Naftalan. He would not be pleased, but he should understand that speed was of the essence.
He allowed none of this to show in his face, only nodded. “Twelve hours at the Naftalan facility. One more thing...”
“Yes?”
“Gerard Cordova—”
“The traitor?” Emeric’s smile was cold. “Was he ever really a traitor, or was that message from Hugo just you in disguise?”
“Both can be true, can they not?” Stephen smiled. “I sent that message, yes, but he left Hugo to die. You should know, however, that whatever he has offered you—”
“He never got the chance to offer me anything,” Emeric interrupted. “He’s dead. My pack tore him limb from limb.” He spoke the words with grim satisfaction. “I will see you at Naftalan.”
He cut the connection and Stephen looked at the others.
“ADAM, show me the trajectory of the plane he’s in.”
“Of course.” ADAM projected it on the far wall.
“You know,” Stephen mused, after a pause. “I do believe he’s going to try to go to Khachmaz and break the agreement.”
“What will we do?” Irina asked.
Stephen’s smile was just as grim as Emeric’s. “We’ll be faster than he is.”
A few minutes later, Stephen was alone in the conference room.
“My Queen?”
There was only a slight pause. “Yes?”
“Gerard is dead,” Stephen told her without preamble.
“Good. Anything else?”
“All but three of the facilities have now been freed, and the other three will be freed within the next twelve hours. There was a ninth facility in France.”
“Which you found.”
She was clearly going somewhere with this, though he was too upset to care. “Too late…although the Wechselbalg were all right. They broke themselves out. It appears they took advantage of the confusion my message caused.”
“Why do you not seem happy about this?” Bethany Anne asked him.
“We have a situation to resolve.” Stephen looked out the window at Earth’s glow. “A Wechselbalg named Emeric Carre liberated the facility in France and established himself as Alpha of the ‘pack’ of prisoners.”
“Why do I not like the sound of this?”
“I’m sure you won’t have trouble guessing what’s happening now,” Stephen answered tiredly.
“He wants revenge?”
“Yes.” Almost, he had said “bingo”—one of Jennifer’s favorite expressions. “I spoke to his father—the original Alpha at Gordes, who set me on the trail. Emeric has agreed to work with us, but it looks as if he’ll try to cut us off. He won’t be fast enough, of course, but the group that left Gordes has fractured too much for us to find them all in short order…if at all. He claims that this justice is not ours to impose, as we were not the ones tortured.”
Bethany Anne did not speak, but her contempt was palpable.
“I do not know if I will be able to reason with him,” Stephen said simply.
The question was implied: What am I authorized to do if he will not listen?
The answer was quick. “I trust you,” Bethany Anne told him. “You’ve wrapped this up in less than a week. If nothing else, I think this new ‘pack’ will fracture without leadership. Do what you must.”
“He’s one of ours,” Stephen whispered. “They abducted him. They made him watch while his family members died. They...”
“And that is why you are going to the facilities.” Bethany Anne’s voice steadied him. “That is why you are shutting it down. But none of it—none of it—justifies him blowing the lid off the Unknown World and starting a global search for Wechselbalg.”
Stephen nodded. Bethany Anne saw to the heart of the matter at once. She always had.
“I will do what I can to persuade him,” he offered simply.
“I know you will.” He could hear the smile in her voice. “I don’t worry about you wantonly killing people.”
Stephen managed a laugh at that.
“How’s Jennifer?”
“Good. She seems happier after Spain. Sometimes she seems very young, but…never in a bad way. She reminds me to be idealistic.”
“What’s that like?” She sounded almost wistful.
He chuckled. “And how is Romania?”
“Cold as balls,” Bethany Anne replied promptly. “Ecaterina’s having the time of her life. We should be wrapped up here in a day or so, and we might be bringing someone back with us. Well, two someones. Believe it or not, Ashur has a crush.”
Stephen blinked. “I… Ashur? Really?”
“He found a bitch,” Bethany Anne explained, grinning. Ashur must have been there, because he heard her say, “Yes, I was talking about you.” She returned to Stephen a moment later. “Her name’s Bellatrix. Compared to any other dog, she’d look enormous. They breed German Shepherds big out here.”
“And you just found her?”
“More or less. Believe it or not, her
trainer is here for somewhat the same reason we are. Her brother’s been taken by the guys we’re after.”
“And you think she’ll join TQB?” Stephen leaned against the window, feeling himself relax slightly. Soon, he would be back on the ground, facing the horrors of the facilities again. For now, however, he and Bethany Anne could talk about the future—about the organization she was building, and the minutiae of recruitment and the friendships between colleagues.
“I hope so. Ashur will be devastated if she doesn’t. The trainer’s part Wechselbalg, too.“
Stephen whistled. “Oh?”
“Yep. Just enough to communicate with Bellatrix. I get the sense that she’s looking for a change of pace. Anyway, you might meet her soon. I’ll let you get back to saving the world, shall I?”
Stephen smiled. “Same to you.”
10
Sofia, Bulgaria
Dedov Timurovich stepped off the train and wrinkled his nose. The winter air was crisp, and the afternoon sunshine fell across the cobblestone streets in a pleasant tableau, but he knew the truth of this place.
Bulgaria had been nothing since it broke away.
Hadn’t it? He’d read Arisha’s article on this place.
He’d read her articles, actually, mostly out of admiration—though he would never admit that. The rest of them sat around, occasionally typing a few lines, waiting for their next assignment. Arisha, though…Arisha always seemed to be going somewhere or doing something. Her articles were always one day early, at least. Usually two days early. And there wasn’t much to edit. She hardly ever made mistakes.
She wrote with clarity and passion about the troubles facing former Soviet states. Never enough food, no opportunity. Ruined by America’s vision of easy money. They thought they would all have Mercedes and Prada when they broke away, and what did they have now? Nothing.
It…didn’t look like they had nothing, though. The people were hurrying to and fro, some stopped at the flower vendors outside the subway stops, some glanced up happily at the buildings and the blue sky.
