A Question of Will

by Alex Albrinck

  ALIOMENTI.

  This must be the Headquarters of the organization, though it certainly piqued Will’s interest. For an organization willing to kill to protect its anonymity, a large modern building on what seemed a private island with the group’s name on the front seemed remarkably out of character. The giant, golden Aliomenti symbols flanking the name on the building also seemed amiss.

  Athos landed the craft on a landing strip near the building, and taxied the vehicle into an open hangar at the base. The structure was massive, easily thirty stories tall, and with a footprint that would cover several standard-sized city blocks.

  The Aliomenti were definitely not keeping a low profile. So why did they want to abduct him for supposedly talking? Why were they so intent on killing his wife and son because they might know about it, if they were willing to broadcast the name and symbols in such an obvious fashion?

  Will’s determination shifted again. He’d come here to eliminate the risk he posed to his new family. Now he was ready to fight again to avenge the deceased one. Apparently, they’d made up a different set of rules for him, for this other Will Stark, and now his family was dead, and his new family — Angel, Adam, and even Fil — were at risk as well. He couldn’t stand the hypocrisy.

  He kept his face stony, however, and ensured his Energy Shield was up. No sense letting on what he was up to until the time was right. Especially since he hadn’t planned on trying to fight and, if he survived, escape. Right now, he had to improvise every step of the way.

  He followed Athos through the hangar and into the main portion of the building, which was as opulent as the outside. White marble floors, columns, and gold trim were to be found almost everywhere. Will noticed three other strange details.

  First, there were dozens of screens of information flush with all of those marble walls, all displaying financial information. Prices of commodities. Exchange rates for currencies. Active stock market data. The numbers looked wildly different than Will remembered, but then, the world was still in a delicate state economically, and he’d not seen such data for nearly two months. A lot could change in those circumstances.

  Second, he felt his Energy being crushed within him as he walked, as if Aramis’ Damper was settling on him. Yet Aramis was nowhere to be seen. He still had some Energy left, but not enough to teleport.

  The final strange detail: other than Will and the two Hunters, every other person he encountered in the building was clearly human. Will had enough of his Energy and enhanced senses to recognize that none of these people would know what Energy was if he asked them.

  The Aliomenti were broadcasting their name and interacting with humans. Inwardly, Will seethed at the hypocrisy.

  Athos and Porthos were clearly well-known among the humans. Everyone smiled and bowed slightly as the two men passed, and Will could sense their obvious fear of the Hunters due to his empathic skills. Will figured that the two of them probably loved generating that fear. Will himself received curious looks as they worked through the lobby to an elevator bank, and thought he saw one woman whisper “must be a new client” to her friend. Will found that conclusion amusing.

  They reached a bank of elevators, but moved to a separate elevator clearly set off from others. Athos held up a card, but Will detected the short trickle of Energy that went into the security device. It was indeed a handy mechanism. It guaranteed that none of the many humans working in the building could ever enter this particular elevator car, even if they should come into possession of one of the cards.

  As the doors closed, Athos fixed Will with a stare. “Why’d you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “You put up a fight not too long ago. Now you stand there and let us take you away without so much as a contrary word. That’s not like you at all, which makes me think you’re up to something.”

  “I don’t want to put my friends at risk anymore.” Sometimes the truth was the best answer, even if his true answer might change in the near future.

  Athos laughed. “And why is this suddenly a concern after so long? It’s not as if those risks didn’t exist before.”

  Will shrugged. “Perhaps I’m just getting old.”

  Porthos snorted. “Now that I’ll give you.”

  Will gestured in a circular motion. “What is this place? Humans everywhere? As I recall, at one of our more recent get-togethers, you were quite upset to find that I’d been involved with a human. Why are so many here?”

  Athos stared at him. “Have you lost your mind? Or just your memories?”

  “At least one of those. I’ll let you decide which.”

  “This is our business front, which we use to develop significant wealth in human currency so that we can live in luxury when we must interact with their world. We’ve essentially set up the world’s largest bank with a very select clientele. All Aliomenti, of course.” He smiled. “Given our abilities, the holdings are rather extensive. We own the whole island, and it’s primarily populated by the humans who live here and work the hotels, shops, restaurants, and beaches. Officially, the island is a nation unto itself, and as such we limit travel here. Only the human workers and Aliomenti coming in for visits are allowed on the island. So it serves as our financial stronghold and our primary playground in this world. The humans who work here in the bank handle the chore of investing our surplus cash, exchanging currencies, and so on.”

  “And the name?”

  “It’s our business name. It just so happens that it’s more than that. We can talk Aliomenti business, as in banking activities, in public all we want, and we do. In the event the term is used with its other meaning and overheard, everyone simply assumes we’re talking about the bank.”

  A thousand-year-old secret society of incredibly gifted, telepathic people who lived in perfect health would certainly seem capable of developing an immense presence in any global industry over time. The financial statements of this company — if they had to issue any — would be incredible.

  “Where are we going now?” Will asked, as the elevator doors opened. He saw Aramis standing there, the man’s face greedy with expectation. The Hunter grasped Will’s arm, and he felt the Damper working.

  “We’re going to meet with the Leader,” Porthos replied. “He has questions for you, and he’d like to get answers to them before you’re gone.”

  “Gone?” Will asked.

  Aramis chuckled. “Mr. Stark, despite your long absence, you remain an Oath breaker and your sentence has been pronounced. The fact that you turned yourself in and appear to be devoid of much of your memory and Energy is irrelevant.” He rubbed his hands together.

  “You see, you will, with our prodding, provide the Leader with answers to his questions. When that is done, I will have the honor of taking you to our Assassin. And then, Will Stark, you will die.”

  XXII

  Turncoat

  The level of the building where the Leader resided was straight from the Gilded Age, the purest example of sheer extravagance that Will had ever seen.

  It was a single open space, save for the elevator shaft in the center. The entire floor was built of pure marble, polished so brightly that Will had to squint to allow his eyes to adjust. The columns here were silver throughout, and Will was quite certain that the silver wasn’t simply plated on the outside.

  The columns changed to gold as they approached the Leader. The man had styled this section of the floor as if he was a monarch holding court. In addition to the golden columns leading his way, thick rugs and carpets lined the floor, and gemstones of all shapes, sizes, and colors ringed the carpets, forming an aisle leading to the Leader’s chair. The chair itself appeared to be made of solid gold, the exterior lined with sparkling diamonds, inlaid with a red velvet cushion.

  The Leader stood from his chair as Will and the Hunters approached. He looked to be in his mid-forties, with slightly thinning blond hair brushed straight back. His smirk was suggestive of a child who had just gotten away with swiping a cookie witho
ut getting caught, and the smirk reached his eyes.

  “Mr. Stark, so good to see you again! It has certainly been a long time.”

  Will said nothing.

  “Come now, my old friend, you mustn’t be upset about the circumstances. All of our rules and laws and Oaths were created for the protection of our community and ideas. What is the term you used in the human business world you so excelled at all those years ago? Intellectual property? Thieves who steal intellectual property, I believe, are committing the crime of industrial espionage. Sadly, Will, you elected to become the greatest purveyor of industrial espionage in our history, among the other broken Oaths. Even you are not above our laws.”

  Will blinked. Something was out of place. “What do you mean...’all those years ago’? My businesses still exist.”

  The Leader laughed. “Come now, Mr. Stark. You mustn’t be so fond of your little enterprises that you pretend they still exist. You are well aware that they ceased to exist mere decades after your alleged death, torn to shreds by the hands of all of those humans you loved to support, each trying to extract what they could for their own ends. And in the end, they destroyed the engine that you built for them, as humans always do.”

  Will shook his head. “But my business can’t have been gone decades after my alleged death. I haven’t been gone that long.”

  The Hunters looked at each other, and started laughing. The Leader joined in as well, the intensity growing as the look on Will’s face grew more and more confused. Athos, still laughing, stepped forward and rested a hand on Will’s shoulder, pausing in his chuckling long enough to concentrate. He frowned. “This is fascinating,” he commented. “To the best of his knowledge we are, oh, two months beyond that little event where The Assassin burned his house down. I see your friends have kept you in the dark, and likely in some type of hibernation or stasis, for quite some time.”

  Will threw up his hands, exasperated. “What are you talking about?”

  The Leader smiled at him. “What year is it, Will Stark?”

  “2030, of course.”

  The Leader shook his head. “Hibernation indeed! No, Will, it appears your so-called friends, the people you sacrificed yourself to protect, have been less than forthcoming about your own current reality. You see, Will, you’ve apparently been asleep for nearly two centuries. It’s currently the year 2219, not 2030.”

  Will staggered backward as if punched, and felt the air leave him. It was impossible. Completely impossible. He’d only counted two months or so since the Hunters had assaulted him in his own back yard. This man was claiming that somehow, what he’d seen as two months had in fact been 189 years. Twice as long as people actually lived. Had the drugs he’d received put him to sleep for decades at a time? But there was still a flaw in that logic.

  “That’s not possible. None of you have aged. None of the people who rescued me have aged. I’d think 189 years would make anyone look ancient, regardless of how young they were when the count started.”

  The Leader and the Hunters burst out laughing again. At him. Will seethed quietly.

  “You really don’t remember anything, do you? When you went through everything all of those years ago, all of those exercises, all of the foods and medicines, you helped your body remember how to stop aging. Your cells don’t die off; they reproduce completely and cleanly every single time. Therefore, you don’t age. You learn more, retain more, understand more. You build substantial wealth. Do you remember any of this?”

  They’d learned to become immortal?

  And it all clicked into place. Immortality. That was their true discovery: the fountain of youth. That was something they were willing to protect at all costs, something they were willing to kill over. It wasn’t the ability to sense and control Energy that truly guided them; it was the reality that, after the people working in the building below were gone, they’d live on in eternal youth and health, growing their wealth, expanding their control over the world. Over the course of a century, two centuries...the amount of wealth a person could amass was mind-boggling. What if they lived even longer than that? In fact...the man they thought he was, that man must have been centuries old as well, in order for him to have acquired as much power as they all claimed. No wonder the Hunters seemed so familiar with him, seemed to take capturing him so personally. In their memories, they might have been after Will Stark for decades or centuries, and even if they’d gone twenty or thirty years between attempts, they still could have made those attempts at capture dozens of times. He could start to understand why they’d been so violent; he imagined that failing at something for centuries might well trigger that type of reaction in someone.

  Still, it changed his perspective quite a bit. And he wanted to know why, if he was supposed to be so critical to the Alliance, that Adam and Fil and yes, even Angel, had elected to simply put him into hibernation rather than rehabilitate him or help him recover his memories. He had no doubt they could do either, after having seen the potions and nano-based “medicines.” Or perhaps that was it. They needed the time to develop the technology to fix him, so they’d put him in hibernation until then. That seemed more comforting. Fil, in all his cantankerous moods, was recalling the literal centuries of work to revive him to what he once was, and was understandably furious when the man he’d restored was putting his family and community at risk, rather than simply remembering who he was and how to truly be a member of the Alliance.

  The problem with this scenario is that it meant that, somehow, his entire life had been a lie.

  Somehow, his memories of his long life had been erased, replaced with those of another, and while he had retained his name, he had no recollection of the skills and knowledge he’d gained over his previous decades, or even centuries, of life. He’d lost his Energy stores and skills. It certainly explained why, after he woke up, that he’d regained the skills so quickly. His body probably remembered everything; it was his mind that needed to catch up.

  The Leader had stated this to further demoralize him, of course, to break down his mental defenses and gather information, undoubtedly about the Alliance and their locations. He needed to survive, to get back there himself. To thank them for what they’d done in rebuilding him, but also to question them in depth about why he’d been altered in the first place, why they’d never told him the truth. He knew it was the truth; the ramifications of what he’d seen with the Purge and the nanos and everything else meant that these two factions could undoubtedly live forever. He needed to reclaim his place with the Alliance, now that he had a truer sense of what that was, and not give himself up to this loathsome bunch.

  And that meant he needed to end this interview now, and escape.

  Will looked back at the Leader. “As a matter of fact, I do seem to remember a few things. For example, I remember that you always did have a terrible inferiority complex, always needing to compensate with external possessions to make everyone forget just how weak you truly are.” Will glanced around the room at the jewels, and rugs, and precious metals on display, then turned his gaze fully back on the Leader. “I see that particular problem has gotten worse. Or is there a new problem that’s come up in the past few decades that’s driving this?” Will arched an eyebrow.

  The fake smile on the Leader’s face darkened. Aramis looked scandalized, an expression he seemed to have mastered. Athos clapped his hand to his mouth, whether to cover a gasp of shock or a laugh, Will did not know. Porthos had no such insecurities. He snickered openly, and then snapped his mouth shut and stayed silent when the Leader glared at him.

  “I see you’ve remembered your lack of tact and decorum, Stark. You never did appreciate all the benefits our group had to offer, never did play by the rules, and you certainly never treated your betters with appropriate respect. Perhaps I was wrong to hold this sentimental little meeting to enjoy a laugh about the good old days.” He looked at Aramis. “I have no need of this man anymore, seeing as how my own spy has taken the time to update me fully on the s
ituation with the Alliance.” Seeing Will’s look of horror, he laughed. “Oh, did I forget to mention that? You see, on the night you vanished from the annals of history, someone else vanished as well. Someone else your Alliance friends drugged into hibernation for two centuries. Thankfully, he escaped the clutches of the evil that is the Alliance, and not long after your little arranged meeting with Porthos. In the process of escaping, he apparently took one or two lives, for he is an Assassin, after all. The Assassin, in fact. He, too, was surprised to learn how long he’d been away. We had to appoint another Assassin in the interim, so now I have two of them to keep busy. You see, they abducted and drugged the man I sent to kill your wife and child. Now he has returned to me, and this very day he will end your life. Isn’t that simply perfect? Oh, and Will?” His smile turned to an evil glare. “They drugged one of their greatest enemies, The Assassin, just like they drugged you. What does betrayal to that degree feel like?” The Hunters all laughed, as the Leader looked at him, triumphant.

  Will fumed. He added another short-term goal. He’d planned to use his Energy to escape, assuming he could overcome Aramis again, and failing that, he’d use his nanos to help out. He didn’t have a lot, just a very basic allocation, but it should be enough to do what he needed done. Now, though, he would avenge Hope and Josh first. He’d simply have to wait a while longer. And after 189 years, a few more minutes or hours were no big deal.

  Aramis came forward, grasping Will by the arm, and he could feel the Hunter’s Damper ability coming to play. The dampering effect in this building negated the impact Aramis had, since there was little Energy left to suppress. But Will played the part, acting a bit more unsteady on his feet and lightheaded, and allowed Aramis to lead him away from the throne of the Leader and back to the elevator.

  Once inside, Aramis spoke. “You really lost your memory? Wow. It must be horrible to be executed for crimes you don’t remember committing.” The Hunter snickered.