by Jenn Stark
And with creation, there was always a choice.
I reached up, gripped Atria’s hand where she had plunged her fingers in my shoulder—and squeezed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Heal!”
The single word burst out of me with so much rage, my vision went white-hot for five long heartbeats, a pulse of energy that ripped every ounce of power from the core of my being, every pocket of darkness that Armaeus had opened wide, and sent it blasting back through me and into the world, surrounding me in a corona of fire.
The toxin that Atria had pumped into me was swept clean in the face of that magic, the pain and violation of it racing away, my fried circuits reconnecting—not just reconnecting but reinforcing, thickening into ropes of steel that glowed with a radiant fury. My heart started beating again, my blood pumping, and my sight returned to all three of my eyes. Though I couldn’t quite erase the memories that were burned into my brain, the vision on the screen I could never unsee.
I clamped down harder on Atria’s wrist, wrenching her claw from my shoulder. With this much power within me, I could easily have melted that electronic monstrosity into a glob of metal and circuits, but my work was not yet done here. My work was not yet done.
“Heal,” I growled again, and my hand held fast to hers, our fingers fusing together as the fire leapt from deep within me and raced to meet the bristling mechanics of her arms, her legs, her guts. In that moment, I unexpectedly dredged up Atria’s core psychic abilities and discovered that her native skills lay in the tricks of the psychic trade—levitation and the movement of objects…and, as I already knew, the ability to throw her thoughts. It hadn’t been enough, apparently. She’d wanted—needed more. And now she was going to get it.
All at once, Atria’s machinery was swept up in a wave of blue fire. She never screamed. She never cried out.
Instead, her head jerked around and her gaze locked on mine, and suddenly, my mind was filled with everything she wanted me to see, to know. She’d been a thief, a lure, when Henri had found her, and she’d survived in the swirling pit of the arcane black market for so long, she didn’t know anything real except the desire to be free. Henri had twisted that desire, used it, as so many others had used her, but though she’d known it was happening, she hadn’t minded. She hadn’t resisted. She’d been altered willingly. It was only after…after, when she’d had a taste of the freedom she’d so craved, that she’d realized that she’d merely traded one set of bars for another.
Even with this rush of thoughts and tumbling emotions, Atria’s mind was filled with so much chaos that I couldn’t see what I needed in her complex circuitry, couldn’t do what I needed to do, not yet—not yet.
But there were other things I could do.
I lifted my left hand and pressed it against her heart.
“Heal,” I ordered, and Atria’s face went rigid with shock, her eyes wide—one a blank machine component, the other still human, her teeth clenching as electrical circuits sparked and whirred. Some small part of me knew that I was no better than Armaeus here, playing god with a soul I had no right to traumatize.
Maybe, maybe not. But if I was no better—I could certainly be no worse.
“Heal,” I growled again, then punched my energy forward. Forward and out and all around, as far and as hard as I could.
Atria passed out, but the electricity holding her body in thrall kept her upright. The human body was, at its core, pure energy. Atria’s life force lit up an inorganic network right now, but even that inorganic construct held matter that could be infused with energy, matter that could be changed, would be changed…
Was changed.
The moment that the machinery of Atria’s body shifted to organic bone and veins and stretching, curling strands of muscle, she gave a convulsive shudder. Her eyes flared open again and she saw me, truly saw me. Our gazes connected, and the walls between our minds fell away, the tumbling mass of her doubt, anger, fear, and self-loathing exposed to the power I poured into her unstinting, wiping it all clean. There was pain in what I did, horrible pain, but there was also vindication.
She had transformed. She would survive. She could choose.
With one last powerful burst, I pushed Atria away from me, and she collapsed, her body sprawling on the floor—as the foundations of the building shook around me and I staggered to the side. I stared down at her, my breath harsh and ragged, sweat streaming down my face, as someone moved to stand beside me. Slowly, carefully. A hand reached to my shoulder, then squeezed me tight.
“That was a hell of a fireball,” Sariah said drily as we both gazed down at Atria. “She gonna be okay?”
Atria lay staring back up at us, then lifted her hands slowly, her eyes going wide as she saw reformed skin that gleamed with actual health, not self-healing polymer. Her gaze leapt to mine, and I coughed a puff of smoke.
Atria’s hair was blonde, her eyes the color of spring, her smile soft and filled with wonder, like a child on her first sunny day.
“She’ll be okay.” I reached out my mind and traced the newly formed circuitry that wound through Atria’s body. There were no more mechanical components whirring and clicking. There was no longer data being spewed out into the ether through a thousand different transmitters. Instead, all that pale skin stretched over blood and muscle and sinew and bone, all of it working together in a perfect symphony.
I shot a look at Sariah. “How is it you were left in here? I had the sense that everyone was evacuated.”
She shrugged. “They were evacuated,” she said. “I wasn’t.”
“But…how?”
“These pretty rocks on Henri’s desk?” She held up the chunk of jade. “Tickets to Hell. He clearly didn’t know what he had. They’re everywhere on the other side too. Single-use passkeys to get in or get out, for those who know how to use them and who are willing to find them.”
My brows fought each other in a race to climb my forehead. “Wait a minute. So you could have left Hell anytime you wanted? You were down there ten years!”
“It’s not quite that easy. The passes returned you to the point of origin,” she said, tossing the rock to the desk and picking up a few others and pocketing them. Dimly I realized that Henri's office had somehow been put to rights, the effect of my battle with Atria all but erased. “You can go into Hell and come out again with one of these, but you can’t start your trip on the other side.”
Something still wasn’t adding up for me. “But you didn’t start in Hell, back when we were seventeen. You started on Earth. You were a person.”
That seemed to catch Sariah up short, and she gave me a wan, sad smile. “No, Sara,” she said, shaking her head. “You were a person. I didn’t quite make the grade, or I didn’t think I did, anyway. Funny thing about Hell, you gotta think you’re worthy of escaping it to break free. That took a while. That took you showing up, honestly. My not so better half.”
A pounding noise sounded on the wall at the far end of the room, and I jolted. “Shouldn’t there be a door there?”
“Like I said, Hell’s a funny place.” Sariah slanted a glance down again at Atria, who’d managed to pull herself into a seated position. “You want me to let them out, or do you want to give her a head start?”
That seemed to have the desired effect. Atria scrambled to her feet, her eyes trained on me. “Don’t—don’t,” she managed, her throat working. “I will run. I will hide. I know now that they’ll never let me go, not of my own volition, and not…” She lifted her hands, and electricity played over them, a miniature version of my fireball. Around me, all the chairs in the room lifted off the floor a few inches, and even I felt like I might have a little more bounce in my step.
“You know anything about where we are? Or where there are cars?” I asked. “Because you’re going to have a hell of a long walk in the desert if you head out on—” I gestured to the barren wasteland outside the window…and stopped. “Whoa.”
Beside me, Sariah smirked. “I w
ondered when you’d get around to noticing that.”
Atria turned and stared as well, one of her hands lifting to her face as if to ward off the view. I didn’t blame her, for all that it was a much-improved view. Where before there had been nothing but empty dirt outside, a desert without even a good cactus to recommend it, now Henri de Castille’s office was surrounded by a flowing lawn that tumbled into a forest of swaying trees. At the corner window, I could see the barest glimpse of moving water.
“Um, what is this place, Atria?” I asked.
“A research facility,” she said, her teeth starting to chatter. “It’s…it’s on an Indian reservation. Abandoned—or made to look like it was abandoned, but…” She shook her head, her eyes still a little glassy, for all that they were both real again. “There is no vegetation here. Henri told me once that the land had been used for low-level testing of nuclear weapons. Not the bomb but—the lead-up to it. The place had been stripped clean, and the radiation levels are all within normal limits, but since then, nothing grows. Not that it would have much anyway, but certainly nothing like this. There was never anything here like this.”
“Other people around, usually?”
“Not…usually,” she said. She slowly shook her head, as if her brain was just now coming back online. “Techs, sometimes. But this was a facility valuable largely because it was in the middle of nowhere while still being close to civilization. And it’s fully wired. You couldn’t even pee without being recorded.” She peered into the corners. “If you think you escaped being taped, I’m here to tell you, that’s probably not the case.”
“I don’t want it to be the case,” I said. “Let them see what Connecteds are capable of. Though you’re probably going to want to get a dye job.”
“Oh…I don’t think you’ll need to worry about that. If Henri comes looking for me…” The table across the room lifted, shifting just enough to dump its contents to the floor. “I’ll be ready for him this time.”
Her gaze found mine. “You didn’t have to do this, you know,” she said quietly. “You didn’t have to…save me.”
I pursed my lips together, pausing to master the unexpected sadness that welled up inside me. What was it about people feeling the need to tell me that? “Well, yeah, I kind of did.”
Another round of pounding on the wall broke the moment. “So, vehicles?” I asked. “That’s a long walk to civilization.”
“Well, there were cars,” Atria said with a frown. “I mean, we came in a car. A van, really, with all the necessary equipment to keep me tuned up.” As she spoke, she idly rubbed her arm, no doubt where she used to have some sort of port. “I don’t have the keys, though.”
Sariah rolled her eyes, then turned to me, handing over the jade amulet. “Drop that anywhere close to the wall and stand back. It’ll pair up with the chunk I gave to Nikki.”
I took the stone from her. “Was I originally that good at stealing, back in the day? Because I don’t remember that, and it didn’t seem like that was on the list of Armaeus’s grab bag of skills.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to practice. No special enhancements required, unlike our girl Atria here.” Sariah eyed her. “They turned you into the Terminator.”
“I chose it,” Atria said, though her voice was rueful. “I have no one to blame but myself.”
“Well, now you can choose something different.” Sariah pulled her by the arm and headed for the door. “Give us five minutes,” she called over her shoulder. “I gotta make sure there aren’t any fried lab techs out here.”
I gave Sariah ten, and when she didn’t come back in at a run, I stepped back from the wall, then tossed the amulet toward it.
It didn’t take long. No sooner had the chunk of jade left my hand than the center of the wall seemed to melt and peel back, and a moment later, a half-dozen people streamed through the opening—Henri, Ventre, Nikki, Theodore, and the attending guards.
“What—what happened!” Henri turned, then turned again, sputtering in outrage. “Where is Atria! What have you done with her? She was a prototype—”
It didn’t serve me to keep Henri in the dark now that Atria was free, so I pointed at one of the cameras.
“A little help here?” I asked aloud, just for the hell of it.
“Of course, Miss Wilde.” And it might have been my imagination, but I thought I heard Simon snickering in the background. Either way, a second later, the video screen above Henri’s desk flicked on again, only this time, instead of the horrifying image that had been burned into my brain, it was a full-color, high-definition playback of Atria and me squaring off. I winced as she plunged her needle fingers into my shoulder. Those needles had been longer than I’d thought.
Henri and Ventre stayed quiet for most of the replay, but when I began to heal Atria, Henri bounded forward like a toddler watching a cartoon. “What is this?” he demanded. “What are you doing?” His eyes were wide, his mouth agape. Behind him, Cardinal Ventre went white as a ghost, what I assumed was a prayer contorting his mouth as he stared, wide-eyed. Then the video ended—never showing Sariah. Good job, Simon.
“The Devil’s work,” Ventre breathed, turning to me with horrified eyes.
“No, but I’ll let him know you’re a fan. And Henri—”
Henri turned at my use of his name, but I lost him just that quickly as his gaze went to the window. “Sacre Dieu,” he whispered, and I once more was forgotten. He strode toward the wall of glass. “Open the window,” he ordered to some in-house computer, and the window obligingly slid back. A soft touch of a breeze played over the disheveled office.
“What have you done to this…to this place?” he murmured. He stepped outside and immediately dropped to one knee, his hand out to palm the grass. When it didn’t bite him, he laid both hands flat on the ground. “What have you done?”
I exchanged a glance with Nikki. Henri might be overcome with wonder now, but with friends like Ventre, I didn’t think he’d be staying that way long.
Speaking of—
I turned back to Ventre, only to see him looking back at me, his hand outstretched, his face…there was something wrong with his face. It was beet red, and his throat looked wrong, swollen, while a blueish-gray shadow had appeared around his nose and eyes. Even his fingertips were blue.
Were…blue…
“Cardiac arrest!” I shouted, lurching forward, but even as I raced back toward the old man, I heard a satisfied hiss in my mind. It wasn’t Simon’s hiss—and definitely not Armaeus’s.
“That,” the brutally hard, ice-cold female voice said, though no one could hear her but me, “is for Father Jerome.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The leader of the Sentinel Group went very quiet when he swiveled around. First, he saw Cardinal Ventre collapsed on his office carpet, heard the call of his guards into their radios for medical help. There wasn’t any point, though. They couldn’t help; I couldn’t help. Even if I’d wanted to save Ventre, I couldn’t. He’d died before he’d hit the ground.
Then Henri’s gaze swiveled up to where the image on the screen had reverted to that of a man in a priest’s robes crumpled on the floor in front of a sea of mute, terrified-looking children. He regarded that image a long moment, not moving a muscle.
Then he turned to me.
“It seems I have misjudged both my allies and my adversaries,” he said, executing the faintest bow. “I did not believe Ventre would stoop to murdering a man of the cloth.”
“That man of the cloth has been defying SANCTUS unceasingly for years,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like me. Nothing sounded or looked or felt like me, as if I was watching myself from another room, seeing me standing in the center of Henri’s office, having a conversation as if everything was normal. As if I hadn’t just lost the man who’d been more of a father to me than my own father. More of a mother too.
The wave of pain snuck up on me without warning, tears sparking in my eyes. But I didn’t drop my gaze from Henri’s.
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“You’re not my adversary, Henri,” I said. “At least, I would strongly suggest that you don’t want to be. I don’t know if this test provided you sufficient data to answer your questions about the strength of the Connecteds, but I’d also strongly advise you against attempting a second one.”
“Atria did volunteer,” Henri said. The words were conversational, not belligerent. The words of a man who had nothing to prove.
“She did. She wanted what you did to her, at least before she understood what she’d agreed to. It’s the only reason you’re still alive.” I gave him a wintry smile. “That and the fail-safes you’ve put in place against your untimely death.”
He nodded, and his own lips creased in a wry smile. “And to your question, I must tell you that now that I’m aware of the Connected community’s strength, as you say, I cannot sit idly by and not explore the limits of that strength. Every leader on this earth knows that something important happened in their countries, something only they can recall. Some of them even now are beginning to dispute their own memories, destroying journal entries they no longer can remember writing. I suspect by the end of this week, very few will believe what they thought they saw, even if they do still remember it. Am I correct?”
He didn’t wait for me to acknowledge the question, but kept going. “But you must know that enough will remember some of what happened, for long enough, that they will begin to look for those on this earth who are capable of more than ordinary humans. And there are enough Connecteds that it will not take long for them to be discovered, studied, even exploited by people far less scrupulous than me. The research will happen, is probably already happening. Cardinal Ventre’s organization made no secret of their desire to eradicate all things heretical in this world, and their form of heresy was quite specific. Other groups would seek not to eliminate it, however, but to leverage it.”
“What’s your point?” I growled. I knew a man negotiating when I saw one, and despite his precarious position, Henri de Castille was doing a good job of it.
