by C. G. Hatton
“I didn’t want to let Charlie down,” he managed to say, squeezing his eyes shut to stop the tears he could feel welling, burning.
“So don’t let him down now.”
His whole body was aching with a dull pull that felt like he’d been through a wringer. He lay quietly with his eyes closed, gradually becoming aware of a presence in the room, quiet breathing and that gentle aura he’d missed so desperately.
She was thinking about that beach again, the coastline and the cabin she’d taken him to when he’d finally admitted to her who he was. She was meditating, thinking of white sand, warmth and safety.
He would have sold his soul ten times over to be back there with her.
He felt her smile and heard a gentle, “Hey,” felt her hand touch his, carefully as if she was worried it could hurt him. It didn’t. He curled his fingers around hers.
The room was cold, not just cool but cold.
“They’re still having trouble keeping your temperature down,” she said.
The virus was humming, feeding off whatever they were dripping into his arm. He couldn’t feel the black tendrils. He kept his eyes closed, not wanting to look.
“They’ve found a concoction that’s keeping it stabilised for the moment,” Sean said.
He couldn’t help asking, “Was it real?”
They’d made him tell them everything, once he’d admitted the hallucinations, made him recount every detail, every second he’d been in that reality, and the way they’d looked at him and dragged him back over it, again and again, they weren’t even sure it had been a hallucination.
She squeezed his hand. There was a hesitation in her mind as if she wasn’t sure how much to tell him.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know but he muttered, “What?”
“They don’t know. It could just be the withdrawal, a reaction from the detox. It was the virus craving the drugs. You know that, right? It wasn’t you.”
There was something else in her mind, something guarded.
He struggled to sit. “Sean, what are you not telling me?”
She looked at him, wondering why he wasn’t just reading her mind.
“Do you want me to?” He didn’t know if he could. He didn’t want to know what else he might see.
“LC, you were dying. The bioweapon they shot you with…” She paused, looking awkward. “It wasn’t just negating the effects of the virus, it was attacking it. And the virus was killing you to defend itself. We couldn’t… There was no way…” She reached for his hand again. “We had to give it a way to fight back.”
He tensed the muscles in his arm, watching the black mottled tendrils shift. “What did you do?”
“You were dying.”
“What did you do?” He couldn’t help the tremble in his voice.
“We infected you with another organism. From the shaman staff.”
Chapter 21
“You’ve dabbled with human DNA for centuries.” Sebastian was staring, the Man meeting his scrutiny unflinching. “Ironic then that it was the Bhenykhn themselves that gave you such an advancement. You knew there was a second phase in their attack, you didn’t know about the shaman… but you weren’t surprised by their appearance. What’s really going on, old man? You’ve given no technology to the humans, save a slight improvement in shields and weapons. But the humans have given you this virus, developed from the Bhenykhn…”
He was adding it up and watching the response, watching that impassive alien face and reading the tranquil mind that wasn’t rising to the taunts.
“And that,” he said, pushing it further, “precipitated the Bhenykhn to send the shamans and this bioweapon that can fight their own DNA. And the organism in the shaman staffs that, what? Amplifies kinetic energy? Boosts telekinetic ability?”
“Fortuitous,” the Man said softly.
Sebastian narrowed his eyes. Not convinced. Not convinced by any of it.
•
“We have no idea what it will do long term,” she said, “but the virus seems to have assimilated it and is using it to draw in as much energy as it needs.”
His stomach turned. “From where?”
She gave him a small smile. “From everything around you. We’re just not sure if these – visions – you’re having are some kind of amplified flashback or something real. They’re trying to work out if there could be a connection, an actual link the Bhenykhn hive is able to tap into somehow, to take your mind someplace else.”
“To where NG is?”
“They don’t know for sure.”
He looked up into her eyes. She was hiding something. “What else?”
She was still holding his hand. “LC… Sienna didn’t make it. You know this. You were there with her. I’m really sorry.”
Everything he’d been doing to hold himself together faltered. He stared, trying to process it, heart and soul sinking.
Sean reached for him and he fell into her embrace.
She held him tight and he didn’t want to let go, even as the incessant beeping got faster and someone shouted from the outer doorway, “Time’s up, Sean. Get out of there.”
She didn’t want to go. But someone was telling her over the Senson not to be stupid, not to risk it.
“Risk what?” he murmured, pulling away.
She shook her head.
Something was wrong.
He sat back, letting his arms fall, beyond empty. “Risk what, Sean?”
He glanced to the door. He didn’t recognise whoever it was standing there, yelling, but Hilyer pushed past the guy, crossed the room and walked into the cell, resting his hand on Sean’s shoulder and saying softly, “Go. I’ve got it.”
He didn’t understand.
Sean touched his cheek. She was struggling to breathe. “I’ll be back, I promise.” She backed away, passing what looked like a piece of paper to Hil before she left, having to hold the doorframe not to stumble.
LC tried to brace himself to stand but his legs felt like jelly. He squinted at Hil. “What’s going on?”
Hil had two bottles in his other hand. He sat on the bunk and passed across the folded document. “Sienna left you this.”
His hands were shaking as he unfolded it, scanning across Sienna’s untidy scrawl, reading as much as he could, heart in his stomach, before he couldn’t face any more.
“She had a med alert,” he said, the memory surfacing. “She refused the virus.” It wasn’t a question. He looked up. “Why would she do that?”
“Her choice.”
He watched, detached, as Hil popped open the two beers. Hil had known Sienna as long as he had. She’d taken them both under her wing, protected them, pulled both their asses out of the fire, many times, above and beyond. She might have got a reputation for being LC’s own personal extraction agent but she’d always been there for Hil too, when he needed it.
Hil handed across an open bottle and held his up, inviting a clink. “She wrote that months ago. Said she had a feeling it wouldn’t work on her,” he said, voice strained. “She said when the time came, she wanted to go out on her terms, not ‘getting taken over by a damned alien bug’. She loved you to bits, bud, but she wanted to stay human. She wanted to die human.”
LC shifted his weight. His chest felt hollow. “And we’re not, are we?” He sucked in a shaky breath. “You know what NG used to think?” He swallowed past the lump in his throat. “That he was going to be the last true human left alive when all this was done and finished. We can only fight the aliens by becoming alien.”
Hil shrugged, raising the beer to his lips. “It’s not like we had much choice.”
LC flexed his arm, watching the black marks twist around the muscle. “Sienna always said I’d get myself killed before she did.”
“She would never have let that happen.”
It hurt to say but he said, “I know,” voice almost a whisper, offering the bottle for another clink. To her. He took a sip and looked up. “What else is Sean keeping from me?
”
That got him a small smile. Hil shook his head. “You’ll have to talk to Sean about that.” He stood and glanced back towards the guy at the door as if his time was up too. “LC, Olivia’s gone to Kheris. Sean stayed. Here. To be with you. Don’t be an ass.” He started to back away, but stopped as if he’d remembered something, reaching into a pocket.
“Spacey wants to see you,” he said, holding something small out in his hand. “We won’t let her just yet but she sent this.”
LC stared, heart skipping as he realised what it was. He took it, rubbing his thumb over the knotted band, the tiny stones threaded through the string warming even with that brief contact. He slipped it onto his left wrist and wrapped his right hand tight around it. She’d kept it.
Hil was watching, glancing over his shoulder as if someone was speaking to him. “She said Latia would want you to have it back.”
It was frustrating as hell not to be able to read him. LC switched to the guy at the door, reading the unease in his mind, the thought that, hell, they didn’t need any more casualties and Hil pushing it like this was not going to help anyone.
He didn’t understand. His temperature was going up and his head was hurting. And it felt like everyone was keeping stuff from him. “What’s with the time limit?”
Hil gave a laugh. He looked tired. “LC, bud,” he said, sounding beyond weary, “we – all – love you to bits but you are draining the crap out of us.”
“What…?”
“You need to suss this energy thing because right now you are leeching energy from anyone within a twenty foot radius. You need to figure out how to control it. And you will. You always have. We always have. Since Redemption, since they sent us into all that shit, we’ve always done what we had to do. To get points, to earn cash, to… I don’t know what, just beat you most of the time.” He took another drink and stared over the top of the bottle. “I know everything is different now. Bloody hell, I can talk to AIs, LC. And I wish Skye was here.” His eyes flashed, dark. And he shut up, draining the bottle and just standing there for a moment.
“It’s just shit,” he said.
LC rubbed a hand over his eyes, pulling the IV line as his arm moved. “We should have gone to NG,” he said quietly. Right back at the beginning when they’d first got the message that Mendhel was in trouble.
Hil looked at him. “I know.” He shook his head. “Don’t overthink it. They’re here. We need to find NG. And we need to find Anya. Because, I don’t know about you, but I want to hand that bitch over to Pen and watch what he does to her.”
“How did we not see it?” He was having trouble equating the Anya he’d known as a kid, bubbly, obnoxious, flirtatious little Anya, with the mastermind who was getting everyone around him killed.
Hilyer reached for the door. “We didn’t count on an alien invasion, bud. That’s all. None of us did.”
Running rehab was the toughest he’d ever done. No one could spend longer than ten minutes with him and after five days of intense physio and psych evaluations, he was climbing the walls.
It didn’t help that he kept getting hit by the hive, no idea if it was a nightmare or reality. There were times when the proximity alarms would sound and they’d pull jump after jump until it was quiet again. Sometimes he’d just wake in a cold sweat. This time there was no jump, no klaxons, just Sean sitting on the floor with him as he doubled over. He breathed through it, concentrating on the firm touch of her hand on his back to keep him there. It eased, the dark dank pull on his senses dissipating until he was back in the cool isolation cell.
She sat back as he did, handing him a bottle of water and peering at him until he blinked.
He shivered. “I’m good,” he muttered, knowing fine well he didn’t look or sound anything anywhere near good, by anyone’s standards.
She didn’t look convinced. She looked worried about him. Looking into her eyes, this close, he could almost drift back to her father’s cabin instead. The sting of salt air. The sun warm on his face. Before the Bhenykhn. It made his heart ache, a knot burning in his chest.
Sean reached and rested her hand on his leg, gentle.
“There’s something I need you to know,” she whispered.
He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to think about anything. He just wanted to fight the Bhenykhn and get NG back.
“I know,” she said, so quietly he almost didn’t hear it. “We will.”
Chapter 22
“We can only fight the aliens by becoming alien.” Sebastian said it again, with more irony, shaking his head.
“The virus…”
“Which is not a virus at all.”
The Man nodded, conceding that fact, although he had never corrected Nikolai before when he’d referred to the alien entity as a virus, never actually explained to anyone at the guild what it was. “The organism…”
“I don’t care what it is,” Sebastian said. “I want to know how you do what you do. I know for damn sure that is no alien virus.”
The Man said again, “You’re not ready.”
“You want to know what happened to Nikolai and Anderton?”
“I want to beat the Bhenykhn.”
“The infection was never part of your plan, was it?” A stark moment of realisation. “You said to Nikolai once that it was serendipitous, this quirk of human biochemistry that reacted to the virus with the very side-effect we needed to fight the Bhenykhn. It gave humans the telepathy you could never recreate from me. I know how desperately you tried to clone my DNA, even if Nikolai doesn’t. But that was just more smoke and mirrors, was it not? You’ve never cared for the casualties, the ever decreasing odds of its success. It’s irrelevant.”
The Man was sitting, impassive.
Sebastian frowned. “What are you really after?”
•
It took a moment to sink in. Then it hit him between the eyes.
He pulled away, backing off, and pretty much mumbling, “How…?”
‘Presumably,’ Sean thought direct into his mind, ‘that night at the cabin.’
Oh shit.
“How…?”
She gave him a look that made his cheeks flush.
“I mean… When…?” He tried to calm his breathing but it was tough with Sean inside his head, for Christ’s sake. “Why didn’t you…?”
“I’ve been trying to tell you. It’s not like we’ve had much of a chance, is it?”
“How…?” He was struggling to string a coherent sentence together.
“I didn’t have the rough time you all did, if that’s what you’re wondering. It just kind of crept up on me.” She shrugged and gave him a tentative smile.
Her eyes were their normal colour, seemingly not affected. Like Hil.
‘Who knows?”
“Hal Duncan. Hilyer. No one else. Not yet.”
“Regenerative?”
She nodded.
He had a lump in his throat. “Anything else?”
“No telekinetics or fire. Not yet anyway.” She squeezed his knee and pulled him close again, touching his forehead with hers. ‘It’s fine. I’m fine. And this is kind of cool.’
Shit, he’d never thought it was cool. Damn painful. Not cool.
He could feel her wanting him to be okay with it.
He wasn’t. He couldn’t lie to her. He had too much inside his head that he didn’t want anyone anywhere near.
Definitely not Sean.
The heat hit him hard, stifling, the stench of the cages, their stinking breath on his cheek, the hunger and lust as they dragged a jagged blade across his skin, revelling in the stench of human blood.
He fell back into it and he couldn’t stop himself, heart beating too fast, dark shot through with glowing orange flashes closing in as humid, hot damp tendrils wrapped around his arms.
Soft lips touched his, pressing gently, a warm, dry hand reaching tenderly to the back of his head, pulling him in. She brought him back. He was safe. For the minute at least.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Don’t be. Now how are we going to get you out of this box?”
They put him on a training schedule. Nowhere he hadn’t been before but tougher, a hundred times tougher. He hadn’t realised how out of shape he was, how much each knock had taken out of him. And as much as running sprints, lifting weights and sparring with Hilyer was a familiar routine, it was different. Mentally different. Back to back missions aside, it was shocking how freaking flaky he’d become. He was monitored every second of the day and night, accompanied everywhere, and after two weeks of putting up with all that shit, he hit his limit.
One of the other field-ops knocked him on his ass in the gym and laughed. He flipped, overreacted, and floored the guy with five fast punches and an elbow to the head.
LC tore the black guild band off his wrist, threw it at the wall and walked out.
One of his Security shadows stepped out to block his way.
“I need a drink,” he said, dark, voice low. “Am I at least allowed to go to the mess for a drink?”
There was a pause, then, “No, you are not authorised to go to the mess. Report to medical.”
The guy was wearing power assisted body armour. If he tried to shove past, he’d get worse than being knocked on his ass. It was suffocating.
He was rescued by Hilyer who seemingly appeared out of nowhere and obviously told the guy to stand down. As if Hil suddenly had more seniority than him, as though he needed baby-sitting and no one trusted him to do anything.
“C’mon, bud, medical.”
LC had to breathe through the urge to lash out. “I just want to be cleared to get back out in the field,” he muttered. “We should be out there looking for NG.”
“I know,” Hil said, quiet, almost conspiring, leaning closer than most people dared anymore. “But, LC, you freak out like this, no one is going to clear you for anything and if you do go out, the only thing you’re going to achieve is getting yourself killed.”
