I stared at him with my fists clenched, my nostrils flaring as I tried to control my desire to kill him. It wasn’t time for his death yet. I would need his help to take Vakros down. Whether he survived to see my victory against Malachi wasn’t certain. It would depend if killing Vakros sated my bloodlust for a while or not. Cortell had plagued my fantasies for some time, and it was difficult to control my urge to take his life, especially when he treated me with such disrespect. I anticipated his reactions, how he would fight against his fate. It would make the win pleasurable, much better than when they gave in to fate.
My clenched fists ached, and I struggled to relax them. I would control my urges for now. I had no choice. I had always known that my destiny would make demands of me.
Cortell continued to watch me, his expression mild, completely unaware of what the future had in store for him.
I retrieved one of the surviving chairs and sat down before him, swallowing down my rage by focusing on the bigger picture. ‘Vakros is human.’ I gritted my teeth with no control. ‘He promised us a world in which we wouldn’t have to hide, yet all the time, he is one of them.’
‘Is that so?’ Cortell said as if the revelation held no meaning for us all. I tried to detect a sense of revulsion, anger, or even surprise would mean something, yet he continued to watch me with no emotion.
I glared at him, straining against a fresh wave of rage. ‘You don’t believe me?’
Cortell looked to where his book lay open on the floor with a sigh of regret before he shrugged. ‘I have seen him release.’
I stared at him. How I wished I could strike him. He would heal, but the feel of his bones snapping beneath my fist was a hard thought to shake. I forced myself to focus on the problem at hand. Vakros. That betrayer had managed to fool me. Me!
I thought long and hard about my next response and how to deliver it. I couldn’t argue with what he said as I had also seen Vakros shed his physical form, but that didn’t make him a Siis. He was tainted by his heritage. ‘I know.’ I forced my voice calm and approachable, with just the right touch of betrayal and anguish. ‘We all have. But Cortell—’ I gave him a pleading look and almost smiled in satisfaction when his eyes narrowed, and he shifted towards me a fraction. I had him now. I indulged in the image of his broken body before I continued. ‘—I trusted him. We all did. But he has betrayed us. He doesn’t care for the future of the Siis and has no intention of ridding the planet of the humans!’ I couldn’t hide my disgust for the inferiors that had covered the planet like a virus. I didn’t need to. We had all joined Vakros because of our discontent with the way Malachi ran things. All of us were repulsed by the rules that forced us to hide our true selves.’
Cortell finally looked at me, not through me, giving me the attention warranted by the situation. ‘Explain what happened.’ Maybe I wouldn’t kill him after all.
I hid my smile of satisfaction as I recounted how Vakros had called me to his quarters, how he had explained that it was time for me to know the truth. I couldn’t prevent the anger in my tight words when I revealed the truth to Cortell. ‘His mother was human.’
Cortell’s eyes widened in surprise for a moment before he schooled his expression. He continued to study me, silent as he pondered what I’d revealed. I forced myself to remain still as I waited. There would come a time that I wouldn’t need his skills. I looked forward to that day.
‘Are you saying that he isn’t of the Vakros line?’
I shook my head. ‘His father was a Vakros, but he bared a child with a human!’ I glared at him. How was he not seething about the deception? How did he not feel the same disgust I did? We had pledged our allegiance to a hybrid. Vakros might be powerful, but he wasn’t Siis. ‘Don’t you see?’ My patience snapped. ‘He will never destroy the species he was spawned from. Everything is a lie!’
Cortell sighed and, to my utter amazement, collected his book from the floor. If he continued reading, I would rip his throat out. I wouldn’t be able to control myself.
Cortell closed the book and tucked it under his arm. ‘I will investigate for myself.’ Before I could retort, he marched from the room without looking at me.
One day, Cortell, you will be mine, and I promise you this, before I am finished, you will beg for your life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
My back arched as I gasped, and I slipped off the wreckage, hitting the open door of a Land Rover with my hip. I landed with a groan. Maybe nothing that happened in here transferred to the real world, but it sure hurt like a bitch.
My mind screamed with agony as if it were being torn apart from within. Images continued to bombard me, all-consuming, lasting mere moments before the next one flooded in.
I became aware for a moment, near a broken shop window, with my arms around my legs, rocking as insane laugher controlled me. Why was I laughing?
More images sucked me away, intense memories of people I didn’t know and places I had never been. Yet, in the moment I saw them, I knew who they were, their ranks in the Siis systems and so much more. Then another memory took over and I became someone else. I had to stop the rollercoaster that swept me away, but it was like arms grabbed at me, yanking me down, away from the real world, not killing me but worse, making it so I never existed.
Adam! His face flashed before my eyes and for a second, I broke free of the lost souls dragging me away. I was on the road, back in the abandoned city that had become my haven from minds more powerful than mine.
‘Come back to me, Ana.’ Adam's voice helped ground me further and the pain in my head receded. It remained in the distance, pressing against an invisible barrier, but I felt like I could breathe again. ‘I cannot lose you.’
I clung to his words, desperate to hear his feelings to me, but so unsure, about the future, about whether his words were directed by the bond we shared through the shi and our child, or real, born from friendship and respect.
‘I have no idea why,’ Adam continued as my breathing settled, ‘or how any of this is happening, but I cannot lose either of you.’
I wanted to speak of my feelings for him, but even if he could have heard me, I couldn’t let that wall down. Gabriel’s love had been born out of our bond; after saving me the night of the junkie attack, he hadn’t been able to get me out of his mind. It had been false, more of a desire for love on both our parts that real emotion that could last through the challenges before us. What if Adam’s feelings were born from the same place as Gabriel’s, and the baby had only sealed his resolution?
Then there was his murdered wife and child. If Gabriel had carried the pain of Deonti’s death for over two thousand years, how could Adam move on in five?
I shook myself. They were questions for when I broke out of The Wastelands, when I figured out how to escape. I also had a lot to make sense of. Cleas was a danger to everyone, Siis and human’s alike. He reminded me of a quote I’d heard in college, by a German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche:
"Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men"
If he replaced human with being, Cleas and he would have gotten along quite nicely. Not that Nietzsche would have survived long in Cleas’s presence. From what I’d experienced, none ever did.
Cleas had a plan, a plot he had devised after Vakros revealed the truth about his conception.
I tried to focus on Cleas, but Vakros’s mother was, or had been, the same as me, and she had given birth to a Siis child. I had been so alone in my uniqueness, the depth of my feelings only apparent when a small flicker of excitement ran through me. I had so many questions but tried to keep them under control. I didn’t have time to be sucked back into the vortex of memories, and there was no certainty that if I did, I would ever find my way back out again. I had to keep fighting. I had to warn them all about Cleas.
I wandered the streets, even searching the abandoned shops, wincing when the dry, musky scent of decay invaded my nostrils. They held no clue as to how to
escape. What exactly was I looking for?
‘A magic door, of course.’ I let out a hiccup of a laugh which I cut short, sobered by the memory of laughing insanely while I rocked.
Now and then, another memory sucked me in, but the black vortex had gone, along with the glinting smog. I gained control. I shied away from delving into any more memories, even my own. They were too intense and, in the case of Cleas, too horrifying.
Is this what happened when a priest bonded with a normal Siis? Was it why Cortell’s partner had run through the woods in Siis form? Because her mind had been sucked into whatever was in her head? Had she lost control in the same way I nearly had? And more importantly, would I end up the same?
If I didn’t leave the Wastelands soon, I had a terrifying feeling that I would soon follow in her footsteps.
I seemed to walk the streets for weeks, though, it didn’t matter how far I went, the decimated city never ended. The sky was a canvas of grey, rain-laden clouds that followed me around. I missed the sun on my skin and the wind on my face. I missed eating and drinking even though I never felt hungry nor thirsty. It was as if the world and I were frozen in time, barring my ability to wander the deserted streets.
No more memories pulled me in, and the voices of those I loved never visited anymore. There was just me, with no way to measure time, only my mind to keep me occupied.
The possibility that I’d died occurred to me more than once. I couldn’t dwell on it. I couldn’t accept that my fate was the nightmare I was trapped in.
I missed sleeping. Without it, there was no escape.
***
I kicked at a loose-hanging car door until the twisted metal groaned and the door crashed against the car below before hitting the ground. ‘You’ve got to find a way out of here soon,’ I told myself as I jumped down next to it.
I wiped the sweat from my brow, wishing I knew how, when I didn’t need to drink, I could still sweat. It was one of a long line of questions that I always returned to, sooner or later.
I slipped the dirty orange strap through the glassless window of the door and twisted it around my wrist. After a deep breath, I bent my knees and heaved the door onto my back. I didn’t have far to go, less than a mile, to camp. ‘You think I haven’t tried to escape?’
I thought over how I had scoured every burnt-out building for an exit. I even searched the sewers beneath, all for nothing. I recalled how, when the physical search had yielded nothing, I had turned all my energy to willing myself back to the real world. I had begged, pleaded, and cried to be released from the never-ending hell, but nothing had happened. I had tried to connect to Adam, like I was sure I’d done when Cleas first invaded my mind, but only silence greeted me. I fought against the urge to give up.
I arrived at my makeshift camp and, with a sigh, dropped the door to the ground. My back groaned with the exertion, and I kneaded my lower spine before I stretched my arms behind me, flexing some life into my tired limbs. Yep, I definitely missed sleep; even if I didn’t feel tiredness, I still ached from a workout.
‘What are you staring at?’ I glared at the metal figure I’d constructed some time ago, his head a metal drum I’d salvaged from the back of an old garden centre, his body a mass of metal scraps twisted into a vague resemblance of the human form.
At first, I had knocked out holes for his eyes, but they soon disappeared under the barrage of metal bits I often flung from my homemade slingshot, the source of most of my entertainment. Now I drew his face on with dirt and replaced the drum when there was little left to shoot at. He was due for an upgrade.
I retrieved the slingshot from the car seat before him, loaded a small chunk of metal into the rubber I had salvaged from underground.
‘Silence?’ I pulled the rubber tube back. ‘After all this time, Cleas, still nothing?’ I released the slingshot and another hole appeared in the drum. He had been created to control my rage and disgust at the Siis who had trapped me in The Wastelands, but had fast become a source of company, even if he never answered back. I dropped the slingshot back into the chair. ‘Suit yourself.’
The seat had been an unexpected yet treasured find. I had been exploring a warehouse that had escaped the worst of the fire. Most of the shelves were empty, some of the contents spilt on the floor as if looting was the cause.
It had come on a day I was about to give up all hope, back before the creation of Cleas but long after I’d been invaded with thoughts of taking my own life. There were times I almost wished for the memories to come back before I remembered the horrors I had committed as Cleas. I couldn’t go back there. Never again could I give myself over to such evil.
Seeing the loose toilet roll scattered on the ground had brought tears to my eyes, though I didn’t understand why; it wasn’t like I ever needed the toilet. Maybe the tears fell because I had been given a reminder of home. Maybe it was because I now had something to clean the injuries I sustained while trawling through the wreckage, injuries that I never saw heal, but always disappeared. Maybe it was for reasons I couldn’t even fathom.
I had cried until the fear left me, until I could once more think of those I loved without bitterness controlling my thoughts, anger for how they had left me here for so long. I cried until I felt nothing. Yet with that, a sliver of hope managed to squeeze its way back in and finding the chair solidified it.
I had been on the way out of the warehouse when I’d come across the undamaged car, excluding the rust that covered the side, something I could never figure out and it didn’t rain. The front doors were wide open as if the occupants had fled by foot, and the fuel cap was on the ground, a cracked hose lying next to it as if someone had bled the engine dry. No more sitting on chunks of concrete or husks of vehicles. It took me what felt like a whole day to get it to my camp. When I’d sunk into it, I smiled for the first time since arriving in The Wastelands.
I dragged the door over to the small construction I had been working on for some time. I’d managed to build three rooms out of car parts, doors that had survived the fire, and anything else I could get my hands on. The new addition to the growing pile of unconstructed metal would become the fourth room. I didn’t know what I would turn this one into yet, but it kept me occupied and I would eventually come up with an idea.
‘If only I could find an untarnished material shop,’ I glanced at my metal man. ‘All the place needs are a few curtains and it will look amazing. Don’t you agree, Cleas?’
As expected, I received no response. If I ever did, I would likely have a heart attack from the shock, or maybe I would be so far gone I wouldn’t care.
I ducked my head as I entered the first room, the place I stored anything useful such as spare clothes, the treasured rolls of toilet tissue I still had left, the weapons I had made. If I created any more knives, I would need a room just for weapons. I hadn’t seen one person I needed to arm myself against, yet I found the act of shaping and sharpening the metal edges for the blade relaxing.
I carried on through to the next room, closing the makeshift door behind me, blocking all light from the area. I made my way to the middle and lay on the rear car seat that matched the ones out front. Thin streams of light spilt into the room through thousands of tiny holes I’d knocked into the ceiling. It was nowhere near as good as the real thing, but sometimes, if I averted my gaze just a little, I could imagine that I lay beneath the stars. If only for a time.
I tried to gauge when twenty-four hours ended and, for a time, had marked each one by scratching a mark in the road surface I’d made my camp on. Once I reached three hundred and sixty marks, I stopped doing it. Even if I halved the number, I had been in The Wastelands for six months. The marks were now covered with mats I’d salvaged from unburnt cars as they were too depressing to look at.
Time passed, or maybe it didn’t; I had no way of knowing. I replaced Cleas’s face more times than I could remember before I lost interest in firing debris at him. Even thinking of killing the twisted Siis no longer brought me p
leasure. There was no point if I never had a chance to carry out my fantasies.
I talked to myself less and less until my only companion was the never-ending, complete silence. I was losing myself. I knew it, but I could do nothing to stop it. My hope had fled without so much as a goodbye, and this time I didn’t have the willpower to fight for it back.
Even thoughts of my child couldn’t bring me back. In all the time I had been trapped in The Wastelands, I hadn’t felt one movement from the baby, and my waist remained as trim as always. By the time I allowed myself to consider the possibility, I couldn’t find a tear to mourn it.
I wasn’t dying—maybe that would have been better—I was disappearing, ceasing to exist.
I continued to walk the city long after plans of escape left me. As always, I ended back at my camp as if I travelled the inside of a bubble, one huge bubble where the streets might look different, but they were all the same. After all, it was The Wastelands and I was here to stay.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I tossed the remaining charcoal to one side and studied the lists of names scrawled on the road; two lists, one longer than the other. At least the list of people I had saved was longer than the one of people whose life I had ruined. My sister and her family were near the top of that list.
I sighed as I traced their names with my finger. I wished I knew how they were, whether they were safe with the witches, or whether I had moved them from the frying pan to the fire. I had only been to America once, but I had made enemies in Maria’s cousins, Maggie and Damian. I had to trust that Cissy would protect them, even if it meant shielding them from those she called family.
I trudged back to my camp with a heavy heart, desperate for some contact from the outside world. The loneliness had long ago devoured me, but now and then, it returned with vengeance for another round.
Noble Lies Page 21
