Armageddon (30 page)

Once they were both seated in the booth, Valari sat back and regarded him with a smug smile. “I’m not going to tell him,” she said, before Atton could even speak.

Atton nodded. “Good, because I’d prefer to be the one who tells Ethan what you did, and what my part in all of this was. He needs to know the truth, Valari.”

“Why?”

“Let’s assume your plot works. Ethan decides to stay with you because his wife won’t take him back, and because you’ve been oh-so-supportive in trying to help him through this difficult time. Even if it works, you’ll be living a lie. You’ll always have in the back of your mind that you lied to get him and you lied to keep him, and that will taint your relationship forever.”

“Look who’s talking, Atton—I mean, Darin.”

“Exactly! I
know
what I’m talking about.” Atton caught a rustle of movement out of the corner of his eyes. A waiter.

“Good evening. What would you like to drink?”

“I’ll have a blue sky cocktail,” Valari said.

“And you, sir?”

“A pint, something cheap and strong.”

“We have Brown Durby, Goldstone, Cavern Ale—”

“Cavern.”

“Coming right up. Anything else?”

Atton shot the man an impatient look. “No.”

“I’ll be right back with your drinks, then.”

Once the waiter was gone, Valari said, “That wasn’t very nice. He’s just doing his job.”

Atton snorted. “Well, you’re the expert in what isn’t nice. I wasn’t really expecting you to give up your game, so I’m here to tell you that I quit.”

“You can’t quit.”

“Yes, I can. I’ve already discussed it with Omnius. He said there will be consequences, but I don’t care. I’m done, Valari. You went too far getting me to betray my own father.”

Valari laughed. “You are a piece of work, Atton! You’re perfectly all right with lying in order to keep the one you love, but when someone else does it, suddenly you’re the penitent sinner, advising people not to make the same mistakes as you. Are you serious? I suggest you go home and let’s pretend that you didn’t bring me here tonight to waste my time with your hypocrisy.”

“All right,” Atton said, already rising from the table. “I’ll go home, but you won’t see me again. I was serious about quitting.”

“We’ll see about that,” Valari said, looking smug again.

Atton shot her a dark look and stalked away. He passed the waiter on the way back to their table. “She’s got the bill,” he said, jerking his chin back the way he’d come.

The waiter nodded hesitantly and continued on. Atton returned to the parking garage on level 15 and flew out in his own car. He’d already returned Valari’s courier. He’d predicted this would happen. Consequences or not, he was done. No more lies, no more drug-running, and no more Valari Thardris.

Atton flew home in a daze. Now he sat parked inside his garage with his hands folded in his lap, his heart pounding in his chest, and his brain buzzing with adrenaline. He had to tell his wife the truth, but how, after all these years, could he possibly tell her that he was a clone?

The door at the far end of the garage slid open and Ceyla walked out. Atton pasted a smile on his face and opened the car door. “Hello, darling,” he said.

Ceyla smiled, too, but as soon as she saw him, her jaw dropped and her face paled. She slowed to a stop and stood there staring at him as if she were looking at a ghost.

“What’s wrong?” Even as he said it, he knew. The truth hit him like an ice pick to his chest. He glanced in his car’s side mirror to be sure, and there he caught a glimpse of a familiar face, but it wasn’t the face he woke up to each morning. This was the one he’d been born with, the one he’d had before striking his deal with Omnius to become Darin Thardris.

“Atton? How… ?” Ceyla’s look of confusion vanished and her cheeks flushed with an angry red heat. “It was you all along, wasn’t it? That’s why you haven’t aged!”

Atton took a quick step forward, one hand raised toward her. “Ceyla, wait, I can explain.” She shook her head, and began backing away from him, stumbling back up the stairs. He kept advancing. “I did it for you! I had to show you that I was still
me,
that we could still be together!”

“Stay away from me!”

The fear and loathing in her eyes was breaking him in two. “Ceyla!”

She turned and ran back inside their apartment. He ran after her, but she’d already shut the door and locked it. He tried the intercom and the doorbell before he remembered that he knew the key code. Typing it in, he breezed inside and strode hurriedly through their small apartment. “Ceyla?”

He reached the kitchen and stopped short when he saw that the front door was open. Atton ran out and down the hallway, taking a guess at which way she’d gone. He tried using his comm band to call her, but there was no answer, it just rang and rang…

“Frek,” he muttered under his breath. He reached the lift tubes just a few seconds too late. The nearest one was already on its way down and two floors below him.

Atton pounded the call button impatiently and eyed the display, trying to estimate how long it would take for the next lift to arrive. It was five floors above him and going up, not down.

Too slow.

He made a run for the stairs, taking them three at a time and jumping to reach each landing. In no time his knees and ankles ached from all the impacts and his chest was burning for air. He left the stairwell on level ten, the nearest street level, and checked the lifts, but Ceyla had anticipated him. She hadn’t selected level ten. The lift was already down to level two.

She was headed for the surface.

“Damn you, Ceyla!” he roared, pounding the call button with his fist. She wouldn’t last long down there on her own.

This time he waited. It would take too long to run down another ten flights of stairs. An eternity passed before the next lift tube arrived. The doors parted and he rushed inside. He wasn’t alone, but the other passengers were on their way out. Atton stabbed the button marked
G
and waited impatiently for the other passengers to exit. He wanted to scream at them.
GET. OUT!

Finally the lift was empty and the doors slid shut. The ride down was just a few seconds, but they felt like minutes to him. The doors slid open, and Atton ran down a dark hallway to the ground-level entrance of the apartment building. No sign of Ceyla, but she couldn’t be more than a minute or two ahead of him.

Atton burst out onto the street and looked both ways twice, searching the murky gloom for his wife. Street lights bloomed in the dark. Hazy clouds of moisture formed glowing golden halos around the light. Further down the street one of those lights flickered and died. The polluted mist and lack of adequate street lighting made it impossible to see anyone at all, let alone his wife. Suddenly he wondered if he’d followed the wrong lift. What if she’d been in the one going up, not down?

“Ceyla!” he roared. “Where are you?”

Silence.

“I just want to talk to you!”

His own echo was the only answer.

Somewhere down the street he heard a crunch of gravel, and he ran toward the sound. “Ceyla?” by now he had his hand on his sidearm. Anything could happen on the surface, and being an Enforcer was no help at all—his uniform would only make him a target.

“Ceyla!”

Atton stopped running and willed his frantic heart to be still so that he could hear. Silence hummed; water dripped from a broken pipe; steam hissed out of a thermal vent in the side of an old factory, but not a peep from his wife.

“Cey—”

A woman screamed. It was a terrible, familiar scream.

Atton burst into motion, running like his legs were on fire. He drew his weapon and clicked off the safety. “Where are you?” he roared.

Another scream sounded, this time farther away. The mist parted just long enough for Atton to catch a glimpse of a raggedy mob running down the street up ahead. He counted at least a dozen of them. Sub-human scum. Psychos.

Atton fired over their heads, hoping to scare them. A bolt of red fire leapt out of his gun, parting the swirling mist with a bloody flash of light. The mob turned to him, a thousand eyes gleaming in the dark. He was shocked to see how many of them there were. Definitely more than a dozen. They moaned and snarled, spreading out. Atton saw a dark shadow lying at their feet, and from the splay of long blond hair, he knew who it had to be.

He fired again, this time shooting to kill. The bolt of plasma struck home and a Psycho fell, his chest on fire, jaws snapping at the air.

Animals.
They were animals!

He fired again and again into the crowd. More Psychos dropped, but those left standing didn’t disperse. They roared and screamed at him, and then they charged. It took a moment before Atton’s head cleared enough for him to realize he was too close, and he wasn’t wearing any body armor, but the mixture of adrenaline and rage pumping through his system made him feel like he could take them all on bare-handed. Dozens of psychos fell, but that didn’t even make a dent in their numbers.

Dirty, clawing hands reached him and batted away his weapon. They beat him with their fists, lifting him and carrying him toward his wife. He threw punches and kicks, but there were too many of them, and soon they had his arms and legs immobilized. He screamed curses at them until his throat was raw. Then something heavy and
hard
hit him on the head with a sickening
crunch.
A fuzzy warmth overcame him… and he fell into a depthless black pit. Out of the darkness he heard a sound—

Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.

The noise came to him as if from a great distance. Then he blinked his eyes open to see where he was. The floor shone with thousands of transparent, hexagonal floor tiles—
clone tanks
—glowing from within and bathing everything in an azure glow. He was naked. Cold. Confused. Sharp, unfeeling claws held him up by his arms—drones, one standing to either side of him.

Atton realized that he was inside one of the Trees of Life—the gargantuan towers where Omnius grew and stored people’s clones. There was no one else around, but he wasn’t surprised. Drones staffed the Trees of Life; people weren’t even allowed inside, except to attend resurrections like this one, and apparently no one had wanted to be around for his.

“You’re awake,” a familiar voice said, contradicting that assumption.

Atton turned to see Valari Thardris walking up to him. The drones rotated him to face her, and she stopped a few paces away, arms crossed over her chest, and that smug smile on her lips once more. Atton glared at her. He was about to ask how he’d died, but then it all came rushing back. The Psychos…

Ceyla.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

“She’d dead, Atton. Omnius warned you there would be consequences.”

“Dead,” he said slowly, his eyes boring holes into Valari’s skull. “All right, you win. Get Omnius to bring her back, and I’ll work for you again.”

“She was a Null. She chose to be a mortal, remember? Omnius can’t bring her back.”

“Since when do you care about the rules?”

“Why should I help you? You made it very clear you want nothing more to do with me.”

“Just bring her back, and let’s forget any of this happened.”

“It’ll take a month to grow her clone. She didn’t have one waiting.”

Atton studied the floor beneath his feet. His eyes burned and blurred with tears as he thought about what must have happened to his wife at the hands of the Psychos. Then he realized the same fate must have befallen him for trying to rescue her.

He shook his head. “Just grow her clone.”

“Not so fast. Are you sure you’re not going to turn on me again?”

“How can I?” he said, looking up suddenly. “I don’t have a choice! No one does! That’s the great lie of Avilon.”

Valari smiled. “It’s good to see you being so smart now. I was worried you might need to be turned into a drone, but I convinced Omnius to give you another chance.”

Atton felt his entire body go cold. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. He hadn’t realized Omnius turned troublemakers into drones, but it made sense. “I know when to quit.”

“Good. Then let’s go. We have Bliss to deliver.”

Atton grimaced. He was going back to delivering the drug that had created the Psychos who had killed him and his wife. It was all very circular and convenient. Valari could have sent contract killers after them, but she’d done one better: she’d had Omnius kill them by predicting the future. All he’d had to do was make Atton’s bio-synthetic suit malfunction at just the wrong moment, setting off a chain of events that ended with him and Ceyla both in a gutter.

Between Valari and Omnius they were pure evil, but Atton had already tried resisting them. Omnius might not be god, but in the absence of a real one, he was the next closest thing. If nothing else, he at least deserved to be feared.

Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, Atton. I’m glad to see you’ve come to your senses.

What choice do I have?

You might be surprised. You’re angry with Valari, and I’m tired of her. I want you to take her place.

That came as a shock.
Take her place… as the leader of the Resistance?

Among other things, yes.

What are you going to do with her?

I will kill her, and I’ll also allow you to tell Ethan the truth about what she did. He will return to his family in Etheria. You will have your revenge, and things will be set right.

You also had a part to play in the things she’s been doing.

Because she asked me to. Valari has been taking advantage of my good will toward her for far too long. I had hoped she would grow out of her petty schemes, but I’ve run out of patience. She does not deserve to live on New Avilon.

New Avilon?

That is where my chosen people will live. You could be there with them if you like.

What about Ceyla?

For your sake, I will deceive her into thinking that she
chose
to be Immortal, but she may never accept the idea.