Powerless (11 page)

But if there was anything the soulless woman in front of me had taught me, there would be no way she would ever be aware that’s what I was thinking.

I held my hands out to her, palms down, knowing full well that she would go through with exactly what she had threatened. “I’ve survived it once before,” I responded coolly.

Priyessa stood and took my hands in hers, running the tips of her fingers over my nails. I restrained a shudder and kept my breathing and heartbeat even. I recited my mantra. Let the chill of Armise’s departure settle into me. I’d been down this path before and, unlike when I’d been a teenager, I was aware there were much worse things than anything she could do to me.

She let go of my hands and before I could react—my mind was still too thick with the haze of surge withdrawal—she cocked her arm back and slammed her fist into my right shoulder. A bone-deep tremor ripped through me, causing every muscle in my torso to convulse. I sucked in a breath and kept myself from dropping to my knees.

Priyessa stared me down, her green eyes alight. “Your recovery belongs to me or to Neveed. Either way you’re marooned with one of us. Despite what you want to believe, you will get well. By pain or by hard work. This will be the only choice you will have in that course of action.”

I forced my shoulders back—that cold ache settling back into my core—cracked my neck and stared down at her.

The supposed choice she offered me was tantamount to asking if I wanted my heart ripped out with a spoon or a knife. Either way I lost. Priyessa was a known evil. Neveed was…

I thought about when he’d been my Coach and every order he’d ever given me was swift, decisive, and on point. Then I thought of the man I’d seen in the bunker when the Nationalists had attacked—broken, unsure. I couldn’t reconcile either of those manifestations with the first man I’d ever trusted enough to let fuck me.

I didn’t know who he was anymore. If I ever had.

I took a step back and whipped the door open, finding Neveed standing nervously next to it. “Get her off the island. I don’t want her here.”

“Merq—” my father began.

I turned on him. “She’s a PsychHAg.”

Neveed sighed. “She’s my mom.”

“Yeah? And she’s mine,” I said, pointing to Tallie. I spoke only to Neveed, though. “That distinction means nothing. I’ll say it one more time. Get the PsychHAg off my island. Fuck that. I want all of them gone.” I leaned against the doorjamb and crossed my arms, my decisiveness kicking in and making me steely calm. “I’ll train only with you.”

Chapter Seven

October 2559

I stumbled, took a step back and Neveed lunged, overtaking me before I had time to think.

He swiped the knife across my neck and pushed me to the ground, my head bouncing on the sand and jolting my whole body with spears of pain, in a parallel image of the night Armise had almost killed me in Singapore. If that had been a real knife, Neveed would have easily taken my life. I wheezed and attempted to drag in a full breath.

“Again,” Neveed ordered and offered his hand to me, even as his chest heaved from the exertion of a morning spent in combat training.

I batted his hand away and forced myself up, but refused to get back into the fighting stance.

“We’re done,” I said and turned my back to him, swiping the sweat from my brow and heading towards the house.

We’d been at a gruelling schedule of training almost twenty hours per day for the last two months. Guns, knives, hand-to-hand, tactics, languages, evasion, and the occasional target practice with sonic weapons. My body was finally clearing of the relentless need for surge—Neveed’s relentless coaching ensured that—but I still struggled at night-time to push thoughts of the drug from my mind. By the end of the day, every day, I was a physical wasteland. That still couldn’t stop the dreams.

I lived with Neveed. Trained with Neveed. Was never farther than a thousand metres away from him. Yet it was the man who wasn’t there who dominated my thoughts when Neveed wasn’t driving my body into exhaustion and my mind into compliance. I would fall into bed—Neveed’s slow, relaxed breathing a hush on the other side of my wall—and I would attempt to match the depth of each inhale. The meditative cleanse of each exhale. But as soon as I was lulled into sleep, I was desperate again. Angry. Searching for Armise in a plane I would never find him.

Despite the challenges, being with Neveed was easy. We fell into oddly uncomplicated domestic rituals and roles. I cooked. He cleaned. We both fixed the mechanical and structural issues that came up constantly with a crumbling house, working amiably at each other’s side, even though we rarely talked.

A boat showed up every now and then to replenish our supplies, but I couldn’t ascertain any regularity to the schedule. I had to assume that was Neveed’s doing. If he had ever trusted me, I didn’t think he did anymore. But there was a part of me that was desperate to earn that trust back.

Maybe it was my history with him. And not just the physical side of it. Neveed was older than me, older than Armise in fact, and there had been a time that I had looked to him for guidance. But our relationship had always felt skewed. As if Neveed had learned more from me than I from him. Even after spending two months solely with him, I had yet to figure out why that was.

“You just need more practice,” Neveed said as he caught up to me.

I stuffed down the frustration at myself building with each failed training lesson. Two fucking months of failed training lessons at this point. “I wasn’t built to need practice.” I ripped the door open and stalked inside, allowing it to crash closed before Neveed could follow me.

“You’re still human.”

I scoffed and thought about my father’s admission that they had genetically manipulated me before birth.

Human. Right.

“Eat something then let’s pick up the Colt again. You ready to try the rifle yet?”

I cringed, and apparently that was enough of an answer for Neveed.

Neveed kept talking, “Food then targets. The last boat brought a fresh case of bullets.”

I moved into the galley without answering him. I poured water from the sink—a recent capability that Neveed and I had spent an entire day working on—and filled a pot. I poured the rice in without waiting for it to boil. Neveed fucking hated it when I did that.

When the fire from the stove was crackling at the edges of the metal pot, I pushed past him and went into my room to change my clothes. I didn’t bother to shut my door as I stripped down to nothing. There wasn’t any point. Neveed watched every move I made. That brand of paranoia unique to the Revolution had come in handy as it pertained to his ever-vigilant surveillance of me.

Neveed’s bare feet slapped against the floor as he came to my doorway. “Do you even know what it means?”

I pulled on the black pants of my Revolution training uniform and slipped my shirt over my head, wincing as I pulled it over my scarred shoulders and stomach before I turned to acknowledge him. “What are you talking about?”

“Your tattoo. The Hindi on your back. Are you aware of what it means?”

Hindi. So that’s what language it was.

There were days now when I forgot that mark existed on my back. I found myself surprised it had taken Neveed this long to bring it up at all since it appeared as if he could read the foreign script.

I nodded. “It means ‘bound’.”

I tried not to think about why I had got the tattoo in the first place, or who I had been with when I’d got it. It had been almost a year since I’d last seen Armise and while thoughts of him were never far from my mind, they brought more hurt than anything else. That damn PsychHAg and her insistence that maybe I was beginning to actually feel. If this was normal, then I would have given anything to go back to the time before I was able to put any emotion into describable terms.

But not all of my breakthrough had come at as heavy a cost. The cold that had settled into my body during my time on surge had been replaced with a temperate ease that I hadn’t ever possessed. Neveed probably would have attributed it to his forced meditation sessions. But I’d never give him the satisfaction.

Neveed hummed. “Yes, but it can also be taken to mean ‘limited’.”

“Semantics. There’s another word for you. There are words which must be taken within context to be properly interpreted.”

“So tell me. What’s the context of that one?”

We had gone this entire time without one mention of Armise. I preferred it that way. I guessed he did, too. So I had to wonder if he knew exactly what he was asking.

I sat down on the bed. “What about hamartia? You want to talk about words? Let’s talk about that one. I mean, really, Neveed. Let’s get fucking truthful for once.” But there wasn’t any heat behind my words. I was exhausted. My muscles burning, that dull ache never leaving my shoulder or my ribs. And as I’d come off the surge high I’d realised that my skin was numb in large portions of the scarring. To have an awareness of my interior mechanisms more than the outside was a sensation I was still getting used to.

Neveed cocked an eyebrow. “Truthful? Then answer me this. That tattoo is about Armise, isn’t it?”

I sighed. “I’m not talking about him.”

“And there’s my answer.”

I looked up at him, unable—unwilling?—to hide the sadness I felt consuming me.

Neveed cleared his throat, shifting from foot to foot, obviously uncomfortable. “So, hamartia. I assume you’re talking about Lim2. Did they show you my reports?”

It had been after Lim2 that Neveed and I had started sleeping together but, much like Armise and I, we had rarely discussed Peacemaker business.

I shook my head and ran my fingers over my head, through the itchy stubble that had started growing since I’d shaved all my hair off. “I heard you that night. Over the comm. Later someone told me you said my speed would be my fatal flaw.”

Neveed nodded and moved to sit down next to me. “Your fatal flaw was never your speed. It was your impulsive decisiveness and unwillingness to change your beliefs once they were set.”

“Was?”

“Still is.”

“Well, you seem to have a pretty clear idea of who I am and what my flaws are. I don’t think this is a conversation I can add anything to.” I stood to head for the galley, but he gripped my arm stopping me.

“Armise isn’t coming back, Merq. He abandoned you when you needed him the most.”

I pulled out of his grasp.

“Armise didn’t abandon me,” I stated, even though I wasn’t sure I believed what I was saying. “He left to go after Ahriman.”

Neveed poked a finger into my chest. “That stubbornness is exactly what I’m talking about. You’re completely unwilling to consider that you were wrong about him. He used you to get the inside track on our operations. Yes, he may be going after Ahriman, but not for any of our benefit. When he kills Ahriman he will take over the Opposition and then it will be your job to hunt him down, too. I’ve seen the intel. He’s in Singapore with Ahriman. Has been for months. He’s alive and not going anywhere.”

I froze. How long had Neveed known where Armise was? I’d seen him talking on his comm—he checked in almost every day—but we rarely talked about the progress of the war or Revolution tactics, let alone the classified reports I used to be privy to. Fuck, we rarely talked at all. And that silence, that separation from the daily considerations of motives and strategies, had freed me to get my head on fucking straight again. I hadn’t asked Neveed about any of it, but that didn’t mean that he shouldn’t have told me when he’d heard anything about Armise.

“You realise I was in Singapore for years,” I snapped. “With the Premiere and Ahriman as I solidified my identity as an Opposition goon. I spent almost four years of my life on Opposition soil and you want me to believe that Armise’s presence there for a handful of months means he’s turned his back on me?”

Neveed seemed unfazed by my anger. “Yes, Merq. I do.”

I paced away. Fuming. Thinking. I would be lying if I told Neveed that I hadn’t come to the same conclusion. I’d figured out months ago that Armise couldn’t be dead, because that was something my parents would have been happy to throw in my face. But to hear my suspicions confirmed was… Shit. Maybe it was exactly what I needed.

To finally move on.

“Let’s eat,” I called out over my shoulder, pushing it all away.

Neveed came into the galley as I spooned the rice into bowls and mixed it with spices, gras beans and the last of our fresh vegetables.

“Is there another boat coming soon? A man can’t survive on rice alone.”

I handed him a bowl and dug into mine hungrily with my fingers. It lacked flavour, despite the spices, but it would be enough to get my energy back up for whatever Neveed had planned for me for the rest of the day.

“There’s one coming soon. Sure you don’t want me to add some meat to the next shipment? You could use the extra protein. You’re healing, but I know you’re frustrated at the rate of progress.”

He was right. I was healing. My body was responding in ways I’d never thought would have been possible when I’d lain on that bed after the explosion and felt as if my skin had been burned off and my bones had been crushed into jagged shards. While Neveed could still get the upper hand over me, I could take him down when we were fighting hand-to-hand. And my ability to sight a target was dead on again, with both pistols and sonic weapons. I had yet to attempt a rifle, but Neveed didn’t have to tell me that was more of a mental block than fear of deteriorated skill.

“I don’t want any of that genetmod shit,” I assured him between bites.

Neveed set his bowl down on the stove—only half eaten—wiped his hands on a threadbare towel then ran his fingers over the stubble on his jaw. “Listen, there’s something else we need to talk about. I’ve been talking to the President. He wants you back on active duty. I’ve bought you more time but probably not as much as you’re going to need.” He hesitated and studied me. “Or want.”

I finished off my rice and picked up his bowl, tipping it towards him in question.

Neveed waved it away. “Go ahead.”