Powerless (19 page)

I huffed. “Oh yeah, I remember that conversation, too. You only stand with me. Always at my side. Until you weren’t there and I nearly died. When I needed you the most you were gone. Back to Singapore. Back to Ahriman and your place as his second.”

“You don’t know the full truth. Yes, I left. But I never abandoned you, Merq. And I won’t now.”

“Funny. Neveed made me the same offer,” I callously spat back at him.

Armise blanched. “Did he touch you? Did you let him—” Armise fought against the restraints. A man turned wild within one heartbeat. “Fuck, Merq. What did you do?”

He sounded desperate, pained, and a part of me was satisfied that he was hurting as much as I was. “You’ve been gone for a year and a half. No communications. Nothing. What happened between Neveed and me isn’t your concern. It never was.”

Every muscle in Armise’s body was tensed, his hands gripped into tight fists, feet raised on his toes as if he were ready to come flying at me. “Don’t do this, Merq. Don’t. Everything I’ve ever done…” He closed his eyes, sucking in a deep breath. When he looked back up at me, there was agony and loss cutting across his features. A depth of emotion I’d never seen from him before. “For you, Merq. Goddammit. You.”

I seethed. How naïve did he think I was? “You killed the President. Don’t even try to say that was for me.”

Armise hung his head, shaking it, as he spoke in a low voice, “Ahriman used Sarai’s life as leverage. Your President, Wensen Kersch, was under the control of the PsychHAgs. So much so that he…” Armise brought his chin up.

My stomach dropped as I waited for him to finish that damning sentence. “Fuck, Merq, I’m sorry. This is not how you deserve to remember him. But he was the one feeding information to Ahriman Blanc all along.”

I fought back the bile building in the back of my throat. “That’s impossible.”

“I’m sorry, Merq. It’s not. I witnessed it myself. I have recordings of aircomms I can show you. Communications between Ahriman and the President going back years. Let me out of these restraints and I’ll show you them all.”

I was stunned. The President’s ease with knowing he was going to die, the PsychHAgs, the missing kids from the jacquerie, the hybrid assassins Ahriman was creating… It all had to be connected. Fuck. Jegs hadn’t known what she’d stumbled upon, but she’d been right.

“What about the kids?” I asked Armise.

Armise cocked his head and furrowed his brow. “I only know what you told me about Exley leaving. Shit. I hadn’t put those pieces together. You think it’s all related?”

I shouldn’t have believed that he didn’t know—Armise was always one step ahead of me—but I did.

“I’m not letting you out of this room or that chair. Just give me the location of where your intel is stored.”

“It’s on my comm chip,” Armise answered without hesitation.

“Encrypted?”

“I’m not a fucking amateur,” Armise snapped, then appeared to cringe back at the intensity of his own tone.

“You’ll show Chen how to access it.”

Armise nodded, his body finally easing back against the restraints that had drawn blood where he’d been pulling at them.

I stood to leave him, but Armise’s strained voice stopped me. “Tell me you’re not with Neveed. Please.”

I had no compunction to pacify him. No matter what he was telling me now, he was the one who had left me without an explanation. “A year and a half,” was all I answered him.

“I had to.”

“You could have told me.”

Armise chuffed. “You and I have great fucking communication skills. If I had told you I suspected any of this, that the man you were willing to give your life for was the one sabotaging your cause, would you have believed me?”

I turned my back to him, a wave of sick dread making me unsteady on my feet. I couldn’t consider the what-ifs now. It was done. “We’ll never know.”

“I never abandoned you, Merq,” he repeated. “And I never will.”

I swung the door open, my body vibrating with anger. “I won’t do this.”

And I walked out.

Chapter Thirteen

Simion was waiting for me in the hallway, his hip leaning against the jamb of the doorway from the room where he’d been watching my entire conversation with Armise. Despite his casual position I could see how thrown he was by what he’d just heard.

We didn’t have time to rehash any of it, though.

“Get Chen down here,” I ordered him. “Make sure she’s not alone with Armise, but I want that intel off him now. Where’s Neveed?”

“In his room,” Simion instructed, pointing up to the residential section of the capital where all of us had been stationed since transporting in here days ago. I started to walk away. Simion pushed off the doorway and grabbed my arm. “But, Merq, we need—”

I shrugged out of his grasp and cut him off. I didn’t want to talk to him about anything to do with Armise. I could see it in his eyes. He didn’t want to grill me about Armise, he wanted to know how I was. And that wasn’t fucking acceptable in this moment. “Not now.”

I pushed past him and climbed the steps to the residential wing. I knocked at Neveed’s door and heard two voices inside.

Neveed opened the door, moving to the side so I could see past him to the other person inside. His mother, Priyessa the PsychHAg.

I stormed past him and went straight to her. “Did you fucking know?”

“No.”

I narrowed my eyes. I wouldn’t have known if she was lying. Priyessa was as callous as they came. She had no guilt, no conscience. But that also meant she was usually brutally honest.

I turned to Neveed, seeking out his opinion on what his mom was asserting. “What do you think?”

Neveed shut the door quietly and faced both of us. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“Merq, I was approached twice by the President,” Priyessa said. “Once for an unnamed assignment that I refused based on the grounds that I am retired and I had the option to tell him no. The second time was for you. And I only accepted that because of Neveed. I assure you. I didn’t know.”

“So who did?” I demanded of her. “We need you to find out who we’re dealing with here. Who has turned.” I looked to Neveed for confirmation that he agreed on that plan of action. While nothing had been made official as far as I knew, Neveed was the President’s second in command, which meant he would be taking over the role as leader of the Revolution. Neveed stared at me for a moment as if he were lost as to why I was seeking his approval. I sighed and ignored him. I would work around him if I had to. I wouldn’t have a repeat of how he’d checked out in the bunker attack. “Can you do that?” I asked Priyessa.

“I can.”

I gave her a curt nod, then, “I need to talk to Neveed alone.”

She swished past me without another word or even a glance at her son and left the room. When Neveed and I were alone I collapsed into the couch next to me. I sank into the fabric, exhausted, pinching the bridge of my nose and clasping my eyes shut.

“How much did you watch?” I asked.

I could hear Neveed moving across the bare floor, then the sound of the bed dipping as he sat down across from me. “All of it.”

I slumped my head against the back of the couch. I was so fucking tired. “How the fuck did we miss this, Neveed? How the fuck did we allow him to be used like this without any idea that it was happening?” I threw my hands into the air, slumped forward, and pushed myself off the couch. I couldn’t sit still, no matter how physically and mentally worn down I was.

Neveed tracked me as I moved around the room. “You mean, how the fuck did we fail him so completely?”

I froze, had to look away from him. For the first time in my life I could feel a pressure building behind my eyes that had nothing to do with the tears of torture or excruciating pain. “I just don’t understand.”

“Hopefully what Armise shows us will help.”

“Fucking Armise,” I swore and started pacing again. I didn’t want to think about any of the other things he’d said to me in that cell. I didn’t want to believe any of them were true. But if his allegations against the President were verified then I could see no reason why he would lie about any of the rest of it.

‘I love you.’

I didn’t know how to respond to that.

I’d told him I hated him and he’d said he knew. As if he’d been waiting for that response. Resigned to it.

But it wasn’t my declaration that had sent him over the edge, it was the mention of Neveed.

And like always, it was as if Neveed could read my thoughts.

“You going to tell him that nothing happened between us?”

I stopped in front of Neveed and quirked an eyebrow. “That would be a lie.”

“Merq…” he chastised me.

I went slack-jawed at his response. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re taking his side? What the hell is this day? You hate him!”

“Apparently not as much as you do,” Neveed observed with a wry twist of his lip.

“Don’t look too happy. I’ll say it again. A year and a half. We were supposed to be a team and he actively excluded me from his plans.” I sounded like a teenage heartbreak victim. Where the fuck was my head? I sat down on the bed next to Neveed, letting that profound sense of loss wash over me again. I’d driven it back in light of Armise’s accusations, but it didn’t matter who the President had been influenced by in his last years. I would miss the man, the mentor he’d been through most of my life. “Fuck, Neveed. Wensen is dead. ”

“I didn’t see it coming. Didn’t think it would really happen,” Neveed almost whispered. “Watching him fall to the stage…” Neveed’s voice cracked. “I’ve seen a lot of death.”

He didn’t finish the statement with anything else. I waited, but he left those heavy words hanging between us. A harsh truth. A violent one-sentence synopsis of our lives. An indictment.

Simion knocked on the door but didn’t wait for either of us to open it. He walked inside and went to the desk. “Chen’s in with Armise. I’ve got Jegs with her. You want me to pull up the feed?”

Neveed clapped me on the back and offered his hand to me. I took it and stood. Simion pulled up a BC5 and entered a keystroke that brought up an aircomm of the holding cell.

“We have sound?” I asked since I could see movement but hear nothing coming from the room.

“Yeah,” Simion said. “It’s a little tense in the cell. Jegs wasn’t happy I was ordering Chen to be in there at all.”

I looked down at the screen. Tense wasn’t the word I would have used. Nerve-racking. Knife’s-edge. Or hair-trigger probably was more appropriate since Jegs had her pistol trained directly at Armise’s head.

We watched as Chen pulled up a chair and placed it next to Armise. She twisted his hand in the restraint, placing his wrist up.

“You can put that down,” Armise said to Jegs, looking over Chen’s shoulder. “I won’t hurt her.”

Jegs grimaced. “Like you would never hurt Merq?”

Armise’s features clouded over at the mention of my name. “How is he?”

“Fuck you,” Jegs spat out, and put her finger on the trigger.

Jegs was probably more pissed off at Armise than she was protecting me or my honour. I couldn’t help but appreciate the sentiment, though.

Chen settled a device over Armise’s wrist and raised a BC5 screen from it. “What’s the key to get into the records?”

Armise didn’t take his eyes off Jegs. “One five zero eight two five two three.”

“Fucking hell,” Neveed said beside me.

I arched an eyebrow at him.

“It’s your goddamn birthday,” Neveed informed me.

There was no fucking way I was responding to that one.

From the aircomm screen, we could see Chen give a satisfied nod of her head. “Got it. Hold still. Want to make sure the data isn’t corrupted. Give me a minute.” She looked up at Armise and frowned. “You need a doctor?”

“I am fine,” he reassured her.

Jegs rolled her eyes. “Don’t offer that fucking traitor any kindness.”

“It’s all we have left,” Chen chided Jegs in a quiet but stern voice.

She kept her head down, but I could immediately tell she knew we were watching.

She spoke to us and not to Armise or Jegs, “Intel is uploading now. You should be able to access it in a minute. I’ll start the analysts through it as soon as you give the word.”

Simion spoke into his comm. “Not yet. We keep this classified until I’ve reviewed it.”

“Got it, Pres.”

My head snapped up to Simion. “President?”

I scanned between Neveed and Simion, trying to ascertain what the fuck was going on. Simion smirked—that trademark half-sarcastic, all-knowing smile—and Neveed rocked uncomfortably from foot to foot.

“What the fuck?” I demanded, wiping the aircomm away.

Neveed cocked his head in Simion’s direction. “You need to talk to Simion about this one. President Simion, that is. Sir,” Neveed added and cleared his throat.

“What. The. Fuck?” I repeated. “You’ve always been set to be the one who takes over, Neveed. Always.”

“Not anymore,” Neveed stated. “Not for a long time actually.” Which was a complete fucking non-answer to how Ricor Simion—unelected and once on the D3 list of soldiers who knew too much—was now the President of the Continental States and de facto leader of the Revolution.

I bit back a scathing reply and pleaded, “Sims, give me something here.”

“The Vice President officially stepped down last year. After the bunker attack. But President Kersch and Neveed decided it would be detrimental to the cause to broadcast that one of our own was running scared. The Territorial Congress convened and voted Neveed into the position, but he refused it. The President used a little known procedural role to place me into the position. Dictatorship at its finest.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “When exactly was this?”

“Just before Neveed located us in the surge den.”

“The President put you into the role of Vice President of the States when you were spun out on surge?” I asked incredulously. “Why didn’t we start questioning his sanity then?”

Neveed got defensive immediately. “He had faith in Simion. In both of you.”

I took a step back and held up my hands. “Hold up. Congratulations and all to you, Simion. But why the hell didn’t you take it, Neveed? It’s everything you’ve been working towards.”