Powerless (21 page)

“When do we leave for the States?”

“The transporters are back up. Whatever hack the Opposition used was lifted soon after the assassination. We’ll transport out in the morning. Presidents Tivy and Agri are travelling with us. There will be a formal burial tomorrow afternoon.”

“And when will the transition to your leadership be announced?”

“Before the service. It’s official and the Council has received notification of the change. I’ll make my first public address tomorrow.”

“Scared?”

“Yeah. Mostly about the whole bullet through the head thing, though.”

I wanted to reassure him that I would be there to protect him, but after today, it wasn’t a promise I knew I could keep. And Simion must have understood that as well as I did. There was reason for him to be frightened of what came next.

“We need to talk about the hybrid assassins.”

Simion nodded his head slowly. “We need more information from Armise before we can strategize.”

I clenched my teeth. “Agreed.” But I didn’t offer myself to take that on, even though I knew that’s where Simion needed me.

“I need you to talk to him, Merq. Maybe to work with him again. We’ll see where this goes.”

“I know.”

“And then there’s the missing kids.” He stared me down, anger making his high cheekbones stand out in stark relief against his paled skin.

“We have to find Exley.”

“Agreed.”

I put my hand on his back, and gripped the back of his neck with the other. “You need to sleep. There’s nothing else you can do today, Pres,” I said with humour, using the nickname Chen had given him already. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to call him the President. That was a title too inextricably linked to Wensen Kersch.

He gave a low chuckle. “Okay.”

I stood, walking to the door, but Simion calling for me made me stop in my tracks.

“And Armise?”

I stilled. Took a deep breath. Repeated my mantra.

Hesitation is my enemy.

I exhaled. Prepared myself for what was necessary.

“Let him go. It’s time we talked.”

Chapter Fourteen

I was pacing again.

Hadn’t stopped moving since I’d returned to my quarters. Alone.

Because I knew I wouldn’t be solitary for long.

The minutes dragged into an hour, then two as I waited for that inevitable knock on my door.

I could’ve used a BC5 to track what was happening in the cell. But I didn’t want to know.

It was likely they were talking about me. About Armise’s role now that he was back.

As interminable as the time lag felt, as soon as the knock came it was as if I’d been rushed into this confrontation.

I wasn’t ready to face Armise.

And that was a position I was completely unfamiliar with.

I huffed a single, resigned breath and ran my fingers through my hair, smoothing it. I opened the door and consciously took a step back, not forcing him to wonder if I would let him inside.

Armise’s frame almost filled the doorway. He was unmarked now, but worn. Just as tired as I was.

“I see they stitched you up,” I stated, leaning against the open door.

He didn’t move inside.

“Yes.”

His voice rumbled roughly over that one word. Haggard.

“Come in,” I offered, pushing the door back against the wall.

Armise’s jaw twitched, but he took a step, then another, passing by me, inches away from me, without touching me.

He smelt different. Of gunmetal and ash. Acrid and bitter.

I wanted to touch him. To wash away the foreign scent and replace it with what I knew. Those Singaporean balms and the clean clarity of inherent coldness.

My chest ached. I had no other words to put to the level of sadness I felt pouring through me.

This was tense, unfamiliar.

And while Armise and I had been at odds many times before, there had always been a promise of something more between us. I hadn’t known it was there until it was gone. Until this moment.

Everything was uncertain between us. And for once it wasn’t because of clashing countries or diverging agendas. It was because that unspoken promise had been broken.

I edged the door shut with my shoulder then faced him. “I don’t know where to start.”

Armise slid the chair out from the desk and sat down, propping it precariously onto the two back legs and running his hands over his face. Scratching at his beard.

I waited.

“I didn’t think you would let me in that door,” he finally said.

I tried to conjure some kind of an emotional response besides defeat.
Fuck. Or regret.

I grazed at the anger inside me I’d been able to so easily access earlier, but just felt pointless with him in front of me. I touched at the betrayal that had sunk into my bones over the last year, and tried to force it to the surface. But all I was was sad.

I crossed the room and sank onto the edge of the bed. I set my elbows on my knees, and told him the most honest thing I’d possibly ever said to him. “I’d never keep you out.”

Armise’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth to speak, but I stopped him. “Look. You left in January of last year. It’s May. One and a half years, Armise. We’ve been apart for longer spans of time, but this time was different. I needed you. I told you that. And you still left.” He frowned. I continued since I had to get this out. “But what I never said out loud to you, what I was too fucking cowardly to admit to, was that I trusted you. I don’t know if things would have been different if I had. I just don’t fucking know. But now we’re here. In the AF, you having killed my President, me having beat the shit out of you and it’s like nothing has changed since that rooftop in Bogotá. But I’m not the same person you left.”

Armise tipped the chair and leant forward in a pose that almost matched my own, but he spread his legs wide, his boots thumping back into place on the floor to steady him. His hands hung between his knees, those bracelets clicking against each other when he circled his hands. “I heard. I didn’t get the full story, but enough. Neither am I,” Armise asserted.

And I could see the change in him.

Armise had always been a calm person. There was a depth of knowledge he carried with him. A certainty in himself that I tried to emulate, but would never possess. But the Armise in front of me was shaken. As if he was questioning everything around him.

I knew that what I was going to say next would only add to that uncertainty. I sighed, pulled my lip piercing between my teeth. “I don’t know if I can trust you again.”

Armise played with the bracelets circling his wrists, his head hung down, unable to look at me.

This entire conversation was more honest than I’d ever been with Armise. And I couldn’t find the will to stop now. There were still things about his time away I had to know if we were ever going to build that trust again. If that was what I wanted at all.

“How long did you have that transport chip?” I asked, broaching the subject of how he’d escaped from the bunker.

“I brought it into the bunker with me after your shot. It was my fail-safe.”

That meant he’d been carrying it for a year before he’d used it. That he’d been hiding an alternate means of escape even when he’d been telling me that his place was at my side. “Which gen?” I probed. I needed to know just how much flexibility he had in where or how he transported. The newest chips—gen twelve—were tied directly into the brain so thought could be used to mark the destination. Earlier generations lacked that capability.

“Gen four. I had to be sure it couldn’t be hacked or the destination changed. It was always set to take me to Mongolia.”

“Home.”

Armise nodded. “In a way,” then added, “I have all my chips again—tracker, transport, comm.”

“Anything else?” I pushed him.

“There has to be. But I do not know what or where.”

Which meant there was a chance Ahriman was still actively tracking him. But maybe that also meant we could use that to our advantage.

Fuck. Our.

I shouldn’t have been sure of who I included in that qualifier. But I was.

Armise and me. Together as a team again.

I pushed past the thought, not ready to take the implications on.

“When did you make the decision to leave the bunker?” I had to know. Ripping away those unknowns, bringing them to the light was the only way I knew how to move forward.

Armise didn’t hesitate to respond. “As soon as you told me Dr Casas thought there might be something being shielded inside my body. I knew I had to find Ahriman. At the very least, leave the bunker. I was worried he could have implanted a reverb inside me like he’d done to your father. A living bomb in a Revolution stronghold, just waiting for the right moment.”

“Shit, Armise. You should have told me.”

Armise finally lifted his eyes to me. “There is a lot I should have said to you.”

‘I love you.’

That damning statement was left unsaid, but I could see him fighting not to say it again. I had been the one telling him to never say it again, and I couldn’t retract that now. He inhaled sharply, shook his head, and clenched his fists. But I didn’t speak. I didn’t know what to say.

Armise cleared his throat. “I couldn’t have known what would happen after that. That I wouldn’t be able to make it back to you. It wasn’t safe for you. I allowed Ahriman to put me under when I found him. To do whatever it was he needed to do. It was the only way I could think to prove to him that I hadn’t really turned. To get the intel I knew you needed. I didn’t start making plans until I was sure I wouldn’t be a risk to you or to your cause.”

A sick wave of realisation rolled over me, dragging me under.

‘Everything I’ve ever done has been for you.’

He hadn’t come back sooner because he was helping me. Worried about me. Placing his life in direct danger. For me.

I pushed myself off the bed and started to pace again. My body was shutting down, exhausted from the day. I hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept. And I was emotionally raw. Overwrought.

But Armise picked up the threads of our conversation. “I know what Ahriman is using to shield himself. I brought a device back with me. Chen has it now.”

That was good. Better than good. With one of those devices in hand we had a chance of picking it apart, searching for weaknesses, if not outright duplicating it. “She’ll figure it out.” I stopped my incessant pacing at the end of the bed and looked to him. “Any other secrets?”

“A man doesn’t go forty years without accumulating secrets,” he stated definitively, but added nothing else.

“Will I ever know them all?”

I could see that telltale tic of his jaw as he answered, “Probably not.”

That’s when I snapped, exhaustion overtaking me. I was too fucking tired to play these games with him anymore. “You know what? I don’t give a shit. I’m so fucking sick of political manoeuvrings, manipulations, lies, missions, espionage… All of it is so fucking uncertain. I can’t even keep my head straight with it all. The only thing I can say with any kind of surety is that someday I’m going to die. No fucking escaping that one.”

I dug into my pocket and brought out the shell the President had given me. I crossed the room and dropped it into Armise’s hand.

I pointed at it, stabbing my finger accusingly at the inanimate object. Dirt across continents was littered with those casings now, but this one had been the one that had started it all. “Not thirty minutes before you killed him, the President handed that bullet casing to me and told me what you said to him. A man who I was closer to and respected more than anyone else on this planet, and he had to be reminded that I was human. By you. I don’t want to be a machine of war, a cog, a pawn, a mindless drone. I want to live. I don’t want to give up fighting or abandon the cause. I’m a soldier, it’s who I am. But I’m also a man, and goddammit, Armise. I want you.”

I was shaking, shocked to the core at my own admission and just how truthful it was.

Armise rolled the copper in his hand. He huffed and sat back in his chair. “It won’t be that simple.”

I threw my hands up in protest. “I know I was the one who said we don’t do simple, but this shit is getting ridiculous. You have to murder my adopted father and mentor just to get on the same continent as me?”

It was all ludicrous. Patently unfair. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all. But there was too much pain, too much lost that could never be brought back for me to find any humour in it.

Armise gripped his fist tightly around the shell. “I’m sorry I had to kill him, Merq.”

I thought about what Simion had said to me only moments ago, mirroring his statement in my own way, giving voice to yet another truth. “You did it because I couldn’t have.”

I stalked away from him. Putting distance between me and that bullet casing. Between me and Armise.

I ran my fingers through my hair and left my hands there, covering my ears, trying to shut it all out as I clamped my eyes tightly shut.

It was all too much. And I was so fucking tired.

I didn’t hear Armise, but I could feel him move. A pull that held my mind and body in place even as another wave of defeat and soul-sucking sadness threatened to yank me into the depths.

“Are you okay?” his voice came from behind me. Only inches away. I could hear the inflection in his words. He drew out the word
you
as if I was what mattered the most to him.

That strength. That lifeline. That complete faith in me. That was what I had missed.

Shit. That was a selfish thought. What he did for me wasn’t all I missed.

I missed his scent. His voice. His determination. His gruff nature with everyone else, even though he kept me close. So goddamn close. Fuck, I missed his hands on me.

I turned, grabbed hold of his shirt, and tugged him into me, putting us face to face.

“Fuck this,” I growled. “No. I’m not okay. I’m so fucking far below okay that I can’t see the light anymore. I keep struggling for the surface, but every current whips me back down, draws me deeper, further. I want to hope. I want to believe we all have a chance. But I can’t envision what comes next, and I can’t muster the strength to fight for it without your sullen, determined ass next to me. And that is just unfair. I was built to do this on my own. So fuck you for being the only person I could ever rely on.” I shook my head, couldn’t tear my eyes away from his. “I hurt, Armise. I’ve never hurt as much as I have in the last year and a half. I still hurt even with you standing right in front of me, because I have no idea where we go from here. How do we forget all of the awful shit we’ve said and done to each other? We’re bad people, Darcan,” I snarled. “We’ll always exist more in the darkness than the light. But if we’re going to make it, we have to find some way not to be bad to each other.”