Powerless (20 page)

Neveed ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve learned a couple of things about myself over the last two years. I’m a man, not a politician, and certainly not a soldier. I can’t do this anymore, Merq. Now that Simion is in control of the government and the Revolution, I’m ceding my position as General as well. I can’t… I just can’t anymore.”

I couldn’t argue with what he was telling me. I’d seen him fall apart more than I’d seen him be a competent leader. When it was just he and I working together, I’d never questioned his strategy, his orders, or his authority. But as a General for the Revolution, Neveed had nearly imploded under the unrelenting pressure.

“What are you going to do?”

“Sims and I have been talking about it. Well before what happened today. I’m taking Chen to my house in the Southern Territories. She’ll be safer there for now. It will give her time to work on the infochip and she can still handle missions remotely. But she’ll be out of the line of fire.”

“Good,” I said, then repeated it. That course of action was perfect. It was a solution I never would have been able to see, but the exact reason why Neveed was so revered for his tactics.

“Who’s going to be your second in command?” I asked Simion.

Simion frowned. “That decision has yet to be finalized.”

I couldn’t miss the wary look that passed between Neveed and Simion. “Please say it’s not fucking me.”

Simion sneered. “No, it’s not fucking you. Thanks for offering me and your country your service.”

I flicked him off then wrapped him into a hug that had him huffing out a surprised breath. “You’ll be amazing.”

“Fuck you. I know,” he teased as he pushed me away.

An uncomfortable silence settled between us—that ache of unexpected loss spearing through me without warning. The President should have been here. It had always been the three of us working towards his agenda, fighting for him, but now we weren’t.

“Everything feels the same, and yet not,” Neveed said sadly next to me, giving voice to what I was thinking.

I sighed. I knew exactly what he was talking about. All of us had lost soldiers. All of us had been on the fighting end of survival. But none of us had lost anyone this close to us before. It didn’t matter that this was war and that death was expected. It didn’t matter that the President’s life had ended under dubious circumstances. He was gone.

I was shiningly aware in the moment that I couldn’t handle the thought of losing either one of these men.

“We should talk about the intel,” I offered, trying to steer the conversation back to the accusations, about the business of the Revolution that was never-ending. And we hadn’t even discussed the hybrid assassins yet, which, in my opinion, had to be viewed as the most immediate threat to the Revolution.

“I’m out of that conversation,” Neveed said with conviction, taking a step back.

“We could use your brain on this one,” Simion offered.

I could tell he wasn’t just trying to placate Neveed. Simion valued him. I did, too. And him leaving the Revolution was going to cause ripples I couldn’t anticipate.

Neveed shook his head. “I’m out. Done. I’m taking Chen and leaving tonight. And I won’t be at the memorial either. Just know that.”

I cringed. I hadn’t even thought that far ahead. We still had to bury the President. In a grave next to his wife. Two lives. Both gone because I hadn’t acted fast enough.

“I get it, Neveed,” Simion said. “One thing before you take off, though. I need your opinion. Do we need to worry about Tallie and Luc? About Merq’s parents? They were never in Singapore like Sarai was, but a lot of damage can be done in a day. We don’t have any clue how they may have been used. Especially since it was the President who was their main contact.”

Neveed looked to me, but I wasn’t the person to answer that question. I didn’t know where they were, let alone how loyal they were or weren’t to the Revolution.

Neveed cleared his throat. “I didn’t have much contact with them, so I can’t guarantee they haven’t been corrupted.”

“None of us can,” Simion admitted. “We’ll add them to the fucking list of shit yet to be handled. Speaking of, I need to start reviewing the intel from Armise. Come see me when you’re done here, Merq. I’ll leave you two to say goodbye.”

Simion clasped hands with Neveed and pulled him close, his mouth tucked into Neveed’s neck. I could see his lips moving, but couldn’t hear what Simion was saying. Neveed took a deep inhale, nodded and clapped a hand on Simion’s back in reply. “Okay.”

Simion put both his palms on Neveed’s cheeks and brought their foreheads together, ushering him into a ritual that had been mine and Sims’ since we were kids. “You’re a good man, Niaz.”

“I’ll see you around, Pres,” Neveed stated with all seriousness.

And with that, Simion marched out of the door humming some nameless tune.

I pointed at the door as it shut. “The President? Seriously?”

“He’ll be good,” Neveed said with surety, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

“Damn good,” I added.

“Listen, Merq—” Neveed started, his lips tugging into a frown that was much more characteristic of Simion than him.

We were all much more intertwined than I’d ever realised. I held up my hand to stop him from saying anything else. “Please don’t. Please. I’ve had enough emotional shit to handle today. You think you’re fucking done? I have to wake up tomorrow and do this all over again. Fuck, hopefully not all over again, you know what I mean.” I poked a finger into his chest. “You and me, we’re good. I’ll give your respect to Wensen Kersch tomorrow. And I promise you we’ll figure out how the hell this happened. His death will mean something.”

Neveed ran his hand through his hair and took out the band holding it back in a ponytail, letting the black waves fall over his shoulders. “Guess I’ll be shaving this off tomorrow.”

That ancient tradition of mourning, of respect for the deceased, so ingrained into who Neveed was that he would abide by it regardless of the shadow that had fallen over the President’s legacy.

“It’s time. Getting out of control.” I grabbed his chin and forced his head to turn as I surveyed his beard. “This, too.”

Neveed slapped my hand away playfully.

But I reached up and put him into the same hold as Simion had. Drawing us close. So close I could feel the whisper of his breath on my cheek. I shook my head as I locked eyes with him. I couldn’t believe he was actually leaving. “You’re a good man, Neveed. And it’s been an honour to serve with you.”

Neveed closed his eyes. “Thank you, Merq.”

He knocked his forehead against mine, leant forward and kissed each of my cheeks.

“Stay safe, Grayson,” he stated as he drew out of my hands.

“Will do, Coach,” I agreed. If it was going to be his last order to me then I was going to take it seriously.

I had to walk away.

I’d had too many losses today, too many surprises.

For once the destruction had come to me instead of me invoking it.

And there was only one way I knew how to respond.

It was time for me to protect what was mine.

* * * *

The door to Simion’s room was propped open when I got there.

I entered and clicked it shut behind me. What Simion was watching didn’t need an audience. I hadn’t seen any of the intel, had only Armise’s assertions to go by, but the second I saw Simion’s face I knew Armise hadn’t been lying. Simion was hunched over the desk, face only inches away from the BC5, eyes vacant but flicking over the images on the biocomp in disbelief. His skin, normally a bronzed gold regardless of the time of year, was pale. Lips drawn into a thin line. He looked like he’d aged ten years in ten minutes.

“That bad?” I asked, taking the seat next to him.

“Four years, Merq. There are four years’ worth of communication between the President and Ahriman. It started with blackmail. With Ahriman using Sarai to get Kersch to Singapore. It escalated from there. I’ve only scanned through it, but the last communication I can find was over a month ago. I don’t even recognise the man I see in these videos. I doubt if the President even knew what was happening. They had him so deep, so influenced… Fuck. It’s not him, but it is.”

I cringed at how Simion spoke of Wensen in the present tense, as if he were still alive. I supposed his presence wouldn’t fade from our daily thoughts for years to come, though. Simion jabbed a finger at the screen. “If anyone wanted to question the Revolution’s motives, this is their ammunition.”

“So why hasn’t Ahriman done exactly that?”

“Fuck if I know. But you know what scares me the most with all this?”

I shook my head.

“How the hell am I supposed to know if the same thing is happening to me? To any of us? How can we trust anyone?”

We can’t, I wanted to say. But I was too tired to take on the argumentative bent of a defeatist. “I talked to Priyessa Niaz,” I said instead. “She didn’t know about the rogue PsychHAgs. We can utilise her. Maybe she can tell us what they would have done to the President’s mind. Maybe she can spot the signs.”

“That’s a lot of fucking maybes there, Colonel.”

“Yeah, there is,” I admitted, sounding as bone-weary as I felt.

Simion played with the screen in front of him, bringing up the feed of the cell Armise was being held in.

He was still in that chair, hands bound, his face a bloodied, bruised mess from my encounter with him. Neither Simion nor I had been gentle when we’d chained him to that chair, refusing to take the time to remove his bracelets before securing the restraints around his wrists. And I could see the places where they had dug into the flesh. The damage had been exacerbated by his battle against the restraints when I had vindictively brought up Neveed. Those wounds would take weeks to heal unless he got surge soon.

I’d inflicted wounds on Armise more times than I could count, his body and mine bearing the scars of each time we’d fought. But this time he hadn’t had the option to fight back. I’d railed at him, demanding answers, and he’d given them all to me without hesitation. I’d torn at him and he’d told me he loved me.

The thought made me sick—regretful—in a way I’d never felt before.

“What are you going to do with him?” I finally said.

I could see Simion staring at me, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen. Simion swiped the BC5 away and leaned on the desk, putting his head in his hands. “What do you want me to do with him?”

I didn’t know.

I’d never been more conflicted in my life. More unsure of what was the right decision, the right move.

‘I love you.’

Those three words ate at me from the inside. I’d spent almost two years trying to bury every thought of Armise so deeply inside me that it could never be extracted again. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t still there.

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

And I’d taken that loyalty and crushed it under my fists. Drawing his blood in vengeance, in hurt, and in anger. Revenge for wrongs that were real to me, even if he denied them. I couldn’t forget those first months after he’d left. I couldn’t let go of the endless cold I’d used surge to obliterate. It was all too real. So real that I didn’t know if I could ever trust him again.

Fuck, I miss him.

But I couldn’t answer Simion’s question. Not yet.

“You’re telling me Armise isn’t bullshitting us. But who’s to say the President had to die? It’s the one thing I can’t wrap my head around. Why didn’t Armise just come to us with this intel and let us find a way to deal with him?”

Simion sat back in his chair. “Because Armise knew that just like you could never kill him, you could never kill Wensen Kersch.”

I started to protest and Simion held up his hand, stopping me. “You haven’t seen the videos. Kersch wasn’t coming back from this. Even if Armise had brought this intel to us, we couldn’t have saved the President. He was a liability. A vulnerability to the extreme. And you and I both know how those are handled…”

I took his words in and rolled them around my belief systems, searching for a different answer that didn’t end with the President’s death. I couldn’t find one, and Simion knew it. I’d ripped him out of that medical facility for the same reason. And I would do the same thing again if I had to.

Could I have taken the President’s life if I’d known? There was no way for me to answer it. Just like Armise’s time away from me, it was done. I couldn’t expend brain space working through a problem that was unfixable when there were other more immediate threats we were facing.

“The Opposition obviously wanted the President dead. But why would they if he was helping them? It doesn’t add up and yet I can’t see any other outcome than what happened. I don’t think there could’ve been any other ending to his life,” Simion added.

I watched Simion closely as he spoke. Observed him more than I listened. I took note again of the odd cadence of his speech. And finally asked the question I hadn’t in all the years I’d known him, “Where the fuck are you from, Sims?”

Simion laughed out loud, a wide grin spreading across his face. “Father was from the Wildes of the UU and my mother was from the AF. We were immigrants. When I joined the Youth Peacemaker programme my family was living in the tent camps of the Central Territories. That’s where were settled for the longest. I’ve lived on every continent at one point or another.”

“Nomads.”

“Pretty much. But my parents are in the capital now. My sister, five brothers, and their families, too.”

I gave a low whistle. “That’s a big fucking family.”

“A lot to lose,” he mused.

“A lot to protect,” I added, wondering what it was like to bear that level of responsibility.

A darkness passed over Simion’s light features. “I’ve got a hell of a lot more to protect now.”

“You’re not alone in this, Sims. Does Jegs know?”

“Not yet. She probably had the same reaction you did when Chen blurted that out. Leave it to me. I’ll talk to her.”

“Yes, sir,” I stated, acknowledging his order without a hint of irony.

Simion grimaced. “That is going to take some getting used to.”