Powerless (8 page)

There weren’t enough synonyms for pain, not nearly enough rough, ripe swear words for me to gasp out and give voice to the agony that tore through me.

I sucked in an arid breath and I could hear Armise’s voice in my head.

‘You’re only powerless if you let them take away your power.’

So I moved.

I retreated in my head to that unbreakable source of strength I’d never been able to give words to when I’d been under the vicious hands of the PsychHAgs, but which I could now define so clearly. It was fury and hate. It was ambition. The instinctual drive of survival.

And maybe Armise had been right. That place, it was also hope.

It was errantly foolish in the moment. I knew from the way Feliu had looked at me that I would never be a soldier again.

But I still wouldn’t let them take my power from me.

I found my feet on the cold floor and opened my eyes. I pushed myself off the bed with my left arm, shaking, allowing the agony to become a static piece of my existence. To accept that I had to keep moving regardless of how much I wanted to crumple into another blackout. Because I wouldn’t give up.

I stilled when I saw the mirror on the wall next to the door. From where I was standing I could only see the left side of my body and while my skin was marked with stitched up lacerations, it was otherwise unmarked. But the fire spreading through my veins told me that the other side of my body would be a completely different image. I had to know.

Feliu must have seen my intent. He placed his hand on my arm, stopping me. “Probably better not to.”

I didn’t listen to him.

I’d always approached my fears head on—with little thought to the consequences—and this time would be no different. I didn’t care what I looked like on the outside, I just had to come to terms with how badly I was injured. I’d never been a vain person. I worried more about the ability of my body than its appearance, but what I saw when I stopped in front of the window shocked me to my core.

My eyes clamped shut almost immediately, but the image of my reflection was burned into the backs of my eyelids.

I didn’t recognise that body. Hunched to the right, seeping open wounds, skin an angry red of burns and singed flesh.

And yet, all of my piercings still remained. A solid weight that I could feel in my lip, my eyebrow and my nipple now that I knew they were there. A piece of my identity I hadn’t lost.

“What…” My voice gave out, cracking around the words I tried to usher from my throat and straining lungs. I dry swallowed, forced my jaw to move again. “What can you do?”

Feliu shook his head. “Not a whole lot right now except for treat the wounds as best we can. You came to me almost a day after the explosion. Much too late for any of the nanoparticles we have to help with healing. We’re still using them, still trying, but I think we’ve discovered the upper limits of their effectiveness. I’ve been scouring through databases and Chen is working some kind of keyword coding through the infochip. But we just don’t have the knowledge of how injuries like these were treated previous to the use of nanos and surge. Most people don’t survive injuries like this long enough for us to need to know, frankly. And I’ve been working off the assumption you want to keep all your limbs intact. Although synths for your arm and leg are still an option. I’m unable to ascertain how irreparably damaged your muscles are or how they’ll heal.”

“Nothing broken?” I asked, even though I knew movement—as painful as it was—wouldn’t have been possible if my bones were shattered as I thought they’d been when I’d woken up the first time.

“Besides your ribs? Amazingly not. There’s a couple hairline fractures in your arm that will only get worse the more you move. You need to stay as immobile as possible.”

I glared at him, his attempt to keep me in bed completely ignored as I continued to shuffle into the hallway.

Feliu swore then stepped in front of me. “Simion is in the room next to you. To your left.”

The door was only metres away, but it took me an untold amount of time to make it there. The doctor stayed at my side the entire time, silent, even as other personnel passed by us, shock contorting their features before they were able to pull their emotions back under control.

When I crossed that threshold I was prepared for the worst. To see the man I’d grown up with just as tattered and torn as I was. But what I was greeted with was infinitely more ominous.

“He’s…” I struggled, trying to find the right descriptor for how whole his body appeared yet completely without life.

“He hasn’t woken up yet,” was all Feliu offered in the way of explanation. “Brain injury,” he clarified as he moved to Simion’s side.

I made those last steps tentatively. Sickeningly aware of what that type of injury could mean for one of my oldest compatriots.

Shit. One of my oldest friends.

“Hey, Sims,” I whispered, unsure if he could hear me. I laid my hand on top of his wrist, feeling my thudding heartbeat fall in line with the gentle thrum of his.

I didn’t take my eyes off Simion when I addressed the doctor. “Now, tell me what happened.”

* * * *

Apparently I had curled up when the explosion from the grenade had hit and the right side of my body had suffered the most amount of damage. Damage that surge couldn’t touch because I had gone without care for too long. And my snapped ribs, already compromised from the standoff in the DCR, couldn’t be replaced or strengthened by the titanalloy they’d discovered long ago my body would reject.

The only reason I was still alive was because of Simion. He had hidden the two of us away through a blasted out wall until the Nationalist forces had vacated the bunker, then tracked down Feliu so he could bring me back to consciousness. Back to life, as it were. That had been almost a full day after the attack. Simion’s synth had come out practically unscathed, as had the bones that had been fused with titanalloy after his injuries in the DCR, but he’d received lacerations that had cut almost to the bone and burns on patches of exposed skin. It had been his collapse into unconsciousness a day after he’d got us to the doctor—later discovered to be a slow bleed in his brain—that had worried the doctor the most.

It took seven days for him to wake up.

And every day I would make the trek into his room. Stand silently at his bedside. With him. Waiting.

I was there the moment he opened his eyes and started choking around the tube inserted into his throat to help him breathe.

I was there when his first word was my name. A plea.

For what, I didn’t want to think about.

I was there the day Feliu smiled when Simion loudly told him off for poking at his wounds too harshly.

It was that affable exasperation that showed me the man I’d grown up with was getting better.

There was little left of the lithe teenager I’d known so many years ago. The form that fought against the restraints was muscled, nowhere as large as I was, but still hardened in ways our adolescent bodies had been incapable of achieving. His blond hair curled at the ends with the sweat from his brow.

He was beautiful, even in pain. Strong.

Ricor and I had been involved with each other years ago, more as exploration and pressure release—another facet of our training process almost. While we’d hooked up and got off, Sims and I had never fucked, had never come close to what I’d had with Neveed at one time and currently had with…

I wouldn’t think about him, not when Simion was here and he wasn’t.

I was at Simion’s side because I couldn’t be anywhere else.

I was there because I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Simion had nearly lost his life saving me. I wouldn’t abandon him.

I didn’t know how he had managed to drag me with him, let alone walk at all or keep conscious for the time it took to get us both to safety.

I still couldn’t remember any of what had happened after tossing that grenade.

But I remembered too much about the days and weeks after waking up. The pain that racked my body couldn’t be controlled by the medically allowable levels of surge they pumped into my blood. And Simion—because of the depth of his lacerations, because of those burns—was suffering just as much as I was in the room next to me. When the silence became too much, or the pain too crippling, and I could hear his grunts of agony, I would shuffle into his room. We talked in stilted sentences that were more about giving voice to the reality that we were still alive when both of us, by all rights, should have been dead years ago. Our bodies—those telltale winces, cringes, and outright cries—said more to each other than we could.

The doctor begged him to sleep. Tried to medicate him with a drug that caused waking hallucinations.

Simion would stare at me—his eyes black holes of dilated empty pupils and his skin a fevered red—as his mind refused to let the drugs take hold and allow him to rest.

When the delusions became too pervasive he would fight against the restraints, screaming about people and conspiracy theories I had no knowledge of. When he was able to recognise who I was he would beg me to kill him.

Some days I wondered if it would be more merciful if I did. But I couldn’t. I was too selfish, unable to let him go, unwilling to suffer alone.

The PsychHAgs had used pain to teach me how to survive. Simion had been spared that facet of training, but that didn’t mean he was any less attuned to the instinct. Both of us had been engineered to tolerate what would have been deadly levels of pain for an average citizen, and nothing the doctors gave us was strong enough to suppress the sheer agony we were experiencing without them fearing they would kill us with a massive dosage of painkillers delivered via surge. It was a stark lesson in just how inhuman we had become.

The President didn’t come to my bedside or Simion’s. He had been hidden away in protective custody since intel had pointed to the attack on the bunker not being the assassination attempt we’d expected. The bunker had been completely destroyed, but even if it had still existed, he wouldn’t have returned there.

I learned that the fight with the Opposition was evening out. At a crucial breaking point.

After a month I was allowed the privilege of a BC5 to watch what the media horde was broadcasting about the war. I watched the President visit the front lines where fighting was the heaviest and pump out speeches to rile his pawns into a bloodthirsty frenzy. He was nothing if not effective.

My login to the Revolution mainframe continued to be denied.

I was a spectator in the war I had started.

* * * *

I thought I knew what pain was.

But as the months passed, lost to a maddening torment of inactivity and inaction, I came to the realisation that even worse than the physical toll were the dreams.

I hunted Armise at night in my sleep.

Tearing through abandoned buildings that crumbled and reformed around me. Searching through the eye of a scope at a sea of targets that blinked in and out of shade and shadow. Swiping at flesh with a knife that became my fist, that transformed into the ruthless round curl of a shattering grenade.

I would wake up sweating, heaving, sick with the thoughts and images—scenarios and conversations both remembered and created in my dreams—that were even more achingly tangible in the daylight.

Sleep became the place where I lived, where I continued that fruitless search night after night. Seeing the face of every person I’d ever killed, my vision sweeping past their bloodied forms without care, because none of them were Armise.

No matter how much I sought him out, those blue-silver eyes were elusive. I could no longer feel his presence, and the lack of what should have been spectral—surreal and untethered to reality, yet so real to me—was jarring. I hadn’t realised how much I’d pinned my own existence to his until he wasn’t with me anymore.

And when I awoke, I would push it, push all thoughts of him away. Burying his absence under my singed skin, under the ripped flesh, under the tattered muscle and snapped tendons. Sliding the latent echo of his fingertips so deeply inside me that it was caged under my skeleton—the only part of me that was nearly whole. The only part of me that was still strong enough to contain those memories.

The Armise I knew never would have left me. Not in this state. Not in this place. But I could no longer deny that he was gone.

The only word I conjured was betrayal.

Each night I swore that tonight would be the first time I would forget him.

Each night I spent chasing his ghost tore me down further and further.

So I stopped sleeping.

If I didn’t sleep then I didn’t have to think about him. To remember him. To wonder where he was or why he’d left.

At least Simion didn’t sleep much anymore either.

* * * *

“Neveed is coming to see you both tomorrow,” Feliu stated calmly, as he emptied another vial of futile surge into Simion’s bloodstream.

My head snapped up. We had been in the medical facility for almost two months now, and if Neveed was coming then a decision had been made about Simion’s and my abilities to continue on as soldiers for the cause. And although I was relatively certain there was a chance for me, I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which Simion would be allowed to go back on active duty as a part of my team or the President’s personal guard. The synth he’d received after the DCR was one thing. The risk of a possibly compromised brain was quite another. And it didn’t matter how ineffective his brain was, there was too much stored in there for him to not be a part of the Revolution and still be allowed to live.

I glared at Feliu. “What’s going to happen to us now?”

Feliu looked up at where I stood next to Simion’s bed. “There are other procedures I can do now that you’re both stronger. You get better and you go back into active service.”

“And what if we don’t?” Simion asked.

“
You
will,” Feliu answered without breaking eye contact with me.

I could hear the inflection in Feliu’s voice. He was talking to me, not Simion. My heartbeat sped.