CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
JOSHUA COULD HAVE LET Caina hit him, but the idea that she could out-maneuver him stretched credibility. His commander would never believe him, and that would put Cristian in danger. He twisted the gun out of her grasp with one hand and tossed it.
His sister blinked at him, her hand still shaped around the gun he’d removed. He also saw the four soldiers surrounding him. He’d learned to spot the way onix bent the light. They were only invisible to themselves, not to him––or to any other Cypher.
By his count, there were forty-two Alliance soldiers. Not enough for the twelve red-eyed Cyphers. This off-world Alliance force was a small, specialized team of some kind. He’d seen Brian lead them all in with Geoff protecting Caina, and he’d seen Geoff die.
He hadn’t figured it out quite yet, but could it be coincidence that his sister and his cousins were in this battle? Why were some of the Alliance soldiers using green plasma, not red, even after Geoff had been killed? And why such a small unit?
It took him a few more moments to realize the only one getting shot with green plasma was him. They wanted him alive. They’d brought in his sister as part of some ill-fated extraction team, and it had cost Geoff’s life to find him. It made him angry, but not at the Nostekoi. The Alliance was constantly screwing up. He’d seen their death tolls firsthand, and it was appalling. Part of the reason had to be the Nostekoi’s impenetrable intel. No one could get close to them.
Caina stood in the windswept street, her yellow sandals criss-crossed on her legs and her long hair blowing in her frightened eyes. How stupid could her commanders be?
The Alliance soldiers were all going to die. The rebellion on Tandaelus ended the moment the Cyphers showed up.
He glanced at the Cypher commander standing across the icy street. Lt. Drake’s skeletal face did nothing to soften the oddity of his scarlet eyes, nor did the greasy strand of black hair across his face. Even with all their training, none of them could match his speed and agility. He moved with a serpentine grace none of the rest of them had.
Sweat broke out on Joshua’s forehead and he looked away from Drake.
“I can’t protect you,” he told her. He knew Drake was listening, but he was out of options. He hoped his allegiance to his sister didn’t bode ill for Cristian.
“Geoff is dead.” Her tears spilled over, her face twisting in rage.
“I saw.” The words sounded cold, even to him.
She raised her hand and slapped him. He let her. He tasted blood in his mouth, to his surprise. She’d learned how to hit. Her eyes were flat, and she’d stopped crying. The small fortress inside his mind began to break. He’d tried so hard to do what was right, and he’d destroyed her innocence anyway.
The feeble sunlight darkened, and the wind began to howl in the distance. The storm was returning.
He wiped his mouth, looking down at the smear of blood on his hand. He could see her shaking, her mouth pressed tight to hold back her tears. “Where is Cristian?” she asked.
“Alive.”
D-plasma shot out at him from the Alliance soldiers flanking him. Already keyed and ready, he moved at Alter speed, falling away from the line of plasma and kicking one of the soldiers behind the knee, knocking him to the ground. He spun around behind another soldier and hit the sweet spot on the back of his head with the butt of his knife. The man crumpled, but Joshua had already grabbed the other two and shot them with their own guns. Caina stood alone, her green eyes wide.
“You weren’t worth it,” she said.
He shut out the pain. “Glad you figured it out,” he said, his gaze finding other targets. “Don’t try this again.”
Before she could move, the blizzard dropped down from the sky and filled the air with cutting ice and snow. He heard her gasp in the rush of air, and then she stumbled away from him. He watched her run into the white maelstrom, his heart beating. He wished he didn’t have to reveal how much she meant to him. Had he been any other Cypher, she’d be dead.
Red plasma lit up the storm, and he heard bodies falling. None of them from the Cypher team. He moved back into position. From deep inside the courthouse, he could hear the frantic voices of the colonial Representatives, the fifty men and women that made up the last of the planet’s government.
Ignoring them, he trained his hearing on a set of footsteps running through the snow. He bent his head, listening to blasts of plasma and calculating how close they were to the footsteps. She was going to make it. He waited until he heard the Alliance ship leave the ground, and knew that she was safe.
“Pathetic Alliance.” Drake’s voice, though low, could still be heard through the driving wind. “Move into the courthouse. Let’s get this over with.”
Joshua summoned Alter speed. He felt his eyes widen, and adrenaline spiked through his body. His vision sharpened, the light and colors bursting into his brain, along with the scent of ice and blood. The colonists had fashioned the building after Old Earth’s historic buildings, the columns carved by laser to look hand-crafted.
He ran up the stairs and found the front line of the Alliance guard. A small army of thirty, red plasma humming and waiting. He heard their heartbeats and smelled their sweat. They didn’t have time to find the triggers. Joshua’s blade cut three of them before they took a shot. None of the cuts were immediately lethal. He still clung to the dangerous distinction of being a Cypher who didn’t kill. He moved around the other Cyphers, as the Alliance soldiers dropped with lightning speed until they all lay on the ground. The ones quick enough to run away were dispatched as well. There could be no record, no witnesses of the Cyphers. They remained the Nostekoi’s secret.
For all anyone knew, the Nostekoi had a couple of soldiers with red eyes. They didn’t know what that meant.
The Cyphers breached the front doors and engaged another group of soldiers. Drake fought with the rest of them, using his blades with easy precision.
Nixa flashed by him, her knives glinting in the light of the chandeliers. A spatter of blood dotted her cheek, matching her eyes. She killed more mechanically than Drake, without the smug smile. Drake seemed pleased when he cut.
Joshua tried to avoid learning anything about the men and women he took down, but it was impossible. His heightened senses refused to be blind. He saw the fear, the courage, the surprise, the resignation…the emotions flickered like shadows in burning micro-seconds he could not erase. He smelled the scent of detergent fading on clothes put on two days ago when the siege began. The soldiers were tired, their movements fatally slow even for them.
The tiled floor disappeared under bodies. Some of the Nostekoi didn’t wait until the foyer was secured, moving towards the heart of the massive building. Everyone could hear the terrified whispers of their targets. Drake didn’t need to tell them where to go.
Joshua followed, dreading the slaughter of the helpless. The image of Geoff’s body in a snow-covered street came back to him, and his throat closed. Had Brian survived? He didn’t know. He’d been concentrating on Caina.
The smell of blood overwhelmed him, and he turned a corner where no one could see and vomited on the marbled floor. Not now. He couldn’t break down now.
He wiped his mouth and ran to the screams down the hall. The doors were open to the wide chamber. Tiers of desks rose up around an oval floor with a green and gold carpet. The aisles were strewn with fallen bodies, and Cyphers blurred around the room. All the representatives of the Tandaeron colony were dead, except for one.
Drake stood over the woman who knelt at his feet. She was older, a thin woman in her fifties with graying brown hair falling out of a once-elegant twist. Her long dress coat crinkled around her legs on the floor, and she’d lost a shoe. Her chin was softened with age, her face rounded and her skin pale, probably with terror. She cried, but in silence, gazing up at Drake.
“I have something for you to sign,” Drake said, and with one blood-stained hand pulled out a thin, gray signature pad. The center lit up, waiting for verification.
“What am I signing?” she whispered, the words breaking and uneven.
“Ownership of the colony. Again. You didn’t think the Alliance could protect you when they gave it back to you, did you? And just because we don’t know where your sons are doesn’t mean we won’t find them,”’ Drake replied, a strand of greasy hair falling from behind his ear as he smiled down at her. “Just sign.”
Her thin, quivering lips pressed into a frown. “No.”
Drake smiled back. “Please.”
She shook her head in denial.
Drake sighed. “Hmmm. Do you know what color plasma really is?”
She blinked and drew in a breath. “Of course. It has no color. It’s clear.”
Joshua felt his nausea returning. The other Cypher team members stood around in various poses of interest or boredom. One of the men pulled out a packet of food and opened it. Nixa’s eyes were fixed on her boots. Joshua wished he could do the same, but he couldn’t. He had to watch.
“Correct,” Drake replied. He pulled a gun out of a holster on his belt. The chamber had no color in it, though it was a plasma gun. “Guess which color this would be, if it had dye?”
The president swallowed. “Green.”
Drake raised an eyebrow. “Why not red?”
“Because if it’s red, you won’t get your signature.”
“Yes. It is green. And I’m going to shoot you with it.”
She didn’t answer, simply staring up at him.
“You didn’t ask why. I’ll tell you anyway. Because it hurts. So I’m going to shoot you with it. And when you wake up, I’m going to shoot you again. Many times. Until it hurts enough that you feel like signing.”
“That’s going to take a long time,” she replied, lifting her chin.
“Not necessarily. I also have this.” Drake pulled a syringe gun from a vest pocket. “A convenient stimulant that wakes you from the plasma shock.”
“You’ll end up killing me.”
Drake shook his head at her. “No, I don’t think so. But let’s find out for sure.” He shot her.
Joshua had never seen clear plasma before. It crackled with the same energy, engulfing the woman, her limbs flailing out before she dropped to the floor, her skull hitting the hard floor.
Drake stepped over her and pressed the syringe into her arm. She convulsed and then her eyes opened, and she gasped.
“I need you to sign here,” Drake said, offering the signature pad, its gray surface dull.
She got to her hands and knees, her mouth open and trembling. “No.”
Drake let the gun charge up, the hum buzzing. She reached out for a chair. He shot her again, and she collapsed, seizing, her head hitting the edge of a desk.
Joshua wanted to close his eyes. He wanted to walk away, but he couldn’t. He had to stay. He had to be one of them.
This time Drake waited before he pushed the syringe into her arm. He passed a medic analyzer over her body, frowning. Obviously, she wasn’t handling this as well as he would have liked.
Flashes of Caina and Geoff kept coming to Joshua’s mind, the look of broken trust on his sister’s face and Geoff falling. Now he struggled to shove his pain even deeper down inside so he could watch this innocent woman be tortured by a man he despised.
Drake paced and then scanned her body again. He exhaled loudly and paced some more. The wind outside still wailed, and the building’s heaters kicked in, sending a wave of heat through the room.
Finally, Drake pushed the syringe into the woman’s arm again. She woke more slowly this time, blinking up at Drake as if she didn’t know who he was.
“Please sign, President Carelli.”
She rose from the floor, holding the gash on her forehead. Her shaking hands grasped the edge of a desk for support. She managed to get to her knees, and then shook her head.
“Is that a ‘No’?” Drake asked.
“I won’t sign.”
Drake charged up the clear plasma gun again.
Before he could shoot, Joshua crossed the room and grabbed the woman by the arms. He could feel her bones, small and breakable in his hands. She stared up at him. He smiled down at her in his best imitation of Lt. Drake’s soulless grimace.
“I know where your boys are. I was the one who found them on St. Aloysius.”
Recognition flickered in her eyes. None of the Nostekoi knew that information. Up until now her sons’ location had been a secret from them.
She looked back up at him, her eyes a mixture of Nic’s blank confusion and Shawn’s sharp anger. It had taken him a few moments to figure out who she was. He wanted to save her in the worst way, but he couldn’t. He could only shorten her suffering…if she let him.
“You can’t save yourself, no matter what you do. But you can save them. Sign it.”
Shaking, she held out her hand for the gray signature pad. Lt. Drake stared at Joshua as he handed it over, approval in his eyes. Nothing could have been more damning. Joshua endured the scalding shame, wishing it could kill him.
With a trembling hand, the older woman pressed her thumb to the pad and said the password. The pad turned green, acknowledging her voiceprint.
Joshua let go of her and she slid to her knees, looking up at Lt. Drake.
Shaking and light-headed, Joshua turned away, terrified that Drake would ask him to kill his friend’s mother. A flash of red reflected off the shiny floor and he heard her body fall. At least he’d been spared that much.
As he stepped out into the blinding storm, he opened his black jacket to let the cold bite into him. His head spun. It reminded him of pilot training when he’d gone through a cloud bank, losing sight of the horizon. Without an earth and sky, he hadn’t known which way was up. He remembered the disorientation, the fear of being out of control. That was nothing compared to what was happening to him now. He hadn’t meant to earn Drake’s approval; he was just trying to spare Nic’s mother any more pain.
The cold brought back the memory of the vid Lt. Drake had shown him on the way to the Tandaeron massacre.
The grainy vid had shown a thin young man rocking back and forth in a small cell. A few minutes into the vid the prisoner started banging his head on the wall and a Nostekoi soldier burst in the room and jabbed him with a needle. The prisoner slumped over, his face rolling up to the camera. Cristian’s eyes were closed, ringed by dark circles; he was alive, but just barely.
Maybe he could use this incident as proof of his loyalty. Maybe it was time he could prove that they didn’t need to hold Cristian.
How many lives had Joshua traded for Cristian’s? Is that what he was doing? He didn’t know.
You weren’t worth it, Caina had said.
Her words echoed with the shame of everything he’d done.