Liam gasped. She was the one who created this nightmare? Everyone who had been lost, all the lives that had been surrendered over this mission, and Mother was the only reason they’d been here!

“How could you not tell us!?” Liam spat.

“Would you have trusted me, if I had?” Mother asked.

“They all died because of you!”

“Yes, they did. Even Leah, and she knew my past. That was the reason she’d always hated me.”

The blood rose to his cheeks. “You told me that you had no idea who you were.”

“No,” Mother corrected. “I told you that I have no memories of my past life, and that has always been true. The only way to know is to be told, and I am one of the unique few who had been gifted with that opportunity.”

Liam glanced to Mastermind. “Did you know too?” He couldn’t believe this!

He frowned. “Leah had insisted that I never tell you. She was worried you’d abandon the mission.”

“Of course I bloody would! That woman is the reason we’re all here. The reason I can’t be with my family anymore! You should have put her in the ground, not followed her straight off a cliff.”

Hades guffawed, then grinned when Liam glared his way. “Oh, don’t mind me. See, now we’re getting somewhere. This soap opera shit is real good!”

Liam squirmed as the revolver pointed his way, and flinched again as it went off. He blinked through the tears. How much more of this madness could he take!?

“Enough with the juvenile theatrics!” Mastermind shouted. “This is no game of roulette, Hades. You’re using sleight of hand to ensure that the cylinder never lands where the round is located!”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, shut up, Mastermind.”

Hades gave the cylinder another spin and pointed the revolver at Mastermind. This time a piercing bang burst out, followed by the dull ring of a gunshot going off in such close quarters. Liam’s heart skipped a beat as he watched blood pour out of his friend’s throat. But as Mastermind looked at the wound, his eyes didn’t roll over, nor did he go limp. He only sulked in silence.

“Not so clever now, huh, Mr Smartypants?” Hades mocked. “That outta keep you quiet for a while.”

Mastermind opened his mouth to speak, but more blood spilled out instead.

“So as I was saying, Liam,” Hades continued as he reloaded his revolver. “Dr Sherman and I go way back. You see, I wasn’t always the coolest motherfucker to ever walk this Earth. I used to just be some Bible Thumper in the middle of nowhere. And when the Hollowing came to my doors, I ordered all my parishioners to their deaths with some kinda cyanide-laced Kool Aid. I know, I know. Real Jonestown shit. Don’t blame me. Elijah’s the guy you want, and I’ve never met him. But he must’ve fucked up and been bit before, because they all stayed dead and I didn’t, leaving me with the perfect feast.

“That’s how it works too. Building a strong Rez is a slow and steady process, but for those of us who get enough free grey matter, we bounce right back. A room full of dead yokels gave me everything I needed, and I was back to thinking and kicking ass within weeks. Of course, that’s when those folks in Cheyenne got a hold of me.” He turned back to Mother and waited.

She took his queue. “After the Pentagon fell, the remainder of America’s government and Aeon’s chief scientists fled to NORAD, located in Cheyenne Mountain. My former self was among them, and it had been her goal to reverse the Hollowing. When they found Hades, they studied him to that end. No one had ever seen a rezzer before then.”

“That’s what they said,” Hades interrupted, “but I think they just wanted an excuse to play around with yours truly.”

“It was there where I was infected,” Mother said. She narrowed back on Hades. “He was the one to do it.”

He frowned. “Oh, don’t give me that look. Was I really supposed to sit in that hole by myself? We’d already spent so much time together, so I thought we’d get ourselves a little more.”

“Ava must have deduced rezzer creation, as they harvested enough grey matter from donor corpses to help fortify my own reservoir. I started thinking and speaking again within the month. They called me Dr Sherman, and they showed me images and videos of myself played back to me, but I never considered them as mine. Even when Ava’s husband introduced himself and I saw the emotions on his face, I felt nothing in exchange. So instead of following their recommendations, I shunned my identity and built another. Hades was only known as ‘The Father’ then, so I took the mantle of ‘Mother’.” She leaned back, resigned. “I was so young at the time, and didn’t see the truth for what it was.”

“And what truth is that?” Liam asked.

“That our past defines us, no matter how hard we pretend otherwise. Hades became Hades through a derivation of ‘The Father’, and that title had come from his priesthood before. I might be ‘Mother’ now, but I’ve never earned the title conventionally. HBRS-15.21 is my true lineage, and not even death can wash that sin away from me.”

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“So that’s why you’re so desperate for a cure,” Liam inferred. “This has nothing to do with saving me or mankind, and everything to do with mollifying your own guilt.” Yet again, Liam felt the fool. Was he no more than the broken chess piece in the middle of their contest?

Mother shook her head. “It was supposed to be easy. If Leah could make you disappear in the one place that Hades would never think to look, we could solve this problem, once and for all. Humanity could go on, and the slate would be wiped clean.”

“Almost worked too,” Hades admitted. “I never thought I’d see Cheyenne after we escaped it. But an investment I made years ago has finally paid off.” He held up his radio. “There’s this fun little old world tool called ‘Global Positioning System’ that lets you locate anything on the planet. The satellites go off course if they aren’t updated, but I managed to restore them back to functionality after setting up relays at a couple outposts in secret. Then I tagged every car we’ve ever rebuilt with GPS trackers in case any got lost or stolen, including those at the Larder.” He smiled. “I had you guys the moment you left Reno.”

Of course, Liam thought, remembering the GPS transponder that he’d found on the Xin Yue Jiang and used to get back to Santa Monica safely. The one bit of his journey that he’d taken without dwelling, and it was the sole reason they’d been found.

“Why won’t you just let me end this?” Mother asked. “No more games. No more spin. Tell me why you’re fighting me so hard on this, Hades.”

“You want to talk for real now, huh?” Hades said. He holstered his revolver. “Very well, then. If you want some hard truths, I’ve got plenty for you.

“A philosopher once said that ‘while there is life, there is hope.’ It became one of the maxims I heard back in Cheyenne. So long as my overlords’ hearts still beat, there was hope that the future might improve for them. But you know what I saw when I was locked in that cell? When I read their mythologies and religions and watched the world I’d been presented? The opposite. ‘While there is hope, there is no life.’ I said that to you once, Dr Sherman, during one of our interviews. Oh sure, you and the rest could run around that bunker and mix one test tube’s contents with another, but what were you doing? I mean really. What kind of existence was that?”

“It was survival,” Mother countered. “Without survival, there is no way for life to continue.”

“Life,” he repeated with a bitter laugh. “What an odd buzz word that we use so callously to define our experience, and yet one that conflicts with itself. A man could survive in a bunker for well over a hundred years doing nothing other than eating, shitting, and sleeping, but most of us would say that he never lived a day. Yet if we took that same man and let him drink, fuck, and party into an early grave, we’d turn around and say nobody had ever lived harder than him.”

He spread his gloved hands wide. “Life. Death. Survival. All made up nonsense just to confuse from the one bit of truth in this world. The now. I exist in this time and at this room, as do you. That’s all there is to it. That’s all there’s ever been. And that’s all that’ll ever be. I trust that if I jump out of the plane, I’ll figure out how to work the parachute before I hit the ground. And if I don’t? Well, then I’ll have made one bad-as-fuck splash. Where does hope factor into all that?”

“It gives us a chance,” Mother said. “Sure, it’s thrilling to live only in the present, but without hope, there can be no future. Hope is needed to keep us from stagnating into extinction.”

Hades raised a finger. “That is where you’re so fucking wrong, Mother. Hope isn’t the savior. It’s the goddamned warden. It exists to invite doubt and hesitation and fear into your blood, lest your actions go at odds with that which you strive to see done. Then you are crippled by the very hope that raised you up. What was Elijah Campbell, but a man who wasted his life under the thrall of the hope that his god would gift him eternal salvation? What am I, but the very incarnate of everything he could’ve been, had he merely abandoned his delusions in place of living in the present?”

“Is that all you are, Hades? A narrow-minded nihilist?”

He gleamed. “When you believe in nothing, you become capable of anything. Let’s not act like our predecessors had some higher purpose. They wasted their time in cubicles or staring at electronic screens, surviving when they should’ve been living. Instead of embracing the day for what it was, they merely existed with the hope that their miserable lives would someday change, all the way until it killed them. Hell, I’d go so far as to say that the Hollowing never needed to happen. Most of humanity had already hollowed inside.

“At least we rezzers are honest. We have no past and no future. We are what we are, and that’s that. But you start upsetting that balance with an unhealthy infusion of hope, and the next thing you know, we’ll live in times that haven’t come, just like them. Maybe start surviving for the sake of surviving. You know, hope for things to change on their own.”

“You deem yourself the savior of our kind by crushing out any aspirations we have,” Mother deduced.

“That’s right. You’re not the good guy in this.” He pointed to himself. “I am. You’d reduce everyone’s Rez to mush waiting for a ‘cure’, and they’d sit there and take it, just like the drones that they were before. But so long as I’m here to kick them until they’re down, they’ll always have something to fight against.”

“And so long as I’m here, they’ll always believe that they can rise back up.”

His red eyes seemed on fire in the shifting light of the lantern. “That’s what makes our relationship so beautiful, Mother. Yin and yang and all that shit. This is the ideal civilization for our kind. No future. No past. No point. Just creatures living their days as if they were their last, with all the confusion and anarchy that comes with it. A chaotic, liberated world. Pandemonium embodied.”

He turned to Liam. “So that’s why I’m gonna kill you. Not for what you’ve done, or what you could do, but because your existence gives me a sense of hope. No more complicated than that.”

“Just be done with it,” Liam said. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“Oh no, you don’t get off that easy. None of you get to enjoy the sweet release until I figure out what Mother’s been hiding in that bunker. It sure as fuck isn’t old world medical equipment she’d use to make a cure.”

Liam looked to Mother. “What does he mean?”

Hades chuckled. “You won’t get her to break. Believe me, I’ve bashed my head against that wall the past week trying. Her people knew fuck all about her plans, and she didn’t crack an inch, even when we ate them all in front of her.

“But you’re gonna help me now that you’re here, Liam. Let’s kick this interrogation up a notch!” He pulled out his radio. “It’s time, Dean. Bring it in.”

There was a pause as Hades stared awkwardly at his captives.

“I said it’s time. Get back here.”

Only static responded.

Hades pulled the radio closer. “Come on, Dean. Pick the fuck up. Do you have any idea how much of an asshole you’re making me look like right now!?”

“Dean’s dead,” Leah said through the radio. “And you’re next, Hades. It’s over.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake…”