Eighty Years Ago
“KING LEE CANNOT SAVE US. MARCHIONESS MENDOZA CANNOT SAVE US. SHE AND HE WILL TEAR THIS NATION APART!”
Spittle flew from Cleric Thurman’s mouth as he bellowed atop the wooden stage.
The sweltering heat inside the barn had soaked them all in a coat of sweat. Their actual coats were folded over the pews, second shirt buttons popped open, sleeves rolled up, sweat stains growing.
The bodies pressed into the closed space only thinned the air, the boom of the cleric’s voice shook it. It left them breathless no matter what he said.
“But not us! Oh no, not us!”
“NOT US!” the congregation echoed.
Hundreds of members of this gated community had gathered here this evening, where the gate was a low wooden fence that was better at keeping cattle in rather than the rabble out.
It had still taken Louis far too much work to get past it.
He nodded deeply, head rolling, chin to the glistening skin of his neck, and up again. His skin buzzed with the energy of countless Skills trying to claw their way in.
He let them and cycled their effects around himself like a storm around its eye to ward off the effects. Not that he couldn’t have resisted, but resistance stood out.
In the back of his mind, he thrummed a hair’s breadth connection in dots and dashes.
“WHAT THEN? CHAOS AND BLOODSHED. ANOTHER WAR ON THE HORIZON. ANOTHER CIVIL WAR PERHAPS? COUNTLESS OF OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS, PARENTS, DAUGHTERS, SONS”—he jabbed a finger at the crowd as if to say: you, you, you, you—“DEAD.”
The congregation moaned.
Louis moaned with then, rolled his head back, and stared at the mage lights in the rafters. They burned, and he teared up.
“BUT NOT US, I SAY!”
“NOT US!”
With a forceful blink, tears of apparent passion rolled from the corner of his eyes as he looked back to the stage.
“GOD HIMSELF STANDS BY ME AND SAYS: ‘NOT YOU, MY CHILD’.”
His heart pounded and he channeled it into a flutter, a moment of weakness, and tilted his head as he gazed up at the cleric with doe eyes.
God himself? the look said. Alternatively, Fuck me.
The cleric glanced his way and smirked.
Louis had intended that, but he still suppressed his disgust and forced a blush like a teen batting his eyelashes. The cleric had to be even older than he was.
Another woman in the inner circle followed the cleric’s eyes and glanced at him. By the glare in her eyes, she felt much the same about Louis, but she did not hide it. Disgust born from jealousy. It was an open secret Thurman got around.
She wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. A second woman … probably … turned her eyes his way and a shiver went down his spine.
Pink.
Her eyes. It could have been a simple cantrip. Louis doubted it. He could sense, and categorize, dozens of Skills trying to infect his disposition right now and this was not the same.
The emotion he felt when he looked into her eyes was primal. A child staring down a lion.
She didn’t fall or rise with the congregation, she didn’t echo the cleric’s words, sing, or speak. She sat with her hands folded over her lap and watched, a silent observer with glowing eyes.
Yet, she was somehow in the inner circle, wearing the dark cardigan and necklace the cleric bestowed upon his personal guests. How?
Louis didn’t know, but he thrummed on that connection, spelling out more letters in a long list he’d been working on.
P—W, C—F—M.
Pink woman, confirmed.
One more name, checking off boxes on a list with page numbers beside them, citing files of levels and Skills. Preparation.
“He, in his eternal wisdom, has chosen us to be spared! No longer need we fear war. No longer need we fear death! I ASKED AND HE ANSWERED. TONIGHT, HE OFFERS US PROOF OF HIS LOVE, MY CHILDREN!”
His voice was even louder this close to the podium. It had weight, the boom of the thunderclap pressed into a bubble that popped over him and spread to a hundred people in dozens of pews.
He felt more of the boom and less of the emotion up close. Intimidation instead of adoration, because he needs to keep those closest to him in line and not faithful?
Rationalizing it helped him minimize the effects. It was probably a Path Skill then. Class Skills tended to be blunt.
“Tonight,” Thurman purred, “I have the honor of welcoming home a member of His flock.”
He swept his arms out to either side of the stage and titled his head with a look of such love that it almost seemed to pain him.
As the cleric stepped back, thin lines in the wooden stage began to crumble into black ash that floated away and vanished.
A flashy way of drawing a ritual circle. Nothing out of the ordinary, but along with the rumors that the cleric had something special tonight, it grabbed his attention.
They’d moved up their schedule. He needed to be ready.
People stopped fanning themselves and sat up or leaned in to catch glimpses. The stage was low but not low enough.
V—S—M, Louis thrummed, wishing somebody had stood up in surprise so he could follow them and see it for himself. The new generation was too damn used to this kind of stuff, taking the wonders and miracles of the new world for granted.
Lucky bastards.
He smiled.
Though, he was one of them.
He made his smile look like childlike wonder at the signs of magic.
Aides—not the young men and women Thurman surrounded himself with, but his older confidants—guided his guests onto the stage.
On the left, Yasin Burr. Far from a poster child. Like many young men, he liked to get shit-faced drunk at the creek with his friends on the weekends, then wear a clean shirt, shut up, and stand behind his parents with a smile at the service the day after.
Even so, his family wasn’t close to the church. Their son in particular didn’t buy into it, and there were rumors he had shit-talked the cleric, calling him a creep.
His family had fallen out of favor.
‘Welcoming home a member of His flock.’ Was this to seduce him back into the fold, or force him?
If so, as much as it hurt him to admit, it wouldn’t be enough.
Yasin looked proud to be on stage, but that wasn’t an indication of anything with the storm of Skills around them—enchantment Skills, spells, and potions could make you feel or act in any way someone else wanted you to.
His family was absent, unless they were waiting in a back room. Louis hadn’t seen them take a seat at any time throughout the service and he was positioned to see most of the entrances.
On the right, another aide welcomed a family onto stage, husband and wife close to one another, their young daughter trailing behind, uncertain.
The Ramos, he remembered. They hadn’t been the church type either until they lost their eldest daughter in a spellcasting accident a few months ago. They lived close by. The cleric had reached out to offer them solace.
Louis knew it all. He’d practically written their files himself. What he didn’t know was how these parties connected.
He didn’t like not knowing, but all he could do was stare like he was slightly high or drunk as he spelled out letters and kept people waiting.
Cleric Thurman had been accused of dark rituals behind closed doors and cult-like behavior—neither of which were illegal yet, sadly. But he was growing bolder, expanding his sphere of influence.
That was attributed to his rapid leveling, but how had he started leveling so much in the first place?
Either way, it was worrisome. People joined his community and never left, some of them of a high level themselves, and large swathes of the area were warded against scrying so here he was.
He needed evidence, to hope whatever was special about tonight would give him the chance to catch him red-handed. He just hoped ‘red-handed’ wouldn’t end up being blood on someone’s hands as it so often did.
Thurman welcomed the family with his sympathies and paraded their loss around for the congregation. “A prodigy,” he named their late daughter. “It’s not right that she should be taken from her family so suddenly.”
He welcomed Yasin next, clasped the young man on the back of the head, and pulled him in to kiss his forehead.
Louis cringed—taking a cue, he made it look like a flash of jealousy.
The cleric said something, and he could read lips beyond the limitations of the art but he only caught a few words. One of them stood out: ‘paladin’.
Yasin nodded eagerly.
Of course. That Thurman had been leveling rapidly was no secret, and he’d offered a share of that to bait him in. A new Class, or consolidation, or levels—power. What every young man dreamed of rather than getting shit-faced drunk at the creek for the rest of their life.
Paladins were combatants, though, which set the tone the future Thurman foresaw for his community.
Yasin accepted an old-fashioned wineskin, and Louis balked in his seat as he watched the exchange.
C’mon, kid. Don’t be stupid. Don’t drink the wine.
What was it? Poison? If he was trying to hold the kid ransom to his family, then what? Thurman would prove nothing, gain nothing. Especially not in front of this crowd.
A Skill potion, maybe, for a taste of power. Draw him in with the promise of more, tied to his new Class, and draw others in with the demonstration.
But that was a cheap scam for a cult this big. More likely, it was something along those lines and addictive. A drug. Something euphoric with destructive withdrawal. Hook him and his family in one go, and dip into the drug business as others had before them.
Louis could only watch and hope the kid would find a good [White Mage] to cure him of his addiction when this was over.
Fuck.
… Why were the Ramos here, though?
Thurman gave some amateur bullshit speech about life and death, which only made Louis miss his own church. He turned the ring on his finger.
Meanwhile, Yasin drank, and the world grew darker.
After the first gulp, the young man frowned and slowed down. The lights above them flickered. He tried to lower the wineskin, but the aide next to him pushed it back up and held a hand to the back of his head with a disdainful look in his eyes.
He kept drinking like this was a kegger and choked. His eyes expression slackened, his eyes turned glassy, and a trail of pitch black fluid ran down his cheek and pooled at his jaw.
Definitely not wine.
Where the liquid ran, color seemed to flee from the world, bleaching it layer by layer until there was a water stain of monochrome blacks and whites reaching into their world.
It didn’t stop. The stain grew and Yasin’s body went slack. Another aide steadied him before the two retreated to the side of the stage, taking the wineskin with them.
The crowd shifted. Thurman told them to have faith, that God was blessing them with a demonstration of His love, but even he stepped away.
Louis considered sending an alarm, but when he looked at the stain he felt … nothing at all.
No fear, no confusion, no curiosity. Nothing. If he relied on his insight, it was hard to even react to its presence without knowing why he should.
He didn’t know what it was, but nothing had happened that would implicate the cleric enough yet and if it turned out Yasin had just taken a drug …
The young man stood there frozen. His friends called out from below, and people shushed them. As if they didn’t have a right to be concerned.
From one eyeblink to the next, the line of dark fluid running down his chin vanished. As if it had been shunted into him.
Thurman turned to the Ramos. Aides blocked the family from leaving the stage, and the cleric clasped the mother’s hands.
“Our Lord has shown me the light,” he told her. “He wants to offer the same blessing to you. He wants to return your daughter.”
Their eyes widened. The mother shook her head and pulled away. Their daughter glared at the men around her before turning to the edge of the stage and walking away.
Her husband caught himself and stepped forward, face twisting in anger as he began to speak, but the cleric simply left them.
His voice wasn’t amplified, but Louis caught the words anyway. “How dare you?! You fucker! We aren’t some fools you can take advantage of like the rest of these—”
Thurman ignored the raving father and stepped into the monochrome world. Images flickered. Wisps of smoke rose from his silhouette and he dimmed a few shade but kept his color.
He was resisting whatever effect that stain had as he stepped up and whispered into Yasin’s ear. A voice cut through the noise.
PAPA?
Everything was still. Everything was silent. The congregation which had been fanning themselves, leaning from side to side to see the stage, muttering prayers, stopped.
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Specks of dust hung in the air, visible in the magelight, frozen. The hot and stale air was absent.
[Poker Face] couldn’t tell Louis if he was breathing or not—the Skill didn’t respond.
The only people who were still animated were those within the ritual circle, and even then, only one small part of it which contained the family and Thurman.
Mr. Ramos stumbled forward, his wife cupped her hands to her mouth, their daughter turned with one leg off the stage.
Yasin Burr stood there like a corpse. His eyes had sunken into twin pools of darkness from which no light escaped, and his monochrome image was overlaid with the ghostly echo of a young woman who shared a striking resemblance to the girl climbing off the stage—long dark hair, olive skin, and a confident smile even in death.
Melody Ramos, their eldest daughter.
“Papa?” the ghost spoke, “Mama?” There was a laughter in her voice as she saw her sister. “Peppi!”
They rushed to her side, and Yasin’s body stumbled forward to reunite at the border of the circle, one inside the monochrome world, the other three vibrant in contrast in their own.
But something was wrong. Her voice— The voice that had spoken first and stilled the barn with a single word had been different. Deeper. Melody’s voice was the vibrant tone of a young woman calling up from the bottom of a well, filtered through, or infused with, that deep power.
The difference shook Louis out of his stupor, and bits and pieces of the congregation followed.
Necromancy.
That alone, while not something that could put them behind bars, was grounds for a search warrant, but the means of this necromancy?
Summoning a higher power without royal permission? That was enough.
It has to be, Louis thought as he rushed to tap his connection and send out an alarm, because he was running out of time.
And did this asshole want to kill them all?
With every word the deceased daughter spoke, Yasin’s mouth moved like a drunkard mumbling to himself, and that stain grew in fits and bursts.
It consumed the aides on the stage, the first few rows of the pews as people stood or scrambled back, and then it consumed him and …
What had he been doing?
The world was still and quiet. Peaceful.
The bench had pressed painfully into his tailbone before, there had been a crick in his neck, but he’d endured those things because he was supposed to look young and now … what did it matter?
He continued thrumming out the signal without knowing why. All of his neighbors were relaxed and peaceful.
He wasn’t even sure the signal went through. The connection felt numb, the signals sluggish, and every time he tapped it, it felt like a fly buzzing past his ear as he tried to find sleep.
He stopped.
That man on the stage, the cleric man, whatever his name was, spoke to them again. His voice had a soft oomph to it, like a weighted blanket. He swept an arm out to point at the reunited family and told them how wonderful this miracle was, how great their Lord’s love.
Louis felt a muted glimmer of something. He wasn’t sure what, but it was the only thing he could feel now, so he embraced it with a smile.
The only feeling in the world was his voice, the only color in the world were the five people in the circle, three reaching out, that ghost outside of it, reaching in, those pure black eyes, and—
Pink.
That woman sat with an open mouth, parted teeth, and wide eyes in a slash of a smile a few rows away.
Her eyes glowed despite the rest of her being the same monochrome blacks and whites as the rest of them, and the lines in her irises looked like thick strands of muscle lain bare.
As she stared, her pupil dilated, and her iris revealing pockets of something deeper beneath. Louis felt drawn to it like it was the only way out of this well he was in—he saw an endless ocean of fat and blood. Power. Life. It was the most vibrant thing he had ever seen.
In the back of his mind, he held a mental finger on a thin, muted line. When he saw her, the primal emotion he felt was the closest thing to surprise he could feel. He let go and sent one last dash.
The woman stood, one leg after another, back straight, like a puppet wearing human flesh. Her giant grin still hung open. Her eyes were fixed on the stage.
“A life for a life,” the cleric said. When he noticed her, he stumbled over his words. The effects of his voice wavered. The lights flickered and grew brighter.
Then the barn doors burst open and an arrow struck Thurman. Its tip and shaft were made of the same dark metal, and they shattered on contact to reform into wires that snapped his arms to his side.
Thurman hit the ground and a ticking buzz cut off his voice—the man convulsed as he was electrocuted.
[Stormsmith Sentinel], Louis thought and frowned because it seemed out of place in this dream he was in.
Melody cut off mid-sentence.
The body she overlapped turned to look at the fallen man, its hair elongated, and its skin paler than it had been before. Suddenly, the twin pools of darkness that were its eyes receded, and they pulled the monochrome stain reaching into their world with them.
Sound and emotion flooded back into Louis’s head. He keeled over and slammed a hand into the back of the bench in front of him to catch himself. The wood cracked.
All around him, the congregation moaned as people collapsed into their seats, and he prayed to God they were stumbling, fainting, not dying.
Because that world he had just been in had felt pretty damn close to death.
It did make what had to happen next easier. Lines of men and women in uniform raided the barn from all sides, bellowing orders and exerting their collective authority.
Only a couple dozen guards worked together against a crowd of over a hundred strong, but this fenced community was just outside the ‘city’, and most of the people here didn’t spend all their time leveling in and around the Tower.
He and his colleagues did. More importantly, they trained to arrest those who were stronger than them.
So when the first members of the congregation with the levels or Skills to react shot from their seats, so did Louis.
He shrugged off the trickle of Skills trying to infect him and flared the connection in the back of his mind. [Chain of Command] and half a dozen Skills like it flared to life as a mantle fell around his shoulders, and it felt like someone had thrust a new spine into his back.
[Mass Hunter’s Mark], he thought as he took in the crowd with his [Widened Vision]. [Accelerated Thought]. [Informant’s Network]. [Stormborn Mind].
Someone resisted the suppression field they’d thrown up and threw a [Fireball] at the main entrance.
Before the spell could completely form, one of his colleagues wiped the spell out of existence with a perfect counterspell tailored to it, and their Jotun shot another arrow at the spellcaster, who failed to deflect—the wires snapped around them and they convulsed as they hit the bench.
Louis searched the crowd as he stumbled into the aisle, looking from face to face, pausing a fraction of a second each time to plant a target, pull up information, and hand it out via the mental link he and his colleagues shared.
Those targets were picked off one by one by spells, nets, bolas, and charging bodies who tackled them to the ground.
It was about then that the rest of the congregation woke up, and pandemonium rose with them as scores of people flooded the aisles.
The unconscious, the weak, and the wise stayed in their seats, suppressed by their field of influence, defensive Skills at the ready and their children held close, or because they had chosen freeze from freeze, flight, or fight. But there were those who had chosen the other two, and their combined aura had its limits.
The result was chaos.
Skills, spells, and items were loosed in all directions, targets picked off, guards hurt, and people fled toward the exits or tried to forge their own.
Louis stumbled through the stampeding bodies, shoving who he had to shove, climbed over a few benches, and avoided the mayhem.
The pink woman strode through it all, and the bodies parted around her as if she were a queen. She climbed the steps onto the stage and walked past the fallen cleric, past the family of three huddled together, past … Yasin?
No, he realized and his stomach dropped, but Louis had a job to do.
She strode up to the aide cowering at the edge of the stage, and the man fell on his ass and cowered in a ball.
His entire body quaked like cornered prey as he looked into her eyes, saw her mad smile, and as she reached down, he began to hyperventilate and looked like he would either pass out or have a heart attack from the primal terror.
But the woman straightened, abandoning him, and held up her prize: the wineskin. A drop of pitch black fluid clung to its mouth.
All of the arrows, nets, bolas, Skills, and spells loosed at her as Louis planted more and more flags in a blind panic were frozen in mid-air, turned aside or simply ignored as they hit her skin and did nothing.
He set a flag of a different color, advising no holds barred, as he ran up the stage to follow his own advice and prepared a Skill—
He froze. A barrier of wind encased him, and he hadn’t even noticed it before it caught him. He flexed his magic resistance and pushed forward two steps, just to freeze again as the wind redoubled its efforts. His body creaked.
The woman wasn’t even looking. All around her, his colleagues who had tried to do the same froze with him.
After she finished her revolution, taking in the chaos of the barn, the woman turned north and bent her knees.
The world buckled. As if reality had fallen into a sudden sinkhole, the barn and all that was in it bent toward the center of the stage, toward her. Bodies twisted in unnatural angles as space bent.
He bent and he wouldn’t have noticed had he not seen the distortion beforehand. His brain reacted by thinking it should feel sick, so it made him feel sick, and if he threw up like this, unable to open his mouth, he would choke to death.
There was no time to stop her, no time to react, no time to keep up. The pink woman jumped.
The roof shattered. Reality snapped back into shape. Her body became a tiny speck amongst the dark clouds of the vast night sky.
Louis could still track her—for a second. Then, all the flags he’d planted on her were shrugged off and she vanished from his perception entirely.
He caught one of the falling beams of the rafters out of the air. His colleagues around the stage did the same with those they could reach, and a levitation spell caught the rest.
Splinters of wood and dust showered them as his knees buckled. With a groan, he pushed past the sick sensation and bellowed, “After her!”
A colleague swept her arms out in a quick somatic incantation, and the debris floated to the ground as she and two others shot off through the hole into the sky.
Louis did the math and knew, they wouldn’t catch up.
Who the hell was that? He doubted that had been her true appearance. Maybe an [Archmage] gathering intelligence? Or handing it out?
She’d taken the wineskin but left the cleric behind, as well as …
Yasin.
Melody Ramos sobbed into her mother’s shoulder as she and her sister hugged her. Her body convulsed as she hiccuped. Another layer of grey skin sloughed off the side of her head and crumbled into black dust, then nothingness. Her olive skin looked pale beneath.
His clothes were large on her. There wasn’t a single drop of blood. Yasin had been dead the moment he drank the potion, and they had all watched.
An aura of warmth and comfort radiated from the hearth fire that hovered in the air in front of his chest. Louis shoved it aside.
They were usually reserved for horrowed civilians, but the EMTs had been passing them out. On a whim, he had taken one.
Stupid idea.
The comfort reminded him too much that monochrome world.
He leaned against a fence post across a dirt road outside the barn, and watched the long file of handcuffed people being led to guard wagons.
Mage lights revealed the tidy lawns and dirt roads, the swarms of chirping critters swarming the edge of his the light.
Some of the prisoners saw him from a distance, surrounded by his colleagues who treated him like one of their own, and drew the right conclusions. They glared.
Nevermind that they’d all just abetted a murder, right? Nevermind this had clearly gone out of hand.
About a fourth of the attendees were being led away: those who had helped with the preparations for the ceremony this evening—whether or not they’d known about Thurman’s plans—those Louis had marked as persons of interest, and then anyone who responded to the Skills his colleagues had to detect crimes and guilt.
There wasn’t a lot of that to go around yet; people were still reeling from the shock of it all. What had happened. That monochrome stain. The influence of whatever higher being Thurman had invited into their reality.
Idiot, he thought as he spotted the man. He was blessedly cooperative and kept his head down as he let himself be led away, unlike some of his closest confidents who were raving about the love and wrath of their God.
Yeah, wrath. There was a reason you needed royal permission to interact with the peers of the Dwarf, who could decide the fates of nations on a whim.
Louis shook his head, grabbed the hearth fire, and pressed it to his face. He breathed the fire in for a second like a cigar. The sharp difference between the feelings it gave him and his own exhaustion was enough to kick him awake for a few minutes. There was more work to be done.
He walked.
The entrance to the barn came into his vision. His colleagues were sweeping the building for evidence and taking witness testimonies.
Yasin’s friends were standing together. One of them had a vacant look in her eyes, another hugged his knees where he sat on a low stone wall that bordered a hill and sobbed.
Of the remaining three, one shot his sobbing friend a disdainful look and spoke. Louis read his lips.
“Yasin’s fine. He has to be. This was all probably some trick, a scam. They teleported him away—we all knew that Thurman was a hack. Yasin said so himself. This was all just … just to teach him a lesson.”
A girl rounded on him and screeched, “He’s dead!”
Louis didn’t have to read her lips to hear that.
“No, he’s fucking not!” the guy bristled. “You’ll see, he’ll turn up tomorrow and we’ll all feel like idiots.”
The sobbing one grabbed a hearth fire out of the air and hugged it like a stuffed animal.
Melody was being checked over by the EMTs, though she looked healthy. When they stepped away to confer with her parents, her sister took her hand and smiled.
Concern was written plainly on the adults’ faces: was this really their daughter? If so, was she healthy? How long could she live like this?
Louis would have to speak with her soon, though he doubted she had anything to offer to help them put Thurman and his cronies behind bars.
The only information she might be able to give was of the esoteric sort, assuming she remembered anything from her time beyond the veil, and only a twisted mind would bother her about that now. Or ever.
Of course, he would check on her before either of them left to make sure she didn’t murder her entire family in their sleep. That was always a risk with cases like this, that she was actually an imposter wearing her skin, an echo of her memories, an amalgamation of others' bundled up inside a simulacrum made to act like her. And that, when whatever magic fueling her being began to run out, she would go insane.
Assuming that wasn’t the case and it was her, but the magic animating her was still limited, he would come find her sometime to have a conversation, then assign someone to observe her and let her enjoy the time she had left with her family.
And what if she lives beyond that? a small, curious voice inside him whispered. The same voice that collected information for his colleagues and categorized it in neat lists and files.
Of course, if she lived, she would have to attend the trial and …
What if this was a true resurrection?
Then Melody wasn’t the thing that mattered most here.
He watched his colleagues inside the barn. The ritual circle they made copies of.
A life for a life, Thurman had said.
The life of a criminal for one of their victims? The life of a reckless self-absorbed fool, a [Berserker] or [Archmage] who tore through a city over some stupid argument or to have fun, for a parent of one of the orphans they left behind?
He caught himself before he went too far down that road. Because then again, how had it been used tonight?
One of Thurman’s confidants resisted as he was forced into a wagon, raving about the justice that had been done.
“A heathen for a lost child!”
And it was Thurman’s words, not his own cleric's back home, that came to him. God knew Louis had listened to far too many of his speeches this past month.
King Lee cannot save us. He will tear this nation apart.
What about the life of a patriot, or some nobody, a hermit taken from their camp in one of the Towers, or a street rat taken from a gutter—somebody who would never be missed—traded for the life of a king whose death would shatter their newborn nation apart?
One life to prevent civil war; to prevent thousands of deaths, to shield them from all of the invaders that waited around their borders like a pack of wolves for a few years longer?
It was too tempting.
Louis would have to write two reports soon: one for the guards, one for his family. At least one of those would be inaccurate and eventually go missing. Maybe both.
His family was still testing itself ever since it had come to the new world and gotten a taste of power again.
In a way, they were much like this gated community. Except, they had lost their home once before, and they had sworn to never let it happen again.
As for his colleagues’ reports and all the evidence they were collecting, he was in charge of providing his team with information in the field. He would have ample opportunities to get rid of some behind the scenes.
Louis knew better than most that there were things that lurked beyond their world, and that some secrets were better kept hidden. Time would erase the rest.
“Yo, Tor! Don’t forget to log your ring back into inventory before you go home to your wife,” a man called over with a bit of a jeer in his voice. “She might leave you if she sees how much you’ve let yourself go.”
Louis smiled when he saw Chevalier, the old fart. They’d communicated during his assignment, but it’d been almost a month since he saw him face-to-face.
“Please,” he said as he walked over to him, lowering his voice, “I wish I could take it off. But guidelines.” He nodded at the witnesses.
His colleague gave him a doubtful smile. “Sure. You need a ride home?”
“I’ll catch one later back to the station. I still have work to do. Just taking a breather.”
“Seriously? You’ve been gone for a month, man. Push it off. You have places to be, people to see.”
Louis hesitated because he really wanted to do that, but when he looked over at the Ramos … “Give me ten, twenty minutes?”
Chevalier saw where he was looking and nodded grimly. For all they knew, the family over there was hugging a twigman who would be wearing their skin soon.
So Louis took a deep breath, put on a professional smile, and walked over to meet it.
When he climbed up to join Chevalier in his covered wagon thirty minutes later, Louis wasn’t smiling anymore.
“And?”
“Mixed news. She got a new Path after the EMTs talked to her and she had a moment to think. [Of the Sleeper Path]. [Dawn Resonance].”
At least, that proved she was still human … for now.
Chevalier took that in. After a moment, he cursed softly, “Fuck.”
Louis sighed. “We’ll see.” She was probably going to get a Class update after she slept, too, but how long she lived beyond that depended on them now.
Louis shook his head and forced a smile. He didn’t want to think about the decision they would have to make soon. “I can’t wait to go home,” he said.
"Neither can they, trust me."
Finally, where none of the witnesses who might later go after him could see him, he took off the ring on his finger.
His smile turned into a grimace as his shoulders and spine squirmed, lines sunk on his face, his hair greyed, a bit of a gut formed, and a million small other aches reawoke inside him.
From his early twenties to thirty-nine, almost two decades reclaimed his body, but he didn’t care. He wanted them to recognize him when he came home. He couldn’t wait to hug his children.