The Ashes of My Soul, page 27
Even throughout all the years she’d been absent from my life, I’d never stopped trusting her. “She got through to me. Barely. Cry for help. I couldn’t maintain the connection and lost her.” My heart sunk as I hedged, refusing to tell the whole story. I’d tell her later, in person. I looked at Star. She shrugged and waggled her hand. Good enough.
“I’m not surprised. She was a strong, resourceful woman.”
“Was?”
“Kevin, she’s been twisted.” Another hesitation before she continued. “It’s bad. She’s in a coma, but we don’t have access to the infirmary yet, so we don’t know if she’ll recover. Damn them!” I heard a thump from the other end of the connection. “Damn them all. She was important to us!”
I clenched my jaw. “Where are you?”
“My office. Why?”
“I’ll be there momentarily.” I hung up and looked at Star. “Pull over. I’m going to teleport. I want you to get a hold of your team and make sure they’re all right, then call your sister. Tell her to get everyone together in Andreas’s room and turn the psionic jammers on. And not to let Max do a goddamn thing.”
She cut across to the right shoulder and brought us to a screeching halt. “What about afterwards?”
“I don’t know what your team’s supposed to do in a case like this.”
“Protect you.”
“All right.” I got out, already drawing the teleportation shell around myself. “In that case, get to the campus as soon as possible and get to your sister. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”
She nodded. Before I completed the shell, she spoke up again. “Do you want me to tell Todd?”
My stomach turned again. “No. Yes? I don’t know. I should do it myself, but if you can get a hold of him, tell him. Tell him Alex said she loves him.”
“Sure. Be careful, Kevin.”
“I try. Sorry if I leave any sort of mess.” I drew myself back and launched the teleportation. The miles between myself and my destination compressed and I tried to count the seconds before I appeared. Keeping the shell intact made me lose track before I hit double digits.
The exit was abrupt and I stumbled forward, my head spinning with sudden vertigo as the shell collapsed. I gasped for breath and took a quick inventory of my physical condition. No obvious external injuries and no inexplicable internal pains. It was my most successful teleport to date.
My mom rushed around her desk and guided me to a chair. Even a successful teleport exhausted me. “Are you all right? How far did you teleport?”
I shrugged. “Fifty miles? I’m not sure.”
“Austin, could you check him over?”
I turned my head to see the older man standing in the doorway. He looked uncharacteristically unkempt. Even in the cabin, he’d always had an air of having his shit together, but right now his shit was most definitely apart. His eyes flickered green. “No injuries of note. I’m impressed, Mr. Parker.”
“Thanks. What’s the situation?” I asked. Any thoughts of telling my mom what Absynthe had told me vanished. I couldn’t trust Burke to not let things get out, as much as I liked him.
“Chaotic. They had a mole that allowed them to get on campus before anyone else noticed.”
“How surprising,” I said. Alistair at work, no doubt.
“They aimed for your dorm.” I tensed up and nearly jumped out of my chair. “No, your friends are all right. Austin made it there in time to keep them safe.”
“Not soon enough,” he said, slumping down into the chair beside me. “When they realized they couldn’t get any further, they split up and tore through the campus.”
“They killed our agents,” my mom said softly. “The team watching your dorm is dead, except for Absynthe. They murdered one of our medical team. Another one of our patrollers. Twice that number twisted. I’m assuming since Austin’s here, they’re gone.”
“I’ll kill them.” I made the statement without even thinking about it.
Burke’s hand landed on my shoulder. “No one’s going to argue with that under these circumstances.”
My mom sat on the edge of her desk. A pile of papers slid backwards into her chair. “I don’t like hearing my son say that, regardless of what’s happened before, but these were my friends. Absynthe was my friend. They’ve gone too far.”
I nodded and stood up. The dead agents would be loyal to Absynthe. Shade wouldn’t let his goons kill indiscriminately. The ones who had been twisted might even be on his side, maybe even volunteering. Everything was plausible and deniable. I had one trustworthy source and now she was gone. “Where is she now?”
“We’ve recovered the infirmary and she’s on the way there,” Austin said.
“I want to see her. Now. Before it’s too late.”
Austin stood up and gripped my shoulder again. “It’s not a good idea. We haven’t accounted for all of the attackers. There could be one waiting for you.”
“I second that.” Mom caught my eyes. “It’s dangerous for so many reasons.”
I cleared my throat. It felt like I had swallowed sandpaper. “You think I’m going to do something reckless to try and save her, don’t you? Pump her full of energy until I’m a husk? Or are you trying to spare me the sight of my mentor in this condition?” Neither of them responded. “I’m not going to do anything stupid. Believe me, I know she wouldn’t want that. I’m also not going to stand by and let her die without seeing her for myself. If there’s anything I can do within my power to save her, I will.”
“We’ll take you.”
“Not both of you.” My mom blinked. “I need one of you to intercept Star and stop her from bringing her Resistance people up here. I don’t want Alistair to have any excuse to do something to her. I told her to come up here and make sure her sister’s safe, and without Absynthe running interference, I need someone else to. I don’t know of anyone else who could guarantee her safe passage.”
My mom glanced over at Burke, then back to me. “Since when have you been a leader?”
“Since when have you known what I’m really like?”
Her face paled and dead silence filled her office for a moment before Burke grabbed my shoulder. “Patricia, I’ll bring him to the infirmary. Will you handle the rest?”
“Of course.” Color slowly returned to her face, but her eyes never left mine.
He practically dragged me out of the room. Once we turned a corner, he slammed me into the wall. “You fucking child,” he snarled at me. “She has enough regrets about her absence in your life and you think this is the time to throw it in her face? For one moment there, I thought to myself you’d make a fine leader one day. Then you revert to a goddamn child. You disappoint me, Mr. Parker.”
“I’ve had a fucking rough day,” I snapped back at him.
He pushed me harder into the wall, his forearm at my throat. “And we haven’t?”
“Trust me, my day’s been worse.”
Abruptly, he stepped back. The outright fury vanished, replaced with a cold anger visible only in his eyes. “How dare you. At least four of our people are dead, people I’ve known for years, some of which I called friends. Murdered. One was tortured and left to suffer. Who do you think found her?”
I couldn’t meet his gaze. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry won’t cut it, Parker.” His tone was less cutting, but still enough to make me wince. “You have unprecedented levels of power and it seems to have gone to your head. We had long discussions about how to proceed with your training, since your level of maturity was so out of line with your power. You’ve proved me right. Alistair believed your maturity would grow while you trained. I believed we needed to slow your training, match it to the rate you were maturing into a responsible adult.” He snorted and started to walk down the hallway. “I thought you’d grown over the past year, but I was wrong. What’s done is done, though.”
My cheeks were burning with the series of rebukes he’d delivered. “I’m sorry, Professor. I don’t know what else to say. She’s my friend as well as my mentor and I’m so angry about what happened, I’m lashing out at others.”
“Yes, you are. I accept your apology.” His tone finally returned to normal. “Let’s see what you can do for her.”
I was all too familiar with the Establishment infirmary. In stark difference to the last time I’d been there, the emergency lights were on and the walls had chunks missing. We turned one corner and there was a section cordoned off, a body slumped against the wall. I knew him. He’d treated me before. Burke paused before walking on.
Eyes were on us as we walked down an unfamiliar hall. When someone approached us, Burke simply said, “Absynthe.”
“Room fourteen.”
He paused again before leading me down toward the end. “Room fourteen?” I asked.
“Thirteen and fourteen are our terminal wards.” He stopped in front of the door and knocked. I resisted the urge to tell him she couldn’t answer, but then the door slid open. I didn’t recognize the agent, but when his eyes fell on me, he nodded and stepped aside. He didn’t follow us in.
A curtain blocked our view of the bed. Before I could approach, he held an arm out. “Be careful,” he said. “There’s no telling if they implanted some sort of suggestion or delayed effect, either to attack you or hurry the process along.”
“I’m familiar with those.”
“If you find anything strange in her body or mind, tell me at once. I’ll look myself.”
“You’re not going to try and help her?” I asked.
“I’m going to stand by and make sure you’re safe. Once we’re both satisfied there’s no danger, I’ll add my power to yours.” After a moment, he added, “If it comes down to it, Kevin, I’ll end her life before she can do anything to you. Before she can suffer.”
I walked forward, pushing his arm aside. I didn’t trust myself to say anything. When I pulled the curtain back, it was all I could do not to cry. For a moment, it looked as if she was sleeping, her black hair spread across a white pillow, her arms laying on top of a light sheet. A needle was in each wrist, IVs quietly dripping nutrients and fluids into her bloodstream. An oxygen line ran across her face, under her nose. Not much of her skin was showing, but I could see large bruises on her neck, shaped like a hand.
“Oh, Absynthe,” I found myself saying. “You’d hate this so much.”
Burke prodded me forward. There were chairs next to the bed and we both sat. I took her hand in mine, careful not to dislodge the IV. “Her heart rate is slowing,” he said quietly. I looked up at the beeping monitor. The distance between each beat looked the same to me. “It’s slow, almost imperceptible. It’ll take days for it to drop below the critical point. It’s almost a kindness, in a twisted way. She won’t suffer forever.”
I looked over at him. “They attacked her because she’s close to me. Does this scare you, Professor? Aren’t you afraid of being close to me? You could end up like this.”
“With all due respect to Absynthe, I am stronger, more talented, and more cautious. This is not to demean anything she has done.” He cleared his throat. “That being said, I know she was never afraid of what might happen to her in the line of duty. “
“I’m going to take a look at what they did. First tier only.” I tapped into my power, coaxing a trickle into a thread of psionic power, then called my Sight. Her mind was opaque until I strengthened my investigatory thread. The opaqueness wasn’t what I expected. It was a twist, a hundred twists, all feeding into each other, nested so densely I couldn’t sense anything behind them. Every time some disjointed thought bubbled up through the mess, a tormented snarl pulled it back down. “Fuck. This isn’t anything I’ve seen before.”
I saw a thread of Burke’s power follow mine. “That’s more severe than we were given to believe. I’ve only seen this sort of damage once before. Whoever did this had plenty of time to work and they used it. I won’t join you yet, but I’d suggest starting here or here.” His thread indicated two separate tangles. “I’ll watch for a reaction. Apply yourself fully.”
“Second tier?”
“Not yet. If you dive too far in, you could do more damage, instead of less.”
I nodded and focused on duplicating my threads until I couldn’t control any more. I divided them almost evenly between what he had pointed out and another place I thought was vulnerable. The tangles pulled apart with only a little resistance, but for every one I disassembled, a new one bubbled to the top. “This is insane. It’s like there’s another layer of damage below this.”
“It’s plausible they created a feedback loop where her thoughts have no choice except to twist and curl back into themselves. Look for a central point, a nexus of sorts, and try to push through it.”
“There’s more than one.” I touched one of the points he had described and pushed. It compressed down deeper into her mind, resisted for a moment, then broke apart. Another nexus pushed back against me. “Fuck me, there’s another one. How deep does this go?”
“It could be impossible for you. You would need enough power to push through enough of those points at the same time to collapse the structure. Even you don’t have the strength and precision to do so. I don’t think even the two of us together could do it.”
“So give me permission to use the second tier.”
Burke let out a deep breath. “Let me take a look first.” I watched him push through the same point. “As I feared. Cutting through those points without also stabilizing others would cause a mental collapse. At best, she’d lose parts of her sense of self. At worst, she would have a stroke, perhaps multiple.”
“Could we work together? One of us working on stabilizing her, the other on pushing?”
He shook his head and his power faded. “Do you know which nexus to push and which to pull? I don’t. If we make a mistake, it’s all over.”
“She’s dying no matter what we do!”
He hesitated. “Let’s try without using the second tier. I feel like drawing attention to our actions here might not be the best of ideas.”
I nodded and we got to work. Pulling tangle after tangle apart was exhausting. Our threads sometimes clashed, sometimes linked, and I could sense the professor’s concentration on the task at hand. After a few minutes, both of us were sweating, even though the room was chilly. Finally, his threads pulled away, one by one. I looked over to him and saw him rock back in his seat. “Giving up?”
“We don’t have enough power,” he said. “Not enough ability. Each time I thought I saw the pattern, it changed. Even if we used every scrap of power at our disposal, without a firm grasp on what’s happening underneath, it’s impossible to untangle this. I’m sorry, Kevin. We can’t save her.”
I squeezed her hand. “What if I could get through enough of the layers to see what’s underneath?”
“You don’t have the strength. You’d need to hold back almost two dozen twists.”
My threads had dwindled. I looked down at her hand, wanting nothing more than to feel her squeeze. Instead of focusing on her hand, I focused on mine, my ring finger. The ring I’d created and filled with psionic energy. “I think I can do it.”
“How?”
“I have a little trick up my sleeve.” I summoned up every last bit of strength I had and plunged my threads back into her mind, at the point I felt was weakest. Once they were embedded as far as they’d go, I pulled power from the ring into my mind. The sudden torrent of power let me manifest another half-dozen threads and I heard Austin take in a sharp breath. I plunged them through the tangles, pushing most aside, straightening others out. The ring wouldn’t last long.
I broke through the bottom layer with only a single thread remaining. The others were threatening to collapse at any moment. I sought out her mind, conscious or unconscious, and just as I thought I found it, my thread received the psionic equivalent of a slap. “Kevin! Stop! Don’t let anyone know I’m still conscious or they’ll finish the job!”
With the last bits of power I had left, I slammed a crude biokinetic command to her heart to sort itself the fuck out. The ring ran out of juice and I slumped back in the chair, almost sliding to the floor. “What the hell was that?” Burke demanded. “Where did that extra power come from?”
I declined to tell him the whole truth. If he hadn’t noticed the power flowing from my ring, I wasn’t about to reveal that particular trump card. “Just tapped everything I could.”
“Did you see the layout? Is she conscious? Damaged?” He was peppering me with questions and I was still trying to catch my breath. “Is her heart function repaired? What happened?”
“I don’t know!” I burst out. “I think I pushed enough power into her to stabilize the heart issue. I don’t know if it worked.”
He looked at the monitor. “Perhaps. I think you may have bought her some time. Mr. Parker, I don’t know what you did, but if you can do it again at full strength, we may have a chance.”
I started to respond, but my head suddenly rang with a psionic message. “Report to my office,” Alistair said. He broke the connection without waiting for my response.
“Fuck,” I said, pushing myself to my feet. “Ripley wants me.”
“Do you want me to go with you?” Burke asked.
I shook my head. “Stay with her.”
It took me twice as long as it should have to get to the administrative building and his office. His secretary didn’t even look up at me as she waved me through. I took a deep breath before knocking and pushing the doors open. If I hadn’t been as exhausted as I was, I would have turned around and walked right back out.
“Mr. Parker. Thank you for joining us.” Alistair was sitting on one of his couches instead of behind his desk. Next to him, Nikki looked up from a cup of tea and gave me a bright, empty smile.
“I’m not comfortable with her here,” I said.
