Dominant Predator (17 page)

I coolly witnessed the moment her heart seized in her chest—her hands clutched at the fabric of her nightgown and her eyes went wide with surprise and pain. The glass clattered back into the sink and she dropped to the floor with an audible wheeze.

I took the handheld medical sensor from my pocket and switched it on, remotely monitoring her vitals. She was in cardiac arrest, but with the dosage of poison I had given her she should have died almost immediately and somehow she was still hanging on. I swore under my breath. Watched the erratic heartbeat continue to stutter but stubbornly refuse to quit on the monitor screen. Well, didn’t that just fuck over my plan. Now I was going to have to enter the house and make sure she didn’t make it anywhere to call for help.

I closed the access plate to the water system and sneaked around back to the exterior door. Her security system was useless, lending credence to her low place on the Committee’s roster. I used the maglock key duplicated from her cleaning company and entered to only the creaking of the house settling around me.

I pulled a knife from a holster at my thigh and waited to see if there were any other noises coming from elsewhere inside. We’d been guaranteed that there would be no one else present. As if I would trust any of that intel or bet my safety on it. I was surprised to hear a gurgling noise coming from my left and the kitchen. The poison had taken her to the ground immediately but the heart attack hadn’t quite finished her off yet.

The kitchen was lit with only one low light that hung directly above where she lay, spotlighting her desperate pulls for breath and the feeble kick of her feet that was more death throes than protest. Her attention didn’t turn to me when I entered the room—I guessed she probably didn’t even know I was there. I crossed the tiled floor and knelt at her side, listening to her slowing pulls of breath. Her pupils were dilated despite the bright light shining in her eyes and her lips opened and closed but no sound came out.

I sat back on the floor and waited for her to die.

I knew her name even if I didn’t want to speak it or think it. I knew every aspect of her life—even the details she had probably hoped no one would ever know. I was the sole witness to her passing. I kept a vigil of the damned. One soulless being ushering another past the gates of hell.

Her eyes didn’t close, and she made no further sound. She simply stopped breathing. And still I waited. I had to be sure before I left the body to be discovered at a later time.

I pulled the radio out of my pocket and switched on the device, leaving the channel open for Armise’s confirmation on his kill.

Five minutes later the code came through. Two clicks on the receiver and one extended tone. I repeated the pattern back and shut the radio off.

Two down.

Ten to go.

Then Ahriman.

* * * *

I heard the President’s voice in my head urging me to stay focused on the task at hand. Not to rush our work. So I took the time to make sure my presence here wouldn’t be detected. I lingered longer than I would have advised any newbie, but I trusted my instincts, and getting this first kill right was worth the risk.

I flipped my hood over my head as I exited the house and crossed the property, cutting across the swanky neighbourhood. Armise and I were set to meet up at a Revolution safehouse downtown. He’d taken a cycle to travel to his target, but I’d decided to go on foot. I wanted to see the city, to witness exactly what was happening on the ground.

Armise had been right when he’d asked snidely where I’d been to not know what the average citizen’s life was like. I’d been unable to shake the idea that the not knowing was another failure on my part. No, it was a glaring oversight.

I’d allowed myself to be coaxed up the mountainous belief system of the Revolution without looking around first to see if there was a different way—perhaps an easier way?—to get to the same spot. Then I’d willingly jumped, falling, careening into the narrative built by the Revolution. And while their version of events was more accurate than what the Opposition attempted to portray, I should have been smart enough to see that no one source could provide all the intel I needed.

Shit, wasn’t that the point of the infochip in the first place?

The Opposition relied on the belief that in the absence of knowledge, in that void created by ignorance, there was room for dishonesty. Ahriman knew that if he controlled education and access to dissenting viewpoints, then there was less likelihood of an insurgence rising against him. And we as a society were willfully following that path. We were allowing our history to be rewritten and presented in pieces that strengthened one point of view because we had no reason to think otherwise.

The Revolution was guilty of the same desecration. What limited knowledge I’d been able to glean growing up had come from sources definitively tied to the Revolution. But it was the President who had first influenced me to look beyond what I was told.

‘Just because you haven’t seen it for yourself, felt it or experienced it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,’ he used to say to me.

Then Armise had come along and dragged me back to the top of that metaphorical mountain and forced me to look around.

Fuck. Why had it taken me this long to figure that out?

For too long I’d been blind. Closing my eyes and ignoring all dissension that didn’t have to do with my mission. I’d shut myself off, been bound by a narrative that affirmed what I was told instead of examining it for myself. And I couldn’t deny that Armise had been the one to free me from that ignorance.

I stuffed my hands in my pockets and moved into the city proper, staying in the shadows cast by the flickering street lights. Amsterdam was a city recently rebuilt. It had been completely destroyed by floods over two hundred years ago. What was left of the old parts had been swallowed by the sea when the dykes were attacked in the twenty-fourth century. From what little I’d heard, I knew that the current layout mapped almost exactly to the previous incarnation. The buildings were constructed of stone dug out of the ground in pits from the mountains of the UU instead of the wood that had been the primary building material at one time. The rough-hewn stone gave the city an aura of timelessness. Of not belonging to this era. I could easily pick out the modern architectural touches—the gravity-defying slant of polymaterials, the shine of manufactured metals—but those were merely touches in the overall aesthetic.

Tent cities didn’t exist here the way they did in the States’ capital. The poorest citizens had moved out of the city after the floods and created self-sufficient encampments in the country, well above sea level.

Tonight, the streets were crowded despite the late hour since active combat had yet to hit this part of the world. But it wouldn’t be long before these citizens were barraged with the firefights and bombings that came with our power struggle. I could feel the nervous anticipation in the citizens who rushed through the streets.

I’d heard that Amsterdam was a city of revelers. I had seen the footage of celebrations the night of the Opening Ceremonies. But the mood of the citizenry now was decidedly restrained and on edge. There were also visual cues to the imminence of the war. The sunburst symbol of the Revolution was graffitied on the ground and on stone walls, the ink still dripping from the most recent tags.

The downtown wasn’t a place where people lived, from what I’d quickly learned in our surveillance of the Committee members. The heart of the city encouraged commerce, hosted travelers and served as a crossroads for those on the move. The shops reflected that purpose, hocking food to go, supplies and treated water. In the section I was walking through there were dozens of comm cafes and adverts for guides, which was thinly veiled code for the men and women who could get you anything you needed or desired—black market or legal—for a steep price.

I turned down an alley next to a bar and considered stopping for a drink, but the most dangerous substance I’d ever put in my body was surge. And as addictive as it had the potential to be, every time I ingested it was under the watch of a Revolution doctor.

I didn’t do the escapism thing. Couldn’t buy into a mindset that sought out a way to dull the senses.

Shit, and maybe—I realised with sickening certainty—that was because I was shutting myself off to all the emotions normal citizens felt.

What the fuck was I doing to myself?

It was infinitely easier not to think. Not to feel. Not to question the narrative that propelled my existence to an unseen—but likely bloody and martyred—ending.

I was a soldier. That should have been enough. But since Armise had appeared in my life, I’d been steadily slipping away from that as my primary identity.

I came around a corner into a section of town brightly lit, the buildings swished in vibrant paint trails of reds and oranges, and loud bass-heavy music pumping out of speakers attached to the street light poles. The streets were just as packed here, but with an air of joviality that had been missing elsewhere. Next to me a hand-drawn sign advertised piercings, tattoos and body mods.

I’d got my first piercing—the one in my lip—as part of an undercover op when I was twenty-three. Since then I’d added the barbell in my eyebrow and the line of studs and hoops in my left ear. I couldn’t deny that I liked that first shot of pain when the needle pressed through my flesh. I enjoyed the sensation of the cool metal against my skin and the weight of them, as minuscule as they might have been.

I was alone. On a different continent from my superiors. Untrackable, unattached. Unfettered, even if not free. And I had the overwhelming desire to mark the moment.

Maybe it was time for another piercing.

The door to the shop was propped open, the scent of warmed, purified air pumping out of the storefront in billows as it hit the chilled night. I walked through the cloud and was greeted by a man at the front desk, his head shaved and a pattern of black and gold anchors on his forehead.

“
Ha’jour
,” he greeted me.

While continental English was spoken by almost everyone here as a second language, I decided to switch to the seaboard dialect of this part of the UU. “
Je’il voudrais en piercing tekrij
.”
I’d like to get a piercing.

He tipped his head in the direction of a woman with long blonde hair and a thin frame. “Ezme can help you.” A line of delicate, curved silver barbells ran up her arms, down the line of her collarbone and dipped into a v-shape that followed the edge of her low-cut shirt.

I sat down in the chair next to her and removed my hood. If either of them knew who I was they didn’t show it. Of course, Amsterdam was known for living on the fringes of modern society, for discretion and favouring cash above all else. I was sure to be recognised, but it was unlikely that anything would come of it.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, pulling on a pair of sanitised gloves.

I quirked my eyebrow. I hadn’t thought that part through, so I went with my first notion. “Nipple.”

“Both?”

“No, just the left.”

“You can put your jacket and shirt over there.” She motioned to a table next to the chair.

I stripped off the jacket and pulled my tee over my head then settled back.

“No tattoos,” she remarked, gliding a cloth used for sterilization over my chest.

“No,” I replied simply.

“You ever think of getting marked?” the man leaning on the desk asked.

“Yeah. Just haven’t gotten around to it.”

“It is a quiet night,” the man stated, gesturing outside with a smirk as the raucous music still blared into the night air. I couldn’t restrain a smile. “My chair is open for hours. Much damage can be done in that amount of time.”

I laughed. “True.”

“What is your vision?” he inquired.

“I don’t have one.”

He gestured to the scar on my shoulder that had come from the repairs done after the DCR standoff. “You are already marked in very permanent ways. Perhaps there is a story there.”

More than I cared to share. I tried to formulate an appropriate response that would convey what I was trying to say in his language. “
Je veronderstel que j’heb geleefd par de balkoo
.”
I suppose I’ve always lived by the bullet.

He nodded thoughtfully and lifted a BC5 screen from the desk. “Let me draw something for you.”

Ezme pulled open a drawer, the thick medicinal scent of hospital-grade antiseptic filling my nose.

“What gauge?”

She started to hand a tray of hoops and barbells to me, but I waved it away.

“The same shape as what’s in my lip, a couple gauges larger. Just make sure it’s not titanalloy.”

She plucked a hoop off the tray and showed it to me. I nodded and she wasted no time placing the metal clamp around my nipple then swiping the needle through immediately after. That familiar sizzle of heat and pain rushed through me, morphing into a slow dull burn, followed by the rush of endorphins that turned the uncomfortable sensation into one of arousal. The removal of the needle and her practiced movements inserting the hoop only intensified the effect and I had to suck in a deep breath of the warm shop air to bring myself back down.

“Beautiful,” she said to me with a shy smile as she fastened the ends together and secured the piercing.

I closed my eyes and sat back while listening to her clean up. My chest throbbed, ached, and now that the hoop was in all I could think about was what the coolness of Armise’s chest would feel like against mine.

Speaking of Armise, he was probably wondering where the fuck I was.

Or maybe he wasn’t. What did I know?

Even though we’d spent almost two months now in close quarters, not much had changed between us. We planned, researched, strategised then ate, fucked and slept. We orbited around each other, came together, then bounced away again, testing, watching, assessing.

Armise didn’t push me like he had in the President’s bunker. He barely spoke to me outside of our tactical conversations. Maybe he’d finally got tired of me answering his questions with more questions.