Dominant Predator (3 page)

I took the capsules, downed one and threw the other to Armise. Immediately I could feel the press of my swollen left eye easing and my injured shoulder loosening.

Above our heads a high-pitched whine gained in volume, followed closely by a screeching explosion and the muted patter of debris drumming to the ground metres above us on the surface streets of the capital. The ground beneath my feet shook, dirt scattering from the packed earth ceiling.

“What is that sound?” I said, my voice breaking from my inability to draw in a full breath.

Jegs cocked her head as if she wasn’t sure what I was referring to even as the room continued to reverberate around us. Another thundering boom came from above and the transport platform shook.

She pointed up, a wicked grin exposing her teeth. “Those, Colonel, are artillery shells. Welcome to the Revolution.”

* * * *

It was unnerving, to say the least.

I had been prepared for war of this type—messy, bloody, loud and more unpredictable than anything I’d ever experienced—but nothing could have prepared me for the unending movement. I could feel each burst of gunfire. Each drop of a bomb. Each crackle-snap-flash of grenades. We were underground, but the ground moved as if it was water instead of the steadiness of bedrock.

The President’s bunker in the capital was our headquarters for now. Meant to be used for days, not weeks, and certainly not permanently, as we coordinated the initial push against Opposition forces. The President had been adamant about that. If his people were out on the streets fighting, then he wouldn’t be hidden underground.

This station would serve to coordinate troops, but the President wouldn’t be staying here and neither would his second-in-command General Neveed Niaz. The Coach.
My
Coach and handler up until minutes ago when I’d finally completed the mission I’d been training for most of my life—to kill the Premiere of Singapore. I’d assassinated him with the first bullet to be shot in public in over two hundred years. That bullet was the first to find its mark in this war, but it would be far from the last.

Up until the moment my shot split his head open, the Premiere had been the leader of the Opposition, a faction set on maintaining power with the most elite of society. Before the Borders War had even started three hundred years ago the citizenry had been decimated, the population of the world skyrocketing to unsustainable numbers in the billions. Rampant disease propelled by food shortages had started the purge, but the war had been the final fatal action.

While the war had brought the world population down to the hundreds of millions, strife had dropped that number even further. Widening the gap between those who had everything and those who had nothing.

The Revolution hoped to turn that tide.

That I had managed to remain hidden as a double operative—supposedly on the payroll of the Opposition, yet loyal to the Revolution—for more than a decade was a miracle unto itself.

And that Armise Darcan—my enemy of seventeen years, and lover of fourteen years—had turned traitor to Singapore so he could make sure I made it out of that stadium alive after my shot was something I hadn’t had time to fully consider yet.

Armise was at my side as we exited the transport room, his demeanour steely calm once again after the brutal transport from the stadium. He wore his silver and cobalt blue People’s Republic of Singapore uniform and his silver-streaked hair was mussed. He slicked the errant strands back. He didn’t make eye contact with me as we walked down the hallway, choosing instead to meet each wondering stare that passed over us. His uniform proclaimed his status as a Singaporean, but that he wasn’t under guard or bound like a prisoner raised more than a few curious glances. His unchallenged presence in what was likely the safest place anywhere in the States brought more attention to us than I was used to.

It didn’t help that his face had been broadcast across the globe next to mine as the world prepared for the Olympics. The people here recognised him—but only as an enemy to the States and possibly to the Revolution. We were a paranoid group at best. Careful was a more diplomatic word, but still hyped up from the shot and uneasy from the continuous roll of the floor underneath me, I wasn’t feeling very diplomatic at the moment.

We approached the President’s transport room—Armise at my right shoulder and Jegs trailing him.

The doors to the room swished open as we approached and the President emerged first.

He turned in my direction, a triumphant smile on his face. “Good shot.”

“So I’ve heard,” I quipped.

The President bowed deeply to Armise but didn’t say anything else as he proceeded down the hallway towards the Comm Room.

The rest of his entourage gave Armise a wide berth, choosing to ignore his presence or blatantly sneer at him. I wondered how many of them knew about Armise besides what intel and rumours had told them.

Traitor
, Jegs had called him.

I wondered what they would think of me if they knew I was fucking him. And that I had been for almost half my life now.

Simion—a fellow Peacemaker, soldier and a man who had been under my command for the last thirteen years—took wide steps to catch up to my side. He laid a hand on my left shoulder. “I believed you’d turned rogue. I should have known.”

I eyed him, not bothering to hide my disdain. “You should have,” I said with all seriousness.

He stepped back, almost shrinking from my words. Good.

In front of me, Neveed walked next to the President talking to him in hushed tones. He must have felt me looking at him, because he turned and gave a nod.

I tipped my chin at him, acknowledging him. I knew that movement was the only recognition I would get from Neveed that I’d done my job. He beckoned me forward and stepped out of the way so I could walk with the President.

“So what’s next?” I asked the President.

He smiled at me. “That’s the first time you’ve ever asked me that question.”

“I didn’t expect to be asking it.”

He tipped his head towards Armise, who kept steadfastly to my right shoulder. “It was better that way.”

“Okay,” I replied without question.

He studied me as if he didn’t believe that it would be that easy, then nodded in response. “Okay. Come meet the rest of the command.”

I shook my head. “It’s not my place.”

“It is now. You are the most recognisable face on the planet,” he said as he pushed into the double metal doors and pointed at the screen at the front of the room. I stopped in my tracks.

Unlike the normal BioComp 5 screens—BC5 for short—that appeared at the flick of a wrist when the wearer had a comm chip, this screen filled the entire back wall. The room was controlled chaos, but everyone came to a complete stop when we entered, assessing eyes flitting nervously between Armise and me. The President didn’t appear fazed as he manoeuvred around frozen forms.

The image of me with the Winchester shouldered—my finger hovering over the trigger, cheek just off the barrel, brown eye focused through the scope—stared back at me, as if the camera had been placed directly in front of my shot. There must have been a camera located somewhere on the dais where I couldn’t spot it. My finger tightened on the trigger and the gun exploded, smoke rising from the barrel and a gold bullet exiting in slow motion.

The press didn’t have any compunction about broadcasting the moment of impact. Also in painful, crystal-clear slow motion. The Premiere didn’t even have a chance to react. The bullet entered his forehead at direct centre—between his eyes, at the point of his third eye Neveed had once taught me. His head split apart obscenely at this speed of replay. Bone shattering, blood droplets flying into the air—splattering, running down the silver metal of the throne—the back of his head opening to the elements as he slumped forward and off the chair.

Then the news footage came back to me. Armise’s arms around my waist and us disappearing in a zap of electrically charged matter dispersal.

Behind me Armise cleared his throat.

I pointed to the screen. “That’s counterproductive to my job.”

The President didn’t bother to turn. He watched the footage as it repeated—the same ten-second loop—over and over again, as he spoke to me. “Your job is the Revolution. You are the face of the Revolution now, Merq.” He gestured with a hand over his shoulder. “Update me, Neveed.”

With that I knew he was done with me. At least for now.

“It really was a good shot,” Armise said when I tracked back to him.

“You’re surprised?” I replied snidely.

The corner of Armise’s lip tipped up in a restrained smile. He crossed his arms as he leaned against the wall. “Nearly perfect,” he goaded me.

I didn’t let it show that his attempt did cut at me a bit. He was a better sniper than I was. It was a fact that both us of were aware of. But that shot couldn’t have been more perfect and both of us knew that.

I crossed my arms and stubbornly matched his stance.

Heads continued to turn in our direction as movement and discussion restarted in the room. The expression in their eyes and on their faces was one of trepidation. Possibly fear. Maybe respect or awe. It was difficult to ascertain. They were all wary for sure.

I could understand why. Armise and I were the two biggest men in the room by far. Standing shoulder to shoulder, even in this at-ease position, we took up almost the entire back wall of the packed control room.

And all the evidence they needed of our deadliness and competence in that area was on an endless loop in front of them. If they didn’t know who we were by reputation then there was no longer doubt.

The realisation made me stand straighter, pull my shoulders back and grit my jaw as I took a deep inhale through my nose.

Before this no one had been aware of just how dangerous I was until they had to fight me face to face or at the end of my rifle. Anyone who had hadn’t lived to report on my skill. Only Armise had faced me in that scenario and survived. But now there was no question as to my power.

I’d never felt more indestructible.

“Fighting is heaviest in the capital due to the influx of Opposition followers for the games,” Neveed began debriefing the President. “Unfortunately, it’s just as heavy in the DCR.” He swiped a hand across a desk and changed the single screen to a grid layout. “Apparently there were more Opposition forces there than we anticipated. We’re in the process of moving more stock into their main distribution centres. Communication channels are clear. So far unimpeded or hacked. We don’t anticipate that to last for long, though. Days, maybe hours.”

The President turned to the left side of the room and addressed a young woman seated in the corner, hunched over a bank of floating BC5 screens in an arc around her.

“How long?” he asked her.

Next to me, Armise leant forward to see who the President was talking to. I could almost hear the unasked question on his lips. Apparently despite being the person who had given us the coordinates of how to find her, Armise had never met Chen Ying.

Her long black hair with wild streaks of blue and crimson whipped around as she turned in her chair. She was tiny, even in comparison to Jegs or the President. Her face was round, with prominent angular cheekbones, full lips and piercing green eyes that gave her an almost predatory appearance. If it wasn’t for those eyes she could have been mistaken for the child she was. Neveed had told me she was sixteen. I doubted whether that was true.

“Hours,” she answered with authority and hunched over her screens again.

“The key,” I whispered into Armise’s ear, using Chen’s nickname to clue him in.

He lifted an eyebrow in silent question—not making the connection with what I was telling him.

“Chen Ying. The key,” I clarified.

He sat back against the wall. “Huh,” was his only reply.

I’d had the same reaction when I’d first met her.

At the front of the room Neveed continued his debriefing.

Armise started to ask me another question and I waved him off, trying to listen in over the cacophony, because I couldn’t have just heard what I thought had come out of Neveed’s mouth.

“What was that, Neveed?” I said, loud enough for heads to snap in my direction.

The room went silent.

Neveed faced me, his face an emotionless mask. My stomach dropped.

“The stadium was destroyed by a reverb. Ahriman ordered the strike. After your shot.”

I couldn’t believe that what I was hearing was the truth. A reverberation bomb. The same type that had brought down the building I’d been born in. Where my parents had reportedly died and my legs had nearly been crushed. They were the most destructive of modern bombs—ever since the nuclear arsenals had been destroyed before the Borders War.

I stood up and leaned on the bar in front of the last row of seats. “How soon after?” I nearly growled, the implications immediately settling in enough for a red haze of anger to overtake my vision. It had been less than twenty minutes since my shot, so I knew the answer wouldn’t be good.

Neveed narrowed his eyes, tipped his chin up but didn’t answer. I knew him well enough to tell that he didn’t want to give me the answer.

“How the fuck long after?” I challenged.

Neveed glanced at Armise, his lips pursing, then ground out, “Immediately.”

Which meant that everyone inside who didn’t have a transport chip—every average citizen and child who had been trying to escape the chaos created by my shot—had been instantaneously obliterated.

Hundreds of thousands of people. Gone.

Because of my shot.

I gave my head a shake, clearing the thought out and reforming my view on the attack. No. They weren’t dead because of me. They had been unceremoniously exterminated by Ahriman Blanc and the Opposition.

“Any survivors?” Simion asked from my right.

Neveed flicked his wrist and brought up an aerial feed of the destruction. “It’s early, but all indications are no. We haven’t been able to pick up any life signs from the scans.”

The President gave a signal to cut the screens, the scenes of devastation snapping off into black. Above our heads and over the mournful silence that hung in the control room, the bombs continued to explode, the staccato rattle of gunfire echoing in the stone chamber.