Legacy (Alliance Book 3) (24 page)

Ella was ready for them in the med bay, going to work on Brody as soon as he lay down. She knocked him out with a shot, telling Lancer that Trelix stole a few of these from the lab, but she couldn’t give that to him, as it was based on the same thing as those pills he couldn’t take. He was okay with it. He felt grateful they had any for Brody. The kid needed to not feel pain for a day or two or however long it would knock him out for. He watched as she stitched Brody’s back, her face betraying the pain she felt at what he went through, but her hands were steady and her voice calm. She had him tell her what happened while she worked, and he didn’t mind telling her any of it, all but about the young Zoriner girl Fuller killed. That he kept to himself.

She offered him a thermos of spiked tea when it was his turn and he drank in long gulps, cringing at the taste, the liquid burning his throat and making his insides feel hot. His mind went fuzzy after a little while and he didn’t fight it. The pain was still there, but softer, blurrier somehow than before. He could tell Ella was stitching him up, could feel the needle going into his flesh, only it seemed too far away from him to worry about. He saw Ella’s soft face lean close to his, her eyes wet for some reason, and felt a kiss on his forehead, and he tried to say something, tried to smile at her, only he was falling now and her face wasn’t there anymore, just darkness, spiraling under him, weighing heavily on his eyelids, pressing them closed, shutting them against the bruises on Tishana, and the slashes on Brody’s back, against Fuller’s smirking face and the rage in his voice, against the ugly green walls of the cell and Tishana’s blood on the floor.

He felt the darkness lift after a little while and he was floating, and then landing softly in the grass. He could smell it, the blades tickling his face, smiling blue-gold eyes looking up at him from the grass, familiar eyes. He tried to remember how he knew those eyes, only he couldn’t think of it, the name, a fuzzy smile on the tip of his tongue, a whisper in a kid’s voice, telling him to wake up, but he couldn’t recall how to do that, didn’t want to do that. He stayed where he was in the green grass, staring into the smiling eyes that made him feel strangely at peace, undamaged.

Riley, June 14, 2236, The Cave.

T
his clearing by the cave felt comfortably familiar, and they all seemed happy to be here again, surrounded by birches. He didn’t think anyone would find them here and the cave would keep them cool enough at night, if they didn’t want to use aux power on the flier for that.

He tried to get Brody to talk to him since yesterday, when he finally woke up, but he wouldn’t talk. Not to him, not to anybody, not even Laurel. He stayed in the cave, avoiding the clearing and the flier, barely touching his food, and it worried him. Lancer told him what happened after they brought Brody into the cell, and to give him some space, but he ached to find a way to ease the pain for his friend, only he knew it wasn’t that kind of pain. It surprised him, too, that Brody didn’t say a word to his father, didn’t even try to see him yet.

The man was strapped to a tree, hands tied with biters in front of him. He didn’t talk to anyone either, not one word. Loren tried yesterday, only he wouldn’t even look at him. But he drank and ate what they gave him, and let Loren take him to the stream to wash and do whatever else he needed to do.

He crouched in front of him, looking at the familiar features. Fuller was wearing his uniform pants and a white t-shirt, sweat making it stick to his chest, but the man didn’t seem to be bothered by it. He looked at him for a long time, remembering this man holding him in his arms when he was little, smiling at him. Remembering how safe he felt when he did that. How he wished he was raising him instead of his own father....

“What do you want, Riley?” A hoarse whisper, Fuller’s eyes on him.

“What the hell happened to you, Max? What you did... how could you do that to him? How could you do that to Brody?” Fuller just tilted his head back and closed his eyes again, and he let him be.

It hurt him to even look at him, and he wanted more than anything for him to not be here now. They were holding him to try to get information from him, but he had a feeling they wouldn’t get anything useful, and he wished Brody would just shoot him and be done with it.

He threw a few sticks into the fire and sat on the log watching the yellow flames dance lazily in the afternoon light. Everybody was in the flier, keeping cool, everybody but Brody. He saw him standing outside the cave, looking around. He smiled at him, but Brody was looking at his father, his face pale, hands in fists. He watched him stand there like that for a long time and suddenly, Brody was walking to that tree, as if he had finally decided something. He followed him, felt he had to, felt he could maybe help him with this. “I’ll leave if you want me to,” he whispered.

“Stay.” Brody’s voice sharp. He sat down a few steps away, hoping whatever happened now wouldn’t make it harder on Brody. Hoping, too, that at the end of it, they would finally be rid of this man. Fuller’s eyes were still closed, and he didn’t move.

Brody walked around him and cut the straps around his body, freeing him from the tree, then grabbed him by the arms and lifted him up. He opened his eyes then, looking at Brody’s face, smiling. “So. You didn’t die.”

Brody didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at him. “My mother.... Tell me what happened to her,” his voice shaky.

Fuller laughed, a loud laugh that made his whole body shake. “Here I was, thinking you and your weird collection of friends would beat me, threaten me, whatever, to get me to help you in whatever war you all think you are fighting, your little rebellion... yet, here you are, wanting to talk about your mother. I really shouldn’t be surprised.”

Brody didn’t move, didn’t say anything, just stood there, waiting. Fuller was calm again when he spoke, “All right, son, I’ll tell you. We watched you, for years, up until you ran from Waller like the coward that you are. You were an experiment, if you will. You see, we needed to convince certain people at the Alliance top councils that reintegrating Zoriners into our society was a bad bloody idea, even if we started off when the kids were young. They were supposed to turn on you much earlier than they did, but maybe you were just too pretty to look at. Too pretty for them to want to hurt you.”

Riley could hear a smirk in his voice, his lips curling into a small smile. “Anyway.... Your poor mother couldn’t take you feeling so hurt, so abandoned by everyone after we staged that broadcast, so she slit her wrists with one of my knives and bled to death on the damn couch, staring at your picture on her screen. She was always a weakling. You are just like her in that, the type to kill yourself or to run away, but you already know that....”

Brody dipped his head, his face a pale blank. “Thank you,” he said very quietly, and then his gun was out, one of the old ones, the barrel pressing against Fuller’s chest. “Any last words?”

Fuller shook his head, no smiles on his face now, Brody gripping the gun hard, waiting, as if not quite trusting that his father didn’t have anything more to say to him.

“Do it, Brody,” Fuller said after too long of this waiting, his voice controlled, quiet. But Brody just kept staring at him, not pulling the trigger. “Pull the bloody trigger!”

The safety clicked off. Brody was breathing hard, his jaw clenched, but Fuller’s face was strangely calm, too calm. The way Lancer’s face was when he took him to that clearing. Like he was genuinely okay with this. It didn’t add up. He was running through all that he said before, over and over, something in it bothering him, and suddenly he had it. He ran up to Brody and took the gun from him, pulling him away, whispering to him, “Not yet, Brody. We need to talk.”

He walked over to Fuller and pushed him down, and quickly strapped him to the tree, pulling on the restraints hard enough to hurt. The man just shook his head and closed his eyes.

He took Brody to the fire, working through his thoughts, trying to make sense of all of it.

“He isn’t Alliance, Brody. Not really... he can’t be. I don’t think Hassinger was either. It’s like they have their own agenda. What he said, about the Alliance wanting to re-integrate Zoriners. I think he was fighting his own people. Remember how we all thought that it wasn’t Alliance that killed all those people in Reston, how it wouldn’t make any sense if they could do that? I think your father is working with whoever did that. And I think the Alliance has no idea they are doing it. Reston, the labs with Zoriner girls, maybe even the S-Squads, I don’t think it’s them. But he knows. Your father knows. We have to get him to tell us somehow.” Brody winced and then nodded, not saying a word.

They sat in silence, Brody watching his father from across the clearing. “Do you think it’s genetic, how he is?” His voice so quiet, he barely heard him.

“You can’t be serious.... No, it’s not genetic, you bloody idiot. You’re not him. You’ll never, ever, in a million years, be him. But I think there is something personal for him in what he’s doing. He seems too invested in all of this.”

He stood up and offered Brody his hand, lifting him gently from the log, “Let’s go tell the others.”

Laurel jumped up from her seat, surprised blue eyes looking at them when they walked in, and walked quickly to Brody. She threw her arms around his neck, and Brody didn’t run from her this time. He let her hold him like that, and then leaned in and kissed her on the top of her head and whispered something to her, Laurel just nodding to him, softly, a small smile on her face, and she let him go. He knew Brody needed to be the one to tell them what happened, what his father said to him, so he didn’t follow him to the front of the flier, staying next to Laurel, watching him. All eyes were on Brody now, only he couldn’t seem to find the words for a little while, and he looked uncomfortable. Finally, he quickly spat out what Fuller said, leaving out everything about his mother, and told them that the man was definitely hiding something, and they needed to get it out of him. They were all silent for a while after he was done.

Loren walked over to Brody, looking concerned. “You shouldn’t be the one to do it, Brody. I’ll do it, if you want, or Drake or Lancer. It just can’t be you. You can put a bullet in his head afterwards if you need to, but not that.”

Brody shook his head at him. “No, Loren. It should absolutely be me. After everything he’s done, I might even enjoy it,” voice clipped, full of barely controlled rage, and then he spun around and walked to the door, not looking at anybody, his steps un-Brody-like heavy on the metal stairs. Riley told the girls and Ella to please stay put, but the rest of them followed him, worry written on all their faces.

Brody was already by the tree, his hand wrapped around Fuller’s neck, knife in his free hand, screaming at him to spill whatever he knew that he wasn’t telling them, but Fuller just shook his head. He watched Brody slash through the thin cotton of the shirt and then rip it off him, Fuller just watching him, and his eyes didn’t look cold or angry like they did before. He seemed tired, older somehow.

“You should have pulled the trigger, because what you plan to do now won’t work, and in the end, it’ll destroy you,” Fuller whispered to his son, his voice surprisingly soft. Brody nodded and without any warning drove the blade of the knife into his father’s chest, right under his collarbone, into a cluster of nerves. Fuller inhaled sharply and shut his eyes tightly for a few seconds, and then looked at Brody again, “Feel better, son?”

Brody pulled the knife out, blood spraying from the wound in its absence, turned around and pulled his shirt off. He watched Fuller’s face, but didn’t see any regret in it, didn’t see any emotion in it at all. Brody faced his father again. “I wonder how many lashes you can take. It would be most fitting, don’t you think?” and he walked away from him, motioning to Loren, whispering something to him.

He saw Loren run to the flier, and when he came back, he was carrying a small bag over his shoulder. Trelix made Fuller turn around and tied his hands to the tree above his head. He noted that the man’s fingers were digging into the bark, but he didn’t protest or fight him. He hoped Brody survived doing this, and thought not for the first time that Loren was right. That it shouldn’t be Brody, no matter what that man had done to him. It just felt wrong, but he didn’t want to fight him on it, so he kept all these thoughts to himself.

Brody was going through the bag Loren brought out, looking for something when Lancer crouched by him and put his hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t do this, Brody. I know you feel you need to, but you can’t. Let me or Loren, any of us. Please, don’t do this to yourself,” his voice so quiet, he wouldn’t have heard a word of it if he weren’t standing so close. Brody’s jaw was clenched and his eyes down, not looking at Lancer. He stood up after a beat and handed Lancer the white handled whip he was holding, the one they took from Hassinger, the one that still made him flinch at the memory of it slicing into his back at the compound.

Lancer nodded, and then told Trelix to get him a bucket of water, and for anyone who didn’t need to be there for this to go back to the flier. He just needed Loren or Trelix to record anything Fuller might say if he decided to talk. He was looking at Brody when he said it, but Brody just shook his head. Drake cursed under his breath and went into the flier, not turning around, and he heard the door slide shut.

Lancer was by the tree, saying something to Fuller, something he couldn’t hear, but Fuller turned his face away from him and closed his eyes. And then Lancer was hitting him, opening up long red gashes in his back, not stopping even when his whole back was bleeding, only Fuller didn’t scream, didn’t say anything. He lost count, and saw Brody running to the tree, reaching for the whip in Lancer’s hand, screaming at him to stop, screaming that he’d kill Fuller if he keeps going. Lancer’s face was flushed, eyes staring angrily at Brody, but he dropped the whip on the ground, and then turned around and walked away, not looking at any of them.

He ran up to Fuller then, hoping Lancer didn’t kill him. His face was pressed into the bark, but his eyes were open. He was definitely awake and breathing. He picked up the bucket of water and poured all of it on the man’s back, Brody standing a few meters away, watching him, face pale.