Power (33 page)

“Not to you,” I replied as I opened the door.

Each step caused a clumping noise on the wooden stairs. I wore heavy-tread boots, laced tightly because the steel toe did wonders for the damage of my kicks. Aesthetically, they were a nightmare, and I’d be the first to admit that. But aesthetics were never my primary concern.

Sovereign was waiting, and he watched me as I took the turn at the L of the stairs. I paused on the wooden landing and looked at him, lurking in the dark close to what had once been the bane of my existence.

The box.

It was metal, stood about six feet tall, and looked like nothing so much as an overlarge gravestone hiding in the shadows behind Sovereign. He gestured to it in a very Vanna-White-esque way, like it was something I’d never seen before.

“Are you going to monologue now?” I asked, leaving a hand resting on the wooden rail next to me. “Because if so, I can come back later.”

“Come on,” he said, inviting me down into my own basement. “You’ve figured it out, and credit where it’s due—I thought I had outwitted you on the Ares thing, but hey, it’s not so bad.”

“You’re planning to destroy every soldier in the whole world, every police officer,” I said and took my hand off the railing to fold my arms in front of me. “It’s pretty bad.”

Any amusement in his expression vanished. “Well, plans can change.”

I let out a fake laugh that actually made him take a step back. “You’re still a terrible liar. You’ve been running a scam on me all along. There wasn’t an inch of daylight between you and Weissman at any point after Andromeda.”

His mouth warped and his eye twitched. “What gave it away?”

“The plane he put me on,” I said. “The flight plan said it was bound for Tulsa.”

He shook his head like it didn’t matter, but I could see the lie written on his face. “So?”

“So you were going to have him put me in storage,” I said. “In a stasis unit.”

His lips pursed with fury. “Maybe that was Weissman’s plan, but—”

I drove a fist through the railing and splinters exploded from it. Sovereign took an abrupt step back. “No more lies,” I said.

“Okay. Fine,” he said. The shock in his voice had been replaced with a menace I doubt he even realized was there. “I just wanted you to see the real me.”

“I’ve seen the real you,” I said. “I’ve probably seen more of the real you than you have.”

“You don’t know me,” he said quickly, with a flare of indignation.

“I know what you’ve done,” I said. “What you planned to do.”

“No, you don’t know, you don’t know
anything
.” He shook his head and now he just looked furious and disgusted. “I can’t believe you figured—” He let out a grunt that sounded primordial. “I was just trying to show you the way. We were fixing the world. Imagine a world without violence. Without cruelty. Without people trying to hurt and kill each other. A place where—”

“Where if you step out of line, the power of a vengeful god descends upon you, prepared to smite you for your wrongs,” I said. “That’s what you were planning to be: the hammer of righteousness.”

“I was—I
am
going to be the one who makes sure that if someone steps too far over the line, they get what’s coming to them.” He was breathing a little harder now, staring me down. “What if someone had done that for you when your mother was sticking you in here?” He flung a hand out to indicate the box. “What if you had been raised in a world where the threat of violence didn’t hang over you?”

“Except the violence you would do if I stepped out of line,” I said. “You’ve got aspirations to be a petty tyrant. To run an Empire like Janus and the others did. And you’ll rule from on high, making sure the peasants and slaves don’t step out of line.”

“That’s not how it would be,” he said, but he sounded like he was becoming more progressively unhinged. “I want to help people—”

“Provided they’ve survived your genocide and are appropriately loyal to your new regime.”

“It’s not like that!” he shouted, crossing into maniac territory. I could tell I’d succeeded in getting not only his goat but his whole herd. He’d been got. “I wanted to make it a better world! Free from war, crime, poverty—”

“Free from humans making choices,” I said. “A utopia ruled by the iron fist of—”

“If you say ‘a god’ again, so help me—”

“You’ll what?” I asked, staring at him from the landing. “You’ll make me the first to fall?” I took a step down and then another until I stood on the concrete, staring at him, breathing hard, his face reddening. “You know what you want to do? You want to lock the whole human race in a box of their own. Take away all their freedom and choices and power—”

He made this kind of squeaking noise of fury, and I had to steel myself to keep from stepping back. “You see this the way you’ve seen your life play out up until now.” He sounded strangled, like he was barely hanging on. “Everything that’s happened to you is coloring your perceptions of this future. It could be grand—and bright —”

“I’ve seen your future,” I said. “There’s nothing bright about it.”

He cocked his head at me. “What are you talking about?” His eyes narrowed. “What do you know?” He looked at me, face straining, eyes trying to see into my soul. “He’s blocking me. How the hell is he blocking me?”

“Dr. Zollers?” I asked. “You wouldn’t know this, but he’s been blocking you all along.” I took another step forward. “He’s been blocking you since I got back from your attempted abduction.”

“Why?” Sovereign sounded furious, but just a hint of weakness had crept into his voice. “How would you know—”

He shot through the air without much in the way of warning, and he was upon me, inches away. His hand flew to my throat and jerked me from the ground, fingers clutching around my windpipe. He lifted me off the concrete, and I could feel my vision darken, the sensation of being choked, of having the blood to my brain stopped. “You know what?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Because I am not going to take this shit from you. Not from you. All my work, all my efforts, none of them mean a damned thing without you, and I will not lose you. Not this close to—”

Chapter 56

The darkness closed around the edges of my vision, and sensation disappeared. My head drifted to a place I had been only a few days earlier, a place full of life and sensation, a place as far from a dark and dingy basement as could possibly be imagined.

It was a forest.

The sounds of living woods were all around me. I could hear the chirp of birds, the thrum of insects. The smell of fresh greenery had been in the air. The lovely warmth of the sun shone down upon my pale skin, and I lifted my face to it where it streamed through the canopy above.

I’d come here in my mind when I’d been in the box, on the plane. And ever since, it had been a memory that played in my head over and over, always at the surface.

And it was the thing I could not let Sovereign see.

Yet.

“Hello, Sienna Nealon,” came the voice of the girl standing across from me. “I have been waiting for this moment. I have been waiting here in the darkness.

“For you.”

“Adelaide,” I said and looked up into the sunlight. “It’s a pretty nice darkness you have here.”

“This is but a memory,” she said, and I saw the faint echoes of the girl who had once been Adelaide change, shift like an illusion wavering in the summer heat. “You are still in the darkness of your captivity.”

“I am,” I said, knowing it was true. “The Wolfe brothers … they’re going to—”

“Shhh,” she said, and her finger was upon my lips. “They are nothing. A worry for another time. I can teach you to make them as irrelevant to you as they are to the world at large. But there is a greater consideration that you need to be made aware of.”

“Sovereign,” I said.

“Sovereign,” she agreed and took a few steps back from me.

“You can teach me how to use my powers?” I asked. “Really? Truly?”

“I can teach you,” she said, nodding with that sense of peace I’d always associated with her. “But first I must impart to you something else. Something of vital importance.”

“All right,” I said. “Hit me.”

“I can feel your spirit flagging,” she intoned. “I can feel your strength waning. You are the last one who is able to fight, Sienna. You are the last to be able to take up this challenge. Omega fed me full of souls so that I could be ready to accept the mantle.” She lowered her head. “It was all against my will, of course. They made me a weapon and were to make me a bride sacrifice. I was told to follow whoever opened my tank, to become indebted and bonded to them. They meant to give me over to him if it came to it, and if he would not accept me, I was to fight and kill him.”

I swallowed. “But you didn’t.”

“Because you freed me,” she said, and she took my hands once more. “Because you saved me—”

“I led you to death,” I said, and closed my eyes. “I got you killed.”

“You let me see the sun once more,” she said. “You let me make my choices. I was not a pet, but they made me one. They took away my will, subordinated it to their own, and kept me in captivity where I could do nothing but witness the world roll by around me.” She turned her eyes to me. They found mine, and something like a fire roared inside them. “I know what comes,” she whispered.

The forest faded around us, and was replaced by something else entirely. Something … horrifying.

Black skies were clouded with a dense fog. The skeletons of buildings stretched around me in every direction. Girders and broken concrete were all that remained, like a tableau straight out of any post-apocalyptic CGI-fest you can imagine. It looked as though the whole world had been washed away by fire and destruction, and all that remained was ashes and bones of the civilization that had once been.

“What the hell is this?” I asked, staring at the horizon for any sign of life, of movement. There was no breeze and the air stunk of death and fire.

“This is the world as it will be if you fail,” she said. “This is what will remain if Sovereign has his way.” She stretched out a hand to encompass everything around us. “This is his legacy, what he will forge should you surrender.”

“My God, this is …” I looked at the nearest building, a structure where nothing remained but a half-foot wall with the occasional burnt wooden stud to mark what it had been. A massive maple had been turned utterly black in the yard beyond, and it took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. “This is my house.”

“And so will be the rest of the world,” Adelaide said, sounding like some sort of oracle. “I have seen it, and now I give it to you to be its keeper. Remember this moment each time you wish to give up. Remember in darkest night. I said to you once before that I would be waiting for you in the darkness. This is the darkness in which I have dwelled. This is the vision that Adelaide—not Andromeda—lived to pass along to you.” She took my hands in hers, and they felt warm. “Andromeda was a broken creature of men.” There was a subtle shift in her appearance, and I saw a faint hint of a mohawk replacing her long hair. “Adelaide fought to the last in hopes of finding a kindred soul to carry on with what she saw, with what she knew.” The British accent came full-on, damned near Cockney to my ears.

“I won’t forget,” I said, taking it all in once more. “I can’t … forget.”

“
Remember
,” she said, and it was a word that reverberated through my soul, soaking up all the sensation—the charred smell, the hot, dead air, the feeling of my flesh prickling—and filling the word with its essence. “Remember, and ready yourself for the moment when you will need it. He is the most base and deceitful of liars, and he thinks his world will be bright and glowing, not filled with ash and death borne of his fury and impatience and wrath.”

“I don’t think he’ll believe it,” I said. “But I’ll … keep it to myself”

“Until the moment you need it,” Adelaide said. “No man wants to know they’ve unmade the world while they’re trying to build it anew in their own vision.”

“I won’t let him see it,” I said. “I promise. And I will … remember.” The word send a stir through me, a sickening, rushing feeling that this was on me, that there was no one standing between the world I saw and the one I’d left outside the box before Frederick and Grihm had shut the door on me. “I won’t stop. Whatever it takes. I swear it.”

“Then I have but one final thing to teach you, Sienna Nealon,” Adelaide said, with a ghost of a smile. “One last thing to show you, and then you must go back into the darkness, then take your light out into the world that awaits …”

Chapter 57

Sovereign’s hand was around my throat and I didn’t care for it. I punched him in his, hard enough that he noticed it, then smacked his arm with enough strength to deaden the nerves for the second it took me to slip free. I landed and kicked him in the chest with a boot, flinging him into the concrete block wall, which shattered, sending dust into the basement air.

“Don’t touch me,” I said simply. I could feel the fury reverberate inside, though.

“Still don’t know … how you knew,” Sovereign grunted as he got back to his feet, dusting himself off. “No one knew but … Weissman and Claire and me … and I had her scooping out those memories whenever he had even a chance of running into a telepath without her …”

“I knew because a girl named Adelaide knew,” I said.

“Who?” He shook his head, partly in rage, partly in disbelief, partly in sheer frustration and WTF.

“She was a succubus,” I said, “who had a Cassandra-type shoved in her brain along with a ton of other metas so she could either be your bride or your worst enemy.” I sneered at him. “Care to guess which she turned out to be?”

“Ohhh,” he said, and the rage just pooled off of him. “You look so cocky, so smug, standing there. Like you have a chance. Like this isn’t going to be the fight you can’t win.” He snorted. “You think you’re done already.”

“Going by the numbers, I’d say I’m about ninety-nine percent done.” I cracked my knuckles. “One to go.”

“Well, that last percentage point is gonna be murder,” he said, and there was no trace of Joshua Harding in his features now. He was scorned, plain and simple, and his rage had taken over. “I’m going to—”