Space Invaders (48 page)

Armise coughed, barely restraining a chuckle. Neveed glared at him.

“He’s told you that you’ll be taking the first shot?” Neveed crooked his head in Armise’s direction.

I nodded. “I didn’t believe him when he said it. But I’m inclined to now.”

Neveed shuffled his feet and put his hands on his hips in a determined stance. It was a posture I was familiar with. One he used to assert his authority.

“It’s been decided,” he confirmed. “The President’s blatant show of support to your enemy, to an enemy of the States, secured that right for you. The Committee announced the decision moments ago.”

“They still believe he’s going to take out the President?” Armise asked.

Neveed nodded.

All of the pieces were coming together just as we’d planned when this operation started to take form over ten years ago with the announcement of the games. Taking out the Opposition leadership had always been my mission. But with the speed of transports and a general distrust for the Revolution’s willingness to abide by the treaty—getting the Premiere in a vulnerable enough position that I could take a shot at him had taken much longer than any of us could have anticipated. I breathed a quick sigh of relief. “So my identity as an agent for the Opposition—”

“Still stands,” Neveed answered, with surety.

I looked over my shoulder at Armise and asked, “Your identity as a Singapore soldier?”

Armise’s lips curved into a wicked smile. “Is bullshit.”

I had to stifle the sudden urge to smile back. Instead I kept my eyes locked to his when I asked, “And the rest?”

Armise’s smile dropped and the fierceness of emotion I saw—painted in the determined, rigid lines of his jaw and the unflinching gaze of his silver eyes—was so raw I had no choice but to believe him. “We no longer have to face each other as enemies.”

Neveed shifted from foot to foot as he impatiently waited for us to finish. He cleared his throat, breaking the thread of silent conversation between Armise and I. I dragged my eyes away from Armise and back to Neveed.

Neveed looked at his watch and then over his shoulder, in an uncharacteristic show of discomfort. “Listen. I’m glad you two know you have each other’s back now. That’s great. Really…” He stumbled over his words.

I had to keep from rolling my eyes. The last thing Neveed wanted was to see me with any other man besides him, but he’d given up that right years ago. Repairing our disjointed relationship was going to take time, but at least I had that now. I motioned for him to get on with it.

“…but we have a Premiere to assassinate. Despite all of these revelations, nothing with your original training, strategy or method has changed, Merq. You, more than any of us, know why this mission is so critical.”

I expected him to break into the Revolution platform at that point.

The world needs to understand the real cost of war.

We’ve become desensitised to death. It’s too quick. Too easy.

We’ve forgotten that freedom has a tangible price.

We cannot be ruled by one when the real power is in the many.

The voices of every teacher I’d ever had who repeated those words on a daily basis ricocheted through my consciousness. But they weren’t just words to me. They were a call to action and the foundation I’d built my life upon. I knew all the reasons why the Revolution was needed now more than ever. Why the President was the only person who could lead us through the upheaval that would happen when the Borders War was reignited.

I didn’t have to be reminded by Neveed or by anyone else why what I did today mattered, because I felt the rightness of our course of action in my soul. But that didn’t change the fact that decades-old rhetoric was about to morph into reality.

Revolution meant strife and unrest.

Real bullets meant blood and the mess of violent death.

I’d been trained almost my whole life for a time when real bullets would be used again. But that was when the words of Revolutionaries were grandiose theory. The ramifications of how different tomorrow would be were incapacitating.

I would be the one to ignite the fires of Revolution.

In all my years of training and preparation I’d never considered whether this calling had ever been my choice. I knew I’d been a pawn all along, but I’d never wondered if there was another tactical strategy that would allow me to still achieve the end goal without me losing myself in the process.

I believed in the Revolution, but Armise was right—the Revolution continued regardless of me.

That was what I’d realised when I tasted Armise’s blood and mine mixing together on my tongue—my life had been a series of setups and strategic moves, but no one had seen Armise coming. Let alone that he and I would forge a bond that couldn’t be separated by conflicting allegiances or the terror of war.

I had been meant to die on the opening ceremony platform tonight and instead Armise would be there to protect me. Armise was changing my destiny, and I owed him more than my life for that. I owed him trust and loyalty above the cause I’d been working my whole life to achieve.

He was the one thing in my life that was still my choice.

And I chose him above the Revolution.

The realisation would have felled a weaker man.

It didn’t change that I would see this mission through or that the outcome of the Premiere’s death was going to be war.

It meant that when the Revolution arrived, my loyalties would be with the man standing at my side. Not to a cause, and no longer with a country.

I crossed my arms, mirroring Neveed’s pose. In this position I was a head taller than him and almost twice as wide. “I never had any choice in this,” I challenged him. The truth of my role in the Revolution had never been hidden from me, but it had never been spoken aloud either.

Neveed stood stock still and met my eyes. Obviously he wasn’t uncomfortable with the answer. “You were created for this moment. From before birth,” he admitted in a low voice.

I wanted to rail. To protest. To have just one aspect of my life follow a path of some kind of normality. That even my conception had been under the auspices of my parents’ work with the Revolution—a cosmic roll of the dice for me to be the heir that they desired for the Merq Grayson name—felt like a slap in the face.

No.

It was an insult to them to think that they owed me any explanations. They might have never offered, but I had never demanded the information either. Part of the blame lay solidly with me and my willingness to put on blinders so I wouldn’t be distracted from my end goal.

I couldn’t be angry. Not with my parents and not with Neveed or the President. Because I was finally going to see my purpose fulfilled. And I would have the only man I trusted at my side when it happened.

It was as if Neveed could read the set of my shoulders, my blatant look of defiance, and he knew what I was thinking. “Armise will be there to protect you,” he assured me, his eyes flitting to Armise for only the briefest of seconds as if it was physically painful for him to maintain eye contact with the Singaporean. Neveed coughed. “He’s there to make sure you get out once the shot is made. He’s been implanted with a transport chip that is connected to your tracker. As soon as you make the hit he’s to deliver you to the President’s bunker. The Opposition is going to mobilise fast. Ahriman will be ready to step in as leader. But this time we have a distinct advantage. One they won’t see coming.”

It was an advantage I was shocked was still hidden at all. The Revolutionaries had been able to unlock enough of the infochip to discover the location of a cache of weapons everyone believed had been destroyed long ago. They’d also been able to glean enough from the digital records to begin manufacturing and stockpiling real guns, bullets and bombs. And that was just the beginning of the information reportedly contained on the chip.

“The artilleries are prepared?” Armise asked.

I raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t been lying when he said he knew everything.

“With Revolutionary forces on every continent,” Neveed confirmed. “They are stocked and ready for Grayson’s shot.” Neveed held out a closed fist to me. “Take this.”

I reached out my hand and felt a capsule drop into my palm. I tossed it into my mouth and swallowed. Obeying without thought for once.

Neveed winced again as he looked at my left eye. He shook his head and said, “We can’t make you pretty for the opening ceremony, that would defeat the purpose of the beating. But the surge will take care of any internal injuries from the attack. We need you to be scruffed up. Obvious that the President tried to take you out, but that you fought back and made it out alive.”

I felt the nanoparticles travelling through me, easing the throb in my kidneys and my shoulder. My muscles unknotted and the particles surged through the now dilated veins, stitching me back together internally. The throbbing in my head ceased. It was disconcerting to no longer feel the pain of my left eye yet not be able to open it. It didn’t matter whether I had use of it or not though. I’d picked off targets in situations where my vision was even more impaired.

Neveed passed another pill to Armise and he made sure to look at it before popping it into his mouth and dry-swallowing it. I could see the set of his shoulders change as the particles healed him too. But I got a perverse sense of satisfaction knowing the visible marks I had left on him would take days to heal.

I could feel my strength returning in waves and I no longer had to use all of my focus just to keep my body in check. It was only then that I realised there was a question I hadn’t asked. “My parents?”

Neveed grimaced and looked to Armise as if for help.

Armise moved a fraction closer to me. “They left the safe house.”

I erupted at Neveed. “Goddammit! What did I tell you?”

Neveed flinched but stood his ground. “It was their choice.”

“They shouldn’t have had one,” I said through a clenched jaw.

Armise’s hand on my arm stilled me. “Focus, Merq. They’ve been waiting for this moment for thirty years. You know that,” he said as if he understood them and their motivations.

Maybe he did. There was a lot I apparently didn’t know about the man standing next to me.

I took a deep breath. Thirty years ago my parents had used the attack on the capital to fake their deaths and set into motion a string of events that put me in the custody of the States so I would have a chance to undo the damage created by the invention of the sonicbullet. They’d sacrificed raising me, their son, because even at that young of an age I showed the same battle-ready temperament as Armise, who had been conscripted as a child. They’d given me up for the good of the Revolution. And waited thirty years for a chance to right the wrongs of a relative so distant that it shouldn’t have mattered—but it did.

I’d never questioned their decision because I felt the same pull they did. And yet I was furious. As soon as it was discovered they were alive they would become targets. Not because of a relative they never knew, or the name they bore as just as heavy a burden as I did, but because of me.

Neveed looked at his watch again. “I’ve got to get back to the locker room. You have five minutes and then I’m sending the trainers down to the tunnels to find you. Armise needs to be gone by then.”

“I don’t need any time,” Armise said, and started to follow Neveed.

I grabbed Armise’s arm and stopped him from walking away. Neveed glanced over his shoulder one last time. “Five minutes,” he reminded us as he continued towards the mouth of the tunnel. Neveed knew the five minutes weren’t for Armise. They were for me.

Armise stared at where my right hand was curled around his bicep. His arms were massive and yet my hand could nearly circle around the muscle. I waited until I could hear Neveed’s heavy footfalls passing through the door before I asked Armise, “How long?”

Armise didn’t have to ask me to clarify. He knew I was asking how long he’d been working for the States. He stood stock still as he answered. “Since the DCR standoff.”

I sucked in a breath. Twelve years. He’d been my ally for twelve years. Of everything today, this moment was the first where I struggled with what to say next.

I stared at him for a minute that dragged on even though I knew I was wasting time. There was just too much I wouldn’t know until this was all over. When we could finally be alone again. And knowing the hell we were walking into, Armise and I probably wouldn’t have a chance to be alone for weeks. Possibly months.

If we survived that long.

Suddenly I ached to go back in time. For it to be last night, when he had his arms wrapped around me and the world wasn’t falling apart around us. Regret was not an emotion I was familiar with and one that I quickly decided didn’t suit me well.

I dropped my hand from his arm and turned my back on him. It had been years since I’d worried about exposing my back to him. Which for some reason, my teetering sanity being the most likely culprit, I found very funny. I chuckled loudly. My laughter was tinged with nerves, more pressure release than happiness, and the oddest thought struck me.

I turned and pointed at his left hand where my escape from that standoff in the DCR was forever marked. “Did you start working for the States before or after I chopped off your finger?”

Armise held up his hand and grinned. “Before.”

Shit.

My laughter was cut short and disappeared into the blackness surrounding us. We were left with silence.

I remembered the aftermath of that standoff. Of the people who had taken me in and given me medical treatment that had saved my life. The same people who had ensured I made it back to the States alive, with the infochip in my possession.

I remembered that vision of a bandaged hand, caring for me after my collapse in the desert. A vision I had been sure at the time wasn’t real.

“It was you who got me out,” I whispered.

“Barely,” Armise ground out.

I could tell there was more to that story. A story we didn’t have time to discuss.

I ran my fingers through my hair. My body was a ball of exposed nerves and anxious energy.