"I want you to live, Pete," Charlotte said in the softest of voices as we lay together in the darkness. "I don't mean not killing yourself or just waiting patiently to die, but I want you to really live. Live like there is no tomorrow because tomorrow you will wake up, and then you get to do it all over again until your tomorrows run out." Her caramel curls, lighted by the glow of a lamp on the other side of the room, cascaded over her shoulders as she leaned on her elbow beside me in bed. "I know you are hurting, and I may never be able to understand how much, but your life can't only be about vengeance and justice because eventually, this war will be won, and you will have to go back to living a life. Your life... I didn't know Faye, but I knew Becky, and I know she wouldn't have wanted this to be your life."
There wasn't any real way for me to answer that, so I didn't. I just nodded my head and looked up at her. I knew, deep down, that she was right. In my heart of hearts, I knew that I had given no thought at all to what life would be like once the people responsible for all these deaths were finally brought to justice - when the rogues were completely destroyed. The problem just seemed so big, so insurmountable; it had been less than two months, but my involvement in this war already felt like it had gone on forever, and we were still nowhere near victory. Hell, we still weren't entirely sure who we were fighting.
The thought of a life after this war was nothing more than a whisper of a conceptual shadow.
My case, ready for the trip to Ukraine, was packed and standing by the door, and one of my closest friends was naked in my bed, leaning over me with nothing but affection and warmth in her eyes. She had helped me tear Toussant to pieces; neither one of us felt even the smallest shred of remorse for that, but there was a big difference between a single act of justice, even revenge, and the drumbeat of an endless war. She was right; it would have to end one day. But that point was just so far away that simply conceiving of it seemed just too remote to even try. There was still so far to go before this journey could be called complete.
"I know," I finally whispered into the fading light.
"Don't let them claim your soul, Pete," she sighed back to me, finally resting her head on my shoulder and sighing again as I started to run my fingers through her glossy hair. "Don't lose yourself to this. You're worth more than that. And if they take that from you, no matter what you do or how many of them you hunt down, you will already have lost. Please, just... be careful."
I let my hand reach up to stroke my palm along her cheek, watching her as she turned her head to nuzzle against it and plant a kiss on my warm skin while Faye purred loudly in my head. "I'll come back," I said behind a soft smile.
She kissed my hand again. "You are the best friend I have."
The scene started to fade, the lamp in the corner growing steadily dimmer as I kept my eyes on Charlotte. The room around us, the case by the door, the lamp itself, and the bed we were lying in, all of it fading into nothingness as the night consumed the memory until Charlotte's affectionately smiling face was all that remained. Then that, too, melted into the darkness.
The screen on the side of my bunker wall turned itself off as the memory of my night with Charlotte ended. There was something about the way she said it, "
Don't lose yourself,"
that seemed to hold extra meaning for me now, as if she could see it coming. I had never been an open book, I had never been easy to read, and yet, perhaps, Charlotte had seen that tenuous grasp on my humanity faltering even before I did. Although I suppose, watching what I had done to Toussant in the aftermath of Becky's death would have been more than enough evidence of that. She had assisted, of course, but she had taken no righteous joy out of it.
I had.
Her whispered warning, in the darkness of that night, was now starting to look more like a pleading request for me to tighten my hold on the goodness in me. A warning I had completely failed to heed and, instead, had sunken further into the depths of my own violent depravities. Faye's theory may have made a lot of sense, but in no way brought my overwhelming anger under control. Judging by my simmering anger at Jakob for halting my assault on and destruction of the Russian convoy, I wasn't even close.
And yet, I knew he had been right. I had known it when he gave that order; it was the only thing that had stopped me from pulling that trigger despite his advice. It's not like he could have stopped me. I could have obliterated that convoy with only a few half-practiced thoughts, and yet I had let him talk me down.
Maybe I had allowed myself to believe that we really were going to
"hunt them down"
the next morning despite it obviously being a turn of phrase. It was the equivalent of 'we live to fight another day'... and I
knew
that. So why was I so angry when, the next morning, we had 'requisitioned' an SUV from a street close to the stadium and - instead of following the Convoy south - we had headed west toward Horlivka?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn't really angry at Jakob but at the Russians who had been allowed to escape. But again, why? I hadn't been angry with the Russians who had given us a ride to the internment camp before them. Hell, I had even advocated for them to be allowed to leave unharmed. If they were innocent soldiers, just following orders, albeit fighting on the wrong side of history, why had I felt such hostility toward the men in that convoy? Why had I felt enough pure loathing that I only managed to stop myself from utterly destroying them because of the risk of death to my allies?
And why did my mind flash back to that pile of dead every time I thought of them?
The answer was already there, right under the surface. Somewhere in that group of Russian soldiers was a man who had cast his mind to the act of butchering them, maybe a group of them, but my mind had picked up on it. The Russians in our truck had been innocent. The men in that convoy, even if only a handful of them, even if only one of them, were not.
Which meant that I had let them go.
I had robbed those victims of justice. I had lost - maybe forever - the one chance we had of finding out what happened to Bob's people, if they had been among the men and women so callously dumped into that pile and what had happened to them and the other innocent people if they were not. The one chance I had to find out where they had been taken had been allowed to drive off into the night. There is no way Jakob could have known that when he gave his order. I knew that without having to look into his mind... but
I
knew it.
Hell, I could have just sat there, looking out that office window, and mined the minds of the men in that parking lot for information, putting nobody at risk at all, gotten what I needed, and acted from there.
But I hadn't put the pieces together until much later on. The internal editing station had given me the ability to filter out all the innocuous thoughts that bounced around inside my head from every human mind for thousands of miles. It had been overwhelming, psychosis-inducingly so. So I filtered them out. But in filtering them out, I had, on several occasions now, missed information that I needed to know.
It would seem that being all-powerful did not make one infallible.
All I could do was simmer in my own loathing, at my own failings, and studiously refuse to look Bob in the eyes. It wasn't only myself who I had failed. I ground my teeth in frustration as my mind stepped back into reality, and the dim light of the bunker gave way to the early hour dawn of snow-swept Eastern Ukraine.
The dull, rumbling throb of the SUV's wheels running over surprisingly intact back roads gave the silence in the vehicle an ominous, if hypnotic, soundtrack. Gabriel was driving, Jakob was upfront with him, and the other three of our escorts - Hans, Karl, and Antoni - were packed in behind them. Bob and I were in the back.
Bob was on the phone.
My enhanced hearing was picking up both ends of the conversation whether I wanted it to or not, and I was... maybe "forced to listen" is not the right term, but I was certainly privy to the fearful, almost inconsolable sobs over the line as he relayed what we had found so far to Isabelle. As much as Bob was preemptively grieving the potential deaths of his brethren, the Princess was inconsolable. It was a deep, maternal, familial pain; I could hear it in her voice. It was more akin to a mother helplessly fearing for her children than a superior checking after her subordinates.
I had no idea how the Inquisition viewed its members; I knew nothing of the culture or the relationship between members, and - to my mind at least - the fact that individual Inquisitors held no loyalty to any individual royal but to whichever one governed the area in which they operated, flew in the face of the idea that any sort of relationship could be built between the higher and lower echelons of Inquisition society. And yet, Isabelle was crying. Weeping in a way that only a deep, meaningful bond could allow. The devastation in her voice at the thought of her people being in that pile and the dread at the idea that they weren't but were still missing was - in a word - haunting.
This was not the battle cry of rage; it was not that coiling anger being unleashed, nor was it any of the other emotions I had felt in the past few weeks. It was pure grief, the one feeling I had forbidden myself from feeling since the loss of Faye. It was listening to the fraying of a soul, and it was excruciating.
Bob's face still hadn't regained its color.
I couldn't blame him for a moment.
Finally, the call finished, and Bob, looking about as drained as he probably felt, cast a glance over at me and offered me the satellite phone. "It's secure," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
I nodded and took it. I looked at it for a few moments before starting to punch in a number. I had no one to call. I would
