A familiar voice echoed through the corridor. “What you accomplished today was masterful, Saarg.” It was Lijjen, his clipped voice calm as if seated behind his desk and once again blaming her for things that were not her fault.
She closed her eyes, kept her mind still. She wouldn’t let him goad her. It wasn’t time to snap the glass tube at her feet. The gel needed more time to set.
“Truly, I underestimated you. I can’t guess how you learned of the laboratory.”
“The rest of my squad have no idea about this, Lijjen,” she called, allowing herself to sound hoarse, flustered. She didn’t need to try. The cadvers helped, their hissing and shrieking almost drowning her voice. “They know nothing. Don’t harm them.”
“I wouldn’t.”
Liar!
“You barely escaped your death in the wastes, and your complement have been suitably distracted. I let you live, and you repay me like this?”
The man really believed he was at the center of her world. Incredible.
“I won’t harm you if you come in, Lijjen. I don’t have a fatal weapon.” Anything to buy time.
There was whispering in the passageway. Lijjen stepped into view in his Keeper plate. Hard, with sharp edges. She kept her hands on her shockpole. His plate might absorb her concentrated shots if she tried it on him.
“You’re upset,” he said. “I understand. But whatever you hoped to accomplish, there is no way out. I promise you will die quickly. If you think there is a better option, I’d like to hear it.”
“We both know I’m dead, Lijjen. How I die doesn’t matter. Just tell me why.”
Lijjen’s posture relaxed. Terese shifted and the glass tube bumped against her boot.
“You came to us at an interesting time, Saarg. Recent, ah, discoveries brought to our attention have caused us to question the nature of our allegiances.”
“You want to rebel against the Royals, using modified cadvers because you can’t make golem? What is wrong with you?”
Lijjen shook his head like he was rolling his eyes behind his helmet. “Whoever sent you knows nothing. The hybrid cadvers are a first step, not the end-product. We have created something… wondrous.” He sounded so proud, so rational.
“Like what?”
“Something those within the Center have no answer for.”
“You can’t control it, Lijjen. It’ll backfire!”
There was a smile in his voice. “It works, Saarg. You’ve seen its handiwork.”
The slaughter she and her two missionaries had found in the Wastes? Or… the Immersion Chamber?
“The Royals will falter before us,” he continued. “Why should they have all the golem? If we Seekers were once a religious order and are now a military one, why should we not undergo another evolution? Given what we’ve learned these past years, we can become engineers!”
Terese recoiled. Gods. That had been the same rationale given to Holder Moorcam; encouraging a Seeker change of identity. Armer Stone had been told the Seekers might one day become ‘doctors’, and Sumad Reach had been promised they could become ‘engineers.’ All promises built on lies.
“Lijjen, you can’t fight evil with evil, no more than you can stay clean in a mudfight! It’s madness!”
“It’s temporary, Saarg.”
Had Lijjen been mindlocked like Jools, or not? There was no point asking. “Is it worth betraying the Founders, Lijjen?”
He chuckled. “Nothing in the charter bans Seekers from experimenting on cadvers.”
It was everything she expected from Lijjen. A defiance of the Charter’s spirit. His was a cynical repudiation of the obligation to protect the innocent. A man who’d knowingly done bad things, taking shelter in false righteousness. She’d known many like him: Cowards who lied about their intentions because their actions were despicable. As she’d done. It was how sociopaths like Lijjen rose to the top.
She cut him off mid-speech. “But how did you get the technology you’ve used on the cadvers? Where did the knowledge come from?”
He sounded irritated at the interruption. “A contact came across an archaeological dig further in.”
Antiques. Patzer.
“An unparalleled find, dating back to the Founding. Artifacts still working, humming with the power they were stowed with five thousand years ago. Can you imagine it?” He gestured excitedly. “We will do what no one has done before,” he declared. “We will overthrow the Royals!”
Oh, for the love of Polis!
“Lijjen, I know Patzer is being mind-controlled by the Darkness. What do you say to that?”
Lijjen’s helmet had tilted as if he were considering the question, then looked around like he were searching for something. Like… he hadn’t heard her.
“Lijjen? Patzer and the Darkness?”
He folded his arms and rocked back on his heels.
A figure in male Sumadan head plate rushed in. Lijjen snapped out of his trance. The head handed Lijjen a metallic tube. A bolt projector, she realized. With a pull of its trigger, compressed air would fling the metallic bolt waiting inside, and easily puncture her armor.
“Any last words?” he said.
Yes. Hopefully, she’d bought herself enough time. “Lijjen, do you know a guaranteed strategy to infiltrate a fortress vastly above your own strength?”
“No.” He raised the projector and aimed through the sighting ring at her helmet. She closed her eyes as she crushed the glass tube underfoot.
“Don’t plan on leaving alive.”
21
Lijjen snorted. “Not an unlikely—”
Nearby cage locks exploded in a crack of purple light, bright even behind closed eyelids. More explosions flared as her crushed tube’s evaporating particles expanded to the other cages, blowing them open. She opened her eyes as the bolt clanged into the bars near her head. The first explosion had knocked Lijjen down. He’d be blinded for a few moments.
The cadvers dragged, staggered and stepped from their cages. Cadvers didn’t scream when they found their targets, they made noises somewhere between howling and laughter.
Help rushed from the corridor to the flailing Lijjen. Armed missionaries should have made easy meat of a
