Chapter 44
MIA
I come to slowly, like swimming up through tar.
Everything hurts. My face, my ribs, my wrists where the restraints have bitten down to raw meat.
My mouth tastes metallic and there’s a gap where my molar used to be, my tongue probing the wound before I can stop it.
Pain flares and I almost slip back under, back to the dark place where nothing can reach me.
But something is different, the air feels different, the smell familiar…
I force my good eye open—the other one won’t cooperate, swollen shut and throbbing—and the first thing I see are boots. Black boots, military grade, standing right in front of me.
I know those boots.
My gaze travels upward. Black tactical suit. Broad shoulders. Arrow symbol. Hands curled into fists at his sides, trembling slightly, like he’s fighting something.
Vanguard.
Nate.
He’s staring down at me, blank and empty behind the eyes. Like someone’s reached inside and scooped out everything that made him him. I’ve seen that expression before.
Behind him, I can see Julia, holding something small and dark in her hand, watching me, us, with interest. And beyond her, by the door, is Conrad Marsh, his expression apprehensive, as if he’s waiting for something to happen.
I know what that something is.
I know what they’ve asked him to do.
The ultimate obedience test.
“Nate,” I manage, and my voice comes out as a croak, shredded from screaming. “Nate, look at me.”
He doesn’t respond. Doesn’t even blink. Just takes another stiff step forward, and his hand comes up toward my throat.
“That’s it,” Julia murmurs from the doorway. “Good boy.”
His fingers close around my neck.
The pressure is immediate, crushing, and I can’t breathe, can’t think, black spots already dancing at the edges of my vision.
His grip is impossibly strong—of course it is, he could snap my spine without effort, could crush my windpipe like tissue paper—and I’m going to die here, in this white room, at the hands of the man I—
No.
Not like this.
I reach up with hands that are clumsy and weak, the restraints not letting me stretch very far, and I grab his chin. Force him to look at me. His eyes are a husk but I stare into them anyway, searching for something, anything.
“Nate.” It comes out as a wheeze, barely a whisper. “I know you’re in there.”
The pressure increases. My vision starts to tunnel.
“I know—” I’m choking now, the words barely forming. “I know what they did to you. I know it’s not your fault. But you have to fight it. Please.”
Nothing. His face is a mask. Julia’s voice drifts in from somewhere far away: “Finish it, Vanguard. Complete your mission.”
My lungs are burning. Seconds left. Maybe less.
I stop fighting his grip. Let my hands fall from his face to rest on his forearms.
“It’s okay,” I whisper, knowing that I might not reach through him this time and knowing there’s some part of him that is still inside, still hearing me. “It’s okay, Nate. I forgive you.”
Something flickers in his eyes.
“I forgive you,” I say again, or try to—there’s no air left, the words are just shapes my lips are making—“for Cal. For this. For everything.”
He blinks, shakes his head.
“Milkshake,” I whisper.
The flicker becomes a tremor. His whole body shudders. And then—
He lets go.
I suck in a breath so sharp it feels like inhaling glass, coughing and gasping, and when I look up at him through streaming tears his face has changed.
The emptiness is cracking apart like an egg.
His eyes are wet. His hands are shaking violently now, and he’s staring at them like he doesn’t recognize them, like they belong to someone else.
“Mia,” he breathes. His voice breaks on my name. “Oh god. Mia.”
“There you are,” I manage, and I’m crying too now, or maybe I’ve been crying this whole time, it’s hard to tell when one eye is swollen shut and the other is blurred with tears and blood. “There you are.”
He reaches for me—gentle this time, so gentle, his fingers brushing my bruised cheek—and his face crumbles.
“I almost—”
“But you didn’t,” I whisper roughly. “You—”
A sharp electronic beep cuts through the moment.
Julia. She’s pressing buttons on her remote frantically, her composure finally cracking. “Vanguard. Comply. I said comply—”
Nate moves so fast he becomes a blur.
One second he’s in front of me, the next he’s across the room, the remote crushed to fragments in his fist. Julia gasps, stumbles backward, but he’s already grabbed her by the hair, lifting her clean off the ground.
Her feet kick uselessly in the air, her heels flying off.
She claws at his wrist, making sounds I’ve never heard from her—high, panicked, human.
“Marsh!” she shrieks. “Call Paragon! Get reinforcements, NOW!”
I see Marsh’s face through the observation window—pale and terrified—and then he bolts from the room.
“You think you can just—” Julia is snarling now, even while dangling from Nate’s grip, her hair taut against her reddening scalp. “You’re mine, Vanguard. I made you. I can unmake you just as easily!”
Nate throws her like he’s swinging a cat.
She hits the wall hard enough to dent the plaster, crumpling to the floor in a heap of navy silk. He doesn’t even look at her—he’s already moving, already going after Marsh.
“The restraints,” I call after him, my voice still ravaged. “Nate, the restraints…”
He stops and turns back, crosses to me in two strides and the metal buckles snap like plastic under his hands. My wrists scream with relief, blood rushing back into my fingers.
“Stay here,” he says, his jaw tight, eyes hard. “I need to deal with Marsh.”
I open my mouth to call him back but he’s already gone, disappearing through the observation room and into the corridor beyond.
Seconds later, I hear screaming. I don’t know Marsh well enough to recognize his voice, but I know terror when I hear it. The screams rise in pitch, then cut off abruptly, replaced by sounds I don’t want to identify.
Wet sounds.
Final sounds.
It’s disgusting but warranted, and I feel a twinge of satisfaction.
A groan steals my attention from the corner of the room.
Julia is trying to get to her feet. Her hair has come loose from its perfect chignon, blood trickling her forehead. She’s muttering something—calling for security on some kind of sub-dermal comm, maybe, or just cursing Nate’s existence.
It takes everything I have to stand. My legs don’t want to hold me, my ribs scream with every breath. But I make it upright, stagger across the room, and when Julia finally looks up, I’m right there in front of her.
“You—” she starts.
I grab her face roughly with both hands, my fingernails digging in.
And I press my lips to hers and kiss her.
It’s revenge, pure and simple, fifteen years of isolation and rage and grief channeled into this one act. I make sure it’s deep. I make sure it counts.
When I pull back, Julia’s eyes are already going wide. “No!” she cries out. “You didn’t. You—”
I know it takes time for them to die but it’s working fast on her. Her hands fly to her throat. Her mouth opens and closes, foam bubbling at her lips, and she makes a gurgling sound that might be my name or might be a curse or might just be the sound of her body realizing what I’ve done to it.
She collapses.
I watch her lying on the on the white floor, trying to take in air, her designer clothes soaking up the spittle and bile, and I think about Cal. About Bayo and Kat’s faces in those photos. About every bruise on my body, every question Keller asked while his fists did the talking.
“That’s for all of them,” I whisper.
I don’t stay to watch her die.
I half-stagger, half-limp into the chaos that is the corridor.
Marsh is—was—about ten feet from the observation room door. I can tell where he fell because there’s blood everywhere, arterial spray painting the pale green walls like abstract art. And the body…
I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies but this—
This is something else.
Conrad Marsh is in pieces. Literally. His arms are several feet from his torso, as are his legs.
His chest has been caved in. Below that, intestines and organs snake across the floor.
His face is frozen in an expression of absolute terror, and his eyes—still open—seem to follow me as I step carefully around what’s left of him.
Nate is standing at the end of the corridor, his back to me. His hands are red to the elbows. His shoulders are heaving with each breath.
“Nate?”
He doesn’t turn around. “Don’t look at him.”
“Too late for that.”
His head goes back as if to ask the ceiling for help and I hear him swallow. “He was running. He was going to call Paragon. I had to—”
I reach him, touch his arm. The muscle jumps under my fingers. “You did what you had to do.”
Even if you literally tore him limb from limb like an animal.
“Did I?” He finally turns, and his eyes are haunted. “Or did I just do what they programmed me to do? Kill on command. Follow orders. Be the weapon they built.”
“You’re not a weapon. You’re a man who just saved my life.”
“After I almost ended it,” he cries out softly.
“But you didn’t.” I grip his arm harder. “You didn’t, Nate. That’s what matters. You had their voice in your head, their commands, their bloody programming, and you still chose to stop. That’s not a weapon. That’s a person. You have your own free will and you chose it. You’re free from this now.”
He shakes his head. “I’ll never be free as long as…” he trails off, looks toward the room.
I give him a gentle, somewhat apologetic smile. “She won’t be a problem anymore. You’re no longer on her leash.”
That’s all I want to say, all I need to say. I know his relationship with Julia was complicated, sometimes familial. He doesn’t need to know the details.
He nods and I can see him pushing that info away to face later, the same thing I keep having to do. “We need to move,” he says. “Marsh got a message out before I—” He glances at the remains and doesn’t finish the sentence. “Paragon’s coming. And security.”