Chapter 2
Still He Refused
In the beginning it was dark.
Four concrete walls, concrete ceiling, concrete floor. Windowless.
Evan Smoak had been taken. He didn’t know how. The circumstances of his capture hovered back in the haze somewhere before this present flash of consciousness.
It was not entirely unexpected; perhaps it was inevitable. In defiance of the law of man, country, and more, he had killed.
And killed and killed and killed.
He’d been chased from a fugitive’s hide into the blinding light of day. Taken hard to the ground, rending the flesh of knees, chest, and chin. Blindfold cinched tight, spit hood over his head, manacles binding hands and feet.
He’d been interrogated. Called to account for every aspect of his sordid past, pressured by fist and fiat to justify his very unsanctioned existence.
Each trespass magnified to eclipse whatever humanity he had retained.
Each fact decontextualized. Each choice filtered through a prism of worst-imagined intentions, transformed into something worse than a lie, an untruth.
Demands were made—to apologize, to affirm what he didn’t believe, to bend the knee.
To consent to a false story of himself, a hammered-flat narrative far removed from the actual sins he carried in the chinks and fissures of his heart.
But he refused to yield.
He refused to break his code.
He’d been enclosed in this concrete box and questioned with greater enhancement.
Fingernails and car batteries. Cattle prod in his side.
Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, static blaring through headphones duct-taped to his head, a crown of anguish.
Sweat wrung from his pores spattered the concrete, matching spots of a darker hue.
Still he refused to break his code.
His face, released to the media, shot through the veins and arteries of the known universe.
Orphan X revealed, exposed. Salacious and damning details propagated through roaring algorithms. War criminal.
Terrorist. Fascist. Islamophobe. Killer of Jews.
Murderer of Christians. Deep-state operative.
Alt-right. Radical left. Anarchist. Instrument of the irredeemably corrupt.
Enemy of institutions. Deranged psychopath.
Traitor. Committer of high treason. Unraveler of order.
An endless, continuous, exhaustive public accounting of his soul was undertaken. Every act imagined or real was spun and bastardized and toxified. The filth of the world pulsed in quickening waves, a feeding frenzy of escalation, of projection, of insanity itself.
Still he refused to break his code.
He was hauled before a grand jury, ordered to spill details of his secret training, to betray his mentor, to bear outsize responsibility for the transgressions of the system that had broken and remade him in its own image.
Still he refused to break his code.
He was sentenced.
They fetched him from the concrete box. He was marched, chains ghostily clanking, to an antiseptic room with a one-way mirror, sterile lighting, and moppable white tiles. A doctor awaited and a warden and a man of supposed faith. An array of lenses readied to stream his fate to the world.
He was placed upon the cushioned table, ankles bound, arms strapped to the cross’s horizontal, spread angel-like. They slid a needle into the femoral vein of his left thigh.
The syringes were lined up, one, two, three, automated so no human hand would have to bear responsibility for the final push.
They asked him for any last words.
Still he refused to break his code.
He turned his head as the first syringe depressed. He watched the blue liquid inch through the clear plastic line and enter his leg.
He felt fire in the meat of his thigh and then radiating through his arteries.
Flayed open, bared to the world, he closed his eyes—
—and awakened.
Floating several feet above the floor of his penthouse condo on the twenty-first story of the Castle Heights Residential Tower.
Atop a mattress that was in turn set atop a metal slab that was propelled upward by powerful neodymium rare-earth magnets and tethered by steel cables.
A push-pull mirroring the endless battle in his battle-weary heart.
The battle to be the brutal thing of darkness he was.
And to remain human.
For a long time he breathed the dark air of earliest morning, wisps of the dream catching in his mind.
That windowless box. A towering bench so high he’d seen only the facade of dark wood and no judge above.
The many-eyed stare of the lenses, windows to the world, watching greedily as the syringes sank to push their poison into his blood.
He took it in, all the poison of the world.
He took it.
And then he arose.