Chapter 3 #3
It isn’t like throwing him, and it isn’t like the pulls I’ve done before, a shoulder out of its socket, a knee folded sideways, a man down but a man still shaped like a man.
This is their power closing its hand on every point at once, and the guard makes a sound that has no scream in it, because a scream needs a breath and the thing I did took the breath along with whatever was keeping him up.
He folds, every piece of him arriving at the floor in the wrong order.
I look away. Too late, always too late to un-see the thing you’ve already seen.
Don’t think about that. Keep moving.
The next one I catch cleaner. I’ve learned in the space of one guard that with their telekinesis in the channel I can’t aim my own reach.
I can only point it and brace. It throws the second guard into the concrete hard enough that he doesn’t get up.
The third I take with their power roaring up through me, more than I’ve ever channeled, and somewhere at the edge of it I can feel the cost stacking, a fever climbing my spine, my hold on it slipping.
Then the air behind my left shoulder cracks.
I turn into it a full second too late, and I watch a crossbow bolt come apart three feet from my back.
Not deflected. Taken apart, shaft and head and fletching separating in the air, pieces raining across the concrete, and below my navel the twins’ power is already settling, finished.
I never saw the shooter. I never heard the shot. They did.
The wolves close on the west team before a second bolt exists.
Thank you, I tell them, and under my navel something turns over once, and settles.
Don’t lose it. You lose it and someone on our side is the nearest thing.
That’s the fear Marcellus built the floor around. I feel our people doing exactly what he briefed, clearing back from me, giving the blast nowhere to land but the enemy, and I love them for it and I hate that they have to.
A man in a loyalist’s gray steps out of the comms room with his hands raised, not in surrender, in display, the smug calm of someone who thinks he has a card to play.
“The investment,” he says. “He’ll want to know the condition you’re in when we send you back. He does so like to track how his property does under…”
The temperature drops.
I feel it before I understand it, the air going wrong and cold, and the shadows that were spread across the floor stop being a tool and become intent.
They climb the walls. They find the baseboards and pour upward, black and silent, and the smug calm leaves the loyalist’s face as Maximus crosses the space between them without seeming to hurry at all.
He doesn’t raise his voice.
“You will not touch her,” he says. “You will not send her anywhere. You confused which of us is the danger in this room. It’s the last thing you’ll ever confuse.” The shadows close around the man’s throat, unhurried. “She could end you herself. I’m only making sure I get there first.”
He ends him. I don’t watch that either. I have enough of my own to not watch tonight.
We clear it room by room. The hub has seven operational spaces beyond the main corridor, server rooms and comms centers and a med station that tells me Konstantin kept his people healthy enough to work and not healthy enough to leave.
The seventh room is a records vault. Paper and digital, redundantly stored, because Konstantin kept physical copies of everything.
Julian’s team hits the servers. I stand at the vault door and look at filing cabinets labeled with dates that span decades, the bureaucracy of a monster who filed his crimes alphabetically and kept receipts.
The hub goes from screaming to silent with very little in between, and then it’s just us and the wolves and the wreckage and the smell of blood on concrete.
“Hub’s clear,” Marcellus says in my ear. “Perimeter locked.”
I should feel the win. I don’t, yet. Everything is still running too high under my skin and won’t come down, and there’s the other thing, the one I’ve been sitting with since the dream rooftop without knowing it.
There’s a room in the eastern structure the surveillance couldn’t account for.
I find it before anyone routes me to it.
Since the twins’ power started moving through me, everything registers differently, and this registers loudest. A pull, a wrongness.
The corridor runs cold and this one door runs warm, climate held constant behind it, power feeding it that has nothing to do with comms or containment.
Maximus’s exact description from the dream rooftop.
I put my hand on the door and the gift maps the lock without my asking, and I open the door.
A room. Lived in. I know this kind of room because Simone was kept in one, and the knowing puts a taste in my mouth that has nothing to do with blood and everything to do with captivity.
Someone built this space to hold a person indefinitely and made it comfortable.
The bed is made. Clean sheets. The chair has a cushion.
There are books on the shelf, real books, curated.
A vase on the nightstand with dried flowers in it.
Konstantin cared enough for flowers and not enough for a key.
And a woman standing in the middle of it, turned toward the door, already facing whatever walks in.