CHAPTER THIRTEEN #2
‘I get this intense pain in my ears, then I start feeling dizzy and sick. If I get too far from the Tower, I can barely stay standing. I guess it’s because of the trauma from…
’ He scowls harder. ‘Whatever happened seven years ago. The point is, I can’t leave.
I’m not authorised to leave the grounds and even if I was, physically, I don’t think I can. ’
Tears sting behind his eyes for numerous reasons.
Admitting any kind of weakness is always a brittle thing.
Kade has to be careful not to cut himself on the sharper parts of himself, but it’s more than pride or shame.
It’s the grief of it too. The dreams he has about the city.
Dancing, just like Lachlan said. Seeing places beyond the Tower and the surrounding woods.
He kept hoping it would improve with time, but whenever he tries sneaking beyond the grounds, the symptoms hit hard.
The first few times he barely managed to make it back under his own steam.
The last time, Riley came to find him collapsed and brought him back inside.
That was humiliating enough that he stopped trying afterwards.
The medics all insist it’s common in people who’ve suffered severe TBIs.
But God, he hates it.
Kade sniffs, forcibly levels himself out and then looks at Lachlan, whose gaze has gone from openly confused to quietly horrified.
‘I mean, don’t get all choked up.’
‘Is it a specific distance?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is it roughly the same distance away from the Tower?’
‘I can walk the grounds fine. It’s only ever when I try to leave. The medic I spoke to about it said that to leave a place of safety can induce a trauma response.’
‘Do the others leave via the grounds?’
‘No, of course not. They leave via the tunnels, with permission.’
‘And you’ve never had permission.’
‘I’ve been out, Tanner,’ he snaps.
‘In a car?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not on foot?’
‘Oh my God, you’re so boring. Can we stop—?’
‘Show me the boundary.’
‘What?’
‘The point you can’t go beyond. Show it to me.’
Kade grits his teeth. ‘Forget for a second that I’m hardly gonna give you a guided tour of Iron Star’s security—’
‘Which I steamrolled.’
‘—but did you not hear what I just said? I get sick if I try. It hurts.’
‘So just point me to it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ Lachlan says, voice hoarse, ‘I think maybe an old friend of mine has helped your boss build some of the Tower’s security.’
‘Talking in riddles isn’t exactly—’
‘Just—!’ Lachlan shakes his head, eyes closed. ‘Just take me to the border.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Kade mutters under his breath. ‘Fine.’
?
Kade trudges through nettles, thorns, thistles and burdock, following the same route he’s tried to take several times before.
Every attempt ended the same way. The closer he got, the worse it became, first the dread, sudden and overwhelming, then hideous dizziness and a vicious fucking headache that drove him back to the Tower half-blind, head swimming, debilitated.
He has no intention of testing it again today, but he can at least show Lachlan the point where it starts. Crows caw from the tops of the dark trees. Kade hangs back when he sees the point looming up ahead.
‘It’s there. Past the big tree, about thirty paces.’ Being this far from the Tower is making him nervous, light sweat stinging in his armpits from the memory of all the times before. PTTCD is fucking brutal.
He’d do anything to fix it.
Lachlan stomps on, casting around, rifling through overgrowth, pulling ivy from the base of a tree, heedless of nettles and thorns. ‘Could be subterranean installation,’ he says, mostly to himself.
‘Are you gonna explain—?’
‘I invented it,’ he cuts in, visibly terse, ‘ten years ago. I had a friend who could craft pretty much anything. I got her out of a tight spot once, we stayed friends. I had her make an acoustic perimeter field weapon.’
‘What did it do?’
‘It induced nausea and imbalance by targeting the inner ears. It was debilitating. No one could withstand it. It would have been set up as a barrier between the grounds and the outside world, that was my plan, but I never implemented it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I didn’t think it up to keep people out,’ he admits.
‘You created it to keep the kids inside?’
‘I said I never implemented it.’
‘But, what? You think my boss did?’
‘Exactly.’
‘If he did then it was to keep people out,’ Kade insists, hackles rising once more even while a few things quietly make sense in the back of his head. ‘Not to keep us in.’
‘Just you, Kade.’
‘No.’
‘Doesn’t seem to be on right now. Did you ever try to leave during the day?’
‘Obviously not.’
‘Then it may well be a defensive measure, but it makes a lot of sense that’s what you encountered. I’ve never in my life heard of PTTCD.’
‘You’ve been in prison for a long time, and my boss would have told me if we had this kind of thing installed. He would have told me what was causing me to… to feel that way. I’m head of security, I oversee—’
‘Are you being purposefully stubborn or can you really not see it? He’s keeping you prisoner just like your father!’
‘I’m his bodyguard!’
‘The Riley Harker I knew of would never have needed one! Why do you think his own father locked him up like that?’ he demands, gesturing to the top of the Tower as he strides over to Kade. ‘He’s older than you!’
‘Riley doesn’t handle things like other people, you don’t know him.’
‘He’s got you trapped, Jules.’
‘My name is Kade.’
‘He’s fucked with your head making you think you have a condition when actually, it’s the Hush Line I created and didn’t stoop low enough to use.’
‘Shut up!’
‘You’re his prisoner. He just gave you a job so you wouldn’t be bored.’
Kade punches him.
The punch cracks across Lachlan’s mouth hard enough to split his lip. He goes quiet instantly, barely even rocked by the impact, blood trailing briefly down his chin before the wound seals itself shut again. Breathing hard, Kade shakes his hand, knuckles sore, but he doesn’t care.
‘If you ever say anything like that again—’
‘Ask him, then.’ Lachlan swallows his own blood. ‘Go ask him about the Hush Line. Ask him how you got that metal plate in your head and how you came to be here seven years ago and why you don’t remember anything.’
‘There’s plenty of people here who have memory loss! It’s not uncommon, even Luca doesn’t remember a lot of his childhood!’
‘Ask your boss who you really are!’
‘Don’t you dare tell me what to do, you fucking piece of shit! I’m not the one who locked those kids up and let them die!’
Lachlan tongues the healed split and looks away. ‘Fine, I’ll prove it then.’
‘How?’
‘Tonight. Be here when it’s dark. I’ll switch it off and show you what it really has been all this time.
’ Lachlan walks away, goes past the point Kade never has, not that way.
Every time he’s gone into the city has been in a car with Riley, and it was Kade’s responsibility to keep him safe every single time.
His magnetic field is Riley, and he never left it.
‘Where are you going?’
Lachlan doesn’t answer.
?
Kade is headed for Riley’s floor when he runs into Seth
‘Hey, man.’
‘Hey, I was looking for you,’ Seth says, eyeing Kade carefully.
They’d sparred earlier, the two of them.
Kade took every bad hit Seth had to give, kept the pads high and then dropped them when only skin on skin would do.
He can’t imagine losing a sibling, let alone a twin, but Seth, like everyone in Iron Star, is a professional.
Whatever he’s feeling, work comes first. ‘You good?’
‘Uh, yeah, yeah sure. Actually no, I’m not. I need to see the boss.’
‘You were with the Paranatural, right?’
‘It’s fine, I just—’
‘You can’t let him fuck with your head,’ Seth says, quietly insistent.
‘That’s what they do, the other types too.
They poison you from the inside out. I know the boss has a…
’ Seth drops his voice all the way down into a harsh whisper, ‘a soft spot for them but he’s not out there on the streets.
He doesn’t see what I see. He doesn’t know what I know.
These fucking things aren’t natural. My dad used to write letters to us when we were kids.
He told me they make you feel things you wouldn’t otherwise. They’re all just—’
‘Seth,’ Kade says, a little sharp. ‘I need to see the boss.’
It works. Seth reels at first but then settles into neutral acceptance, jaw working. He steps away. ‘Sure. We’ll talk later.’
Kade takes the service stairs to the fifth floor and when he enters the Watch, he stops dead. Riley, Cole, and Finn are inside, but someone unexpected.
‘Lee.’
Three pairs of eyes swivel onto him, but her sharp greens take their time.
‘There he is,’ she purrs. Sitting on the console desk, legs swinging, she has on those killer boots today, the ones adorned with thin silver chains and spurs on the thick heel. ‘?a va, mon c?ur?’
There’s never any mistaking Céliane Malréve once you’ve seen the weaponised metal wrapping her hands like skeletal gloves, elegant and vicious, the sharpened tips currently retracted into a design beautiful enough to almost disguise what it’s built to do.
Her hair is cut into a sleek blood-red bob that frames her face with surgical precision, and she’s dressed entirely in black.
She has five or six years on Kade at least, is barely over five feet tall and easy to overlook if you don’t realise you’re staring at death incarnate.
She is the maker of ingenious, impossible things most people couldn’t even imagine and years ago, when Kade had so many ideas for improving the once-outdated high rise of Iron Star, she was the one to provide material application and help make his ideas a reality.
‘Avec toi ici? Toujours, ma cherie,’ he reels off easily in response, taking in her attire (casual) and her stance (friendly) and then studies the other three. Riley’s arms are crossed while Cole and Finn seem vaguely troubled, glancing between the three. Kade doesn’t blame them.
If she’s here, something is up.