3. Aron #2
He doesn’t need to tell me the last part.
Nobody knows who Phoenix really is. It’s clearly someone high up in the Continuum, close to the Consuls themselves.
They feed us intel through trusted middlemen or, when possible, through secure one-way channels.
No way to contact them back. Personally, I find it hard to trust someone whose identity is a complete mystery.
But Tristan, a man who likes to think of himself as the chief resistance leader, refuses to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Phoenix has been sending us so much money that they are the resistance’s main source of funds at this point.
Funds we need and have no better way of obtaining.
“Phoenix? No way to confirm that either,” I point out coldly. “And unfortunately for you, that sounds even more improbable since it was Phoenix who gave me your location yesterday.”
The first and only time that Phoenix ever hit my comms channel directly. Something stinks. But whatever it is, I’d bet anything this joker has nothing to do with it and is lying through his teeth to save his and that bitch’s ass.
“You know what I think, pal? I think you’re full of shit,” I snarl at him, leaning closer in the gravitational pull of imminent violence.
“No! No, I swear!” he roars desperately. “Please. Please! I’m sure there’s some explanation. Please, wait!”
And here we go. Tearful, pathetic begging.
I snatch both his wrists and yank his arms down, then whip my fist forward.
The brass knuckles smash into the side of his face with a nasty crunch, and he collapses to the ground with a high-pitched howl.
He gags on something and then spits, ropes of his bloody saliva mixing with the dust on the ground.
Two broken molars land between the pebbles.
“Here’s your benefit of the doubt,” I tell him. “No presumption of innocence here. If you want me to believe you, you’d better start making some fucking sense.”
Sobbing, he raises himself onto his knees clumsily. The air shifts with his movement, and his acidic, terror-suffused stink reaches my nostrils. Fucking revolting.
“Riley.” The word is slurred, indistinct.
“Don’t hurt Riley.” He makes wet, sloshing sounds that barely resemble speech.
“Keep beating whatever truth you want out of me. But please, leave her alone until you have proof either way. And please take her out of that cave. You have no idea what it does to her to be there.” He spits out more blood, red mist coating the limestone wall.
“Oh no. No, no, no ...” I drawl, savouring his anguish. “You have this all wrong. See, if by some chance what you told me is true, then you have always been a double agent. Right?”
He nods vigorously. “Yeah!”
“Right. But Riley, she let Volker recruit her in earnest at first, didn’t she? And only got back in touch with the resistance a couple of years later?”
He freezes, eyes wide in realisation, mess oozing out of his broken mouth.
“I differ on this with some of my ... colleagues,” I say the word with a grimace, like it’s an insult. “But I always say that if you betray once, you betray forever. Riley is a traitor regardless. And she will be treated as such.”
“No!” He gasps and scurries closer to me on his knees. “No, please listen!”
The fucker grabs me, looking up at me the way a terrified servant would at a merciless master.
“I am listening. But there’s nothing you could tell me to alter the facts. She’s done a lot of damage. She may or may not have tried to make up for it. But that changes nothing. She will die, and she will die screaming.”
My voice lacks my usual conviction, but he doesn’t seem to hear it.
“You can’t! She’s just a kid!” He grows hysterical.
“She is twenty-two now,” I point out harshly, and he frowns, surprised that I know her exact age. “I was younger than she is now when I joined the resistance.”
“She joined the resistance when she was twenty, in secret and at a great risk to her life!” He throws his arms wide. “She was still a kid when she joined the Continuits!”
“No, she wasn’t. She was eighteen, an adult. The same age I was when I first picked up a gun and went to war.”
I crouch to look him directly in the face, smeared with blood, tears and snot. He whimpers, averting his gaze.
“Listen to me. You’re an old man, by today’s standards anyway.
” I let a gentler note creep into my voice.
“You knew too much of the world before to adjust. Kids don’t stay kids for long these days.
And Tamara Volkova?” I scoff. “Trust me, she stopped being a kid the minute she picked up a camera and started calling herself Riley.” I pat the top of his head before standing back up. “We’re done here for now.”
I turn around, walking away from him. He keeps yelling, his voice grating against my last nerve.
“I said we’re done!” I cut him off without bothering to look at him. “If you don’t shut up now, you’re a fucking tableau.”
Predictably, he goes quiet. They all do.
“Anything on there to support what they said?” I ask my tech guy, a sixty-year-old dinosaur who worked for one of the big IT companies back in the day.
He’s at the desk in his little nook, hunched over the crybaby’s laptop, ignoring me with an expression of intense concentration.
“Martin?” I nudge him.
“Huh?” He raises his head, his thick-lensed glasses reflecting light and obscuring his eyes. “Oh. No, not really. But there is something you should see.”
Hitting the keys, he hands me the laptop. Repulsed, I sink onto his unmade bed. The quilt is tangled, and the sheets are yellowed. I try my best to ignore the stale stink that assaults my senses, focusing on the screen instead.
I’m looking at a folder titled ‘Macabre Marvels’.
“That’s poetic,” I remark.
“Open it.”
I do, fumbling, the mousepad unfamiliar underneath my fingertips. Dozens of other folders are revealed within. As I scan their titles with my eyes, I realise they’re familiar. Alleyway, Tent, Tower ... those are all codenames for my tableaus. Pinned at the top is a folder titled ‘Selection’.
I open that, large picture icons popping up as they load slowly. Without looking at them more closely, I’m already recognising these. Curious, I click on the first one and then, hitting the right arrow, I hop through all of them.
Two lines of oiled wooden stakes, placed evenly on opposing sides and angled just right to form a triangular alleyway, a man speared on top of each.
A large tent made of nothing but bones, wire, and large patches of skin sewn together, pink sunlight seeping in through the peels of tissue.
A tower made of chopped-off limbs, joints and tibias broken in half, protruding from the decomposing, maggoty flesh.
I took photos of all my tableaus, but they were nothing like these.
Mine were just plain documentary shots, a few from each side, and done.
These are infinitely more inventive; taken from unusual angles with the light hitting just right, some with shadows hiding the faces, others with sunlight falling through the hollowed-out ribs, the last shreds of skin and flesh almost transparent like curtains.
My photos merely showed my tableaus. These show them off.
I huff in disbelief as a new masterpiece is revealed with each click of a button.
She must have spent hours on the sites. Lying in the dirt on the ground, hiking up the surrounding hills, crouching motionless in wait until clouds parted just right.
Scaring off the crows, letting them re-settle, then scaring them again, over and over, until the perfect picture of them rising from the corpses like a black cloud was born.
“You’ve got to give it to her. The girl is good.” Noticing my astonishment, Martin chortles; the sound is wet and guttural, making me think of a bubbling pool of mud.
“We already knew that,” I point out dryly.
It feels like a lie, even if it isn’t. Yes, I did know she was good—we all knew she was good—but fuck me, until now I didn’t even know that good like this existed.
Hardly breathing and not taking my eyes off the screen, I make it to the final picture. That one is different because it’s a photoshopped montage of two things: a free newspaper article about me that came out a few years back, and a shot of my most iconic tableau.
On a gently sloped hill, thirteen crosses rise from the ground. And crucified to them and wrapped in the coils of bowels spooling from the jagged gashes in their abdomen are thirteen men who deserved to beg for death long before I granted it.
The newspaper overlays the image, semi-transparent and blending seamlessly into the ghastly background. A headshot of me, my most recognisable skull mask showing nothing of my face but my eyes, simpering with determined rage.
The article’s text is unreadable, too small, and not opaque enough. It serves only to lend the image a gritty, grainy quality. But the headline is legible, black and bold. A quote I gave that reporter, not knowing it would become my signature line.
“I am the Necromancer. I summon the dead and make them speak for me.”