Chapter 9
CHAPTER 9
UNEXPECTED HELP
Kassian glared at the computer screen. For about the billionth time, he yanked his leg, straining it against the shackle that attached him, by a literal chain, to an anchor in the concrete wall.
There was one on each ankle, attaching him to the walls on either side of the desk at which he sat. The chains held his legs apart, an awkward angle that pressed his pelvic bone against the hard chair and kept him from getting comfortable. He probably hadn’t been sitting there an hour yet, and his hips ached for not being able to shift their position.
“You are, of course, completely entitled to refuse to help,” General George said, tone as creepily amicable as always. “There are plenty of other ways we can spend our time.”
“Like?” Kassian asked, though he feared he already knew what George was alluding to. Bjorn probably could have made the question sound innocent. Leif would have made it suggestive as hell, because that man had way less sense of self-preservation than was healthy.
The fact he was profoundly grateful neither of them were in his place said a lot about how deep they’d managed to burrow into his brain already. He’d never been known for a sense of selflessness, yet there it was. He’d gladly take whatever George could dish out if it saved them having to face him.
“Don’t worry,” George said, drawing his thoughts from his … from them. “None of it will incapacitate you. At least not so you can’t do the work we’re asking of you.” He smiled, a wide, friendly smile. “You don’t need your legs for that, do you?”
Kassian rattled the chain again. “Apparently you do.”
“Did you know we have excellent surgeons working for us? Very talented. We can remove them. Your legs, I mean. Not the surgeons. A little bit at a time.”
It wasn’t the threat that made Kassian shiver. That was patently ridiculous. It was the absolute certainty, and the impenetrable cheer with which he said it. He wasn’t menacing in the least. He was friendly. Matter of fact. Implacable.
“Now I’m going to do something I don’t usually do, and allow you a moment to speak with your brother. Not long, mind you, but it only seems fair, don’t you think?”
“Whatever.” He wasn’t keen to talk to Rufus. What he was doing working for this asshat, Kassian didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Did he regret being out of touch with his brothers for the past… however long it had been? Only because it left him out of the loop. Not because he missed them.
Who missed assholes, anyway?
George patted his shoulder, like someone might if they were a benevolent mentor—which made Kassian’s skin crawl—then left the small room.
A minute later, new, heavier footsteps approached him from the door to the room, directly behind him. To the left and right of his chair, and just slightly back from it, were office dividers, much like the one by his chair at SPAM, but nicer. Cleaner. Their placement was deliberate, because twist as he might, there was no way to see who was approaching him until they came to stand far too close for comfort. It was a consequence of the uncomfortable position he was forced to sit in, and another subtle way to keep him off balance.
“Hey,” Rufus said, voice soft.
“Fuck off.”
Rufus snorted. “Seriously? I might be the only friend you have here.”
“You know what’s on this file he wants us to crack, right?” Because he couldn’t give away what he didn’t talk about, and because he was far from sure if Rufus was a friend.
“How could I know if I couldn’t crack it?”
And that reminder was the only thing that saved Kassian from hating his brother, because what the hell? He couldn’t crack it? Since when? “What do you mean you couldn’t crack it? Of course you can crack it.”
“I tried.”
“And what makes him think if you couldn’t do it that I can?”
“Because I told him you were the smart one.”
“Gee. Thanks.”
“It saved you being the dead one,” Rufus ground out.
There was no question the room was bugged, and no chance the many cameras on the computer and monitors on the desk in front of Kassian weren’t recording his every move. No way to ask Rufus if he really couldn’t do it, or if he had managed to find a way to make it look like he couldn’t.
Except Rufus really was the smart one.
“Do you remember when you were twelve and you couldn’t ride that dirt bike? And no matter how much we explained it, you just didn’t get it?”
Kassian hadn’t had any issue riding their eldest brother Gerome’s motor bike. He’d been told not to, because the bike was too powerful for him, and he was too small. That hadn’t stopped him. The problem hadn’t been that he couldn’t do it. It had been that he absolutely should not have, and doing so was going to get him hurt. Which it inevitably had.
But for the longest time, if he ever got caught taking the bike out, he pretended he was trying to learn how to drive it and failing. And he’d gotten away with it, managing to keep the ruse going for half a summer, but eventually, the signs had been too clear to miss. It hadn’t even been the wipeout or the resultant shattered bones in his foot that had given him away.
It had been the bike itself. A slightly adjusted angle to one of the footrests, a bit of spattered mud under the front fender, it not being parked at the exact angle it had been when he’d taken it out—all of that together, and Gerome had taken a closer look at the gas gauge and the odometer and figured out what was going on.
As soon as he realized Gerome was onto him, to try proving he really did know what he was doing, he’d taken it out to the dunes, ripped up the side of the little valley, and wiped out. One broken bike and one broken foot later, and Gerome had refused to let him get his own dirt bike for the rest of that summer and the following one.
“Remember how pissed off you were about that?”
He did. But he suspected that Rufus’s point was that he could break the encryption on the file perfectly fine. He just hadn’t. But now it was getting dicey, and he worried that, like the bike had given away Kassian’s activities, the signs were all there to show George that Rufus could do it, but wasn’t.
Which made Kassian wonder. Had Rufus lured him here with that near miss? Was this his way of saving his own skin, throwing Kassian, his annoying, talentless little brother to the wolves so he and Randolph and Gerome would be okay?
“So now you get to shine, little brother,” Rufus said. “You get to do what I couldn’t.”
“Which is what?” Break the encryption and be blamed for doxing hundreds of people who just wanted to live a quiet, normal life? Put those people in the hands of the military who would use them until they burnt out? Or worse, the MNR, who would do much worse things to them, trying to figure out how their powers worked.
“Save the day, obviously.” Rufus put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, and didn’t that bring him back to that day, sitting in the sand, in pain, twisted bike next to him, Gerome there, a hand on his shoulder as he checked him over and told him it was okay. He was okay. Everything would be okay. “Save the day,” Rufus said, squeezing again. “Like with the bike.”
He wasn’t sure what else to take away from the bike analogy, because at the end of that day, he’d wrecked the bike, his foot, and his relationship with Gerome for the entirety of his teen years. It had been a disaster and had cost him Gerome’s respect while proving his brother had been right about his reasons all along.
The stress he’d put on all four of them, because he was a stubborn asshole, hadn’t, in the end, been worth it. He hadn’t saved that day by trying to show off. He’d ruined it and almost ruined his family.
Gerome had stuck the trashed bike in the back of the garage and never taken it out again. He didn’t fix it, and he stopped riding himself. He’d become the parent Kassian hadn’t appreciated until much, much later.
But Rufus hadn’t said “save us.” He’d said “save the day.”
Like he had with the bike.
Wreck it?
He scowled at the screen.
Wreck what? The file? He pondered if he could implant some kind of parasite into the file while he pretended to un-encrypt it, one that would devour the information it contained if it was opened. He doubted it. And even if he could, there would be no way to hide that it had been him who did it. At that point, losing his legs, even a piece at a time, would be the least of his problems.
He sighed, and for a split second, really, really wished he’d brought Bjorn in with him. That would have offered them a completely different—arguably more effective—destructive option.
Still, he was glad he hadn’t, because neither Bjorn nor Leif deserved to be in this position, and where one went, the other would always follow. He sort of wished he had someone—anyone—in his life with that kind of loyalty.
“Not anyone,” his soft-hearted half told his brain, and he couldn’t argue with it.
He wanted them. Bjorn with his guileless acceptance of Kassian’s quirky brain and his tender kisses to prove he didn’t care. And Leif, who saw him more clearly than his own family ever had and wasn’t afraid to flirt outrageously anyway.
Annoyed, he glared at Rufus in the reflective surface of one of the monitors, trying to read his brother’s meaning in his placid expression.
Rufus hadn’t told him to save their skins. He had said to save the day. Sacrifice for the greater good. Like Gerome had with the bike. Sacrificed his potential—his dream—for Kassian and the twins. Become the saviour that had kept them together and skating on just the right side of the law until they’d no longer needed him.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
Rufus squeezed his shoulder almost to the point of pain.
Kassian glanced up, and if Rufus’s face remained still, the expression in his eyes didn’t. He didn’t like this any more than Kassian did. He had regrets, and it all clicked into place in Kassian’s head, the machinations becoming clear to his brainiac, along with the apology his other half sensed but that Rufus couldn’t say out loud.
Because he had lured Kassian here. Not to take the fall for him, but because sure, he could have broken the encryption, but he couldn’t write the necessary code to destroy the file and save all those people. He didn’t know how. He knew it could be done, and knew Kassian could, given the time and opportunity, figure it out, but could not do it himself.
Kassian grimaced. “Fuck you, asshole.” He shrugged his brother’s hand off him and began to type, not bothering to watch his brother’ retreat in the monitor’s reflection.
He had to believe Rufus knew he understood the assignment. After everything he’d done so far, followed this damn thing through cyberspace for as long as he had, erasing all trace of it he could find behind it…
He’d sent worms into computers as the file was passed on, destroying hard drives it had stopped on, just to be sure there was no copy. He’d erased reams and reams of cloud storage, locked people out of accounts and systems and bricked phones to keep them from getting back in. He’d corrupted backup copies of pretty much any and everything the file had tangentially touched. He’d done everything in his power to remove all trace of it as he’d followed it to this final destination.
The one thing he’d never been able to do was affect the file itself. Not without leaving a fingerprint as obvious as a lipstick stain on a glass.
Rufus had to know that if Kassian could have done this thing without getting caught, he would have done it ages ago.
So Rufus knew what he was asking. Knew what it would mean, and what it would cost.
So Kassian had to believe his brother had a plan.
Had to hope he had a plan beyond the one that meant Kassian ate a bullet the second General George understood what had happened to his precious database.
There was no way to ask, so he worked. He did what was being asked, and ignored everything else. Let George think he was scared of the threat, that Rufus had betrayed him, that he had no reason not to comply to save his own ass at this point.
Let Rufus think he was willing to sacrifice himself for this. Because he was. He’d seen, first-hand, what happened to people in the hands of villains like George.
Rufus and Randolph had lost their powers. Sal had lost their confidence, become someone who never left the safety of the 500 square feet surrounding their desk. Roger had so many hang-ups there was no way to count on him, and he knew it, and that only made all his hang-ups that much worse.
“Fuck my life,” he muttered.
He’d done everything in his power to do this some other way, but this was, as he’d always figured it would be, the only option. He just hoped to hell Bjorn and Leif would be able to take care of Sal and Roger from now on.
“You’re leaving your friends in their hands. How sad is that?” he asked himself.
He yanked a leg, watching the anchor in the wall from the corner of his eye. Did it wiggle? Even a little bit? He kept the tension tight, just in case. “They’re in perfectly good hands,” he reminded himself. “You know that. You trust them.”
“They’re idiots.”
“But very pretty idiots.”
“Fuck off.”
In reply, that little voice snickered, then focused its attention on flexing his muscles, tensioning the chain, stressing the connections that kept him captive.
The rest of him typed. There was also no reason to draw it out.
He typed.
He hoped.
He tried hard not to think.
He absolutely refused to regret what hadn’t happened with Leif and Bjorn. For them, it would be better this way. If he didn’t make it out of here, at least they still had each other.