"I want you to live, Pete," Charlotte said in the softest of voices as we lay together in the darkness. "I don't mean not killing yourself or just waiting patiently to die, but I want you to really live. Live like there is no tomorrow because tomorrow you will wake up, and then you get to do it all over again until your tomorrows run out." Her caramel curls, lighted by the glow of a lamp on the other side of the room, cascaded over her shoulders as she leaned on her elbow beside me in bed. "I know you are hurting, and I may never be able to understand how much, but your life can't only be about vengeance and justice because eventually, this war will be won, and you will have to go back to living a life. Your life... I didn't know Faye, but I knew Becky, and I know she wouldn't have wanted this to be your life."

There wasn't any real way for me to answer that, so I didn't. I just nodded my head and looked up at her. I knew, deep down, that she was right. In my heart of hearts, I knew that I had given no thought at all to what life would be like once the people responsible for all these deaths were finally brought to justice - when the rogues were completely destroyed. The problem just seemed so big, so insurmountable; it had been less than two months, but my involvement in this war already felt like it had gone on forever, and we were still nowhere near victory. Hell, we still weren't entirely sure who we were fighting.

The thought of a life after this war was nothing more than a whisper of a conceptual shadow.

My case, ready for the trip to Ukraine, was packed and standing by the door, and one of my closest friends was naked in my bed, leaning over me with nothing but affection and warmth in her eyes. She had helped me tear Toussant to pieces; neither one of us felt even the smallest shred of remorse for that, but there was a big difference between a single act of justice, even revenge, and the drumbeat of an endless war. She was right; it would have to end one day. But that point was just so far away that simply conceiving of it seemed just too remote to even try. There was still so far to go before this journey could be called complete.

"I know," I finally whispered into the fading light.

"Don't let them claim your soul, Pete," she sighed back to me, finally resting her head on my shoulder and sighing again as I started to run my fingers through her glossy hair. "Don't lose yourself to this. You're worth more than that. And if they take that from you, no matter what you do or how many of them you hunt down, you will already have lost. Please, just... be careful."

I let my hand reach up to stroke my palm along her cheek, watching her as she turned her head to nuzzle against it and plant a kiss on my warm skin while Faye purred loudly in my head. "I'll come back," I said behind a soft smile.

She kissed my hand again. "You are the best friend I have."

The scene started to fade, the lamp in the corner growing steadily dimmer as I kept my eyes on Charlotte. The room around us, the case by the door, the lamp itself, and the bed we were lying in, all of it fading into nothingness as the night consumed the memory until Charlotte's affectionately smiling face was all that remained. Then that, too, melted into the darkness.

The screen on the side of my bunker wall turned itself off as the memory of my night with Charlotte ended. There was something about the way she said it, "Don't lose yourself," that seemed to hold extra meaning for me now, as if she could see it coming. I had never been an open book, I had never been easy to read, and yet, perhaps, Charlotte had seen that tenuous grasp on my humanity faltering even before I did. Although I suppose, watching what I had done to Toussant in the aftermath of Becky's death would have been more than enough evidence of that. She had assisted, of course, but she had taken no righteous joy out of it.

I had.

Her whispered warning, in the darkness of that night, was now starting to look more like a pleading request for me to tighten my hold on the goodness in me. A warning I had completely failed to heed and, instead, had sunken further into the depths of my own violent depravities. Faye's theory may have made a lot of sense, but in no way brought my overwhelming anger under control. Judging by my simmering anger at Jakob for halting my assault on and destruction of the Russian convoy, I wasn't even close.

And yet, I knew he had been right. I had known it when he gave that order; it was the only thing that had stopped me from pulling that trigger despite his advice. It's not like he could have stopped me. I could have obliterated that convoy with only a few half-practiced thoughts, and yet I had let him talk me down.

Maybe I had allowed myself to believe that we really were going to "hunt them down" the next morning despite it obviously being a turn of phrase. It was the equivalent of 'we live to fight another day'... and I knew that. So why was I so angry when, the next morning, we had 'requisitioned' an SUV from a street close to the stadium and - instead of following the Convoy south - we had headed west toward Horlivka?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn't really angry at Jakob but at the Russians who had been allowed to escape. But again, why? I hadn't been angry with the Russians who had given us a ride to the internment camp before them. Hell, I had even advocated for them to be allowed to leave unharmed. If they were innocent soldiers, just following orders, albeit fighting on the wrong side of history, why had I felt such hostility toward the men in that convoy? Why had I felt enough pure loathing that I only managed to stop myself from utterly destroying them because of the risk of death to my allies?

And why did my mind flash back to that pile of dead every time I thought of them?

The answer was already there, right under the surface. Somewhere in that group of Russian soldiers was a man who had cast his mind to the act of butchering them, maybe a group of them, but my mind had picked up on it. The Russians in our truck had been innocent. The men in that convoy, even if only a handful of them, even if only one of them, were not.

Which meant that I had let them go.

I had robbed those victims of justice. I had lost - maybe forever - the one chance we had of finding out what happened to Bob's people, if they had been among the men and women so callously dumped into that pile and what had happened to them and the other innocent people if they were not. The one chance I had to find out where they had been taken had been allowed to drive off into the night. There is no way Jakob could have known that when he gave his order. I knew that without having to look into his mind... but I knew it.

Hell, I could have just sat there, looking out that office window, and mined the minds of the men in that parking lot for information, putting nobody at risk at all, gotten what I needed, and acted from there.

But I hadn't put the pieces together until much later on. The internal editing station had given me the ability to filter out all the innocuous thoughts that bounced around inside my head from every human mind for thousands of miles. It had been overwhelming, psychosis-inducingly so. So I filtered them out. But in filtering them out, I had, on several occasions now, missed information that I needed to know.

It would seem that being all-powerful did not make one infallible.

All I could do was simmer in my own loathing, at my own failings, and studiously refuse to look Bob in the eyes. It wasn't only myself who I had failed. I ground my teeth in frustration as my mind stepped back into reality, and the dim light of the bunker gave way to the early hour dawn of snow-swept Eastern Ukraine.

The dull, rumbling throb of the SUV's wheels running over surprisingly intact back roads gave the silence in the vehicle an ominous, if hypnotic, soundtrack. Gabriel was driving, Jakob was upfront with him, and the other three of our escorts - Hans, Karl, and Antoni - were packed in behind them. Bob and I were in the back.

Bob was on the phone.

My enhanced hearing was picking up both ends of the conversation whether I wanted it to or not, and I was... maybe "forced to listen" is not the right term, but I was certainly privy to the fearful, almost inconsolable sobs over the line as he relayed what we had found so far to Isabelle. As much as Bob was preemptively grieving the potential deaths of his brethren, the Princess was inconsolable. It was a deep, maternal, familial pain; I could hear it in her voice. It was more akin to a mother helplessly fearing for her children than a superior checking after her subordinates.

I had no idea how the Inquisition viewed its members; I knew nothing of the culture or the relationship between members, and - to my mind at least - the fact that individual Inquisitors held no loyalty to any individual royal but to whichever one governed the area in which they operated, flew in the face of the idea that any sort of relationship could be built between the higher and lower echelons of Inquisition society. And yet, Isabelle was crying. Weeping in a way that only a deep, meaningful bond could allow. The devastation in her voice at the thought of her people being in that pile and the dread at the idea that they weren't but were still missing was - in a word - haunting.

This was not the battle cry of rage; it was not that coiling anger being unleashed, nor was it any of the other emotions I had felt in the past few weeks. It was pure grief, the one feeling I had forbidden myself from feeling since the loss of Faye. It was listening to the fraying of a soul, and it was excruciating.

Bob's face still hadn't regained its color.

I couldn't blame him for a moment.

Finally, the call finished, and Bob, looking about as drained as he probably felt, cast a glance over at me and offered me the satellite phone. "It's secure," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

I nodded and took it. I looked at it for a few moments before starting to punch in a number. I had no one to call. I would like to have called Charlotte, but I just couldn't bring myself to tell her what we had found yet. I couldn't bear to hear that same heartbreak in her voice. So instead, I punched in my own number, the number to the phone that was currently switched off and in my pack, letting it go straight to voicemail before handing the phone back to Bob with a shake of my head.

To Bob - who sighed, took the phone, and put it away again before turning back to silently gaze out at the passing landscape - and to everyone else in the vehicle, that is all that happened.

Of course, none of them knew about Jeeves.

"Did you connect to the computer?" I asked my aged-looking butler

"I did, Sir. There is still no sign of any suspicious activity around any of the people we are watching. There is also no word from Uri, although it looks like you have received a rather urgent message from Marco."

"Rather urgent?"

"He sent you an email, Sir."

"He... sent me an email... in a warzone... when he knows my phone will be off...?"

"It would appear so, Sir."

I sighed and rolled my eyes. "Okay, let's hear it."

Jeeves' voice distorted, deepening slightly, and the words malformed into an exact replica of Marco's as he read out the email.

Pete,

I pray this message finds you well and in time.

I am worried about Uri. I have thought for some time now that there has been a traitor in the ranks of the Conclave. My investigation into that and the attacks perpetrated by Sterling are the real reasons that kept me from progressing your training. I am sorry for that. But I am starting to suspect that Uri is behind everything. If someone has been instigating a war between the Conclave and the Inquisition, he would be in the perfect position to both perpetuate and then pretend to investigate this crime. He also took over the position from the man who would have been alive the last time the Inquisition had a communication from us. That didn't seem relevant until now, but it all makes sense, and he is acting very suspiciously.

He is refusing to check in, not with you and not with the Conclave. He is insisting on complete radio silence. But we are not actually doing anything. He keeps sneaking off to use the phone, and I don't know who he is calling; he is permanently blocking me. He says it is to maintain security, but that doesn't make sense. We have been driving around from town to town, aimlessly, since we left you at the airport. We still haven't met his contact. At this point, I'm not even sure there IS a contact. I think I may be being led into a trap. I will find out everything I can and get word to you if possible, but if you don't hear from me again, you know why.

Pete, if Uri is the traitor, you are in great danger. Do NOT trust Jerry. I think he may have been put there to keep tabs on you. I know Bob's mission was to get to the Inquisitor's office, but I need you to assume that this is some sort of ambush. Uri knew where it was, and if he is in league with these rogues, I have to suspect that he has told them you will be there.

We are currently on our way to Horlivka. He says he has to meet someone there before we move on to see his contact, but he won't tell me who or even why. Pete, if something happens to me, I need you to take my suspicions to the Archon. He will know what to do. I know you haven't always seen eye to eye, but I trust him, and I need you to trust me. The Black Knights have been compromised, and every single Evo is in great danger.

Get out of Ukraine, Pete. Go home. It is not safe here, and you are the one person Uri would consider a threat. I think that is why he was so quick to separate himself from you when we got off the plane; you would have been able to see his lies where I cannot. You are the strongest of us, the best of us, and if we have any hope of surviving this war, we need you to stay alive.

Pass my love onto Faye. I hope I will be able to see her again in that magnificent city of yours one day, but if I don't make it, then tell her that it was an honor to know her. She grew to be one of my favorites.

Please be safe.

Your friend

Marco

The sound of Faye growling echoed through my mind as she listened to Bob reading the email at the same time as I did. Part of me felt vindicated, justified even, at my suspicion of Uri. If Marco felt the same and was seeing the red flags independently of me, then it couldn't have just been in my head. There had to be more to it. But at the same time, I had left Marco alone with him, knowing that he could be the traitor. If he was killed by Uri, it would be my fault.

I groaned internally. Things were starting to fall into place. The note that was pinned to the pole in Malaga. Sure, they could have known I was coming, but how the hell did they know my name and what had happened at the party? Uri had sent me there and could easily have informed the rogues that I was in the area. Jerry and Fiona seemed to have a perfectly good explanation for being on the sand dunes in The Hague. But their intervention and their rescue of me had been one of my main motivators for trusting them. What if that was all planned? They always seemed to be close at hand, too. From the removal of Sterling's comatose body from my apartment to the cleanup of the aftermath of the attack on Mary and her family. For a pair who apparently worked all over the country, they never seemed to be more than fifteen minutes away. I never did work out why the Inquisitors never came closer than the end of the drive to the cottage when I had laid that trap for them, either. Not even to check that I was actually there. Yet they were confident enough in my location to make Mary, a pensioner in her nightdress, walk to me in the middle of a storm. They must have known I was there for them to take that risk. The only people who knew I was there were Jerry and Fiona.

Uri had also changed his mind awfully quickly when I challenged him at the cottage. I had told him that we were going to war whether he was with us or not, and I had done it while standing over the shattered remains of Toussant. At the time, I had thought that my breaking of an inquisitor's mind had been all the proof he needed to see that action could be taken proactively rather than reactively. But now that I thought about it, I had been the one to suggest coming to Ukraine, but Uri - in a massive break with tradition - had supported the idea wholeheartedly. If Ukraine, or possibly Russia, was the power base of the rogue inquisitors, and if he was working with them, then this would be where he was at his strongest. Getting us here would put us right where he wanted us. He kept Jerry with me to keep an eye on me and report back while...

Fuck!

.... While he left Fiona with Charlotte and Evie. She had wanted to come with us, but he had ordered her to stay behind to "watch our friends." He was then free to keep the woefully and intentionally under-prepared Marco in the dark while he organized the ambush that should have killed us. Jesus, even while suspecting him, I had managed to walk us straight into his trap.

"Jeeves, when was that message sent?"

"Yesterday, sir. Around the time we were finding the executed civilians."

Okay, that was something. It was impossible to know if Uri had been informed about the failure of the ambush, but it was very unlikely he could have known about where we had gone after it, and almost beyond comprehension that he knew where we were headed now. Horlivka couldn't have been a coincidence, either. The fact that we were both heading to the same place, both of us looking for "contacts." I had to assume that Uri was looking for the same woman that I was, but whereas I needed information from her, he would need to silence her. And he already had a day's headstart on us.

Fuck Fuck Fuck!

Gabriel suddenly got the urge to drive much faster.

********

In terms of geographical footprint, Horlivka was about sixty square miles bigger than Donetsk if both cities were measured to their suburban boundaries, but where Horlivka had a population of about 245,000 before the war, its physically smaller neighbor was home to almost a million people. Donetsk was the political, industrial, and economic capital of this region of Ukraine and had been one of the primary objectives of the Russians in their invasion. Horlivka, on the other hand, was the next big strategic target for the aggressors. The city was the anchor around which Ukraine's entire defensive line was based. If Horlivka fell, the line would have to be pulled back some twenty or thirty miles to the next natural barriers, and more territory would be ceded to the Russians.

The taking of Donetsk was a simple matter of controlling the major administrative capital and population center of the region, but the attack on Horlivka was essential to winning the war, and therefore, its defense was given the same, almost desperate importance as the attack the Russians had mounted against it. Donetsk had been turned into a blasted shell of its former magnificence, but Horlivka had been utterly obliterated. A city that had survived and flourished for hundreds of years had been almost completely destroyed in only a few short months, and the miles-wide column of smoke that rose from the city's remains could clearly be seen against the clear winter sky for more than an hour before the rest of the city came into view.

From the rise in the terrain, a few miles outside of the city, we watched the artillery shells detonating in its streets and against its buildings. How anyone could survive in that was beyond my ability to fathom.

And we were going to walk right in.

Bob was standing beside me, his eyes set on the city with grim determination. Inside the shattered remains of buildings and the lives of the people who had lived in them was our contact and her information. Information he needed badly.

"She's in there?" I asked, my tone somewhere between hard-set resolve and genuine amazement that someone could survive in that hellscape for more than a few minutes. The arrangements for meeting the contact had been dealt with by Isabelle, and the details were forwarded to Bob

He just nodded.

"We need to wait for night," Jakob said from the other side of me. "There is no way we are going to be able to get in there without being spotted in daylight. Russian artillery may not be as effective as the Western equipment that Ukraine is using, but it is certainly effective enough to kill us. We wouldn't make it within a mile of our rendezvous."

"No," Bob shook his head. I didn't need to be able to read his mind to know that the haunting sobs of Isabelle, not to mention his own fears over his people, were echoing loudly within it. "We go now. Pete will get us in."

"Wait... what?" I blinked at him.

Bob pried his eyes away from the city, turning to face the very confused-looking Jakob and the utterly astonished me. I mean, I knew what he was suggesting, but the idea that Bob, of all people, was advocating the large-scale use of my powers to get us into the city was more than a little surprising, to say the least.

"Can you do it?"

"Well, yeah," I answered slowly, "but..."

"Then do it. I will deal with the consequences." The ardent resolve in his eyes faltered for a moment as they held mine. "Please"

I glanced back at the city. "Fuck, alright. This isn't going to be pretty, though."

"Do what you need to do," Bob nodded solemnly.

I pinched the bridge of my nose as my eyes glided back over the city, watching the billowing smoke climbing into the air from the destroyed sections of it. "Does anyone want to tell me what is going on?" Jakob asked with an eyebrow arched confusedly as his eyes flicked back and forth to follow the conversation.

"Not really," I mumbled and waved a hand toward him. The confused face vanished as his desire to question this part of the mission was completely removed from him and the rest of his men. As far as they were concerned, what was about to happen was not only perfectly normal but would barely be noticed, and what was noticed would be instantly forgotten. The fact that they would now all be taking orders from me wouldn't be questioned either.

I would be lying if I said a plan was forthcoming. Trying to finesse my way past a literal army wasn't necessarily a difficult feat to pull off; the vast, overwhelming majority of the men in that army were human and could be manipulated en-masse just as the men in our truck to Alchevs'k had been. But therein also lay the problem: most of the men were human, but not all of them; it was an essential assumption to make. It would only take one rogue inquisitor or one treacherous Evo in the ranks of people I was trying to brainwash, and the plan would be undone or at least seriously threatened. So what I needed was a solution that lay somewhere on the scale between a secret, stealthy infiltration and the mass manipulation of thousands upon thousands of hostile troops.

The brute force and optimism approach may have worked, but I doubted it.

I was drumming my fingers against my thigh. It was like a flex, the physical representation of my internal processing. The stretch of a muscle as - inside my bunker and with the useful slowing of time within - I ran through every idea I could think of, every possibility and variable, ranging from the conceptually ineffective to the downright ridiculous.

The idea I finally settled on, or at least the idea that led me to the idea I settled on, was to make myself look like Putin himself and simply waltz up to the lines and demand to be allowed through. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wouldn't necessarily need to go that extreme to get the same results. Something with a little more subtlety could be just as effective.

"Ok," I nodded after hours of thought and planning in my bunker, which amounted to about two minutes of real-time thought. "Get in the car. Bob, I need you in the back, Jakob; you are with him."

Both men just nodded their acceptance of my orders and headed back to the car as I looked back over the city. I shook my head. In any other circumstances, this plan was utterly insane. But that also meant that it might just work.

I climbed up front with Gabriel and gave him his orders. He started the engine and pulled back onto the road, heading straight for the Russian lines

********

To be honest, the Russian commanders around the city were taking their lives in their hands with the positioning of their headquarters. The American HIMARS system was a mobile rocket launch platform with a range of more than eighty kilometers and was accurate down to almost the meter, meaning that any target within that eighty-kilometer range either had to be worthless, moving, or really really well hidden. An attack from the HIMARS gods rarely left much of whatever it hit.

The Russian HQ for local forces was an eyewatering four kilometers from the city, maybe thirty from the far side of the city, where HIMARS could be deployed. There is a fine line between courage and stupidity when it comes to warfare. I'm not going to pretend that I didn't have one eye on the sky as the SUV pulled up to the checkpoint that permitted entry into the Russian camp.

Just like every other soldier who had stopped us after we had left the rise, the young man at the final checkpoint - looking even younger than I was - was filled with the distinct impression that he recognized me from somewhere. He couldn't place where, but he knew my face.

That face, at least to him and every other Russian in the area, was older, more weathered, and sporting a trimmed, greying beard. It was a trick I had learned from Sterling. But it was the illusion of the General's uniform that his eyes told him I was wearing that sold the act. His own mind filled in the blanks. He saw a man he half recognized, given a name that sounded familiar, saw a man wearing the military insignia of a rank many, many orders higher than his, and he put two and two together, accepted the ruse, and let us pass.

An hour after we had left the rise, Hans and Antoni - appearing to be wearing crisp Russian uniforms of their own - opened the door of the SUV for me and escorted me into the command tent of the local Russian military commander.

Col. Toptonov was a balding, slightly overweight, and dirty-looking man who had long ago given up on trying to maintain proper military dress in the perpetual cold and constant mud of the Ukrainian countryside. He didn't really believe in the cause for which he was fighting. He didn't really think that Ukraine was being run by drug addicts or Neo-Nazis... at least, he didn't anymore. To his mind, if any of that had been true, the people would have welcomed their removal. Instead, they had fought an army once considered to be the second strongest in the world to a complete standstill. But still, he did his duty.

The limp-looking cigarette that hung loosely from his lips was burning itself out as he looked up from the stack of papers in front of him, but he damned near knocked over the half-empty bottle of vodka on his desk in his rush to his feet and his snap to attention. Momentarily startled by their commander's very uncharacteristic burst of energy, it took the rest of the men in the tent a few seconds to follow suit.

I tried my best to look impatient.

"General, Sir." Toptonov barked, "Welcome to Horlivka."

"Well," I said back in perfect Russian, with no small amount of disdain in my voice. "Four kilometers outside Horlivka would be more accurate, wouldn't you say, Colonel?"

I must point out here that I was basing my interactions with the man entirely on what he thought they would be. His original orders had been to seize the city by mid-October. It was now well into January, and he was more than aware that the delay was something that was annoying his superiors. It hadn't been his fault, of course. He had conducted himself in this war about as well as an officer was able to in the Russian army; there had been no war crimes - which I suppose was accurate only as far as you considered shelling an inhabited population center could be considered a war crime - and he had no knowledge, let alone involvement in the atrocities like the one we had found in Alchevs'k. He had just been woefully under-supplied and completely unprepared for the stoutness of Ukrainian resistance.

He was also very aware that neither of those points would be considered an excuse by his superiors. So I just acted like it wasn't. He had an idea in his mind of how a meeting like this would go, and I simply played along.

"Yes, Sir, I'm sorry, Sir. We are planning a major push into the SouthEast of the city in the coming days once our reinforcements have arrived from..."

I waved a hand dismissively, and he instantly stopped talking, "I don't care," I shook my head. "I am here for another purpose."

"Sir?" The realization that he was not being replaced seemed to calm him down, but the idea that he was not about to be dragged off to military prison had him feeling much more cooperative.

"It would appear that some of our intelligence operatives managed to get themselves captured by the enemy," I said, pulling a piece of paper from my pocket and handing it to him. "I am here to organize a prisoner transfer. So I am going to need you to stop shelling the city."

Toptonov took the paper with a frown and looked down at it. What he was reading, at least according to the manipulations I was inflicting on his mind, was a very clear and very strongly worded set of orders that came from the head of the Russian Army himself.

What he was actually holding was a bar receipt for four beers that had been scrunched up in my pocket since the last time I had worn these jeans months ago.

"But Sir..." he looked up after he had finished. "The artillery bombardment is the only thing holding back the Ukrainian counter-offensive. I cannot guarantee that significant portions of the city won't be lost in their attack if the barrage is stopped."

Even fucking better.

I nodded. "And how long do you think that will matter when the Ukrainians are told the exact coordinates of this base, all of your barracks, and your ammo dumps, and blow them to hell with their fucking HIMARS?"

"You think they would talk?" The Colonel looked positively horrified, suddenly understanding the precarious position his base was in.

"I feel you are missing the point here, Colonel. It doesn't matter what I think. Someone above me thinks they might and have decided that it isn't worth the risk. They have given the order, and we follow it. A meeting has been arranged with an independent third party, and I am to meet them in the city to handle the negotiations. It would be very inconvenient to conduct that meeting while our own shells are landing around me, wouldn't you agree?"

Toptonov, orders in hand - or so he believed - nodded firmly and snapped off a surprisingly sharp salute. "I will organize an escort for you immediately, Sir."

"That won't be necessary. I already have an escort." I rolled my eyes and nodded to Antoni and Hans. "You have one hour to make sure your men know to hold their fire until I return. I don't need to tell you what happens if any of them misunderstand your orders, do I, Colonel?"

"No, Sir," the man shook his head, a bubble of fear announcing itself in his chest at the prospect of what would happen to him if he failed again. A bubble of fear that had very intentionally been put there by me. "I will see to it personally."

"See that you do."

With that, and after holding my hand out to take the orders - um... beer receipt - back off him, I spun on my heels and, flanked by my escort, exited the tent just as Toptonov picked up the phone.

"All batteries stand down, I repeat, all batteries stand down until further notice. Hold your fire!" he barked into it after a short pause. I fought to stop the small smile from creeping onto my lips.

The plan, if it worked, was, by my own admission, a pretty good one. I had influenced the fewest amount of people, and being in the same room as they had been when I did it meant that I was sure that all of them were human. Anyone else who thought it strange that the army just stopped firing at the city wouldn't get much of a chance to disrupt my plans because the orders hadn't come from me; they had come from Toptonov.

Even if a rogue inquisitor or a treacherous Evo within their ranks found that very suspicious, the men around him had received their orders through legitimate channels. If they still thought that required investigation, they would have to travel to the command post and then somehow work out that the Colonel had been duped. With only the smallest amount of manipulation involved, I considered the chances of that happening to be very slim.

Along with my escorts, I made my way back to the SUV, and with Antoni maintaining appearances by holding the door open for me, we all climbed back in again.

Gabriel put the vehicle into drive and slowly started to drive out of the camp.

I must admit that I felt a little bad. The lively, boisterous, spirited personalities of the men that I had been fighting alongside for days were gone. In their places were the shells of what was left after I had temporarily muted their willingness to question the things they were seeing. All of them were just looking peacefully out of the windows of the SUV, like being in the middle of a Russian HQ was just another day on the job. There was no pride, no surprise, no nerves, not even any suspicion about how I had pulled it off. They were just sitting there.

It had been the same when we had requisitioned our ride away from Donetsk, but I had been too preoccupied with my own problems to notice, so I knew that the change wouldn't be permanent. It was just... unsettling.

Bob, on the other hand, was fidgeting nervously in his seat and trying not to look as worried as he probably felt when he looked out the window. I caught his eyes in the rearview mirror. "Is it done?" he asked.

"Yeah." I nodded. "We're in. We shouldn't have to worry about artillery or any interruptions while we are in the city."

I could tell by the grimace on his face when he nodded that the thought of me using my powers like that made him very uncomfortable. He was currently fighting down a very pronounced ball of hatred, disgust, and hostility that was growing in his stomach. Bob was an Inquisitor; the reaction was pure instinct. it was nowhere near as overpowering as it had been after my dispatch of the ambush in Donetsk, but it was there. It wasn't helping that the three men waiting in the SUV with him had all had their minds altered, albeit at his request. But Bob, true to his word, was controlling it the best he could.

Perhaps it was because it was a use of my powers on a much smaller and much less violent scale. Perhaps it was because he didn't see most of it with his own eyes, or perhaps it was because he had known it was coming in advance, but in only a few minutes, his face calmed, and he took a deep breath.

"You good?" I asked when his eyes finally met mine again.

He nodded again. "Yeah, still a very disconcerting feeling. But I think I have a handle on it. What did you do to them?"

"Nothing, really." I shrugged. "The commander just thinks that there is a very strong possibility that he will wind up in the Gulag if any shells land in the city before I return."

"Before you return?" he asked, confused. "You're going back?"

"I wasn't planning on it, no," I smirked into the mirror. "The Ukrainian counterattack can thank me later."

Bob huffed out a laugh and turned back toward the window.

"You okay?"

He didn't answer for a few moments before he just sighed and shook his head. "I'm worried, Pete. There were more than a hundred of my people in the Donetsk office, but that isn't the only one that has been targeted. We still have no idea what has happened to them, and the more time that passes..." he let the rest of his sentence die on his lips.

"I know," I said softly. "We will find out what happened to them."

I dropped my eyes back to the road ahead as Gabriel navigated the vehicle around shell holes and mud puddles. The going was slow and steady, but the city was inching closer to us with every revolution of the SUV's wheels. It shamed me to think that in my revelations about Uri, I had overlooked the fact that other lives were at risk, that Bob and Isabelle were feeling the loss of their brethren about as acutely as the other Evos like Charlotte had felt about the losses at the party. The difference was that the Inquisition didn't even know if they should be mourning or mounting a rescue attempt, and it was that, not knowing that must have been eating at Bob. At least the Conclave knew that their members were gone. The only thing worse than that would have been not knowing.

And yet, despite the pain being suffered by Bob, despite the anguish that had been etched onto his face since we found the execution site, my mind was somewhere else.

Marco was somewhere in that city.

And Uri was with him.