My mind had barely had time to register what had happened. Uri's eyes were already rolling into the back of his head when the sound of the shot - and that zipping noise of the bullet racing past my head - smashed into my eardrums. His legs started to buckle beneath him as the centers of his brain responsible for muscle control were violently introduced first to the bullet and then to the charred concrete wall behind him. Blood, skull fragments, and brain matter splashed wetly into the wall; the metallic scent of blood filled the air in a heartbeat.

Olena just stood there, frozen in a mix of shock and panic.

The anger, the suspicion, the blinding fury that, only a moment ago, had threatened to overwhelm me with that urge to punish Uri for all his transgressions blinked out in an instant.

They weren't replaced with concern or shock, and my mind wasn't changed by a sudden realization of this new reality; there simply wasn't enough time for that. One instant, it was there, and the next, it was gone. It was like a switch had been flipped, and everything my mind had been so convinced of less than a second earlier was just gone.

The impact of the bullet had snapped Uri's head back, but the momentum of that violent movement had jolted the rest of his spine forward, and his body started to tip toward me. I reacted without even thinking about it.

I reached out, and I caught him.

As soon as my hand made contact with him, existence melted away.

********

The sky was burning.

Literally burning.

A huge gash had been ripped through the heavens, a tear in the fabric of this reality.

Darkness had descended on the perpetual summer day of the mindscape as I faded into Uri's city. There were no stars in the deathly night sky, just that burning tear and forks of lightning that seemed to rip back and forth between the edges of that flaming abyss and occasionally smash down into the city below.

Fire rained down from the sky, and the heavens themselves seemed to have shattered, chunks of Uri's mind, burning embers of... him... fell onto what must once have been a city of marvelous beauty, crushing anything and everything it landed on.

His hospital, a large building close to the center of his city, was a blazing inferno; smoke and fire billowed out the windows, and I watched as the westernmost wall started to crumble and collapse. With a lurching, crunching cacophony of crashes, the rest of the hospital collapsed with the western wall into the street. The last of Uri's ability to heal himself was gone, reduced to nothing in a cloud of dust and smoke. Yet even as the smoke and the debris was blown out around the falling building, I could see bits of it bouncing off a shield erected around his library. The repository for his memories and his knowledge was - somehow - still standing, and still being kept safe.

It took a few horrified moments of watching for me to realize that I was standing on the balcony of Uri's office, his version of my bunker, his "Nexus," as he called it. Just like in my own city, the balcony - on the upper floors of his once impressive Palace - was the best seat in the house when it came to the view. But instead of a breathtaking panorama laid out before me, I was watching the literal destruction of a man's mind after the damage done to it by that bullet.

Uri was dying... in very, very slow motion.

Each fragment of him that fell from the sky, each burning building collapsing and crumbling into nothing, each bolt of lightning smashing violently into his city, and every single passing second was literally my watching the end of him.

This wasn't Henry. This wasn't even me after the accident. There was no way to undo this level of catastrophic damage. No matter how powerful I was, no matter how miraculous my ability to heal, there was nothing I could do.

His marketplace, the building at the center of his city responsible for the major bodily functions like his heartbeat and breathing, was on fire. I could only watch in muted horror as a segment of the sky itself, trailing fire like a falling star, broke away from the terrifying vista, meteored toward the ground, and smashed into it with an earth-shattering jolt that shook the whole city. The marketplace, and the last slim hope for Uri's survival, was crushed out of existence.

"I always wondered what it would be like," Uri's voice spoke from beside me. I hadn't even realized he was there. "The end, I mean. Having your own death drawn out to such lengths should be its own form of torture, but in this case, I am grateful for it."

"Uri... I..." I turned to face him. Words were already failing me, but he held his hand up and shook his head, a soft smile pulling at its lips.

"It's okay, Pete. It was my fault."

"But..."

"We don't have a lot of time," he interrupted my argument. "There are things you need to know before it is too late. I know you are not the traitor; I always knew that."

"Then why...?"

"Because you have been infected by him."

"I... What?"

Uri signed. "Do you know what you did to Toussant? How you took a piece of yourself and forced it into his mind?" I nodded. "Well, the traitor has been doing that to almost everyone, just on a much smaller scale. He has put a part of himself into as many people as he could; that... influence... it corrupts people. It affects their loyalties, or at least their perceptions; it completely diverts suspicion away from him and onto someone else. In your case, it diverted your suspicions onto me. If I had told you what you wanted to know, you would have been compelled to pass that information on, and I couldn't risk him finding out."

I just blinked at him. I'd had good reason to suspect Uri, though, lots of them... Didn't I? Everything made so much sense when I had it in my head. Uri had been acting suspiciously, or... evasively... or... secretively. Fuck! there was something about the logic of it that now made a hell of a lot of sense. The instant that bullet had hit him, those doubts, the questions, the suspicions, the absolute conviction that he was the enemy, and the marrow-deep need to destroy him just... vanished. Instead of the utter loathing I had felt while being inside the mind of the broken Toussant, a man I knew to be an enemy, I was now filled with a deep and profound sense of... regret.

Of betrayal.

Not betrayal by him - Uri was looking at me with eyes that just exuded warmth and friendship, maybe even fraternal affection. But the betrayal of my own mind. The moment he said it, I felt it. That corruption, the infection, like a dark shadow lurking within the hidden corners of my city. I could feel it now, at that very moment, working to undermine everything that my own eyes were seeing, everything that my own senses were telling me. Someone had put an echo of their own mind into mine and almost every thought I'd had for the past... however long... had been filtered through the prism of my real enemies desires. That corruption, and my own mind's inability to even detect it, had robbed me of an ally that I now knew... knew!!... I should have trusted implicitly.

Uri shook his head as if able to decipher the look on my face with little more than a glance. "Don't blame yourself, Pete. Your strength, your resolve, and your love for Faye have kept that infection at bay much more effectively than most. You have been fighting it, even without knowing, grasping onto your humanity, and working to control your anger. I can't imagine how hard and confusing this must have been for you. But I need you to keep fighting. With me dead, you are the only thing standing in the traitor's way, and with their infection running through the highest tiers of the Conclave, I fear his next move will be against you."

"Who is it?"

Uri held my eyes and shook his head. "You know who it is. You have suspected it all along. It's the reason you kept things hidden for him, the reason why your mind reacted to him. I can't answer for you; his influence won't let me. It will rail against any information I give you, and it won't let you believe me. It will shift all that hostility toward me. You have to realize it for yourself."

I groaned loudly. "That is why you kept things from me. If you told me, I would have thought you were lying, whereas if I found the information out for myself, I would have no choice but to accept it." He nodded with another soft smile. "Like the fact that there was a traitor. It wasn't a suspicion, you knew, didn't you? You knew all along, but there is no way that you could have told me." Another nod. "I'm going to fucking kill him!"

"No!" Uri barked. "You need to be patient. If you kill him, every person he has infected will rally against you; all of them will come for you. It is like a defense mechanism. You are powerful, Pete, but not even you can take on the entire Conclave."

"Then what do I do?"

"He will blame you for my death. The others will believe him." He sighed. "I need you to keep Olena safe; she has the information you need to expose him, but you need allies, as many as you can get. You need to break into their cities - by force, if necessary - and remove their corruption. That will get them onside. The more people you can convert, the better the chance you will have."

"Then why didn't you do that?"

"Because I only worked out who it was about a second before I was shot."

I sighed and slumped against the railing. Uri turned and looked out at what remained of his city. "I wish you could have seen it in its full glory," he smiled, nodding out at the devastation. "God, I loved it here. I have spent decades exploring it, wandering the streets, studying every building, and yet I would find something new every time. It didn't matter where I was, or what I was doing, this was always home. You know, I brought my wife here a few times."

"You're married??"

His smile managed to grow both bigger and warmer at the same time as he nodded. "Anya, she's like Evie. One of us, just unawakened. I brought her here when she was sleeping. We spent so long just... being here, together. With a whole world to explore, we both found our happiest place here, just with each other. We planted that garden together." He nodded out to a section of greenery off to the east. Birch trees and flower gardens wrapped around a small pond.

All of it was burning. Even the water was on fire.

"I'll keep her safe," I said softly. It was all I could think to say.

Uri looked at me and nodded. "She's hidden. Nobody knows about her. But I would appreciate you keeping an eye on her"

A titanic crash snapped our gaze back to the city. Part of the sky had flattened the entire northwest corner of it. The walls, the buildings, his mustering field - which dictated his mind's ability to move his body - his forge, and the streets around them were reduced to rubble. Smoke and dust billowed out in every direction.

The normally lush green fields of the mindscape beyond his walls were obscured by the smoke and darkness.

Was every Evo torturously forced to witness their own deaths like this?

Uri's hand came up to his head, his fingers pressing against a spot above his eye as the physical pain of what was happening to him ripped through his mind.

I took a step toward him. I don't know why; there was nothing I could do, but it was an instinct. He turned back toward me and smiled again. His eyes were bloodshot now and a trickle of blood ran from his nose and out of one of his ears.

"I'm so sorry," I whispered.

"You would have been like a son to me," He said, resting a trembling hand on my shoulder. "I could never tell you how proud I was of how much you have grown and how much you have achieved. You worked it all out on your own. You put the fear of god into all of them; you forced the sect and the Inquisition to the table. You have achieved more in a few months than I have managed in decades. Pete, I am proud to have known you. I only wish it could have been under better circumstances."

I could feel the tears starting to well up in my eyes.

"I..." he looked back out of the ruins of his city before shifting his pained eyes back to mine. "... I don't have much time, Pete, so I need you to listen. I need you to keep fighting. Jerry and Fiona are both infected, too. I need you to save them first. They are both good people. Rhodri as well, if you can reach him, and Charlotte's loyalty to you is beyond question. That is a good start. But I'm going to need you to do something for me first."

"Keep Olena safe, I know." I nodded

"No, Pete," he sighed. He swallowed hard and cast another sorrowful look out over the city before turning his gaze back to me. "I need you to perform my last rites."

In an instant, I knew what he meant. My mind flashed back to the memories of Jacques and how he had drained Mattius of his powers and all of his knowledge all those years ago, Matthias feeding his power and his memories back into the Conclave so it could be used in the wars to come, passing the torch on so that the fight could be continued.

"No... no, no, no," I backed away. "I... I can't. I won't. You're not..."

"You have to," Uri whispered softly. "You need to know what I know, and we don't have the time for me to tell you all of it. I'm fading, Pete. I can feel it. My control is slipping, the shield around my library won't last much longer. I am starting to see my memories leak out. I'm dying."

I closed my eyes, willing this all to be a dream, willing my own mistakes to never have happened. Willing my head to have moved just an inch to the side to catch the bullet so Uri wouldn't have had to.

"Pete... please."

I opened my eyes again, mine holding his for a moment and seeing the resolve behind them.

I nodded. I couldn't bring myself to answer

"I wish I could have known you better, son." He smiled back at me.

I sighed, instinctively knowing what to do. I stepped forward and rested my palm on his forehead. "I'm sorry, Uri," I whispered.

He turned his eyes back to his city, a serene smile pulling at his lips. "I wish I could have seen Anya one more time. Tell her that she was always my one."

With a deep breath, I closed my eyes and focused on the very core of him. Uri sucked in a deep gasp, the last that he would ever take. The last rites were an ancient and honored custom. It was, in a very real way, a means to grant the dying person immortality. Every single memory, everything about them, the center of their being, would live on in the person draining them. It was Uri's consensual surrender of his power to me.

But that power was the only thing still keeping him alive. It was the thing slowing down time and letting us have this conversation; it was the thing shielding his library and all the information within, it was the thing that was keeping his brain functioning despite the bullet hole that had been ripped through it. I took it all.

Uri's last living act was to give me permission to kill him. And he had done it with that trusting, serene smile still on his lips

A huge silver birch burst from the ground in a far corner of my city and reached to the heavens, and a pattern, a little like a tattoo, etched itself onto the outer edges of my city walls.

And I felt it all

Fireworks went off behind my closed eyes as Uri's life flashed before them. I could see his mother's face, looking down at him in a crib, the marvel in her eyes that this little infant had not only saved her life but had survived when her husband had died of radiation poisoning. Days at school, teased for a speech impediment that would plague him until his awakening. A now long-dead friend coming to see him on his fourteenth birthday to unlock his mind and the mind of his friend, Sasha, Olena's brother. They had done it in a side room at his birthday party, both of them at the same time.

They had been like brothers since.

Flashes of his meeting Anya, a beautiful blonde Ukrainian woman, currently tucked safely away in the mountains of rural Austria, hidden from the world and the dangers within. Their marriage, the ceremony, his vows where he had called their love "the two halves of the same one." Endless nights laying together in the now-burning garden in his city, where they had planned the entire rest of their lives together. Plans that would now never happen. I saw the first time they made love; I saw the last time they kissed. Anya would spend the rest of her life knowing that the last words her husband had said to her were, "I will see you soon, my love."

Every shred of the man was sucked out of him and into me. My library ballooned with all of this new knowledge, the rush of it all almost overwhelming me as I felt my head spin and my legs wobble. I saw it all. I felt everything. I knew everything about him in an instant. His hopes, his dreams, his fears, his traumas, his prejudices. I saw the moment he was shown his first inquisition victim. Later, when he had been shown Sasha's body, a man he had known for decades was now broken, battered, and barely recognizable. I saw the moment when Uri realized that Sasha's death couldn't possibly have happened without the betrayal of another Evo. I watched years of his growing suspicion, the endless struggle, the sleepless nights.

I saw the moment, years ago, when the Mantle - An ancient mark bestowed by some unknown or forgotten power - burned its mark onto his skin. The top of which poked out from just above his collar. It marked his flesh in a way that never really sat right with him.

I saw the moment he first saw me, not when he met me, but when he first saw me in my full furious glory when my anger had first erupted in the party. I felt his amazement as I scythed my way through our enemy like an angel of burning vengeance, his hope that I could be an ally, and his terror when he first realized, at the diner only a few weeks ago, that I had been infected by the real traitor's corruption, just like the others.

His despondency, almost to the point of surrender, when I had started to turn on him.

But then the hope blossomed again when I went after the Inquisition, when I put aside my doubts and followed the evidence. The pride as he watched me, despite knowing that he was unintentionally, but unavoidably standing in my way, as I picked my way to a truth that he had taken years to find.

I could feel his surrender. He had never expected to survive this war, but he would have liked to have seen home one more time.

Uri's mind flashed to the children he would never have, the future he would never see, and the lifetime with Anya that would never happen.

His last thoughts were of her.

I could feel the tears streaming down my face as the man who could have been my closest ally and valued friend faded into nothingness.

I opened my eyes.

Uri was gone.

My knees buckled beneath me as the full weight of it all crashed onto me. All of those memories, all of that knowledge, the very core of another person, had been driven through my mind with about the same force as the bullet that had killed him.

I grasped onto the railing for support and looked out of the city. The sky was gone, and there was no more fire reigning down onto the city. The last of his buildings were now burning, smoldering piles of rubble, fading against the midnight light, and even those were starting to crumble like sand castles fighting the tide.

The light faded to black.

The remains of the city and the place where Uri had stood faded with it.

I was alone.

Just me and the nothingness of the bravest man I had ever known.

********

Olena's scream yanked me back to reality as the weight of Uri's lifeless corpse pulled me to the floor. It took her a moment, but the realization of what had happened dawned on her pretty quickly, and she, too, dived for cover behind the broken wall that looked out over the street.

We blinked at each other for a second, waiting for the rest of the shots to come. But nothing happened.

Our eyes moved back to Uri at the same time. His lifeless eyes, one of them blown red from the explosive blood pressure change inside his skull, stared vacantly into nothing, and his blood was pooling around my legs as I leaned back against the same wall as Olena.

"Contact, Contact!" Jakob's voice echoed through the radio. "Where did that shot come from?"

"East, no visual!" Another voice answered back, possibly Antoni, but I couldn't be sure.

"Stay in cover and keep your eyes peeled for..."

"Got him!" That one was from Gabriel. "Single shooter in a ruined highrise. Bearing zero-eight-seven, range about 450 yards."

"Take the shot, four," Jakob answered after a pause.

"Negative, hold your fire!" I barked into the radio without even thinking.

"What??" Jakob's incredulous voice answered back.

"Pete? Are you okay? Is anyone hit?" Bob's worried, almost panicked voice came next.

I didn't answer, a frown pulling at my eyebrows.

"Why the hell did I just say that?"

As if at once, I felt it. A lifetime of knowledge and experience coming to the fore inside my mind. Plans upon plans, tactics, strategies, and ideas. A wisdom, a maturity, a sense of self that I had never felt before. In less than a heartbeat, I could see that the brute force approach would get me nowhere, and firing off a tit-for-tat shot, even one to avenge Uri, would achieve nothing.

My hands were shaking, my heart was pounding, and time slowed down to a snail's pace without the slightest use of my powers. For a brief moment, everything just melted away and, listening only to the soft northerly wind and the sound of my own breathing, I closed my eyes and just focused.

Uri had been doing this for decades before I was born. Jacques and Mattius before him had been doing it for longer. Of all of Sterling's victims, most of them had no experience in combat or warfare at all, but some did. They had knowledge, they had real-world experience, they had been through war and had learned the lessons from it.

And for a few silent moments, they were talking to me.

It was a moment of Zen-like clarity--perfect calm in the total stillness of my mind.

A plan - the origins of which could have come from any one of those lifetimes, from me, or from a combination of us all - bubbled to the surface. And Uri's voice echoed in my mind.

"Knowledge is power,"

"Jeeves!" My eyes snapped open. "Cut the filters on the editing station. I want to hear every thought within a five-mile radius! I want to hear every footstep, every heavy breath, every rattle that could be from a weapon, every vehicle engine, and every whispered fucking word! I want to know if anyone is moving in this direction, whether I can sense them or not. I want YOU to tell me what I need to know without being overwhelmed with the background noise."

"Got it, Sir."

The power pulsed out around me. It washed over Uri's body, Olena, and the ruins of the rest of the hotel. It raced out over the street outside and over the building on the other side of it, picking up each of the members of the anxiously waiting escort, all of them except Bob, but I could hear his nervous breaths wafting onto the cold evening air. Further and further out, it flowed, picking up every mind of every man and beast in the area, every labored breath, every shuffle of body armor, every running footstep, and every breathless pant. We didn't have much time. Not a single human mind in the men now racing toward us had any notion of who I was, the exact reason I had not sensed them before, but they were under strict orders to take any man in this room alive...

And to immediately execute any women.

My eyes looked up in time to see a sobbing Olena starting to crawl toward her friend, her hand absently coming up to pull her hat off. Whether it was a comfort thing, an age-old sign of respect, or just a subconscious gesture, I didn't know, but her streaming eyes were locked on Uri's rapidly paling face.

"Olena, get your hat on!" I barked at her, probably a little harsher than I had meant to. "They will be here soon, and I need you to focus. I promise you, there will be time to honor Uri later, but he wouldn't want you to be put in danger doing it."

She blinked up at me in shock but nodded and pulled her hat back over her head. "I don't understand, how could he have been the traitor," she sobbed. "Why wouldn't he have told you about any of this? It doesn't make sense. He was my friend."

"He wasn't the traitor," I growled. "But someone has been trying really fucking hard to make it look like he was, and the people working for him are on their way here. You cannot be found when they get here!"

"You mean..."

"Yeah, this was a trap, and we walked right into it."

"What about you?"

I looked up from Uri's face and held her eyes. "I am what they came here for, so I am going to give them what they want."

Her eyes scrunched up in confusion for a second before they shot up in sudden realization. "No, you can't... you..."

I wasn't listening; my hand was already moving to the Radio. "Jakob, I need you to listen very carefully..."

********

The room we were in could never be called large. From the archway that once contained the door to the outer wall opposite was maybe fifteen feet. The section of exterior wall that ran along the left-hand side has assumably had some windows in it at some point, but the shell that had created the yawning hole in the wall seemed to have connected those windows into a single void that left only the chest-high section of the remaining cover that I was now sitting against. The inner wall opposite me was surprisingly intact and probably no more than ten feet away.

It was, therefore, quite surprising how many soldiers were apparently needed to secure it.

Twelve of them, it would seem.

Six of them filed in first, all of them leveling their weapons at me and barking at me not to move, then another six after them. Their job, at least by outward appearance, was to secure the rest of the room, or maybe the adjoining rooms - which no longer existed - or possibly the rest of the floor - which also didn't exist. The room was literally a burned-out shell with four walls of varying degrees of intactness and a doorway.

And me.

Sitting on the ground with Uri's head on my lap.

Aside from a pile of rubble leaning against the corner of the room, there really was literally nothing else in it--me, Uri, rubble, and now twelve heavily armed, sweaty dudes.

I had commented to myself a few times, by this point, about the ineptitude of the people I was fighting. All but three of these men were human, and all of the minds I could read knew what I was. Most of them knew what I had done to the men who had attacked the party; they knew - albeit through false information - that Toussant's apparently elite squad had been decimated to a man by me, too. One of them even knew the fate of the men who had tried to ambush us at the Inquisition office in Donetsk.

So, knowing all this and knowing what I was capable of, they still thought that the best way to deal with me was to point guns at me and shout.

I mean, they must have been at least a little suspicious when the stairs they had just climbed didn't collapse under them or the walls holding them up didn't implode. Surely, they must have asked questions when rifles didn't jerk themselves upwards and pump a few bullets into their owners' heads entirely of their own accord. They should at least have been feeling a little surprised by the fact that they hadn't been hurled out of the hole in the wall behind me and left to the mercies of the biting winter air and gravity. One of them, specifically, was wondering why he wasn't currently on fire, as had happened to the ambush team.

Maybe that is why there were so many of them. Maybe they thought I was only capable of attacking one of them at a time. Maybe if one man was suddenly launched through the hole in the wall or decided to spontaneously combust, the others would be able to pump me full of bullets before I could attack any others. However, I couldn't imagine why they would think that. They were hoping that the shock of losing Uri was enough to daze me. At least, that was the theory.

They were wrong, of course, but they didn't need to know that quite yet. None of them had even considered the possibility that their bullets were entirely useless against me, nor had they really considered that there were only twelve of them when I had taken out almost ten times that number at the party.

Admittedly, I had no idea what the three Inquisitors were thinking, but if the humans had known that I had butchered other inquisitors before, these ones must have known it, too. Still, they seemed to be playing along with the others, so it was safe to assume, or at least guess, that they were working from the same faulty information.

God, I wanted to fucking kill them.

I don't even have words for how much I wanted to fucking kill them.

Especially that smug little ass wipe, third from my left, who was just itching to get back to base to boast about the shot that killed Uri. I could still smell the cordite on his gloves.

I could feel that anger pacing back and forth behind its walls, rendered impotent - for now at least - by the plan that had grown out of Uri's tactical experience. For the time being, they would be allowed to live.

One of the things Uri had been most impressed with was my plan back in the sand dunes on the coast of The Hague. Those Inquisition hit squads had, from their perspective, cornered me; I had fought one group of them off, and if the plan had worked, I would have been captured by the second. It was only the untimely intervention by Jerry and Fiona that had ruined the plan. It would have looked real, at least to the rogues. They would have captured me, "taken me in," and I would have been led straight to the enemy leadership.

To be fair, I probably would have destroyed the lot of them before getting all the information I could have; that was just who I was then. But now I was different. I was more.

It hadn't worked that time. But that didn't mean it couldn't work now.

I just had to make it look real.

I growled and started to move, pushing Uri's lifeless corpse off my lap and lifting my blood-soaked hand up towards one of the men; my eyes clouded to that midnight black, and the walls of the room started to shake. Flecks of masonry started to crumble off the precariously standing building just as it had done during my rage with Uri. "Fuck you!" I snarled at one of the men just as he was launched backward into the wall. He hit the concrete with a grunt and crashed to the floor, one of his hands coming up to cradle his now broken shoulder. I made a show of turning my attention to the next man.

It took less than a second before a rifle butt smashed into my face. The blinding white light and the loud ringing in my ears from my brain bouncing off the inside of my skull was very, very real. It was a blow that would have at least fractured - possibly caved in - part of my skull had I been human. The look of pain, the gash above my right eye, and the steady stream of blood that started to flow out of it, however, was entirely fake. It was just another trick learned from Sterling.

I groaned loudly, slumping back to the floor and putting on my best impression of the dazed confusion often associated with a mild concussion.

I would never win any Oscars, but the human minds in the room were buying it.

"Get his radio," one of them barked. I was making a show of my eyes rolling around in my head, so I couldn't quite make out which of the men said it or which one acted on it, but a few moments later, the nervous breaths of a man started wafting over me as I was frisked. His hands checked my ears for the earpiece, my neck for the wires, and my chest for the radio itself. His hands delved into my pockets, ironically pulling out, and then tossing away, the beer receipt that had gotten me into the city.

"It's not here," the man muttered, "He doesn't have one."

"What about him?"

The man moved away, and my eyes cleared enough to make out the hazy shape of someone rifling through Uri's clothes. "Nothing."

"Okay, good. He won't be able to call for backup."

"He needs his hands," another voice said. "Get him on his front and cuff him behind his back..." there was a slight pause before the same voice started speaking again, apparently into a radio. "...Team four to Falcon. Target has been subdued. The area is secure."

I was yanked roughly from my place, slumped against the wall, and shoved onto my stomach. I let myself be moved, not putting up any measure of a fight as a knee was pressed into the small of my back, the barrel of a weapon was pressed into the back of my head, and my left arm was pulled behind me, being held against that knee before my right hand was jerked into place with it. The feeling of cold metal being pressed around my wrists shot up my arms before the knee was removed, and I was left on the floor, wheezing against the dust that was being sucked into my lungs.

To every eye in the room, I was barely conscious.

My mind, on the other hand, was racing.

Here's the thing. Whether they knew it or not, these men were giving me information. I was starting to think that the knowledge and experiences drawn from Uri were having more of an effect than I had thought, or at least that this mental clarity afforded by him was providing some unexpected benefits because I was picking up a lot more from the situation around me that I thought I normally would have.

There was a traitor in the Black Knights. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, I already knew who it was, but the corruption planted inside me by him wasn't letting me focus on it. The more I tried, the more I doubted it. Uri had been right. I would need to discover it on my own; trying to piece things together without that unequivocal proof was a waste of time. The point was that there was a traitor and that these men could only have gotten their information about how powerful I was and the full measure of my capabilities from them. Even if they got it from the rogues, the traitor would have had to at least confirm it for them.

And yet, they were woefully misinformed.

I didn't need my hands to use my powers, for example. The cuffs would barely slow me down, their firearms were basically useless, and that lovetap with the butt of the rifle was about as effective as it would have been against the side of a tank. But every single human mind in the room was silently congratulating themselves on subduing me. They genuinely thought they had me captured and that I was no longer a threat to them. They had been told that restraining my hands and knocking me out would be enough to detain me safely, that if they could do that quickly, then there was very little chance that I could do anything to defend myself.

The only person who could have given them that information was the traitor.

Meaning that person was either intentionally giving out inaccurate information or was basing his understanding of my powers entirely off his own. If he needed to use his hands for his powers, then I must, too. Maybe every other Evo needed to use their hands. I mean, there was an awful lot of hand-waving going on in the duels I had seen at the party. None of them had just stood there. I was more than capable of dispatching all twelve of these fuckers with less than a twitch of my nose, but if the traitor couldn't do that, was it conceivable that he had never considered the possibility that I could?

If I played along for long enough, I could ride this train of ignorance pretty much to the top of the organization. All I had to do was to play the part of a broken prisoner. The minds of the humans around me were basically giving me a road map; they were telling me how they were expecting me to react... so that is how I acted.

And right now, the man who had hit me was starting to wonder if he had hit me harder than he had intended because I should be coming around by now.

I let out a deep, dangerous growl. "I am going to kill every last fucking one of you!" I snarled into the dust-covered concrete.

The man who had spoken into the radio laughed. "And how are you going to do that, sunshine?" he goaded. "You can't move your hands to use your powers, and there are too many of us for you to take at once. We even brought composite rifles, so you couldn't make them shoot us..."

Composite rifles? You mean you actually thought I was moving the metal in people's guns like my head was a fucking magnet?? Okay then, good to know.

"....even your cuffs are a polymer alloy; not even you can break out of them." The man went on.

"Jeeves?"

"It is about as much nonsense as it sounds, Sir. I predict it would take less than point-two of a second to break them open."

"Cool, thanks."

".... your leader is dead. Eric here fired the shot that killed him. Right between the fucking eyes. And all it took was a special non-metallic bullet."

I rolled to the side and looked up at the man speaking, then to the man with the smug grin next to him. "Eric, is it?" I said, trying to stop my voice from sounding calm.

Eric nodded.

I turned back to the floor and rested my head against the concrete. "You are going to die last, Eric... and screaming."

Eric drove the steel toe-capped tip of his combat boot into the side of my ribs. They all heard the crunch of breaking bones, or at least they thought they did, and they all heard my howl of pain. "What was that, you piece of shit?" he hissed at me. "Say it again." He kicked me one more time. "I fucking dare you!"

I whimpered out a pathetic-sounding laugh, forced through the entirely fake gasps of pain and sobs of frustrated desperation. "You heard me!"

"I'm going to enjoy watching you die, asshole," he snarled. "Just like I enjoyed blowing your boyfriend's head off."

I inwardly rolled my eyes. "Homophobia, that'll show me."

I made a show of coughing up some blood onto the floor but didn't answer. I just pressed my forehead back to the concrete and wheezed, the concrete dust and soot resting on it puffing out on the small waves of my breath. The men were waiting for something, an order or an instruction or something, from one of the Inquisitors in the room. None of them knew what was coming, nor did they know what they were supposed to do next. But, one by one, they kept flicking glances up to one of the men in the corner, one of the ones with the invisible mind. Yet, as invisible as their minds may have been, I could tell that the room's rogue occupants were nervous. They were shuffling on their feet; there was a slight edge to their breaths, their fingers wrung tightly on their weapons, and the leather of their combat boots creaked a little as they subconsciously flexed their toes in the classic fight-or-flight bodily response. All three of their hearts were hammering in their chests. I could almost smell the nervousness wafting from their pores.

These were men who had spent their entire lives believing that they were invulnerable to an Evo's power, yet here I was, the man who had utterly obliterated dozens of their brethren. There must have been at least some small part of them that wondered why this had been so easy.

For my part, I just bided my time. I felt that hungry, furious anger stalking in eager circles behind the inner walls of my mind, like a prize fighter waiting for the bell to ring on a grudge match. In a former life, I would have been completely unable to hold it back; I could see that now, the rage was too strong, it was too all-encompassing, and it had picked up the scent of blood and fear. Yet I was in total control. Every shred of me was burning with anger and hate; there was a very large part of me that wanted to throw the gates open and let my fury have at them. But within that anger was a simple voice, a calming influence, one that told me that I needed to wait; I needed to let the game play out a little longer if I wanted to get to the answers I needed.

The sound of another car engine echoed into the room, yanking me back to the moment, getting closer by the second. There was no gunfire heralding its arrival as it had done for us; there were no mighty explosions of landmines or rockets, just the deep bass rumble of an engine getting closer. Finally, it pulled to a stop outside. My ears tracked the doors opening and the sounds of what sounded like three men alighting from it

"He's here," one of the Inquisitors said, his voice coming from a spot that would have looked over the wall and out onto the street.

"Get him on his feet," another voice said. A few seconds later, two men hooked their hands under my armpits and hoisted me upright. I may have gone a little overboard with the blood from that gash above my eye because it had flowed down the entire side of my face, blurring my vision as I tried to blink it clear. I spat out a mouth full of dust and was turned to face the archway, listening as three sets of feet made their way up the stairs. I made a point of not looking at the pile of rubble. Olena was hiding in there with my radio, and I didn't want to draw any attention to it.

A blurred outline of a man appeared in the doorway, standing there for a moment and just looking at me.

My vision was thick from the blood that had run down into my eyes, and blinking didn't seem to be clearing it as fast as I would have liked. That blood had been caked in the dust and the soot from the concrete floor, too.

His thick, rich, Italian accent identified him with the very first syllable. "Hello, Pete."

In an instant, that shadow of corruption shattered into nothingness. Every doubt, every question, and every manipulation vanished as the infection dissipated.

Time froze. My mind smashed against itself as a thousand thoughts all competed for primacy at the same time. I remembered the way the ghosts in my city stopped to look at him as I showed him around, the suspicion and the unease on their faces as if they could sense the corruption being left in his wake. That wind. Memories, some mine, some belonging to Uri, of excuses made to keep my training - and the training of others - at its lowest possible level. Charlotte's almost instinctive hatred of the man.

But mostly, I felt that pit of betrayal in my stomach. Uri had once considered him to be one of his closest friends, his most steadfast ally, his confidant... a brother in arms. Yet the attack on the party had raised too many questions. The memory of the moment that Uri's own corruption was shattered flashed through my mind, the moment in the diner with me when he realized that the only person who could be responsible for that level of treachery was his friend.

I remembered that look of horror washing over his face.

His attempts to keep me away from him, to protect me, to protect this mission, even if it meant putting himself in harm's way. Waking up one morning to find him gone from their camp and knowing... knowing... that he was on his way here to silence Olena.

Knowing it was a trap, but knowing he had to come anyway.

Even if it meant his death.

I sighed deeply, letting my face finally express my utter loathing of the man in front of me before it hung toward the ground.

"... Marco..."