The revelation had left me in a daze.

Not at the fact that Marco was the traitor but at how all-encompassing that corruption had been.

In the deepest parts of my mind, I had already known that it was Marco, but that corruption had somehow managed to make me overlook it. To doubt my own reasoning. I think a big part of me had known the moment Uri had told me about the traitor's influence. The simple fact of the matter was that only three people had ever stepped foot in my city to be able to plant it.

Sterling had been inside when he attacked, but there was nothing in his broken mind about the rogues, the traitor, or the war between the Evo's and this part of the Inquisition when I had smashed it open upon his defeat. Sterling had been physically and mentally incapable of hiding anything from me, and I mined that fucker for everything. I found it inconceivable that I had missed something this huge.

Charlotte had been another person who had been allowed into my city, but my trust in her was marrow-deep. I had watched her crumple when she learned of Becky's death, I had seen the concern, venturing into panic, on her face when she had found me after the party, and I had seen her anger at the Sect when they refused to pick a side. Every single part of me trusted her. I trusted her with my secrets, I trusted her with Philippa and Evie, I trusted her with my life.

That only left Marco. It could only have been him.

I knew that as soon as Uri described the corruption, yet that manipulation, the little spec of Marco's own consciousness that he had used to poison my reasoning, had fought against that simple, undeniable knowledge. Right up to the end, it fought me. Uri could have been lying, even though I had seen his memories firsthand and knew that he wasn't. Maybe it was Fiona when we had slept together in the cottage, or perhaps it had been Jerry... he'd been around pretty much constantly since New Years as well. Yet, I somehow knew that whoever had planted that seed of doubt would have had to have done it from within my own mind. Neither Jerry nor Fiona had ever stepped foot inside my city.

Yet still, it fought me.

Every thought I had was twisted to push suspicion away from Marco and onto Uri, or - now that he was dead - it warped my reasoning instead. Anything to get my mind to question whether it was real or not. Right until the moment it was shattered.

Things were starting to slot into place. Marco, as far as I could tell, hadn't even considered inviting me to the party until he had seen my city and seen the full measure of my power up close. He had invited me knowing that the attack was about to happen - and yes, it had to have been him who arranged it. I couldn't even begin to imagine the sense of smug self-admiration he must have felt when I carved my way through the men who had executed Faye; he must have thought that all of his Christmases had come at once. He couldn't possibly have known that I would have decimated the ranks of attacking rogues as effectively as I had, but he also couldn't have known that I would have met and bonded with Faye, either. Let's face it: that was the part that really induced my incandescent rage.

The best he could possibly have hoped for was that I was either killed in the attack, meaning one less threat for him to worry about, or I survived the onslaught and joined the fight. Either way, the war would have started, either with me out of the way or firmly on-side.

Instead, he had found a weapon that he was able to control or at least manipulate into doing his bidding.

Jesus. He had even known about Faye being in my city. He couldn't possibly have known about Faye without being in my mind; nobody did. And yet he had mentioned her in his email. How the fuck had I missed that?

He had played me like an instrument the entire time.

With his influence firmly in my head, he could manipulate every thought I had about every single piece of information that I had found in the entirety of my investigation. He couldn't change what I found out, but he sure as shit could make sure that the finger of suspicion pointed firmly away from him.

As soon as I had heard his voice, the corruption had shattered, like a shadow being exposed to the truthful rays of the sun's dazzling light. In its wake, however, I was starting to see the full effect he was having on me.

The manipulation wasn't like a passive computer program, automatically operating in the background and affecting my thoughts. It was like his own little window into my city. It was a conscious effort on his part. Everything that had been done to me had been Marco deliberately warping my own logic. Every mistake I had made had been capitalized on, and every chance I had to address my own failings, every time I had considered a way to make myself better, he had smothered them like an infant at birth.

The filter I had put onto the thoughts I could hear around me was a perfect example. Only that morning, I had once again come to the realization that I needed to re-examine how that was working because I kept missing important information that was right at my fingertips. From not sensing the men sneaking up on us in Donetsk or the partisans in Alchesv'k to missing my chance to deal justice to the men responsible for the massacre of the civilians there. I had known that I needed to look at how my filters worked again; I had plenty of time to do it on the way here, so why hadn't I?

And now I knew.

Marco had sat back and watched those thoughts developing, and then he had perfectly redirected them onto something else and made sure I had forgotten about them. Because he knew that having access to that sort of information would have made it much harder for him to stay hidden. By the time I made it to the meeting with Olena, he had warped my thinking enough to make me completely forget about the filters and instead focus on my target. I had been utterly convinced that Uri was the traitor in our midst, so much so that it only took one comment from him to smash open the gates that were holding back my rage. I had been only moments away from crashing into his mind to take the information I wanted. Information that Marco would have twisted to suit his own purposes.

There was no doubt in my mind that, upon finding the 'facts' that Marco wanted me to see, I would have simply destroyed Uri, considered my job done, and I would have gone home.

It was Eric-the-smug-sniper who had stopped things. His bullet had killed Uri, and my being inside Uri's city as he died - after knowingly sacrificing himself for the cause - downloading decades of knowledge and memories and seeing some of them firsthand finally convinced me that Uri wasn't the traitor. It was more first-hand information at once than Marco was capable of manipulating. That bullet had undone all of his planning, although I doubted any of the people in the room saw it that way. As soon as I had performed those last rites, the chances of Marco maintaining his facade that Uri was the viper in the nest dropped to zero. That didn't mean I would have worked out it was Marco; the manipulations were still in place, and he could have redirected my suspicions onto someone else.

It's very hard to say if Marco would have shown himself if Uri had been killed by me as he had planned.

But he was here now.

I just didn't know why. The effectiveness of his manipulation was nothing short of astonishing; there was nothing stopping him from maintaining it indefinitely. Maybe the fact that Uri had brought my attention to it was all that was needed to end the charade. I had recognized the truth of it as soon as Uri had told me; I had felt that corruption inside me. Perhaps knowing that it was there rendered it ineffective because I would certainly have second-guessed every decision I made while it was still in my mind, and I would have, at the very least, tasked Jeeves with removing every trace of it and tracking it back to the source.

Maybe knowing that was what finally prompted Marco to make his big play. Because he was right here, he was looking right at me.

And judging by the look on his face, he was under the distinct impression that he had won.

"I didn't want it to come to this," he said softly, my vision clearing enough to make him out properly as his eyes dropped to the lifeless body of Uri. "I wish things could have been different, old friend,"

I said nothing.

I just watched him as Uri's apparently inexhaustible well of patience and his font of strategic knowledge kept the locks tightly sealed on the walls that held back my anger. There was nothing in the world I wanted more at that point than to immolate every other fucker in the room and then take my time breaking into Marco and making him suffer.

I could feel it. I could sense my rage turning its entire focus on the man who had pretended to be my mentor. I could feel the simmering heat rising from it; I could feel that malevolent, sadistic intent bubbling just beneath the surface, and I instantly understood the one simple truth of my new reality.

Either Marco died, or I did. There was no way in hell that both of us were going to survive this war. He was responsible for everything: Faye, the deaths at the party, Becky, the fracturing of Philippa's mind, my betrayal of Uri... all of it.

I was going to kill him. Or I was going to die trying.

Marco turned his attention back to me. "I'm sorry it had to happen this way, Pete," he said softly. I just looked at him, my face being contorted by my patience to a look of pure shock and painful betrayal rather than the unspeakable contempt I now held him in. "I don't want to hurt you. I want us to be friends, to be allies. I still have so much to teach you. There is so much that you don't know."

I still said nothing.

"Uri wouldn't ever have understood; he was too loyal to the Conclave, too self-righteous, he couldn't see the bigger picture. I didn't want him dead, but he left me no choice. I could have killed you, too, but I am hoping that you are willing to listen to reason."

"Why?" I whispered, my voice hoarse from dust still lodged in my throat. "Why did you do it?"

"I wish I didn't have to," his shoulders slumped. For the briefest of moments, I almost believed the look of regret on his face. "I'll tell you everything, I promise. But I need you to come quietly first. Where are the rest of your escort? Where is Bob?"

"We..." I coughed, my voice still weak, at least to the outside world. "The Russians executed his people, hundreds of them," I lied slowly, "Civilians too. We found them. I came here to meet a contact, but Uri was here instead. The others went after the Russians."

Marco nodded. "Thank you, Pete." He turned and nodded to one of the men. "Let the others know they are being tracked. No prisoners," he said quietly to him. I had to consciously stifle the growl in my throat. Not only did Marco know about it, he was aligned with the people responsible for the massacre. Yet, at the same time, I had just told an outright lie to another Evo, and he hadn't spotted it. The other man nodded and reached for his radio, talking into it as he stepped out of the room.

Marco sighed, watching me as my eyes followed the man out of the room. "Don't waste your concern on Henry and his team, Pete. They are the enemy. I know you don't see that at the moment, and for what it is worth, Bob seems like a nice guy, maybe even Isabelle, too. But they're no different than the Conclave; they are rotten from the inside out, corrupt and archaic. There needs to be a change before all of us are wiped out. The order that I work for, they are committed to making sure that doesn't happen."

"What order?"

"You have been calling us the Rogues. But it isn't only errant members of the Inquisition in there; there are hundreds of Evos, too, maybe thousands, from the Conclave and from the Sect, and our order is much, much older than you might think. We call ourselves the Praetorians."

My anger purred happily - if such a thing was possible - as it learned the name of our new enemy. I could almost feel it rubbing its hands together in dangerous, malevolent deliberation.

I nodded slowly, still playing the part of the defeated captive.

"Look, Pete. If you cooperate, if you work with us, I promise that you and everyone you care about won't be harmed..."

Another growl stifling moment. There were already more than enough people harmed to render that promise meaningless, or at least ridiculously late in the game.

"... but we are going to need you to come with us." He went on, still trying to sound friendly. It was actually odd to see Marco without that trademark, disarming smile, but somehow, this nervous look suited him better. He knew he was treading dangerous ground; he had seen what I was capable of, even if he was woefully misinformed about most of it. "These men are highly trained. I know you could attack my city, but they know what to look for when someone enters the mindscape. If you try that, they are going to shoot you, so please... just cooperate. I don't want anything to happen to you."

"Where?"

Marco frowned, "Where, what?"

"Where are you taking me?"

"Oh. A compound; it's not far from here. You will be... interrogated to make sure you aren't just playing along. But once you pass, we will talk; I will tell you everything. I won't lie to you and say the ordeal will be pleasant; these guys need to be thorough, but it's a sacrifice we all make for the cause."

I held his eyes for a moment, sighed, and shook my head, letting that look of surrender wash over my features before looking down at Uri. "Let's get this over with," I said softly, the hollow pang of sadness and capitulation flooding my raspy voice.

"You won't regret this, Pete," Marco half-smiled, his eyes were on his old friend's body, too.

Oh, I know I won't. You might, though.

Marco turned and nodded to one of the Inquisitors, who in turn barked out a few orders, and I was led - nowhere near as roughly as I was expecting - through the archway and down the stairs. A personnel truck and two SUVs pulled up into the street next to the one that had brought Uri as we stepped out of the hotel lobby, but my eyes weren't on them.

I was looking at the third floor of the building opposite. Bob, Jakob, and the rest of my escort had heard nothing from me since I had given my radio to Olena and buried her under that rubble pile, but they had been clear on their orders. They were to wait until morning, retrieve Olena, and then get the hell out of Dodge, but all of them were now in concealed positions, their rifles trained on my assailants with some very itchy fingers on their triggers.

I locked eyes with Bob through the darkness. The look of fear at my bloodied appearance swept over his face, but it didn't stay there long. Revulsion, anger, and horrified betrayal replaced his expression the moment he recognized Marco. Bob had, in no way, been corrupted by the traitor, but he instantly understood his mistake; he had been just as suspicious about Uri as I had been, and the look of disgust on his face - not just at Marco for his treason, but at himself for falling for the ruse - was more than enough evidence that he wanted to bestow his measure of justice immediately.

I held his eyes and shook my head as softly as I was able to.

Jakob's face appeared next to Bob's, and in a move almost identical to the one he had used on me in the outer windows of that stadium in Alchevs'k, he placed his hand on the barrel of Bob's weapon and gently pushed it down.

The look of helpless, indignant, and righteous fury on Bob's face was probably very close to the one I had flashed Jakob myself the night before, and it was almost enough to pull a smile from my lips, but I still had a part to play. None of my captors had seen the shake of my head, and if they had, they had dismissed it as some internal processing. A smile would be harder to hide. My eyes flicked to Jakob.He gave me a soft nod, and then both of them ducked back down out of sight.

For what it was worth, Jakob thought it was a ballsy plan... batshit crazy but bold. It was only the need to get Olena, and the information she had, to safety that was stopping him from mounting an impromptu rescue. His mission was to help Bob find his people; the means to completing that mission was currently hiding, hat on head, under a pile of carefully suspended rubble. I was secondary to that, and we both knew it.

"Get in," one of the Inquisitors said, putting his hand on the back of my hand and pushing it down as I was bundled into the car. Another man got in on the other side of the car, and the first man climbed in behind me, sandwiching me between them. Marco, getting into the SUV in front of ours, cast a look back at me and disappeared out of sight.

********

A little over three months.

That is how long I had been in this cell. Injections of various drugs, coupled with random noises that were blasted at deafening levels through speakers in each corner of the room, had stopped me from sleeping for more than a handful of interrupted hours during that entire time. There was a very comfortable-looking bed along one wall, but being chained to the opposite side of the cell, my bindings nowhere long enough to allow me to reach it, made its presence little more than another form of torture.

The worst part was the electric shocks. There was no pattern to them, and at random times throughout the days and the night and at varying levels of intensity, the electricity would explode into my body through the metallic shackle around my ankle, and my whole body would seize violently.

My jaw would clench shut with enough force to almost shatter my teeth, my ears would ring, and the adrenaline in my bloodstream would explode from the muscle spasms and the pain, which in turn made my heart hammer desperately in my ribs. I could smell my hair singeing. Every single burst was enough to leave me writhing and twitching on the ground, my muscles spamming as I whimpered pathetically.

I hadn't been fed more than a handful of times since I got here, either.

The closest I'd come to getting a drink was the occasional times when the door opened, and a ski-mask-wearing man carrying a firehose smashed me into the back wall from the sheer pressure of the water he had hosed into me.

It was powerful enough to tear strips of flesh from my body.

Clothing may have helped, but I had been stripped before being bolted to the wall, and if it wasn't already freezing before each hosing down, it sure as shit was afterward. I had been reduced to sucking the water off the floor while simultaneously coughing the water out of my lungs from almost being drowned. I had learned to turn my back toward the door on seeing the hose, but these days, I could barely even stand.

I was burned from the electric shocks, aching from the muscle spasms, bruised from the current-induced seizures on the ground and the impact of that firehose. I was starving, I was dehydrated, I was sleep deprived, I was cowering away from the incessant noise from those speakers, and I had never been colder in my entire life. My powers were being stretched to breaking point, simply trying to keep my body healed and warm and to combat the ever-present pain smashed into me.

My hands were stiff from still being cuffed behind my back, adding more pain to my increasingly frequent spasming muscles, and there was something about the construction of the room itself that was blocking me from using my powers or even sensing anything beyond its walls.

I was hanging on by a thread.

I was curled up in a ball on the floor, trying to muster the energy it would take to drag myself to my feet. Walking would cause my muscles to cramp excruciatingly painfully, but those cramps would subside, and the movement, however limited, would get the blood flowing again, and the level of my suffering would be reduced for a short time. It was a double-edged sword, though, because the camera bolted to the wall above the door was tracking my every movement, and more than once, my captors had chosen one of those moments of movement to send another violently agonizing burst of electricity into my ankle restraint.

I knew that the time was approaching. Somehow, despite all of the hardships I was suffering, and without a single point of outside reference, I was still able to track the relentless passage of time. And every two hours, day or night, like clockwork, my cell door would be opened, a man in a hood would come in and sit down on a chair in the corner of the room - which I also could not reach - and ask me the same questions.

Over and over.

Countless times since I had been tossed in here.

The same. Fucking. Questions.

I was at breaking point, he knew I was at breaking point, and he knew it was only a matter of time before I gave him the answers he wanted.

With a groan that sounded like it could have come from the lips of an eighty-year-old postal worker, still struggling with his rounds, I hauled myself to a more upright position. Panting and wheezing, grunting through full-body muscle cramps, and stretching out the ache of limbs that hadn't moved in hours, I dragged myself off the floor and sat back against the wall.

There was a toilet in the room, probably the only mercy these Praetorians had shown me, but sitting on it for any longer than was necessary to relieve myself was one guaranteed way to get myself electrocuted. Still, there was a certain element of.... Shall we call it 'bodily releases' that came with that kind of muscle contractions, and the lower part of me was a disgusting mess of urine and the remnants of Uri's blood that had soaked through my pants. I could only look at my legs with thinly veiled contempt as the muscles contorted painfully beneath the skin, adding a strange shimmering effect to the dried fluids that now caked my extremities as the light from the only bulb in the room bounced off them.

I had done this enough times to know that I needed to wait for those muscles to stop having a tantrum before I would be able to attempt any more movement.

The small patch of blood on the ground, a little way to my right, was evidence of what would happen if I rushed it. I had made it to my feet the week before, determined to be on them when the interrogator arrived, needing to demonstrate my defiance. My legs had cramped, then buckled, and with my arms still secured behind my back, I had no way of preventing the floor from coming up to meet me as I face-planted into it. My nose had been spread across my face after that one, and stopping the bleeding and resetting my nose had taken up more of my power reserves than I had to spare.

I was fairly sure my collarbone was broken, too. Same reason: a sharp and violent impact with the floor, although that one had been at the behest of a sudden and unexpected dose of mains power to my body while I had been upright.

I had given up on trying to be on my feet for the arrival of the interrogator after that.

Every moment, every shudder of pain, every inhalation of my own stench, every shiver from the cold, every burst of agony from the electric shocks, and every growl of my hungry stomach was just counting down to the moment of my surrender.

And my time was just about up.

The large, heavy-sounding deadbolts on the door were pulled back with a loud, metallic clunk, and the solid steel door creaked outwards on strained-sounding hinges. A man in a hood, a significant white aura surrounding him, stepped into the room, regarded me with dispassionate eyes, and took his seat on the chair in the corner.

"How are you feeling today?" his voice asked calmly, the same first question as always.

"Peachy," I grumbled back at him. I still couldn't bring myself to answer him properly. No matter how close I was to that abyss, I wasn't in it yet, and I would be damned if I wasn't going to throw every shred of myself into fighting for as long as I could.

The man nodded and wrote something onto the clipboard he was holding.

"Are you ready to begin?" It had taken me a few goes around to realize that was question number two.

"Raring to go."

"What is your name?"

"Barbara," I had given him a different name in each of the interrogations. I was honestly starting to run out of new ones. But again, my defiance simply wouldn't let me answer him honestly. He scribbled my answer onto his paperwork.

"Where were you born?"

"In West Philidelphia, born and raised. On the playground was where I spent most of my days." I tried keeping that answer novel, too, as well as the ones for every other question. I had made it into something of a game.

"What is your father's name?"

"Chuck Norris."

"What is your mother's name?"

"Dolly Parton, but don't tell Chuck's wife."

"Where do you currently live?"

"Here, I'm guessing." I finished my answer with a long, haggard cough, which in turn caused a series of full-body cramps. The man waited for me to finish, looking at me with neither contempt nor compassion in his steel-grey eyes.

"Where did you go to school?"

"Sesame Street."

"Where did you go to college?"

"Also, Sesame Street."

This went on for a while. There were more than two dozen questions in total, each one as innocuous as the last and each one a question that I was certain they already knew the answer to. The goal was relatively simple: They were trying to break me. They would keep asking the same questions until I had been worn down enough to answer them truthfully. Once I had been broken, they could ask me the questions that they really wanted to know.

This time, like the hundreds of times before, I gave him nothing.

Without a sigh, without a growl, or without a single outward sign of any emotion one way or another, the man scribbled down the answer to his final question, stood and left the room.

I closed my eyes as the door slammed shut and started to count down.

5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

The pain smashed into me. It would seem that the powers in charge of this place were not impressed with the flippancy of my answers and, as had happened every time since the fourth or fifth interrogation, a huge amount of electrical current was forcefully crashed into my body.

Being electrocuted, for those of you fortunate enough to have never experienced it and sensible enough to have never licked a battery, is rather unpleasant. We have all experienced muscle cramps before - in bed or after exercise, and usually as a product of dehydration - all you really need to know is that it feels like that... just everywhere and at least a few hundred times worse. But whereas you can usually stretch out a leg cramp, the convulsions of the rapidly oscillating current from the power grind simply forbade any muscle in your body from functioning by cramping them, over and over again, a dozen or so times a second, for as long as you were subjected to the electricity.

Everything was pain. Pain consumed my entire existence for those few seconds. Acute, debilitating agony, the likes of which I had never imagined before. Then it stopped, and I found myself back in that twitching ball on the floor. The pulsing aftershocks, the body-wide cramps, the smell of burned hair as my heart pounded in my ears. Wretched and crumbling, broken and forsaken, I just lay there.

It appeared that my captors were either growing increasingly frustrated by my petulance, or they were able to see how close I was to breaking and decided I needed that extra push. Because whereas I had only ever been subjected to a single blast of electricity after each interrogation before, I was completely blindsided when, thirty seconds later, another one smashed into me.

And then another.

And then another.

Five seconds of torture, thirty seconds of respite, then another dose.

Twenty-one more times.

I passed out.

********

I blinked my eyes open, momentarily disoriented by a severe lack of knowledge about how long I had been out, and looked around the room.

It may have been only a few minutes, it could have been hours, it could have been longer.

But the door was open.

I frowned at it.

My eyes scanned to the right until they came to the shape of a man - quickly clearing through the flog of my bleary eyes - sitting on my bed, with a moderately powerful aura framing his silhouette.

I frowned at him, too.

"Why do you resist?" the distorted and echoey sound of his voice floated into my ringing ears.

I groaned and, fighting off the crippling pain in every part of my body - and spitting out a mouthful of blood as I did - rolled onto my back. "Because I can." I croaked at him. During my convulsions, I seemed to have bitten off the end of my tongue, but more of my powers, the very last of them, had been subconsciously expended in repairing the damage. I frowned at the taste of blood in my mouth and quickly banished the question as to where that chunk of flesh had gone while its replacement was being grown.

The man sighed and shook his head. "We are not your enemy."

I twitched my foot, making the manacle around my ankle rattle."Yeah, I can see that."

His eyes flicked down to the manacle with a frown. It wasn't so much that it looked like he hadn't noticed it before that moment; it was more like he had just realized that its function did sort of set something of a tone.

"Do you know why you are here?"

"To be tortured for information and then killed, right?"

The man shook his head. "No. You are being tested."

I arched an eyebrow at him.

"Ours is a venerable order," he said, holding my eyes. "We trace our lineage all the way back to the Praetorian Guard, who protected the Emperors of Ancient Rome. Of all the legionaries of the Roman armies, only the best of the best were selected to join its ranks, and even then, there were trials. That soldier had to prove their worth. You have already shown your abilities in combat; this was to show your ability to persevere against the very worst of conditions. It is a trial we all go through."

"Even you, huh?" I answered non-commitally. His inquisitor mind forbade the ability to read any of his thoughts, a common problem amongst my guards, but I somehow doubted that many people would commit to an order after being brutally tortured by them.

The man nodded, leaning down and rolling up the bottom of his pants on his right leg. The very clear scar of a burn mark, in the exact place my manacle was attached to mine, ringed around his ankle. "In the Conclave and the Sect, a person's position is dictated by their power, in the Inquisition, it is afforded by their lineage. None of them have to earn their positions; they are attained purely through the manner of your birth. Here, you have to prove your worth," he said, rolling his pants back down and sitting upright again. "Not just your abilities. I lasted thirteen days. You have just passed day one hundred."

I still said nothing.

"I know what you are thinking," he went on. "I was thinking the exact same thing when I was in the position you are in now. That I would never work with anyone who had put me through this, that this was the very definition of evil. That I was going to kill every fucking one of them the first chance I got."

I kept saying nothing.

"But when it was all explained to me, I saw it. I saw why this was important, I saw why it was necessary. And when I learned the order's objectives, their purpose, and the role I could play in that..." he left the rest of the sentence hanging in the air. "I am the man I am today; I am free precisely because I went through what you did. You have passed your test, you have been made to suffer, and you gave us nothing." The man stood. "You are to be commended on your strength."

Yeah, I couldn't tell if it was a trap, either.

"Your ankle restraint will be removed; there will be no more of... this," he went on, gesturing his hand at the chain connecting me to the wall. "You will be fed, and you will be allowed to sleep," he finished. As soon as he did, the roaring noise from the speakers that had been my constant companion for one hundred days shut off, and the cell descended into silence.

I looked around. The room somehow looked a little bigger without the oppressive, unending noise being blasted into it. "Then what?" I asked, eventually turning back to the man.

"Tomorrow, once you are rested and have eaten, you will have a meeting with some of the Prefects and Tribunes, our commanders. They will answer the questions that you have, and they will decide if you are offered a place in our order."

"And if they don't? Or if I refuse."

The man held my eye. He didn't answer verbally, but his look said it all.

"If you refuse, you will die."

I matched his gaze for a moment before slumping my shoulders. I was just too tired to fight it. I nodded softly.

"We will see you tomorrow, Pete." With that, the man reached down and unlocked the restraint around my ankle, leaving it and the chain it was attached to loosely on the ground, then removed the cuffs from my wrists before walking out of the room and closing the heavy steel door behind him. I reached my hand out lazily and stroked the tender skin around the other wrist as I rested the other on the chain

"Did you get all of that, Jerry?"

"Yup, I got it all."

********

I should probably rewind.

********

A very old Polish saying floated from Uri's memories to the surface of my mind as I watched Marco climb into the SUV outside the hotel in Horlivka.

"All mushrooms are edible; it's just that some of them are only edible once."

These men, these 'Praetorians,' weren't trying to capture me; that much was obvious from the moment Marco had started talking. They were trying to recruit me. They were trying to bring me into the fold. And if that was the case, I was going to make sure that I was as poisonous to their order as it was possible for me to be in the relatively limited time I would have to do damage. The longer I played along, the longer I would have to do that damage.

By the time the car doors on my own SUV had been closed, it became apparent that half of the four men in the car were human, and both of them had a fair idea of what was about to happen to me. I couldn't quite tell if I was unique in this regard, but I remembered watching that 'zoned-out,' vacant look on the faces of the other Evos at the party when they all entered the mindscape; it was what my guards were looking for. Yet I had perfected the ability to enter it while still looking like I was doing something else in the real world, mainly as a means to work on the computer program while Jimmy was around and harvest information from my lecturers during college classes without being noticed. It was that zoned-out look that my guards were watching for. Making that appearance less obvious seemed a fairly simple solution to me so it was more likely that other Evo's couldn't do this, rather than just had never thought of it. So, with the men on either side watching me for those telltale signs of my entrance into the mindscape, they thought they had that base covered. Instead, what they saw was me fidgeting uncomfortably, looking worriedly out of the windows at the passing scenery, and coughing the last of the floor dust out of my throat.

In reality, I was learning everything that it was possible to learn about what was about to happen to me and coming up with a plan with Jeeves on how to tackle it.

In a massive stroke of luck, it turned out that one of the men in my car had a rather significant crush, bordering on infatuation, with the doctor who would administer the injections when I first got there. He didn't know specifics, but he knew that one of the drugs I was going to be dosed with was a form of antibiotic that would combat infections in the wounds I would doubtlessly suffer during my "interrogation" and could, therefore, be considered reasonably harmless. Another was some sort of hypertension medication designed to lower my blood pressure. Lower blood pressure would leave me feeling tired, lethargic, less prone to bursts of anger or defiance, and generally feeling a bit shit. It was designed to medically reduce my ability to resist. That one could be filtered out of my bloodstream without having any effect at all.

The deafening sounds coming from the speakers were, honestly, a bit of a shit show, too. Marco had already told me that at least "hundreds" of Evo's had been recruited into the Praetorians, not to mention Marco himself, so the fact that none of them pointed out that I could simply tune that noise out while still being able to hear everything else was something of a mystery. My ability to control my conscious body whilst in the mindscape could, theoretically at least, be put down to me having much more power than other Evos. Maybe the ability to do both of those things at the same time was quite draining, and that power requirement was something I'd never had to think about, but without another friendly Evo to ask, nor any way to secretly get that information from anybody else, I had no real way of knowing. The thought of not being able to tune out the noise, however, just didn't make sense. One of the first things Marco had taught me to do was to tune out the background thoughts of other humans, so surely the leap to filtering out literal background noise was not a massive one and, as far as I could tell, took a truly tiny amount of power.

But then maybe that was the point. Every single drain on the well of a normal Evo - even in tiny doses - added up to a point where they would eventually become powerless. But Marco had seen my powerplants; was it feasible that he simply hadn't understood how much power they could produce and how instantly they could produce it? At least compared to the finite wells of all other Evos.

The same went for the lack of food and water and the perpetual cold. After a certain amount of time, my body would start to draw on my powers to sustain me. That power would drain from the reserves that these people still seemed to think I had and would, in theory, shorten the time I was able to resist.

Where they really went wrong, however, was with the electrocutions.

The concept was simple enough. The pain inflicted by increasingly violent bursts of current into my body would need to be blocked; the randomness of their timings would mean that I would need to keep that block on my pain almost permanently, and any physical damage to my body would need to be repaired. All of it added up to significantly increasing draws on my body until the damage couldn't be repaired and the pain couldn't be blocked anymore, after which point, the real torture would begin, albeit for a much shorter period of time.

The entire basis around which their methods revolved was the assumption that, like every other Evo, my powers were finite. That eventually, my reserves would be drained, and that I would break. That as long as they inflicted enough pain and discomfort, regularly enough, over a long enough period of time, I would inevitably crack, and their plans to recruit me would rock into action.

They were very, very wrong.

I mean, obviously.

But that wasn't their mistake.

Their mistake came in the manner they had chosen to administer those electric shocks. The room itself seemed to have that lattice of tin literally built into its walls and operated in the same way as an Inquisitor's skull or Olena's hat. I had been quite nervous when I had first been dumped into the cell at how completely it had blocked my mind's ability to reach the outside world; even though I knew it was coming from the information I had mined from my human captors, it was still very disconcerting. As a cell designed to contain Evos, it was perfect.

That is, apart from the hulking chunk of metal attached to my leg. The one that literally connected me, through the mind/machine interface, to the power grid, and therefore, every computer, router, lightbulb, TV, rechargeable dildo, and charging cell phone in the building, not to mention the outside world beyond it via the powerlines and the internet. It seemed that nobody had ever considered the possibility that I would be able to use that to maintain my connection to my powers when they built this cell, but that glaring oversight had essentially undone all of their hard work. I had reconnected to my computer within seconds of the manacle being attached to my ankle.

No more than twelve hours after I had been taken from Horlivka, Jerry had received a text message from me telling him that the plan was on and to relay the information to Bob via the radio. He, in turn, sent one back an hour later, saying that Olena had been safely retrieved and that the whole group was making their way back to a secure location to wait for me.

Then there were the interrogations. They were simply a means to test how far along the path to being broken I was. But for reasons that I couldn't quite fathom, they had left the door to my cell open for each one of them. Maybe it was so backup could arrive quickly in case I became violent. Maybe it was so the man interrogating me could escape; it didn't matter. For the entire length of time that the interrogation was going on, the power-blocking properties of the cell were completely undone, and my powers had as much free reign as they always had done.

Including the ability to jimmy the frame of the door a fraction of an inch out of place, a tiny but permanent crack in the field of nothingness surrounding me. Small enough to let the door still close properly but imperceptible to anyone without a magnifying glass and a knowledge of exactly where to look, and more than big enough to let my powers slip through and render all of their efforts meaningless.

You know what they say about the best-laid plans surviving contact with the enemy.

Or, in this case, the enemy's best-laid plans surviving contact with me.

Within a few days of being left in the cell, I had harvested the minds of the dozens of humans coming and going from the compound and had an entire working map, not only of the complex I was being held in but of the local area around it. I was officially in Russian territory, in a wooded area just outside the tiny little village of Christopl'e, which in turn lay about halfway between the Russian-Ukrainian border and the city of Rostov-on-Don. The village was tiny, even by the standards of where I had grown up, and this complex was a few miles outside of it. It was the very definition of the middle of nowhere. It wasn't just rural; it was in the wilderness.

That posed a little bit of a problem, but nothing that couldn't be overcome.

The minds of the human members of this order divulged some pretty interesting information. Firstly, and most importantly, they understood absolutely that they were second-class citizens. There wasn't any clear supremacy between the Inquisitors and the Evo's within the ranks. Promotion did really seem to be given on merit, but even the very lowest of those was far higher in the structure of the Praetorians than the highest of humans. It struck me as something akin to how men in an occupying army may treat cooperative local civilians. They were helpful, useful, and maybe even essential, but they were always going to be locals, and they would never be members of the nation that had taken them over.

Secondly, this was an organization that took Uri's need-to-know sentiment to extreme levels. These men understood that they worked on a specific assignment or performed a specific role and nothing else. They were even restricted from entering areas of the compound not related to their job and rarely spoke to non-humans outside the performance of their duties. They were paid well for their work, but they knew that the people they worked for operated well outside of any known apparatus of law. If they broke their oath of secrecy, they would be the victim of a tragic accident, and their families would probably meet a similar fate. And yet none of them were working here against their will, nor - as far as I could tell - had they been influenced to do so by one of the treasonous Evos.

The sentiment shared by all of them, when they thought of their employers, was that a war was coming, and it was better to be on the right hand side of the devil than stand in his way.

Lastly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, considering their apparently lowly status within the Praetorians, none of them had access to any of the information that would tell me anything I wanted to know.

I left that last part up to Jeeves.

Being a modern organization, everything in the compound was linked to a computer; that computer was linked to the nearest power outlet, and that power outlet was linked to me. There were hundreds of computers in the facility, and Jeeves, over the course of entire days, trawled through everything - which would illustrate how much there was to scour through, given the mind-boggling processing speeds of my computer at home - and found absolutely fucking nothing.

I should clarify. For all we knew, he had found, copied, and transmitted every single shred of information we could ever hope to find, but all of it, every single byte's worth of data, was encrypted behind what he called a "512-bit, rotating encryption algorithm."

What that meant, in effect, was that the information now being held on my computer was complete gibberish. To translate it into anything recognizable as a human language would take a 512-bit decryption code... which, in terms of letters and numbers, was fucking enormous. The code had something stupid, like 500 trillion trillion trillion different combinations, and even with the insane processing power of my computer, there was no way it could decode that level of encryption without the decryption code. To make matters worse, that code was changed every twelve hours. To put that into context, the German's World War II Enigma machine that took Alan Turnin and his team two years to crack - and had been considered unbreakable before him - was the equivalent of two bits.

None of the human minds had the code; moreover, in a show of how little they were trusted with that level of clearance - possibly justifiably, considering I was currently stealing everything else they knew - they didn't even know that such a code or overly complicated encryption process existed, nor did they know what was on the computers.

I was forced to wait.

While I waited, I played my part. A copy of Sterling's theater had replaced one of the placeholder buildings near the center of my city. I hadn't seen it yet - I needed my wits about me, and taking a break to check out a single building within my mind seemed a little risky in my current circumstances - but it was doing its job well. I allowed the skin to be ripped from my body when I had been blasted by that hose. I allowed my lips to crack and my skin to start looking drawn and pale as the telltale signs of dehydration took hold, at least as far as my guards were concerned. Each time electricity smashed into me, I allowed it to course through my skin, but only my skin, with every pain-receptive nerve ending firmly switched off; I allowed my muscles to spasm, my body to convulse, and my hair to singe. I groaned when I was supposed to groan, I screamed when it was dramatically necessary to scream, and I... made a mess when my captors' minds told me I should be. My theater did it all. It told my body exactly what it was expected to do to pull off this performance, and my body played its part beautifully. To any outside observer, I was being slowly drained of my power faster than I was able to recharge it through the very limited amounts of sleep they thought I was getting..

What my captors didn't know was that I was getting no less sleep than I usually would have. Every time I was laying in a ball on the ground, twitching and sobbing in despair, my body playing the part my theater dictated, entirely on its own, my mind was curled up quite comfortably in my bunker's bed while Jeeves smashed through one firewall after another in the Praetorian computer network.

All the while, my mind was plotting.

Jerry had been kept up to date with everything, but aside from letting Bob and Charlotte know that I was okay, he had been sworn to secrecy. With my power still filling a sizable part of his well, it had been easy to link my mind with his, find that shadow of corruption, and banish it. I admit that I felt more than a little pissed off with how easy it was to shatter that manipulation now that I knew what to look for when I had missed it so completely in my own city when I hadn't. The secrecy was to make sure he didn't inadvertently pass on something important to someone corrupted by Marco. Charlotte was a gamble, but there was something about her utter contempt of the man that told me that she couldn't have been corrupted.

For his part, Jerry was kind enough to stifle his "told you so" moment when he had learned of Uri's innocence. Perhaps it was because of the soul-consuming grief he felt at his death and the unspeakable loathing he felt toward Marco on discovering that our mentor was the traitor. Uri's insistence, however, that he could be trusted was not only a source of great comfort to the younger man but proved to be entirely accurate. For those hundred days, he was the only friendly voice I had. My mind and my powers may have smashed through the Praetorian defenses, but he was my connection to the outside world.

"Charlotte is still pissed at you," he chuckled.

"Still?? It's been weeks. Hasn't she calmed down yet?"

"Nope, she said that she is expecting you to get out alive so she can kill you."

I rolled my eyes silently and chuckled to myself. Tales of the lengths that Charlotte had gone to show her support for me had been the warm blanket I had wrapped myself up in while she kept her vigil over Philippa. She had moved to the mansion with Evie to be with her friend while the trusted members of the Sect worked on reconstructing her fractured mind. Fiona, even less trusting of the Sect since the revelations of their members being involved with the Praetorians, had reluctantly gone with them. Apparently, only Agatha knew that they were there, hidden in some secluded room in the bowels of the mansion where nobody ever went. It was Agatha herself, a veteran of a few Evo-on-Evo wars and no stranger to the damage that an Evo attack could do, who had taken the lead on Philippa's treatment.

There was no news on any progress.

"This is gonna be one of those frying pan and fire situations, isn't it?"

"Yup, you're fucked!" he laughed. "She is still saying it's the bravest plan she has ever heard of and that she is proud of you, but she is going to kill you."

"Oh well, something to look forward to."

Jerry laughed, but soon, his voice turned serious again. "I don't like this, man." He confessed. "I wish there was a way for me, Bob, and the boys to come get you. Kick the doors in, all guns blazing, ya know?"

"Yeah, I know." I tried to sound reassuring. "But there are other Evos here. I can feel them. I don't know how many there are in total, but any one of them could turn our escorts against us in an instant. Then it will be just you and Bob against a small army of people expecting you to attack."

"I know, but I don't understand why you don't do that. Turn the humans there against the rest of them. That would give us an edge."

"Oh, I already have," I answered cryptically. "I am just waiting on a few last-minute preparations before I am ready. And I am kinda curious about what they want to say to me tomorrow."

"Will those preparations be ready by tomorrow?" he asked.

I didn't answer for a moment, letting my mind wander to the little surprise I was preparing for my captors before reconnecting to Jerry, "It will be close, but it should be, yes."

"And if it's not?"

"Uri said that Conclave law is enforced by Evos combining their powers to take on more powerful members, right?" I asked.

"That's right, yes, but..."

"That is what I am expecting tomorrow. A bunch of Evos there, ready to have a go at me if I refuse to work with them. If worse comes to worst, I will just have to fight my way through them to get out."

"Pete, to match your power, they would need quite a few Evos. But they don't want to match it; they want to exceed it, by a lot, just to be sure... that would be a hell of a fight."

"Yeah, I know. I won't lie; that is the part of the plan that worries me. So far, I have counted twenty Evos in the compound. But those are only the ones the humans have seen. There are lots of areas they aren't allowed to access. God knows how many others there are that I haven't found yet. They are all blocking, permanently."

"Fuck, I still can't believe there are that many of them," he sighed heavily. "One or two of them from the Conclave was bad enough, but this is so much worse. I just don't get it."

"Neither do I. That is why I want to hear what they have to say tomorrow. Or at least find a way to get hold of that decryption code."

There was silence for a few moments, Jerry not really knowing what else to say about the plan, so I changed the subject. "How is Henry?"

"He's doing good." came the quick reply. "The doctors are trying him on solid foods this week, I think. Still no progress on the speech, but the therapists are optimistic. He's still getting annoyed with having to communicate through me via a notepad, though."

"I'm sure he will manage," I chuckled back.

Jerry matched my laugh before his voice turned serious. "You are going to need a good night's sleep before tomorrow. Perhaps you should get some rest."

"Yeah, I'm laying on the bed now," I sighed, "I've gotta say, it looked a lot more comfortable than it feels."

"Bastards!" I could hear the smile in his voice.

"Alright, tomorrow," I sent to him, my real-world body looking like it was succumbing to the exhaustion of my ordeal. "I need you monitoring and recording everything. Get a transcript to Bob as soon as you can; he will transfer it to Isabelle."

"It still blows my mind that we are in the position of trusting a member of the Royal Inquisition above anyone in the Conclave." Jerry sighed despondently, "But you've got it. I will make sure it is done."

"I know it's hard, man. But we don't know how many people Marco..."

"I know, I get it... I really do."

"This will be over soon," I said, with more vehemence than I expected. "I'll touch base in the morning."

"Night, Pete."

"Goodnight, Jerry. You get some sleep, too. Tomorrow is gonna be a long day."

********

The now-dressed walk through the complex brought back some strange memories. Stark grey concrete walls and the dank, stale smell of the air. It was remarkably reminiscent of the very first nightmare I'd had since I'd come into my powers. There was no beast hunting me - I confirmed that with a semi-nervous glance back over my shoulder to find nothing there - and there were no other Evos being chased with me. The walls here, as opposed to the dream, were interspersed with other closed doors. Some of them were clearly other cells, especially during the first few minutes of the journey, but with their blocking fields intact, I couldn't tell if they were occupied or not. The corridors in the dream were also part of an underground complex. I couldn't tell how I had known that, and there was no visual way to confirm that this complex wasn't. It was simply the minds of the other humans I had mined for information that told me that it wasn't.

Still, the stretches of the corridor without floors, the muted sounds of my footsteps on the wall, the heavy, nervous breathing from my chest, and the smell of sweat and mold on the air had the eerie effect of transporting me back to the dream I'd had in Becky's bed all those months ago.

Despite the act of surrender that I was putting on, despite the plans in my mind, despite the surprise that was waiting for my captors, and despite my connection to the outside world, it put me on edge. There was nothing like a dream to really fuck up the start of a day. Still, for this moment, a dream meant nothing, and dwelling on it was a waste of energy.

The complex itself was fairly standard as far as quasi-military complexes went. This wasn't some futuristic or even overly advanced installation. Most of the rooms I passed - the ones I could see into - were briefing rooms that were oddly similar to my childhood classrooms, storerooms filled with crates and pallets of stores, barracks and bunkrooms, locker rooms, bathrooms, and the odd office.

The 'prison' section of the compound gave way to the more administrative section after a few minutes of walking. One armed Inquisitor marched ahead of me, two flanked me, one on each side, and two more followed up the rear. Whenever someone came the other way, walking toward us in the corridor, they would press against the wall and let us pass with their eyes invariably fixed on me. The further into the administrative section we ventured, the fewer humans we encountered - perhaps this was one of the areas they were usually not allowed - but even the Inquisitors stopped and watched me go. What was interesting, at least to me, was that there was none of the expected hostility - or even concern - in their eyes. Just a vague expression of curiosity.

There was a marked difference between them and the men who had attacked the party, the men who had tried to corner me in The Hague, Toussant's team, and the people here. Those men had meant me unspeakable harm, and they had killed without mercy or hesitation, and Toussant at least hadn't felt the slightest shred of remorse. It was more than a little confusing to suddenly see the contrast between that and the way I was being treated now.

I was being watched; they were being careful, but I wasn't being treated like the enemy. At least not one they should be trying to murder on sight.

Finally, I was led into a large conference-like room. Much larger and grander than the one that I had seen at the sect, the table was weighed down by three marble busts spaced evenly along its length. Five men were sitting at the far end of the table - two Inquisitors and three Evos - while a place was left empty at the opposite end, presumably for me. Lining the room were about twenty-five men, all spaced equally apart and all seemingly standing to attention; all of them were Evos, too. I stifled a frown at the fact that Marco didn't seem to be among the men here. My five guards closed the door behind me and took up positions behind the chair I was expected to take.

Well, that accounts for the security.

My eyes were drawn to the busts on the table. Somehow, from somewhere in the recesses of my memory, I recognized them. One was of Julius Caesar, another of Augustus, but the one in the middle was the most out of place. It was of a Roman General: Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo.

"Do you know who that is?" One of the men at the far end of the table asked.

"He looks familiar," I lied as I sat down.

"He was a General in the Roman army, General Corbulo. The mad emperor Nero became fearful that the General's influence would become a threat to him, so he ordered the General to commit suicide in front of his men. Corbulo, being a man of honor and loyalty and knowing he had done nothing wrong to deserve this order, obeyed his Emperor anyway. His last word, shouted to his men as he threw himself onto his own sword, was "Axios."... I. Am. Worthy. The General is venerated as a man who put his loyalty to the Emperor and his honor above all other things. Before greed, before ambition, and before personal gain."

I just nodded and held his eyes as he spoke.

"Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo is the epitome of the virtues we strive to achieve. The line of the Emperors may be gone, but the basis on which they stood is still embodied in our principles."

"And what principles are those?"

"Those of evolutionary supremacy." One of the other men, an Evo, replied.

He looked like he was about to say more, but the man sitting at the very head of the table, clearly the one in charge and also an Inquisitor, held his hand up to stop him. "I think we are getting a little ahead of ourselves. Perhaps introductions should be made first."

All five men looked at me from their end of the table. "We all know you know who I am," I said flatly. I was trying to strike a balance in my tone between a renewed, if diminished, sense of resistance and genuine curiosity while also making it clear that I knew where I was and what had just happened to me. I couldn't imagine that anyone in the group staring me down thought that I was a keen and enthusiastic acolyte, but I didn't want them to think this was going to be too hard either. I wanted them to feel hope that I would join the cause, but not quite stretching as far as optimism.

The man in the middle nodded. "My name is Tiberius. I am the Prefect in charge of Regnum Bospori; these are my Tribunes."

"Is that the name of this... place?" I arched an eyebrow.

"Regnum Bospori is the region we are in," he replied. "Our order does not recognize modern state boundaries, so we acknowledge neither Ukraine nor Russia."

"But... you are based in Russia."

The slightest hint of a smile curled at his lips. "I see you have done your homework. Our history is long and complicated, but I will try to explain. The Praetorian guard left Rome with the last legitimate Western Emperor after the city was sacked by the Usurper in the year 475; we found our way to Constantinople and pledged our services to the Eastern Emperor. As you may know, our Order is made up of Demi-gods, sons, and daughters of Jupiter himself, blessed with divine powers, what you know today as Evos and Inquisitors. Evos were the offensive arm of the Praetorians, able to invade and break the minds of men, to bend them to our will, to imbue themselves with great powers that made them perfect soldiers. The Inquisitors were the defensive arm, able to resist even the strongest of manipulations, blessed with exceptional martial prowess, we could fend off any attack against the Emperor and his domain. Two arms, the sword and shield."

Wait, this was Pre-Maria. Before the founding of the Conclave. Do they mean that Evos and Inquisitors worked together before that?

I said nothing and just listened.

"Over the years, however, we came to realize that Evos and Inquisitors were appearing in places never touched by Jupiter's light. Places you now know as Northern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Russian steppe. In the year 1215, the same year as news of England's Magna Carta reached us, we sent out two emissaries, Maria, an Evo, and Stephen, an Inquisitor, tasked with finding as many of our brethren as they could and bringing them to us. Maria, as you know, found a measure of success. She was an exceptionally powerful woman, able to leave parts of herself at fixed locations so that any Evos in the area could contact her. It took her centuries for her to travel the enormous distances she did by foot. The Conclave, as you know it now, was officially founded in 1324, but its first iterations started life more than a century before that as a means for Maria to maintain communication over the vast distances that she traveled. Once she had found all of the Evos, she was going to lead them here.

So that is the power source I felt when I visited the British Museum, but she would have been dead when it was built. Maybe that is why the museum was built in that specific location... interesting.

"Stephen wasn't as successful. We are not exactly sure how, but he was captured by the fledgling Catholic Church and taken to the Vatican. Under torture, he revealed to his captors the survival of our order and the existence of Evos and Inquisitors. With a reach vastly wider than our own, they started to hunt down any Inquisitors they could find and convert them into warriors of their faith. Inquisitors are, by their nature, unwaveringly loyal to the cause to which they are sworn, and once they had joined, the zeal with which they carried out the orders of the church was nothing short of fanatical. The Pope, however, saw the threat that unchecked Evos posed. They saw them as a threat to every doctrine they had been preaching. Men with the power of God. There could only be one God, and the Inquisitors were the only ones who could combat that power. After a few years of deliberation, the extermination of the Evos was given a Papal decree, and the war began.

"By this time, the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity had separated from the Eastern Orthodox Church, and there were, effectively, two popes in Europe. The Eastern Pope was not only in Constantinople but was guarded by our order, so when the Vatican demanded the immediate destruction of the Praetorian Guard, the arrest and transportation to Rome of all Inquisitors, and the execution of all Evos, our Pope refused. But we couldn't stay in the city. The Byzantine Empire was under threat from Muslim forces to the east and relied on Rome for support. To save the city, our Emperor, and our Pope, we left Constantinople willingly, first traveling north through what you would call Bulgaria and Romania, then through modern Ukraine and into Russia. We hid amongst the population and allowed the Vatican and the Conclave to forget about us. In the meantime, the war waged on.

"Pockets of Evos, even ones not affiliated with the Conclave, banded together for protection against the relentless attacks from the church. One group of Evos, for example, had formed an alliance in the city of Edirne, seizing power and growing their influence until they had an army at their backs. A century later, in 1453, one of their descendants, a Sultan named Mehmet II laid siege to Constantinople and captured the city. His publicly declared aim was to spread the Muslim faith, but in reality, he was targeting Rome to destroy the threat to his kind. He was an Evo, and like all Evos, he knew perfectly well the source of the threat against him."

"So you guys are the real home of the world's Evos and Inquisitors," I deadpanned. I suppose there was an element of sense in Tiberius's monologue, but he wasn't actually explaining anything. "And that is why you killed every Evo and Inquisitor not aligned with you in Russia."

"Did we?" Tiberius held my eyes in a way that not many people did these days. "Or did we take them, do to them what we have done to you, break their bonds of loyalty with the Conclave or the Inquisition, and then pull the wool from their eyes, tell them the truth, and they joined us of their own free will."

I opened my mouth to reply but felt a frown furrowing my brow. Olena's words in Horlivka echoed through my memory.

"The Inquisitors that your friend is looking for are alive. They have been taken to Russia. We don't know where, exactly, but we know that they are alive."

"The Inquisitors from Ukraine, you are converting them, aren't you."

"Converted, past tense," Tiberius nodded. "It took significantly longer to break your loyalties than theirs."

My loyalties? Did these people know nothing? How deluded did Marco have to be to genuinely think that I was loyal to the Conclave, or anyone else for that matter, and tell them that?

I sighed deeply and rolled my neck. "So what's the plan then? To reunite all Evos and Inquisitors under a single banner, your banner?"

"A little bit of an oversimplification, but yes."

"Is it an oversimplification? How?"

Tiberius looked to Tribune on his right, the Evo who had spoken when I first entered the room. "Our goal is to dismantle the institutions that have grown to separate our brethren," the second man said after clearing his throat; he had been left conspicuously unintroduced, as had all the other people in the room. "It must be remembered that both the conclave and the Inquisition are older than many of the countries they operate in, and their influence has spread, in a lot of cases, to the very foundations of those national governing structures. They are ingrained into the way those nations function. The British House of Lords, for example, may be free of Evo influence now, but when it was founded, they were almost all members of the Conclave. The Spanish Cortes Generales and the Dutch Staten Generaal have been Inquisition Bastions for centuries and still are. The French Parliament has changed more times than most people can count; the Germans were governed by humans for almost all of its existence as a state, but Evos made a strong play for control in the latter part of the nineteenth century, which led to two world wars."

"Wait, I was told the Inquisition was responsible for the holocaust."

There were a few glances around the room before the second man spoke again. "It is a complicated subject. But essentially, Hitler didn't start the Nazi party; he just became their figurehead and then, later, their leader. The men who did start it were convinced by Inquisitors that there was a secret effort to control the fate of Germany and they were the ones responsible for Germany losing the Great War, which was true, except their raging, blinding, psychotic anti-Semitism twisted that warning to focus on Jews instead of Evos, and instead of a few hundred Evos being killed, around 8 million Jews and other minorities were made to suffer instead. This is why institutions like the Conclave and Inquisition can not be allowed to exist."

"So, everything Hitler said about there being an enemy within, undermining the country, was true?" I asked with raised eyebrows. Hitler being right, was not something you expected to hear in polite or sane company. "Except that it wasn't the Jews, it was the Evos? And in trying to stop that influence, the Inquisition basically put Hitler into power, which, in turn, caused the Holocaust?"

"That's about the extent of it, yes."

"Jesus..." I shook my head. This was new information and on a pretty serious level, too. "Okay, so all the Evos and Inquisitors getting together is better for everyone; the whole world gets to live in peace?"

The five men glanced at each other.

"Pete, our order has no interest in the plight of humans. We are the children of Jupiter," Tiberius answered this time. "That may be an archaic term, but it is true. Demi-gods, the next stage in human evolution, hell, call us the spawn of alien breeding; call us what you want; we are above humans on the evolutionary scale in every imaginable way. With no supreme Emperor to govern them, our place is not to care for humans but to rule them in the Emperor's stead."

And it was all going so well.

The casual ease with which the Prefect said these words took me aback a little. It was said with the same fervent belief as someone pointing out an apparently obvious fact. Like someone saying, "What do you mean, 'why does it quack?' Cause its a duck!" As if it were the most plain to see fact on earth and the concept that ruling over humans was one that should be an automatically held belief among all of our kind.

"It is a simple matter of nature," Tiberius went on. "I know you have felt it; all of us have. The feeling of dominance over humans, the elation we have all felt at vanquishing lesser beings, controlling them, displaying our powers. It is natural law that the dominant species, the superior race, subjugate the lesser ones. In the natural world, that usually means extinction for the lesser species, but for us, humans will be allowed to live in peace and under our protection."

"As long as they serve." I finished for him after he left that little detail out.

"We all serve." Tiberius countered. "The humans serve us, we serve the order, the order serves the greater good, and the greater good serves the planet. Just imagine it: all of the earth's population pulling together toward a single goal. An end to poverty and petty little wars, an end to political in-fighting and the hunger for power, politicians overlooking what is right in favor of what is expedient or popular, power resting in the hands of those capable of wielding it. Global warming and climate change would be a thing of the past, racial and religious tensions gone, and silly ideas like capitalism and democracy eradicated. People being granted position and privilege based on what they contribute to the whole. We could cure cancer in a few years with the influx of scientific minds focused on it. I know you gave yourself vast quantities of knowledge that you didn't otherwise have; all Evos do it. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but imagine if the collective intelligence of the Conclave was set to a task like medicine, education, or renewable energy. We could have achieved proper space flight within a decade, exploration within 50 years, and maybe even colonization within our lifetimes. The problem of an overcrowded earth could be solved before it ever begins. It will be paradise."

I had to admit there was a certain amount of logic in what the older man was saying. I could never really tell if my experiences were different from less powerful Evos, but I had causally downloaded and learned everything there was to know about computer programming and, in only a few short months, had built a system that had the potential to revolutionize information processing for a generation. It was a leap forward of at least a few decades, and I had done it in a few months, entirely alone. If I had turned that intent to something more globally beneficial, like medicine, for example, were there any limits to what I could achieve? And that was just me. What if the entire population of the Conclave and the Sect were set to the same task without the constant need to keep themselves hidden and their existence a secret?

There was also more than a grain of truth to what Tiberius had said about my feelings toward the humans I had fought, too. I couldn't ignore that spark of feeling that welled up inside me when I was dispatching the ambush in Donetsk. The feeling of overwhelming superiority. How effortless the expenditure of energy, how profound the results would be, a display of power that would have entire cultures bending the knee.

I could almost see them: the supplicating, fawning masses.

My experiences with the human race had not exactly been stellar. They may have been dead now, but my parents had shown me a degree of abuse and neglect that was nothing short of horrific, and aside from that single name, that one clue, I had no idea why.

Sean

Even my grandparents had abandoned me to my fate. Opting for the easy choice over the right one. My school life, as a fully-fledged human, or at least as an unawakened Evo, wasn't much better. I never fit in, I wasn't bullied, I wasn't ignored, I just always felt like I was invisible. Even now, only a few years after leaving, I would have been astounded if any of them remembered my name. But looking back at that time now, it all just seemed so... unimportant. They seemed so unimportant. Not because my life had moved on and school was not a major part of my existence anymore, but because they were just humans

And I was above them.

"And what about the people who won't serve."

"Then they are an enemy of the people," Tiberius shrugged. "An enemy of progress, an enemy of the natural order." I held his eye for a moment. He seemed to realize what I was wordlessly asking before he had finished the sentence. "You are referring to Uri."

I wasn't. I was referring to all the people who had been killed, and I wasn't entirely willing to overlook the attempts made on my own life yet, either. But I nodded anyway.

"There will be a lot of Uris in the world. People who see righteousness in resistance, people who see nobility in the lost cause, and those who see value in the institutions that have existed for generations. The thing is, if you look at it properly, you will see that these people only value those institutions because they elevate them above their station. Uri, in any other walk of life, would have been nobody. It was only his powers and the position that they gave him within the Conclave that made him special. There was no noble goal to protect the Evos of the world; there was only a wish to protect the institution that made him unique and gave his life value. An institution that was never meant to exist in the first place beyond bringing people like him into our fold."

"So this little game you are playing to instigate a war between the Conclave and the Inquisition..." I already knew the answer before I asked the question.

"Necessary to weaken and distract both of them," came the predictable reply. "You must understand that as long as the real Inquisition is clueless about what is really going on, and the Evos think that they need to stay hidden, they aren't paying attention to the Praetorians moving our pieces into positions on the board."

"So tell me about the party and about Toussant. How did they fit into your plans?"

Tiberius looked confused for a moment as if he had no idea what I was talking about. His bewildered expression was so complete that, for a moment, I started to wonder if there was yet another force at play here. The other Inquisitor at the head of the table leaned over and whispered something into his ear. "Oh," Tiberius nodded and looked down at one of the pieces of paper in front of him. "I'm sorry, we conduct a large number of operations globally, and it is difficult to remember individual events. Let me see..."

He started reading through the sheets of paper. It was odd that the most life-changing moment of my brief time on Earth, the thing that had completely redirected the path I had been on, was of such little importance to someone else that they had to remind themselves of it right in front of me.

"Oh yes, the expedition run by Reinard Montreaux." Tiberius looked back up at me. "He was one of our Prefects, an exceptional member of our Order. Do I take it that you were the one who killed him? The man who spared his guards to deliver your message?"

"He attacked me first." It was my turn to hold the elder man's eyes.

Tiberius frowned and looked back down at the paper. "He was there to capture or kill Uri at the behest of Marco. What do you mean he attacked you first?"

"He attacked a peaceful gathering of Evos," I answered flatly. "He and the men helping him were indiscriminate in their violence. They killed more than forty of the people you say you want to be brought back into the fold. If the attempt was designed to target Uri, it was very poorly planned out."

Tiberius nodded. "You lost friends."

I hesitated for a moment but then just nodded.

"I am sorry for your loss, Pete. Collateral damage and unintentional losses are an unfortunate reality of war. Prefect Montreaux was a bit more... vigorous than most in his pursuit of his mission. His father, the former King Montreaux, is one of our Senators. He was not happy to hear of his son's death, but losses are expected on both sides."

"And Toussant?" I continued, swallowing hard on the anger that was stalking back and forth behind its walls. "He captured innocent humans and used them to draw me out."

Tiberius smiled and nodded... he actually fucking smiled. "Jean Pierre happens to be a friend of mine. His methods are unorthodox, but they are effective. I'm sure you will be working closely with him upon his return."

You have no idea.

"But," Tiberius continued, "if I know him well enough, I would say that he found your pressure points, as he would call them, and used them to draw you out. If they were killed in the process, well, they are only humans. It is a remarkable testament to your power that you were able to defeat his ambush and escape in one piece. I would be interested to know how you managed that."

All five men looked at me expectantly, but I wasn't about to give away trade secrets. Not yet, anyway. "There is one thing I don't understand," I said slowly. "What is with all the religious bullshit? Every time I have interacted with one of your people, I have been bombarded with a tirade about how it is God's will that I die, and I am an abomination, and so on. You don't strike me as particularly religious."

"Oh, that," Tiberius snorted out a laugh. "Let's just say we have never forgiven the church for mandating our exile from Constantinople. We could have been the difference that turned the tide of that battle. We could have at least gotten the last Emperor to safety. So, we look to redirect attention to them at every chance we get. One day, we are hoping that someone will take us at face value and reduce the Vatican to ashes."

I nodded, a little underwhelmed by the answer. Silence descended on the room. The five men at the opposite end of the table all looked at me while I continued to look thoughtful.

"Pete. We would like you to join us," Tiberius said after a while. "I know it is a lot to consider, but we will be on hand to answer any questions you may have. We are not your enemy; I would ask you to try to remember that. There is no rush for your answer, but..."

"No need," I said, resting both of my palms flat on the table. "I can answer you now."

"Oh, that is... unexpected, but..."

"There are two things that you haven't taken into account with your sales pitch." I carried on as if the man hadn't interrupted me. "Firstly, my age. I am the oldest known person to ever be awakened, meaning I spent all but the last year or so of my life living as just a human. They are assholes, they are cruel, they are vicious, they are unreasonable to the point of stupidity, but they are my people, and I haven't given up hope on them yet, at least not enough to see them subjugated by an order that thinks so little of them. Secondly, there have only ever really been two people that I have ever loved, and you killed them both. I let myself get captured so I could be brought here. Your torture didn't break my loyalties because I am not loyal to the Conclave; I am loyal to them. One of them you just called collateral damage, and the other, one that Toussant murdered just for the crime of knowing me, was, apparently, only a human. This isn't a recruitment meeting, gentlemen. This is a reckoning. But you were right about one thing..."

"Oh, and what was that?" Tiberius answered with a self-confident smirk on his face.

I turned and nodded toward the door.

All eyes fixed on it.

And nothing happened.

"Err, Jeeves?"

"A few more seconds, Sir."

"Seriously? You could have warned me about the timing before I made a fool of myself in front of the bad guys."

"Of course, Sir, but as you would have said, where is the fun in that?"

"For fuck sake. I had a really cool line prepared and everything."

"The world will forever be poorer for its loss, Sir."

Tiberius shook his head. "I'm sorry you feel that way, Pete. You could have been an important man in the new world." He flicked his eyes up to one of the guards behind me. "Kill him."

I heard the rustle of movement behind me and a loud bang. Something, presumably a bullet, tapped into the back of my head, deflected back away from me, and hit the guard in the throat. He was already slumping to the flood, grasping at the gaping and bloody wound in his neck by the time I had turned to look at him. Everyone else in the room looked at me with wide-eyed shock as if finally realizing the full extent of my ruse.

"Surprise," I smiled maliciously at them. With a surge of power, I pressed down hard onto the table. I wasn't sure if I was the only one who could see it, but a ripple of energy rolled across the top of it toward my five targets. As soon as it reached their end of the table, it erupted. Razor-sharp shards and splinters of wood exploded into the air. Tiberius was knocked backward out of his chair. Two of the three Evos had their heads impaled on the shrapnel, one of them taking a lance of wood under the chin and into the brain, the other took a foot-long splinter through the eye. The other Inquisitor at the table's head didn't last much longer as the bust of General Corbulo, the one he had been so proud to tell me about, caved in his skull.

"Take him!" Tiberius screamed as he scrambled away from the detonation of my power. "Take him now...!"

His words froze in his throat as the door to the conference room was kicked in, and in strode a now blonde Jean Pierre Toussant, an assault rifle pressed firmly into his shoulder. The surprise I had been waiting for.

"Fucking Finally"

The weapon in his hand sang its loud but deadly tune as, one by one, the guards behind me were reduced to bullet-riddled corpses.

I turned back to the room. The Evos lining the walls had all ducked away from the explosive force of the table and then again at Toussant's surprise intervention, but they were quickly regaining their composure. Their furious gazes locked onto me for just a moment as Tiberius smashed his hand into the bright red alarm button on the wall before the combined weight of their minds smashed into mine.

********

It had been months since I had been in my city. Not wanting to draw attention to the fact I had been faking my condition for the entire ordeal of my torture, I had stayed away from it on the off chance that my face had shown that zoned-out expression of Evos entering the mindscape for even a moment.

The entire metropolis was thrumming with energy. The power drained from Sterling had been a lot, the combined power of dozens of Evos over the centuries, but the power from Uri had eclipsed even that by a huge amount. After Sterling, there had been a single new powerplant in my city; after Uri, there were four. I looked out at the thriving, vibrant cityscape from atop my colossal marble walls, basking in the warmth of the sunlight I hadn't felt since before Horlivka.

And then I turned toward my enemy.

On the horizon, much further away than normal - possibly because there were so many of them that the mindscape had to push them back to make room - were thirteen hostile cities circled around mine in every direction. A strong wind blew over the mindscape and rustled through my hair. I rolled my neck as I watched their gates open, and thirteen armies started to pour out.

"Jeeves, can we take them?"

"I believe so, yes, sir. As long as Toussant keeps the others occupied in the real world."

"And yeh won't be doin' it alone, darlin'." Faye's soft, lyrical voice echoed over the wind as she shimmered into place next to me, leaned up, and kissed my cheek.

"You and me against the world, eh baby?" I smiled down at her.

"Yeh sure know how ta show a girl a good time." she grinned. "But, in this case, it's not just the two of us."

"What do you mean?"

She turned and nodded behind me. "Surprise."

I turned to follow her smiling gaze and immediately felt my jaw hit the floor. "Oh, you have got to be shitting me."

"She shits you not," Uri said as he shimmered into full view before me. His presence in my mind was as strong and as permanent as Faye's. "It's good to see you, Pete. Now..." he nodded over my shoulder at the oncoming hordes. "... shall we?"