There is always that moment; we've all felt it. Where the weight of the world is on our shoulders, it may only be the weight of our own world, but it weighs us down, nonetheless. Deadlines at work, sick family, chores, bills to pay, a million things to be done, and not enough hours in the day to do it. You spend every waking minute trying to get shit done, rushing from one essential task to the next; not only trying to get those completed but trying to juggle and prioritize those still waiting. A to-do list that's so much longer than your arm that it reaches the floor and rolls off into the distance.

Then you finish.

A single moment to take a breath, to feel the stress and the pressure that has weighed you down so much finally lift, even if only a little.

And then you are crushed beneath the mountain of your own weariness. Everything, every ache, every pain, every moment of fatigue, every wall you have pushed through; every time you have made your task a priority over your own wellbeing, all of it just lands on you, all at once. A tiredness that you feel in your bones, so draining that your body and your mind doesn't have the strength required to fight off even the most trivial of sicknesses, and all you can think about is rest.

The insane amount of power that I had been using for the past few months to keep myself functioning suddenly demanded replenishment the instant I stepped onto that ship. I slept almost all the way home. Bob, insisting that he had spent the past few months sitting around and doing nothing other than worrying, re-assumed command of the mission pretty much immediately after leaving the compound. Aside from a very brief meeting with Isabelle - where she hugged me, thanked me with more heartfelt sincerity than could be expressed in words, and told me to go home to rest - I was free to recuperate. While I was neck deep in the ordeal, I had taken the exertions in stride; my staggering ability to maintain and replenish power had seen me through the closest thing to hell that a man could imagine, and it had seemed endless. But each day, each brute-force-push through one wall after another, and every overwhelming display of power, had taken a toll on me. The moment the ordeal was over, those tolls came due.

It turns out that I wasn't quite as all-powerful as I had thought. The question that I found myself wondering is how much longer I would have been able to go on before the Praetorians really did manage to push me too far, and my need for power outstripped the amount I was able to replenish. I had assumed - with no evidence to the contrary - that my power plants could maintain my vast levels of power indefinitely, it turned out, however, that power plants need fuel, too, and I had been dangerously low on it.

Stepping into my apartment for the first time in months was like stepping out of a dream. It was like walking into a parent's home the day after their funeral; it didn't have the warmth of home I expected. It was a cold, empty shell with some stuff in it and nothing more. The vibrancy, the joy, the life, the energy, the feeling of safety and security that I had always associated with it - without ever consciously knowing it was there, and despite not having lived there for long - was gone. And it was an absence I couldn't help but see with every glance at every wall and every piece of furniture as I walked through the living area, into the bathroom, and looked at myself in the mirror. I had been victorious. I had dealt a massive blow to my enemy; it may have been tiny to them - in the grand scheme of things - but it was huge to me, and yet it felt... hollow.

I had done a lot of thinking on the way back from the Praetorian compound. Probably too much. But there was one part of the last few months that I couldn't seem to get out of my head, and it was gnawing at me. Now that I could see it in myself, it was all I could see.

I had raged in the battle, truly raged. I had let loose every ounce of fury and anger. There were moments when I had been so blinded by it that I had lost control of myself. But that wasn't the part that bothered me.

No. It was what had been revealed in the pits of my stampeding rage that had my mind preoccupied.

When I had been making my best attempt to cave in the face of Julias, when I had hit him over and over and over again until he was a crumpled pile of flesh in a crater made by his own body, it was not vengeance that I was blinded by. It was not anger at the things they had done or the crimes they had committed; it was anger at myself.

It was the pain of losing my parents without getting any sense of closure about my childhood. The contrast in feelings between my utter disgust at them as human beings, and the way they had stood their ground to protect me. It was those unanswered questions about the one word in that whole ordeal that seemed to stand out above all the others.

Sean.

It was the guilt, the soul-consuming guilt at the way I had treated Becky. My own cowardice when it came to her feelings for me, my refusal to look at them, let alone recognize them, and my abuse of them to get my dick wet. She had loved me; she had been killed for me, and I didn't have the spine to admit that or even acknowledge her love until she had died. A lot of the self-righteous anger at her murder was only serving to disguise my own self-loathing at how I had treated her.

I had been a rampaging bull for so long. I had killed so many people. It was not like they didn't deserve it, and if I had been put in the same position again, I wouldn't change what I had done; I would be dead if I had hesitated. But killing a person did something to you, and the more anonymous it was, the worse the effect. People like Tiberus or Toussant, or even those fucking idiots in the mindscape who had challenged me at the end of the battle, were people. I had taken their lives, I had acknowledged their existence, I had recognized a threat, and they had died for a reason, even if that reason was only the punishment for crimes I had deemed them guilty of. Their deaths had meaning, maybe only to me, but meaning nonetheless. But they were an overwhelming minority of the number of lives I had ended. The vast majority of them had just been... in the way. They didn't have faces, they didn't have names, they didn't have stories. I had no idea if they were guilty of the crimes that they had been killed for, but I had killed them anyway. They posed a threat; they stood between me and my goal, and their deaths were ordained by simple association with the people I knew who were guilty. But they were people; they were fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, friends; they were men, but I had slaughtered them like livestock. Each of them had been given no more consideration than pixelated combatants on one of my video games.

I had butchered them.

If there really was such a thing as a soul, the essence that made us who we were, then taking a life put a stain on it, no matter the circumstances. That stain... it had a weight. I could feel it pulling at me, a tether tied to the pit of my stomach, and it would take time and a lot of soul-searching if I was going to be able to let that weight go. To make matters worse, I knew that there was still a lot of fighting and death yet to come. The last time I had been in this apartment, I had relished that idea. I had headed off to Ukraine with all the fervor and vigor of a naive child eager for adventure; I'd had no idea what I was signing up for. Now I did, and the prospect of more war was not one that I relished, even if it did have to be done.

What I wanted, above all else, was to see my friends. Yet, at the same time, I had a marrow-deep need to be alone, to process, to come to terms with the new person staring back at me when I looked in the mirror.

It hadn't been long ago - only a few months - when I had stood here, getting myself ready to head down to the bar to dazzle Olivia the morning after leaving Backy and Philippa. It seemed like an eternity ago, a whole different life, and, in a manner of speaking, that is exactly what it had been. I had stood in this exact spot, utterly convinced of my powers. My aim was not to woo Olivia, flirt with her, or try to get laid. Those were a given. I was going to fuck her no matter what. No, what I had been contemplating was the mind-blowing ease with which my desires could be satisfied and oh so nobly deciding against it. I had the gall, the nerve, the downright cheek to wonder if I could make Olivia want me without using my powers - as if I was being done a disservice by all the people I had intentionally manipulated to get my own way. They couldn't possibly like me for me; otherwise, they would have liked me before, so the people who did like me before my awakening were, therefore, special simply by the virtue that I had not messed with their heads. Because I - poor, lonely, abused little me - deserved someone who would like me for me without the slightest bit of effort on my part to earn it.

I was pathetic.

It could be argued, perhaps fairly, that I had been young; I had used my powers in the same way that any young man would do, and, judging by the few Evos my age I had met, it was precisely what they had done, too. They had used them to have fun, to get laid, to make themselves better, just as I had. I'd had no notion of the danger lurking around me aside from the few warnings from Charlotte and a few manipulations by Marco about an abstract threat that neither one of them -correctly, it turned out - seemed to understand. I may not have drawn attention to myself the way that I have been warned not to - in fact, the sum total use of my powers before the party had been paltry - but they were still enough to drag me into the situation I was now in, a situation that, ultimately, ended Becky's life, and the lives of my parents, destroyed Philippa's, irrevocably changed Charlotte's and Evies, and - unless I was very careful - would do the same to Jimmy and anyone else I knew.

More than that, it had ended mine. I was not the person I was before; that life was over. My new reality hadn't just changed me, it hadn't made the edges rougher, it hadn't simply ended my naivety; the old me had been utterly destroyed. He was gone.

Looking in the bathroom mirror, I barely recognized the man looking back at me. My eyes were harder and colder, and a look of something akin to emptiness seemed to be etched permanently into my features. It was subtle, but it was there. The horrors I had seen, the acts of unimaginable violence I had committed, the lives I had taken and seen lost; all of it was echoed in every haunted flick of my sunken eyes.

I was broken. I could feel it. The frayed edges of nerves that I didn't realize had snapped until after the fighting had ended abrasively rubbed against each other in the shattered remains of my sense of safety. The constant state of alert. The flicking of eyes into every darkened, shadowy corner, the tightness of my grip on the bathroom sink, and that expectation - the unending and unwavering belief - that I would be attacked at any moment. It wasn't fear, I wasn't afraid, I was ready. But I was ready for something that my logical mind was telling me wouldn't be coming. There would be no battle above the Queen's Head; there would be no armored column of tanks or enemy soldiers rumbling down the street outside; there would be no pile of bodies to be found around every anonymous corner, and there would be no need to burn down half of the world to defeat them. And yet, the preparedness for it was something I couldn't just switch off. There was only me, only the silence around me, and only the guilt and the pain plaguing my once-naive mind.

The first casualty of war is not truth; it's innocence.

And mine was a distant memory now.

The person who had walked so determinedly out of this apartment all those months ago had already been through a lot before he left; he had already witnessed the deaths of Faye and Becky, he had broken the mind of an inquisitor, and he had massacred men at the party, at Mary's house, and at the warehouse where Becky had been murdered, he was far from innocent then. Yet, compared to the man I was now, he had been painfully naive. I had thought myself so superior, my powers allowing me to rise above all of the threats and the dangers around me, but I had no idea what I had been walking into. I thought I knew war, I thought I knew what to expect, I thought I knew how to win. I knew nothing. Only now was I beginning to understand that nations and armies win wars. Men... men don't win wars; they only survive them, or they don't.

My life wasn't just about fighting off the Praetorians anymore; it wasn't only about hunting for Marco and The Judge, and it wasn't about gouging the corruption and the cancer of treason out of the Conclave, the Sect, and the Inquisition. Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I knew it was going to be more than that now. It was about surviving this in a way that would let me be able to rebuild myself when it was over, and Charlotte's words, spoken in this very apartment, echoed through my mind.

"Don't lose yourself to this."

Had I lost myself? Was it already too late? Could any semblance of my old life be recovered, or could a new one be built in its place? I didn't have the answers, and only time would tell if I was even asking the right questions.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to break eye contact with the shadow of me in the mirror; I looked down at my hands instead. They were shaking; a tremor vibrated through them that seemed to refuse any sort of command to stop. My heart was hammering in my chest, that hollow pit remained firmly in place in my stomach, and my throat had suddenly become extraordinarily dry. I flexed my fingers and clenched my fists a few times, I took a couple of deep breaths, trying to control my own rebellious body before I shook my head and turned back toward the living room. I didn't have time for this; there was so much to do, so many things I had to think about before I could...

Someone knocked on the door.

My whole body must have jumped a few inches into the air, and a chill raced down my spine, followed by the beads of an almost freezing sweat. Whoever was on the other side of the door was lucky not to be turned into pulp by the energy blast that I almost launched through it. My heart rate exploded, and for a few paralyzed seconds, my body was frozen to the floor, stuck between the urge to fight or to flee. Everything was instantly and terrifyingly on edge. I half expected half a dozen soldiers to burst down the door and charge in with guns blazing.

But there were no soldiers or blocking Evos, there were no voids of Inquisitors either, only a single, familiar presence. One that I had missed so very dearly.

The door opened on its own as I stood there and watched it, forcing myself to snuff out the ball of power in my hand and trying to will my body to stop trembling. Charlotte stared at me, her eyes wide and fearful; she could feel the danger rippling off me. She could feel my fear, my nerves, that edge, and the power that had almost obliterated her. "Pete... I..."

My knees buckled, and I dropped to the floor.

I wasn't okay. Holy shit, I was really not okay.

She was right there on the ground next to me, arms around me, in a heartbeat, the wetness of her tears soaking into the collar of my t-shirt. Despite the danger she had knowingly or unknowingly been in a moment before, she didn't hesitate. She was there, and the more that thought echoed around my brain, the more I felt I didn't deserve her. If anything, I was putting her in harm's way just by being around her. All I could do was cling to her as if my life and my sanity depended on it and let myself just... feel her.

I felt it instantly, that presence, that betrayal, the feeling that immediately smashed down the walls holding back my anger, and a deep, rumbling, terrifying growl vibrated through my chest.

Charlotte's eyes widened in horror for the briefest of moments before existence melted away.

********

The mindscape was warm, sunny, beautiful, yada yada yada. I knew the routine by now, but there was something very different about this time in the mindscape. I was on the offensive and I was looking up at the walls of one of my closest friend's city.

Charlotte was on her walls, looking down at me with panicked eyes filled with fear. "Pete, what is going on?" She called out to me, the tremble in her voice perfectly matching the tremble that I had felt in my body only a few minutes before. Her hair whipped back in the wind that had filled the air, wind that she felt, but I couldn't. I could see the confusion in her eyes; she had never felt that before, but it didn't take her more than a few seconds to work out its meaning.

Wind equals danger.

Except this time, I couldn't feel it because I was the danger.

"He's in there!" I growled back. My words were quiet; in the real world, a person six feet away would have struggled to hear me, but in the mindscape, they were blasted out in a wave of unimaginable loathing and power.

"What? Who? Pete, please... It's me." She looked down at me, her hands on the crenellations of her wall as tears started to run down her face. She could only watch as the US Marine Corps and the million men of its ranks shimmered into existence around her city.

"Marco!" I growled back. "He's in there. I can feel him!"

"What??" Her panicked eyes left mine, and turned to look back behind her and into her city. Somewhere in the deeper, calmer, more rational part of my mind, that one look absolved my friend of even the smallest shred of guilt; she had no idea what I was talking about and, therefore, had no idea that she had been a potential mole for the enemy since the beginning.

"Open your gates; I'm coming in one way or another, but I'm not here for you."

"Pete... please," she sobbed. She was terrified. She had dropped to her knees and looked down at me with an expression that, under normal conditions, would have broken my heart.

My eyes met hers and, somehow, softened a little. "Charlotte, I need you to trust me."

I could see it in her: the fear, the soul-consuming terror. My demand was going against every single instinct she had. An army was at her gates, and every fiber of her being was telling her that opening them would be tantamount to suicide. I was asking her to step into the darkness, to surrender every shred of safety and security with nothing more than my word to go on. Every part of her was screaming at her that opening her gates to anyone without an invitation - let alone one with an army stretching out as far as the eye could see - was the very definition of self-harm.

And yet, behind that was something else. A simple question: Did she trust me enough to allow this?

I just held her eyes, watching the conflict battle across her beautiful face and silently feeling my own battle in the depths of my chest. Would I force my way in if she refused?

She let out a long, quivering breath of abject surrender, and her gates swung open. With a single thought, I blinked into being on her walls and wrapped my arms around her, waiting until she looked up into my eyes. Even through my fury, even through that stomach-turning loathing, even through my need to completely destroy the man who had destroyed my life, the sight of Charlotte looking so scared was enough to make me pause. I cupped her cheek and let a thumb wipe away a tear that was working its way over it. "I've got you," I whispered to her.

Her hands gripped a little tighter onto me as she pulled herself to her feet, she held my eyes for a few searching moments before she nodded softly.

"Find him!" my voice bellowed out to the men of my army. "Protect this city as if it were your own and bring him to me... alive!"

It was like a scene out of Lord of the Rings. The gates of Minas Tirith had been battered open, and the orcish hordes were washing through the breach like water pouring through a shattered dam. Except these were my hordes, and I had no intention of hurting my friend. But the ground-shaking thuds of thousands upon thousands of heavy boots hitting the ground as my army flooded into Charlotte's city could be felt not only through the walls beneath our feet but in the air itself. Charlotte could only watch in blind faith and terror.

Jeeves, Uri, and Faye shimmered into place next to us, earning a squeaked yelp of surprise from Charlotte. Her understanding of Evo nature far eclipsed my own, though, and it only took a few seconds for her eyes to widen in realization. She knew Uri - although nobody, not even Jerry, had been told he was now in my head. She knew Jeeves, too, but it was the first time she had ever seen Faye. Agatha, the member of the Sect whom Charlotte trusted above all others, had been the one who told me that Faye was waiting for me in my city after our bonding, but she wasn't. At least not in the way Agatha had meant. Faye wasn't here as an echo of our relationship; I had completely downloaded her the moments our minds had met. I didn't know how or why it had happened, but it had. Uri must have been downloaded as part of his last rites; when I had drained his well and emptied his library, I must have inadvertently brought his whole consciousness with me as well. The realization of those truths flashed through Charlotte's eyes in only a few moments, and her gaze flicked from them to me with something approaching a newfound confidence.

"Come 'ere, darlin'," Faye whispered to her softly as she stepped between Charlotte and me, wrapping her arms around her to hold my friend safely. "Yeh know he loves yeh, he ain't gonna hurt yeh, yer safe. Our boy just needs to rip a cunt's head off."

"I don't... I don't understand what's going on. I'm... scared."

"Marco has infected you," Uri stepped forward, closer to the edge of the walls, his eyes scanning the city. "But this is different to what we have seen before. It's... older. Cruder." He turned to face Charlotte. "Marco has developed what I called 'the corruption.' It is an intangible presence inside an Evo's city; it's like a shadow. But my guess is that it took time to develop and perfect. Before that, he must have tried something different and a lot less subtle. Somewhere in your city, he has literally injected a part of his consciousness, and it's been hiding in here ever since." Charlotte, who had been listening with rapt attention, stood herself up straight in Faye's arms, suddenly bristling at the implication. "How long have you known Marco?"

"He... He awakened me," She answered. Uri arched an eyebrow at her. "Thirteen years. But... I fucking hate Marco; I've never trusted him."

Uri smiled.

"Urgh," I groaned, finally realizing what Uri was getting at. "And you've never known why." Charlotte shook her head. "It's because your mind recognized that he had done something to you and was fighting off his presence. But why didn't I sense it before?" I asked Uri.

"The corruption," Uri shrugged. "It was probably programmed to make you ignore his presence in anyone else.

Charlotte blinked for a moment. "Oh, that fucking piece of shit! But...that means..." The anger on her face was instantly replaced with a look of pure horror.

"How many times has Marco been in your city?"

"I... I don't know. Not since my training, maybe a dozen times before that."

Uri nodded. "Then you have nothing to worry about. He wouldn't have been able to make contact with that piece of himself without being in here. You haven't given away anything."

The look of relief that washed over my friend's face didn't last long before one of firm, hardened resolve took its place. "How do we find him?" her growl almost matched my one from outside the walls. The answer came before anyone had a chance to speak.

We don't. You do.

Charlotte's city, like most others, was filled with ghosts. Representations of the people in her past who had made an impact on her life. Parents, family, childhood friends, teachers, professors from college, doctors and other nurses, friends she had made as an adult, ex-boyfriends, lovers, bullies, everyone who had ever contributed to the molding of Charlotte into the person she was today. Somewhere in her city, there were ghosts of Becky and Philippa. Somewhere, there was a ghost of me. All of them had stood aside to let my army stampede past them, leaving them just standing in the streets, pressed against the walls of her buildings - all of them being systematically searched from top to bottom by rifle-wielding Marines - and watching. Suddenly, they all froze. Each of them raised a hand and pointed.

"There," one of them said.

"There," said another.

"There. There. There. There. THERE! THERE!!." A hundred voices all murmuring, the murmurs getting louder and becoming chants, and those chants growing yells, then into raging, accusatory screams. All of them pointed from different places in the city, triangulating the spot where the alien, unwanted, hostile presence was hiding.

THERE! THERE! THERE!

Charlotte's palace, an Evo's representation of the conscious and subconscious mind, looked a lot like the Disney castle. I remembered thinking that its pristine white stone edifice looked nothing like a real medieval castle. In fact, her whole city looked more like a romanticized version of medieval Camelot than anything resembling historical reality, and yet, the city suited the beauty of her mind perfectly. Tall, finger-like spires grew out of the lower fortress of her palace and reached into the air, four on each corner and a larger, taller one in the middle. Each of them was topped by a golden, gleaming, conical-shaped roof, but the roof of the central tower - positioned just above Charlotte's office balcony - was now the target of a hundred accusatory pointing fingers.

Charlotte growled louder, her eyes locked onto the tower. "He's there."

Within a fraction of a second, it wasn't just the city's ghosts that were pointing up at the spire of Charlotte's palace but the business end of every weapon of every Marine in the city. But they held their fire. The risk of missing Marco's ghost and hitting the Palace was just too great. Now that I thought about it, it was the perfect place for Marco's specter to hide; I had no idea what damage could be done by a single bullet, let alone a sustained barrage. This was literally her mind, and as far as I knew, simply cracking a roof tile could have caused a catastrophic amount of harm.

"You three stay out here. Make sure he doesn't escape," I said to Uri, Faye, and the silent Jeeves without looking at any of them. "We are going to go up there and get him." Charlotte nodded firmly, her eyes locked onto the spire of her palace with the same look of grim determination as mine.

I reached down and laced my fingers into hers, giving them enough of a squeeze for her to look away from the tower and toward me. "We take him alive."

"But..."

"Alive!" I repeated, a little firmer. "Once we've worked out what he has done to you and can be sure there is no risk of him hurting you, he's all yours."

I could hear the grinding of her teeth from where I stood as she glowered at me, but she eventually nodded and turned her attention back to the tower. Her hand squeezed a little harder in mine, the world seemed to lurch, air rushed past my ears, and in the blink of an eye, we were standing on the balcony of her tower. I was tempted, however briefly, to look into her... her bedroom. That is what she called her version of my bunker. I had never seen it before, but I had the immediate and inexplicable impression that there was a lot of pink in there. I also understood that a person's mind was a sacred place, and she was putting an enormous amount of faith in me by just allowing me to get this close to it. Nosing in there without her express invitation was the highest of all intrusions. I turned to look back at my friend, finding her peering through narrow, infuriate eyes, above us toward the point where the tower wall met the conical roof.

I stood there for more than a few moments, watching her staring at the roof. "I have to admit," she said after a few silent moments, throwing her hands in the air and looking at me with a huff. "This is as far as my planning went. How the fuck do we get up there?"

I laughed. I couldn't help it. I don't know if it was a release of tension or just the look on her face when she realized, as I did, that neither of us had ever tried to get onto the roof of one of our buildings before, and now that we did, we had no idea how to do it, only that 'willing' ourselves up there wouldn't work. We both just looked up again, momentarily stumped.

I would like to say we came up with a plan of such astounding genius that the very fact we thought of it all was a testament to how utterly incredible our enhanced minds were, but we didn't. We both just stood there, completely dumbfounded, for more minutes than I would be comfortable admitting before we both heard a scratching sound coming from our right and below us.

Charlotte frowned and looked at me. I frowned and looked at Charlotte. We both seemed to understand that the sound was neither natural nor was it coming from anything that either of us was consciously doing in her city. We were about to look over the edge of the balcony to see what was making that noise when a metal World War II helmet levitated itself above the apex of the balcony railing, followed in short order by a dark grey fuzzy head, a set of leather flying goggles, a long pointed snout, and then the rest of my friendly neighborhood mole. With three of his clawed paws digging into the masonry of the tower, he saluted comically with the fourth, looked up again, and carried on climbing.

Charlotte had been shown the mole after his debut during the battle with Sterling, but the look of surprise on her face - one that was gradually replaced with amused curiosity - was hilarious enough to pull another snicker from my lips. "I don't know what to think about what just happened," she murmured, her eyes still fixed on the mole as he clambered further up the tower, hooked his front paws onto the ledge of the roof, and hauled himself onto it, his rear legs kicking comically as he pulled his fat ass and stubby tail out of view.

********

Twenty minutes later, Charlotte and I were back on terra firma, now joined by Uri, Faye, and Jeeves; any look of joviality or even amusement on my strawberry-blonde friend's face was gone and had been replaced with one of pure, hostile contempt. All of us were staring at the mole, who, in turn, was holding an almost perfect replica of a struggling Marco by the scruff of his neck in his jaws.

I say almost perfect because that is what it was. The real Marco was a little over six feet of bronzed, chiseled Italian masculinity. If women were ever said to have wet dreams, it would be safe to say that Marco could be the subject matter of a lot of them. The thing in my Mole's jaws, however, was different. It was smaller for a start; it was hard to tell with it being held above the ground, but it couldn't have been taller than four feet. Real Marco's tanned complexion was gone, too, replaced with what could only be described as a blackness. Not racially black, but actually black, as if his body were covered in perpetual darkness. It made making out individual characteristics on its face a lot harder than it normally would have been. Lastly, and there is no other way to really say this, he was partially transparent.

Charlotte was seething. If there were ever a moment in real life where people would have the cartoon-esque steam blowing out of their ears, this would be it. The fact that she was only standing there, her fists balled at her sides and her eyes fixed on our new captive, instead of pacing back and forth and demanding blood - as I would no doubt have been - was more of a testament to her character than even she understood.

Look, I will be the first to admit that there are only two types of men in existence. There is the tiny, obscenely fractional percentage of men who understand women, and then there are the rest of us. My first question to the... thing... in front of us - had I been in the situation Charlotte was in now - could have been summed up in some varying wording of the question "Why?" That is what I would want to know. Why had Marco done this? Why had he done it to her? What was his end goal? That sort of thing. Of course, Charlotte hadn't been told that I had those answers already and had just not had a chance to show them to her yet. That made her first question all the more surprising.

"Who else have you done this to?"

The thing that vaguely resembled Marco looked up and held her eye. There was no fear, no joy, no apprehension, not even the slightest amount of comprehension. It was just.. There.

"I don't think it understands you," Uri said quietly from behind us. "And even if it did, Marco must have realized that this ruse could be discovered, so making sure that this... agent... couldn't give away important information would have been pretty high on his design criteria. Besides, look at its mouth."

Charlotte's eyes followed mine to the thing's face.

Have you ever seen that scene in The Matrix where the AI bad guy is interrogating Keanu Reeves' character, and that flap of skin grows over his mouth? Well, yeah, that. Shadow Marco didn't have a mouth. He had a nose, he had a chin, and there was nothing in the middle. The thing tilted its head at all of us; its eyes carefully scanned each of our group, the mole holding it, and the few of my soldiers it could see from where it was being held.

"It's gathering information," Uri remarked after a couple of moments of us watching it watch us. "That is its only function. I think the plan was for Marco to retrieve that information on his next visit to your city, but obviously, that visit never happened."

"What do we do with it?" Faye asked.

"We kill it!" Charlotte and Uri answered simultaneously.

"It's too dangerous," Uri clarified. "If Marco were to ever get into this city, he would know everything that Charlotte knows in an instant. Hell, it may even be designed to broadcast that information to him without him needing to get in here. That's what I would do. Make it so that I could get close enough to receive the message properly, sit back, and download everything without Charlotte being any the wiser. I think we..."

Charlotte didn't wait for Uri to continue. Spawning a lethal-looking saber into her hand, she swung her arm in a powerful, practiced arc and effortlessly severed the thing's head from the rest of its body.

The corpse dropped to the ground in a crumpled, lifeless heap. The mole, still holding the ghost's head in his mouth, tilted his head and slowly opened its mouth. The severed head dropped to the ground with a thud. The mole looked at Charlotte, then down at the head, then back to Charlotte again, promptly sat back on its haunches, scratched behind his ear with one of his hind legs, stood again, cocked a leg up like a dog, and pissed on the corpse before flashing her another salute and trotting off as if this were just another day in the office.

Faye giggled and waved at him as he went. "I can't believe yeh haven't named him yet!"

"Marvin," Charlotte said in a monotone voice, her eyes never leaving the body of Marco's ghost.

"Ha!" Faye laughed loudly. "Marvin the Mole. That's perfect!"

Charlotte turned to me, not even the slightest sign of a smile on her face, and looked at me. "Is it gone?"

I didn't need to ask what she meant. It was the presence I had felt when she wrapped her arms around me in my apartment, the thing that had caused me to drag her into the mindscape and show her a side of me I had hoped she would never have to see. I swallowed down a sigh and focused on her and the city around us. "It's gone," I nodded.

"Good. Now I need to get out of here."

********

Charlotte looked at me, her face pale, and her eyes, while not wide with fear, were looking at me as if I were a stranger. Not a suspicious one, just someone she didn't quite recognize. Her fingers were still curled around mine; against my better judgment, I had shown her everything. At the enormously accelerated rate that information passed between Evos, it had still taken more than an hour to show her the full measure of what had happened since the last time I had seen her.

"Are you... okay?" She asked softly. A question that was less about wanting to know how I was and more a question asked to fill the haunted silence that had settled between us.

"I..." I looked around. We were in my city, sitting on a wooden park bench in a new plaza that had grown out of the rubble of one of the placeholder buildings that had been destroyed during the battle, a block or two away from my still-scarred walls. "...I don't know."

Charlotte's eyes faltered, and she looked away.

I averted mine, too. It wasn't shame or an inability to look at one of my closest friends; I just couldn't bear to see that look in her eyes. Instead, I looked up at the statue standing in the middle of the plaza. I wasn't sure why my mind had decided this was the best place to have this conversation, but this is where we had entered my city, and we had just sat down to talk, but looking at the representation of the battle in front of me - the newest of my core, foundational experiences - I was starting to wonder if my mind was taking some sort of sick pleasure in torturing me.

The statue showed me with a shorter Uri and Faye on either side of me, stalking forward through the battlefield. Uri had his two swords at his sides at the ready, and Faye had her arms crossed, but what seemed to be a shadow haloed around her head. But it was the image of myself that I couldn't stop looking at. Both of my hands had balls of energy burning against their palms, but my face was a twisted visage of snarling rage. The fury, the anger, the unquenchable thirst for violence I had felt in that moment... it was etched onto every feature of my face. I looked terrifying. Oddly, a dragon was floating above the three of us, one whose eyes seemed to follow me wherever in the plaza I stood.

"I... this is a lot, Pete," Charlotte finally said haltingly. "I thought you were out of your mind when I heard about your plan to let yourself be captured, but... I had no idea it went this deep."

I frowned and looked up at her again. Her eyes still didn't meet mine, but I could still see them looking over the statue. Charlotte had never seen me in the deepest depths of my rage; the closest she had come was seeing my treatment of Toussant, and she had been as lost to grief as I had been. Besides, the anger had only grown in the time since then, and the very small parts of it she had seen at the Christmas cottage had been dwarfed by the utter fury I had unleashed in the battle. But she had seen it now; she had been shown even more of it than she had seen outside her city, and I could tell that she could feel it around us. That malevolent lust for inflicting violence and vengeance permeated my entire city. Every brick, every cobblestone, every piece of mortar, every window pane, every tree, and every thrumming blue light resonated with it, and she felt it all. And yet, that look in her eyes was already starting to change. The initial shock at seeing the things I had done was quickly tempered by her knowledge of who I was and the fact that my options, under those circumstances, and the ones she had so recently found herself in, had been very limited, and yet, there was no hiding a newfound sense of fear of my powers, and nervousness around me in her eyes.

I had achieved something. Something that neither she nor anyone else ever imagined to be possible. But... and there was always a but... she could already recognize the damage that had done to me, and she was already asking herself if I was the man she had thought me to be and if she needed to be careful around me.

It was possible, with her already in my head, to read her thoughts, to find out exactly what she was thinking and how deep her change of opinion of me went, but that was still an enormous violation of her trust. All I could do was try to read the features of her face. Charlotte was not like me; I was not an expressive person. Where some people wore their emotions on their sleeve or let every feeling cover their face as plainly as the clothes on their back, I couldn't. A look at some people could tell me if they were feeling happy, sad, angry, or any other of the myriad of sentiments of the human condition. I, on the other hand, could never seem to muster a look of anything other than indifference, maybe even apathy. At the very least, it was passive. It's not that I didn't care; I did, I cared a lot. Too much, even. But an upbringing such as mine meant that any blatant show of emotion was a weakness that invariably led to pain. I had been trained over a lifetime to give away nothing. If I was seen to be happy, then the thing making me happy would be destroyed. If I was seen to be sad, it would be exploited. Anger would be goaded, pride ridiculed, confidence smashed... Showing nothing had just been safer, and the habit that had been beaten into me over a lifetime of countless experiences was a very hard one to break. Reading people, however, that was second nature. A single look at my parents was enough to tell me if I was going to spend a blissful evening having my existence ignored or if I was about to have the shit kicked out of me purely for the inconvenience of my presence.

Charlotte was not my father, not in any way that could possibly be measured, but she wore her emotions on her face just as plainly as he did. It was the same tapestry of contorting facial muscles and eye movements, frowns and blinks, that every other person on the planet seemed utterly incapable of smothering. Charlotte was scared of me.

The only way I could explain it to someone who had never experienced it for themselves is to suggest you imagine a beloved family pet, a dog raised from birth into a lovable, adoring creature whose whole world revolves around you. Whose tail wagged every time it saw you and would happily spend countless hours just in your company. A dog that had never so much as bared its teeth to you in reflex.

And then one day, you take it out for a walk, and it suddenly jumps on a passerby and rips out their throat.

No matter how much you loved and trusted the affectionate and adoring pet, no matter their history with you, there would be a massive part of you that - seeing what it was capable of - was forced to completely reevaluate your safety around it and realize that you weren't sitting next to a domesticated dog, but next to a wild, dangerous wolf.

The person with the missing throat, in this case, wasn't a random passerby but a stranger with a weapon. The attack wasn't against an innocent person minding their own business, but a threat that had broken into your home and meant you harm. That feral growl, that lunge, that sinking of teeth into flesh, all of it was understandable, all of it was justified, and you may not want to change a thing. But it would still change your opinion of your pet from a lovable, innocent, slightly dopey animal into something that could, and had, ended lives on little more than a whim. In the real world, that dog would be destroyed.

And yes, I just compared myself to a dog.

It's funny what the mind comes up with when it's watching a person you care about so much, changing the way they see you in front of your eyes.

I didn't want to be here anymore. I didn't want to see it. I didn't want to feel it. I just wanted to send Charlotte home, tell her to forget about me, curl up into a ball, and let the earth swallow me whole. I could feel it, that sense of self-preservation growing again, that need to cut myself off from the world, to isolate myself from the things that could hurt me. I had spent months wearing down those walls inside me and starting to let people in. I had wanted to be part of something, to have friends, to mean something to someone, something more than just a man to be feared and respected. I had fought so fucking hard to be a better person than who I had been before; I had fought to protect myself and those I loved. I had fought to keep hold of the slightest shred of a better life, and with every new look that passed over Charlotte's face, I could see those hopes slipping away.

I was alone.

The light around my city had darkened with my realization, the glowing blue light around my tower in the distance faded away to nothing, and the air had grown colder. So much so that Charlotte was pulled from her thoughts and looked around before her eyes fell nervously back to me. Maybe she understood what the changes meant; maybe that cold, haunted chill in the air communicated more than I thought. Maybe my face wasn't quite as unreadable as I had assumed, but Charlotte's eyes held mine for only a moment before they fell away again. She knew that I had seen it, and she had known - from my sharing of what had happened - that I was afraid that what I had been through would ruin things between us, and she knew that in that moment, I had been right.

She took a deep breath and tried to put a smile on her face, her eyes completely unable to meet mine. "Okay, what do we do now?" she asked.

"I need you to go," I said as I stood with a sigh. If there was anything worse than the look of nervousness and hesitation on her face, it was the fake smile designed to hide it.

"What? Why?"

I looked at her. There was no anger or hurt on my face; there was no expression giving away the turmoil clawing at my insides, and there was no hardening of my eyes. There was nothing--cold, expressionless, emotionless, nothingness. Charlotte knew me, or at least she knew the old me. She had wandered the halls of my mind and my memories, and she understood me on a level that nobody else had ever even come close to. That look was all it took for her to understand what had happened. With that understanding came the realization of what her face had told me and - in turn - the conscious revelation of the truth of those sentiments. What I had shown her had scared her, not just a fear of the enemy or a fear of the threat they posed, but a fear of me. "Pete, I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it," I said plainly.

"It's just... I need time to..."

"It's fine," I nodded, feeling my heart breaking in my chest but showing nothing. "I'll see you soon."

Her eyes finally managed to meet mine. "Please don't shut yourself off," she whispered.

My mind did that thing that most of us have experienced in that situation, every conceivable answer rushing through it once in a maelstrom of screaming thoughts...

"Why not? This is who I am, this is me, and being around me gets people hurt or gets them killed. I did this for you, for all of you, I went to fucking war to make sure that nobody else would be hurt again, and you can't even fucking look at me! Do you think I wanted to kill those people? Do you think I went looking for the most evil and twisted way to end them? I gave them a chance; I gave them the choice to surrender, and some of them even took it! Would I have done that if I was as dangerous and evil as you seem to think I am? I could have walked into the command center outside Horlivka and obliterated every single soldier there; they were shelling civilians, after all. I could have hunted down the execution party we bumped into in Alchevs'k and massacred every fucker that stood in my way until I could make them suffer! No, I did what I had to do to keep you safe and to bring justice for Becky! I knew I shouldn't have told you; I fucking knew it! Why shouldn't I shut myself off? What possible good can come from feeling like this, from having people think of me like this, from being this dangerous, from being this much of a threat to people? I got Becky killed, I got Philippa's mind broken, and now you are afraid of me! Those Praetorian assholes would do the same to you in a heartbeat just for the crime of knowing me! So it's safer for you and a fuckload less painful for me if you just didn't. If I am a burden to be feared, then consider yourself fucking relieved of it! Just go, stay away from what you fear so much. Leave me alone, Leave me alone, Leave me ALONE!"

Of course, none of that came out of my mouth; the light in my city faded a little more, and, in another show-stopping moment that I couldn't even begin to understand, it started to rain. "I'll see you soon," I repeated levelly and emotionlessly.

Charlotte's mouth opened, and she managed a pained look up into the rapidly increasing downpour before she faded out of my city. I don't know what she was going to say, I didn't give her the chance to say it. I just closed off my city and my mind, put up the shields that would let me block any Evo from seeing me, and banished her from my head.

I don't know what she did when she re-emerged in the real world. I don't know if she looked at me, I don't know if she tried to speak to me or to reconnect with me, I don't know what emotions were playing out on her face. I didn't look. I just sat back down on the bench and let the rain soak into me.

I was alone.

They say it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Well, fucking try it! Sitting and wishing for something you can't have is its own special version of hell, but there is nothing... nothing... more painful than having something so important and meaningful to you be taken away.

My shields were up, my heart was broken... and I was alone.

********

Author's Note.

And that is it for Book Two of NewU. It is amazing to think that it has taken more than a year to get this book finished and more than two years before that since the whole story started. The feedback and enthusiasm from my readers - both on here and on our Discord server - have been incredible, and I can't thank you enough.

'The Whispered War,' as this book will be called upon full release, was a much darker tale than the one that came before it. Book three will see our hapless hero not only trying to finally end the war but start trying to piece his life back together as he does it. I hope you enjoy it all.

I wanted to say a massive thank you to my wonderful editors, too. This work would not be what it is without them.

Book three will start soon. But until then...

Stay Awesome.

Nova