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He nodded and swallowed down the last of his saliva. A breath of cold air allowed him to relax and set his eyes on the clones. “You’re right. We are so close. Soon, the world will be ours.”
His mother looked off into the negative space above her bed. “Yours,” she corrected him. He didn’t say a word back. It wasn’t like his mother to be jealous.
Eventually, a new smile crept against her cheeks. Compromise. It defined solidarity.
But Cassian could no longer compromise his goals. His thoughts were of the whore omega. She ought to have been his bride had no one interfered. “I should have made sure he was dead,” he whispered. He disgusted even himself.
“Your brother was not born a warrior,” she whispered. Cassian nodded and waited for her to keep speaking. He loved hearing her words of encouragement, and she knew that more than anyone. “When she wakes from her torturous slumber, she will adore you.”
But as much as Cassian wanted to believe her lies, he was deep in worry. Despite Vash’s parasitic weakness, he was concerned that all of his actions would add up to nothing. Like the tyrants of power before him, he was afraid all of this was a pillar of rock to be turned to sand.
“Remember…” he whispered. “There are two.”
“We won’t discuss such matters,” she said. “For now, you will do as I say. For once, you will rest. Then, you will wake her.”
They will find her first.
His thoughts bounced inside his head, but he knew his mother had a plan, too. He was the destroyer. She was the saving grace. Together, they would rule as a Hegelian force.
Cassian forced his body into a bow. “Yes, Mother. I will wait for your instructions.”
Vash threw a punch at the door, crumpling to the floor once the pain hit his frazzled nerves. Harsh tears fell from his eyes, and all he wanted to do was give up. With nothing left to lose, Vash collected himself before leaving the prisons and running upstairs.
Positioning himself against the door of the stairwell, he listened to the rapid firing of soldiers outside. Their brash cries of courage could only be met with the obvious indifference of death and rising suffering. As soon as he opened the door, the smell hit him. In the distance, mounds of burning bodies polluted the horizon. Grabbing a loose rifle, Vash closed his eyes and centered himself.
The sound of gunfire calmed him. For the last ten years of his life, he’d gone to bed in the barracks listening to the cold noise of machinery. Other soldiers told him stories about man coexisting with nature. There was equality to things back then. Apparently.
Vash had never believed the stories. He didn’t see it as something possible. Man was born to weave a story, and every story had a cruel cast of characters. Parity and fairness were bullshit. The one constant this world had to offer was violence.
Shouldering his rifle, he ran through the wrecked prisons as vibratory explosions rippled through the earth. The walls came crashing over him, but he rolled into a small clearing of rubble and waving trash. Unmarked civilians with guns of their own fired through the walls, but Vash had trained himself to be the quicker aim. He shot into the dense crowd of people, watching as they twitched like insects.
As Vash sucked in the adulterated air, he saw it. Amidst the burning wreckage of war vehicles and small farm buildings stood the transport carrier, resting in the outside lot. He stumbled toward it, fighting the urge to look at the soldiers shooting in his direction. When his hand hit the green carrier, he jammed the detonation device onto the hood of the vehicle. He made sure the alpha driving saw his flashing grin.
The front of the carrier exploded into flames. Of course, the soldiers working the vehicle spilled out like sour milk. Every single alpha was begging to be hit with his malice. Now more than ever, Vash wanted to destroy Cassian’s armies, and with his brother’s eyes elsewhere, it would be easier done than most thought.
When the dead were silent, Vash stepped inside the driver’s seat and pushed the sunken bodies aside to look through the cage to the holding area. Drooling alphas stared back at him, but Killian was the one who came to the front first.
“Vash!” he screamed. Across his face was a fresh cut, deep, open, and running with red. “Bastards cut me up…”
Vash took the driver’s keys and ran to the hold. When he opened the door, the prisoners ran, but Killian paused. “Where’s Lucas?”
“You’re asking me?” Vash asked. “I thought he was with you.”
“Shit!” Killian hissed. “The bastard split us up. There are multiple transports. He could be halfway to the southern regions by now if Cassian wanted it.”
Vash eyed the barracks again. He wouldn’t be forced to walk back into that firefight. Half of it was an exhibition of demolition and pain. It wasn’t the least bit safe. But just as he turned around, a flimsy hand appeared from the rubble followed by a thin body caked in dust. Vash recognized the body immediately.
Lucas wiped the dirt from his paramilitary-style pants and clenched his teeth around his metal toothpick. “You ready to go or what?”
Killian nearly dropped his gun onto the spoiled soil. “What the…?”
Lucas took a rifle from one of many dead soldiers’ wrists. Taking aim at the prisons, he fired a few rounds blindly. “They never tell you about the smell of the killing fields,” he said.
Killian eyed the smoky horizon. The sounds of gunfire ceased momentarily. “Feces.”
Both of the men laughed deeply.
At the moment, Vash was a million miles away, inside his own head. Riddled with anxiety, he couldn’t stop twitching his eye to face each corner of the dense socket. There was a noticeable dull sting to those movements, but that wasn’t to say it hurt. It just felt different.
