AllFreeNovel
Share Us
We walked home in silence before splitting up into our private rooms. I was tired and passed out after taking a shower. I woke up again when I felt Trevor squeeze under the blankets next to me.
“So you’re still planning your attack?” he asked.
“You think I’ll back down now, because we lost a friend?” I said, with a confidence I didn’t feel. I wouldn’t blame him if he wanted out. But there was never any choice for me.
“You’ve got the rebels,” Trevor said. “A bomb, some sharpshooters from Iklebot, if they show up.”
“They’ll show up. And we’ve got more than that, we’ve got the antidote, remember? We just have to find a smart way to use it. And we’ve got the daylight. That’s more than we had a month ago. More than we’ve had in a hundred years. Plus, we may have more allies than we think. Look where we are.”
“You think Augustine will fight for you?” Trevor asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, curling up in the blankets. “But he wants something. Something I haven’t given him yet.”
We couldn’t afford to wait any longer. Both Trevor and Camina had offered to put their lives on the line for me, and we all knew time was running out. Damien would probably have arrived at the citadel already, as a captive prisoner. Who knew what Nigel would do to him. If I did nothing, Camina would enter into a foolish bargain and probably get hurt, or end up with a debt too big to pay. There had to be another way, otherwise why had Augustine spent so much time talking with me, telling me stories.
I felt like the elite we’d met so far were more subtle and cagey than those in the citadel. Maybe they’d had to be, without the easy protection of Richard’s kingdom. It was clear Augustine wasn’t happy about the stunt Tate pulled. He’d been trying to back me into a corner, mesmerize and trap me with his maze of delights. Tate shattered the illusion he was trying to cultivate; peeling back the carpet to show the blood stains.
Which meant, he probably wouldn’t want this race to happen, either. And I knew he could stop it. I just had to offer him something concrete and specific. Something he wanted.What did he want?He’d told me so much about himself. He was lonely. He wanted a family. He wanted to be surprised. It was time to play all my cards, and I was holding a royal flush; something that shouldn’t have existed, something impossible. At least I hoped that’s how he’d see it. It was time to close this deal, before it was too late to matter.
I waited until sunset, and this time I let Augustine find me. I figured he could smell my blood, if he wanted. Still it was an hour after dark, the streets starting to fill, when he finally showed up at my side.
“Took you long enough,” I said. “So what’s on the menu for tonight? A little mayhem, death and destruction? Some city you’ve got here.”
“I told you earlier, Tate loves the spectacle of carnage, as well as ruining my best-laid plans. I prefer to negotiate slowly. A very subtle dance, like a kind of intimacy. But she’s determined to force some kind of splashy shitshow, and neither of us wants that. This is our third evening together, I think it would be a good idea to formalize the nature of our collaboration, if only to stop your friends from doing something reckless.”
“I agree,” I said quickly. “I have to get back to the citadel, as soon as possible. Too many lives are at risk.” I bit my lip from saying more, when I saw him beginning to smile. He knew I was desperate.Whatever the cost.I was sure he had a price in mind already, I just had to force him to admit it, and see whether it was something I could afford to pay.
“Well in that case, would you mind joining me in my office? It’s where I prefer to conduct business agreements.”
I shrugged and followed him down the street, into another building and elevator. It was hard to remember sometimes that he owned nearly everything.
The apartment upstairs had a dark, velvety interior, like chocolate, with a large bed behind a curtain, a wide-screen TV on the wall, and a leather couch and glass table facing the wide window looking down on the strip. He put something on the screen with a remote, some kind of movie. Then changed it, to a faux fireplace, that was just a projection of real flames on a screen. I settled into the couch as he put on a record of classical music, and then brought me a glass of wine.
“The curse of immortality,” he said, gesturing at the TV. “It’s enjoyable at first. I spent years consuming media, I watched everything. Thousands and thousands of hours of content. Gritty detective series and romantic comedies. But it steals too much attention.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, having only seen a handful of movies in my life, but I imagined it was a bit like reading—how you had to be enthralled in the story, tuning everything else out, to really enjoy it.
“The only thing it taught me,” Augustine continued, “was how boring regular life was, compared to the fictional worlds of human creativity. So I focused on the arts, music, even writing for a while. Then, magic. There were a ton of magicians in the city in the early days, until they died out. I learned all their tricks. Reality is a construct. How we feel about it depends on the story we tell ourselves, and stories can make us feel good, or bad. Mostly depending on who the heroes and villains are, and who triumphs in the end. They all have one thing in common: an unstated promise, that interesting things can happen. That happy endings are possible. Happiness is a kind of fantasy, of calculating all the steps and seeing an orderly progression to the ideal outcome, culminating in a satisfying resolution. The pursuit of this dream gives us sense and meaning, makes our emotions more palatable—but happiness is a myth. The fleeting joys, hopes, and thrills we encounter endure for an instant—pleasurablebecausethey are limited. Because life never ends up with a hard, closed resolution. Happiness implies a continued, stable state that doesn’t exist in reality. For most humans, it’s enough. The illusion that happiness might be possible and the unending, inevitably fatal pursuit of it. But elites know better, at least those that have been around for a while, though there are few of us. We’ve sifted through history. And we can see that we are in the very end of humanity, the last drops in the bottle, the final grains of sand in the hourglass.”
5
Iwas getting used to his speeches, but it still caught me off guard when he stopped speaking and looked at me with a penetrating gaze. It was hard to keep up the tempo of the conversation when his observations droned on for several minutes, fading into the background noises of the scratchy record and soft crackling of the simulated fire. It was disarming, like a fish being given too much line, and then snapped back with a sharp hook.
“That went dark,” I said, sipping my wine. “You and Damien really would get along.”
“That’s nice,” he said. “But Damien’s not here, and I’m not making a deal with him. I’m making one with you.”
“But… why?” I asked. It was inarticulate, but I let the question hang in the air, and it seemed enough to elicit a small smile of approval.
“Firstly, we’re bored and restless. Few fights are any challenge, nor do any bets hold real risk for us. Some of us dare to adventure, but there’s so little left out there, uncomfortable and dangerous, even for elites. The older we get, the more we have to lose. Which takes all joy from our existence.”
“That’s why you visit the compounds. The thrill of the forbidden, of getting caught?”
“Something like that,” Augustine nodded. “King Richard’s kingdom lasted much longer than I expected, and it grew. It wasn’t the best solution, but it was a solution—and it kind of worked, for a long time. As far as I know, there are few alternatives. Small realms like my own, I’m sure, separated by thousands of miles. Any truces made between them would last a decade before failing, and fighting wars in the wilderness would only feed the mutids.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying, Emily… I’ve always felt like I was preserving some kind of human culture. Waiting until things got better, and I could spend my remaining wealth to help humanity back on its feet. But that day is not coming. Not for a very, very long time. I am a torch of light in the wilderness, waiting to be snuffed out entirely. I keep all these humans alive because of their faces; the thrill of watching a story unfold for the first time, of experiencing something new and unexpected. Something I lost a long time ago. I felt it, you know, in Crollust. Your unexpected arrival, then your attack on the renewal center. That’s when I first realized something was different, something was changing. I had spies follow you from a distance, keep eyes on the compounds. Algrave abandoned. Your little insurrection in Iklebot.”
