Vengeful (Villains #2)(60)

Rios looked up from her own table. “Your mind,” she said, “truly is a marvel.”

Holtz beamed, as if it were a compliment.

“But,” she continued, “if you bothered to read the eval files, you’d know that an EO’s power is tethered to the method of their NDE and the state of their mind at the time of incident. So tell me,” she said, turning in her chair, “what kind of accident gets you the power to change the model of your car?”

Holtz made a comical frown, as if genuinely trying to puzzle it out, but Bara was clearly bored.

“What about you, Rios?” he shot back. “What would your power be?”

She returned to her book. “I’d settle for the ability to create quiet.”

Holtz let out a nervous laugh.

Dominic let his eyes slide over the group.

He hadn’t expected it to get easier—hadn’t wanted it to get easier—but it had. That was the thing, it was amazing what you could get used to, how quickly the strange became mundane, the extraordinary normal. After leaving the army, he’d missed the camaraderie, the common ground. Hell, he’d missed the uniforms, the orders, the sense of routine.

What Dominic could never get used to were EON’s cells. Or rather, the people kept inside them.

The complex’s crisp white walls had become familiar—the obscure maze reduced to clean lines of rote muscle memory—but there would never be anything comfortable about the purpose of this place. If Dom ever found himself forgetting the building’s true design, all he had to do was look at the surveillance footage, click through the images of three dozen holding cells.

Now and then, when Dom drew rounds, he had walk those cells, deliver meals, listen to the EOs beyond the fiberglass beg for him to let them out. Sometimes, when he drew eval, he had to sit across from them—the prisoners in their cells and Dominic in his camouflage as human—and ask them about their lives, their deaths, their memories, their minds. He had to pretend he didn’t understand what they meant when they talked about those final moments, the desperate thoughts that followed them down into the dark, the ones that pulled them back out.

Across the table, Holtz and Bara were still tossing around hypothetical powers, and Rios had gone back to her book, but Dominic stared down at his food, his appetite suddenly gone.





II





TWO YEARS AGO


DOMINIC’S APARTMENT

HE turned the business card over in his hands, waiting for Victor to call him back.

The black ink caught the light, illuminating the three letters.

EON.

Ten minutes later, the phone finally rang.

“Take the job.”

Dominic froze. “You’re not serious.” But he could tell by the ensuing silence that Victor was. “These are the guys that hunt us. Capture us. Kill us. And you want me to work for them?”

“You have the background, the qualifications—”

“And if they peg me as an EO?”

A short, impatient sigh. “You have the ability to step outside of time, Dominic. If you can’t avoid capture—”

“I can step out of time,” said Dominic, “but I can’t walk through walls. I can’t open locks.” Dom ran a hand through his hair. “With all due respect—”

“That saying usually precedes a no,” said Victor coolly.

“What you’re asking me to do—”

“I’m not asking.”

Victor was a hundred miles away, but still Dominic flinched at the threat. He owed Victor everything, and they both knew it.

“All right.”

Victor hung up, and Dom stared at the phone for a long time before he turned the card over, and dialed.

*

A black van came for him at dawn.

Dominic had been waiting on the curb, watched as a man in street clothes climbed out and opened the back doors. Dom forced himself forward. His steps were slow, a body operating against drag.

He didn’t want to do this. Every self-preserving nerve in his body was saying no. He didn’t know what Victor was thinking, or how many steps ahead he was thinking it. In Dom’s head, Victor went around acting like the world was one big game of chess. Tapping people and saying, “You’re a pawn, you’re a knight, you’re a rook.”

Dom chafed a little at the thought, but then, he’d learned not to ask questions in the army. To trust the orders as they came down, knowing that he couldn’t see the whole scope. War needed both kinds of people—those who played the long game and those who played the short one.

Victor was the former.

Dominic was the latter.

That didn’t make him a pawn.

It made him a good soldier.

He willed his body toward the van. But before he could climb in, the man held out a ziplock bag. “Phone, watch, anything that transmits data and isn’t hardwired to your body.”

Dominic had been careful—there were only a handful of numbers in his phone, and none of them named; Victor was boss man, Mitch was big man, Syd was tiny terror—but he still felt a nervous prickle as the bag disappeared and he was ushered into the van.

It wasn’t empty.

Four other people—three men and one woman—were already sitting inside, their backs against the windowless metal walls. Dom took a seat as the doors slammed and the van pulled away. No one spoke, but he could tell the others were military—or ex-military—by the set of their shoulders, their close-cropped or tightly wound hair, the steady blankness in their faces. One had a prosthetic arm—an elaborate piece of biotech from the elbow down—and Dom watched the man’s mechanical fingers tap absently on his leg.