Brenton gave me a scornful look. “You don’t know the first thing about cold,” he said. “Rashid told you what the Eyes do?”
“Caldswell told me the propaganda,” I replied. “But Rashid filled in the ugly parts.”
“It’s all ugly parts,” Brenton said, his voice as hot and bitter as banked ashes. “Eyes are monsters, murderers. I know, because I used to be one.”
I’d guessed as much already, but hearing the truth from his own mouth made me fidget. I was trying to figure out how best to respond to his confession when Brenton suddenly changed the subject. “Do you know why the Eyes use symbionts?”
“Because phantoms break powered armor,” I replied.
Brenton smirked. “Phantoms break anything electronic, but that’s not the whole reason. If we just wanted something that would keep working around phantoms, there are other less dangerous options. The real reason every Eye is required to have a symbiont is because they make us highly resistant to plasmex.”
“To resist the phantoms?”
“To resist the daughters,” Brenton said. “Every daughter breaks free of her conditioning eventually, and when she does, the first person she attacks is her Eye.”
I shrugged. “That makes sense. The Eyes are her guards.”
Brenton shook his head. “You don’t understand. This isn’t like a prisoner escaping. There’s no rational thought to it, no planning. When a daughter is made, Maat takes her over completely. Everything she was before is wiped out and replaced by Maat herself, and Maat hates the Eyes with a madness that cannot be calmed. Rightly so—they deserve nothing less for what they’ve done to her—but the point I’m trying to make, Miss Morris, is that the only way an Eye survives past his first assignment is by shooting his daughter before she cracks.”
Brenton leaned forward, his eyes bright with the same fanatical gleam I’d seen back on Falcon 34. “Rupert has been a perfect Eye for a long time now,” he said. “When I left, he had an unblemished record, and he must have kept it up because they put him on Caldswell’s ship.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Why is that special?”
“Because Brian Caldswell is the Eyes’ field commander,” Brenton explained. “He’s number two in the entire organization, and his partner, Mabel Cobb, is widely considered to be one of the best covert ops combat symbionts ever made.”
I sighed. That explained a lot. You didn’t get to be as overbearing as Caldswell without some real power behind you.
“Caldswell’s team handles the most difficult and dangerous daughters,” Brenton continued. “The ones Maat has the most control over, the ones who break the sharpest and have to be killed most decisively.” He smiled at me. “The Glorious Fool is a death sentence for more than just security officers. The only Eyes who sign up to fly with Caldswell are the ambitious ones willing to risk their lives to learn from the best. So, what does that tell you about our dear Rupert?”
He was looking at me like he expected an answer, but I was barely listening anymore. My mind was back on the Fool. The night I nearly broke my leg on him, I’d told Rupert all about growing up on Paradox and my ambitions to be a Devastator, but the only thing I’d learned about him was that he considered it an honor to serve under Caldswell. At the time, I couldn’t see how. Now, thanks to Brenton, I understood.
That thought was still finishing when a memory rushed into my mind like a flood. I had enough experience now to recognize it immediately as one of Rupert’s. Even if I hadn’t, though, I would have known soon enough, because in this memory, I was looking in a mirror, and it was Rupert’s face that was staring back.
It must have been a while ago, because his hair was cut military short. Otherwise, he looked just like he always did: same black suit, same intense blue stare, but his reflection was blurred by the blood that was sprayed over half the mirror. There was blood on him, too, splattering his pale face and hands, one of which held his pearl-handled disrupter pistol. It must have just fired, because I could feel the intense heat against Rupert’s hand, but his attention wasn’t on the burning metal pressed against his palm. It was on the body lying at his feet.
The corpse looked far too small and thin to be the source of so much blood. Its head had been completely blown off by the disrupter pistol blast, but even so, I knew it was a daughter. Curious, I poked the memory, trying to pick out why this daughter was special, but all I got was horror, regret, and a sadness so deep it brought tears to my eyes as the Rupert in the memory fell to his knees. With slow, jerky motions, he took off his coat and tucked it around the girl’s body, whispering something again and again in a language I didn’t know. The words didn’t matter, though; I understood. He was saying he was sorry, repeating it over and over until the syllables ran together.
The regret was still throbbing in my skull when the memory vanished, and it was all I could do to turn away before Brenton saw the tears. I wiped them away in a quick, furious motion, but they just kept coming back. I didn’t know if what I’d seen was the first time Rupert had killed a daughter or just the one that got to him the worst, but the damn misery wouldn’t fade. Worse still, Rupert’s memory was triggering others. My own this time.
I was freshly out of the trauma dampener after the fight on Falcon 34, lying helpless and weak as Rupert leaned over me. The newly returned memory was so vivid I could almost feel the brush of his hair on my cheek as he leaned down to whisper about the horrible things he’d done, still did, could not undo. How he did not deserve me, how he could not be forgiven, and how he had no right to love me. Like the others, the memory was just a flash, fading as quickly as it came, but it left a dead, bitter taste behind in my mouth, and suddenly I didn’t want to talk about Rupert anymore.
“My turn,” I said, turning to Brenton. “Back on Falcon Thirty-Four, you said I was the one who could save the universe. Why? What am I? Does it have anything to do with my ability to see phantoms?”
Brenton jerked. “You can see phantoms?”
I nodded, and he whistled. “No wonder Brian was after you so hard. Did he tell you what he thought you were?”
“No,” I said. “He claimed to be stumped, but the seeing phantoms thing was special enough that he was ready to stick me in a lab for the rest of my life on the off chance I might be a useful weapon in his war.”
“Better than being shot,” Brenton said with a shrug.
The glare I gave Brenton snapped his mouth shut. “I would shoot myself in the head before I let them take me,” I growled. “I’ve seen how they treat their weapons, and I’d rather be dead five times over than end up like Maat.”
Brenton eyed me with new respect. “Fair enough,” he said. “But your escape tonight might be luckier than you know. For you and the universe. Do you remember what I told you back on Falcon Thirty-Four about Stoneclaw’s virus?”
I had to hunt through my newly returned memories before I found what he was talking about. “You said she was making a biological weapon,” I said. “And that was why the lelgis destroyed her ship.”
“She was making more than that,” Brenton said. “Given the vast differences between species, even between the various xith’cal clans, viral weapons have limited effectiveness. But Stoneclaw wasn’t just engineering a virus, she was making a plasmex virus, which is another thing altogether.”
Brenton held up his hands and spread them slowly, like he was stretching something invisible between them. “Plasmex flows through every living thing. Certain races can feel it more than others, but the same plasmex that flows through the xith’cal flows through aeons and humans. What Stoneclaw figured out was a way to corrupt plasmex itself, creating a one hundred percent lethal virus capable of infecting any living thing regardless of genetic difference.”
“Well, if that was the idea, she messed up,” I said. “That ship was full of downed xith’cal, but they weren’t dead.” I didn’t even have a word for what they were, other than wrong. I could still remember the horrible stench of them, the terrible white film over their eyes. Dead but not dead.
“My sources believe the virus that killed off that tribe ship was not yet complete,” Brenton admitted. “Now, of course, it never will be.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean there is no more Stoneclaw,” Brenton replied. “The lelgis have spent the last few weeks hunting down her tribe ships and destroying them one by one. If there’s so much as a scout ship left bearing her mark, I’d be very surprised.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. It seemed impossible that one of the three xith’cal clans, the monsters of my childhood, could just vanish. But even as I tried to work my brain around it, a part of me could only think that at least this explained why the lelgis hadn’t caught the emperor phantom that had destroyed Unity as they were supposed to. They’d been off killing lizards.
“Unlike the rest of us, the lelgis are nearly pure plasmex,” Brenton continued. “Though she didn’t make it to fight them, they had more to fear from Stoneclaw’s virus than anyone else, and they burned her entire clan to a cinder just to be sure it was destroyed. They did a good job, too. So far as we know, all records and samples of the virus are now gone. All, that is, except one.”
I didn’t need his pointed look to get where this was going. “You mean me,” I said. “You think I have the virus?”
“I don’t think,” Brenton said, reaching into his pocket to pull out a handset. “I know. Take a look at this.”
I took the offered handset gingerly, but it took me a moment to recognize the black shape on the screen as a woman’s body. It was Evelyn, Brenton’s other plasmex user, the one I’d killed. Her corpse was covered head to toe in the black stuff that had come off my finger when I’d touched her, and as I stared at it, I could feel my blood running colder and colder.
“Now tell me, Miss Morris,” Brenton said. “Does that look anything like the xith’cal you saw on Stoneclaw’s tribe ship?”
I closed my eyes. Part of me wanted to throw the handset back at him and scream that he was wrong. That I couldn’t have this virus. But it all lined up so nicely—the rotting xith’cal biting me across the shoulder, the black stuff that appeared on my skin with its pins and needles, the weird smell Hyrek claimed I had. But even if I accepted Brenton’s explanation, it still didn’t make sense, because that would mean I had the virus that was made to kill everything, and I was still alive.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Let’s assume for the moment that I do have this virus. Why aren’t I dead? Why haven’t I killed everyone around me?”
“That’s a very good question,” Brenton said. “One I don’t have a definitive answer for, actually. That’s why I’m taking you to see some experts.”
“But I’ve already been tested up and down!” I cried. “Caldswell’s doctor ran more of my blood than I knew I had in me through his machines, and he still found nothing.”
“He wouldn’t,” Brenton said. “Because this sickness isn’t in your blood. It’s in your plasmex, and even the Eyes have never figured out a way to test plasmex properly.”
“But your ‘experts’ have?”
“Yes,” Brenton said simply.
I dropped his handset on the table and flopped back against the bench with a curse. I suppose I should have been relieved to finally have a name for what was wrong with me, but finding out my mystery illness was a xith’cal supervirus wasn’t something I could be happy about. Worse, my xith’cal supervirus was apparently malfunctioning, which meant I couldn’t even predict what was going to happen. It felt ungrateful to be miserable about something that was the only reason I was still alive, but I hated working with unknowns. What if my virus suddenly kicked in and I started a plague?