Ash shook her head. “No. Summer, you know how I can sometimes get stories from things I touch? Well, I just had a whopper of one happen.”
“Oh? Tell me.”
“I had a vision of a man standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking a beautiful ocean cove. Looked—felt—tropical.”
“What did the man look like?”
Ash told her, perfectly describing Merc. She clasped her hands and held them against her chest, rubbing one over the other. “He touched me. I don’t even know him, or know if he’s real, but we connected in a visceral way. He said he would find me.”
Summer went over to give Ash a hug. “I felt just that way about Sam. As soon as I met him, it seemed I knew him forever. I couldn’t stand being apart from him. Who knows why these things happen?”
“Do you think it was real?”
Summer sighed. “Sometimes, I’m not at all sure what’s real. I suppose if it felt real, then it was real, even if it’s just your mind playing out a scenario it wants you to learn something from.”
“Does that happen to you?”
“You wouldn’t believe the tricks my mind does.”
Ash chuckled and shook off the lingering effects of her vision, letting her energy return to normal. “Never mind about it. I don’t want to waste a minute of our time. Let me just wash my face. Wait here. I have so much to go over with you and Kiera about ideas for my trip.” She went into the bathroom, calling out, “And I know that if I don’t give you my itinerary and you happen to not hear from me, you’ll totally panic if you don’t know where to look for me.”
“Of course I would. You never travel to the gentle corners of the world.”
Ash looked up from the hand towel she held to her face, grinning. “Where’s the excitement in that?”
Liege met with Lautaro while Summer was busy with Ashlyn. Guerre was upstairs with Merc. Bastion and Selena were in Wyoming for the weekend. And Acier was at his shop in town. So it was just the two of them in his den.
“Interesting Summer’s friend could see me,” Lautaro said, his dark eyes sparkling with curiosity.
Liege leaned against his desk and folded his arms. “It is. I have to admit I’m curious about her abilities.”
“I can learn more when she comes out to visit the plantation.”
“Tell me how things were in the village?”
Lautaro shook his head. “I’ve never seen such a mess. Merc did nothing to hide himself from the regulars. I had to scramble their memories of him, as there was no way to block the impact he had on the town.”
“Why not?”
Lautaro stared at Liege. It was uncanny, given that Lautaro wasn’t even in the room. The Colombian had a big energy. His mind was an agile thing that outpaced many a mutant and regular’s cognitive abilities.
“Did you know that your man can set curses?”
“No.”
“Well, he can. He was setting those suckers out like candy.”
“Great. Could you undo them?”
“No. And apparently, he couldn’t either. You know those mass graves that were used before the peace talks were started? The ones the government recently investigated? Well, he’s well on his way to having them fill back up.”
“Shit. That’s why he kept us blocked from him.”
“I understand from the village priest, who made it a habit to spy on Merc, that he tried several times to revoke the curse, to no avail. And that’s not all. There are three instances of particularly violent gang members being consigned to end their lives sitting in chairs set in front of gang murals that Merc had painted over. They died and are decomposing—still sitting in those chairs. Village pigs and dogs have been chowing down on them, but even as their corpses lose structural integrity, the skeletons stay intact. And while animals and insects can interact with them, humans can’t.”
Liege bent his head and covered his eyes. Mutants, by their very nature, were exposed to the worst of what was possible in life. But no matter what a mutant saw or experienced, he was not to interfere with the behaviors and choices of regulars.
Merc broke every rule Liege had laid down.
“Maybe some rules are meant to be broken,” Lautaro said.
“Not these. If he had complied, you wouldn’t have needed to clean up after him.”
“If he hadn’t done what he did, how would we know he had the skill to set curses? That’s never surfaced among other Legionnaires.”
“And what good is a skill like that?” Liege asked.
“We’ll have to wait and see. Perhaps it’s one we can use against the Omnis—mutant or otherwise.”
“And where does it end? Are we allowed to act against Omni regulars but not gang regulars? Is it only civilian regulars that we care to protect? What happens when they violate some moral code we believe in?” Liege shook his head. “The line exists for a reason.”
“And I believe everything happens for a reason.”
“Do you? Is that a recent belief?” Fuck. Liege knew that was a low blow. There was no reason sufficient to explain Lautaro’s wife’s death, but if he’d come to a place of peace about it, Liege shouldn’t have used it to kick him in the gut. “Sorry. That was cruel.”
Lautaro shrugged. “I get it. There’s no history for mutants to follow, no norm we can keep as an ideal. All of this is still too new. But nonetheless, I am beginning to think things do happen for a reason. Like, why did you send Merc down to connect with Santo? Why not one of the other guys you have up here? Why not have me handle it?”
“I don’t know.” Liege frowned. “I felt that Merc was the right one for the task.”
“See? Things happen for a reason.”
“Maybe so, maybe not. How did the villagers react to what Merc did?”
“As you might expect. They think he was a divine messenger sent to rid them of their violent gang infestation. Apparently, the village has petitioned the priest to ask the church to send investigators out to validate Merc’s actions as miracles.”
“Aw, hell. And you couldn’t wipe that from their minds?”
“Not with the death pits continuing to fill. Not with the three dead men sitting in place with nothing binding them to their chairs. Not with any of a handful of other minor miracles he made happen.”
“What about the coca works and the mine?” Liege asked.
“That was a good find. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of both throughout the jungle. As the government finds one and shuts it down, another resumes operations. But my gut’s telling me something is off about that mine. It’s difficult to penetrate the energetic blocks the Omnis have set around it. Maybe they’re just hungry for the money both operations at the site offer. But maybe something else is going on. The presence of the ghouls confirms our friend Brett Flynn’s involved. It may be a side project he’s trying to keep under the radar from his good old papa.”
“We need to get Flynn’s crew out of there so we can hand it over to the government to deal with.”
Ash tucked her feet up under her on one of the loveseats in the greenhouse, setting her laptop on the chair’s arm. Bastion had brought dinner out to them at a private table next to the pool. Everyone else in the fort was hanging around someplace else, giving them their night together.