“It was twice, right?” Atlas says. “Twice you were taken out of the camps by a Transporter. Both times, I thought you were getting moved somewhere else, but after a couple of hours, you were brought back and you slept for days. I know now that that's part of your recovery pattern from a big power usage.”
I nod slowly and I meet Gryphon’s eyes as he stares at me for a second before nodding, as if encouraging me to speak.
I really don't want to talk about it, but I'm also aware that Sage is with us and that I've been encouraging her to let go of her own stigma around what had happened with Dara.
Maybe this will help her.
It's a little more terrifying than taking out one person, although I didn't have a close relationship with any of the people that Silas had forced me to kill. It doesn’t make it feel any less horrifying to me though.
I glance around to make sure that we’re alone here only to find all of the TacTeam personnel around us have a white ring around their eyes. None of them move other than breathing, their chests going up and down but their minds just shut off completely.
I glance back at Gryphon, and he shrugs as though the answer is obvious. “I’d rather not have any rumors of what is said here circulating on the street by lunch.”
I swallow, grateful that he was thinking that far ahead, and Sage leans over to hold my hand.
I try to lighten the serious mood that’s overtaken the room. “That's an awful lot of people. Have you noticed how much your power has grown?”
Gryphon smirks as Atlas and Gabe both roll their eyes. “Oh, he's noticed,” Gabe snarks, and I glance between them all, not understanding the joke.
“Like you, I have found no limit to my power yet, Bonded.”
No limit.
Is that going to be my legacy to my Bonded, the ability to use their powers with no restrictions or worries about personal consequences?
I clear my throat and find a small scratch on the mats to focus on so that I don’t have to look any of them in the eye as I let my terrible legacy tumble out of my mouth. “The first time… I was taken to an underground bunker. It was full of Gifted that the Resistance had taken from the streets and that all had their heads picked apart by Davies. Any useful information that they might have had was already extracted, and none of them had Gifts that the Resistance wanted to ‘utilize’… so they were nothing but cannon fodder to him. Most of them were so broken already that they didn't even get up from their small, stinking little cots in their cells. But there were a few who got up to take a look at me. I think about them a lot, the ones who stopped to look.”
I take a second to swallow and glance up to see if any of them hate me yet. I trust them. I trust them all, but I also wouldn’t blame them for changing their opinions of me after hearing this. Gryphon holds my eye and nods, the white ring around his iris glowing, and I can feel North in my head, reaching out to me to offer what little comfort he can. Nox is there too, the same tiny remnant that I can feel of him now that we’ve completed the Bond, but he's there and he's listening.
Deep breath. “They wanted to test how far my Soul Rending ability could go. Silas was afraid that I had limits that would take me out. The strongest Soul Render in history… the one that he knew about, died because he pushed his power too far.”
Atlas nods behind me and adjusts his hold a little. “He killed twelve men at once. It burned him out, and he dropped dead at the same time as they did. He did it to protect his family, but it killed him all the same.”
Davies had talked about it enough that I already knew that little fact, and I clear my throat again. “There were four hundred people in the underground bunkers, and Davies had made a comment about how he didn't want me burning out the same way but… I was already so tired of being stuck in the camps, and I didn't want to be in pain anymore. So I asked my bond to kill them all, and it did.”
I swallow and look down at my hands, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. They've all seen my work before, seen me killing huge numbers of people at a time, but it had always been our enemy. There's something particularly shameful about them knowing that I had done this to our own people.
“The second time they took me, I refused. My bond refused as well. It was only after Davies got into my head and manipulated my Gift that my bond took the people out just to get him away from us. That’s when he figured out that my bond was a separate being, and he knew that he needed to deal with it more than me. That’s when he realized that I could be the weapon in this war that he so desperately wanted.”
Chapter Twenty-One
North
Despite what I’ve told the other council members, we do have TacTeams out in the Wastelands at the moment, trying to shut them down. There's one in Virginia that’s so big it has swallowed up an entire town, and I'm not going to waste resources there.
It's too far gone.
I have no doubt that it will end up being one of the main battlegrounds that we will be forced to fight on, and I’ve been monitoring the fighting there closely.
However, there are three smaller Wastelands that we have attempted to get to soon enough to shut them down before they get out of hand. Gryphon was the obvious choice, his team being the strongest and most experienced, but with only just completing the Bonded Group, I didn't want to split us up so soon.
The matter might have just been taken out of my hands.
The call comes in that one of our TacTeams has been wiped out, with a handful of prisoners taken, just as I'm about to leave the office for the night. I've had a fucking terrible day between dealing with the non-Gifted community summit fallout and Gryphon sending through the images of Oleander discussing her time at the camps. I'm not really all that interested in dealing with anything else, but to have an entire TacTeam wiped out is catastrophic.
The fact that Unser had gone along with them is an especially devastating blow.
I immediately send a message to Gryphon to come to my office so that we can figure out a plan of action, and then I make the call to Vivian to let him know the situation.
It’s bad, but not as bad as having to call Adella to let her know what's happened to her Bonded.
It's always the worst part of losing men out in the field, and losing someone who is a close friend to my Bonded Group makes it even more devastating.
“He’s not dead. I can still feel him.”
I rub a hand over my face and try to figure out the best way to explain the predicament of that to Adella. I go with just being honest with her. “That means that they have two Triggers, and that we have none. On a personal level, I am devastated, but it is also my responsibility as Councilman Draven to think about this from a strategic point of view.”
Adella is a no-nonsense sort of woman, someone who has dealt with having two TacTeam leaders as her Bonded her entire adult life, raising their children alone most of the time, and still maintaining perfect relationships with them both.
After losing my own parents’ Bonded Group at a young age, they were definitely the sort of people that I looked up to, and hoped that my own Bonded Group would look something like. I still have that hope today.
“I understand what you're saying, and so I'm telling you that you need to go and find him. He's alive, and it is a threat for him to not be with us. The same way that if the Resistance got their hands on you, or your brother, or your Bonded, it would be a threat to us all. There are certain people that we need to protect. He’s one of them, North.”