NewU Pt. 11

Welcome to Chapter 11.

A quick thanks to my amazing editing team. Your grasp of the English language allows these stories to be what they are. Thank you to the rest of you for your comments, feedback, and high ratings for each chapter as well, not to mention a huge thank you for your participation on the Discord server.

Now, on with the story.

*********

Ten days.

It had been ten long days, and I was finally starting to think a little more clearly. To the normal human, that is nowhere near long enough to even get over a beloved family pet, let alone the potential love of your life, but I had spent every single moment of those ten days in my bunker. With the time dilation effect making every minute or real-world time stretch out into forty-five minutes in my head, I had spent more than fifteen months pulling myself together.

Jeeves had basically taken over the running of my body. Keeping me on autopilot when it came to feeding me, watering me, and taking bathroom breaks. A single thought made Jimmy, Olivia, Becky, and pretty much everyone else within a few hundred miles become unconcerned over my absence and robbed them of the desire to check in on me. None of them knew about that side of my life, and if they didn't know, they couldn't possibly understand what had happened. Charlotte knew enough to let me grieve.

The time after Charlotte had picked me up was a bit of a blur. Remembering it was like watching a movie reel of events that had happened to someone else. By the time we arrived back at her apartment, she knew that something was wrong, at least something more than surviving an Inquisitor attack. She didn't push it, she didn't ask, she just said she was there for me if I needed to talk or just share what had happened. She had pulled me into her bed, both of us fully clothed, and she had just cuddled comfortingly into the side of me. There was nothing sexual or even vaguely romantic about it. She just wanted to be there for me. She had known there had been casualties. She had known it had been bad, but other than that, she had no idea what had happened to me.

It was somewhere around 4 am when I finally took her hand and showed her everything... and I do mean everything.

It must be explained here that sharing a memory in this manner was a lot more detailed than just letting her see what happened. Not only was she watching everything unfold through my eyes, but she was also feeling what I felt, emotionally and physically. She could smell and taste and feel everything that I had. For those few moments when my hand was in hers, she was reliving the entire party as if it was happening to her.

Her eyebrows raised at the introduction of Uri, and she almost laughed at my defeat of Rhodri during the duel. I felt her surprise at what had grown between Faye and me. I felt that swell of overwhelming joy within her that I had found something so rare with someone so perfect. The happy smile on her face was still able to brighten the pre-dawn darkness of her bedroom. She was over the moon for me. Of course, it was very short-lived.

The nerves grew within her as she watched me begin to realize something was wrong. Her hand tightened in mine as that fear grew stronger, then squeezed in abject terror as she relived the initial stages of the attack. I felt her heart shatter on my behalf as, once again, Faye was butchered before my eyes. Then she watched in horror as I absolutely massacred our attackers.

As soon as the memory ended, the feelings and emotions that I had shared with them ended as well, leaving only her own. She sobbed uncontrollably, trembling and shaking against me, not able to say a coherent word. She had known Faye's blonde friend, she had known Neil, she had known that woman running toward me when I was behind the bar, the one who had taken a round to the head, and she had recognized a few faces in the crowd who had run past me to the fire escape. None of them had survived.

Neither of us said anything as she cried. I was simply incapable of doing the same; the tears wouldn't come for me for a few more days. Charlotte's emotions were all over the place. She was horrified by what she had seen, and a large part of that included the punishment I had dolled out to the Inquisitors. She knew I was powerful, but seeing my loss of control and the damage I could do... It was a sobering realization. But mostly, she was heartbroken. Heartbroken over the loss of Faye, heartbroken over my life with her being cut so short, and heartbroken over the loss of the people she had known. There had been so much death. The violence of my reaction to the attack had taken her by surprise, she was not necessarily horrified at the fact I had reacted as I had, and she didn't blame me in the slightest. But the gruesome nature of it was not something she had expected. It was like shooting a pedophile in the face. He absolutely deserved it, but that doesn't prepare you for the mess. She had felt the depth of emotions within me at the loss of Faye and the rage that had exploded at her loss.

"I am so sorry." She had whispered into the darkness. Echoing the words I had said to Faye's lifeless body before I left the club. I didn't answer, I couldn't; there were simply no words.

It was the afternoon before I had managed to convince her to let me go home. I needed to be alone. She had said something about wanting to make contact with the Sect elders. Apparently, an attack on this scale hadn't happened in a generation - although I had no idea how long that represented in Evo terms - and they needed to be shown what I had shown her. Everyone within the Evo community knew that the attack had happened, and everyone knew that there had been casualties, but the details were vague.

By mid-afternoon, I was home. I walked through my door, sat on my couch, entered my bunker, and stayed there... for ten whole days.

The tears came on day two, the first attempt at sleep on day three, and the first successful attempt on day five. It was prolonged periods of numbness punctuated by moments of indescribable agony. Anybody who says that grief is not a physical pain has never felt it. There were endless hours where I just sat on the sofa in my bunker, staring into space as Faye's death played in an endless loop on the screens on the walls. There were times when the pain was so great that I just curled up into a ball in the middle of the floor, almost like hunger pains, but thousands of times more acute. There were times my mind simply refused to deal with the realities of what had happened and forced me to think of something else. I half-heartedly worked on the finishing touches of my project. One eye was being kept on the local news. An event like this would not go unnoticed... and yet there wasn't a word about the death and destruction in a small urban suburb. It was like the whole thing had never happened. I filed that one away for later. By day eight, the grief was starting to subside, or at least the acute pain of it. It was still there, and it would probably always be there, but I could string a few coherent thoughts together.

That was when the questions came.

Some of the more obvious questions could be answered quite easily. How had Charlotte known so quickly, for example? Her explanation made sense. The Evos who had survived had warned the others, those people had passed the word on, the boundaries between the Conclave and the Sect ignored in moments of crisis, and the news had eventually reached Charlotte. Other questions were not as easily answered.

If this was the largest single inquisitor attack in a generation, why had they attacked that night? How did they know the party was even happening, or where it was being held? My understanding was that Inquisitors gleaned the location and identity of an Evo from discovering the prolonged and extreme use of their powers. That couldn't apply to a one-off party.

From the little information that I had gleaned during the gathering, Uri had flown in from the other side of the continent to attend the party, he wasn't supposed to be attending, but Marco had wanted him to meet me. That meant that for the first time, the two most powerful Evos alive would be in the same room at the same time. It hadn't been planned that way, so how had the Inquisitors known? There had to be a reason that they had attacked that party and no others for god knows how many years. There were only two possible answers; Perhaps they were always watching the party. Maybe they had always known it was on and had decided to attack based on Uri being there. They couldn't possibly have known who I was on their own, could they?

But why attack that party and not somewhere else if Uri was the target? Uri and me being there was the only thing that set that party apart from any other target they could have chosen. It had to be planned in advance. The number of men and material they had brought to bear ruled it out as a spur-of-the-moment thing. Which meant that they had to have known Uri was going to be there in advance. Nobody knew me, only Marco knew what I even looked like, so the very slim chance that I was the target meant that they wouldn't have known we were both there until someone inside the party had passed that information to our attackers. My mind struggled to make sense of that option...

Because the only other possibility was that someone had told them.

That would mean there was a traitor in the party, and if that was the case, then that person was single-handedly responsible for Faye's death, not to mention the others. If there was a traitor, they were going to face a wrath the likes of which had not even been felt by the Inquisitors. It suddenly dawned on me that I could not trust anyone; perhaps only Charlotte had shown she was above reproach. Everyone else was suspect. The inquisitors had already signed their own death warrants, they had murdered Faye. Nothing short of their utter annihilation was going to quench my hunger for revenge. The question now was who else was going down with them.

Make no mistake, this was not a hunt for justice. Revenge and justice are not the same things. But I didn't care. I was going to war!

It was impossible to know, at the moment, not without significantly more information than I had available to me, and there seemed to be only a limited number of ways to get more. On the morning of the tenth day, however, I came out of my bunker to find the answer to that problem. I had powered down my phone when I got home, and turning it back on had preceded a whole minute's worth of beeps and dings from the device as notifications of missed calls and messages scrolled up the screen.

The first message was from Charlotte, hoping I was okay and letting me know that the Sect leadership, her elders, had asked if I would be willing to meet them. The Sect: that was another group that could have potentially passed the information on to the Inquisitors. Charlotte's innocence meant nothing in that regard, she could simply not have known about it. I sent a message back telling her that I was willing to meet them and that I was okay. I promised to get in touch properly in the next few days.

The next few messages were from the one person I actually needed to speak to. Marcos's message stood clear against the white background of the phone screen. "We need to talk. Call me as soon as you can." Almost every other message had been a variation of the same request. He had known where I lived, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised he knew my number as well.

"Pete! Thank God you are okay!" Marco breathed in relief down the line as he answered my call. "I was starting to get worried."

"I'm okay," I answered slowly, trying to keep the suspicion out of my voice. "Did everyone else get out alright?"

There was a pause on the other end of the call before Marco took a deep breath. "We lost a lot of good people, Pete. I suppose I don't need to tell you that. Thirty-one of us got out. Jesus, what did you do to them?"

"What I had to," I answered simply. "I didn't see any sign of any of you when I got out. You all kind of left me there to fend for myself."

"I know. I'm so sorry, Pete," Marco sighed heavily. "Uri insisted on it. He outranks me, and he ordered us to run. He said that you were the only one of us able to hold them off, and we needed to get the injured to safety on the off chance you failed. He went back for you, but you had already gone."

"Hmmm."

"Uri made his report to the Conclave high council, including the Archon, a few days ago. He has credited you with saving the lives of everyone who survived. He is personally sponsoring your entry into the Black Knights."

I swallowed the urge to make an Independence Day reference. I was still pretty pissed off. "How noble of him. I'm going to guess that they are something important."

"They are the section of the Conclave tasked with fighting the Inquisitors," Marco replied. "Pete, I know you are upset, obviously, that is not how I saw your introduction to the Conclave going, but an attack on that scale hasn't happened for fifty years, at least. And if any of us had any hope of helping you in any meaningful way, we would have stayed with you and fought. We don't leave our own behind, but we were totally unprepared for what happened. The council is battening down the hatches, they are preparing for more attacks. I don't mean to put such a fine point on it, Pete, but we need you."

I stayed silent for a few moments. Of course, I was going to agree to Marco's inevitable request, that was the easiest way to get the answers I wanted, but I didn't need him to know that.

"The council has asked to meet you." Marco finally said when it was clear I wasn't going to say anything.

"When?" I asked levelly

"As soon as you can."

"Okay, fine," I sighed after another agonizingly long pause. "I'll meet them. Where do I need to go?"

"That's... a little complicated...."

********

Without wanting to necessarily divulge where in the UK this all happened, I will simply say that London is not exactly down the street. A domestic flight to London city airport - as opposed to the busier Heathrow or Gatwick - was easily swallowed up by my new bank account, and a series of inexplicable, rolling technical failures made every single security camera on the route from The Queen's Head to my Central London hotel stop working for the few seconds they could have picked up my face. I wanted as few people as possible to know who or where I was. The false names given to the airline and the hotel were accepted without question, thanks to a less than gentle mental nudge, and "Will Smith" checked into the Holiday Inn, just around the corner from the British Museum, two days after my conversation with Marco.

Look, I couldn't hold back that Independence Day Black Knights reference forever.

The British Museum really was a staggeringly beautiful building, its carved, ornate front edifice is known the world over. Opened almost twenty years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is the oldest publicly accessible museum in the world. The famous "Round Reading Room" within it had originally been inspired by the Parthenon in Rome, but any American would immediately recognize its layout, having been copied almost exactly in the construction of the Library of Congress. For centuries, some of the greatest minds in the world came here to read. Names like Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Karl Marx, Alan Turnin, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and everyone's favorite commie, Vladimir Lenin, could all be found on the sign-in sheet of this iconic room.

Now, Will Smith's name was on there too.

Marco's instructions hadn't made much sense, but I had followed them exactly. "Head to the Northwest section, pick up a book, and find a seat. You will know what to do," He had said.

Northwest? Does that motherfucker think I carry around a god-damned compass with me?

I finally resorted to pulling out my phone, turning on the maps application, and turning around in circles until it pointed me in the right direction.

"You know I could have helped you with that," Jeeves said quietly as if the library rules somehow applied to him.

"Well, telling me AFTER I needed that information is better than not at all, I guess," I replied with a roll of my eyes. I was amazed at how many people still used libraries in this day of age, given the existence of the internet, but it was a little harder than I expected to find a seat in the Northwest section. Dropping down into the green leathered seat, I opened the first book I had laid my hands on - something about James Cook's famous last voyage to Hawaii - and started to read.

Within seconds I felt it. The throbbing, pulsing pull of energy around me. It was the same energy I had felt every single time I touched another Evo and stepped into the mindscape, like a subtle but insistent pull on the back of my mind. I let myself be pulled in, and existence fell away.

********

Remember when I said that I expected the Conclave to have some grandiose cathedral-like palace from which they conducted their business? Well, it turns out that is exactly what they had, just not in any physical location. The building that faded into existence around me was large and grand enough to make the main halls of St Paul's Cathedral or Westminster Abbey look like nothing more than janitor's closets. It was enormous. The lack of any real laws of physics in this version of the mindscape meant that the vaulted ceilings were more expansive than anything that could be built in the real world.

The structure was laid out like a cross, the intersections of each arm merging at a central, circular atrium. Each arm looked like it was the better part of a mile in length, with a wide, marble walkway running up the center and layered, increasingly rising platforms flanking either side. Those platforms were covered in desks, bookshelves, reading lamps, and hundreds, perhaps even thousands of people sitting and working on whatever it was that those people were working on. Towering over all of them were enormous, five-story tall stained glass windows, each one depicting a different person or event. Not knowing much about the Conclave or its history, I had no idea what any of them were meant to mean, though. The center looked like the primary assembly area, with a throne-like chair on a raised central platform and rows of benches circling around it, and it was in that direction I started to walk.

My arrival hadn't gone unnoticed. One face in the multitudes of people on the platform recognized me, then another, then another, and pretty soon, almost every head was turned in my direction, watching me as I walked past. The quiet whispers steadily grew into the rumbling cacophony of excited murmurs.

It took about twenty minutes for me to reach the central circle. A group of people, most with their backs to me, and none of the rest of whom I recognized, were sitting on a small corner of the benches and watching the attack on the party from the point of view of someone who had been behind the bar. The images just sort of floated in the air, like a screen without any borders and held up by invisible means. They were just getting to the part when the two men had burst in from the staff entrance, only to have their own guns blow the tops of their heads into the ceiling, when I arrived and cleared my throat.

The men all spun around, Marco and Uri among them. So was Fiona, the girl whose duel I had watched before my own. I hadn't really met her during the party, not properly, but she instantly knew who I was. She ran over to me, wrapping her arms around me and burying her face in my neck. "Thank you," she whispered softly. "Thank you so much, you saved my life. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you." She pulled back and looked into my eyes. "I'm... I'm sorry about Faye."