NewU Pt. 32

Everything burns under those conditions. Even oxygen will ignite if its temperature is raised high enough. The soldiers were forced to just stand there and accept their fate, albeit briefly, as their clothing burst into flame along with their hair, their skin blistered, started to melt, and then ran down their bones like a macabre form of candle wax, eyeballs boiled and melted, so did the blood in their veins, their lungs turned to ash, and their brains were subjected to their skulls turning into an oven.

Of course, the shock alone had killed them long before they felt most of these things. The human body is only capable of surviving so much, and that limit was passed long before those men were subjected to the full measure of my fury.

In only a few seconds, it was over. Any semblance of moisture had been boiled out of the bodies of our attackers. A few charred bones clattered to the ground, but most had just been reduced to ash. Heavy smoke hung in the air, the smell of burned flesh and singed hair was everywhere, and twisted and warped rifles lay scattered on the ground next to the scorched outlines of their former owners.

There was complete silence.

With another deep breath, I turned back and looked at Jerry. He had seen the whole thing and could scarcely believe his eyes, one of his hands was still on Henry's throat as the other held the hand of our escort's commander in an attempt to comfort him. I had no doubt that Jerry was in his mind, trying to keep him alive and calm. Henry's eyes were rolling into the back of his head as he slipped in and out of consciousness. In the heat of the moment, it was impossible to tell how successful Jerry had been, but Henry was still breathing, and his legs had stopped kicking.

Movement from the smoldering door to the stairwell caught my attention. Bob was looking out over the scene, not in victory or even relief as I had expected, but his eyes were filled with a burning rage that rivaled my own a few moments earlier. His gaze dropped to Henry, or more accurately, the part of him that Jerry was healing. His expression changed to one of revulsion, of pure disgust, and of unspeakable loathing before his eyes finally rose to mine.

The hatred there was unmissable; it was absolute contempt. Beneath it all, however, was an unutterable hostility. In that moment, Bob meant me harm.

I held his gaze and turned my body toward him.

Bob blinked and shook his head clear. In only a few moments, that look was gone. "Jesus," he murmured. "I never expected it to feel so... visceral." I ached an eyebrow at him. "I'm sorry, Pete. That was the first time I had ever seen you use your powers firsthand. It was like every one of my instincts, every part of me was telling me that you needed to be destroyed, that you needed to die. That was a very disconcerting experience. Please forgive me."

I held his eyes for a few seconds longer. "Is this going to be a problem?"

"No," he shook his head. "No, I assure you. I was warned this could happen. It's built into us; it's why those men at the meeting treated you so badly. It's instinct. I have been trained to overcome it, and now I know what it feels like; I can beat it. It won't happen again."

He took a deep breath, seeming to consciously center and calm himself before nodding again. "The instinct is strong. I won't pretend otherwise. But I can control it. Just give me a heads up next time." he finished with one of his trademark smiles.

"Oh, napalm, old school, I love it." Jakob grinned as he stepped around Bob and out of the stairwell. He seemed to stop and frown at the scorch marks on the ground as if recognizing that they couldn't possibly have been made by napalm. Especially the triangle of perfectly preserved floor between the arches of the stairwell door and where I was standing. But he shrugged it off quickly and, as the rest of the team stepped wearily back into the foyer, he followed their lead in gathering around Henry.

Jerry stood up, shaking loose the arm that had been pouring so much power into our wounded leader. "I've done all I can," he whispered to me as he stepped clear of the group. "He isn't going to die immediately, but he isn't going to last long without a hospital and a proper surgical team either. He has maybe an hour. He's still very much critical."

I'm not sure how I could tell, but I knew that one of the things that Jerry had given himself at his own internal editing station was a complete and thorough understanding of medical procedures. He wouldn't ever be a doctor, but he knew enough to know what he was talking about. I didn't even try to question it.

I sighed and nodded. "Okay, I will finish it."

I was just about to step forward when Bob, who had joined the conversation, grabbed my arm. "Pete, I need you to think how you would explain that to them." he nodded his head at the group of soldiers. "The more people who know about this, the more likely we are to be discovered. I don't know how I know, but I can tell you haven't done anything to their memories or made them accept that... whatever you just did... really was napalm. But I am absolutely sure that I could tell if you had. And if I could..."

"Shit." Jerry spat. "If he could, then it is fair to say that the bad guys might be able to as well. Hell, they may even be able to track them using that, and it could kill them all. He's right. You can't heal him."

"So, what, we leave him here to slowly die?" I asked, trying to keep my voice barely above a whisper. "You said we can't move him!"

"We need to call in a med-evac," Jakob called over with almost scripted timing, despite not having a clue what we were talking about.

"Wait... what?" I blinked at him. "I thought this was a no-fly area and that's why we drove for eight damned hours. You're telling me we can call in a helo here?"

"Of course, we can." Jakob squinted as if it were the most obvious answer on earth. "I don't understand your confusion. Why would we risk a chopper on an insertion that needed to be quiet when we have legs to walk in? Getting out a wounded man is a completely different priority."

"Oh"... yes, okay, it was an obvious answer. "Okay, well, call one in for him." Jakob nodded and started talking into his radio. I wasn't sure why the team was suddenly deferring to me, but Jakob made the call without question. I didn't miss the look on Jerry's face, though. "What?"

"Pete," he sighed. "By the time the chopper gets here, loads him up, gets back to the landing zone, unloads him, and gets him to a hospital and into surgery... he doesn't have anywhere that long."

"Fuck!" I pinched the bridge of my nose. "Can't you keep him alive long enough to get him there?"

"I'm tapped out, man." Jerry sighed. "...unless..."

The pause after his last word was entirely too long. "Well, shit, dude. Don't leave us in fucking suspense. Unless fucking what?"

"Unless you give me a boost. A Refill."

Bob was eyeing us both, his head following the back and forth, but considering we were discussing ways to keep his man alive, he was being pretty accommodating when it came to the use of our powers.

"I..." I paused; I had no idea how to do that... until Jeeves cleared his throat inside my head, and suddenly I did.

"We need to talk about your timing, old man!"

"Alright, pucker up, sunshine," I rolled my eyes and pressed my hand against Jerry's chest.

In the recesses of our minds, a connection was made between the powerplants thrumming around my city and the well at the center of Jerry's. Jeeves, in his infinite, if selectively timed wisdom, calculated that at full power, it would take my power plants only a few seconds to completely refill Jerry from empty. But Jerry wasn't empty, not literally, just very close to it. Going overboard and pumping him full of my power could actually be dangerous. Flooding his well could kill him.

"I'm sorry, man," Jerry's voice echoed through my head. "I should have regulated my power use better. It's just that dodging those bullets, making sure I landed my shots, and not fucking shitting myself took a lot out of me. Healing Henry just finished me off. I should have gotten more sleep on the plane and the car ride here."

"What has sleep got to do with it?" I asked, giving more brain power to Jeeves' calculations than I was to Jerry's apology.

"That's... what?... That's how we refill our wells. Didn't you know that?"

"Nope."

I could almost hear Jerry frown. "Marco didn't tell you that?"

"Nope."

Jerry's frown sounded like it grew deeper. "The sleep thing is a pretty big deal, man. You need to talk to Marco about it.

I could almost hear Charlotte saying it. "Fuckin' Marco!"

"Alright, I'll do that the first chance I get. I'm not sure it applies to me, though."

"Of course it doooooooooh shit!!" Jerry sucked in a deep, gasping breath, and his eyes almost bulged out of his head as I pumped him as full of my power as I dared. It was as close to filling his well to the brim as it was possible to safely get and judging by Jerry's reaction, it was more than he was expecting. "Holy fucking shit, I don't think I've felt this rejuvenated since I was a teenager!"

"Will that be enough?" I asked, trying to get the conversation back on track while the rest of our escorts were still tending to Henry.

"Fuck yeah, it will. Unless I have to bat a few Anti-Air missiles out of the sky, I should be able to keep him going for a few days!"

"Alright, good. I guess it is redundant to say you are going in the helo with Henry then." I turned to look at Bob. He was frowning.

"Interesting," he said quietly.

"What?"

"I'm assuming you just passed some of your power to Jerry?"

"Yeah, why?"

"I didn't feel a thing. Absolutely nothing."

"Were you expecting to?"

"Well, given how strongly I felt about you burning down the... well... everything, yes, I thought there would be something."

Jerry shrugged. "Passing his power directly to me doesn't interact with the world outside our bodies; maybe that is why you can't detect it?"

Bob seemed to consider this for a moment before nodding. "It's as good an explanation as any. I just think that if we are assuming that they are tracking your powers in the same way that I can, it is useful to know what they can and can't detect."

I nodded. It was a good point. Something had allowed the Russian state to hunt down and murder every Evo in the nation with terrifying efficiency. But at the same time, something had let them do the same to the inquisitors too, and I couldn't even begin to guess how they could have done both. But it was something.

"Err, Pete?" Jerry's voice sounded in my head. "So I'm guessing that if you didn't know about the sleep thing, then you didn't know that this whole power transfer thing lets us communicate psychically without needing to be in physical contact."

I blinked at Jerry.

"Well, now you know," He laughed. "It's like having part of you inside me. Heh, I bet that's not something you thought you would hear from another dude, was it?" Anyway, we can talk like this now without needing to worry about being overheard, at least for as long as it takes me to burn through all this power you gave me. Listen, man. If I fuck off in the helo with Henry, are you gonna be okay with Bob and the others? I saw the way he looked at us."

I gave Jerry my best deadpan expression and arched an eyebrow at him.

Jerry looked around the smoldering remains of the foyer on all sides of us. "Okay, yeah, never mind. Forget I even asked."

"So, are we going to overlook the glaring red flag in our predicament?" I asked

"What do you mean?"

"You heard Henry before he was hit," I said with a sigh. "The only way those mother fuckers would know where we are is if someone told them. We can count on eleven fingers how many people knew about this plan, and nine of them would have been killed if that ambush had worked."

"You think Uri tipped them off?"

"If by 'tipped them off' you are asking if I think he told them exactly where to find us and when to hit us, my answer would be that it is not looking good for him. He couldn't distance himself from this mission fast enough."

Jerry sighed deeply, but didn't answer for a few long moments. "Alright, I would like to know where those bastards got their information, and I admit that Uri is looking like a fairly strong possibility. But I'm not willing to throw away a lifetime of what I know about him on one unanswered question, even though it is one hell of a question."

A thought passed through Jerry's mind. It wasn't something he was consciously trying to hide, but I latched onto it before he had a chance to articulate it, and it pulled a groan from me, the likes of which are usually reserved for really bad Dad jokes.

"If Uri IS the traitor, that is really gonna fuck up your plans for Toussant."

Uri had seen Toussant with his own eyes. He knew who he was, what he looked like, and what I had done to him. The whole point of having that mole was to feed information back to us or, given our current predicament, help us out if we got into a jam. But if Uri had fed Toussants's true nature back to the rogue Inquisitors, they would either kill him outright - robbing me not only of the satisfaction of killing the man responsible for Becky's death but making the whole torture thing utterly redundant - or they would use him as a double agent to feed us false intelligence. Either way, he would be useless.

The thing is, Uri couldn't exactly transmit his memories of Toussant to the other inquisitors for the same reason he couldn't read their minds. This meant that assuming the cell structure of the Inquisition stayed intact, Uri would be one of the few people on Earth able to recognize him because almost all of his former cell had been butchered on Christmas Eve. By the same measure, the human nature of the men who just attacked us meant that this rogue faction had humans working for them in the same way as the real Inquisition, and he could certainly broadcast Toussant's appearance to them.

I closed my eyes and tuned into the part of my power that was currently directing Toussant's actions. It was essentially the same process that allowed me to talk to Jerry, but over a much greater distance.

Apparently, Jerry was not the first dude to have part of me jammed into him.

In only a matter of moments, I was inside Toussant's head. The shattered glass avatar that had haunted my last time in his mind was gone, ripped out of him with everything else that made him him. Instead, there was a fully intact avatar that looked like me.

Toussant, it would seem, already had a plan for exactly this eventuality. Well, not exactly this one, but one where his cover was compromised. As it turned out, practically every high-level inquisitor, those with more than a few generations of inquisition blood, had the same precautions. Toussant's parents were both Inquisitors, so he had been in the order, for all extents and purposes, since infancy, and in the oldest of Inquisitor traditions, his parents had not named Toussant once but four times.

One name was the one he would use in the family; another was one he would use in the outside world. One was the name by which he would be welcomed into the Inquisition, and the fourth name his parents left blank. A right of passage that he would undertake upon coming of age was the attainment of a name that he chose for himself. One that nobody else would ever know unless he trusted them implicitly. The whole point of the exercise was to teach inquisitors to compartmentalize their lives and to be able to keep secrets. To be able to change identities on a whim and to quickly lose himself in a crowd, even a crowd of his own peers who were looking for him.

The name "Jean-Pierre Toussant" was one of what he called his operational names. But because he committed to the role so completely, a trait he had been taught since childhood, it never registered to me as a lie when I asked his name because, to him, it wasn't one. That was literally who he was at that moment.

And Toussant had dozens of others.

Hidden in caches dotted around the continent were everything Toussant would need to become someone else completely. New papers and passports, hair dyes, grooming kits, and even contact lenses that would change the way his eyes registered on a retinal scan. In less than a few seconds, Toussant had understood the danger, understood that he needed to avoid anyone who had been in that house when he was broken - except me - and to make a beeline for the closest cache. Then get his ass as close to where I was as he could to do what he was designed to do.

"ETA, six minutes on the bird," Jakob announced through the radio, pulling me back to the moment. My eyes cleared, and I fixed a look at Jerry. He gave me a nod, understanding that at least one problem had been dealt with to the best of our current abilities. I nodded, flashed a thumbs up to Jakob, and then turned to Bob.

"What did you find upstairs?"

Bob, apparently surprised at the sudden turn in the subject of conversation, sighed and glanced toward the stairwell. "Not much, not as much as I was hoping for."

"I'm guessing our rude interruption didn't help." I nodded, referring to the lack of time he had to actually look for clues as to the whereabouts of his brethren in comparison to the "all night" that Henry had initially estimated.

"Actually, no," Bob replied with a concerned frown marking his aging features. "It's strange; it is like they all just got up and walked out. There are no signs of a struggle, there are no signs of force being used, all the damage up there seems to have been done when the building was hit, and that looks like it was after the evacuation."

"But, I thought you said you found something." I matched Bob's frown. "Well, you nodded when I asked you."

Bob sighed again. "Years ago, before I was made part of the Princess's personal security detail, I used to work in the intelligence department of our security branch. I suppose you would have to think of one of these offices like an embassy or something like that. There would be the diplomats and office workers and admin staff, all the front-of-house people. But there would also be the intelligence operatives, the soldiers, and the more secretive elements of the mission. That is the part I used to be in charge of, counterintelligence, assessing any threats or risks to the Inquisition. One of the things I used to teach was to assume that all electronic devices had been compromised, so if there was something that you needed to make note of, you should physically write it down.. And then hide it."

"Hide it how?" Jerry asked.

"You would hide it in places that people wouldn't think of looking, rather than actual hiding places. The most common one, and easy one, was to staple it to the underside of your desk. Most searches would empty drawers, smash picture frames and break open safes, but the majority wouldn't think to get down on their hands and knees and look at the bottom of every desk in the building. Well, I did. And I found this."

Bob tucked his hand into his pocket and pulled out a tiny scrap of paper, no more than an inch or two along its unevenly ripped edges. It had three words scrawled onto it, but I couldn't see what they were from this distance. I arched an eyebrow at him.

"It says 'Alchevs'k Relocation center.'" Jerry and I waited for him to elaborate. "It appears that the Russian forces evacuated the office, maybe other civilian residents of the city, to an internment camp further behind the lines. One of our operatives must have sensed something was wrong, so left behind a clue to be found."