NewU Pt. 37

We blinked at each other for a second, waiting for the rest of the shots to come. But nothing happened.

Our eyes moved back to Uri at the same time. His lifeless eyes, one of them blown red from the explosive blood pressure change inside his skull, stared vacantly into nothing, and his blood was pooling around my legs as I leaned back against the same wall as Olena.

"Contact, Contact!" Jakob's voice echoed through the radio. "Where did that shot come from?"

"East, no visual!" Another voice answered back, possibly Antoni, but I couldn't be sure.

"Stay in cover and keep your eyes peeled for..."

"Got him!" That one was from Gabriel. "Single shooter in a ruined highrise. Bearing zero-eight-seven, range about 450 yards."

"Take the shot, four," Jakob answered after a pause.

"Negative, hold your fire!" I barked into the radio without even thinking.

"What??" Jakob's incredulous voice answered back.

"Pete? Are you okay? Is anyone hit?" Bob's worried, almost panicked voice came next.

I didn't answer, a frown pulling at my eyebrows.

"Why the hell did I just say that?"

As if at once, I felt it. A lifetime of knowledge and experience coming to the fore inside my mind. Plans upon plans, tactics, strategies, and ideas. A wisdom, a maturity, a sense of self that I had never felt before. In less than a heartbeat, I could see that the brute force approach would get me nowhere, and firing off a tit-for-tat shot, even one to avenge Uri, would achieve nothing.

My hands were shaking, my heart was pounding, and time slowed down to a snail's pace without the slightest use of my powers. For a brief moment, everything just melted away and, listening only to the soft northerly wind and the sound of my own breathing, I closed my eyes and just focused.

Uri had been doing this for decades before I was born. Jacques and Mattius before him had been doing it for longer. Of all of Sterling's victims, most of them had no experience in combat or warfare at all, but some did. They had knowledge, they had real-world experience, they had been through war and had learned the lessons from it.

And for a few silent moments, they were talking to me.

It was a moment of Zen-like clarity--perfect calm in the total stillness of my mind.

A plan - the origins of which could have come from any one of those lifetimes, from me, or from a combination of us all - bubbled to the surface. And Uri's voice echoed in my mind.

"Knowledge is power,"

"Jeeves!" My eyes snapped open. "Cut the filters on the editing station. I want to hear every thought within a five-mile radius! I want to hear every footstep, every heavy breath, every rattle that could be from a weapon, every vehicle engine, and every whispered fucking word! I want to know if anyone is moving in this direction, whether I can sense them or not. I want YOU to tell me what I need to know without being overwhelmed with the background noise."

"Got it, Sir."

The power pulsed out around me. It washed over Uri's body, Olena, and the ruins of the rest of the hotel. It raced out over the street outside and over the building on the other side of it, picking up each of the members of the anxiously waiting escort, all of them except Bob, but I could hear his nervous breaths wafting onto the cold evening air. Further and further out, it flowed, picking up every mind of every man and beast in the area, every labored breath, every shuffle of body armor, every running footstep, and every breathless pant. We didn't have much time. Not a single human mind in the men now racing toward us had any notion of who I was, the exact reason I had not sensed them before, but they were under strict orders to take any man in this room alive...

And to immediately execute any women.

My eyes looked up in time to see a sobbing Olena starting to crawl toward her friend, her hand absently coming up to pull her hat off. Whether it was a comfort thing, an age-old sign of respect, or just a subconscious gesture, I didn't know, but her streaming eyes were locked on Uri's rapidly paling face.

"Olena, get your hat on!" I barked at her, probably a little harsher than I had meant to. "They will be here soon, and I need you to focus. I promise you, there will be time to honor Uri later, but he wouldn't want you to be put in danger doing it."

She blinked up at me in shock but nodded and pulled her hat back over her head. "I don't understand, how could he have been the traitor," she sobbed. "Why wouldn't he have told you about any of this? It doesn't make sense. He was my friend."

"He wasn't the traitor," I growled. "But someone has been trying really fucking hard to make it look like he was, and the people working for him are on their way here. You cannot be found when they get here!"

"You mean..."

"Yeah, this was a trap, and we walked right into it."

"What about you?"

I looked up from Uri's face and held her eyes. "I am what they came here for, so I am going to give them what they want."

Her eyes scrunched up in confusion for a second before they shot up in sudden realization. "No, you can't... you..."

I wasn't listening; my hand was already moving to the Radio. "Jakob, I need you to listen very carefully..."

********

The room we were in could never be called large. From the archway that once contained the door to the outer wall opposite was maybe fifteen feet. The section of exterior wall that ran along the left-hand side has assumably had some windows in it at some point, but the shell that had created the yawning hole in the wall seemed to have connected those windows into a single void that left only the chest-high section of the remaining cover that I was now sitting against. The inner wall opposite me was surprisingly intact and probably no more than ten feet away.

It was, therefore, quite surprising how many soldiers were apparently needed to secure it.

Twelve of them, it would seem.

Six of them filed in first, all of them leveling their weapons at me and barking at me not to move, then another six after them. Their job, at least by outward appearance, was to secure the rest of the room, or maybe the adjoining rooms - which no longer existed - or possibly the rest of the floor - which also didn't exist. The room was literally a burned-out shell with four walls of varying degrees of intactness and a doorway.

And me.

Sitting on the ground with Uri's head on my lap.

Aside from a pile of rubble leaning against the corner of the room, there really was literally nothing else in it--me, Uri, rubble, and now twelve heavily armed, sweaty dudes.

I had commented to myself a few times, by this point, about the ineptitude of the people I was fighting. All but three of these men were human, and all of the minds I could read knew what I was. Most of them knew what I had done to the men who had attacked the party; they knew - albeit through false information - that Toussant's apparently elite squad had been decimated to a man by me, too. One of them even knew the fate of the men who had tried to ambush us at the Inquisition office in Donetsk.

So, knowing all this and knowing what I was capable of, they still thought that the best way to deal with me was to point guns at me and shout.

I mean, they must have been at least a little suspicious when the stairs they had just climbed didn't collapse under them or the walls holding them up didn't implode. Surely, they must have asked questions when rifles didn't jerk themselves upwards and pump a few bullets into their owners' heads entirely of their own accord. They should at least have been feeling a little surprised by the fact that they hadn't been hurled out of the hole in the wall behind me and left to the mercies of the biting winter air and gravity. One of them, specifically, was wondering why he wasn't currently on fire, as had happened to the ambush team.

Maybe that is why there were so many of them. Maybe they thought I was only capable of attacking one of them at a time. Maybe if one man was suddenly launched through the hole in the wall or decided to spontaneously combust, the others would be able to pump me full of bullets before I could attack any others. However, I couldn't imagine why they would think that. They were hoping that the shock of losing Uri was enough to daze me. At least, that was the theory.

They were wrong, of course, but they didn't need to know that quite yet. None of them had even considered the possibility that their bullets were entirely useless against me, nor had they really considered that there were only twelve of them when I had taken out almost ten times that number at the party.

Admittedly, I had no idea what the three Inquisitors were thinking, but if the humans had known that I had butchered other inquisitors before, these ones must have known it, too. Still, they seemed to be playing along with the others, so it was safe to assume, or at least guess, that they were working from the same faulty information.

God, I wanted to fucking kill them.

I don't even have words for how much I wanted to fucking kill them.

Especially that smug little ass wipe, third from my left, who was just itching to get back to base to boast about the shot that killed Uri. I could still smell the cordite on his gloves.

I could feel that anger pacing back and forth behind its walls, rendered impotent - for now at least - by the plan that had grown out of Uri's tactical experience. For the time being, they would be allowed to live.

One of the things Uri had been most impressed with was my plan back in the sand dunes on the coast of The Hague. Those Inquisition hit squads had, from their perspective, cornered me; I had fought one group of them off, and if the plan had worked, I would have been captured by the second. It was only the untimely intervention by Jerry and Fiona that had ruined the plan. It would have looked real, at least to the rogues. They would have captured me, "taken me in," and I would have been led straight to the enemy leadership.

To be fair, I probably would have destroyed the lot of them before getting all the information I could have; that was just who I was then. But now I was different. I was more.

It hadn't worked that time. But that didn't mean it couldn't work now.

I just had to make it look real.

I growled and started to move, pushing Uri's lifeless corpse off my lap and lifting my blood-soaked hand up towards one of the men; my eyes clouded to that midnight black, and the walls of the room started to shake. Flecks of masonry started to crumble off the precariously standing building just as it had done during my rage with Uri. "Fuck you!" I snarled at one of the men just as he was launched backward into the wall. He hit the concrete with a grunt and crashed to the floor, one of his hands coming up to cradle his now broken shoulder. I made a show of turning my attention to the next man.

It took less than a second before a rifle butt smashed into my face. The blinding white light and the loud ringing in my ears from my brain bouncing off the inside of my skull was very, very real. It was a blow that would have at least fractured - possibly caved in - part of my skull had I been human. The look of pain, the gash above my right eye, and the steady stream of blood that started to flow out of it, however, was entirely fake. It was just another trick learned from Sterling.

I groaned loudly, slumping back to the floor and putting on my best impression of the dazed confusion often associated with a mild concussion.

I would never win any Oscars, but the human minds in the room were buying it.

"Get his radio," one of them barked. I was making a show of my eyes rolling around in my head, so I couldn't quite make out which of the men said it or which one acted on it, but a few moments later, the nervous breaths of a man started wafting over me as I was frisked. His hands checked my ears for the earpiece, my neck for the wires, and my chest for the radio itself. His hands delved into my pockets, ironically pulling out, and then tossing away, the beer receipt that had gotten me into the city.

"It's not here," the man muttered, "He doesn't have one."

"What about him?"

The man moved away, and my eyes cleared enough to make out the hazy shape of someone rifling through Uri's clothes. "Nothing."

"Okay, good. He won't be able to call for backup."

"He needs his hands," another voice said. "Get him on his front and cuff him behind his back..." there was a slight pause before the same voice started speaking again, apparently into a radio. "...Team four to Falcon. Target has been subdued. The area is secure."

I was yanked roughly from my place, slumped against the wall, and shoved onto my stomach. I let myself be moved, not putting up any measure of a fight as a knee was pressed into the small of my back, the barrel of a weapon was pressed into the back of my head, and my left arm was pulled behind me, being held against that knee before my right hand was jerked into place with it. The feeling of cold metal being pressed around my wrists shot up my arms before the knee was removed, and I was left on the floor, wheezing against the dust that was being sucked into my lungs.

To every eye in the room, I was barely conscious.

My mind, on the other hand, was racing.

Here's the thing. Whether they knew it or not, these men were giving me information. I was starting to think that the knowledge and experiences drawn from Uri were having more of an effect than I had thought, or at least that this mental clarity afforded by him was providing some unexpected benefits because I was picking up a lot more from the situation around me that I thought I normally would have.

There was a traitor in the Black Knights. Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind, I already knew who it was, but the corruption planted inside me by him wasn't letting me focus on it. The more I tried, the more I doubted it. Uri had been right. I would need to discover it on my own; trying to piece things together without that unequivocal proof was a waste of time. The point was that there was a traitor and that these men could only have gotten their information about how powerful I was and the full measure of my capabilities from them. Even if they got it from the rogues, the traitor would have had to at least confirm it for them.

And yet, they were woefully misinformed.

I didn't need my hands to use my powers, for example. The cuffs would barely slow me down, their firearms were basically useless, and that lovetap with the butt of the rifle was about as effective as it would have been against the side of a tank. But every single human mind in the room was silently congratulating themselves on subduing me. They genuinely thought they had me captured and that I was no longer a threat to them. They had been told that restraining my hands and knocking me out would be enough to detain me safely, that if they could do that quickly, then there was very little chance that I could do anything to defend myself.

The only person who could have given them that information was the traitor.

Meaning that person was either intentionally giving out inaccurate information or was basing his understanding of my powers entirely off his own. If he needed to use his hands for his powers, then I must, too. Maybe every other Evo needed to use their hands. I mean, there was an awful lot of hand-waving going on in the duels I had seen at the party. None of them had just stood there. I was more than capable of dispatching all twelve of these fuckers with less than a twitch of my nose, but if the traitor couldn't do that, was it conceivable that he had never considered the possibility that I could?

If I played along for long enough, I could ride this train of ignorance pretty much to the top of the organization. All I had to do was to play the part of a broken prisoner. The minds of the humans around me were basically giving me a road map; they were telling me how they were expecting me to react... so that is how I acted.

And right now, the man who had hit me was starting to wonder if he had hit me harder than he had intended because I should be coming around by now.

I let out a deep, dangerous growl. "I am going to kill every last fucking one of you!" I snarled into the dust-covered concrete.

The man who had spoken into the radio laughed. "And how are you going to do that, sunshine?" he goaded. "You can't move your hands to use your powers, and there are too many of us for you to take at once. We even brought composite rifles, so you couldn't make them shoot us..."

Composite rifles? You mean you actually thought I was moving the metal in people's guns like my head was a fucking magnet?? Okay then, good to know.

"....even your cuffs are a polymer alloy; not even you can break out of them." The man went on.

"Jeeves?"

"It is about as much nonsense as it sounds, Sir. I predict it would take less than point-two of a second to break them open."

"Cool, thanks."

".... your leader is dead. Eric here fired the shot that killed him. Right between the fucking eyes. And all it took was a special non-metallic bullet."

I rolled to the side and looked up at the man speaking, then to the man with the smug grin next to him. "Eric, is it?" I said, trying to stop my voice from sounding calm.

Eric nodded.

I turned back to the floor and rested my head against the concrete. "You are going to die last, Eric... and screaming."

Eric drove the steel toe-capped tip of his combat boot into the side of my ribs. They all heard the crunch of breaking bones, or at least they thought they did, and they all heard my howl of pain. "What was that, you piece of shit?" he hissed at me. "Say it again." He kicked me one more time. "I fucking dare you!"

I whimpered out a pathetic-sounding laugh, forced through the entirely fake gasps of pain and sobs of frustrated desperation. "You heard me!"

"I'm going to enjoy watching you die, asshole," he snarled. "Just like I enjoyed blowing your boyfriend's head off."

I inwardly rolled my eyes. "Homophobia, that'll show me."

I made a show of coughing up some blood onto the floor but didn't answer. I just pressed my forehead back to the concrete and wheezed, the concrete dust and soot resting on it puffing out on the small waves of my breath. The men were waiting for something, an order or an instruction or something, from one of the Inquisitors in the room. None of them knew what was coming, nor did they know what they were supposed to do next. But, one by one, they kept flicking glances up to one of the men in the corner, one of the ones with the invisible mind. Yet, as invisible as their minds may have been, I could tell that the room's rogue occupants were nervous. They were shuffling on their feet; there was a slight edge to their breaths, their fingers wrung tightly on their weapons, and the leather of their combat boots creaked a little as they subconsciously flexed their toes in the classic fight-or-flight bodily response. All three of their hearts were hammering in their chests. I could almost smell the nervousness wafting from their pores.

These were men who had spent their entire lives believing that they were invulnerable to an Evo's power, yet here I was, the man who had utterly obliterated dozens of their brethren. There must have been at least some small part of them that wondered why this had been so easy.

For my part, I just bided my time. I felt that hungry, furious anger stalking in eager circles behind the inner walls of my mind, like a prize fighter waiting for the bell to ring on a grudge match. In a former life, I would have been completely unable to hold it back; I could see that now, the rage was too strong, it was too all-encompassing, and it had picked up the scent of blood and fear. Yet I was in total control. Every shred of me was burning with anger and hate; there was a very large part of me that wanted to throw the gates open and let my fury have at them. But within that anger was a simple voice, a calming influence, one that told me that I needed to wait; I needed to let the game play out a little longer if I wanted to get to the answers I needed.