Freedom (27 page)

Loki looked at the pile of D-Space objects on the bed. One of them in particular stuck out at him. He picked it up. It was a silver ring with the name
Signet of Spell Storing—Level Twenty-One
hovering above it.

Holy shit.
“Is this the object you were transporting?”

She obviously didn’t want to say.

“Siren. Is this what you were bringing north?”

She had wrapped a towel around herself and nodded.

“This is powerful. Whose is it?”

“It belonged to a sorcerer killed near Denver. How it got to Oklahoma, I don’t know. Our faction found it, and we’re contributing it to the fight in the Midwest.”

Loki took off his armored gauntlet. “Consider it contributed.” He slipped it on his finger. As he did he felt a sharp pain. “Ah!” He pulled it off and could see blood dripping off a needlelike protrusion.

And then it hit him—even as he was already staggering toward the doorway.

She looked at him. “What’s wrong?”

Loki was meandering like a drunken person, cursing and now nearly on his knees.

“You little bitch!”

“What is it?”

“A needle! You fucking cunt!” Loki raised his one gloved hand and suddenly a blinding flash of bolt-straight electricity leapt from his fingertip into Siren’s eye. Her hair stood on end briefly before her head caught flame and she dropped like a rag doll onto the floor—her entire body smoking and sizzling.

Loki slammed down onto the bloody, littered carpet and felt his mind losing connection with his body. Paralyzed, he stared at the bottom of a dead mercenary’s boot. Beyond that he could see the open doorway of the motel room—and a razorback standing guard. He tried to summon it. To control it. But he couldn’t move. He felt saliva flowing out of his open mouth.

In the distance somewhere he heard several deep booms—one after the other. With a final boom, the headlight assembly of the razorback in the doorway blasted apart. It fell out of sight.

Moments later, through a syrupy haze, he saw men walking through the motel room doorway. One of them leaned his face down next to his.

It was The Major. “You helped me win a bet, Loki.” He gestured to unseen witnesses. “They said you wouldn’t kill the girl. But I knew better.”

As Loki’s vision began to fade, The Major moved closer. “She was innocent, by the way. . . .”

L
oki hung by his wrists from a hook on the ceiling of a concrete cell. He was naked and had been from the moment he awoke. He’d spent most of the last day with a hood over his head, bags on his hands, chained into confinement positions. No one spoke to him. No one said a word. It was only in the past hour that they’d brought him here.

As Loki looked around, the doors and walls of this place indicated it was a stable. There were thick, wooden doors, split into two parts—like a Dutch door. That’s where the horse would stick his head out and feed. That’s how it worked, wasn’t it?

There were cameras and lights all around him in the room, creating a harsh glare. He was having difficulty breathing in this position, and the pain in his shoulders was almost unbearable. They’d also strapped some sort of muzzle over his mouth that had an almost stirrup-like piece of metal forced between his teeth. Sleep was impossible.

He felt the loss of the darknet like the death of a close friend. No, that wasn’t right because he’d never really had a close friend. He felt the loss of his connection to the darknet like the amputation of a limb. As though someone had castrated him. His electronic contact lenses were gone. His haptic vest was gone. His gloves, his bone mic—everything. Everything except the implant near his aorta—that remained. However, it was just a locator—he couldn’t interact with the darknet through it. But it was his only hope. The question was: how much time had elapsed?

After what seemed like an eternity of pain, he heard the slap of heavy bolts and looked up to see the big wooden door open on squealing hinges.

There before him was the devil himself—The Major—followed by several other men, some of whom were wheeling metal carts on rubberized wheels. The Major stood in the doorway for a moment to regard Loki.

“So you thought your fanboy toys would destroy us, is that it? Do you think you’re the first group to come at us with novel tactics? It’s not about how many people you can kill—it’s about who runs out of people first. And I promise you, it will be you.”

The Major moved into the room. His entourage began to set up equipment and workspace behind him. The Major was wearing what looked to be surgical scrubs. Loki heard the clank of metal tools being arranged behind The Major. He felt a cold dread creeping up his spine. Fear gripped him, causing him to tremble despite his exhaustion.

The Major accepted rubber gloves passed to him by an Asian man wearing a face mask. The Major did not wear a mask. He grinned humorlessly as he pulled the rubber gloves on.

“Loki Stormbringer. That’s what you call yourself isn’t it? Fiftieth-level Sorcerer—or something like that? The most powerful darknet operative known. Your fingerprints bring up nothing in government records. Was that the first thing you did, Loki—destroy your old identity? No footprints from birth. No fingerprints from child abduction prevention programs. No DNA samples from prior arrests. It’s like Loki is the real you—as though you wanted to pretend the white-trash loser you were before never existed. But I’m going to show you that you do exist.”

The Major walked right up to Loki’s face. “I’ve been amused by the debate in America over whether torture is effective.” He paced a ways away and picked up a pair of nasty-looking clippers from a metal table that had been set up. “Of course it’s effective.”

The Major returned holding a tool shielded by his hand. “But not at producing information. Torture isn’t
about
extracting information.”

He brought the sinister-looking clippers up to Loki’s face. “Torture is about control. You let me torture a thousand people, and I can keep five million working obediently with their heads down. The more innocent the victims, the better. And after they’re broken and maimed, you release them so that everyone can see what awaits those who resist.”

Suddenly the hook on the ceiling started to lower, and in a moment Loki’s feet touched the ground. It was the first time in hours that the pressure on his breathing and shoulders had eased. But before he could relish the relief, strong hands grabbed his wrists, and he was forced down onto his knees. Two powerfully built men forced his wrists into clamps that were bolted to the floor. They shoved pieces of two-by-four under his palms to prevent him from closing his hand into a fist, and even though he struggled, Loki soon found himself with his arms splayed out before him. The Major was kneeling right alongside him.

“There is no debate about torture in here, my friend. So you see, there’s nothing you can tell me that will stop the pain. You’re no longer Loki, the sorcerer. The only thing you are is a billboard—on which I’m going to write my message: this is what happens to people who join the darknet. . . .”

At which point The Major clamped the tip of Loki’s index finger in the metal clippers, and though Loki struggled to pull away, the steel jaws snipped off his index finger up to the second knuckle.

The pain shot through him like needles moving through his bloodstream. He tasted blood in his mouth from where he had bit his tongue.

The agony was followed by still further searing pain as the Asian doctor in a lab coat applied a red-hot filament to the stump, cauterizing the wound and sending up a sickening sizzling sound.

Loki thrashed around, pulling a muscle in his back, but it was only the beginning. The Major cut off another fingertip, and another, and another. The doctor cauterized each wound before the next digit was clipped off. Loki felt his consciousness ebbing, but they waved smelling salts under his nose.

The Major was in his face again. “How will the Daemon know you if you have no biometric markers left?”

The unbearable agony continued as the spawn of Satan himself snipped off the tips of all eight of Loki’s fingers. And finally the most painful ones of all—his thumbs.

In his mind Loki was begging for death. To use his powerful intellect to will his heart to stop. To die and let the universe take him.

But his world was nothing but a white-hot wall of pain.

And yet it got worse. Before he had a chance to realize what was happening, he felt his left eyelid pried open and he saw a pair of surgical scissors coming for his eyeball as they pulled it out of the orbital socket. He tried to scream—tried to turn away, but they’d clamped his head into place. With a dagger of pain, he lost all sight in his left eye and saw through his tear-filled right eye as they dropped it into a metal pan.

The next few moments brought utter blindness as the horrific event was repeated. Loki prayed—actually prayed—for death, yet it did not come. He heard horrible groaning, and realized that he was the source. He was like an animal being butchered. He no longer wished to live.

He heard the devil’s voice in his ear one more time. “And so that the Daemon cannot recognize you by your voice . . .”

Loki felt the stirrup-like gag they’d fastened over his mouth expand with the force of a car jack—opening his mouth and keeping it open no matter what he did. He felt the sharp pinch of a pair of pliers pulling his tongue forward roughly and then the searing cut that bored right into the center of his mind. Loki’s tongue was cut clean from his mouth.

As he died within himself, trapped in the broken shell of his body, Loki felt the shell’s head pulled back and the devil’s voice whisper again.

“The Daemon no longer knows you. And I have all the biometric markers I need to become
you
. I will be Loki Stormbringer. Your identity is my reward. The only reason I’ll keep you alive is so that you can pass the occasional fMRI test for me.”

It was the final nail. Loki felt his soul guttering, flickering, and though he prayed with every fiber of his being for death, it did not come. He existed, just as The Major said he would, as a vessel that spoke of torment.

Oscar Strickland’s interest in medicine arose from his many blissful years hunting white-tailed deer in the Colorado Rockies. Cleaning and dressing carcasses beneath the aspens awakened in his young mind a fascination with all living things. This ultimately inspired him to join a volunteer rescue squad and become an EMT—which exposed him to the miracle of human anatomy as he helped to pry victims out of crumpled wreckage on mountain roads. And it was here where he discovered his connection to pain. Namely the infliction of it.

The discovery was accidental—a careless push of a gurney that struck the edge of an ambulance door. But then he began adding a few extra bumps to a spinal patient’s transport, or
not quite
administering a painkiller. At first it was the thrill of indulging a taboo. But then it was a
need
—a need to see others suffer. He endured several years of private shame, feeling that he was a horrible person.

When he joined the army, it was with the hope that they would give him the discipline he needed to conquer his sick compulsion. But on the contrary, in the army he found that pain—and the infliction of it—had a long and storied history. It was, in fact, the history of the world. No great nation or empire could exist without it. It was in some ways the guardian of all that was good. Fear of pain kept men honest.

And as Strickland’s career advanced from the army to covert government operations and then on to private security operations, he held his head high. For his was a noble profession.

It also paid well—especially given the current economic crisis. Strickland’s contract would do more than care for his wife and kids in Wyoming. It would also care for his wife and kids in Costa Rica.

But on this posting, he was a second stringer. It was easy work. He looked up from his Sudoku puzzle as his lone patient groaned pitiably. The man was strapped to an old bed among several dozen others in the infirmary of an old Catholic school. Strickland looked up to see a cross-shaped clean spot on an otherwise dirty wall above him. The diocese apparently had some difficulty with lawsuits and had to shut down the school. He had no idea who the maimed young man was—only that he was an enemy combatant who needed to be kept alive. The way they’d cut him, Strickland didn’t see how they’d ever be able to get anything more out of him.

Still, the groaning was nice background music. He focused his lone lamp more fully on the puzzle and continued.

But then he heard the telltale sound of a security detail approaching over the squeaky wooden floors. He put the puzzle in the empty desk drawer and sat up straight—ostensibly to observe his patient suffering nearby in the darkened ward.