Noble Conflict (18 page)

He went straight to his room, logged onto the datanet and dictated a full After-Action report on his latest encounter with Rhea. He was thorough, even including the exact time and the address where he bought the mellisse croissant. The massage he explained as allowing him to observe his suspect surreptitiously. Kaspar read through what he’d just written. The truth in certain places had been bent, but not to the point of breaking.

Massage as covert surveillance? Was anyone going to believe that?

Kaspar needed to write about when Rhea had carried him to safety, but now was not the time. A message came through general comms that all unassigned Guardians were to report to ground zero. He was needed on the front line. But he vowed to submit a full report including his
first encounter with Rhea the moment he got back – and to take whatever punishment Voss threw at him. He deserved whatever was coming to him, and worse. The only thing Kaspar regretted was that his parents’ reputations could possibly be tarnished along with his. But Kaspar’s personal reputation and his exposure to contempt and mockery weren’t exactly the highest priority right now.

He tapped ‘SAVE’ on his half-completed report and headed out to join his colleagues at Loring School. There would be nothing to do except help put little bodies in body bags and run crowd control on grieving parents. But at least he would be doing something. Loring School was one of the schools that Kaspar had visited on his public relations stint. He remembered the five-year-old girl he’d met.

‘
My name is Gnea – with a G. It’s pronounced Ni-ah! Everybody always gets that wrong
.’

He still remembered her smile and the way she’d hugged him and thanked him for protecting her.

Protecting her  . . .

Kaspar felt heartsick. He’d let an Insurgent go free when he had the chance to stop her in her tracks. Kaspar wondered in despair if Gnea-with-a-G was still alive.

‘Stop it, Kas,’ he berated himself. ‘If you dwell on their faces, you’re going to lose it.’

He forced himself to think of the terrorists instead. What kind of soulless evil would target a primary school? It was highly unlikely he’d ever see Rhea again – the last couple of times had been coincidences. But if he
did
see
her again, he would zap her evil terrorist arse without hesitation, and take pleasure in doing it. And if the people at the Clinic mistreated her a bit, then so be it. Nobody could say that she didn’t deserve it.

Gnea-with-a-G and her friends had got a lot worse.

Kaspar made it to the school, and the horrors painted in his mind by his imagination throughout the journey there were as nothing compared to the real horrors that lacerated his eyes and seared his mind on arrival. Kaspar knew that even if he lived to be one hundred and fifty, the images he saw that day would never leave him. Never in a million years could his imagination have conjured up anything like this.

Reality was more cruel.

It took every gram of control he had, and more he didn’t even know he possessed, to keep it together. He and the other Guardians moved like automatons, gathering bodies and placing them in body bags. No one spoke. What words would be adequate?

Kaspar would wait till he was alone to shed tears for the fallen.

And the bitterest tears would fall for Gnea-with-a-G.

It was over a week since the attack on the school and Kaspar was still having trouble sleeping. The carnage at Loring School was something he didn’t even need to close his eyes to see. Row upon row of tiny bodies laid out on the lawn. Grim-faced Guardians and medics bringing out more and more to join the ranks. It was the unreality of it that got him most, the eerie silence broken only by the sobs of the medics and the gasps of the Guardians who struggled to keep it together. Because it was gas and not a bomb, there was no damage. The victims had all just stopped and dropped. The décor of the classrooms was still bright and cheerful, and the contrast between the effects of the attack and its setting somehow made it that much worse. Some of the children had died painting pictures of their pets. Some had been eating break-time snacks. Some had been playing musical games or reading. The school looked like a playroom after a birthday party, full of books and toys and assorted bric-a-brac.

And dolls.

Discarded dolls lying crumpled on the floor, slouched over the tables, lying back in the chairs.

He had thought the tears would arrive the moment he was alone and able to take in the enormity of just what had happened, but he hadn’t managed a shed a single tear. It was as if his mind was frozen. Thinking about the school, not thinking about the school; it made no difference. He’d had to submit to a compulsory psych evaluation along with all the other Guardians the day after the atrocity, but the answers required to pass weren’t hard to figure out. It was merely a question of telling the psych evaluator what he or she wanted to hear. He’d passed with flying colours.

Faked it. Aced it.

But he couldn’t get any respite from what had happened.

He felt each and every death as if it was one of his own. He eyed his stun rifle with distaste each time he had to clean it and check it. He longed for something more powerful, not to mention more permanent, to tackle the Insurgents. They didn’t deserve the humanity the High Council still insisted they be shown. Kaspar’s hatred of the Insurgents was nurtured and grew tall and strong with each remembered child’s face.

And yet he couldn’t cry.

After submitting his report about his run-in with Rhea, the gym had been raided of course, but to no avail. The receptionist was exactly what she claimed to be. No weapons, literature, plans, or secrets were found. Apparently Rhea had provided good references as a qualified masseuse and physiotherapist, using the name
of Leah Mettiána, and had worked there for about six months. Of course she hadn’t been seen since Kaspar’s visit. And as for the delay in submitting his report  . . . Kaspar still winced as he remembered how Voss had ripped into him.

‘I don’t care if she tied your windpipe into a pretzel. If you have any contact with a terrorist suspect, you call it in
immediately
. You do not go to a café for a sodding milkshake before strolling back to report.’

Kaspar’s report had also contained a severely edited version of his encounter with Rhea in the desert. He had put down his reticence to report their meeting to his shock over Dillon’s death and the fact that he kept drifting in and out of consciousness and so wasn’t sure if the meeting had been real or just a figment of his imagination.

The full story would have to wait. It wasn’t that Kaspar was a coward, it wasn’t that. But he was desperate not to be bounced out of the Academy before he could make amends for what he’d done. He needed to confront Rhea again, and this time there’d be no more mistakes. He’d make sure she paid – her and every other Insurgent who crossed his path.

Kaspar replumped his pillow for the umpteenth time and tried to get to sleep. His gaze fell on the empty bed that had once been Dillon’s. Not for the first time, he wished his friend was still around. He turned to check the clock. Two-ten in the morning.

‘Kaspar, go to sleep,’ he told himself.

He closed his eyes, determined not to open them again
until morning, even if it meant viewing the back of his eyelids all night.

Kaspar awoke slowly again after less than half an hour, but it wasn’t from a nightmare or a hallucination this time. He opened his eyes and was instantly awake, his mind alert. Why was he so cold? Freezing, in fact. The environmental controls had obviously packed up. Hang on  . . . that smell  . . . that wasn’t air conditioning. That was night-time air. He rolled over to look towards the window. The curtains were billowing slightly.

I don’t remember opening—

That was all he had time to think before the muzzle of a gun was pressed firmly under his chin. He froze.

‘Don’t move and don’t speak.’ The voice was calm – and female.

Looking at the side of his bed, he could see nothing but a shadow seated on his bed and an arm holding the gun, but he recognized the voice.

‘Rhea?’ he whispered.

‘Turn on the light,’ she ordered. ‘Slowly.’

Kaspar groped behind him for the switch and did as he was told. ‘How did you get in here?’

‘I can get in anywhere at any time. You should know that by now,’ said Rhea.

‘I want to know how you got past the Academy’s security.’

‘I turned into a bird and flew over the electrified fence,’ Rhea replied. ‘Then I used my invisibility shield to sneak past the guards.’

Kaspar glared at her. Did she think she was funny?

‘You people of the Alliance love to tell all kinds of ridiculous tales about us Crusaders,’ said Rhea. ‘D’you think we haven’t read some of the stories you record about us on your datanet? They’re laughable, and yet you all choose to believe them.’

‘
Our
datanet? The Crusaders have computers and access to the datanet too,’ said Kaspar. ‘It’s not exclusively ours.’

‘We may have computers, but your High Council makes damned sure that the data we can access out in the Badlands is strictly limited,’ said Rhea.

Was she telling the truth? It would certainly explain why the Insurgents were so hot on accessing data nodes from within Capital City.

‘Are you saying the records about your lot aren’t accurate?’ said Kaspar.

Rhea’s lips thinned. ‘I’m saying we were left to rot in the Badlands and had no choice but to develop new skills to survive. And for that we are hated. But I guess I’m just wasting my breath trying to get you to see things from our side.’

Kaspar shook his head. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Was she really seeking to justify what she and the other Insurgents did? ‘You must be crazy to break in here.’

‘Be quiet.’ She glided to her feet like a dancer, but the gun didn’t waver. Rhea took a step back as he sat up, putting a safe distance between them so he couldn’t grab for the gun, and fished a small packet out of her black form-fitting outfit. He tore his eyes away from hers for
long enough to look at the packet that she was now ripping open with her teeth. For one ludicrous second, he thought it was a condom, but it was a transdermal patch – a measured dose of some pharmaceutical on a flexible, adhesive plastic backing. A neat way of delivering all sorts of drugs into the bloodstream.

‘Put it on,’ she ordered, placing the thing face up on the bed.

It could be any number of toxins, but why would she bother? The silenced pistol would do the trick just as quietly and much more quickly. Unless, of course, she wanted to pass off his death as natural causes?

‘What’s the drug?’ Kaspar asked.

‘That’s not important.’

‘It is to me.’

Their eyes locked. He waited for her to thrust the gun at him dramatically and utter an ‘or else’, but she did nothing.

‘Your gas attack on the school was despicable,’ he said into the silence. It needed to be said.

Her eyes flashed. ‘Not my attack.’

‘Friends of yours, though.’

‘No friend of mine carried out that assault.’

‘So you don’t know every Insurgent,’ Kaspar dismissed with impatience. ‘That doesn’t make you any less guilty.’

‘I do know each and every  . . . patriot. None of them carried out that assault,’ said Rhea. ‘That is
not
the kind of thing
we
do.’

‘You killed my friend Dillon. That was you.’

Rhea sighed. ‘I regret that. Your car was getting too close and we couldn’t afford to be discovered and have our position reported. My colleague was only trying to take out your car’s engine.’

‘Then he couldn’t aim worth a damn,’ said Kaspar scathingly.

‘We try not to take life unnecessarily,’ said Rhea quietly.

Kaspar stared. Was she serious? ‘Yeah, right. Next you’ll be telling me you didn’t carry out the attack at the Academy during the Guardian Inauguration Ceremony either,’ he said.

‘No, we were responsible for that one,’ Rhea admitted without hesitation. ‘But there should have been no casualties  . . . Were there many? Apart from my friends, of course.’

Kaspar frowned. One middle-aged woman had had a heart attack, he remembered. Most if not all of the Insurgents had been zapped – and he knew where at least some of
them
were now  . . . ‘Only one serious casualty during the Academy attack – but that was more luck than judgement on your part,’ he said with contempt.

‘We never leave such things to luck,’ Rhea replied. ‘Now put on the patch.’

‘Why?’

‘I need to know something, and I need to know that it’s the truth,’ she said quietly.

Kaspar looked at the patch. It really could be anything. He picked it up. ‘I put this on or you kill me?’

‘If you really believe I could kill innocent children, then killing you wouldn’t even make me blink.’

Kaspar scowled, making no attempt to disguise his loathing. Rhea met his glare with composure, though for just a second Kaspar thought he saw a shimmer in her eyes. He was obviously imagining it. Kas wasn’t sure if it was because he thought she would kill him anyway or if he just wanted to know why she was there, but he defiantly stuck the patch on his neck.

Within a couple of seconds, his limbs started to get heavy and his head started to swim. It was like being drunk. Very drunk. He collapsed back down onto the bed. She stepped closer and checked his eyes. He felt his brain start to fog over. He struggled desperately to hold onto his senses, though his body didn’t move, couldn’t move.

‘My arms  . . .’ OK, his voice was still working at least. But his brain felt like it was folding in on itself. ‘My arms feel palarysed  . . . pa-ra-lysed. Did you poison me? I’m  . . . you’ve  . . . you have great eyes  . . . they’re really green  . . . no  . . . not green  . . . they’re turquoise-blue  . . . With the lights down low, they look violent. No  . . .
You’re
violent  . . . your eyes are vi-o-let. With the lights down. Low.’

Rhea took his pulse and then sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Shh! And I haven’t poisoned you,’ she assured him, ‘It’s just a muscle relaxant combined with a strong hypnotic.’