Shades of Treason (33 page)

Rykus holstered his gun.

More blinking. “I can help you. I can—”

Rykus hammered his fist into Valt’s face.

“Wait—”

He hit Valt again.

“Ash—”

And again.

Valt had hurt and abused and mentally assaulted the woman he loved. Rykus would let him live so he could pay for those transgressions for the rest of his goddamn life.

He felt bones shatter, blood spray, but he slammed his fist down over and over, beating Valt until he lay as still as Ash had.

One more hit.

One more.

And another.

A hand rested on his shoulder. “Sir.”

Rykus stopped with his fist in the air. He wanted to hit Valt one last time. Wanted it with every cell in his body, even if it would kill the man.

“Ash has a pulse, sir.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

THE DOOR TO Rykus’s cell clicked open. He raised his head.

“Bayis has authorized your release,” Katie told him, stepping inside.

He stood. He didn’t care about his release. “How is she?”

“She’s the same. Sit back down.”

He glanced at the open door.

“You can see her soon,” Katie said.

“I-Com will let me?”

“Yes.” The word sounded hesitant.

Rykus tried to force his exhausted mind to make sense of her tone and expression. He’d expected to have to fight to get permission to see Ash. “What’s wrong?”

Katie toyed with the strap of her comm-cuff. “We’re taking her to Caruth.”

Anger flashed through him.

“She’ll pull through on her own,” he said, attempting to keep his emotions in check. “She doesn’t need anyone fucking with her mind again.”

“We think we might be able to fix her,” she said. “We think
you
might be able to fix her.” When he didn’t react to her words, didn’t respond in any way, she added, “We want you to re-indoctrinate—”

“No.” He turned away.

“Jevan broke the loyalty training. Her mind went from one set of instructions to another, and if we—”

“I’m not re-indoctrinating her.” He couldn’t.

“It’s the only thing we have left to try.”

“Get someone else to do it,” he ground out.

“You really want that?”

He cut her a look over his shoulder.

She stepped closer. “Don’t you think she’d want her sanity back? That she’d want to live?”

Ash was a fighter. Of course she’d want to live, but re-imprinting himself as her fail-safe… “I won’t do it.”

“The loyalty training was designed to prevent mental breakdowns. That’s why some anomalies sign up for it. This has a chance to work, and you would be saving her life.”

He wanted to save her life; he just didn’t want control over it.

“You’re worried about her free will,” Katie said. “But you don’t have to be. You just have to accept never seeing her again. If this works, Ash will be like she was before, voluntarily fighting to preserve and protect the Coalition and whatever new team she’s assigned to.”

“Voluntarily.” He snorted at the word.

“She
chose
to join the Fighting Corps. She
chose
to go to Caruth.”

He ran a hand over his face. Katie’s words made sense, but putting Ash through the loyalty training again felt like an abuse. A betrayal.

“I can’t make this decision for her,” he said, lowering his hand.

“You can.” Katie unhooked her comm-cuff and passed it to him. “She gave you authority over her life if she became incapacitated for any reason. Look at the date.”

He swiped down the screen, saw Ash’s digital signature.

“It’s the day before she underwent the loyalty training,” Katie said. “She trusted you with her life then. I think she’d trust you with it now.”

Why? On Caruth, he’d been a cold, heartless instructor. He’d pushed her beyond her capabilities, punished her for major and minor transgressions, sentenced her to weighted runs through hellish terrain. Only once had he been… different with her. That night before Drop Day when he’d caught her in the shower. There had been a moment then, a moment when he’d allowed himself to see Ash as a brave, beautiful woman.

And a moment when she might have seen him as something other than her bastard of an instructor.

He closed his eyes. He couldn’t allow that memory to be significant. He couldn’t allow
any
moments to be significant.

“I’ll do it,” he said. It felt like he was putting another hole in Ash’s chest.

From outside the observation window, Rykus watched Ash cry. He’d only seen tears in her eyes twice before. The first had been when she was originally loyalty trained. The second, when she’d broken down on Ephron. Now, when the doctors removed the psyche-mask—the blasphemous piece of metal and technology that brainwashed the cadets of Caruth—tears streaked down her face. Terror rimmed her red eyes. They were opened wide but unseeing. The spark of life and defiance they always held was gone. He prayed to the Seeker’s God that Ash was in there somewhere.

Blood dripped from her nose. A technician wiped it away. Another hemorrhage. The fifth so far. The tech injected her with a treatment, made a few adjustments to the electrodes inside the psyche-mask, then enclosed Ash’s head in it again.

She thrashed against her restraints, arching her back in a silent scream.

“You don’t have to watch this,” Katie said from behind him.

“How much longer?” he asked.

A pause. “Another hour. Maybe two.”

It had been ten already. He told himself to be grateful he was watching this. Ash was alive. She’d survived the bullet he’d put in her.

“You have half an hour before you go in again. Why don’t you get something to eat?”

He shook his head. “Next time.”

He’d said that during the last session too. Every hour, he entered Ash’s chamber, and the technicians ended her nightmares. It was a temporary relief. It gave the doctors time to read her brain and body scans, and it gave Rykus time to plant his voice in her mind.

Pain pulsed behind Rykus’s eyes. He wanted to reach up and rub his temples, but he deserved worse than a headache. He deserved eternal damnation.

Sweat glistened on Ash’s skin. She wore only underwear and a thin wrapping around her chest to keep the bed’s restraint strap from rubbing against her healing bullet wound. He wanted so badly to take her away from here. He wanted to hold her in his arms and watch the fires in the Camarnerie Clusters dance in her eyes. He wanted to relax with her on a beach and take her up on all those ridiculous offers to skinny-dip in the seas of Caruth.

He wanted to make love to her again.

It wouldn’t happen. Each time Ash crawled her way to consciousness, she was deranged. Completely crazy until she saw him or Katie. When she saw one of them, her focus sharpened, and she tried to rip their heads off.

Valt’s last command still controlled her.

Bright lights.

An incessant beep.

Something pricked her left wrist. She couldn’t lift her arms.

She opened her eyes. Her vision was blurry, and everything was bright and white. Were her wrists strapped down? Her ankles? Something heavy crossed her chest.

She turned her head to the side, made out the image of a man dressed in light blue.

The beeping sped up with her heart rate. That shade of blue would be tranquil to most people, but not to her. Not to any loyalty-trained anomaly.

She squeezed her eyes shut, tried to get rid of the rough, sandy feel behind her lids, tried to see. There was a patch on the person’s left breast. His deep voice spoke to a blur beside him. The second blur moved toward her, lifting a black, fully enclosed helmet.

A psyche-mask.

No!
Ash tried to scream the word, but something was in her throat, cutting off her ability to make a sound.

Three men held her shoulders down. She tried to fight them, tried to kill them, hurt them, make them let her go, but two… ten… twenty hands gripped her. There were hands everywhere. Too many to count. They crept around her thighs, her stomach, her throat. They found their way inside her veins, pricking capillaries as she writhed on the bed.

No!

She was too weak. She couldn’t free her arms or legs, couldn’t defend herself against the psyche-mask as the demons lowered it over her head. Before they cinched it tight around her throat, she caught sight of the eerie, green shimmer of a hundred medicine-coated electrodes.

She shouldn’t be here.

She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be here.

Someone shifted the mask, making sure the electrodes made contact with her skin. She felt them burrow into her scalp, attach to her face and lips.

A jolt of pain flashed through her. She gagged, convulsed, and then her sight, which had been blessedly black, lit up with a thousand overlapping images, and she screamed.

“It’s time, Commander.”

Rykus jerked awake. It took a second to orient himself, to realize he’d fallen asleep against the wall in the observation room and that this wasn’t a nightmare. Ash was still strapped to a med-table on the other side of the one-way mirror.

He rubbed his eyes, stretched muscles that had grown tight from exhaustion and stress, then stood.

His knees creaked, an appropriate sound considering he moved to the door like an automaton. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d entered Ash’s cell. The doctors had wanted to end the programming hours ago, but he’d ordered them to keep going. Ash was strong. She’d make it through this. She had to.

He tapped a command into a keypad in the wall. The door slid open.

Before Rykus stepped inside, a technician intercepted him. “It’s been thirty-six hours,” he said, staring down at his data-pad. “If she doesn’t show signs of improving, this is it.”

Rykus didn’t throttle the man for his dismissive, uncaring tone. He waited until the technician sensed his silence and looked up. The man’s mouth opened, then closed. He shifted his weight, glanced inside the cell, then, after one last, uncertain look at Rykus, he moved out of the way.

Rykus went inside alone. The doctors and techs had stopped coming in with him a few sessions ago. They’d given up on her.

He moved to her bedside. They’d stopped taking the psyche-mask off too. He’d figured out how to undo it himself. His fingers found the locking mechanism on both sides and pressed. A click and hiss indicated it had retracted the electrodes. Carefully, he lifted the device off Ash’s head.

Her lips were blue. He’d asked the doctors for a blanket the last time he’d entered. They’d denied the request.

He wanted to slam the psyche-mask into the wall. Instead, he set the multimillion-credit device on its docking station, then turned back to Ash. Her eyes were closed, her hands clenched into tight fists.

Rykus wasn’t allowed to touch her. Physical contact that wasn’t preapproved with the doctors could damage the loyalty training.

Like that mattered now.

He placed a hand over her cold fist and sat on the stool beside her bed.

He swallowed, loosening his vocal cords. Sometimes his voice soothed Ash. Sometimes it made her scream.

Regulating his tone and cadence, he spoke the words he’d memorized almost half a decade ago: “Ramie Ashdyn, you are a soldier of the Coalition’s Fighting Corps. You exist to preserve and protect the Coalition and all its citizens. You will sacrifice your desires, your life, and your freedom to complete the missions given to you. You will not fail. You will not falter. You will not disobey.”