Trustless Shadows, CH 08 (Patreon)

I wake up slowly. Even once my eyes are open, it takes far too long for me to understand what that means. That the ceiling is what I’m looking at takes minutes to register, that it’s white a few more, and finally I realize it’s metal. I’m lying on something hard, the floor. It’s cold under my hands—also metal.

This state of not-quite-consciousness is strange. Normally I come awake instantly, body and mind. Did the electricity cause this?

I’ve been subjected to electricity before; Amanda made sure it was one of the methods used to test my resistance to pain. It hadn’t been pleasant, but it had never been this intense.

I try to move, but my body protests. This is worse than any punch demons have given me. Those only hurt in places. This is everywhere. How long have I been here? How much damage did I have to heal from?

I force myself to a sitting position. Doing that takes most of the strength I have. 

My trench-coat is gone, but I still wear my jeans and shirt. There’s a hole in the pants where that thing hit. The edges of it are burned. I don’t have any visible damage. I run my tongue over my teeth, felling for the cracked one. Nothing. I know from experience I can regrow a tooth under two weeks, but I didn’t know a damaged one could repair itself. Amanda never left partially-broken teeth in my mouth after a fight.

I look around. The walls are metal, like the floor and ceiling. There are deep gouges in places. No windows—the light comes from two strings of light encased in a metal mesh in the two corners of the wall. This is a cell.

I take a breath. The smells are old, but there have been demons in here. Multiple ones. This isn’t the headquarters. Amanda never kept demons prisoners; I would have known. I would have smelled them.

My attackers were organized, skilled. They knew to use stun batons powerful enough to affect me. They also had a sniper ready. That seems to indicate Amanda told them about me. She knows what I’m capable of; she made me, after all.

I don’t know of anyone who captures demons, but I know next to nothing about who else is out there, fighting and killing demons. There’s the military, but if Amanda did it, there must be others. I don’t even know what the military does after taking down a demon. Do they just destroy the body? Capture it alive for studies?

The door opens with clanging sounds.

Before I can think of getting up, let alone get my body to obey me, people rush in—fifteen men and women dressed in the same type of armor as those who attacked me. They line the walls, looking at me. They don’t have anything on them I recognize as a weapon, but each of them holds a box with a handle and a trigger. They think of them as weapons, but I can’t imagine what they do.

A man enters, dressed differently. The cut and colors are similar, but it’s missing the armor, and there are decorations at the shoulders. Patches of color glint in the light.

He nods to the woman on his right.

She points the box at me. I don’t move. If they wanted me dead, they wouldn’t have let me wake up. She presses the trigger, and the end of the box opens to shoot prongs at me.

I don’t even feel them when they hit me. I look at the thin wires connecting them to the box. If this is supposed to—

My body tenses and pain courses through it.

Then it’s gone, and I’m panting. I’m also lying back on the floor again. I pull the prongs out, and with an effort get back to a sitting position.

“Now,” the man says. “I hope this was enough of a demonstration. It was one second, at half strength. Each of those soldiers has one, and has been instructed to use them on you the moment you do something I haven’t told you. Do you understand?”

I nod. Soldiers mean army, which means military. They never wore these colors when I saw them on the television. I’ve never seen them in the city. I made sure to never be close to where they were.

“Good. I’m Major Wise. You’re going to stand and follow me. You and I have things to talk about.”

Getting to my feet takes work, and my body is shaking by the time I manage it. It’s part exhaustion and part anger. He can’t tell I’m angry. If he could, he wouldn’t keep standing there. He has to know that I’m fast enough to reach him and break his neck before they hit me with those things.

He turns his back to me and leaves the cell. My legs are unsteady as I follow him. I focus on that instead of my anger. The soldiers are around me, but just out of easy reach. I could take one down, maybe two or three, but then I’d be in pain again.

The corridors remind me of headquarters: white and featureless, except for doors. Here there are none of the occasional windows that let people look in on the tests being run on me. The doors are different—metal, where they were wood.

After a few turns and many doors, he opens one. The room is large, with a round table in the middle. There are eight chairs around it. 

The man points to one. “Sit.”

I sit. From here I’m facing the large screen on the wall. The man sits three chairs on my left. Everyone else positions themselves along the walls, except where the screen is. They stop on each side.

“You are Doctor Walker’s fourth trial.”

I don’t respond. This confirms they know Amanda.

“She considered you her best one, until you went rogue and helped a demon. One of the old ones, according to her reports.”

I keep my face expressionless. She reported to them? I thought she was in charge.

“You’re coming with us to rescue her.”

“No.”

He smiles. He shows teeth and he looks amused. “This isn’t a negotiation. I tell you what to do, and you do it.”

“No.”

“Let me tell you something. You might think you’re this big unstoppable thing, but you’re nothing here. I’m in charge. If needed, I have ways of getting you to cooperate.”

I look around the room, at the soldiers standing. I take my time, pausing on each one as if I was studying him or her, evaluating them.

“No, you don’t.”

“Just one of them can render you unconscious. Then all we have to do it bring you with us.”

“That still won’t make me help you.”

He sighs. “Okay, have it your way. I tried to be nice, I tried to keep this about you and me, but you want to be stubborn? Fine. Let’s see what you think about this.” He raises a hand, and the soldier behind him takes a step forward. I ready myself for some sort of attack, but all the man does is pull a folder out of his jacket and hand it to the major. He places it on the table and slides it to me. “Go ahead, look in it.”

The folder contains pictures.

The ones on top are of a woman, dark skin, much darker than mine, with short, frizzy hair. She wears a gray suit in one picture, and points to something out of frame with a serious expression. In another she wears something less severe, and is smiling.

The next two pictures are of a child, very young, although I can’t tell the age or the gender. There is a resemblance in the face between the child and the woman. They have the same shape to their nose and blue eyes. Child and mother.

The next picture has the two of them in it, with a man. The child is between them. They are outside, in a park. It’s sunny, and they are in the shadow of a tree on a blanket, eating and laughing.

The man’s skin is lighter than both the woman and child. His hair is straighter, cut short. He’s lean, but has visible muscles under the shirt. I don’t have to look hard to see the resemblance between the man and child. They share the shape of their jaw and the ears. The man is the father.

And then I realize the man is me.

So he did have a family, this man I had been before Amanda made me. After I found out I was the result of injecting a pulverized demon’s soul stone into this man, instead of having been built as she had previously said. I asked if he had had a family. She hadn’t known. She hadn’t cared.

The man looks happy, and my anger flares. How could she do this to him? Take him away from his family?

“If you don’t do what I tell you, I’m going to send soldiers to her house.” When I don’t react to his words, he continues. “They are going to hurt your wife and daughter.”

I take a moment to study my reactions to his words. My anger isn’t at him, it’s for what Amanda did. Do I want him to hurt these two people? No, I’d rather no human were hurt. Can I do anything to prevent it from happening? No. Do I even want to stop it? I…have no answer.

I put the pictures in the folder and close it. “I don’t care.”

My response surprises him. “Did you hear what I said? I’m going to have your wife hurt if you don’t do what I tell you.”

I look him in the eyes. “I am not helping you.”

He stands and smacks the table with his hands and leans forward on them. “Listen to me, you piece of demon shit. I own you. You think Walker made you with her own money? She works for us. We provided her the funds for her research, which means everything she made is ours. Do you get what that means?”

“I can break your neck before anyone has the time to react. Then I can use your body and this table as cover from their weapons.” She tried to do it without me seeing, but I saw how the soldier had to replace the front of her weapon after she used it on me. It was a slow process. I can kill a quarter of the people in this room while they are busy doing that. I can use their body as weapons against the others.

I let the words sink in, watching worry fill his eyes, then turn to fear. The soldiers shift in place nervously.

“Amanda made me to kill demons. You don’t scare me.”

The major furtively glances around the room. “You can’t take us all down.” His voice lacks conviction. He looks at the table. “It’s bolted down.”

I look around the room, casually again. “Maybe they take me down. But you’ll already be dead. One hit, and your neck is broken. You won’t even realize what happened.”

I kick at one of the table’s legs. The snap is loud. The major and guards jump. Weapons are raised and pointed at me. In the following silence, the broken metal leg falls to the floor.

He backs away. He’s five feet from me when he stops. He calms down. He thinks he’s safe, out of reach. By now the soldiers are ready for me, or so he thinks. I can’t win this fight anymore, but I can still kill him if I want to.

If I want to.

“Stop worrying. I’m not going to kill you, any of you. I don’t kill humans.”

He’s still trying to work out if I’m telling the truth when the door opens. A woman enters. She’s older—her hair is gray and her face wrinkled. She wears a uniform similar to the major, but the decoration on her shoulders are more elaborate. 

She looks around. “What’s going on?” Her voice is sharp.

“Nothing, Colonel.” The man is visibly cowed by her.

“Really? Then why did I hear something that sounded like a gunshot?”

The major hesitates. “He—he kicked out one if the legs.”

She bends and looks under the table. “Why did he do that?”

“He was threatening my life.”

“And why would he do that?”

“He threatened to have my wife and daughter killed.” I say the words, but that’s all they are. I understand that they have meaning from conversations with Jason about what makes a family, why people care so much about them, but they don’t mean anything to me.

She places a finger on the folder and sighs. “Do I want to know why you threatened them?”

“He wouldn’t cooperate, Ma’am. My orders were to get him to help us rescue Doctor Walker.”

“So you decided to threaten an innocent family?” She opens the folder and spreads the pictures. “Do you know who they are?” 

“No,” I answer.

She nods. “Tell me, Major, did you bother reading Derick’s file?”

“I read the parts that mattered.”

“Then how did you miss that he has no memory of Master Sergeant Ferguson’s life?”

“That’s still his wife, Ma’am.”

She sighs again. “Derick, what do you feel toward these two people?”

“Nothing.”

“Would you seek to save their lives if they were threatened?”

I consider the question. I’ve seen plenty of humans be threatened. The only times I’ve acted on it was when demons were involved. Would I do anything different with these two?

“Not if humans are doing it.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve come to realize that humans thrive on hurting each other. I won’t waste my time trying to keep them from doing what they enjoy.”

She winced. “How useful do your threats sound now, Major?”

The man looks uncertain. “I couldn’t know, Ma’am.”

“You would if you’d bothered reading all his file. Doctor Walker was quite clear in her reports as to the extent of Derick’s emotional connection with the rest of us. How little success Doctor Gourd had in getting him to feel like he was one of us.”

So Jason didn’t report to them too?

“And where in my orders did it say to resort to threats? I instructed you to find him and bring him here. I just found out that you attacked him and that two-thirds of that unit are now in the infirmary.”

“He didn’t want to come.”

“Did you even bother asking him? No, of course not. You sent an armed unit, clearly under-armed at that, and just expected him to come along quietly? He was built as a weapon, what did you think his response was going to be? To sing you a lullaby?”

“I did what was needed, Ma’am.”

Her exasperation strangles her sigh. “Just get out of here. You’re dismissed, Major. And take them with you.”

The man looks from her to me. “Is that wise? What if he attacks you?”

She regards him. “Now I know you didn’t bother reading his file. There’s a long list of observations on him since he broke from Doctor Walker, chief among them is that Derick doesn’t initiate fights, he responds to them. Now get out. Go find Harry and tell him to join me.”

The major salutes her and leaves. 

The guards look at each other before following him out.