Chapter 48: Hostages
Chapter 48: Hostages
Ryan Ashford stepped out of the blue vortex, and collapsed to his knees on the stone floor of the anchor point.
His broken wrist struck the ground. He gritted his teeth and swallowed a scream. Around him, anchor point staff rushed over, but their eyes carried no welcome. They carried suspicion.
A Silver-tier returning alone. No team. No commander. From an operation led by Gold Tier 9 Damien Vale.
"Who are you?" an officer asked, hand resting on his weapon. "Where’s Vale’s team?"
Ryan lifted his head, and he understood at once that this moment decided everything.
If he told it wrong, he was finished.
So he told nothing at all.
"Take me to Gerald Greaves," he said, his voice trembling from pain, and from something else he carefully kept from showing. "Immediately. I have news about the subject Ethan Ashford."
That name opened every door.
Gerald Greaves didn’t ask what had happened.
He sat behind the desk in the clan estate, watching Ryan being helped in, his wrist temporarily bandaged, his face drained white. He let the young man sit down, poured him a glass of water, and waited until there were only two people left in the room.
Then he spoke, very slowly.
"You returned alone."
"Yes."
"Damien Vale, eight Gold-tiers, fifteen Silver-tiers. You’re the only one who walked out." Gerald interlaced his hands. "You understand how that looks."
Ryan lowered his head. "I understand."
"So before you tell me what happened," Gerald said, "I want to ask you a different question."
He leaned forward. And in that moment, deep in his pupils, a flicker of purple light gleamed then went out.
"How do you want this story to end?"
Ryan lifted his head.
He looked into the eyes of the man before him, and he realized Gerald Greaves didn’t care about the truth. Had never cared. He cared only about which story would be told, and who told it.
This was the lesson that Ethan, top of the class in every theoretical subject, would never learn.
"I want Ethan dead," Ryan said. "As a criminal. With every charge on his head."
Gerald smiled.
"Then we need the same story." He stood and walked to the window. "Damien Vale will return. Possibly with others. And they’ll tell a different version from yours."
"So what?"
"So their version has to arrive later." Gerald looked out at the city through the glass. "And anyone who says otherwise from you has been in the Anomalous Coordinate too long, under the influence of someone bearing a Mythical Partner. Including Damien Vale. Especially Damien Vale."
Ryan understood, and something cold slithered through his chest.
Gerald had just turned the truth into a symptom of a disease. Whoever spoke the truth had "been infected."
"One more thing." Gerald turned back to look at him. "I’ll order a lockdown of every transfer anchor point in Safe Zone Number Seven. The official reason: to prevent the threat Ethan Ashford from returning."
"The real reason?"
"So that no one in that group gets to open their mouth in front of the public, until I have them under control." Gerald sat back down in his chair. "Now, get you to the hospital. Your wrist needs treatment, and a wounded victim is more believable than an unharmed witness."
Ryan was helped out, to the Greaves clan hospital.
He didn’t know that this very hospital bed, the thing set up to make him look like a victim, would be where they came to arrest him.
Thirty kilometers underground, on the other side, the blue vortex opened.
The group of nine stepped out of the Anomalous Coordinate.
But they didn’t emerge at the military anchor point where they had departed. The coordinate had shifted while the field of ruins collapsed, and the gate let them out at a civilian anchor point on the eastern side of the city.
For the first half-second, Corin let out a breath. A different anchor point, unplanned, meant they might have slipped free of any arrangement.
Half a second later, that hope went out.
The anchor point was surrounded.
Not a rescue team. A force. Thirty, forty people, black armor bearing the Greaves and Hale emblems, arrayed in multiple layers, weapons already raised. They weren’t waiting to ask. They were waiting to arrest.
An officer stepped forward, holding an order. "By order of the Earth Shield Council, all of you are detained for screening for the influence of the subject Ethan Ashford. Put down your weapons."
Damien Vale stepped to the front, and the pressure of a Gold Tier 9 radiated across the anchor point.
"I am Damien Vale, Council member, commander of this operation. I order you to lower your weapons. This girl needs emergency treatment immediately."
He pointed to Mira in Nadia’s arms, her face flushed with fever, her breathing ragged.
But that officer didn’t budge.
"Councilor Vale," he said, and in his voice was a carefully rehearsed pity. "You’ve been in there too long. We can’t trust your words until you’ve been screened. This is for your own safety."
Damien stood frozen.
He was a Gold Tier 9. Thirty years of campaigning. A Council member. And his words had just been brushed aside like the words of a madman.
In that moment, he understood exactly what Ethan had told him in the ruins.
The one who speaks first is always believed first.
Ryan had returned. Ryan had told his story. And now even the truth from the mouth of a Gold Tier 9 was nothing but the symptom of a disease.
Ethan saw it all.
He watched the encirclement tighten. Watched Damien powerless. Watched Mira burning with fever in Nadia’s arms. And he calculated, fast and cold, as he always calculated.
If the whole group was arrested, they vanished into Greaves’s system, and not a single testimony would survive. Ryan won. Mira might die before ever reaching an emergency table.
But if Damien’s group was seen as victims instead of accomplices, they would be saved, treated, and their words would carry weight.
There was only one way to turn them into victims.
Ethan had to become the perpetrator.
He didn’t warn anyone. He only glanced at Laira.
She understood at once.
Laira swung her arm. Deep red chains of fire blazed up from her palm, coiling out, wrapping around the necks of all nine of Damien’s group, locking them within a ring of fire. The same chains Victor had used to lock her down in the Anomalous Coordinate, now in her hand, burning red.
Ethan stepped forward, alone, and the silver-gray armored arm was revealed under the anchor point lights.
"You pieces of trash!" Ethan’s voice was full of madness and arrogance. "If you want to rescue these hostages, stand still. If you dare open fire, I’ll kill every last one of them."
The encirclement halted.
"Hostages?!"
"What the hell? Could it be... there was an error in the report?"
"Maybe so."
The one leading heard this and frowned, his eyes going to the fiery chains coiled around those necks, something turning over in his mind.
The captain of the arrest squad now spoke up. "What do you want?!"
"Damn you all!" Ethan cursed loudly like a thug. "Cut the chatter, lower your guns, or else..."
Ethan flicked his hand, and Laira tightened the chains a little.
The captain of the arrest squad saw this and immediately started, gritting his teeth, hurriedly saying, "Don’t do anything rash."
Because now they didn’t dare open fire. Within their line of fire was a Council member and an entire task force, all being "held captive." Firing recklessly meant killing hostages.
Ethan had just turned nine people into innocents with his own hands, by taking all the blame onto himself.
Damien started.
He whipped around toward Ethan, and every instinct of a soldier in him rose up. This was fake. This was a false accusation. He opened his mouth, about to shout, about to expose that no one was holding him captive, that Ethan was innocent, that this was a performance.
Then he met Ethan’s eyes.
And Ethan whispered, just loud enough for him to hear.
"Don’t argue."
Damien froze.
"If you expose this now, we get tangled up here," Ethan said quietly, his eyes still looking straight out at the encirclement so no one would see him speaking. "They arrest everyone. And Mira can’t wait. Look at her."
Damien looked down at his niece.
Mira’s face was flushed, her lips cracked and dry, her breathing shallow and rapid. Nadia was pouring the last of her energy into holding her, but even Nadia was shaking her head.
She needed a safe-zone emergency table. Right now.
"Let me be the bad guy," Ethan whispered. "You get her out. It’s the only way."
Damien Vale, the man who had stood outside when his own niece was locked in a dark room for three days, the man who always chose principle over family, looked into the eyes of the one he had been ordered three days ago to kill.
And for the first time in his life, he swallowed every word of protest.
He chose the life.
"...All right," he said, so quietly only Ethan could hear. "But I’ll repay this. I swear."
Ethan didn’t answer.
Within the ring of fire, Mira suddenly cracked her eyes open.
The fever pulled her up out of her coma for a brief moment. Everything was blurred, burning hot, far away. She didn’t understand what was happening. She couldn’t hear a single word. She only saw, through the haze of fever, a figure standing with its back to her, facing an entire encirclement.
Then that figure turned its head slightly.
Ethan looked at her.
And he smiled.
Not a happy smile. It was the smile of someone who wanted to say it’s okay, wanted to say she’d be fine, wanted to say something there was no time to say.
A reassuring smile.
Mira wanted to reach out. Wanted to call his name.
But the fever dragged her back down, and that figure and that smile dissolved into the darkness.
She sank into her coma, not knowing that was the last time she would see him for a very long time.
The encirclement began adjusting its formation, seeking a way to approach without harming the hostages.
Ethan knew he had only a few seconds.
Every anchor point had been locked down. There was no way back to the safe zone. He had cleared Damien’s group of the charges, but he himself had no way out.
At that exact moment, Damien whispered, this time on his own initiative.
"The right rear pouch on me." His voice was very quiet, urgent. "An emergency transfer device. The kind that only works inside an Anomalous Coordinate, or in unstable energy zones like this open anchor point."
Ethan glanced over.
"But hear me out to the end." Damien’s eyes turned grave. "It won’t take you back to a safe zone. It’s designed to escape when every official gate is broken. It throws you to the nearest stable point outside all safe zones. I don’t know where that is. No one has ever used it and come back to tell. It could be a wildland. It could be worse."
Ethan looked at the small device Damien deftly nudged toward him through the ring of fire.
"Only enough energy for two people," Damien said. "No more."
Two people.
Ethan looked around. Mira needed a safe zone, needed an emergency table, needed the thing a wildland couldn’t give. Taking her along was killing her. Nadia, Corin, the others, they belonged to this world, they could be cleared and return to their lives.
Only two people no longer had a place in this city.
Ethan looked at Laira.
She had been looking at him already. And she only nodded faintly, as if the answer to a question not yet even asked was already there.
’Wherever you go, I go.’
The encirclement began to close in.
"Seize him!" the officer shouted. "Careful of the hostages!"
Ethan gripped the transfer device tight in his armored hand.
He looked at Damien one last time. "Save her. And when you repay that debt..." He paused a beat. "Tell the truth. But don’t tell all of it."
Damien looked at him, and he understood. There was a part of the truth, the part about the ruins, about the armor shard, about the eye, that these nine people would have to bury, to protect the one who had just sacrificed his own reputation for them.
That was the debt they would repay in silence.
"Go," Damien said.
Ethan activated the device.
Laira lunged over, one wing curving around him, pulling him tight against her.
Light flared up, not blue like an ordinary transfer gate, but a cold, alien white.
And in the moment before it swallowed the two of them, Ethan saw the encirclement rushing in, saw Damien turn and shield Mira with his body, saw an entire world that he had only just begun to fight back against push him out to its edge.
Then the white light swallowed him and Laira.
The anchor point stood empty where the two of them had just been.
The chains of fire dissolved. The nine of Damien’s group dropped to their knees, "freed" from the one who had just held them captive.
And amid the chaos of the encirclement flooding in, Damien Vale held his unconscious niece tight, lifted his head, and in the voice of a Council member just escaped from the hands of a kidnapper, he shouted the first line of his plan to repay the debt.
"Emergency! Get this person to the central hospital immediately! I am Damien Vale, and I have testimony about what really happened in the Anomalous Coordinate!"
In a place no one knew the name of, beyond every safe zone of humanity, the white light went out.
Ethan and Laira fell onto a strange ground.
The air here was different. The sky here was different.
Ethan saw the thing before his eyes, and unable to hold it back, he blurted out: "What the hell is that?!"