Chapter 757: An old hag and his delusions
Chapter 757: An old hag and his delusions
A woman was waiting in the small visitor’s lounge the next afternoon, the same room where delegations and grieving families and the occasional confused contract client sat when they needed somewhere quiet that wasn’t a hallway.
Jayden’s aunt had introduced herself the day of the memorial as his sister, but Sam corrected the record gently afterward, explaining that the woman who’d come was actually the only family Jayden had left at all, an aunt who’d raised him from twelve onward after both his parents died in a beast incursion outside Academy 12’s perimeter, close enough to the school that they’d never managed to get him fully clear of what happened that day.
She sat with her hands folded in her lap, a cardigan pulled tight around her shoulders despite the facility’s climate control running warm, and when Sophie walked in she looked up with an expression that had already decided something before either of them said a word.
"Sit if you want," the woman said. "Or don’t. I won’t be staying long."
Sophie sat anyway.
"My name’s Sophie," she said. "I don’t think we were properly introduced before."
"I know who you are," the woman said. "I’ve seen the streams. Everyone has." She looked at her own hands. "I watched the footage from that planet eleven times before I came here. Eleven times, trying to understand what I was looking at."
"I can explain what happened," Sophie said. "If you want me to."
"I don’t think I do," the woman said. "I think I already understand it well enough. You looked at my nephew, mid-fight, building toward something, and you told him to stop. And he did. And then the Harbinger killed him anyway, except now it wasn’t a fight he died in. It was you, telling him not to finish what he started."
"I saw what would happen if he did," Sophie said quietly. "If he’d completed the attack."
"I’m sure you did," the woman said. There was no venom in it, which somehow made it land harder than if there had been. Just exhaustion. The particular flatness of someone who had spent eleven viewings of the same footage running out of any version of anger that had enough fuel left to sustain itself. "I’m sure whatever you saw was real. I’m sure it justified everything, every piece of it lining up exactly the way it needed to so that the math worked out in your favor."
"It wasn’t in my favor," Sophie said. "It was never about—"
"I know what it was about," the woman said, cutting her off, not unkindly, just finally. "I’ve had time to think about it. You did what you thought needed doing, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend I know enough about whatever your ability shows you to argue the pros and cons of it." She looked up, and her eyes were dry, had been dry for a while now, the crying apparently already finished somewhere private before she ever walked through the facility doors. "But I raised that boy since he was twelve years old. I made him breakfast every morning for six years. I sat through every academy ceremony, every competition, every single time he came home with a new scar he wouldn’t talk about. And I am never, ever going to be able to look at you and feel anything except the fact that you’re the reason he isn’t going to walk through my door again."
Sophie said nothing. There wasn’t anything to say that wouldn’t sound like an excuse, and she’d promised herself walking in that she wasn’t going to offer excuses.
"I don’t forgive you," the woman said, standing now, smoothing her cardigan. "I want to be clear about that, in case you came here hoping for something else."
"I didn’t," Sophie said. "I came because you asked for me. I wasn’t going to make you come find me."
The woman looked at her for a long moment, something passing behind her eyes that might have been the smallest fraction of respect, gone before it could fully form.
"That’s something, I suppose," she said.
She left without another word, the door closing quietly behind her, and Sophie sat alone in the small lounge for a long time afterward.
She understood. That was the strange, heavy part of it, sitting there in the quiet. She understood completely, didn’t need the woman to soften anything, didn’t expect forgiveness and wasn’t owed any. She’d taken a life she believed needed taking for a cause she believed in, and it wasn’t the first time.
Adrian first. Years ago, a maintenance corridor, a boy from her academy doing his father’s work even as it killed him.
Now Jayden.
She sat with both of them in her chest, weighing the same and weighing nothing alike at all, and decided, the way she’d decided after Adrian, that the weight was simply hers to carry now. Permanently. Without complaint.
It was all good. Not because it didn’t hurt. Because it had to be done, and she’d been the one capable of doing it, and that was simply what the role required of her.
Angel found her an hour later in the common area, dropping into the seat across from her with the particular energy of someone who’d just come from a debrief and hadn’t fully shaken the formality of it yet.
"Sebastian wants a full report," Angel said. "My task force’s official position on the operation, casualty figures, everything for the public record." She rubbed her eyes. "I’ve written four versions already and deleted three of them because none of them sound right."
"None of them are going to sound right," Sophie said. "Some things just don’t translate into a report format."
"Yeah," Angel said. She looked at Sophie properly then, taking in whatever was visible on her face. "You went to see her."
"This morning. And yesterday, the boy. The dragon stand."
"How’d it go."
"Exactly how it should have," Sophie said.
Angel didn’t push further. She just nodded, the kind of nod that said understood without needing the rest spelled out.
"There’s something else," Angel said. "Lucas mentioned it before he crashed for the night. A faction reached out. Southern Cardinal. Calling themselves the Dreamers."
"Never heard of them."
"Nobody had, until about a year ago," Angel said. "They’ve built themselves up fast. Streams, fan accounts, the whole apparatus, structured almost exactly like we are. Right down to having their own charismatic faces out front for the cameras." She pulled out her tablet, bringing up the message that had come through faction channels overnight. She was an unofficial official member of the faction.
"Their coordinators are requesting a formal meeting. Something about shared values, public service, freedom from EDF oversight. The pitch reads like a merger proposal."
"A merger," Sophie repeated.
"That’s the word they used," Angel said. "Apparently they’re dealing with their own encroaching Harbinger problem down south and think combining resources benefits everyone." She set the tablet down. "Eclipse went from six people in your apartment two years ago to over a thousand and the most recognized faction in the Eastern Cardinal. We’re not exactly small anymore. Other factions are going to keep looking at what we built and wanting a piece of it."
Sophie looked at the tablet, at the polished, careful wording of the proposal, the kind of message that had clearly been drafted by someone who understood exactly how to sound sincere.
"We’ll need Lucas and Kelvin in on this before we respond to anything," she said. "Carefully."
"Figured you’d say that," Angel said.
---
Deep somewhere else in space, lied a planet.
The sky over the strange world ran a permanent, bruised red, the kind of color that never settled into anything resembling dusk or dawn, just a constant low light that bled across the stone courtyard where the Rowes stood watching the horizon. Harbingers moved along the courtyard’s far wall in loose formation, and among them, indistinguishable in posture and pace, men in plain dark clothing walked the same patrols, the two kinds of soldiers working the perimeter together like there had never been a difference between them at all.
Mr. Rowe had his hands folded behind his back, his posture carrying the careful stillness of a man who had learned, across a very long career inside the Purge, that stillness read as authority even when nothing underneath it was actually steady.
"The mission’s progressing," Marcus Rowe said. "One has secured his position. The Conclave’s response force is dealt with."
"Progressing for him," Elise said. "Not for Arthur. There’s a difference, and I think you know it as well as I do."
"Arthur sees a son finally executing his vision," Mr. Rowe said in that cultured tone of his. "Expansion. Conquest. Bloodline secured through demonstration of capability rather than mere inheritance. From where he lies, it reads as everything he spent centuries failing to produce."
"And what does it read as from where we’re standing." Elise asked in a mock tone.
"A boy who stabbed his own father and is currently building an empire that answers to nobody," Mr. Rowe said. "Including Arthur."
Mrs. Rowe almost laughed. "He still believes the boy reports to him. Still believes the conquests are gifts being laid at his feet, proof of the family legacy finally taking root the way every failed attempt before it never could." She shook her head slowly. "He’s an old man clinging to the idea that loyalty is something he can engineer into someone’s blood the same way he engineered the abilities into it. He never once stopped to consider that the one attempt that finally succeeded might also be the one with no interest in succeeding for him."
"One doesn’t need him," Mr. Rowe said. "That’s the part Arthur refuses to see. The boy has fire, lightning, shadow, blood, and his father’s own gift of copying, all of it working in concert, all of it entirely his own to wield. He doesn’t require permission. He doesn’t require resources Arthur controls. He took an uninhabitable world and turned its people into an army inside a single campaign. He just dismantled an entire Conclave response force in under an hour, alone, without so much as breaking stride." He paused. "What exactly does Arthur imagine he’s offering a being like that. Guidance? Wisdom? The boy is already past needing either."
"An entitled child," Mrs. Rowe said, testing the words. "That’s what he is, underneath all of it. And that’s what his father is as well. Spoiled by power he never had to earn the way the rest of us earned ours, working our way up through decades of patience and positioning. He simply existed long enough, succeeded where every prior attempt failed, and now believes the entire galaxy owes him whatever he decides to take from it."
"Entitled children," Mr. Rowe said, "tend to become very expensive problems for whoever raised them, eventually."
"Arthur thinks he still has him in hand," Mrs. Rowe said. "The way you’d think you still had a leash on a dog you raised from a pup, right up until the day it decides the leash was always just a suggestion." She looked toward the horizon, toward the direction where, somewhere far beyond it, One was presumably continuing his work without a single thought spared for the old man lying in a chamber surrounded by beast core lanterns and machines keeping him alive on borrowed time. "He’s going to be a problem. Not for the Conclave. Not for the EDF, not really, not in any way that matters long term. He’s going to be a problem for Arthur specifically, the moment he decides his father has nothing left worth keeping around."
"You sound almost sympathetic," Mr. Rowe said.
"I’m not," she said. "I’m simply accurate. An old man who built the one thing strong enough to finally succeed without him, and then convinced himself it was still loyal, has built his own ending. We don’t need to do anything to hasten it. One will handle that part entirely on his own, in his own time, the same way he’s handled everything else since the day he decided his father’s blade belonged in his father’s chest."
"Then we let it run its course," Mr. Rowe said.
"We let it run its course," she agreed. "And in the meantime, we make sure his collapse, whenever it comes, finds his network already ours rather than anyone else’s." She turned to face him fully. "Which brings us back to Arthur."
"The old hag is unfit to continue," Mrs. Rowe said, the words landing flat and final, no hesitation left in them at all. "Whatever loyalty his followers still carry for him, they carry it for a man who built something extraordinary, not for the husk lying in that chamber now, kept alive by beast core lanterns and machines that hum louder than he can speak. We need to take what’s his. Properly. Completely."
Mr. Rowe looked at her for a long moment.
"It won’t be easy," he said. "You know that better than I do. He’s had decades to bind that loyalty into something resembling instinct. They don’t simply follow orders from him. They follow him, the name, the legend, the idea of him standing in a room even when he isn’t standing at all anymore. Stripping that away isn’t a matter of removing one old man from one bed. Not to mention, we are not the only ones gunning for that position. We both know the Reigns must already be planning this,"
Mrs. Rowe smiled.
"That’s why I have a plan," she said.
Mr. Rowe exhaled slowly, the closest thing to hesitation he allowed himself in conversations like this.
"They’ve been thorough," he said. "More thorough than most of Arthur’s assets, frankly. They identified One’s threat profile before we did and embedded themselves into the response effort without ever drawing attention to whose interests they were actually serving."
"Which means they understand exactly what we understand," Mrs. Rowe said. "That whoever controls the cleanup after One’s collapse inherits whatever’s left of his network, his resources, his territory. The Reigns aren’t there to stop him out of any loyalty to Arthur. They’re positioning themselves the same way we are."
"So we’re competing with them for the same outcome."
"We’re competing with them for the same outcome," she confirmed. "Which is why their mission needs to fail in a way that looks like misfortune rather than interference. Nothing traceable. Nothing that points back to us. One is unpredictable and violent enough that almost anything could plausibly happen to anyone who gets close to him."
Mr. Rowe considered that. "If One discovers the Reigns are there working against his interests rather than simply observing—"
"Then he does the work for us," Mrs. Rowe said. "We don’t need to lift a finger. We simply need to ensure that whatever information reaches him about who’s circling his operation includes their names prominently and ours not at all."
"You want to feed him their position."
"I want to feed him doubt," she said. "About anyone watching him closely enough to matter. The Reigns happen to be the ones currently in range to absorb that doubt." She looked at her husband steadily. "It costs us nothing. It removes a competitor without our hands ever touching the outcome. And if One decides to handle the matter the way he’s handled every other inconvenience he’s encountered so far, the Reigns simply become another footnote in his expansion."
Mr. Rowe was quiet for a long moment, watching the dark-clothed soldiers move along the wall beside the Harbingers, the two ranks indistinguishable from this distance, all of it Arthur’s design, all of it slipping slowly further from his hands with every passing day he spent confined to that chamber.
"And if he doesn’t take the bait," Mr. Rowe said. "If the Reigns survive him entirely and come back with One’s network intact and untouched."
"Then we adjust," Mrs. Rowe said simply. "We always adjust. That’s the one advantage age and patience have given us over everyone else still scrambling for position in this." She turned back toward the horizon, the red light catching across her face without warmth in it. "We didn’t survive this long inside Arthur’s apparatus by needing every plan to work the first time."