Cym.
Fourteen allowed himself a heavy sigh and a longing glance at his bed before making for the door, slinging his bag over his shoulder as he went.
Instead of going to the window Cym had exited, Fourteen left by the side entrance, guessing his new charge would be heading out of the marina rather than further in. When he saw a pink, cat-encrusted backpack disappear around the corner of another building, Fourteen knew he had guessed correctly.
He had been expecting something like this from Cym eventually. In less than twelve hours, Cym had consistently exhibited the sort of self-sacrificing behavior that would lead toward such an action.
Instead of catching up and confronting him immediately, Fourteen decided to observe his habits, so that the next time Cym ran out on him, he’d have a better idea of where to look in case the guy managed to vanish on him completely.
Like the last time he’d followed Cym, his charge watched his back well enough to force Fourteen to stay farther away than he liked. Unfortunately, a traffic snarl caused by construction allowed Cym to get away. One minute, he was standing on a street corner looking intently at a map in his hand, and the next, he had vanished behind a long line of tour buses squeezing through the single lane open to traffic.
Fucking hell.
For someone like Fourteen, losing a civilian in traffic was an embarrassment, to say the least. An unfamiliar feeling broke free, paralyzing him with its intensity. His throat closed for a moment, and his heart raced, causing his head to spin.
Then memory kicked in. Fear. For a second he was an eight-year-old boy racing to the hospital with his father to check on his mother after the accident.
Fourteen shook his head to gain distance from the memory and waited impatiently for his conditioning to kick in and take the fear away, but it was slow to respond.
Was that part of his mind smaller than it was before? Fourteen took the fear and shoved it toward the cold, urging it to do its job. Slowly, the cold unfurled and wrapped around the unstable emotion, freezing it into nothingness.
Fourteen frowned. If his conditioning continued to deteriorate, he was going to have to learn how to get a handle on his emotions before they compromised his ability to function as a soldier. Until then, he was going to have to limit his exposure to Cym as much as possible.
Taking a slow breath, he centered himself and went back into mission mode. Once he was steady, he identified a break in the line of buses and darted across the street.
He spent as long as he dared to observe every detail his new vantage point gave him, but he saw no trace of Cym. Fourteen decided to kick himself later for his not-so-clever plan of hanging back to observe Cym rather than confronting him. Useless self-flagellation would only slow Fourteen down at this point.
Where would Cym go next? For Fourteen, the logical choice would be to steal a car and get as far away from the city as he could—preferably another safe house—but he didn’t think Cym had a safe house to go to. If his guess was correct, Cym had nothing to fall back on. No, Cym wouldn’t go for a logical approach. Fourteen wasn’t going to find him at the bus station or hitchhiking. Not yet, anyway.
His mind presented him with a play-by-play of all of Cym’s reactions to various stimuli during their short acquaintance. From his repeated insistence that Fourteen stay away from Cym for his own good, to Cym’s reaction to the devastation he and his family had inflicted on the cemetery, it wasn’t difficult to figure out where he would go first.
Cym would need to see for himself the fallout from the fight earlier. That was the kind of person he was.
It was over two miles from his current position, and traffic was backed up as far as he could see. Fourteen’s SUV would be useless.
He ran.
What had once been a graveyard was now a gaping hole surrounded by police tape, a variety of vehicles covered in flashing lights, and swarms of people in uniform. The only body bags he saw were near the building leveled by Cym’s family, though he didn’t imagine Cym would find any comfort in that. The kid would probably take the whole thing on his own shoulders.
Fourteen didn’t know Cym well enough yet to anticipate what he would do once he got here, which meant finding the guy in this clusterfuck was going to be a challenge, so Fourteen hung back to survey the scene. Delving into his sniper training, Fourteen stood still and allowed the landscape to talk to him.
First, he scanned the area in front of the police tape, hoping to find Cym stymied along with the rest of the civilians. When that turned up nothing, he began to filter out useless information, deleting the flashing lights from emergency vehicles and the low buzz of the crowd from his perception. He let the setting play out in front of him, waiting for something different to attract his attention.
On the top floor of a white building to his far left, he caught a quick movement that stopped abruptly, like something being jerked away from a window. It was as far away from the cemetery as a person could get and still be able to see, but Fourteen thought someone as cautious as Cym would choose distance over details right now. Sentimental he might be, but the guy wasn’t stupid.
It was easier to move away from the scene of destruction than it had been to get closer, so Fourteen got to the top floor only minutes after seeing the movement in the window. He was still running up the last flight of stairs when he heard the sound of something hitting the floor above him and a sharp yelp.
Through the open door on the landing he could hear, “It was stupid for you to leave your shield behind, Boy.” The voice was rougher than before, but Fourteen thought it was the older woman from the fight earlier. “Or maybe he just ditched you when he saw how much trouble you are?”
Fourteen drew his gun as he made it to the landing and burst through the door without slowing. In the hallway, he spied Cym sprawled out on the floor and moving feebly like he was trying to get to his feet but couldn’t figure out which way was up. Fourteen assumed the reason was the head-shaped dent in the wall behind him.
Towering over him was the lady from earlier, only she didn’t look as nice as she had in the graveyard. One side of her face was caked in blood and dirt, and her dress was torn. Fourteen processed the information as negligible—he was more concerned with the outstretched hand she was pointing toward Cym. Fourteen noted the boy from the cemetery pressing his back against the opposite wall, eyes wide with fear. His jacket was torn and missing half its buttons. And, like the woman, his bedraggled form was caked in mud.
Fourteen ignored the cowardly boy and shot the woman directly in the head.
Instead of seeing the normal result after shooting someone, Fourteen’s eyes registered something his mind couldn’t process. Before him, ripples in reality warped and bent around the woman. She jerked her head around to look at him, and her face twisted in rage at the interruption. She didn’t have a scratch on her.
He shot her again with the same result, this time noticing that his bullets weren’t bouncing off, but rather disappearing once they hit whatever magic was shielding the woman. At least he didn’t have to worry about Cym catching a ricochet, which was a plus. On the downside, they were making enough noise to draw attention, and half of the Boston PD was just one cry for help away. Having a silencer on his gun didn’t mean zero noise. It meant less noise.
He proceeded to empty his clip at her. In his experience—with one notable exception—every shield could be breached.
After the first few shots, the anger drained from the woman's face and was replaced by fear as the ripples from her shield grew fainter with every hit it took. When he’d emptied his clip, she threw up a hand and put it through a series of strange positions. Fourteen felt something flow past him and heard the door behind him fall to the floor with a crash.
He cocked an eyebrow at the woman, reloaded his SIG, and trained the gun on her. Firing as he went, he pressed forward, forcing the lady away from Cym. When he reached Cym, the woman turned and ran. The next time he shot her, there was a wave of distortion that looked like a bubble being popped, and he heard a faint chuffing sound. The woman jerked sharply, stumbled, and then fell against the wall.
Cym put a hand on Fourteen’s foot, digging frantic fingers into his ankle.
Fourteen paused. “I won’t leave her behind us,” he told Cym, assuming he was about to plead for the woman’s life. “She’ll just keep coming after you.”
Cym’s eyes were dazed and didn’t track together, but he managed a weak, “Behind you… idiot.”
A wave of distortion passed over him and evaporated. Fourteen turned to see the cowardly boy standing before him with an outstretched arm, and he was staring at his hand like it had betrayed him.
“Where did my brother find you, the Terminator store?” Eyes wide, the boy backed toward the door but didn’t make it before Fourteen grabbed him by the front of his tattered jacket and threw him into the wall.
“This is your brother?” He kicked the now-stunned boy’s leg.
