Page 2 of First (After the End #1)

THE GENERAL

Gabriel

My sword slides out of the Alpha’s abdomen with a lurid squelching sound.

Around me, the battle swirls on, plasma blades clashing against metal armors, bones shattering, shrieks of pain swallowing grunts of effort, but I ignore it.

My fighters know how to defend themselves from a surprise attack, even one in which they are vastly outnumbered—if they didn’t, they would have fucked off to Valhalla a long time ago.

So I leave them to their fun and crouch to inspect the lifeless body crumpled on the stone floor of my operations suite, where a viscous blood puddle is already seeping into the grout lines.

I am flooded with instant irritation. At myself. “Fucking hell,” I mutter.

“Everything okay, General?” Martia, my deputy commander, asks, winded. She quickly finishes strangulating the Alpha man wedged under her armpit, drops him, then wipes a sweaty blond curl off her forehead. “Did they get you?” She pouts. “Do we have a boo-boo on our hands, Gabriel?”

I grunt my displeasure. “I fucked up.”

Her eyebrow lifts, and she glances around the room. The fight has wound down, and the ground is now strewn with the corpses of Alpha soldiers. “Killer’s remorse? That’s new.”

“I meant I should have just broken their necks. Goddamn bleeders.” Now the stench of iron will linger around the suite for days, and this is where I take all my fucking meetings.

In petty retaliation, I wipe my sword on the head of the closest body—when it comes to soaking up blood, there is nothing as dependable as hair—and once the memory-alloy blade has returned to its more compact original form, I sheath it in my back scabbard, then ask, “Who the fuck were these assholes, and how did they get into a high-security zone?”

It’s a fair question, especially considering that the raid interrupted a private council between me and three of my closest aides, one I called to discuss the latest string of increasingly bold attacks.

And yet, an uncertain silence stretches across the bloody room, until Martia starts talking in her report voice.

“It was ten Alphas—nice round number, and twice as many as the last group, which is…flattering, maybe? Six of them men. They barged in and headed straight for you, General, so we can easily infer who they were after. I believe you and I each killed four. Ivar got one—”

“Two,” Ivar corrects her, looking profoundly bored.

My brother, who also serves as my chief political advisor, may be a skilled fighter out of necessity, but he finds physical violence beneath him.

Deviousness, scheming, Machiavellian plots—that’s how he prefers to take care of his enemies. Typical Omega.

“My apologies. Ivar got two, which leaves none for Bastian. Bastian, did you try to get any, or did you just quietly step out of the way to avoid blood spatters?”

“This is a new shirt,” Bastian says primly.

“I know it is, because I bought it for you. So Bastian got zero, and—”

“Thank you, Martia,” I interrupt. “I am delighted to discover that you are able to count to ten. Who are they is what I asked.”

“Right. And I ignored that part of the question because, just like every other time, the attackers are wearing cheap, unmarked armors and using low-grade weapons anyone could buy on the black market.”

“Next time, I don’t know will suffice.”

Martia snorts and mumbles something unflattering about my ability to deal with uncertainty, and I consider forgetting that she’s my oldest and most loyal friend and reminding her of our respective ranks.

But Bastian interjects: “This might be a clue.” With the tip of his still-immaculate leather boot, he rolls the corpse of an Alpha woman.

On the inside of her arm is a shapeless brand, as though someone meant to mangle the flesh to hide the mark underneath.

A tattoo, possibly. “Just big enough to cover the Larsen symbol,” he muses.

Larsen.

I’ve been wondering when that name would come up.

“And as for how they made it past the retinal scans, Gabe, as an expert in military strategy,” Ivar says drily, “I think this may have something to do with it.” He bends to pick something up, then lifts his arm, showing something amorphous and red-smeared.

Bastian gags in revulsion. Martia’s muttered “fuck” echoes through the room.

That’s when I realize that Ivar is fisting a clump of light-brown curls, still attached to a head.

A gaping-mouthed, severed head. Open-eyed, too, because the lids have been ripped off.

Yet a quick glance around the room tells me that none of the bodies have been decapitated.

“Who the fuck…?” I step closer to the head. The incision starts at the base of the throat—a clean, almost-surgical job, fresh enough that bloating and decomposition have yet to set in and the features remain recognizable.

And I do recognize them. They belong to a young Beta soldier assigned to guarding the entrance to the tactical wing.

In the three years since I first became general of the northernmost stronghold, I have walked past him hundreds of times.

If I ever knew his name, I no longer recall it.

I do, however, remember that his rank-insignia ceremony happened just a few weeks ago.

Both his parents were present, and they were so proud of him for becoming a member of the engineering army, they were weepy through the whole service.

A couple of hours from now, someone will show up to their quarters to inform them that their son is dead.

I close my eyes. Take a deep inhale, trying to stave off the anger.

When it sweeps me anyway, I take a step closer to Ivar and take it out on him.

Through gritted teeth, I say, “Two weeks ago, after they sabotaged the shields and four engineers were killed trying to patch them up, I told you that if we didn’t act soon, something like this would happen—”

“And I stand by everything I said back then, Gabriel.” Ivar’s eyes hold mine steadily.

My older brother is my right hand. The most brilliant mind out of the tens of thousands of people who seek refuge from the elements in this stronghold.

It’s thanks only to his strategies that common-born organizations like the military—and I, as its general—currently hold more political power than ever in recent memory.

At the moment, though, I don’t give a fuck. “Seven attacks, Ivar. And that’s only from the start of the year. At least two dozen victims. Two weeks ago, I petitioned the council to bring House Larsen to justice—”

“And I told you not to, because I know how the council thinks. They will never side with the military over the high-born, not unless we have incontrovertible evidence that House Larsen is behind these illegal strikes. If we overplay our hand and act without solid proof, all noble houses will see it as overreach and rally behind Lord Larsen—”

Before my brother can finish his speech, I pin him to the wall and unsheathe the dagger at my hip, pressing it to his throat. The outburst immediately brightens my mood. Ivar might hate violence, but sometimes it’s just what a situation needs. Typical Alpha, he’d say. And he’d be right.

“Gabriel, I’m simply telling you—”

“I know. Please, continue telling me why I have to let these bastards come into my home, kill my people—”

“Gabriel,” Martia says, wrapping a hand around my shoulder. “Ivar is right. None of this is his fault.”

I ignore her, because I’m not done. “During the last Low Tide, they were directly responsible for the death of seven of my best mechanics, some of whom had been doing their job for longer than I’ve been alive, and one of them was our uncle.”

“General Agard.” Martia’s switch to my title is a very unsubtle reminder that my days of dealing with issues however the hell I please are over.

I’m no longer a recruit who enlisted because the military was the only way to prevent my family’s starvation.

I run the fucking thing now. “Can you be reasonable for a goddamn second?”

“Not exactly what I’m known for,” I say, eyes on Ivar.

But he is remarkably unconcerned for someone who’s a single deep breath from a slit throat.

I take a step back from him and return my dagger to its sheath, just in time for the automatic doors to slide open.

A dozen soldiers barge into the room, ready to protect us from an attack that was over about five minutes ago.

“Better late than never,” I bark, exchanging an eye-roll with my brother.

Excuses and apologies are offered by one of the commanders, followed by a detailed account of the victims killed by the attackers before they reached the operations suite.

While Martia deals with them and oversees the removal of the bodies, I take a few steps to the side and inhale deep breaths, trying to subdue the roar in my ears—the one that snarls at me to clutch the hilt of my sword and go to House Larsen’s headquarters and run my blade through each loathsome member.

Instead, I lay my palm against one of the west-facing portholes, letting the cool carbo-glass ground me.

The windows are as tall as two men, thick-framed and imposing.

During Lows, sunlight streams through them and across the raw stone and steel of the stronghold’s floors.

But the tide rose weeks ago and has lingered several feet above the highest cliff in the Northern Lands ever since.

All that can be seen beyond the glass are the fish swimming by, disturbing the hazy blue patterns filtering inside, casting shadows over my bloodstained round table.

We haven’t seen the sun in nearly two months. The lamps embedded in the wall’s recesses provide the illumination we need, but the artificial light radiating from them is dim and makes my skin itch. When I was a child, a High this long was unheard of. Now it’s the norm.