Page 24 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)

“You take your thumb, like this, and you press into the middle,” Ares had said, and this time she finally listened.

“That will open it up. Don’t just go through the peel.

You get to the soft spot and work outward.

The peeling is there to protect the orange.

Takes much longer that way. Everything, by its very structure, has a soft spot. It’s the same with—”

She opened her eyes.

War.

She searched the campsite again, easing up this time.

Jasper had been gone too long.

Cal had been on watch.

Cal of all people. The soft spot.

She started to stand up.

Click.

She stiffened at the metallic sound. She held her breath as her stomach dropped in horror.

“I see you’re out of retirement,” Ares’s soft voice murmured from the darkness.

She scanned the campsite. She eased toward the campfire, fingers searching the ground for a rock.

“Long time no see, or at least that’s what I’d like to say,” she said, rushing to put the pieces of Ares’s puzzle together and hoping Lethe would wake up.

“You’ll see me soon,” he replied, and she followed his voice to a different place in the woods. He was quiet, always so painfully quiet.

Her fingertips grazed a rock in her hand. She collected it into her palm. “I’m not sure how I feel about having a gun pointed at me in the dark. It’s a little unfair.”

“I’m not aiming at you,” Ares replied.

“Well, you haven’t shot yet,” she said. “What do you want?”

“Put down the rock.”

“A rock against a gun?”

“I don’t want to shoot your friend. And I’ve seen you use a rock,” he added with a lilt of humor. Mechanical as it was, it helped her relax. So, he wasn’t completely hostile, at least not yet.

It seemed after all this time, in his complicated mind, she was still categorized as a comrade, or at least a more neutral party.

“All right,” she said, and tossed the rock, hitting Lethe. She heard his breathing pause as he woke up.

“What did Hailey tell you?” Ares asked as he stepped toward her, nothing but a vague shape in the darkness, gun still aimed at Lethe.

“He told me you’d become an informant for the Mystics.”

“He’s right,” Ares whispered, voice light and ghostly.

Ana didn’t reply.

He lowered his gun.

“Why don’t you think I’ll turn on you?” she said.

“Because I have the green and Jasper,” Ares replied, green being a nod to Cal’s youth.

“They’re both alive. I’m going to give you orders.

I know you well enough to know you aren’t stupid, but hesitate, disobey, or make me the slightest bit uncomfortable, and each time it will mean a bullet through the joint of one of your friends,” he explained, deadpan, as if reading from an instruction manual.

“If you want Jasper to keep his knees, I suggest you pay attention. Now, saddle the horses.”

He stepped back, and his small, dark silhouette dissolved into the shadows.

“Lethe,” Ana said.

Ares walked back into the woods, steps audible now. He circled a wide perimeter as if he was looking for someone. She heard Lethe shift.

“So, that’s him?” Lethe whispered sleepily.

“Yes,” Ana said.

“A lot shorter than I was expecting.”

“That’s your first thought?” she snapped, annoyed.

“No, his fairy-like voice was actually, but I thought that was impolite.”

“You thought that was impolite?” she shot back in a hushed voice as they started to gather their things around the perimeter. She didn’t realize Lethe had any kind of measure for what was impolite.

“Should we try and find an opening?” he asked.

“No.”

“I could find one,” he said casually.

“Keep your ego in check. I want to see what he wants,” she replied, listening as Ares moved through the woods.

“What is he looking for? He’s leaving us wide open.”

“I don’t know. Let’s get the horses. Don’t try anything, all right? I’m serious.”

“You act like he has powers or something.”

“Something like that,” she muttered back as they approached the horses and saddled them up, linking Cal and Jasper’s horses up as well. “You could say he’s the State’s version of a Strike.”

Lethe paused as if thinking through the statement. “No,” he said after a moment, and then a bit louder, “You black bred human beings?”

“Shh,” Ana hissed back. “He can probably hear us.”

“You’re not kidding, are you?” Lethe said, leaning back as he scanned the woods. He hunched near her. “The State created human beings using Madness?”

“Ares declared a ban on it when the war with the Mystics ended. As long as they honored the ban, he’d work for the State,” said Ana as her fingers hastened to prepare the horses.

“That was over thirty years ago. He looks like a twelve-year-old girl. He’d have to be in his fifties at least.”

Ana hit him on the shoulder, glaring.

“Would he shoot me for saying that?” Lethe asked.

“I don’t know! That’s the point. Stop talking.”

Lethe searched the area again, longer this time, making Ana worry about the next statement he was preparing to say.

He leaned in again, glanced back at the woods, and then craned his head uncomfortably close to her ear. “What are his powers?”

Ana shoved his face away, hopping onto her horse. She pointed to his horse with a silent demand.

Lethe smirked, somehow smug despite her attitude toward him. He climbed onto his horse just as Ares came back through the woods on a blonde pony.

Ana ignored another glance from Lethe when he saw the horse. She was certain he wouldn’t be so relaxed if he knew how many people Ares had killed.

Ares started to guide them through the woods, the rifle strapped across his back, a dark complement to the black gear that covered his body.

No one spoke.

As the dawn light broke over the horizon, Ana glanced back to Lethe, finding him rubbing the sleep from his face. Lethe gestured at Ares, who rode ahead, and drew a line across his neck with his finger.

Ana shook her head and looked away.

She felt something hit her thigh and looked back at Lethe. He’d thrown something small, but she couldn’t tell what it was. He gestured to the knife on his belt. She noticed for the first time that he’d retrieved it, and then shook her head against any suggestion that he should use it now.

He shrugged his shoulders, and she waved him off, preparing to look away again before a small pebble hit her hand, clanked off the small canteen on her belt, and fell into her lap.

She whipped her head in Ares’s direction. He didn’t look back.

She glared at Lethe, noticing the handful of small pieces of rock he seemed to have peeled off the adjacent rock wall.

He seemed very uncomfortable with her lead of not attacking Ares.

They argued for a moment through hand gestures before Ana drew a line across her neck and pointed at Lethe in a threatening way.

Lethe rolled his eyes but stopped arguing, turning his hand out and dropping all of the pebbles. They pattered against the ground, causing Ana to look forward at Ares again. When she turned back to Lethe, he was staring up at the mountains.

As the ride continued, Ana scanned the mountains of the Dragon’s Spine. They rose like walls of sheer stone around the path. The place was covered in bones, and tablets clad the mountains like an armor of gravestones.

The Riders had covered the mountains in writing, mostly names and creeds, list after list on the surface of rocks and mountain faces.

Ares navigated the path with a peculiar pattern, avoiding certain spots and instructing them to guide their horses in the same way.

Lethe did not add to Ares’s words, keeping his sleeves down near his wrists as if to hide any indication he was a Rider.

Ana watched as he kept glancing at a tattered orange flag waving on a distant peak and wondered what he truly saw among the scribbling of the rocks as they came through the mountains.

By her calculations, these rocks had been abandoned for nearly a century.

The path opened into a great sanctuary around a cave where one grand slab of stone rested.

She knew without reading it the nature of the thirty-two names, most of them scarred through to mark the death of a Strike.

What she had not expected were the grand rock faces, rising up in and around the cave, covered in names that extended as high as her eyes could see.

As they walked past the names, she watched Lethe, but he didn’t do so much as look at the names.

Glancing back, Ares seemed to notice her interest. “This place belonged to the Riders of Saint East,” he said.

He removed his black head covering, revealing the pallor of his delicate, pale features and his notorious gray eyes.

“These names are the memorialized murdered, missing and then those frostbitten by the Strike virus who had to be executed. This is what I would call a sacred place,” he explained, looking over the names as they rode through the stone yard back to a single path.

“The silence here speaks of a generation who gave everything to protect the soul of humanity, even when mankind didn’t want it any longer.

The Riders embraced the philosophy of the Sanctus Ghost—this powerful thing, call it faith.

It’s illusive but real, divine and yet innate to us all, much like music.

It is the opposite of The Eating Ocean.”

No one spoke, and Ares looked up at two connecting cliffs above with a gateway on each side. Despite the nature of the path, the cliffs were far apart. She could not have imagined everyone making the leap.

“It takes bravery, surrender, and a deep sense of one’s purpose to jump cliffs chasing a ghost,” Ares said, “even a divine one.”

Those seemed to be the final words of the ride.

The mountains nestled them into small paths again, and when they opened up once more, the three of them were overlooking a valley of abandoned houses.

Ana knew the nature of the houses without asking.

When the war had started, the Riders of Saint East were something like bodyguards, preserving the essence of human culture—the best musicians, scientists,artists,scholars, chefs—people who had a deep understanding of things that seemed to define mankind’s nature.

Each Rider had space on their right arm with the names of people tattooed, a severe dedication to bring them through the war intact.

When the Strike came to official power, they hunted down the people the Riders had protected, eventually giving way to the cult of extremists that brought down the Strike’s regime.

Those were the riders Lethe had been a part of.

His arms—the right one bare, the left tattooed with the names of the Strike—were a clear indication of that.

Ana centered her gaze back on Ares abruptly as the horses stopped. He was looking down at his watch, adjusting something on it.

“You have ten minutes,” he said before looking up at her.

Ana’s brows furrowed and she looked over at Lethe.

Well, the empty saddle where Lethe was just a second ago. What? When did he—?

“Or I shoot him,” Ares clarified.

Ana leapt off her horse like a reflex, spotting a nearby cave that could have been Lethe’s only escape.

“Don’t kill anyone!” she shouted back at Ares, sprinting into the cave before skidding to a stop where the cave split into several tunnels.

“Lethe!” she shouted before muttering to herself, “I’m going to kill him.”

Her heart pounded with adrenaline and rage as she picked a direction and sprinted down it. The tunnels were a terrible maze, winding in every which way and direction.

She called for Lethe several times, sprinting through the tunnels lit by dim skylights.

She passed by old, broken furniture, cobwebs, and bug-eaten leather bags, clothes, and saddles.

After several minutes, she slid to a stop, nearly slipping over the side of an abrupt cliff at a tunnel exit.

Across a sizable distance, in the tunnels across a deep cleft, she spotted the slightest movement.

If it was in fact Lethe, she had no clue how he’d managed to get over there.

She searched the area, unable to find any nearby bridges, ropes, or passageways. Heart pounding, she removed the belt from her pants, keeping her utility belt intact.

She eased back toward the cave she’d come from, eyes focused on the cliff across the way.

In one arm, she held her belt, buckle at the end, and in the other, she dialed back the triggers on her Atlas, adjusting the radius of the time release.

She selected four and a half hours with a very small radius of release—thick time, they called it.

She hooked her belt around one of the triggers before tossing her Atlas into the air, high between the cliffs. She sprinted after it as it activated, hovering in the air with the belt hanging from it.

She grabbed her belt and swung, and what would have been a second for the belt to come loose with her body weight compounded to several seconds. She used that time to swing herself onto the opposite cliff, hitting her retrieval ring as she rolled.

She lifted her hand and caught her Atlas, just as it whirred toward her fingers. Her belt came loose, falling through the air between the cliffs. She heard it hit the ground far below and rubbed her face.

Lethe owed her a belt.

She checked her watch.

Nine minutes.

Ares had never failed to kill a target.

She searched the new array of tunnels as clouds grumbled overhead. A crack of lightning split the dark, building storm clouds overhead.

She wasn’t sure which of her chances were better, finding Lethe in time or getting struck by lightning.