Page 25 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)

LETHE LEANED BACK against the cave wall. He removed the packet of cigarettes from his pocket and popped it open. There were three left.

He drew one out, taking out his lighter. It hissed but didn’t light. He tried again. The third time, it caught.

He inhaled and tilted his head back, exhaling the smoke into the air.

He had time, he knew that. No one could navigate these tunnels as quickly as he could. He’d find Ana and Ares again, dance whatever dance they wanted, but he had business to finish first, especially when the future was so uncertain.

He couldn’t rush this moment, and more so, had to guarantee it happened.

“Sometimes I imagine a red balloon,” he said, looking down at the cigarette in his hands.

He moved it back and forth in between his fingers.

“It’s always just kind of floating up and up.

I watch it go. There was a carnival in the city park sometime before the world collapsed.

” He stood, perusing the cave wall, reading the writings of former Riders of Saint East. There were layers of codes and creeds, all that remained of a culture and people.

“We all have those little…flickers of life before it broke, but the strange thing for me is that the memory of the balloon specifically never happened. When I think back on my life before the collapse, that balloon is what I think of, and it seems more real than anything else. It took me a while to realize what that meant.”

He paused before a series of carvings, reading a saying etched in stone.

“‘It’s the high wheat that catches the harvest. The tall grain makes the bread.’ They say the reason the Strike went after the people on our Dear Anne’s was because what they considered the best of us were more likely to be compatible with Madness.

They were wrong, of course, which is why that saying spoke to me. ”

He turned from the carvings and continued to circle the room.

“It’s all nonsense. Pointless murder in the end.

One big joke. A laugh. I don’t need to tell you that, though.

You were there.” He passed a wooden slab centered in the room, surrounded by dried branches.

The smell of oil filled the cave. He put the cigarette between his lips, turning to face the pyre he’d built.

“You thought you’d be a hero,” Evira accused, tied back against a wooden slab.

He’d tracked her last night, on his watch, when the other’s had been sleeping. He knew these mountains; these caverns were as close to him as the atria in his own heart.

She’d been on her way back from scouting, from one of two known paths. Finding her in the dark had been the most tedious part. The rest of it had been quick and easy.

“I did. For a while, I thought I was a hero.” Lethe tilted his head back, watching the ceiling as he exhaled a line of smoke.

“And you failed,” she bit out like a snake, as if noticing the contentment on his face.

She bared her straight, white teeth against rich, painted lips.

No doubt she was a snake, doing many flattered men and women in with her venom.

The Eating Ocean had never infected her with Madness, but no doubt she’d inflicted all she’d learned from the Strike on unsuspecting people all these years.

As Lethe watched her, he couldn’t help but be reminded of the people she’d killed, if only to get what she wanted.

Pushing back against burdensome feelings, he removed his flask and approached her. He unscrewed the top and offered it to her, a betrayal of those very feelings that held him captive.

“I’d need more than that,” her voice hissed, low and bitter.

“Just drink it,” he urged. “You’d be surprised.”

She obliged reluctantly, and he returned the cap. He sat back down and almost immediately saw her relax.

“You’ve been drinking Snake Bite,” she spoke as if confirming her own theory and then stared up at the ceiling with a bitter laugh.

“Ah, the infamous Snake Bite.” For a while, it had been infamous indeed.

It dulled the effects of The Ocean, muted a Strike’s powers, or at least it would have, had their sense of smell not tipped them off to its purpose.

It had been a part of one too many failed attempts to kill the Strike.

“I tripled the dose for you.” He exhaled, watching the smoke dissipate into the air.

“My healing mutation is a double-edged sword. I’ll tell you, when the Strike caught me, they had their fun with it.

” He rubbed his neck, feeling the stubble down his jaw.

“When their attempts at getting me to accept the Strike virus didn’t work, they handed me over to Amiel. ”

“Amiel was a disgrace,” Evira barked.

Lethe chuckled at the irony in her distaste. He wanted to return to her reverence of the Strike, remind her of her own fascination with them, but he didn’t.

She’d see Amiel as a foul exception to the rule.

Amiel was one of the few Strike who resented the temptation of human beings, turning instead into terrifying beasts and hunting people like prey instead of being willing to indulge in the seductive emotions that made all Strike so weak.

It had been that very weakness that had pushed the ROSE to consider the final solution to the war: burn the Strike along with their human herd.

Their codependence on each other would render the Strike too mindlessly distraught to fight with any strategy or escape the flames.

The final solution, at great cost, had worked, even for Amiel, because even though Evira claimed Amiel was a Strike with no real sense of honor or loyalty, those things had been the attributes that had cost her.

Amiel had been too loyal to Strike Peter and not Evira, despite everything she’d sacrificed, things that Lethe knew Evira thought had been hidden from the rest of the world.

They were deeply humiliating things, even for a monster like her.

For the first time, Lethe realized why he hadn’t minded Evira as much as he once did.

Though he’d never mention it, or reveal that he knew of it, he could relate to the sting of such humiliations as hers.

Amiel’s every word could have bent her into whatever shape, favor, or degradation imaginable.

Meanwhile, Amiel’s powerful counterpart, Strike Peter, had played a very real role in Lethe’s own torture.

Now, Evira would never forget Amiel’s purple eyes—that sickly, glowing mauve. Lethe would never forget Peter’s eyes, burning with rings of red like hot steel.

The mutuality of their experiences compelled him to go a step further in their discussion. Something deep inside him ached to talk.

“Did you ever go down there? Into their lab?” Lethe asked.

“No? There’s a lot more down there than a few dissection tables and a cellar.

It was full of gruesome experiments, and attempts at creating powerful and strange illusions.

They could turn that place into whatever they wanted.

They could make you replay your life, live out scenes like a puppet.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking all of this”— he gestured around the room—“is just me, living out another one of his simulations. The Strike experimented with reality as if trying to master it. Ivan, Peter, Khilani, Ria all wanted to learn how to create life, wanted to become gods. In their mind, their great experiment is perfecting the human experience.”

“And what makes you think you’re not in one of their simulations?” Evira asked, as if she partially believed his theory herself.

“Because I’m still trying to survive, and survival isn’t a fantasy anyone lives in.

It’s an in-between that keeps repeating itself day in and day out, and I can’t help but feel like that’s not efficient or interesting enough for one of their simulations.

” Lethe rubbed the back of his head. He hated how bitter his own words sounded, but it was as much truth of himself as he could muster.

Self-reflection hadn’t been his favorite pastime in the last few years, and talking to Evira now, he hardly recognized the feelings that started to unbury themselves.

“Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Ivan Rowe had a role to play in The Great Light.

It makes me wonder if he knows the key to breaking it, or why they created it in the first place. ”

Eager to move on to the next topic, he continued, “Now you trade in secrets, Evira. I’ll ask for one. I need to know. Is Ivan Rowe really the last living Strike?”

“All dead in the Burning. Did you not see them yourself?” she said impatiently. “It’s true.”

“You’re giving me facts. The truth is a lot more complicated.” Lethe kept one arm folded across his chest, his elbow resting over his hand as he held his cigarette in front of his face. He took a drag of the cigarette as he waited for her answer.

She struggled against the ropes as if to release herself from his doubts. Strands of her hair fell loose in front of her face.

He tapped his cigarette on the metal lining of his glove and ran a hand through his hair before tilting his head back and exhaling.

“Seventeen Strike and we learned everything about every single one. We knew their strengths, their weaknesses, habits, preferences, histories. We immersed ourselves in their politics for years, obsessed over them. You attached yourself to Amiel and Peter, thinking they would rise to the top and rule the Bleeding Grin. For different reasons, they were our lives,” Lethe said, standing as he finished his cigarette.

He approached her, the pit of wood the only division between them. “And it’s all gone now.”

Lethe watched her for a long moment, seeing the hatred in her eyes.

“Maybe it’s judgment for us both,” Lethe breathed. He removed his stopwatch and clicked it open. He’d need to get out of here soon. Taking the standard route, it would be about six more minutes before anyone found him.

He released his stopwatch and dropped the cigarette. The oil at the bottom of the plank ignited. He stepped back. “The dose of Snake Bite I gave you will kill you before the fire and smoke does.”

She looked up at the ceiling, staring as if she saw the sky through it.

She strained upward, away from the flames, but then her body started to settle, the residual effects of the Snake Bite setting in quickly.

A calm clarity came into her face, and she lowered her chin back to Lethe. “Why not burn me alive?” she asked.

Lethe sighed and couldn’t help but reflect back on Manaj’s words.

“I’m tired of watching suffering. As long as I’ve waited…I don’t get any gratification out of this. Killing you is my obligation. I’m putting the other Riders’ souls to rest.”

She chuckled darkly, and he saw her attention begin to fade as she said, “Only in our world is fire grace.”

Her eyes grew steadily vacant and reaching. She knew how the war had been. She’d seen the extent of its ugliness. No doubt she understood what it meant to appease vengeful ghosts. As she stared at the ceiling, she started to laugh.

Unsure of how quickly she would die, Lethe lingered for a second longer. Her laughter continued, delirious and rising, like it had been trapped inside her all along, now only freed in the breaking open of her death.

Lethe watched solemnly, having known that kind of laughter, the laughter of complete absurdity. When he was assured only seconds remained, he stepped back toward the entrance of the cave. Outside, it was starting to rain.

The laughter faded into tired choking.

For the first time in a long time, he felt complete isolation. Even in the death of his enemies it seemed he faced only more vacancy in the world. He was exhausted by it.

He ran his hands through his hair as the storm churned above, small droplets landing on his shoulder.

The idea of Ana walked through his mind like a stranger, intruding on the moment, and making him wonder at her reaction when he returned. Evira’s death was something sacred, a nod to the war, and Lethe was intrigued by the direction of his own thoughts now.

Ana had a curious complexity to her spirit, the expression of a curiously complex life.

When he looked into someone’s eyes, he saw the soul.

It wasn’t with the same clarity as it had been before he’d started taking Snake Bite.

Sometimes he forgot why he bothered to take it at all, because the sight of a soul was a beautiful thing.

It was an essence without age, shape, color, flaws, or reservations.

It was perfectly balanced, humming energy of another plane.

Ana’s soul was buried deep as if she was scared to recognize that she had one, and thinking of that silent, warm darkness in her eyes made him want to sink into them. The realization was jarring in that it was unusual for him to want to hide in another person.

He’d fooled himself, perhaps, into thinking the human world couldn’t snare him. Strike were still part human, after all. Generally, he enjoyed undulating between two conflicting personalities, but today it seemed exhausting.

As if he’d missed his window to leave, he stood there in the rain, knowing now that Evira was dead.

She didn’t even shift as the flames reached her feet and began to climb up her legs.

Smoke escaped through small skylights that dribbled now with the downpour of rain.

Large droplets clacked inside the cave as the body continued to burn.

He wasn’t sure what transfixed him there. The rain was cool through his hair and down his neck, but the image of the fire kept him still, Evira’s face in it now. With her face, he saw the others. Once again, he saw his own.

The loud clink of metal against stone drew his head around.

He wasn’t sure how long she’d been there, but the look in her eyes assured him she’d seen enough. Her Atlas had hit the ground, slipped right through her fingers before rolling to his feet.

Ana’s hair lay soaked over her shoulders, a strand of it lying across her face. Her eyes were alight like an animal and the raw heat of her emotion was like steam in the rain.

The woman in the rain wasn’t Ana at all.

Not Ana from the State.

This one was from En Sanctus.