Page 5 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)

ANA MEASURED HER feelings as she packed for a trip to the capital. She tried to coax out that eager warrior, that drive, that out here in the wilderness she’d buried to give rise to something new.

She’d worked the past two years since her retirement to foster something peaceful inside herself.

Though she was young, it was the end of her career, and she’d dug a hole for her past, filling it with her achievements, ambitions, and skills.

She’d hoped those things would decompose inside herself, break down from lack of use, and become the soil from which a sense of lasting accomplishment could grow.

She could retire like a hero, looking back on a career well spent.

She was wrong.

She fought off the lingering sense of her miscalculation as she prepared her things, changing into a pair of old riding boots and pants with a loose, brown shirt.

Hailey was a problem, her last mission a death sentence, but not the most singular source of her dread.

Instead of decomposing in the peaceful way she imagined, everything she’d buried had festered into a cancerous fear. She felt it in her chest now, radiating like heat at the mere notion of leaving her cabin again.

The world, in all of its unpredictability and severity, scared her more than anything else.

She’d trained long and hard for years to become a good soldier, and at the Dal Hull mining tragedy, in a day, she became a traitor.

She’d started this morning watching a remarkable sunrise, and an hour later, that version of her life was over.

It was as if the surrounding universe was just as conflicted as she was. Unending, unpredictable, uncomfortable conflict.

As she saddled her horse, she couldn’t resist the image of digging into the grave and removing everything she’d buried: her skills in combat, military strategy, drive, bravery. Not quite what it used to be and yet interrupted from becoming what she’d wanted it to be.

Getting back on her horse and embarking on what had once been a familiar journey felt like an imposition into the past.

She rode through the woods of Satellite, a town only by name that was composed of wide ranges of farmland and forests. There wasn’t another human being in sight until she crossed onto the main beaten path to the capital a few hours later. Hours on horseback brought her to the cornfields.

She admired the capital beyond them. It rose in the distance like a great, white giant, the clock tower glimmering like hot gold in the sun.

The white-washed walls reflected the grandeur of an ordered empire, a symbol of hope that, aside from the corruption she knew existed with any system, always burned as a beacon for her.

Unlike the En Sanctans, Statesmen didn’t hide. Unlike the Mystics, the Statesmen didn’t bow to The Eating Ocean or the memory of the Strike.

Statesmen could be proud and severe, but to Ana, they were the embodiment of courage and hope. They were mankind’s best chance at a bright future.

Ana rode past the ring of huts on the outskirts of the capital and then took her horse up the stone paths that wound along the villas of politicians and government officials. The sides facing the town were layered in political flyers. The headings read, “The Great Fright.”

It was a nod to the En Sanctans’ legend of The Great Light, a powerful phenomenon that had apparently hidden many dark mutations and healed the world after the terror of The Ocean’s War.

It was hated by Statesmen, who, as ardent intellectuals and historians, despised the idea of anything being covered up.

John Hailey and the Var had pushed their political agendas under that banner and sent more Statesmen into En Sanctus.

The touted goal was to disprove the existence of The Great Light.

The actual goal, lesser known, was to discover war secrets that could be weaponized against the Mystics now poking at State borders.

Two soldiers in uniform stared as Ana trotted past the gates of the capital building. Dressed in civilian clothes, she imagined such boldness in the capital seemed peculiar. She rode past rows of barracks overlooking the training grounds beyond as she tied up her horse near the stables.

A familiar face greeted her when she entered the storage building next to the barracks.

“Ana?” Pamina said, lowering the book in her hand as she tried to get a better look from behind the protective bars.

With porcelain skin and platinum hair, she looked like a jailed ghost. “What a surprise.” She folded her book over her thumb as she stood from her chair.

“Are you visiting Jasper? He should be out of classes soon.”

“Something like that,” Ana said. She stopped in front of the bars. She removed a copper card from her belt and set it down on the iron desk between them, sliding it through a small window.

Pamina took it, adjusting her glasses as she read the codes etched into the card. She looked up at Ana with those intent, studious eyes.

“Your ID card? You don’t mean to—”

“I’m coming out of retirement. State orders. Do you still have my Atlas here?”

“W-Well yes, but you—you can’t use it, can you?”

“I didn’t say I was. Can I just see it, Pamina?” Ana replied, deadpan.

Pamina scrambled from her chair. “Yes, yes, of course. I’m sorry. I don’t know when to stop sometimes!” She scurried off, her scrawny legs shuffling under a faded blue dress as she disappeared behind a bolted black door.

Ana stepped back from the bars and paced with slow, patient steps around the room.

She scanned the familiar photos, the same ones she thought she’d seen for the last time.

She stopped when her eyes settled on a picture of Santiago and the former Sixth Hour, Rosco.

The two men were grinning at the camera, drinks in each hand, status awards hanging from their necks.

The State military, or Numbers, had twelve generals called Hours, each commanding sixty Minute soldiers with squads of their own.

Rosco had been one of the elite. Being an Hour meant so.

The path to achieving that honor took years of experience, merit, and a rigorous testing process. Having a family history of service in the Numbers didn’t hurt either.

Even among the elite, though, Rosco had been a model of a soldier. He’d retired at forty-six with six years left on his Atlas. He’d died at fifty-two with family all around him. She looked at another photo of her old mentor, Juliana, who’d died three years ago, age forty.

The Atlas was the State’s crowning invention and most powerful weapon.

Many would say it was the only reason the State could resist the Mystics’ incursions for so many years.

The only trouble was, the users had to sacrifice their own lifespan to make it work.

Ana was all too familiar with that sacrifice.

“Ana?” The word jogged her from her thoughts, and she turned to see Pamina with her ID and Atlas in hand.

Ana took her ID and put it away before accepting the ball of rolled velvet, recognizing the weight of her Altas inside.

“Thanks,” she said, and started filling out a form near the bars. She finished writing the details into the form in silence before turning with her Atlas and walking out.

She passed by the capital’s museum with its grand steeple and stained glass, striding into training building B a few buildings down.

She perused the corridors before locating Jasper’s class, nearing what should have been the end of his regular hours.

She stood outside the doorway, listening in on his lecture.

“…Eating Ocean is the source of energy we refer to as Madness. Madness is like ink. Mutations, or more deliberate manifestations, called curses, are like the writing from that ink. Do any of you know where The Eating Ocean came from?”

There was silence in the class.

“Good,” Jasper said, “if anyone raised their hands, I’d be amazed. No one knows, except for maybe the En Sanctans. As far as we know, it appeared out of nowhere and broke the world. Simple as that. Now. Neutralizing Madness and its mutations.”

Jasper started explaining how an Atlas and the time generated from it could neutralize a mutation.

Ana had always understood that The Eating Ocean, an alien force, existed on another plane, in another world, maybe.

People and things with mutations didn’t seem to age, and a bit of The Ocean lived inside every mutation in the form of Madness.

To some, that meant that The Ocean was timeless and maybe even repelled time.

“Mortals are mortals because we have time applied to our lives,” Jasper explained.

“Time restricts energy, and when we run out of time, our energy is released back out into the world to be recycled. We become dirt, another form of energy, to be harnessed again in other ways, like becoming a plant. Now, say we take some of our mortal time and pin it on an immortal energy, like Madness. Through the application of our time, it becomes mortal, and then it can be killed and released back to The Eating Ocean on its own plane of existence. You see, it invades our world, but it can’t play by our rules.

Time is like a pathogen to it, a disease that we are used to living and dying with. ”

“And that’s how we always win,” one student replied.

“Right,” Jasper said. “The ancient world used fire to completely destroy the hosts of Madness, but that takes oil, it’s hazardous, and it’s hard to control.

We use time. It’s how we purged the State from mutations, mutated things, and mutated people.

It’s how we beat back the Mystic empire.

It’s how we preserve what few natural laws are still left as Madness seeks to mutate them. Don’t forget it.”

Ana checked her watch before peering into the classroom to see Jasper, a lanky blond, traversing the room. The gestures of his hands and the methods of his teaching were all perfected practices made to seem deceptively natural. The eyes of the students followed him like a spotlight.