Page 117 of Villains Series

THREE WEEKS AGO

EON

“WHAT about you, Rush?”

Dominic blinked. He was sitting at a table on the upper level of the canteen, Holtz on one side and Bara on the other. After getting Dom the job, Holtz had stayed close, helped him fit in at EON. A cheerful blond kid—Dom couldn’t help but think of him that way, even though Holtz was a year older—with a mischievous smile and a perpetually good mood, they’d served together, two tours, before Dom stepped on an ED and found himself retired. t was nice to have a shared shift break, Bara’s presence notwithstanding.

Rios sat alone one table over, the way she always did, a book open beside her food. Every time a soldier passed too close, she shot them a look, and they retreated.

“What about me?”

asked Dom.

“f you were an EO,”

said Bara around a mouthful of sandwich.

“what would your power be?”

t was an innocuous question—inevitable, even, given the environment. But Dom’s mouth still went dry.

“—don’t know.”

“Oh, come on,”

pressed Bara.

“You can’t tell me you haven’t thought of it.”

“’d want X-ray vision,”

said Holtz.

“Or the ability to fly. Or the ability to transform my car into other cars whenever get bored.”

Rios looked up from her own table.

“Your mind,”

she said.

“truly is a marvel.”

Holtz beamed, as if it were a compliment.

“But,”

she continued.

“if you bothered to read the eval files, you’d know that an EO’s power is tethered to the method of their NDE and the state of their mind at the time of incident. So tell me,”

she said, turning in her chair.

“what kind of accident gets you the power to change the model of your car?”

Holtz made a comical frown, as if genuinely trying to puzzle it out, but Bara was clearly bored.

“What about you, Rios?”

he shot back.

“What would your power be?”

She returned to her book.

“’d settle for the ability to create quiet.”

Holtz let out a nervous laugh.

Dominic let his eyes slide over the group.

He hadn’t expected it to get easier—hadn’t wanted it to get easier—but it had. That was the thing, it was amazing what you could get used to, how quickly the strange became mundane, the extraordinary normal. After leaving the army, he’d missed the camaraderie, the common ground. Hell, he’d missed the uniforms, the orders, the sense of routine.

What Dominic could never get used to were EON’s cells. Or rather, the people kept inside them.

The complex’s crisp white walls had become familiar—the obscure maze reduced to clean lines of rote muscle memory—but there would never be anything comfortable about the purpose of this place. f Dom ever found himself forgetting the building’s true design, all he had to do was look at the surveillance footage, click through the images of three dozen holding cells.

Now and then, when Dom drew rounds, he had to walk those cells, deliver meals, listen to the EOs beyond the fiberglass beg for him to let them out. Sometimes, when he drew eval, he had to sit across from them—the prisoners in their cells and Dominic in his camouflage as human—and ask them about their lives, their deaths, their memories, their minds. He had to pretend he didn’t understand what they meant when they talked about those final moments, the desperate thoughts that followed them down into the dark, the ones that pulled them back out.

Across the table, Holtz and Bara were still tossing around hypothetical powers, and Rios had gone back to her book, but Dominic stared down at his food, his appetite suddenly gone.