All her blinds are drawn, making her office seem even more cave-like than most of the buildings on Avon. Now that I’ve had a chance to look around, I can see empty ration packets strewn about, dirty coffee mugs littering the drinks station and her desk. It looks like she’s been holed up here for a week.
Her voice is ragged when she answers. “Everyone goes mad, everyone. Except for you. Why don’t you? Why don’t you?” She leans forward, bracing her hands against the armrests of my chair, her face only a few inches away.
I did, I want to scream. I killed over half a dozen people. Except I didn’t. Tarver Merendsen proved that.
“I don’t know,” I whisper instead.
“The facility you saw wasn’t military,” she says finally. “It belonged to LaRoux Industries.”
My pulse quickens—I have to tread carefully to get the answers I need. “Why? What interest do they have in Avon?”
“They approached me when I was first assigned here, said they were working on a way to stop the Fury. They said all the base commanders for the past ten years had been allowing them to do their research here.”
But why? To what end? I open my mouth, but Towers is still talking, her head down, mumbling in a low, droning voice that frightens me.
“We find them out there sometimes,” she mumbles. “Soldiers taken by the Fury. Drowned or buried in quicksand or dead with guns in their hands and bullets in their brains. They go east, into no-man’s-land, if there’s no one nearby to kill when they snap. They’re looking for it. They’re looking for the place. But it’s moving, always moving. It’s never in the same place twice. I tried to find it, but…”
If I didn’t have reason to believe in at least some of what she was saying, I would tell her she’d lost her mind. Her gaze is wild, her eyes sunken, lips chapped. She hasn’t been taking care of herself. She clearly hasn’t been sleeping. She looks like I did, drowning in guilt the morning after the massacre at the rebel base, when I believed I’d killed all those—
I freeze. “Sir, what have you done?”
Commander Towers shakes her head. “It seemed like nothing at the time. An extra bonus finds its way into my account every month, and I provide copies of our medical records. Sometimes the bodies disappear, the ones we find in the swamp. You have to understand, LaRoux Industries conducts such revolutionary medical research, and no one else is helping us, helping my soldiers. I thought they might have an answer to the Fury. You understand that, you know what it is to live and die with your platoon.”
“Yes, sir,” I say cautiously, keeping my voice free of judgment. I’m not sure I would have done differently in her position, and I want her to keep talking.
But it’s like she doesn’t even hear me.
“I can’t do it anymore,” she’s whispering. “That place, the things they study—the Fury’s only getting worse. Taking civilians now, like that man Quinn with no history of violence. I’ve told them I won’t cover for them anymore, Lee. And I’m telling you, in case…” She swallows, taking a deep breath that restores a little of the sanity to her expression. “In case something happens to me.”
My palms are sweaty, pressed against the seat of the chair. “Why me?”
“Why you,” she repeats. “That’s what they want to know. I’ve figured it out. LRI wants to know why you don’t snap, why you never get the dreams. That’s why you’re still here. Lee, they didn’t just pay me to look the other way. They paid me to watch you.”
Dread grips my throat, chokes my voice away. “Who? Who’s doing this?”
She gazes back at me, still standing close. Her mouth opens, then closes. I watch as her eyes focus past me, then snap back, then blur again. “Lee,” she whispers—and then again, this time with an odd urgency. “Lee.”
“Sir?” I force myself to move, to break out of the fear holding me down so I can reach for her. “Sir, what’s happening?”
As I watch, her pupils dilate, her muscles beginning to tremble. It’s what happened to Mori, how she looked as she blew away that teenager in the town. I reach for my gun, but my fingers seize when they touch the familiar grip; I know I can’t shoot my commander.
The first time I watched a fellow soldier die was a few weeks after I went on active duty. We were on a patrol, and he stepped into a poorly constructed—but effective—booby trap leftover from the long-ago rebellion there, and it blew him half to pieces. But there was a moment, after his foot tripped the wire and before the explosives ignited, when we both knew what had happened. His eyes met mine, and that instant unspooled into an eternity stretching between us, the knowledge unfurling on his face that he was about to die, the helplessness on mine, unable to stop it. It was only a split second, but it lasted forever.
That moment comes back to me now as Commander Towers meets my eyes. For an instant, she knows she’s falling.