“So this was his doomsday,” Duran said. “But he wouldn’t have stuck around. I knew he had an evac plan because he told my mahmen and she told me. He never planned to die with his flock, and he was going to take her with him. He used to say, ‘If the red lights start to flash, we have three minutes before the compound blows apart. I will come and get you.’ I guess the explosives failed.”
As Ahmare got to the bottom, she wanted to throw up. The blood had rivered down the aisles and pooled around the base of the stage, called by gravity toward the focal point, the last offering to an evil, mortal god.
Her boots left prints, as if she were walking on the silt of a dried riverbed—and she thought of Rollie’s missing head, and his blood on the dirt, spreading out like the Mississippi River. It had glistened in the night. Was it dry now? Yes, and some of it would have been absorbed into the thirsty earth.
She looked over at Duran and didn’t know what to say. It was all too much.
His eyes swung back to her. “I never knew his name.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The male who died in front of me. I never knew anyone’s name—well, except for Nexi, and she told it to me only after I got her to the bunker, when she was thanking me. I informed her it was a team effort, and that was the truth. She was the one who figured out the escape route and the timing of it all. She’s brilliant like that.”
He looked around again. “You know, my mahmen used to tell me her father’s name all the time. I couldn’t figure out why, but now . . . I think she wanted to give it to me. She couldn’t quite get there, though.”
Ahmare knew that she would never forget what he looked like, the risen son, his hair chopped by a blade’s thin edge, his eyes wary and pained, his big body magnificent and unbowed under all he had endured.
And there was that collar around his throat, locked on tight, blinking a red light.
It was a symbol of everything that had marked his life: He had never been free. He had been ever a captive.
“What was her father’s name?” Ahmare said hoarsely.
“It doesn’t matter now.” He paused. “Theo. It was . . . Theo.”
Going around, she ascended the five steps and joined him on the stage. The view from the focal point of the arena was gruesome, the full magnitude of the deaths the stuff of nightmares.
How could anyone do this to other people? she wondered. It was murder even though the cult members had volunteered for it.
“We’ll see about the beloved now,” Duran said. “Enough of the past.”
Lost in his story, she had forgotten about everything else—except . . . “Oh, God, was your mahmen Chalen’s female, too?”
He laughed in a short, hard burst. “No.”
“But then she’ll be dead, too, right? The Dhavos must have killed Chalen’s female, too. Or . . . did he leave and take her with them?”
Shit, her brother.
“We’ll find out. This way—”
“Wait.” She stopped him. “First this.”
He turned around with expectation on his face, like he was ready to answer a question. That expression changed quick as she took the trigger to his collar out of her holster.
Placing the black box on the floor between them, she lifted her boot over the control. “You deserve your freedom. Just the same as everyone else.”
With that, she slammed her steel-reinforced sole down with all the anger she felt at what had been done to him, to his mahmen, to all the innocent, wayward souls who had died here.
The trigger box broke into pieces. The red light on the front of the collar dimmed.
And was extinguished.
It was an incomplete freedom, of course, as he would never not be tied to the circumstances of his birth or the terrible acts of his father. But he could choose his path forward. Just as she had chosen a path forward from the deaths of her parents.
No one else at the helm.
“What have you done?” he whispered.
“Fuck Chalen,” she replied.
24
WHAT ABOUT YOUR BROTHER?”
As Duran asked the question, he knew Ahmare had already answered it by crushing the trigger to his restraint collar. But he wanted to make sure he understood what she meant.
“I’ll save you both.” She shook her head. “That’s the way this has to end. I cannot accept any other outcome.”
He glanced out at the skeletons and then thought of the empty corridors of the facility. It seemed cruel to mention that outcomes were not always acceptable. That sometimes they were even worse than un-acceptable. But he appreciated what she was doing for him, what it implied . . . what it meant.
An impulse to kiss her mouth occurred to him, but not here. Not in the space where all these deaths had occurred—it would be like turning something special into a bad omen, as if the setting could contaminate the contact.
“Thank you,” he said in a voice that cracked.