Page 126 of Bitter Burn
He blushes again.
We’re able to step on the pressure-sensitive floor of the server room with impunity since we used my biometric data to access the space. If we hadn’t, the system would have sensed an unauthorized user and initiated a lockdown protocol, sealing off the space with aluminum shutters and turning the room into a giant, exitless cage.
As we walk, I give the glass-cased rows of CPUs a fleeting glance, along with the mounted cameras on the ceiling, before I speak again. “So you worked for Cashel from the beginning. As a saint?”
“Not quite,” my assistant says.
I lead him to the nearest access terminal, which also happens to be in a row that the cameras can’t see between. Sedge hasn’t checked his iPad again since we started walking, I’ve noticed, and he hasn’t waved up at the cameras again either. Like communicating with Veronica isn’t all that important anymore. “Not a saint…perhaps you were purely administrative then? Or clerical? Ah, I see.” There’d been a tremble in his mouth at the word clerical.
He seems a little irritated with himself for giving this away.
“It must have been quite something to be a priest at Lyonesse,” I observe lightly, kindly. “Hard to be further away from holiness than here. Although if you were working for Cashel, I assume you’d already bargained your holiness away piece by piece. A murder here, a theft there, a handful of plenary indulgences for your troubles. It can be disheartening after a while, I’m sure.”
Sedge—Adam—doesn’t ruffle at my teasing tone. In a way, it seems to relax him, that I’m the same Mark, that I don’t seem to hold my impending death against him. His mouth softens the tiniest bit as he shakes his head. “I liked it here,” he says a little quietly. “I’ve been sent so many places—parish churches, army bases, corporations, militia enclaves—and this is the first place where I thought maybe…”
I don’t prompt him after he stops speaking. I merely open the case for the terminal and start logging on, taking care not to look in his direction. I keep my face as he’s used to it being—cool, unbothered, any wickedness contained to my mouth or perhaps a flashing look—which is harder than it seems right now, when all I want to do is murder anyone who’s laid a finger on Tristan. Who’d even think to threaten his life.
I’d like to murder myself while I’m at it for not seeing this, for not seeing Adam right under my fucking nose, for being outplayed in my own home yet again. For spending the last eighteen years learning how to block, shoot, grapple, and kill when right now, my enemy isn’t a combatant at all but a slender executive assistant who looks on the verge of tears when I glance over at him. Who looks like he’ll blow apart like a rose in July.
But I remind myself that it could be worse. Andrea and Dinah aren’t here, and Ms. Lim and the dog are out of the building. I only have to save Tristan. I don’t even have to save myself.
The soft welcome of my silence seems to work, because Adam finishes his thought as the terminal pulls up the treasury’s index.
“I thought maybe there was a different version of myself I could be. Like maybe if I’d met you before I met Cardinal Cashel, if I’d seen Lyonesse before I went to seminary…” He’s looking down and away now, and when I dare another glance, I see the blue light caught on his colorless eyelashes. Like he’s underwater.
I think of him kneeling in my apartment, the desperation in his eyes when he pressed his face into my lap. Pity rolls through me, hardly perceptible over the anger and adrenaline but there all the same. I can see some of Isolde in Adam, actually, in that inborn need for things that someone in a harness could have given him on a Friday night for free, followed by a kiss and a snack besides. And instead he signed his soul away, quite literally, to the first avatar of power he found, mistaking its votive demands for the actual demands of God, mistaking cruel control for cruel love and order for care. The Church—like the Army, like so many things—is just another toxic Dom when you get down to it.
He still hasn’t checked his iPad or looked up at the ceiling to check the cameras. Maybe because he knows where they are…or maybe because they don’t matter. Maybe because Veronica isn’t even watching the feeds right now.
And then it makes sense—God, yes, of course. Adam already told me that I was going to die, but he’d also told me that he wasn’t planning on fighting me. It would be Veronica who’d come to finish things after my obedience was secured with the little display in the grotto. Which means she’d be away from Tristan.
Which means I might be able to have more than Adam’s word that Tristan will live—I might be able to personally ensure it.
I’m tapping nonsense into the terminal now, trying to tally up the different variables that would affect the time it would take to get from the grotto to here. The grotto and the treasury are on opposite sides of the club, and you’d need the elevator both ways—maybe ten minutes, going at a desultory pace—but Veronica is shorter than me, and she doesn’t know the way as well as I do. So fifteen minutes, maybe?
“We can’t change the past, only the future,” I say absently, changing the view on the index so that it looks like I’m doing something, then toggling over to the treasury room controls. “Although Cashel tried to change the past, didn’t he? Or at least the records of it.”
Adam gives me a sharp glance. “You know about that?”
I don’t want to implicate Lox, but there’s no reason to protect Father Minch. “The Vatican archivist who fled? I took the liberty of visiting him in Fez. And do you know what he said to me as he was dying?”
Adam regards me in silence.
“He said ‘it’s not real.’ At the time, I didn’t know what to make of it. It was almost a whim that had me taking his Bible with me when I left Fez, and it was definitely a whim that had me hunting down some of the titles he had written inside. Titles that either hint or explicitly point to the existence of Ys. Except?—”
“Except only digitally,” Adams interrupts, looking away. “Yes, I know. It’s much easier to forge something when it’s a small matter of Photoshop and hacking of barely protected archival databases.”
“And yet the actual books themselves, the first editions, remained unaltered. No mention of Ys whatsoever.”
I’ve stopped pretending to type now, instead watching Adam as he seems to wrestle with some impulse. Pride, maybe.
“Was it your idea?” I ask.
He slides a look over to me, his bottom lip caught behind his teeth.
“I only ask because it feels like you. You always think of those clever details, of the subtleties other people miss.”
It is pride. A shy smile pulls at his mouth. “His Eminence wanted a mythology. He wanted Ys to feel like something that had always been there, under the surface. Convincing people to work with you is always going to be difficult, whether it’s moving guns into the Schengen Area or giving you a misinformation campaign for free—but if you invite people into an exclusive ancient club instead, if you make them feel like they’ve been chosen, like they have secret knowledge only given to the special among us…it’s very easy to manipulate people then. But such a club would have a footprint going back centuries, and without it, the allure would be gone. Nothing can be too mysterious—actually secret—if you want it to impress people. It needed to be the kind of rumor that would only seem sturdier the more people tried to look into it.”
