Hard Reset (Relics Singularity Thrillers Book 2), page 18
From the moment they'd cleared the final five feet of the lift's ascent and stepped off onto solid ground, Solomon Merrick had not taken his eyes off the young man standing next to Ary. They'd moved left, out of the platform's way, and stopped at the cliff's extreme edge with the canyon dropping behind them, and Sol had stood there with his mouth opening and closing as if the mechanism for speech had become temporarily unavailable to him. Ravi had never seen the man at a loss for anything.
Ary seemed surprised too. She'd gone immediately to the young man and kissed him, then turned and waited, her eyes moving between Sol and her companion and back to Ravi, trying to read a situation that clearly hadn't developed the way she'd expected it to.
Sol broke the silence first. His voice came out at a register Ravi hadn't heard from him before — something stripped of the professional composure, something raw underneath it.
"K — Kellan?"
The young man held his stare. "Solomon."
Sol took a slow step forward. The words still weren't flowing. Ravi watched the man's face work through something that had the shape of disbelief and the texture of recognition, the two things arriving simultaneously and neither one yielding to the other.
The young man — Kellan — took a step as well.
Ravi saw it before he understood it. The step wasn't toward Sol. It was a pivot, a repositioning, the specific movement of someone bringing their dominant hand side into alignment with a target. Kellan's hand dropped to his hip and came up with a handgun in a single practiced motion.
"No!" Ravi heard himself shout.
The gun fired.
Sol stopped his forward motion. His body registered the impact before his face did, the sequence that Ravi had seen before — the body knowing before the mind catches up. He didn't fall, not yet. He stood there and kept looking at Kellan with the same expression he'd had before the shot, as if the shooting were additional information about a situation he was still trying to understand.
Kellan fired again. Then a third time.
Sol went to his knees.
Ravi moved. He was at Sol's side and dropping before he'd made a decision to do it, catching the man's upper body as he began to fall forward, taking the weight of him and pulling back, trying to keep his face off the ground. His mind was running two tracks simultaneously — the one screaming at him to get up and run in the opposite direction, because they were going to finish this and he was next, and the quieter one underneath it that had already made a different decision and wasn't negotiating.
They could have killed you hours ago, the quieter track said. In the cave. On the platform. At any point in the last day. They didn't.
The two tracks didn't resolve into anything comfortable. He held Sol and stayed.
"I should have done this a long time ago, Solomon."
Sol sputtered. Blood came with it, a dark and immediate welling that he swallowed back with the particular stubbornness of a man who was going to use what he had left deliberately rather than let it go. He blinked. He was still looking at Kellan, still with the expression that was trying to make sense of something. His head moved in Ravi's grip — not weakly, but finding a position, orienting.
Ravi looked at Ary. She had turned away, her arms crossed, her jaw set in a line that was rigid and deliberate. The posture of someone who had decided not to witness something and was holding to that decision through force of will.
"Ary," Ravi said. "Look at me. Look at him."
She didn't move.
"Why?" Sol's voice was barely a voice — a shaped exhale, the word assembled from whatever he had left.
Ravi wasn't sure at first what the question was aimed at. Then he looked at Kellan and understood.
Kellan was staring down at both of them with the focused intensity of someone who had rehearsed this moment in detail and found that the reality of it was both exactly what he'd expected and somehow different in texture. His teeth were clenched. His eyes were hard in the way of something that has been pressed hard for a long time. Behind him, the older men stood in a silence that had the quality of discomfort — people who were present at something they'd agreed to and were now inhabiting the agreement.
"Why?" Sol asked again.
Kellan walked closer and went down on one knee, bringing himself level with the man in Ravi's arms. He was close now. Close enough that Ravi could see the specific quality of what was in his eyes, which was not pure rage — rage would have been simpler. This was something that had rage in it and other things as well, layered over years into something more complicated than any single feeling.
"Why?" Kellan repeated the word back at him, the way people repeated questions that they found almost insulting in their simplicity. "Because of what you did." His nostrils moved. His eyes made a quick involuntary dart away and returned. "You —"
"Kellan." Sol swallowed. "Kellan, there was no — I had no choice."
Kellan stood.
He looked at Ravi for a moment — not with hostility, but with the assessment of someone registering a fact — then back down at the top of Sol's head. He took a step back. Then he brought his leg through with the full force of a man with reach and weight behind him and kicked Solomon Merrick as hard as he could.
The impact transmitted through Sol's body and through Ravi's left arm simultaneously, and Ravi felt himself snap backward with it. He grabbed for Sol and his hands found fabric and then the fabric was moving and then his hands found nothing at all.
He was on his back on the ground at the cliff's edge, one hand extended over the drop, grasping at air that didn't have Sol in it anymore.
He lay there for a second with his hand still extended and his mind running the calculation that it couldn't help running, the one that confirmed what had just happened, and then he pulled his arm back and pushed himself to sitting.
Kellan was walking back to the group of men. They parted for him as he passed through them, the automatic deference of people who understood the hierarchy they were in. He lifted one hand in a casual, backward wave and they followed him, falling into movement behind him, the whole group drifting away from the cliff's edge and into the camp without looking back.
Ary stayed.
Ravi sat on the ground for a moment and felt the adrenaline doing what adrenaline did — the trembling at the periphery of his muscles, the pressure behind his eyes, the specific fullness in his throat that he recognized and rejected. He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes for a second, then stood.
He walked to her.
"You —" He stopped. Started again. "You —" The words weren't finding their shape. He knew what he wanted to say and couldn't locate the sequence that would say it. It was her fault and it wasn't her fault and it was still her fault.
He reached her as she turned, and he saw her face. The fear was there, genuine and immediate, the same fear he'd seen when he'd found her behind the boulder two nights ago. He didn't find it as disarming this time.
"I had to," she said. Her voice was quiet. Direct, not pleading. "Ravi. I had to."
He stood in front of her and breathed. He looked at her face — the bruising still visible under the morning light, the cut on her cheek beginning to close — and made himself stay with what he was looking at rather than what he was feeling about it.
"I know you don't believe me," she said. "But it's true."
He took several slow breaths. Then he closed his eyes and held the darkness behind them for a moment, and when he opened them he saw the same face he'd seen at the boulder — the same clarity in the eyes, the same directness, the same quality that had moved him then and that he was now uncertain what to do with.
"It's your fault he's dead, Ary," he said. The words came out at a level and measured volume that was somehow harder than shouting would have been. "I'm going to make you pay for that."
She turned and walked away.
Ravi stood at the cliff's edge and let the moment finish itself, and then he looked up and looked around and took inventory of where he was.
The camp spread out around him with the organized logic of a military installation that had been operational long enough to become comfortable with itself. Smaller than the valley camp he'd looked down at in the dark — considerably smaller — but organized with the same hierarchical arrangement of tents, the same distribution of equipment and personnel that spoke to people who knew what they were doing and had been doing it for a while. The weapons he'd counted among Kellan's group were representative of the general inventory he could see — these were not people running short on anything that mattered.
Men and women moved through the camp's lanes with the purposeful routine of an operation in progress. None of them had looked at the clifftop. None of them had reacted to the shots, or to what had followed the shots. Whatever had just happened at the cliff's edge was either known to all of them and already processed, or it existed in a category that didn't require their attention.
He couldn't run. Couldn't hide, not in a camp this organized. Couldn't fight his way through it with his hands and two bullet holes that weren't finished healing.
So he went after her.
He moved at a pace that was quick without being a run, threading between tents and people, keeping Ary's back in his sightline. No one looked at him. No one stepped into his path or called out to him or reached for a weapon. He was either expected to be here or not worth the effort of dealing with, and he couldn't tell which from the inside.
Ary ducked into one of the larger tents near the camp's center and Ravi followed her through the opening a few seconds behind.
The tent was empty. Large enough to hold several dozen people at the tables that filled most of the interior space — long boards on wooden legs, chairs underneath, a functional and impersonal dining arrangement. Stacks of dishes on a far table, large pots beside them, the setup of a meal operation between meals. The canvas walls diffused the morning light into something even and shadowless.
Ary stood just inside, waiting. As if she'd known he'd follow and had calculated approximately how long it would take.
"Why did you bring me here?" Ravi kept his voice at conversation level. "Was I incidental? You needed to deliver Solomon, and I happened to be standing next to him?"
She shook her head. The motion was small but definitive. She looked around the tent's interior, confirming what her presence there had already suggested — they were alone. When she spoke again, her voice was lower than it had been at the clifftop.
"Kellan wanted Solomon," she said. "That's true. But I —" She stopped. Started again. "I was looking for you specifically."
Ravi waited.
"You're lying to me," he said.
"I'm not."
"Then why." Not a question. A demand.
She looked at him with the eyes he'd originally found so disarming — clear, direct, nothing performing anything. Whatever she was about to say had been carried for a long time and had the weight of something that had been carried for a long time.
"Because I blame you," she said, "for the death of my family."
RAVI_
Ravi was visibly startled. The words landed the way blunt things landed — without preparation, without cushioning, just impact.
"I — I'm sorry?" He shook his head. "I'm not sure what you think I —"
"You are the reason my family was taken from me." Her voice was level, which was worse than if it had been raised. "Every single one. All of them. My parents, my brothers — all of them, Ravi."
"This has to be a mistake, Ary. I don't have any idea what you're —"
She reached out and grabbed his shirt, pulling him forward until there was almost nothing between their faces. "Listen to me. I told Kellan I would get both of you back here." She didn't release her grip. "When Grouse called it in — when he reported you and Solomon were in the area — Kellan's eyes lit up the way you saw out there. He's wanted to kill Solomon Merrick for years. There was nothing you or I could have done to change what was going to happen on that cliff. Nothing."
She released him and stepped back. She looked at the floor for a moment, then back up. Her small frame was planted solidly on the dirt, the kind of stillness that came from having made decisions and being on the other side of making them. "He was going to go find you himself. I told him I'd deliver Solomon directly to him, if he let me bring you in first."
"If you got me?"
"If he didn't kill you."
Ravi took a slow breath in through his nose. "Still — why —"
"Stop." The single word had the quality of something that had run out of patience. "I told you already. And no — I'm not going to kill you. That's not what this is." She paused, and something shifted in her expression, not softening exactly but moving toward something more complicated than anger. "Don't think you're the only person who's experienced loss. You and I have more in common than you know. I know you understand what it means to lose people."
"I know what it means to lose everything," Ravi said.
She watched him for a moment. Then she rotated her head very slightly to one side.
Ravi realized, a half-second too late, that she wasn't nodding at him.
He screamed as his arms were pinned to his sides — two sets of hands, strong and practiced, coming in from behind and pressing his limbs against his body with the efficient grip of people who had done this before and didn't need to think about it. He hadn't heard them enter. Hadn't registered any change in the tent's ambient sounds. They'd been there, waiting, the whole time.
Ary's signal.
He glared at her. She looked back, and for just a moment — before the blank composure resettled over her face — her eyes held something that wasn't calculation or victory. Something that looked almost like apology. As if the eyes had decided to be honest about something the rest of her face had decided to conceal.
They took him to the ground, working his wrists and ankles with cord, quick and efficient. Then he was pulled upright and sideways — roughly, the handling of someone who was cargo now rather than a person — and placed into a metal chair near the table in the corner. The impact of being dropped into the seat sent a jolt through his wounds that he expressed as a grunt and nothing more. He kept his eyes on Ary, who watched the process with an expression calibrated to suggest disinterest and not quite achieving it.
He wanted to fight. Wanted to shout, to throw his weight against the bindings, to do something that was the opposite of sitting in a chair tied to a chair. But his wounds told him what that would produce, and his brain agreed with his wounds. Even if he got free — even if both of those things happened — he was in a camp full of people who were not on his side, and he had no next step beyond free.
He sat in the chair and thought instead.
Ary had played them from the start. From the moment he'd found her behind the boulder, from the moment she'd looked at him with those clear, direct eyes and said I don't have a choice and he'd believed her, she had been moving them toward this. All of it — the tent, the hill, the valley, the cave, the lift — it had been a route, and she had known every turn of it, and he had walked every turn willingly because she'd found the specific thing that made him want to believe her.
And yet something was still nagging at him. He turned it over while the men finished tying the knots and checked their work. What did she actually want from him? Not his death — she'd had multiple opportunities for that and hadn't taken any of them. Not his compliance, exactly, because compliance wasn't a thing he offered and she seemed to know that. She wanted him here, in this chair, at this specific moment, waiting for something.
She waited until both men had finished. "Is he coming?" she asked.
One of the Unders turned to look at her, the slight adjustment of someone who had been successfully unnoticed and was registering the return of attention. "Should be here within the hour."
"Tell him we're ready in here."
The man nodded. Both of them left.
Ary crossed to the chair and ran her hand along the cords binding his arms and legs, checking the tension, finding no give. She stepped back and looked at him with the expression he'd been trying to name since the boulder — fascinated, almost reluctant, as if she'd arrived at a place she'd been navigating toward for a long time and found it more complicated than she'd prepared for.
"Now what?" Ravi asked.
"We wait."
"Who's coming?"
"Peter Grouse." She said it without drama. "He runs this region. He heard you and Solomon were in the area and left whatever he was doing immediately." She paused. "We're also preparing for a move against the Relics settlement east of here. The timing worked out."
Grouse. He'd heard the name in the other camp, in fragments, the name that came up when people were explaining why something had happened or was about to happen.
"How did he know we were here?"
She didn't answer that, which was its own answer.
"Why does Grouse care about us?"
"I don't think he does, specifically. You're a way to get to Myers Asher. That's who he cares about."
"I don't know where Myers is."
"He doesn't seem to believe that."
Ravi sat with that for a moment, then looked up at her. "Ary. I don't think you want to kill me."
She raised an eyebrow. "No?"
"No. And I don't think you want me to be killed either."
She made a small sound that was in the vicinity of amusement. "You're not exactly in a position to negotiate."
"I'm not negotiating. I'm being honest with you, which is more than you've been with me." He held her gaze. "You told me I had something to do with your family. Something I did. I don't know what that was. But I think you know I didn't mean harm by it — whatever it was." He paused. "I think that's actually the problem."
She moved toward him and raised her hand, and he thought for a moment she was going to follow through on it. She didn't. Her hand stopped, the motion incomplete, and he could see the trembling in it before she pulled it back.
