Depraved by Trent Evans
Chapter 3
The three figures stood around the fire, the flickering flames inside the battered barrel painting crazed, oversized shadows upon the crumbling walls of the shattered building. It was night, and it was cold, and it was—almost—hopeless.
“Neither one of you has to do this.” Anson Merriwether looked to his friends, one, then the other. He was tall, rangy, his close-cropped dark hair sweaty, the grime and dust on his face clear even in the low light. “I’m the only declared Loyalist here. You two can… keep your heads down. I wouldn’t blame you. You’d still be my friends no matter what you chose.”
Lyssa propped her long scoped rifle up, leaning upon it, her violet eyes showing brilliant with the flickering glow of the fire. “You know that’s not something I can ever do, boss. Where you go, I go. Too bad if you don’t like it.”
Anson tipped his head. “What about you, Tom?”
His friend rubbed his chin, the tips of the dirt-stained digits almost as dark as the fingerless gloves he wore. His short, spiked hair was bright blond, almost white, washed out in the firelight, but his eyes were brilliant, clear and striking. His broad, muscled shoulders shrugged.
“It’s a risk. I’m not gonna bullshit you about it. And I don’t like it… smells like a set-up.”
“Here we go again, Tom,” Lyssa sneered, rolling her eyes. “You think everything’s a goddamned set-up.”
Her long dark hair was wrapped up at the back of her head, and though wild and ill-kempt, it didn’t detract from her beauty, the black color almost purple in the firelight. Her pale, slender face shone clean and clear under the harsh illumination, though the slightly darker crescents under her eyes betrayed the same fatigue they all felt.
Anson threw another chunk of structural wood into the bin, a swirl of embers dancing above the battered steel barrel then fading away.
“It is a risk.” Anson sat back on the pile of crumbled cement, the hard angles digging into his ass uncomfortably. “This is Yulia though. And I’m not abandoning her to Beckett Carter. Not for one fucking second.”
“I’m not kidding,” Tom said, cracking the knuckles of his left hand. “This is exactly the sort of shit Carter would set up. Tell me I’m lying.”
“You’re not lying, but you are irritating.” Lyssa met Anson’s gaze. “He drives me nuts, but he does have a point. Smells, all right.”
“I know it—but I’ve got no choice. We don’t know who we can trust anymore, who’s been turned.”
“Harling—and who else?” Lyssa asked.
A gust of chill wind set the flames guttering a moment, then they flared bright once more.
Anson shook his head. “Unknown. With Harling working for Carter now, there’s no telling. Might have turned more. Likely, actually. Harling’s got to have enough help to keep her there—so we have to assume a few of the officers, maybe a handful of rank and file too. He’d want to keep it quiet. The less who know, the easier that would be for him.”
Anson had served a long while with Benton Wyndham, both before the Schism—when The Awakening split off from the rebels led by Beckett Carter—and after. It had always been Wyndham’s nagging fear that Carter would somehow peel off a few Awakening officers, convince them to betray the under-resourced and undermanned Awakening before it could really get on its feet as its own distinct entity.
“Strangle the baby in the crib.” That had been how the soft-spoken Wyndham had termed it.
It had turned out to be a bitter prophecy.
“What if they’re all in on it?” Tom held up his hands to the fire. “What then?”
“Hard to believe that, but if they are? Then we’re cooked.” Anson stared into the flames as he said it. “But we’ve got to try.”
“You need a bigger team,” Tom said, more a question than a declaration.
“Too risky. The bigger the signature, the more attention we’ll get—and not just from TSS sentries. If there are a few Loyalists still at Gamma, we’re going to need them—and we’re not going to be able to figure out who they are until we get inside.”
He already had some idea of where she was likely to be kept, assuming Harling hadn’t made some sort of structural modification to the base. The most logical—and secure place—was to hold her in the brig. It would be hiding her in plain sight, assuming there were enough guards to go along with it.
It’s what he’d have done, were he in Harling’s shoes.
What still bothered him was the why. Why Yulia? Yes, she’d been at her father’s side since the very beginning of the Awakening, but she wasn’t a fighter. Yes, she advised him, but she was still young. He would have guessed she was more an emotional support to Benton than anything else.
But she was also a friend. And a good woman.
The world was desperately short of good people at that moment.
Most of all, she was the daughter of his dead best friend.
Did he really think Benton wouldn’t do the very same thing if their positions were reversed?
Still, the question nagged him. It didn’t really add up—and yet people do things for a reason.
If it didn’t add up, then that meant there was something—likely a critical piece of the puzzle—that he was missing.
And therein laid the danger, that unknown.
Because too often the unknown… was what got a man killed.
“You’ve got me,” Lyssa drawled, sliding her gaze pointedly over to Tom.
The blond soldier grimaced, then shouldered his rifle, the palm of his hand settling over the top of the receiver.
“I’m probably gonna regret this—if I live long enough that is—but I’m in.”
Anson poured the contents of his canteen over the fire, until the flames spluttered out with a hiss, darkness falling once more.
White smoke drifted upward, angling away in the chill of the wind.
“Then let’s go get our girl.”