Something is different. He is moving much faster and hitting harder than before. His movements are more fluid as well. It is as if you are fighting another person entirely.
“I still owe you for Rianno, Chiyva, you bastard,” Cameron snarled.
Is that Tao speaking? How is that possible?
The boy attacked again, hitting Jacob from all sides, no longer moving as predictably as before. It took Jacob several seconds to adjust to this new speed and movement, but he was a veteran of thousands of fights. No matter what new trick Tao and his vessel had somehow pulled over him, it wasn’t enough. Cameron managed to hit him a few more times, once even cracking Jacob’s rib, but in the end, experience and age won out.
Jacob got Cameron trapped in a vice and grinned as he torqued the boy’s head. “Hell waits for you, betrayer!”
Before he could complete his motion, Jacob was blindsided from the back and knocked to the ground. He looked up in time to see Jill half-carrying, half-dragging her son toward the ocean.
“No!” Jacob screamed, drawing his pistol and firing.
It was too late. The two betrayers reached the cliff and tumbled over.
Jacob scrambled to his feet and ran to the edge. He could hear them crashing through the foliage, but he saw nothing in the darkness. It was a steep drop, thick with vegetation that hid their whereabouts. They could have fallen anywhere. Jacob took a step forward and began to climb down.
“No, Adonis,” one of his men said, grabbing his arm. “The transport is here, and the police are arriving. We have to leave now!”
He is right. The scientist is the priority. Vengeance can wait.
“No!” Jacob screamed, throwing his head back to roar at the sky. The fates were testing his patience yet again. He looked back over the cliff one last time, desperately searching for any signs of his prey as his men dragged him toward the helicopter waiting on the grass by the trailer. Then, he looked at his man picking himself up off the ground. The woman must have overpowered him. With a dismissive scowl, Jacob pulled out his pistol and shot him in the face. That was the price of failure.
“It isn’t over, Tao,” he said as he got into the helicopter. “The inevitable comes.”
36 Backup
Timestamp: 3389
Eventually, Cameron joined us, and we were a whole family once more. I would like to say that it was because he missed his parents, but it’s really because he was heartbroken over the death of Eva, his grandparents’s dog. Still, he was getting older and rapidly becoming the one thing I’d dread he’d become. There was nothing I could do to stop him. It had been inevitable from the day Tao had entered his body.
I decided then to just embrace the inevitable. Instead of trying to prevent my child from becoming a Prophus, which he would anyway, with or without my blessing, I decided to make him the best damn agent possible. Together with Tao, I began to teach him everything I knew.
The Frenchman Prie was a relatively poor patient, which was in line with Roen’s experience when it came to babysitting guys like him. He was demanding, obnoxious, arrogant, and was so high-maintenance that they had to allocate him a full-time nurse. Everyone except Marco drew straws; Elias lost. Actually, Sheck and Helen had rigged the straw-pulling so that Elias would lose. Fortunately, he was the most laid-back of the group and took the job in his stride.
The team had spent half the night burying Chase under a tree along the Malheur River. Roen had insisted on doing the majority of the digging. Now, Chase’s empty bed was a constant reminder to Roen of his poor decision-making and the price that came with his mistake.
None of the guys blamed him; they were too good people for that. They all agreed that things happen in the midst of combat that were outside anyone’s control, but he felt their judging eyes when they looked his way. Was he too careful with the enemy? Had his directive inadvertently caused Chase’s death? That thought weighed heavily on his conscience.
When they returned to base, against all their protests, Roen insisted on taking watch for the rest of the night. He grabbed a six-pack from the mini-fridge they had bought for the hole-in-the-ground and was walking toward the guard point before any of them could stop him. For the first hour, he stewed in his own guilt.
He sat down on the lawn chair in the factory alcove overlooking the roads and raised his can of beer. “Rest in peace, Chase Hoffman.” He downed the entire can and threw it at the oil drum in the yard below, missing by a mile. He scowled. “Tao wouldn’t have made that mistake.”
Your people come first; your objective comes second. Everything else is crap.
That’s what Tao would have said. He would have scolded Roen for caring too much about the safety of the enemy and not his own people. And he would have been right. Roen exhaled and picked up a second can of crappy beer. He rotated his shoulder, massaging the muscles up and down his arm and back.
“I’m such a screw-up,” he muttered, downing the second beer and chucking the can at a crate in the corner. He missed. Not surprising. He had been bad at ball sports ever since he tried to put the round peg into the triangle hole as a kid.
A short while later, he heard the clanging of footsteps on metal grating. Marco came up the stairs and pulled a lawn chair next to him. Roen took a can of beer from the cooler and handed it over. Marco clinked cans and chugged half of it before resting it on the ground next to his chair. He threw his head back and sighed, looking at the slowly-fading stars dotting the sky.
“You should get some rest, Roen,” Marco said.
“I told you I have the rest of the night covered. That dank hole creeps me out.”
“Well, I’m taking this watch now. That’s an order. You can chill out here with me if you’d like.”
Roen acknowledged Marco with a slight nod. He had realized over the past few days that he had the guy figured out all wrong. Under the ego was a man who cared as much for the Prophus, and in a way, for Roen’s family, as Roen did. He had heard gossip from the guys about Marco, just snippets here and there. There were very few hosts who had sacrificed as much for the Prophus as Marco’s family had. He owed the guy probably more than a few thanks and apologies. Maybe it was time to finally bury the hatchet. Roen yawned as they continued to sit in silence.
“Get some sleep, Roen,” Marco said. “God knows your mug needs the beauty rest.”
The sun was just coming up from the east, its burned orange rays splashing across the darkened factory yard. Roen caught himself dozing off again and slapped himself awake by putting the now only-cool can of beer to his cheek. He remembered the first time he had had to do one of these exercises. Tao had him watch a patch of water on Lake Michigan for hours. It was pretty soul-crushing. Like all things, though, he got better at it over time. For Roen, the trick was to keep alert with your eyes while forcing your mind to sprint over things that bothered you.
In this case, his mind wandered back to Chase, his now-flattened house, and his family. Doubt crept into him about every decision he had made over the past week. Hell, his entire life. There were only a few times in his life when he had felt self-assured. Not coincidently, it was when he was with Tao.
He wondered where Jill and Cameron were right now. He should have been with them, he shouldn’t have come on this job. He questioned being here even now. Marco had pleaded with him to stay and finish the mission, and out of a sense of duty, Roen had agreed. Again, was that the right decision? He didn’t know. Everything just felt so wrong.
You are being delusional and have gone over the edge. Cut it out.
That’s what Tao would say, but when Roen tried to repeat those words to himself, they felt hollow and useless. It was because he just didn’t believe it. The guilt gnawed at him. What if he had watched out for his men more than for the IXTF? What if he had insisted on staying at home with his wife and son instead of coming here with Marco? What if he had not listened to Tao and stayed with Jill when Cameron was small? What if he had not gone to that Decennial? Sonya would still be alive then. All those what ifs, these decisions that all led to his life now. Was he doing the right thing? Most undoubtedly. Would he have made the same choices? Undoubtedly not.