Page 10 of Xerxes Ascendant
“Take this chance to slit your own throat before I do it for you,” Akira snarled at the device before Master Theta’s face had even materialised on the display.
“I see you’re in another of your foul, bratty moods,” Theta commented, seemingly unmoved by the threat. “Are you having trouble finding someone to beat it out of you? Just say the word, darling.”
“Youdaredto stand there and tell them you wereinnocent-”
“You forced my hand that night, you know that,” interrupted his old Master tersely. “If you weren’t so fucking stubborn, Akira, so pointlessly sentimental and weak, we wouldn’t have had to go through any of it. I wouldn’t have had my House seized by the Coterie. You wouldn’t be a sullen, wounded mess. And your little blonde puppy dog wouldn’t be lying comatose in…let’s see.” He paused, eyes now glittering in satisfaction. “Room 33 of the Level E hospital. Did I get that right?”
Akira fell still.
He should have known better than to believe Theta would go quietly. Even though he’d fled as the city shook and crumbled, in the days since he’d apparently been plotting and manipulating as fiercely as he ever had.
“You’ll leave Kyle alone, Simon.”
Theta laughed, slow and devoid of humour. “Icould. If I had other things to distract me, perhaps, such as having my business and life restored to me. You’re going to make sure Randall testifies to the Coterie in my favour.”
A low growl was Akira’s only response.
Theta tsked. “Consider this your one and only warning, Epsilon. You lose me my Mastery, and I will lose you your nuisance of a boyfriend.”
The screen blanked out with the terminated call, the man’s final words ringing in Akira’s ears.
“House Theta for that bitch’s worthless life.”
Its use of the illegal Greek alphabet to name Houses is a clear fuck you from the Coterie. I've heard each Master has their House's letter tattooed over their heart – and as a script other than Universal, the only language permitted to be written or spoken, this is an imprisonable offence. But I suppose if the Xerxian police ever dared to arrest one of the Masters, it would ignite a war between the Coterie and the government that none of us would survive.
-Anonymous musings
CHAPTER 4
Kyle
Kyle was in darkness.
And then there was light. Blinding, bursting light, harsh and close andloud.
“Akira?”
“What? Kyle?”
“Akira,” he murmured, more urgently this time. Kyle reached out, needing to touch him and pull him close with an intensity that bordered on feverish, only his arms felt too heavy to move.
“Kyle, can you hear me? Kyle!”
He blinked. There was no Akira. Just a pale, anxious-looking Indira, his cousin’s blonde hair haloed against the light and her bottom lip puffy and red from where she’d been chewing on it.
He was on his back, lying down. There was softness beneath him – a bed – but he didn’t recognise the white, cheap tiles of the ceiling, or the scuffed walls covered in runed equipment.
“Where are we?” Kyle asked, but the words came out as a helpless, incomprehensible croak.
Indira gently shushed him and brought a polystyrene cup to his lips. He drank the water greedily, wanting to wet his mouth and soothe his throat and wash away the unpleasant taste on histongue all at once, but it was taken away too soon. He mewled his protest.
“You’re in hospital,” his cousin whispered with a hoarse voice of her own, glaring at the pair of hands that had removed the cup from her grasp. They belonged to a nurse, Kyle realised when he turned his head, indicated by both the dark green scrubs she was wearing and her efficient, clinical bustling as his vitals were checked. He stared down numbly at his right arm and all the foreign things sticking out of or attached to his skin: tubes and strips of tape and neatly wrapped gauze.
“Not too much water, Mr. Randall, or you’ll make yourself sick,” the nurse admonished without looking at him. “You’re getting all the hydration you need from your IV.”
“Akira,” Kyle said again, yet now the name brought with it a leaden weight; all the pain and loss that had struck him before...before whatever had happened to him to land him here. Hot tears formed behind his eyes.
But he was given neither the privacy nor the time to cry, for the nurse was soon joined by a doctor and they both proceeded to ask him questions in rapid-fire succession, Indira filling every spare second of silence with her own.
