Page 10 of The Infinite Glade
“To takeyoudown,” Mikhail muttered, his eyes fluttering. St. Petersburg burned in the distance; the land would be scarred for eternity. She winced, but knew well enough not to scream out all the obscenities she wanted to hurl at Mikhail—the islanders might hear and would surely come running.
The space between Alexandra’s eyebrows burned. She pinched it. It took all she had to hold back a deep, visceral string of words. She instead whispered to him, quiet and calm.
“Dear Mikhail, you have not taken me down.” Her mind’s eye blossomed red with anger, her vision static again, but her words floated with incredible force, as if someone else had taken over her body. She held this man hostage with her hatred. The red aurora completely blanketed her mind. “I am standing here. And I am alive. The city and the people will suffer, but the Evolution will live on forever. You are a failure.” She couldn’t help but smile, feeling a bit mad herself—but the Cure waited for her along the coast. She would travel to the Villa, and all of this would be but a blip in history. A small, meaningless, bump in the road to Evolution.
Those who don’t evolve, die.
“No . . .” Mikhail groaned.
“Yes. You couldn’t do what you needed to, so you trained an entire army to kill me—but they are failures, too.” For just a moment, she was flattered for what Mikhail had gone through, sneaking off every other month for years to gather an army. She felt certain his absences and the Hollowings were intertwined. That he initiated the Hollowings to kill others in order to satiate his own need for madness, just enough to focus on his main task at hand. And what an opulent plan it was. What an absurd waste of time to train hundreds of soldiers to rise up and kill her, while he couldn’t find his way out of a crashed Berg.
The Evolution took care of itself, as it always did.
Flaring justice. Flaring justice.
“It wasn’t you . . .” Mikhail’s head dropped to his shoulder. Confusion. Madness.
She slapped him awake again. “Speak!”
Mikhail coughed. “It’s not just about you. Your ego . . .” He choked out a laugh. “Your ego is as big as your vision, if you think this war is just about you!” He coughed again. “The Godhead is everything your ideas touched. Every place you put your plan into motion. It’s all been a lie. Everything’s a lie that had to be destroyed so the truth . . . the truth could evolve back to it’s original form . . .”
Alexandra’s stomach burned.The truth.Mikhail didn’t know his ass from an eyelash. “What do you know about the truth?” she asked, remembering all the ways Mikhail’s nightmares had become his reality. All the nightmare images of fire and war that he’d discussed with Nicholas. He had created the very thing he feared most.
“Evolution . . .” He reached for his back as he continued to cough. “True Evolution . . .” He spat a wad of yellow phlegm. A peasant would have had more class. “You’ve learned nothing from being a part of the Godhead? You think the power you hold is real?” He gagged on his own coughs. “Nothing is real . . .”
The man couldn’t be more wrong.
She spoke with measured calm. “You never had any power in the Godhead.” He’d always held them back. She’d felt him working against her; she just had no idea the scale of it. “That’s how we’re different, you and I . . .”
He opened his eyes and his giant pupils met hers. For a moment he stopped his mumbling and his squealing and just looked at her like he used to, before everything—including their names—changed. After Nicholas brought him back from Crank Palace and The Gone, his mind never quite recovered, despite the visions he claimed to see. She wondered how much of Mikhail’s reality was purely manufactured by Nicholas—telling himwhatto see andhowto see it. She’d never forget the week or two in between Alexandra losing Mikhail for good and finding herself, hertrue self,as Nicholas called it. The version of Mikhail after The Gone was never reallyhim. That bodied human held the memories of his life inside of it, but that body wasn’t Mikhail anymore than Mikhail was a Godhead.
“We’re not that different,” he whispered. Wrong again. Alexandra leaned into the pilot seat of the Berg and she gently, lovingly, caressed Mikhail’s face until the lines etching his pain slowly smoothed themselves out.
“We are different, dear Mikhail.” She leaned closer and closer, like she might kiss him, give him one last forgiving moment of affection. Or maybe help him out of the tangled mess of the Berg’s safety latch. But when she leaned in close, she whispered, “Because I can easily do what you never could.”
She pinched his nose shut.
And nodded her head as if to convince herself thatyes, this needed to happen.
Yes. It was time.
She pressed herself hard against Mikhail’s chest, trapping his arms, and took the corner of her long mustard-colored Pilgrim’s cloak with her free hand. She shoved the thick material deep into Mikhail’s mouth, pushed it all the way to his throat. His nostrils tried to puff out, but her fingers kept them pinched shut. He tried the usual squealing and wiggling, but like a pig already caught, he wouldn’t struggle long. His eyes widened, as if in that exact moment Mikhail escaped his own mind and finally saw Alexandra fully for all that she was and all that she had been. The Berg straps only tightened as he struggled, his muffled noises sounding no different than a dying pig as they faded. She never wavered, never weakened. Finally, the straps that tangled Mikhail loosened themselves from the slack of his lifeless body.Flaring Justice, Flaring Justice.
The Flare be damned.
The Remnant Nation be damned.
Mikhail be damned.
At last, there was only One.
Soldiers were trained for stealth.
To remain unseen while at the same timeseeingeverything.
He watched as Alexandra took a step back from the Berg and smoothed out the wrinkles in her Pilgrim’s cloak. Minho ducked down behind a thorn bush. After witnessing the supposed Godhead snuff the life out of someone with her own clothing, he couldn’t take chances. His finger rested on the trigger of his gun with the woman in his sights. Kneeling in stealth-mode, he watched through the scope as she walked back in the direction of the coast. Years of training from the Remnant Nation pumped through him as he slowed his breath. Steadied his gun. And exhaled, ready to shoot.
She abruptly stopped walking, and Minho lost her in his scope.Did she see him?Every instinct from childhood told him to realign and pull the trigger. She’d be dead before she even knew it. No one in the group would know it, either. He could time any shot with the sounds of war in the background. In half a second Minho could end the Remnant Nations’ lifetime fight to kill the Godhead, dispose of her body with the other body in the Berg, and fly everyone the hell out of there.
