The Edifice

43. The Stakes

OLIVIA

"Such adorable conversation in the car, you two," Zagan drawls, slinking out from behind the silhouettes of the abandoned equipment that litters the warehouse. He waves his phone at us. At the press of a button it replays a short burst of our exchange on the drive over. How humiliatingly whiny my voice sounds now, begging Lee's gruff silence for love. "Oh I really bet you're feeling so warm and fuzzy right now, Noble."

Lee's expression is practically a vacuum of emotion. Not even his usual scowl remains, lost to an emptiness more terrible than rage.

"Lee... what's going on?" I don't want to believe my eyes. Surely this isn't Lee's plan to fix this. "When you said get Otis's soul into someone else, are you saying it's-"

"Zagan, yes," Lee finishes. "Wasn't my first choice. Or my choice at all, actually."

"What does that mean? Lee is he controlling you or-?"

I look back at Zagan, standing so casually across from us. His easy handsomeness and the stark cleanliness of his clothes mixes with memories of Robert. Lee's father had lived in near-poverty, face withered and hands too gnarled to vacuum without help. Something begins to build deep in my stomach at the sight of the youngest Creed's many gold chains gleaming like the eyes of their owner. It's not the fear I thought it was, nor is it the energy from Otis's growing power in my bloodstream.

Only when I feel my feet moving beneath me, pacing back from the two men, that I recognise is the emotion within me. Anger.

Lee is a smuggler. The words came from Katy's lips themselves, his history of following orders and moving trophies across from Earth for money and fame. His sudden outburst of spending on lavish meals and wine begins to make sense, let alone his refusal to look Otis and I in the eyes in the last few days. It wasn't fear for me, it was knowing guilt.

"You sold me out." The words are flat as they leave my lips but I breathe fury into them as the full implication of what's happening hits me. "You sold Otis out."

"That's not what's happening," Lee says placatingly as Zagan mimes the drop of a penny, accompanied by the theatrical 'whoosh'. "Nobody is being sold. This little shit is only paying to bring you here. Then we go back to Earth. You and I, Olivia. You get your life back?"

"And Otis?" I snap.

"Otis is looking after himself first and foremost, Olivia. We need to do the same." Lee extends a hand that I don't take. "Him or us."

"But this could kill him. He said he needs someone from Earth to take his power, or it will-" My words overtake my thoughts, it's only when I catch myself seconds later that I look back at Zagan. Otis's brother, barely nineteen and carrying on like a Spiderman villain. "Or they'll be..."

Blown to a million pieces.

That's how Lee had phrased it.

All the power in the world. Universal entropy.

I think back to Otis describing his power, the blinding white current that poured out of him and electrified everything it touched.

In my early days of nursing placement, I'd worked on an industrial worker who'd suffered burns from an arc flash. His hands looked as though they'd been blown apart from the inside out. The electrical current had charred the fingers to the bone. A shiver wracks my spine to think of how many times that voltage could come from Otis straight into my own flesh. Unless, like Lee said, someone else took it on.

"It's him or us," Lee repeats and I realise that he's not talking about Otis.

"Forty-eight minutes left," Zagan declares, glancing at his phone and turning back to us, ember-eyes blazing through the gloom. He remains eerily still, his words as casual as though planning a lunch date rather than the end of his life. "Are we doing this or not?"