I, Cassandra

04 | RYAN MADDOX

I look away. She wouldn't tell me. She promised she would when I got her out of there. Said it was a secret. I went along with it and called her Blue, for the wig. I should have suspected something, maybe I did and ignored it. I didn't want to lose her.

'You already read my memories,' I say, tight. 'I'm not in the mood for games.'

He turns his attention back to the tablet, his fingers deft, opening files. A video still pops up on the screen. I stare at it, stunned. It's her, wearing her blue wig, smiling, halfway through pouring out a lurid green shot atop a ring-stained, sticky, black-topped bar.

'From your memories,' Akron says. He taps the tablet's screen. The video plays. He steps back and joins me, his arms folded over his chest. There is no sound. The thump of the club's music is gone. She leans over the bar to yell something into my ear, her blue wig brushing against me. I touch my face, remembering the feel of it, plastic and stiff. She is asking me if I am looking for something stronger. Opiates. I say no and point at my empty shot glass. She smiles and pours me another. I watch, transfixed, aching for her. She's right there, as large as life. I promised I would go back. I have to go back. I have to get her out of there. Her and that scrawny cat of hers, Miro. She made me promise to take her, too.

'Her name is Cassandra Vallis.' Akron says, crisp, sliding into debriefing mode. I suppress the urge to punch him. How dare he take what little good I had in my life and turn it into this: a peep show. I wonder if he jerked off to it. He probably watched it while he fucked his droids.

'If you say so,' I reply, belligerent, moving closer to the screen. I want to touch her face, but pride holds me back. I won't let him have everything. Some things will be mine. And this, looking at her, right now. This is mine.

'Maddox,' Akron says, his voice hard. 'Lubochnia was a Q Clearance level mission, your team should have been in and out, the target retrieved in less than an hour. But the UFF were waiting for you when they should have been forty kilometres away.'

I continue to gaze at her, stubborn, though his words trickle through me, sickening me, poisoning my memories. He moves back to the panel. She fades to black. I turn.

'Did you tell her you were going to Lubochnia?'

I smile, flashing him my ugly, broken teeth. 'Check my memories.'

A look of unease slips over Akron's face. He hides it, but not fast enough. My senses tingle, intrigued. Typical Akron, doling out information little by little, leaving pieces out—important ones. I can play this game, too.

'Large sections were missing. Nothing but black.'

'I was asleep,' I shrug.

'No,' Akron says turning back to the tablet's screen. I watch as he pulls up another file, marked Q Clearance. He punches in a long string of characters, then presses his thumb to the screen. Files pour onto the wall where just a minute before I watched Blue, no, Cassandra pour me two fingers of Absinthe into a grubby glass.

'You were conscious. We think she drugged you,' Akron says, his attention on the files.

'I doubt it. The blood tests would have flagged any narcotics up.'

Akron lifts a scarred eyebrow at me. He fishes out a file from the directory and opens it. Several images spread across the wall: more drone shots, one looks to be what is left of central Berlin, another of a heavily barricaded compound, patrolled by armed UFF soldiers, several images scroll past of a medical lab filled with machines preparing compounds, the final image shows an old man zip-tied by his ankles and wrists to a metal chair in a bland white room, his face badly beaten. Akron nods at him. 'We got him to talk. Eventually.'

He looks like he expects me to say something. I cross my arms over my chest and wait.

Akron opens a sub-file. A bio rolls out along the left side of the wall. Henrik Åkersen, Danish, born 2013, PhD in biomedical engineering, Lead Engineer of R&D at Novo Nordisk, its facilities and sites subsumed into Military High Command in the global pharma reclamations of 2050. Granted citizenship to Alpha VII, 2058. Disappeared 2071. Assumed captured by UFF forces.

I already know all this, but I have decided to make things difficult for Akron. If he wants to accuse Blue—Cassandra—of being the one behind the ambush against me and my men, he's going to have to work for it.

'Henrik wasn't captured. He joined the UFF, and has been working for them since 2071. Between then and now, he's been busy. He built up three facilities in Berlin, Madrid, and Athens.'

'He left Alpha VII?' I ask, stunned. Fuck, Akron's got my attention now. Everyone wants to get into Alpha VII. Perched at the top of a green Greenland, basking in a temperate climate on the shale shores of the Arctic Ocean, it sits in its self-contained bubble housing Command's most elite and prized citizens. Only the best for them. I heard they even get real beef. Not meat grown in labs for the rest of us housed in the other Alpha and Omega cities of southern Greenland and across the Canadian tundra, but actual living, breathing cattle, raised and slaughtered just for them.