New Elysium: Weapons of War (Book 2)

Ashes Part 26

Red's attention shifted. There was another person here after all.

Jack stood behind them, his gaze wandering over the landscape, taking it in. Red couldn't read his expression at all, but his anger rose at the thought of Jack being here in the mindscape of his sister. It felt like an invasion of space that Red considered his.

"What is this?" Jack's harsh whisper cut across the landscape like a knife.

Up to this point, Red had never been entirely sure just how augmented Jack was when they'd worked together. He'd never given any sign that he could do any of this, and now?

His gaze focused on Red. "What did you do? How did I get here?"

Red was taken aback for a moment. His jaw dropped open as he stared at Jack. "What did I do?"

"Where's Ember?" Jack continued as if Red hadn't spoken. He continued to search, his gaze darting about until they settled on Null and Lars. "Who?"

"Here we go again," Nova muttered from Red's right.

Jack's eyes narrowed as he focused on them. He'd never seen Amy Larsson in cyberspace. He knew there was an AI in her head but seeing him was different. He recoiled as any Neo-Tokyan would have and Red could see he understood what Lars was, his hand still on Null's arm. This time Null reached over and put a hand on Lars and moved in front of him. She looked so very helpless in this situation but Red knew that was the last thing she was.

Gone were the vestiges of her life, in its place was the last form she'd had. A form that Jack was now gawking at.

Jack's face was unreadable, but Red understood what he saw there. He was a man after all, and the self-loathing expression on his face told Red all needed to know. He said nothing though, at least in this instance it would never be acted upon. Jack would sooner flush them all out of an airlock than admit his attraction. He glanced at Nova and could see from the expression on Nova's face that he'd reached the same conclusion.

Damn this just gets stranger as we go.

But Red's eye was only on Ember and he shifted gears now. Jack was just as in the dark here as the rest of them. He was only a threat to Ember if he tried anything, but she'd brought him here so she at least trusted him to a degree.

"We were in the main hall, just steps out of the hangar, trying to get to you," Nova said. "And then she started, well... You know."

"What was there?" Null asked. "And how do we get out?"

"We need to find her," Red muttered. "Problem is, she's here, all around us... I had no idea she could pull us in like this. I mean she's pulled me in before but I wanted to go... I've never been yanked in like this..."

"Of course you don't know what she's fully capable of. Why would you?" Jack snapped. "We don't exactly tell other people what we're capable of. I doubt she told you everything."

Red felt sucker-punched for a moment. He had no response. Jack knew exactly where to hit him to make him bleed. Ember was his weak point and he was happy to live with it. But the idea that she kept things from him in a way that Jack was suggesting grated on him. He's already made you doubt her once, she still chose you, never forget that. He shifted his stance to look away from Jack. He'd scored a point no doubt. But Red couldn't give him the satisfaction of letting him see how much he hated the idea that Ember may have kept secrets from him.

Lars looked around. "She's a Vesper, we already knew they had powerful systems but this I wasn't aware of. Captain, you've been here before?"

This time Jack looked startled as Red nodded an affirmative. Your mental cyberspace, or mindscape as it was termed, was your own and letting someone in demonstrated a huge amount of trust that they wouldn't come in and destroy you from the inside out. It was much safer to meet someone in cyberspace and the fact that Ember had brought Red in here. It was the intimacy without the sex.