Defiant: Quantic Dreams Book 2 by Elizabeth McLaughlin (reading list txt) 📗

“After all of it. After everything. It is you.” I paused for breath. “Fuck, Gabriel. You are a stubborn piece of shit, you know that?”

Gabriel chuckled deep in his throat. “That I am, Jacob, that I am. We’re two of a kind, my friend. Your aspirations about resettlement have been admirable, I’ll give that to you. In fact, I’m impressed that you’ve been able to keep it together so well, given that your friend is dead. And another one about to be? That’s got to be tough.” He grinned up at my captors.

“Just kill me already, Gabriel. I’m tired. I’ve had enough. Get on with it.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave,” he deadpanned. “You don’t deserve a quick death. You see, you took away everything dear to me. I had a life in there. I had a purpose. You destroyed it. You destroyed it all!” His hand swung out in a fist and connected with the wall. I heard a crack, but Gabriel didn’t flinch. “Hurts, I suppose.” He regarded his hand cooly and continued. “We’re going to start with the mouse. I’ll admit, you had me pinned with the first one. There was no way I was getting close enough to that lab to do a thing to little Odysseus. But Athena? Well, you didn’t exactly leave her closely guarded.”

“What did you do?”

“I left your little warrior goddess a little gift in her bloodstream. It’s so cute, by the way. You humans and your naming, I mean. They’re mice, for fuck’s sake. But you had to go and name them. Always lending greatness to the most insignificant things. But as you said, ‘what did I do?’ Athena’s been implanted with a slow acting poison. She’s been dying since the day you let her out of that cage, Jacob.” He pulled a tablet from his pocket and pulled up the feed from Athena’s camera. “I’d say that her time has just about run out. Let’s watch together, shall we?”

He put one massive arm around my neck, the crook of it resting across the back of my head, and held the tablet in front of me. My captors released their grips and stepped back, presumably to take in the show. On the tablet Athena ran through a grassy field, photographs being transmitted back to the shelter fast enough that it looked like a movie. I couldn’t see much outside of her field of view, but she must have stood on hindquarters because the grass was suddenly replaced with black sky. It looked as if a celestial painter had thrown streaks of white paint across a canvas. Specks of white dotted the edges of the streak, and it occurred to me that I was looking at the Milky Way. It would be beautiful if I didn’t know what was about to happen.

Athena fell back to earth and the camera frame started shaking. I could see the camera’s point of view moving forward as the mouse tried to escape her invisible predator. A few moments later, the camera fell sideways, its mount dead in the dirt. I gritted my teeth and swallowed hard.

“Don’t worry, Jacob.” George replaced the tablet in his pocket and patted me on the head with his free hand. “She wasn’t in pain. I made sure of that. After all, I’m not a monster.”

“The photos.”

“Oh, I’m going to leave those alone. You see, the trick with getting people to do what you want is that you have to make them think that it’s their idea. Deleting the photos would be too obvious of an answer. People would get suspicious, they would demand an investigation, yada yada yada. I don’t have time for that. Your people will wake up in the morning and discover that something killed Athena. Something invisible and unknowable.”

“You think that will foil their plans? For all you know, that will just motivate them to go out and retrieve her body. They’ll assume it was exposure or something else simple that isn’t a threat to humans.” My muscles were aching from being kept in the same position for such a long time. I yearned to move, but Gabriel’s massive arms held me steady.

“That’s where you come in. Welcome to the club, Jacob. You’ll be the principal actor in ensuring that every last human in the shelter returns to the virtual world. Never again will they have to struggle with, well, anything, really.” His colleagues laughed behind me.

“You really have lost it, you know.” I did a mental scan of my body while I spoke, searching for a way to break free. “I’ll never help you, Gabriel. You should just throw me into the furnace now and save yourself the trouble.”

“And have someone discover the bones of the beloved leader?” Gabriel gasped in mock shock, pressing a hand to his chest. “I could never. Once again, investigations. Plus, your grandson would be at my throat in no time flat. That’s one smart kid, Jacob. I’m not sure where he got his brains, but he probably had this figured out a week ago. I see the way he looks at me when we pass in the halls. Too bad he won’t get to use those brains for very much longer.”

“The hell is that supposed to mean?” The icy terror that gripped me before was gone, the fires of rage replacing it. “You will not touch him.”

Gabriel stepped around me and tapped his chin. “You have to wonder, Jacob, why the Founders were so uptight about chemicals in the shelters. I imagine that they were mostly concerned about one of you trying to off yourself, but what they really should have been concerned with is how many chemicals can be used to kill that aren’t locked up in a cabinet. Luckily for them, I concerned myself with just that. If you do anything, and I mean anything in an attempt to expose me and my comrades, who knows how much of that