Page 32 of Retrograde

Then he walks out without another word, clicking the cell door shut.

ARON

I’m stomping away towards the exit. My mind is reeling. I have a million questions and no way to get answers. I don’t know what this means. I only know that if it’s true, then it changes absolutely everything.

It’s like I’m in free fall, reaching for something, but there’s fuck all to grab. Just empty air and darkness.

I’ve developed a decent sense for bullshit over the years. When you torture people for information on a regular basis, you learn to recognise when they’re still trying to keep the truth away from you and when they’ve stopped lying.

And what Riley told me? How she told me? Her tone of voice, her body language, the look in her eyes? I’m not sensing bullshit. Not anymore.

And the sheer fucking burden of it! It’s like an iron weight has dropped onto my shoulders. I can’t stand straight. Already, I’m trying to figure out who to share this information with—who can be depended on to handle it responsibly—and I can’t come up with a single name.

Fuck! I can almost understand why she wouldn’t tell me. I do have a reputation for being a bit ... unpredictable. A reputation I have more than lived up to, as far as she’s concerned. In her place, I probably wouldn’t tell me either. So why does it bother me so much that she didn’t trust me with this?

She’s a traitor. I do not care about traitors. I don’t care what they think, how they feel; I certainly don’t give a shit about their opinion of me. I view them as nothing but vermin that need to be eliminated.

So how the fuck did I let this happen? How the hell have I allowed her to get under my skin? It’s like some twisted addiction—like a book I can’t put down. Like opening a box within a box within a box—a compulsion to know what’s inside.

I’m breaking my own rules. I’m losing my fucking mind.

I reach the door, but I freeze with my fingers wrapped around the handle. I don’t want to go out there. I need time to process, to calm myself down. But out there feels like a lion’s den, people clamouring constantly, wanting directions from me, wanting a solid plan. A plan I don’t have.

If I go out there, all that’s going to happen is I’m going to think about being back down here. With her.

It’s like an itch. An itch I have to scratch because I can’t afford to be this distracted. Not with this new intel and the offensive drawing near, not with everything that’s going down.

My gut clenches with shame because I already know I’m going to do something bad. But I need to get whatever this is out of my system right the fuck now.

Before it becomes dangerous.

“Fuck it.”

I turn around and march back to Riley’s cell, anticipation boiling in my veins.

12

RILEY

My eyes are glued to the ear. Pale and rubbery, a few greying hairs protruding from the lobe. The gravel beneath is stained with crimson.

Conflicting emotions assault me from all sides.

Disbelief.

Horror.

Anger.

But relief, too. Relief that it’s just an ear and not something worse. There was nothing stopping Aron from bringing me the whole head. An ear is only a warning.

How fucked up is it that a part of me feels grateful to our captor for only chopping a non-essential body part off my best friend? How fucked up am I?

Beyond repair is the answer.

It’s a symptom of our age, of our society: we’re so used to truly terrible things happening that when we see something bad happen, we don’t think “this is bad”. We only think “it could have been worse”. We’re like a dull blade. No longer capable of outrage.

But he isn’t. The Necromancer. Everything he does, everything he’s told me, it all speaks to a deep-seated anger. By doing the outrageous, he is challenging our complacency. Like a whetstone.