Page 83 of Retrograde

“Benefits?” I repeat after him, hissing. “Benefits?”

“Notoriety,” Krasnik elaborates. “I made one of the fuckers call for reinforcements before bleeding him dry. A whole platoon’s coming this way, and that bitch Riley is with them.” His handsome face stretches into a particularly nasty smile.

Fire roars through me with the next breath, and I lean forward, like I’m readying myself to lunge at him. “You demented son of a—” I start but snap my mouth shut the minute my queen opens hers.

“Tristan, please, let’s get out of here. I’m feeling sick.”

So am I, my love, if for different reasons.

The command-and-control hierarchy only exists between our groups in the loosest sense. Such is the price of each group being an independent unit that operates on a need-to-know basis. The only way to stop Krasnik from doing more of ... whatever this is ... would be a head-on collision with him, and for now, he’s sadly a little too useful for that.

“Fine,” I growl. “But I want nothing to do wi—is there anything else?” I groan when I see him open his mouth to speak before I’m even finished talking.

“Yes. We’re now called Retrograde. My group,” he elaborates when I raise my eyebrows at him.

What fresh hell is this?

“Why?” I curl my lips.

“Retrograde means moving backwards or making things worse,” he explains, straightening to his full height, arms thrown wide. “We want to move backwards. Return to a world not just before the Rift, but before the Continuum.” His voice detonates, controlled and forceful. “And to do that, we are going to make things worse until we force them to make them better!”

31

ARON

Cheers erupt when I enter the room we use as our HQ room, men crowding me and patting my back. A glass is shoved in my hand, its contents the colour of diluted piss to match its smell. Clearly, we’ve run out of whiskey, and we’re now back to the home-brewed dregs. Damn it.

Tossing my head back, I down the drink, letting it burn its way down my throat without tasting it. My mind is still on the visit I paid Attila down in the cave. On the hatred burning in the swollen slits of his eyes when I told him that I was keeping him in the cage until the fractures in his hands healed wrong. That he would go to his exile mute and maimed.

Even when he couldn’t speak, I could hear his thoughts, clear as day.

All this for a bitch you were meant to destroy.

If he doesn’t get that brute force isn’t the only way to destroy someone, then that’s on him. I have a plan. I always have a plan. He should have known that.

I try my best to ignore the tremors in my fingers as I pick up a cigar from the offered box. I bite into it and light it, ignoring all the good to have you back’s—some sincere, some less so. Everybody knows to let me be for a bit, to let the alcohol do its thing, to let me take a few drags on my cigar, before getting down to business.

“So ... let’s talk about the offensive?” Alex suggests tentatively, but I brush him off.

“No. Boring. Tell me about Reprobates first. What have they done now?”

An uneasy chuckle ripples through the room. Oh, like that, is it?

“They’ve gone a bit ... mainstream.”

More uneasy chuckles. A mosquito buzzes near my ear, and I catch it and squish it between my fingers, wiping them off on my T-shirt.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Distanced themselves from the original group. Now they call themselves a society,” Alex replies with a wry smile. “Compounds, vegetable growing, public relaxation sessions, black robes, you name it. Fuck knows what really goes on under the lid. They’re a hit, recruiting new members by dozens a day.” He pauses, cracking his knuckles, and taking so long to spit out the next part that he’s testing the last bit of my patience. “Now the interesting thing is, they have compounds both within the Rifterland and the Continuum.”

I straighten and take a long drag on my cigar, letting the smoke linger in my mouth until my eyes water.

“That is interesting.”

“In case you’re wondering how that happened⁠—”

“I am wondering that.”