Aleks

We do what’s needed to make our lives possible

Aleks felt the shift, the tension in the air, when the footsteps of the guard in front of his prison tent stopped pacing back and forth. There was a strange heat drifting in, but Aleks’s mind still felt half-addled behind the haze of his own inability to feel the Sower’s Gift over his shoulders, and he couldn’t see the walls of the city for answers.

He tensed, dropped the radio apparatus to the ground, and knelt – pulling his chains so that they no longer were tangled up. The guard must have heard the rattling, and pulled aside the flap, gun pointed right at Aleks.

“What are you doing?” the guard hissed. “Stay where you are. I’m coming over.”

Aleks stayed still as the guard walked toward him, one foot in front of the other. “Can’t believe we’re bothering with you. They’re not going to pay a fucking ransom. These aren’t normal people we’re dealing with. Never have been.”

“You’re one to talk,” Aleks croaked, making his voice hoarser than it really felt to accentuate his own weakness. The guard, under his visorless helmet, scowled.

“Sit still and don’t move,” the guard said, and continued walking forward.

The radio spoke. “I think it’s time.” And the guard froze. He glanced down at the ground.

“What is that?” the guard said, at the same moment that he realized precisely what it was. He ran over and smashed it with his boot, turning his back to Aleks for just a moment.

Before Aleks knew what his own body was doing, he was up on his feet and had whipped his chains around himself. The rattling noise alerted the guard, who turned around, and finally the Primordial holding Aleks’ shoulders seemed to grow uneasy. But he was already in motion, and it was already too late for the guard. His helmet did not cover his neck. Aleks whipped the chains around and leapt with energy he didn’t know he had, landing on the guard’s shoulders even as he strangled the life out of him. It was over before thirty seconds had passed, and the body which fell to the floor had no more breath left in it.

Aleks’s body moved without his mind’s conscious input and he took the gun before he’d even fully felt the grip of the Devotee – with no body left to connect to – drift away into the ambient energy of the world around it. Before the gun had even touched the ground. He barely knew which end was up on this thing, but he turned its barrel at the places where his chains connected to his wrists and fired. With a horrible wrenching feeling through his arms, the manacles broke, and the sound of the gunshots and the shattering chains echoed through his skull as though the inside of him had been turned into a horrible drum.

And then everything began to move.

The Sower’s Gift fell over Aleks, settling his nerves and making everything feel instantly better. It was euphoric – the feeling of sinking into calm, the shifting in focus that came with his mind switching fully into its analytical frame. Even through the terror and the pain, he sighed in contentment.

And smiled, the way he’d always smiled through the years – the way he knew made others think him uncanny.

Let them all fear me, then, he resolved, as the ground shifted under his feet and a dozen pounds of canvas became streams of thin sharp ribbons, weaving through the air and wrapping round the necks of every Invictan nearby. And all of their thoughts in the moments before unconsciousness, all the memories they clawed at, flooded toward Aleks like pressure-backlash along the mist-tendrils that connected him to all of them, and he let it all wash over him, shutting himself off, a turtle inside its shell, until he was nothing but a nexus of death. In the distance, above the walls of Kivv, Aleks saw the whirling of dust and sand and blood and glass, and the familiar flash of red light glowing through it all.