Chapter 39: Chapter 39

Everyone was ready. Prisca had explained the whole plan in detail and we descended into the hotel elevator, seized by an unbearable silence. The excitement of battle felt and weighed heavily in the cabin. The hostess looked dumbfounded on seeing the apparent strangeness of our troop preparing to leave. The automatic doors of the hotel opened, it only remained to cross the street to the Abraxas, the caste prison where many enemies of Magnus Burton Race remained locked up.

Without a word, Chun pulled out an item from her shoulder bag. Jendayi opened the door first and threw a circular object inside. After five short seconds, a kind of grey smoke came to saturate the air in the bar. Thomas and Prisca put on an oxygen mask and disappeared inside.

“Your turn, Eve,” Salomon said to me.

I closed my eyes. Using my powers, I was already blocking the street to passers-by while my telekinesis helped me get all the smoke out of the place. The job done, we went in without a word. Prisca and Thomas were standing, planted in the middle of the bar. Dozens of sleeping or stunned bodies littered the ground. I saw Salomon suddenly stir. A second later, a woman appeared from behind the counter with a huge knife in her hand. In a split second, she disappeared to reappear just behind Prisca, the blade of her switchblade coming to wedge dangerously under her jaw. The madwoman had sloppy brown hair, and excessive makeup, and her feverish eyes were bloodshot from the smoke bombs.

“What the hell do you want!?” she snapped.

“In your place, I would put down that knife,” Salomon advised her with deceptive calm.

“I doubt that!” spat the woman.

“Do you even know who you are dealing with?” continued Salomon.

“No, and I don’t care, get out of my bar!”

“That’s out of the question,” I retorted in a sinister tone.

“Oh! But I know you!” she said, her eyes widening.

“I would be very surprised. Put down your blade and nothing will happen to you!”

“She told us you would come.”

I saw my companions looking at each other, stunned by this revelation, for there was no doubt that it was about Egeria. A surge of rage gripped my chest.

“Tell me where she is!”

“Not happening, sweetie!”

There was no need for more. I closed my eyes and the knife slipped from her hands. With incredible violence, I ejected the woman’s body and slammed it against the back wall. The knife went through her collarbone as Prisca ran her hand over her unharmed neck. Trapped and unable to move, the woman screamed in pain. Prisca never took her eyes off me while Thomas was already trying to unlock a titanium security door. The five guards were down and not one had the access card to enter. I walked toward the bartender who was starting to cry as the pain in her shoulder was becoming unbearable. An abundant trickle of blood soaked her white shirt. Impassive, I glared at her with contempt.

“You should leave while you still have the choice!” she said, her voice cracking.

“Where is she?! And how do we open this door?”

“If you think I’m going to tell you, you need a backup plan!”

Without even touching her, I turned the blade of the knife a few degrees to the left, the bartender gave an intolerable scream, but I kept my composure.

“Answer!” I ordered without raising my voice.

“I’d rather soil myself!” she cried, panting. “You were less proud when you were raped in London…”

The knife immediately came out of its place and went straight into her open mouth. She collapsed, dead instantly. My breath hitched, my blood froze in my veins and I thought my legs were going to give out any moment. I was shaking, because I had just killed again, and the worst part was that the atrocity of my act hadn’t been able to prevent the others from hearing what this woman had just coldly revealed.

I tried to come to my senses, but my fury and my emotion were such that I could no longer control myself. I observed the inert body of the woman and I understood that she must have been one of the caste spectators of that accursed evening in London. I was so high at the time that I couldn’t make out everyone there. I owed her a debt of gratitude for having reminded me; she has had her reckoning.

A long silence. The eyes of my colleagues remained fixed on me. The last sentence of this idiot had obviously escaped no one. The fact is that I was now torn between the desire to annihilate this place and all the people here, and the shame that commanded me to go hide as far away as possible. Slowly, I looked away from them. Thomas was livid, Prisca had terrified eyes and Salomon lowered his head. Only the Van Durens continued to seek to open the door. I walked toward them and asked them to step aside. With all the hate I was engulfed in, I could feel my powers increasing tenfold and thought to myself that if Ethan had been here, Amsterdam could have been wiped off the map for sure. But without him, was I really able to regain my destructive telekinesis? I tried to remember the time we had pulverized our opponents and returned my attention to the door. Madness, I told myself, titanium was bound to be impenetrable. Suddenly I thought of Egeria. Her face imprinted itself in my head as clearly as the day I had the misfortune to meet her. An incandescent ire fried my brain and the heavy door began to melt in the middle. The adrenaline was at its peak, I felt it running through my veins and galvanizing me. My power was such that I managed to punch a gaping hole through the thirty centimetres of armour.

“We can go,” I say in a firm tone.

Everyone was watching me shocked, except Thomas. He had already glimpsed the potential of my abilities in the middle of the wind turbines two years earlier. But seeing his mortified face, I knew he was still under the influence of the bartender’s revelations. Prisca, meanwhile, stared at me with a strange look, both respect and mistrust. She went first, followed by her two Amazons. The Van Durens followed suit, while Salomon remained expressionless. He ends up rushing through the door as well. There was only Thomas left, who seemed devastated. I held his clear gaze without detaching myself from my coldness. He moved towards me, his face only inches from mine, and unexpectedly, his sad eyes turned into an icy expression. I felt his anger as surely as I was chilled by it. He stared at me determined and entered through the doorway. I followed him down the dark hallway that led to another titanium door.

“Get ready!” said Thomas coldly.

I stared at the door with such intensity that I felt like I was merging with the metal. It took me even less time to manage to disintegrate it, and this time completely. The feeling of power that overwhelmed me destabilized me for a short moment. I realized that my destructive power had increased and dared to imagine again what would have happened if Ethan had stayed by my side. This prospect made my blood run cold. However, I didn’t have time to think about it more because no less than six castes threw themselves on us. Prisca stopped one in his tracks by grabbing his neck with one hand. She picked up the poor guy who was now kicking and gasping for air. The spectacle of this slender woman in a trouser suit lifting a man twice her weight was not without interest, but three others rushed towards her. Chun and Jendayi disappeared in a whirlwind of speed and two of them collapsed, passed out, their faces horribly swollen. Salomon dodged a man who tried to punch him in the face, Thomas grabbed him by the neck and dragged him several metres. He grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and slammed an angry fist right into his brow bone, which immediately spurted blood. But Thomas didn’t want to stop there, he let the guy fall to the ground and continued relentlessly to hit him with incredible force.

“Thomas!” cried Salomon, trying to pull him by the shoulders.

But Thomas pushed him away and started again. I could feel his anger through every pore of my skin as I watched the spectacle, intoxicated by his vengeful emotion, but I also realized that I didn’t want to let him get lost in this endless spiral. Resentment had been eating me up for so long that I almost felt like I had never felt anything else and I didn’t wish that on anyone, especially Thomas. I stopped his arm using my powers.

“He’s had his reckoning,” I say, my voice calm.

Thomas got up and turned around. His eyes didn’t give him a benevolent look and stared at me with such intensity that I had to lower my head. Shame overwhelmed me again and Thomas guessed it. He walked over to me and grabbed my face.

“We’ll kill them.”

I looked up and met his determined gaze. I nodded and choked back my tears. Turning around, I found Prisca kneeling in front of one of our assailants, her hand still encircling his neck and threatening him with certain death.

“How many are they?”

“I can’t tell you,” replied the caste with terrified eyes, “the Master Hand will know.”

“Tell yourself, my dear, that he will soon no longer be your master; then you have two choices: either you join me or you choose to die here.”

“I can’t! He would kill me…”

Prisca loosened her embrace and clapped her hands to his temples. The guy’s face suddenly changed expression, he was smiling and the next second, he fell dead on the floor. Prisca got up as if her gesture had no importance and went to join Salomon and the Van Durens who had taken shelter in the corner of the room.

“Salomon, how many consciences do you capture, in your opinion?”

He closed his eyes for a minute.

“There are many. I pick up some very clear ones, about ten maximum, but I also feel others more buried, more distant, I can’t quite identify them.”

“It’s the prisoners,” declared with one voice the Van Durens, whose gaze had frozen. “There are fourteen of them.”

“Can they walk?” asked Prisca, for whom the demented looks of the three cousins were nothing frightening.

“Most.”

“Where are they?”

“The guards are distributed in the two corridors,” declared Marcus, who came to his senses, “six prisoners are in the western corridor and seven in the eastern corridor. Only one is in the basement but there is a weird thing, like a barrier. We cannot visualize what is happening down there or who is there.”

A silence. Prisca was thinking. After a moment, she raised her head and said aloud:

“Salomon and the Van Durens, you’re going to look for a means of transport capable of containing us all. Jendayi will accompany me to the west corridor while Thomas and Chun will take the other. Everliegh, you’ll take the sub-s…”

“Absolutely not!” Thomas protested without letting her finish.

I turned my head towards him.

“Thomas, this time, I would prefer to know you are away from me.”

“But, we don’t even know what’s waiting for you down there!”

“You won’t let Prisca and the girls free these people alone! And I can protect myself, so let me do what I have to do!”

I spun toward Prisca and crossed the threshold. After a few metres, I was faced with three corridors. The middle one led to the stairs. Without asking myself any more questions, I turned on the flashlight we were all carrying and descended into the depths of Amsterdam.

According to Blake, the place dated back to the seventeenth century, when maritime trade was at its height in the country. It had served as caste HQ for emergency meetings when each territory lord or important castes had to talk on neutral ground and by the sea. It was, therefore, ultra-secure and highly secret. Blake had found it through his research. Listening to him tell us about it, I had guessed that he hoped to find Carmichael locked up there, a hope confirmed by my intuition at this very moment.

The staircase descended into the depths and the atmosphere reeked. The rock faces smelled musty, and the further I walked, the more slippery the steps became, the foul, damp air burning my nostrils. I put one hand to my nose and held the torch with the other. My steps were safe but slow, and after a few minutes, I finally ended up in a hallway. I heard drops of water crashing on the ground and a kind of clapping a little further. The noise was not regular, I immediately concluded that someone was at the bottom, behind the heavy door firmly locked a few metres in front of me. My heart was pounding, I advanced, quicker. It only took me a second to smash the door to pieces. There, my gaze locked in an expression of horror.