I am going to murder this motherfucker, I swear. I'm not going feel bad about it either. Not even a little bit.
"My 'boss' ordered me to take you from your room to meet her,” Leo tells me. "She said not to talk to you. Thought you might corrupt me with your evil Obsidian wiles, I guess." He wiggles his fingers in my direction. I think very seriously about grabbing his fingers and breaking them.
"But no.” Leo gives a mournful sigh. “Instead, you just scornmy potentialfriendship and subtly threaten to kill me. Can you hear the disappointment in my voice? Because I am. Disappointed, I mean. Deeply."
My response is brazenly sardonic.
"I couldunsubtlythreaten to kill you if that would help."
"Oh, no, I am sufficiently afraid of you," Leo reassures me. His expression changes, rearranging and resetting into a more serious cast. "We've been tracking you for a while."
That’s not a huge surprise. I'm an OI agent. Most agencies in the world either want to take Obsidian Inc. down or get hold of their creations. Capturing me could potentially help give them either.
"I've seen what you can do," Leo says, voice low and troubled.
I've seen what you can do. Now that. That is hysterical.
Leo shrugs like it doesn’t matter, but the look on his face says otherwise. Shadows flit across it, darkening his expression further. He seems disturbed by whatever his agency has shown him of me. He didn’t look at me like this when we first met, so it must have been since then. I don’t know if FISA was trying to scare him, knock the stupid out of their young agent by showing him grainy security-camera videos of me murdering a whole load of people again and again.
Whatever it was they were trying to accomplish, it doesn’t appear to have worked very well if he’s still able to walk alongside me like this, with so little trepidation.
I allow my gaze to flicker up and down Leo, pretending to size him up again, when all I’m really doing is taking another extended look at him. "Then you're an idiot for wanting to be this close to me," I tell him because it’s true, and someone should really have noticed he was still feeling this soft towards me. Someone should have cared about his idiotic little life and stopped him from reentering my orbit in this state.
"Wantis a strong word," Leo says, somewhat ruefully. "It's more obligation than anything, I think."
I don'trespond tothat, which seems to confuse Leo. He looks like a perplexed, overgrown puppy.
"You're not going ask why I feel obligated to help you?"
I snort as obtrusively as I can to fully emphasise just how stupid I think his question is.
"I'm not your agency-appointed therapist, dickhead. Whatever personal feelings you have towards me are between you and the keeper of the Bad-Touch Puppet."
Leo, for some reason, misinterprets my rebuff as permission to carry on the conversation.
I’ll give itto whoever trained him in interrogation: his ability to annoy the hell out of a prisoner might just be better than any torture technique ever invented. For the right prisoner anyway.
Everyone breaks, and pain is usually the easiest way to make that happen. But there are other things a person can do. Other ways to leave scars. Mental ones.Claws that dig in deep, scraping wounds into psychological flesh and leaving behind damage that lasts and lasts and lasts.
"You're a Liquid Onyx survivor," Leo says, like it’s supposed to mean something. “OI took that and twisted it to their own ends, not you.”
"So, I'm a science experiment." I make a low scoffing sound. “Much better.”
Being a science experiment is technically an upgrade from being amonster or a murderer but not by much.
For me, it all overlaps. I can't tell where the monster begins and the science experiment ends. I can't remember the last time I tried to figure out which edges are blurred, and which ones are irreparably connected.
“None of us can change what was done to us as children," Leo says. His fingers twitch towards me, like he wants to offer something. I get the bizarre and disturbing notion that what he wants to offer is comfort or reassurance of some kind.
I think: if he touches me, I'll break his arm.
He doesn't. It's slightly disappointing. It's even worse that I think I need a reason to hurt him. That's not something I've felt in a very long time. The requirement for justification.
I really hopethey didn't send this bloke to talk to me because we happen to have been fucked with by the same mad scientist. If they think I'll hesitate to kill him because of some unspoken bond we definitely do not have, then I'm more than happy to prove them wrong. They shouldknow better.It's goddamn unprofessional is what this is. I'm almost offended on Leo's behalf. They might as well have thrown him into a pit filled with spikes and wolves.
"Your boss must really want you dead," I say, feeling very tired all of a sudden.
Iturn my attention away from Leo. I have to. I can't keep looking at him. I can barely hold myself back from slamming him up againstametal wall and demanding he pick a real fight with me so I can hack out some of this crystalised tension.
