Jessica grabbed the bottle of water. Morals didn’t matter at the moment, and she was incredibly thirsty and in need of hydration in order to keep going. She spun the cap off and drank the richly oxygenated water down in several gulps.
The rush of liquid and air into her system buoyed up her ability to handle what she was looking at. She stepped out of the parlor, listened hard, and then retraced her steps back to the door that led to the kitchens.
In the kitchens, she found several servants, all of them dead. The kitchens had been looted, the water purifiers drained, and all of the massive pantries emptied as well.
Sick to her stomach now and saddened by the realization that those below must have indeed been engaged in fighting those who lived above, and with disastrous results, Jessica stepped back out of the kitchen and into the hallway.
Her feet took her up the staircase to the study of Yori’s father. He too was dead, and his death had not been easy or swift like his wife’s and the deaths of the servants.
Disgusted and horrified by the loss of human life, she turned away. It was past time to get out of there and get back out on the streets. She had to help people, and there was nobody here for her to help.
She turned toward the door, and her mouth dropped open in surprise and relief as Yori suddenly appeared within the frame. His eyes met hers.
Her lips trembled. “My God. I am so sorry. We can’t stay here. We have to move.”
He didn’t answer her for long moments. His fingers plucked at the weapons in his belt. His eyes moved past her face to the body of his father, but no emotion showed upon his features.
He was in shock. She moved forward, making sure to keep her hands at her side so as not to startle him. “Yori, we have to go. Come on, come on.”
His eyes shifted from his father’s body to her face. There was not a flicker of anything in there. He could have been a cyborg for all the emotion written upon his face. “They just wouldn’t understand.”
Jessica didn’t know exactly who he was referring to. She wasn’t sure she cared either. All she cared about was getting him to leave there. She wanted out of there, out of that house of death. “Come with me. Come on.”
He ignored that entreaty. “Do you know how many times I told them that they had to change? Do you know how many times I told them that if we did not end our insistence on slavery and mistreatment of those who live below that they would rise up against us? I had to show them. I need you to understand that.”
An uneasy feeling set in. “I have always understood that. We need to leave here now.”
“Have you understood it?”
He paced closer, and that uneasy feeling grew deeper, clawing its way along her nervous system and telling her that there was danger here. He was obviously unhinged, and why wouldn’t he be? He had just witnessed the death of his parents. He had railed against their way of life, but he had never wanted them dead.
He’d clearly snapped. Yori was always above it all: the violence and the dirty work of the resistance. He had not even been willing to break into the warehouses to steal the nutro-loaves and the foodstuffs that had kept those belowground in the most need from being starved to death. He was…he was an observer, not a participant in things.
She had seen too much bloodshed, but the senseless death in that house had rattled her as well, and she was not even family.
She kept her voice low and soothing, talking to him as if he were an invalid. “Yes, I have. We have to leave here. The people are in the streets, and they are dying. There’s so much death out there. We have to help. They’re firing at us from above, and it’s not safe here.”
It wasn’t safe anywhere, but now was not the time to say so.
He came closer still. “Do you remember the first time we met?”
Her lips formed an unwilling smile. “How could I ever forget that moment? It changed both our lives forever. If it had not been for you standing up for me that day, making it known what had happened down there in the tunnels, I would’ve been put to death for the crime of coming above.”
His eyes, still expressionless and unreadable, locked onto hers. “I lied that day.”
Another niggle of disquiet nudged into her consciousness. What was wrong with him? Obviously Yori, who had no taste for bloodshed and never had, had been pushed completely over the edge by the bloodshed within his home. “It doesn’t matter.”
His voice lifted into a shout. “It does matter! It matters a great deal! Don’t you dare stand there and tell me that it does not matter when everything hinged on that one lie!”
Her entire body felt as if it had been encased in a cryo-chamber. Her mouth went dry as Talon’s words came back to her. Could Yori have betrayed them? “I don’t know what the lie was. I never knew you had lied.”
The expression on his face now was one of pure rage, and it held her transfixed. He had always been so remote that was one of the reasons why their brief love affair had not lasted. He had always cultivated within himself a great distance from others. He kept everyone at arms -length and his emotions buried beneath a calm demeanor. “I said that it was all Heren’s idea.”
Jessica gawked at him. What did it matter now? So what if it hadn’t been Heren’s idea? Heren was dead, and had been for a great many years. He had died several weeks after that tunnel incident. He had fallen from a roof turret while working as a house guard as part of his punishment from his parents for going down into the tunnels.
She chose her words carefully because she was terribly afraid they might be her last. The suspicion that Talon had planted in her head made her very aware of just how close to his weapons Yori’s fingers really were.
Those weapons, they were like him. He preferred to be the mastermind behind the bloodshed. He had created that chamber above the tunnels but below ground in order to have a command center from which to run the resistance. He did not even know how to use a weapon as far she knew. But he wore the ones strapped around his waist with real authority.
