Page 131 of Love, Nemesis
Two small, glowing yellow rings awaited ahead. Ana eased toward them, moving deeper and deeper into the room until the door behind her felt a sizable distance away.
When she was within arm’s length of the rings, she held her breath, stepping closer to them as she reached out her hand slowly.
“You’ve wandered into the world of monsters,” a voice echoed to her left like a shadow of her memories, and just as she looked, fire exploded in front of her. Ana stumbled back as a pyre lit up before her, illuminating the face with yellow rings in the irises.
Hands wrenched her arms, one deactivating Chronos, and as she saw their faces, she stopped struggling.
They pulled her to the edge of the room, setting her back against the wall as they crouched around her.
“Surprised?” One of them laughed, stroking the edge of her chin with blackened fingers before she drew her head away.
They walked around the pyre, firelight that showed walls and stairs and monuments covered in lines and lines of curses. There were statues, and art, monuments to the Great War’s Strike, artifacts collected from years of Hailey’s efforts.
They looked down on her with illuminant eyes. One of the Strike knelt down in front of Ana. This one had a ring of green in his eyes. He saw through her with those eyes. He saw her fears, her questions.
“Do you finally see?” he asked. “Why The Great Light is such a beautiful thing?”
And she realized, in refusing to speak the truth all along, in fearing it, they’d never asked questions they all should have asked. If The Great Light had brought back those dead in the war, why not the Strike as well?
In that moment, she watched them all, these creatures of legend, once long dead.
In the midst of the chaos, several in the crowd stepped aside. A figure approached, fire at his back like destruction’s crowning glory and pale, blue eyes that burned with all of the undeniability of anguish.
“Ana,” he sang, firelight cast across his face, igniting a wicked smile, “welcome to the State.”
It was Strike Ivan Rowe.
Chapter 32: Fifteen
ANA TRIED TO steady her breathing, mind moving through the possibilities, racing to process the situation and determine her next move.
She had no next move.
Nothing had ever prepared her for this.
The Great Light had brought back the Strike. How many? How many had she seen?
“Look at me,” Ivan said, and her chin was drawn up as if by an invisible force. His hands moved to his hips and he titled his head slightly, rich hair combed back in a perfected style. They all looked in many ways perfected, pictures from a century ago, State’s time, as if they hadn’t aged at all. She looked through their faces, recognizing each and every one.
“There are fifteen of us here,” Ivan said, answering the question in her mind. “Do you want to fight us all? Use Chronos—the device we helped invent—against us? Hmm? We couldn’t let you die. No. No. Not yet. One domino chasing another one. Pulling strings, one by one, but why? What has this all been for?”
He dangled the question in front of her, smiling as he bent down at the hips. He seemed to relish her confusion. She couldn’t look away. Fifteen. There had been seventeen Strike total.
She resisted the urge to see who was missing.
“The State you serve with so much loyalty? We built it. The roles we played in death, it seems we played again in our second lives! You were, again, a slave!”
The truth echoed with a deep, resounding crash in her brain, and every conviction she had, every truth she’d discovered, crumbled in front of her eyes.
She’d spent her entire life defending the legacy of the Strike. She’d given everything she was or ever could be back to them, all in her attempts to distance herself from them. Now, as Chronos, she was a cornerstone of their empire.
Ivan smiled as he seemed to witness all of the devastation this truth created inside her mind.
“Looks like we have another guest.” He released her head from the power of his invisible grasp and backed away from Ana as he counted down with his steps.
“Three, two…” He looked toward the entrance, rolling one of his wrists toward the door as two Strike wrestled Lethe into the room.
Ana and Lethe’s eyes met.
