Stormblood, стр. 17
She stopped nodding. ‘That might not be possible.’
‘Tell Kindosh to make it possible. If there’s any misunderstanding, if he’s held against his will or being blackmailed, I won’t risk him getting lost in the bureaucracy because Kindosh needs a scapegoat.’ My armour creaked as I settled back into my seat. I hadn’t realised I was leaning forward. ‘We’re talking about rehab centres being targeted, Reapers being murdered in public. You don’t pull that off without a hell of an organisation backing you up. These people would have years, decades worth of work behind them. Artyom hasn’t been on Compass long enough to be anything but a part of someone else’s plan. I don’t want that forgotten.’
Kowalski gently twirled her mug, the motion reflected in the viewport. ‘I’ll talk to Kindosh. She’s not going to be happy, but I think she’ll find your terms acceptable.’ I had no doubt she would. She wanted me involved badly enough to make allowances. ‘What matters is that we get this solved.’
‘This isn’t for Kindosh,’ I said. ‘It’s not for her alien buddies or her career or Harmony. That’s your screw-up. I’m doing this for the Reapers I fought with. I’m doing this for my brother.’
It was ironic that it had taken a stormtech outbreak that threatened thousands of people, the very thing that split my brother and I apart, to bring our lives crashing together again, but you don’t choose the cards you’re dealt. I’d hoped that time would have eased things, or that Artyom might have forgiven me, even if I hadn’t forgiven myself. This was far from how I’d envisaged reuniting. But while Artyom’s view on me hadn’t changed, the situation sure as hell had. Ugly as it was, I had to follow this problem to its roots, even if I unearthed things I’d rather leave buried.
Of all people, it had to be my brother.
Kowalski nodded. ‘You’re doing a good thing, Fukasawa.’
I wondered.
Whatever hells the war had thrown at us, it had created an ironclad, unbreakable bond between Reapers. We stuck together no matter what, because no one else understood how it felt to have an alien organism slither up your backbone and into your brain. What it was like to be excited at the prospect of charging head-on into a maelstrom of Harvest gunfire and Berserker killsquads. How your adrenaline spiked when enemy sniper rounds began chewing your cover away. Or what it felt like to be struck with a stormtech-induced seizure in the middle of a tactical operation, your hands clenching with the urge to kill every living thing on the planet, including the members of your own Battalion.
No one who’s not been there themselves can wrap their heads around a nightmare like that. No one but the men and women who stood by your side and survived it with you.
I’d been badly injured in my first skirmish with Harvest, a plasma blast searing across my thigh, leaving a scar I still have. Our intel was compromised, the terrain unfamiliar and access to SSC aerial support jammed. My armour had been fried, my weapons lost in the fray, my leg broken. I was dead in the mud. Alcatraz, multicoloured artillery fire glaring off his armour, scooped me up and carried me over his shoulder for three hours, blasting Harvesters one-handed like something out of a Harmony propaganda piece, until we reached the safety of our buffer-zone. I lay panting on the cold floor as he unstrapped me from my armour and asked him why he’d risked his skin for someone he didn’t even know. He looked at me for a long time before saying we were both Reapers. That made us brothers. ‘To Harmony, to the Common, we’re nothing,’ he’d said, sinking down on his haunches next to me. ‘A bunch of freak experiments, fighting their war for them. And if we don’t look out for each other, who will?’
Wasn’t until he’d limped away I’d seen he’d been shot in the shoulder. He hadn’t breathed a word about it.
We didn’t survive because we had better guns, better wartech, better tacticians, better orbital dogfighters. We survived because we trusted each other with our lives, through every bloody step of the screaming, unflinching darkness of the Reaper War. You don’t survive the traumas we’d endured and the horrific, gut-wrenching things we’d seen without being scarred. Without forming a bond. So, no matter what battlefields we faced, no matter what horrors Harvest would throw at us, we relied on each other. We shared an unbreakable loyalty and honour that every Reaper would shoulder for the rest of their lives.
And now, in order to save them, I had to turn on my brother. Believe that the boy who’d been beside me and Kasia since we were children was involved in their murders. It felt like a betrayal. Worse: the soldier in me shouldn’t have thought twice. I was dead to Artyom. My fellow Reapers had been my only family for half a decade.
But that’s the burden of being human – doing right by the people you love, long after it’s stopped making sense.
5
Grim
We got as far as the Starklands Central Station before I was sure someone was following us.
The stormtech sharpens your senses with a permanent extra edge, so I was distinctly aware someone had kept pace with us since the restaurant. I almost mentioned it to Kowalski, but by the time we got back to my apartment complex there was