Chapter 8 - The Flood of Remorse
The effect of the reversal agent was instant, terrifying, and absolute.
Clara gasped—a violent, ragged intake of air that sounded like her lungs were tearing open. She dropped her combat knives. They clattered uselessly onto the wet gravel.
Her violet eyes dilated until the irises almost vanished. The icy, psychopathic stillness that had defined her posture vanished, replaced by a sudden, violent trembling that shook her entire frame.
The chemical dam holding back ten years of suppressed human emotion shattered in a microsecond.
Every murder she had committed for The Sovereign, every life she had ended without a thought, every tortured scream she had ignored filled her consciousness in a blinding, agonizing flash flood of pure, unadulterated remorse.
Clara fell to her knees in the mud, clutching her head with both hands, screaming in absolute, unhinged agony.
"No! No! Make it stop! Please, God, make it stop!" she shrieked, tears pouring down her bloody face, smearing her makeup into dark streaks. "The faces... oh God, the faces... I can see them... I can feel them..."
Julian stood over her, bleeding heavily from his shoulder wound, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
He looked down at her. For the first time in fourteen months, as he watched Clara writhe in the agonizing hell of restored human empathy, Julian felt a faint, distant prickle of something he hadn't felt since he sat on that sidewalk on Eighth Avenue.
He felt pity.
Phobos-9 was slipping. The sight of her suffering was creating a friction in his own chemically frozen brain—a crack in the armor.
"Clara," Julian whispered, kneeling beside her in the mud.
She looked up at him, her eyes wide with unimaginable terror, weeping like a broken child.
"Kill me," she sobbed, grabbing his coat with trembling, muddy hands. "Please, Julian... kill me. I can't live with this... I can't feel this... please..."
Julian closed his eyes for a second.
He remembered the old man handing him the sandwich. He remembered the feeling of total helplessness. He realized then that the ultimate cruelty of The Sovereign wasn't that they turned people into monsters; it was that they made their victims love their own damnation.
Julian raised his right hand, placing his fingers gently on the back of Clara’s neck.
"Sleep, Clara," he murmured softly.
He applied precise pressure to her carotid artery. Within five seconds, her frantic weeping slowed. Her eyes drifted shut, and she went limp in his arms, slipping into unconsciousness.
May you like
Julian laid her gently on the dry wooden pallets beneath a container overhang, out of the rain.
Then, he turned toward the entrance of the warehouse, where the headlights of Victoria Cross’s black Lincoln Continental were slowly approaching through the fog.
