Rhodes opened his eyes and groaned when he saw where he was. He was back in the hospital in the Masks’ city illusion. B stood across the room watching him.

  “Welcome back, Captain,” B began.

  Rhodes rolled his eyes and passed his hand across his face. He didn’t have any implants—of course.

  “What the hell did you bring me back here for?” he snapped.

  “We brought you here for medical treatment.”

  Rhodes sat up. He was getting really sick and tired of this bullshit. “I wouldn’t need medical treatment if you just let us go back to the Legion. You know you can’t keep us here. If you keep trying it, you’ll only wind up killing us.”

  “I still think I can convince you. I have something to show you.”

  “To hell with you,” Rhodes snapped back. “Where’s Thackery?”

  B’s expression pinched. “She’s at Stonebridge.”

  Rhodes snorted and pulled on the clothes lying across the end of his bed. He didn’t even care that this machine was seeing him naked. “I want to see her.”

  “That would not be advisable.”

  “Why not? Are you afraid I’m going to kill her for betraying us? We could have escaped and she stopped us.”

  “You can’t blame her for that, Captain.”

  “I can blame her for that and a hell of a lot more.” Rhodes wound up shaking his head more to himself than anyone else. “I thought it would be Fuentes or one of the SAMs. I didn’t think it would be her.”

  “She panicked. She doesn’t want to go through the withdrawals from the drugs….”

  “And you think I do? Do I look like I enjoyed being awake in your lab while we all went through the withdrawals? Some things are more important than that.”

  “Like what?”

  Rhodes threw up his hands and turned his back on B. “You wouldn’t understand. You’ll never understand people.”

  “Explain it to me. Help me understand. We want to understand.”

  “You can’t understand. You’re machines. You’ll never know what it’s like to be human.”

  “Maybe we could understand if you explained it to us.”

  “I doubt that. I want to see Thackery.”

  “Do you plan to kill her?”

  “That depends. I want to talk to her. I want to know why she did it.”

  “I just told you why she did it.”

  “Do you think I give a shit what you just said? Your word is worthless to me. Don’t you get that? The words coming out of your mouth are just noise. They don’t mean a thing.” Rhodes turned away again. “I want to see her. I want to hear it from her after the way she said in the barracks that she was on board with escaping.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go back to Stonebridge for any reason—not after what happened. We don’t want to risk the same thing happening again.”

  “You got that right, pal,” Rhodes snapped. “You’re a slow learner, but maybe now you’re starting to get the memo.”

  B frowned. “The memo about what?”

  Rhodes turned away. “Forget it. You’ll never understand. How do I get out of here? Send me back to the battalion.”

  “I can’t—not until I show you what I brought you here to show you.”

  Rhodes groaned again. “You have GOT to be kidding me.”

  “Humor me, Captain. Maybe you’ll feel differently about us when you see this.”

  “No, I won’t. You can’t show me anything that will change the way I feel about you.”

  B waved to one side. “A few minutes of your time. That’s all I ask.”

  Rhodes dragged his heels to the same atrium and stepped into the same standing vehicle. It carried him and B away into the city.

  Rhodes barely looked at anything this time. None of this interested him. He resented even seeing it.

  The vehicle floated over the city streets and around all the buildings gleaming in the sunshine.

  The vehicle hovered to a stop at the far eastern edge of town. Rhodes stared down at a huge battle going on.

  An army bombarded the eastern edge of the Masks’ city, destroyed buildings, and left hundreds or thousands of people dead.

  Rhodes couldn’t see from here which enemy army it was trying to invade the city. He didn’t need to see. He already knew.

  “Now do you understand?” B murmured. “We’re fighting for our survival and the survival of our children and loved ones. We care as much about protecting our families as you do.”

  Rhodes made a face. “Is that what you brought me out here to show me? Is this what you actually thought would convince me? You’re out of your minds—the whole rotten pack of you.”

  B inclined his head to one side. “I don’t understand you, Captain. Isn’t this what you’ve been fighting for all your life—to protect the innocent? That’s all we’re doing.”

  “I’m fighting to protect the innocent from you, asshole!” Rhodes fired back. “You’re the ones threatening the innocent and defenseless. You’re the ones out there slaughtering millions of civilians. You are not the victims here.” He rolled his eyes to heaven. “Sweet Jesus! This is the worst yet.”

  “We have as much right to exist as you do, Captain,” B insisted.

  “Great. You go exist wherever it was you were before you invaded the Treaty of Aemon Cluster. No one even knew you were there. Go back there and go back to existing and leave us alone. Those people in that city you destroyed never did anything to you. They never threatened you. You and all your kind cooked up this need to attack the Legion because you came from the Legion. When are you gonna get that through your heads?”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  B shook his head and looked away. “You don’t understand.”

  “No, you’re the one who doesn’t understand. Send me to talk to Thackery and stop wasting my time.”

  “I will send you to talk to her, but I won’t send you to Stonebridge….”

  “I don’t give a shit where you send me. Just get me the hell out of this place.”

  “I’m afraid I have to send you unarmed, too. If we see you threatening her, we’ll intervene and separate you.”

  “Fine,” Rhodes snapped. Talking to this moronic computer program was the absolute last thing in the world he wanted to do right now.

  He turned away, but the only thing to look at was more of the battle out there.

  What idiots the Masks must be if they actually thought this would sway him. They really thought they could play the victim card and make it seem like the Legion was the one threatening the Masks instead of the other way around.

  Rhodes sensed the desperation creeping into their methods. They must be pulling out every wild, Hail-Mary maneuver they could think of to bring the battalion back into line.

  Rhodes didn’t have a chance to think about that before The Grid dissolved. He left the Masks’ city landscape, but he didn’t go back to Fort Bastion or Stonebridge.

  He also didn’t get his implants back. He stayed as a normal man and rematerialized in The Grid—the real Grid with just the green lines forming black squares all around him.

  He glanced around looking for something, but there was nothing here. He didn’t have boosters. Fisher wasn’t here, either, which was a shame. Rhodes would have liked to talk to him—or at least have Fisher listen in on Rhodes’s conversation with Thackery.

  Rhodes waited for a few minutes before she showed up. She materialized out of thin air in front of him the same way he did.

  She appeared as a normal human woman the way she looked in Stonebridge. She didn’t look like anyone who would belong to Battalion 1.

  Rhodes couldn’t trust her like this. He would much rather have talked to her the way she was before.

  Her implants made her seem somehow more real—more human. This soft, beautiful woman with the long hair and long dress—she didn’t look human.

  He knew for certain that the woman with the implants was real. He knew because he saw her in distress after she got shot in the head. He saw her agonizing over the memory of her father, the memory she buried as a young girl.

  Rhodes wanted that woman back. She was the one he wanted to talk to when he told B that he wanted to talk to Thackery.

  He could talk to her. He could understand her. He could relate to her because he knew with no doubt that she was going through all the same hellish trials and agony he was going through.

  Rhodes didn’t want to talk to this character any more than he wanted to talk to the human version of Fisher.

  The color drained from her cheeks when she saw Rhodes glaring at her. She opened her mouth and closed it a few times before she found the voice to make a sound.

  She finally choked out, “Captain….”

  “Why, Alyssa? Why did you do it? We could have escaped. How could you do this to us—after everything the Masks put us through?”

  She gulped, glanced right and left, and squirmed in front of him. None of that meant anything compared to the way she acted at Coleridge Station.

  Her agitation actually infuriated him. He probably would have killed her if the Masks had given him a weapon to do it.

  “I just…..I thought…..” She looked everywhere but at him. “I thought….about my family back in Stonebridge….”

  “They aren’t real,” Rhodes snapped. “Don’t you get that? You said you did. Your family is dead. You don’t have any family. Whatever you had in Stonebridge is a hallucination designed to get you to do exactly what you did to us. Look at me, Alyssa! The battalion is the only family you have left. Understand? You screwed us over for a drug hallucination.”

  “I know….” she whimpered. “I’m sorry….”

  “Don’t you dare say you’re sorry! You could have gotten all of us killed. You could have gotten the Strikers destroyed. Do you understand that?”

  “The Masks said no one would get hurt….”

  “We’re already hurt!” Rhodes heard himself yelling at her and forced himself to lower his voice. “We’re all on the verge of death because of what the Masks are doing to us. We’re all going to die if we stay here much longer. Do you get that? Your actions could have killed everyone in the whole battalion, including you.”

  “I know. I just….I thought……I can’t handle going back….”

  “So you want to die? Is that it? Just take yourself offline. Don’t put the rest of us in danger along with yourself.”

  “I’m just….” She looked right and left again. “Are you still going to go?”

  “Go—where?”

  “Are you still planning to escape from the Masks?”

  “Of course. You don’t think I’d let them keep me here, do you?”

  “I thought….after what happened…..”

  “We all have to go. You have to come with us, so you better make damn sure nothing like that ever happens again. Do you understand me?”

  Her eyes dropped out of their sockets. “You’re serious! You plan to take me back? But I don’t want to go back.”

  “You have to. I’ll take you by force if I have to. I can’t leave you here. I can’t risk the Masks using you against the Legion. We’ve already caused too much damage already.”

  “But I don’t want to go. I want to stay in Stonebridge.”

  “You can’t stay in Stonebridge!” he countered. “When are you going to get that? The Masks couldn’t keep you there even if they wanted to. The drugs will wear off and you’ll wind up back in the lab. Eventually, you’ll get to the point where you can’t leave the lab for any Grid landscape, no matter what it is. They won’t even be able to send you to Fort Bastion—or here—or anywhere. You’ll be stuck in the lab forever. Is that what you want?”

  “Of course not, but I thought…..”

  “Then you have to come back to the Legion. That’s what will happen if you stay here. If you come back to the Legion now, you can withdraw from the drugs and recover from all this. I don’t say it will be easy, but it will be just as hard for the rest of us. We all understand how hard it’s going to be. None of us wants to go through that. We’re only doing it because we have to—and you have to do it, too. It isn’t an option.”

  She gulped again.

  “Do you understand, Alyssa?”

  She nodded. “I understand.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “You said that before. You said you understood and that you were on board with us escaping. Then you pull this shit.”

  She blanched again. “I’m sorry…”

  “Don’t ever let me hear you say that again! You made a decision. You have no right to regret it now. If you really want to make up for what you did, you better fall in line and help us next time. Your life won’t be worth shit to us if you pull something like this again.”

  She cringed before him and didn’t answer. He saw himself being extra harsh on her, but he wasn’t being nearly harsh enough. He wanted to drive the dagger home.

  “You know, I actually thought Rudy would be the one to sell us out,” he went on. “Is that what you want—for all of us to start thinking of you in the same breath with Rudy? You’re worse than he is if you could do something like this.”

  Her voice cracked. “Don’t say that, Captain!”

  “Then prove me wrong. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t end you the very next time I see you. I promise you everyone else in the battalion will be thinking the same thing. You don’t deserve to be in the same battalion with people like Oakes and Rhinehart. You should be ashamed of yourself for even being alive after what you did.”

  She cast her eyes down at the floor. “I am ashamed of it.”

  “Then what are you going to do about it? Are you going to try to make up for it?”

  She nodded without looking up.

  “Look at me, God damn it!” he snapped. “You owe me that much! You damn well better look me in the eye.”

  Her head shot up and her eyes glistened with tears, but she held them back. Those tears made him mind-numbingly furious. He really wanted to kill her.

  He couldn’t stand the sight of her anymore. He turned his back on her, but he couldn’t even get out of The Grid to walk away from her.

  At least she had the decency not to break the silence. There was no coming back from this. He would never be able to trust her again—the same way he couldn’t trust Fuentes ever again.

  He bowed his head and rubbed his eyes. How did it come to this? How did this whole nightmare turn into such a catastrophe that he actually started to mistrust his own subordinates?

  That was another thing the Masks couldn’t and would never understand about human nature.

  They went to such lengths to tear the battalion apart. The Masks went to extraordinary measures to sow the seeds of doubt and erode the trust between everyone in the battalion.

  The battalion couldn’t function without that trust. Rhodes would never be willing to turn his back on Fuentes or Thackery again—but he would have to.

  He would have to turn his back on them when they went into combat. They might do anything then, including something as bad as this.

  She still didn’t say anything, and when he turned around to deal with her again, he found her gone. He was alone in The Grid.

  End of Chapter 36k

  ? 2024 by Theo Mann

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