Traitor Twice Removed: Chapter Two.

Traitor Twice Removed: Chapter Two.

Mason returned home relatively early, just before sun down, and dropped his house key in the dish on a short metallic table next to the front door before sliding to the carpeted floor with something just short of an exasperated sigh. It was a silent policy that none of the Corps ever rode a vehicle in the City unless it was absolutely necessary; thank goodness he almost never had to make a trip to the City’s mental asylum -- in fact, the corps commander was pretty sure that this was the very first time visiting some place so far across the City.

“It’s my birthday today,” he muttered, almost as an afterthought, before pulling himself up off the floor and into the kitchen. One of the few people in the City who had the luxury of a house (albeit a very small townhouse that might as well have been two apartments stacked one on top of the other), Mason used its abnormally large kitchen to his advantage -- when he felt up to it, it wasn’t unusual for him to cook an outsized meal for an equally outsized crowd in a spur-of-the-moment party that, following the normal course of events, he generally regretted later.

That night was not one of those nights. The man didn’t feel like eating at all, really. Something in his head told him that tonight was a champagne-on-the-couch night, maybe resulting in sleeping in the next day and appearing at Headquarters an hour late.

Maybe. Just maybe.

Mason reached for the cool champagne lying on its side in a rack within the refridgerator with one hand, and searched out a bottle opener with the other. He could already feel the bubbles rising in his chest from the prospect. He could treat himself to something special once in awhile, couldn’t he? The bottle cap gave a loud pop as he pried the champagne open, almost immediately taking a swig straight from the green glass.

“Happy birthday to me,” he sang, attempting to revel in the inherent loneliness of his voice and failing rather miserably. “Happy birthday to me…”

There had to be other people worse off than he was that he could think about. Aleta, for instance.

His mind fell on her rather heavily and he startled at the emotion the thought of her face forced upon him: undeniable pity that he knew she didn’t want, and hapless guilt. In his mind’s eye he remembered her naked form quivering on whitewashed marble steps before flashing cameras, thinly muscled arms clutching herself as if trying to hold all the pieces of herself together; she was cold, and yet burning with a humiliation she had never experienced, ever --

-- and he had just walked away --

The Corps Commander took another swig from the champagne bottle and allowed his thoughts, almost gratefully, to turn to whether or not his fiancee would come home soon.

===

“Sir -- the latest on Ms. Claire’s trials.”

“Hmm?” Mason looked up from his computer. It was the next day, late afternoon. He had been discussing the most recent Resistance movements with Major General Camden via a video conference between Headquarters and PGCMO, numerous red dots flashing on the screen. Since Aleta’s discharge there was just too much to do, with too many circles that were so easy to run in. He could make better plans if he delegated his City Branch Group Commanders, but until these situations were cleared the man couldn’t look over profiles and assign new group commanders. Not that he was very eager to do so in the first place. Zalene and Andersen had left gaping holes to fill; the pile of paperwork on his desk and a couple of failed skirmishes were evidence to that.

It wasn’t that there was no one signing up for the position, either. Merely the fact that though the Corps was composed of the best and the brightest, Aleta had pulled together a dream team of which only two out of five remained: Taylor Forcene of the Northern Forests Outpost, Supplies Officer; and Jason Camden of the Mountain Outpost, Personnel. Now that he had taken Aleta’s position, Mason had the responsibility and curse of replacing the rest. Somehow.

The young woman who now stood before him was currently his first choice as Intel officer. “The latest on the Claire trials, Corps Commander Song. As you requested.”

“Thank you, Colonel. Just leave them here. I’ll take a look at them a little bit later.” Even Mason could hear the weariness in his own voice, the subtle resignation to a position where he just couldn’t find his comfortable niche. “Has Lady Felicia answered my appeal as of yet?”

“No, sir. Not many have heard from her at all, to be honest.”

The man sighed. “All right. Thank you, Colonel Summers. That will be all.”

The woman walked out without another word, leaving Mason to once again stew in his thoughts. He’d been doing way too much thinking, lately. Aleta had made this look so easy…

“Uhh… sir? I’m still here.”

Mason gave the group commander on his computer screen a bemused glance. “Give me a call if any of them so much as swat a fly, Camden. And get some sleep -- you look like hell.”

“Understood, sir. Thank you. Camden out.”

===

Aleta’s cell was guarded by four of his own, as per usual and much to Mason’s dismay, when he came to visit yet again that evening. There was a broken woman in there; granted, she was an emotional, highly volatile soldier of a woman, but a broken woman nonetheless that didn’t need the looming presence of those who had once served under her. The man hadn’t planned on approaching her again before the trial, really, but their last words had made him restless. He waved the guards off tiredly.

“Go home. You’ve been here all day. Didn’t I assign the guard to be rotated every four hours?”

The seargant stood at attention. “I’m sorry, Commander, but we can’t do that.”

Mason twitched. “Excuse me?”

“Lady Felicia Baron has instructed us with new shifts.”

“Bullshit,” he muttered, and drew up to his full height to tower over them. “Stand down, soldier.”

“No, sir.”

This conversation had nothing more to do with sending the four men before him home, and Mason knew that. All he could feel at the moment was beyond the frozen-over calculation that his training had taught him -- it had long crossed over into unmitigated hate. Felicia dared to override his orders? She dared to fuck around with his command, even now? He knew what they needed, what they felt, and seeing their ex-corps commander as such was demoralizing --

The thought cut short and gave him pause. Was this really about Felicia’s supposed authority over his?

“Soldier, who is your commander?”

“You are, sir,” the woman responded tightly.

“Then, pray tell, why are you not listening to me?” He leaned in, his voice dropping down to a whisper. “I have this covered. Don’t make me ask for your tags, Seargant.”

With obvious hesitation the soldier stepped aside and lay her weapon down, motioning to the rest of her subordinates to do the same. Mason nodded to them as they left and entered the staunch white room once more. The overwhelming scent of bleach and medicine washed over him, making him reel a bit as he searched out Aleta.

“You’re back,” remarked a buttery voice from a corner. Mason’s eyes revealed Aleta’s wide-eyed, orange-haired freak of a roommate, and the man smiled weakly.

“Good evening, Ms. Kasse.”

Amber’s gaze flickered over to the bed. “You shouldn’t have come. I just managed to make her fall asleep.” The girl nodded, drawing her knees to her chest. “She has trouble doing that.”

“Sleeping?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Dreaming.”

“I see.” Her expression disturbed Mason. Just a little. The dreamy-eyed stare wasn’t something a soldier was normally accustomed to seeing in someone of her age. “So you don’t want me to wake her?”

“She might be crabby and snatch you up in her little pincers and gobble you up,” Amber said.

“I…see,” Mason said again. “I doubt that she’s a mutated lobster, but I see your point.”

“She talks about you a lot in her sleep,” the girl commented off-handedly, “if you listen really close. Mumbles and murmurs and all sorts of stuff.” Amber rocked back and forth, not meeting his eyes. “She told me that Fyre Andersen is dead, too. Is that true?”

Mason steeled himself. “Yes.”

“Yes, yes. Crucified, I heard. What bastard would do such a thing?” Amber cackled, her laughter tinged with sickening sarcasm. “Not me, of course. I’m not that psycho. I think.”

“So you don’t think that she’ll be -- ”

“I wanted to meet her, did you know?”

The man caught himself in mid-sentence, staring blankly at the pale girl with what could have been curiosity but not quite. Silent candor blinked back up at him, bipolar in its alleged allegiance. The way she looked, with her riotous hair and glassy doll eyes, wasn’t her fault; repeatedly broken bones and fractured pieces of consciousness could only have been harmed by too little attention. Or too much. Mason wasn’t all so confident himself.

“What?” he finally blurted out, in a pathetic excuse of a response that came from not knowing what else to say.

“Fyre Andersen. The one who locked me up tight and forced me to take all this nasty medicine.” Amber was still rocking back and forth, the action sending chills up Mason’s spine. “She fought hard. Got all her ickle little intelligence officers to do ‘research’ for her and everything! And at the trial? An inferno blazing across the court room. I was so scared that I’d die, there; that I’d seen fire that no one else had and we’d all burn to the ground.”

Mason blinked at her, again unsure as to how he should respond, and instead ignored it completely.

“Ms. Kasse -- if you don’t mind -- inform the warden when Claire is awake again, will you? I really must speak to her before her trial tomorrow.”

Powder blue eyes glimmered, glazed over, and Amber nodded.

“Good. Thank you, Ms. Kasse.”

The Corps Commander shut the door quietly behind him, the faint click rebounding hollowly back and forth between the sickeningly white walls; Amber flinched, as if attempting to avoid the harpoon of sound. Slowly, as if her thin bones ached (and they might have, as they cracked and popped beneath her weight), the teenager rose, clutching the wall, and made her way back towards the bed where her cellmate lay on the bottom bunk.

“Commander Claire, he’s gone.” Amber placed a surprisingly gentle hand on Aleta’s tense shoulder, which shrunk away from her touch, and shook her. “You can get up now.”

The woman turned to face her, eyes red from witheld tears that confused the girl. She wished that she would stop calling her that, but had long given up on trying to make her. “Thank you, Amber,” she told her. “Thank you.”

“I don’t understand why you have to pretend to sleep when Mason Song comes to visit,” Amber said.

Aleta hid behind a curtain of oily obsidian waves and let out a cough, which turned into a low chuckle, which then petered into what could have been a whimper or a quiet moan.

“Mason was the one who first brought me here. To the Asylum,” she began to explain. “He had been ordered to have me dress in my full Corps uniform for a reason apparently undisclosed to him. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Mason couldn’t have known what was happening, either -- he’s too honest a man not to tell me, if he did. But I wish he did. I wish he’d have told me.”

Aleta looked away almost wistfully.

“So there I was, standing before the doors of Pelham Asylum for what could’ve been my second, maybe third time (I can’t quite remember) in my life, thinking, ‘This is it. It’s all over.’” She inhaled sharply, deeply, before exhaling much quieter in comparison. “But I kept thinking that it wasn’t, even though it so obviously was.

“You see, we had it all wrong. The uniform that was spoken of in the message to Mason was referring to these, these white clothes that all the Asylum inmates wear. The Asylum administrators never specified it, claiming that they thought he knew what they were talking about. They lied and lied and lied to our faces when they knew all along that Mason would make the wrong assumption and I would have to shame myself just to play by the goddamned rules. Just to make sure that I didn’t get into any deeper shit than I was already in.

“I was forced to take my clothes off in front of those fucking doors. In front of reporters. In front of my Corps. In front of Felicia.

“In front of Mason.”

Silence.

“That’s why I can’t stand to look at him. Because only he, I think, knows the amount of shame I felt then. And he blames himself for it.”

Amber’s mind was too far gone to allow her to feel pity; her mind could no longer comprehend the emotion. But Aleta saw stirrings of it beneath the glassy surfaces of her mirrored, powder-blue eyes. “I’m sorry,” the girl murmured, and she meant it.

“Don’t be. It wasn’t you.” Such malice in those words. “That day, they didn’t just strip me of my uniform, Amber. With every camera flash, hushed whisper, startled scream, mocking grin, they stripped me of whatever dignity, respect, trust, and belief I had left -- ” Aleta could feel herself start to snarl as she spoke the words, distraught fury rising with every syllable, but it was gone as quickly as it came, like a forest fire that couldn’t sustain itself. An inferno with nothing left to burn.

“And all that was left was…betrayal. I’d never felt something so cold.”

“I understand.”

Aleta looked up, startled. The teenager before her had never spoken in that tone before, and she had been caught off guard. “What?”

“I mean, I understand.” Amber paused, as if to collect her thoughts. Then:

“When people imagine feeling betrayed, they believe that the first thing to come is anger; a hot, fiery passion; a need for bloodlust that can't be easily sated. It's not. That's revenge -- it comes later. Betrayal is more like frost, creeping stealthy and silent across window glass. It’s that slow, sinking realization that those you trusted never existed, that you were stupid enough to think otherwise, and that you will never, ever be able to have faith in anyone again.

“I know. I’ve felt it, and it’s terrifying. It's terrifying to think of yourself as so limited, so powerless, so... small and insignificant, and... tired.” She looked up at Aleta reproachfully. “Are you tired, Commander Claire?”

Aleta let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

Yes. God, yes, she wanted to say. I felt so tired of it all. Tired and sad and pathetic and lonely and I wanted to cry but I couldn't, because my chest was tight and painful and all I could do was steel myself and watch as I was dragged away. And after that... after all of that... there was nothing left. Nothing at all. Nothing except the fact that you can't breathe, that you're drowning and no one gives a fuck, because you're all alone and it doesn't matter anymore and it's all over.

It was all over, and I just didn’t want to admit it.

“No,” she told Amber. “I’m not anything, anymore.”