Page 178 of Pulse Zero
“And yet,” Malcolm replies, “you now stand a fighting chance in this world because of me. You can’t deny that you understand me more than you want to.”
That shuts me up. Because…fuck him. Fuck him for that.Part of medoesunderstand. I think about the man I killed upstairs, about how little I felt afterward, how little Istillfeel. I think about Reese telling me he’d burn the world down for me and knowing I’d do the same.
“You think Ascended are inherently good because you love one,” he says when I still haven’t managed to respond. “Because you are one. But I’ve seen what happens when people like us are left unchecked.”
“You mean people likeyou?”
“Yes,” he answers without hesitation. “I know exactly what I am, Cason. Everything I built, everything I’ve done, was to create control before chaos consumed it all.”
“By killing people.”
“By creating structure and guidance.”
“You can’t do both!”
“I can when the alternative is extinction.”
I stare at him. At this man who watched his wife die, his brother die, and then decided the solution to everything that fate showed him was to build an empire around death itself.
But the most horrifying part of it is that he genuinely believes he’s right.
“You manipulated me into destroying Reese’s resistance, and that was more than just to add to my trauma. Wasn’t it? All those Ascended your people hunted down, all of those they killed…”
“It was all to prevent worse outcomes.”
“Fucking hell.” I stare at him in disbelief. “You really don’t hear yourself, do you?”
His jaw ticks for the first time. “Reese Morgan was recruiting Ascended without oversight, without containment. Some of them were dangerous beyond comprehension.”
“They were people.”
“They were volatile.”
“You’re fucking volatile!”
A strange look flickers briefly across his face, then the faintest of grins. “Exactly.”
For a moment, that response freezes me in place. Because Malcolm really believes he’s dangerous too.
“Reese and his people have discovered only one instance of rogue Ascended out there.” His eyes hold mine, steady and unsettling. “But there are more. There are always more. Ascended no one controls, people who crossed Pulse Zero and disappeared back into the world. Some are terrified of what they become. Some hide. And some enjoy it. Some embrace it. Some become monsters. Everything I’ve done is to try to prevent that.”
I open my mouth to say something else, but a different voice cuts through the chamber from behind me. Low and familiar andfurious.
“And yet somehow,” Reese says, “you still ended up becoming the worst monster in the room.”
Malcolm straightens, and I turn around.
And standing in the doorway, shadows curling violently around him like smoke before a fire, is Reese Morgan.
The second I seeMalcolm Bellrose standing in front of Cason, every violent instinct in me wakes up at once.
My shadows react first, spilling across the floor in twisting black currents, crawling up the walls and machinery like something alive and starving. The entire chamber darkens around the edges as they surge outward in response to one singular thought pulsing through me over and over and over.
Kill him.
Kill him.
Kill him.
