Page 125 of Victorious

“What is that?” demanded Noah.

“I don’t know,” he said. Which was true—he wouldn’t know for sure until he found her. Them. But he had a bad fucking hunch.

A backpack lay, upended, several feet away, the contents turned out in a pile. A change of clothes. A chemistry textbook. A battered paperback that caught his eye. The word VALE took up half the cover. The name was like a splinter under Eli’s skin.

The Lockland Victor flickered briefly through his mind.

But that version of his friend was dead, replaced by a specter who was out there, somewhere, alive in spite of him. And given that Sydney and Mitch were here, he wouldn’t be far behind.

Noah’s voice cut across the roof. “Over here.”

Eli looked up and saw the EO standing at the rooftop’s edge, looking down. When he joined him, he saw the four agents sprawled on the pavement below, like they’d been thrown—or jumped.

Noah leaned forward, and Eli briefly considered pushing the other EO off the edge, but judging by the agents lying on the ground below, and the fact that two showed signs of life, the fall wouldn’t be enough to kill him.

“What the fuck…” muttered Noah before marching back toward the stairs.

Eli followed, but slowed as he neared the door and caught sight of a metal shape glinting in the dark. Sydney’s gun. It lay on the ground beside the broken door. Eli crouched, and took it, tucking the weapon into a holster at his back before catching up with Noah.

Down below, he knelt beside an agent as they struggled to sit up.

Eli wondered, absently, if these human puppets still felt pain. If they did, it didn’t seem to stop them. One agent’s arm hung, visibly broken, at his side. The other limped, though it seemed less from discomfort as necessity, his foot jutting at a wrong angle.

Unnatural.

Eli was about to do something when Noah beat him to it. He approached the agent, put his hands on his helmet, and twisted sharply, breaking the man’s neck.

“Dead weight,” he said, by way of explanation, as if expecting Eli to disapprove. Noah tugged the helmet off the agent’s body and dragged it down over his own face.

“Malcolm,” he said, addressing one of Gabriel’s other projects, the sentient computer back at base. “Show me the last few minutes.”

As he stood there, watching, blind to the outside world, Eli considered the weight of the gun against his back.

He was still surprised that Gabriel had let him out.

Of course, there had been caveats. Several orders, the first of which was not to kill Sydney. The second was to make no attempt at escape. The third, to do no violence against EON.

When is murder not an act of violence? Eli asked himself.

The answer came so easily. When it’s an act of mercy.

Eli smiled. Loopholes.

It was true, he had also instructed Eli, that first day, not to fight the other EO.

But it would only be a fight if Noah struggled.

And yet, as his fingers drifted toward the gun, he felt Gabriel’s will bearing down on him, pushing his mind and body away from the act, the way it had when Eli tried to imagine killing the therapist.

As if Noah were an extension of Gabriel himself.

Eli glared at the EO, but relented, lowering his hand. He didn’t have many bullets, and he was saving them for her. Or Victor. Whichever he found first.

There would be time to handle Noah later.

“Hey, Cardale,” said the EO, tugging off the helmet. “You want to tell me what I’m looking at?” He handed the helmet over. Eli put it on and the visor went black before the internal camera replayed what the agent had seen in the moments before he fell.

Eli watched, and as he did, his suspicions were confirmed.