Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.
The conference room was already filled with the cabinet, buzzing with whispered conversations. Cain, Reed, and General Reese were conspicuously absent, and everyone present had a good idea what that might mean.
The room quieted when Moira McCaul stepped through the door. She paused to look around the room. Her face was serene, with no trace of anger or bitterness, but few of those gathered were able to meet her eyes.
Justine Vahn, her replacement, looked around at the downcast faces, steeled herself, and pulled out an empty chair, offering it to Moira with an open hand. The corners of Moira’s mouth turned up almost imperceptibly, and she crossed the room to sit.
The buzz of conversation slowly returned to the room, only to be silenced moments later when the door opened again. Two figures entered: Reed, hands cuffed behind his back, and Reese, hands free, with his service cap in his hands and his head bowed. They were escorted by a uniformed soldier with a sidearm. This was something that had been forbidden for decades on the grounds that it would be tantamount to the military secretaries like Reese and Bell throwing their weight around in private cabinet spaces. Their world was changing, and the rules would change with it.
Cain and Christopher followed them into the room. Christopher pulled two chairs to the front of the room, where the prisoners sat. Cain whispered to the soldier, who saluted and stepped out, closing the door behind him.
Christopher’s mind was a vortex. In the center, an identity was coalescing, as though the memory of the murder was a blockage that had been opened, freeing the vast torrent of memories and feelings dammed up behind it. It could still only pour into him at a certain speed, but the end result felt more inevitable than ever. It could not be stopped. He was becoming God-Speaker.
As if that wasn’t enough, the voices were equally cacophonous. They congratulated and advised him. They raged against him. They howled and buzzed and thrummed with emotions that did not easily translate into human moods. The one saving grace was that it had become so easy for Christopher to tune them out. God-Speaker could block their noise as easily as turning off a faucet.
He stood at the front of the silent room. He kept his face neutral, but God-Speaker was reveling in the moment.
“Thirty-two years ago, Reed Parricida murdered me in my office. Today, he attacked me once again.”
“I have someone looking through the security footage,” Cain said. “We’ll see if it’s been tampered with.”
Reed sighed. “I’m sure it’s all there. I didn’t have access.”
“How did you expect to get away with it?”
He laughed. “Who said I did? The best I could hope was that you’d let your guard down and I could kill him. Either way, I was going to be found out.”
“Then why do it?” Cain asked.
“I was already as good as caught, once his memory came back,” Reed replied. “For all I knew, it already had, and he was playing his games with us. Better to keep my freedom, but since that no longer seemed possible, I thought I ought to at least try to finish what I started.”
“But why kill him at all?”
“Why? Because he’s made us all prisoners. You think you’re important, you think you’re in control. You’re just as trapped as those deserters.”
“I don’t need to be in control of everything,” Cain said. “Is that what you were hoping for? After all this time, you haven’t gotten very far.”
“You stupid ass,” Reed replied. “You just couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to kill him unless they had grand plans to become the new emperor. I just wanted him dead.”
God-Speaker frowned. “I gave you…”
“What?” Reed snapped. “A job? A purpose? Some modicum of power and a nice lifestyle? An endless stream of lies to tell and be told?”
“Everything,” God-Speaker said.
“My mother would disagree,” Reed replied. “With all that control, you could try to make things better. Even if it was just in this hidden corner of the world. No, even here there’s poverty and misery. People struggle. I grew up like that. I thought I might be able to make things better. Eventually I realized that you just didn’t care. Things only needed to be good enough to serve your needs. People are just tools to you.”
“This place has an important function,” Cain said.
“The only function of this place is to keep him alive. To keep him safe. And us, the people closest to him, we aren’t picked because we’re the best at what we do. Every one of us was picked because we were deemed safe. Useful enough, and docile. Pliable.”
“Obviously not all of us,” Cain said.
“No?” Reed said. “Look around this room. Everyone so happy to have their king back. To be told what to do again. And I’m hardly any different. Even when I realized what a monster he was—long after I realized—I never planned to do it. I never thought I would. I thought I would do his bidding for the rest of my life. Then he told me to forget about the job that was supposed to be my whole purpose. He had me drop everything because there might be some hint of a threat to him. Something just snapped in me. I…broke.”
Christopher saw the muscles working in the man’s jaw.
“I guess I’ve been broken for a long time now. So that’s something you gave me.”
Christopher studied Reed, who now faced the floor, and felt a weight in his chest, despite what had happened between them in the hallway less than an hour earlier, and what had happened in his office decades before.
“Do you feel any guilt? Any remorse?”
Reed laughed. “Of course. I couldn’t explain why, but I do. I’ve carried it with me all this time. I suppose it’s in my nature to abhor what I did. That’s why you chose me.”
“You killed another human being,” Moira said softly.
“No,” Reed replied, tensing. God-Speaker thought he might try to lunge to his feet, but instead he leaned back in the chair, shifting his cuffed wrists. His voice was softer than hers, but held a dangerous edge.
“No, a man of fifty years is human. A hundred years, maybe two hundred, sure. What about five hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? Oh, and he hears voices under the mountain. He picks out new faces the way real people buy clothes. I don’t know what he is, but he isn’t human.”
Silence followed this pronouncement. Into it, Reed spat, “and he isn’t dead. He’s standing here, isn’t he?”
God-Speaker’s gaze swept down the table. There was little sympathy in the eyes staring back at Reed. He wasn’t making any converts in this room.
“That’s why I’ve always had the upper hand,” God-Speaker said. “That’s why your story ends like this.
Reed shrugged, as much as he could while cuffed.
“You didn’t seem to have the upper hand when I put a knife through your heart. Or when I got my people on your plane. In fact, it seems like you’re mostly here right now through sheer luck and the hard work of a man you’ve barely acknowledged.”
He tilted his head toward Cain. “A man you once asked me to investigate because you thought he might be a troublemaker.”
“I couldn’t have been more wrong,” Christopher said. “But I am curious about General Reese’s part in this.”
“Oh, we’ve talked a lot, in recent years, he and I,” Reed said. “Talked about certain indiscretions, mentioned in confidence. He couldn’t bear the idea of his family finding out about his dirty little secrets. All he had to do to avoid that was go along with my plan to give you a little test.”
“I see,” God-Speaker said. “General, would you say that’s accurate?”
General Reese nodded miserably, eyes still on the floor.
“We’ll have to chat more about that, General. We might find that there are ways you could redeem yourself.”
The fact that this had happened meant that the General was a dangerous liability, but Christopher felt sorry for him, and showing him some mercy could benefit the morale of the other secretaries. Even if he couldn’t keep his current role, he might retire with his honor mostly intact, and his personal indiscretions kept quiet. So long as they weren’t a problem for God-Speaker.
“I think we’re done here, for now,” Christopher said. “Cain, these men are ready to be escorted out. Please make sure that General Reese is made comfortable until he has a chance to go over his story in more detail.”
Cain nodded, already moving to open the conference room door.
“And Mr. Parricida?”
Christopher glanced at Moira.
“I believe a cell just became available.”
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