Summary: Zach's mother has a chat with him. Post-OGSY.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything from the books …
A Little Chat
He spun and roundhouse kicked the man who had tried to sneak around him and attack him from behind. The man fell back, and Zach quickly turned again to block a punch aimed towards his shoulder from another of the black-clad men.
The night air was crisp and cool against his face as he moved, and the atmosphere was absolutely still. There was no noise. No crickets chirping tonight.
No noise except for the thud as a third attacker took advantage of the opening in Zach's guard as he had been blocking. The man's fist connected with Zach's stomach, and Zach stumbled back a few steps, winded. The other two quickly grabbed his arms and pinned them behind his back in that moment in which he was off balance. The third pressed a rag to his face, and his body went limp.
And then they dragged him into the van.
He opened his eyes, squinting against the bright light trained on his face. A moment later, everything came rushing back to him.
He sat up immediately, then lowered his head again as the pounding in his skull threatened to make the world spin. He cursed. This must be their headquarters, he thought. Which would mean that … she's here.
As if on cue, the door opened behind him. He couldn't turn his body to see who it was, as he was bound to his chair, but he had a good guess.
"Mother," he said by way of greeting. Bitterly. They had a fairly unhealthy relationship, family-wise. It didn't help that she kept sending hit men to capture him.
"Aw, Zachary," she said, pretending to sound hurt. "Aren't you glad to see your mother?"
For a moment, Zach actually thought that he heard a tiny bit of real pain in her voice. Would it be so hard to believe, that a mother cared about her son? After all, she had pushed away the man who had tried to shoot him in the Tombs. But then he remembered. She had killed his father. Of course she didn't care about him.
"Why, of course," he said mockingly. "Who doesn't love being knocked unconscious and dragged here?"
She laughed, a light, carefree laugh. As if he was just an adorable son, teasing his mother. He remembered when her laugh had been real. When it had been rich and full of emotion. When her face had smiled with genuine happiness. When his father had been alive.
But this isn't the same woman, he thought, as he studied her with narrowed eyes. That's why he wouldn't hesitate if there was a chance to escape, to knock her out, or even … kill her. Would he kill her?
As he struggled with this decision, she walked around the chair and into view. "You know, you could have been a little easier on my agents," she said. "You didn't need to kill them all."
But he had. They were from the Circle. And he was trained as an assassin, was he not? It would have been a shame to put all that training to waste. More than that, if they were alive after chasing him, they would have been sent after … her. Cammie.
"You could have joined us," his mother said wistfully, facing away from him. "We wouldn't have had to hurt you."
Zach kept his face clear of emotion. "Never."
"Ah well. You have plenty of time to decide, and we do have some rather persuasive methods, if you don't choose right."
His mother. This was his mother. She was threatening to torture him. All he could do was try not to show how much it hurt and stay silent. I don't care. I don't care, he chanted in his head, a sort of mantra to keep him sane.
"So," she continued. "Let's chat." She pulled up a wooden chair in front of him. "What's new? How's school?"
"Oh, it's lovely. You should see my report card. I'm failing. That's probably because I haven't been there for a year, which is most likely because your agents have been tracking me down every week."
She laughed again. "I heard you did well at Gallagher Academy. My old school. Was Gilly's sword still hanging in the Grand Hall?" she asked, as if she was simply nostalgic about the good old days.
He just glared at her.
She smirked- his smirk- and went on. "Did you meet any cute girls?"
He looked away. He knew she would get to this part. The part about Cammie.
"Oh, that's right, you found your little Gallagher Girl," she said in pretend surprise. "Don't worry, you'll get to see her soon enough."
Surely that didn't mean … Cammie's here? When he didn't respond, she said, "She's a feisty girl. You've got good taste."
Even as he felt a flash of pride at Cammie's ability, his temper flared. She had no right to tell him he had good taste, as if he wanted her approval.
A split second decision made him speak, even though he had originally sworn to stay silent.
"What do you want her for?" he snapped.
The set of her mouth hardened. "She's got something we want. A memory." She glared into the distance for a moment, and then turned back to him with a sweet smile. "But we can't go telling you all the details, can we? Since you're so very close to her."
A sudden need to deny it, to deny everything, swept through him. "She's just an acquaintance," he said smoothly.
"Which is why you asked her to run away with you."
They heard it. They saw us. He blinked, momentarily stunned.
"And you kissed her, too," she sang teasingly. "It would seem almost as if you forgot your lessons at Blackthorne."
He flinched. At Blackthorne, they were taught to avoid relationships in general. For assassins, they could prove deadly. It hadn't been much of an annoyance at an all boys' school, but once they were out in the real world, things like this did happen. He had seen countless examples of covers blown and lives lost because of love. And while some graduates did manage to make it work, more often than not, it didn't.
"She's nothing to me. At Blackthorne, we were also taught how to lie," he said scathingly, the words coming out easily. They could have almost fooled him, were it not for his breath stopping for a tiny instant. He hoped she didn't see that. "I guess they didn't teach that at Gallagher."
His mother ignored the quip about Gallagher. "So you wouldn't mind if I asked you to help me get the memory from her?"
Dammit … "She's here?"
"Maybe," she replied lightly.
"Why in the world would I help you? I'm not joining the Circle."
"You wouldn't help us, if say … it was a life-or-death kind of situation?"
He caught on quickly. "You're going to kill me if I don't help you? I thought you were my mother," he spat. He knew she was corrupted, but a pang of sadness and anger still followed her words. He supposed he had been hanging on to a thread of hope that maybe, just maybe, she cared about him. Unloved, unloved, a voice whispered in the back of his mind. You're unloved.
A few seconds of silence ensued as he took this blow, and then he looked over his two options logically. At first thought, of course he would never involve himself in torturing Cammie for information. But there was a slim chance that he could get both of them out of the headquarters.
He remembered when he was ten, his mother walking and pulling him around these headquarters. She had been reveling in the fact that she was the newly appointed leader. She had whispered promises in his ears- You will get to be leader after me. I'll teach you everything. We'll be an unstoppable team when you're older, hmm, Zachy? She had said, laughing. And here we have the interrogation room.
I had looked into the room with wide eyes, taking in the cold steel table with metal cuffs and white lights above, the sinister chains hanging from the ceiling. It would be impossible to escape, he had thought. And then, as a game, he thought about how he would escape. He was proud to discover a vent in the corner of the room, one that he knew led above the storage rooms of the building and then to the outside world.
Coming back to the present, he thought, I can save her.
His mother was talking again, saying something about how she had no use for a son who wouldn't help her, but he interrupted her midsentence.
"I'll do it."
She led him to the interrogation room. The hallways were just as he had remembered, and the tiled floors were the same patterns as from seven years before. The only difference was that this time, there was a man in the room, and a girl chained to the table.
A girl he was there to "torture".
The girl he loved.
And a girl who was very bruised and bloody.
He forced himself not to show any sign of emotion or attachment, but it was so difficult. The man in the room was digging a knife into her thigh, and Cammie was clenching her teeth to keep from screaming.
"We've got another here to try," his mother said as she walked into the room after him. The man looked up and then pulled the knife out. Cammie let out a small gasp of relief and then let her head roll to the side, facing away from Zach.
"So. Which would you like to use?" his mother asked, motioning to a wall of torture devices. "A knife? A needle? A whip?" She smirked. "Or I think you could probably just tell her you don't love her. That might be enough by itself. Who would have thought my son would be a heartbreaker?" She sighed dramatically. "Well, go on."
He didn't choose any of those things, especially not the last suggestion. Instead, he reached quickly into the hidden inside pocket of his sleeve where he had hidden several Napotine patches as well as an inactivated tracker device just in case this happened and, before she could do more than widen her eyes in shock, he slapped one on her arm. She fell.
The man who had been torturing Cammie reacted rather slowly, but he still pulled out the knife and attempted to slash the arm which carried the Napotine patches. Zach moved to the side, then grabbed the man's knife arm mid-lunge and pulled him over to where he himself had just been. The man fell forward a little, and Zach landed a blow to the back of his head. He tugged the knife away from the man's hand and, without a second thought, stabbed him in the middle of his back. He crumpled to the ground, dead.
He stopped to look at the unconscious woman next to him, knife in hand. It would be so easy to kill her. You've killed dozens of people. You can kill her. But the irrational voice- the voice of ten-year-old Zach- said that he would regret killing her.
She was the only family he had left. And for that stupid, illogical reason, he left her alive.
Cammie had watched this, but not fully absorbed what was happening. She looked as if she was seeing through a haze. They had probably drugged her. He rushed over to the table and released the metal cuffs from her ankles and wrists.
She can't walk, he realized. Her legs were covered in slashes and blood. Actually, her entire body was, but the point was that her legs wouldn't carry her weight. He slipped his arms underneath her back and knees and picked her up. She winced in pain.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. He slapped a Napotine patch on her forehead- this crazy escape would probably hurt less if she was unconscious. Then he kicked the table to the corner where the vent was, climbed on top, and pushed her awkwardly into the vent.
After eleven minutes and forty-three seconds of maneuvering uncomfortably through the labyrinth of vents, Zach finally found a vent opening that had natural light flowing in. Making sure Cammie was safely in his grip, he jumped out of the vent feet-first.
Right next to a Circle agent.
Luckily, the agent was facing away from him, so Zach reached out and slapped a patch on his exposed arm. Unfortunately, they had ended up right in front of a window, and several more agents spotted him. He did the only thing he could: run.
He ran as fast as he could, and even with Cammie's weight on him, that was still a pretty impressive speed. The agents followed, shooting at him as they ran. They weren't very well trained.
And for once, he was so very glad that Blackthorne was so rigorous.
These agents must be fairly new, he thought. He flinched as a bullet clipped his side, but kept running. He ran the distance into the nearest town and eventually lost them in the maze of alleys and quiet streets. They're gone. They're gone. We were lucky.
He stopped running after fifteen minutes and no sight of tails. He ducked into another empty alleyway. Panting from the exhausting run, he set Cammie down and activated the tracker so that someone would find them.
We were lucky. He hated that he had let himself be caught, that he hadn't killed his mother. She would have killed you, Zach, he thought to himself. You coward. Why didn't you kill her? She'll be after Cammie again. Coward, coward, coward.
He wanted nothing more than to lie down next to Cammie and sleep, but he had to stay awake. If the Circle agents found them now, they would be defenseless if he fell asleep. So he forced himself to ignore the black haze that was slowly taking over his brain. Abby will come, he thought. Just one more minute … one more minute …
Cammie shifted a little, or maybe it was his vision that flickered.
One more minute …
Finally, a car drove up a little ways away, and Abby stepped out.
And now I can sleep.
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