Too Far Gone
Part Seven
Previously:
He kept back, hiding behind piles of old rubble, and he watched 494.
On the opposite side of the fence, his target was conversing with a small group of people. Then, without warning, the lot of them jumped the fence. Bingo! Biggs smiled. Looks like Ifound the other X5's Renfro was talking about. If he and Max played their cards right, they'd be revelling in the praise of Manticore's elite. He rubbed his hands in anticipation.
Biggs walked back to the car and drove to meet Max.
A Lesson in Futility
Alec woke to find Cece and Original Cindy asleep on his couch, each girl's head resting on the other's shoulder. They'd taken to doing that whenever loneliness overwhelmed them. He knew that Cece missed Biggs. They all did. They missed Max too. Original Cindy had taken Max's absence the hardest. To Alec, it was like a knife to the gut where the wound never healed.
What had scared them all was the fact that she never called. It had been almost a year since she left Seattle . Cindy kept telling him 'My boo' woulda called. Sumthin's wrong.' And he agreed. For Max not to contact her best friend was unthinkable, and it indicated something was terribly amiss.
Alec had spent months searching for clues as to the whereabouts of his friends. With Eyes Only dead, most of Logan 's contacts had disappeared into the woodwork never to resurface. He was left to his own resources and those were minimal at best.
Alec's mind tortured him with agonizing memories whenever he thought of Biggs; of the fact that his best friend had been kidnapped, and most likely tortured into submission by Manticore. It had been his home for the first twenty years of his life. A place where he'd been created, not born. A place where playing 'soldiers' meant fighting to stay alive, where his mind had been manipulated, invaded, and raped at will. It was place of nightmares and pain.
Alec, Baz, Nell, Sketchy and Original Cindy had searched and researched, cracked and hacked, travelled, snooped, and in his and Baz's case, had even beaten people on occasion for scaps of information. All their efforts had been in vain. They were no closer to finding Manticore's location now than they were almost a year ago.
And Alec worried about Max. Every day he thought of how she'd left thinking the worst of him. How if she'd only told him what she felt he could have assured her he felt the same. Alec's heart bled, knowing that in the past year they could have shared the kind of love he'd only ever dreamed about. And each night in his bed he did what soldiers never do. He cried.
During his friends' absence, Alec was in dire need of diversion. And so he threw himself headfirst into building Terminal City in to a relatively safe haven for the displaced transgenics, transhumans and assorted anomalies that had found their way to Seattle . He'd organized raids and heists to facilitate necessary repairs. Set up a mess hall and bar for food and entertainment. And he'd established a command center that would have made Manticore proud. The inhabitants of TC worked together as a team and they were slowly becoming a nation. A secret nation, perhaps, but they were strong in number, strength and faith.
It had been a unanimous decision to elect Alec as their Commander. And one of the benefits of this was the loyalty they all showed him. In his pain and grief, TC did everything to help Alec find Biggs and Max. Even going so far as to use the funds at their disposal to assist him.
But now, months down the line, TC was stretched thin and Alec had called off the search.
Baz called it a lesson in futility. And Alec guessed that it was.
