I leaned back slowly and crossed my arms. “So long as I have the code, Lace can’t use ATLAS, and so long as Lace has the weapon and I have the code, the resistance can’t use it either.”
“Whose side are you even on?” Aizel scowled at me.
“I don’t know,” I told him firmly, “I am yet to make up my mind. Right now I’m on nobody’s side.”
“Well you better think fast, because as soon as we’re done here, I’m taking you back to headquarters.”
“And if I refuse?” I asked.
There was an extreme shimmer of impatience in his darkened, slightly green eyes. “I don’t think you quite get it,” he mused. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re fighting a war, and now that ATLAS has been thrown on the board, one side is going to win pretty soon. Now, you’re the one who has the code. Whoever has the code has control over ATLAS, and whoever has control over ATLAS, well, they pretty much run the place. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
It sounded to me like he was saying that I had the power to end the war, but that involved killing a lot of people, and I really didn’t want that kind of blood on my hands, and if I did I’d probably end up like my mother. But then again, had I let go of the code then someone else would end the war for me and those thousands of people would still die because I gave the code to one or the other. It was a lose-lose situation!
“Listen to me,” Aizel said sharply. “By all means, feel free to run off and do whatever the hell it is you want to do. But people know about ATLAS now, and pretty soon, they’re going to find out that you are the only person alive who knows how to activate it. That’s going to make you a very popular girl. I’d love to see how far you could make it on your own.”
I stood up, my face probably red like the canopy of ribbons at the festival. I was angry. “And what would you have me do?” I begged. “Give the code to Benson so he can de-throne Lace and murder thousands of innocents in the process?”
Aizel softly pressed his fingers over his eyes. “It isn’t like that,” he said. “Arthur Benson is a good man, and your father thought so too, which is why he trusted him even though the professor didn’t. Benson never had any intention of using ATLAS right away. He had Sierra build him the device so that he could use it as leverage on Lace in order to get him to turn down his position and end the war. If Lace happens to be too stubborn to value the lives of his people over his precious leadership, then Benson will have no choice but to use it – but only as a last resort.”
“Call it what you will, Aizel. Murder is murder!”
“We’re at war!” He snapped. “All wars have their casualties, it’s inevitable, but Benson’s plan is wise and it’s fair. We’d only ever use it on the capital building, away from any civilian areas, that way there’d be minimum casualties – but it all comes down Lace’s decision!”
I didn’t talk after that – for a while at least. My god, my hands were shaking, and all Aizel did was look at me. And then a thought occurred to me. “Why do any of this?” I asked. “Earlier you said that you would tell me the real truth behind this war. What did Lace do to cause all this? Why do we really hate him so much?”
Aizel seemed to notice something and he glanced briefly outside the window. About as suddenly as a gust of wind the distant thunder of the fireworks came to an eerie halt, and an immaculate silence drifted into our little room.
“It’s midnight,” he uttered. “We’re running out of time. Listen, I’ll tell you more on the way, but right now it isn’t safe to be hanging around in the city any longer.”455Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTJuSRuSdyG
I stood up carefully, taken back by the sullen wave of nothingness in the sky. “You mean on the way to headquarters?” I asked, and obviously, I was expecting the answer.
Aizel pulled away from the wall and slowly opened the door, it creaked loudly on its hinges. “That’s right,” he said, as he turned back to me. “Unless you have some other place that you need to be?”
I tilted my head at him with yet another challenging look, but I didn’t speak – I wasn’t in the mood for trying to outwit him.
“Alright,” Aizel continued, “I say we make a deal. Come with me to the resistance headquarters and I’ll help you find whatever answers you’re looking for. But, if you happen to be convinced otherwise by the time we next see Benson, then you have to promise that you’ll give him the code and let him use it for the cause. Now, does that sound fair?”
He made an excellent point – I had nowhere to go. I had no friends… well, no living friends, who could help me; I wouldn’t go home either, not that that’d help anyway. I had considered running away, just getting up now and leaving Tartarus city forever, but again I didn’t know how to survive outside the city, and to add to that, there were probably at least a hundred people out there right now who wanted my head, or rather, what was in it. So, that left me with two options: The Capital or The Resistance.
The decision was in every way impossible to make at the given time. Assuming that Benson was the man that had my father and the professor killed, I could give the code the Lace and he could use it to end the resistance and avenge their deaths – although he, no, I would still be killing hundreds of people in the process. But, if Lace was in fact the man that half the city believed him to be, then he wouldn’t even think of using ATLAS as a weapon – in which case he’d be trying to destroy it right now. Maybe he’d already done it and this is all over before it even began. Oh, how nice that would be.
But what if I was wrong about Benson and Aizel was actually telling the truth? After all, there must be a reason as to why half of the city is on his side, and also why my father trusted him in the first place. So, if that were that case and Benson was the good guy, then I could give him the code and he’d go through with his plan to use ATLAS as leverage to end the war. That still doesn’t answer what Lace actually did to start all this, and I still don’t know why Sierra told my father not to trust him. Either way, Benson was hiding something and I needed to know what it was, because if I’m wrong about him and I give him the code, thousands of people will die. Argh! No matter what I do it always results in people dying!
It was a problem I’d have to work on, but for now I knew with certainty that I was heading back to the resistance with Aizel to find answers about my father’s death. It was already very late into the night, and without any other mode of transport to get us to our destination, we had to walk for over an hour.
Tartarus was a big city, and I knew that because I had never been outside before in my life – that’s right, I had spent my entre life in one big city.
It must have been about three o’clock as we paced rather hastily along one of the bright major roads that took us through the centre of the city, and I guess the ban on cars had been lifted for the night because I was beginning to see more and more rolling at a low and distant rumble down the streets. The warm aroma of festival foods had transformed into the chilling odour of car fumes, the bright jazz melodies of the night had been devoured by nothingness, and the colours that I loved so much had dulled and dispersed – leaving nothing for me but the emptiness of this street and the company of Aizel’s voice. It saddened me to say it, but the festival was over.
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