Chapter 448 | The Color of a Dead Signal

Chapter 448: 448 | The Color of a Dead Signal

The words came out with the casual conviction of a child announcing a preference for chocolate over vanilla. Not rage. Not burning hatred refined through years of training into a weapon.

Just want, bright and uncomplicated, the kind of want that emerged from a place in Silas’s brain that did not bother with justification because justification was a thing adults required and Silas had stopped being an adult about Radiant approximately six years ago.

Gerard picked up the glass of water and held it at precisely the angle that would catch the monitor light without creating a glare, a gesture so practiced it had become involuntary. "I know, Young Master."

"Today."

"Not today."

"Tomorrow."

"Nor tomorrow."

"Then when?" Silas twisted in the armchair until his legs dangled over one arm and his head hung off the other, a position that no adult would adopt and that Silas found optimal for expressing displeasure at the pace of institutional violence. His black hair fell away from his face and revealed the scarring around his eye sockets, the thin lines of burn damage that traced the perimeter where fire had come close enough to take his sight and then decided against it for reasons nobody had explained to his satisfaction. "I could do it. You know I could."

"I know you believe you could."

"I could." The leg bouncing intensified. The foot-tapping shifted from concrete contact to a staccato rhythm against the armchair’s leather. "I could walk in there and I could burn through every wall between me and that building and I could stand in front of him and I could make him stop smiling."

Gerard set the glass down on the tray and regarded Silas with the expression of a man who had heard this speech or variations of it approximately four hundred times in the past two years and had developed a response protocol that balanced therapeutic intervention with operational security.

"Young Master. Your medication."

"I don’t want the medication."

"The medication is not a request."

"Everything’s a request. That’s what he said. Everything’s a choice and a request and a—"

"The Architect’s philosophical framework does not extend to pharmacological compliance. Take the pills, please."

Silas looked at the pills. Blue. White. Yellow. A sequence he could identify by color alone because he had been taking them in this exact order since he was thirteen, when the Architect had synthesized the first batch and explained that the pills would help Silas focus, which was true, and that the pills would help Silas feel stable, which was mostly true, and that the pills were entirely for Silas’s benefit, which Silas had stopped believing around age sixteen but continued accepting because the alternative involved his brain becoming a place he did not want to inhabit without chemical assistance.

He took the pills. Swallowed them with water. Handed the glass back to Gerard with the cooperation of someone who recognized that this particular battle was not worth the energy expenditure and had already moved on to the next complaint.

"I’m bored."

"You were bored this morning as well."

"Still bored."

"Perhaps the Young Master might consider reading."

"I’ve read everything."

"You’ve read the fiction shelf. The operational briefings remain untouched."

"Because they’re boring."

"They contain intelligence about target infrastructure, patrol rotation schedules, and vulnerability assessments for seven high-priority targets that the Architect has personally—"

"Boring."

Gerard inhaled through his nose in a manner suggesting he had learned this breathing technique specifically for conversations with Silas Malfoy and employed it at a frequency that constituted an occupational hazard. "Then perhaps, Young Master, you might exercise patience and trust that when the time arrives to make that man pay for what he has done, you will be the instrument through which the payment is collected."

Silas sat up in the armchair. The motion was abrupt enough that two darts fell from the cup on the side table and rolled across the concrete floor. His silver-grey eyes caught Gerard’s storm-cloud gaze, and for one second the face beneath the unkempt hair and the burn scars looked exactly like what it was.

"You always say that."

"Because it remains true."

"You don’t know that."

"I know that you are the most powerful person in this building, that the Architect has spent nine years ensuring your readiness, and that the moment will come when the world’s faith in that man’s smile will cost them everything." Gerard’s voice had not changed register. "We will make that man pay, Young Master. In full. With interest that compounds daily."

Silas’s mouth opened.

Black flame breathed out between his teeth, a small plume no larger than a candle’s worth of fire, but the color was wrong. Not orange. Not yellow. Not any shade that occurred in natural combustion. The flame was the color of a television screen at three in the morning when the signal dies. It curled from Silas’s lips and dissipated into the cold air of the sublevel like smoke from a gun that fired things worse than bullets.

The huff was petulant. A child blowing out birthday candles that nobody had lit. The flame tasted like copper and ozone and the inside of Silas’s own lungs, and he let it go because holding it felt like holding his breath and holding his breath felt like drowning and drowning felt like the night when he was nine and the algebra tutor crashed and the fire came and his mother went in after his siblings and the part of Silas that was supposed to feel things about this watched from outside the house while the fire inside him felt something that his conscious mind had never agreed to feel.

The monitor on the far wall flickered.

The screen had been displaying ambient light, a faint blue glow that served as the room’s primary illumination source and that Silas had assumed was simply the monitor’s standby mode.

Now the blue shifted to black, and a figure appeared on the screen in silhouette. No features. No details. Just a shape that suggested a person sitting in a chair somewhere else, in a room that was probably darker than this one, in a building that Silas had visited exactly twice and that he understood he would never be able to find again without assistance.

"Silas."

The voice came through the monitor’s speaker. It was smooth in the specific way that knife edges were smooth, all the rough parts removed through a process that left something too clean to trust.

Silas’s foot stopped tapping.