Chapter 11: The Pulse Interruption
The pounding wasn’t a fist. It was the flat of a hand, hammering against the reinforced steel of the bedroom door with a sound like a garbage can lid being beaten in an alley.
“Prescott! Pérez! Cool it in there, I heard the whole damn building shake! Don’t panic!”
Edward’s body went from spent to battle-ready in the space between heartbeats. He rolled off Consuelo, placing himself between her and the door, his back to her in a protective arc. Every muscle coiled. Consuelo scrambled upright, snatching the soiled blanket to her chest, her eyes wide with a fresh horror that had nothing to do with fear of attack.
Aris’s voice, muffled but clear, carried through the metal. “It’s the tech, you freaks! We brought a portable pulse emitter back. Low-yield, for scrambling localized comms. Side-effect no one mentioned—it dials up the autonomic nervous systems in anyone with Compound D or its derivatives. Makes you want to fuck like rabid weasels. So, you know. My bad. But you can stop now. Jimmy’s making coffee and looking traumatized.”
The explanation hung in the antiseptic air. A tech glitch. A side-effect. Consuelo’s face, flushed with pleasure and exertion moments before, drained of color. She made a small, wounded sound and lifted the blanket higher, covering not just her body but pressing the fabric against the lower half of her face, as if she could hide. Her black eyes, over the edge of the wool, held a profound, burning humiliation.
Edward didn’t look at her. He kept his eyes on the door, his voice a low, venomous snarl. “Get. Lost.”
A brief silence. Then a chuckle. “Sure. Whatever. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t killing each other. The data’s too valuable.” A thump—maybe a hand slapped against the doorframe. “Five minutes. Kitchen.”
Footsteps receded. The heavy click of the door locking from the outside echoed with finality.
The silence they left behind was worse. It was contaminated. Edward slowly turned his head to look at Consuelo. She was a statue of shame, curled in on herself, only her eyes visible, bright with unshed tears. The raw, unfiltered connection of the last hour—the tenderness, the possession, the desperate, truthful words—now felt suspect. Chemically aided. A side-effect of a machine.
Then, something in him rebelled. A cold, defiant clarity cut through the humiliation. His eyes swept the room, landing on the mattress. The center was a dark, soaked patch, a blatant testament to what they’d done, pulse emitter or not.
A slow, smug grin spread across his face. It was a predatory thing, full of teeth.
He looked back at her.
“You called me Eddie,” he said, his voice quiet, rough, and utterly pleased.
Consuelo blinked. The blanket lowered an inch. “What?”
“When you were coming. Screaming my name. You called me Eddie.” He shifted on the bed, moving closer to her, ignoring the dampness. “You haven’t called me that since 1946. The night before I shipped out for that bullshit PR tour in the Pacific.”
She stared at him, confusion and defiance warring with the shame. “It was… the heat of the moment. The… the pulse, or whatever.”
“Bullshit.” His grin didn’t falter. He reached out, hooking a finger in the blanket she clutched and gently tugging it down, revealing her lips, her chin. “The pulse might make you want to fuck. It doesn’t pick your childhood nickname out of a hundred years of storage.” His gaze was locked on hers, intense, unyielding. “You were gone. Lost in it. And you called for Eddie.”
She looked away, but he saw the truth flicker in her eyes before she did. A weakness. A memory. A piece of the real her that had broken through everything. She weakly punched his chest, the gesture lacking any real force. “Shut up. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Doesn’t it?” His voice dropped to a whisper. He leaned in, his breath hot against her ear. His hand left the blanket and gestured casually toward the undeniable evidence on the mattress. “And that? The pulse make you do that, too? Because that, cariño, requires a certain… enthusiastic participation. A specific kind of surrender.” He let his words hang, thick and suggestive. “Felt pretty real from where I was. Felt like you wanted to be bred. Wanted to be filled up so good you’d feel it for days.”
A full-body shudder went through her. Not disgust. Recognition. He was weaponizing her own words, her own desperate cries, and it was stripping her last defenses bare.
“Stop,” she whispered, but it was a plea, not a command.
“Why?” He captured her chin, forcing her to look at him. His thumb stroked over her bottom lip. “You said it. You screamed it. ‘Breed me, Eddie.’ You wanted it to take.” His eyes darkened, the green seeming to swallow the room’s low light. “Maybe part of you hoped it would. Maybe part of you still wants a forever tether to me. Something even the Corporation can’t cut.”
She was trembling. The tears finally spilled over, tracing paths through the sweat on her cheeks. “You’re a bastard,” she breathed.
“Yeah,” he agreed, without an ounce of remorse. He pulled her into him, blanket and all, wrapping his arms around her tightly. She didn’t fight it. She collapsed against his chest, her face buried in his neck, her shoulders shaking with silent, conflicting sobs. He held her, one hand cradling the back of her head. “But I’m your bastard. Pulse emitter or not. Lie or not. That part’s just us.”
They stayed like that for several long minutes. The hum of the safe house’s hidden systems was the only sound. Eventually, her breathing steadied. She pulled back slightly, wiping her face with the heel of her hand, a gesture that was both vulnerable and oddly childlike.
“We need to get up,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Aris is waiting.”
“Let him wait.” Edward didn’t release her.
“The data, Edward.”
He sighed, the practical world intruding with the force of a slammed door. Reluctantly, he let his arms fall. “Right.”
They dressed in a silence that was no longer charged with sex, but with a fragile, new understanding. The cheap, generic clothes felt like a costume after the naked truth of the last hour. Consuelo avoided looking at the mattress. Edward, with a grunt of effort, flipped it over. The underside was clean, a small, pathetic victory.
As he pulled on his shirt, his fingers brushed against the subtle ridge of scar tissue over his sternum—the conduit for his chest blast. A weapon. A tool of the system that had broken them. He looked at Consuelo, who was finger-combing her wild curls into some semblance of order. She felt his gaze and met it.
“It was real,” she stated quietly, not a question.
He gave a single, slow nod. “The realest thing left in the world.”
She nodded back, a decision solidifying in her eyes. The humiliation was burned away, replaced by a cold, clear resolve. The Terror of the Sky was back, but she wasn’t alone. “Then let’s go deal with the man with the bad tech and his jokes.”
Edward followed her to the door. He paused, his hand on the knob, and looked back at the overturned mattress, a corner of the dark stain just visible from the side. A crude monument. He turned the knob.
The kitchen light was still buzzing, harsh and unforgiving. Aris Thorne leaned against the counter, a chipped mug of coffee in hand. He was tall, lean with a whipcord strength, his face all sharp angles and shrewd eyes. He took them in—their cleaned-up appearance, their deliberate calm—and a smirk played on his lips.
“Look who’s alive. And quasi-human.” He sipped his coffee. “Sleep well?”
“Where’s Jimmy?” Edward ignored the jibe, his voice flat.
“Monitoring the police bands. Your little stunt at the bank triggered a sector-wide alert. They’re calling it a terrorist attack now, not a robbery.” Aris’s eyes glittered. “Good work. You’ve officially upgraded our threat level.”
Consuelo walked to the sink, pouring herself a glass of water from the rusty tap. She drank it down, her throat working. When she turned, her expression was neutral, unreadable. “The pulse emitter. How far does the effect radius extend?”
Aris shrugged. “About a city block, full intensity. Drops off after that. Why? Planning a neighborhood orgy?”
“Planning to know if we were chemically compromised during a critical security briefing,” she shot back, her voice like chilled steel. “If your toys make us unreliable, we need to know. Now.”
The smirk faded from Aris’s face. He set the mug down. “Point taken. It’s off now. Jimmy turned it off before we even came up the service elevator. The… residual effects on your biology would have lingered maybe ten, fifteen minutes after deactivation.” He looked between them, a calculating glint in his eye. “So. You’re clear. For whatever that’s worth.”
Edward moved to stand beside Consuelo, a united front. “The data we pulled. We need to analyze it. Find Charles’s pattern, his vulnerabilities. Not just bank accounts. His movements. His habits. Where he’s weak.”
“I already started,” Aris said, pulling a thin, transparent tablet from his jacket. He tapped it, and a shimmering holographic map bloomed above the cracked linoleum countertop. It showed a grid of the city’s elite sectors. “Your husband’s a creature of habit, Prescott. For a ghost who runs the world, he likes his routines. Every Thursday night, he has a private dinner at The Aerie. Top of the Sentinal Tower. No guards inside the suite. He likes the illusion of normalcy.”
Consuelo studied the map. “Impenetrable security to get to the tower. To the top floor.”
“Yes,” Aris agreed. “But he gets his food from a specific, vetted artisan kitchen. One delivery, 7 PM sharp. A single, human driver in an automated van. The van gets waved through every checkpoint. The driver is scanned, but he’s clean, just a paid civilian.” Aris zoomed in on a route. “There’s a ninety-seven-second window, in a blind spot between the outer perimeter scanner and the service elevator bio-check, where the van is alone. No direct visual. Just city cams, which we can loop.”
Edward understood immediately. “We take the driver’s place.”
“We don’t,” Aris corrected, his gaze settling on Consuelo. “She does. The driver is a slight build. About her height. The system expects one heat signature, one biometric print. Prescott here would set off six different alarms just by breathing too heavy near the outer gate. You, Pérez… you can fold those wings of yours in tight. You can be quiet. You can look… non-threatening.”
Consuelo’s lips tightened. The idea of making herself small, of playing a submissive role to get close to Charles, clearly rankled. But her eyes were already analyzing the route, the timing. “And once I’m inside the suite?”
Aris’s smile returned, thin and cruel. “That’s the beauty part. You don’t have to do a thing. The kitchen uses real ceramic plates. We’ll have a micro-emitter built into the underside of the main course plate. Once it’s placed on his table, within ten feet of him, it’ll release an aerosolized neuro-toxin. Odorless, colorless. He’ll be dead before dessert. His heart will just… stop. Natural causes. A tragedy.”
The plan was elegant. Brutal. Cowardly.
Edward felt a hot coil of disgust in his gut. “An assassination. A poison trick. You want us to be your hidden knives.”
“I want Charles dead,” Aris said, the charisma vanishing, replaced by something feral and raw. “The method is irrelevant. This is clean. It doesn’t start a war in the streets. It just removes a tumor. You get your vengeance without blowing up three city blocks. Seems efficient.”
Consuelo was silent, staring at the holographic route. Edward watched her. He saw the conflict—the warrior’s desire for a direct, honorable confrontation warring with the practical, devastating appeal of a sure thing. Of safety. Of a clean end.
“What’s in the toxin?” she asked finally.
“A synthetic compound that mimics a Daisy cascade failure. It’ll look like his old, unstable Compound finally turned on him. Poetic, right?” Aris picked up his coffee again. “So. You in? Or do you want to keep fucking in the panic room until the real soldiers come?”
Consuelo looked at Edward. Her black eyes were deep, unreadable pools. In them, he saw the ghost of the woman who cried over burned lasagna, the specter of the terror who broke bombers over the English Channel, and the fierce, present reality of the woman who had screamed his old name into a damp mattress. She gave him a nearly imperceptible nod.
She turned back to Aris, her spine straight, her voice absolutely steady.
“Get me the uniform. And the plate.”