Chapter 785: Imposter
Chapter 785: Imposter
Tharionson’s mind raced even though his body would not move. He lay on the cold archive floor with his cheek turned partly against the stone, his limbs useless beneath him, his breathing slow and shallow in a way that did not belong to him. The needle had not killed him. That, somehow, made the terror worse.Death would have been clean compared to this paralysis, compared to being trapped inside his own body while the figure standing above him wore the face of the one man he had still trusted.
Zion’s face looked down at him with an expression so calm it felt almost obscene, not the calm of discipline or military restraint, but the calm of something standing outside ordinary fear, something that had no need to hurry because the outcome had already been decided before Tharionson understood there was even a game being played.
’Who are you?’ Tharionson thought, the words tearing through his mind with a force his mouth could no longer give shape to. ’What are you?’
His eyes strained upward, following every detail he could still see. The angle of Zion’s jaw. The dark blond hair. The commander’s uniform. The posture he knew too well. Everything was familiar, and that familiarity made the wrongness more horrifying.
He tried to search backward through the day, then through the week, then through the past months, looking for the moment when Zion had stopped being Zion. There should have been something. A shift in speech. A delayed answer. A habit missing from the man’s hands. A wrong look when names were mentioned.
7But memory betrayed him with nothing clear. Zion had been present in security briefings. Zion had reviewed reports. Zion had spoken with the same measured dryness, given the same practical conclusions, challenged Tharionson in the same blunt way only he was allowed to. If this thing had been wearing Zion for a long time, then it had not merely stolen his face. It had learned him.
Or had it?
The thought struck Tharionson with a different kind of sickness. What if this was Zion? What if the man he had trusted had always been something else beneath the skin? What if the commander who had stood at his side, fought under his command, taken private orders, and helped him search through the kingdom’s rot had been part of it from the beginning?
The possibility flashed through him and was rejected just as violently. No. Zion Ardent was not this. Zion could be cold, calculating, even brutal when duty demanded it, but there was weight in him. A human weight. A soldier’s burden. This creature had none of that. Its calm was empty of strain. Its eyes, even with Zion’s face still shaped around them, had become too still, too anciently amused.
Then another question ripped through him. If this was not Zion, where was the real one?
The real Zion. His commander. His last trusted man. Was he dead? Had this thing killed him and hidden the body somewhere beneath the kingdom’s unrest? Was Zion lying in some ditch outside Zone 15, already reduced to another unexplained corpse among too many others? Or was he alive, imprisoned, used, silenced, kept somewhere because his face still had value?