Devoted - Merritt's Story 2 - Chapter 11

The next chapter is here!  For the first time in quite a while, we have a normal size chapter instead of a double or triple size chapter, haha.  The next two chapters are also normal sized, which means there won't be a super long wait for them. (yay!)

FYI, edits for my upcoming novel are due next Friday, and this has been a sort of hell week, so I will probably have to push the next DOTU page to 1/28.

You can read the chapter inline or download the attached PDF.

The start of this chapter reads more smoothly if you pick it up from the last paragraph of the previous chapter, btw.

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Book 2, Chapter 11

He got no sleep.

Belmont took the lead during their morning meeting, garnishing his presentation with an overabundance of superlatives and exaggerations about the success of their battle simulator test run. Merritt gladly allowed Belmont the front seat. It was taking nearly all his effort just to maintain a steady poker face while he ruminated on his previous night’s misstep.

You were tired. That was all. You were too tired to think clearly, and you let your emotions get the best of you.

It was a half-truth worthy of Belmont himself.

He’d avoided meeting Belmont’s gaze throughout the entire meeting. Without looking into those persuasive green eyes, it was easier to convince himself that every word Belmont spewed was a lie.

But the previous night hadn’t felt like a lie. During their months of working together, Merritt had learned to spot Belmont’s tells. He had a subtle rawness when he was being reluctantly forthright—an odd squint to his eyes that revealed cagey vulnerability. At least Merritt thought that was what it was. He’d seen it only a few times before: their conversation after the West Sphere invasion, their lunch together when Belmont had talked about his dad, again when he talked about working for Higgins, and during their confrontation ages ago in the stairwell at Yackley’s, when he’d discovered that Merritt had only seduced him to collect evidence against him.

Part of him longed to trust Belmont, but part of him didn’t want to believe anything Belmont had said last night.

Why had it hurt so much to be asked if he enjoyed taking orders? At this point, what else was there in his life? Torrence was still shunning him. Archer had been too busy to keep in contact lately. He hadn’t had sex since his night with Devon, and that had hardly ended well. 

The strongest relationships he had were the ones he’d forged through servitude. When he answered to Mercury or Belmont, it felt like he was giving the deepest part of himself to them.

The more he thought about it, the more painful it became.

He just needed a break. That was all. He needed to get away from Belmont. They’d been spending too much time together.

At least the battle simulator presentation was a success. Mercury gave his approval without any demands for revisions. Merritt wished he was clear-headed enough to appreciate the victory, but he just wanted to return to his quarters for his lunch break and crash—if not to rest his body then to shut off his mind for half an hour.

It wasn’t to be. Moments after Mercury departed, Merritt received a text message from Wilson, Archer’s boss as Director of Science and Medicine. Come by the poisons lab during your lunch break. I’d like to talk.

Strange. They’d exchanged numbers long ago at Merritt’s first quarterly review party after he’d dislocated Belmont’s arm. But aside from a great conversation at the party and a couple of phone calls shortly after, they hadn’t kept in touch.

Perhaps he’d have time to stop by Archer’s office and say hello after. She would probably be there. If their past months’ canceled lunch plans were any indication, she’d been eating a lot of meals at her desk lately.

Normally, he stayed behind after meetings to ask Belmont if he needed anything and to offer his help. Today, he left without even a glance at his boss.

Accepting that he wouldn’t get that coveted half an hour of sleep, he snagged a vial of Spark off the wet bar on his way out the door, grimacing as he hurriedly downed it without a mixer. His throat still burned with its acrid aftertaste as he mounted his motorcycle and took off down the street.

* * *

Wilson had the unsettling look of someone who’d deliberately aged himself in order to appear more respectable. His neatly combed salt-and-pepper hair was too perfectly balanced between salt and pepper, and the creases around his eyes and mouth could have been sculpted into his suspiciously smooth face with a hammer and chisel. The wrinkles looked too deliberate, too precisely placed—as if the wrong crease could have revealed him as infirm instead of distinguished.

There was nothing rare about cosmetic surgery in the North Sphere. Among high-level professionals, the practice seemed almost mandatory. Merritt remembered a conversation he’d had with Archer long ago. “I’m running on a different clock than most of the people I’m competing against, Merritt. I have to make my mark before I grow too many wrinkles for Mercury to take me seriously.”

What a different life the North Sphere elite led. It had never occurred to Merritt that any given wrinkle could be right or wrong. As an underground soldier, he simply saw wrinkles as aspirational. He’d consider himself lucky if he lived long enough for his first.

“Wilson, sir. You wanted to see me.”

Wilson sat behind his desk at the NSTech executive office, raising his eyes from his computer screen to his guest at the door. “Merritt,” he said with unusual warmth for an elite blue-tie. He rolled back in his chair and stood up. “How nice to see you. It’s been ages since we’ve been able to sit down and have a proper conversation.”

“The pleasure is mine, sir.” They shook hands, and Wilson pointed Merritt toward a chair on the opposite side of his desk.

After they were both seated, Wilson held up a vial labeled NSA-2. “I’m telling you, Merritt, those poison formulas you gave to Belmont? Genius.” He looked at Merritt and chuckled. “Why do you look so surprised to hear that?”

“I’m surprised you knew that they were mine, sir. I didn’t think Belmont would credit me.”

“Well, they certainly weren’t Belmont’s. How do I say this in layman’s terms?” He stroked his chin pensively. “There are certain conventions from which someone schooled in North Sphere D&P processes would never deviate. Your formula works, but it breaks a lot of rules. You made connections and combinations that someone with a D&P degree would have considered too basic, too messy, too inelegant to pursue.”

“Oh,” Merritt said, embarrassed.

“That wasn’t a criticism, Merritt. If it works, it works.” He gave a smile that strained the artificial wrinkles in his cheeks. “Sometimes it takes a person without formal training to see things with fresh eyes. My team is thinking about poisons all day, every day. After a while, they grow blind to it. I’d like to utilize your fresh eyes a little more. Maybe send you a couple formulas to look at when my team hits a roadblock.”

“I’d be happy to help however I can, sir,” Merritt replied.

“Great.” Wilson retrieved a binder overstuffed with at least five inches of poison formula printouts. “This is the last month’s batch of failed formulas from the Personal Use Poisons team. Give them a look over the next two weeks and see if you can salvage, say, 20 percent of them.”

Merritt eyed the binder as if staring down the barrel of a gun. This was hardly the casual request he’d expected. “Ah… Wilson, sir….” I’m General of the North Sphere Army. It’s kind of a full-time gig.

“Yes, Merritt?”

“I really would love to help, sir. But my duties as military general don’t leave me with a lot of extra time, and this looks like more work than I can fit in.”

“Do you really have that much to do?” Wilson asked. “I heard the programmers finished up the battle simulator overhaul last night. Doesn’t that do most of the work for you?”

It took all Merritt’s willpower to keep up his poker face. Did everyone in the North believe that the military was run by computers instead of people? “Machines can’t do everything, sir. I’m overseeing our entire military. I’m sure I can take a look at an individual formula on an occasional basis. But this volume of work….”

“I’ll tell you what,” Wilson said, patronizing him. “I’ll have a chat with Belmont and see if he thinks you can take on the extra work. We’ll let him issue the order. All right?”

“That’s fine with me, sir.”

It seemed Wilson expected Belmont to reprimand Merritt for being lazy and order him to take on the extra work. But Merritt knew Belmont wouldn’t be so eager to steer him away from actually running the military. He had no problem letting Belmont make the call.

He was oddly proud of himself for turning down the job. Just months ago, he wouldn’t have even considered denying such a request from a jack of spades like Wilson, even if it was clear that the jack was overstepping his bounds.

It helped that he now answered to the queen.

He remembered one of his first military meetings as general with Belmont, Pratt, and Evans. Pratt had casually handed Merritt a stack of reports and asked him to make copies during their break. Belmont had shoved Pratt’s hand away before Merritt could grasp the papers, stating tersely, “That’s not his job.” And then he’d pulled Pratt aside during the break for a private conversation. Merritt didn’t know what had been said, but Belmont had assured Merritt that no board member would dare demean him by demanding clerical work from him again—along with a promise to back him if ever he declined an order unsuited to his position.

Back then, it hadn’t even occurred to Merritt that he was being demeaned. He’d been raised to serve, to be helpful. The word “no” wasn’t part of a blue-tie soldier’s vocabulary. He could credit Belmont for teaching it to him. 

For the next ten minutes, he and Wilson chatted about poisons manufacturing and some of the ways that they could cut costs both in production and in military usage. Perhaps Merritt was imagining it, but Wilson seemed to respect him more after he’d set his boundaries. Their discussion was productive and enlightening, and Merritt was happy to offer his expertise. For all Wilson’s typical elite attitudes, he at least appeared to value Merritt’s insight enough to take his suggestions to heart.

Wilson concluded their discussion with a handshake and a promise to be in touch. After saying their goodbyes, Merritt headed down to the first floor toward Archer’s office. He knocked on the door and waited. After a moment, he heard movement on the other side, and then the door opened. “Merritt,” Archer said, looking pleasantly surprised. “What are you doing here?”

“I just came from a meeting with Wilson. Since I was in the area, I thought I’d say hello.” He laughed sheepishly. “I probably should have texted to let you know I was coming.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Archer stepped aside, motioning for him to enter. “It’s been too long since we’ve last talked. We need to start doing lunch together again.”

“I almost miss our Sunday evenings,” Merritt said, referring to their immunization meetings that had always left him nearly too nauseated to drive home.

Archer ushered Merritt inside and closed her office door before saying, “I’m still working on the IPJ-8 antitoxin, by the way. I can’t promise that the next version will work, but I’m not giving up. It’s a six-month regimen. Hopefully you can wait that long.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Merritt said. “I’ll still puke any time I get a trace of it in me, and that’s good enough until then. And I think Belmont has less of an incentive to poison me now than he did before.”

“Perhaps,” Archer replied, her tone oddly distant.

Merritt tried to redirect, hoping to return the previous warmth to their conversation. “I’d love to do lunch more often, though. My schedule’s been hell thanks to the battle simulator overhaul, but things should get better now that it’s finished.”

“It’s always something, isn’t it?” She tilted her head. “And I can only imagine what Wilson called you in for today. No one ever walks out of his office without tripling their workload.”

“It wasn’t bad,” Merritt said, following Archer back to her desk and taking a seat in her guest chair. “Of all the elites I’ve known, Wilson has probably been the most welcoming. Well, after Higgins. And you, of course.”

Archer gave Merritt a sideways glance. “Higgins was quite friendly to you, wasn’t he?” She straightened a stack of papers on her desk before stowing them in her file cabinet. “Say what you will about Higgins, but at least he could fake being pleasant.”

“I really didn’t think Wilson was that bad.”

“I didn’t say he was,” Archer replied with a pointed raise of the eyebrows. Merritt could tell that she wasn’t refuting his point but rather putting it on the record that she hadn’t badmouthed her boss. She took a bite of the half-eaten sandwich that sat by her computer mouse. She chewed and swallowed before continuing. “Regardless, I often find that people who are tolerable in small doses can be insufferable on a daily basis.”

“I had no idea,” Merritt said sympathetically.

“I’m not talking about any particular person,” Archer said, though it was clear that she absolutely was. With a soft chuckle, she redirected. “But if it’s horrible bosses you want to talk about—how has that been, answering to Belmont?”

Merritt shrugged. “He’s a better boss than I thought he’d be. I really don’t have any complaints.”

“Well.” Archer’s eyes lingered on her computer screen as she spoke. “You’re probably the type who’d say that about any of your bosses.”

Merritt was taken aback by her tone—or lack thereof. “What do you mean?”

Archer scrolled down her spreadsheet, and Merritt wondered if she was stalling for time. “You’re willing to do things for your boss that most people wouldn’t. So in that sense, I suppose you can make a relationship work with any boss you’re given.”

“I’m a soldier. We’re supposed to obey our superiors.” He felt an odd surge in his chest—a rare enough emotion that he had trouble placing it at first. He was offended—not at the implication that he mindlessly obeyed his bosses, but that Belmont was the type of boss who’d give unreasonable orders.

He swallowed to wet his throat. The last thing he needed was for his voice to crack upon uttering Belmont’s name. “Belmont isn’t an authoritarian boss. He relies on my expertise, and I rely on his. We’re allies.”

The word seemed to catch Archer off guard. Merritt’s declaration had been unintentionally bold.

Citizens of the underground—particularly blue-ties—did not declare each other to be “friends.” Friendship, a word associated with surface-dwellers, implied a baseless vow of everlasting camaraderie and emotional codependence. Instead, blue-ties were “allies”: independent, self-serving individuals who agreed to help serve each other’s interests for the sake of mutual benefit. To Merritt, who barely knew how to serve himself, friendship and alliance were one and the same. But he knew better than to use the F-word among fellow blue-ties.

“I’m sure Belmont would say the same,” Archer deadpanned, her eyes still on her screen.

But what was she getting at, and why wouldn’t she just say it? Merritt’s brows furrowed with frustration. “Belmont and I work well together. Are you questioning my job performance? Or his?”

At last, Archer turned her head, her eyes narrowed as if she hadn’t expected his confrontational tone. “I don’t question your ability to do your job. But I know your eagerness to please your superiors, and that’s something Belmont can exploit.”

Again, he felt that surge of indignation. Belmont, in their time working together, had never tried to exploit his eagerness to please. Unlike….

He immediately attempted to sever his train of thought.

Unlike Mercury.

No, he couldn’t think that. He was Mercury’s subject. By definition, a King couldn’t exploit his subject.

“I don’t think you’re being fair to Belmont,” Merritt said carefully. “He’s the one who taught me how to say no to people like Wilson. If anything, he wants me to be less eager to please.”

Archer replied, her tone just as careful, “And I think it’s rather convenient that the attitude you’re learning from Belmont is directly opposed to what Mercury would want from his faithful general. I suppose that’s one way to cull the competition.”

Merritt bit his tongue, unable to summon a counter-argument.

“I’m not claiming that Belmont is sabotaging you,” Archer continued. “I don’t know enough to make a determination. And I’m not even saying that his advice is wrong. But you need to be aware of what he’s getting out of it.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Sometimes I wonder just how much he’s getting.”

“What does that mean?” Merritt asked, stunned by the insinuation. This wasn’t the conversation he’d expected—or wanted—when he’d decided to stop by Archer’s office.

“Rumors spread,” Archer said evasively. When it was clear that Merritt expected more of an answer, she elaborated. “Wolfram and Hale told me that you and Belmont have grown tight. They say that, in board meetings, you have his back—a little too much. They don’t know what to make of it. Six months ago, you were at each other’s throats, and now you’re inseparable. I was told that you two spent all of February’s quarterly review party just sitting in a corner by yourselves and talking. There’s a rumor going around that your relationship has turned….” She gestured with her head. She didn’t need to say it.

Merritt frowned, staring down at the surface of Archer’s desk. It had been ages since she’d last questioned his relationship with Belmont. He’d thought she’d let it go, but apparently not. “Why can’t I just do my job without people thinking I’m doing something more?”

“It’s Belmont,” Archer said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen his enemies magically turn into his greatest advocates, and it’s always come down to his three B’s. I know you wouldn’t take a bribe, and I doubt he has any material to blackmail you, so that leaves the bed.”

“You really think that’s the only way he and I could work together?” Merritt’s cheeks burned with an uncomfortable mix of shame and hurt. “I thought if anyone would believe that I got here just by doing my job, it would be you.”

“What I question is just how much you consider to be ‘your job.’”

Merritt blinked—once, and then twice. His facial muscles relaxed into a steady poker face, masking the indignation that he knew better than to show.

How dare she? What if he’d asked her the same questions about Mercury after she’d been invited into his inner circle?

Except he had asked. Or at least he’d begun to ask, and she’d immediately shot the question down with a firm, confident denial—the type of denial he lacked the conviction to deliver.

“I haven’t done anything with Belmont,” he said at last, his tone stone cold. That, at least, wasn’t a lie—regardless of what he’d wanted to do, or tried and failed to do.

“It wouldn’t be any of my concern if you had,” Archer replied, even colder. “Your sex life is of no interest to me. I only brought it up out of concern that he was using your personal relationship to abuse your professional relationship. But if you have it under control—”

“I do.”

Archer’s eyes didn’t flicker. “All right.”

Her poker face was too good. Too good to tell if she was convinced or not. Too good to tell if she’d put their tense conversation behind her or if she never wanted to speak to him again. She gave no conciliatory smile—the type of artificial display a more gregarious blue-tie might have offered to temper the chill of their poker face.

He couldn’t remember her ever presenting herself so coldly to him before. Did she think he was lying to her? Or was she on such bad terms with Belmont that an alliance between him and Merritt would sever the one between Merritt and her? Did she fear that any words she spoke to Merritt would be taken back to her adversary?

He’d declared her enemy to be his ally, and he hadn’t thought to consider what that would mean to her until after the words had spilled from his mouth.

He wanted to reassure her. But was he the one who needed the reassurance most? He couldn’t bear the thought of losing her, and he needed her to give him a sign—any sign—that she wasn’t cutting him out just like Torrence had. He wished he could just ask what was going through her mind. But as the unbearable chill continued to emanate from her, he failed to summon the words he needed.

“I should probably get going,” he said, matching her even tone so she wouldn’t know how hollow he felt. “My lunch break is almost over, and I haven’t eaten yet.”

“Have a good lunch,” Archer said, still inscrutable. She returned her attention to her computer screen and took another bite of her sandwich.

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