Hello. This is the rewrite of Playing God. Most of what you may have read in the first draft has been scrapped, or thrown away, so try to forget what you read and start anew. The plot is different, and the character development will be much less rushed and true to form. Thank you for your patience; the other chapters will be uploaded as I write them, which should only take a handful of weeks.
This is not a necessary sequel. If you are not happy with what I have done with the changes, then you don’t have to read it to understand anything in the ending or plot of the first story, Toy Soldiers.
Thanks for reading.
x Riley
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“It’s snowing.”
Eighteen years of life, and I still hold this fascination toward something as simple as snow. Even now I leaned toward the window as if I wanted to be outside, but I knew better than to put myself into the vulnerable position of standing defenselessly in the middle of a clearing. I wanted to feel the snow on my skin, to mold it, to destroy it. I suppose, as in many aspects of my life, I simply wanted to play God. To build and destroy, to create and erase. I couldn’t bask in beauty when I knew it would ultimately lead to my evil.
“Focus, Caitie.”
“That’s not my name,” I argued feebly, my mind fuzzy and incoherent from drugs pumping through my veins. I got lazy, stayed in one place for too long, and now I am here.
The white of the snow melted in with the white of the walls.
My companion sighed heavily, but there was a hint of a chuckle, like he was trying hard not to be amused at my antics. I moved my bleary eyes away from the window of falling sky and back to him, squinting. The light was starting to take a toll on the pounding behind my left temple.
Woodburn leaned closer to me, his hands on his knees, his eyes patient. “Do you know what happened to you?”
“I fell,” I mumbled. “From a . . . helicopter?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. From a helicopter. How long ago was it?”
“From now? Approximately . . . eighty-three hours, give or take.”
“Exactly eighty-three hours.” He leaned back with his hand over his mouth, like he was holding back what he wanted to say. He sat there like that for a moment that felt like a lifetime before he leaned back toward me, his game face on. “What is your name?”
“Gemma,” I told him.
“No,” he said. “Your name is Caitie.”
“It’s not real,” I slurred. “They gave it to me.”
“They almost found you because you checked in with your true name. Did you know that? When they asked you for your name, you gave them your real name.”
“What else would I have given them?”
“Anything. Anything but Caitie. Anything but Gemma.”
“That’s my name,” I objected.
He grabbed my arm and said, “Not anymore.”
I was getting a headache talking to him. The room was spinning and his words were starting to blur together like they were all a part of the same sentence and I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. There was fear and sadness, and there was pity; I hated pity the most of all, felt the most hatred toward him because of that pity. Woodburn tried to wipe it away with his hands, but his face would never truly be a blank slate. He would always leave something behind.
“My head hurts,” I tried to tell him.
“Agent, what do you remember?”
“Cold.”
“Cold. And?”
“The fall.”
“From the helicopter. Yes. But what else?”
“I remember Rian,” I whispered, feeling pain in my chest at the words but it felt in my confused state like I had to say them. “I remember shooting Rian through the heart and wishing I had the courage to turn the gun on myself, and I remember running, and I remember Parker, and I remember every question that they asked me, and I remember what I told them before they pushed me and left me there to die.”
This answer must have surprised him a lot more than I thought it would because it took a second of silence before I was able to add, “Iremember, Woodburn.”
“Do you?” he asked skeptically, pityingly. “What are your injuries, Caitie?”
I flinched away, away from him. “Shut up.”
“Soldier, what are your injuries?”
“I am not your soldier,” I moaned, twisting away, but something was stopping me. “I am not Helford and I will never be again. I am not a soldier.”
“You will always be a soldier,” he told me. “Now, what are your injuries?”
I tried to push away from him, but I was going nowhere.
“Caitie.”
That isn’t my name.
“Caitie, your injuries?”
I bit my lip to keep from moaning, something hurting in my leg, but I didn’t stop my attempt to twist away, to escape from him. It felt like it was the only thing left to do in the world, and I had to do it, or else I wouldn’t be able to fight him anymore.
Woodburn wasn’t the bad guy. I didn’t think so, at least. From what I knew, Woodburn opposed Helford silently—or maybe not as silently as I thought he had. Maybe they just didn’t know. I didn’t know. One year, one year spiraling out of control, one year and then one fall, and now I am here and my head hurts and it keeps spinning and I am scared and it turns out I don’t know anything.
I have never been more scared in my life.
Because I am tied down.
“Let me go,” I tried to tell him, but he ignored me easily.
“You know I can’t do that until you tell me your injuries, Caitie,” he told me, pitying but unwavering. “You have a mental block—you are trying to save yourself from the bad, but what you don’t realize is that you will drive yourself insane in the process. I can’t stay here forever, and I need to know now. I need you to look at me, and I need you to tell me what your injuries are.”
“Read the chart,” I whimpered.
“I need you to tell me.”
“I can’t . . . again,” I attempted to communicate, but it kept hurting my head. I couldn’t form complete enough sentences to get him to stop asking me the question I didn’t want to hear, the question that would ultimately break me. “I . . . fell. They can’t . . . fix . . .”
He let me have a breakdown. He watched when I started crying, when I started screaming.
“My head,” I pleaded with him. “Something is wrong with my head.”
“What is wrong?” he asked me, but he looked away before I could meet his eyes, and I realized that Woodburn is human too. After so many years as Helford, killing for Helford, dooming people for Helford, Woodburn is still human, and I do not have that strength anymore.
“I can’t . . . think,” I said. “My head hurts. I can’t . . .”
“Can you see, Caitie?”
“I see snow.”
“What about the snow?”
“It’s . . . snow. I don’t know . . . What do you mean?”
“Caitie . . .”
When he trailed off, that oddly worried me more than anything. My hands wanted to find my hair, to tug it free, but I couldn’t move my hands. I glanced down, startled, and I was chained, held there by restraints, in a white room. I was having a mental breakdown but I was still crying, and Woodburn was still looking at me like he was watching me slowly die, and maybe I was. Withering in on myself. Maybe I deserved to be in these chains, imprisoned, screaming at them to let me out but they had the good sense to know they never should.
Maybe I would always be stuck here. Watching the snow.
It was then I realized what was wrong.
“It’s blurry.”
“What is?”
“I thought it was falling fast but . . . it’s just blurry.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t . . . focus. That was what I needed to live—I needed . . . to see the things that no one else . . . No one else sees the way I do.”
“I can make it better, Caitie, I promise. I can help you hear better, but you have to trust me and take a couple of deep breaths, alright? You have to stop panicking, or else I can’t help you. Caitie?”
“My name is Gemma!” I cried.
Woodburn looked at me sorrowfully for a long moment before he turned to the side and called something else in another language, my brain automatically identifying it as Swedish, and I wanted to ask but logic told me that it all made sense, but I was too blurry to understand how. He asked the nurse something and she replied back and he got this look of infinite relief on his face for a moment, and then it was gone. I watched the exchange through my bleary eyes, watching as the I.V. bag dripped, dripped, dripped. He said something to the nurse, and she nodded. She pulled out a syringe.
“Can you untie me?” I asked them in garbled Swedish.“Please?”
The nurse looked at Woodburn, and he shook his head.
“I am sorry,” she told me. “You will hurt no more.”
“Where—?” I pathetically began, but she inserted the needle into the I.V. bag and my vision ran with black, like water over stones.
Woodburn looked to me and he tried to smile, but there was no reassurance in what I was seeing, what I could hear from his tone as he spoke so lowly to the nurse. I knew something was happening now, something I couldn’t stop, and I could feel the exhaustion seeping over me. It was almost overwhelming, but in a soothing way. I was ready for a good sleep. I was ready for an infinite dark.
I didn’t think it was the end. I knew better than that. I knew that the end, where I was going, would not as be peaceful as the rest I now go to.
I let the drug overtake me, let it sink in. Because I needed to escape a little bit.
From myself.
From the world.
From running and hiding.
From being Caitie and Gemma and Ari and Paola and a million others.
I needed a rest.
And then, tomorrow, I would understand.
~*~
I didn’t get that solace of tomorrow, because the realization, the memories, started to sink in during that sleep.
I saw an ambush—a black bag was pulled over my face, and someone was dragging me off to somewhere. The nerves on my body were on fire and instinct made me panic, but my training kept me calm enough to control my shaking as I sat in the back of a cold car, a van by the feel of the flooring, the kind that is used more in the transportation of materials than the transport of children and soccer balls. I had been in Turkey at the time, and I could hear the people speaking in the square over the engine through the thin walls of the automobile. I listened carefully for as long as I could, but they eventually pressed a cloth of chloroform over my mouth, and then I woke up in a helicopter over the sea.
It was cold. It’s remarkable how much that little thing residually stuck with me, because I could feel the goose bumps rising on my skin even now from a far-off slumber. I was wearing clothes for the summer, and it was a shock to my system to feel the sudden change of climate.
I heard them speaking next. American; one of them was specifically American, but I couldn’t hear the second voice, the one replying. I immediately assumed Helford, because contracts rarely jumped continents the way the assassins and spies do. I closed my eyes and wished I could know more about the environment, but all I could hear was the light chatter and the pounding of the blades above.
They must have realized by then that I was awake because they tugged the hood off, and the sudden shock into the brightness was startling. I blinked against the white light and up at the two figures standing over me, looking down at me almost curiously. I tried not to show surprise at the two men, too familiar.
My first instinct was to strike out, but my hands were tied very tightly behind my back. It was a big helicopter, the kind used by the military to carry troops into situations, and I could understand how the familiar faces had gotten hold of one of these with ease. I gritted my teeth against the gag over my mouth and glanced down to find that my feet as well were confined. My eyes shot up to them, unforgiving.
Woodburn kneeled next to me, expressionless. Flat.
“It has to be done,” he told me solemnly. “You said you were all in, with whatever it took.”
I didn’t realize it would be like this, but I might have done it anyways. I didn’t think about how much I didn’t have to lose until then, when I was faced with that harsh reality. I tried to take a breath through the gag and closed my eyes for just a moment as Woodburn continued to yell over the sound to me, apologizing and saying he wished it could be different, but this was the only way.
I had to die.
We all knew that.
To win, I must die.
“Are we clear?” Woodburn boomed through the airways. “There is no going back, soldier.”
I nodded slowly.
The second man approached me and kneeled down in front of me, looking right in my eyes as he roughly tugged the gag off, making me cough and gasp a little. He waited for me to get air before he demanded, “Who are you?”
I didn’t respond. I knew I didn’t have to. Not quite yet.
Two of Woodburn’s agents picked me up and held me over the edge of the helicopter, looking down into a blue ocean covered in frost and broken ice, a hundred feet up and hypothermia too quick to settle. I felt my bones chilling over as I looked down, closed my eyes for a second. The man leaned down a little bit closer to me, so close that I could hear every accent to the syllables when he said:
“Who are you?”
“Gemma Havarti.”
And again: “Who are you?”
Taking a deep breath that would never be deep enough, I looked up into his eyes and I said, “My name is Caitie Alastair, and I’m going to watch the world burn.”
Parker smiled at me and said, “Good luck, Gem.”
And then the arms pushed me over the edge, and the last thing I remember is hurtling toward the water below, bracing for the impact, thinking about the orders I had, and how this was the first sacrifice I would have to make, and I thought about Jonathon and his smile, and if I would ever get to see it one more time.
I hit the water, and the world went cold.