Excerpt: Peacemakers PG-13
(buy link and other info is with the interview, just posted) AZG

“”¦And, in other news, Natalia Breckenridge, a small-business owner from Montreal,
was found murdered in her home with four gunshots through the back of her head and
multiple post-mortem lacerations”¦”

The Channel 6 news anchor reported the tragedy without so much as a shift in the
expression on her makeup-laden face. From the edge of her seat on the sofa in the
living room, Kiera groaned in disgust. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Natalia? Killed? How
could we let this happen?”

Across the room at a small wooden table, Dustin and Jackson were absorbed in a
chess game. At the sound of Kiera’s complaining, Dustin looked up. “What do you
mean, “how could we’? Are we supposed to patrol the streets like superheroes?”

Kiera glared at him. “That isn’t funny. I knew Natalia. She was a mutant, and I bet you
anything that was a hate crime against her. I kind of thought the point of the Paralysis
was to stop the humans from murdering us left right and center, but obviously, the great
Dustin Sordeno has more important things on his mind.”

As Dustin struggled to come up with a retort, Jackson moved a chess piece, smirked
triumphantly, and declared, “Checkmate. I win again.”

“Well, perhaps if Graves hadn’t distracted me–”

“Oh, so now it’s my fault you suck at chess?” Kiera said cheekily. An infuriated Dustin
popped out of his chair, acting like he was about to attack her, but Jackson held him
back.

“Let’s not start a riot, Dustin,” he said. “We only narrowly avoided one this morning
when Calera came calling.”

“There wouldn’t have been an issue had you not slammed the door in her face,” Dustin
retorted.

Kiera suppressed a snicker. “Calera as in my aunt, Calera Verstohlen? You slammed
the door in her face?” The thought made her grin–she had always found her aunt
intolerable, always picking on her mother in a petty sibling rivalry. “What was she doing
here?”

“She’d hoped to congratulate Chantale on her baby,” Dustin explained, “but it was
obvious she only wanted to gloat about the fact that her nephew ra–”

“Dustin, can we please not discuss my niece like this?” Jackson cut him off.

“Why not? Everyone knows what happened between her and Dietrich. She may act all
secretive, but she hasn’t even tried to quell the rumors,” said Dustin. “She’s a spectacle-
-just like the both of you.”

“And just how are me and Jack spectacles, eh?” Kiera narrowed her eyes.

“Oh, please. You, with your constant complaints about the societal corruption that can’t
be fixed”¦” He turned to Jackson and continued, “And you”¦ you only turned Calera
away because of the bad blood between you two. Don’t pretend it was for Chantale’s
sake. Mon dieu, when are you all going to stop wallowing in self-pity and just get over
it?” He stood up, pushed in his chair at a crooked angle, and left the room, muttering,
“Sometimes I hate all of you.”

Kiera looked at Jackson expectantly. “Bad blood?”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” he said. “Hey, want to play the winner?”

“Sure.” She took Dustin’s place at the chess table and asked, “So, what’s Dustin’s
problem, anyway?”

“It’s not a Dustin problem. It’s a mankind problem. People think it’s so easy to get over
everything when they’ve never had to get over anything,” he replied, and though he tried
to hold back the flashbacks flooding into his mind, he knew it was no use, so he went
through the game without a word, expressionless.
~*~
Imagine spilling lemon juice onto a fresh paper cut.

Now, imagine the little paper cuts spread throughout your body, each nearly an inch
deep, bleeding rapidly. Imagine the lemon juice is rubbing alcohol. This was typical of
criminal discipline at Fleischer, the Norwegian mutant penitentiary.

People weren’t people there. The criminals locked up in the imposing stone fortress
were nothing more than target practice for government officials. If they were lucky, they
were left in their cells to rot. Otherwise, they were punished for their crimes with slow
torture, or else experimented on by the scientific minds within the guard population.
People became canned tuna; only the tuna would writhe and scream while a satisfied
customer ripped apart its body and its morale.

Newcomers to the prison used to complain a great deal. Then an elitist college kid
who’d been a convict for two weeks griped about the unsanitary conditions, expressing
his concerns to a guard that he might contract a disease through his open wounds. With
a half-amused smirk, the guard took the prisoner down to the basement and doused
him from head to toe with a bucket of antiseptic. There were no more complaints after
that. Everyone in the victim’s cellblock jeered at him, taking pleasure in his pain, but he
hailed himself as a hero for teaching the others a lesson by example. Jackson Solomon
was just that kind of guy.

As his sentence wore on, it became clear to his fellow prisoners he was nuts. They went
from enjoying the torture he brought upon himself with his snarky attitude to genuinely
worrying he would get himself killed by the guards. He was the only one of them who
seemed to retain a shred of his spirit. If he broke, they’d all break.

The guard patrolling Block Nine was Veronika Artyom. She addressed Jackson as
fourteen-oh-eight, the number on his cell. He knew it by heart even though he couldn’t
see the numerals engraved into his forearm anymore; he’d been cut so many times.
Artyom made sure to remind him he would never again be anything more than a four
digit number on a regular basis, but try as she might to keep him down, he never
stopped retaliating. She hit. He hit back.

So she hit harder.

Fleischer’s first invasive medical experiment was conducted in cell fourteen-oh-eight,
when Veronika slit Jackson open with no sedatives and tampered with his insides until
she’d conjured a tumor in him. Due to a clause in the guards’ regulations, explicitly
stating no employee of Fleischer was allowed to use mutancy to give a prisoner cancer,
she was forced to reverse the damage she caused, so she dug out the tumor with a
switchblade and left him on the floor to bleed.

After spending the night moaning and convulsing in agony and miraculously surviving to
see morning, he lay glassy-eyed in his cell and rasped, “Maybe I should stop provoking
her.”