Disclaimer: Not only do I not own Applegate’s stuff, this chapter is Wraithlord42’s work. He’s my very excellent beta, and since I was struggling with characterization for the members in Maya’s War Council, he wrote this for me. We will go through all of the members of the War Council in this fic and take a slight break from Nadar Chronicles 3 as I finish writing the 5th chapter.

Claimer: Although this character is technically mine, it is very much based off of Wraithlord42 and I really don’t own Wraithlord42… but I do own the other characters that will come up in this fic.

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THE WAR COUNCIL

So how can you tell me you’re lonely?
And say for you that the sun don’t shine?
Let me take you by the hand, and lead you through the streets of London
I’ll show you something that’ll make you change your mind.
- Anon.

Chapter 1:

My name is Jeremy.

I’m a killer. A murderer. What they call a Nadar. One of many serving Princess Maya in her quest to do… whatever it is she wants. I can’t even remember these days.

I’m a deadeye shot with any gun, hand-held or ship-mounted. It’s an odd little talent of mine. Useful, in my current life.

People know me as a cynical joker, and I suppose that’s what I am now. There’s a saying that if you repeat a lie enough times you start to believe it yourself. I can’t be bothered to craft myself a more interesting persona. For now, I’m just the one that makes stupid jokes and laughs at people’s idealism.

I’m from England, whatever the hell that matters. Some people in our group still think nationality means something. Mostly Americans.

People ask me about my past. I spin them stupid stories about finding a gun when I was five and becoming a Nadar two weeks later. I don’t give a damn what they think.

Except for Maya.

Maybe someday I’ll tell her the whole truth.

--

Shards of smashed glass were littered across the carpet, glinting in the dull orange light from the streetlamps. The cold London air invaded the darkened house, spreading its wintry fingers across a sprawled body all in white.

Juliet had still been wearing her wedding gown when she died. It had become her shroud.

A pool of crimson spread slowly across the linoleum floor of the kitchen, running in carmine streams from gashes in her throat, her belly, her breast.

The man who had killed her was crouched by the fridge, frantically guzzling last night’s curry and hacking at a block of Cheddar cheese. He looked like a beggar. He stank like one too. A vagrant, a thief and now a murderer.

I watched silently. I had arrived in the house to find all the lights off, and a downstairs window smashed.

Most people would call the police straight away. But I was curious, and worried. I had a gun – a pistol from my stint in the Territorial Army, certainly illegal but something I found myself unable to throw away – and I knew how to use it.

Curiosity killed the cat. Among other things.

The beggar finished the curry, licked the orange paste from his fingers and shoved the bowl aside, then rummaged in the back of the fridge. I took a step into the room, the gun raised before me.

I was going to kill him.

He must have heard my feet on the lino. He tried to obscure himself behind the counter, grabbing for the bloodstained kitchen knife.

As if in a dream, I felt the gun kick in my hand. Saw the man’s head blow apart in a red mist.

I crossed the room with measured steps, leveled the pistol and fired three more times into the beggar’s crumpled body. Brass cartridges clinked on the floor. His body slumped with the knife still in his hand, a silent scream contorting what was left of his face.

Silently, I walked to Juliet’s stricken form. I don’t know why, but I bent down and kissed her gently on the lips.

Something dripped onto the lino. It might have been a tear, or it might just have been a drop of blood from the slaughtered figure of my beautiful bride.

Ring, ring.

Ring, ring.

Click.

“Mmf? What?”

“George.”

“Is that you, Jeremy?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell time do you call this, then?”

“One AM, according to the car clock.”

“…Isn’t it your wedding night? Shouldn’t you be whispering sweet nothings in your lovely wife’s ear or something just about now? Not, you know, randomly calling your friends in the middle of the night?”

“Juliet’s dead,” I said in unreadable tones.

There was a long pause.

“What… the… HELL?”

“Some lowlife came into the house when I was driving Cami back home. He killed her, George. He killed her.”

“And what happened next?”

“I blew his head off.”

“With what?”

“A Browning Hi-Power I kept from the Territorials.”

“…damn.”

“I need to get out of the country right now.”

“Where are you?”

“Upper Street. I’m heading towards Heathrow Airport right now.”

“Then what?”

“George, I need five thousand quid in cash for a plane ticket and spending money right now. You can have everything I own if I can have that cash.”

“…You’re insane. I’d be tried as an accomplice after the fact. You just murdered someone, Jeremy. You want me to get you out of the country? I do anything, it’s my arse on the line. You’ll be off in Swaziland or Turkmenistan or wherever. I’ll be in Highbury prison with madmen and rapists and god knows what.”

“Five thousand. Cash. You can keep the Beamer too at the airport, I won’t need it any more.”

“You’re mad. You’re bloody crazy. I should call Scotland Yard and have them send a special squad after you right now.”

“Terminal Four.”

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

My jet-black BMW pulled into the Heathrow car park, lit by a bright full moon, and I hopped out in a vague pretence of an upper-class idiot. At that time, I was barely eighteen, an unremarkable youth from a middle-class family, known among my few friends for cynicism and a tendency towards black humour. I’d only recently finished university, and had yet to take up a job. I was just like any number of students in London, except for my sudden and spontaneous marriage to my old friend and lover Juliet Drayton.

And I had left my twenty-year-old bride and an unidentified beggar lying dead at my home.

I didn’t even feel grief right now. Right now, I had blocked all inconvenient emotions from my mind. Grief and rage could come later. I needed to disappear.

I’d thrown the Browning out of the window halfway to Heathrow. What use would it be in an airport?

I had various electronic bank accounts in case I needed anything, but I dare not use them before I was a long way from London. A different continent would be favourite. I doubted anyone had found the horrific scene at my home, or would for a long time, but the police could easily track me to Heathrow – and beyond – if I used one of the cash machines there.

A powder-blue hatchback ground to a halt. The window creaked down, and a hand came out holding a thick brown envelope.

“Take the damn cash, Jeremy.”

I grasped it as though I would never let it go again, and shoved it into a jacket pocket without checking the contents. I turned to the window, but my old friend’s face was shrouded in shadow.

“Promise me I’ll never have to hear from you ever again.”

“I promise,” I said sadly. “It’s been good knowing you, George. So long.”

The car screeched off without bothering to reply.

I swore quietly and stalked into the terminal.

The great Departures board was covered in flight times and destinations, as diverse as the aeroplanes that flew them.

Somewhere I could fit in without too much trouble. Somewhere far away.

Ireland. No.

France. No.

Ukraine. No.

India. Maybe. No.

Japan. No.

America. What the hell. It was a big country. They spoke English, more or less.

I’d always wanted to fly in one of the Concorde jets anyway.

I found it far easier to fit in the US than I’d earlier imagined. Turning my online funds into cash in one state and moving to live in another, I felt safe from the law. If Scotland Yard decided I’d murdered my wife and a random beggar, they’d barely even know what continent I was in.

I ran a gun shop. I sold people instruments of death. I am indirectly responsible for the deaths of dozens of innocent people, killed by guns from my shop. I turned a peaceful suburb into a war zone. I sold everything up to rocket-propelled grenades and antitank land mines. You can get away with all kinds of stuff in America, it would seem.

Then one evening a man approached me, asked me to sell the property. Said he belonged to a community group called the Sharing, and that this group wanted to have a community centre in my area. He didn’t want to buy guns.

Business had been very slow. I needed money more than anything else. I didn’t want to go to the authorities for benefits. Legally, I didn’t exist.

I would have sold the building in an instant if I hadn’t seen right away he was wearing a concealed weapon.

So I managed to get a bug on him, asked him to let me think about it for a while. He went outside to talk to his colleagues. They didn’t quite sound like community people to me.

“Will he accept?”

“He will. The stupid man hasn’t sold so much as a bullet in weeks. He has no choice but to accept.”

“Good. We’ll have the infestation centre up in no time, a human host with a lot of underworld contacts, and of course we can always use more weapons. Much easier than a violent firefight, don’t you think?”

“We have four Hork-Bajir in the truck, just in case.”

“I’m going back in a few minutes. The man says he wants to think it over. I think he’s just trying to preserve as much dignity as possible.”

“Human behaviour is so absurd.”

There wasn’t enough time to blow up the whole shop. I had nowhere to run away to. The idea of being a “host” to some people who apparently weren’t human was not an attractive one, but…

What the hell, I thought. If you have to go, you may as well go in style.

I blew up two of their cars with RPGs before any of them knew what was happening. They panicked. The side of a lorry across the road was suddenly shredded, and four inhuman shapes leapt out.

I came out of the shop screaming defiance at the world, and the guns leapt and sparkled in my fingers.

They infested me, needless to say. I was a marksman for the Yeerk Empire.

I can remember an old man, so much like the beggar who murdered Juliet, shrieking “The Yeerks! The Yeerks are here!” and my hand coming up and killing him in a flash of red.

I can remember a local politician calling out to a crowd, “And Dapsen Lumber Company will not receive permission to cut down out beloved forests,” and the rifle kicking against my shoulder and the man falling with a neat round hole in his head.

I can remember shooting from the top of a truck at a pair of bladed monsters – Hork-Bajir – running through the woods. My bullets land clean, but it doesn’t even slow them down. The thing in my head was working for human physiology.

My Yeerk using my skill with weapons to kill enemy after enemy of its masters – escaping aliens, annoying human officials, incompetent fellow Controllers. Murder blurs into murder. It doesn’t matter any more.

I ended up on a spaceship, rebelling against the Empire. A different Yeerk in my head now. One less indifferent to life. He doesn’t want to kill my targets. I’m past caring.

I met Maya. I escaped with her and her band of Nadar, and the group of aliens and freaks of nature that has joined up with her in the last few weeks. The idealistic Andalite Xelaman. The insufferable mutant Alexa.

There’s a saying that a hero can be forgiven anything. I know I’m no hero. I’ve never saved the world, or the whales, or done much else but kill people. I know if I go back to Earth, to America or to London, I’ll be locked up at the very least. I don’t have much choice about what I do now. It doesn’t matter any more.

I can feel the cold London air around me, rather than the warm Somolonanian night. I can smell the sharp tang of blood and cordite in the air, even though my nose tells me I’m smelling the scent of blossom on the breeze. I can see Juliet dead in the moonlight, as I look down on vast rolling plains.

I can feel her lips on mine one last time.

Maya talks about a new civilisation. Alexa talks about peace. Xelaman talks about a united Andalite and Elemaki world.

All of them are focused on the future. Their dreams are there, and I am bound to them now.

But my dream’s in the past.

That’s where it’ll always be.