Puppet {ManxMan}

CHAPTER 42

We cremated Jayden the next day. There were no complaints when I explained the situation to Kailas and the others, I suppose we were all too far gone to care about the ethical dilemmas and the majority of negative reactions to digging up a dead body. All we cared about was honoring Jayden's wishes and making Gale feel a little more at ease. The headstone was left in place so Gale had somewhere to visit when he missed Jayden, and for the entirety of the rebellion so they had a memorial in place for a man who sacrificed himself for the good of humanity.

A handful of his ashes was thrown over the ground near the stone for added effect, and now we just had to get into the air. The problem there was that we didn't own a helicopter or a jet, so we would have to wait. Meanwhile we let Gale take the brass box of ashes to keep in his room. It was grotesque in a way, the way he was hugging the locked box like it was alive, and it made my heart twist in terrible ways, but I just gave the doctor a tight smile to reassure him when he looked at me for clarity, like he wasn't sure if keeping the box was okay and needed permission.

After my talk with him I was happy to see he was doing a lot better, although he was still overwhelmingly silent and spacey, still walking into walls and doorframes, occasionally falling over chairs if he was having a remarkably bad day, but he wasn't hiding from us anymore, he was sleeping and eating, so there was improvement.

There were four other men from Jayden's old regime of the Air Force who joined the Vidroh, people who had been there when they'd shown up at the hospital where Gale had been kept. They'd known him for as long as Jayden, and although they weren't nearly as close to the young man, they knew how much Jayden cared about him, so they were almost always a constant now that Jayden was gone.

The way I see it, when Jayden died, he left Gale with four guardians. Obviously they were busy most of the time, but not too busy to pop in at random moments, smacking a hand over Gale's forehead just before he hit the corner of a doorway or setting a hand on his shoulder and turning him so he wouldn't fall over a chair when they passed each other in a room or hallway. It was nice to see and always brought a small smile to my face.

Even Dakota was doing so much better. He would constantly avoid people if they tried to ask him about Rhett, or ask if he was doing alright, so we learned not to ask and to just take it as we saw it. Dakota had always been silent and withdrawn, he seemed to be so fully against talking about himself, so it wasn't all that surprising, but after that little bit of information he told me, I tried to keep a close eye on him.

With Gale doing alright, four different people looking after him, Dakota's mental health doing much better, and Kailas' nightmares getting less frequent, now my only serious issue was doing a good job as Jayden's successor training soldiers, new recruits, and the kids from the settlement. I was supposed to teach the children simple self-defense, while showing the soldiers and new recruits some of the skills I learned while at the Con Rồng.

The fact I had a chance to use these assassination skills for something other than killing innocent lives, honestly made the whole "ten years in captivity" thing seem a little less painful. I was teaching these men lifesaving skills, like how to take an opponent down with nothing but a pen and a paperclip, how to ration your bullets successfully, and how to almost never miss a shot. These people had dedicated their lives to taking down Con Rồng, it was the least I could do to show them the best way to kill a man with a roll of twine, right?

There were only two reactions I got when I was teaching. Utter horror at the fact I could do these things, or a sense of uneasy respect towards me. I was either a hero or someone to be feared, and either way I didn't like it. Luckily I didn't have to get along with them, I just had to put up with them until they knew what they were doing. They should be happy I wasn't teaching them with the same methods the Con Rồng taught me with.