Mikkel

I had to see Matthias--alone. I mean, without other Serpents. Nate, of course, was always handy to have around.

It had been nearly a month and I was tired of hearing about how Ian stuck Cory in a corner to rot every day because of his verdam' fear of being out-shined by an augmented street-rat.

Nate and I had won enough money to pay for Ingrid and Anna, so we left the riverfront early and dropped into the city tunnels from the restaurant across from the old Serpent building. Nate and I were regulars at that restaurant. Our generous tipping is what kept the place afloat through some of their rough spots, so the owner always let us in the walk-in freezer when we asked. The entrance to the city tunnels hid in a hole dug through the floor in the back of the freezer.

From there we made our way to the capital building. I'd come upon the capital building before by accident. The symbol used to show it was almost completely faded into the tunnel wall. So if you weren't looking hard enough, you'd miss it.

We came out in the basement of the capital building, behind a built-in shelving unit filled with boxes of broken furniture and the like, and fumbled our way up the stairs. I hadn't had that many to drink, but we didn't want to turn on a light in case we ran into some verdam' adelige.

Matthias's bedroom wasn't all that hard to find. I knew the biggest room in the house and I figured either Matthias or Ian slept in it. And as much as I hoped it was Ian so I could just knock him off and be done with it, it happened to be Matthias.

And he wasn't asleep. Turns out we, M-kollectiv brothers, are all night-owls. Obsessive night-owls. The guy was reading through a stack of books on the theory of economics. Definitely Miles's twin. I'm sure that if you put the two of them in a room together, they'd just end up throwing books at each other until one of them was unconscious. Ironically, as far as appearances went, they weren't all that similar. Matthias was noticeably taller and had a sharpness to his face that made him look like the evil twin.

Matthias wasn't too happy to see us walk in his room this late at night. Or at all, I suppose. I guess he never really saw us as "brothers." It took some convincing to not have us thrown out on our asses. Problem was that I couldn't be so blatant with it. If Matthias found out I was an Indigo Child, he'd find a way to make me his slave, just like he did Cory. So in an effort to be discrete, I pretended to be desperate and losing control of the situation. Nate knew how to play along. We'd done this before to some thugs on the street.

"Ah, you're awake," I said when I first opened Matthias's door and saw him hunched over in an arm-chair.

He looked at us both with a familiar burning anger that I liked to provoke in Miles and then spoke in Gebrochen. It was the Serpent way of showing superiority. We in the Underground couldn't care less and usually spoke a muddled mix of Gebrochen and English, which ticked the Serpents off even more, which made us happy. "What the hell are you doing here?" he asked.

"I wanted to talk," I said in English.

Matthias narrowed his eyes at us. He couldn't run and he had nothing on him to fight with. He needed to look like he was in control of the situation so that he didn't appear weak to anyone. And I needed him to feel like he was in control of the situation. "Please hear us out," I said. That one line broke his guard. It's amazing what posturing could do. After that one line, he relaxed himself and straightened up to fit the role of a man who could decide our fate.

I chose my words carefully and explained my concerns and desires--not just for Cory, but for all of us. Considering his desperate searching through the mound of books beside him, he was obviously open to ideas; and ideas, I had. I was the mastermind of the Serpent-Underground war, you know. He knew that. He knew I was the reason that Cory now worked for him instead of standing over his dead corpse as a Masters mercenary. Or why he now had the numbers and power to take on the Jaggars in the south end of the city.

All of that gave me sway. And my posturing gave me favor. He could demean me all he wanted to; tell me I was a bastard child of a philanderer and an unfaithful wife; tell me that I had no adelige blood in me at all; that I was müll, a Misch. But after all his breath ran out, I held the deck, which, quite literally, was in my pocket. I always kept my fixed deck on me. Meanwhile, he thought of himself as the one with choice.

So he listened to me and agreed with me (it was his choice, right?). By the time I left the capital building, I had Cory's future fixed and mine set for whatever I decided to do. And I didn't even have to touch Matthias.

Nate played his part brilliantly. He kept silent and put on those desperate puppy dog eyes that always got him what he wanted. I couldn't pull off those eyes. I tried once with a girl we both knew in the Underground. She said I looked untrustworthy. I guess my eyes come from my mom's side because Nate's are a carbon copy Voltair's. Have you ever seen his pictures? He's pulling the sad puppy dog eyes in every one of them. It's how he got to bed so many married women, I guess.

We took longer than expected to make it home that night. We got lost when we took a wrong turn and ended up in an old store on the riverfront. I told Nate that one of our projects needed to be repainting those directional signs in the tunnels. We also needed to get Cory back in training for her next big job. Judging by her performance in the Underground-Serpent war, she was going to need a lot of strengthening in both her confidence and her abilities before she could take on the Jaggars and the SBS.