Rex looked at them with the chilling, detached quality of an architect who had just finished laying out a blueprint and was now simply waiting to see which part of the structure his victims would choose to crash into first.
There was no warmth in his eyes, no lingering shred of the "friend" Zane had mourned. There was only the terrifying, vast expanse of a mind that saw the world as a series of levers and pulleys.
Zane's breath was a ragged, uneven thing. He felt like he was drowning in the sheer scale of the deception.
"You managed three identities on a single island," Zane hissed, his voice trembling with a mixture of awe and pure, unadulterated hatred. "Simultaneously!"
"You were running the Underlayer remotely, intercepting every goddamn intelligence transmission through the earth itself, building a golem network that blanketed the entire surface, and all the while... you were sitting in Academy classes, pretending to be a fucking student!"
