by Jenn Lyons
“No. He’s a good kid. He wouldn’t approve of what I’m doing.”
“Who does? So now what? Are you going to shoot me? Or do we stand here staring at each other until the bombs go off?”
He smiled. “I thought we might have an acrobatic melee on the catwalk. It would be so dramatic.”
“Oh sure. You can reveal you’re my father just before I throw you into the lava.”
He chuckled. “You’re not going to throw me into the lava. You’re not that good.”
My mouth went dry. “And revealing you’re my father? Is that going to happen?”
He stared at me. “No. No, I’m not your father.”
“That is a vast relief.” I couldn’t hide the thickness of my voice.
His eyes narrowed, then widened. “You—?” Zaladin shook his head, ever-so-slightly. “It’s been ten years, Lory. I thought—I thought you’d have gotten over that infatuation.”
“I’m human, or human enough.” I said through clenched teeth. “No bond, no coerced hormonal cascade forcing an emotional chain to the first person to stimulate the right nerve endings. My feelings don’t vanish just because I haven’t seen you in a decade.”
The look he gave me then was haunted. “I’m sorry.”
“Well,” I said with a shrug. “I’ve been told I have lousy taste in men.” I nodded towards the doorway. “Let’s at least do this out in the hallway. All joking aside, I don’t think either of us wants to fight out here. The lava’s starting to bubble through.”
“We don’t have to fight at all. You’re the last person I want to hurt. You’re not my enemy.”
“I can’t let you kill Maia-Leia Shana.”
His expression darkened. “I stand corrected.”
“Or you could tell me what’s going on, why you’re killing these Sarcodinay? We could go grab some coffee, reminisce about the old days...”
He snarled. “Come on out then.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” I slowly moved towards the door, while Zaladin backed out into the hallway.
I thought I’d try something once I’d reached the hallway, but I had forgotten how fast Zach could move. In the time I took to reach the doorway he crossed the space between us and made a grab for me. I twisted under his grip and sent a hard elbow into his side followed by a kick to his arm that sent the rifle spinning to clang against the metallic floor in the main cavern. He grunted in recognition of the blows, then hit back hard with an uppercut that I blocked at the cost of leaving myself open to the leg sweep that dumped us both on the ground. Thankfully, we landed in the outside hallway, and not back out on the catwalk.
At that moment I would have seriously protested any claims by Tirris Vahn, Lorvan or anyone else that Zaladin would protect me. There is a way people fight when they are not holding back, when only one person is going to walk, limp or crawl away: no talking, no flippant quips, no extraneous movement. Every breath is saved for the effort of two people sincerely trying to kill one another. Zaladin wasn’t holding anything back, but then, that had never been his style. I felt a sense of déjà vu, but we weren’t teacher and student in school this time.
No practice mats, no uniforms, and no holds barred.
I rolled just in time to avoid Zaladin’s elbow smashing my throat. He sprang to his feet as I bounced off the doorway and used the momentum to deliver a kick to his side. He tried to block a punch only to discover it was a feint, and didn’t counter in time to keep me from hitting him in the face. I followed it up with an elbow jab and a knee to his ribs. He grabbed the leg and pulled, but I twisted his arm out of position and freed myself, delivering several quicksilver kicks in the process.
He was far stronger than I, and almost as fast. The only real advantage I had was that for all his training, I could still read every move he telegraphed—those old patterns were still there, clearer than any vid sign. I landed several good blows before he had a chance to do much in return. I knew better than to gloat over my success: I kept hitting.
Then pain exploded in my mind, and I realized too late I’d forgotten one important little detail: he didn’t have to pretend to be human anymore. He wasn’t Zacharei Zaitsev. He was Seris-Sarco Zaladin, High Guard, with over a century of experience—and a telepath. I put my hands to my head, vainly trying to shut out the agony. While I writhed, trying to shield my mind, I felt him come up behind, jerk back my arms, and lift me off my feet. I lashed out and hit him, but not in time to stop him from putting me in one of those rare, ugly chokeholds that can only be escaped through unconsciousness or death.
I tried to throw him off with any a dozen tricks I knew, some that he’d even taught me, but he was too heavy, too strong, and too aware of the same tricks. In desperation I tried lashing out at him telepathically the same way he was hurting me. The walls of his mind were made from iron. Still I heard him grunt and his hold on me slacken. It wasn’t enough.
“Well done, Lory,” I heard him whisper into my ear. “You’ve come a long way. I even think you might have won if this had been a fair fight. But you’re not a better telepath, my dear, not yet.”
“Zach...” I couldn’t breathe. He had his arm around my neck, slowly choking off air. I lashed out again at him with my mind, but it was like climbing a glass wall with buttered hands. I slid off again and again. ”...bombs...”
Adrenaline was pumping through me, but for once that was proving a distraction more than a benefit. I could feel the minute pull of muscles in his arms, in his chest, the smell of his sweat and blush of hot air from his breath on my neck. I could hear his heart beating furiously fast inside his body, but not half as fast as my own. Fear and panic blasted through me. I couldn’t get out. I wasn’t going to make it.
“Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll find them.”
I felt something cold at my side, blossoming into fire. A knife. Zaladin had slid a dagger between my ribs, angled up into my heart. Strangely, the awareness that he was actually killing me, really and truly killing me, hurt more than the act itself.
The rest was over quickly.
FIFTEEN.Gabriel
I woke up in a morgue.
There’s nothing romantic about waking up in a morgue, by the way. There’s no satisfying “oh thank the Keepers, isn’t it wonderful that I’m still alive?” feeling to it either. On some primal level, your body knows where you are: cold and claustrophobic and reeking of the most unpleasant sorts of bodily fluids floating under an acrid cloud of astringents. Morgues smell like death; not battlefield death or abattoir death, but a tin medical death that is somehow the most frightening because it is the most potent reminder of the inevitability of it all, that death comes for everyone, even the people with doctors and hospitals. If you were unlucky enough to be the corpse, as on several occasions prior to this incident I had found myself pretending to be, it meant waking up inside a foil envelope, a suffocating metallic winding sheet, and once out from that, still trapped inside a narrow little cubicle, filed away in a refrigerated alcove like so much chilled meat. Panic would mean real death, and yet, there is a very urgent time schedule to keep. Waking up in a morgue is like waking from a deep sleep to find you have been mysteriously volunteered as an escape artist, dunked inside the water tank, body wrapped in a strait-jacket, jacket bound in chains, and the clock ticking. Do not panic.
But: hurry.
So under the circumstances I wasted no time whatsoever on unimportant trivialities such as “how did I get here?” and “why am I still alive?”
I would deal with it later.
Sarcodinay morgues, like everything else Sarcodinay-built, are arranged on a predictable layout, so once I was free of my little shelf, finding the door was not exactly a feat of amazing intellect. The place looked familiar, but then, see point number one: most Sarcodinay morgues look familiar.
Something was wrong though, wrong quite beyond the whole ‘waking up in a body bag’ ordeal. A part of my brain, the part of me that would look at a room like this and see its telltale clues, the signa
tures of identity that would reveal to me just why it seemed familiar, were switched off. Identifying anything—table, chair, gurney, scales, computer—was a struggle, like thinking through fog. Instead, everything was texture and surface, shape and volume, the way the light reflected, matte or shiny, unique, distinct, beautiful even in the midst of antiseptic ugliness.
Had I been drugged?
My perceptions were altered, although it was a change I found troubling in abstract, tinged as it was with wonder. Still, something was wrong, like I was dreaming. I inhaled and stilled myself, trying to reassert my own mind.
A feeling came over me like ringing a silent bell—no sound but a sense of force pressing outward, a quickly expanding ring rippling out away from me, and in its wake came identity, meaning and order. I looked around, recognized the room, knew why it was familiar, and wished I had left myself drunk with nameless, label-less beauty. I felt the weight of velocity-induced artificial gravity, smelled the stale stink of rank air recycled through filters long since passed their optimal expiration, tasted the inescapable ferrous tang of metallic ores crushed, cut, and poured molten hot. I heard the dull, distant claxon of insistent, nagging alarms, and saw the neglect of equipment and decorations that would never have been tolerated in a megacity but was quite acceptable for a location devoted to waste disposal of the most atrocious and