Holly shook her head and couldn’t help but laugh at his perpetual refusal to acknowledge pain. “This and that,” she shrugged jokingly. “You know, looking for something exciting to do.”
Peter’s voice then interrupted. “This is for Sakura’s dad,” he growled, sending a hard-to-watch blow into David Boyce’s jaw after propping him up. Boyce’s moans were muffled by the tape Peter had already attached to his mouth.
“Are his hands bound?” Grav barked sternly.
“Of course not,” Peter said. He then turned to Holly, sensing her confusion. “Only temporarily, that is; you never strike a man whose hands are bound. I will fully restrain him now.”
“So you can shoot someone who doesn’t know you’re there, but you can’t punch someone whose hands are tied?” Holly asked, more than a little confused by their rules.
“More or less,” Peter said.
However hard she tried, she would never understand them. She shrugged it off and untied Grav. “So now that your hands are free, I guess this is the part when I punch you for getting caught on purpose?”
Grav’s face contorted. “What? How stupid do you think I am, Hollywood? Peter, do you hear this shit?”
Peter hesitated. “Some of us thought…”
“Unbelievable,” Grav said, shaking his head at Peter. “For sure, I could have broken free at a few points after the initial error, but do you really think I planned for the first guard to see me? He was armed! He shot me, right here in the thigh. That could have been the heart, the head, anywhere. I did not wear my suit because I thought I had more chance of reaching the guard unseen and unheard without it. Unfortunately, I stepped on something and he heard it… that is all.”
Holly couldn’t pretend to be unsurprised by this, having assumed the opposite for so long that the assumption had come to feel empirically justified. She helped Grav to his feet, no longer harbouring the slightest hint of anger towards him for kicking off a chain of events that ultimately led to Remy Bouchard’s death now that she knew he hadn’t meant to be captured.
Grav’s injured leg, shot at the thigh and worse below, buckled as soon as he put some weight on it. He accepted Holly’s help, though not exactly gladly.
“I’m staying here to ask Boyce a few questions,” Peter said. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure he can’t go anywhere.”
Holly was more than a little torn on this; the immediate danger had been averted and she wasn’t comfortable authorising what could euphemistically be called extreme interrogation techniques
“Good work, Peter,” Grav said.
When he didn’t say anything else, Holly stepped in. “Peter… we’re better than that.”
“Of course Holly is right,” Grav added. “I did not think you would be considering it, but if you were… I will not let you lower yourself to his level. Trust me when I tell you: those are memories you do not want.”
Peter nodded, evidently having been merely willing rather than keen to forcefully interrogate Boyce.
“Keep him here for now, though,” Holly said, very pleased by Grav’s stance. “It’s the safest place.”
“Okay,” Peter said. He turned to Grav. “But what exactly did he do to your leg? With so much flesh taken so recently… how come there is not infinitely more blood?”
“Wait,” Holly interrupted. “You didn’t know his leg has been like that for years?”
“What?” Peter said, as surprised to learn this as Holly had been to learn that he didn’t already know.
Grav shrugged. “A firmer man than David Boyce asked me some questions I did not want to answer. There is little more to the story than that.”
Peter didn’t push for any more details and instead moved his gaze to Holly. “Are you and Sakura going down into the tourist compound now?”
“And me,” Grav said. “Call me sentimental, but I want to be there for the liberation.”
“I could call you a lot of things,” Holly quipped. “But not that.”
Grav allowed a rare chuckle to escape his dry lips before reining it in as soon as he noticed it.
On the way to the door, Holly caught sight of a single book on the large bookshelf which ran along the room’s side wall. As had been the case before Viola trashed the room four years earlier, Harriet Brock’s infamous work, The Great Reset, once again sat pride of place and all alone.
Having taken the original book away, Holly picked this one up to do the same. When she picked it up, the memory of last time brought her attention to another item which had reappeared: the paperweight on the desk. She pointed this out to Peter and suggested that he bring it with him later to give to Viola as a surprise gift upon their safe return to the Venus station.
“She’ll appreciate it,” Holly said, recalling the glee with which Viola had thrown the paperweight through the still-unrepaired window.
Peter acknowledged the suggestion and continued his task of restraining David Boyce on the same chair to which Grav had been tied just minutes earlier.
As Holly helped Grav down the grand house’s many stairs, he asked why the hell Viola would want a paperweight and why the hell Holly had taken the book by Harriet Brock, a long-dead faux intellectual who he and many others blamed for Roger Morrison’s early radicalisation.
“It’s either the same paperweight or an exact replica of the one she threw through the window when we were here with Spaceman,” Holly said. “And as for the book, I just don’t want it to be in there.”
“Ah,” Grav said, satisfied with the explanation of the paperweight’s relevance in particular. “So about the mission today… apart from my capture — my accidental capture — were there any major complications?”
Holly paused for a second. “Nothing we couldn’t get past,” she eventually said, avoiding the painful issue of Remy Bouchard for as long as she could.
Grav inhaled the fresh New Eden air as they reached the door and prepared to reunite with Sakura before venturing underground.
“Well, Hollywood… this is what we came for. It is time to free some hostages.”
sixty-six
Sakura’s joy at seeing Holly and Grav descending the imposing house’s stairway carried her out of the still-cloaked VUV and took her quickly towards them. On arrival, her smile faded momentarily as she asked where Peter was.
“Taking necessary precautions,” Grav said. “Peter is unharmed and making sure that Boyce is in no position to cause any more problems.”
Sakura took a long look at Grav, up and down and then up again. It was clear to see that Boyce had caused more than a few physical problems for Grav, who Sakura then bombarded with criticism for being so foolish as to be deliberately captured.
Less alarmed by this suggestion than he had been when Holly first voiced it, Grav this time laughed it off. “You people think a lot less of my intellect than I thought you did,” he said. “And really, Sakura, if I planned to be caught, why in the hell would I not have taken those dissociative pills I brought for you in case something went wrong and you were captured? Because that sure as shit would have made the last hour a lot easier than it was.”
Sakura’s assumption faded as quickly as Holly’s had a few minutes earlier, and after a few further questions about the specifics of Boyce’s interrogative techniques and Grav’s current level of pain — zero, he claimed with a straight face — she was satisfied that he was fit enough to hobble downstairs to see the former hostages receiving the decisive news that they were free. That was what they came for, he repeated, and an injured leg wasn’t going to stop him from being there to see the plan through to its conclusion.
“Injured,” he stressed with a hint of a grin as Holly rolled her eyes. “Not sore.”
Holly saw the TE-500 which had carried David Boyce to New Eden after Grav was captured, and upon seeing it she remembered hearing from Peter that Boyce had killed the guard who spotted Grav and had then thrown his body inside the vehicle.
She approached the vehicle after explaining to Sak
ura and Grav that she wanted to learn the man’s name, hopefully via his tourist lanyard, so that his family could be informed.
“Landon Eriksen,” she said only ten or twenty seconds later, relieved that the task had been made as easy as she could have hoped courtesy of the lanyard.
Grav said nothing, displaying neither sorrow that his carelessness had led to Eriksen’s death nor any kind of satisfaction that the man who shot him had fallen.
Holly, as the only one of this trio to have previously ventured underground in New Eden, led the way to the front stairway which she knew to be the closest to their destination.
“It is just like the stairway at the bunker,” Grav said, stating the obvious. “Except there is no keypad.” He pushed the door with his free hand — the one not around Holly’s neck for support — and it swung easily open.
“Do you think Viola will have told the hostages that Boyce is down?” Sakura asked as the trio walked along a corridor which was just as pristine as it had been four years earlier.
“I didn’t ask her to and she probably wouldn’t know how,” Holly replied, “so I think these people are going to be very happy to see us. This is it: this is when they’ll know they’re really safe.”
Holly stopped at the large doorway leading to the museum-like central hall where half of the hostages were housed. It was locked from the inside, wisely, so she knocked loudly three times.
Murmurs and footsteps filled the air until someone opened the door and silence fell. The two formerly coerced guards stood facing Holly with their weapons raised. When they saw it was her and not either Boyce or one of his accomplices, they lowered their weapons. The roar from the hundreds of tourists behind them was immediate and the rush forward was just as quick.
With smiles all around, Sakura stepped in front of Grav to protect his injured leg from the joyous mob who surrounded their rescuers.
“It’s over,” Holly boomed. “Boyce and his men are down. A Ferrier will be here soon to take you all home, and until then you can make use of the facilities. For those of you who paid a lot of money to come here, I’m pretty sure that refunds will be forthcoming.”
This raised a few laughs, but most in the room were too busy celebrating the “it’s over” part of Holly’s announcement to have heard anything that followed.
From near the front of the mass of celebrating tourists, a young woman Holly recognised as the tour guide from her first ride in a TE-500 stepped forward and embraced her warmly. The sight of a familiar face, particularly one so happy to see her, helped Holly’s mind focus on the positive side of her mission’s outcome.
“Is my daddy okay?” a very young boy then asked, so short as to have evaded Holly’s attention until he was standing right next to her and pulling on her hand.
“What’s his name?” she replied softly.
“Umm…”
The boy’s mother hurried over to get him. “Sorry about that,” she said.
“It’s okay. What’s his dad’s name?” Holly asked.
“My husband? His name is Phillip Howard. Why?”
Holly looked at the little boy and winked. “Your daddy is okay.”
While the boy beamed from ear to ear, his mother looked far less delighted. “Are some of the men Boyce took outside not okay?” she asked, speaking loudly enough to catch the attention of many others.
This was the part Holly had dreaded. “Does anyone in here have the surname Francis or Eriksen?” she asked, raising her voice to command everyone’s attention.
No one raised a hand or stepped forward.
“In the other group,” one woman yelled from the back. “There’s definitely a Francis family in the other group.”
“The Eriksens are in there, too,” someone else called out.
Holly nodded. “Thanks. In that case, all of your people are okay. Your dads, husbands, partners, brothers… whoever Boyce took outside from your families, they’re all okay. You’ll be reunited today.”
This sparked more celebratory scenes, though mainly among the children. Several of the women and older men — none of whom Boyce had deemed suitable guards, for reasons known only to himself — wore more sombre expressions having inferred that two of their fellow hostages had not lived to see freedom.
“I ask that you all stay in here for ten minutes,” Holly said, “until the other group have been told everything that we’ve just told you.”
“Can we come with you?” one of the two former guards asked. “Our families are in the other group. Boyce didn’t want anyone pointing a gun at their own family. Conflict of interest, I guess.”
“Of course,” Holly agreed, gesturing towards the door.
Back in the corridor, with the now-unarmed men walking behind Holly’s trio, Sakura offered to go into the nursery without Holly to deliver the necessary news.
“Why?” Grav butted in. “Because of John Francis and Landon Eriksen? It will be no easier and no more difficult for their families to hear the news from any one of us in particular. Besides, Hollywood, I want to see these twins you have told me so much about; these twins you have worked so hard to keep safe. Where is their father, anyway? Remy. Is he in the Karrier?”
Holly stopped walking and felt the weight of the world crash onto her shoulders all over again.
“Hollywood? Are you okay? What is going on?”
Sakura instructed the two men to back up and give Holly some space. When they did, she asked them to go further. They did so without complaint. “I can take care of this, Holly,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”
“Are neither of you going to tell me what is going on here?” Grav asked, standing unsupported on one leg as he flitted his gaze between them until he saw tears collecting in Holly’s eyes. “Oh, no. No…”
“He wouldn’t get out of the way,” Holly sobbed, covering her face with her hands as the emotion finally came flooding out. “He was going to call Boyce… and he grabbed Viola… and…”
“Is she okay?” Grav asked. “Did he hurt her?”
“Viola is fine,” Sakura said. “Holly made sure of that.”
At this point, Holly expected Grav to do something like pat her on the back and say something like “kill or be killed.”
He did neither.
Instead, he stepped back and spoke in a far more gentle tone than normal: “You are stronger than I thought, Hollywood.”
This broke her frame, bringing a halt to her sobbing and causing her hands to lower from her face. “Strong?” she echoed. “If shooting a guy in the forehead at close range is strength then I don’t want—”
“Doing what has to be done is strength,” Grav interrupted, suddenly firm. “Doing something you do not want to do… doing something which is necessary but ‘bad’ — something which you know that you alone will have to live with long after the dust has settled — that is strength. Violence is not strength, Hollywood, but violence is not weakness. Cruelty is weakness. Brutality is weakness. Boyce is weak. Morrison was weak. We are not weak. You are not weak.”
Grav’s direct reference to Morrison in relation to Holly’s actions instantly brought to mind the only previous occasion she had been backed so aggressively and so far into a corner that her only way out was to reluctantly take another’s life. In that instance, during an ill-fated psychological experiment in which she and her colleagues had been masterfully fooled into believing they had crash-landed on a hostile world, she had acted out of flat-out self defence. Although the situation with Remy had been slightly less black and white, the galling irony wasn’t lost on her that her hand had once again been forced by a sociopathic maniac — this time an individual loyal to Morrison rather than Morrison himself; an individual who was perhaps less cunning but one who was just as sadistic and far more willing to get his own hands dirty.
Nor was another sad irony lost on Holly: that Remy Bouchard, an initially reluctant lottery-winner who had been talked into accepting the prize by his excited family, had likely been the only touris
t on Terradox who didn’t really want to be there in the first place. His fears over the security of the romosphere had proven well-founded, but Holly knew that no amount of this kind of reflection could do her any good.
“I still feel like I have to tell them myself,” she said, accepting Grav’s words without necessarily agreeing with all of them, then turning to address Sakura. “I feel like I have to tell Cherise what happened.”
Sakura didn’t look convinced. “If that’s what you really want. But I’m more than willing to do it.”
“Go,” Grav told Sakura. He gestured for the two men behind him to go with Sakura, then turned back to Holly. “I know you think you have to do this, but it would be worse for the kids. Going in there is not the kind thing to do, Hollywood. Some kind of closure for yourself… that is no reason to put his family through any more than they have to go through. When they see you, they will be overjoyed. And for you to then tell them he is dead, with or without details of what happened… for that news, which is going to hurt no matter what, for that to come from you when it could come from someone they do not know… that would not be a kind thing to do. I mean this in the nicest possible way, Hollywood, you know I do, but their feelings of grief matter a lot more than your feelings of guilt. You have no reason for guilt, which is why it will pass. But their grief will not, which is why we must not do anything to exacerbate it.”
In Grav’s many words, Holly found none to take issue with. It wasn’t easy to accept, but she knew he was right; her going inside the nursery to deliver the news would do the Bouchard family more harm than good.
“We will see to it that the family is well looked after,” Grav said to Holly as Sakura and the two men walked ahead towards the nursery.
Holly wiped away her slowly drying tears and nodded as convincingly as she could.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 61