by M F Sullivan
The laser sights of guns flashing across the hall, the chartreuse beams of night-vision glasses marking positions: she would have had an easy time locating her quarry without electronic help. Still, the DIOX-I proved its utility—not with its night vision, but with its twelve targets, which encircled each man’s head like ill-starred halos. A video game, she thought with rueful humor, rueful humor being the thing with which she maintained her cool as she pressed tighter against the wall. The men split their group in half to begin the sweep. Two slowed behind each party of fellows marching down the hall, and these began clearing rooms. She stilled her breath. Once she moved, her position would be given up, and she’d need to deal with the consequences. So would the men, who, in an attentive group of four, crept past an overturned table. The DIOX-I highlighted their weapons to reveal the positions of a few hidden knives, and she waited, waited, squeezed shut her eyes as an officer neared, sure to blow her cover. But he was not observant enough, and she was protected by the veil of impossibility and rumor, and when the man passed, she raised her gun and took one, two, three, four, five, six shots, and the four men dropped while she, in a movement too quick for a human to emulate, reloaded her revolver to greet the four others who emerged from the rooms, shouting, guns at the ready. These unfortunates died with their fingers on triggers which jerked as consciousness absented itself from four more brains.
Footfalls approached from the distance. Dominia tucked her gun back into its too-long empty holster and swept up the nearest assault rifle, then emitted a disgusted sigh: identity locked. The so-called security only succeeded in promoting tastelessness in battle, as when Dominia dropped to the floor beneath the body with her hand upon its gloved one. As soon as the other units appeared, she squeezed the dead man’s finger. The rifle was a powerful one and, from the awkward angle, almost impossible to hold. It took too long for two of the four targets to fall, the other pair having been pelted haphazardly in armor and helmets rendered bullet resistant by an admixture of graphene that didn’t seem like a bad idea at a moment like this. Meanwhile, more charged from the hospital’s other wings, with other officers surging up floor after floor, or waiting outside with rifles. Then, of course, there was the sun. Glittering bright and hot.
She had to do something stupid.
The bullet-bloodied body draped in her arms until the gun clicked empty, Dominia darted into the nearest cleared room and barred shut the door with the life-support machine of a dead man killed by Cicero and whatever team he’d brought. But what Cicero often failed to take into consideration was that he was unmanageable, and, unlike the calm Hierophant, prone to unpredictable bouts of temper. This was never truer than when he was separated by business or ill fortune from the Lamb, who was more beloved by Cicero than even the populace. El Sacerdote had been in too good a mood to be there alone; surely, that bringer of miracles, that parent who loved her for who she was and not what she could do, was also there. That parent who, at times, looked into the future, and who had, at some point, no doubt foreseen the person Dominia would become. Knowing that, he stopped neither his lifelong partner, Cicero, nor his Holy Father, from bringing her into the Family. She could not understand it now. Dominia had never the faintest idea what a troublemaker she would become: not until Cassandra stood before her. After that, conflict with the Hierophant and the apple of his eye was inevitable. But her quarrel had never been with the Lamb. Never had he been anything to her but gentle and kind: no matter what the Church of the Hierophant had done to him, or forced him to do to others. It was the propensity of the Hierophant to render the Lamb complicit in his crimes, and this propensity was why praying to the Lamb, given her intent at that specific moment, seemed stupid. But there was a reason she had survived so many battles, beyond natural cunning.
As behind the locked door she fell to her knees to pray, Dominia stretched out the limbs of her mind and cried, “Help,” as a child for her gentler father. That gentler father responded in immediate kind: the distant roars of men and the thuds of the door slowed, slowed, fell off, and Dominia was inside of herself. Inside and behind her body, a conscious spark: a mere rider of her form, as a body might ride a horse, camel, or elephant. His spirit entered her and she eased her troubled mind. She imagined she glimpsed him standing before her in some formless Void within her mind, the ram’s horns around his head—installed to reduce and channel the directions whence he received otherwise-unmanageable psychic input—glowing the soft moonshine silver of stained glass.
“You still answered me. But I guess you don’t have a choice. Oh, Rabbi”—the word meant “teacher,” but to her it meant “Daddy” and it made her cry all the harder as he took her in his arms—“I think I’m afraid. Maybe it’s because I’m so sad. But, please, I need your help.”
“There will be consequences,” he said. “Greater than those already faced.”
“You let me live. You saw this path and let me live, knowing what I’d do. Would you let me come this far and allow me delivered into death’s cold hands? Please.” Outside the room, the team was close to bursting through the door. She felt numb as she begged, “This once on my journey. Please, lend me your grace. I’ll take the consequences that must come, as long as you don’t let me meet my end. Not now.”
The silent Lamb regarded her face, then bent to kiss a tear from her cheek. It was as though she felt the coarseness of his beard. “My child,” he said, and she was in fact a child, standing upon the big feet of her father back in that lost Mephitolian cottage. Outside of herself, Dominia rose on feet commanded by a spirit that was not hers, that was not bounded by time in the way of her own. Though she had but half sense of what happened, being as she was a child learning to dance upon her father’s feet, she watched in awe as that good father made her throw open the door so a few unready squad members tumbled in. The trip left them disoriented enough for her to shoot them dead through the throats. She did not know where all the soldiers would be; yet, with the Lamb in her, somehow she did know, and moved all the faster, as if her muscles pounded at their maximum capacity even given a martyr’s endurance. The Lamb, like some organic quantum computer ever-calculating at nontemporal rates the amplitudes of an infinity of possibilities, knew in a way beyond knowing the exact position, at every second, of every being on Earth, because he was within all beings, was all beings, as much as he was also himself. As much as he was a slave to the Hierophant. A slave who could only take what petty opportunities he could to rebel, such as this: this fleeting moment when Dominia, bouncing a grenade back to the senders, looked into the face of the Lamb and wondered, “Why are you helping me?”
“Because I believe in you.”
“Believe I can do what?”
He didn’t say. He just kept dancing, danced her right out into the hall so that she was faced with a pair of specialists holding vibroblades; swords whose high-vibrating frequencies made them as dangerous as they were useful. They required a great deal of experimental armor to operate, but the armor was only a delaying tactic to give the user a second or two in which to cut the blade’s power and keep it from sawing through their own flesh. While bullets flew from a distant handful of cinnabar-outlined targets, Dominia focused on the blade wielders, dodged a swiping sword, and was moved by the Lamb to the left. Thus, she narrowly avoided a blade and caused a too-enthusiastic squad member to shoot one of the swordsmen between the eyes. Dominia caught up his sword before he was on the ground. The rest was quick, and clean: in through the gut of the other swordsman, back out, then off, her boots pounding a trail of blood down the hall as she dodged, through sheer providence, the hail of bullets whizzing every way. One snagged her coat as she dove down the stairs and pinned a hapless man to the ground like a butterfly to a display board. His partner’s cry of fury was soon silenced by the last bullet in a gun she loaded yet again.
As she snatched up a no-longer-required helmet, it struck her as possible that the Hierophant was aware the Lamb helped her. Maybe even supported the idea. But it didn’
t matter, in the end, who helped her, or why; even if it was all a scheme to make her look worse than she already did (and it was, she felt in her heart). All that mattered was that she got out alive.
The first-floor lobby was a mess of people when she arrived, and a mess of bodies when she exited. At the Lamb’s urging, she dug in her proverbial heels and ran into the sun with the sword still in her hands; sadly, the weapon was quick to slip away from her, as she had to leave it lodged in some poor fellow’s chest to dodge roof-mounted snipers. Bullets rained across the pavement while militarized officers screamed orders in Japanese. It didn’t matter what they said: the tanque was her goal, and no one poised near it was fast enough or stupid enough to stop her as she tore open its door, yanked the driver from his seat, and sent the passenger stumbling out with a gun in his face. She didn’t worry about closing the doors before she took off, though she grimaced as the windshield shuddered with a few deflected bullets, then hissed as one lucky shot sliced the edge of her neck. The tanque snarled into the closed road and took out the roadblock like it was a wall of hay. At last, she was released into the freedom of a road where all drivers hastened to pull aside for her. “Thank you,” she said to the Lamb, out loud, in her head, the white knuckles bared by her driving gloves already pinkened from those seconds under the sun, “thank you, thank you, oh, thank you.”
“Please be careful,” he said in her heart. “Please be safe. Please, don’t pray to me again. Not for a while. I can’t keep him from knowing forever.”
“I know. I’m sorry I had to ask this of you.”
“You don’t ever need to apologize: not to me. Go in peace, my daughter.”
“And you, Rabbi. Please, stay safe.”
Then, her mind was still, and around her, rising traffic noises gripped her consciousness. She felt so alone she almost missed René. With some irritation for the circles that kept indicating pigeons and other potential hunting quarry, Dominia dismissed hunting mode for the “personal” set of features, then used her wristwatch to call Ichigawa.
“You and Basil need to be ready to leave.” With a few mental pleas on her part, the DIOX-I pulled up the address of the hotel, which René had given her during his visits. As her new feature mapped it out in a translucent pane that floated in the lower right-hand corner of her vision, she told him, “I’m three minutes away.”
“Huh? What’s the matter? What have you done?”
“Turn on the news while you pack your bag. Just trust me when I say we needed to be at the LRS half an hour ago.”
“Yare, yare… What kind of car are you driving?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
The radio station on which the tanque landed played classical music from before even the Hierophant’s time, some ancient Japanese artist now dead for almost two thousand years. It struck her as better than the recent stuff, which was all heavy electronic and grinding metal that reminded her too much of the gunfire she’d just evaded. As she rounded the corner before the hotel, a police chopper—or news helicopter, she couldn’t be sure—hovered above, but she was undaunted. Beneath the overhang of the hotel’s entrance, Basil wagged his tail and barked a few times as he recognized the driver of the massive vehicle that bounced into the parking lot, honked its way past a few short-stopping autos, then screeched to a halt in front of a startled René.
“You weren’t kidding about the car,” he said, flinging open the door and hustling the dog into the back seat. “This is a European model! Nice, too. They didn’t identity-lock it? Pft! The suckers.” As he slammed the door shut and Dominia hit the electric, the wail of police sirens encroached on their position. “But how do you expect to make it onto the Light Rail now?”
She hadn’t thought that far ahead, living as she was in a minute-to-minute frame of mind. Looking too far ahead would get her into trouble. Thinking too much about the precious gem around her neck, more precious than any diamond anywhere, in this or any world, more precious than the diamonds rained on Jupiter—that would get her into the most trouble of all, because she would think about how easily lost that diamond was, and how she needed to protect it. The more she thought about her duties and the consequences of not completing them while in the line of fire, the clumsier she became, like a person becoming aware of their tongue and no longer finding it suited to their mouth. She tried to focus her consciousness elsewhere, on something productive. She looked into the rearview to see the face of the dog, then asked René, “What’s the deal with the tickets?”
“They’re universal LR Tickets: good for any one-way ride.”
“Under whose names?”
“Your fake one, Dominique LeBlanc. I don’t need to hide if I’m not coming back.” From his breast pocket, he presented a new watch, cheaper but newer than hers. It was preloaded with information belonging to Dominique LeBlanc, who might even have been a real person: Dominia, for her part, had acquired a few stolen identities for the odd espionage mission over the years, each used once and discarded for some purpose like a mask made of a human (or martyr) life. After programming the vehicle to take the shortest route to the Light Rail, she accepted the watch with skepticism.
“And there’s no tracing the tickets back to us?”
“No, no. They’re donated. Our organization has many wealthy donors who subsidize or fully fund the Light Rail tickets of refugees who will not be staying in Japan. Far faster and less risky crossing the sea by train than by ship. You’re not the only person the Hierophant has gone to great lengths to reacquire.”
“I’m not so sure it’s an acquisition he’s after.”
“Then, what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well what do you know? You’re being tight-lipped about this Black Sun thing.” While the dog whined, René slithered into the passenger’s seat to admire the thick Kyoto traffic and the glowing skyscrapers enclosing it. Great billboards all around them showed advertisements, but Dominia found to her displeasure that her DIOX-I overlaid existing ads with new, targeted marketing. Normal commercials for toothpaste featuring smiling women through Dominia’s left eye became, upon slipping into her right side as they rounded a corner, a Red Market advertisement, which disturbed Dominia because it implied the device had already divined she was a lesbian—perhaps through her Halcyon information, she consoled herself, and not through its access to her literal brain—for purposes of advertisement. It was also rather distasteful, seeing as she was married: but, then, she wasn’t now, was she? The recognition came upon her once again with a sad twist while the lingerie model parted her lips and winked at Dominia as if her prerecorded body had been produced just for the former Governess.
“Earth to Dominia,” snapped René, his irritation keeping her from projecting Cassandra all over the model. “Come in, come in, I’m talking to you, here.”
“Sorry! It’s this eye, it’s really—” A champagne advertisement, golden fluid showering down, became a tumbling leadfall of bullets asking her to buy from a military surplus website. A blue jean advertisement transmogrified into one for graphene-based armor, which she’d just been admiring. (The one for Lavinia’s livestreamed performance in La Traviata, however, stayed the same.) “Distracting, showing me all these ads.”
“Then turn it off.” He stroked his goatee with irritation as he fell against the window. “Didn’t you ask the doctor how to use the damn thing before you shot him?”
“You can’t think I did that! I tried to keep from discussing it with you until we were on the train— Cicero’s in town.”
“Cicero,” repeated René, his eyebrows lifting high. “What could he want?”
“He was my surgeon”—the glittering gold of the distant rail, visible for a length before it eased down into the Earth, shimmered into sight while they crested the hill—“and he wanted me to know how easily he could have killed me.”
“So why didn’t he?”
In answer to René’s question, advertising on all passing billboards was interrupted, an
d the radio flipped from music to an emergency news broadcast. While a frantic Japanese man spoke over the radio, a woman paled by urgency introduced on the billboards a clip Dominia struggled to ignore. Camera footage from the masks of the swordsman: her body, steered by the Lamb but herself all the same, slaughtering the unlucky men sent to kill her. Dead, all in a gambit by Cicero to leave her looking—well, like a terrorist, as she said before. One eye, two eyes. It didn’t matter, and she grimaced to see her old two-eyed POW mugshot shown as René, sighing, shielded his eyes with his hand to the sound of some woman’s scream. As though to add to the clamor, the footage switched to an aerial view of the T1-63 R thundering through hastily parting but still too-thick traffic. So it had been a news helicopter, then. That meant that it didn’t have guns like the encroaching sirens, whose noises were now naked amid the news anchor spitting out rapid warnings to the denizens of whatever shopping district through which they plowed. Dozens of people began speeding and worsening the traffic in effort to flee the area, and dozens more, seeing how close they were to the General, opted to abandon their vehicles in the street and run screaming.
“How would you feel about leaving the dog behind?” asked Dominia, looking at Basil in the rearview. While his ears pinned in displeasure at undisguised comprehension of these words, René shrugged. “It was inevitable, right? That, or we would have to portion him between us when we started starving in the desert.”