“I was crazy.” He pushed on, needing her to understand. “I was hallucinating! I saw angels everywhere, blue ones, and one of them put a razor in my hand, and told me a stranger was trying to kill Zia. They were so real—
“And then…and then I saw what I had done, and I knew I’d never do that. It was the first thought I had about myself in so long, and…”
Rachel slid over to him and began to rub his back, keeping well away from his bare skin.
“They can’t stay here,” he finished. “Unless something changes, they’ll stay like this. They need the chance to break through.”
“I’ll talk to Mulcahy,” she told him. It might be possible. Load Adrian and Sammy into a van, drive them out to their childhood homes in the dead of night…
“No,” Shawn insisted. She didn’t think she had been broadcasting, but he had still managed to pick the thought out of her head. “They need to be around their families. They need to remember where they come from, or they’ll never find their way back to themselves.”
Rachel’s hand slipped into the pocket of her jeans, where the 3D-printed replica of the fragment from the Antikythera Mechanism lay against the curve of her leg. She wasn’t quite sure why she kept transferring it from pocket to pocket when she changed pants, but it was starting to take on the familiarity of a talisman. I wasn’t lost but three seconds, she thought to herself, and I still needed help finding my way back.
“Exactly.” Shawn had heard her again. “Can you help them?”
“Shawn—”
“Please, Rachel.” Shawn was pleading, his colors a pleasing mix of teal, wine red, and her Southwestern turquoise, all of them reaching out to her in a slowly twisting liquid wave. It was beautiful, and she didn’t understand what it meant.
A knock at the door saved her from making a promise she couldn’t keep, as an Agent arrived to relieve Rachel’s shift. Rachel barely nodded to her replacement, focused instead on forcing Shawn to come with her, out of the panic room, to put some distance between himself and a near-infinite number of memories.
He didn’t resist, not until the hidden door had swung shut. Then he froze in place, and looked up at the plastic ossuary with wide eyes. “Rachel,” he said, “why are we fighting?”
“We’re not,” she said, finding her way down the narrow corridor the Agents had left as a walkway between the cardboard boxes. “This is a tricky issue, and we’re discussing it like rational adults. We’re fine, Shawn.”
Rachel felt his confusion, and she turned towards him to see him still staring up at the ceiling. She followed his attention, through the skulls and the walls… Oh!
Halfway across the mansion, someone was getting his nose broken.
Rachel grinned at Shawn. “C’mon,” she laughed, and pulled him into a run.
Their path included two flights of stairs, and five long stretches of rooms and hallways, all of it layered in furniture and boxes and the occasional speedboat. Shawn struggled to keep up with her as she climbed and jumped, laughing the entire way.
Their race took them into the main entrance hall, and the two of them stopped and stared.
Rachel had never seen so many people in the mansion before. Never. Not even during their biggest parties, and OACET was renowned for events that would have been better suited to abandoned warehouses. It was a milling mess of people from the front doors of the mansion all the way down to the lawns and gardens. There were caterers and food trucks galore, with tents set up in the courtyard. She saw Santino’s cobalt blue standing beside Zia’s sweet violet, and the entwined greens of Hill’s forests and Ami’s spring meadows. There were others she recognized—hundreds of them!—and Rachel began to pick out the colors of those whom she had met through work. A kaleidoscope of colors from the MPD. Others she recognized from working crime scenes with the FBI… Oh! There, across the main room, was Alimoren’s workaday denim blue.
Friends, maybe. Allies, definitely. OACET had surrounded themselves with a thousand witnesses.
She reached out to Mulcahy, and found him sitting on the landing of the great staircase in the entrance hall. “You’re a fucking genius,” she told him.
He tilted his beer bottle downwards, to where Josh Glassman stood on stage, working the crowd. “His idea,” Mulcahy said.
“You could have told me to expect a party.”
She felt him laugh. “Puppeteering is our responsibility. I keep telling you—focus on alliances within law enforcement, and we’ll handle the rest.”
“Are you expecting a raid?” Rachel asked, casting her scans towards the road that led to the mansion. She saw nothing but a steady stream of cars moving into whatever parking spaces they could find. She stretched her scans as far as they could reach without bringing on a headache, towards the woods and open fields around the mansion, searching for the professional blues of a SWAT team…
“No. We’re good. Thanks to you, someone in the MPD or the FBI would have tipped us off if they were coming. But better safe than sorry. Besides,” he said, nodding towards the crowd, “we needed this.”
“Next!” Josh Glassman’s voice thundered over the crowd.
Josh occupied the only clear space within the main hall, and stood four feet above the crowd as he strode across the portable boxing ring. The boxing ring was an old friend, one of the first items OACET had repurposed for their own use when they had moved into the mansion. Over the winter, it had been packed up and put away to make room for the holiday decorations. Rachel had missed it: the ring had been more sincere than a glittery tree. After the decorations had come down, the space had been left empty, yet another sign they were starting to venture out of the safety of their first home. Instead, the entrance hall had begun to fill up with clutter as it began its slow transformation into yet another storage area.
During those few hours she had spent in the panic room, the clutter had been cleared and the boxing ring had been returned to its old location. It was surrounded, ten deep, everybody shouting and cheering. The smell of fresh buttered popcorn was heavy in the air, and Rachel felt kernels crunch underfoot as she and Shawn pushed their way towards the ring.
“Next!” Josh was actually wearing a hat. An honest-to-God carnival barker’s hat. His core, the unsaturated blue of fresh tattoos, was almost completely obscured by reds—rich reds, those of friendship, belonging, and more than a little lust—and the yellow-white energy that defined Josh whenever he was performing. “Come one, come all! Others say they have the greatest show on earth, but that’s because they can’t afford our rates!
“You’ve seen the rest,” he said, and spun the hat from his head with a twirl of his wrist. “Now see the best!”
Rachel grabbed Shawn’s arm again, the two of them giddy, as Hope Blackwell climbed up through the ropes and joined Josh on stage.
Mulcahy’s wife was a hand shorter than Rachel, with dark, wild hair over her strange core of blue-black light. She was barefoot, and wearing an old blue Judo gi that looked as if it had been through the wash a couple thousand times. Hope danced around to limber up, shouting and waving as the crowd cheered her name.
Two Agents in martial arts whites, both of them men with eighty pounds on her, joined her in the ring. They bowed to her; she returned it.
Then, they rushed her.
Hope swept an arm low, and brought her fist up into the meat of the first man’s thigh. He gasped in pain, and began to shift his weight to his good leg. This mistake took a fraction of a second, but it was enough for Hope: her leg shot out, her heel slamming into the tender skin on the arch of his foot. Off-balance, he began to fall, and Hope grabbed his belt and tossed him over her hip.
The name of the technique came to Rachel—Obi-otoshi, a belt throw—as the collective chattered about the fight.
Hope followed the first Agent down to the ground in a sacrifice fall. Mistake, Rachel thought, but Hope had already rolled to the side. The first man, struggling to recover, went after her with a low kick, and caught his teammate in
the knee. Hope hit that same knee from the other side, and the second Agent crumpled into her range. Hope’s legs wrapped around his head and neck in a scissor hold, and he found himself locked down tight. Caught, his free hand began tapping on the mat, and the match was over.
“What?!” Josh Glassman crossed to the edge of the boxing ring, one hand trailing against the top of the ropes as he worked the crowd. “That wasn’t a fight! We’re not here to watch a demonstration! We’re not here to learn!”
The crowd responded with boos and catcalls, and the schoolyard chant of Fight! Fight! Fight! went up.
“Someone get up here and give this woman a fight!”
“Hey!” Hope Blackwell leaned over the ropes, Southwestern turquoise blazing in her conversational colors. “Peng! I heard you saw my ass last night!”
Rachel laughed, and shouted back: “Saw a lot more than that, Blackwell! Bring a bathrobe if you’re gonna let Mulcahy tag you in public!”
High above them on the landing, Mulcahy maintained his poker face, but his colors flushed red in embarrassment.
“Up for some fun?” It was Josh, his presence in her head alive with good humor.
“Always!” she replied, as the adrenaline surged.
“Peng!” Josh shouted! “Get up here!”
“If I do, we’re boxing!” Rachel shouted back. “None of that tricky Judo shit!”
“Deal!” Hope said, punching the air.
Rachel whooped, the sound lost within the uproar from the crowd.
She shed clothing as she ran towards the ring, until she was down to nothing but her tee-shirt and jeans. Phil took her gun before he taped up her hands, and patted her on her butt as she squirmed up and through the ropes. She bobbed and hopped in place to warm up, windmilling her arms until her heartrate found its fighting tempo.
“Rachel!” Santino’s voice drew her scans to where her partner was clapping and shouting her name. “Kick her ass!”
She yelled back at him, a nonsense phrase thick with excitement, and let Josh slip a mouth guard between her lips before she moved into the center of the ring.
Hope Blackwell grinned at Rachel, her own colors high, and the two of them began to circle.
Rachel knew she didn’t have a chance in hell of taking Hope in a fair fight. She had sparred with Hope in the past, and unless Hope held herself back, those bouts were always short and painful. The woman had been training in Judo since she was five years old, and once she had started traveling the world for competitions, she had picked up other martial arts along the way.
Boxing, however…
Martial arts was punches, kicks, and throws. Boxing was a straight-out slugfest. Rachel was counting on Hope’s lifetime of training to work against her, to mentally exhaust her as she forced herself to keep both feet on the ground and concentrate on using boxing-legal techniques.
Rachel threw the first three punches, quick jabs to see what Hope would do. She expected Hope to be a counter puncher, watching for Rachel to make a mistake, and then closing on her in a quick rumble. Wrong. Hope lunged, pairing hooks and jabs to drive Rachel to the ropes, and Rachel realized she was a swarmer.
Damn! Should have expected it. Weird woman’s all energy, Rachel thought, catching the punches on her shoulders before coming in with an uppercut. It landed square against Hope’s chest, and knocked her back. Rachel followed up on that first punch, bearing down hard to drive Hope backwards, until the ropes were all that kept Hope from falling four feet to the floor.
The first round was over faster than it should have been. Josh was there to pull her off of Hope, to send her to the corner where Phil was waiting with water and a dishtowel. “Good one,” Phil said. “You got her mad.”
“She should be mad. I wasn’t pulling those punches,” Rachel said. Her left hand was throbbing: she had injured it last October, and it was prone to acting up when she abused it.
“Keep her off of the ropes,” Phil said. “It’s a rope-a-dope. You keep her there, you’re gonna wear yourself out while she’s still fresh.”
“Right,” she said, nodding, and he stuck her mouth guard back in before he pushed her into the fight.
Hope came out low and hard, throwing jabs, looking for a way to drag Rachel into a legal clinch. Rachel kept some distance—if Hope managed to close, the round would be over—and landed two right hooks, split with a short left jab.
Hope saw her favoring her left hand, and her colors exploded in bright yellow-whites as she moved forward. Rachel tried to drive her back with another right hook, but Hope spotted this one before it could land. A fast parry, and she was in tight with Rachel.
Fuck! Rachel thought, as she felt Hope’s shoulder press against the side of her windpipe. It wasn’t illegal, but only because boxers didn’t know how to maintain this kind of chokehold. Worst place to be with a Judo master. Absolute worst.
She began to drive her right fist into Hope’s ribcage, hitting the same spot again and again. If she were fighting a big man, the move wouldn’t have worked; the distance between him and her fist would have been too close to build up any real momentum. Against a woman, there was plenty of room for Rachel to maneuver. Six hard strikes, and Hope was forced to drop the clinch before Rachel broke her ribs.
They circled, then closed again, Hope listing slightly to protect her injured left side. Rachel noticed, just in time, that the pain red coming from that area was shallow, more of a patina than what she’d expect from an actual wound…
She barely got her hands up in time to block Hope’s left haymaker. The crowd roared.
Hope recovered before Rachel could slide under her raised left arm, but it was an instinctive act. She dropped Rachel’s forearm almost as quickly as she had grabbed it, walking away and raising her taped hands to show she recognized the foul. Too late: Josh had already called a halt to the second round, breaking up the action before Hope could turn the illegal arm lock into a throw.
They limped towards their corners. Phil had a folding chair waiting for her, and Rachel collapsed into it. “Ow ow ow ow ow…”
“Where’d she get you?”
“Nowhere,” Rachel said, rubbing her right hand. “Woman’s all muscle. It’s like punching a brick wall.”
“Rachel!”
She tossed her scans down, and saw Becca on the other side of the ropes. Rachel felt her face split in a wide grin. “Aaa-dri-aaaan!”
Becca laughed. “Kick her ass, Rocky!”
“One more round!” Josh called out. “These lovely ladies have work in the morning!”
The crowd booed his decision.
“Like this is the last fight of the night? No! Let’s spread out the damage to our collective’s brain cells, friends,” he said, and gestured for Hope and Rachel to get on their feet. “Let’s go!”
Rachel knew she was starting to flag, but she forced herself to bounce around like a tennis player before the last match. Hope just grinned at her, and then dipped to the left. Rachel turned right to block—she’s going left, she’s building momentum for another haymaker—and couldn’t get her arms up in time to block Hope’s sudden shift in weight and a lightning-fast right cross.
Stunned, Rachel vaguely realized Hope had followed the first punch up with a second, both of them solid hits across her jaw. Hope backed off a few steps to see if Rachel was done. Rachel shook her head to break out of the daze, and then charged.
Now it was a fight, both of them going all out. Rachel knew Hope could take a punch, so she laid into the other woman’s head and torso with everything she had left. She went after Hope with power blows, trying to put her on the ground before the fight ended. No luck—there was no way to get through her defense. Hope blocked half of what Rachel threw, and turned the other half into openings for her own attacks.
Rachel stumbled. It was fast and next to nothing, and Hope still managed to follow it up with a powerhouse of a left hook.
“Time!” Josh shouted, and the crowd cheered.
Rachel fell against Hop
e in an exhausted embrace, both of them laughing. Josh stepped between them, and the crowd went silent as the scores came in. Then, Josh held up Hope’s hand. “Winner!”
“Boo!” Becca shouted from Rachel’s corner. “Recount! Recount!” Her colors were all high reds as she screamed for her girlfriend. The banker had caught a bad case of bloodlust, and Rachel realized she could probably spend the rest of her life with this woman.
She slumped against Josh, and he helped her towards her corner.
They were all waiting for her, Becca and Santino, Phil and Shawn and Jason and Hill and Bell and…Oh! When did Zockinski get here? She dropped into their arms, feeling strong. Feeling sane.
Feeling whole.
She reached out, across the room, to find Mulcahy within another cluster of Agents and their friends as they held his wife above their heads. “I want you to talk to Shawn about Adrian and Sammy,” she told him. “He’s got some good suggestions on how we can help them come back.”
She expected resistance. Stalling and delays, possibly some wordplay that would leave her reeling worse than Hope’s left hook. Anything but his quick, decisive: “Yes.”
TWENTY
The gentle knock on the door was hesitant, and mostly a politeness for Becca.
“One sec, Mare. She’s asleep.”
Rachel tossed blankets around until her legs were free. Every room in the mansion with a bed was currently occupied, so she and Becca had made do by piling spare comforters on a broken air hockey table in one of the basement storerooms. They hadn’t been there very long; Becca’s hair was longer than Rachel’s, and was still damp from their shower.
She shuffled towards the door. The soreness from the boxing match was just starting to settle into her muscles. Tomorrow was going to hurt.
Rachel cracked the door and slipped into the hall as quickly as she could, trying to keep the roar of the party from waking her girlfriend. “You could have just called me upstairs if the pizza is here,” she said. “I’m starving.”
Mare blinked at her. “You’re not running emotions?”
State Machine Page 30