“Very villainous. I approve in principle, but in practice it’s kind of annoying.” He moved his gaze back to the screen. “I think I’ve got most of them.”
“Probably best to have Alpha double check that.”
“Sure, sure. You’re the host and I’m the guest. Take any precaution you want.”
Alpha returned, and got to treating the wound. I hissed as he sprayed it with something, and leaned against the wall, clenching my teeth, while he got busy with a needle and thread.
“Head wounds are the worst,” Vector said. “They bleed like a son-of-a-bitch.” He fiddled with the controller one last time, and sat it down. “Done. Ready for your review, Doctor.”
“Alpha?” My minion nodded and went to go check it over.”
“You don’t want to look at it personally?” Vector took off his broken spectacles, and regarded me with surprise.
“It’s a long story.” I didn’t want to tell him of my weakness with biology. The guy had some trust to earn before I’d admit that sort of problem. “Can we come to a truce, until the business with Maestro M and the Sins is done?”
He sighed. “Yes. If nothing else I owe you, and I’m not confident of my ability to escape his reach without your help. Pretty much every asset I have or had, he knows about. In a lot of cases they’re managed through his people. He’s got a lot of people.”
I pulled a chair over. “The more you can tell her, the easier it’ll be to get our vengeance.”
“Okay, that verbal tic of yours is really distracting in person. Chaingang told me it was involuntary, but I didn’t believe him at the time.”
“Dire hasn’t thought about that guy in a while.” I blinked, as I remembered his disturbing power. Conjoined clones was the best way to describe it. “What was his story, anyway? Whatever happened to him? Is he around? We could use him.” I could put up with grotesque if it got us an edge.
“Not much of one. He wanted superpowers, I needed a henchman I could trust. I augmented him with a series of symbionts, that got close enough to what he wanted.”
“So you actually gave him superpowers?”
“No! Gods, no. Basically it’s like his body is an organic suit of power armor, and I’m really drawing an analogy here. Naturally-gained powers don’t usually have limits, you know this, right?”
“Of course. So he needed an energy source to get his trick to work?”
“Solar, and stored reserves of highly refined proteins and starches. He ate like you wouldn’t believe. Towards the end of it I had to tweak his digestion so he could graze like a cow. God, the bitching over that. But I just couldn’t afford to spend so much on takeout every day.” He rubbed his head. “Anyway the Metahumn Resource Bureau scooped him up after our last encounter. They put him wherever the hell they put villains.”
“So no help from that angle. Alright, it was a long shot anyway.” My eyes fell on the Janissary. “This might be a better shot, though. Alpha, get him hooked up to the machine. Vector, can you do a brainscan, look for triggers?”
The scrawny scientist nodded. “Sure. Who is this, anyway?”
“This is the Last Janissary.”
“Who?”
“He’s a supernatural troubleshooter. An immortal alchemist who wanders around, hunting monsters and saving people in his off time.”
“A hero?” Vector’s face was almost comical in its alarm. “Hang on a minute, here. No good usually comes of this sort of association.”
“Not a hero. More of a gray area, and smart enough to stay under the radar. He was doing his thing long before the current costumed paradigm, and he’ll probably be doing it for many years to come. He’s more good than hero.”
“Well. I can’t promise much, but I can try to get him free. If Maestro’s got him, should be doable. Just a quick run-through, like mine, and some synapse realignment. If Lust had him bound by something more than a simple charm, I can’t make any promises.”
“Not asking for them. Just try your best.” I rubbed my face. “Fucking magic. Janissary has more expertise there; we’ll need him on board.”
“An immortal alchemist.” Vector licked his lips. “I don’t mind the chance to study an honest-to-god immortal, I tell you that much.” He looked at me sideways again. “Something’s not adding up, though. You’re in this for revenge? Is this really all about vengeance? That’s usually not one of my main priorities, honestly. Survival’s more my thing.”
“Not just about vengeance.” I took a deep breath, and let it out. There were puzzles here that I wouldn’t crack without help. And loathe as I was to admit it, this was a biological problem at the core. “Maestro’s cracked the metahuman creation code.”
“What do you... oh. Oh.” Vector’s eyes went wide. He swallowed hard, and looked away. “You know, I’ve been looking into some deep space transhuman mods. For colonization.”
“No, Dire’s not running. Not turning the world over to Maestro M, either.”
“If he’s cracked the code we wouldn’t get far, anyway. So tell me about it.”
I told Vector about Maestro’s metahuman farm, and the rare radiation exposure and sophisticated tortures he used to induce superpowers. As I spoke Vector’s face grew more and more somber, and toward the end he bolted to the nearest wastebasket and emptied his stomach.
Alpha walked over, patted him on the back. “Easy. You didn’t know any of this.”
“I should have. Should have known it was too good to be true.” Vector spat, and I went and got him some juice. After he rinsed his mouth, he shook his head. “God damn it. The black market mods and custom pets are bad enough, at least there people knew what they were getting into. What you’re talking about here, that’s war crimes. That’s dead villain, grim heroes, and nobody asking questions business.”
I smiled. “And given the Maestro’s usual methods of putting his mind-twisted puppets out to do his dirty work, who do you figure is going to take the fall if this comes to light?”
“Me, naturally. It even fits with my usual method of operations... well, it would if I was entirely devoid of conscience and a thoroughly horrible person. I like to think I’m not. Just mostly horrible.”
I had to give him that. Granted, he’d caused more than his share of deaths, but from what I could see they’d all been accidental. Didn’t excuse any of them, but it didn’t make him deserve to be the fall guy for a far worse villain.
“So those heroes you were treating for radiation problems...”
Vector sighed. “Villains, too. And a few civilians, here and there. All clandestine, yes.”
“What you said back in the lab, was that true? You really didn’t keep any files or records, or examine them closely?”
Vector smiled, a small grimace that would have been at home on a weasel. “I may have been stretching the truth a bit there, just in case anyone else was listening.”
I answered with my own carnivorous grin. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Maybe, maybe not. The heroes were genuine heroes. A few of the villains checked out too, though most of them were from elsewhere, and you know how it is.”
I did know. Villains who stayed under the radar weren’t as well known as the heroes they fought. The media had also realized the dangers of promoting villains, back in the eighties, and now worked to minimize coverage unless necessary. Usually they’d only be mentioned in generalities as “so-and-so hero group’s enemies this week...”
“What about the civilians you treated?” I mused.
Vector shrugged. “I would have had to go through Maestro’s people to check that sort of thing. Since he was the one setting it up, it would have been kind of silly. Besides, at that point I trusted him implicitly.” He scowled. “Insidious little bastard. Really, I only looked into the heroes and villains because I was curious, and because I don’t get enough chances to study metahumans.” He worked as he spoke, hooking up the electronics around the Janissary’s form, and poking at the interface. Alpha helped hi
m calibrate the mind control device, now turned into an anti-malware application for brains.
So possibly only a few of the blanks had gone through Vector’s treatments. Still, I couldn’t see Maestro M offering any form of altruism to heroes or rivals, not even if money was involved.
I rubbed my forehead, grimaced as my wound flared up with pain. Now that the adrenaline was leaking out of me, I was feeling the rigors of the day. I directed my armor into the repair cylinder, and leaned against the wall for a moment.
“Boss?” Alpha asked. “You want to get some rest?”
“Too much to do.”
“Yeah, and if you let us work for a while, you’ll be on a better footing when we do move. I can get started integrating the circuitry into new boxes and creating my kids.”
“What is this now?” Vector perked up.
Alpha took his shoulders and gently pointed him back towards the Janissary. “Focus. You debug him; I’ll do my thing, and we’ll give the boss some space. Boss?”
In my earlier days I would have ignored him and gone back to work twice as hard, pushing myself to the physical limit and ignoring all else but the task at hand. But taking a second to reflect, I realized that I wasn’t in great shape. The wound was nothing, I’d had far worse in my time. Inside, though, I was a mess. Emotions swirled as I thought of Manuel who wasn’t Manuel, and of my defeat at Lust’s hands.
“Yes. You’re right. Let her know when you’re done,” I said, and made my way to the elevator before I could crumble.
I didn’t crumble, though. And that was maybe worse.
Instead, I found myself wandering from bedroom to kitchen to living room, looking at the things we’d left lying around. Last night’s dishes in the sink, still there, where I’d planned to rinse them eventually. A discarded political magazine over there, where Manuel-who-wasn’t-Manuel had a good long read about the Prime Minister’s latest tiff with Parliament. A few strides took me to the window and the London skyline, with the sun high in the sky, and the busy, full streets below. People scampering like mice, scrambling from minute to minute, heads full of their own lives, barely noticing the city around them. Then back to the bedroom to look at the neatly-made bed, sheets cleaned religiously every week whether they needed it or not, a book by the bedside where I’d left it, taken my time reading page by page at a slow rate for once, savoring the story.
Our things.
Our lives.
False, true, but real as any I’d known.
We’d built this together, he and I over the last few months. Sailed to distant shores together on a too-small boat, used my technological expertise and hacking skills to ease our path in on arrival. False lives built bit by bit, infiltration and acquisition of resources, and nights spent sleeping together. Strangers in a strange land, both of us, and I begged a silent pardon from Heinlein for thinking it. London, this old city, this stern-but-lively city, had been ours to discover and fit into.
Before this, I’d only known Icon City as a proper metropolis. London put Icon City to shame. So many people, so much history, ancient monuments standing rough-hewn cradled by buildings that had survived war after war, survived terrorism and supervillains and economic woes and discontent. A city that had room for everyone, somewhere, so long as they could find the rhythm and ease themselves into it. Yet always with its own customs, its own little quirks that never let you forget you were not in familiar territory.
It hadn’t all been smooth. But we’d met it together.
I put my hand against the bedroom window, leaned on it, and pressed my forehead against the cool glass. Clouds moved over the sun. Rain coming in, I thought. It rained a lot here, and we were well past winter, into the moist part of spring.
We’d spent months here and Manuel lied to me about his name.
And that bothered me, most of all because I didn’t know why.
What I thought we had, even if we both knew love was out of the equation, was a relationship based on mutual respect and truthfulness. And he’d broken that, by lying about his name, yes, but it wasn’t the lie that bothered me. I figured he’d lie at some point, and I forgave him that.
Was it that he felt he had to lie at all?
That was closer to it. Yes, that felt right. He’d spent months with me, I’d openly and happily told him all about myself and my plans, and let him in on my secrets and tricks of the trade. He hadn’t done the same, not as much, but enough that we laughed together at the funny stories, and I lent him a shoulder to hug when he brought up the bad times. Why would he lie to me? He had to know I wouldn’t use it against him.
The glass warmed under my brow, and I puffed air, filling it with obscuring white. He had to know, but he didn’t. He didn’t have faith in me. He didn’t accept that I was a good person, at the end of it. That was it, wasn’t it? At the end of the day I was still a villain by society’s reckoning, and he’d bought into the lie. Bought into the notion that I couldn’t do anything that wasn’t bad.
Shit.
Maybe he was right.
I heard motion behind me, pulled away from the glass. Alpha stood in the doorway, silent.
“How long were you there?”
“Twenty-two seconds.”
“Mm.” I sat on the bed. “This has turned into a fairly horrible day.”
“We’ll get him back.”
“That’s not what she was angsting about.”
“No?”
I took a breath. “Maestro won’t kill him. Worst case he’ll be a hostage for a while.” I hoped that was the case. Still, it fit with what I knew of Maestro M.
“It is a worst-case scenario. I’ve been keeping an ear on the news. They’re calling it a villainous attack on Queensguard, up in Manchester. The team got out of there, Leo and Thrush too. No word on Acertijo.”
“As usual, he is a riddle.”
Alpha snorted. It sounded weird, coming from him. “So if that’s not your worry, then what is?”
“Pretty sure it’s done. Any relationship we might have had. Not that it would have lasted long past Maestro’s end, but still—” I swallowed. “It still hurts.”
He sat next to me, put a skeletal robotic arm around my shoulders. I leaned into him, and shut my eyes. No tears. Just a dull ache, and the throbbing of my wounded temple.
I enjoyed it, but my mood turned black again for a very stupid reason. “This isn’t like the bodice rippers. All those romance stories lied.”
“People like the pretty lies, I’ve found.” He squeezed my shoulder. “You’re the harsh truth.”
“Acertijo just couldn’t see Dire as she needed him to see her. Yes, that sounds like the truth of it.” I sighed, and tapped his hand. He released me and I stood, stretching my arms and hearing joints crack as the tension drained. “Alright. We’ll regroup, rescue his ass, then Dire will break up with him. Gonna get a power nap. Wake her when Janissary’s deprogrammed.”
“Sure thing, Boss.” He left, I flopped on the bed and closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew, he was shaking me awake. Rain spattered down against the window. London had gone gray again, as she so often did, sky and wet concrete and a sea of umbrellas below.
I missed Acertijo and I hated that.
Speaking of... “Any change with the transponder?”
“No.”
For them to be able to neutralize it so quickly... that was troublesome. It implied that they had more insight into my technology and operations than I had planned for at this stage. “Vector and Janissary?”
“Talking shop. Arguing about phlogiston.”
“Joy.” I changed into casual clothes, and found my way downstairs.
They were having tea. That made me smile. Both men looked up and put cups down as I arrived. Khalid stood, but his face turned from a weary smile to a mask of confusion. “Your face is not the one I remember.”
Vector froze, reaching toward his pocket. “Uh-uh,” Alpha said, sliding up to him with a whisper of metal. “It’s cool, be cool.”
>
I ignored them, catching the Last Janissary’s eyes and holding them. “It’s a long and sad story. Dire stands before you, do not doubt that.”
“It would be folly and unseemly for a guest to doubt a host so, particularly when she comes as if sent by the heavens.” The confusion faded, and Khalid offered a smile. “I am glad I used my real name for a change, those years when I first met you.”
“Isn’t that dangerous in magical circles?” Vector squinted. “I’m no expert, but most of the research I’ve done seems to indicate that.”
“It can be if one has no other precautions.” Khalid ran a brown hand through his short, black hair. “But only against certain creatures or spells. Alas, while I had prepared against that, my preparation in other areas was lacking.”
“What happened?” I asked, moving to the teapot they’d stolen from my workbench, and taking a cup for myself.
“That is also a long and sad story. But I can perhaps encapsulate it in a single phrase: I came prepared to hunt for demons, and ran into fae.”
“You mentioned she was half-fae,” I looked to Vector.
“Oh yeah. That’s part of her method. She plays up the infernal angle, but every magical thing she’s got is faerie or part faerie, or related to faerie. Including her. I’ve lost track of the demon hunters she’s managed to snag with that angle.” He rolled his eyes.
“I, alas, was one of them for a time.” Janissary shook his head. “Foolish. But unlike the others, I had resilience and knowledge she desired. So she kept me, bound me with strong enchantments and primal magic. I have been fighting her a very long time, weakening her hold with every action. Your naming was the last rung of the ladder I required to pull myself free.” He offered me a bow that wouldn’t be out of place in an ancient court. “I am forever at your service.”
“Let’s not be too hasty,” I waved at him to straighten up. “Friends don’t need to trade favors. Although Dire could certainly use your help in rescuing Señor Acertijo.”
“The swordsman who opposed you? Your ally, going by the phrasing. Yes, of course. Best done quickly, he’s just the sort to catch her eye.” Khalid started to speak, frowned. “And fill her bed, at least for a time.”
DIRE:SINS (The Dire Saga Book 5) Page 12