“You can’t make it in.”
She jerked slightly at the sound of Six’s weak voice, barely audible above the hungry growl of the engine. When she looked over at him, it seemed like his eyes were the only thing left alive in his small body; they glittered hot and cold as the lights from the passing streetlamps and never-ending neon signs flashed through the window, glittering even in the last gray shades of daylight. Nothing else on his body moved—just those eyes. Watching and judging. Knowing.
She scowled. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” She didn’t say anything else for a long moment, then she added, “Haven’t you been paying attention? Killing is what I do. It’s what I’m good at. I’m a titan—a monolith. Nothing can stop me.” Violet wanted to soften her expression when she looked over at him, but she didn’t know how.
The boy only stared at her. Finally, he said, “I know. I can see it in your eyes.”
She swallowed, hating herself. Hating the world. “Well . . . what fucking choice do I have?”
Six’s eyes widened, as if he couldn’t believe she didn’t already know. “A very clear one,” he said with a tiny nod. “To watch me die, or . . .” He nodded again. “Make me watch you do the same.”
The main entry gate to the ArchMinistry was open, a circumstance that was nearly unheard of. Violet could see why—on the other side of the square, Daxus was standing at the top of the stairs and waiting for her, heading a ridiculous mini-army of what had to be nearly a thousand soldiers. If it hadn’t been for the smell of gun oil in the air and the dull gray of the countless weapons held at the ready, it might have been a beautiful sight, like something out of the history archives she had studied in school as a teenager. The ArchMinistry of Medical Policy itself was like a palace of lights and metal, seated dead center in a square that very much resembled the ancient palaces in the now disintegrated Soviet Union—Leningrad, perhaps. Like the dead royalty who had occupied such long-gone places, the people in power at the ArchMinistry had turned the buildings and grounds into something like a country unto itself, lording it over all who came within its purview.
But all that was about to end.
Violet would see to that.
The Viper hurtled through the front gate without incident, then went into a controlled power slide that stopped it some twenty yards in front of the waiting front lines. From her position, Violet could see that Daxus had placed himself where he would look like he was the head of everything, but he could still escape without incident should the battle go badly. Again, it was just like the battles of the ancients, where the king sits above everything and watches his men die before him, royal sword at the ready should he need to go in and personally save the day. In Daxus’s case, his “sword” was cradled comfortably in the crook of his left arm in the form of a machine pistol, while his right hand curled around the grip of a smaller pistol. He might see it as ancient tactics—if the long-ago veterinarian was actually that well read—but Violet found it rather amusing that he had so little faith in his small army that he felt he couldn’t just go on about his business and leave them to deal with a single female vampire—a sick one, at that.
She yanked up her phone and dialed him, and when the Viper had barely stopped its movement, the driver’s door slid open and Violet catapulted out of her seat and faced the men a mere sixty feet away. On the surface they saw her armed with only a standard-grade machine pistol and a sword, but each and every soldier in front of her knew she was capable of much, much more. Daxus might not see it from his oh-so-lofty position, but from here . . .
Violet grinned as they stepped back, just a bit.
Despite the reassuring presence of his troops, Daxus sent her a look that made it clear he thought she was insane, then pulled a mouth-mic from his collar and snapped it into place. “Are you mental?” His voice rang clearly into her ear from the headset. “I—”
“The antidote,” she interrupted rigidly. Her face was expressionless.
“I told you,” he insisted and jerked one hand impatiently. “There is no cure!”
“Bullshit,” Violet said crudely. “You wouldn’t create a human-lethal antigen that didn’t have an antidote you could administer to yourself and your people.”
Daxus stared at Violet for a long moment, then a smile reluctantly played across his mouth. “Very nice, Violet. Well . . . yes. There is an antidote.” He lifted his chin and looked at her disdainfully. “And yes, when I get the boy, isolate the antigen, and release it into the atmosphere, yes—anyone who wants to live will queue up daily at this door to get it.”
Violet’s mouth dropped open in amazement, but at least she finally understood why the man had taken her call rather than shouted his words over the heads of his soldiers. It’d be pretty poor policy to announce to your people you were about to dose them with something that was guaranteed to kill them, and then make them pay for the privilege of staying alive. But . . . his own race? “I thought we were the ones you hated,” she finally marveled. “I thought we were the ones you wanted to wipe out.”
From where she stood, she could still clearly see the hunger in his eyes, the greed. “What’s the problem, Violet? You were . . . past tense. But now you and those like you are all but extinct.” He lifted his shoulders and tried unsuccessfully to seem sad. “What’s someone like me—a man with a job to do—going to use to keep order? This is a society that left to itself would sprint toward chaos like an Olympic event.” He shook his head. “Oh, we did our job too well. Now we must make amends.”
The muscles in Violet’s jaw ticked with the effort it took for her to speak, but she was still able to get the words out. They sounded more like a hiss than actually talking. “You disgust me.”
He shrugged. “It’s a relative term. Just give me what I want.”
Her mouth twisted into a sneer of anticipation. “Come and get it.”
He glared at her for a moment, then suddenly jerked his arm above his head. The troops staggered in upward rows on the steps below him homed in on her position and fired as one, sending tens of thousands of rounds into her and the Viper parked behind her. Without a word, Violet dropped to one knee and used her sword to brace herself, leaning forward as though she were facing the vicious winds of an onrushing hurricane. The barrage of bullets seemed to last forever, thundering through the air with a roar loud enough to shatter unaccustomed eardrums and make the ground tremble. When it finally ended, when the last shell casing had fallen to the ground and the atmosphere was filled with smoke and the smell of gunpowder, the soldiers lowered their weapons and stared at Violet in amazement.
A few feet behind Violet there was almost nothing left of the Viper but shredded, smoking metal and shattered glass. Long ribbons of fiberglass, twisted beyond recognition by the firepower, swayed in the artificially hot breeze, while the countless bullet holes in the iron and aluminum parts of the engine ticked as the metal cooled and expanded.
Even so, Violet still knelt there, head down and unmoving.
Untouched.
Uninjured.
And smiling sadly.
Daxus stared at her, disbelieving, then his features twisted into a mask of hatred. Up to this point, he had simply stood back and watched the assault, trusting in the art of ammunition and the training of his soldiers, not to mention the completely mismatched proportion—one to a thousand—to eliminate the annoying little problem of Violet. Now that his plan had been foiled, he realized he would have to take care of it himself.
The lines of his soldiers parted instinctively as Daxus raised his own machine pistol and lunged forward, sprinting down the steps and holding his finger on the full auto-trigger. His bullets razored through Violet’s form and sent a thousand shining blots of firework sparks into the air as they pinged into what little was left of the car to her rear; with its tires long reduced to shreds of hot rubber, it rocked on its rims, bouncing back and forth with each burst of machine pistol fire.
At ten feet Daxus was convinced he had her. Fla
t-space technology was one thing, but force fields were still nothing but movie-based wishful thinking—it would take several more decades to get that engineering to work. Then he was five feet away, then three, and finally he was right on top of her and glaring at her as he made his machine pistol hammer another few dozen rounds into her head.
But Violet only looked up at him. “You won’t have him, Daxus,” she said softly. He had to lean down to hear Violet’s words, and this close to her, Daxus finally realized he could see the faintest of shimmies in Violet’s image.
His mouth worked, then his gaze cut to the car. The driver’s window had been obliterated, of course, but when he sprinted over to it and waved away the gun smoke, he saw it.
Violet’s phone, lying undamaged on the front seat. It was quite literally a miracle that it hadn’t been blown into little more than plastic vapor and bits of wire.
Damn her. She had made him into the supreme fool in front of practically his entire regime.
“You bitch!” Daxus howled, then for no good reason he pointed the pistol at the device and fired. It blew into a thousand pieces and the image of Violet a few feet away winked out. All Daxus could do was spin helplessly in front of the car’s pathetic remains—
And wonder where the hell Violet had gone.
TWENTY
Violet watched Daxus from her carefully concealed position in the lush, wet bushes just outside the front entrance, then pulled off her mouth-mic and disabled it. Nothing more than habit, actually—with the phone now obliterated, it wasn’t likely he or his security forces could track her anymore. And really, had she expected anything other than attempted death from Daxus anyway? Anything better? No, of course not. Well . . . maybe. Hope was such a tricky thing—it could spring up unbidden in even the most cynical of people. Like her, for instance, a woman who had once had everything she’d ever dreamed of, past, present, and future, and then had it yanked away forever by a sick, panicked man wielding an organism so tiny she couldn’t even see it. Funny how that organism—the Hemophage virus—killed not just people, but hope itself. Or maybe, like the vampires in the ridiculous old legends, hope wasn’t dead, just undead, springing back to life at the most unexpected of moments.
After a few more seconds, Violet finally found the courage to meet Six’s eyes. She immediately wished she hadn’t. In those clear blue irises, she saw everything she didn’t want to admit—fear, defeat, helplessness. Hopelessness.
“There’s just too many of them, V.” The boy said the words gently, as though he were bringing the worst of news to someone who might break under its weight. “Just too many.”
It was a crushing thing to give in to, but all Violet could do was nod.
Finally, the dismal sky had cleared up. Most of the clouds from earlier had been blown away by a brisk, chilly wind, but that, too, had faded; what was left in the sky looked like layers of thin cotton, cheesecloth worked apart by a baker’s fingers. To the west, the rays of the setting sun peeked through the tall buildings and washed the sky in rare shades of pink and purple, making the clouds look like pastel-colored strips of fabric. Violet had never seen such a sunset except in coffee-table books, those oversized, expensive tomes full of magnificent photographs of a part of the western United States that she had never visited. Did places like that even exist anymore? Or had they been overrun by people and compounds headed by madmen like Daxus? She would never know. Even where Violet and Six were, in one of the concrete and metal playgrounds at Grant Park and the lakefront—about as far away from the western sun a person could get in Chicago without actually getting doused with Lake Michigan water—the ground and grass were tinged with pale color; Violet wished she could see the water of Lake Michigan on the other side of the Outer Drive, wished she could take Six to watch how the sunlight sparkled on the ceaselessly moving waves. But no—he was too fragile, too tired. Even if she could carry him without being obvious, the sun would disappear for the day before she could get him over there. At least she’d gotten him this far, to the real-life equivalent of the picture he’d once handed her beneath the dazzle of a late-night fireworks display.
Balancing herself, Violet gave the merry-go-round another spin, making Six scream with breathless laughter as he whirled around. At first she’d been afraid to put him on it, terrified that he couldn’t hold on. Rather than see him tumble, a little improvising with her jacket and a couple of knots had saved the day. Now the boy was enjoying himself, and she was enjoying watching him . . . as much as she could, anyway, knowing that she had failed him in that most important part. He was going to die—there was nothing she could do to prevent it. But, damn it, at least he would have had a little bit of the boyhood that Daxus and the circumstances of his own existence had denied him.
She let the merry-go-round slow enough so that Six could catch his breath—the boy was laughing so much that he was nearly delirious. When it came almost to a stop, she saw Six pull on the knot she’d tied around his chest so he could slip off and lie on the grass. She went over to be with him, and for a couple of minutes, the child just sprawled there with Violet right next to him. His chest still hitched with giggles as he looked up at the color-splashed sky, the patches of pink and purple interspersed with that special, brilliant shade of blue that precedes sunset only on the rarest of days when the air is heavy with the perfect amount of moisture from an earlier drizzle. Eventually, Six’s laughter faded and he made no sound, just stared into the blue nothingness as if he could see something she couldn’t.
The silence made Violet look over nervously. “Are you okay?”
He blinked. “No,” he said quietly.
Violet jerked and sat up. His honesty was startling and carried a reminder she hadn’t really wanted. She had monitored it now and then, of course, but sometime during the last hour or so the meta-crystal on Six’s chest had slid away from the ominous dark gray that the stone had been holding all day and gone fully into undeniable, irreversible black.
But Six only turned his head to look at her and smiled faintly. “No—it’s all that spinning. I think it made me sick.”
Violet relaxed again, returning his smile as she let herself lean sideways onto the cool, soft grass. Her stance was a lie, of course—she knew full well that Six’s time was heartbreakingly short. But she wouldn’t show it, wouldn’t ruin the last bit of time he had, especially when he was so obviously enjoying himself. She propped herself on one elbow and locked away her emotions as she watched Six fold his hands behind his head, savoring the way he was immersing himself in this mini-slice of the world. She could see the deepening blue of the dusk sky reflected in his eyes as he watched the sun go down.
“Sunset,” he said suddenly, as though he could read her thoughts. “My first.” She started to agree with him, then realized that for all her efforts, she couldn’t speak around the lump that had blossomed in her throat. His first, yes . . . also his last. Even though she’d known all along that it was coming, the realization was a brutal one, crushing in its implications, in the way it highlighted her failure to help him. His next whispered words chased away the thoughts of self-recrimination and brought her mind back to completely focus on him. “But it’s so . . . dark.”
Violet pressed her lips together, fighting for enough control to speak without having her voice shake. “Six—”
“So dark,” the boy repeated, and this time she could barely hear his voice. He sighed.
“Six?” She yanked herself upright, then pulled the child into her arms. His body came up and onto her lap without resistence. Still warm, but little more than a rag doll covered in human skin. “Six?”
His eyes were looking right at her, but there was no . . . focus in them. No seeing. “Smaller,” he breathed.
“Six!” she cried.
“Violet?” His blinded eyes fluttered. “Are you there, Violet?”
Abruptly the breeze picked up again, chilling the tears that were suddenly sliding down her cheeks. “Yes, Six.” She brushed a tiny, wayw
ard lock of his hair off his forehead, a small clump of hairs that had somehow escaped the barber’s scissors. “Yes, Six, I’m here. I won’t leave. I’ll never leave.”
The breeze churned up another notch, turning into a surprising, sudden wind. The quickest of glances gave Violet the reason—human Security Enforcers, dropping from half a dozen sleek, black Whisperjet helicopters that had lowered to a hover position over their small spot in the park. She wasn’t surprised and she hadn’t forgotten; so much had happened since Six had come into her life, and she’d had so many plans, but she’d never found a way to get that damnable tracking device out of his body. She turned her gaze back to Six’s face and saw his brow furrow at the noise of the copters. She stroked his cheek, wishing she could do something, anything, to bring him more comfort than her sad and helpless presence. “Violet? What’s that sound?”
“Nothing,” she said as reassuringly as she could. The skin of his face was cold and clammy, chilled almost blue by his dropping body temperature and the roar of the helicopters around them. It was obvious that he didn’t feel it, and that made her heart crack a little more. She was forcing herself to stay outwardly calm, to keep anything but serenity from coming through in her voice. It was all so much—the boy dying in her arms, Daxus, her own impending death, the soldiers about to descend on her. She could no longer tell if the high-pitched whine in her ears was her own nerves or the scream of the helicopters’ engines. “It’s nothing—just the wind.”
One by one, the shadows of the Security Enforcers fell over her and the boy, like overlapping waves of impending doom edging closer and closer. Violet was glad Six couldn’t see them, that even though his eyes were open, his vision of anything in this world had already been obliterated. He was so innocent. He shouldn’t have to spend his last coherent moments in this world full of terror.
Six’s small hand moved up and waved in the air for a moment, the fingers fumbling until he found the top of Violet’s hand and covered it. “It’s okay, Violet.” She felt a sob rise in her chest and barely ground it away as Six’s eyes fluttered and closed. Now she could barely hear him. “It’s okay,” he repeated.
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