The Robin Hood Thief

by H. C. H. Ritz

They were helpless.

  And she couldn’t remember Cobalt’s username so that she could buy their freedom.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.” Grief and guilt squeezed her chest painfully as she stared at her daughter’s placid, pale face. “I tried to keep you safe, and I failed.”

  Her face contorted as she gazed at this person she knew so very well and so little. This person she had carried in her own body, stayed up nights to feed, comforted when she cried. This person she had taught right and wrong. Taught to stay safe. Struggled with. Punished. Cried with. Praised and encouraged and yelled at and bullied. Tried to be both father and mother to. Failed. Failed and failed and failed.

  Something in Helen’s spirit broke.

  “I will help you,” she sobbed. “I promise.”

  It felt like a lie.

  Time passed as Helen wept at her daughter’s side. Eventually, the worst of the storm of emotion settled, and when it did, Helen’s mind latched onto what Tolbrook had said:

  You’ve failed. Just give up.

  The words flashed around inside her mind, taunting her. They’d made her so angry she couldn’t speak.

  Now, that anger bubbled back up. With it came that same steel core of determination that had come to her when she threw a chair through her living-room window because she’d learned she was going to die in forty-five days.

  She straightened up and wiped her eyes and face with trembling hands.

  Tolbrook said she’d failed. But she wasn’t here to succeed. There wasn’t time enough for that. She was here to take action as if she were going to live forever. To start things as if she’d live to see them finish.

  The ultimate sting of death wasn’t failure—it was futility. It was giving up without ever trying. And she had not given up.

  She had come alive as the Robin Hood Thief, and it was because she had dared to live boldly, to be a hero, to live with courage.

  Now was not the time to quit.

  Courage.

  Not success. Just courage.

  No one could take that away from her.

  Helen got slowly to her feet and wiped her face again. She took a deep breath and went to the door. She would not give up. She would summon Roman or Tolbrook, and she would do whatever it took to save her daughter.

  A faint voice came from the bed.

  “Mom…?”

  “Mandy!” Exhilaration ran through Helen. She hurried back to Mandy’s bedside and knelt. “Are you okay?”

  “My head hurts…” Mandy’s eyes opened and closed weakly. Tears smudged the smoky makeup around her eyes.

  “I know, baby. You got hurt. I’m sorry.” Tears came to Helen’s burning eyes again and she forced them back.

  “Where are we?” Mandy got her eyes fully open and looked around.

  “Some rich guy’s penthouse. Just stay put, okay? I’m going to rescue us.”

  “There was a guy with a gun… was that real?”

  “Yes, baby, it was real. I’m so sorry.” She reached for her daughter, but remembered in time not to touch her.

  Mandy struggled to sit up.

  “No… don’t move,” Helen said. “I’m so sorry… I never meant for any of this to happen… I never meant for you to get hurt.”

  “You’re sorry? What are you sorry for?”

  “This. All of this. Of course. Mandy, please just lay back down.”

  “Leave me alone, dammit,” Mandy protested as she got herself into a sitting position. “Now explain why the hell you’re apologizing!” Strength was returning to her voice.

  Helen let out a sigh and braced herself. It was time to confess, like it or not.

  “I’m the Robin Hood Thief. All of this is my fault. I’m so sorry.”

  Mandy’s jaw dropped and her eyes widened. “No freaking way, Mom!”

  “I never should have done it,” Helen said. “I knew they would come after you too. I tried to take precautions to protect you, but…”

  “Wow… Holy shit, Mom.” Mandy’s tone had shifted to something… admiring? “Do they know who I am?”

  That was an unexpected question. “Of course they know who you are. They wouldn’t have grabbed you if you weren’t my daughter.”

  Mandy shook her head, then grimaced in pain. She leaned in toward Helen’s ear and whispered so softly that Helen could barely hear her. “I’m Cobalt.”

  “What?” Helen gasped.

  She leaned back from her daughter, who suddenly felt like a perfect stranger. She stared in amazement as she tried to take it in. “You’re Cobalt?”

  Mandy nodded soberly.

  Helen wanted to laugh.

  She’d imagined some scrawny boy, a kid with no job probably still living in his mother’s house… the image shifted and morphed. No, a girl with no job still living in her mother’s house. With blue hair. “You?”

  “Yeah.” It was all Mandy could seem to muster.

  Helen thought back along the interactions she’d had with Cobalt. There had never been any particular reason to think Cobalt was male, she realized. They had all just assumed.

  Cobalt was her daughter? The chubby stoner, the college student who was making nothing of her life… this person was the amazing hacker who had been Helen’s partner in crime for weeks now?

  Helen began to laugh. “All that time, I kept going to the library or some Scenie store to send you messages…”

  “Shhhhhh…” Mandy whispered insistently, but she broke into quiet laughter herself.

  Helen leaned close to whisper the rest of the sentence. “I could have just knocked on the wall.”

  Their laughter approached hysteria. Hushed hysteria.

  “Oh my God,” Mandy gasped.

  A thought struck Helen and she sobered. “It’s really not possible? The thing with the stocks?”

  Mandy grimaced. “I don’t know, Mom. I really don’t. It’s super difficult. Maybe in, like, months. Maybe.”

  They stared at each other.

  Helen found herself toying with acceptance. It was alien and strange after all this struggle, to accept that she had already done all she could. But then, the point wasn’t success. It was courage.

  “What do we do now?” Mandy asked.

  Helen stood up.

  “You’re hurt,” she answered. “So it’s up to me. I’m going to go out there and try to fight them. I have to get you out of here.”

  “Mom, you can’t fight th—” Mandy finally noticed the bloodstains on Helen’s shirt and gasped. “Oh shit! Mom, you got shot!”

  “Yeah. It’s not the first time, remember?” Helen managed to say with some panache. She grinned wryly as her daughter’s mouth fell open for the second time. “But listen, Mandy, I have to try. It’s just you and me here. And I’m not going to let you get hurt again if I can help it.”

  Mandy stared at her mother with awe. “Since when did you turn into a badass?”

  Helen grinned. She thought again of her realization a few minutes ago.

  “I think I figured out that the only way to live is like you’re never going to die. To live with absolute courage.”

  Mandy stared at her, taking this in.

  Helen took a breath. “Mandy…”

  It was time to tell her about the diagnosis, and that Helen had three days left to live.

  But Mandy interrupted her.

  “Absolute courage, huh? Okay. If you’re going out there like a crazy person, so am I.”

  “No, Mandy… no, you’re my daughter.”

  “So?” Mandy fixed her with a steely-eyed look as she got to her feet. “Do you actually mean what you just said or not?”

  Helen grimaced. She’d painted herself into a corner. “But there’s something else I need to tell y—”

  The door opened and Roman took a step into the room. “Time’s up.” He swung Helen’s silver locket casually in his hand.

  Helen didn’t even see how it started. Something long and heavy swung at Roman from above. He threw up
an arm and the weapon drove his arm down and slammed into his shoulder and the side of his head. He half-crumpled, stunned. The silver locket hit the floor.

  A standing lamp. Mandy had swung it overhead and the weighted base had become a weapon.

  Mandy tried to raise it again for a second swing, but Roman grabbed onto it defensively.

  Helen’s impaired brain was frozen. She stared in confusion and shock.

  An explosion sounded from stories below. The floor vibrated beneath Helen’s feet.

  Mandy dropped the lamp and stepped forward. She kicked Roman in the head with her combat boot, and he grunted as his head snapped back. But as she tried to kick him again, he caught her leg and twisted it, forcing her to the ground. He began to crawl on top of her.

  The garrote wire. Helen had it wrapped around her ankle as her weapon of last resort. She bent and unwound it as quickly as she could.

  Mandy hit Roman in the face, drawing blood, and he knocked her arms aside.

  “What’re you going to do to get that around his neck? Ask him nicely?” That was what the man had said when she’d bought the garrote on a whim because she’d seen it in an action movie.

  But Roman was already on the ground, distracted, facing away.

  She got the wire over his head and crossed the handles and twisted to put her back against his and pulled the wire as taut as she could.

  He rolled onto his back, on top of her, crushing the breath out of her, and she went with his momentum until they were both on their sides on the floor. He flailed and caught her in the side of the head with the back of a fist, and her vision flickered, but she didn’t let go.

  He bucked and struck out with his arms and legs, and Helen absorbed the blows while she focused with wordless grim determination on keeping the wire taut. Mandy stayed at the periphery, crying out in fear.

  Helen’s muscles weakened, and she began to lose hope. But he weakened too, and at last his weight sagged limply to the floor.

  “Help me tie him up,” Helen gasped. He would only be unconscious for a few moments.

  They searched quickly and found curtain tiebacks they used to secure him.

  Then Mandy threw her arms around Helen, and they hugged for dear life. Hugged for the first time in three years.

  Helen could hardly bring herself to let go.

  “Absolute courage, right, Mom?” Mandy asked breathlessly. She looked like she wasn’t sure whether to celebrate or to cry.

  “Hell yes,” Helen answered fiercely.

  Her locket.

  She searched quickly on the floor, and when she found the locket, it was open and empty.

  She glanced around frantically until she saw the black powder smeared on the floor under Roman and the pill’s casing a crushed mess a few feet away.

  2 Days, 13 Hours, 36 Minutes

  “What is it?” Mandy asked, not understanding what Helen saw.

  “Nothing. It doesn’t matter,” Helen lied, even though it felt like the dismay cut her in half.

  She stood up, put the necklace in her pocket, and faced her daughter. “Now we take out the rest of them.”

  Hesitantly, she put out her hand. Her daughter took it and clasped it firmly.

  Together, they went out of the room.

  As they went down the hall, Helen realized that she had been hearing the unmistakable clatter of a helicopter. And now it was close… very close.

  Carefully, cautiously, Mandy and Helen opened the door leading into the living room.

  There, Tolbrook stood facing the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows, staring in bemusement at the helicopter as it swung alarmingly close. It was unmistakably interested in the penthouse.

  A second explosion shook the ground under them. What was going on?

  A guard came in from the other hallway. “Sir, things are escalating downst—”

  Tolbrook cut him off with a wave of his hand.

  Helen saw the insignia on the chopper. It was LSTV. Her heart skipped again. Was this a good thing? Or a bad thing? Either way, it was peering in the window from all of twenty feet away, just on the other side of the balcony railing, just past the Jacuzzi and the pool.

  Tolbrook shifted anxiously. He said to his guard, “Those windows are tinted, right? They can’t see in?”

  “Yeah,” the guard answered.

  The chopper rotated to the left, and a man inside adjusted controls to set the helicopter to hover—it was a recent model—then extended a handgun with one hand. He fired off a few shots high, toward the top two feet of the tall windows.

  The huge pane of glass came apart and dropped in shattered fragments, exposing the men to the chopper’s view.

  Tolbrook and the guard jerked back from the window and ran for cover behind the sofa as warm, humid air swept in.

  The man in the chopper looked in again, and this time Helen recognized him from his Whatsit photo. Christian Smith. He had gotten her message after all. And he’d come to save them. Admiration and gratitude swelled in her chest.

  Helen looked at Tolbrook and his guard, who were still cowering behind the sofa. Tolbrook screamed at the guard. The man’s reluctance was obvious on his face, but he ran toward the two women.

  “Run!” Helen shouted to Mandy, grabbing her hand again. “Get to the chopper!”

  As they ran past the dining table, the chopper came even closer, the wind from the rotor blade tearing at them and everything lightweight in the suite. The racket beat at their ears. The chopper struggled for a landing spot. It got one landing skid down on the balcony railing and teetered.

  The guard cut them off on their path toward the chopper. He tried to use his handgun to hit Mandy on the head, but she dodged and ducked behind Helen.

  Christian Smith raised his pistol again, sighted, and fired twice with careful precision. The guard dropped—and so did Tolbrook, who’d come too far out from behind the sofa.

  Relief swept over Helen. She knelt and picked up the guard’s gun, just in case.

  Another LSTV chopper appeared from around the same corner. But it kept its distance, behaving as Helen thought a news chopper would. A newsman operated his camera in the back.

  Helen hesitated. She felt compelled to find out whether Tolbrook was alive. “Get to the chopper!” she yelled to Mandy, and she hurried to Tolbrook’s side.

  Mandy disobeyed her and followed, though she stayed back a few feet.

  Tolbrook was conscious, but pale. Blood covered his hands where he was trying to apply pressure to his left side.

  He looked up at Helen, his chest heaving. “Help me,” he begged.

  She stared at him, remembering what he had said to her before, when their positions were reversed and she was the one on the floor hoping he wouldn’t kill her. “I would tell you to just give up, but I guess I’m not a jerk,” she said. “I guess you taught me that. So instead, I’ll tell you to have hope. I’m sure this place will be swarming with first responders in about half a minute.”

  “Please…” he moaned helplessly, and then he passed out.

  Just as she was about to turn away, she caught sight of his Earworm still clinging to his ear. She swept it off his head.

  She gave it to Mandy.

  “Can you please take this guy for all he’s worth?” she said. “Copy down all his passwords or something? He didn’t see me take it. He’ll think he just lost it in all the chaos.”

  Mandy took it and tucked it into her bra. “Hell yes. Now let’s go!” She gestured toward the helicopter.

  Both of them ran to the chopper. Christian Smith threw a rope down, and Helen boosted Mandy up toward the chopper as the younger woman scrambled for the rope. Helen hated having her daughter precariously balanced on the skid and the railing with fourteen floors of empty space below her. But she made it in.

  Then Helen’s gaze connected with the ground far below them, and she gasped.

  There were hundreds of people massing outside the building, forming a bottleneck at the doors of the lobby—screaming�
��attacking the police—and just as many SWAT team members. The cops wore riot gear. They threw smoke bombs and fired their guns into the crowd.

  “No…” she breathed. “Not for me, dammit!”

  People were dying for her, and she couldn’t allow that. Not when her life was forfeit already—had been forfeit from the start of all of this.

  Everyone knew who she was now. If she went down there and showed herself, gave herself up… told them to stop…

  It would be self-sacrifice and possibly suicide. There was no chance she could somehow stop what was happening downstairs and still evade the police and stay alive and free. But once she was captured or killed, the rest would disperse. Lives would be saved.

  She remembered, too, that the black pill was gone, crushed during the fight with Roman. There would be no easy way out of this.

  She stared at her daughter up there, safe in the chopper. Mandy held the rope out to Helen with one pale hand. Her daughter reached out to her.

  But Helen had no choice.

  The helicopter’s racket was too loud for Helen to explain, to make Mandy understand. But there was nothing Helen could do about that.

  Resolutely, Helen shook her head at her daughter and stepped back. She waved at Christian Smith—telling him to get clear, to get Mandy to safety.

  Mandy screamed at her. Helen couldn’t make out the words, but she could guess them. No! Mom, come on! Grab the rope!

  Christian’s gaze met hers for a long moment. Surely he couldn’t understand.

  The sound of more helicopters met her ears. She looked up to see black SWAT choppers descending on the building. They were out of time.

  Mandy screamed again.

  Helen gestured emphatically at Christian, who nodded, then pulled the chopper away from the building.

  She had chosen it, but it still hurt. It hurt to watch her only chance of escape leaving her behind, and it hurt even more to watch her daughter being taken away from her, with so much that now might never be said.

  She turned back toward the penthouse. She had no choice but to face whatever waited for her down there.

  Courage. Not success.

  She went to the stairwell and through the door.