by Camilla Monk
A minute passed, which is in fact a very long time when your heart is beating so fast it hurts. At last, footsteps slammed onto the steps of the staircase. My initial reaction was one of relief, and I slumped against the cool brushed steel of Pio Maraì’s dishwasher . . . Except there had to be more than two pairs of feet, some sounding particularly heavy, and that no one was calling me “biscuit” or telling me that it was all right, and I could come out now.
What I heard was a deep voice muttering orders in a thick Eastern European accent. Boots clattered on the parqueted floor. It was as if my windpipe and lungs were being crushed, and I couldn’t breathe, suffocated by a paralyzing fear. On my left, the bay window reflected a dark shape creeping toward the kitchen counter, half crouched, holding a gun.
He mustn’t come near me, I thought. If he moved any closer, I’d be within shooting range, and I was toast. I clenched my fist around Dries’s pocket C-4 bombs. Last. Resort. I told myself I could earn a little time, find something to make them back off until March and Dries returned.
Yeah, I know a jar of olives isn’t exactly military-grade stuff, but it was the only decent weapon sitting on the shelves of the island. I grabbed it and threw it over the counter, in the general direction of the living area. The jar crashed to the floor in a din of broken glass. A round of fire in the island welcomed my initiative. Bullets banged against the steel, hard enough to make the structure shake, but, thankfully, none made it through. The guy moving toward me stepped back. In the window, I saw him make little hand gestures to whoever had opened fire.
I’d earned a ten-second reprieve, but now they knew I had no gun. I was desperately trying to think over the pounding in my ears, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I threw a couple of caviar tins because I thought it’d earn me five more seconds, and maybe March would show up and save me. There was another round of fire, caviar in my hair, and March wasn’t there.
The footsteps came closer, and my hands were shaking so hard I could barely find the strength to press each side of the metallic rectangle like Dries had told me to. I repeated in my head, like a mantra, that once I let go of the buttons I could feel clicking under my thumb and forefinger, I’d have five seconds left until . . . Before I knew it, I’d tossed the pocket C-4 over the counter. I had a terrifying vision that the device would somehow remain stuck to my hand and blow my entire arm off. It didn’t. I registered a faint clatter as it landed on the floor.
Boots thumped around the living room before it was all swallowed by a loud explosion, much worse than the necklace’s. I felt the shock wave travel through my body, all the way to the tips of my toes. Shards of wood and burning plush flew above my head and landed on the counter. I clamped my hand over my mouth and nose to stifle my own cry of surprise.
Then I heard it. An agonizing howl coming from the other end of the living room. “Oh God! Oh God, I’m hit! Man down! Man down! It’s . . . it’s everywhere! There’s blood everywhere on me!”
“Shut up, Karl!” hissed the big voice I’d heard before. The boss, surely.
“I can feel myself going. There’s a light, I—”
“Someone make him shut the fuck up!” A third voice growled, echoing his comrade’s callous order.
My breath coming in gasps, I thought of that poor guy, agonizing just a few feet away. I had done that. Admittedly to defend myself, but without thinking of the consequences. I was responsible. Was my soul as dark as Dries’s after all? Like it was genetics? I pressed a palm on my chest to calm my racing heart and, in as loud and steady a voice as I could muster, called out to him. “Sir, are you mortally wounded?”
I didn’t miss the sharp clicks of guns being reloaded and armed as I spoke, but Karl ignored his teammates to answer me.
“I don’t know.” He moaned. He had a slight accent I couldn’t place, and his voice sounded a little less urgent than it had moments before, but he was clearly in horrifying pain. “I-I have a bulletproof vest”—I distinctly heard someone behind him whisper, “Let me shoot that cocksucker,” but he kept talking—“there’s blood on my leg . . . It’s . . . aaaahhh . . . I think it’s the femoral artery. God, I’m gonna lose my leg, I can’t feel it anymore!”
Panic throbbed in my forehead: I had to do something, quick. A roll of paper towels had landed next to my feet when everything had blown up. I grabbed it and threw it over the island, like I had the C-4. A new round of bullets clanked into the wall of steel shielding me. I covered my ears until there was only silence again.
“Thank you!”
I let out a breath of relief as Karl confirmed the safe delivery of the paper towels.
“It’s probably too late for me already, but it’s a very good brand. Very absorbent!”
This product review spurred another aggravated roar. “Seriously? Will you fucking shut up? We’re in the middle of somethi—”
It’s sad because those were that guy’s last words, and he wasted them insulting Karl, when he could have been paying attention to his surroundings. He’d have noticed that March and Dries were done with his colleagues and were back to finish the job.
Or maybe it would have made no difference, given how fast the bodies hit the ground after each shot. One gave a low moan, followed by a gurgle, before collapsing less than two feet away from my hiding spot. I screwed my eyes shut to block the sight of his blood spilling from his neck on the blond floorboards. I suddenly thought of Karl: a burst of renewed adrenaline gave me enough courage to crawl out and toward Dries’s shoes as he moved to finish a guy wearing a balaclava and holding a roll of paper towels to his chest.
I scrambled to my feet just as March came behind me to help me up. “Don’t shoot him!”
Dries’s finger paused on the trigger, and he cocked an eyebrow at me.
I joined my hands in prayer. “Please! He’s badly wounded!”
He stepped over Karl with an air of disgust. “He’s perfectly fine, and he’d better get up if he wants to live.” Done with his diagnostic, Dries ran to the terrace to haul a barely conscious Sabina to her feet. She was limp in his arms and struggled to even stand up. Frustrated, he pressed his thumb against her carotid to knock her out again, before he hauled her over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes.
“March,” he said, an undercurrent of warning in his voice.
March took my hand in response and dragged me fast across the living room and after Dries.
I turned to look at Karl, who had gotten up, and was following us, paper towels still in hand. “You said your femoral artery had been torn,” I said accusingly, while we barreled across the ninth floor among dead bodies and damaged furniture.
“Must have been,” Karl whined. “It sure felt like it!”
In front of me, I heard Dries mutter, “That boy’s just a poes.”
It started when we reached the elevator. Not a noise at first, just a strange pressure in my ears and my chest. Then, as the doors slid closed, the glass walls outside started to make these low crackling sounds. March, Dries, and I looked at each other. All around us, the vibrations intensified. Understanding dawned on us. March’s hand squeezed mine urgently.
Trapped on the top floor of one massive pile of Novensia glass . . .
He was about to press on the first-floor button, but Karl lunged to punch sublevel five instead. Before I could stop him, March grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against the elevator’s wall, while around us the building structure seemed to be shaking more and more, and I was getting frankly nauseous.
“It’s the caves!” Karl yelled. “It’s safer down there!”
March released him. It was too late to back out anyway. We had just glided past the ground floor. Through the holes of his balaclava, Karl’s eyes were wide with panic. That didn’t look like the face of a man with an evil plan B. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure he was smart enough for that.
The elevator doors opened to some sort of dark basement. I glimpsed fluorescent lamps and some numbers painted on the walls. The
next thing I knew was pain. Above us, a detonation shook the ceiling and the elevator, so loud, so violent that it felt like my very bones were shattering inside me. My ears were ringing, buzzing; I couldn’t hear anything. I ran because everyone else was running, and March wouldn’t let go of my hand, but in truth, I had no idea how my legs were even moving. Plaster and gravel fell on our heads, and I kept running, down a corridor, toward a glimmering blue light. I saw turquoise spots dancing in my vision, outlining March’s back as he pulled me with all his strength.
Then the solid ground was no more, and we plunged into dark, cold water. Fully clothed, my body felt heavy, like the black depths were calling me, and I’d never breathe again. Bubbles swirled around me, and the turquoise light was getting brighter. I thought I saw a veil, something white and beautiful wrapping around March and me as he held me tight against him and swam us up to the surface.
The paper towel roll. That shit was everywhere. Emerging from my daze, I removed a towel clinging to my forehead and spat salty water. The sun was blinding me, my eardrums still hurt, but we were alive; March’s drenched cheek against mine told me that much. We were floating right outside the entrance of a cave leading to the facility’s private cove. Above us, the building was a blazing steel skeleton, shedding burning debris down the cliff and onto the beach’s pristine sand. A few feet away, Karl was fighting his way out of a wet paper roll but was otherwise fine.
“It’s over; it’s going to be all right,” March said with a gasp of effort, keeping me afloat until I remembered how to move my legs.
I looked around frantically. “Dries! Where is he?”
March looked back to the cove. “He split from us in the cave.”
The roar of a motorboat had me pedaling in the water toward the source of the noise. I drank a mouthful when a white shape bulleted through the natural stone arch giving access to the cove, splashing us like only a nefarious asshat would have.
Wide eyed, I watched the boat race west and leave us behind. I recognized that patch of green: Sabina’s dress. “He’s not seriously leaving us here and taking off with her?”
March swam closer to me. “He wants to be alone with her.”
Deep inside, I knew why. But wanting to believe otherwise, I forced a smile onto my lips. “She won’t sleep with him after he knocked her out like that.”
March gazed in the direction where the speedboat had disappeared, anger knotting his brow. “I don’t think that’s why he took her.”
I kept quiet as we swam back to the beach. I couldn’t find any way to sugarcoat the fact that Dries simply didn’t want us around while he . . . questioned Sabina Falchi. Sweet Jesus, I hoped he’d limit his efforts to scaring the ever-loving crap out of her like I knew he could.
By the time we got out of the water, police sirens echoed from above our heads. I looked at the top of the cliff. They’d likely come by the road, alerted by the explosion. We’d have to find another way out, which is where Karl came into play. Now a full-time member of our team and not at all a shady character wearing a balaclava and following us around with a wet roll of paper towels, he led us to another boat, moored to a wooden pier in the creek. He didn’t have the keys but instead hotwired the ignition with the ease of a true professional. Or, at the very least, a professional more used to petty crime than paramilitary action.
Minutes later, March stood behind the wheel, and I sat curled up next to Karl on the boat’s back seat as we glided away from Vis on a smooth sea. Karl twisted around to get one last look at the blackened skeleton of Novensia’s building, shrouded in a dark smoke cloud that swelled toward the sky.
“Whoa.” He let out a low whistle. “They weren’t lying when they said the rehearsal would be something crazy.”
March’s hands dropped from the wheel. In the blink of an eye, Karl was up on his feet and struggling against a powerful headlock. Mr. November was past any sort of courtesy, and his growl boded nothing good. “What did you say? What rehearsal?”
Nearly as freaked out as Karl by March’s sudden outburst, I snuck around them to keep a hand on the wheel, my eyes jerking back and forth between the strip of land stretching along the horizon and Karl’s interrogation.
Through the holes in his black hood, his eyes became big green marbles. “It’s just something I heard from the others—”
“What else did you hear?” March asked, tightening his grip around the poor guy’s windpipe.
“Nothing, I just—”
“Stop it, please!” I yelled over the engine sound. “Let’s find somewhere safe, and then we can chat!”
March let go of him with a huff. “You’re right. Let’s get out of here first.”
The moment he was free, Karl collapsed in the back seat, gasping for air in exaggerated gulps. He sounded suddenly very young and very lost as he cradled his head in his hands and moaned. “I can’t believe they told me to join because Croatia was nice at this time of the year.”
22
The Invitation
The kind, considerate, and presentable son-in-law your parents love will invariably turn out to be a lying, cheating sack of shit. So, take the time to gauge their reactions. They hate him? Good. He’s a keeper.
—Aurelia Nichols & Jillie Bean, 101 Tips to Lock Him Down
March said that it wasn’t really stealing because we’d drop that black Golf in front of a police station once we were done with it. Also, he’d make sure to return it with a full tank and after a ride through a carwash. Emergency borrowing, that’s what he called it.
Palm trees flashed past us, and Croatian pop poured from the speakers, filling the car with its mandatory accordion chorus. March’s eyes were on the road and the few tourists on the sidewalk, his mouth a stern line as he drove us through the streets of Split, a large coastal city two hours away from Vis. There we’d—hopefully—be able to find a safe place, acquire some “equipment,” and work on finding Dries and Gerone. In the mirror, a brown-haired guy with a patchy crew cut stared at us. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, and his air of innocence seemed completely at odds with his now-dry fatigues. Karl had removed his balaclava, but he still held on to his paper towels.
I turned in my seat to look at him. “So who hired you, the guy with the Japanese mask, Lucca Gerone?”
“Not him directly, but yes. I applied on Yaythug. They have a Swedish version now, very nice.”
So, dude was from Sweden. Where citizens enjoyed such a degree of freedom and Nordic efficiency that you could apparently apply online to work for supervillains. “Um, Yaythug, is it like—”
Karl nodded. “Well, it’s not just for dating; they do classifieds and job offers too. It’s on the darknet, but I don’t think it’s run by the same guys who made Yaycupid.”
“It isn’t,” March commented soberly.
It puzzled me that someone like Karl could have spiraled into a criminal career. I examined his nose, as I often did when assessing reprobates. I found it a little big, but from an evolutionary point of view, if nasal cartilage had been a determining factor in making someone a gangster, someone like, say, Pablo Escobar would have carried his around in a wheelbarrow. So it wasn’t that.
March’s voice cut through my musings, intentionally cold. “You said what happened at Novensia was a rehearsal. What does it mean?”
Karl looked down, studying his combat boots. “I don’t know the details; I just heard . . . things.”
“Like what?” I prodded, more gently.
“That the Whisperer wanted to test the cannon on something big, like Novensia.”
The cannon? March and I exchanged tense looks. It wasn’t impossible—sound cannons existed, which operated on a similar principle: exposure of a target to a specific frequency capable of causing physical discomfort or even material damage. But something like what had happened back at Novensia? That was another level.
“When you say the Whisperer, are we still talking about Lucca Gerone?”
“That’s what he c
alls himself: the Crystal Whisperer. I think it’s because he likes to blow up glass. He’s some sort of scientist. Very rich too. I’ve never worked for someone so rich, you know?”
So there was a tacky code name to go with that Noh mask. Hopefully we’d live long enough to get to the bottom of this. “Karl, what’s that cannon you’re talking about, and what’s after the rehearsal?”
He shook his head sadly. “I don’t know.”
As we reached the historical center, the ruins of Diocletian’s Palace came into view. It was an odd sight, all those colorful houses and restaurants leaning on thousand-year-old stones and pillars. Split's center had literally been built inside and around what had once been a Roman emperor’s three-hundred-thousand-square-foot retirement crib. Goes to remind you that a couple thousand years from now, somebody will be running a fast-food joint inside one of Bill Gate’s twenty-four bathrooms.
March’s fingers rapped on the wheel in frustration. “What about Maraì and Sabina Falchi?”
Lines of concentration formed on Karl’s brow. “The Whisperer knew him. And Maraì knew it would end like that. When we took over, well”—Karl scratched his nose on his forearm—“there was nothing to take over; everyone was gone already. He was alone.”
“Did Maraì say anything?”
“He cried. He said things in Italian. I didn’t understand. But he yelled stuff at the Whisperer’s girlfriend, Sabina. That’s when she got afraid, and I think she didn’t want to be with him anymore, but he said, ‘No way.’ Well, it was in Italian, so maybe he didn’t say it like that.”
Considering Sabina’s state of panic when we had found her, and Gerone’s attempt at killing her, Karl’s version of events confirmed our findings so far: Lucca Gerone, aka the Crystal Whisperer, enjoyed using an unidentified technology of his making to blow up anything made of Novensia’s “revolutionary” Ceraglass. Sabina knew why, and she wasn’t so smitten with him once she found out what her savior was up to. But Dries had taken off with her, so there went our key witness. As for Maraì’s role . . .