When he came back to himself, Claudia, The “translator,” was staring at him from across the hallway.
Frank considered running. One word from her, even a raised voice, and the jig was up. Perhaps the old Frank might have run, the Frank of a year ago who got a glass of scotch thrown in his face that fateful day on the job investigating the Beauchamp claim. That Frank took the abuse and piled it on his back. That Frank looked for the path of least resistance. But now, he walked calmly across the stairway and stopped a foot from her.
“What are you doing here?” she hissed, pulling him back to the wall and looking about, keeping low.
“I should have figured. The mess at the graveyard was all your fault.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re not even trying. It’s written all over your face. And in the tone of your voice. And your body language. I was trained to pick these things up back—”
“Shut up! Are you crazy, coming in here like this? Now, of all times!”
“I’m trying to find my friend. My friend they took, because of you. And I’m trying to save the planet as we know it at the same time.”
Claudia rolled her eyes but wouldn’t meet his own. “If it hadn’t been me who worked you it would have been someone else. One of his other sets of eyes and ears. There are hundreds.”
Frank was unimpressed. “You don’t have to be just a set of eyes and ears for him, you know. That’s up to you.” And with that he turned back towards the stairway and the double doors just as gunfire began again in the courtyard.
She grabbed him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“In there. Hopefully to the Red Room. To find Lock, and then to find Ellie Willmore. Lock would want me to do things the other way around, but he doesn’t get a say in it.”
“Mazaryk is in there!”
Frank swallowed. “Yeah. I know.”
“You don’t understand—”
“—Yes, I do. I’ve met him before. I know. I know him better than you do, I’m positive of that, because if you knew him like I know him there is no way you would be working for him.”
This stilled her.
“You know, I liked you. Even after I figured out you were double crossing us, I still kind of liked you. And not just because you’re pretty, either. You’re smart and you’re quick and you’re capable. I’d have thought you’d figure out what’s going on here by now. The power play Mazaryk is pulling. Guess I was wrong.”
He turned again to go but she spoke up.
“You’d go in there? To your death?”
Frank smiled. “This is what I live for.”
“He’s in the north tower,” she said quickly. “Lock is. He’s not in the Red Room anymore. You’d just be throwing your life away walking in there.”
Frank turned slowly to face her.
“There’s no one guarding him,” she added, looking down. “Not since the fighting started. Down the hall behind me, all the way around, up the set of stairs at the back.”
“Thank you,” Frank said, and he meant it, but Claudia only shook her head and he realized she was crying.
“Don’t thank me. Ellie doesn’t stand a chance. You’re all finished.”
Frank heard another peppering of gunfire and then the noise of the crowd swelled again.
“Not yet we’re not,” he said.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
ELLIE AND IAN STAGGERED into the Black House. Blood ran down Ellie’s face and seeped through a rip in her jeans where a chunk of statue had slammed into her calf. Her left hand hung limply. Ian was in far worse shape. He sloped into Ellie at an angle, the diode bleed from his right shoulder creeping closer to his windpipe. His left arm was useless and pulsed with pain in time with his heart. Auldborne had capped his right knee and the slow burn was spreading up his thigh and once it hit the artery he would be beyond help. When they crossed the threshold Ellie turned around and kicked the door closed. It swung heavily and slammed shut and the bustling room froze.
Ellie made no pause. She aimed her gun at Vasya where he stood behind the podium. “Are we going to have trouble from your people?”
All of the sound was sucked from the room, as if the door had sealed them in a vacuum. Vasya closed his ledger. He made a good effort at professionalism but looked like a man confronted with a dangerous homeless person.
“We are under orders not to interfere in any way,” he said dryly.
Ian was having none of it. He lurched forward and the staff now crowding the halls and stairs pressed back against the walls, some of them stifled screams. “Where is he?” Ian rasped.
Vasya swallowed and set his tie. “We cannot interfere.”
Ian grabbed Vasya by the lapels and steadied himself. Vasya pawed at him as if he were trying to free himself from a spider web, but Ian held fast. He felt the telltale bump in Vasya’s breast pocket and reached inside his coat and before Vasya could call out, Ian had plucked a pack of cigarettes. He looked at it: a Russian brand he didn’t recognize, but he flicked it open and gummed out a cigarette and mimicked a lighting motion, poorly, with his shaking left hand. Vasya winced away from him and looked at Ellie as if for help.
“I’d light his cigarette if I were you,” Ellie said.
Vasya lit Ian’s cigarette and watched helplessly as the two of them eased each other up the stairway, holding fast to the railing and taking the steps one at a time. People scattered before them. At the top, in front of the Mahogany double doors, Ian took a big drag and watched his left hand. The tremors did not abate.
“Fuck,” he said. Plain. Simple. It told Ellie all that she needed to know. She walked up to him and took his arm and he sagged back and allowed himself to rest on her.
“You’re dying,” said Ellie.
“We’re all dying.”
“No. I mean right now. Here. In this house.” And then tears welled in her eyes and she shook him like a doll. This broken, fearless, punching bag of a man still stood even as his heart caved in on him, and she fell in love with him when she knew he was leaving her and she staunched the pain with anger.
“You selfish asshole. You didn’t tell anybody. Does Pyper even know?”
Ian shook his head.
“Does your family know?”
Ian shook his head again.
“Ian, if you go under...”
Ian exhaled in a thin stream of smoke and nodded.
Ellie felt like a rock lodged itself at the top of her throat. She grabbed his jacket and pulled him back towards the stairs and the door below.
“Well then we’re leaving, you idiot. We’re getting you to a hospital and we’re going to stop the bleed out and patch you up and then you’re never getting in front of a diode again.”
He didn’t fight her. But he didn’t move. He just watched her as tears streamed down her face and then slowly grasped her hand, enveloped it in his own even as he blinked with pain.
“It must be finished,” he said.
“No!” she screamed, pulling her hand away, but he held it fast.
“We’re finishing this, Ellie.”
Ellie shook her head violently, but he stilled it with a touch and then he kissed her. It wasn’t a searing kiss. Neither one melted into the other. It was a simple, pure, deep kiss in which both held the other a little taller, a kiss of understanding, borne more out of need than desire. It was simple and soft, and then it was over.
And then Ian Finn saw Alex Auldborne limp around the corner from the back of the house and come to a stop in front of one of the big windows, his ragged coat falling of his shoulders, his face dappled in blood. Alex raised his gun and fired.
Ian swung Ellie behind him and took the diode between his shoulder blades and Ellie screamed. Ian watched her, his mouth open, breath coming out of him in broken steps.
Auldborne laughed, then coughed. “There are a lot of ways into this house, but only one way out.”
Ellie held Ian tight but he was slippin
g from her like sand. Her eyes met his and there was none of the manic hardness in them anymore. They were the clean green of midsummer grass. He smiled.
“You can stop Mazaryk,” he whispered. “You were meant to. It has to be like this.”
Ian steeled himself with every last ounce of strength. He managed only to pull back slightly on his bad leg. He was precarious, he wouldn’t be able to make more than ten steps, but that’s all he’d need.
“It’s up to you, now.” He dropped her hand, turned around, and launched himself towards Auldborne. He was unsteady and falling forward as soon as he left her, but he was falling fast. Auldborne got one more shot off that went wide and cracked into the door behind Ellie before Ian slammed fully into him and flung both Auldborne and himself through the round window behind him. The glass broke with the sound of a car wreck and both of them disappeared, leaving only the blue sky beyond.
Ellie ran after them in stunned disbelief. The glass still fell in broken shards from the round outline of the window as she looked out. There was a veranda that formed a small, rolling lip and beyond that the frenzied crowd that relentlessly pressed in upon the house. Helicopters flooded the hallway with spotlights and she hooded her eyes. They had cleared the outer gate and plummeted into the sea of humanity below. Even counting the lip, the fall was at least twenty feet. The two of them were in a broken pile below. Neither of them moved. She saw a great body of people rush in and over them like a feeding organism and she saw the flashing lights of the medics already pushing in from the outskirts of the park. Then a spotlight flooded over her and she was blinded. She tried to wave the helicopters off but they didn’t move. They had her in their sights, proof that she was still walking, precious information for the waiting world. She stepped back and blinked away the harsh blue burn in her eyes and when she could see again she noticed the staff around her retreating, running down the stairs towards the back of the house.
Suddenly she was alone, the way to the Red Room clear. No one stood between her and the great wooden doors.
With Ian gone, Ellie felt the full weight of the battle and it nearly floored her. If the fall didn’t kill him, she knew the diode wounds would. She couldn’t process the permanence of his loss. He was there, and then he wasn’t, and yet everything else remained the same: the pandemonium of the crowd, the smell of gunpowder throughout the house, the cutting brightness of the sun, the pain of her wounds. This easy continuance of the world in his absence felt impossible, but his voice echoed in her mind: It has to be like this.
And so it was. She grasped her gun in her good hand and pressed the flat of her forearm upon the doors, took a breath, and threw them open.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THE RED ROOM WAS striped in bright, sanguine light and deep, beckoning shadow. The contrast was so sharp that Ellie thought the room was one long, thin strip of red that ended at a fireplace, but then she saw that the round table extended beyond the light and into the darkness and she knew that her eyes were fooling her.
“Drop your gun, Ellie,” said Eddie Mazaryk, but from where in the shadows she couldn’t tell. His voice seemed to come from the vaulted ceiling itself and she sighted into the darkness, spinning around, searching frantically for him but finding only black space beyond space.
“Please,” he said, not unkindly. “I won’t ask a third time.”
Ellie drew her gun down and looked helplessly at it, flashing brightly in the red. She dropped it to the floor with an echoing thunk.
“Walk forward, please.”
And as Ellie approached the round table Eddie Mazaryk stepped out of from the shadows by the fireplace and nodded slightly to her before offering her a seat at the opposite end. A slice of red cut across the middle of the table like a crack in the Earth. She sat and then he followed suit, and then he smiled. His was a child-like smile, one of contentment, free of worry or obligation. He wore a crisp white shirt under a thin black tie and trim black jacket. His hands were free. His hair was banded loosely behind his ears and the red of the room reflected back in his eyes like a wolf caught on camera, but his smile was especially disturbing, that of a man who stood on the top of the mountain.
Eddie Mazaryk was happy, and it made Ellie want to run screaming out of the room to warn the rest of the world to lock their doors. He took his gun from his jacket and for a horrible moment Ellie thought he was just going to end it then and there, shoot her where she sat, and part of her wanted him to, a larger part than she cared to admit. Instead he showed it to her before setting it down carefully in front of him and pushing it well across the table, out of both of their immediate reach.
“You look different from when we last met,” he said. “Harder.”
“Why don’t you just shoot me, Eddie? So many times you could have, but you didn’t. Why?”
“For the same reason that you formed your alliance. For the same reason that you walked through that door. For the same reason you dropped your gun when I asked. Because you know that the diode only puts the stamp on true victory. True victory is beyond gunfire.” He watched her through his steepled hands. “And you’ve given it to me. You brought in the holdouts, and they’ve been brought to their knees. They have nothing left to give.”
“They’ll never join you.”
“No, they won’t,” Mazaryk allowed. “But they will join us.”
Ellie laughed then, a short, clipped honk that sounded so out of place that she did it again. “Just like best friends, huh? You and me? You don’t work well with others. You’re very good at getting other people to work for you. I should know. We gunned down eleven of them so I could get up here.”
Mazaryk sat back and his face shadowed. He set his hands softly onto the armrests of his chair. “Why do you like the Tournament? Some of them, they like the fame, or the money, or the power, or they flock to destruction, but not you.”
Ellie pondered his question as a helicopter passed across the red windows around the fireplace, glinting like a ruby dragonfly. “I like the freedom.”
“Exactly.” Mazaryk leaned forward into the light once more. “And so do I. I want to set the Tournament free. Only then will it be pure enough to act as judge and jury for the world. It is all I fight for, all I ever ask. You and I are the same.”
Ellie shook her head. “You’re a hypocrite, Eddie. You want a world free of rules, but you want to rule it.” Ellie set her hand flat on the table. The gun was out of her reach, but she could jump for it. She could grab it, she knew. Or he could be quicker.
Mazaryk guessed her thoughts. “Don’t patronize me, Ellie,” he said, his voice that of a disappointed parent.
“You put a gun in front of me, you better believe I’m gonna try to shoot you with it.”
“I’d expected more from you,” he said, the red creeping over his face with each passing minute, draping the rest of him in darkness.
“That’s another reason that I love this game,” Ellie said, inching closer with creeping fingers. “There’s expectation...” she said, rising to a slow stand and stretching over the table, eyes locked with his. Mazaryk watched her as her finger grazed the stock of the gun. His hands slipped off the chair. She was inches from the trigger now and she tensed to make a stab for a grip, and when she did there was a single, muffled gunshot from under the table. She jerked back and settled into the chair, her face slack.
“...And then there is reality,” Mazaryk finished sadly, as he took a second, hidden gun from underneath the table and rattled it lightly for her to see.
Ellie gasped and balled her hand into a fist and pressed it to her gut to slow the diode bleed. When the initial, ripping pain subsided, she managed a weary smile. “The illusion of choice,” she said, defeated.
That was when Frank Youngsmith barreled through the double doors like a line cook on fire, followed closely by Allen Lockton. “Who’s hit?” Frank screamed. “Did we get him? Is it over?”
Mazaryk shot to his feet. He aimed at them where they stood, a rare loo
k of genuine surprise on his face.
“...Oh,” Frank said lamely, and his face fell.
Ellie struggled to turn around and blinked at them, her face pale and mouth slack. “Welcome to the party,” she said, barely closing her lips. “The fun never stops.”
“Allen?” Mazaryk questioned. “You and your friend will have to wait your turn.”
Both stood side by side and regarded Mazaryk, neither backed down. Ellie’s head began to loll to one side.
“Oh Eddie,” Frank said, dropping his arms to his sides. “Your father would be so disappointed in you.”
There was a suspended silence and the air turned heavy, as if the four of them were figurines pushed deep into a jar of molasses. Sensing a change in the pressure, Ellie screwed her hand deeper into her wound to ground herself. The room was starting to fall away from her at the edges.
“What did you just say?” Mazaryk asked, his voice a single tone above a whisper.
“Dahlia would be disappointed too,” Lock added.
Ellie, Frank, and Lock saw a brief shift on Mazaryk’s face that none of them had ever seen before. It was as if he wore a mask that slipped a fraction about the eyes just then, and beneath it was the son and brother, not the captain. The impression was fleeting, soon replaced by an icy fury.
“You think because you saw their graves that you know their wishes? You arrogant—”
“—Dahlia loved her father,” Frank cut in. “And I know that Pollix loved her back. They’re buried within arm’s reach of each other.”
“I know where they are buried. I laid them there myself!”
“Eddie, you’re doing this for your father, aren’t you?” Frank suggested. “For Pollix and his legacy.”
Ellie rested her head on the table, but she did not close her eyes.
“My father...” Mazaryk began, then paused to choose his words carefully. “My father was a visionary. He had a grand dream that was clipped at the blossoming by treacherous and weak willed men—”
The Tournament Trilogy Page 87