Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle

by Mercedes Lackey

  Trigger her completely.

  And she knew very well what had happened the last time she’d done that, to Bulwark. She’d almost killed him . . .

  Sovie knew, too, and showed it with a swift intake of breath. “Sestra—leave alone the ethics of doing a trigger without consent—”

  “If I don’t, she dies,” Bella said harshly. “If I do, maybe she lives, but if I don’t, she dies. We can’t hold her much longer.”

  There was a moment of silence among the three of them, Soviette, Bella, and Vickie still listening on Overwatch. It was Vickie who finally spoke.

  “In the absence of patient preference, what is the primary duty of a physician? Screw that you aren’t a doctor, Bells, you might as well be. So what’s your duty?”

  Sovie’s eyes cleared, and she nodded. “Vedma is givink correct thinking, sestra. I am physician, and I say that.”

  “Make every effort to preserve life,” Bella said, through gritted teeth and anxiety so high it made her voice go up half an octave. “All right then, stand by, Sovie. God and Marx only know what’s going to happen.”

  She plunged deeply into the healing gestalt, and “spoke” to Ramona’s cells, fully triggering the metahuman healing factor, and “watching” in a state of near panic as the unknown “other” triggered after it in a cascade.

  Then she was too busy trying to keep control of the situation as Ramona began pulling energy out of her, rather than passively receiving it. Somewhere in the back of her awareness, she heard Soviette call urgently for Upyr, and felt a pair of cool hands going to her temple, infusing her with somewhat musty “flavored” power.

  Nat must have some thugs in the CCCP brig . . . who are going to wake up with a helluva hangover . . .

  Three times more this happened, and then—

  I am here, little sister.

  And the flow of slightly tainted power was replaced by that impossible geyser of pure, sweet energy that she could only, barely, sip at without being overwhelmed. Once again, Sera had come to the rescue.

  And finally, the demand on her shut off. With a feeling of relief—at least Ramona hadn’t died from whatever she’d triggered—she opened her eyes, and took away her hands.

  “Well,” she observed wearily. “At least I didn’t kill her. And she only looks half-cooked now.”

  The blackened skin was flaking away as Soviette cut off what was left of the detective’s clothing, leaving behind something that looked like second-degree burns, rather than third- and fourth-degree. But Soviette was frowning.

  “What?” Bella asked.

  The physician pointed with her chin. “There was being a cart with tray with surgical instruments there,” she said. Bella blinked, and craned her neck a little. There was nothing there now next to the surgical table but four rubber wheels. “Am thinkink it was good thing table is beink plastic.”

  But—there hadn’t been any of the cellular changes there had been to Bulwark! In fact, Bella hadn’t noticed anything other than the incredible draw on her own powers and energy. “Where’d it go?” she asked, feeling stupid. “I mean, what’d she do with it?”

  “I do not know,” Jadwiga replied, with a touch of irritation. “But scissors are all I was beink to save, and I am nyet pleased about losink equipment!”

  “Fret not, Echo Med will provide,” Vickie’s voice answered, before Bella could. “Or better still, I’m diverting a nice package on its way back from autoclaving and sterilization that’s coming from Greenboy’s private Blacksnake clinic.”

  “Horosho,” Jadwiga said, mollified. “Spasibo, Overwatch.”

  “Think nothing of it. I got visual feed from Sovie if you want to see what happened, Bella, but basically near as I can describe, it was like some sort of movie SFX, the stuff just started sucking into her, with no obvious changes in her other than the healing.”

  Bella pulled the feeds to the pheresis machine out of the plugs in her arms. “Sweet mother-of-pearl,” she said, suddenly feeling every bit of what she’d just gone through. “Did you do that pain-sharing thing? Because that’s the only part I don’t think I did.”

  Soviette nodded. “Was not beink pleasant, let me tell you. Would not have wished to be you when doing similar healink on Djinni.” She hung an IV bag on a stand, and prepared to insert the needle in Ramona’s arm. Thankfully, the detective had not woken up yet. She was still going to be in a fair amount of pain when she did, until they got some painkillers into her. “If it were not for—borzhe moi!”

  “What?” Vickie and Bella said, simultaneously. But Bella had already spotted what had made Soviette exclaim and drop the IV needle.

  The back of Ramona’s hand—where Soviette had been trying to insert the IV needle—now sported a shiny metal shell.

  * * *

  Ramona blinked open one eye, the effort Herculean as her eyelids felt like lead weights. She immediately regretted the motion, light streaming from the overhead igniting a headache. Soft whirring preceded a trio of gentle beeps from the corner of the room. A soft voice spoke in Russian, followed by a higher-pitched response that started in Russian and ended in English.

  Both sounded exhausted.

  “Is good to see you awake, Detective.” The gentle face of the CCCP’s lead medic came into Ramona’s field of vision. She laid a hand against her forearm and studied Ramona’s face, as if the simple gesture could tell her more than the nearby machines. “Do you know where you are?”

  Ramona worked to open her mouth, but her jaw felt incredibly heavy. She struggled to move her tongue and her words slurred, the taste of copper and aluminum foil filling her mouth. Her face screwed up and she tried to form the words again. “CCCP HQ,” she managed. “I was on my way home, it was the last train of the night, and the explosion . . .”

  “The explosion ripped four cars from the track and rendered the southwest routes completely useless. Due to the time of the explosion, no civilians were present. As far as the public knows . . .” Bella moved next to Soviette, her face twisted in a half-smile. “Detective Ramona Ferrari is dead. Congratulations, you’re a ghost. Feel free to pull the bedsheets over your head and make scary noises.”

  “But I’m not dead.”

  “Nyet.” Soviette and Bella exchanged nervous frowns as Ramona shifted and struggled to sit up. “You are beink very much alive, and remarkably so. Would not have expected you to survive.”

  Even her fingers felt heavy. Ramona gripped at the sheets and tried to sit up. She expected wires and tubes to stop her movement, but as she pushed herself up against the pillows, she found nothing. An unfamiliar queasiness rumbled in her stomach. Given what they had said, Ramona expected a spiderweb of medical connections. “How . . . how long have I been asleep?”

  “Nine hours. Is quarter past eleven.” Soviette pulled up a stool, Bella following suit and resting her hands against the bedsheets. Ramona thought the blue girl looked too pale and exhausted to be awake.

  “The . . . next day?”

  “Yeah, the next day.” Bella exhaled slowly, gathering the little strength that she had. “Like Sovie said, we didn’t expect you to survive. We worked on you, but we had to take some extreme measures.”

  “Extreme measures?” She could still taste tinfoil on her tongue. Ramona quickly checked to make sure that she still had both legs, both arms, and the ability to wiggle fingers and toes. Her entire body ached and her lower abdomen felt as if someone had wrapped her in flaming barbed wire from the inside out, but she seemed to be whole. Memories of her leaving the Echo campus progressed to boarding the train, a quick debrief with Victrix via Overwatch, and then . . .

  Ramona felt her entire body shudder. Anxiety welled up and she couldn’t control the trembling, her heels knocking hard against the end of the bed. As if she had been waiting for the shakes to come, Bella reached for Ramona’s hands. Weak waves of calm moved over them both. “Our priority was to keep you alive. During the first fifteen minutes, it took everything to keep you from fading out. If it had
n’t been for . . . for the evac, you’d be a smear underneath metal and concrete. When JM brought you in, we did everything we could, but . . .”

  “Am I still me?” Ramona gripped Bella’s hand tightly. The blue woman gasped in pain and Ramona quickly let go, apology on her lips and fear in her eyes. Instinctively, the detective searched for a mirror, any kind of reflective surface. Fingers flew to her face as she tried to reassure herself that “extreme measures” didn’t mean some self-contained suit or some full-body transplant.

  Bella flexed her fingers. “Yes, you’re you. But I had to trigger something in your cells to help you to repair the damage. You came in burned, and flooded with toxin from the inside out and broken all over. Anyone normal wouldn’t have survived to make it here.” She took a deep breath, steeling herself to meet Ramona’s eyes. “You had a latent meta factor. I don’t know if it’s always been there, but I saw it and used it. After that, you . . .”

  “You healed yourself.” Jadwiga laid a gentle hand on Ramona’s shoulder. “With help from others, but you healed yourself.”

  “A latent meta factor? As in metahuman meta?” The queasiness increased, although the trembling and anxiety didn’t return. “So I’m like you? I can regenerate and heal other people?”

  The two women shared a worried glance. “No,” Bella finally admitted. “You’re a metahuman, by all definitions, but healing isn’t what we’d call the origin power. From what we saw, you’re one of those who’s able to manipulate inorganic material and incorporate it into your cellular structure. It’s not uncommon, but it’s one of the harder ones to manage.”

  “Inorganic . . . cellular . . . what?” Ramona pulled her hand away and threw back the sheets. She started to move her legs, but she screamed when she saw the mottled metal around her ankles and calves. With no concern for modesty, she pulled away the top of the hospital gown. Where she had felt burning wire around her torso, swaths of surgical steel covered her skin, the edges pink and tender. She pushed back against the pillows, futilely trying to distance herself from the injury. Instead, the bed groaned with the stress and weight. The two women grabbed her arms, keeping her from getting up as Ramona thrashed and cried.

  “Ramona! Stop! You’re not . . . please, we can’t give you anything!” Bella grimaced as she fought with the detective. “Calm down, or I’ll have to—”

  Ramona struggled for half a minute more, fear and anger giving way to despair and loss as she didn’t wake up from some horrible dream on her way home from Echo. She felt Bella’s attempt at consolation, but she finally gave in as the Russian woman put both arms around her shoulders and drew the blankets up around her chest. With nothing left to do, Ramona gave in to her grief and sobbed, exhausted and full of questions that neither of them were able to answer.

  * * *

  “Well?” Red Saviour stood outside the room, arms folded across her chest. Bella slipped out the door, rubbing at her face. “Is nyet accident that caused this, I am certain.”

  “As am I. Miss Victrix confirmed that from the cameras around the station. This was planned.” Yankee Pride’s gauntlets glowed with energy, his mouth drawn tight. “And for us to succeed, Verdigris has to think he won this round.”

  Bella nodded once. “Then we tell him nothing. Let him draw his own conclusions. Keep her here to recover in the meantime. Everything surrounding the ceremony goes as planned. And Pride . . .”

  “I know, Miss Parker. Miss Victrix says she can supply some convincing remains. Officially, Detective Ramona Ferrari is dead.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Save Me

  MERCEDES LACKEY AND CODY MARTIN

  All I can say is that in the middle of all the hell we were going through . . . there was still time to be human.

  Even for those of us who weren’t.

  * * *

  It had been another long day for John Murdock. So much of what he did on a day-to-day basis was what a neighborhood cop would have been doing, if there had actually been any neighborhood cops left; police forces all over the world had been decimated, and they were scrambling for recruits. Hard to get them when merc organizations like the cheaper versions of Blacksnake were offering more money than any police department could offer. The rich in their gated communities were getting protection from gangs, thieves and Thulians alike; as ever, the poor were left hanging in the wind. Until the cops could get their numbers up, most beat cops were kept to high priority areas; John’s neighborhood didn’t qualify, so they rarely saw so much as a patrol car.

  So John and CCCP were taking up the slack. Lots of walking, talking to the neighbors, showing the colors. Sometimes rousting out a dealer, or a thief, or a bully. Domestic disputes. Sometimes a genuine bad guy. Not a lot of action today. After his patrol with Georgi and Bear he had made sure to stop in at Jonas’ shop to see how the neighborhood was doing socially, get the lowdown on how things were shaking out that didn’t involve busting a head or three; there were a few minor chores that he had to take care of, all of them adding time to his already long shift. Tired as he was—and damn if it seemed like he could never get enough sleep these days—he was happy to take care of the tasks. The last was to check up on the community garden; it was a sight different from when he’d first helped the neighborhood start it up. Vegetables, some dwarf fruit trees, and raspberry and blackberry bushes donated by the Hog Farmers, herbs and flowers all sprouted and grew where there had once been a lot strewn with rubble and broken glass. Kids were encouraged to play carefully between the rows of plants and pull up weeds while they played. There were a lot of “weed houses” and “rock forts” in the shade of the taller plants. Action figures and dolls salvaged from the destruction corridors acted out high drama under the tomatoes. People in this neighborhood were still “shopping” in the rubble, and who could blame them? Anything that had belonged to someone still living had been claimed.

  John was inspecting a short row of cornstalks when he heard someone working on the far side of the garden. Quietly he made his way around the side until he saw Upyr diligently cultivating around the roots of some bean bushes. Well, they looked like bushes, anyway; they were certainly waist-high and didn’t look as if they were going to stop growing any time soon. At the same time she was instructing a little girl who was squatting next to her with a completely absorbed expression on her tiny face. John leaned against a post and watched the exchange.

  “So, plants are beink like little girls with growink feets. You must to give them room for toes to wiggle in dirt, da?” The little girl giggled, and nodded. “But you do nyet want to tear up shoe or scratch feets at same time, so you must to beink careful.” She looked up and spotted Murdock. “Privyet, Chonny.”

  “Evenin’, Thea. Burnin’ the midnight oil?”

  She shrugged, and tossed her snow-white hair out of her eyes. “Is only sunset. And is beink too hot for pale devushka to vork garden in afternoon.” She stood up and handed the little girl a kind of basket or bucket carefully folded out of newspaper. It was full of beans. “Now, beink take home to mama. Tellink her kale be ready for pickink tomorrow.” The little girl dashed off, both arms wrapped around her bundle. Upyr picked up her gardening tools. “Are you hungry for beans, Chonny?” she said, with her Mona Lisa smile.

  He held up his hands, smiling. “Naw, but thanks, comrade. Not feeling too hungry at the moment; just a bit under the weather, lately.”

  “Too much Amerikanski fasting food, not enough wegetables,” she scolded. “You are to beink look pale, like me! People vill to be sayink you are my twin brat.”

  “I ought to be so lucky as to be so pretty.” He grinned at her. “Now, git. I know for a fact that there’s gonna be a long line at the soup kitchen. I’m gonna take a shift tomorrow morning.”

  “And you vill to be eatink my good borscht,” she said, with a look. She was very proud of her borscht. She’d even gotten some of the die-hard Southerners who wouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t deep-fried or covered in bacon grease to slur
p it down.

  John just winked at her. Nothing wrong with her borscht that a little ol’ tabasco can’t fix.

  She put the tools in the common storage box at the side of the garden. They were safe enough there; it wasn’t as if people were likely to be stealing the garden tools they all needed when a two-by-four was a better weapon anyway, and the more dangerous implements, like the big shears, were kept locked in the lower half with one of those school-locker combination padlocks. Anyone who would properly need one of those had the combination.

  John watched her leave, but remained. It was rare to get quiet moments like these where he could just be still and not have to think. Everyone would be at dinner now, some trying to get some sort of picture out of their jury-rigged TV antennas. Cable wasn’t even pretending to make an effort to restore service out here; they knew damn well that no more than a third of the households had money to spare for even basic service. That was all right with John, it meant that things were quieter; how much time had people wasted in front of televisions? He felt it was better all around that they now had to actually get out in the sun and do something. There were benches cobbled up out of debris placed all around the garden; he walked over to one and sat down heavily, watching the sunset turn into twilight.

  He felt, more than heard, the sound of wings, and a warm breath of air scented with vanilla and sandalwood wafted over him. Sera alighted on the back of the bench, and stepped from there lightly down to the ground. “I brought you food,” she said, her hands cupped around a bag.

  “Not borscht?” he asked.

  She laughed musically. “Not borscht. Peaches.” She handed him the bag, which held fragrant peaches still warm with sunshine. “The farmer told me to take them.”

  “Did y’scare him half to death by showing up looking like that?” He chuckled, removing a peach from the bag and taking a bite out of it.