by H J Peterson
Friedrich turned away and put his head between his knees before he passed out. Keep it together, he kept thinking to himself. Keep it together, damn it!
“What’s going on?” Katalin asked.
“We need to get out there, now,” Friedrich said as he stood back upright. He felt a little better, but not by much: hopefully, that dizzy spell wouldn’t return when he tried to defend the house with Katalin.
Katalin nodded as she ran over to the panel, where the entrance to the safe room was.
“I’ll go out there first,” she said as she looked for the proper levers to open the door, again. “Talk me through what’s going on.”
Friedrich nodded and looked back through the peephole. Nothing had really changed about the scene, thank heaven: the last thing he wanted to see was this situation getting any worse than it already was.
“She’s got a gun to his throat,” Friedrich said quickly. “She’s got it pressed right under his chin: if she shoots, now, he won’t be able to get the bullet redirected in time.”
“Oh, sweet heaven!” Viktoria whispered to herself, but Friedrich wasn’t listening: he was too focused on what was going on between Maddox and the woman.
“Where’re the nobles?” the woman asked. “And try not t’ lie t’ me.”
Despite the fact that he was being threatened with a gun to the neck, Maddox didn’t give her the answer she was looking for. Instead, he spat at her, narrowing his good eye in defiance.
“Damn you,” he growled. “Damn you, and damn your archangel-“
The woman didn’t let him finish his sentence. She smacked him across the face with the butt of her gun, hard. Friedrich had a feeling that something in Maddox’s face had just broken: there was a really loud crack accompanying the hit.
Maddox turned to the side and spat, again, this time, spitting out blood and what looked like a tooth-
Friedrich couldn’t handle it, anymore. He turned to the side and began dry-heaving.
“Open the door,” Friedrich managed to get out between heaves. Out in the drawing room, he could hear the woman telling him that Maddox was going to get one last chance to save his life. “Open the door!”
Katalin didn’t ask him what had just happened or why he was dry heaving, thank heaven: Friedrich wasn’t sure if he could answer that, even if he wanted to. Instead, she threw open the panel and the painting without hesitation, launching herself into the fray with her rife up and ready to fire.
There was a loud bang as a gunshot went off, making Terézia and Viktoria yelp.
Friedrich could feel the blood drain from his face. What just happened? Had Maddox just gotten shot? Had Katalin, heaven forbid? Had someone else just died in the drawing room?
Forcing his fear into the back of his mind. Friedrich slung the rifle over his shoulder and ran through the door of the safe room, praying to heaven that he wasn’t about to see his fiancé bleeding out on the floor.
That wasn’t at all what Friedrich saw, thank heaven. Instead, he saw Maddox on the floor, dazed but alive; Katalin on her feet, aiming the gun at the woman with the discipline of a soldier; and the woman with her back towards Maddox and her gun on the floor, her left hand bleeding oil.
“Get the hell out of here,” Katalin growled. It was weird, to hear his fiancée–usually so sweet and caring–threaten a mad woman who’d just about killed one of the members of the Königstadt Guard. “Get out of here, or I’ll blow more than you damned hand off!”
“You must be that von Thurzó girl,” the woman said. “Funny; I never pegged you for a Dodger.”
Then, the woman didn’t something Friedrich wasn’t expecting: she turned tail and ran out of the room.
Katalin didn’t hesitate. She sprinted after her faster than should’ve been possible in a dress, slinging her rifle over her shoulder and leaving Friedrich behind in their dust.
“Friedrich, what on earth is going on?” Viktoria was poking her head out of the safe room, looking around in horror at what had happened to her drawing room.
“Get Maddox into the safe room.” That was the only thing Friedrich told his mother before he ran after Katalin.
He sprinted after his fiancée and the mad woman she was chasing, going as fast as his legs would carry him. They exited through the door leading to the balcony he and Katalin had just been on.
He ran out there only to find himself alone.
Friedrich skidded to a stop, looking around frantically for the two women. Where the hell were they? They couldn’t have gone very far: he’d watched them run onto this damned balcony, for heaven’s sake!
Finally, he looked up into the sky.
That’s when he saw her. Katalin was up in the air, thrown up by a change in orientation. It looked like the woman was either on the roof, or Katalin was trying to find her again.
She landed on the roof, disappearing from view.
Friedrich climbed over the edge of the balcony and onto the trellis that stretched up to the roof, doing his best to ignore the rain pelting him and chilling him to the bone. He couldn’t believe he was actually about to do this.
He began climbing up the trellis, heading up to the roof to help Katalin.
Well, Friedrich was positive that he’d had worse ideas than this, but he couldn’t really think of a specific example. That climb was awful: the rain soaked right through his clothes, the gun and bag of ammunition weighed him down, the wind made everything cold and threatened to blow him right off the side of the building; however, he kept climbing. He knew at that point that Katalin could handle herself, but… he couldn’t let her face whatever was up there by herself. What kind of a man would he be if he stayed behind while his fiancée fought for a house that wasn’t even hers?
When Friedrich got to the roof, he saw that he was right to have followed Katalin up to the roof. There were two people on the roof other than he and Katalin, and both of them were Alchemists. The two men were throwing fire at her, while Katalin dodged the fire, threw them to the sides with orientation changes-
Wait; men?
Just as he realized who was missing, someone grabbed him from behind, wrapping one mechanical arm around his neck in a chokehold and shoving a knife into his kidney with the other.
Friedrich gasped in shock and reflexively arched his back.
Needless to say, he began to panic.
“Ya know, I’ve never liked guns all that much: they’re so impersonal,” the woman said with an eerie calm. She twisted the knife, hard, making him squirm and cry out. “Ya don’t get t’ enjoy the kill as much.”
“You won’t get away with this,” Friedrich managed to say through clenched teeth. “Th-they’ll put you on the scaffolding for this!”
“Ya sure?” The woman twisted the knife around in the other direction, putting him in even more pain. “We’ll just have t’ see, won’t we?”
Finally, she yanked the knife out of him and shoved him down to the roof, walking away towards the fray, while wiping down the knife on her pants.
For a few seconds, Friedrich just lie there on the roof in shock. He’d just been stabbed: he was bleeding out on his own roof.
He rolled onto his side and pressed a hand to the wound. He could feel it: his own blood, seeping out of the hole and through his fingers. The sensation made him shake, and already, he could feel himself starting to get woozy. This was bad; this was really, really bad!
Friedrich held his hand up to his face to find that it was soaked in blood.
Almost immediately, he started to get light-headed. Not good; notgoodnotgoodnotgood-
Frantically, he tried to scramble to his feet, but it didn’t work. He stumbled and fell right back down, making his side hurt even more. Everything was going dark. Oh, heaven: was he about to die? What was happening? What…
His body couldn’t take it, anymore. Friedrich passed out, the last thing he heard being Katalin shouting his name.
XXVI. ADELRIC
Adelric sat in his holding cell at the po
lice station, slowly going insane. He’d been in there for hours, and he didn’t have a single thing to do. They’d brought in meals every once and awhile–mostly rice, chunks of mystery meat, and a tan-colored sauce–but nobody came in to talk to him: not Ikeda, not Brooks, nobody. All he really had was his violin, and he had a feeling that they wouldn’t appreciate him practicing concertos and solos, especially this late at night.
Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. He knocked on the door to his cell and waited for a reply.
“What the hell do you want, Biermann?” the guard outside his cell door asked.
“Do you mind if I play my violin?” he asked.
There was silence in the corridor outside his cell for a second, then a sigh. “Why not? The second you start playing crap, though, I’ll come in there and break that stupid thing over my knee.”
That seemed fair enough, Adelric guessed. It wasn’t exactly the first time someone had threatened to smash his instrument.
Happy to know that he didn’t have to go insane that day, Adelric pulled out his violin, his bow, and his rosin. He began to apply the rosin, running the bowstrings against the amber-looking substance. Once he was done with that, he put the violin under his chin and began his usual warm-up routine: his twelve major scales, arpeggios, and technical studies.
Like every other musician he knew, Adelric wasn’t exactly fond of his warm-ups; after all, playing actual music was a whole lot more fun than running through the same things he’d been playing since he learned to play the violin. That day, though, things were a little different. He actually found that he enjoyed it that day: staring at his instrument, unsure if he could play it without getting yelled at did that to a person, it seemed. The fact that he enjoyed it was probably the reason why these warm-ups sounded a whole lot better than they usually did-
“Biermann, if the next thing you play isn’t an actual song, I’ll smash your hand in a door!”
Adelric couldn’t exactly blame him. He had five warm-ups per key: the major scale, the arpeggio, scale in thirds, triplet exercise, and what his tutor when he was younger called the ladder exercise, in which he went up and down the scale, adding the next note in the scale with each repetition. And since he was in the middle of playing his B-flat major scale, and since he’d played around the circle of fifths that day, that meant he’d played… well, he wasn’t even sure how many that was. Enough, he guessed.
Taking a deep breath, he began to play through one of his favorite pieces in his repertoire, which was composed by his favorite composer: Capriccio in A Minor, by Bassani.
The piece was one of the hardest he knew: it was the piece that many orchestras across the world used as their audition piece every year for their violinists, as it tested just about every skill that every great violinist needed: technical accuracy, tone accuracy, cleanliness in technical passages and in octave jumps; it was a song he’d learned just so he could figure out how good of a violinist he was, and it was when a renowned violinist heard him playing it on the street one day when he was fifteen that someone told him of his potential. He was a prodigy, that Imperial Symphony Orchestra violinist told him; if he kept up with the violin, any music conservatory in the country would be happy to have him; he needed to audition for the Imperial Symphony Orchestra once he was old enough; it was on that day that he realized that being able to play the violin well might get him out of that life.
Well fat chance of that happening, now; the Imperial Symphony Orchestra didn’t exactly take on people who assassinated lords while they watched operas.
Adelric forced those thoughts out of his head as he came to the pizzicato passage of the piece. Even though he, the guard, and anyone who happened to be in the holding cells around him were the only ones there to hear it, he wanted to nail this piece. Just as he always did whenever he played anything. It didn’t matter where, or to whom: he wanted everything he played to sound like he was performing for a full house at the Überhaus.
He felt great as he finished the piece, ending the song on a not that he managed to make as perfect as those first notes. He paused, letting the music–his music–linger in the cell for a little while longer. A few of the people in the cells around him and in the halls outside his cell began to clap, which made him a little embarrassed; he’d known that a few people would be willing to listen to him play, but he’d also assumed that nobody would actually care enough to applaud him.
Well, not that he cared, anyway: the applause made him feel good.
To his surprise, the door to his cell opened and someone he didn’t recognize walked in. It was a young woman, dressed in a white serving gown and a white apron, toting along a food tray, and a young man in a police officer’s uniform. It was weird: the officer was so young, he almost looked like a woman at first glance.
“You sounded excellent, by the way,” the woman said as the two of them came into the cell and Adelric lowered the violin. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone play quite like that.”
Adelric put the violin back in his case, preparing for his meal. He didn’t notice the cop closing the cell door shut behind them, cutting them off from the rest of the world.
“Thanks,” Adelric said as he clasped the case shut. “I was rather hoping I’d be able to-“
He turned around-
Only to get stabbed in the gut by the woman with a very long butcher’s knife.
He cursed as the woman yanked the knife out of him, putting a hand to his stomach. Oh, heaven, that went deep: he wouldn’t be surprised that hit a few organs on the way through him-
Adelric realized something: he recognized the woman. Yes, her eye color was a little different, and her face looked a little thinner, but he could see past the work of a Doc. This woman was Francesca Cabrenzo, while the cop–the one that kind of looked like a woman–was Luciana Cabrenzo.
“Why?” It was all Adelric could think of saying as his stomach began to burn and he began to sweat furiously. He didn’t have to look at Francesca’s knife to know that the woman had used shade oil on him.
“You know damned well why, bastardo,” Francesca snapped, pointing the knife red with his blood at him. “You’re a rat, and you don’t let rats live.”
My powder! He still had some in the pockets lining the leaves of his coat: they hadn’t checked them when they arrested them.
He opened one of them and let the piece of coal in the pocket drop into his open hand. He could make it through this night alive, yet!
Well, if he could get some help soon, anyway: with the way his poisoning symptoms were progressing, he didn’t have much time to get to a Doc before he was beyond saving.
“You’re fortunate, Adelric,” Luciana said as Adelric rubbed the coal on his hand. “Back home, they rip out rat’s fingernails before they kill them.”
Adelric carefully put the piece of coal back into the pocket. Part of him felt bad about what he was about to do: even though the twins didn’t exactly like him, right then, they’d always been good to him, letting him have free beers whenever he was worried about Bator beating the crap out of him for not bringing in enough money, and giving him extra chunks of meat in his food if Bator actually did end up beating him. He didn’t really want to hurt them, but… well, it was either them or him.
“I’m sorry,” he said under his breath. Francesca and Luciana didn’t seem to hear him, or they didn’t care about the weird comment.
He held his hand up, let the coal on his hands burst into flames, and pushed.
A fireball erupted in and flew right towards Francesca and Luciana. The two of them held their arms up, shielding their faces from the flames.
Adelric took the opportunity. He grabbed his violin, shoved passed them, and ran right out the door.
Well, he couldn’t say that he ran out the door. It was more of a stumble. The shade oil was starting to course through his system: he recognized the side effects from when he was first taught to use the stuff. He was dripping with sweat, his vision was growin
g blurry, his heart pounded against his chest much faster than it should’ve, his limbs felt like led; The end would be here soon, unless he could get to a Doc.
The guard stood up quickly from his seat, knocking his chair down to the ground as Adelric fell onto his stomach. “What the hell are you doing out of your damned cell, Biermann-“
Francesca answered that question. As Adelric rolled over onto his back, she cocked her knife hand back to her cheek and threw her butcher knife at him. It barely missed his head, sticking in the floor right next to his head and slicing his ear open.
The guard drew his gun and began shooting at Francesca and Luciana. He missed, allowing the twins to duck back into the prison cell and for Luciana to start shooting back.
More guards began to rush down the stairs, wearing the colored epaulets of the Shaper unit, as everything grew dark around Adelric. Help was coming; help was coming…
The last thing Adelric saw as the lights went off was a man with green epaulets running towards him.
XXVI. HIRO
Where the hell was she?
That wasn’t a question that Hiro wanted to ask herself. Ever. Yes, she was relieved about being alive after getting injected with mystery liquid, but the predicament she’d woken up to wasn’t exactly fantastic. She woke up on the cold, cement floor of a room whose only features were a single lantern hanging from the ceiling and a drain in the floor, with her hands tied behind her back and her ankles tied together. She didn’t have a blindfold or a gag: either she’d been kidnapped by a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, or they didn’t care if she saw anything or screamed. Judging by the fact that they hadn’t killed her with that injection, she assumed that the answer was the second option: she must have been in a spot where nobody would hear her, or care if they did.