Retching, I crept up to hands and knees and made like a lizard under the hail of gunfire overhead, pushing through the slight resistance still offered by the containment circle. I got to the cages before the Yen did, seized the bars between me and Jenner, and hauled her away from it across the floor.
“Jesus Christ, Rex!” Her sharp yellow voice was a flash of color against the blinding light of the klaxon. “Why are you... what the hell...?”
“No time to explain!” I yelled, already running back for Zane. I wasn’t sure he was alive, but it wasn’t his body at risk. Grunting, I braced my shoulder against the cage, dug my feet into the floor, and charged forward to push it out of the liquid crawling toward us. We got maybe three feet before a crushing blow hit me across the back of the head. I collapsed in a heap, my face against the wet ground. Sokolsky men are built like bricks, so I didn’t pass out, but I was slow to sway back up—too slow to stop Joshua Keen from thrusting his long sword through my back and out the front of my shoulder.
Chapter 46
I roared more from shock than pain, rolling to the side and pulling the sword out of his sweat-slick hands. He’d hit me in my right side, immobilizing that arm, but the left was free to come up. Keen blocked my punch, then collapsed, breathless, when I slammed a knee up between his legs and ground it in. The man’s eyes bulged.
“Come on, princess! You want to fucking brawl!?” I shouted at him in Ukrainian. I grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pulled him close as he tried to push back. He was gangly, fast, hard with lean muscle and jacked up on magic, but still couldn’t match my raw strength. I headbutted him, knocking his glasses off, and did it a second time hard enough that I saw stars. The Agent coughed blood onto my neck, snarling as he wrenched his shirt from my hand. He clubbed me across the face, two or three hits that brought a surge of fresh bile to my throat. He reached for the sword, and I lunged up and bit him on the arm just above his elbow, holding on, curling up, and driving my fist into his ribs until they finally cracked under my knuckles. The Agent collapsed on top of me, teeth bared, and went for my eyes with his fingers. My right arm still wasn’t working: all I had were my jaws. Clawing at him, shaking my head from side to side, I managed to keep his nails out of my eyes and got a finger in my mouth. He screamed before I even bit down, jerking back, but I hung on like a pitbull.
“Let go! Let go of me!” Keen’s voice was shrill, barely registering against the full-body sensory overload of the air-raid klaxon. I felt him groping for a weapon with his other hand, voice rising in pitch and volume as I ground the joint between my teeth until the cartilage splintered and crunched. Finger-crushing, unlike stabbing, hurts from the time it starts to the final wrench of the phalanx that dislocates the joint. I was vaguely aware of Keen hitting me, of the blows raining against my ribs and shoulder, but nothing registered until he jammed the fingers of his other hand into the wound in my shoulder. “Let go of me, you waste of space! I’m a Federal-”
“Fuck you!” I screamed, put my knees up against his abdomen, and shoved him off of me. Keen tried to catch himself on his bad hand, yelped in pain, somehow got to his feet, and finally pulled his pistol. He leveled it at my face, eyes hazy and wet with involuntary tears, and was about to pull the trigger when a spinning blur whirled past him and took off his right hand at the wrist. The Agent stared at the spurting mess of meat and bone in shock for all of a second before his eyes rolled back in his head. He swooned into a faint on the Yen-encrusted floor.
“Alexi!” It was Angkor. He ran to my side as I rolled to an elbow, wheezing, and spat. Something hard and white came out. A tooth, I thought numbly. How hilarious.
“Jenner. Zane. Let them out.” I gasped, voice deep and thick. Angkor helped me up to my knees. “Go!”
“You’re bleeding to death.” Angkor caught my shoulder in both hands, and I swung weakly at the back of his knee on reflex as he bent his will to the wound. There was a rippling, hot pain, then a numb warmth that spread through my arm. It spasmed as the severed nerves started to heal, enough relief that I was able to stand on my own.
“Get them.” I was weak, dizzy and sick, panting with the effort to breathe. “I have to find Binah.”
Angkor didn’t argue. He left me to get the Weeders out of their cages. I clumsily moved forward a step, then finally noticed the carnage wrought in the extraction room. There were bodies everywhere. Tomas was missing - fled, presumably. ANSWER fighters were mopping up. Led by Zarya, they were cleansing the Morphordian additions to the hyperbaric chamber, spraying them with backpacks and hoses, like the kind used to spray pesticide on weeds.
Keen was crawling across the floor, straining for his sword with the fingers he had left. I had a brief vision of stabbing him with it, over and over again, until arterial blood spurted and he stopped moving. He managed to clap his hand down over it as I stalked toward him, and looked at me with eyes red from tears and raw with hatred. “Sacratus adytum!”
I froze at the command word, a defensive word of power jerking my tongue. It never manifested. Keen disappeared in a flash of light. The afterimage lingered on the backs of my eyelids.
Binah’s panic broke through my fugue, and I instinctively swung in the direction of the freight room door, pushing past someone—I didn’t see who—on my way to reach her. Her meowing was a dark blue sawing sound. I barely needed vision to find her in the piles of empty crates and refuse in here. When she saw me, her cries grew in intensity and depth, a rolling miiaww, miiaww, miaawww.
“Binah, Binah. Calm.” I came to a stop in front of her and unlocked her carrier cage with shaking hands. She clung to my skin with claws when I pulled her out of it, still meowing with frantic terror while I petted her, rubbed my cheek against her head, rocked her gently. “My kitten, my girl... it’s alright.”
She was still in good condition: physically, at least. Thirsty and hungry. I closed my eyes and buried my nose in her soft fur, embracing her small, lithe form with deep urgency. She helped with the sensory pain, somehow. Some part of me, deep down, was howling at the fresh memories of Ron’s and Otto’s screams, Keen’s cold Final Solution-style attitude. The mere thought of something dissolving Kutkha made my stomach quake with a weird, paradoxically erotic sensation, disgust so profound that it was interwoven with a kind of fascinated lust.
Binah grasped my head with her small paws and began to frantically groom my nose, and that, out of everything, made me break down. The tears flowed as I stroked her, the conversation I’d had with Norgay playing through my head like a recording. He’d started with a warning.
“What I ask you to do would destroy anyone else. But with the Rhizomes, your courage, your abilities, and your background, you are uniquely qualified to achieve what no one else has been able to do.”
“What’s that?”
“I want you to break into the Vigiles prison. And I want you to bring the place down.”
“You think that’s possible?”
“Yes. This is a very difficult thing to ask of someone, Alexi. It will be humiliating and degrading, hard, and the price for failure is very steep. But you face a choice between this temporary pain and the inevitability of the Engine. I ask you to take pain over the destruction of you, your world, your blood-brother. We MUST learn where this prison is, and stop them before it’s too late. In return, we will help you hunt down Yaroshenko and Vassily. If you die, then I swear we will still take them out.”
“I’ll think about it,” I had replied. “But I don’t know. I have no idea who you are or why I should trust anything you say. How do I know you’re not setting me up to be dumped?”
“Because deception is not in our best interest,” Norgay had said. “GOD is a massive multicellular being, Alexi. Individual parts of a complex whole are only useful when those parts are all functioning together. Spotting a Morphorde is easy when you think of it this way, because the NO is inherently pointless and purposeless. Why do Morphorde do what they do? We don’t know, and neither do they. They have
no true purpose, except very abstract things, like ‘transcendence’ or ‘power’ or ‘hygiene’ or ‘destruction’. Not stewardship. Not growth, unless it is rampant, cancerous growth without end. They will never profess a commitment to digging the truth out of history or understand why we need to preserve oceans or save animals from extinction, or the conservation of precious, rare cenotes untouched since Mayan times. There is a theme underlying all of the practical goals of life and livingness. Do you know what it is?”
“Yes.” I’d answered. “Freedom.”
“Almost correct. The theme of all life is submission.”
I’d frowned, not understanding. “Submission is the opposite of freedom.”
“All beings are in service to something,” Norgay replied. “Every cell in your body submits to the greater whole. Every urge you have makes you a servant to it. You depend on the animals, microbes, and plants who have died for your continued life, even as they are of service to you. Altruism exists in nature for that reason. Freedom is merely the exercise of choice within the confines of life—life which would not exist without submission and interdependence. Why do you think the most common motivator of HuMan Morphorde is transcendence? Bodilessness? Nothingness?”
I’d wanted to disagree, but hadn’t been able to think of anything to say in reply.
“Morphorde hate choice, because for them, the answer is always ‘no’. The act of working for the greater good is inevitably an act of submission that requires someone to say ‘yes’. And that’s another easy way to pick a Morphorde: they embody mastery and denial. To them, submission is degrading, and those who submit are less worthy than those who oppress. Torture and rape are their primary weapons for this reason. To us, submission is the backbone of everything we do. It is something you can only understand with time.”
“How does that work out for a soldier? They can’t submit to the enemy.”
“But they do. What is courage, Alexi?”
“The willingness to do battle against the things that frighten you, no matter what.”
“The soldier submits to his command, his command to the needs of the war. And through it all, the bravest are the ones who continue to say ‘yes’ – not just to the orders they receive, but to their own consciences and the needs of their comrades, and to the actions they must take on the field.”
“So you want me to serve you, then?”
“I want you to understand that all submit to the inevitability of being part of the future of your Cell. GOD is suffering an infection that will become fatal if the NO-thing burrows its way into GOD’s core, and we HuMans can choose to serve it, or resist being a part of its journey. I don’t want a servant. I want someone smart enough to know when they’re on the bottom rung of the ladder, they get to choose when to knock it down and kill everyone at the top in a single master stroke. Extract our last Keeper from this ‘Delta Site’ and pull the place down on their heads, and we will do everything in our power to aid you.”
“Bat’ko!”
I turned to see Zarya at the head of a three-person team. She strode toward me from the doors, the visor of her helmet lifted to show her face. “Bat’ko! We have to go! The Army is here!”
Binah was purring now, kneading my neck with her claws to soothe herself. I breathed in the cat’s familiar dust-and-sunlight smell, exhaling against her coat. “I’m sorry, girl. You’re not going to see me for a while again, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Come on, Alexi!”
I turned, and held the Siamese tightly in my arms as I broke into a jog. We met Zarya halfway, following her as she pivoted and ran for the door with us in tow. ANSWER was rallying inside the digester room, forming rank. Jenner, Zane, and Talya milled around with them. Zane was pale and drawn, skin still ashy blue-brown. Talya was weeping, her arms wrapped around Zane’s waist. Angkor was with Jenner, still in her tiger form.
“Angkor.” I went to him and Jenner, Binah cradled in my arms. “Jenner. Talya, Zane. Thank goodness you’re alright.”
Talya looked up at me, her face a red, puffy mask of grief. “R-Rex. They killed him, Rex. T-They killed him!”
The tiger turned her nose toward the smashed digester and moaned.
I touched Angkor on the shoulder and went to Talya to kiss her cheek. She hugged me with hunched shoulders, frightened and in pain, and only let me go when Binah began to squirm. Zane came to a stop in front of us, solemn and glassy-eyed with dissociation.
I opened my mouth to speak: to tell them that Ron had probably betrayed them, that he’d been in on it, but the words faltered. In the end, they would all have been victims of Keen’s purge. “I’m sorry we didn’t make it in time.”
“You made it. That’s the point.” Talya wrapped an arm around Zane’s waist. He was still in shock. “Thank you. Angkor, we… we…”
“Don’t worry about it.” Angkor had drawn up beside us while Zarya got everyone else together. “We have to go. Doug’s reporting that a military helicopter is preparing to land on us.”
“Okay, time to move! Move out!” Zarya called to the assembled ranks. “We have to get out of here, ASAP!”
I bowed my head. “I have to stay.”
“What?” Angkor’s expression immediately shifted toward suspicion. “Alexi-”
I drew a deep breath, the precursor to all magic, and stood up straight. “Take Binah, find my things, and go,” I said. “I have to stay here.”
The tiger reared up on her haunches, smoothly morphing back into Jenner’s much smaller, wiry human form. “Rex, don’t be a fucking idiot.”
“I have to, just this once.” I held Binah out to Angkor, trying not to look at Jenner. She was nude. “Angkor... this cat means the world to me. If I know that you, Zarya, and she are alive, I’ll stay alive. Protect her.”
Angkor’s eyes darkened, and his lips parted as if in surprise for a moment before he nodded. He took the purring cat from my arms. She looked back at me with innocent, predatory, loving eyes, her throat still vibrating. Binah somehow understood my intent... and was at peace with it.
“You took the Delta Site mission,” he said, matter-of-factly.
“Protect her.” I lay one hand on his arms, and one on Binah’s head. “And tell Norgay I said yes.”
“Rex? What’s going on?” Talya’s voice was trembling, but before she could say anything else, Zane rested a hand on her shoulder. She fretfully glanced at him, wide-eyed and stricken. “What do you mean-?”
“Leave it, Kitten.” Jenner had her arms crossed, her face hard and resolute. “I got no idea what you’re talking about, Rex, but I want you to know something. You showed real class back there. You always have. I love you like a brother. Whatever you’re up to, we’ll be waiting for you.”
“We’ll find you,” Angkor said to me, his voice heating like a brand. “I swear we’ll find you. And we won’t let them have her, or you, or this world.”
“Bat’ko!” Zarya called from across the room. “Angkor! Come on!”
My chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with my aching ribs. Tongue-tied, I bowed my head to her and took a couple of steps closer to Angkor. When Binah was pressed between our chests, I kissed him chastely on the mouth. He breathed softly against my lips, almost a sigh.
An explosion rocked the ceiling overhead. I pushed Angkor and Binah away, and turned around. “Go.”
“Bat’ko!”
“Leave it, Zarya!” Angkor called back to her. “It’s a directive!”
I glimpsed Zarya’s worried expression as they reached the door and hurried out. She was the last thing I saw before the roof caved in overhead.
Twenty or so soldiers in black fatigues dropped to the ground, scattering into teams. More burst out of the freight room, having entered through the truck delivery doors. The room was still charged with Phi, the air humming. I closed my eyes, felt for the course of magic, and meshed my two best spells together.
The debris and water pouring in rushed to the doorwa
y where ANSWER had fled, plugging in the gaps, sealing edges and locks. I went to my knees and laced my hands behind my head while the magic burned through me, barricading the door with scrap metal, ice, and hardened dust. The remaining energy I had left with the shockwave, and the resistance I’d mustered against the siren wail collapsed entirely as the gift of Zarya’s Phi drained from my body.
The soldiers rushed me, shouting for me to stop casting, lie down, stay still. I stayed where I was, unresisting as they surrounded me, and waited.
Joshua Keen and Tomas Black walked out from the freight room with an escort, their faces drawn into hard, grim lines. Keen was stony and jowly. Eyes sunken, face pale, still covered in blood, he was riding a high, some form of drug replacing the pain of his severed hand with numb vigor. His wrist was bandaged. Tomas looked... unwell. Pinched and hard, like a dry pastry left in the sun for too long.
“You.” Keen was still weak, still hurting, but his voice was cold and clear. He pulled his pistol with the left hand, cocking the hammer. “You did this. This was your plan all along, wasn’t it?”
“Surprise,” I replied. “Remember that thing about the stick-and-box trap?”
His eyes narrowed to furious slits. “Who do you work for?”
Submit. “I work for myself, stumpy.”
“You arrogant…” The Agent’s eyes were mad with rage as he lined up the shot.
“But I do still know where the Shard is,” I lied calmly. “And if you kill me here and your superiors rip out your memories during their review-”
“Shut up.”
“-They’ll see you putting yourself above your organization,” I continued. “And the next thing you know, your brothers will be throwing you into the meat grinder or the crematorium or whatever it is your ‘knighthood’ uses to kill Phitometrists like us.”
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