Fight the Darkness

by W. J. May

  Jason fought back a grin. “Disagreement over his-and-his closets?”

  “...something like that.”

  Jason chuckled and raised his hands. “Come here. Let me fix it.”

  Tristan leaned as far back against the couch as he could. “No, I’d rather not.”

  “Don’t be a coward, Tris. Get over here.”

  “No, I think it’ll probably just heal on its—”

  “Do you want to show up in Munich tomorrow looking like you got a brick to the face?”

  “Yeah, it might add some character.”

  There was movement on the couches, punctuating the increasingly-desperate one-sided conversation, and Simon snickered quietly as he watched.

  “No, Jason. I’m serious, man, come on. Dude, seriously, stop. I’ll take care of it myself, alright, I swear. It’s going to be—MOTHER OF THOR!”

  There was a gruesome crunch, and the nose popped back into place. Tristan cried out in pain, before promptly sneezing blood all over his copy of the mission report.

  It’s official. There’s no turning it back in now.

  Jason clapped his hands in the air. “And with that...I bid you all a good night.”

  “Wait,” Simon scrambled up after him, “you’re leaving?”

  Jason didn’t break pace as he headed down the stairs. By now, Tristan had recovered enough to follow along behind after Simon. “You guys don’t need me here. You know what you’re doing. I have to get back to the school.”

  It made sense, but, their safety net...was leaving? Both Tristan and Simon shot each other a panicked look before they started talking at the same time.

  “But what if we need some help?”

  “What if there’s something we missed or you forgot to tell us?”

  “I’d really like to go over the blueprints again in the morning.”

  “There’s an extra guest room you can use down the hall...”

  They trailed off as Jason turned around at the top of the front porch. He looked fondly between them, one after the other, before speaking in a steady, reassuring voice.

  “You don’t need help,” he repeated calmly. “You’ve got this. There was nothing we missed, and, if anything out of the ordinary comes up, I’m not your call anymore. You know who to call.”

  Keene. Although he seemed like a decent man, the name was suddenly dirt to Simon.

  “You memorized the number?” Jason demanded quietly. “Say it back to me. Both of you.”

  Simon and Tristan shuffled their weight and looked down at their shoes, mumbling the string of numbers in despondent unison.

  Jason pursed his lips and nodded with a small smile. “Well, that’s it then. I’m off.”

  Simon dropped his eyes to the floor, while Tristan glumly held out the second bag Jason had carried in with him. “Well, here,” he said glumly. “You almost forgot this.”

  Jason’s eyes lit up with surprise, and he pulled it open. “Actually, you were right, Simon,” he murmured. “I almost did forget something.”

  He pulled out a tiny liquid vial, along with two glistening syringes. They twinkled innocently on his hand in the moonlight, while Simon and Tristan looked at them blankly.

  “What is that?” Simon asked.

  “This,” Jason held it up, “is for if the two of you get into trouble. The kind of trouble you can’t easily get out of.”

  It took a second, but suddenly the vial and the syringes made sense. Tristan took an automatic step back as Simon’s mouth fell open with a gasp.

  “Are you serious?” he exclaimed, his voice dropping to a horrified hush. “Like...cyanide?”

  “No,” Jason chuckled, understanding the reason for their fright, “nothing like cyanide. These won’t kill you—they’ll put you into a deep sleep. It’s only been used on a few occasions. Like when an agent had to smuggle himself over a long distance, or fake his own death to avoid getting taken. Just three times, I think, in the last three hundred years.” He set them carefully into each of their hesitant hands. “They’re collected at the end of each mission... odds are you’ll never even think about using them.”

  They both nodded automatically, as they were certainly expected to do, but the two little needles weighed heavy in each of their hands, symbolic of a much heavier weight that had been placed upon their shoulders.

  Jason’s face softened as he watched them. “You’re going to be fine,” he said again. “Both of you.” They shared a parting look before he clapped them on the arms and started off across the street to his car. “Good luck, and do me proud! I’ll see you when you get back.”

  Simon’s head snapped up. “You will?”

  “Oh yeah.” Jason glanced over his shoulder with a grin. “You guys aren’t done with Guilder yet. You’ve still got training. I’m actually thinking of putting ‘cooking’ into the rotation. Heaven forbid you ever get assigned a mission where you have to make grilled cheese...”

  IT WASN’T THAT SIMON didn’t sleep well that night, it’s that he didn’t sleep at all. Judging by the sound of light footsteps pacing back and forth across the hall, Tristan wasn’t sleeping either.

  The morning came before either of them would have liked, and at five o’clock sharp they met downstairs in the kitchen.

  The air still reeked of their disastrous almost-dinner from the night before, but the coffee maker was still working. Tristan was already hovering in front of it when Simon came in.

  “Hey,” he said shortly, his voice tight with stress, “coffee?”

  “Yeah, thanks.” Simon took the cup and sipped it gratefully as Tristan leaned against the far counter and did the same.

  Neither one knew what to say. Neither one knew what to do. Their tickets were in their bags, their bags were stacked by the door, and thanks to Jason’s impromptu workshop last night they’d be surprised if they couldn’t somehow speak German. All that was left to do was wait.

  “Do you think we should get curtains?” Tristan asked suddenly.

  Simon choked on a gulp of coffee. “I’m sorry...what?”

  “Curtains. For the house.”

  The two of them stared around at the bare windows with wide, unblinking eyes.

  “My mom always said the first thing you put in your house is curtains,” Tristan continued quietly, fingers twitching nervously against his mug. “Maybe we should get some.”

  In a rare moment of empathy, Simon set aside his own nerves and smiled reassuringly at his friend. “Yeah, that sounds good. We can pick some up when we get back.”

  Tristan glanced up at him and nodded slowly.

  “Yeah. When we get back.”

  A horn honked from outside, and suddenly they were out of time. The mugs were set in the sink, still steaming, and they picked up their bags by the front door.

  “You ready to do this?” Tristan asked as they stared down the steps at the waiting cab.

  Simon clapped him on the shoulder. “Born ready. You?”

  Tristan grinned in spite of himself. “Whatever happens, I’m sure I’ll end up doing it better than you.”

  WHEN SIMON SIGNED UP to join a covert intelligence agency, he assumed he would be travelling around in a style fit to match. When crossing international borders, for example, he had imagined something like a private jet. Machine gun dropping down where there should have been landing gear. Joystick controller that both he and Tristan instinctively knew how to fly. What he didn’t expect was—

  “The train?” Both he and Tristan glanced down at their tickets, numbly, as they stood inside the busy station. People knocked past them left and right, thoroughly unaware that the men they were hitting were about to save the world from brainwashing conformity. “Really? They’re sending us to Munich on the train? Can we even get there by train?”

  “We’re about to find out,” Tristan replied, handing his ticket and passport to the attendant waiting by the side. Simon did the same.

  The older gentleman looked over their papers with an expert eye, before
croaking out the same standard questions.

  “Carrying any fruits or vegetables with you?”

  “No,” they said in unison.

  “Going to Munich on business or pleasure?”

  “Business,” Tristan said confidently.

  “Pleasure,” Simon blurted at the same time.

  They shared a panicked look, before turning back to the attendant in supplication. The man narrowed his eyes and Simon flashed him a winning smile, cocking his head towards his friend.

  “He takes his job much more seriously than me.”

  After a few halting apologies, half in German, half in English, both Simon and Tristan finally made it onto the train. They had been granted a private compartment, and Simon spread their blueprints over the little table as Tristan locked the door firmly behind them.

  “Pleasure?” he accused. “We’re going to kidnap a guy, and you call it pleasure?”

  “It’s better than the alternative, isn’t it? What exactly would you have told him our ‘business’ in Munich was?” Simon snapped back. “Now get over here and quiz me.”

  The rest of the trip passed without event. It was about nine hours to get to Munich, and another two after that to locate the studio apartment the Council had acquired for them to stay the night. They were to sleep for a few hours and infiltrate the lab at around three in the morning, when there was guaranteed to be the least number of casualties.

  There were two small beds, pushed against opposite sides of the room, and neither boy said much as they undressed quickly and got ready for bed. The tension had been mounting the closer they got to Germany, and now that they were here it threatened to be enough to consume them.

  Once again, Simon decided to take the reins.

  “You know,” he began teasingly, “we could always go and try to find one of those famous German ale-houses when this whole thing is over...”

  He trailed off suddenly as his eyes focused on his friend. A hundred long, jagged scars littered his back, crisscrossing all over his tan skin. It looked like he had been run over by a dozen trucks. Dragged behind a chariot over shards of glass. Surely nothing he could live through. How had he never noticed them before?

  “Tris,” he said quietly. Tristan looked over, and Simon gestured to his back. “Is that all from the fall? I thought Dr. Stein healed you...”

  Tristan glanced down and quickly slipped on a shirt. “Oh—he did. Well, he did everything that he could. Said the limits of ink could only be stretched so far. I still go see him every week for a standing appointment. It’s gotten better. He says they should vanish entirely in time.”

  Simon was shocked. He had no idea Tristan had been doing that. And seeing the scars with his own eyes...?

  By the time Simon had raced after Jason to the hospital, they had already cleaned off most of the blood. The contusions and tears littering Tristan’s countenance had already been superficially healed; that initial image of him being dragged out of the rubble was a fast-fading memory.

  What Simon remembered most about his time in the hospital was how perfect he looked, actually. Perfectly intact. It was infuriating. Like nothing was wrong and he had only just fallen asleep, ready to wake at any moment. He didn’t remember anything like this.

  “I’m sorry,” he heard himself saying. It wasn’t planned. In fact, even though Simon blamed himself for the fall entirely it was a secret he had sworn to keep to the grave. He kept it now, only he couldn’t help but apologize in at least some trivial way. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  Tristan glanced over in surprise, and his face softened. “It’s cool. I’m alive, aren’t I?” He flashed a grin that Simon reluctantly returned. “And who knows, maybe after we catch this guy we can force him to help me get my memories back. Figure out why I was stupid enough to go up there in a storm to begin with.”

  There was a sudden tightening in Simon’s stomach, but he forced a smile. “Yeah, maybe.”

  It was on that note that the two of them set their alarms, and bid each other goodnight. One going to bed feeling slightly uplifted, the other feeling deeply unsettled.

  Simon tried his best to sleep. Tristan seemed to pass out almost immediately. Simon knew he’d also be needing all this strength for what was about to come, but no matter what he did his brain kept right on spinning. For some reason, it was a quote that Keene had said that kept looping through his mind. A description of their target.

  ‘According to our source, he’s been working on creating some sort of device—the kind of device that could render a group of people sufficiently helpless to whatever message he tried to instill.’

  Simon remembered the feeling of relief that had washed over him when Tristan woke up in the hospital and didn’t remember they’d had a fight. He remembered how many times he had sat in a Guilder classroom, wishing there was some way he could just force everyone to get on the same page as him—force them to believe what was right.

  Who knows? Maybe there is...

  Chapter 12

  “SIMON.” THERE WAS A rustling of sheets. “Simon, wake up.”

  Simon blinked open his eyes to see Tristan staring back at him. He was already dressed in the standard black PC uniform—black pants, black vest, black shoes, his golden brown hair stuffed unceremoniously under a beanie.

  “Our alarm went off. It’s time to go.” He held out a second beanie to Simon, a symbolic invitation, floating tentatively in the air. “You ready?”

  Simon took the beanie. “Let’s do this.”

  The studio the PC had organized for them was in a bad part of town. On the outskirts of the old industrial center. Littered with gangs, and drugs, and homeless fires—all scattered around the abandoned train tracks. Not exactly ideal quarters for their first mission, but they had been chosen for a reason. It was only a two-minute drive from the supposed entrance of the lab. The boys were going on foot, but with their ink it was only three-minute run.

  “You want my tatù?” Tristan asked quietly as they headed outside, bypassing the industrial center and heading for the forested country just beyond. There were a few shadowy-looking strangers milling about, but no one paid them a second glance. “Or do you want to keep Jason’s?”

  Considering it was an obvious question, Simon honestly hadn’t given it any thought. He was lucky he had been sent here with Tristan tonight, and not someone like Jacob. It wouldn’t do to have two sets of passive ink. And Simon wanted all the firepower he could get his hands on.

  “Jason’s,” he started to say, but he changed his mind halfway through, “no—yours.”

  There wasn’t a thing in the world that could approach Jason’s speed, but the speed only came in strategic bursts. It wasn’t sustainable. Not to mention Simon was going to want every tool in his arsenal tonight. Speed, strength, and agility. It also didn’t hurt that Tristan’s was the ink he was most familiar with. It had become his unofficial default.

  With a quick nod, Tristan rolled up his sleeve and extended is arm into the space between them. A silent offering. And the beginnings of a pattern, a pre-game ritual.

  Simon took it and closed his eyes as the familiar burn laced up his arm. Already he could feel the raw energy of the fox dancing just below his skin. Ready to be released. Ready to prove to the world what it could do. He opened his eyes again with a slight smile. “Let’s do this.”

  They made the run in two and a half minutes, probably due to the nerves. Their spy gear worked exactly as it was supposed to, masking their every sound, but Simon was sharply aware of the edges of the syringe pressing hard against his chest.

  This is not a drill, he kept having to tell himself. Not some training exercise. This is the real thing. What happens tonight matters.

  Sure enough, the entrance to the lab was exactly where the blueprints indicated, nestled beneath a false canopy of shrubs to disguise it to anyone who happened to stumble by. Not that anyone would, so far out in the middle of nowhere. Simon had to hand it to this McAllister guy. He had
covered his tracks well. If it weren’t for the fact that he’d somehow made the mistake of getting on the PC’s radar, there was every chance he could have pulled the whole thing off and finished creating his device without anyone ever being the wiser.

  “You see the wire?” he asked Tristan in a breathless undertone. His voice barely carried past his own lips, but his friend heard it loud and clear.

  Tristan nodded as he knelt down in the tall grass and pulled a small set of clippers from the front pocket of his vest. Then, with a look of supreme concentration, he bypassed the false trip-wire and cut the second smaller one that was strung just behind. “That should do it,” he breathed.

  The two of them shared a tense glance as he reached down and wrapped his fingers around the handle to the wooden door that led down to the stairs.

  Moment of truth, it was now or never. They each pulled in a silent breath, offered a silent prayer. Then, in a sudden fluid movement, Tristan yanked up the lid.

  Nothing happened.

  Simon exhaled in relief as the two of them stared down into the darkness. Their first objective was complete. They hadn’t tripped the alarm.

  Now all they had to do was find this guy and pull him out of his little rabbit-hole.

  “After you,” Tristan said with a smile, gesturing to the inky blackness below.

  Simon’s eyes narrowed teasingly. “Oh, together would be fine. Partners, right?”

  Tristan laughed silently. “Fine. On three.”

  He lifted his fingers, and the two of them jumped at the same time. There was a swoosh of air, and a second later their feet were back on solid ground.

  Simon straightened up with a triumphant grin.

  There, that wasn’t so hard—

  CRASH!

  His head snapped up as the door above them slammed shut and locked firmly into place. At the same time, a screeching wail pierced the silence in the air. He and Tristan shared a panicked look as all around them whirling red lights flashed a warning on the wall.

  Intruder! Intruder!