Breach

by Eliot Peper

  Vasilios was different, a fighter on another level entirely. He had fans, glory, an agent. Real money rode on his matches. Real law enforcement tried to shut down his fights and usually failed because of generous bribes carefully applied by promoters. That he had special forces on his résumé might help explain Vasilios’s meteoric rise through the brackets.

  “If we could all take our places,” said Lowell.

  Lowell, Freja, Nisanur, and the rest sat on the second tier of stone benches running around the perimeter of the room. The tuxedoed enforcers retreated to stand on the floor directly in front of the lowest benches, clearing the central ring of sand. They didn’t holster their weapons, but they did lower them to their sides.

  The silence stretched like a rubber band. Emily was aware of her own breathing, the strange fact that she was still alive and that base terror could still manifest. Her stomach twisted. Her pulse was arrhythmic. Bile seared the back of her throat.

  Slowly, half expecting the goons to pack her full of lead, she released her hands from the back of her head. Nobody objected. Nobody moved. Reaching down, she scooped up a handful of sand and rubbed it between her palms. Then, rolling back onto her heels, she rose to her feet and turned around.

  Vasilios stood on the last step, as still and erect as a mast. His golden hair was tied back in a ponytail. His face was classically handsome but smooth, too smooth, as if he had arrived straight from a plastic-surgery theater. His eyes were chips of jade and there was something deeply unnerving about his gaze, as if the dragon from her father’s fairytale lurked in its green depths.

  He grinned when their eyes met, wide and toothy. Then he descended the final step onto the sand and shrugged off what looked like a short kimono. Shitagi. The word sprang into Emily’s mind, a relic of Rosa’s long obsession with samurai serials. Underneath, Vasilios wore nothing but a fundoshi, the long piece of white linen wound around his slender hips, tucked between his legs, and knotted at the back. Samurai diaper. Rosa had hated it when Emily called it that. Vasilios was not a big man, but his body was lean and muscled and he moved with an athlete’s grace. His skin was hairless and as glossy as his face, with pink patches that looked like they might have been grafted on recently.

  Reaching to the small of his back, Vasilios brought something around in front of him, a stick that he gripped with both fists. Then he pulled his fists apart and it wasn’t a stick but a short blade that he unsheathed, a wakizashi, the katana’s little sister. The curved steel glinted, displaying the grain of thousands of expert folds.

  Lowell applauded in delight. “I’m trying to remember that night at Rizal’s,” he said. “But the champagne was flowing, so I just hope I get this right.” His voice dropped to an affected baritone. “May fortune favor the bold.”

  Emily pushed her lucky glasses up her nose.

  Pitting her against the Greek was already hopeless. Giving him a blade and leaving her unarmed made it ridiculous. But this wasn’t a fight. This was a baroque execution.

  She remembered her mother’s reassuring instructions as they disassembled and reassembled the telescope, the murmur of her father’s stories under the stars. There was the unmooring shock of their deaths and the fierce joy of claiming her own independence. Then channeling that zeal into protecting others, and an unexpected softening as those others became a family she would do anything to defend. Fission. Her crusade and her honor diverging, splitting her apart and her new family with it. Darkness. The agony of protracted self-flagellation, turning her crusade inward, laying siege to her own soul. And then that most unexpected of prospects, the sliver of a chance of a new beginning. If this was where that new beginning would meet its premature end, Emily would hold nothing back. If this was to be a show, let it be a show.

  Cycling through her mental record collection, Emily selected Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock.” She didn’t need the feed for a song she knew by heart. Bambaataa had introduced the Roland 808 drum machine to hip-hop, and this particular rhythm was a lazy river in the heat of summer. The synth spiced everything up, dropping a kaleidoscopic lens over the entire piece. Staccato lyrical chants exploded over a groundbreaking mashup of electro, R&B, techno, and favela funk that inspired and prefigured decades of subsequent musical evolution. This was music to face the music to.

  Emily let the beats cascade through her body, relinquishing conscious control. She began to step, to move, to dance, enhancing the childlike liberty of her untethered movements.

  That inhuman grin was still plastered on Vasilios’s face. He sidestepped to match her, relaxed and unhurried. His cheeks flushed to a rosy pink. This was his element.

  They circled each other, the damp air electric.

  And then he struck. The attack came impossibly fast, a high kick that Emily only just managed to duck under. Too late, she realized the kick was a feint, and could do nothing as the wakizashi snaked in to taste first blood.

  Circling again.

  Blood dribbled down Emily’s deltoid, but the cut was extremely shallow, barely skin deep.

  Another strike, a triple feint, and this time he drew a fiery line across her left breast. But something was off. He was too good. She hadn’t been fast enough—he could have sunk the blade into her heart.

  Circling.

  Emily came at him with a low kick as he was stepping across the stream, hoping that she might catch him off balance. But he turned his leg to deflect the kick off his calf, and steel flashed.

  Only then, panting as they resumed their circling and reaching up to touch the superficial wound on her cheek, did Emily understand. Vasilios wasn’t fighting her at all. He was playing with her. He was ex–special forces. His name sat at the top of the global fight-club rankings. She was a civilian who had trained under a mediocre martial artist late in life, fought nobodies in a backwater ring. Emily was hopelessly outmatched, and Vasilios wanted to sate himself on her death, revel in her suffering with predatory glee.

  It was the same power trip that petty bureaucrats savored when they raised impediment after impediment to her teenage autonomy. It was the apathy that drove so many people to disenfranchise themselves through cynicism. It was the self-conscious free riding with which Lowell and his cohorts in this room had forged their dominions. It was the cat toying with the mouse just for the hell of it. More so even than the prospect of her own death, it was the one thing Emily could not abide.

  She had to find a chink in Vasilios’s armor. She had to make him, them, pay.

  Or die trying.

  Thoughts churned, far outstripping Bambaataa’s lazy beat. The ex-lobbyist Lowell referenced while announcing Vasilios had to be Dag, but Emily had no idea what he was referring to. Lowell had said this took place ten years ago, after Emily had arrived on Camiguin. Apparently she had missed a lot. But she had been inside Dag’s feed when he visited Lowell and Freja on an Arctic oil platform years before that, when he was their partner, not their prisoner.

  “Eternal twilight,” she called out in a singsong voice following the beats of her mental soundtrack. “Purple and orange and green, the fiery ball of the sun skimming along the horizon like a child skipping a stone across a pond, but never sinking, never dropping below the endless gray-blue of the ocean.”

  Dag had struggled to come to terms with how they were hijacking the feed. Even just the possibility of a breach was a lot to take in. There are two broad families of martial arts, she had explained to Dag. Hard forms, like karate, use direct strikes and meet force with force. You might aim to break an opponent’s arm with a block. Soft forms are all about using the minimum force possible to deflect an opponent’s attack to their disadvantage. Instead of blocking, you might redirect a kick to throw your opponent off balance. In the fight over ideas, we use the softest of soft forms. We plant seeds and nurture them to maturity. We encourage potential opponents to take our side of their own volition. In the past thirteen years, Emily had reverted to a hard form. But there was no way she could beat Vasilios at his own game.<
br />
  He came at her and Emily threw herself to the side, landing hard in the sand and popping back up. Blood oozed from a fresh cut on her thigh.

  “You know it’s going to be freezing,” she continued. “A cold that makes your bones ache, that leaches all vestiges of hope. But they don’t tell you about the humidity, how the air is thick and viscous, how moving through it is like pressing yourself through solid ice, how the wind cuts like a knife. That knife.” She pointed to the wakizashi. “And how, staring out over that slate sea, watching the dirty bergs float on groundswell and cargo haulers traverse this remotest of shipping lanes, that it’s beautiful in a rugged, alien way, that its sheer natural savagery illuminates your own fragile humanity.”

  Another strike. Another dodge. A burning trace across her shoulders.

  Emily remembered waking Dag up in the middle of the night with mugs of steaming cocoa—hopefully she had added sufficient quantities of marshmallows that time—and dragging him out to stare up at the cosmos. Even actors have a choice, she had told him. Once you know there’s a script, you can choose your own inflections. You can learn to improvise. You can make the play better. Understanding how things came to be frees us to imagine new possibilities. That’s part of what our whole effort here is all about. Ultimately, the only power we have is to choose how we see the world.

  “And rising from that hostile sea like a leviathan, aviation lights blinking and paint peeling, is a miracle of engineering, a symbol of our endeavor to conquer an environment that once confined us: an oil platform,” she said. “The helipad, the cargo elevators, the cabins and stairwells and control rooms, the endless branching corridors, turning back in on themselves like an industrial labyrinth.”

  Vasilios wasn’t smiling anymore.

  A blur of slices. Emily leapt back, hitting the chest of one of the tuxedoed guards who grunted and shoved her back into the ring, blood pouring from a crosshatch of slashes across her torso, mixing with the glitter, turning her into a sparkling wax candle that dripped crimson.

  She would only have one chance. Making her gambit too early would mean certain death.

  “And there’s this odd thing about labyrinths that we all know deep in our hearts, even if we pretend not to,” she said. “There is always something living in the center. We reach a dead end, but there’s a whiff of sulfur. We turn a corner to see a monster, only to realize that it’s our reflection. We open a door, and the walls are covered in gore.” Emily wiped her hands across the cuts, smeared the blood across her face, and then licked each finger one at a time, pretending to savor the sharp tang of iron. “We can run, we can hide, but we can never, ever escape.”

  The wakizashi spiraled in, her naked skin a canvas for its violent calligraphy.

  Identity was narrative, and if you were careful, you could unravel the threads and knit them back together in a new pattern. Emily couldn’t face Vasilios without Pixie. Pixie couldn’t face Vasilios without Emily. Vasilios couldn’t beat her if she could find herself in him.

  “Look at me, Vasilios,” Emily screamed, forcing herself to meet his emerald gaze. “I know what’s in the center of things, I know who is in the center of things, I know the Minotaur waiting in your labyrinth. If I were real, how could I possibly know his name, the one you were tasked to protect, the one who disappeared into thin air, the reason you are here at the end of the world, at the end of time? Dag Calhoun. Dag Calhoun.” She stepped toward him, conjuring the memory of every bad trip she’d ever had, summoning the ecstasy and the agony of every existential crisis, invoking the wondrous terror of infinity. She opened her eyes wide, contorted her face, and stuck out her tongue in her best demonic impression. “Tell me! How could I possibly know that? How could I possibly know his name? You pathetic little maggot. Don’t you get it? Fighting on a global circuit? Shadowy visitations on sleepless nights? A cave under a mansion in the mountains? None of this is real. The past ten years never happened. You. Are. Still. On. The. Rig. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t kill me. You are me. I am you. We are each other, you dumb fuck. Killing me is killing yourself.”

  Vasilios’s eyes glitched. An inarticulate roar tore itself from his throat, and he charged. This time, his attack had no grace. It was raw, desperate, fueled by incandescent rage.

  Emily broke her rhythm, forcing herself to move faster than she ever had. She mirrored Vasilios, charging directly toward him instead of the sidesteps, ducks, and dodges she’d survived with so far. As the blade came hissing down in a vicious overhead cut, she threw herself at him, getting inside the arc of the wakizashi, snatching her lucky glasses off and snapping the right temple from the frame.

  Getting this close was suicide. He could wrap her in his arms and crush her in a deadly embrace from which there would be no escape. But then his glistening chest hit her like a freight train, she stabbed the temple into his pec, and the auto-injector released. His arms came down to trap her and he squeezed the breath from her lungs, laughing madly, a man believing himself the victor, thinking he might just have rediscovered sanity. It took three heartbeats for the fast-acting neurotoxin to cross the blood-brain barrier. Only then did his muscles seize.

  If there was one thing Emily had learned, it was that luck was something you made for yourself.

  CHAPTER 32

  Emily heaved, kicking up sand as she thrust forward. Foam oozed onto her head from Vasilios’s mouth as his body twitched against her. Time was short. It would only take them a few seconds to figure out that something was wrong.

  But Vasilios was heavy with ropy muscle, and Emily almost lost her footing in the sand. She howled at the top of her lungs as her vision narrowed. She was Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill forever. She was Atlas holding the world on his shoulders. She was Pixie and she was Emily Kim, and if Vasilios hadn’t been able to kill her, she wasn’t going to let his corpse finish the job.

  Like a rugby player rucking over a loose ball, Emily threw herself and Vasilios into one of the guards standing around the edge of the ring. As before, the guard tried to shove them both back onto the sand but wasn’t prepared for the deadweight of Vasilios’s shuddering body. As they both went down, Emily slid out from Vasilios’s embrace and snatched the wakizashi from his spasming fingers.

  Frozen in disbelief, Lowell was seated on the second tier of benches, less than a meter away. The rest of the guards had no clear line of fire.

  Emily leapt.

  In a split second, she was behind him, locking her legs around his waist, pressing the razor-sharp blade to his throat, and bringing her lips to his ear. “I warned you”—she whispered—“to keep your ghosts at bay.”

  A moment of perfect silence. Even her imaginary soundtrack had ceased.

  “Do you want to die today?” she asked.

  His entire body was trembling so badly his teeth chattered and his fat jiggled. The masqueraders had every gun trained on them. The other guests were sliding along the benches to the far side of the room. Vasilios’s corpse was convulsing on the blood-soaked sand.

  “I asked you a question,” she said. “You’ve got a nice thing going here. Big house. Pretty ladies. A gang of megalomaniacal friends. Whatever special level of hell you’ve earned a ticket to probably won’t stack up. But who am I to say?”

  Lowell gurgled, and Emily felt his Adam’s apple bob under the wakizashi.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time because it’s really best to be sure about these things,” she said. “Normally, certain death is rather, well, certain. What you just witnessed is the exception that proves the rule. So, Mr. Harding, do you want to die today?”

  “No,” said Lowell. “Please, no.”

  “Ahh,” said Emily. “I remember you saying something rather unkind about begging for mercy earlier this evening. But you know what? Fuck it. I’m willing to give the Golden Rule a shot and treat others how I want to be treated.”

  Lowell let out a muffled sob. Tears ran down his cheeks and splattered onto the blade, rinsing away
her blood.

  “There, there,” said Emily. “I’m working with you. We’re on the same page now, buddy. You don’t want to die today, and I’m willing to consider the possibility of not opening your throat. That, as the therapist you so badly need would say, is progress. But if we’re going to get through this, we’re going to have to do it together. Think you can handle that?”

  He nodded awkwardly, trying to keep his neck perfectly still.

  “What a trooper! I knew you had it in you. Lowell Harding knows how to pivot when the winds of change blow. You’ve never been one to go to the wall for anything or anyone except yourself.” She cinched her legs tighter. “Now stand.”

  “What?”

  “Stand.”

  Leaning forward to support her weight, Lowell rose shakily to his feet.

  Emily raised her voice to address the room. “My dear masqueraders, please drop your fucking weapons.”

  They hesitated, and she pulled the blade a little tighter, drawing blood.

  “Do what she says,” shrieked Lowell.

  The guns hit the sand with muted thumps.

  “A little slow on the uptake,” said Emily. “But you got there eventually. I’d give it a C plus, but hey, that’s still passing.” She adjusted herself slightly to secure her piggyback position. “Now we’ve got a party raging upstairs, and you seem like just the kind of dickwads who enjoy crowd control more than dancing, so I’m going to give you the opportunity to shine. You’re going to go up those stairs with Mr. Harding here right behind you, and then you’re going to cut us a path through the shenanigans, straight out the front door, and down to the dock. Capisce, assholes?”

  They exchanged looks.

  “Do it!” said Lowell.

  Vasilios gave one final gurgle. His face stretched into a horrific asymmetrical grimace, his back locked in an arch, and his extremities twisted at unnatural angles. The temple from Emily’s lucky glasses stuck out of his chest like an arrow’s fletching.