In Veritas

by C. J. Lavigne

  Jihan starts to crouch over the fallen man and Verity says, quickly, “He’s only doing his job.” She isn’t certain whether the other woman will listen; Jihan, as always, is as smoothly unreadable as a porcelain doll. The other woman straightens, though, at the foot of the bed, and stands looking at the cop, then at the window. Outside, Verity can see nothing but half-clouded sky, marked by the fading orange of a sunset moving toward twilight.

  When Jihan goes too long without moving, Verity ventures, “Did Colin ask you? What’s ... what’s happening?”

  Deerlike, the other woman whips her head around and stares at Verity. For a breath, Verity looks past the swirling haze of the hospital, the fire-and-iron chill of Jihan’s presence, and she sees Jihan’s shattered eyes, an infinity of broken shards.

  She shivers.

  The throbbing in her head lingers, but is partially subsiding, forced back by necessity and the pounding of her heart. The sudden dimness of the room is helping.

  Verity thinks of the equipment dying all around them and tastes the last hints of ozone electricity. She realizes no one else is coming.

  Gently, she says, “Can you get me out of these, please?”

  Jihan stands poised in precise balance, fingers outstretched. One of her hands is frozen as though reaching for the weapon she without a doubt has hidden somewhere in the frayed bulk of her clothes. The kaleidoscope of Jihan’s gaze slides back to opaque reflection; Verity sees herself, wan and tousled amid moss-green sheets, then the sound of distant yelling washes across her vision and the moment is lost.

  Verity says, “Please.”

  She can’t see anymore, but she feels Jihan’s calloused fingers on her wrist, doing something quick and definitive to the cuffs. The restraint on her right wrist snaps open, then the left. The tubing attached to the back of Verity’s hand rips free as the needle is pulled from her flesh. She winces, then blinks until she can see. She fumbles to free her legs, pulling at velcro, then lowers the bars at the side of the mattress so she can slide off.

  When her feet hit the floor, she remembers her bare soles and the uncomfortable whisper of the hospital gown around her hips. “My clothes.” It takes her a rushing moment to stand. Her limbs shake. She is relieved to keep the floor steady.

  Jihan only moves soundlessly back to the door. She waits while Verity checks the downed officer (who breathes, though it rasps) and the room’s only cupboard (which is empty). The second Verity slides her abandoned pillow under the officer’s head and straightens, Jihan has opened the door and slipped back into the hall.

  Verity finds the ties to the gown and tugs them to the front, pulling them into a rough knot at her hip. She considers the officer’s boots, but they are far too large, and the laces elude her in the dim light. She sighs, then follows Jihan.

  To the left, the hallway is dark; to the right, the remaining halogen lights die on the ceiling as Jihan passes beneath. The hospital wing is plunged into blackness, leaving only one window at the far end, shining as a beacon. A silhouette crosses in front of it, and Verity freezes before she sees a patient dragging wheeled tubing and the thin line of an IV tower.

  She knows Jihan has slipped back beside her because she can taste blood and steel. She whispers, “I can’t see,” and “Can you stop killing all this equipment? People need it.”

  A hand closes on Verity’s elbow, and she half jumps, but then she’s being pulled firmly down the hall and through a doorway. Jihan tugs her against the wall just before another pair of footsteps goes rushing by outside. “Why isn’t the generator kicking in?” yells a woman’s voice, and a man further down the corridor answers something indistinct.

  Another voice, this one querulous, says “Nurse?” from just behind them, but before Verity can muster a response, Jihan has tugged her back into the hall and away.

  The floor tiles are cool on Verity’s bare feet. Her footsteps sound of soft pine and the tremor of ripples on a pond. Jihan is silent, and her long fingers are strong and unforgiving. Her grip isn’t brutal, but neither does she give Verity time to find balance, or to adjust to each new sound or scent. When Verity manages a glance to the side, she catches only the metal sheen of the other woman’s eyes, focused somewhere down the hall and—Verity suspects—simultaneously somewhere else, impossibly far.

  “Too fast,” pleads Verity, but it makes no difference. She is propelled forward. The hall blurs breathlessly around her.

  Verity has no idea where they’re going—apart from, she assumes, ‘out’—but Jihan is assured. Four or five times more (Verity loses count), they pull to the side, ducking into some unlocked doorway just before a member of the hospital staff comes around a corner or emerges from a room just ahead. Flashlights approach them and die before coming in range. Voices curse.

  Only once, in the fading twilight that ekes through a window in some sleeping patient’s room, does Verity see the shine of the knife in Jihan’s hand. The voices outside are close. Someone is complaining about funding cuts.

  Greatly daring, Verity touches Jihan’s forearm and shakes her head. Jihan stares only at a dead computer on its cart, but she sighs, a slow and deliberate release of breath, then lifts her chin with apparent impatience and slides the blade away within her sleeve.

  It is something of an anti-climatic rescue, Verity supposes; they dart through shadows and slide down corridors. They wait what feels a long time in a supply closet before Jihan leads her down an unlit staircase—Verity stumbling, the other woman pulling her with unrelenting insistence—but they don’t encounter anyone else. They hear voices on the staircase above them, and someone calls down, “Jessica, is that you?,” but Verity doesn’t answer, and they keep going.

  The main lobby is a babble of voices; they emerge into a crowd and another nearby flashlight winks out. A red glowing sign reading EXIT flares and fades to black. A child is crying. Here, the last of the fading day comes through a glass wall and a set of revolving doors; wheeled cots have been gathered, and nurses are bustling. “The ICU is still running,” shouts a woman near the back hall, “and Emerg. Will anyone who needs immediate assistance please report to Emergency!”

  Verity tastes the slight gleam of a badge and freezes, but the officer only brushes by in front of her, a short, uniformed woman pushing her way through the crowd. “Everyone remain calm; ladies and gentlemen, we are here to help.”

  No one is looking for Verity. She thinks of her guard with a stab of guilt.

  “Stay away from Emergency,” she tells her general impression of Jihan. She can’t feel the floor beneath her feet anymore. Every step she takes is cushioned by the slip-slide sensation of angry patients; voices prick her skin. “I can’t,” she says, or wants to say, but the sound of her own words is lost in a rush of static. She thinks someone bumps into her.

  She starts again, one more time: taptap, tap, taptaptap, her fingers against her palm. She can barely perceive it, here with a chattering crowd that drips down her skin in cold mustard gobs. She blinks, and sees glass revolving. She blinks, and concrete paving is ridged and frozen beneath her feet. A bevy of flashing red lights nearly undoes her, and then Jihan is jerking her back a step as an ambulance whips past them. She thinks the lights falter as the vehicle comes close, but then the engine roars and it’s safely on the street.

  More lights denote ambulances lined up and waiting to evacuate off to the side. A wheeled cot is pushed past, a very pregnant woman sweating and wailing in the company of two efficient nurses.

  Verity ducks her head and goes in the other direction, hoping Jihan has no need to go too near the ambulances. She’s apparently right; they descend a short decline of sidewalk to the street. No one shouts after them.

  The chill evening bites at Verity’s skin. Night has fallen just enough for the streetlights to illuminate, but a short line of them is burned out just across the road. She is not surprised when they head that way; she is not surprised to see a small white face waiting, glowing with a hint of trapped moonlight, pale as
the snow on the ground.

  The world comes to her in dizzy waves. She’s still tapping her fingers—she thinks she is—but she’s lost the thread. Jihan is a razor presence next to her, then behind. A siren peals in the distance and drowns the street in crimson desperation.

  The usual evening’s traffic congestion is now snarled by emergency vehicles and strobed with flashing lights. There are four lanes for Jihan to pull Verity across, and as headlights fall across them, Verity is suddenly acutely aware of her thin hospital gown, her bare legs and her feet pinched by ice chips and loose asphalt (or by the stutter of an engine stalling; she isn’t sure).

  Some of the headlights die, and she’s grateful. A car horn honks.

  She blinks again.

  “Crap,” Colin is saying, and, “Here.”

  Clarity suffuses her: Verity is standing on the far side of the road from the hospital, past a snowy snarl of traffic now further complicated by two stalled cars. Jihan is just behind her. Colin has taken her hand; his fingers are small and trembling, fragile as twigs or the wings of a sparrow. She is warm and safe; she is cared for. She can breathe.

  It is hard for her to pull her own hand away, but she does. He doesn’t try to hold her. Her own shaking has subsided; her headache is gone.

  “Thank you.” Verity means it, but she hears the remorse in her own voice; the angel is a guttering candle. He stands leaning on his cane, his too-big coat fluttering at his legs in the nip of the evening breeze. His eyes burn like flame shining through sapphires, but his skin is stretched over bone, and even his feathered hair has gone dry. His lips are chapped. He shakes his head.

  “Here,” he says again. This time he holds out a second trench coat that’s folded over his arm. It’s nearly identical to the one he’s wearing. When Verity takes it, she is careful not to touch him.

  Even on her, the coat is too big, its hem brushing the ground and its broad shoulders swallowing her own. She discovers as she shrugs into it that someone has carefully sewn long slits down the back, to accommodate the wings she doesn’t have. The coat smells of stale vomit, feathers, and a hint of whiskey.

  “Thank you.” Verity supposes her conversation is getting repetitive. Colin only shakes his head again; with some awkwardness, he is shrugging a small pink backpack from one shoulder. Jihan takes it, and his lips tighten.

  “Pass that off to her, would you? Boots in there,” he adds, to Verity. “We’re not quite the same size, but it was a bit of a rush. Look, tell me now: did she kill anyone?”

  “I—” Verity pulls worn boots from the pack and glances back at the hospital. She sees the top three floors glaringly lit, other windows spotty, some sections black and dead. “I don’t think so,” she says slowly. “There was a guard. I think he’ll live. There were a lot of electronics that failed. Not all. I think she was, um ... being careful.” She is pulling at the laces of the boots. It is so easy to do two things at once, with the angel’s light in her.

  She doesn’t touch him again. She only pulls on the boots, which are slightly too small and nibble at her toes.

  “Thank Christ.” Something loosens in Colin’s stance, though he holds himself tensely, chin up, looking across the street as though he’s barely preventing himself from bolting toward the main entrance and the line of cots by the ambulance bay. Verity resists the urge to block him, though he isn’t actually moving. His hand is rigid on his cane.

  “We’re done,” continues Colin, tersely. “No more fighting, no more—no more of that mess outside your place. I’m sorry about that. I couldn’t stop her; I couldn’t stop any of them.” When Verity would interrupt him, he bulls ahead: “She was the only one who could go in there. All those machines. All that need. We weren’t going to leave you, though. Come on. We don’t have much time.” He extends his free hand toward Jihan without looking; he’s already shifting his weight when she steps in to his side, letting him take her arm. He pauses to fumble one-handed at the misaligned buttons of her sweater, quick and practised as he straightens them. “And you,” he adds to her, “you keep it up. You don’t hurt anyone. You remember.”

  The tall woman cocks her head to the side and extends her free hand to touch Colin’s hair with her fingers. For a moment, there’s a line between her eyebrows.

  Verity sees them look at each other. Holding her own precious clarity close in her chest, she perceives the angel’s infinite regret and the lithe puzzlement of the woman he leans on. It almost seems as though Jihan will say something.

  “No,” says Colin then, roughly. “I haven’t forgiven you yet.”

  It’s a lie—Verity feels it scratch against her bones, the first abrupt jarring of her new peace—but both have already turned away from her, walking away from the road and into the park behind. There’s a sign: Lynda Lane. There’s a light in the trees that stutters and burns out as they pass underneath. Colin’s slight glow bobs unevenly. Between the two of them, only his feet crunch audibly in the winter drifts.

  Verity sighs and follows, her own footsteps a whispered crackle. “Is Ouroboros...?”

  “He’s all right. He and Stefan’ve gone with the others. They wanted to come here, but they were the best I could send to the stadium. That damn concert, or whatever Privya’s—it’s definitely going down tonight. Can you feel the air? I’ve never seen Jihan just fry a building by walking through.”

  “The Chalice? But I’m here. Doesn’t Privya need me?”

  “Alan’s gone,” says the angel, shortly. “Took the little girl with him. Stefan sent Ouro to guard her and found a pile of concert tickets on her grandfather’s bed.” Trees loom over them. They are keeping to a path, but a fallen branch cracks beneath his foot.

  Verity feels her stomach drop. “She’s too young. She doesn’t understand.”

  “No shit she doesn’t.” Colin is limping with haste, balanced between the cane and the silent woman at his side. He crackles despite the fleshless wasting of his body; like Jihan, he is alert, energized. Not only does his pale glow light the path, it casts a warm reassurance that lets Verity focus even as she resists its comfort. Everything is not okay.

  “Alan doesn’t want to hurt anyone.” Of this, Verity is certain. The words are still easy to say; they are ghosted with grey, but there’s no undercurrent of oil.

  “I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know how it’s come to this. Look, whatever it is—I don’t want you to come with us.”

  “What?”

  Colin glances back over his shoulder; Verity catches the momentary flare of burning blue eyes. When he looks back to the path, he says, “Don’t do anything. Whatever it is anyone wants from you—don’t do it. Let this cup of power or whatever it is—let it pour out and die.”

  “But then you’ll die too.”

  “Probably. Look, stop, hold up a minute—thanks.” When Jihan pauses, the angel lets go of her arm and turns, bracing both of his hands on the head of the cane. Verity has a sudden impression of Santiago and Ouroboros; Colin and Jihan stand simultaneously still, heads cocked at identical angles, both looking at her. But the woman’s eyes are blankly reflective; the boy’s are shining.

  “We’ll die.” Colin’s voice trembles, but there’s strength in the line of his shoulders. “Some have. You saw, outside your house: they threw themselves against her. Like lemmings. I felt them die, and they were terrified—not just of the pain, but before. That’s how scared they were of her. That’s how real this danger is. So we can’t. We can’t open up some door somewhere else if it ends everything that’s here.”

  It costs him just to say it; Verity doesn’t need the soft clarity of his light to be aware of the tic in his jaw, or the way his hands clench on the head of the cane. The shine of tears in his eyes lodges in her own throat. Colin doesn’t look away.

  He continues with quiet intensity: “And Privya—she’d kill how many of them, just to give a few of us what, a few more years, or another generation suffering a losing fight? I can’t choose us or them, not—we’re
not better than they are. Your boyfriend—he seems nice. It’s not his fault he can’t see us screaming. So choose peace. I can’t tell you what to do, but I’m asking: let it go. We’re going to head over there and stop Privya if we can, but that’s all. I’ll help who I can for as long as I can, and then ... well. The walls will be empty. But no one’s killing anyone else, if I can stop it. I sat there on your sidewalk and I felt that poor woman’s life slide out of my hands. No more. It was bad, that first day, when Jihan left you bleeding on the floor. I didn’t know how much worse it could be. Let it go.”

  Verity wants to touch him—not for herself, but for the boy in the big coat, standing there with broken dreams littering the ice-slippery pathway at his feet. Jihan is a wordless guardian at his side; her attention falls on him, but then a breeze stirs the trees and she’s scanning instead in the direction of rustling branches. So Colin stands alone, and Verity’s hand twitches, but she only shakes her head.

  “Alethea, um—whoever she was. She maybe understood this, and she failed. I don’t understand. I—I wish I did. So it’s okay. I mean, not okay. But I won’t take the risk.” She doesn’t know she’s decided until she’s said it, the words coming in a low torrent. “I’m sorry,” she adds to Jihan, but Jihan is watching for ghosts in the encroaching starlight.

  “All right,” breathes Colin, and this time he does look away, blinking rapidly.

  “Thank you. For coming for me. Even though I don’t know how to help.”

  “I’m sorry it couldn’t be sooner. All those damn machines. I’ll be honest: I don’t know how this is going to turn out, so we weren’t going to leave you there for after.” Colin attempts a smile, but to Verity, the expression is a wasp about to sting. The angel only shakes his head and reaches for Jihan again. “I’m sorry we couldn’t bring you much. If your boyfriend will let you back in....”

  “I don’t think he will.” Regret is an animal clawing; it hurts more than Verity thought it would. “But I’m going with you. I’m not going to do—whatever Alethea tried. I won’t.” She jams her hands in the pockets of the unfamiliar coat. “I want to help. And....” She pauses, looking for words, but there is no time and the night is descending. “I want to see,” she says. “Since Santiago, the first day in the market. Since the knife. I told you all I wanted was to understand. When I’m not with you, everything is grey. I want to know.”