by Dakota Banks
Lucius walked into view on the monitor.
The heart on the tree proclaiming his love for her flashed into her vision.
No! He can’t be here! Her fear for him nearly overwhelmed her, making her knees weak. Somehow she kept the fear from her face and voice. As soon as she’d found out that the Leader was Ageless, she’d downgraded her chance of survival. Lucius was in the same position. He could no longer confront Rasputin as an equal.
“I know you have the nanites distributed in the water of the target countries. How do you plan to turn them on?”
“Distribution is not complete. That would take a year. What I have is barely adequate for a first strike. You have not figured out the key?”
Maliha thought back to what Fynn had said. “Some kind of broadcast?”
“Excellent! What kind?”
She shrugged. She could see out of the corner of her eye that Lucius had entered the room and was crouched behind a piece of furniture. “A concert.”
“So close. Television is very popular in emergent countries. Where TVs have not penetrated, there are radios. Who would object to a patriotic advertiser who buys time to play the national anthem? No one. The trigger is a complicated series of sounds buried in the national anthems for each country. The ads are bought, the soundtracks submitted, and they will run several times over the next twelve hours starting in”—he turned to look at the clock—“eighteen minutes. There is a neutralizing sequence. It makes the nanites eat themselves. The council insisted on a last-ditch failsafe, in case the distribution went bad and the nanites got into their own countries. I thought it might be useful for blackmail.” He pulled a jump drive from his pocket and held it up, then put it back in his pocket. “Might be fun to give them a scare after the first round of deaths. Contaminate London and New York, say, and offer to neutralize for a few billion dollars.”
Maliha said nothing. Time was running out on the clock. She had to make her attack soon, regardless of what Lucius was planning, and she had to find a way to convey how the hitchhikers were going to be triggered.
“I have an interesting experiment you’ll be participating in. Too bad you won’t survive it, but you will contribute to my study of the nanites.” He patted a strange-looking gun on his desk that was loaded with a vial attached to a dart.
Maliha figured out what it was, and she shivered.
“You’re going to infect me.”
“Yes. Wait…” Rasputin took a deep breath and tilted his head to one side. “There’s someone else here.”
Rasputin drew a knife and hesitated slightly as he used his senses to pinpoint Lucius’s location. Rasputin’s attention wasn’t on her. Maliha pulled the sai from her waist and threw it forcefully. The point rammed through Rasputin’s eye and came out the back of his head.
Instantly she saw Lucius take off at a run, and she heard one of his crossbow bolts whizz through the air. Hoping Lucius could take advantage of Rasputin’s situation, Maliha quickly drew one of her throwing knives and raked the point of it across her arm. Dipping her fingers in her blood, she wrote TV AD on the floor. There was no time to write national anthem, so she wrote FLG and 15. Yanmeng, viewing her, would see the letters and tell Amaro and Hound. She could only hope they’d interpret them correctly, including the fifteen minutes left until the ad ran for the first time.
When she looked up, she found that Rasputin had pulled the sai from his eye and stabbed Lucius in the shoulder with it. She didn’t know if Rasputin was blind in one eye or not, or if the brain damage had been repaired by his Ageless body that swiftly.
Lucius was on the floor. As she watched, she saw him yank the sai from his shoulder. Maliha reloaded her Glock and began firing.
Rasputin moved rapidly to her side, wrenched the gun from her hand, and brought his elbow down on her upper arm, breaking the bone. Her right arm was useless.
He turned his back on her and went back to finish off Lucius. He wasn’t showing any sign of blindness or brain damage. She took two throwing stars from her bag and held them in her left hand, aiming carefully. She sent them flying at Rasputin’s back. In midair they split apart, each taking its own path, and hit him in the back. One struck at the base of his spine, the other at the neck. A normal man would be dead or paralyzed.
Rasputin staggered a little, reached around, and pulled the stars out. He spun around and fired them back at her. She’d anticipated it and ducked down. The stars flew over her head and embedded themselves in the concrete wall. When she moved to reposition herself for another attack, Rasputin threw a knife at her. The knife impacted her thigh, and she stumbled.
Rasputin reached for the gun on his desk. He fired a dart at Maliha as she was trying to regain her balance.
Lucius dashed across the room, stretched as far as he could, and just barely deflected the dart with his sword. There was a cost. The second dart thudded into his chest.
“No!” Maliha screamed.
Cackling in triumph, Rasputin flipped a switch that flooded the room with the activation sound. Lucius fell, with the nanites rapidly attacking his organs.
“Stop them! Turn them off!”
“Once started, there is no way to halt the nanites. Just enjoy the show.”
Rasputin did just that. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the suffering man on the floor.
“You see, this is what’s so interesting,” he said. “His healing abilities are fighting the destructive power of the nanites. He’s rebuilding what they are tearing apart, but inevitably, not fast enough. He is mortal, and he will die—just slower than other humans. I should be taking notes.”
Maliha closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear to see Lucius in a condition where there was no hope. She had to make his sacrifice for her mean something. Retrieving the first dart that had been aimed at her, she straightened out the bent tip and hurled it at Rasputin.
The dart landed in his back and injected him. Annoyed at another throwing star from Maliha, he reached around to pluck it out. When he got a look at what he held in his hands, his body became rigid with fear.
“Shut it off! Shut the sound off!”
The activation sound was still playing in the room.
“Enjoy the show, Rasputin.”
Maliha moved over to Lucius. He was moaning and losing the battle. He was losing the fight for his life to the machines inside his body.
Then the nanites began to affect Rasputin. As one of the Ageless, Rasputin healed as rapidly as the nanites destroyed, but he couldn’t gain an edge over them. Rasputin was helpless, his body stuck in a continuous cycle of destruction and renewal.
Maliha waited with Lucius. She cradled his head in her lap and kissed him gently. With effort, he tapped his belt with one hand, indicating that she should look there. In a small pocket sewn inside his weapons belt she found a key. She took it and held it up so he could see it.
“Is this for the shard?”
He wasn’t able to nod, but his eyes told her that the key would allow her to retrieve the shard he’d taken from her in the Taklimakan Desert. Her heart overflowed with emotion and her eyes with tears.
She clutched the key to her chest. “I’ll do it. I’ll do it for us. I’ll kill the demons and then we’ll be together.”
A tear slid down his cheek and she kissed it away.
She could have speeded his death, but she knew what awaited him: torment at the hand of his former demon master, because Lucius failed in his quest after stepping onto the mortal path. He did not balance the scale so recently carved onto his body. The only life saved to his credit was Maliha’s, and while it counted for a lot, it wasn’t enough to balance nineteen hundred years of working on the side of evil.
She could have been the one with the nanites coursing through her body. Would have been, if Lucius hadn’t sacrificed himself for her.
That makes twice. When he gave up his immortality for me, then his life.
Portions of his body didn’t look completely solid anymore, and she was ce
rtain if she touched those parts her fingers would sink in. She slipped his head off her lap before the last stages began. After Lucius took his last labored breath, his body disintegrated further and his heart failed.
Reluctantly leaving him, Maliha used Rasputin’s communication equipment to contact Amaro and make sure that her message had gotten through about the TV ad. It had, and with Hound’s connections in the U.S. government, the warning was taken seriously. The ads were pulled—awaiting, of course, a fabricated explanation to follow. Hound reported that a few deaths were reported among curious broadcasting personnel who listened to the ad in spite of the dire warnings, but those were quickly hushed up by their respective governments. Panic and mass deaths were averted.
Maliha went to the helpless Rasputin, who watched as she took the jump drive with the neutralization sequence from his pocket. The long process of detoxifying large numbers of people with the permanent deactivation sound would soon begin, and they wouldn’t even know how close they had come to a horrible death.
Maliha tried something for which she didn’t have much hope. She lay down as close to the position Lucius died in as she could and opened herself to experiencing the last impressions of his death. She hoped that somehow his spirit would coalesce around her, as in other cases, and that she’d be able to help him onto a different path, freeing him of torment.
She did slide into his death experience and her hope grew that she might be able to do something positive. She felt the kiss they’d shared from his point of view, and knew how much it meant to him.
His tortured soul did come to her, for a few moments only, and she felt the incredible agony of what he was going through. Then Lucius broke the contact. Maliha was sharing the pain of his torment, and he wouldn’t permit it.
Maliha was tempted to leave the quivering, powerless Rasputin in his jungle hideaway for a few decades, stuck in the tortured space between life and death, as a partial retribution for the deaths he’d wrought. From the Sudanese and Nigerian villagers to Lucius, Ty and Claire, to Saltz’s fiancée and child slaughtered in their apartment, to others who died in her pursuit of him.
Rasputin is a bloody nightmare.
Maliha felt stabbed in the heart by her own thoughts. A bloody nightmare—the same could have been said of her, until she set foot on the mortal path. And since then, she’d killed in the process of saving lives, people like guards. People like Duma, whom she may have befriended under different conditions.
People. Not targets. This is my burden to bear along with the deaths marked on my scale. Is it Lucius who achieved redemption with his act of sacrifice, even though he suffers now? Some potent questions to be considered. Yanmeng would be proud of me.
Maliha decided it was too risky to let Rasputin live. She came up to him, shoved him down on his knees, and with him watching but helpless to stop it, she swung her sword and sent his head rolling across the floor.
Freed of the immortality that was keeping them at bay, the nanites overwhelmed what was left of Rasputin and turned him into an ill-defined gray mass on the floor. Two of them.
A few minutes later Maliha, the only one left alive in the utilitarian concrete haven, convulsed on the floor. She was receiving the reward on her scale for killing Rasputin. A large number of figures moving into the “saved” pan left a rut across her belly from the acid of their footsteps. A noticeable shift in the balance of the pans resulted, and when the pull through time came, she felt as though a rope had yanked her forward, not that she was tugged gently by a cord.
A year, perhaps. Maybe a little more. Worth every second of it.
She bandaged her wounds as best she could. She forcibly straightened her broken arm, shifting the bones back into their approximate position since she had to travel. Using a sheet from Rasputin’s closet, she tore a section to make a sling for her arm. The tunnel, indifferent to the death of the building’s resident, ran through its cycle and let her out.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Maliha walked out of the rain forest to Ouésso and boarded a helicopter to the airport in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, where jets frequented the runways. The jet from the clinic picked her up and took her to Switzerland.
Dr. Corvernis fussed over her broken arm and had to break it again under anesthesia, because it had begun to heal in the sling position Maliha used to hold the arm steady near her body. She woke up with a cast on her upper arm. He patched her other wounds and pressed into her hand a bottle of anti-malarial medication because she’d come from an area where the disease was endemic.
She had no need to worry about the disease. Her aggressive immune system killed the parasites injected by an infected mosquito before they had time to multiply in her liver and spread to her bloodstream. Finally, the doctor warned her to avoid coffee, a piece of advice he trotted out every time he treated her. She nodded, already craving her first freshly brewed cup of Kopi Luwak at home, made from Sumatran coffee beans that had been eaten and then distributed on the forest floor by civets.
During her initial recuperation, she had plenty of time to think about the way she’d handled the mission, escalating in violence until the slaughter at Landry’s. She could see how Rabishu might get the idea she was ready to come back into the fold. In the calm and healing environment of the clinic, she began to see what had happened to her. She had been sucked in by the power her old life represented, the feeling of being in charge and on her own as she had been for over a couple of hundred years. It was a strong pull, but now she saw it for what it was—an attempt to recapture the feeling of being Ageless without the grim reality that went with it. It had backfired, caused deaths that might have been averted, and alienated her friends. It had brought her back to Rabishu’s attention, and the very worst thing of all—the most shameful—was that she hadn’t rejected the demon’s offer immediately.
I’m going to be living with all of these choices for a long, long time.
She went to the safe house in Canada. Everyone was relieved to see her. She took her close friends aside for some private conversation.
“You ready to apologize for being an asshole?” Hound asked.
“I wasn’t going to phrase it quite like that, but yes,” Maliha said. “You three keep right on being my conscience.”
“Let’s skip the rest and go straight to the group hug,” Amaro said.
“I’m not hugging him,” Yanmeng said, pointing at Hound. “He hasn’t showered since we came here.”
“I forgot to bring my special soap. I have sensitive skin,” Hound said.
“That is complete bullshit,” Amaro said. “Remember that time in Iquitos when you took a bath in—”
“Ladies present,” Hound said. “One of them, anyway.”
Maliha drifted away as the conversation deteriorated. She hadn’t told them about Rabishu’s offer, and didn’t plan to.
She took Randy and others out on snowmobile rides under the aurora borealis, had snowball fights, and gave the kids skiing lessons to make it seem more like a vacation. Randy told her she had a memorable time, and Amaro was mum about the whole thing, which made her think something was going on between them. Sooner or later, she’d worm it out of Randy.
She used downtime when the shelter was quiet to finish her book and send it off to her editor. Amaro dutifully tracked the progress of her new black Zonda F, currently at Dewey’s Custom Security in a warehouse somewhere in New York City. Soon it would be finished to her exacting standards. She tried to contact Jake, but kept getting his voicemail. It didn’t surprise her. When working on a case, he could be very single-minded. She knew that first-hand, from the intense way he’d investigated her when he thought she might be involved in a smuggling operation.
Maliha looked out over the sea from the reclining chair she’d awakened in when Lucius first brought her to his Mediterranean island. It was hers now.
Sun flooded the room she was in, and a breeze lifted the gauzy curtains. She glimpsed sparkling waves and olive trees with their
trunks twisted like an old farmer’s hands. With a silk gown wrapping her, Maliha looked like an ancient Grecian goddess. The smell of the sea was haunting, a call to adventure.
Not just yet.
Maliha was there to heal, her battered body and soul needing the peace of solitude. She meditated, fished for her supper, and lived simply.
I could withdraw from my quest and live here. Stop hunting shards, stop trying to balance my scale. Jake loves me and I love him. I could have a family with him. I’d wait until my children were grown and then go back to my quest, only if it didn’t put my kids in jeopardy. And if I didn’t succeed in balancing my scale, I know what would be waiting for me. So how much am I willing to sacrifice to have a family? Or is the whole idea all talk and no action?
She could put that plan in motion now. Just pick up the phone and ask Jake to come to me. Lucius…is gone. I can’t build a life around a man who isn’t even in the Great Above.
She’d told Lucius she would rescue him and bring him back. A fairy-tale happy ending. How do I know what would happen if I kill all the demons? Even if I did rescue him, I might get whisked off to join Anu. I doubt if they sell diapers in the third plane of existence.
A sweet memory of the kiss they’d shared before Lucius was swept into his snake-demon’s hell was all that was left to her.
What am I thinking of, marriage, family, diapers? I’m the only rogue alive, the only one who has a chance to destroy all the demons and set humanity free to make our own path. Priorities! Damn.
Maliha had the Tablet of the Overlord and three shards now. At least she would have three when she used the key Lucius gave her as he died. Only four to go, and if Jake would help her, they might come into her possession quickly.
What motivation does Jake have for wanting the demons gone? He’s doing well enough as it is. She considered his missing five years, something that gave her an uneasy feeling even though she loved Jake. A dear friend waited in Jerusalem who might have the information that would finally put those qualms to rest. She was due for a visit to Abiyram, anyway. She’d promised him that she’d bring him into the circle of friends who knew about her goals.
