by M F Sullivan
There had been nothing in this physical world for Cassandra after that awful second of sonic disruption that marked the destruction of her brain. Martyrs had two irrecoverable organs: the heart, and the brain. Everything else grew back, or could be replaced with a cyborgan. But nothing could be done about those two physical mainstays of martyrs. A basic biological fact known the world around.
This had not been a cry for help. This had been a calculated decision that left Dominia as disoriented as now. Both times, she survived the tahgmahrish noise, and now, in Kabul, stood amid the screams of this massa confusa that might have been, for all she knew, her own charging back from the past. They must have been, at least partially: the screams of the humans were loud; yet, muted like a socked phonograph amid her Father’s collection of antiques, they could have been miles away. It was the motion of the Hierophant’s lips that drew her attention back to the present, and that helped her keen senses pierce the dense ringing to compile the meaning of his sounds. “We have a car,” he was saying. She struggled to divine what he was getting at in the haze of the explosion; when it clicked as he said, “Come with us,” she laughed.
“You want me to help you? I have to save these people from Lavinia’s virus.”
“You claimed before your quarrel was not with us; then, it cannot be with Lavinia.” The spray of a semiautomatic weapon in the distance did not deter unharmed (even wounded) racers from resuming their run as if nothing had happened, with more ignoring the debilitated amid the rubble of the blast zone by the distant podium and most prominent camera set. The Hierophant placed a compatriot’s hand upon her shoulder. “Will you help us?”
Before she spoke, the feedback of a microphone echoed through Kabul: the city’s emergency alert system had been co-opted to announce the marathon. Now, it had been co-opted again, by a familiar voice whose inappropriate jolliness exceeded even that of the Hierophant.
“Ladies and gentlemen, there is no need to fear.” Tobias Akachi didn’t even bother to switch to Arabic, the prick. “The Hunters have heard your call of alarm. While your police waste their time at Lake Hashmat and the martyr terrorist runs rampant in your city, the source of the problem has presented itself for the slaughter! Miss Mephitoli? May I see you for a moment?”
Dominia leaned around the grandstand that had sheltered her from debris. Tobias lowered the microphone from where he stood surrounded by a bunch of armed and armored soldiers. With those perfect white teeth, he smiled, then called across the rubble- (and body-) filled pit that smoked with energy from the explosion. “I am sorry to see you have not secured Lazarus for us, but I am pleased, as I said, to see the bad teeth making up your Family are all here for the extraction. Even infamous Miss Lavinia! I suppose it is no use asking her to come along with us.”
“What do you want with Lavinia,” asked the General as the Hierophant set Cicero on his feet and rendered him, as usual, the responsibility of the Lamb, upon whom he leaned his bloodied face and caught his staggered breath. The drama queen.
Akachi, as though they were not present, enthused, “What does anyone want with Lavinia? As powerful as your sister is, a man could control the world. But I have so many questions—perhaps you could answer them for me.”
“Go to hell.” Dominia ducked back around the grandstand for a safe place to reload her gun. At that, the Hierophant spread his arms in a show of helplessness.
“How sorry I am to say, Tobias, that my daughter may be a troubled girl, but she is not a fool.”
“You two know each other?” asked the aggrieved General. Her Father chuckled.
“I know him better than he does me, but we have some small association in this life, I admit. We have quite a lot in common, so far as I can tell.”
“Then”—Tobias drew a gun from the tan fabric of his cloak—“perhaps it is a pity this will be the moment our association ends.”
She had seen many people disappear that morning, but it was still uncanny to see the Hierophant blink out of existence and back into it five centimeters behind Tobias. As the dentist registered the event, he winked out of existence to the sounds of open fire.
Through clenched teeth—two of which were, indeed, designed to listen in on her private conversations—the General swore. She swore, not just for the observation that Akachi, head of the Hunters in Kabul and maybe all the Middle States, was also in possession of that same power as Lazarus and her Father. No: she swore because, after all the pain he had caused her, all the disgrace to her name and his responsibility in pushing Cassandra to suicide, she would greet dawn fighting by her Father’s side.
The tone of the sky and the singe of her cheeks alerted her that they had, at best, five minutes. Darting around the corner, the General unloaded (by luck of the Lamb) three rounds and killed four men while the Hierophant snapped the neck of one, acquired his weapon, and put down three more. This much gunfire hadn’t filled the air around her since Nogales, and it sent her into a conditioned response so efficient in open terrain that the DIOX-I couldn’t have kept up. Before, she had needed the influence of the Lamb to clear the building due to problems of tight quarters and a clear outmatch in numbers and equipment: here, she was free. Here, she sang, first acquiring the ceremonial dagger that Lazarus had let tumble at the feet of the Lamb. With this, she meant to charge into the fray, but her Father called, “No,” and, “Your sister.”
The densely skirted girl crouched in a panic against the shelter of the grandstand. After ending the lives of some Hunters who charged around a corner, Dominia dashed to the side of her sister and caught her by the arm.
“Are you all right?”
The girl, paler than Dominia had ever seen her, shook with such violence that her older sister ached beneath the immensity of guilt. “I wanted to see the world with Daddy,” Lavinia said, her pupils pinpoints. “I wanted to bring you home.”
The poor girl. A soft heart was clay to the Hierophant. “Stay close to me and I’ll keep you safe, all right?”
“Yes, Ninny, please.”
Tearful, the Family’s alleged superweapon clutched Dominia’s forearm, and the General shifted her to reload. “Why would you do that to these people, Lavinia?”
“Didn’t you see their awful costumes? It was terrible! They’re disrespecting Daddy, and because they’re disrespecting Daddy, they’re disrespecting God.”
“Our Father is not God.”
“Of course not, Ninny. But he’s closest to God on the whole Earth. He knows God.”
“Your Father”—Tobias appeared in a blink before them and provoked a shriek from Lavinia—“is a liar.”
“Why don’t you join the race,” hissed the girl, but the dentist laughed.
“I have taken the blood of Lazarus, thank you, and while I do not go in for the sacrilegious nature of his efforts to explain the phenomenon of his blood, the effects upon the body and the mind are undeniable. Your filthy pagan magic means nothing to me, witch.”
While Lavinia squawked in indignation, Dominia leveled her gun with his face. “Why don’t you show me how fast you can disappear.”
The answer was “faster than a bullet.” In her blind periphery, he reappeared, and she whipped right on Lavinia’s scream to find him already pointing a gun at the General’s face.
“Do you martyrs have time to drag this battle out? Dawn is minutes from breaking over the city’s horizon. When the sun shows his golden face, where will your sister be? We can offer her immediate shelter if you’ll send her with us. And if you hand her over, General, I am sure you and I can meet at some reasonable compromise.”
“My daughters belong at home with their Family, Akachi.” The Hierophant appeared behind him and pressed a rifle into the back of his head, for whatever good that might do. “Let them be.”
“You are making a mistake by going with him.” Tobias once more flickered out of existence; Lavinia, with a cry of relief, flung herself into her Father’s arms to weep.
“There, there, princess, we’ll have
you home soon enough.”
“I wish I’d never left,” she lamented as he swept her off, the General racing alongside them and picking off scattered insurgents before accepting the assault rifle from her Father to act as their proper escort. While she continued mowing down anyone with a gun, keeping her bursts of fire short and even to prevent civilian casualties among the runners, the Hierophant did not seem inclined to stop shaming her to Lavinia.
“In all fairness to the big, bad world from which I have shielded you, it is often bad—but not often this bad. It takes a character wild as our dear Dominia to bring about this level of chaos.”
“It’s not my fault you followed me! And it’s not my fault that Lavinia infected these people.”
Their protector nailed a few snipers poised on fire escapes while the trio darted down an alley in pursuit of the Lamb and Cicero, who were already about to emerge on the other side; nonetheless, Lavinia insisted, “They deserved it!”
Dominia could have screamed, and almost had to over the battle. “No one deserves this! These are good people!”
With a pettish noise of disgust, the Hierophant ducked a spray of gunfire from behind and hurried Lavinia before him to hasten their escape. “Yes: humans are such good people, my girl! That is why they are trying to kill us because we are martyrs. Why they maligned us with the insulting marathon to which your sister took offense.”
The alley’s exit was close, but behind them it had filled with Hunters. Dominia wheeled about to dash backward amid her wild firing while she shouted, “That doesn’t mean they all deserve to die.”
“And they will not,” answered the Hierophant, as, in a moment that seemed choreographed, the emergency alert system again booted up with the sound of feedback. No longer the voice of Tobias Akachi: to Dominia’s relief, it was the voice of Lazarus, who’d taken advantage of a podium emptied by Hunters in pursuit of the escaping Family.
“To be, or not to be,” his voice announced, “that is the question.”
“You see,” asked the Hierophant, smiling over his shoulder. “No harm done.”
Throughout the city of Kabul rang the melancholy speech of Prince Hamlet, its English words capable of curing even those who knew no English. The effects were the same with reading the Japanese Tale of Genji to Spanish speakers, or even, in one remarkable instance, forcing an ailing human to look at a QR code that would have decrypted into an image of the “Mona Lisa” for a computer or digital implant—to a normal eye, was the same as any bar code, but it had some effect. The format in which the information of the fine art was represented did not seem to matter when it came to curing the memetic virus; so long as the information was presented to the ailing mind in any form, for any sufficient length of time, the will would be restored. A brain desperate for a cultural palette cleanse seemed to take what coherent information it got; or perhaps there was a deeper reason at work on another level, as Dominia would someday suppose.
As Lazarus continued on, “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… To die,” and Dominia shot down men, those many running citizens of Kabul began to slow, and stop; those watching from other countries who had felt compelled to drive or even fly to Kabul now found themselves in their cars or at the airport, baffled as to their own intent; and those earliest to heal, those quickest to regain consciousness, responded to the realization of what had happened with a citywide wail louder than any siren.
As the speech slipped into the subject of dreams, Dominia, Lavinia, and their Father emerged from the alley. Time was up. Sunrise stretched across Kabul, and as the tanque driven by the Lamb snarled to a halt before the ragged trio, the Hierophant turned to his former Governess. Studying the gun and deciding that forcing her into their car was not a valid option, he settled on his usual weapon: reason.
“Come with us, my girl. Come home now, and spare us this heartache. Are your false hopes worth this? Don’t you see none of this would have happened—no one would have died—if you would have stayed at home? Come back, Dominia. Leave with us now, and it will be like nothing ever happened.”
Lavinia’s tear-stained, debris-smudged face gazing up at her, her Father’s expectant, all-knowing black eyes barreling into her.
The empty spot upon her breast where Cassandra’s diamond should have been.
“I can’t.” Her words were hoarse as she stepped away. “I’m sorry.”
“You would rather meet the sun than admit you were wrong,” shouted Cicero from within the vehicle, even as the Holy Father stuffed protesting, crying, and pleading Lavinia into the tanque. All the while, the girl screamed, “But Ninny! She’ll die!”
“It is her choice,” said the Hierophant, pulling the door shut behind him. “Drive.”
Her Family peeled through the streets of Kabul; stomach in knots, Dominia faced the alley down which she’d come.
Save for corpses, it was empty. The remaining insurgents had seen they walked into a death trap and turned tail, either to run, or to try and acquire Lazarus, whose words came to their abrupt end with the phrase “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” and another, swift-to-end hail of gunfire.
The General dropped her stolen gun and hovered in the shadow of the building as dawn glowed across the cured—but not yet near healed—city. What was she to do? Where was she to go? How was she to find Lazarus?
“Follow me,” he had urged her.
She would see the sun, he had promised her.
She studied her own body with a wretched feeling and wondered, again, what it was like to die. “And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought”—her voice was tight and humorless as her soft laughter—“and enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents, turn awry, and lose the name of action.”
Although she laughed, laughed at herself and the (in)appropriateness of the soliloquy amid the citywide grief of Kabul, she could not make herself step into the sun. She could not believe that she was not reading into his words, that it was not all wishful thinking on her part. Yet, as Tobias Akachi appeared before her while his men called from the distance, she could not deny her eye.
“Alone at last, eh, Miss Mephitoli?” She no more bothered to level her revolver at him than she usually would have at her Father, and he smiled at that. “I am sorry to see you were abandoned by so many: first, Miki and Kahlil; then, Lazarus and your dog; now, your Family.”
“I’ll be meeting at least one of the pairs you mentioned elsewhere. For the others…I don’t know what to say about them.”
“You do not need to defend the actions of those who have abused you, General. We all must reach our breaking points, and rise against our traitors and slavers. If we do not, we are as good as dead!”
“I’m already as good as dead, whatever I do.” She studied the hardening edge of the building’s shadow and pressed against the clay bricks behind her. “You and your men seemed pretty comfortable with the idea of killing me a few minutes ago.”
“When you tried to kill us, we needed to defend ourselves! It was your Father who began the fight, remember.” She made no comment. “I see you are cross about the teeth.”
“You’re the most stunning hypocrite I’ve ever met. The Hunters are terrorists.”
“To your people, perhaps.”
“And yours. Don’t play games. Your organization has killed more humans than martyrs over the years.”
“All in the name of higher justice. The most important thing is that your species is wiped off the map. The cost required to achieve this goal does not matter to God.”
“Met Him, have you?”
“I know nothing more of God than any other Christian man; but I will say that I know more than your blasphemous Father, who profanes the Word at every turn he may. He has so profaned the Word of God that he has dropped a veil before your eyes, and the eyes of all your people.”
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br /> “My eyes are—” She fought back an expression of annoyance. “My eye is open.” Although, it was rather obvious she did not believe it, and she was not at all surprised by Tobias’s look of distaste down the death-filled alley behind her.
“Then perhaps you had better put it to use, General. Do you suppose those men you killed to be nothing more than dreams? Is that how you won your thousand battles?”
This blistered her, and had she not been restrained both by the increasingly spectacular sunlight and Akachi’s supernatural capacity to blink out of sight, she would have killed him then and there to show him how she’d made so many victories. But that was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Wanted to goad her into striking him so he could mock her. She almost hoped so; because, if she was just projecting her own expectations upon him, well, maybe Miki was right. Dominia needed to adjust her attitude toward herself before she learned to get along with anyone else. With forceful calm, she shaped the words. “I remember the men and women I’ve killed. If not their names, then their faces. How many faces do you remember?”
The son of a bitch laughed at her. “Why do you bother, Miss Mephitoli? Do you think that your remembering them makes up for what you have done? Think of all their mothers.”
“Did you come here to shame me, Tobias?”
“No, my friend. I came to speak reason to you. I am concerned about what will happen if you will not be reasonable.” Around the corner of a distant mosque flooded a troop of Tobias’s men; Dominia rolled her eye along with her shoulders. “We cannot afford to let you die at this juncture—and it will cost a great many men, I suspect, to take you alive.”
Her lips curled into a spray of her own bitter laughter. “So you need me for something? Want to find out about my Father’s Project Black Sun?”
“My friend, I know all about your Father’s project.” This shocked her, until he went on with a pleased lift of his brows: “Monsieur Ichigawa was compliant.”
“I didn’t tell him anything of value.”
