The Children of the Sun

by Christopher Buecheler

  “I’m done,” she growled. “I know, keep calm, stay rational … that’s how you roll, right Theroen?”

  “If I wanted to be with someone who ‘rolled’ in the manner that I do,” Theroen said, “you would have been the very last person I chose.”

  “Fucking right,” Two said, but now she glanced up at him and saw that he was smiling.

  “The point I was trying to make is that everyone here has been through terrible experiences in the recent past. It might behoove all of us to tread carefully with each other. Thomas is a friend.”

  “Is he?” Two asked, and she swung back around to Thomas. “Are you?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck I am,” Thomas said. “For the past few years I was the best bartender at one of Manhattan’s best clubs. I was also an undercover agent spying on an important member of an enemy council. Now? At worst I’m a traitor and a disgrace to my people. At best I’m just some asshole.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Two said. “But it’s a shitty one. You’re not just some asshole and you’re only a disgrace if you actually believe the Emperor’s bullshit, which you obviously don’t.”

  “The only thing I believe right now is that if the Emperor’s still alive come the morning, I’m a dead man,” Thomas said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Fine,” Two said. “I’ll stop preaching if you’ll stop complaining about these people getting what they deserve. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “Good. Let’s just do this.”

  They continued down the hallway in silence, Tori leading the group. In front of them, packs of Burilgi lead by Ay’Araf warriors were wreaking havoc on the Children’s forces, the combat occasionally spilling out into the hallway from the rooms on either side. Eventually they reached the staircase at the far end of the hall.

  “They will have broken through to the second sublevel on the other end, by now,” Theroen commented, and Tori nodded.

  “Yeah. Hopefully they’re giving the Command Center all they can handle. That will keep the colonels busy for a while, at least until they realize it’s hopeless and retreat. I can get us to the Emperor’s chambers. After that … I’ve never been inside and I don’t know what to expect. I imagine there will be reinforcements.”

  “You don’t sound real concerned,” Two said, and Tori flashed her a bloodthirsty grin but opted to give no other response.

  “What if he has already been evacuated?” Theroen asked, and Tori shook her head.

  “I don’t think he’ll go. Not without … no, he won’t. Trust me.”

  “He won’t go without his weapon,” Thomas said. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Captain? He won’t go without you.”

  “I’m the key,” she replied. “Everything he’s spent his entire life building toward is in his grasp, but only if he’s got me. It’s not just the fighting – but that’s a big part of it. I can go to the places he can’t go, do the things he can’t do. I’m not just his weapon, I’m his Right Hand. He needs me and he needs your sister.”

  “The fuck does my sister have to do with anything?” Thomas asked, and Tori gave a small laugh. She began to descend the staircase, but spoke as she went.

  “You don’t get much gossip down in Cellblock, huh?”

  “Vanessa came to tell me when Charles passed, but other than that, no … not so much.”

  “Right. So you know the Emperor needs a new Left Hand. You wanna take a guess who Charles nominated?”

  “No shit?” Thomas asked.

  “No shit. The Emperor needs someone who is very, very good, but still young enough to make his own.”

  “And Charles decided on Vanessa?”

  Tori shook her head. They had reached the second sublevel, and she peered through the window in the door before turning and answering Thomas’s question.

  “Vanessa decided it for him. It’s a brilliant choice. She’s the best we – they – have.”

  “Except you,” Two said, and Tori gave a small laugh, pushing her way through the door. The others followed.

  “I’m the best they had at killing vampires, that’s all. I don’t have her breadth of talents and I don’t have her way with others. People are scared of me … they respect her. There are galaxies of distance between those two things.”

  “So you think this man, Charles, made the right choice?” Theroen asked.

  “I have no idea,” Tori said. “He made the best choice, but that doesn’t mean it was the right one. Now we’ll never know.”

  “Why’s that?” Thomas asked, and Tori favored him with a glance that was almost sympathetic.

  “Because we haven’t seen her yet, which means she’s down here somewhere. I’m guessing she’s going to come between me and the Emperor, and when that happens I’m probably going to have to cut her down to get to him.”

  “This decision is getting worse by the minute,” Thomas muttered.

  “Vanessa’s one of the few people in the world I respect,” Tori told him. “She’s a good soldier, and when I first heard that Charles had chosen her, I wasn’t surprised. I was impressed by his judgment. I won’t kill her unless I have to.”

  “You’ll probably have to,” Thomas said. They had come to a stop in front of an ordinary-looking metal door, having met no resistance as they’d moved along the hallway. Whatever fighting was happening, it wasn’t happening here. Tori turned and glanced back at him.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

  * * *

  “If you and your people take another step forward, Captain Perrault, we’re going to have to open fire.”

  The woman at the end of the hall was standing at the center of her soldiers in front of a massive pair of wooden doors. Two recognized her from the cathedral and, now that she and her brother were in the same room, could see the family resemblance.

  “Vanessa,” Tori said, coming to a stop and indicating to the others to do the same. “Why the hostility?”

  Vanessa looked unimpressed. “Even if I had somehow forgotten that those two are vampires who we were supposed to kill at the cathedral, it’d be pretty tough to miss that you’re hanging around with my traitor brother, who’s supposed to be rotting in jail right now. Let me ask you a question, Tori … did you help them hack our systems? Or did you sign up after that?”

  “I didn’t help them,” Tori said. “I just figured out what they’d done as soon as I heard you captured these two. No way they could have gotten that deep if the cameras were working right, and frankly your security people should have figured that out hours ago.”

  “Well, they didn’t. I guess when this is done, I’ll have a little chat with them – if any are left.”

  “This won’t be done until the Emperor is dead,” Tori said.

  “Why would you want to go and kill the man who gave you everything?” Vanessa asked, and there was a note of legitimate curiosity in her voice.

  “Because he’s the real traitor here, to his people and his ideals.”

  “‘His people,’ huh? Curious what you mean about that.”

  “Humanity, Vanessa. When the chips came down, the Emperor sacrificed innocent human beings to get at me. Then he took me in, filled me with drugs, and taught me to hate vampires. He taught me to kill for him, and now he has to die for it. That’s the way it has to be.”

  “There’s so much you don’t know,” Vanessa said, and she shook her head. “It’s almost sad. You have no idea.”

  “I know enough.”

  “You don’t know anything! You think you’ve got it all figured out, but you’re just stumbling around in the dark.”

  “He murdered my parents!” Tori shouted. “He took them from me!”

  “You didn’t even want them!” Vanessa cried. “You couldn’t even bear spending time with them anymore. All you wanted to do was go out and get drunk and whore around. My parents were killed too, you know, when I was just a kid. And my sister. Thomas and I lost everything! You think I’m suppose
d to feel sorry for you because you lost some people you didn’t even give a fuck about?”

  For a moment there was silence. Tori stared at the woman in frank disbelief before finally speaking in a strange, low voice, the words coming out shaky and loaded with barely contained emotion. “How long have you known?”

  “What difference does it make?” Vanessa asked. “What if I knew all along? What are you going to do, kill me harder?”

  “Just tell me when you found out!” Tori was screaming now, out of control, and Two wondered how much longer it would be before she simply launched herself at the soldiers, guns or no. If it came to that, Two was unsure who would prevail.

  Vanessa took a long, deep breath and shrugged. “Four weeks, Captain. I found out about it when I found out about everything else, when Charles told me what I was going to become. The only thing I’d ever heard before that was the same shit they told you, that the vampire council did it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What are we, best friends?” Vanessa asked. “Captain, in the last month I lost half my squad, found out I was going to be elected the Emperor’s new Left Hand, and got about six thousand pounds of information I never wanted dumped on my head by a dying man. Then I lost him before I could ask him even a tenth of the questions I had. You think I was in the best place to make decisions? It’s amazing I didn’t throw myself off the fucking roof.

  “I haven’t said shit to anyone – about anything – for weeks, because I’ve been too busy trying to come to terms with everything that Charles told me. Maybe I would’ve found you eventually and told you the truth about your parents, but honestly it wasn’t that important to me. Turns out the Emperor and the Children have done plenty of terrible shit to get where they are now. Your parents are just a blip on the radar.”

  “But you stayed with them anyway,” Tori said, and though her voice had returned to a normal level, Two could still hear deadly anger in it. “You’re standing here defending him even now.”

  “They’ve given me everything I ever had. I have friends here, people I care about, a job, and a mission. You think it’s easy to walk away from all of that just because I found out that the Emperor’s not quite as nice a guy as we’ve always been told he was?”

  “He’s a murderer,” Two said, stepping up beside Tori.

  “So is that crazy bitch,” Vanessa snapped back, and then swung the muzzle of her gun around to point at Two. “And so are you. How much blood is on your hands, lady?”

  “Too much,” Two admitted. “That’s why we’re here. That’s why we have to stop him.”

  “I can’t just step out of the way and let you go kill the Emperor,” Vanessa said. “Murderer or not, I promised Charles I would protect him. I have to stand between you and him.”

  “Then we should get this over with,” Tori said.

  “Why not just turn around and go? Take my brother and your two bat friends and get out of here. Why is it so important to kill the Emperor? It won’t bring your parents back and it can’t possibly atone for everything you’ve done to the vampires. They’ll never accept you.”

  “No, it can’t do any of that,” Tori said. “But I won’t live the rest of my life with the specter of him over my shoulder. He won’t ever let me go, Vanessa. It will never end until one of us is dead, and I mean to make that happen tonight.”

  Vanessa sighed. “All right. I’m sorry it had to come to this, Captain, but I’m glad if it had to happen, it’s happening right here.”

  “What’s that?” Tori asked.

  “Because you’ve got nowhere to go,” Vanessa said, and with those words she raised her assault rifle and pulled the trigger.

  She was wrong; Tori had plenty of space, Two realized; it just lay in a direction that no one had considered. Even as Vanessa was pulling the trigger, Tori leapt not just forward but upward as well, springing toward the nearest chandelier, which hung nearly fifteen feet above their heads. She caught it with both hands and whipped her body forward, swinging on it and throwing herself at the group of Children soldiers from above.

  Meanwhile, Two and the others were throwing themselves on the floor to avoid the hail of bullets. Two landed hard on her stomach and chest, arms outstretched before her, holding tight to her pistol to keep from losing her grip on it. There was very little cover in the hallway, but she rolled to the right side, where she was at least semiprotected by a wooden half pillar bulging out of the wall. One of the soldiers saw her and turned in her direction to fire, but Two was faster. She leveled her gun at the man and put two bullets into his chest.

  Tori landed behind Vanessa, spun, and grabbed the woman by the shoulders. She threw Vanessa into the soldier standing to her left and both fell to the floor in a heap, dropping their guns. Tori kicked the firearms down the hallway. She then turned and leapt toward the two soldiers still on their feet, pulling her blades out at the same time. One of the men managed to get a shot off with his rifle and the bullet grazed Tori’s left bicep. She dropped the sword she’d been holding with that hand, snarling in pain and swinging around with her right arm. The sword she was still carrying carved off a chunk of the man’s shoulder and he howled, dropping his assault rifle.

  Vanessa and the soldier she had collided with were struggling now to their feet. Two leveled her gun at the male soldier and would have shot him, but before she could, Theroen threw himself forward into her line of sight. She watched as he bowled into the two humans shoulder-first like a linebacker, splitting them apart and sending both back to the ground. The last of the soldiers, the one who wasn’t engaged with Tori, took a shot at him, but it was wild and Theroen dove behind a pillar that stood next to the massive doors.

  Her sight still blocked, now by Tori, Two couldn’t fire on the man and instead hauled herself to her feet, holstering her gun and drawing her sword. She raced forward before the man could turn and target her, and with a shout she drove her blade into his side. He cried out and swung his gun around butt-first, and it collided with the side of her head, sending bright red flashes through her vision. Two stumbled back a step, dropping to one knee and touching her hand to her temple. When she brought it back before her eyes, it was covered in blood.

  The soldier who had hit her was screaming and clawing at the sword, which was still embedded in his side. He had dropped his gun and was trying to pull the weapon out by the blade, but was succeeding only in slicing up his own hands. Two stood and grabbed the handle, kicking out with her foot and connecting with the soldier’s midsection. The force of the kick was enough to dislodge the sword, and the soldier shrieked again as the blade came sliding out.

  “Sorry,” Two told him, and she was. She didn’t want any of this, but it was far too late to back off now.

  For his part, the soldier didn’t seem impressed with her apology. “Fuck you, bat!” he swore, and he wrapped his hands around her neck.

  Holding her sword with both hands, Two brought it up and forward, spearing the man in the solar plexus and driving the weapon deep inside of him. Its tip pierced through his back and in another moment his eyes rolled up, his hands went limp, and she shoved him backward.

  “All right, then,” Two said, her voice a little hoarse. She turned to see that Tori had dispatched the man who had shot her in the arm by cutting most of the top half of his head off. His body was lying on the floor, still twitching, and she had moved on to the two soldiers who Theroen had collided with. Vanessa and the other man pressed their backs against the doors and held their swords out.

  “Vanessa …” Tori began, but before she could continue, the male soldier threw himself at her, roaring something incoherent and swinging his blade downward with both hands.

  “Baker, don’t!” Vanessa shouted, but it was too late. He and Tori were fighting now, their blades clashing together. Vanessa leapt forward – whether to help her soldier or try to pull him back, Two didn’t know. Theroen never gave her the chance to find out, taking advantage of the woman’s distraction to g
rab her from behind, gripping her shoulder with one hand and palming her head like a basketball with the other.

  “I apologize for this,” he said in his customary, calm tone, and then, with a powerful twitch of his shoulders, he drove her face first into the wood-paneled wall. There was a cracking noise that Two hoped was the mahogany and not Vanessa’s skull, and when Theroen let her go, she dropped to the floor, dead or out cold.

  The man who Vanessa had called Baker was still alive, which Two thought was something of a miracle. He had managed to avoid one or two killing blows from Tori, and now he parried another. He was clearly very strong and well conditioned, but Two could tell from his breathing that he was starting to tire. She thought it would be only a few more seconds before Tori finished him off.

  In this estimate, she proved correct. Using an amazingly agile fake, Tori changed direction at the last moment and, with a flick of her wrist, slashed across the man’s unguarded chest. He screamed in pain and, when he clutched at the wound with his free hand and looked down, she took the opportunity to drive her sword upward, pommel-side first, and hit him under the chin with it. The man’s eyes rolled up, and as he fell she cut off his head.

  For a moment there was silence. Tori walked over to the blade she had dropped, picked it up, and sheathed both weapons. She turned to look at Two and Theroen.

  “Is she still alive?” Tori asked, indicating toward Vanessa’s prone figure. Theroen knelt down beside the woman, checked her pulse, and nodded.

  “Good,” Tori said. “I really didn’t want to kill her.”

  “How’s your arm?” Two asked, and Tori glanced at her wound, unconcerned.

  “Hurts, but it was a clean shot. It’ll heal in a day or two.”

  Thomas had spent the fight lying on the floor, but now came up to stand beside them, looking at his sister.

  “I know you guys didn’t have to do that,” he said. “Theroen, you could just as easily have snapped her neck, but you didn’t. So thanks.”