by Victor Milán
“Your life is forfeit anyway,” said Ariane, the blonde woman covered in weeping sores. Apparently the first shift of Speakers she’d encountered was back on duty. “Along with his.”
“And yet you’d try to bargain your life for your brother’s, even after what he did to you?” That was Evadne, the middle-aged woman with the all-black eyes.
“He’s my brother. It’s not as if my life is such a fucking carnival, anyway. Just—just keep him. I know you can’t let him go. But alive. Kill me.”
Aristide, the naked, callused man said, “You may redeem your life and his. And your freedom.”
“Though as you say, your brother must remain in Evernight always.”
Evadne gestured toward a big LED TV, which had been set up by the curving wall to one side. Sortilége turned the volume up with her lower left hand.
“—Valentine’s Day Massacre,” an angry white guy with tie askew was ranting in French. “We cannot allow our streets to become the Wild West as the Americans do. And even when one terrorist kills others, worthy of death though these victims were, they were still victims of a monstrous crime. And it was still an act of terrorism, by a fugitive sheltered in the hellish underworld beneath our sacred city!”
“You want me to kill the loudmouth?” Candace asked. “I mean, I can see why, but all respect to you, Mama, that’s not the sort of job I—”
“You misunderstand.” As before, Candace had started ignoring the Speaker, and heeding the one who Spoke. “As you might gather from his overheated rhetoric, your brother’s actions have made a marked impression. Especially on the authorities.”
“Oh, shit,” Candace said.
“Yes. Though details of the agreement with us have been covered up as a matter of routine, it’s been leaked that the Mayor and the President agreed to give Evernight a reprieve on the grounds they prevent a wanted terrorist from striking again. They have been deeply humiliated. And they react as powerful men who have been humiliated have the power to do.”
“The deal’s off.”
“More than that. Much more. Our watchers have seen an armored van leave the building in the 1st arrondissement that Section 23 of GIGN uses as its headquarters. It is rolling for the Pont Neuf that crosses the Seine to the Left Bank.”
“That evil bastard DuQuesne got his green light,” Candace said, sick and angry. Marcel, Marcel, what did you even think you were doing?
* * *
The slim fibril whipping out of nowhere to wrap Candace’s left wrist was so unexpected she almost tripped and fell face-first in the nasty-smelling water that ran ankle-deep in this stretch of the old Paris mining tunnels that made up most of Evernight.
They’ve found my commune beneath the Moulin Rouge. The words sang in her blood with the urgency of adrenaline. You must hurry. They’re wearing masks, and spraying gas from canisters.
“Shit.” Alarm thrilled through her, even more jangling than Mama’s neural intrusion. “Mama, you’ve got to pull your fibrils back down the tunnel away from there. Now.”
I can’t! My people need me. They’re falling down already. The poor innocents! I hope it’s only knockout gas.
“It’s not. It’s nerve gas, Mama. Pull back!” Talking out loud at a dead run was taxing her wind, but fear and anger helped keep her moving.
Surely they’d never do—
“You never met DuQuesne. This is exactly what he’d do. I’m surprised he didn’t just plug up the known entrances and flood the whole tunnel network with the shit.” Except they’d never plug all the cracks and holes, if they had a decade to try, she thought. Apparently even La Vipère had some scruples when it came to killing straight Parisian citizens and tourists in droves. Or his superiors did.
My senses there are growing fuzzy, her blood keened.
“Fuck. This isn’t an attack on your colony. It’s an attack on you. Pull your fibrils back now, a quarter kilometer at least or more if you can! It should take a while for the neurotoxins to travel up them.” I hope.
I can’t abandon my children!
“They’re already dead. Think of the rest of Evernight!”
But Candace knew as she spoke that breath was wasted. She was already whipping out her knife to slash through the tendril that had stayed stubbornly twined about her wrist for the last thirty meters. It gave a bit, like rubber tubing, but parted.
She stopped, knelt. The main skein of Mama’s fibrils ran along the base of the wall, just above the water. She grabbed it with her left hand. It was surprisingly heavy. Candace wondered just how many rats and ODing drifters Mama had had to metabolize to make so many kilometers of the stuff.
Mama read her intent. The cords of slimy tissue suddenly blazed her hand, like a live wire, like fire. Worse than the agony of La Vipère’s bite. She screamed—then hacked through the bundle with a single stroke.
“I hope you like my way better than being dead,” she said aloud, panting from exertion and the throbbing torment in her left hand. I also hope my way works.
She’d already begun to sprint, out of reach of Mama’s intact and wrathful tendrils. She opened her mouth, and Darkness poured out, to fill the tunnel network before her.
* * *
The rake-gaunt nat woman’s hysterical shrieks of terror went silent when Candace touched her eyes. “I can see,” she said wonderingly. Candace could barely hear her over the strangled squalling of the infant who had apparently been nursing when the Dark came upon them and stole away their sight.
She looked at Candace with wide pale eyes—Candace saw no colors in her Dark. “I can see!”
“Yeah. Now lighten up your grip on the baby. The baby can’t breathe.” The woman recoiled from her. “Now. Or I’ll have to break your arm.”
That snapped the woman out of it. She switched her constrictor clutch on her child to a gently fervent hugging and rocking.
Candace seized the hand of a wizened old man nearby, who looked as if all that was keeping him upright was the dark beetle carapace that covered his torso and legs, and pressed it against the woman’s arm. Stunned by his sudden, unexplained blindness, he didn’t resist.
Candace had hit a nest of maybe twenty Evernighters, all of them as sightless as if their eyes had been gouged out, none of them handling it much better than the nursing mother had been. Candace knew she’d never have time to touch everybody’s eyes and let them see through her Darkness. She felt bad about literally poking the first woman’s eyeballs, but she was the first at hand and there was no getting through her panic to get her to close her eyes.
“Take his hand. Good. Now lead the way back down the tunnel toward Mama Evernight, quickly as you can. The rest of you, come to my voice. Join hands, and form a chain.”
“Why should we?” somebody asked.
“Hard men are coming to kill you. Hurry up. We got no time.”
At ten, including a couple of little kids, the chain got unwieldy. By this time most of the others had calmed down enough that she could get the young man closest to her to shut his three eyes so she could touch the lids. “You link up with the rest and follow the first group. Quickly!”
“Who are you?” Twenty meters along the first woman, who now could see, had turned her face back over her shoulder to Candace as she staggered.
“Life,” she said.
She looked the other way. The way she was bound.
I’ll never save them all, she knew with sickness in her soul.
“And death.”
* * *
Screams flew to meet her as she ran. Some ended in choking. Candace’s steps didn’t fault her, though it felt as if she’d been stabbed in the belly.
An elderly woman staggered toward her around a curve, wheezing and staggering, keeping contact with the rough limestone tunnel wall on her right with an outstretched hand. Her labored breathing seemed to result from terror and exertion, not nerve agents, and she was moving toward what she clearly hoped was safety with all the speed her body still had.
A
few meters behind her, leisurely strolling, came a GIGN Section 23 operator. He had his own gloved right hand to the wall and was holding a nozzle in the other. “We told you, you old bitch,” he called out. “If you run, you’ll just die tired.”
He sprayed her. The gas the operators carried obviously had some sort of dye in it so they could see where it went. Ironically, Candace was the only one to see it now; their night-vision goggles, whether low-light or equipped with active infrared which lit the wearer’s way with an IR flashlight, couldn’t penetrate her Dark.
The Evernighter woman started a shriek as she felt the loss of neuromuscular control grip her chest and begin to strangle her like a python. She fell to her knees, beating futilely against the wall and floor as she gagged and dry-heaved.
Fast-acting shit, Candace thought. Her feelings had gone dead numb. But her mind raced ahead. I can’t enter that cloud. I can’t help, only join the dying. And then nothing will stop these monsters.
She made herself hang back, despite the urgency thrilling in her nerves that made it a kind of agony not to run forward.
The operator walked forward, still feeling his way along the wall. He didn’t spray more gas. Of course their supply was limited to what they could carry.
All Candace had to do was flatten herself against the opposite wall, and wait.
“Hello, Gaspard,” she said into his ear from behind. She knew his voice, muffled or not; DuQuesne had named him when he hustled her in for interrogation. Candace had keen senses and a keener memory. “Hope you got enough jollies with that pain-compliance grip on my arm to last you a lifetime.” Candace grabbed his mask, yanked it up his face, thrust her knife into his throat, and slashed. The blade cut easily through muscle and cartilage and rubbery jugular veins. He couldn’t even gurgle a warning through his own blood on their communications net.
She put the mask on her head but left it up. Gaspard rolled side to side on his belly, hands struggling to slow the blood that was gushing onto the use-smoothed stone floor. She knew there was a chance, however small, he could survive the severed veins. She stabbed his neck again beneath his left ear and cut his carotid artery. His body bucked up off the floor and went limp as his brain, deprived at once of half its blood, shut down.
Candace wiped her blade on his ass, folded it, and slipped it in her jacket pocket. She pulled the mask down over her face, ignoring the stink of Gaspard’s breath and the garlic he’d had for his last meal, and tightened it as best she could. She was far smaller than he was, but the respirator and goggle set were clearly not custom-fit.
If there’s a leak, she thought, at least that’ll spare me from having to live with what I’m going to do next.
She stood straight and walked on around the bend. The old mining tunnel widened into a gallery, and she confronted a gray-scale image of agony and despair, like an animated Doré etching of The Inferno. The dying writhed and choked with tears and snot running from eyes and mouths, clutching each other, stretching hands that pled toward the masked men. Who could hear and feel their suffering, even though they couldn’t see it. They kicked their victims in their faces and laughed at the torments they inflicted like Dante’s demons.
Twenty doomed souls? Thirty? Candace couldn’t tell. She took a deep breath and released the grip of iron self-control she’d maintained for five hard years.
She stalked forward, as feral and merciless as her brother in his leopard form, walked up to the closest GIGN operator, and stripped the mask right off his face. Then skipped away twirling it by the strap as he dropped to his knees, clutching at his throat.
The next two operators sensed something amiss, put themselves back to back with the gas-nozzles raised defensively. “Bruno?” one said in an Eastern European accent.
Candace tossed Bruno’s mask away and pulled his off. His partner helpfully turned his head for her to strip his too. They actually dropped their sprayers to cling to each other as their mouths filled with saliva and then their lungs ceased to work, kissed by the fast-acting “next level” poison gas. “Touching,” she said, and moved on.
She knew the next one, too, who stood above a large woman lying dead on her back with eyes and mouth agape. He’d been the one who seized her left leg and bared it to La Vipère’s tongue. He’d seemed to get into fondling her bare skin a little more than professional cruelty required.
Candace planted herself right in front of him. “This is for groping me,” she said, and shin-kicked him in the balls. He had some kind of cup on under his trousers. It didn’t help him much. She whipped his gas mask back off his head as he doubled toward her.
A hand brushed her left shoulder, then clamped like trap-jaws on her biceps. “Got you, you bitch!” He had his gas-nozzle thrust almost against the weird bifurcated snout of her respirator mask and was spraying it with mad optimism—as if the nerve agent wouldn’t have killed her long since if it could. She whipped her knife out and open.
A single vicious slash across the back of the hand that held her laid open glove, skin, and tendon to bone. His fingers went slack. She slashed his throat, then pulled off his mask for good measure as he dropped to his knees grabbing at his gullet as if to slow the bleeding.
She looked around. And then there were none. Where’s that snake DuQuesne? she wondered. “He got past you when you were focused on the others,” she said aloud into her mask. It was as if some third party offered commentary.
She turned and ran back the way she’d come—toward Mama’s chamber, the heart of Evernight. No less a monster than she was now, her enemy was likewise no less focused. He was still bent on poisoning and killing Mama, and destroying Evernight.
The mask made breathing hard. Candace ran. Around the bend she saw La Vipère’s back. Still blinded by her Darkness, he forged determinedly on, left hand outstretched to touch the limestone wall. She slowed her pace to a brisk walk. No point winding herself. She still moved faster.
Ten meters beyond the bodies of the woman and Gaspard he stopped, turned, and stripped off his mask. “I hear you,” he said. “Which terrorist are you? Your steps don’t sound too heavy.” He stood smiling, seeming calm. But his mouth was open far enough that she could see his fangs twitching partway down from the roof of his mouth and then back, as if to nerves.
She took her own mask off. “I’m the little black bitch you tortured,” she said, stalking forward. She watched him closely for a move to draw the Manurhin .357 Magnum revolver holstered beneath his left arm.
“Shongo?” He looked and sounded surprised.
“My name is Candace Sessou. I was one of the PPA’s terrorist child aces. I’m one of the most wanted terrorists in the world. I am The Darkness. I’m going to kill you.”
“Impressive. And you’re telling me this why?”
“One of us at most leaves here alive,” she said softly, “so why not?”
Three meters from him now, she slipped to the tunnel’s far side so he couldn’t target her by sound. She meant to slip behind him and use her knife.
DuQuesne laughed and stuck his tongue out at her. The childish gesture made her stare harder at him. “I thought you’d be dead, having failed your infernal mistress. Well, you will be soon.” Again his tongue flicked out. It made Candace’s skin crawl. What’s wrong with this—
He lunged straight at her and punched her in the face.
Sparks burst behind Candace’s eyes and she sat down hard on a dry patch of floor. Fuck, she thought. Lucky shot. She rolled right, started to get up.
A boot in the side lifted her in the air and dumped her on her right hip. He kicked her again in the pit of the stomach. The air blasted out of her lungs.
He kicked her in the face. She fell onto her back, stunned.
His weight landed hard astride her hips. She slashed at him with her knife but her eyes wouldn’t focus and she missed. She struck him in the chest with her left fist but had no strength.
For a moment they banged forearms off each other. Then the Vipère caught her righ
t wrist and pinned it to the yellow stone floor. He trapped her left a moment later.
He leaned toward her, opening his mouth. The fangs swung down from their slots in his hard palate with cruel deliberation. The venom-stink washed over her. “Poison’s not the only gift my ace gives me, little terrorist,” he said. “I can taste you from several meters away.” The fangs retracted enough to let him waggle his tongue at her.
Her wits were starting to coalesce again inside her battered skull. That’s why he had to run away from the fight and leave his men to die. He couldn’t take his mask off to find me without dying from his own gas.
The irony failed to cheer her. He was leaning his face slowly closer to hers. “And now I’m going to bite you,” he said, “right in the face. Just a touch to paralyze you. Now that you’ve so conveniently come to me, I have a little time to play before I kill the Queen of the Underworld.…”
Sheer outrage drowned initial terror at her utter helplessness, that he was playing with her now because he was by far the stronger.
… And because he doesn’t know I have a knife.
She rolled her right wrist and cut the back of his left one with the folder’s locked-back blade. He uttered a strangled cry and reared up. Both grips on her wrists slacked slightly. But enough. She couldn’t match her muscles to his, but she was wiry strong. She eeled her hands free, gashing his left palm on the way out.
Inhumanly wide-spread jaws darted for her face, the long fangs fully extended. She stabbed between them, into the roof of his mouth.
He screamed shrilly. She writhed out from under him and jumped up. He was clutching the knife-hilt with both hands, trying to yank it free. Guess I jammed it in there pretty well.
He let go with his right hand and yanked out his heavy revolver. She was still almost muzzle-contact close. She threw herself backward, hoping his tongue couldn’t taste her with her knife in the way.
The noises he made had turned to furious gobbling. Now as she landed on her back and rolled, they rose in pitch and urgency. And then were muffled.
She rolled against the wall, expecting the smash of a bullet every instant, and looked at him through the dark. DuQuesne had what looked like a bandanna wrapped around the lower half of his face.
