by Camilla Monk
March’s dimples creased his cheeks as the doors opened to a poorly lit level that seemed unfinished. “Until now. The night is still young.”
Farouk shook his head in response, the sunglasses concealing whatever despair might have been brewing in his eyes. The three of us stepped out and into a long hall whose bare walls still awaited some paint. Scaffolding remained here and there, half concealed by transparent tarps. Red carpet rolls had been stacked against a wall, next to golden signs still wrapped in plastic sheets. Orchestra level. Bar du Pacifique . . . We must be near the concert hall. Backstage? No, more like right underneath.
“So you and the Queen, you’re Iranian, right?” I asked, inspecting the dim fluorescent lights buzzing above our heads.
Farouk tucked his phone back inside his tux jacket, adjusted his sunglasses, and remained silent. I took that as a yes.
March offered him an apologetic shrug. “I’m afraid I didn’t brief her on the etiquette.”
The offended party considered me from behind his sunglasses. “It’s all right. I won’t kill her.”
Goose bumps bloomed on my arms.
March winked at our host. “You know I wouldn’t let you.”
Farouk’s face remained impassive for a few seconds. His thick black eyebrows lowered behind his glasses until he barked a dry laugh. “Ah! Weird, weird day . . .”
And it’s about to get even weirder, I thought, when at the other end of the hall, a pair of security doors opened, letting in the two leads of tonight’s drama. Night and day. Him, in a black tux very similar to March’s save for the black bow tie, her, ethereal in a champagne sheath dress that was perfectly assorted to her new straight blond bob. I didn’t miss the way Sabina clung to Dries’s arm as the two of them walked toward us though: underneath the class act, she was probably terrified. Next to me, Farouk tensed visibly. As per his Queen’s orders, however, he made no move to reach for his gun.
Dries gauged him with a smirk. “Here’s a face I haven’t seen in a while.” His arm wrapped around Sabina’s shoulders. “Farouk, this is Sabina, who’s here to help us keep the dome in one piece, at least until dawn. Sabina, this is Farouk, my favorite lackey.”
This time, Farouk’s right hand jerked instinctively to reach inside his jacket, but March’s hand was on his forearm in the same instant, acting as a safeguard. He turned to Dries and Sabina. “Are you two ready to go?”
She cast an uncertain look at Dries. “Yes. But you promised—”
“Don’t worry. I’m a man of my word.”
I refrained a grimace. “Um, what did you promise?”
Her face took on a pleading expression. “Dries said that if we can catch Lucca, he won’t kill him. He has to be stopped, but he’s . . . I think he’s very ill. He doesn’t realize, because he suffered so much—”
“And I said I wouldn’t kill him.” He gave her shoulder an almost paternal squeeze. “I already told you you have my word.”
March and I exchanged a look. Dries wouldn’t kill Gerone, indeed. Our mass-murdering emo was looking at a swift forty-five if he got caught. Seeing Sabina’s frightened, hopeful eyes made even bigger by a copious amount of eyeliner, I felt uneasy. She saw something we didn’t in Lucca Gerone: the man he had once been. She still retained a tiny drop of faith in him, even after all he’d done. Entrusting that drop in Dries’s hands was a highway to heartbreak, but for now, we needed her to trust him. We couldn’t afford for her to freak out.
I boxed my guilt in a small part of myself I knew would probably shatter when this was all over and offered her an encouraging smile. “It’s gonna be okay. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think you’re safe with Dries.”
A nervous laughter shook her frame, and she bobbed her head in agreement.
Farouk checked his watch and tilted his head toward the elevators. “It’s time.”
“Island and I will join you upstairs in two minutes,” Dries said, letting go of Sabina.
March’s brow furrowed. “Island? That’s not what we planned.”
I looked back and forth between him and Dries, dumbfounded. “Uh, I know. Dries, is there anything . . . ?”
Dries’s jaw ticked in impatience. He waved a dismissive hand in March’s general direction. “How come you’re still here? Go. We need a moment.”
I mouthed a silent It’s okay to March and watched him, Farouk, and Sabina disappear in the elevator, his eyes never leaving me until the doors had closed.
When I turned around, Dries stood with his arms crossed, giving me what can best be described as the “dad eye,” a narrowed stare that was at once concerned and judgmental. “So the two of you . . . patched things up?”
“Yes.”
He gave me a leveled stare. “Surely it won’t last.”
I thought of March’s words, right before Guita’s dolphins had tried to eat us. Instantly, the glow returned, warming me from the inside. “I hope it lasts. For a very long time.”
Dries’s eyes screwed shut, like I’d stabbed him. “I see. Well”—he stroked his beard—“I suppose we’re all entitled to our mistakes, even the gravest ones.”
It was probably the closest thing to a blessing I’d receive. I smiled. “Thank you.”
He pulled me to him for a loose hug, which I returned as best as I could with my right arm. “March gave me a P99, you know,” I murmured in his chest.
“Good.”
“If I you ever barge into our bedroom again, he won’t shoot you. I will.”
The moments my words registered, Dries broke our embrace to look me up and down. For the first time, in his eyes, I saw more than the pain and confusion of a man trying to pick up the pieces of his past. I saw pride, and perhaps even happiness. In his irises, the gold shone bright. “That’s the spirit, little Island. That’s the spirit.”
In the elevator taking us to the concert hall on the first floor, Dries showed me how you could avoid ending up in the pool by placing your feet on each side of the trapdoor I now knew how to detect on the floor. I didn’t think I’d ever need that again, but when I told him about the dolphins, he seemed surprised and made a passing comment that they were “something new.” Upon my asking what other life-forms had previously been inhabiting the pool, he declined to comment. I gulped.
When the elevator’s doors revealed the wide hall leading to the orchestra, March was there, waiting for us. He extended his arm for me to take, but Dries moved faster and barred the way. He wrapped a hand around the nape of March’s neck, something that might have looked like an affectionate gesture to the external onlooker, not unlike a bro hug. I saw the way he tapped March’s cheek mobster-style, though, and heard his gravelly hiss. “As jy haar swanger maak, ek sal jou piel plastinate.” If you get her pregnant, I plastinate your cock.
March was smart enough not to answer, not even with a pledge to practice safe sex at all times: this was about an old Lion giving his daughter away to the favorite disciple with as little damage to his ego as possible. Satisfied with his performance, Dries moved to join Sabina, who stood behind March. At last, I was able to take his proffered hand, and we were engulfed by flashy cocktail dresses, elegant gowns, and a battalion of tuxedos.
In a moment of scathing irony, I came to realize that while my eyes kept darting around, anxiously checking the crystal chandeliers hanging above our heads or studying every single tux to guess if the owners were spies, the guests were in fact looking at me. Well, not me, I suppose, but that firetruck of a dress. Or maybe it was the cast around my arm, barely visible under the veil cascading down my shoulders, that had people wondering what sort of grim punishments were dished out in the intimacy of our hotel room. Whatever it was, it worked. If Gerone and Alex were hidden in that crowd, they couldn’t possibly ignore my presence . . . or Sabina’s.
Quite a few heads turned as she walked across the hall on Dries’s arm. They pretended not to notice, taking the stairs to reach their box and get in position.
March’s hand settled on t
he small of my back. “You’re a sensation.”
I shrank under the scrutiny of yet another woman. “I dunno. Maybe.”
Like Dries and Sabina, we took the stairs all the way up to the fourth tier, where a box strategically placed on the side and across from Dries’s would give us a perfect view of the concert hall. Everything, from the walls to the seats, was lined with burgundy velvet, like a wink to the rococo debauchery of times long gone. After we sat down, I scanned the rows of seats and the orchestra below us. The red curtain wasn’t open yet. The musicians had started tuning their instruments, filling the space with an oddly soothing cacophony.
When I dared to look up, I was swallowed by the immensity of the dome. Fifty feet above our heads, gigantic incurved steel beams supported thousands of tons of Novensia’s cursed Ceraglass. Beyond, in a cloudless night, billions of stars shone, nested in the mysterious fog of the Milky Way.
In another life, I wished we could have been there on an actual vacation, because, really, that dome was beautiful enough to make me cry, and although I was rapidly rethinking my rankings, the Magic Flute had always been my favorite opera. I used to sing the Queen of the Night’s second aria in my bathroom as a child, because that’s where artists of my caliber belong.
A hum reached me and soon turned into low vibrations that thrummed through my body and made the chandeliers hanging from each box’s ceiling tinkle softly. I looked up at the stars moving away from us. No. We were moving. We were going down. Everywhere, the hubbub of the concertgoers stopped and was replaced by an explosion of cheers and applause. March’s hand squeezed mine.
“They’re locking the iris,” I murmured, as the dome slowly sank until dark-blue waters engulfed two-thirds of the structure, leaving a disk of stars in the guise of a ceiling. I inched closer to March, unable to stop the tremors in my body when I noticed schools of fish roaming on the other side of the glass walls, glimmering like sapphires thanks to external lighting.
That was it. If we were unable to locate Gerone’s cannon, all we could count on was our evacuation plan. The more I thought of it though, the less likely it seemed that the dome’s personnel would manage to evacuate everyone in time. Maybe I’d made a terrible mistake.
“Breathe. It’s going to be all right.”
I looked up at March, perfectly composed as usual. I was amazed that he could withstand so much stress, and that, ultimately, I was the only one who could push his buttons to the point of no return. A kryptonite of sorts. The lights went off. I retrieved the pair of opera glasses Farouk had given me before leaving sublevel four, which I’d put in my red clutch next to the gun. Placing them before my eyes, I discovered we’d been given a different model than the rest of the audience: onstage, Tamino’s infrared signature ventured into the Queen of the Night’s mysterious kingdom.
We watched and listened as the first half of the opera unfolded. Scene after scene, the infrared picked nothing spherical or big enough to fit the description Sabina had given us. My neck was getting damp with sweat. Gerone was here, somewhere, and there was nothing, no fricking sign of him.
On the stage, princess Pamina fought the evil and ugly Monostatos trying to kiss her. The Queen of the Night appeared in a roll of thunder to chase that piece of shit Monostatos away, terrifying in her glimmering black gown. A trapdoor slid, from which giant black lotuses bloomed all around Pamina as the Queen’s divine voice ordered her daughter to kill the kind magician Sarastro.
March and I saw it at the same time. His arm, which held the glasses, jerked as he tried to get a better look. In my visor, all I could see was the largest of the black lotuses. The only one emitting a faint heat signature, unlike its counterparts.
35
Hölle Rache
“Hells Revenge cooks in my heart, Death and despair flame about me!”
Emanuel Schikaneder, Libretto of The Magic Flute
“March. This is it!”
How fitting, I thought, as the first angry notes of the Queen of the Night’s aria filled the dome. A vengeful rant and a promise of death: I almost felt stupid for not having foreseen that Gerone would pick that particular scene for his grand finale.
March sprang from his seat and whispered into a tiny mic concealed under the lapel of his tux, sending a signal for Ilan and the Taco Delta team to go ahead and blow up the filtered water tanks.
He took my hand and practically hauled me up from my own seat. “Island, we’re moving!”
Across the Poseidon Dome, the soprano’s voice gradually rose, and those terrible, grandiose F’s tore the air. They rang in my skull as we ran down the stairs to the orchestra, sharp like the dagger the Queen wielded.
We reached the ground floor and raced toward the stage in the dark. A rush of adrenaline surged through my veins when cold wetness splashed my feet. The water. No one had noticed yet, and the soprano kept singing, each note higher than the previous, until the aria ended, and a round of applause thundered in the hall. On the stage, however, the singers looked down at the orchestra in confusion. It was a woman’s ear-piercing shriek that started the commotion. The singers and musicians snapped out of their shocked daze and ran away, some back to the wings, others hurrying up to the doors without even taking their instruments.
The water was now rising fast, and the spectators panicked in their turn, scrambling up from their seats. I heard a child’s cries. There was nothing I could do, and in that moment, I felt shitty that the whole thing was my idea, and that these people were experiencing what might turn out to be the biggest fear of their lives. March and I were less than twenty feet away from the stage, trudging ankle deep in a pool that shimmered and undulated across the orchestra’s floor. We dodged countless tuxes and wet dresses; some bumped into my arm, and I hissed through the jolts of pain.
“Stay close.” March took my hand and pulled me to him, shielding me from the last spectators running away.
All around us, lazy vibrations and metallic moans indicated that security had regained control of the elevation system. Waves crashed against the dome; we were rising back to the surface. Relief washed over me, so intense that my knees grew weak for a second. A strange peace fell onto the hall as we reached the orchestra pit. There too, instruments had been abandoned, and glitter from the stage decor floated across the water’s surface.
March helped me up the stage, and I ran toward the giant black lotuses that had bloomed earlier around the Queen of the Night. The petals were made of velvet-lined plastic, and pleated golden tulle in their center made for a seedpod. I carefully lowered myself inside the biggest flower, and my feet met something hard.
“Help me; there’s something inside,” I said to March.
Shredded tulle flew in all directions as we uncovered what seemed to be a giant black sphere and heavy-duty four-hundred-ampere cables underneath we couldn’t easily reach.
“I think it’s the cannon, but I don’t know how to cut the power. I can’t see where the cables go.”
I crawled closer to the sphere, battling the waves of pain shooting up my wrist. God, if this thing went off and fired high-intensity ultrasounds directly in my face, I’d probably be howling in agony and begging for the sweet kiss of death in seconds. That’s the sort of LRAD they use against protesters who stand dozens of yards away from the device. Now imagine being nose-to-nose with it . . .
March helped me out of the flower.
I gestured to the deadly boom box we’d just uncovered. “We need to cut the power and disassemble it. And we need to do it fast. Gerone isn’t stupid; the cannon might be connected to its own generator.”
“All right, I’ll warn Erwin’s team.”
As he reached for the tiny mic in his lapel, splashing sounds reached us, coming from the orchestra. We both looked down to see Sabina, whose silk sheath dress left little to the imagination now that it was half-drenched. She rolled frightened eyes at the lotuses onstage. “Is it there? The cannon?”
“Yes. We need to get away from here. Where is Dri
es?” March asked.
She wiped tears from her eyes with her forearm. “He went after a man.”
Alex . . . ? I frowned. “Who? Did you see him?”
“No.” She sniffed. “Dries said he’s a little shitstain.”
Yup. Alex all right.
March forced a smile on his lips. “Come on, Sabina. We can’t stay here.”
She extended her hand to him. “Yes . . . we need to find Dries.”
I nodded. “Yeah, we—”
The ultrasound wave hit me like a freight train, the unbelievable power of the vibrations twisting me into knots. Over the agonizing pain in my skull and the nausea boiling at the back of my throat, I saw that March and Sabina had collapsed too in a similar fashion.
March called my name, reaching for me, hauling me up. I didn’t answer. There was no time, and I could barely stand. I thought, We need to see where he is. It’s the only way, and that’s when I remembered the infrared glasses I’d put back in my clutch when leaving the box. The bag was a few feet away—I’d dropped it when climbing inside the lotus. I wrenched my hand away from March’s and went to my knees, grabbing at the bag.
I struggled to bring the glasses to my eyes. Was I hallucinating those cracking sounds around us? I prayed I was. In the deserted concert hall, all it took was one look. High above us in the backstage scaffolding, a bright spot moved, the glowing heat of several bodies. I pointed the direction to March and screamed at the top of my lungs, “Up . . . there!”
Never had I been so glad to be dating a former hit man. I saw his arm rise, aiming at the shadows moving in the scaffolding. A series of shots cracked over the powerful hum filling the dome. I registered a muffled groan. Above us, something fell down, clanking repeatedly against the scaffolding’s steel. And, blessed be Raptor Jesus who no doubt guided March’s aim, the pain stopped. Footsteps shook the metal structure right before the bullets started raining.
