by Camilla Monk
The car slows down in front of gate number 8, and Morgan flashes us a smug look, visibly pleased by our aghast silence so far. Gate number 8 blinks green, and its steel doors slide open with a whoosh. I distinctly hear my jaw unhook itself and hit the floor mat at my feet.
To quote the dramatic statement of that CNN anchor, where is Odysseus? Here. Sitting in the middle of a concrete dome so high I can’t even get a feel for its size, surrounded by scaffolding in which a flurry of orange helmets and black fatigues hustle and bustle in deafening noise . . . there it is.
THIRTY-THREE
THE LAST SUPPER
We’re driving through the dome, but I barely pay attention to the hubbub around us, the mini trucks driving by, loaded with spaceship components. My eyes are glued to the bullet-shaped stack of three modules apparently still undergoing some touch up. The lowest one, that’s the nuclear ion thruster, a mad engine capable of propelling more than a ton per kilowatt. All around the ship, large dents in the hull will allow Odysseus to dock to its gravitational ring . . . once it leaves the atmosphere.
I squint at the ship, trying to identify the various sections. The longest one must be the habitable quarters, then the control, both pressurized. A huge electronic arm is working on a third unit, some sort of long tube secured to the underside of the ship. I hope—pray, really—that it’s not what I think it is . . .
I still can’t fully process the fact that Anies seriously did it. In the opposite seat, Dries too seems to have momentarily forgotten Morgan’s presence. His gaze is riveted to the spaceship, his face completely blank. His hands though, they’re shaking a little, and knots form in my stomach when I notice it. The car stops in front of a large glass tube—another elevator. Morgan rubs his hands in anticipation when the doors click open. A group of Lions surrounds the car, all carrying visible guns at their belts. Two men detach themselves from the group to open the rear doors. Anies definitely isn’t taking any risks this time.
Morgan pulls me out of the car none too gently while his men do the same for Dries, immediately encircling him afterward. I turn around to check on March and see men drag him out of the second SUV. I clench my teeth, the urge to run to him boiling in my veins, hammering in my chest. He no longer seems fully asleep, but rather in a daze. They haul him to his feet and support him because the effects of the drug they injected him with make him virtually unable to walk. I can’t stand seeing him like this, his head lolling on his chest. I take a step toward him, but Morgan’s hand immediately clasps around my arm. “It’s this way,” he chides.
We’re escorted to the glass elevator in religious silence while, around us, workers and Lions alike go about their business and appear to blatantly ignore the fact that Anies just kidnapped people who look in poor shape. The words collective moral failure come to mind.
At least in this confined space, I’m closer to Dries and March. His head rises weakly, and he sees me. His eyes are half-closed, and he blinks repeatedly, as if struggling to keep them open.
“It’s gonna be okay,” I whisper to him.
“It’s not,” Morgan shoots back without looking at me, adjusting his black leather gloves. “Not for him anyway.”
I barely resist the temptation of ramming into that asswipe and biting anything my teeth can reach. The elevator is taking us to the top of the dome, and Odysseus now rests below us, majestic, its white hull even brighter under the artificial light. In the scaffolding, one of the orange helmets is busy erasing the US flag painted on the side of the main unit with a laser. For all the Lions have accomplished, I find there’s something pathetic in that single move. Like a reminder that this is nothing more than grand theft after all.
When the concrete ceiling looms dangerously close and we must be 150 feet above the orange ants hurrying at our feet, the car slows down to a stop. The elevator’s glass wall slides open with a hydraulic sigh. I turn around and freeze at the sight awaiting us, but Morgan grips my arm tighter and drags me forward. The salon’s stone walls are the same, an exact replica, down to the faint musty smell, and each painting hangs exactly where it should. The couches and the brocade armchairs are in the same place, facing each other. In the fireplace, logs crack and pop softly as flames consume them. The bar is here too, and the absinthe fountain stands on its mahogany countertop, the glass vessel gleaming gold from the fire reflected in it.
I’m back at Ingolvinlinna.
It takes me ages, or maybe just seconds, to realize that someone is sitting in one of the armchairs, facing away from us and toward the fireplace. On the burgundy armrest, a hand moves. I already know the black suit, the mesmerizing green glow of the absinthe swirling slowly in the crystal glass. He extends his arm to place the glass on an antique table and gets up from the armchair.
Anies turns around to acknowledge us. At my side, Dries stares at his brother, his gaze devoid of anger, only an unfathomable sadness. When one of the guards shoves March and he collapses at my feet, I shrug off Morgan’s hand and get to my knees, trying to balance myself with the handcuffs. I can’t touch him, but I feel the heat of his body against mine, and I find the strength I was lacking. He may not be at his best, but I read determination in his irises. He can still fight this, and we can be okay.
“Come closer; let me see you both,” Anies says, his voice hoarse from what I suspect was a recent fit of coughing.
With one last look at March, I allow Morgan to help me to my feet, and I follow Dries as he walks toward the fireplace. In a corner of the room, a heavy oak door opens, its hinges protesting with a creak. Anies’s lips curl into a wry smile. “It isn’t like you to be late, broer.”
A shudder dances down my spine when Stiles appears in his eternal gray suit and black tie. There’s nothing but tenderness and compassion to be found in his pale-blue eyes as he takes in my state of disarray. Too bad none of it is real.
“Bring us the bottle,” Anies says.
With a nod, Stiles walks to the bar and retrieves a red wine bottle from a finely sculpted cupboard. He pours a glass with careful, practiced gestures and brings it to Dries.
“Romanée-Conti,” Anies comments. “Still your favorite?” Without waiting for an answer, he flicks his wrist to Morgan, who seems to hesitate before resolving himself to obey his boss’s command. His mouth is a tight line as he produces a universal key from his inner pocket and proceeds to unlock Dries’s handcuffs. I watch the key turn in the lock with gritted teeth, silently praying he won’t notice the way Angel rigged them.
Dries accepts the glass without a word or even a glance for Stiles. He takes a slow sip, his eyes closing in delight. “Enlighten me, broer,” he says. “What is going on in here, exactly?”
Anies waves the question off. “Nothing you need to concern yourself over. Enjoy your wine, sit down, and relax. You’ve earned it.”
Dries chuckles. “No, thank you, I’d rather die standing.”
“As you wish,” Anies replies, his voice a notch colder.
Dries takes another long sip and considers his brother over the rim of the delicate crystal glass. “Nuking the world, huh? Ma sou skaam wees . . .”
Anies coughs a laugh. “I’m afraid Ma would be ashamed of every single thing you and I have done since we left home. But let me ease your mind. I don’t want to destroy the world—I have enough on my plate as it is. Let us say I’m trying to rescue my kind.”
Hot anger flares in my veins at his words. “Rescue . . . You’re bringing terror!” I shout.
His golden gaze sets on me. The same as Dries, as mine, suddenly softer. “I’m happy to see you, Island. I knew you would come back to me.”
I step back instinctively.
“Oh, yes, that’s something else I wanted to discuss with you . . . I believe you stole my child, and took her mother from me,” Dries notes, in a chilling conversational tone.
“Jy weet ek het die regte besluite te neem.” You know I made the right decisions. I seldom, if ever, heard Anies speak Afrikaans, save for the occas
ional endearment to his brothers . . .
“Vir wie?” For whom? Dries’s congenial mask falls as he spits the words. He throws the glass to the ground. It crashes on the aged wooden floorboards. Wine spills like blood, and each crystal shard is set ablaze by the flames reflecting on its edges.
But it’s not to him that Anies answers. His eyes are set on me as he says, “I was very happy when your mother obtained the Cullinan for us. I trusted her, shared my vision with her, and I offered her a place at my side . . . I would have given her everything.”
“But she refused,” I say, shaking from all the pain, the rage.
He looks sideways at Dries. “What a misfortune . . . that she was the one thing we both loved the most.”
Dries stares at him, like the words didn’t fully register. So I say it, and I can feel my voice breaking with each syllable. “You killed her.”
“She would have become a problem. I made a rational decision at the time.”
I think I see Dries’s fingers quiver, the only warning before he sends the table on which the absinthe glass rested flying into the fireplace, and he lunges at his brother. He grabs Anies’s throat with both his hands and squeezes, and I feel it in my neck, in my bones too. Anies barely resists, but Morgan and his men instantly leap to protect their dear leader. I scream when I see them gang up on Dries like beasts, grabbing his arms, his neck. March tries to get to his feet. I realize that his gaze holds renewed sharpness—his body isn’t quite willing yet, but his mind is clear. His shoulders flex. He’s summoning the strength to snap out of Angel’s handcuffs.
“No!”
Dries’s roar booms over the grunts of the men trying to restrain him. He’s seen March, who freezes in a kneeling position.
“No . . . ” Dries repeats, this time in a breath of exhaustion as he gives up the fight and allows Morgan to bring him down to his knees with a powerful kick to his weakened right leg. The very one that got shot and shattered when Anies destroyed the Poseidon.
Tears are building in my eyes, and each breath I take burns my lungs. I understand, and yet I don’t. If March frees himself now, when he can barely stand up, it’s over. We don’t stand a chance. But I can’t accept this, seeing Dries like this, defeated. Two guards close in on me as well, clasping their hands around my shoulders in silent warning. In my legs, the muscles coil with the need to cross the distance in the room to him, but I can’t; I stay petrified as Morgan pulls out a long combat knife from a sheath in his boot.
Through it all, Stiles has remained perfectly still. He made no attempt to stop Dries. He watches, like a sphynx in the middle of a sandstorm.
Morgan presses the blade to Dries’s cheek while his men hold him still. “I want to start with his eyes,” he rasps.
Anies sighs and walks to his protégé. He places a hand on his shoulder, in a paternal, almost tender gesture. “We are just,” he says softly. “And we abhor unnecessary cruelty.”
Morgan’s features distort with equal hate and frustration, but he mumbles a barely audible, “I know.”
I draw a breath of relief.
A derisive smile cracks through Dries’s beard. The gold is fading; he looks exhausted. He looks up at his brother. “You’ll fix my daughter. No matter what it takes, you’ll fix your mess.”
Anies nods, but it dawns on me that Dries is looking past him. At Stiles. I don’t think Anies noticed it though. Icy fear creeps up my spine when I hear him tell Morgan, “You deserve justice more than anyone else in this room, Alexander.”
Blood freezes solid in my veins. March too seems to pick up the renewed threat in Anies’s voice; he straightens, the muscles in his forearms rippling, ready to fight back. But again Dries shakes his head imperceptibly. He’s looking at March and me, an odd peace relaxing his features, something foreign . . . that could be love.
Anies’s voice sounds distant, unreal as he says, “Clean and quick, please.”
The blade moves so fast I don’t have time to scream. Pain explodes in my chest as it plunges effortlessly through the skin, slicing neatly through Dries’s carotid. The blood flows, dark and fluid, on his neck, his chest. It drips onto the floor, and a howl builds from deep inside me, that won’t come out, that just can’t. I watch him tremble and go lax in Morgan’s grip. His body jerks one last time and hits the floor with a soft thud, his eyes still open but unseeing. A whimper escapes me. I need to see him more, just a little longer, but my vision is getting blurry. I feel salt pooling at the corners of my mouth, and March . . . he’s gone quiet in the arms of the men holding him. He’s gazing at Dries in stupefaction, his Adam’s apple rolling painfully as he swallows several times.
A sob bursts from me. “Oh no . . . No, no, no, no!”
But Dries can’t hear, and no one else in this hellish den will. I lost him before I could even remember him. I lost my father. Through my tears, I see that Morgan’s only remaining eye is glistening too. He’s looking down at Dries’s prone body, at the warm blood that splashed on his hands and boots. The blade still rests in his hand. His tongue darts to swipe at his lips as if they were dry, and he smiles, the guileless smile of a child who got his Christmas present at last.
Anies’s gaze softens, filling with the false kindness he used to bathe me with. He pulls Morgan into his arms. “You did well, Alexander. You’ve served your purpose.”
Morgan rests his sweat-soaked brow on Anies’s shoulder. Around the knife’s grip, his fingers shake a little. He exhales with difficulty. With infinite care, Anies takes the knife from his hands as a happy sob rakes through Morgan’s body.
“You did well . . . ” Anies repeats, his voice coarse silk.
The knife flips in his hand and sinks into Morgan’s side with ease, tearing through his ribs and left lung. In Anies’s arms, he stiffens and takes a gasping breath, his eye wide with incomprehension. With a flick of his wrist, Anies turns the blade in his chest. Morgan’s ribs snap with a sickening crack, and the blade reaches deeper, probably to his still beating heart.
Each thump of my own heart feels like an earthquake reverberating through my entire body as I try to process what just happened. Blood gurgles from Morgan’s throat, streaking down his jaw. His knees shake, and he too collapses, mere feet away from Dries’s body.
In Anies’s eyes, the fatherly kindness dissipates like fog on a window. He extends a hand wordlessly, waiting for one of his men to go fetch a hot towel from under the bar. He wipes his hands meticulously, including under his nails, until Dries’s and Morgan’s blood has entirely transferred to the white terry, mingled. He gives the stained towel back to his henchman without a glance for him or the bodies lying at his feet.
“Mr. Stiles.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Please take care of the rest,” he orders. “I’ll go introduce Island to Claire.”
It’s the mention of my name that snaps March out of his own stupor, and this time the volcano I know to rest dormant inside him, ever close to the surface, erupts. Risk or not, Angel’s magic handcuffs snap open, right before the forearm of the man holding him back snaps in its turn. Nausea pushes at the back of my throat when I glimpse the dangling limb’s unnatural angle. The guard closest aims his gun at him and four consecutive shots shred the brocade of an armchair, sending delicate feathers flying in the air. Half a second too late: feathers snow around March as he leaps at the guy’s throat. One heartbeat later, there’s an ugly bruise where March’s fist shattered his windpipe and the gun now rests in March’s hand while his victim slowly suffocates, wide-eyed.
When new gunshots crack in the air, I strain against my own cuffs in panic, trying to reproduce the trick Angel taught me. I give several desperate tugs that nick my skin while blood and brain matter splatter onto the elevator’s incurved glass wall—an imprudent Lion got shot directly in the face. The salon descends into chaos, and bodies hit the floor as Anies’s men try to stop a now-armed March—or maybe just survive. The moment I finally manage to free my hands, I register a flash of b
lack at the edge of my vision. Anies hauls me to my feet and tries to drag me with him toward the oak door Stiles disappeared behind seconds ago. My feet skate in blood as I claw at his hands, fight him with all I have.
At first, I mistake the booming sound and the shock wave that rip through the room for a grenade, but through the windows overlooking the launching area, I see flames and coal black smoke rise from a gaping hole at the base of the dome.
Distant gunshots crack in the facility, followed by screams, and soldiers pour from the newly formed wound in the wall, clearly wearing various types of gear, some light, some black. Time stops, and I forget how to breathe. The Queen really did it. To go after Anies, to get her revenge, she raised an army of fortune, an improbable alliance of mercenaries, Ecuadorian gangsters, and black ops who trusted Erwin’s instincts and remained faithful to him, against all logic.
A rough hand grabbing my chin brings me back to the pandemonium roaring around me. Anies’s fingers dig into my cheeks, his gray eyebrows quivering over wild eyes. “Island . . . Did you play me?”
THIRTY-FOUR
THE RING
Shielded behind the bar, March has seen Anies trying to take me away. Several rows of bullets blast into the sculpted mahogany in an explosion of wood shards. Not good . . . He can’t cross the room until he’s gotten rid of the three remaining men, and that’s without taking into account the elevator. It went down a few seconds ago, and whether it’s coming back up full of Lions or the Queen’s men will determine whether we live or die.
I kick and jerk in vain in Anies’s grip as the door gets ominously closer, and his men slowly back up in a cluster to protect our escape, guns and rifles in hand. There’s no time left. When I hear renewed gunshots coming from behind the bar, I expect to see March jump out in the open, but that’s not it. Above our heads, the crystal chandelier illuminating the room tinkles and creaks dangerously . . . before crashing to the ground, taking out one of the Lions in the process. My eyes briefly screw shut at the sight of the sea of blood-covered crystals now covering a copy of Anies’s favorite Persian rug.
