“No, not quite.” They both knew they had to move fast, to finish it before someone else arrived, but they didn’t know who.
The driver flexed back his shoulders to shake off the ghost that had climbed his spine. “If you think you can do your fucking job, search the tents. I’ll be in the building.”
Aidan released her.
~~~~~~
Those crazy mad ceiling lights appeared and made her smile. She felt warm, too warm for a jacket. She nuzzled into the fleece collar and decided she could not be bothered with removing it. She knew this feeling, this sultry weight that embraced and assured everything was good, so very fine, no worries in this sunshine. She wondered just briefly whose place had these ridiculous bulbs. This was not the ceiling of anyone she had ever gotten this ludicrously whacked with. She looked lazily to the side.
Curled in a tight ball, a woman hugged her knees.
Sable rose up to take in the full length of the hall. Looking over the succession of bodies, she noted the presence of family members kneeling among the injured, reassuring with words and touch they were not alone. She watched as a gurney was wheeled out of sight and heard the hall groan in commiseration at the sound of a bone saw.
Putting her back to the wall for support, she was searching her pockets when the old nurse told her, “They took all them weapons off you.”
“My phone,” she said.
“Don’t know if you came in here with a phone, but you and half these other lunatics came in strapped up like you was conscripts from the war a hundred years ago. Don’t know what you need all those guns and knives for.” He had come to kneel beside her. “Who you need me to call?”
Through the hazy pleasure, Sable reached into the distance. Mind free of body, she followed the connection, a well-traveled path to Enzo.
The nurse tried to catch her eyes. “You zone out, baby girl. Ain’t feeling no pain, not you.”
Enzo, filled with agitation, was near, but he was lost.
She had to place Aidan. She needed to know which way to run. When she looked, he was there. He drew her near but would not reveal himself; instead, he showed her the man coming down the hall.
Instantly, Sable dropped her head into her hands and cried.
“Now don’t you go to crying, or you’ll make this old man cry too.” As he spoke, Sable wrapped her arm around the nurse and buried her face in his neck.
~~~~~~
The man walking the corridor was just another tired laborer searching for a loved one caught in the disaster. It was likely a sister or girlfriend, as he only paused before young women, lingering once on the bruised and swollen face of a blonde with bleached hair.
It would be easier if the girl still had black hair and pale skin, but he was hunting for the eyes that stared from the picture like dead pools. He saw crying against an old man a redhead with a worker’s tan and long thin braids adorned with beads, piled in loops on her head and held with black sticks. The stretch of injured spanned before him leading him away.
~~~~~~
Sable began to whisper. The old nurse could feel her breath hot against his neck, his jaw, his ear. Her voice vibrated in his muscles and across the bones of his face. It was like she was insisting on getting under his skin to possess his frame, but rather than feel alarm, he felt quite suddenly like he had dipped into the narcotics.
“The sunshine is good, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Mmm, sure is.”
“You did this to me.” The playful accusation made him laugh. She held the nurse in her anodyne-addled influence to ask, “Did helicopters come in?”
“There was a few.”
“Are they still out there?”
“Never heard them leave.”
“On the roof?”
He laughed again, “Baby child, look around. We don’t have no working elevator. They land in the field out back.”
Sable’s jeans had been cut at the waist to place a compression pack over the wound at her hip. She told the nurse, “I need your belt.” She wound it through the loops, assuring him, “I am fine. You are fine. Everything is fine. It’s a little trick of sunshine, yes? Good, now help me to my feet.”
She clung upright to the nurse and laughed as well, though not from delight, but at how outrageous was the pain, how absurd to think she could walk on this bouncy floor with these rubber legs. It would pass. It would settle. The anodyne would mask the stab in her ribs and, as she brought her weight down on her leg, maybe even her hip. She leaned against the nurse thinking that with just a little time, she might even convince herself she had not been thrown at great speed into the side of a train.
She rested her head on the nurse’s chest and whispered, “Hold me,” and went again into the distance.
Aidan was everywhere. She saw through him like water that flowed over stones, rippling around objects, tugging at the resistance, but clear. She was searching for the man who blended so perfectly, but Aidan guided her to another. Together the men held a single purpose, a violent image of her and of death. She pursued the first down the hall, but Aidan warned of danger, turned the current, and pulled her back toward the other, toward the tents and the crowd and the street.
The nurse felt her emerge. Slinging braids out of her face like they were wet, she pointed her attention toward the helicopters she’d been told were outside.
4:50 p.m.
He was coming out of the cafeteria where the families had gathered when he saw the redhead sliding down the hall, one shoulder against the wall, her right leg bloody from the hip. She had that great mop of braids shoved on top of her head, but the hair sticks didn’t hold it all, probably hadn’t held it even before the wreck. She was all fucked up, but she was fucked up sexy.
This is no time to be banging crazy, he told himself as they passed.
From his earpiece, he heard the pilot, “She is not out here.”
He said into his phone, “Well, she’s not in here either.”
Behind him he heard crazy rattling the push bar to the back exit.
He corrected himself, “Maybe she is.”
He told her, “There are bolts. Let me get them for you.”
She turned, eyes all crinkled in a smile. “God, thank you.” Stepping back, she gave him access to the door. “They won’t let a girl smoke.”
No, he thought, that’s not her. He turned his back on her to flip down the top bolt and then, as he was kneeling, she ran her hand across his shoulder and cupped the side of his neck. She was whispering some mad shit. Aw hell, going to get a little crazy. He reached down to the bottom bolt and those enamel sticks plunged into his temple and were so fast gone, he felt them puncture his jugular before he fell.
4:55 p.m.
Enzo’s phone rang. He didn’t know the caller and wouldn’t have answered it but there was Marlow to consider. “Yeah?”
“Where are you?” He heard the clang of metal doors opening.
“Eudokia, trying to find the hospital. The map’s all wrong. You’re out of breath. Are you Ok? Where are you?”
“Hospital. But I am fucked up. Lovely nurse has me rolling in anodyne like sunshine.”
“Not all bad then.”
“I’m heading for the helicopters. Nika always said I couldn’t fly one to save my life.” She was dryly amused. “I hope to prove her wrong, but I suspect I am about to make a spectacle of myself.”
Then Enzo heard her breath shudder. He heard the hopeless growl of denial, “Oh, no, no,” fear as he had never heard her utter. He heard her foot slide on the pavement as she turned to run and the phone clatter across the surface.
~~~~~~
She had not been the subject of their scrutiny in years, now three of them in their forbidding black robes with their cold, relentless stares focused on her. She had come down the back steps and could see the dark outline of two helicopters beyond the pavement in the grass. She had smiled at her fortune. Then the nuns rounded the corner of the hospital. The Cloitare. Her heart slammed blood
through her veins. She did not know it could beat so fast; the sensation was foreign and overwhelming. In all the years she was gone, she had never been this close to them, and now, muddled on drugs, bent with injuries, she reeled to think she would have to fight them.
The anodyne could not convince her everything was fine. Panic carried her above the narcotic. “Oh, no, no,” she refused to believe she was about to be caught. She spun to avoid the group, but the landscape tipped with trauma and sedatives, and her body resolved to thwart the reckless action. She fell, hands to the ground, disoriented but recovering, ready to flee when she felt him. Aidan.
Suppressing a scream into a strangled cry, she closed her eyes and knew with a sense of crashing finality it was over. Everything in her sunk: all emotion, all fear, all hope. It was the state of the condemned. She became perfectly still and heard his soft approach over the gravel-strewn pavement. She knew precisely where he stopped. Already down, she folded further.
Head bent in respect, she addressed him, “Master,” and then, “Mentor.”
Aidan took in the sight of her: the dyed hair, the braids, the jeans, the dirty boots, and the blood. None of it mattered. Before him was his life’s work. He said, “I find your honor lacking.”
She bowed deeper.
Two more nuns had followed, and now all five came to encircle the two. Picking up the phone, Mother Vesna gently closed it before throwing it into the grass. Sable heard the approach of men too loud to be of the Cloitare. She recognized the metallic clink in their uniforms of gear and guns shifting against the other. Standing at the perimeter to shield the order from scrutiny, they were an issue but not a threat—nothing they carried would be used against her. Sable considered her condition, the space between her and the helicopters, the drugs and the number of nuns. It could all possibly be overcome, but then there was Aidan. That she might be captured was always a possibility. She had been told what to do. She had agreed to do it. Braced for the hardest part, she smothered her pride and made herself humble.
“Much time has passed.”
“It has,” she agreed.
“I have missed you, anawa.”
The affectionate term for a favorite disciple made Sable sink lower. Her voice shook with the truth, “I, as well, have missed you.”
“And now, anawa, what will you do now?”
Sitting back on her feet, she lifted her face to him. It had been so many years for her—most of her teens and now into her twenties—she was not the same, but he was, still disconcertingly perfect despite the scars, faultless in form and expression, the face the Cloitare tried to imitate but had turned callously inanimate.
There had been a plan and she had agreed to do it, but the hurt and guilt as she prepared to betray was intense. She did not think she could go through with it, not until she thought of the future, and then she discovered her integrity could still sink lower. “Forgive me, Master Aidan.” She dropped her eyes. “I did not know how to end it. I have longed to return.”
He was silent.
And she was the wide-open water, void of thought and intention for him to inspect.
He said at last, “I have never lied to you, anawa.”
A stone of shame rippled the surface. She stilled it.
He asked, “You would return with me of your own will?”
She met his eyes with flawless conviction. “It is my greatest desire to redeem myself.”
Subtle shifts in the black fabric surrounding them showed the nuns relaxing, but then, from over her shoulder, a compliance shackle was being pushed on Aidan by Mother Vesna. In an instant, she was outraged and alarmed. “Those are illegal,” growled from her throat an unexpected rebuff.
“Of your will you would come with me. This should make no difference.”
“It is electronic. It violates Cloitare doctrine.”
“For you, they make an exception. For you, they always make exceptions.”
“It is not necessary,” she insisted.
“I have never lied to you, anawa. I see plainly you intend to submit to me while you are weak and defy me when you heal.”
The wall of mothers stiffened.
Aidan accepted the bracelet from Vesna.
She pleaded for sense, “You can drop me at will. You don’t need it.”
“The mothers insist.” He reached for her hand.
The years had seen her give respect to another master of a different art. Sable grabbed Aidan’s hand and started to twist his wrist. With her feet tucked under, she already suffered the greatest disadvantage, but her rise to stop him was met with the strength of the mothers pushing her down. She rolled with the force of their direction, down and over, accepting the pain it brought, flipping to come up on her feet with Aidan at her back. Still low in a crouch, she started the spin around Aidan’s leg that would leave them behind, but she was pulled up by his hand on her neck, his voice in her ear, commanding, “Quiet.”
The sound of appeasement choked in her throat. Her body fell slack into delirium as the mind gave into the voice that controlled, the anodyne, and the warmth. A plea for mercy was about to drop from her mouth, but instead, the sound of surrender brought her back to the moment. She knocked aside her compliance to recover. Grabbing his arm, she threw herself forward, curling to the side, trying to come around and hook her leg around his to knock him down, but habit picked the wrong leg, the wrong move, and then it was too late to correct it.
He followed her momentum in the circle, dropping his arms to trap her hands, circling her leg with his, stretching the cut at her hip but not intending to make her scream.
Balanced on one foot, she tried to shift him, but he remained motionless. She wrestled her hands for freedom, but her wrists were tiny in his grasp. Desperate now, she dropped the whole of her weight, hoping to pull him forward so she could flip in his hold, but her weight was nothing compared to his size and he remained unmoved. She knew panic and horror, started thrashing to gain any measure of freedom that would let her slip through his grasp. Then wailing denial that this was happening, she rattled the nerves of the soldiers.
Finally, she knew she was defeated and he felt her settle then yield. She begged just once, “Please,” but he rolled his voice, commanding with persuasion, “Be still.”
There was a last sob of fight before he felt the shake of exhaustion tremble across her body. He coaxed again, “Still,” his voice slowing, dragging out the order to a rumbling murmur, “Quiet like the night.”
She wanted to resist but the direction was compelling.
Sinking already, he pulled her under with the demand, “Return to the dark.”
He supported her body while Vesna took the bracelet from the ground and clasped it around her wrist.
Mind held passive, Sable felt the cuff whir to life, heat, then expand pliable to tighten flush against the skin. She had given respect to another master, his hand crippled from the wrist, the bones crushed to the thumb with an improvised club. It had been a less painful option than staying in the shackle, he had said, a frenzied assault on his self for freedom he could not regret.
After
Enzo and Nika returned to the airplane hangar that was home in disbelief. Searching for an explanation as to what had happened, they made Max break into the carrier plane Marlow called the Pigeon. It was a tech freak’s fantasy chamber. When Enzo had first met Marlow, she had just come from some technophobic religious boarding school and could barely operate a phone. He had struggled not to throttle her. But eager for knowledge, she had pulled from him everything he knew before eating up Nika and then finally devouring Max. Only Max understood what all laid in the hold.
“She learned well from the master,” he acknowledged, “but she can’t beat a master.” He pulled the memory drive from her onboard computer and prepared to break the security.
His workspace was filled with new equipment, hundreds of memristor cores stacked and connected, all dedicated to finding her encryption key. It left no room for him to work o
n the old hardware recently stolen from the hospital, so the hospital hard drive sat on the floor and Max sat before it, his legs crossed with a tablet in his lap.
Every time he looked up to roll the tension from his neck, he was confronted by the Pigeon. No one except Marlow had ever cared for the ugly cargo plane, but now that it loomed outside the rolling doors like an angry bird, squawking of her disappearance, everyone found themselves placating it.
“Ok, big birdie, nearly got your mamma.” Max played the unsuccessfully erased files from the single emergency room surveillance camera. He frowned and called across the hanger, “I got it, but no one’s going to like it.”
Enzo came to kneel on one side of Max, and Nika leaned into the images from the other. Max played the video again. They watched Marlow slumping down the hospital hall, her shoulder into the wall for support. Enzo exhaled frustration, “There she goes.”
“And now…” Max waited for the moment, “she is out of the picture. Last seen going in the direction of the dead man with those nasty little puncture marks of hers.”
The three stared at the screen, lost for an explanation of what had happened next.
Nika walked away to press Max’s padded headphones hard over her ears. She’d saved Marlow’s final words to her phone, and over the past month, she’d played it repeatedly. The sound of the plastic case skidding across the pavement was followed by Marlow’s barely audible voice. Even with the audio cleaned, Nika had to strain for the words. “If I didn’t know better, I could swear she said master.”
“Not Marlow. I couldn’t even get to her to call me a master hack. I bet she’d even kick the shit out of her strategic trainer if he’d asked it.” Max laughed.
“No, she’d die before she’d bow to anyone,” Enzo agreed.
Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1) Page 6
