by Bō Jinn
* * *
Naomi was in a deep sleep, his arm draped over her and the small hands held on to him. He lay awake. The gentle rise and fall of her breath usually moved him to sleep, so that he never slept until she did and always slept when she did. But it had been hours since she had fallen asleep and his mind was still racing.
Vincent…
His lips moved to the name, but no sound issued.
Vincent…
The night sky was star-filled and the great, nocturnal orb was a sparkle blazing white in the blanks of his eyes, sparking something deep within the folds of thought.
His pupils dilated.
… Caine!
The thought sent a surge through him.
“Vincent Caine,” he contained the sudden flame whisper.
At once, he slipped his arm loose from Naomi’s grip, careful not to wake her, rising from the bed and pulling the cover back over her. He stepped out of the room and his pace quickened down the corridor. “Vincent…” he mumbled obsessively.
The light came on over the shelf behind the glass-enclosed flame where the books he’d accumulated were set in jagged stacks and rows. He looked down the spines of each book and ran his finger down the row until he found it:
“UNITED MARTIAL COVENANT: THE BIRTH OF NEW WORLD ORDER.”
The book slipped out of its row and the other books toppled into the space. He opened it and began feverishly flipping through the pages. After page 50, he started skimming through the text.
I know you are here…
Every so often, he would stop on a page, when flashes of familiar words caught his eye, then he’d turn the leaf over again. Finally, he stopped on page 213, where the top of the page read:
“Chapter 12: A World Divided”
He ran two fingers over the front of the page as he read, mumbling:
“…Internal division … early years … UMC…”
His finger stopped in the middle of a sentence.
“…Vincent Caine Incident…”
That was it. That was the name.
He carried on reading but nothing of any immediate relevance followed.
His eyes narrowed over the small number ‘4’ right beside the reference and flicked through to the end of the chapter and the found the number on the endnotes. The note at the foot of the page read:
“4. 02/03/53 – Vincent Caine – Multiple Homicides – Assassination – Sen. John Clarke Jones…”
All that followed were a series of cross-references to books and cases he had never heard of, and strings of letters he could not begin to decipher.
“Triple homicide … Senator John Clarke Jones…”
Nothing.
Could his obsession have been so misguided? All that because of a meaningless half-inch of small print? Then, the natural assumption followed: It really had been a dream – a conjuring trick of the subconscious. The name must have somehow transposed from memory and the rest was pure imagination. The more he read the name over and over, the more logical it all seemed. And yet the more logical it seemed, the more his intuition rejected it. There was something more – something he was missing…
The doorbell rang.
He jerked round like a startled lion and he stood still until the echoes faded through the hall, at which point he thought he must have imagined it. He looked across toward the kitchen, where he could just make out the numbers “0345” on the chronometer.
About a minute later, the bell chimed again.
The book closed without a sound.
The gleaming edge of a blade, lying on the shelf, caught his eye. He put down the book, taking one last look up the corridor to the bedroom, where Naomi was lying asleep. He turned off the lights, took the blade off the shelf and began a slow, soundless creep down the long path, through the hall toward the front door.
The bell rang again.
It was unlikely a drunken straggler would wander to the top floor of a residential tower on the edges of the inner city. His fist was firm around the blade grip…
When he stopped at the door, the bell rang a third time. The small display on the side of the door lit up at the touch of a button. His sinews unwound. The blade slipped into his sleeve, hidden.
The door opened.
The city lights spilled in through the windows of the outer corridor lighting a silhouette.
“Why are you here?” he asked
There was a long and guarded silence.
“I… don’t know,” said Celyn, standing in the doorway. Her response was slow and trembling. There was disquiet written all over her: her hands caressed her sides, almost neurotically, and her eyes darted in any direction except his. “I’ve been … just … walking around the city.”
“Since you left?”
Her nod was as a shiver.
“What happened?” he asked, warily. His blood was still simmering, hand still on the blade.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I got … lost.”
He took a slow, hard look. She did not appear as though she was high on ambrosia or anything else. Then a realisation steadily dawned on him through the silence of the dark. She was lost and she had come. She had come to him.
He stepped back and held open the door.
After a long delay, Celyn stepped over the verge. The door noiselessly swung shut.
He filled a glass with scotch, and then took a seat across from her, with the blue flame swaying beside them. He drank and the warm fluid seared his throat. He looked up. Celyn sat rigidly, hands on her knees as though she were prepared to spring up at any moment. Her eyes were gaping and sullen, still anxiously flitting about without direction. The frail light shone sallow over her and the sweat broke over her crown. Her fingers trembled.
“Why have you come?” he asked a third time.
For a while, Celyn did not seem able to speak or move.
Then, suddenly, she raised a lone hand and he followed the lone hand cautiously as it slipped into her coat. When her hand emerged, it wielded the ubiquitous black canister.
She set the neural cylinder down between them.
Saul looked from her to the canister and back twice before picking it up. By the weight, he could tell immediately that it was full and slowly tuned his eyes back up at her again.
“I can’t do it,” Celyn broke with a barely audible murmur ,“I can’t…” and then immediately, she went quiet again. She lowered her head and started to laugh a low, unsteady, possessed laugh that half-sounded like sobbing. When her head rose again, the bright centres of her inflamed eyes whirled in the shallow film of suppressed tears. She clenched her teeth and her mien became suddenly indignant.
He set the canister back on the table and the silence of his glower made it clear that he would not ask her the same question again. Why had she come? If there were even a reason, she appeared to have presently lost all sense of it. She was on the edge. He could sense it. The leap was all there was left.
“We’re martials,” she whispered. “We kill. We die. We disappear. That’s all there is.”
“That is all you know.”
“That’s all we are.”
“And as long as you believe that, you will remain their slave.”
“We’re all born slaves.”
“No … I am through being the pawn of the PMCs.”
“You don’t know…”
“Do not tell me what I know!” His fist rattled the table and sent the glass toppling with a clink and a smash.
The blood built up within him.
“Fear loves power,” After a long silence, his voice settled again. “The PMCs profit off fear. Fear is what drives nations to war. Fear is what created the martial world. Martials are the agents of fear,” he added, darkly. “As long as the Commission keep us believing that we are flawed machines, the real machine will not stop growing. The real machine is the war economy. And unless the parts defect, there will be no stopping it.”
“You can’t stop it…” Celyn shook
her head resignedly. “No one can stop it.”
There was silence again.
“No,” he said, sullenly, “perhaps not.” He could feel her within his grasp. He would not allow her to slip through his fingers. Not now. “The martial world grows every day, consuming everything in a fire. Soon, that fire will be all that there is. There will be nowhere to run from it.”
“It already has us.”
“True,” he nodded. “I thought that I could escape and I was wrong.”
“Then why?” she whispered. “Why are you doing this?”
He gazed at her mutely.
“You would not be here if you did not already know the answer.”
Their eyes remained locked; the silence disturbed only by the ripple of the blue flame swaying in the glass vessel. He saw the crazed passion allay in her.
“The girl…”
She looked away.
“I cannot let it take her too,” he said. “I will not.”
Silence fell again.
He waited for Celyn to speak, but by the frown lines forming above her eyes he could see that she was slipping away from him. It was too much. Too soon.
Celyn quietly stood up.
“Where are you going?”
She didn’t answer, but simply took the canister off the table, tucked it back in her coat and turned away.
“Do you even know?” he asked.
Just as she began to walk away, he shot to his feet and seized her by the arm, causing her to stop and turn back with a scowl.
“Do not do this.”
“Get – off – me,” she snarled and shrugged off his grip.
Seeing her walk for the door, the fire beat up in him again. He could not let her go. He would not. He lunged toward her and made to grab her again, and as soon as his hand made contact, he saw her body turn sharply and that was the last image he glimpsed before the blow struck.
What followed during the succeeding second happened in an unconscious flash of white. When he came to a split-second later, blood was issuing from an opening on his temple and streaming down the side of his face, and onto the hand, clutched around the blade, with the tip of the blade’s edge was pressed over Celyn’s neck.
His breaths rabid and juddering and their faces were so close, his own feral eyes scowled back through the reflections in hers. The instant before the blade would have torn through the jugular, a thought that flashed through his mind that percolated into him like a chill: He would have sooner killed her than let her go.
He clenched his jaw, stilling the sudden rise in fury. The blade shook in his lowering fist, dropped from his hand and clattered to the floor.
He stood before her, never breaking his gaze. The wave of pain settled. He looked away, disconcerted, as though waking from a trance, palmed the point of the throbbing over his temple and regarded the blood on his hand, then looked up at her again, wanting to say something, nothing left to say.
He clenched a blooded fist and turned away.
The instant he turned, he felt a hand latch around the back of his neck. There was another flash of white and next thing he knew, Celyn’s mouth was pressed against his and the rest of her body followed. Their teeth ground under the force of new passion. The visceral mind took hold once again.
He flowed with her rhythm, equalled her force, brought his arm around her, one hand clawed the flesh on the small of her taut back and the other dug into the roots of her hair. He bent her to his will. The blood smeared his face, neck and chest, wherever her hands strayed, and he tasted the blood on his mouth and hers, and tussled with her until the clothes pried off.
They fell together – him upon her – under the firelight, his groin thrust into hers, his body hard for her. When he felt her nails dig into the lines of his back, the sting of it roused him back to consciousness.
He stopped, inclined and stared at the shining eyes, wide with ravenousness, through the dark of his own heaving shadow. The flame danced over them.
A last drop of blood fell from his brow onto hers, blending with his breaking sweat. And when he sobered and noticed that she had stopped too, he saw that he had her exactly where he did not want her – in his power.
Her breasts heaved furiously and he waited for her breath to yield before he yielded with her. Her hands glided softly over the lines of brawn from the base of the abdomen up to his chest, around the bulge of muscle over his neck. She drew him in and he lowered and kissed the blood away.
C. 5: Day 600
