by Stu Jones
The second punch lands home and though I clench my abdominal wall at the last moment, it still knocks the wind from me again. Sarding coward. I’m hauled to my feet again. Gasping, I lower my eyes. Let him think he’s won, Mila.
“Anything else to say?” Giahi smirks, “No? Tell me why I don’t put a bullet in your head, traitor. Where have you been?”
“On the mission to Vel, I was led into a trap. There was no way for me to come back from what happened. You should know. You set me up.”
“Lies.” Giahi laughs, appraising the crowd. “Who actually believes that?”
My gaze wanders across the familiar faces. Some bear looks of confusion and pity.
Giahi turns back to me. “You deserted us.”
“Deserted? You exiled the rest of the leadership, so don’t pretend like I left you hanging. You wanted this as much as your puppetmaster did. Don’t for a second act like what you’ve done was for anyone’s benefit but your own,” I say.
“Yeah, I took control. Someone had to. This place was a mess. Opor was completely impotent. But I’m going to make it strong again.”
“How? By subjugating everyone? You know that’s not what this place was about. They do too.” I toss my head at the gathering crowd. “You’re part of the problem, Giahi. Vedmak is going to destroy everyone and everything and you’ve been all too eager to help him do it.”
Giahi steps forward to punch me again.
“Yeah, that’s right. Hit me to shut me up, because you can’t risk the truth getting out.”
“You don’t know anything.” Giahi spits at my feet.
“No? Let them hear it, Zaldov.”
There’s a pause, audio crackles through the speakers in the room. Giahi’s voice loud and clear is heard conversing with another.
“Now is the time to make your move. Remove the old man.” Vedmak’s voice echoes off the red rock walls.
“Now? I’m not sure he’s far enough along.” The reply is distinctly Giahi.
“Now, Rat. When she returns, with the old man gone, she’ll receive yet more intelligence. A reason to come to Vel. And when she does. I’ll be waiting. Make sure she brings a minimal party. She’ll die chasing a doomed operation and you’ll finally have Opor. Fail me on any of these points, and you’ll watch your own gizzards empty onto your feet.”
“Yes ... yes, Vardøger.”
Giahi’s eyes grow wide as he draws a small chrome pistol from his waistband and racks the slide.
“You’re dead.” He presses the gun to my forehead.
“Not so fast.” An old woman behind Giahi draws a pistol from under her cloak, leveling it at him. Immediately two of his henchmen turn their rifles on the old cripple.
“Shoot them,” Giahi says. “And shoot anyone who gets in the way.”
“I would advise against that,” Zaldov says, the crowd parting to reveal several Creed armed with glowing plasma rifles.
Giahi’s confident façade drains away. “What’s the meaning of this?” he says turning, his men jerking their rifles back and forth at too many threats to cover.
“Yes. I think that’s an excellent question.” Oksana steps forward, a tired and overworked version of the perfect woman I’d first met.
“Oksana,” I say. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but, I’m glad to see you.”
“Took you long enough to get here,” she fires back. “This Neanderthal has kept me locked up working on his pet projects for the last six months.”
“It’s a long story, but you can thank Zaldov,” I say.
The Gracile pats Zaldov on the shoulder.
“This isn’t a sarding family reunion,” Giahi barks, pushing the pistol flush to my face. “Flinch a muscle and I’ll blow this cow’s brains out.”
“You’ll be dead before her body hits the ground.” The old woman drops her cloak, stands straight, and pushes her hair back.
“Yuri?” I almost laugh. I’ve never seen the master of deception with his silver hair down.
“I’ve been watching things spiral out of control here. Under Bilgi’s orders I was supposed to sabotage the entire operation. But now you’ve come back from the dead.” He smirks.
“I’m in charge here,” Giahi shouts. “I call the—”
My hands come free from the loose bonds and intercept Giahi’s wrists, driving them upward. The concussive blast rings in my ears as he squeezes off a round. Shots ring out from Yuri’s weapon and Giahi’s riflemen drop to the floor, clutching their thighs.
Giahi grunts, attempting to pull back his hands but before he can adjust, I’ve pivoted beneath him and yanked his arms down. He flips over my bowed back and hits the ground hard. With a jerk, I strip the gun from his grasp.
“Everyone hold your fire,” I call out, catching Yuri’s nod that he’s okay.
I point the pistol at Giahi’s head.
“Do it.” His lips curl back in a snarl. “You don’t have it in you.”
Pressing my teeth together, I hold his stare. “You’re right,” I say, lowering the weapon, dropping the magazine and disassembling it in front to him. “I’m not you and I’m done with the killing.” I toss the broken down pistol parts off to the side. “Get up.”
Giahi laughs and makes his way to his feet. “You wanna go a few rounds, you salty little bitch?”
“It won’t take that long,” I say, raising my fists.
“Everyone stand back. No one interferes,” Yuri calls out.
The crowd widens. Without warning, Giahi lurches in with a barrage of punches. Parrying the first two, the third grazes my chin as I step to the outside and deliver the hardest palm strike I can muster straight to his ear with a satisfying smack.
Giahi stumbles back, rubbing the side of his head.
I’ve been waiting years for this.
“I’ll kill you with my bare hands, you rotten whore,” Giahi swears.
I say nothing, my focus absolute. He comes again, a snarl of fury melted into his ugly face.
I sidestep, deflect down and deliver a kick of my own hard and fast to the groin. The strike doubles him over. An uppercut to the jaw and an elbow strike to the back of the head sends him to the floor, wheezing.
“What’s the problem? I thought you were a tough guy? Should I let your men tie me back up?”
Giahi groans and raises himself shaking to his feet. This time he says nothing, his chest heaving.
“Surrender and I’ll leave you some dignity.”
“Sard off.” He charges in with a scream.
He grips my shoulders and shoves me back against the wall. He slips his meaty hands to my throat. Madness flares in his eyes.
The crowd presses in, gasping.
Enough of this.
I gouge deep into his ocular cavity. With a piggish squeal, he releases me, his hands flying to his ruined eye. A sweeping low kick takes his balance, followed by a knee strike to the face that sends him down.
Giahi makes it to his knees, trembling, blood and fluid streaming from the wounded socket. “Kill me.”
Without breaking eye contact with Giahi, I extend my hand to Yuri, who fills it with his pistol. I accept it and turn the handgun over. “I will spare your life, but your eye and your teeth are to remember your treachery.”
“Teeth?”
I whip the slide of the weapon across Giahi’s face with a crack, sending three bloodied teeth scattering across the floor. He slumps back, gurgling through split lips, and pitches to the side, unconscious in a pool of gathering blood.
“Yeah, you can live without your teeth.” I hand the weapon back to Yuri. “Thank you, friend.”
He gives a short bow. “Time is short, Mila. Bilgi is gathering everyone to meet the coming storm head on.”
“And we will join them, but first, please see that Giahi’s wounds are treated and he is confined to lockup.”
Yuri gives a little bow and alongside two others, drags Giahi away. The crowd breaks into cheers and applause.
With a sigh, I hold my hands up
to the crowd. “Everyone. I know some of you must be very confused. Just know that we all have been deceived. As we speak Vedmak, in the body of my friend Demitri, is doing something terrible. Something far worse than the Gracile Leader ever dared. The whole world, maybe even the known universe, is at stake. I’m sure you’ve all seen the growing green dome of green fire?”
Whispers of the terrible gateway ripple through the crowd.
“That’s it. That’s what will kill us all. We have to stop him. We have to try. I’m not going to lie to you. He has an army. An army of Graciles bonded to demons like Vedmak. But if we stop him, we stop annhilation.”
“By stop, you mean kill, right?” Yuri says.
I shake my head. “I know you don’t understand, but I have to try to save him. I have to.”
“Mila, you can’t save him,” Yuri says.
“Oksana’s been working on an antidote. Right, Oksana? To remove Vedmak forever,” I say.
The Gracile smirks. “Lucky for you, the tasks this troll had me working on were menial.” She waves at the unconscious Giahi. “I have it. I think.”
“Good.”
Yuri steps forward, pity etched into his features. “Mila, this doesn’t make sense. Why save one Gracile? If Oksana has a cure for the madness, why are we not curing all of them? Hmm? Because we can’t. Because this is war.”
He speaks with words that could easily have come from Bilgi. Their wisdom cuts deep. I hadn’t thought of that. We’re going to war against her people, and she has never once argued the point.
“Oksana,” I say, my voice but a whisper.
The Gracile gives the saddest smile I think I have ever seen. It quickly fades and she clears her throat. “Sun Tzu once said: ‘a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.’ We Graciles have had our time and we squandered it. I would like to tell you to spare my kind, to avoid killing them, but they won’t spare you. Or whatever resides inside them won’t. I don’t have enough of the antidote yet to cure all of them. The VME feeds on the connections between the Graciles and the ... demons. Without enough cure, and no time, the only way to stop it is to kill them. Do what you must to save us all.”
“And sparing this monster who leads them?” a woman calls out.
Oksana turns to the crowd, though addresses no one in particular. “Mila’s need to save Demitri is logically flawed, perhaps selfish even. But a more human desire I have never seen. And if we aren’t fighting to save our humanity, imperfect as it is, then we should just let the VME take us all.”
The room grows quiet.
My mind is suddenly filled with the horrific thought that we are about to commit genocide to save the universe. It’s paralyzing.
“Mila?” Yuri presses. “Did you hear me? If you don’t succeed, I’ll kill Demitri myself. It’s nonnegotiable.”
I can only wave him off.
I clear my throat and address the crowd. “I won’t force you to fight, but if you have a mind to stand with us in this, get yourself ready. Time is short.”
The small throng disperses and heads off to their individual tasks.
“Oksana,” I start, though I have no idea what I’m supposed to say.
She shakes her head. “Don’t.”
I exhale away any speech that was brewing inside.
“The delivery system,” she blurts out. “You’ll have to be close enough to manually hit him with an auto injector. There’s no other way.”
“That part could prove difficult,” I reply.
“There something else though, Mila.”
“Something else?”
“I think this antidote may also be a cure for the NBD.”
What did she say? “What? How is that possible?”
“I stumbled upon it. I’m not one-hundred percent on this but the antidote works by editing his genes inside his own body. It’s like a virus that will instruct his cells to stop making the protein that allows quantum entanglement. This same tech can be used to instruct bacterial cells to self destruct. NBD bacterial cells. It’s a tech worked on a couple of hundred years ago, but the plague took hold so quickly it was never fully explored.”
I can’t even fathom what this could possibly mean right now. A cure? A world free from the fear of the NBD?
“Back up everything you’ve got and get ready to go. We can deal with that later. Right now we focus on saving Demitri and Husniya—” I shake my head. “As well as everything else any of us have ever known.”
Yeos give me strength.
Chapter Thirty-eight
DEMITRI
Dark clouds, heavy with snow, gather on the horizon. A deep roll of thunder and a flash of jagged, forked lightning in the distance foretells the impending sounds of war. Pushed directly toward us by a brutal Siberian squall, the saturated vapors move with malevolent intent. Harbingers of death, they bring darkness—and Mila.
Vedmak stands on the battlement, impatiently waiting for his mortal enemy to appear so he can slaughter her and her friends. Wind batters my body, the body he stole from me, but I can’t feel it at all. Not even a remnant. He paces back and forth, restless like a caged animal. He seems to be deep in thought but I have no connection to him, pushed back into the recesses of my own brain. Locked away where I can’t meddle.
This is the worst it’s ever been. The potency of this cocktail—his red mist the alchemist cooked up—is incredible. I’m so far away, a vignette of numbness permanently obscures the world. He has complete control now. Though I fought as hard as I could, it just wasn’t enough. He was one step ahead. He’s always one step ahead. And because I failed, everyone will die. Either by his hand, the hands of those he controls, or the VME.
Perhaps it’s the best course, to let him finish what he started; to let the universe collapse and finally rid itself of the disease that is the human race. We have brought nothing but death and destruction from the moment we appeared on the planet. Nature, mother Earth, Yeos—whatever force one believes in—has tried to cleanse the planet before with little success. Natural disasters, famines, plagues, all seemingly sent like Earth’s immune response to a virus. Only the NBD almost succeeded. Yet somehow, like cockroaches, we survived.
It begs the question: is Vedmak really the enemy? What if he was right all along and he’s the answer. Earth’s final cure. Better to shake the universe like a child’s magnetic drawing board and start over.
The demon spins on a dime again, trudging the worn path, ice crunching underfoot. In front of him, Husniya is fixed, splayed out, to the icy outcropping. A particularly violent gust whips sleet and her jet-black hair about her face. Little Husniya. Mutilated by my hand once already, and now this. Vedmak’s final insult to Mila. He hovers next to her for a moment, stroking her face with a gloved hand, apparently admiring his ingenious idea.
This is all my fault.
She is innocent, yet forced to be something she’s not to survive. Molded and bent out of shape simply for being born into a world she had no hand in creating. Suffering for the mistakes of our ancestors. She, all the children of Etyom, deserves a chance to make it better.
I can’t let this happen. I can’t let him win.
Mila will never be able to stop Vedmak, not with his little trick. But I can from the inside. I have to—it’s my responsibility. Evgeniy and Mila, they had faith in me and so far, I have failed miserably. Well no more.
Do you hear me, Vedmak? No more!
The monster cocks his head, as if listening to the storm speak his name, but then leaves Husniya and returns to his angry pacing. You heard me, you bastard. No stim works permanently. You told me once you can’t outrun your shadow, Vedmak. It’s true. I will defeat you, one way or another. Even if I must die doing it.
The Ripper battle, radiation poisoning, that Creed’s attack, sleep deprivation, and my own mental assault have driven him to the brink. This can be used to my advantage, if I can just break through. Perhaps... It’s clich�
� to suddenly feel the need to believe when everything comes apart at the seams. But what can it hurt?
Yeos, I don’t know if you’re real. Anastasia and Mila believe in you. Maybe I’ve been the one who is wrong all along. If you can hear me—prove me wrong. Show me you’re real. Give me the chance to stop Vedmak and save Mila and Husniya, and Anastasia and all the children of Etyom. Take me if you have to. Just allow humanity one more chance.
I focus, drawing what energy I can from the ether, my consciousness coalescing into an imaginary ball of light that sits at the center of my own body, ready to explode outward, destroy Vedmak, and finally reclaim the flesh.
Concentrate, Demitri.
Concentrate.
Ayúdame ...
What was that? Is someone there?
Ayúdame ... por favor ... ayúdame a rescatar a la niña,” a voice says from the void.
Margarida?
Chapter Thirty-nine
MILA
In the distance, the stacked stone walls of the Zopatian enclave loom, high and impenetrable. Behind it, our destination calls to us, the emerald-green glow emanating into the sky like manmade aurora borealis. We round the northernmost edge of the enclave, keeping a good few kilometers’ distance as we circle back west.
Two lillipads once stood over Zopat; both fell inside the walls. Meaning Zopat remained one of the few enclaves not breached. We scoured it, looking for both Demitri and Faruq, but found nothing. But the great green beacon strobing up into the atmosphere behind Zopat jogged all our memories: there was a third, to the north near the outer wall. Since few ventured that far, it was all but forgotten. That surely is where Vedmak hid all these years, and where we are headed.
I adjust the bulky cylindrical launcher hanging from a worn canvas strap on my shoulder. It was recovered after the battle for the Gracile Leader’s rocket ship. After digging through the armory for a few minutes, I’d found it under a pile of old flack jackets. A quick oiling of the breach break mechanism followed by a function check and everything appeared to be in working order. I even found eight lead-filled beanbags and an extra canister of compressed air for it.
