The Last Mayor Box Set 3
Page 65
In such ways he'd framed himself as their savior, and many in the Redoubt had come to believe that story with all their hearts, were willing to die for it. Rachel Heron had tried hard to believe it too, because that would have made the things they'd done acceptable, even right. Yet she'd never really felt it. Instead she'd grown expert at mimicking belief.
Parroting a little of that belief back at him now was easy.
The slit in his neck throbbed blood, darkening his white shirt. He no longer looked so clean and pure, a white knight come to save them all. Now he was a brawler dirty from the trenches, and it made him more dangerous than ever. Clothing him once more in his old righteousness was a survival mechanism not only for her, but for them all.
He stood. Given his hulking frame of a generation one Lazarus, closer to the 'demons' than the humans of old, he towered over her.
"You're right, Rachel. I was arrogant, just like the Mayor."
She gave a slight nod. That was enough, to push him over and eliminate any doubt. She'd been working such slight manipulations for as long as she could remember, leveraging his pride and the respect he held her in to lessen the weight of his overbearing hand, though never before had she worked her influence so brazenly.
Before she'd commuted sentences, earning clemency for minor crimes and brief reprieves for her fellow inmates. Now there was no time to tiptoe around, not when his rage made him primed and ready.
"Send me," she said, thrusting her chest out. "I'm ready. You've trained me well. I see the lessons you've learned, and I'll carry them forth."
He inclined his head. It was pure temerity for her to suggest tactics. The path forward had been laid out years in advance. His plan. But his plan had just failed, and it was into that gap she needed to steer. That was why forcing him to accept his mistake was so necessary. Enforce a little trust. Cash in on a decade of unremitting service.
"Send you," he said slowly.
"I can travel where you can't. I can lead our forces to victory and return with firepower to level this jester Mayor." She forced extra sarcasm into repeating Amo's title. Perhaps too much, and he caught it.
"So you'd let hate rule you, Rachel? A moment ago you said you would follow him to the end of the Earth."
She laughed. There was nothing else for it, not without backpedaling madly, and she couldn't afford the scrutiny that would bring. He'd see James While bleeding out in her mind, and all that would remain would be the box.
"But not beyond, I said," she answered firmly. "He hasn't died and returned. What does he know about the weight of the future? He's a vicious and charismatic leader of men, I acknowledge it, but we are not men here. We are angels."
Olan Harrison smiled. That had been one of his greatest rhetorical flourishes, once upon a time. Rachel had always smiled while he'd made his pronouncements. Probably he'd felt her judgment, had known that she didn't really believe, but he'd always needed her expertise, and had tolerated her as long as she'd kowtowed.
"Angels," he repeated, tasting the word. "You never liked the term."
"What other term suffices, when he rallies outside our borders with an army of beasts plucked from the depths of hell? What else can we be, but protectors of what is good? I will lead our forces to victory, I swear that to you. Everything I love is here, and I will protect it to my last breath."
His smile spread. Yes. She felt him taking the bait, even if he took it in his own way. Like Amo, she'd laid another trap out of things that were real, and Olan didn't stop to doubt himself any more than before.
"You love us so well, Rachel. Perhaps you also love your dream of controlling a continent? You seek North America, I expect. Your ambition runs unchecked."
There was no point pointing out that he'd promised her North America a very long time ago. He knew it was her vaulting ambition. She understood now, more than ever, that he never intended to give it to her. Not in any meaningful way. He couldn't stand to cede power to anyone.
"I've made no secret of it," she pressed. "I never have. I seek to earn my place in the firmament of angels, at your right hand. All I ask is a chance to prove myself."
It was all a salve to his ego. After the defeat he was ready to lash out blindly. Now he was regaining control, thanks to her. The mask of command was coming back, and that kept him on a leash for a little while. She didn't dare think about the apocalyptic violence he would rain down if he thought all was lost.
"Be sure not to rise above your station. Remember who rules." He tweaked her thread, pulling control of her body away for a moment, and she stiffened. For seconds he prevented her from breathing. It was a game, one of many.
He returned control, and she gasped for breath. Dizzy silver spots danced before her eyes, but she managed to keep her feet. He wouldn't like it if she fell.
"I remember who set me free," she said, looking into his stinging white eyes. "I remember who made me what I am. How could I forget my Lord and master?"
He waved a hand, tiring of the flattery. The decision was made.
"Go, then. Take the battalion of your choice. I want the girl crushed and prepared for Lazarus protocol. Once she falls, the SEAL will crumble. The Last Mayor will be unable to resist. I entrust this to you."
Rachel gave a sharp nod. There. It was done.
"I swear, the girl Anna will die today."
14. APIA
Anna jumped and dreamed and stood up shields. She left lepers behind her like cairns stitched across the world, snatching glimpses of a hundred different realities that all somehow existed at once.
She saw deserts where whistling sand zephyrs spun about the fragmented ruins of ancient civilizations; columns stood in rows, the giant face of a woman emerging from a hill of sand.
She saw a gray-flanked wolf pack stalking an elk through hoar frosted tundra, cornering their prey in the dead-end between two sunken cars and a highway support column. Their teeth closed and blood flashed, and then -
- ice climbed up a dark cliff-face like translucent vines, perfect and crystalline and so pure that -
- wide, shimmering waters peaked and troughed around her, perched atop a greened spit of rock like a mossy emerald in the midst of an ocean, until-
- a rolling valley opened up ahead, of such breathtaking beauty that her heart pumped like a steam train and -
- voices swam in the lengthening black static between jumps, becoming a place unto themselves, filled with hurtful old images that only grew louder and more raucous.
"Honey, I can't read you any more Alice tonight."
The old words echoed with the ringing clash of old shame lurking in the darkness and the final sighs of people dying, and Ravi bleeding in the corn and Amo shambling near. She heard the Jabberwock flapping near, while somewhere on an island her father stood and roared into the skies.
One by one the bunkers came back to life.
First of those was Istanbul. They sent for Lucas but she didn't wait; had nothing to say. She left within minutes of forming the shield, jumping across thousands of miles with her hundred-league boots. In Zarafshan, Uzbekistan, they stared at her like she was a messenger from on high, atop a dusty gray steppe.
"Go," she told them. "Before more bombs fall. Talk to Istanbul. I can't stay."
They stared until she flashed out of existence and away.
In Lucknow, India, there were monkeys hanging from low boughs in the trees around the bunker entrance, watching as she brought the people buried below back to life. In Nagqu, Tibet there was a strange red sun in the sky, more fascinating to her than the cries of the people as they woke. In Naypyitaw, Myanmar, there was a heavy, hot rain that sizzled off the burning metal bunker arch. In Xi An, China, a voice in her head sang a song she couldn't shake, a jingle from an old television show about Reading Rainbows. In Surabaya, Indonesia, the bunker was embedded in a dormant volcano at the head of a cloud-shrouded mountain range, and the people didn't speak any English at all, so she left them a radio and a frequency to dial and jumped away.
In Carpentaria, Australia, she vomited blood, and at the twelfth bunker after her longest jump yet over the Pacific, in the tiny, balmy town of Apia in American Samoa, she barely even spoke to the people before jumping out of their new shield's radius to collapse on a red-tiled roof looking out over the sea.
Her head was an inferno, too hot now to cool.
Perhaps three days had passed. She couldn't tell and could barely think for the agony. So many jumps had left her transformed; fundamentally twisted on the line. She rolled numbly down from the roof, dropping the last stretch onto her shoulder with a crunch. Over a railing she went, staggered down a baking yellow beach and poured herself into the water.
It gathered her in. The ocean. She laid her head down in the tide and sank. Water pooled over her face and the cool of it was delightful. Breathing didn't matter down here. She didn't care about her body anymore, not after so many jolts on the line. What was even left of her body, now? It felt like an anchor, and anchors were made to sink, so she sank. Soon her lungs began to convulse. The cool was all that mattered.
She didn't want to see Ravi anymore, riddled with bullets in the corn. She didn't want to see him on the bed beside her, his eyes not his own and staring back at her.
Where was he now?
Her chest bucked in the water. He'd been with her before, so close behind a thin kind of shadow veil, but that was such a long time ago, nine bunkers earlier, and she wanted to see him as he was supposed to be; a happy friend, a lover, a husband-to-be.
The names of all the SEAL installations burned like brands in her mind. She'd made the list years earlier with Lucas' help, with Amo's blessing, then she'd set out to destroy them all. She'd been so righteous. Their dead were going to heap up around her, thousands upon thousands, and now she'd saved them all.
How odd that was. She'd offered them no treaty, made no pre-conditions laid down for their survival, had only gifted their lives back to them, and for what?
She felt the world changing out there. Her lungs took their first sip of water, salty and burning down her throat, but deliciously cool compared to the heat in her head. She didn't want to see Amo anymore, not like he'd been in Istanbul, standing over her with his shoulder hideously broken and that pawing madness in his eyes. She couldn't bear it, not from him; she needed to erase it along with the rest.
Another little sip sent galaxies of silver spinning through the darkness. It felt much better, and wasn't it better to save rather than murder? She thought back to the days when she'd first circled the world, and what had she been dreaming of, then? Saving people. Saving herself. Finding her father.
He cried out from his island in her head. Lint and cobbles, he shouted, but he was old now, and his words no longer made sense. Old and forgotten. There were others she owed more to, faces she liked to think of even less.
Cerulean.
It hurt worst to remember his face, as she dropped the silver necklace back into his lap. "I'm not your daughter," she'd said. "It's time to grow up, Robert, and stop pretending."
There was no running away from that. She'd done that, and now every jump threw it back to her, and she was tired. Beyond everything else; the years of bullying Ravi, the years of disappointing Amo and Lara, that hurt more than anything. After that, he'd died, and there'd been no chance to apologize, no way to thank him for all that he'd done.
The pain of it worsened with every jump. She found relief only in the water, in taking another little sip that -
…….
She realized distantly that she was dying.
Bubbles popped of consciousness, so urgent, sinking into darkness fast. Was it better? Was it weaker?
One bunker murdered, eleven saved; it was a legacy of sorts.
…….
It was a legacy of cold.
Amo.
She thought again of Amo there at the end, floating into darkness. She thought of his eyes, like Cerulean's eyes, filled with all flavors of disappointment, of love, of madness, and understood that perhaps it wasn't fear of him that hurt her so much now, but the terrible weight of responsibility.
He was too far gone to save himself. He needed help.
He needed her.
But who was she to help him?
……..
Her arms jerked in the dark water. Death throes, they called this. Better this way. What had she ever done but destroy? Eleven bunkers saved was good, but Ravi, the baby, Peters, so many things were gone forever. She had pledged herself to so much destruction.
But those eyes remained, Amo's eyes mingling with Cerulean's eyes. What did she owe any of them, really? She'd never asked to be born into their world. She'd never known the world before the ocean came, she cared nothing for its people or its customs, for its mistakes or its stupid, crumbling morality.
But still, in the darkness as she shuddered away, she couldn't look away from those eyes, couldn't ignore the questions they insisted on asking. They were everything now, becoming one great, bright eye rimmed with golden light. Amo's eye, and Ravi's eye, and Cerulean's eye, and Lara's eyes, and her father's white eyes, and so much regret.
So much regret.
Somewhere far off a giant stood atop his island and roared.
"Anna," he cried, though she didn't know whose name that was, or why they were calling it so desperately. "Anna!"
The last convulsions passed. She closed her eyes and felt peace. Wasn't it good to be going home? Soon she would be back in bed and her father would be there to tuck her in, and the Hatter would be there with them nosing her wetly, and her mother would be there too, somewhere in the distance as a loving memory, and all she wanted was that.
"Anna!!"
The world and the eye and the coming of enemy angels were nothing to her. She felt their hot fall across the surface of the Earth even now, crisscrossing her stitched pattern of leper-shield cairns, bound for Istanbul and another end, but what was that to her?
How was that her responsibility anymore?
"Anna!"
Then Ravi was there at her side, maybe for the last time, using himself up. His sandy brown hair drifted around his face like seaweed in the darkness. He didn't need to say anything. She saw the truth in his eyes, which were the same eye, like the universe had blinked and was looking all the way down into her soul.
He saw her as the little girl. He saw her as the woman. He saw that she was tired, and broken, and going mad, and he asked for more. He asked for the warrior who would break down the doors of hell and turn back the hands of time.
It made her crack inside. He'd always seen the best things about her and raised them up. His loving gaze had helped build the woman she had now become. He wasn't poisonous or cruel, not snarled up inside with ambition or the need for respect, but good and loving. He'd always loved her, and he needed her help still.
There was work yet to do, and how could she turn her gaze from that?
The jump came in her death throes. She flung a hand up, caught hold of a passing wave on the line and let it wrench her away. Thousands of miles she flew at once, the furthest, the hardest, halfway round the world to land with a wet thump and a final pulse in the midst of the escape convoy fleeing Istanbul, on the floor behind Lucas and Sulman as they worked feverishly on their cure.
15. JAKE
Lucas was standing above her when she roused. She moved at once to stand, in a dim van somewhere rattling along a ruined old road, but he pressed a hand firmly against her chest.
"Wait," he said, "you're far from ready to-"
She pushed against him, and he pushed back.
"Anna, please, wait just a moment!"
The line resolved under her touch and she readied to send a pulse charging into his body, rearranging his particles, but at the last moment he gathered himself and spat out the news he'd been willing himself to give.
"Jake died."
That felled her.
She sagged back on the gurney. The throbbing in her head came back.
Jake?
He stepped back and took a breath, as if surprised he'd been able to give such a speech. He looked in her eyes, and maybe saw some of the pain.
"I don't know how you're even breathing," he added, more gently now. "It beggars belief."
She stared at him.
Belief?
She reached inward, and yes, she could feel the damage in her lungs now. In her throat, layered in ways of knowing she hadn't had before. It wasn't only the pain that was new, but also a kind of deep knowledge; of her own anatomy, of her malfunctioning cells, of her cracked vibration on the line. She remembered nearly drowning in the sea off Apia, and through the fog of the headache she also remembered why.
It brought on a bad hangover freighted with secret shame. She'd tried to die.
But Jake?
It was an easy thing now to reach inside and repair her throat. There were pieces out of place, cells that were damaged, and she rallied the T4 to fix them. It knew the way. It was her servant and responded at once. Flesh knitted, cells repaired, drawing on deep wells of the line to fuel the transformation.