Kyrano's hands are firmly at ten and two, and they're on their way from Berlin down to Munich, practically flying down the A9. They drive at a speed that has John's hands clenched in fists on his knees, his back pressed tight to the passenger's seat, vaguely motion-sick. The tension relaxing out of him just makes him feel weak and nauseous, as the lights along the dark highway flash overhead, the puddle of the headlights in front of the car continue to swallow up the apparently endless highway. The echo of Scott's voice still has him feeling all twisted up and guilty inside.
"I was curious what you would do," Kyrano remarks, in response to John's comment. "You were free to speak up at any time."
John swallows, hard, and exhales a slow, deliberate breath. "So were you."
"I was perfectly well-aware of what I was going to do."
"…lie to my brother, you mean."
"I would be thoroughly amused to hear you attempt to scold me about anything whatsoever, John Tracy. Go right ahead."
This isn't a verbal sparring match John's well-positioned to win and he doesn't rise to the bait. Instead he falls silent, props an elbow against the car door and rests his face against his hand. He stares fixedly out the window and keeps silent, hopes that the concern Kyrano's professed for his health is enough to let him feign sleep. There's some small consolation in the form of simmering, low-level malice being muttered in his left ear.
EOS doesn't especially care for Kyrano.
"I could," she tells him, "override the manual controls, pull this car to the shoulder, and blow the air bag in his face. If you get out and run northward, there's a—"
- N - O - .
First finger on his right hand is a dot, third is a dash, the magnets in the tips respond to quick taps on the metal of his seat belt buckle. It's dark in the car, but he still keeps his hand carefully out of sight, twitches his fingers only slightly to tap out his answers. Kyrano's eyes are fixed on the road, but he's preternaturally observant, and John's not ready for him to know about EOS.
"Why not? I don't like this. Tokyo to Moscow, Moscow to Berlin, and now who knows where. The GPS says Munich, but I don't trust it. He trapped you and now we're in his control. This is a blood relation to the man who tried to kill you. How do we know we aren't about to be delivered to the Hood again?"
- C - A - N - . - T - R - U - S - T- . - H - I - M - .
John doesn't mention that he's too tired to bail out of a car on the side of a German Autobahn, at midnight, and make a break from probable safety into dubious freedom. He also glosses over the fact that he sincerely doubts an airbag to the face would be enough to stop Kyrano; that pursuit would be swift and apprehension almost certain. John's not really in the mood to be tackled into a ditch by a small Malaysian.
"I have no data on him. The name Kyrano returns only files that are listed as sealed, and stored as hard copies. I gather he's an associate of your father's. Is he taking us to Jeff Tracy?"
- N - O - . -T - O- . - D - O - C - T - O - R - .
There's a long silence in his ear, and he can see her starting to pull up various biometric readouts, starting to populate the field of his vision with a ridiculous amount of data, everything she's tracked since the pacemaker was first installed. The field of text precipitates a giddy swoop of nausea, vertigo. Irritably he swipes his hand in front of his face, clears all of it.
- D - O - N . T - . - C - A - R - S - I - C - K - .
"I'm sorry." Her voice is small, contrite, and John wonders if the terseness in the way his fingers had twitched and tapped out the reprimand had translated. He wants to talk to her, wants to apologize—but to tell her that he's just tired and heartsick and anxious wouldn't serve anything, would only make her worry, and would take too long, besides. She falls silent and John imagines her plumbing through the same data she'd tried to show him. He doesn't like to think about what she'll find.
"Are you all right, John?"
This is Kyrano, presumably reacting to the way John's just slapped the empty air in front of his face, apparently startled awake. "…fine. Sorry."
"An hour out, and there's a room booked at a hotel in Munich. I hope you're feeling better. I apologize for the necessity of all this travel. A quiet night will help."
"I'm fine."
Kyrano's the consummate bodyguard, and he's probably about as much of a paramedic as Virgil or Gordon. The likelihood of anything escaping his notice is perishingly small, especially considering what had happened in the safe house. It's the reason they're on their way to see a doctor. They've crossed two continents because apparently the list of doctors Kyrano trusts is a short one, and the nearest available is a German cardiologist.
For the first time since Tokyo, there's a moment in which Kyrano doesn't seem absolutely in control. He seems to have put very careful thought into what he says as he asks, "If my brother's done something to you, John, would you be willing to tell me what it was?"
John doesn't answer, mostly because he's trying to imagine what he would say, trying to follow the thread back through everything that's happened to where he would need to start. He doesn't want to talk about EOS, but the whole thing hinges on her existence—on what he'd been willing to do to save her.
Kyrano must mistake his silence—or perhaps he understands it better than John does himself—because his tone is gentle when he asks again, "Have you had anyone to talk to, John? I understand you had contact with the Lady Creighton-Ward."
"I'm fine." He says it again, just because it's the last thing he'd said and it seems like it's still salient. "It's fine. I'm all right, really."
"With due respect, I don't believe you."
John's starting to scramble, internally, for something to say, something to fend off further probing, some excuse not to be subjected to an interrogation about what happened in Auckland—in San Jose—in Vegas after that, and just everything since. He hasn't been alone. He's had someone to talk to. Casting about, John seizes on the first marginally true fact he comes up with and says, "—you remind me of him."
John doesn't mean it as an insult, finds himself hoping he hasn't given offense. He's known Kyrano since he was a child, and he's not afraid of him, even knowing who his brother is; even starting to see the similarities. Kyrano's gaze stays fixed on the road ahead. Possibly his foot falls a little heavier on the gas pedal, but his tone remains even as he answers, "Yes, I could understand that. Insofar as the world can be considered to have sides, one of the only significant differences between my brother and I is the sides we've chosen."
The shiver that goes through him, cold and electric, is probably just owing to the efficiency of the car's air conditioning, to the chill of the air blowing against his face. "That…that's—it seems like that isn't something that makes me feel much better."
"It's perhaps not the sort of thing that should."
He still doesn't want to talk about it, but it's crept up on him sideways, some deep, desperate need to confess what he's done and what had happened because of it. "I guess he wanted to kill me." The thread of the conversation continues to spool out, out of his control and he can't help continuing, "He wanted to get my dad's attention. Malaria. I didn't…I mean, obviously, I didn't know my Dad was still around to find out about anything happening to one of us, but that—that's got a kind of awful logic to it, doesn't it? I suppose that's the sort of thing that would get his attention. Kill me with the disease he cured."
EOS is in his ear again, protective, "You don't need to talk about this with him. John? You don't have to tell him anything."
But Kyrano's jaw has tightened ever so slightly and there's a perceptible increase in their speed. The speedometer ticks up past 135 kmph. John's fingers tighten on the armrest and for all his perception, Kyrano seems not to notice. "It will mean next to nothing, but I am sorry, John. I'm sorry for everything he's done to you, and to your family."
The fact that he would preface it with an awareness of how little the apology actually means stirs up a flare of anger, the sort of feeling he's been keeping shut down tight, closed off and boxed up as non-productive, unhelpful. He can't seem to help what spews out of him next, and the words taste like heat and blood, all tangled up with the memory of being deathly, feverishly sick, spitting red pearls into TB5's interior, "…and what you've done? And Penelope? And Lee Taylor? And my father? The list of people lying to us keeps getting longer, and you've got the nerve to suggest your apology could mean anything at all?"
"John—"
He wishes the comparison between Kyrano and his brother hadn't been drawn, because now his brain has helpfully started drawing all the parallels. The most salient of which seems to be that he's been here before, been in the thrall of someone who's long-term aims and interests he isn't sure of, "—what do you want from me, anyway? Where are we going, why am I here? If you wanted to send me home, you would've sent me home."
"You've been alone in the world before now, and from here on I intend to keep you close. You need to see a doctor. After that, I'll tell you more about—"
"If that was all you wanted, there are doctors in Tokyo. Why would we need to—"
Kyrano's voice takes on a certain sternness, a tone that might be warning John to lose the attitude, "Circumstances have changed. The time it would take for me to find and vet a doctor for you to see in Tokyo would have been time in which we would have been vulnerable."
"To what?"
"Yesterday, my brother was broken out of a GDF prison. I don't know where he is, but I've got reason to believe he's going to be after you. If not you, then your father. Regardless, the situation needs tighter control, and you're not safe out in the world, ignorant of my brother's movements."
If it was a lie, it was a lie of omission, a truth that Kyrano had held back, possibly for good reason, with the way time seems to shrink down, and then stretch out moment to moment. John doesn't want to be frightened. More than anything else, he just wants to be calm and quiet and still and not stray into that newly terrifying place where his heart seizes in his chest, skips and palpitates and fluttering, necessitates EOS' intervention, jolting electrical impulses back into the correct rhythm.
It feels like a lot longer than the fifteen seconds it has been before he hears his name, "John?"
They both say it, but EOS' voice in his ear is sharper than Kyrano's gentle concern. The way John looks from the outside mustn't be worthy of Kyrano's concern, but then, EOS has the inside track, has all the biometric data that Kyrano can't possibly perceive. She's the software onboard the hardware, the answer to Kyrano's question: what has my brother done to you?
Reached out and closed a fist around John's heart, is what. Even if the Hood no longer has control, he's left his mark. Like the hand around his throat that John still feels sometimes, closing tight around his windpipe, bruising, crushing the breath out of him, late at night. Invisible, undetectable, the damage done. Threads of metal punched through his skin, plunged into his veins and threaded through to his heart, tearing and punching and scarring; doing the damage to justify their presence.
So the Hood hasn't succeeded in killing him. Maybe he hasn't quite failed yet, either, maybe the mechanism of action is just different from what it was meant to be. John Tracy's life and death exist in a Schrödinger state of superposition, and the duality won't collapse unless observed.
If it happens, when it happens, dead is dead. The end is more important than the means.
The car swerves sharply to the side of the road and Kyrano yells, startled as control of the vehicle is taken over. The inertia catches John in the chest and he's oddly aware of the way his seat belt presses tight across his chest, keeps him from falling forward, even as the dark interior of the car darkens further and EOS' voice fills the car, pure command, and the last thing John hears, "Pull over. Help him."