Hah! I found myself with an unexpected chunk of spare time, so I was able to finish this installment a day early! Disaster has struck - and now the gang holds their breath! There's lots going on in terms of angsty contemplation, but if it's slow - worry not! Next few chapters are giant adrenaline-dumps!
Hope everyone is doing well, and keeping safe! Review, pretty please :)
Yomitan, Nakagami District, Okinawa
Japan
"Freyja fuck a druck!"
Nathan's first words, and they are the opposite of rousing. Saya watches him stare through the glass at Yuri's disfigured body. His expression grows thunderous, and the hope drains out of her.
In the waiting room, her family is a wreck. Kai paces up and down the corridor like a caged tiger. Sachi sits on the couch, his face in his hands, his shoulderblades rigid. Beside him, Yumi's head lolls against the headrest. She isn't asleep. Just too shell-shocked to move. V, his own face palely fatigued, keeps tipping a can of energy drink to her lips. Lipovitan D—her favorite. She barely stirs, and his restless fingernails clatter repeatedly against the can.
The tinny echo fills Saya's ears and transmits through her pulse.
"Well?" she asks Nathan. "Can't you do anything?"
Silence.
In the medical bay, Yuri spasms, and begins to cough. Blood splatters the sheets. Julia, looking worse for the wear herself, races to Yuri's bedside. She injects her with a sedative. Yuri gasps, her face twisted in more shock than pain. Then the tension drains thickly from her muscles, seeping out in uncontrollable tics and twitches. Murmuring fitfully, she subsides into slumber.
Staring at her in the sterile hellbox, Saya thinks, My fault.
I let this happen.
Haji squeezes her hand. He stands beside her, a calm eye in the storm. She is grateful for the physical solace of him, even as she knows it is a covering for the dread they both share.
"Nathan," she says. "Isn't there something—?"
"Sssh."
"What?"
The ancient Chevalier cocks his head. "Hear that?"
"Hear what?"
He wheels on Saya with a scowl. "The cosmic choir striking up a poignant rendition of You Fucked Up!"
Saya winces. "I—"
"Where were you when this happened?"
"I was—"
"Lured away by the turncoat? Typical." He throws up his arms. "You block, you stone, you worse than senseless thing! What if he'd hurt your daughters too?"
In the background, V echoes, "Daughters?"
Nathan's eyebrows plummet like guillotines. "You didn't tell them?"
Kai stops mid-pace down the corridor. "Tell us what?"
Saya's heart skids messily in her chest. Her fingers, wrapped around Haji's, tremble. Her Chevalier has fixed Nathan with the full force of his subzero stare. But he says nothing. Waiting for Saya to disclose the news on her own terms.
Quietly, she says, "I wanted to keep it a secret."
"Keep what a secret?" Kai asks, with renewed anxiety.
"I-I—"
"She's knocked up," Nathan interrupts. "Again."
Haji's glare descends to absolute-zero. Nathan doesn't balk.
"What? If I waited for her, we'd be treated to a s-s-stupefying sonata of s-s-stammering stultification."
"Auntie Saya..." Yumi is jolted out of dazed inertia and into disbelief. "Are you really—?"
Saya manages a nod.
The news rolls through everyone. Saya sees joy, but also grief, the emotions churning together in a stew that is half-sickening. She feels the same way. The newfound happiness of her pregnancy is difficult to reconcile with Yuri's suffering, or the mass of anxieties umbilicaled to the cocoons of her daughters.
"Well then." Nathan rubs his hands together. "Having circumvented that drama, let's focus on the juicier one."
"You didn't answer my question," Saya says. "Is there a way to save Yuri?"
The Chevalier sighs. His gaze returns to the medical bay, as if speculating the possibilities from a safe distance. "The deyði is an unstoppable force. It begins with a spidering of dead blood-cells. Then it diffuses throughout the body: brain, heart, lungs. The Queen begins to collapse from the inside. In the end, death is a mercy."
That isn't what Saya wants to hear. "Tórir said there was a cure. He tried to bribe me with it."
Nathan hawks deep in his throat, and spits on the tiles. "Świna bqllr!"
"But—"
"The only way to contrive a cure is to bring the dead back to life!"
"The dead?"
Nathan doesn't elaborate. Instead he twists to scrutinize the wall clock. "It's no use. We have to let her go."
"What?" Yumi lurches to her feet with such suddenness that her chair topples. "No! You can't!"
Sachi, rising more slowly, lasers Nathan with the sniper-steadiness of his eyes. "How can you even suggest it?"
Nathan is undeterred. "She's worse than bruised fruit, kiddos. She's a compost pile."
"So we should just give up!?" Yuri goes radioactive with rage, her whole body vibrating with it. "You won't even try to help her?"
"Nothing can."
"What?"
For a moment, Nathan looks distantly sympathetic. "I told you already. There is no stopping the deyði. The antidote went extinct with the ancient Queens—may Beyla bless their bones." He shrugs, his soft-hearted mask sloughing off. "Gods' honest truth? It's for the best. Lightening the load, so you can focus on what matters."
"What matters?"
Yumi's fury explodes into motion. She launches herself at Nathan—only to be dragged back by Sachi, his arm slung around her waist. Compared to Yumi, he is stock-still. Yet his wrath is just as potent.
"You call yourself a Chevalier?" he hisses.
"I do." Nathan unsheathes the stiletto-fine glitter of a grin. "That's why I'm here to warn you. There's a big storm a-coming. You'll need all able bodies—the operative word: able—on deck to stay afloat."
"Bodies, hm?"
Sachi's echo is mild. But across his musculature, a tension gathers, so smoothly it would be imperceptible—if Saya didn't know what to look for after a century of war. When his hand uncurls from inside his pocket, a glint of silver catching the lights, Saya's reflexes are faster. A clang, and the blunt edge of her sword parries Sachi's throwing knife, sending it spinning away. In the same movement, she aims at Sachi, not a challenge but a plea.
"Stop this!" she says. "We don't have time."
Sachi, stone-faced, sets his jaw and forces himself to look elsewhere. Beside him, Yumi's boil of rage spills over into grief. Sobbing, she buries her face in Sachi's shirt.
"Baby, sssh." V steps forward with arms outstretched. But Yumi retreats, pressing herself further against Sachi. His clasp isn't tentative, but tight with tenderness.
The sight of them unnerves Saya on a level below speech. But why should it? Yuri's loss will hit them like a meteor, blasting all normalcy to ruin. No one will be left more dizzied and despairing in its wake than her sister and her Chevalier.
Like I was, after killing Diva…
Tears burn Saya's eyes. Then her ire downshifts to Nathan, whom she'd summoned for support, and who is instead sowing seeds of discord. He is watching Yumi and Sachi with half-lidded eyes and an inscrutable smile. Friend or foe, his private agenda remains a cipher. One no more tethered to morality than Tórir's.
"How long?" Kai asks then. "How long does Yuri have?"
"An hour," Nathan says without hesitation. "Maybe less."
Kai exhales through gritted teeth. The last of his self-control is unspooling. Saya can feel it. She knows the signs: the roiling muscles down his arms, the defensive high-shouldered stance. Crossing the room, she thinks he is going to the exit. Maybe to punch a hole into a wall, or howl his lungs out in manful privacy.
Instead he marches up to Nathan. Grabs him by the collar and slams him, without warning and with unexpected force, against the wall.
"Kai!" Saya cries.
Kai doesn't dignify her with a glance. His eyes blaze into Nathan's.
"Know what?" he says. "Nobody hurts my family. Not you, not Tórir, not IBM-UAWA, not some fucking magic potion from fucking pre-Gregorian BC. Nobody. If you can't help us, we'll use your skull to knock down Tórir's door and kill him ourselves."
"Is that right?" Nathan unslinks his sly-fox smile. "You and what army?"
"Me."
Haji steps closer. His face is expressionless under its dark fall of hair. But his eyes hold an unnatural sharpness.
"You are hiding something," he says.
"Aaaaam I?"
"As surely as you breathe." The words are almost polite, even as the ambience around Haji darkens and chills. "There is a way to save Yuri. I think you know it. Otherwise you would never come here."
"I'm here because of—"
Haji cuts him off. "I will only ask once. How do we save her?"
"Speak now, or forever hold my peace, hmmm?" Nathan chuckles. But the change in his energy is unmistakable, the mercurial mask dropping to leave a face hung heavy in shadows. "Fine. Your dedication to our little Queen warms my chillblain cockles."
"Ew," Yumi mutters.
"He means his heart, not his pants," V supplies helpfully. Then, in a self-conscious fit of doubt. "Right?"
"Of course." Nathan flutters his eyelashes. "Heartening. Uplifting. Soul-stirring—"
"We get it," Kai snaps.
"Do you? Oh, goody." He slithers out of Kai's grip. "Fine. There is a way to keep Yuri in stasis."
"What?" Saya exchanges glances with Haji. "How?"
"Now, now. Don't get ahead of yourselves. It's no antidote. The most I can do is delay the poison's effects."
"Delay them?" Kai says, hope firing up his voice. "With what?"
"The Blood of the First."
"Huh?"
Nathan's tch is rudely rhetorical. "The First, you hairy-knuckled homunculus. Her earliest drink of blood from a living vein." He looks Kai up and down. "I'm betting it was you. A little nonomnom when she started teething?"
Dazed, Kai shakes his head. "She never… never fed off me."
"Seriously?"
Kai bristles. "The hell do I look like, a blood-dispenser? I cooked meals for her. I didn't serve 'em up from my arteries!"
"What about me?" Sachi cuts in. "She takes blood from me daily. Maybe—"
Nathan shakes his head. "Blood of the First is never the Queen's Chevalier. In my day, it was her father. The one who'd mated with her mother. If he conked it, such as during a battle or assassination, one of his blood-brothers stepped in. Since Diva got her little wenches off of Riku, that would make it—"
"Me," says Haji.
Everyone turns to stare at him. A far-off memory encrypts the Chevalier's face.
"When I first met Yuri," he says, "she was ill from pool folliculitis. When I came to her bedside, she bit my wrist. It seemed natural for her. Perhaps her body's way of healing."
"I remember," Yumi sighs, bittersweet. "You waltzed right in through the window. This life-sized Slenderman with giant claws for hands. It was like something from a Guillermo del Toro film."
Haji meets her gaze ruefully. "Pan's Labyrinth?"
Yumi sticks out her tongue. "More like the Sharpe dude in Crimson Peak."
Nathan cuts through the reminiscing with a clap of his hands. "Shlep the schmoozing! Haji, gimme a vein."
"Will Yuri have to bite him?" Saya asks, with a fraction of unease.
Nathan shakes his head. "Too risky. Her saliva carries enough pathogens to infect him. Better to siphon blood the old-fashioned way, via a transfusion."
Kai's gaze skews irrepressibly to the medical bay. "Will this work?"
"One can hope."
"If it does—" An audible swallow, "How much time will it buy?"
"Until midnight," Nathan says. "If not…"
"If not?"
"She'll be dead by the next hour."
Saya stares at the wall clock at the corner. Quarter past seven. She sucks in a steadying breath against the dread that gut-punches her. Worse is the memory that strikes her with double the force. Diva at the Met, her features a knot of anxious pain as cracks fanned out across her body, the dark stain on her gown replicating the slow seepage of Saya's own despair, and then the edge of Saya's sword poised over two babies, her tears trickling across their little faces…
Diva.
I'll find some way to stop this.
I promise.
They watch from the window as Julia hooks Yuri up to a pack of Haji's blood.
Yuri lays twitching in a carnage of bloodied sheets. Red flecks glitter on her mouth. Oily tufts of hair are plastered to her face. It is so strange for Saya to see her that way. Her niece is always so impeccably styled. She thinks of their girls' nights-out, when they'd stand together in the powder room and Saya would steal glances at Yumi and Yuri in the mirror. She always felt herself the plainest of the three of them—Yumi a bombshell of sultry curves and sleek curls, with an ease in her skin that only a well-loved, well-sexed woman could possess, and Yuri ending up with the best qualities of both Diva and Riku, effortlessly radiant, her beauty a diamond-cut replica of her mother's, yet softened by Riku's homespun sweetness.
Now the poison is making a carrion of her.
Then Julia starts up the IV. Blood drips into Yuri's system. In increments too slow to track, something happens. The ragged cadence of her breathing slows. On the EKG, her pulse steadies. The fissures in her skin grow less angry-red and puckered.
She melts out of restless lassitude and into real sleep.
"It worked," Yumi whispers. Tears fill her eyes; she sways giddily on her feet. "Holy shit! It worked!"
She makes a crazy dash for the medical bay. Nathan curbs her with an outstretched arm.
"Hold your horses!"
"But—"
"She's not in the clear yet. The blood will keep her alive a few hours."
"Tórir is still out there," Saya says. "We can't let him stir up more trouble."
"There's also those clones," Kai mutters. "We've got security in the safe-house. But if they decide to drop in…"
"Mmmm." Nathan's hum is a silky drawl of speculation. "Between Scylla and Charibdis. As per usual. But perhaps we can maneuver through it."
"What do you mean?" Saya asks.
He waves a dismissive arm. "Seafaring metaphor. Nothing to stress your silly little heads abou—"
"What, Odysseus and the Strait of Messina?" V says. When everyone stares at him, he mutters, "I studied it in Marine Corps Ethics."
"Oh, tough guy," Nathan croons. "You can drop the act. I've always known you had a nice big brain to go with that nice big—"
"Nathan," Saya interrupts, "What are you up to?"
"Shush, Killjoy Kelly. Not now." He swivels on his heel. "I'll call you in an hour."
"Where are you going?!"
"To grease the wheels. Unclog the pipes. Etcetera."
A hot sensation like anger hits Saya square in the ribs, then boils over into something infinitely colder. Without thinking, she crosses the space to lay a palm on Nathan's shoulder like a ferocious knighthood, wrenching him around. She stares up into his face, and finds it alight with surprise. Not the vaudevillian variety that he plays up for drama, but the echo of recognition as he meets her eyes, and finds in them something that wasn't there before.
"The man who killed your Queen is at large," she says. "I refuse to believe you don't know what he's up to. Or that you haven't known all along."
Nathan tips her an off-kilter smile. "And if I haven't?"
"Then Sunako was wrong to think you brave."
Something crosses Nathan's smooth face, the briefest flinch as if from a sucker-punch. "Sunako—"
"I met her."
"You—"
"Her, and my mother." Her eyes burn into his. "They had a lot to say."
"What—" He tries again and has to stop, his silver tongue twisted, his endless reservoir of witticisms caught in his throat. "Wh-what did they tell you?"
"Enough."
"What about—?"
"I said: Enough." The softness of her voice is a counterpoint to its sharp edge of anger. "What passed between us is private. What's between you and Tórir is not. He's killed your Queens. He's killed my daughters. I need to know how to stop him. I need you to help me, as you once vowed to help them." Softer still, "I won't ask twice."
Nathan is motionless as a seraph, as stone. Then something cracks inside him, a chisel-edge of purpose piercing through the playful ennui. For a moment he seems completely unlike himself. Or like his true self for the first time in ages. His eyes glitter past the surface, some long-hidden dream disgorging itself in slow-motion.
"So," he whispers. "I am chosen?"
"Until this battle is done."
"Is that a command?"
She nods.
Nathan breaks into a smile, brilliant and beastly. His fangs glow like splinters of phosphorous.
"Chosen!" he crows. "Music to a Chevalier's ears! A call to arms at last!" He pirouettes around her, the words practically dancing off his tongue. "You will not be displeased, min dronning. Tórir is a cunning craftsman of cruelty. But he knows nothing of the true art of skin-shedding. A viper changes its scales but never its shape. That makes him easy to snare, no matter how fast he slithers."
Saya stares up at him. His expression stirs something inside her: a far-off memory she cannot dispel. Days of sojourning and stretches of silence made significant by a vow to vanquish a traitor, and a vow to die trying, all conjured in the heartbeat before she speaks:
"What is Tórir doing at Yabuchi? You know something."
"That I do." He glides closer, his voice descending into a hush of intimacy. "What good is an ace if he can't stay hidden up the sleeve?"
"Tell me."
He leans in to tuck her hair behind her ear, and whisper into it. As he croons out his story, Saya is too shocked to move. Because if he is telling the truth...
"I warned you, didn't I?" Nathan says. "You've heard stranger things in your past. And you'll hear stranger in your future."
"You—"
"Sssh. Give me one hour. I'll call you when our stage at Yabuchi is set."
"But how can I—?"
He kisses her—no lewd punctuation of tongue, but kneeling to bestow a brush of lips to her palm. It is like a knight kissing his sovereign's ring. A pledge of undying fealty.
"One hour," he whispers, and is gone.
Dumbstruck, Saya stands there, her family gathered around her in a semi-circle. Then she glances up at the clock.
Five hours until midnight.
In the wake of Nathan's exit, the safehouse vibrates with tension.
Kai feels it, like the judder of a railroad track presages a locomotive. The same deep-seated tension locks itself in his bones. Neither dozing on the waiting-room's bench or pacing restlessly down the corridor uncoils it. Finally, he finds himself in the restroom in the east wing. A stitch on his shoulder has popped—maybe from when he'd slammed Nathan against the wall. Stripped to the waist, Kai blots up the blood with a paper towel.
In the mirror, his reflection is haggard: one eye swollen half-shut, the other bleary, his jaw darkened with bristles and his torso splotched with bruises. Sandbagged—but still standing.
Just like in the war.
Splashing the water on his face with cupped palms, Kai stands there a moment. Thinking he can hear, even with the closed doors between them, Yumi's sobbing, punctuated by despairing wails, and the crackle of Yuri's body crystallizing to death.
Except the sounds are only in his skull, echoing and re-echoing, and they aren't Yumi and Yuri, but him and Riku.
The night of Red Shield's ship, when Diva climbed on top of his little brother and took his innocence, and then his life.
How many times had Kai awoken, the year afterward, with psychic residue from that night still seeping into his brainpan? Sometimes it was dreams where Diva devoured Riku alive, like a spider feasting on a twitching moth in a web. Other nights it was Kai whom she attacked, and he'd scramble awake drenched in sweat, and hard—a queasy, rageful hardness that he never touched, because doing so would allow Diva's peculiar brand of evil to infect him too, making him succumb to the lure of violence as a twisted pleasure.
Violence was never in Kai's matrix. Scraps and fistfights, sure, but they always ended with a shared beer and a clapped hand on the shoulder afterward. The world of Chiropterans was different. A violence steeped ineradicably in cruelty. A cruelty Kai's whole body held an innate resistance toward, even at the war's ugliest. Instead, he made it his sole purview to survive it. Doing everything possible—fighting, failing, laughing, loving—to keep his self, and his family, intact.
I've lost Dad and Riku.
I can't lose Yumi and Yuri.
So he banishes the fatigue, and shrugs back into his shirt. Butts his fists together, before turning from his reflection.
In the corridor, everything is quiet. Dee, exhausted after a day and a night in relentless motion, is slumped on one of the benches. Her eyes are closed, mouth slightly open. Her eggshell-smooth forehead is creased by the slightest frown. When Kai steps in, she blinks and stirs guiltily awake.
"Hey," she says, getting to her feet. "I wuz just—"
"Catching Z's," Kai says, his expression innocently neutral before his lips twitch into a smile. "Go back to sleep."
Dee waves it off. Her eyes, Kai notes, are a little pink at the edges. He wonders if she was crying—except what she really looks is tired. Instinct moves him to comfort her, but Dee isn't built for that sort of mollycoddling. Whether on-duty or off, she holds herself steady—a trick of composure passed down from her father, solidified by the innate resilience inherited from her mother.
For the first time, Kai acknowledges how much he values it. Values her, and the quiet core of sanity she's come to embody in his whirlwind life.
He wants to tell her that. Or maybe kiss her. When his eyes meet Dee's, it seems for a moment that she is thinking about it too. Instead she reaches out and folds her fingers through his, squeezing with a familiar warmth and a peculiar tenderness. Surprise and affection bubble thickly up Kai's throat. Swallowing, he squeezes back, and thinks that it is enough.
For the moment, it will have to be.
"Ezra's pulled through his surgery," Dee says then. "They're helicoptering him up here."
"Good to know," Kai exhales. "It's safer for us to stick together."
"Oh, I think someone got that memo hours ago," Dee mutters, and jerks her chin toward the waiting room.
Kai frowns—then notices Sachi and Yumi. They are standing off to the corner, heads templed and gazes dipped, murmuring near-inaudibly to each other. From time to time, their eyes flit to the medical bay. From the porthole window, they can see Yuri. She seems almost peaceful, ebony hair and ivory skin. Snow White with a chunk of apple caught in her throat. Yet now and again, her brows tug together—phantom twinges of pain.
The sight cinches the ventricles of Kai's heart.
Until midnight, Nathan said, like a warning from a fairytale. What are they supposed to do until then? Sit around twiddling their thumbs? How can Saya even trust Nathan—especially when it's impossible to twig what side he's on?
He's playing you! Kai wants to snarl. He's playing us all!
Except Saya won't hear him, even if she was here. She's been so distant since arriving at the safehouse. Her eyes are blank as test patterns in the pale sheet of her face. Kai would blame it on the pregnancy. Except he gets the sense something big is going down. Something fit for the superheroes of yore—the kind who slay dragons, who leap tall buildings in a single bound, who eat fire and shit lightning if they shit at all.
For Kai, Saya is one of those superheroes. No matter the ordinariness of their family life, there has always been a crackle of the supernatural about her, making her unlike ordinary girls. It used to scare Kai as a teenager. His tiny twig of a sister—transformed with a sip of blood into violence in the raw. But he'd come to terms with it, and his own limitations. He'd accepted that Chiropterans couldn't be understood the way humans can. They had purposes he couldn't even fathom.
What purpose is Saya boiling with now?
Shaking it off, Kai exchanges a look with Dee, then goes to Yumi and Sachi. "Yo."
They stop talking, not as if the conversation was intimate but as if their solitude was. A moment of shared stasis.
It weirds Kai out. He was expecting Yumi to be clinging like a brokenhearted banshee to V, while Sachi holed up in a sniper's aerie someplace, carving Tórir's name into his bullets. Instead the two of them have been inseparable since Yuri's illness. Kai has suspected for a while now that they might have a thing for each other. Each time, he's made himself unthink it. Now he pictures the four of them—Yuri, Sachi, V, Yumi—like darts on a board. No matter who they're paired off with, all that matters is hitting the target.
He can't blame them. It doesn't feel creepy or expedient. It just seems natural. The unwritten law of Chiropterans.
Yumi says, "Julia-san took a sample of mine and Sachi's blood."
Kai raises an eyebrow. "What for?"
"Research, she said. She's trying to figure out an antidote for Yuri."
Sachi's eyes flick sideways, to the medical bay, then back to Kai. He murmurs, "We were also, umm, discussing something else."
"What?"
Sachi gusts out a soft breath. But his gaze is flinty. "I do not think we should wait for Nathan's call. Yabuchi is obviously Tórir's base of operations. Instead of wasting time, we should launch a pincer attack. Yumi and myself on one side. Dee, David and Red Shield's troops on the other. Take them by surprise—and take them out."
"Yuri's running out of time," Yumi agrees, rage sparking her red-rimmed eyes. "Saya may be willing to wait for Nathan. But I can't. Not when I could be doing something to save her."
"Yumi—" Kai falters.
Inside, everything in his body churns around her words. His inner hothead is one-hundred percent for it. They can't afford to trust Nathan. They can't afford to waste time. Better to launch a full-scale strike on Yabuchi, to hell with the consequences. The other part of him—wiser and older—cautions that they should hang back. Saya is counting on Nathan for a reason. Maybe there's an arrangement between them that Kai doesn't grok, but that will benefit the battle itself? Maybe they'll have a better shot at saving Yuri? Better than exposing Yumi to risk, or to the same fate as her sister?
The tightness in Kai's chest intensifies. He swallows hard.
"What about V?" he asks. "What's he think?"
Yumi pulls a face. "He says we're being hasty. He wants to lay low until we get more intel on Yabuchi."
Huh, Kai thinks. Maybe V's got more sense in his thick skull than Kai gave him credit for. Or maybe he's reluctant to leave because Yuri's babies—his daughters—could hatch any moment.
"Where's V right now?" Kai asks.
"In the nursery's special unit," Sachi says. "He is staying close to the cocoons."
Bingo, Kai thinks. To Sachi: "Why aren't you with him?"
Sachi's internal struggle manifests itself in the tiniest twitch of his jaw. "Not yet," he says. "I cannot—cannot see them yet. How will I look them in the eye if I cannot do something to save their mother?"
Sympathy tugs at the roots of Kai's heart, even as he downplays Sachi's rare display of distress with humor. "In case you haven't noticed, Hotshot, they got no eyes to speak of."
"They have heartbeats," Yumi whispers. "They're moving around in the ultrasounds. It's a matter of time before they hatch. I can't—" A sob catches her throat. Tears overspill her eyes. "I can't face them the way Saya had to face us. With our mother gone, and nothing but blood all around. I can't let that happen to Yuri's babies too. I can't—"
"Sssh."
Kai snatches her into a hug, her sobs vibrating against his chest. From the corner of his eye, he sees Sachi scrub the heel of his palm across his face. Grief and guilt whip through the air around him like a cut power line. Kai understands it too well. The entire night is like an eerie reprise of the war. Worse than a blast from the past—it is a reckoning with ghosts long-buried, but never forgotten. A reminder that Kai and the rest have never moved on, but simply away, walling the ugliness off in a bomb-shelter in their minds to keep living day-by-day.
They can't run from it anymore.
No more running.
If something big goes down tonight, I'm going down with it.
Kai's eyes pass from Yumi to the wall clock in the corner.
Four and a half hours to go.
Four and a half hours to go—and Haji stands guard.
The safehouse has a training-room: a subterranean space with a vaulted ceiling, peeling wallpaper, chipped concrete floor. Shafts of light trickle through the gaps in the boarded-up casement windows, picking up the glitter of dustmotes around Saya's body. She is going through her kata, her sword flashing in lightning-fast jabs. The familiar dance is burnt in inverse colors into Haji's retinas. Torque of her waist, the focused grace of her body, the empty intensity of her face.
Haji's eyes pass over her belly. Precious cargo; undefended territory. He fights off a frisson of fear.
Since the news of her pregnancy, emotion comes and goes in waves. He is overjoyed. He is terrified. He is in a paroxysm of panic. He is in the center of a Zen-dark calm. It is difficult to know what feelings to settle on. So Haji does what he does best: keep everything submerged, and reorient his mind with iron absoluteness on the task at hand.
Nathan's phonecall, and the attack on Yabuchi.
He knows there is misgiving among the family. Whispers of doubt and dissent. How can Nathan be trusted? What if he's lying? What if it's a trap?
He has no answers to give. But he trusts the rightness of Saya's judgement. She's spent all of the past year shaky in herself, and her life. But she's found her sea-legs, and fought off the storms flung her way, so with each passing day Haji has seen the command return to her body, and the renewed spark of focus in her eyes. And with the—exorcism? spiritual purging?—by the yuta, there is something about her, noticeable not when she speaks but in the silences in between. As if she is channeling untapped reserves of strength, for the coming hours ahead.
As if she will need every ounce of them.
"I needed to see my mother."
Her exact words. Ordinarily, the statement would trigger Haji's default cynicism. He would theorize and rationalize. A lapse of sanity. Hallucinogens. A bad dream.
Except he believes Saya, the way he believes in the cyclicality of the moon, in the secrets thriving beneath the sea, in the magic of their blood-bond itself. Perhaps it is an offshoot of his past, a childhood shaped by superstition, a tribe's deep-rooted respect for life's mysteries. Or perhaps it is because he has become one of those mysteries: the vampyr from his grandmother's scary stories.
All he knows is that he trusts Saya.
She would not lie to him. Never about this.
Not for the first time, he tries to visualize Saya's mother. A pureblood Queen from the olden days. Nathan claimed they were dread goddesses, not unlike Kali or Hekate, their bodies charged with primordial power. Haji pictures it, and comes away with a disturbing mental image of Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty—"I call upon all the forces of nature! Fight with me now!"
What was the mother-daughter reunion like? What did she tell Saya?
There seems no way to ask.
"Is it too soon for congrats?"
Kai drifts into the training-room, with two mugs of fresh blood.
Haji inclines his head at the offering. But Saya doesn't notice. She is in the zone: a territory barred against distraction. Flashing out a series of eyeblink jabs—tsh tsh tsh—the whistle of steel slicing air audible in the distance. She executes a perfect taglio and then leaps in a ballestra, the motion fluid, the delineation of muscles evident in the slenderness of her body. She is warming up; in the first bloom of sweat. Everything about her is swift and strong and unstoppable.
Haji prays it will be enough.
Kai sets the mugs on the table, and leans against it. He and Haji watch the swordplay in silence.
Then Haji murmurs, "Congratulations, or condolences?"
Kai tips him a wan smile. "Nobody's dead yet."
He means Yuri, but maybe also Saya's babies, but maybe also everyone else. Despite the black humor, there is no escaping the gut-chill of possibility. Tonight could end carnage, and if it happens, how can Haji stop it? How can he keep Saya safe? She looks so lost in her kata, her mind emptied of anything but the motions of killing, and Haji's mind is crammed with too much else. Thoughts of her, thoughts of Yumi and Yuri, of Nathan and Tórir and the debacle brewing at Yabuchi, of the past war and their future survival, and the more he struggles to ward it off the more he succumbs to—
Stop.
With a small intake of breath, Haji sips from the mug of blood. Kai watches him, the way he'd once watched Yumi and Yuri finish their blood-smoothies, in that brief era when they'd eat nothing but cereal in cold milk. That was over two decades ago; hard to believe. Harder to believe that in that timeframe, Haji's closest tie to humanity (friendship) has become Kai.
Kai. The nuisance teenager. A thorn in Haji's side at worst, an uneasy rival for Saya's affections at best. Now it is disorienting to realize how valuable he has grown as an ally—as family—so that their goals are in synch, their eyes on the same destination. It makes Haji wonder. Was it the years that forged their bond, or their shared love for a single girl?
Tonight, on the cusp of fresh disaster, do the difference even matter?
"I know snitches get stitches," Kai says, "but I've already gotten my share."
Haji looks him over questioningly.
"There's rebellion in the ranks."
"Rebellion?'
"Yumi and Sachi want to storm Yabuchi by themselves."
"I am aware," Haji admits.
"You're not worried they'll run off?"
Haji shakes his head. Ordinarily, a livewire like Yumi and a professional killer like Sachi teaming up would be a disastrous combination. But he also knows that they are both, at their core, terrified that Yuri will slip from their fingers and into death the moment their backs are turned. So long as nothing cataclysmic occurs to divert their attention, they will remain at the safehouse, at Yuri's side, simmering with half-formed plans for vengeance.
They are not Saya—who has sustained herself for decades on nothing but.
"So what is the plan?" Kai prompts. "That way, I have something to tide 'em over with."
"Same as before. Wait for Nathan's call. Storm Yabuchi. Kill Tórir."
"Oh." One edge of Kai's lip quirks up. "That plan."
The offhand snark reminds Haji of the precariousness of their set-up. But the ferocity of Saya's movements shreds the doubt in wide swathes.
Then Kai says, "I'm coming with you."
Haji blinks, swiveling to face the younger man fully. "What?"
Kai's body-language is edging on the redline of exhaustion. There is a violet bruise on his temple, a shiner blossoming on his left eye, and a badly-stitched gash still sluggishly seeping blood into his shirt. But his deep brown eyes hold a familiar steadiness.
"I'm coming with you," he repeats. "To Yabuchi. I need to see for myself what's happening there."
"Kai—" Haji phrases himself with deliberation, convinced the recent flux of tragedy has addled the other man's mind. "It would be wiser if—"
"Bullshit." Kai's jaw hardens. Haji recognizes the short-tempered truculence from the war. "Before they shot Yuri, I could have done something. I didn't. Now I need to do whatever I can to make things right."
Make things right.
As if it were that simple. Then again, has it ever been?
Haji glances past Kai to where Saya whirls like a dervish in the deadliest trance. His eyes skim the vulnerable curve of her belly. The familiar ice-trickle of fear returns. It is superseded by an icier wash of resolution, past and present overlapping, inescapable, and there they are, aligned in a constellation no different from the war, their selves scarred in ways both surface and secret, but still intact.
Still waiting, in charged stasis, until the battle begins.
"It will be dangerous," Haji says, less warning than rhetoricism.
"Big shocker," Kai grunts.
"You are also not as young as before."
"Hell, neither are you." A crooked smile. "Besides—"
"What?"
Kai follows Haji's gaze to Saya.
"If all goes well," he says. "You'll be a dad."
"So I will."
"And? You expect me to let you die before it happens?" His smile is a study of sunny schadenfreude. "Nah, bro. I gotta prepare you for the real war. Toddler Queens take no prisoners."
Haji's jaw twitches. He unrolls a reluctant smile, turning away before Kai can see it. Yet in the shared silence, there is a pact sealed. Watch my back, and I will watch yours. He hears it in the strong beat of Kai's heart, and the rapidfire tshh tssh tssh of Saya's sword sweeping in blazing helixes through the air. The Queen, the Knight, the Squire, each in their own place, and yet together.
Waiting.
The safehouse is caught in uneasy stasis. Not a breath held, but a lit fuse that is fizzing toward explosion.
The prospect of it tugs powerfully on Julia's nerves. With a breath, she makes herself steady. She can't stand the thought of her life, her work, which she's dedicated to uncover the truth, ending on the stale note of failure.
Or worse.
The room she occupies is tiny. A concrete cube. The overhead lights are fried, but enough to see by. A steel workbench and swivel chair occupy one wall. The other is dominated by a bank of screens, labeled RM 1, RM 2, RM 3 and so on.
In the first, Yuri lays in a supine sprawl. Julia has cleaned her up, and covered her in a fresh sheet. With Haji's blood running through her veins, her tremors have abated. But now and again, slushy, half-formed words tumble from her lips. Her extremities jerk in distress. Nothing at all like the serene, sweet-natured girl in Julia's memory. She reminds her almost of Diva, in the brief time Julia was her physician. Neither mind nor body at rest.
In the second room, Ezra is convalescing. He was brought here after his surgery, to preclude an attack at the hospital. Drugged with painkillers, he snores softly. His face in repose is David's: a classic profile, strong jawline and chin, blond hair curling softly across his forehead.
Studying him, Julia remembers in a heartsick rush how many times she'd tucked him into bed when he was small, or with a good-natured chiding when he got older and stayed up playing videogames. Strange, that she'd never wanted children, yet after meeting David, it felt so natural to have three of them. She adored them equally, but the depths of intensity varied. Adam was the baby, doted on but also treated with a benign subspecies of neglect. For Dee, she felt pride—strong and steadfast, as a scientist might for a Nobel Prize. But Ezra... she felt a special propriety in him. He was similar to her in temperament and interests. Mild-mannered, bookish, analytical… but with an unexpected wild side. Few people knew he excelled at drag racing and skydiving. Fewer knew he'd inherited the hobbies, not from David, but from Julia.
Watching him sleep, Julia allows herself to feel his horror of the attack. The crack of the bullet. The splatter of blood. The sneer on Collins' face.
She'd rescued Ezra in time. Stanched his wound and eased him through the shock. He is safe.
Yuri isn't.
Nathan's warning hangs in the air like a pall. Until midnight. Julia is determined to race against the clock. To crack the mysterious code of the poison. Whatever the wolfsbane is adulterated with, its chemical structure can be broken down to its smallest components, then used to determine their antithesis.
A cure.
Behind her, the door clicks open. David steps inside. He looks the way Julia never likes to see him. Rigid with robotic control, his face flat and unfeeling, the way he used to be in the war, and sometimes still becomes after a mission ends in a bloodbath, or whenever his father's death anniversary looms near.
Except, as always, his coldness is tempered with concern.
"How is he?"
He means Ezra. David's brand of parenting skews toward disciplinarian. Yet Julia has never once doubted his intense devotion to their children.
"His vital signs are stable," she says. "He's recovering well."
He nods, a single, military nod. But the slope of his shoulders relaxes.
Quieter, "How are you?"
"Hm?" Julia blinks, then resumes her analysis of the wolfsbane. "I'm all right. I'm finishing up the qualitative tests on the toxin. Truthfully, I'm amazed it kept its structural integrity for thousands of years. But no researcher can look that gift-horse in the mouth. I'm trying to discern what makes this wolfsbane different from other types of aconitum. Ordinarily, the treatment for such a poison is symptomatic and supportive. It has no antidote. But something tells me that wolfsbane is not the active ingredient here. Rather, it's catalyzed by a specific element that attacks the Queen's blood. If I can—" She becomes aware of David, who is staring at her strangely. "What?"
"Nothing," he says, and touches a thumb to her cheek, where a single tear has spilled.
Caught off-guard, Julia fumbles for a tissue. David waits until she dabs her face dry, then reaches out to fold his fingers through hers.
It's not the kind of comfort she needs (for Julia, work is the ultimate antidote). Still, his proximity eases something inside her, the way it has done for decades. Reminding her of what counts.
"It's strange," she whispers. "I always worried … that it might be you lying on that hospital bed. Or Dee. You were the reckless ones. I never worried about Ezra. He was too cautious. Too obsessed with contingencies. If anything happened to you or Dee—" Her throat tightens "—Ezra was my fallback. My safe bet."
David smiles, a reflex of comfort meeting dryness. "Beware the quiet ones. Isn't that the saying?"
"I think that only applies to you and Haji. Every other quiet person I know is predictably dull." Speaking of which— "Haji's blood neutralized the poison in Yuri's body. But it won't stay inactive for long. Her suffering is far from over."
David frowns. "Why not try a whole-blood transfusion? Flush out the toxin?"
Julia shakes her head. "A transfusion might trigger a different poisoning. Given how volatile Yuri is right now, there's a risk of acute hemolytic reaction. Her immune system could go haywire."
David forces an indrawn breath, and squeezes her hand. "Then our best bet is to storm the citadel."
"Go to Yabuchi Island? You think it's wise?"
"Wise or not, Saya is ready. And she's counting on Nathan to find an opening." He darkens. "There's a possibility—"
"What?"
"Collins could be there too."
A chill passes through Julia. More than the name, it is the glint in David's eyes.
She whispers, "What are you thinking?"
"That letting him live the first time was a mistake."
"David—" Her fingers knot painfully through his. "You can't possibly consider—"
He shakes his head, his features receding into hyperfocused unreadability. "This has crossed the parameters of a standard op. The hostiles after us aren't human. But those pulling their strings are. We've seen what they're capable of. We can't adhere to the Prime Directive with so much at stake. We get the chance, we strike first."
Kill them first, he means.
Julia absorbs this with the smallest tremor of nausea. She and David are both unsettled by tonight's events. But she understands that David's anger isn't exactly like her own. It is like Saya's, and Kai's—steelier and yet more savage. He will spill blood—human, monster—if the mission demands it. Lose no sleep over it afterward, or his illusions of rightness.
Tonight has called back the war, and reminded them of their vulnerabilities. Now they must fight, or die.
Julia understands this. Yet her throat is clogged with words better left unspoken. So she swallows them down, and nods. Her area of expertise is the laboratory. David's is the battlefield. They respect each other's judgement in each sphere. That is why they work well together.
But that doesn't make it easier.
"David?"
"What?"
"Do me one favor?"
He eyes her with earnestness. "Name it."
"Whatever happens," Julia whispers. "Promise you'll come back safe. Promise—"
Behind them, the door swings open. Dee shoulders her way inside. Her expression isn't reassuring. The operational mask of composure shows fault-lines of stress.
"Bad news," she says.
David and Julia break their handclasp.
"What now?" David asks. "Intruders?"
Dee shakes her head.
"Clones. Out in the city. They're attacking civilians."
Julia exchanges shocked glances with David. "What?"
"We've got video-feed in the control-tower. Attacks happening in real-time." She blows out a ragged breath. "It's the same creatures that attacked Omoro. The ones with Diva's face."
David says, in a gravely undertone. "Shit."
Well, Julia thinks, with a numb irony whose real name is horror. There goes the explosion.
Next chapter: a declaration of war.
Hope you guys enjoyed! Review, pretty please! :)
