A/N: Two big triumphs this chapter, ladies and gentlemen! First of all, a second chapter this month; secondly, we are out of the dream-memories and back in the real world! You see? I told you it wouldn't go on forever! Bwahaha! Anyway, with the return to reality - if that's the right word - we get an awful lot of waking realizations and answers to many lurking questions. I hope you enjoy them!
Nami Swann, I'm glad you enjoyed the previous chapter - thanks so much for your kind appreciation of the story so far and my talents as a writer (weird and eccentric though they may be). As far as Alphaba's reaction to the Wizard's confession... well, after showing Elphaba shocked and enraged by this kind of discovery in the last two stories I've written, I decided that a different approach was needed, especially given how much Alphaba has changed since she was "purified": I felt this response was a good way of displaying that Alphaba is slowly losing touch with her sense of empathy - and her sanity in general; by the time of her revolution, she's managed to divorce herself from normal standards of compassion, mercy, and even basic emotional responses so well that she can listen to the Wizard confess his darkest secrets, shrug her shoulders, and say, "Hmm, that's interesting. Now hold still a minute while I tear out your brain and hook it up to a computer for all eternity!" Thanks again for your lovely review, and I hope you enjoy the following chapter!
Anyhow, without further ado, the latest chapter: constructive criticism is always welcome, as are long reviews and creative predictions! Read, review and above all, enjoy!
Disclaimer: Wicked is not mine. The fact that reality has not dissolved into gibbering glorious madness beneath my interdimensional fingertips is evidence enough. (Sorry, don't know what came over me there)
8/8/15: Realized I screwed up Harnley's rank prior to Captain-promotion; corrected from lieutenant to sergeant - please forgive my insomnia-induced clusterfrappe.
16/6/16: Finally picked up on all those typoes and flubbed dates I missed the last time around.
Elphaba's eyes snapped open.
It took a while for her to realize that she was actually awake, and by then she was already out of bed and frantically hopping into her shoes, instinctively following the steps that had been drilled into her over the last few days of preparations. An alarm, she thought, heart suddenly racing; it must have been an alarm that woke me up! But after a few minutes spent hastily donning her blouse, leggings and cloak, she finally noticed the conspicuous lack of blaring klaxons outside her window, and finally sagged with relief: not an attack, then – but if so, then what had woken her?
Then, as if someone had decided to answer her in the most direct way possible, there was a loud metallic clang from the alleyway below. Opening the nearest window and peering out into the freezing night air, Elphaba scanned the gloomy passageways for the source of the noise, sleep-muddled eyes suddenly alert for potential threats… and yet all she saw was a prone figure lying in a heap among the hotel's garbage cans. With so little light in the street, it was almost impossible to see who he was at this distance: in fact, all Elphaba could tell was that he was trying to get to his feet – the key word being "trying." After about a minute of scrabbling for a grip on the cobblestones, the man finally managed to get to his feet and set off at a brisk shamble – only to crash headlong into the wall of the hotel and collapse back into his former position. For a while he struggled to rise again, but eventually, he gave up and settled instead for passionately hugging a garbage can, before finally losing consciousness and flopping bonelessly on the cobblestones.
Leaving the drunk to sleep it off, Elphaba closed the window and sat down on the bed, lighting one of the candles on her bedside table with an almost absent-minded wave of her hand. Then, dreading the answer, she peered down at the alarm clock flanking the candle: it was now one-thirty in the morning, she realized with a groan. She had three and a half hours to go until reveille forced her into the chilly morning, and she'd barely managed that amount of sleep tonight: even if the enemy didn't attack tomorrow at dawn, even if the routine of crushing boredom continued all day, she needed to keep herself rested and alert for when Loamlark inevitably went mad all over again.
And, if nothing else, sleep might leave her better prepared for the inevitable itching fit that would descend on her with the growth of her next crystal. After all, there were about four of the damn things protruding from her back by now, and the coping with the growth of a fifth – combined with boredom, cabin fever and insomnia – might just drive her into the murkiest depths of insanity.
So, yanking her shoes off and hanging her cloak on the edge of the bed, Elphaba slid back into bed, pausing only to reach for the bottle of dream-pills…
…And then the events of the last few dream-memories came flooding back.
She'd just seen Alphaba's revolution.
She'd just seen an entire city prodded into riot and rebellion, and then watched as Glinda and Fiyero were tricked into supporting the coup d'état that followed – all arranged in advance by her other self.
She'd seen the final Plague strain rage across the Emerald City, driving more than half of its victims feral with rage in the process.
She'd seen the Wizard… die? No, he wasn't dead, the memories were very clear on that point. She'd seen him lying on a stone slab beneath a hulking mass of machinery, their cables burrowing deep into his brain, eyelids mindlessly fluttering as the wires ate him from the inside. She'd watched through Alphaba's eyes as every thought, every emotion, every impulse, every memory, every last vestige of the Wizard's personality had been siphoned out of his skull and poured into the vessel that Dr Mainspring had crafted for it. And then, while the mage-surgeons had gone about the ugly process of preserving the Wizard's lifeless tissues and replacing his internal organs with Mainspring's automated clockwork, they'd brought the new body to life – just long enough to hear the Wizard's first dawning moment of realization:
"Elphaba? Elphaba, where am I? What happened? I… Elphaba, I can't feel my legs. I can't move at all, actually. I… where are my limbs? Where's… what's happened to my body? What's happened to… me? Elphaba, please, I need you to tell me what's happened to my body; I can't see anything and I can't even move – please tell me what's happened… Elphaba? P-please, say something. I… don't just leave me here! Oh no, please find a doctor, find a spell that can undo this, just don't leave me here alone! Please help me, help me oh god help me oh god forgive me if this is hell please have mercy…"
And then the screams.
And then the silence.
And then, once the programming had effectively muzzled every single unwanted aspect of the imprisoned personality and roused it from its synthetic coma, the newly-fettered intelligence had begun obediently printing out information: designs, schematics, lists, letters, notes, diaries, official documentation, and ream after ream of paperwork that had only existed inside the Wizard's mind. In the end, Alphaba had preserved the Wizard solely for the knowledge he could provide, either in the form of designs for miraculous machines, or in the form of step-by-step plans for every dirty political trick in the book.
Elphaba found herself faced by two earthshaking revelations: first of all, she'd just witnessed the birth of Paragon. Glinda had told her all about the Thinking Engine while recovering from her visit to Exemplar, from the magnificent emerald obelisk that had dominated its processing chamber, to the complex duties that the Empress had assigned to it; Elphaba had obviously gotten a good look at its humble beginnings, back when it had been little more than a tombstone-sized block of machinery with a dead body plugged into it. But from what she'd seen of her other self's thoughts, Alphaba had already been planning on preserving much more than the Wizard: there'd been a secret file hidden away in her office above the Pottery, a list of potential candidates being evaluated for "indefinite preservation" – scientists, magicians, strategists, political experts, and a whole host of other figures with knowledge too rare to replace, all of them judged worthy of sharing in Paragon's immortality.
Alphaba knew the machine, had understood perfect detail thanks to Mainspring's blueprints, and she'd no doubt be kept appraised of how it grew and changed over the decades… and now, Elphaba held the details in her mind too. At long last, the dream-memories had given up something worthwhile!
But all that paled into insignificance compared to the other revelation from tonight's dream-memory: the Wizard was…
…was…
She shook her head. Even when spoken in the privacy of her own mind, the words sounded ludicrous, unreal, and her brain simply refused to process them. She tried again, mentally reciting the sentence in the hope that it might start to make sense given time and repetition.
The Wizard was her father.
She had been told that the Wizard was her father.
Somewhere, in between starting a riot that ended in the deaths of three hundred innocent people and having the Wizard's brain rendered down into processed slivers of consciousness for easy storage, Alphaba had found the time to sit down and listen to a confession from the man she'd just deposed: there, she'd been told that the Wizard was her father, and she the product of a one-night-stand between a con artist and a lonely housewife. And Alphaba had carefully examined the evidenced, considered the Wizard's story, and acknowledged it as the truth.
The Wizard was her father.
Sitting there, listening to the words echoing across her mind, Elphaba fell back on denials. For a minute or two, she almost managed to convince herself that the Wizard had been lying in a last-ditch attempt to save his life, that Alphaba had been simply too addled by madness to recognize the confession as the bald-faced lie that it was. But after dreaming her way through three whole years of her other self's memories, she knew for a fact that Alphaba wasn't that deranged: delusions of grandeur and fanatical obsession with beauty aside, her thoughts were too lucid and methodical for Elphaba to dismiss her as insane. And besides, was it really such an insane idea? She had to admit that the evidence made just as much sense to her as it had to her other self: the Wizard was a brilliant liar, but after so many months of deterioration and stress, even he might find it difficult to invent such a believable story on the fly.
So, with that line of reasoning exhausted, another denial rumbled to life: even if her other self was right and the Wizard really was her father, so what? Just because it was true in one universe didn't necessarily mean it was true for all of them, least of all Elphaba's world. The Wizard of this reality was the father of her alternate self, but that didn't mean that the Wizard of her reality was…
…was…
Elphaba quietly groaned and wearily massaged her scalp, already feeling the beginnings of a headache at work inside her skull. No, she couldn't deny the evidence she'd seen. Maybe there were worlds where the Wizard hadn't been the one to father her, but Elphaba's world evidently wasn't one of them. After all, from what she'd seen so far, Alphaba's reality was essentially identical to the Oz she'd known, and the differences hadn't set in until after her other self had been shot down and captured. Why would this be different? If it hadn't been the Wizard's elixir that had stained Elphaba's skin green, then what could have done it in her world? Why would her mother have kept the bottle, if not as a keepsake of the affair she'd enjoyed? And even if she hadn't seen any evidence of an affair, she'd noticed – even as a child – the long business trips her father had taken-
No, not her father. Frexspar. Frexspar Thropp had taken those long business trips and had been taking them for years prior to her birth; he'd left his wife alone in the house, sometimes for days on end, and let their marriage slowly wither until it had been as strained and distant as Elphaba had witnessed. Bored, frustrated and lonely, Melena had found solace in the arms of a man from another world, enhancing their brief affair with sips of green elixir... and nine months later, Elphaba had been born.
The Wizard was her father.
Had Frexspar known? Had he realized that Elphaba wasn't his daughter? It might explain why he'd hated her so much... but of all the arguments she'd witnessed between her mother and Frex, it had been over her treatment, with all the range focussed on Elphaba herself. Their relationship had been strained and somewhat distant, but they'd had moments of real affection, real love; if the governor had known that he'd been cuckolded, he'd never shown any sign of it.
To her astonishment, Elphaba found herself choking back a sob.
The Wizard was her father.
The Wizard was the reason she'd been born deformed.
The Wizard was the reason she'd grown up hated and despised by the rest of Oz.
The Wizard was the reason why Nessarose had been crippled – not directly, but it had been his elixir that had driven Frexspar to the desperate attempt at ensuring that the next child didn't turn out green.
The Wizard was…
She wanted to hate him. She wanted to despise him with every single fibre of her being. She wanted to let every single violent impulse possible to blur through her head and let the madness erupt out of her mind in a maelstrom of twisted magical energies – and she wanted the Wizard – or Oscar Diggs or her father or whoever the hell he was – here and now so she could inflict every single monstrous fantasy that occurred to her on his defenceless body. She wanted to feel murderous rage.
She wanted to… but couldn't. It made no sense to her, especially given how easy it should have been: after all, she'd hated him long before today – from the moment she'd realized that he'd been responsible for the silencing of Animals. And from then on, she'd hated him almost every day of her "Reign of Terror," every minute that wasn't spent planning her next attack or yearning for the company of Glinda or Fiyero being spent on loathing the Wizard from afar. She'd wanted to see him deposed, humiliated and brought to justice for everything he'd done to the Animals of Oz – and later, for having Nessarose assassinated; at times, she'd even wanted to murder him with her bare hands. But now, with this final revelation, homicidal rage seemed to elude her.
In fact, most emotions seemed be eluding her right now, except for shock and a deep and chilling sense of numbness. Understandable, but still bewildering to her sleep-muddled brain.
If nothing else, she could at least comfort herself with the knowledge that she'd reacted with more emotion than her other self. Yes, that was another shock from tonight's dream-memory: the sight of Alphaba listening to the Wizard's testimony, calmly assessing the facts and recognizing the truth… and then, without the slightest flicker of guilt, continued to the next stage of her plan as if nothing had happened. She'd been so casual, so glib about the whole thing, so utterly indifferent to the Wizard's fear and desperation, so dismissive of her past self, so… callous. Even when the Wizard had been rendered down into the newest cog in the machinery of her perfect world, the future Empress barely had a thought to spare for him until he'd started working again – and those thoughts on how he'd be better for eternal imprisonment in service to her new empire! It was almost as if-
A knock at the door shook Elphaba out of her reverie.
Stifling a yawn, she staggered out of bed and opened the door to find Harker standing in the corridor, his spindly arms and tree-bark skin barely visible beneath his thick overcoat – his one concession to the cold air outside. At once, Elphaba knew that something was wrong: even though the lack of eyes made his expression difficult to read at the best of times, there was no mistaking the tense grimace that had replaced his usual frown.
"We've got an unexpected visitor outside," he said, voice barely louder than a whisper.
"What do you mean? Is this a euphemism for 'assassin' or do I actually have a visitor?"
"You'll have to see for yourself; he's in no fit state to come up here. And bring your broom."
Wearily donning her shoes, draping her cloak over her shoulders and tucking her broomstick under her arm, Elphaba followed the old sniper down the stairs, out through the draughty entrance hall and out into the freezing streets – their breath instantly turning to mist as the chill of the night swept over them. From there, the route led them around the corner into the alleyways bordering the hotel, more specifically the one sitting beneath Elphaba's window – easily recognizable by the pile of overturned garbage cans, and the crumpled shape of the drunk still lying unconscious among them.
"Harker, if this is the visitor, I've already noticed him."
"Just get a light on. You'll see in a minute."
Hesitantly, Elphaba allowed her magic to gather in her hands and emerge as a vivid green glow bright enough to illuminate the entire alleyway. But as the light swept across the alleyway, she realized that she'd been mistaken: the man lying at their feet was not actually a drunk, nor was he unconscious.
He wasn't even alive.
Furiously cursing herself for dismissing the man so easily and for getting complacent in a war zone, she knelt down to take a closer look at the body. Even if the cold air hadn't given away the fact that the man was no longer breathing, he was quite obviously dead: his head was a mangled ruin of torn flesh, scorched hair and blood – gallon after gallon of swiftly-cooling blood, most of it now puddled around the tattered remains of his skull in a coagulating halo, the rest left to dye his face and clothes deep carnelian. Something had ripped the man's scalp away, taking a sizeable chunk of flesh with it and leaving his skull exposed to the air; most of the skin that remained above the man's hairline was covered in third-degree burns, some of them searing his neck and ears, others coursing down his forehead and across his closed eyes. Even without the aid of a diagnostic spell, it was clear that the man had bled to death – either from the scalping or from the multitude of minor stab wounds decorating his chest.
Taking a deep breath and trying desperately to ignore the metallic stench of blood now clogging the air around her, Elphaba turned to Harker. "Who did this to him?" she asked.
"Not a clue," Harker replied. "Whoever did the deed, he didn't do it here: I'd have noticed them."
"In other words, when this man showed up in the alleyway, he was already horribly injured – maybe even dying." Elphaba fought down a twinge of guilt for dismissing the man, and continued: "Then who was he? Where did he come from? Why would anyone do… this to him?"
"I've got the answer to your first question: take a good look at his uniform."
On close examination, the man's blood-soaked clothing had indeed once been part of a soldier's uniform; and despite the drying layer of gore obscuring most of it, Elphaba could tell that this unfortunate victim hadn't been one of the Deviant Nations' Regulars, nor had he been one of the Strangling Coils: the colour and rank pips didn't match either of the two factions. And as for the badge sewn on the breast pocket of his uniform… well, there was no mistaking Unbridled Radiance's distinctive golden mask-and-sceptre insignia.
"What the hell would an enemy soldier be doing this deep into the city? Did we take any prisoners during the last battle?"
"You'd think so, by the look of his arms and legs, but appar'ntly not." By way of explanation, he reached out and gently rolled up the corpse's right sleeve – one of the few parts of the uniform left dry: on close examination, the man's arm was almost purple with rope burns, the skin along the forearms broken and bloody. "Whatever happened to him, he was tied up when it happened," Harker surmised. "Probably someone wanted to torture the poor bastard. Probably wanted him to run, too."
"How can you tell?"
"Just compare the burns: the ones on the arms are worse than the ones on his legs, and fresher too. Whatever they did to him, they untied his legs before they started – maybe so they could get a cheap laugh out of watching him run around like a headless chicken."
"You've seen this before, haven't you?"
"I can neither confirm nor deny…"
In any case, whatever had happened to the unfortunate soldier, it hadn't happened to him in this particular alleyway: even if he'd somehow been scalped without screaming loud enough to wake every single officer in the building, he'd left a trail leading all the way down the alley – a long, winding line of blood splattered along the road, complete with smudged on the ground, puddles on the cobblestones where he'd collapsed, and handprints smeared along the walls.
Intensifying her handheld light, Elphaba stood and began to follow the trail as best as she could; Harker followed close behind, his rifle at the ready.
Other than the occasional stray cat and the distant light of a militia patrol, the alleyways were almost completely deserted; if the torturer had decided to follow the victim, there was no sign of him or her anywhere in the area. In fact, other than the trail, the only thing they found for the first few hundred yards was a length of shredded rope lying in one of the larger blood puddles. Apparently, the victim had managed to sever his bonds with a broken bottle from the nearby garbage can, before staggering on to his demise.
The stream of blood led them almost four blocks away before it finally ran dry directly beneath another window: despite the cold, it had been left conspicuously open – and a faint patina of blood decorated the windowsill. According to Harker, the building was actually one of Loamlark's smaller police stations, one of the many that had been repurposed as a guardhouse by the militia; judging by the laughter and applause echoing from behind the window, there was obviously a sizeable crowd of them in attendance. And somewhere beneath the shouting, Elphaba could hear the soft but all-too-distinctive sound of someone crying.
For a moment, she and Harker could only stand there and listen in bewilderment. Then, after about half a minute of yelling and hollering, the noise of the crowd within softened to a gentle background rumbling, just soft enough for them to hear a familiar voice purring, "I hope it's not too hot for you, is it? No, I think the cap's well and truly fitted by now."
Colonel Gloss, Elphaba realized. So the Strangling Coils are responsible for this… but that doesn't explain why they're working out of a militia building.
"Now that we've gotten the preliminaries out of the way," the mercenary officer continued, "let's get down to the meat and potatoes of our little chat… assuming, of course, you feel like talking."
There was a choked sob, and an agonized voice whimpered, "Please, I've told you everything I know. I don't have anything else…"
"Is that so? What do you think, folks?"
The crowd roared in the negative.
"So sorry, good sir: it seems our adoring public doesn't believe you. But alas, I think we've wrung all the fun out of the usual method, so let's try something different…" There was a pause, and then a faint splashing sound echoed through the window. "A little turpentine to sweeten your pitch-cap, good sir," Gloss laughed. "Just the thing for a cold night like this…"
Mocking laughter rippled through the building, accompanied by jeers and catcalls from the mob.
"But… b-b-but-"
"Now, normally I'd just use gunpowder, but we want to keep this little chat as long and sociable as possible. So, I'm just going to light the cap, and we'll let you decide the rest: if you feel like talking, we'll give you a nice cold bucket of water to soothe your bubbling brains; we'll even find a doctor to get all that mess off your head without doing any permanent damage. If you're not in the mood for a chat, well, you'll have every opportunity to see just how hot under the collar you can get. No water for you, good sir, just your bare hands… assuming you can get your hat off without help. Do you think you can get your hat off?"
"I told you, I don't know anything, please, I can't, I don't wanna-"
"Oh, don't cry. I'm sure you're a much steadier hand than Sergeant Garley; you'll probably only rip half your scalp off! Now… matches, matches, where did I put my matches…"
Suddenly, Elphaba was running along the perimeter wall, eyes frantically scanning the length of the building for a way in, mind almost blank except for the all-consuming mantra of must stop this, must stop this, must stop this.
Finally finding the entrance, she practically flung herself up the front steps towards it, hammering the doors open with a blast of kinetic energy and charging inside: she had just enough time to register the basic layout of the room she'd arrived in – reception area, large desk, doors leading to administrative offices, cells or armoury, lone receptionist running up to tell her that visitors weren't allowed at this time of night – before the first scream split the air, accompanied by another roar of approval from the crowd now gathered in the admin offices. Galvanized into action once again, she shoved the receptionist aside and charged towards the source of the noise at high speed, feet barely touching the ground as she rocketed towards the offices. She didn't even stop at the sight of a closed door in her way: she simply wrenched it open with a wave of her hand, almost ripping it clean off its hinges in the process, skidding to a halt at the edge of the mob now crowding the room.
"Arena" was the only word she could use to describe the place, because it hadn't been an office for several days by the looks of things: someone had shoved almost every last piece of furniture to the back of the room, clearing enough space for perhaps a hundred people to squeeze inside. With such a large audience in the way, it was difficult to tell what was going on at first. In fact, the only thing she could see from this angle was that most of the crowd seemed to be an even mix of Loamlark's militiamen and everyday citizens, and despite the extremely audible presence of Colonel Gloss, only a handful of mercenaries could be seen among them.
But as the crowd began to part before her, Elphaba finally saw the makeshift stage at the centre of the room: little more than a few desks crudely nailed together and surrounded by a protective barrier of overturned chairs, it now served as the pedestal on which Colonel Gloss now stood, visible from almost every angle – as was the lit match in his hand. Behind him and the stage were the rest of the mercenary squad: some of them stood guard at the opposite end of the room, others serving as stagehands, occasionally hurrying to Gloss's side with the next batch of instruments for his grotesque performance.
And kneeling at his feet, arms and legs tightly bound, was their newest victim. Like the corpse outside the hotel, he was dressed in the uniform of a U.R. soldier, but unlike his unfortunate colleague, he'd been left almost unmarked except for the bruise over his left eye, and the distinctive burns forming around his ears and forehead; obviously, the mercenaries had only just started torturing him.
The victim's hair was almost completely hidden by a sheet of thick paper crumpled against his scalp; from beneath, thick rivulets of viscous black fluid oozed down his face, slowly cooling and drying in the frigid air. Even if Elphaba hadn't heard the gloating from outside, the fluid was instantly recognizable as pitch, probably applied to the soldier's head while still boiling hot (hence the burns, she thought absently) and then allowed to cool until it glued the paper to his scalp.
And then they rip it away, she realized with a thrill of horror, scalp and all.
Or they just soak the damn thing in turpentine and make him remove it himself just to escape being burned to death.
"That's enough!" she shouted. "Put the match out and let him go, now!"
For good measure, Harker raised his rifle and fired a deafening report into the ceiling, instantly silencing the mob around them.
There was a distinctly amused pause, as all eyes in the room slowly turned in Elphaba's direction.
"Ah," purred Gloss, extinguishing the half-spent match in his bare palm. "If it isn't the Leviathan's new friend, the little green minnow. What's kept you awake so long past the witching hour?"
"I'm not in the mood for games, Colonel: let that man go or there'll be trouble – for you and everyone else in this mob. And where are the militiamen who're supposed to be running this station?"
"Oh, they're here and there. Some of the more agreeable ones are here in the crowd with us or else just helping to keep this station from going idle. As for the militiamen who disputed tonight's fun, they're in in the cells where they won't cause trouble. Don't worry, though: we're keeping them fed and watered."
"Let me guess: you're one of the more selective lynch mobs."
"Do I detect a hint of disapproval in your voice, Miss Thropp?"
"Disapproval? No, no, I'm not disapproving in the slightest. I mean, you've already ripped a man's scalp off and let him bleed to death, and now you're about to set another unlucky bastard's head on fire. What could I possibly disapprove of?"
"Showing signs of Radiant sympathies already? Oh, I'm disappointed, Miss Thropp, very, very disappointed; after all the sound and fury I heard from you in the last battle, I'd have thought you had a stronger stomach than this. I thought at the very least you'd be able to tell the difference between friend and foe – silly of me, I suppose, but them's the breaks..."
"I don't have any sympathies towards Unbridled Radiance at all, and you know it! Call me crazy if you like, but I just have this inexplicable aversion to watching people being tortured to death."
"Well, nobody said you had to watch, dear lady. I'm sure you've got a nice cosy bed waiting for you back at the hotel; you can enjoy a few precious hours of sleep, and we can enjoy everything this fine upstanding waste of skin has to offer us without having to make your deniability implausible – no horrified generals, no trials, no jail sentences, no consequences at all. Or perhaps you want to have a little fun of your own with the little squaddie? Well, I don't blame you at all: he's quite a handsome young man, and a pretty face like this just cries out for a good tenderizing-"
"Would you shut up?!" Elphaba snarled, her composure shattering loudly. "I'm not interested in plausible deniability, and I'm not interested in 'a little fun of my own.' More to the point, I'm not in the habit of leaving people to die and I've no intention of making it a habit!"
Liar, whispered an unpleasant voice in the back of her mind. Where were you when Fiyero was dragged into the cornfield? Where were you when the guards tortured him to his last agonized breath?
She took a deep breath to steady herself, and then continued: "I'm not interested in playing around anymore, Colonel: let the prisoner go NOW."
"And keep your hands where I can see them," said Harker, his rasping whisper as loud as a shout in the eerie silence of the room. "Don't think I didn't notice that holster behind your back. And no gestures to your friends back there, either."
If anything, Gloss's smirk seemed to widen. "What friends?" he asked brightly. "My fellow mercenaries… or the audience in full support of tonight's festivities?"
Suddenly, Elphaba was very much aware of the few dozen pairs of eyes now staring balefully out at her. Gloss and the other Strangling Coils might be the only combatants armed, but the mob around them definitely presented the bigger threat at present… but then again, the last few minutes of conversation had made it abundantly clear that Colonel Sadist & Co couldn't be reasoned with; perhaps the crowd could. So, she turned to the nearest branch of the audience, and cleared her throat: "Look," she began, trying to sound as calm and reasonable as humanly possible, "I know we desperately need information at this point: we need to know where the enemy camp's been hidden and what their next plan of attack will be, but torturing this man isn't going to get us any meaningful answers. There's no point in-"
"No point?" one of the mob's ringleaders bellowed. "NO POINT? You think we should just send him on his way with a pat on the head and an apology – after what he tried to do?!"
"He tried to take my baby!" a woman in the front row screamed. "Him and the rest of his squad! They were trying to take our children!"
Suddenly, everyone in the room was shouting at the top of their voices.
"Kill him! Let him burn, rip his fucking scalp off-"
"-they held up the schools, shot the teachers, tried to take the students! They broke into the nurseries, they took the babies from the cradles, the-"
"-he'd have their minds scrubbed away, make them forget their parents and adopt the Empress as their mother and you want us to forgive that?! Are you-"
"-saw in his backpack, he had equipment we could use on him, turn his blood to lightning-"
"You want him to get away with what he did? You want to give him our children?!"
"String him up for the others to see!"
"Unbridled Radiance won't take our children from us!"
"Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!"
And over the growing chorus of "kill him," Elphaba could hear the focus of their anger weeping openly as he tried to explain himself to anyone who was listening: "I was just following orders, I didn't kidnap anyone, I was just told to cover their escape, I'm just the squad tech officer, just a junior guardsman really, I'm just a grease monkey, I just do what I'm told I do what I'm told I always just do as I'm told-"
And it was then, with the mob thundering towards the gibbering tech officer, the Strangling Coils readying their rifles, Gloss lighting another match, and the noise getting louder and louder by the second, that Elphaba gave up on niceties for the evening. Taking a deep breath, she swung her hand through the air in series of complex magical gestures, hissing a few well-chosen incantations as she did so.
A split second later, the room was flooded with an intense white light that left the spectators reeling, accompanied by an eardrum-shredding sound that shattered most of the station's windows and forced the mob to its knees through sheer volume. For several seconds, they remained kneeling, eyes clenched shut against the relentless barrage of light, hands clamped over their ears as they tried to blot out the noise of skyscraper-sized fingernails sliding down a blackboard ten thousand miles across.
When the sound and the light finally abated a few minutes later, Elphaba and Harker were gone.
And so was the prisoner.
Not for the first time that evening, Fiyero found himself gently headbutting the bars in front of him. "You – have – got – to – be – kidding me," he grumbled between headbutts.
"Look," said the militiaman defensively, "I didn't have enough time to say anything-"
"He was standing right in front of you – for a good twelve seconds! More than enough time to say 'please tell Elphaba that one of the prisoners wants to speak to her when she has the time, don't worry about who it is, she'll recognize him on sight.' Seriously, how hard could it be?"
"Actually, I don't think you could say any of that in twelve seconds-"
"Oh shut up, sergeant." Fiyero took a deep breath. "Did you at least find out where they were going while you and the eyeless one searching for the keys?"
"Well, they were trying to take the tech office as far away from the mob as they could, but it sounded a bit like were making it up as they went along. I think I heard her saying something about flying away, though."
"Meaning that she could be literally anywhere in the city by now. Brilliant. Would it be too much to hope that you might be able to let me out? I mean, you've already emptied the other cells, so…"
"Um… well, you know how I said we needed Chief Marchfly's approval to release you?"
"Oh for Oz's sake."
"Don't worry, we've put in a call for help already, and Elphaba's probably got the whole militia and the DVNers marching down here even as we speak! Marchfly's practically guaranteed to come down here."
"And in the meantime, I've got to stay in the same damn cell I've been trapped in for the last week. Thanks very much. You're a legend."
"Is there anything I can do for you in the meantime?"
Fiyero offered the most malicious-looking smile his burlap lips could muster. "You can take this dog for a walk, for a start."
Toto barked eagerly, as if in agreement.
And I sincerely hope he mistakes you for a tree, Fiyero thought, as the guard led the excitable little dog outside.
"What do you mean, 'no'?"
Branderstove shrugged: had he been fully armoured and his right arm hidden beneath a humanoid prosthesis, the gesture would have only looked mildly unusual; tonight, though, the mercenary general was clad in a dressing gown that left both of his real arms exposed, and Elphaba couldn't help but shudder at the sight of the two huge clusters of tentacles shrugging fluidly up and down.
"I'm sure the meaning was pretty self-contained," said the Leviathan.
Forty-five extremely crowded minutes had passed since Elphaba, Harker and the prisoner had escaped the lynch mob: flying back across Loamlark had been difficult enough already even without having to constantly avoid flying too high just in case an enemy sniper noticed them, but the combined weight of Elphaba's passengers had sent the broomstick careening out of control far too many times to count. At one point, the three of them had stopped on a rooftop just long enough to get their bearings, and the prisoner had taken the opportunity to offer grovelling his thanks to his rescuers… only to get his first good look at them for the first time; one good look at Harker's eyeless face and an even better look at Elphaba's skin, and he'd collapsed to the ground in a dead faint.
Once they'd slapped the prisoner awake and forced him to get back on the broomstick, though, things slowly began to improve – if only in the sense that the journey ended faster. The route took the three of them over a few hundred rooftops at high speed before they'd crash-landed safely in the middle of the Deviant Nation's local compound – loudly enough to wake up just about every single soldier in the garrison. Command had questioned Elphaba, Harker and the prisoner at length, argued a bit with Mayor Wilder and Chief Marchfly, before finally sending a detachment of soldiers and militiamen down to the police station to arrest the mob.
As an afterthought, they'd also decided to provide the prisoner with medical attention before depositing him in a cell; so, once he'd finished attending to the bumps and bruises Elphaba had acquired in the landing, Doctor Kiln had volunteered for the job of removing the prisoner's pitchcap. It was a long and extremely frustrating process, especially given that the patient had curled into a ball and started sobbing for mercy as soon as he'd seen Kiln's snakelike fingers looming towards him. Eventually, he'd been sedated, allowing the mage-surgeon to gently remove the hardened mixture of paper and pitch from the unconscious tech officer's scalp with a specially-prepared solvent.
"Child's play," Kiln had remarked blithely. "Now, replacing severed scalps? That's a different kettle of herring altogether; suffice it to say that this man's squad-mates are going to be spending the rest of the night in surgery – provided they don't bleed to death first."
Unfortunately, once that particular madness was over and done with, Branderstove had showed up to discuss the situation with the Mayor and the commanders; the conference had been worryingly short and the mercenary paymaster had left with a look of vague satisfaction on his distorted face, so Elphaba had stupidly decided to wander up and ask him a few questions regarding the punishment of Colonel Gloss and the other offenders.
Except, it seemed there wasn't going to be any punishment at all.
"Why not?" Elphaba demanded.
"Because their crimes simply don't merit that kind of response."
"Oh, for… they were scalping people! They were having people tortured to death!"
"Said 'people' being dedicated servants of Unbridled Radiance – your enemy, in case you hadn't noticed."
Elphaba took a deep breath, and began silently counting to nine thousand. "Mr Branderstove," she said through gritted teeth, "I know who they are, I know they're the enemy, and I've already listened to one condescending lecture on the subject from Colonel Gloss, and I don't need any more condescension from you. I don't want anyone being tortured, friend or foe. Clear?"
"Perfectly. But that doesn't change the fact that Gloss and the other mercenaries will not be disciplined for what happened tonight – not by me, not by Loamlark's authorities, and not by your commanders."
"Let me guess, you're still waving a contract over the Mayor's head." Elphaba sighed deeply, remembering her brief glimpse of the offending article; up until then, she hadn't thought it was possible for clauses to be hidden in underlines and semicolons, but if nothing else, her time in Loamlark was proving to be quite horrifyingly educational. "Has it ever occurred to you that if your men can do this without your permission and get away with it, your leadership over the Strangling Coils is dead in the water?"
"What makes you think they did it without my permission?"
"I… WHAT?"
"I've known all about the Repatriation Squad's presence in the city for some time," Branderstove explained, voice calm and distinctly remote. "Colonel Gloss came to me for orders the moment they were captured, and I gave him full permission to do as he pleased with them. I even suggested that he invite the lynch mob along. Granted, I didn't think he'd be able to keep himself amused for so long with so few casualties, but I suppose he's finally learning to pace himself at long last. Anyway, long story short, this act was performed with my sanction and blessing, and I stand to lose absolutely nothing by denying your request for disciplinary action." He smiled apologetically. "Just one of the realities in this business, I'm afraid."
For a moment or two, Elphaba could only blink in astonishment. Then, she finally exploded, "But why?! Why would you do this?"
"The same reason why the Mayor isn't going to press charges against the lynch mob, the same reason why Chief Marchfly isn't going to fire the militiamen who went rogue and joined the mob, the same reason why your commanders are prepared to forgive tonight's festivities until this stage of the war is over: they need to appease the more volatile divisions of the populace, and I need to keep the more bloodthirsty members of my army satisfied. Unpleasant though it may be, sadists are unavoidable in the mercenary business: sometimes you find otherwise professional soldiers developing a taste for cruelty right under your nose, sometimes the best-qualified men for the job were dyed-in-the-wool torturers from the moment they learned to walk. In any case, they're too useful to do away with and too dangerous to discard without taking precautions first, so as long as you keep the psychopaths employed, you have to keep them occupied: if you can't give them battles, you give them prisoners to play with, and if you can't do that, you find a subclass of the local populace that nobody's likely to miss and have your resident lunatics vent their frustrations on them instead. You have to keep feeding the beast… unless, of course, you actually want the beast to turn on you. Now, be honest, Elphaba: if it came down to keeping enemy soldiers alive and healthy, or keeping your allies loyal and contented, would you really risk your life saving the worthless hides of a few child-thieving cowards?"
Elphaba took an even deeper breath, and absently realized that her count had stopped at somewhere around five hundred. "What the hell happened to you, Branderstove?" she asked wearily. "When I… when my other self met you, you were actually a decent human being – I mean, you had ethics compared to some of the industrialists I met. What happened to you? I saw what happened to you in the Pottery and you told me about your last brush with the Plague, but that still leaves about half the story unfinished. So what-"
Branderstove, his face already contorted with amusement over the last few seconds of Elphaba's retort, abruptly burst out laughing. For almost a full minute, he could only lean against the nearest wall in mirth-induced paralysis, his vast belly rippling as he gave full vent to his thunderous laughter. "You think I used to be a good man?" he boomed at last. "Why? Because I was polite? Because I rejected the bigotry of my colleagues? Because I was willing to listen to reason? Oh, I was crooked as the rest of them, Elphaba; I just happened to think that a handshake and a few kind words were cheaper than their porcine discourtesy. I did my fair share of bribing and blackmailing where necessary, and I made sure to keep a few unmarked graves ready for the trade unions when they showed up. And Loamlark wasn't the first time I've used a contract to rob a customer blind, either. I had things going behind the scenes that even your other self didn't know about. So with all that in mind, do you honestly believe that I was once a good man just because I had higher standards than the glorified slave-drivers among my colleagues? Or because you agreed with my political views?"
He fell silent, regarding Elphaba with piercing, unearthly eyes. "So this is what the Empress was like before the Wizard had her Purified," he remarked, his voice now soft and faintly contemptuous. "A naïve, impetuous, soft-hearted child. Tell me, is the green really a skin pigment, or is it just a sign of inexperience?"
"Oh, a green joke. How very original of you."
"Word of advice, Elphaba: your boss doesn't hesitate to use harsher methods, and neither should you. Learn a little pragmatism." And without another word, the Leviathan turned and stomped away, pausing only to toss his spent cigar over his shoulder.
Some minutes later, she found herself sitting on a park bench two blocks away from the church, head hung low, eyes fixed on the grass in front of her. Time seemed to be becoming increasingly abstract as the night wore on, partly due to the sheer number of horrible things she'd seen but mostly due to exhaustion. And yet, she couldn't go back to sleep: there was too much on her mind for that, too much frustration burning beneath her skin… and by this point, she was almost too tired to move from her current spot, anyway.
She was so lost in her thoughts that she didn't notice the sound of approaching footsteps until Harker sat down next to her.
For a while, the two of them sat there in silence, Elphaba too entangled in her own thoughts to speak, and Harker too busy being his usual tightlipped self.
Eventually, though, Elphaba managed to smother her bad mood long enough to ask, "Have even seen anything like that before?"
"Like what, exactly – the lynch mob or the pitchcapping?"
"Both. And if you say 'I can neither confirm nor deny,' I will be forced to hit you someplace sensitive."
"Well, I've seen my fair share of lynch mobs and torture scenes; pitchcapping's not unknown, given the need for sadists to improvise, but I've never seen it performed with such an audience. Normally, when you see a lynch mob gathering for some informal "justice," they usually just kill their victim – they hang him, or shoot him, or behead him… or hang him, then shoot the corpse until the noose snaps and then decapitate the body and use the head as a urinal trough. Or if they're in a really bad mood, they just grab the victim by the limbs and rip him to bits. Civilian mobs out for torture are pretty rare, especially the kind that can leave the victim alive; most of the lynch mobs don't have the patience for that sort of thing.
"Mind you," he added thoughtfully, "there was that time in Sapringal Province. There was a judge, unpopular with the locals, got on their nerves one too many times: they stripped him naked, dunked him in a vat of treacle and locked him in an ant farm for five hours. Don't worry, he got out alive, but that didn't stop the local police from putting him the stocks and pelting him with jelly doughnuts for the rest of the day."
Elphaba considered this. "Did you just make that last part up so that I'd feel better?" she asked.
"I can neither confirm nor deny…"
"You bastard!"
"You smiled, Elphaba; mission accomplished, as far as I'm concerned. Doesn't matter how I accomplished it, either."
"Oh har har. You know, I'm pretty sure that's the most I've heard you say in a single conversation."
By way of an answer, Harker lapsed into a minute-long silence.
"All hail the barracks comedian," Elphaba remarked dryly. "I notice you only seem to develop a sense of humour on really bad days, so this is probably doesn't mean anything good for either of us. I did have one other question, though…"
"Ask away."
"What's a Repatriation Squad?"
Harker's face, almost smiling by now, suddenly turned deadly serious once again. "Probably the single most hated personnel in the armies of Unbridled Radiance, an' for good reason too. Repatriation Squads are usually made up of soldiers who've shown some aptitude for stealth missions and live captures, and it's their specific duty to slip past our lines into populated areas like Loamlark. Once they've arrived, they… repatriate as many locals as they can."
"Define 'repatriate'."
"Well, like Loamlark, most of the targeted zones have a high population of refugees from U.R., and it's up to the Repatriation Squads to bring them home by any means necessary, along with any converts that might crop up among the natives. More often than not, they just kidnap them – all in the purpose of removing the poor deceived people of Unbridled Radiance from 'corrupting influences,' of course. And if the refugees have settled down and started families, then the Squad considers it top priority to 'rescue' them, too." Harker sighed. "You can see why they're called child-thieves, can't you?"
"Well, I can certainly see why they ended up with a lynch mob after them. But how do you know so much about them? Have you had any run-ins with the Repatriation Squads?"
For a moment, she half-expected him to reply with "I can neither confirm nor deny." But instead, he just shook his head. "Outside of the occasional POW inspection, no; I've never seen them in action, and I've never been on the receiving end of their so-called rescues. But I know people who've been unlucky enough to be visited by Repatriation Squads: some of them were killed resisting repatriation; some of them died trying to escape their new home; some of them just vanished into the woodwork and were never seen again… and a rare few made it back to the Deviant Nations… like Vara, for example."
"Vara? Oh, of course, she told me her parents were refugees from Unbridled Radiance-"
"And that made her eligible for repatriation. Ten years ago, she was living in a border town just like this place, a bit more cosmopolitan than Loamlark but still pretty small-fry as far as towns go; it was where her parents had settled, where she'd been born, where she'd grown up… and from what she told me, where she'd been planning to stay for the rest of her life. But then, the war hit a fever pitch, artillery strikes reached deep into the Deviant Nations, and the Empress wanted to make sure that any wayward sons of Unbridled Radiance were rescued from the line of fire. So, the Repatriation Squads were sent in." Harker shook his head sadly. "When Vara told me this story, she always seemed to be looking for a positive spin on things: 'at least I was an adult when it happened,' she'd say, 'at least I wasn't a child dragged out of bed, screaming in terror. At least they didn't hurt me. At least they didn't threaten to shoot me.' Not that they could, at any rate."
"What do you mean?"
"Vara was top priority that night, higher than even the children selected for repatriation; you see… Vara was pregnant at the time."
"Oh gods."
"Suffice it to say, she was given the gilded cage treatment; indoctrination without torture, luxurious imprisonment, and a chance to "redeem" herself and her family by bringing a child into the population of Unbridled Radiance … but that's her story to tell, not mine. Long story short, she broke out ten months later, killed her way through a dozen guards, stole a ship and returned to the Deviant Nations. Joined the Irredeemables a few months later."
Elphaba could only stare in astonishment for a moment. Then, she finally managed to ask, "So you've never been targeted for 'repatriation'?"
"Nope. I'm not eligible to be allowed back into the fold, especially after joining the Irredeemables. Not after the way I ended up in the Deviant Nations."
Not for the first time since she'd met the old sniper, Elphaba found herself gripped by an insatiable curiosity – hardly surprising, given his habit of playing the man of mystery every other day of the week. But this time, the desire to know more was stronger than ever before: she'd heard too many hints about the man to just overlook the many secrets, especially after hearing what the Hellion and the Empress had to say about him. The former of the two had called him, "the unforgiveable marksman who felled a nation with two shots," and the latter had sneeringly asked him if he was still a captain or just a lieutenant – remarks spoken out of spite, true, but that didn't stop them from fuelling Elphaba's curiosity. And the more she thought about those two little hints, the more familiar Harker seemed, almost as if she'd met him before – and for all she knew, she had, if only in one of the dream memories.
So, spurred on by another fit of curiosity, Elphaba found herself asking, "So you were from Unbridled Radiance originally?"
"I can neither confirm nor deny…"
"Alright then, let me put it another way: you were a citizen of Oz before Alphaba took over, weren't you?"
"I can neither confirm nor deny…"
"Oh come on, Harker! You've already made it clear that you escaped the memory spell and that you're old enough to have lived in Oz during the Wizard's reign. So, who were you, how did you end up working for the Empress, and how did you serve her? Who are you really?"
She paused, and thought of the best way to break the sudden stalemate.
"Were you a sniper then, as well?"
And in that moment, Elphaba knew she'd hit close to home, for Harker instantly froze. Strong emotion rarely touched the old man's eyeless face at the best of times: smiles were reserved for special occasions, laughter was restricted to the occasional hoarse chuckle, and anger only made itself known by a slight deepening of the sniper's ever-present frown. But for perhaps the second time since she'd met him, Elphaba saw fear written plainly on Harker's face, visible in every line of his suddenly-frozen expression; the last time he'd worn this expression, he'd been face to face with the Empress herself.
"I…" He took a deep breath, and just managed to stammer out the words "I-I can neither-"
"Harker, could you please just answer the question? I've gotten enough obfuscation from Kiln and the Mentor, and after all the mayhem and madness I've endured tonight, I could do with a little more honesty and a lot less military jargon. So, if you don't want to talk about your past, just say so; if not, I'm officially all ears."
There was an uncomfortable pause.
"As I said, if you don't want to tell me, you can just say so."
If anything, the old sniper grew even quieter.
Elphaba tried again: "You told me that you gave up sniping after your last mission in the field and swore never to look through a scope again? How did-"
"That doesn't mean anything anymore," Harker groaned wearily. "I've said that at the start of every single mission I've accepted in the last thirty-five years, and it gets more ridiculous every time I say it. Every time I take a shot, things change for the worse and I try to resign… and then the Mentor summons me for another top-secret mission and scuppers my plans for peaceful retirement, and the hell of it is, I can't complain because it's my own damn fault for causing the mess I've been enlisted to clean up."
He was speaking faster now, his clipped "tight-lipped old codger" mode of speech giving way to a flood of words: It was if he'd been waiting to confess his feelings on the subject for years, and Elphaba's prodding had just opened the proverbial floodgates. And the more he spoke and the more his speech unravelled, the more familiar he sounded.
"Every mission it's the same old pattern," he plunged on, "and the only comfort I've got is the simple fact that it'll never be as bad as the first time. Back then, it took years to realize what I'd done, but once the realization hit I came this close to drinking myself to death. I'd been so proud of my perfect aim, my brilliant eye for details, and that aim had cost Oz everything. Once I got out of the hospital… well, that was the first time I swore I'd never look through a scope again: I'd already betrayed the Empress by jumping ship to the Mentor's camp, but then I decided to compound my treachery by joining the Irredeemables and requesting the most radical alterations possible – if only so I could have a face that I couldn't connect with my shame. I even had them take my eyes just so I could make my retirement complete; blindness seemed a small price to pay for never playing the role of a sniper again. But no! Even after changing my name, changing my face, and blinding myself, the Mentor wasn't fooled: she had the mage-surgeons restore my eyes in the most roundabout way, and then gave me the task of redeeming myself – me, the man who'd shot down the Wicked Witch of the West!"
For a moment, Elphaba could only blink.
"Harnley?" she said at last. "Captain Harnley?"
For perhaps the second time since she'd met him, Elphaba took in the sight of Harker's face with a mixture of surprise and fascination: the gnarled tree-bark skin, the bare scalp clustered with dense green veins like roots, the grey lips twisted in anguish. This time, she found herself desperately looking for any signs that this man night have once been the Harnley she'd seen in the dream memories, to no avail: even the most basic shape of his body had been altered, the former captain's finely-toned muscles and statuesque build whittled away until all that remained was a spindly trunk and a set of limbs that looked as though they'd once been the branches of a dead tree – complete with long, thorn-tipped fingers. Handsome Harnley, as he'd once been known, was no more. If anything, this was even more extreme than the transformations that this world's Glinda and Boq had undergone: the Mentor hadn't had much of a choice in the case of her alteration, and Boq had never been especially fond of his own appearance, but Harnley had been arrogant and vain even on his good days, notoriously self-aggrandizing and fiercely proud of his good looks… and yet, he'd submitted to the surgery of his own free will.
Even in light of what she'd just been told, it was almost impossible to believe; instead, she could only ask again:
"Harnley?" she repeated.
"Yep," said Harker/Harnley, sighing deeply, "That was m'name. Well, I'm not a captain anymore – barely a corporal by current standards. Now I'm just old Harker."
"… so that's what the Hellion meant when she said-"
"Yep. She's got a wonderful way of seeing what you want to keep buried."
"And that's the reason why you were assigned to this mission? For the sake of your redemption? For shooting down my other self?"
"And causing the downfall of Oz, too. Can't forget about that."
"Harker, how in the name of sanity can you possibly blame yourself for that? I'm pretty sure the Empress has the lion's share of blame for that-"
"Elphaba, please don't try to explain: I've heard arguments like this from just about everyone who's been willing to respectfully disagree with the Mentor and still capable of remembering what really happened that day. They're always trying to tell me it wasn't really my fault - that just because I shot down Elphaba Thropp didn't mean I guaranteed her transformation into the Empress." He laughed mirthlessly. "How could I when the Mentor blames herself for that already? But I was the one who forced Elphaba into that position. I was the one who shot her out of the sky and almost killed her; I was the one who left her in the hospital, forced to choose between accepting Morrible's bargain and spending the rest of her life in prison. True, I didn't give her the contract and I didn't make her sign, but I put her in that position. I didn't decide the course of the life from then on, but I set the stage. I didn't help her plan the Plague of Transformations, but I certainly ended up making it work without meaning to. I never intended to help her depose the Wizard… but somehow I ended up doing just that. In the end, I was the triggerman: my arrogance; my stupidity; my fault."
He sighed. "And it seems I've got a little more to atone for every day."
"In terms of having to carry on as a sniper?"
"Well, there is that… and what I've seen in the dream-memories."
This threw Elphaba for a moment. "You mean your other self somehow ended up in this dimension?"
"No. Ever since we found you and Dorothy out on the border, I've been experiencing weird dreams – disjointed, blurry, incomprehensible most of the time, but every now and again, a scene emerges in perfect clarity. At first, I thought it was my past replaying itself in my sleep, but then the day when I should have shot Elphaba from the sky passed without a single broomstick passing overhead. From what Kiln tells me, it's a side-effect of proximity to the dimensional portal: if anyone in that raiding party had a counterpart in the other world, they'd find themselves the recipient of a tiny droplet of memories bleeding through the gateway. And I saw a few things of the other Harnley that…"
He hung his head in sorrow. "I'd like to pretend I couldn't blame myself," he said quietly. "But looking at my other self, he's exactly as I was back in the bad old days: arrogant, selfish, vain… and monstrous. The more I tried to pretend, the more it felt like it really was me. Until…" He paused, as if trying to collect his thoughts. "Have you ever felt responsible for what you saw in the dream-memories? Did you ever start to feel guilt over what Alphaba had done in her conquest of Oz?"
"At times," Elphaba admitted. "But not often. I can see how much she's changed since our paths have diverged; by now, she seems like a completely different person, so it's harder to blame myself – harder, but certainly not impossible."
"With me, it's the opposite. The young man I saw in my dream was exactly like me: same face, same personality, the same self-righteous anger… So I can blame myself. He was willing to cross the same line I'd have been willing to cross if Glinda hadn't stopped me. Except he didn't just kill, he… gods, I only saw half of it, but the things that took place in that cornfield…"
"… what are you talking about?" Elphaba asked, suspiciously.
"You were there, Elphaba; you should know."
"No, I don't – you'll have to be a bit more specific than that."
"Gods!" Harker half-laughed half-sobbed. "You were there, Elphaba! You saw it happen! You saw me in charge of the squad that dragged him away!"
Dragged who away? Elphaba demanded, but the words never left her mouth. Somewhere in the back of her mind, realization was brewing.
"You're honestly telling me that in all the dream-memories you saw, you didn't recognize my face? You didn't recognize the ringleader of the guards that murdered Fiyero?"
In that moment, Elphaba's heart stopped.
Then the emotions flooded in.
She had met him before, she realized; she'd seen Harnley's face that horrible morning in Muchkinland, seen it contorted with unreasoning hatred as she'd fled the scene, and heard the shout of "Put him up on those poles!" And as she'd flown away, bullets whizzing past her ears, a scream of "Hit him harder! We'll make the traitorous little bastard talk yet!"
For a split second, Elphaba found herself agreeing with Harker.
She honestly and truly believed that he'd actually killed Fiyero. And for a moment that could have lasted anywhere from a millisecond to a millennia, she wanted to kill him.
She wanted to wrap her hands around his throat and squeeze until she felt blood welling up beneath her fingers. She wanted to impale him on a scarecrow's harness and leave him to dangle above the ground for days on end, suffering without respite just as Fiyero had suffered. She wanted to pour all her energy, all the destructive power she could muster and pour it into Harker's body, then stand back and watch as he screamed, writhed, vitrified, and finally dissolved.
But then Elphaba took a breath, and in the space of a second, logic returned to her mind. The man standing before her hadn't killed Fiyero, even though he certainly believed he had; the Harnley who'd done the deed was back in the Oz she knew, still unpunished.
And even if logic hadn't intervened, by the time she'd taken her first step towards Harker, her hatred had simply bled away. Once again, rage was beyond her at this point: she was just too tired for it; too much had happened to her this evening when by rights she should have been fast asleep. She'd gotten into arguments, she'd flown upside-down across the city with a screaming torture victim in the backseat, she'd had to witness the worst excesses of a lynch mob and rescue someone who (for all she knew) could have deserved it, she'd spent the best hours of the evening outdoors in the freezing air and following a trail of blood down an alleyway…and she'd learned that the Wizard was her father. And now, on top of everything else, she was face to face with an unpleasant reminder of perhaps the worst day of her entire life, accompanied by a man so hell-bent on atonement and personal redemption, he seemed determined to blame himself for things he couldn't possibly have done.
So, in the end, she could only sit there, dazed from shock as she tried to think of what to do next.
And then, from somewhere behind her, there came the sound of booted feet charging down the path towards them; seconds later, Dr Kiln skidded to a halt in front of the bench. "I got here as soon as I could," he panted. "Ran just about all the way – becoming a habit I suppose. Elphaba, you're needed at the northern wall, ASAFP."
"Why, what's happening?"
"We've got portal activity occurring just outside the city walls," Kiln exclaimed, his face aglow with excitement. "There's another dimensional portal forming out there, and it looks like it might just lead back to the Oz you came from!"
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