2-2. Retribution

The first shot hit the chandelier that hung high in the center of the arched ceiling, raining shards of fractured crystal on the dinner tables below. The orchestra squawked and screeched and then fell silent, and the dancers froze, two by two. A murmur swept with terrifying speed through the crowd; it started on the edges, by the doors, and spread inward to the heart of the crowd. Terrorists.

"Attention, Shinra swine!" a harsh voice shouted. The partygoers tangled in confused knots, searching for the source of the voice, trying to hurry away in six different directions at once. The swirl of color became a nauseous, nervous churn; the feathers shivered spastically and the light jumped and flickered as the chandelier shivered from the impact. "Attention! Every last one of you! Bureaucrats, beggars, leeches and thieves!" From the door—from every door—stepped men and women with hard eyes and cold faces. They were dressed in rags, in peasants' clothing, in the uniforms of the Crystal Room staff. Each one was armed; most had guns, though a few were armed with swords and knives.

Vincent swiftly pulled away from Lucrecia, reaching inside his suit jacket for his gun. His relaxed smile evaporated as the empty Turk's mask closed over his face. "Go," he whispered fiercely, over the crowd's terrified rumble. "Get your cloak and meet me in the entrance hall."

"But—"

"Go! They're after me, the Turks. I can't let you stay with me, it's too dangerous. Hurry. I'll meet you there. Please." He pulled her back to him, almost roughly, and kissed her lips. "Stay warm. I'll catch up. I promise."

Lucrecia nodded, her throat too tight to speak, and slipped away through the rippling crowd toward the Project table.

"Shinra swine!" the voice continued, as a band of the armed people stomped up onto the orchestra's risers. The musicians dove out of the way as their instruments bent and splintered under the shoes of the intruders. One of the group, a man with a scarred jaw and a fierce, almost insane look in his eyes, stood in front of the rest, and continued his tirade. "Shinra leeches, that suck the life from every town they touch! Who come in with their guns and their poisonous machines, drain the earth and enslave the people! Three months ago your Shinra bastards came to the mining town of Corel with a sales pitch for one of their death machines, one of their Mako Reactors. Some of us staged a resistance, so you, you Shinra beasts, called your attack-dogs and killed the resisters. Shot down, in cold blood, by a gunman they couldn't even see." Lucrecia stopped dead, afraid to turn around. Her mind flooded with Vincent's silent, pained face and the light under the Shinra Mansion's trees at dusk.

On assignment in Corel.

"You could never kill anyone."

Vincent…

"You thought you could get away with it, didn't you? Thought you were above the rest of us! Thought you were above the law!" The resistance leader laughed, a clanging, merciless sound. "Well, guess who makes the laws tonight?"

Lucrecia made it to the coat rack and seized her cloak. A stutter of bullets coughed from an unseen gun, tearing the cloak from her hands. Lucrecia cried out, leaping back from the wall as the bullets gouged flying chips from the stone. "Not so fast!" someone shouted, and the crowd shrank back to reveal one of the Crystal Room waiters—or someone who had posed as a Crystal Room waiter—carrying a machine gun and smirking. The waiter turned to watch the speech, satisfied with his display. Lucrecia snatched her cloak from the floor, bundled it into her arms, and dashed through the crowd toward the back of the ballroom, crouching low.

"Hear this, Shinra slime! You will pay for what you have taken from the people of Corel, from the people of Midgar, from the people of Wutai—those people you tried to crush, but will rise again, in a battle as none of us have ever seen! We are no longer at your mercy! You are at ours!"

Lucrecia had just enough time to duck behind a polished stalagmite at the back of the ballroom before the Turks opened fire.

They had last been seen huddled over the bar, five of them without Vincent, the sole straggler. Now they seemed to be everywhere, fanned invisibly through the crowd. Maybe the alcohol had not yet clouded their senses—or maybe, knowing the risk, they hadn't drunk as much as they seemed to drink—for in those first few seconds, resistance fighters fell in their tracks, one after another, instantly, as if a switch had been thrown. The Turks, anonymous in the suited crowd, fired with mechanical precision. Not even when the crowd began to trample toward the door in blind panic did the Turks hit a Shinra employee by accident.

The resistance needed no such accuracy.

They stood in small clumps for the most part, and the first row of each fell, wounded or killed by Turk bullets; the second row froze for a moment, stunned, staring at their fallen comrades, at the screeching mass of fleeing executives, mechanics, and copy clerks that packed the hall. After this moment of silent realization, they began to return fire.

The crowd's jabber of fear rose to a scream as the fighters surged forward, as the blades whirled and the guns rapped out their rhythm of destruction. The Turks continued firing, and a few army officers unsheathed their ceremonial swords and took on the knife-wielding terrorists, but the crowd remained largely undefended. Some of the partygoers ducked instinctively to avoid the bullets; some were trampled as almost a thousand Shinra employees strained toward the only exit.

"Get the Turks, you idiots!" the leader shouted, just before a Turk bullet struck his shoulder. He sank to his knees, stumbling down the steps of the orchestra riser.

Lucrecia's breath seized in her lungs. She was crouching against the base of the pillar, a mass of rock wide enough for two people to hide behind—but bullets were already flying past, ricocheting off the walls and from the stalagmite itself. Her heart pounding, Lucrecia looked back toward the door and its hopeless tangle of limbs and cloth and flashing jewels. The entrance hall…but there's no use going there now, it's a death-trap. Wait until the crowd thins, you can make it then…but now? She glanced around her, along the back wall of the ballroom. Nothing but tables—many with terrified Shinra cowering under them—and to her right, a solid marble bar. She focused on it: some twenty feet wide and three thick, no bullets could penetrate it, and it stood parallel to the back wall, shielding the space behind it from almost all firing angles. There.

Lucrecia unfurled her cloak and wrapped it around her, more for a feeling of security than for any protection it might have afforded. She closed her eyes, prayed that she would make it to shelter, prayed that the rebels would not find Vincent. With these thoughts filling her mind—she would not allow herself to think of bullets—she launched herself from the shelter of the pillar, her cloak and its tattered hood flying behind her. For five seconds there was nothing but the chaos of the ballroom on her right side and the pounding of her fine slippers on the glinting floor. The edge of the bar whacked into her right arm, exploding bright shimmers of pain behind her closed eyes. She dropped to her knees, curled up as tight as she could, head on her knees, gripping the thudding pain in her arm, feeling the solid oak cabinet behind her back, knowing that it was backed with even more solid marble. She'd made it to shelter. For the moment, she was safe.

A voice murmured over the distant chaos of the ballroom, mushy with drink and unmistakably nasal. "Why…fancy meeting you here, Lucrecia Sir."

Lucrecia opened her eyes.

In the most protected spot, where the bar angled into a corner, the closest point possible to a fortress within this madhouse of violence, Hojo huddled with one bony hand wrapped around a half-empty bottle of spirits. His eyes were bloodshot and watering, but his voice remained calm.

"Looks like your hero's going to get himself killed tonight," he observed with more than a trace of pleasure. "Pity." Lucrecia's stomach churned with fear and with loathing for this man, the last person in the world she wished to see at this particular moment. She pulled her cloak tighter around her body as if it would shield him from his eyes, from the insane, amused calm of his voice. "Then again, that might not be so bad. I've been thinking about you, Lucrecia. I may revise my judgment of you. You may yet be useful to the Project…"

If I kicked your sorry head in, would that be useful to the Project? Lucrecia thought, but she remained unmoving, half immobilized by fury, half mesmerized.

Hojo lifted the bottle to his colorless lips and drank, spilling translucent amber drops onto his starched shirt front. "The Project is not what it should be," he continued with that same detached calm. "The Project has lost its focus."

"It hasn't," Lucrecia whispered, and repeated, indignant and afraid: "It hasn't."

A smile crept slowly across the scientist's face. "It hasn't?" He chuckled softly, with a sound like grinding machinery. "What have you found in the last three months?"

Lucrecia's heartbeat speeded up, and an angry—or was it embarrassed?—flush washed up into her cheeks. Nothing. You know as well as I do that it's not turning out as planned… She'd spent the last three months struggling to advance her last great discovery, but had uncovered no reason for what she'd found. The cells held their mystery tightly; she had spent the last three months and all of her skill prying into them, with little success. She'd found a phenomenon, but no explanation. As a discovery it was tabloid stuff, with no real scientific weight. Incomplete. Unpublishable. A failure… "We just need time," she said tightly.

"Time, money, bureaucratic say-so, materials, workers, and leadership." Hojo snapped his fingers. "Easy as that!" He laughed harshly and took another slosh from the bottle, wiping his mouth on his tuxedo sleeve. "Gast is killing the Project. He has no sense of what it needs to survive. He's a damned bureauc-crat," he said, stumbling over the word. "He has no dedication to science. None of you do. Between Gast sucking up to any Shinra in a suit and that little Chemistry bastard and you, the new village slut…"

Lucrecia felt the blood rushing to her face as she slowly rose to her knees. She had to hunch over to avoid being seen from the ballroom, but she still looked down on Hojo's slumped figure. "If you ever say anything like that again…"

Hojo's smirk did not change, though he avoided her murderous gaze. "What are you going to do? I'm your supervisor and you damn well know it."

I could bring you up in front of the Conduct Subcomittee, have you sued, or maybe just kill you in your sleep… but you won't, will you, village slut?

Shut up, I've never…

Shut up. Just shut up! He can't say those things, not about Dr. Gast at any rate…Why don't I fight back? Why can't I…

He's my supervisor…he holds the power here…but…

I can't even handle my own project…

Lucrecia lowered her fists, her breathing slowing. She turned away, listened to the chaos in the ballroom. The shots were slowing down, almost taken over by the hum of the fleeing crowd and the agonized groaning of the wounded. She saw the refugees under one of the tables dashing for the door, and realized there was no way she could wait any longer.

Without a word she launched herself from behind the bar, dodging tables, almost blind from a sudden wash of tears. The crowd still pressed against the exit, but it was smaller and a bit calmer; most of the rebels in the room had been shot or disarmed, or had fled. The room was in shambles, tables and chairs broken, walls scraped and chipped. The ice-blue tablecloths and the polished crystal floor were stained with slow drips of blood.

Lucrecia pushed her way into the crowd near the entrance and fought her way through the door, jerking to a halt more than once as someone stepped on her gown or pinned her cloak to the wall in the confusion. She shook away the tears as her irritation and fear both grew—what if Vincent didn't make it to their meeting point? What had happened to Dr. Gast and Elmyra and Reece? She pulled her skirts up a bit, to keep them from being stepped on again, and elbowed her way through the crowd, pushing toward the entrance hall. The front door was wide open; the entire population of Shinra Inc. moved in a sea of sick fear and insane glitter toward the darkness outside. The wind blew in, biting cold. Lucrecia held her cloak closed with one hand as she drew closer to the exit. She worked her way toward the mirrored wall—now cobwebbed with bullet holes and the frantic pushing of a thousand fleeing Shinra—where she'd first seen Vincent, four hours and a lifetime ago. Her heart thudded with anticipation—let him be here, just let him be here, please…

The spot was deserted. Lucrecia slumped against her own shattered reflection, exhausted and anguished.

"Lucrecia!"

Her head snapped up. "Vincent—"

Vincent broke from the crowd, his black suit wrinkled, his hair falling over his face. His gun was still out; he shoved it into his coat as he stumbled toward her. He fell into her outstretched arms and held her so tightly that she could hardly breathe. Lucrecia was sure she felt him shaking. "You're all right," he whispered. "Lucrecia, you're safe…"

"So are you," she replied. "You were out in the middle of it…I was so worried…"

Vincent did not reply. After a little while he was able to let her go, and they ran together into the night.

The crowd continued to flow from the doors, a random stream of terrified humanity, and huddled, freezing, on the Ropeway platforms. The overloaded Ropeway gondolas strained, slowly lifting away from the ruins of the Nibarel Crystal Room. When the last Shinra had left, the rebels emerged in a limping but grimly triumphant group. The lights had gone out; the lake reflected only the moonlight and starlight. The reflection shimmered as the rebels hacked through the Ropeway cables and sent them slithering into the lake. The rebel band shot out the light in front of the entranceway, and, their task finished, disappeared into the dark mountains.