XXXVI. You Turn the Screws
A/N: Apologies to Megan, who asked so nicely back at Ch. 26. The ending was not mine to write, only the journey getting here. Like Anne Boleyn and King Henry VIII, that single day of convergence must sustain a lifetime of distance unspooling.
My readers, my sweet reviewers, my tough critics, the currents that buffet me along the right path with your questions and your encouragement: it's all about you. And especially you, cowgirlnoir, the other half of my brain and my soul found serendipitously in a world I had no business inhabiting. I look forward to the forever.
Years seemed to pass while Spike lay balled up beneath the table. He heard the clatter of rubble faintly, and thought it was followed by the sound of the katana being sheathed, but judging from how the sound did not carry, he would have a hell of a time getting out when he judged it safe to do so. Vicious did not speak and if he moved, he moved too lightly for Spike to register it.
Finally, the sound of other voices cut through the din, hotel employees, someone trying to open the kitchen door and coming up against debris. Vicious would have fled by now. Then an ominous creak and crack preceded another rain of plaster and stone, and someone shouted "get out!"
When the room was silent again, Spike finally uncurled as much as he could and dug for his lighter. Its flame revealed the dead sniper, perhaps six inches of clearance between the body and the underside of the table. He reached over and pushed experimentally at the large chunk of plaster nearest him, pleased to find it shifted. After another ten minutes of inching his way over the body and shoving at rubble, dim light crept in and he knew he was free.
Vicious barely missed the cavalcade of hotel employees who streamed out of the elevator; he could hear them running from behind the stairwell door. He took the fifteen flights of steps down three at a time, burst out into the rainy afternoon, and was into his ship while the lights of the ISSP zipcraft were still at least a half-mile away. He headed straight for Julia's building, knowing he had nothing to fear from the police but the fate already assigned to him.
The knob of her new door turned easily under his hand and he pushed it open, eyes sweeping the room. She sat in one of the dining room chairs turned toward the window, looking over her shoulder at him. Her opal derringer rested in her lap, already cocked.
"I'm done playing games with you, Vicious," she said in a gravelly whisper. Tear-streaks marred her cheeks, but her eyes were dry.
He laughed and shut the door behind him. "I refuse to believe you would kill me, if you would not kill Spike. Even if I pose the greater danger to you."
"You pose no danger to me at all, Vicious," she replied. "Just as you are certain I would not kill you, you would have done me in already if you had the balls for it."
His hand went to the hilt of the katana and he advanced on her, but she lifted the pistol and aimed, her blue eyes impassive and hard as sapphires. "We're going to the Tower," she said, "and I'll explain to Mao why I did not come. That you ordered me to kill Spike. He knows what you asked Spike to do before we went to Ganymede. He knows everything."
The muscles in Vicious' jaw clenched, but he stayed his hand and relaxed. "You are a better liar than even I realized," he said, and the corners of his mouth turned up just a little. "But I have secrets of my own, Julia. And news you will no doubt be sorry to hear. Spike is dead."
She stifled a gasp, but the hand holding the derringer did not shake.
"Not only Spike. Mato and Lao, and three of the Vanguard, too. The Van will no doubt wonder if it might have turned out differently, had the tenth member of the team been there to provide the coverage we planned to have. By all means, let's go to the Tower. You can explain to Sou Long and to Mao Yenrai why they had to lose their sons."
Her eyes narrowed. "Spike is not dead."
"Oh, but he is," Vicious said, a grin spreading across his face. "He knew what would happen to you when the Van got hold of you. He curled up with a handful of C4 and took the transport out of this life. Like a coward."
"Bullshit," she hissed, and her lower lip trembled a little.
He crossed the few feet between them so fast she barely had time to react, and though she squeezed the trigger, he'd feinted far enough to one side that the round buried itself in the wall next to the door. He wrenched her wrist around so that the gun fell and had it behind her back in one swift turn. She let out a snarl of pain and did not struggle.
"Let's go," he whispered in her ear. "I would not put you out of your misery before you had the opportunity to face the fathers of dead men. Nor before you learned that you would have been free, not just of my wrath, but of me, if you had done as I ordered you to do."
"Vicious, I'll never be free of you," she said as she straightened her back. "I would settle for being rid of you."
He shoved her forward, still holding the hand behind her back, and then drew himself up against her back again, forcing her toward the door. "I'm in the Army now," he barked in her ear, and laughed. "Yes, you would have been rid of me. Everyone seems to want to be rid of me. Clearly, I pose a bigger threat to them than any one man should."
She went through the door ahead of him without protest, hiding her expression of confusion from him behind a curtain of hair. They went up the roof stairs in silence. At the ship, he lashed her hands behind her back with his scarf and shoved her roughly into the jump seat. As he climbed in after her, she finally replied, "What do you mean, you're in the Army now?"
"Mao and the Van decided I could use the emotional enrichment of boot camp," he said from behind clenched teeth. "To buy the ISSP's blind eye for the Tiger hit, they agreed to allow me to be conscripted."
He heard her suck in a breath behind him. "How long have you known?" she ground out.
"Longer than I have known you let Spike fuck you."
"And you ordered me to kill him anyway. You are pathetic," she hissed. "Jealous and childish and pathetic. You can't have me, so no one will?"
He inclined his head. "I am alive, and I will remain so on Titan, and I will return to what I have worked my whole life to achieve. Dying for love is pathetic."
She bit her lip and said nothing else through the flight, or the long walk from the hangar to the Tower, or their halting march across the lobby to where four Vanguard stood waiting.
"The Van will see you immediately," one of them intoned, and they all moved smoothly, forming a semicircle behind Vicious and Julia with their weapons drawn and held casual by their sides. Their procession slid through the knots of other Dragons talking in low voices in the hallway, and halted at the double doors of the chamber where Mao stood with his head bowed.
He looked up, his face drawn and sallow, flesh hanging as though somehow heavier with grief, and opened the door behind him. Seven now, they filed into the dim chamber as the lights came on in the mezzanine.
Julia stepped forward, ignoring the warning look from Mao and Sou Long's raised hand. "Before anything else is said, you all should know – I would have come to you freely. I would have made sure you knew that Vicious ordered me to kill Spike Spiegel at the hit today. That he would have murdered me himself if I would not do it. Mao knows he ordered my own death at Spiegel's hand before. I'm glad to be here, where you can see how little stock he puts in your orders."
She heard the shuffling of bodies behind her and was afraid to turn. She knew Vicious had gone for his weapon and been restrained by the guard. She dropped her head and waited for the Van's reply.
"Turn him over to the ISSP," Sou Long said, his voice strangely high and strained. "Confine her in the chamber until we have had a chance to review the events of this afternoon. Get out of my sight," he finished, and stood up from his seat, disappearing down the back stair. A rough hand grasped her above the elbow and yanked; she turned and followed, numb, avoiding Mao's eyes as she passed him.
Spike stepped out of the stairwell cautiously, noting the yellow crime scene tape strung all the way across the alley between the hotel and the next building. He blinked a few times, glad he'd left the Tommy behind, and began an unsteady walk toward the nearest ISSP officer.
"Hey!" the cop called out as Spike lurched toward him. "You all right there, buddy?"
Spike raised a hand and smiled. "Yeah, I got hit in the head by some guy coming down the stairwell. Put me out for a bit. I'm okay now, though."
"Did you get a look at him?" the cop asked with his hand on his sidearm.
"Not really. He had white hair. A sword." Spike stifled a smirk.
"You should go to a hospital, get that checked out," the cop replied, already looking off toward the trickle of people coming out the front doors.
"Yeah, I'll do that right now." Spike ducked under the tape and waved, cutting across the street to the shopping center between cars.
He got a few strange looks in the elevator up to the parking garage, but news of the explosion next door had traveled fast and most people gave him a wide, if curious, berth. He changed awkwardly in the cockpit of the Swordfish, scrubbing at the dried blood on his face with the sleeve of his discarded suit jacket. It was stubborn, but faded after he'd used up most of the bottle of water left from the flight out of Alva City.
He didn't want to risk the Swordfish being spotted in the daylight, with all of the police activity, so he rode the elevator back down, much more anonymously, and hailed a cab. Light drizzle made everything seem to glow with a faint halo of light as the car snaked down the side streets toward the cemetery. Spike paid the driver with a thousand-Woolong note, waving, and sat down on the bench in the long, stone-paved alleyway that led to the courtyard and the tiered rows of headstones. He lit a cigarette and leaned back, squinting into the mist, one hand jammed in his pocket.
The hours until the clock chimed seven drifted like a time-lapse slideshow, the clouds breaking up to allow watery sunlight in, the cars whirring by on the street, occasional visitors to the cemetery passing him with carefully averted eyes, deep in their own memories and grief. He thought of Mao and Sou Long, outliving their sons; of Vicious and his bizarre unspooling out of sanity; of Julia and guilt and a future where she remained and the guilt could fade. At the sound of the bells, he stood and went out into the courtyard. A single red rose lay in a puddle on the pathway. He bent and picked it up, holding it loosely in his fingers, and turned so he could see all three entrances to the cemetery. Waiting.