anyway, the last short chapter before the endgame. i was going to make everything one part, but i found i couldn't fit it together without one final break.
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Part Twelve- The Show Must Go On
'Over there.'
'Where?'
'There, by that fence. I think it's a squirrel. That's three points to me.'
'Like hell. That's a pigeon. One point.'
Murphy made a supercillious noise in his throat, leaning back on the cab's faux-leather upholstery. 'Damn it, Sis, you are such a sore loser.'
In the other window seat, Spring continued to stare intently through the glass. Her sharp grey eyes flicked across every kerb and gutter, searching for the next point. It was a long and boring cab ride across the darkening city to the Orpheus Theatre, and after the first ten or so minutes she and her brother had started to resort to little games to pass the time. Right now it was that old favourite, Roadkill I-Spy.
'Save it, Murph. I'd be winning right now if you didn't keep making stuff up.'
Her brother spread his hands in protest. 'I don't! I swear!'
She turned a sceptical eye on him. 'An ocelot. In the middle of Manhattan.'
'Maybe it'd got lost-'
'Shut up, you two.' said Schafer, from the middle seat. She was hunched over the weighty gym bag on her lap, doing something intricate to the wiring of one of the headcoms. Strangely enough, although she was the least tidy (some might say least professional) out of all of them, when it came to actually doing the job she was always the edgiest, the most focused. She had barely spoken a word for the entire ride so far, letting her colleagues bicker over her bent head.
In the front of the cab the driver turned the steering wheel to manouvre the car around another congested intersection. He wasn't listening to the muttered conversations in the back, and if these black-clad, serious-looking trio of customers with their heavy luggage were anything out of the ordinary for him, he wasn't about to show it. He didn't know them, and it was an absolute certainty that, from the moment they arrived at their destination and stepped out of his cab, he would continue to have never seen them before in his life. It was amazing, the amount of voluntary amnesia that could be bought for the right-sized tip.
'Murph, you wanna tell us exactly how we're going to handle this?' Schafer put the headset down and pulled out a printed blueprint, showing a detailed layout of the Orpheus Theatre building. Spring leaned over behind her as Murphy pulled out a marker pen, suddenly all business.
'Think Prague.' he said. 'It's basically the same setup. We don't have to worry about peripheries, no bodyguards, no counterteam. But there's gonna be plenty of neutrals, about five hundred people in the audience, plus staff. And somewhere here…' the marker tapped the big block of seats in the centre of the ground-floor auditorium, 'is our guy. Friends and family first night seats, I'm guessing. That's not a problem, 'cause by the time he gets there we'll already have been in position for eighty minutes.'
'Prague?' said Schafer. 'So you're planning on getting backstage and making the hit from long range? What're we gonna do, sit around and play Go Fish?'
'I need you standing by near the target to make sure nothing goes out of whack.' said Murphy, swiftly. 'You and Spring, your methods are both kind of…hard to miss. We do not want to be identified, got it? Anyone spots us packing, we make goddamn sure they don't get the chance to pass it on.'
'Got it.' said Spring, stifling a yawn. 'I take it Osborn wants the whole tragic accident deal, huh?'
'Yup.' Murphy smirked. 'Can't blame the kid for wanting to keep his bloody hands behind his back. And that's exactly what's gonna give him to us.'
'I sure hope you know what you're doing, Murph.' muttered Schafer. 'We don't want to get on the wrong side of something like OsCorp. Could make life hell.'
'Don't worry, sweetheart, I've done my homework.' As the cab swung around a corner, Murphy leaned closer, compelling the girls to follow suit, until their heads were almost touching. 'From what I hear, Osborn's got a real guilt trip going since his daddy got himself killed a couple of years ago. The guy was some big-shot scientist, practically ran OsCorp singlehanded. Now Junior, our client, will do whatever it takes not to disgrace Pop's memory.'
Murphy stretched out, rolling his neck muscles from side to side and leaning back once more. 'And after we finish this job, whatever it takes…is whatever we want.'
The assassins smiled at each other.
It was Spring who broke away from this pleasant mental image first, shaking the theatre map out so she could memorize it fully. 'So, our positions?' she said.
'Well…let's just say you ladies are going to have to smarten yourselves up first.' her brother said. 'We're gonna stop off somewhere where we can get a couple of pretty jackets or whatever, something you can lose fast if you need to.' He flipped a couple of gilt-embossed card rectangles from a pocket of the bag.
'I hope you like Shakespeare.'
It was nearly dark by the time Escher arrived back at the 72nd Street apartment block where she lived. She had covered the first few streets away from the warehouse district in record time, probably breaking several records (including that of Fastest-Panic-Fuelled-Combination-Remembering) but after ten or so minutes she had been forced to either stop or fall over, bike and all.
If asked, the owner of the convenience store that stood on the corner of West 22nd and 10th would have probably been able to describe her in great detail. He probably didn't often get fourteen-year-old girls limping in alone so late in the evening, or leaning against the wall to one side of the automatic doors wheezing like a racehorse for several minutes, before buying four dollars and sixty-two cents worth of Oreos and pocky. Young teenagers of her type didn't tend to pay much attention to the newspaper stands, either, preferring the colourful magazines and comics over by the milk cooler to the multiple copies of the Bugle that filled the rack by the door. They certainly didn't usually stand in front of the wire stand for quite so long, with such an unpleasant expression of frustrated disapproval, or suddenly turn and walk out with (the owner would have been ready to swear) the glimmer of angry tears gathering in their eyes.
After this little interlude, Escher had cycled slowly home through the gathering twilight, barely noticing the passing streets. If both feet hadn't been occupied by the pedals, it was safe to assume that she would have been constantly kicking herself. Who knew how much worse she had made things now, just by trying to help?
It wasn't fair.
She wheeled her bike into the lobby of Lyndstrom Heights, and was just in the process of waiting for the receptionist to show up so she could lock it into the safe room when someone tapped her on the shoulder. This was one more shock than her already fractured nerves could handle in one day.
'AaAAaarghh!…Oh.'
The young man who had come up behind her jumped, more than a bit rattled by her violent response. Escher backed off with one hand clamped to her chest, trying to persuade her heart to stay in her ribcage despite its efforts to the contrary. It was the guy who knew Spiderman, the photographer whose name Doctor Octavius had reacted so badly to.
'Um…hi.' he said, gingerly. He was wearing a light grey sweater, and the remains of an enthusiastic grin which was now tinged by concern. 'Are you all right?'
'I'm fine.' Inwardly, Escher winced. Even in her own ears, her voice had sounded about as convincing as that of someone standing on the 45-degree deck of the Titanic and yelling 'Everything's under control!' She tried again.
'Sorry, I just…um, I'm kind of on edge. You startled me.'
Peter gave her a searching look. Even without the obvious insincerity of her words, he didn't need genetically-amplified senses to work out that something was wrong. The girl looked exhausted and upset. She was red around the eyes, her shirt and jeans were dusty and disarrayed, and there were several long, bleeding scratches on her arms and hands. Then there was her posture. Peter was very sensitive to body language, and Escher's screamed help me. From the look in her eyes, she was overriding the impulse to voice this second by second.
'What's that in your hair?' he said. Her hand flicked up guiltily, coming back with a long wooden splinter. She tossed it aside.
'I, I, uh, fell off my bike.' she said, quickly.
He tilted an incredulous head. 'Into a threshing machine?' Then, slowly; 'Wait, this doesn't have anything to do with-'
'WHAT,' said Escher, urgently, 'are you doing here anyway? And what are those things?'
Thrown, Peter looked down at the thick wedge of bright paper in his hand. 'Oh, these are just some flyers. Heard of the Orpheus Theatre?'
'No.'
'Well, my girlfriend's got a part in the play that opens tonight. A Midsummer Night's Dream. She's Hermia.' said Peter, proudly. 'Anyway, when I was here last time, I asked the receptionist if I could leave a pile of flyers, y'know, for people to take.'
'And she said yes?' Escher was impressed. Sonja-on-the-desk was a gum-snapping harpy who would have probably charged for the time of day if she thought she could get away with it.
'Yeah, so I just came by to drop them off. I'm in kind of a hurry, I got…held up…on the way here, and I have to take MJ to the theatre before I can go home and get ready myself.'
'Well, don't let me keep you!' said Escher, with a plastic smile and rather more force than she intended. She really didn't want to be rude to Peter, who had been so understanding, but she could well imagine the reaction any adult would have to the idea that she had willingly walked back into danger after such a 'narrow escape'. Espacially since it had been such a disaster.
And, of course, there was always the terrifying possibility that anything she told Peter Parker might just end up being relayed to her mom…
He still looked worried. 'Are you sure you're-'
'Oh, look, there's Sonja! Hi, Sonja, I'm just going up, goodbye Mr. Parker, tell your girlfriend to break a leg or whatever, and don't worry about me, I'm fine, so 'bye!' She gave a lighting-fast grin and sprinted for the lift, and got nearly six metres before-
'Escher!'
Slowly, dreadingly, she turned. Peter was standing behind her, holding out a colourful paper rectangle. He must have moved with some speed to catch up so fast.
'Have a flyer. It's sold out tonight, but it's running for about a month. I bet you'd enjoy it.' He gave her a last, doubtful look. 'It's a comedy…maybe it might help you relax a little.'
He handed it to her. She took it, and as she looked up their eyes met for a second. Deep blue and mossy green, charged with hidden meanings.
Tell me.
I can't.
'Thanks.' said Escher, and turned away.
Memory is a fickle thing. There are theories that suggest that we remember every single detail we come across throughout our lives, and simply never learn the way to access most of this knowledge. That it all sits there, locked in the dusty storerooms of our minds, but most of the time we never really bother to summon it.
If Escher had been informed of these ideas, she would probably have guessed, quite rightly, that the people who had come up with them clearly never had to take a high-school math examination. Great hypothetical storage rooms of facts and figures are all very well in theory, but in reality the eye of memory generally operates more like a shaky digital camera, grabbing odd bits of things as they pass before it. When put under the levels of stress that Escher had been subjected to recently, the result tends to be the kind of jumbled mess of clues that would make even Jessica Fletcher give up and throw her typewriter out of a window.
As Escher rode the lift up to the ninth floor, her memory nagged at her like a sore tooth. Deep in thought, she let herself into her apartment, only to find a note on the hall table explaining that her mother was in Washington, her brother was in a daycare centre, and her chicken casserole was in the microwave. Crumpling the note in absentminded fingers, she walked through into the bathroom, found the medical kit, and started to clean the grazes on her arms.
She was underwater when the revelation hit her. Having filled the sink, she had ducked to submerge her face in it and was just about to stand up again when two trains of thought, lumbering along the same track in the depths of her head, collided. Thunderstruck, she breathed in instead of out, which is never a good idea when your mouth and nose are surrounded by liquid.
For the next minute or so, she was too occupied with coughing to do anything else. Then, grabbing a towel from the handrail, she leaned on the edge of the bath and tried to gather her thoughts. There were suddenly rather a lot of them, all crowding into the front of her mind in fragments, like clips of a jerky old film.
An upgrade…
…we intend to teach this city a little lesson on the nature of truth.
Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the flyer, scanning it desperately. The design was simplified, compared to the poster she had glanced at on the wall behind Doctor Octavius's desk, but there was no mistaking the headache-inducing design.
You told…Peter Parker…about me.
Peter Parker...
His friend, Spiderman…
Escher looked up. The bathroom mirror caught her wide-eyed reflection, the freckles livid across her cheeks as dawning horror drained them of colour.
We'll still do it…and why wait?
I've got things to do…
She stared at the flyer, and a sound halfway between a squeak and a sob escaped her.
I've got…
…things…
…to do.
Ten seconds later, the apartment's front door slammed shut. In the deserted hallway, a small, colourful piece of paper fluttered gently towards the ground.
Eight o'clock came and went, and the sidewalk outside the well-lit front of the Orpheus Theatre swelled with queueing, talking people. As the doors opened, groups and couples started to filter in towards the elegant lobby, chatting in sociable knots that reflected their status, aquaintances, and most importantly their class of ticket. The murmur of a dozen conversations carried upwards on the warm night air, a muted rustling of polite voices lifting as far as the flat rooftop of the opposite Shelley Hotel, some ten storeys above the theatre's low girder-spanned dome. A floodlight, strategically placed in the hotel's facade to illuminate the Shelley's ornate sign, cast a faint uplit glow on the figure that stood on the concrete lip of the roof, the long shapes of the tentacles at his back throwing strange shadows across the arial-tangled surface behind him.
Why are you uncertain, Otto?
'I'm not.' Otto mumbled, keeping his eyes on the last stragglers walking into the theatre below. 'I'm just thinking.'
But your thoughts are illogical. The smart arms twined around him, their heads opening a fraction. He felt that they were more interested than agitated, and tried to explain.
'I was just…thinking…about what we'll do tonight…it's only that I remember how much I liked Parker the first time we met. I thought he was an exceptional young man…gifted…'
And you were right. An exceptional, gifted…
'…brilliant…'
…brilliant, lazy, two-faced young man, who stood by and let you be demonized so that he might gain public acclaim. This is truth.
'I know…but Escher was trying to tell me something about him.' Otto felt the back of his head, where the bruise still smarted beneath his tangled, dusty hair. 'Perhaps I should have listened…'
Your determination is your greatest strength, Otto. Do not let yourself be clouded now.
He sighed, drawing his coat around him as a faint breeze stirred its frayed hem. Peter…the boy had admired him, and he in turn had been enchanted to meet such a kindred spirit, such a brilliant mind for his age, so much potential…
And here he was now, about to take all that and snuff it out with as much ceremony as swatting a bug.
The fact was that Escher's faltering little speech had been far more effective than she'd thought. As for her parting remark…well, from his reaction she could have been forgiven for thinking that her incautious words had merely enraged him, but in truth they had struck much, much deeper. It was a thought that had been festering away inside him for months, though for fear of his own dwindling sanity he had never given it a voice. Now, recognising that this was the last chance, the thought burst free.
'What…would…she…say?' He choked the words into his hand, fingers gripping his face, digging into his skin. 'Oh, God, Rosie, if you could see me now…'
The arms were silent. They had always chosen to reserve judgement on this subject, their usual calm directives conspicuous by their absence. They recognised the fragility of their host's mind, and the peril of all matters concerning Rosie, and dealt with it as carefully as their A.I could navigate. They neither comforted or accused him, remaining safe from blame in their chilly neutrality.
This time, however, the smart arm intelligence recognised that there was a third option, a way to turn their host's misery into productivity. The arms stretched out, the digits flexing, limbering up in calculating expectation.
It hurts, doesn't it, Father?
He started. He'd almost forgotten that his creations had once called him 'Father'. He remembered…
In their original incarnation, before the accident, their powerless requests for directions in the lower regions of his mind had contained almost nothing else that could be recognised as words. They called him Father, a mark of subservience which continued for as long as the inhibitor chip was still functioning. The moment he'd drifted into consciousness, blind, to the stench of disenfectant and death and the chilling coherence of the words in his head…
Wake up, Otto.
…that had been his first indication that something was horribly wrong.
Now, a claw dipped into his vision, the curved tip of one manipulator flicking against the metal of the goggles that lay, pushed up, against his forehead. The bridge had been fitted with its cover, and was now the same uniform black as the rest, though with a dull circle at the centre.
You're in pain.
He didn't need to speak. They knew his mind, and they knew its inevitable conclusion. The way out they were offering might be terrible, but the only alternative was worse. To go back to the warehouse, and everything it stood for, to hide away and continue with his scrapbook wall of bile…anything was better than that.
You can end it.
Yes.
He pulled the goggles down over his eyes, blinking as the early nocturnal blue was sucked from the sky by the smoky glass, and leaned out unhesitatingly over the void. The smart arms snaked downwards, claws ramming forcefully into the hotel's facade to modulate his descent. Safe in the rapid, capable 'hands' of his creations, falling was easy.
He lifted his hands, the rushing updraft tugging at his sleeves. The electrode studs were cold to the touch. He felt a final stab of doubt-
ssshhk.
-and then it was gone.