Ghouls. He had been taken by Ghouls. And now maybe they were going to let him die.
The abduction itself had been so fast Mokuba hardly had realized what was happening. He hadn't even seen the guy who grabbed him. Fujita had just gone down, dropping like a rock, and before Mokuba could even call his bodyguard's name a rough hand had clamped over his mouth, and the sharp blade of a knife had been pressed to his neck. Immobilized by that threat, he was dragged into the waiting van.
The guy was indisputably a professional; he had been blindfolded and tied up in a minute flat, his wallet and keys and switchblade removed from his pockets. Then they had driven off, Mokuba lying in the back of the van, jarred by the bumps and turns of the road and struggling not to panic. It was hard enough to breathe through the gag in his mouth and he couldn't risk choking. Instead he counted in his head in the rattling darkness, keeping track of the minutes passing so he would have some idea how far they had driven. How far his brother would have to search.
After about a quarter of an hour the van stopped, the doors were opened and the rough hands grabbed him again, throwing him over a broad shoulder like he was a sack. He tried kicking the guy's solar plexus, but the blindfold made it hard to aim, and with his legs bound he couldn't get good leverage. He was dropped into a chair, a tight grip around his arms holding him down while someone else retied him to the metal frame. Voices talking, money being exchanged. Then the footsteps tromped out and a door closed, leaving him alone.
He tried shouting through the gag and rocking the chair to make noise, but only succeeded in banging his head painfully hard against the wall behind him, and no one came. He had a beacon pinned into the waistband of his jeans, but depending on how far inside he was, the tracking system might not be able to receive the signal.
The voices had said something about picking him up later. Probably whoever had hired the pro would leave Mokuba here long enough to ensure that the man hadn't been followed, before incriminating themselves by taking possession of their purchase.
Wise move on their part. Because by now his brother would surely be looking for him, and he would not be inclined to be lenient to anyone responsible for this kidnapping. After a couple hours tied and blindfolded, with his bruises smarting from the jostling in the van, Mokuba was not particularly inclined toward leniency himself.
Worse than the bruises was the sting of embarrassment. It was an insult to KaibaCorp to have such an easily abducted vice president. His brother was going to be furious--not at him, but Mokuba couldn't help but feel culpable all the same. His brother wouldn't have allowed himself to get grabbed, not that easily. Admittedly Mokuba had a good deal of growing to do before he would be as tall or strong as the elder Kaiba, but it still frustrated.
A hired thug implied money was behind this, an organization, or a wealthy individual. Probably not a ransom from Kaiba Corp, then; more likely it was to blackmail his brother into something or other. One would think their rivals would have learned the lesson by now, that his brother and their company could not be so manipulated. But as his brother often groused, there was no lack of stupid people in the world.
His brother would be coming. It was easy to suppress his fear, even alone and bound and unable to see, when he knew for certain that his brother would come, as soon as he became aware of the trouble. All Mokuba had to do was wait. His brother had told him before that in such a situation, survival was his priority. Escape if he could, but being a Kaiba wasn't about running away. It was about winning. And this kind of game you won by making it out alive.
Knowing there would be a search, Mokuba realized that he should leave some sign behind, in case he was moved before his brother located this place. It took a good deal of squirming and twisting in the chair to get his locket off, and he scratched his wrists on the rough rope until he felt blood slicking his fingers, but he managed to tie the string to the underside of the chair, only minutes before he heard a key rattle in the door.
Several sets of footsteps entered, but none were his brother's confident strides, and he hid his flickering hope back within his heart before it could be extinguished. "Good evening, Kaiba-san," a gravelly, unfamiliar man's voice said, as strange hands cut him loose from the chair and picked him up. "Are you ready for new accommodations?"
They kept him blindfolded for the ride, finally dragged him from the automobile into warm night air, then carried him inside and up a flight of stairs. He was dropped like a sack of flour onto a tile floor, and the blindfold was untied and the gag removed. Mokuba coughed and wiped his eyes, and someone handed him a plastic cup of water, which he drank greedily before it occurred to him it might be drugged.
"Sorry for the delay," said the man who had spoken before. He and the two men with him were all wearing black face masks, but he was a fairly tall, thin individual with stringy dark hair. "We wanted to wait until after dark to move you."
Mokuba glared up at him and said nothing, studying all of them from his position kneeling on the floor. The door behind them was ajar, but his limbs were cramped and sore, and he wouldn't get far with his wrists and ankles still tied. Three was too many; he might be able to trip one or two of them if he caught them by surprise, but not all three. They also might be armed, and not yet knowing what they wanted him for, he didn't know how expendable they considered him to be. They hadn't killed him yet, but neither had they taken particular care with him thus far.
The man crouched over him, took out a pocket knife and cut the bonds around his wrists, then patted his shoulder. "There you go. I hope the trip here wasn't too uncomfortable. It must have been scary, but you're our guest now. If you answer our questions, Kaiba-san, you won't get hurt."
Questions. Not a ransom or blackmail, then. And they seemed to know exactly who he was--they had wanted him after all, not something from his brother.
Well, at least it would be a change of pace.
His number one priority was survival. And his brother was coming for him. Those were the only things that mattered now.
"What do you want?" Mokuba asked, his voice raspy. His mouth was still dry from the gag, even after the water. Didn't matter, because he wouldn't be talking much anyway. Whatever they wanted to know, he wasn't about to tell them.
But he didn't put that in his tone, just the tremulous fear they would expect from a kid, and the masked men nodded approvingly. "Nothing too important," their spokesman said. "Just a couple computer codes. Specifically the passwords to the KaibaCorp satellite network that uplinks to the duel disks."
Mokuba stared at the man, trying to look childishly confused, when really he was thinking hard. He had already noticed the outlines of card cases in their pockets, and one of them wore a wristband of the sort often worn under a duel disk's straps. They were dressed in regular clothes, shirts and jeans, not the crazy cult robes of Malik's gang in Battle City, but he had a hunch. A nauseating sinking feeling in his gut. "What you mean," he said, "I don't know any codes--"
"Don't play the dumb kid, Mr. KaibaCorp Vice President," the man interrupted. "You were managing the network in Battle City; you had to have the entry codes. We want administrator-level access to the holo-projection databases and the central duel regulator."
That had cinched it. Ghouls. Rival companies might have use for their codes, but with those exact specifics, they didn't want to copy or sabotage the network. They were trying to hack into it. The Rare Hunters' collections of copy cards had been rendered useless after Battle City; Mokuba and his brother had worked for weeks to make sure that the duel disk system would reject all fakes, no matter how well-crafted. If the Ghouls could reprogram the system, they could again put their copies into play.
This wasn't just about dueling, naturally. Fortunes would be on the line. More than just the pro tournaments they could win with an endless supply of powerful rare cards. If they could pass off the fakes as the real thing, the counterfeit business would make them a mint.
And ruin the game, and probably KaibaCorp. They had only just managed to recover their reputation after the situation with Dartz; if the legitimacy of the duel disk system was cast into doubt, Duel Monsters might well be over, and Kaiba Corporation with it.
No way in hell would Mokuba ever allow that to happen. Not to his brother's company, or his brother's game. Never.
Naturally he said none of that to the Ghouls. Rather than outright refusing them, he continued to insist he didn't know what they were talking about. That first night, they didn't do anything to him, at last just left him in the room alone.
Mokuba had been grabbed by the Ghouls before. This was problematic, because not only were they sure of his knowledge about the satellite system, they also knew what to expect of him. This time they had put him in a little whitewashed room that might be an old maintenance closet. There were no windows or air vents large enough that he might escape through them, just a couple narrow ducts high on the wall, and a small round drain in the floor in one corner. His ankles were still bound, and though he worked at the knots for hours he couldn't loosen them.
There was no furniture, just the tile floor and a couple empty cardboard boxes. The door was thick metal, not even shuddering when he lay on his back to kick it as hard as he could with his tied feet. He finally sat on one of the boxes to crush it, curled up on the flattened cardboard for the night, with the light bulb overheard burning dimly.
It was hard to sleep without his locket. He was used to the string around his neck, kept jerking awaking whenever he reached for it and grasped empty air.
They brought him a few store-bought riceballs the next morning, which he wolfed down in seconds, not having had anything to eat since the lunch he had missed the day before. They were initially quite pleasant about their questions, though he didn't bother to return the courtesy. If they had grabbed him instead of his brother because they thought that Mokuba's age would make him more pliable, that was their own stupidity. He told them as much, and a good deal more beside, while still insisting he didn't know a damn thing.
They took his insults, and waited until after lunch before they started to hit him. Mokuba got bored of calling them things in Japanese and English and moved on to German and Chinese, where his grammar was shakier but his vocabulary was adequately extensive, thanks to KaibaCorp's various overseas negotiations and his brother's impressively short patience. By nightfall--he presumed, not being able to see outside--he hadn't yet exhausted his store of profanity, though he kept having to spit out the blood that oozed into his mouth from his split lip. They didn't give him any dinner.
They didn't bring him any breakfast the next morning, either. There wasn't time for that to trouble him; he had bigger concerns. The three Ghouls had entered with their faces unmasked.
Mokuba recognized the man with the stringy hair as a Ghoul who had competed in Battle City; the other two were strangers. But that wasn't what made his heart pound in his chest. He was a witness now. Having seen their faces, he could identify them to his brother or to the police, and they would know this. Which meant that they weren't planning on letting him have the chance.
Before, they might have been planning to release him once they had their questions answered. For whatever reasons, that plan had changed. Which made it all the more crucial that he didn't tell them anything. Because once they had what they wanted from him, they had no reason to keep him alive.
And his brother hadn't found him yet.
They didn't feed him anything that day. His stomach growled, but that was just one more ache added to what he had already collected. He could deal. He was surviving. These Ghouls were nothing. He had survived Pegasus's dungeon, even losing his soul, and he hadn't known his brother was trying to save him then. The future of Kaiba Corporation depended on him; his brother was counting on him; there was no way in hell he was going to answer their questions, even if they cut off all his fingers.
He told them so, and spat in the skinny man's face. The black eye was worth it, even if it throbbed when he tried to sleep that night, swelling up with no ice to put on it.
He woke up to it aching. The light overhead glowed unchanged, but it had to be morning by now, he thought. Except no one had come.
Mokuba had been trying to count the hours since, and was pretty sure most of the day had already gone by, but they hadn't come into the little room at all. He was still hungry, but that didn't worry him much. People could go a long time without food.
But they needed water to live. To survive. His throat had been dry yesterday, but he hadn't really felt thirsty since he had woken up this morning, and Mokuba didn't think that was a good sign.
Maybe the Ghouls weren't just ignoring him to soften him up for more of their questions. Maybe they had forgotten about him, deliberately. Had decided simply abandoning him here in this closet was easier than shooting him or poisoning him. Or maybe the police had captured them, or his brother--no, that couldn't be, because if his brother had them, then by now he would know where Mokuba was. His brother would have made them tell him. He would have come by now.
Maybe there had been an accident and the Ghouls all were dead and no one knew where he was, had no way of finding this place. He was in a warehouse or an old office building, he had guessed; the walls were reinforced with concrete. His beacon's signal didn't have a chance of carrying through such thick walls; there would be no way to track him. The trip here would have been too short for his location to be triangulated.
But his brother was going to find him somehow, nonetheless. His brother had promised long ago to protect him, and took that promise as seriously as he took his games. And his brother didn't lose any game. He never had, not to anyone except Yugi; never to anyone as stupid and weak as these Ghouls.
And how much stupider and weaker was he, that he had been caught by them at all--but Mokuba couldn't allow himself to think like that. Such thoughts were too close to giving up, and that would be even more pathetic. His brother might be able to forgive him for getting into this mess, but giving up, giving in, letting them win--that would be unforgivable. Mokuba couldn't bear to think of his brother losing at all, but it would be infinitely worse if it were his fault.
Mokuba had lost track of how many times he had thought all this through. There wasn't much else to do but sleep and think, though both had become more difficult as the hours wore on. Not thirsty, but his tongue felt swollen in his mouth, and even sitting against the wall he felt dizzy. He was too tired to keep knocking on the door, not that anyone had come anyway, and his knuckles and feet were sore from it. He had tried picking the lock with the hard plastic tip of his shoelace, but though he had eventually heard it click, the door hadn't budged. They probably had wedged it shut with a chair or a board. There was nothing he could do here to save himself.
But his brother could do anything. His brother never lost, never failed. Mokuba just needed to make it until his brother found him. His brother wouldn't fail him, so he couldn't fail his brother.
Shivering--the room felt colder today than before--he wrapped his arms tighter around his chest, tucked his chin to his breast and tried to go to sleep. Sleeping made the time pass faster. And his brother would be that much closer when he awoke.
"Please, Nii-sama," he whispered, before he could help himself. "I'm waiting, just find me, please..."
to be continued...
Thank you as always for the reviews - as per recent
policy changes, I'll be forgoing individual responses in my author's
notes (though I will answer questions if it seems like others might
like the answers), but I can't see the harm in expressing my
gratitude! Wouldn't be so quick to post this if it weren't for the
wonderful feedback I've been getting.
...Not that Mokuba
appreciates quick posting. Poor boy. I feel a bit guilty. Also a bit
nervous about what Kaiba will do to me, should he figure out that I'm
actually the one behind this...
