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"A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed to be hopeless failure may turn to glorious success."
~Elbert Hubbard
Chapter Twenty-six: Roads
"Shit...shit...shi-"
Jiaying cried out as her running mantra abruptly came to a halt, shattered by the rock that tripped her. She clamped a hand over her mouth afterward, praying altogether more earnestly than she had in many years that the night was in fact as still and quiet as it portended. There weren't even any insects making what her uncle had always called "cheery night noise".
No running feet. No shouting. Jiaying let out a quiet sigh after two minutes of peace crawled by. Gingerly, she swept up the bag that had flown from her shoulder with her tumble, throwing it over her shoulder as she crept up to her toes, throat very dry.
"Of course," she muttered. "Of course the local captain gets his head out of his ass tonight. Why couldn't he maintain his stupidity for just one more lousy..."
No point to complaining. And less to lingering - Jiaying had no idea what would happen if Advent caught her, but she was fairly sure she wouldn't be showered with the Elders' praises and held up as a sterling example of humanity. Especially after she'd made such a good show of...liberating...things that she wasn't supposed to.
"Go, go," she muttered. "They can't be far ahead." Ingrained attention to the English language - legacy of her never-sufficiently-cursed schoolteacher of a mother - made her clarify, even though there was(hopefully) no one to hear her. "My contacts. Not Advent."
Her feet fell in the dust. This part of Italy was about as far as it got from the Vancouver apartments she'd called home all through her childhood, but sometimes life tossed little boats around. Jiaying was very aware hers was about as small as boats got. A little caracole, or perhaps even an inner tube.
And the storm was rapidly turning into a Category Five hurricane, thanks to that mysterious god of war on the other side of the metaphorical barbed wire.
"Almost," she muttered, as she hurried around a corner, darting a glance over her shoulder so fast her ponytail defied physics and flicked out in front of her. "Almost there." She allowed herself a little chuckle, turning back to the road. "I guess maybe the captain still has his head up his-"
"Donut!"
"They're coming!"
"Good!" Mariah seized a pistol from the workshop, hunting for the safety. "Bring 'em on!"
"Calm down," snapped the Frenchwoman giving the warning, who even grabbed the pistol and glared angrily to get her fractious companion to stop and glare back for a minute. "There are at least a dozen of them."
"We've got plenty of bullets-"
"We need to leave," said the blonde, shaking her head firmly. "If we slip into the woods, we can get out from under their eyes and loop back around toward Pretoria. Do you fancy taking on a couple stun lancers and a muton?"
"A muton?" That did give Mariah pause. She'd seen a muton once, when her mother dragged her to an Advent parade in Miami. Before everything went to hell, of course. "Big and green and all?"
"Oui. Big and green." The blonde had an old-beyond-her-years look in her haunted eyes, Mariah thought, with only a passing acknowledgement that she herself didn't have nearly as many of those years. Charlotte had just shown up out of the blue one day, on the run and looking for somewhere to lay low on her way to a Resistance Haven. Mariah knew a few Havens, and they'd been kicking around together since, trying to hunt down the ones that hadn't been obliterated and hadn't quietly packed up after too long in one spot. Sometimes it was hard to tell which fate had befallen one set of ruins or the next, so thorough were the runaways at destroying anything they didn't need.
"Well...we can..." Mariah glanced around the workshop. "We've got some kerosene-"
"Idiot!" Charlotte grabbed Mariah's arm and frogmarched her toward the door. "We need to leave, not die heroically!"
"What's wrong with dying heroically?" Mariah was seventeen and ready to prove it - it being a very nebulous and universal concept. If it could be proved, Mariah was here to do the proving.
"I have far too much to pay back to throw myself away being stupid." That was logic that penetrated Mariah's world, and she couldn't very well argue with it. To her, Advent was capable of any atrocity.
"Well..." Mariah reclaimed the gun. "Give me that. And find yours. We'll try and make it out to the river and across. Mutons don't like water much at all."
"It is worth an attempt."
With that ringing endorsement, Mariah led the way to the back of the burned-out house they'd temporarily claimed. Pistol in one hand, she forged her way into the ankle-high grass, brown hair falling in curls while she hunted for targets.
"Go," she urged, not seeing any black-clad figures and not altogether sure how she felt about that. "Let's move!"
They scurried for the treeline. Darkness was falling, but Advent had never been very disturbed by that. Night vision gear was a thing, and far more common on the occupation's side than the rebels'. The lengthening shadows would likely hinder the escapees far more than their pursuit.
"I hear engines," Charlotte muttered. Mariah listened.
"I don't."
"You're not listening hard enough. Aircraft engines." Charlotte had her gun, all right, and she flattened herself against the first tree they reached. She knelt, trying to peek out behind them. "Someone's almost on us. The soldiers I saw weren't in a transport."
"More of them?" That didn't bother Mariah as much as it did Charlotte. "The more of them there are, the more ground they'll try to cover. They'll spread thin and give us a chance to escape."
"There are so many things wrong with that..." But Charlotte didn't elaborate, even when Mariah angrily cleared her throat. Instead, she frowned. "I don't hear it anymore. We should get moving again."
"We wouldn't have stopped, except for you." Mariah sulked. "It's not my fault."
"Move." Charlotte might have rolled her eyes. That almost made her companion snap at her. In fact, it would have, if-
"Advent!" Mariah cried instead, as the dark figures of soldiers came into view up the low rise angling for the house. She brought up her pistol and-
"No, wait!" Charlotte cried, an instant too late to prevent Mariah squeezing the trigger.
"Yes!" she crowed, as her target stumbled. She fired again, and again, and the soldier collapsed, yellow spraying. His fellows dove to the ground, and Mariah whooped, the sound louder and more feral even than the thunder-cracks of her pistol's report. She turned to Charlotte. "Did you see that? How long the range was?"
"You...you..." Charlotte lapsed into French for a long moment. Mariah frowned. It didn't sound happy.
"You should be shooting at them, not yelling at me-"
"They hadn't seen us!" Charlotte shouted, and Mariah froze. "And you just fixed that good and proper, didn't you?"
"Donut!" repeated the Advent officer facing Jiaying. She snapped her hands up in a flash.
"No problem!" she cried, grinding to a halt, eyes flicking to the half-dozen soldiers following their red-caped leader. "Not a problem, not at all. I'm cooperating! Don't shoot me!" It wasn't that Jiaying was a coward, she thought. She just had a moral objection to dying for absolutely no point whatsoever.
"Drop the bag!" cried the officer, in heavily accented Italian. Fortunately, Jiaying had picked up a decent smattering of the language over the last two years - definitely enough for today. Her bag hit the dirt with a thump and nary a whimper of protest from her lips. A gun appeared in her face. "Down, with your hands behind your head!"
"Of course!" she agreed, interlacing her fingers and kneeling. "Yes, sir. Whatever you say, sir."
Someone grabbed her hands from behind, and Jiaying waited while she was cuffed with quick efficiency. She wanted to kick herself. Why hadn't she waited one more night for the commander to hare off on whatever the next stupid thing he got obsessed with would turn out to be? The local garrison post was hardly a model of the Elders' efficiency. If she'd been a little more patient...
"Up." Her captor pulled her to her feet, while his friends fanned out in a protective circle. "Walk."
"I'm walking, I'm walking!" Jiaying bit her tongue after that, trying not to fall over as the soldier clutching her arm set a blistering pace. The officer led the group, and his troops converged on him, talking among themselves in that ugly language. Jiaying kept her eyes down, not wanting to give them a reason to shoot her.
She stumbled as her holder again sped up. She yelped as that rock she'd met earlier loomed, and she barely kept her footing upon reacquainting herself with it.
"Please," she started. "I need a minute to get my balance-"
He yanked even harder. Jiaying yelped as this time it was too much, and she crashed down on her face in the dirt. With her hands tied, she couldn't even catch herself, and blood burst from her nose. She spat it and dust alike out, risking a glare at her captor's boot. The other soldiers kept moving, chortling and chuckling, while the holder let out an aggrieved noise and leaned down.
Jiaying saw it an instant before the officer did. It hadn't been there when she'd last come by...had it?
No, the engineer decided. No, I would have noticed a grenade sitting in the middle of the roadway.
"Hold!" The officer held up a hand. He knelt to examine the little circular device. Maybe it wasn't a grenade. It certainly didn't look like any grenade Jiaying had ever seen, but somehow, that was all she could imagine it to be. But the officer wouldn't be down there if it was...
Then she saw the little irregularity in the bushes: a gun muzzle poking out from full concealment, and all at once, she understood.
Jiaying shut her eyes as the rifle barked.
The explosion ripped through the patrol in a flash. Jiaying didn't see it, but shrapnel eviscerated four soldiers and hurled them in at least three times as many chunks every which way. The officer rolled away from the blast, howling and clutching his injured shoulder but still alive. That left two Advent soldiers: the first hovering over Jiaying protectively, the other turning to the trees.
"Mor balaten!" cried the officer, surging to his feet as Jiaying screamed. She coughed, spitting out ash and trying to clear her eyes as dust and smoke rose from the remains of the explosive in the roadway. The stink of torn flesh flowed around her, and the acrid, alcoholic tang of yellow Advent blood. It smelled like a fire in a hospital: clean, crisp, sterile, and charred and blackened.
"Over there!" The soldier holding her pointed, and his fellow opened fire into the trees. Jiaying coughed again, looking for the agent who had made such a mess of the patrol-
Whum!
That had to come from a different sector of trees. It had to, because the yellow gore hurled by the bullet that tore up the soldier's forehead and exploded the back of his helmet didn't coat Jiaying. Angles were something that made sense to her, even if she hadn't seen the shot.
And that noise did not sound like a gun. It was something different from your run-of-the-mill rifle - if Jiaying didn't know better, it almost would have sounded like an Adventer's own mag-weapon.
"Show yourself!" the captain cried, proving how little imagination he had. Jiaying almost snorted.
She didn't, because he then proved how much imagination he did have by putting his gun to her head where she knelt.
"Don't shoot!" she cried. She turned her eyes down, struggling to raise her bound hands. "Please, I'm cooperating-"
"Come out!" the captain repeated. "Come out or we shoot her!" He didn't even glance at his companion, flanking Jiaying from the other side.
"Yes, well. About that."
Jiaying's gaze whipped to the soldier. The officer turned too, and for just a moment, his gun wasn't pointed at her.
"Ow!" Jiaying hit the ground and rolled, coughing and feeling what she imagined to be an indentation in her chest from where the soldier had kicked her. Speaking of him, she could only stare as with one hand he caught the officer's rifle, holding it down toward the ground. From his other wrist, blades sprouted, and in a flash, the soldier drove them into the officer's chin from below.
"Vox tala," he muttered, almost conversationally, "for Ten."
"My God." Jiaying stared as the officer finally dropped, and the soldier flicked yellow blood off his wrist-blades. "You...you just..."
"Doctor Shen?" That was a woman, storming from the trees with a strange rifle over her shoulder. Jiaying made the mistake of trying to look her in the eyes, and she gasped when she did: all she saw were glowing yellow eyepieces on a full-face helmet; about as good of an approximation of a demon as existed outside of a chryssalid hive.
"You must be my contact." Jiaying Shen let the woman - she had to be a Reaper! - help her to her knees, then waited while she drew a knife and knelt, working over her zip-tie. Jiaying let out a nervous laugh. "I didn't think you'd try to blow me up..."
"Draguonva. Sergeant Dragunova." The sergeant stood, zip-tie cut, and took Jiaying's hand. She pulled the shorter woman to her feet. "And there was never any risk of that. The soldiers formed a living shield for you."
"So they did." Jiaying glanced at the turncoat soldier. "Lucky for you I fell down, I guess. It let them get ahead."
"So it did, and luck had nothing to do with it." The soldier reached up and removed his helmet, and Jiaying felt a shiver as she took in his scarred and tattooed face. "Sergeant Pratal Mox, at your service, Doctor Shen. I apologize for pushing you so hard, but I needed you to fall behind." He paused. "Let me see your nose."
"Oh." Jiaying had entirely forgotten it was bleeding. She waited while Mox produced a handkerchief and dabbed at the blood over her upper lip. "That's...that's kind of you."
"Think nothing of it."
"Let's move, you two." Dragunova might have been amused. She might not have, too; Jiaying didn't think much amused any Reaper. "We need to get to the safehouse until Avenger finishes up with that business in Africa."
"Safehouse?" Jiaying liked that word a lot. Then her curiosity got the better of her. "What business in Africa?"
"Mor balaten!" cried the leader of the Advent patrol - pointing right at Mariah. "Hug that shit!"
"Shit. Shit!" Mariah fired, and at least this time Charlotte joined her. Bullets flew, and the Advent soldiers who hadn't already ducked did so now, diving into cover and flattening themselves. "I'm sorry-"
"If we live through this, I'm slapping you!" Charlotte probably meant it, too. Mariah winced.
"I didn't mean to-"
"Run!" Charlotte cried, bolting deeper into the forest as her magazine went dry. Mariah gulped when her gun clicked a second later. Scrambling for another mag, she tore after her older companion, swearing under her breath.
Father wouldn't have made that mistake, she berated herself on the one hand.
It's not my fault, she defended herself on the other. I panicked. Everyone panics!
It was hot and muggy, even with night coming on. Bugs flew and whined all around, and Mariah couldn't help from smacking at them, even knowing what was coming. Her feet tangled in the undergrowth, and she spent more time than she'd have liked leaning on trees and trying to force her way forward.
"Keep up!" Charlotte called. She hesitated on the other side of a clearing. "River's not far."
"Go!" Mariah ordered. She glanced over her shoulder. "I'll...I'll slow them-"
"Mariah-"
Roar!
"Oh, shit." The sound of an angry muton obliterated Mariah's ill-advised teenage glory-seeking courage, and she let out a sound that was a lot less coherent and a lot more shrill than the beast's battle cry. Mariah dropped her pistol and bolted, nearly bending over as she tore for the river line.
"Hang in there!" Charlotte was beside her, smacking branches aside and ducking others. A high-pitched whine filled the air, and Mariah nearly wailed.
"More of them," she gasped, red tinting her vision and her legs shaking with terror. "There's a whole dropship back there dropping more in-"
"Then you'd better run faster!" Charlotte ground to a halt ironically soon after snapping that. Her boots literally skidded in the dirt, throwing up a little spray. Mariah was not nearly so observant, and she ran right over the edge of the little rock drop and very well did shriek now.
"Fuck!" She crashed on her hands and knees in eight-inch deep brown water. Her arms jarred and her knees cried out as she skinned them. Was it her imagination, or could that motion be a crocodile? Were there crocodiles around here?
"Mariah, get up!" Charlotte pulled her to her feet, questions about ecology notwithstanding. "We need to get across, and quickly."
"Right." Mariah swallowed. "We'll just-"
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Mariah screamed as red light filled the trees. Gunfire exploded on all sides, and the heavy stomping of what had to be a MEC. Advent shouts filled the air, harsh and angry on her ears.
"Hang on!" Charlotte caught her around the waist, and the brunette barely had time to suck in breath before the blonde pitched them both into the water.
For a moment, all was quiet under the brown liquid. Mariah's shoulder hit the bottom, and she let out a yelp and a burst of bubbles as it lit up with pain. She didn't think it was broken, but that didn't prove anything. She couldn't see Charlotte, and the blonde's hand wasn't on her any more. Mariah turned for the surface.
Something big splashed into the water not far away. Whatever it was thrashed...and then went still very quickly. Mariah shivered. She stayed under.
The red glowing overhead came to a halt. Advent must have realized they couldn't shoot the women if they didn't see them. Mariah clutched a rock on the bottom, hoping to keep her air long enough Advent would move on without letting herself drift away. She held on tight, eyes shut, trying to stay as low to the bottom as possible.
Seconds turned to minutes. Mariah prayed.
Boom! That wasn't an explosive, but the sound of someone dropping into the water. Mariah nearly inhaled, checking herself at the last minute. She waited, listening to the amplified noise of footsteps on the bottom of the waist-deep water.
I can't stay under for long, she realized, as her lungs burned. And whoever that is...I think he's coming right-
A foot hit Mariah in the side. She cried out, and bubbles rose in a sudden flash. Mariah turned, trying to push away, but a hand shot down through the surface in a flash, and she screamed as it caught her collar.
Mariah burst to the surface, choking and gasping. She spat brown riverwater even as more ran from the ends of her hair and off her arms. She grabbed for the hand holding her up, crying out as her captor dragged her toward land. With hair and water in her eyes, she couldn't see.
"Wait," she gasped, without any particular idea why the Advent soldier should do any such thing. "Let me go-"
Whoever it was did, and Mariah landed on her rear at the edge of the river. She coughed up a bit more water, brushing soaking hair to the side.
"Bit of a strange time for a swim," a woman observed. Mariah frowned.
"Who..."
"Be fair. Pretty hot out today." That was a man, and Mariah's head swiveled. He loomed at the edge of the river, overtop the coughing form of Charlotte. "Probably a good way to cool off, huh?"
"Who are you?" Mariah demanded, looking from him to the woman before her. She rapidly discovered this one to be a redhead, wearing the strangest black armor and with the most unusual weapon slung over her shoulder. "What happened to the soldiers after us?"
"Being chased by them, were you?" The redhead raised an eyebrow. "So, I imagine there's a price on you with Advent, then. We could be rich."
"No, wait, that's not...I didn't..." Mariah swallowed. "It's not like that!"
"Isn't it?" The redhead chuckled. "Gave yourself away, kid."
"I remember you!" Charlotte looked up at the redhead with wonder, then over at the man. "From Switzerland, a month ago."
"What?" The man frowned. Mariah fully acknowledged his Australian accent for the first time. "Switzerland...wait." He eyed Charlotte again. "Were you one of those-"
"The black site. In the cells." Charlotte rose, and Mariah hesitantly mirrored her. "You rescued me. And all the others."
"Did I?" The Australian blinked.
"We. Us." That was the redhead. Mariah glanced at her...and couldn't tear her gaze away, not when she saw those vivid purple eyes. "We did, David. I remember her."
"You're who we've been looking for," Mariah gasped, probably only a minute or two behind Charlotte. "You're...XCOM."
"Disciple Richardson, at your service." The redhead clapped Mariah's shoulder. "You can call me Julie. Everyone does."
"The soldiers." Mariah pointed back at the trees. "There's...there's a muton with them-"
"He ate Junior's fist," David explained, which didn't help much at all.
"...Junior?" Mariah blinked.
"Our pet robot." Julie beamed. "Point being, the soldiers are dead or we'd never have had time to look for you." She tugged, leading Mariah out of the water. "Now, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you two are the wannabe soldiers we've heard so much about lately, and you'd like to come on back to Lieutenant Quinn with us for extraction."
"Oh, yeah!" Mariah cried. She winced a moment later. "I mean...yes, ma'am."
"Better...rookie." Julie glanced to make sure David and Charlotte were following, then hopped up into the trees. "You'd better believe the Commander's just dying to meet you."
Author's Note 26: Honey, I'm Home
Hi, everyone! I'm still alive! Through no fault of my own. Cars are awful things, but it was just a tire - and a bearing - at the end of the day. Bleh.
I also recently(at the time of this writing) celebrated my birthday - 23 - and as a present I'm trying to get back to work. This winter has been kicking my ass, so maybe a bit of VC is what I need to get the ball rolling again for more professional work. I started a new game of XCOM 2 just the other day, and I have a rough outline for Season Two. We'll see how closely I follow it.
Jiaying Shen harkens back to a game of EW I played a long time ago, where I got a rookie with the last name Shen. I wondered if it was Dr. Shen's daughter/niece/whatever at the time. I've quite forgotten what her first name was in the playthrough, but I intend to explore a bit of "what could have been" with this.
If there is interest, I've considered making some of the characters from the fic in the character creator and taking screenshots, just to help people with what everyone looks like. If that sounds like fun, let me know in the reviews and I can look into it. If not, less work for me is fine!
Until next time, Vigilo Confido.