The tea was growing cold.
Lan folded his hands, restraining the urge to clear the table. He watched the fireflies drifting in the calm air beyond the wooden lattice of the gazebo's walls, absently wondering when Iris would be coming back. Not that he minded being left on his own. It gave him time to think. Time to consider what Iris had said. ...And what she hadn't said.
There was another Clover here.
That bothered Lan, more than he cared to admit. He hadn't sensed any others, even when he'd heard that voice speaking over the Minor Waves. Yet he'd always been able to sense Iris' presence, the aura of a Three-leaf Clover, whenever she entered the area beneath the dome. He reached up to touch his left shoulder out of habit, his fingers curling in the fabric that covered the clover mark tattoo. The only Clover that could hide from a Three-leaf was a Four-leaf, and, to the best of his knowledge, Suu was the only Four-leaf that existed.
Lan admitted to himself that the best of his knowledge was proving woefully insufficient in dealing with the situation that had developed around him. Restlessly, he got up from his chair, going over to lean against one of the archways in the gazebo, staring out at the night sky. His gaze once again fell on the black lattice of bars that comprised the framework of the glass dome. This place was beautiful, lavish, spacious. It didn't change the fact that it was still a cage. That was all Iris' offer really was. The choice of one prison instead of another. Was that really a choice?
Except...
Gingetsu.
That was the root of the problem. This choice was not his alone. Lan knew that to live in this cage wouldn't bother him, he had spent his whole life in cages. He didn't even know what true freedom tasted like, save for one empty day in the rain. However, Iris' offer had included the Lt. Colonel as well. If Iris were correct that the Parliament had decided to lock Lan away once and for all, this might be Lan's only chance to be able to stay with Gingetsu.
Would Gingetsu be happy, living in this cage?
Lan believed he knew the answer to that question. After four years of living with the Lt. Colonel, he knew the temperament of the other man all too well. Gingetsu, like Oruha, was meant to be free, a Clover who would not be comfortable locked away in a cage. Gingetsu had experienced too much of the outside world to be content to live without it. To try would only bring him unhappiness--and Lan could never bring himself to do anything that might make Gingetsu unhappy.
Besides, Iris had said there was a chance they could stay together. It hadn't been a guarantee. When it came down to it, Lan wanted to believe that her offer was genuine--but a lifetime of dealing with the Parliament, and A, and a multitude of other people who had their own secret motivations for their actions, he didn't trust her. If he didn't trust her, he couldn't accept the offer she had made.
Restless, Lan paced back to the table, then past it to the other doorway. He had only stood there for a few minutes, when he sensed a figure coming towards him through the garden. It was Iris. The Three-leaf was walking quickly, and soon he saw the blur of a pale sweater emerge out of the darkness in front of him.
Iris stopped a few feet from the gazebo's archway, her face set and serious in the flickering lamplight. "It seems you've made your decision."
Her words startled him. He knew that there must be surveillance systems monitoring him wherever he went in this place. For that reason, he was certain that he'd not voiced any of his thoughts aloud. "I don't know what you mean," he said.
"Of course not." Her expression changed subtly, transforming into something that could almost be considered a smirk. "It's because you don't yet understand."
Unease began to uncurl in the pit of Lan's stomach. He shook his head, trying to make sense of the words. "What don't I understand?"
"That you can't hide anything from us."
Lan looked at her. There were no other figures behind her. Iris was alone in the dark.
"You still don't realize, do you?" she said cryptically. "You don't realize who you're talking to." Then she slowly reached over and peeled off the glove on her hand, turning it palm-up to show the symbol tattooed on her flesh. The flickering yellow light illuminated the clover mark on her left hand.
...The left hand. Not the right...
Only then did he sense it, hidden until the very moment when he felt a cool touch on the base of his neck from behind.
The presence of a second Three-leaf Clover.
Power slammed into him through that deceptively gentle contact--a violent electrical shock like the discharge of a stun gun. The unexpected surge was too much voltage for even a Three-leaf to handle. Lan convulsed, and for the second time in twenty-four hours, felt his consciousness slipping away.
Hands were there, clutching at him, trying to break his fall. They succeeded only in keeping his head from hitting the floorboards. Those same hands tugged at his unresponsive limbs a moment later, rolling him over onto his back at the edge of the gazebo.
Iris' face came into his field of view. Her eyes were sad. "I'm sorry, Lan," she whispered.
Another face appeared next to hers, wavering in and out of focus as his vision darkened and skewed. There were two of them, he realized to his dismay. Two of them, and they were identical.
"I thought you of all people might have guessed, " the second woman, the one who was not Iris, murmured in satisfaction.
"The genetic changes for the creation of a Three-leaf also increase the likelihood of twins."
----------
They were running down the empty corridors, heading towards the moving platform that would bring them up to the surface. As if, Kazuhiko reflected, running might actually help. Nonetheless, he would be the first to admit that it was better than sitting still and waiting to be blown up with the rest of the complex. Kazuhiko's feathered blade adorned one hand, but so far they hadn't run across another living soul. Maybe the building's occupants had already gotten the word and were evacuating, too.
A moveable wall slammed down from the ceiling, planting itself barely a foot in front of his face. He skidded and managed to hit it with his shoulder, grunting from the impact. He heard Gingetsu slide to a halt beside him. Just in front of the wall, without running into it, damn him. In frustration at the appearance of this sudden barrier, Kazuhiko smacked his hand against the metal and swore. "What the hell...!"
An intercom speaker in the hall beside them crackled with a sudden burst of static. "You were right." A's disembodied voice said grimly. "They were running away."
"Shit," Kazuhiko hissed, none too pleased that the brat was back. Any fleeting hope he might have had that they would somehow manage to find Lan and get out of this alive was evaporating completely. No need to wonder about A's use of the past tense "were" in referring to the other military team. He had no doubt that A had taken care of them already.
Light flickered in the hall around them, a manifestation of A's power. Apparently he'd run out of patience in waiting for the explosion to kill them. Kazuhiko looked at Gingetsu, hoping he would at least try to do something...but the Lt. Colonel was standing motionless, an impassive expression on his face as he watched the light solidifying into bars around them--long and black, a perfect cube. Kazuhiko recognized it now. It was Lan's teleportation cage.
"A." He heard Gingetsu say, as he watched his own body start to spin off disconcertingly in winding ribbons of light and shadow. Kazuhiko didn't know how it was possible so far underground, and without a Move. He'd heard that Lan had done such a thing once or twice, but each time it had exhausted him to the point of collapse. "Why?"
The intercom speaker on the wall crackled, as if with a short huff of breath. A's voice, thin and strained and nearly inaudible against the background static, gritted out in determination. "Do your job." And then, in a last burst of static, "Save my brother."
The underground room around them vanished into a shower of scintillating light.
----------
Sound flowed over him, a string of meaningless syllables that came, first from one direction, then from another. As he tried to focus on the low, constantly shifting reverberation, he became aware of a different sound, a slow, beeping noise. It gave him something steady and constant to focus on. Lan could sense the electronics that were the source of the beeping, coming from a metal box lying nearby. A monitor, he realized, after a moment of drifting thought. Beating in time with the rhythm of his own heart.
He felt cool grass underneath him, the gentle night breeze blowing over him. He must have been transferred off of the gazebo's floor. He still couldn't open his eyes or move in any other way. His limbs were unresponsive, wrapped in paralysis. There was something very wrong about that. A subtle and constant electrical current ran through him. He could sense it just like he could sense the current in the box beside him in the grass. That minute flow kept him motionless, originating from a spot at the top of his spine.
A voice, breaking the silence, then. This time, Lan understood the words. "He's waking up."
A gloved palm rested lightly on his forehead. "Don't try to move." A gentle voice, Iris' voice. "You won't be able to."
"He shouldn't even be awake," came the first voice, nettled. It was also Iris' voice, but different in tone--much the way A's voice was different from Lan's.
"Did you expect any less, from another Three-leaf? It won't make any difference, in the end."
Lan heard the familiar sound of plastic creaking, as wires were unrolled. A light touch to his right temple, then, and a patch of coolness that adhered to his skin. An electrode, he realized. That caused a moment of panic, and he heard the electronic beeping noise increase to match the beating of his heart.
"Relax," Iris whispered softly, even as a second electrode was pressed to his other temple. "This will all be over soon."
That was not reassuring in the least. Beginning to get desperate in light of his lack of ability to move, Lan turned his attention inward, to better examine the current that was keeping him paralyzed. An electrode had been attached to the back of his neck, the plastic casings of its wires bespelled by Clover magic so that he couldn't sense them from the outside. From the inside, however, he could follow the path up the copper leads, which connected with the sophisticated electronics of a military issue visor. Iris' visor. He heard her gasp.
Clover magic surged in response, as Iris reached for and clasped the hand of her twin. The two of them pushed him back effortlessly, and sealed off that electrical pathway from his magic. He could still feel the cool patches of the electrodes, and the plastic casings of the wires that brushed against his skin, but now he could no longer sense the current running through them, even from the inside.
"I bet you think that was clever, don't you?" Iris' twin snapped shrilly. She drew in a sharp breath and held it a moment, and when she spoke again, her voice was calmer, more controlled. "It's useless. You can't do anything against us. Three plus three equals six. Nothing can stand in the way of two Three-leafs if they choose to work together. Pity you never decided to go back to your brother, or you'd understand this fact."
"Please don't fight us, Lan," Iris added softly. "You'll only make things harder on yourself."
Another touch, another electrode, this one placed precisely in the center of his forehead. Lan fought back the panic that clawed at his throat. He didn't know what she was doing with Clover magic or how she was doing it. It made no sense to him that his limbs didn't work. An electrical current could stun, or cause muscles to spasm uncontrollably, but an ordinary current couldn't cause this kind of limp paralysis, could it?
"No," Iris said softly, "it can't."
Lan had barely registered the fact that she had answered his unspoken question before she started speaking again. "I can read your surface thoughts, when I concentrate on them," she murmured. "You see, I, too, have a specialty. As yours is in engineering, so mine is in neurophysics. The human mind is not so different from a computer, the electrical impulses along neurons and synapses is the same as current carried along copper wires. It's a different brand of Clover magic, but is Clover magic, nonetheless." He heard a rustle as she sat back a bit. "Your friend the Four-leaf knew this, too. It's how she was able to help you when you were in the hospital, and allowed her to remove the aging curse the Parliament had programmed into your body before you were born."
He didn't doubt her words. In fact, her actions over the course of his time here all began to make a horrible kind of sense.
"I bet you didn't realize," Iris' sister said smugly, "the two of us have done contract work with the Azurites before. Two years ago, my sister created the host interface for a computer virus with the ability to infect human beings. ...And I developed the encryption signature that delivered it."
Of course. The Icosahedron virus. Lan felt suddenly cold. He had direct experience with that particular computer virus. Two years ago he had been infected, and it had nearly killed him.
"You have to understand," Iris said quietly, in defense of the terrible weapon she and her sister had helped to create. "The benefits we got from that work kept our country alive with imports from the Azurite government for two full years. It saved hundreds of thousands of jobs and lives."
It also could very easily have taken hundreds of thousands of lives. ...But Lan's jaws were still locked, his throat closed with the paralysis that blanketed him completely, and so he wasn't able to point that out--although he would bet that she was able to read it in his thoughts.
"I didn't want to do it," Iris's voice was so low as to almost come out as a whisper, "Please believe me when I say that I don't want to do this, either. But then, as now, we have no choice. The Azurite military wants a Clover. They have always wanted a Clover. What they are willing to offer in exchange will sustain this dying country for years to come."
Lan's mind raced to digest this new information. He had been right not to trust her. In all of her explanations, all of her logic and carefully worded lures, there had only been the illusion of choice. She had intended to hand him--and likely Gingetsu as well, over to the Azurites all along.
But it didn't make sense to him. She had to see that there was a flaw in her plan. Iris could trade him away to the Azurites, but what would they gain in the end? That country had no way to make him stay. Everyone knew that Azurite had no Wizards--and with no Wizards, how could they possibly hope to keep a Clover under control?
"Ah," Iris's sister murmured in satisfaction, "You see the difficulty immediately. The Azurites are well aware of this problem. Their encounter with the Four-leaf Clover two years ago taught them that. There isn't much they can do against a Three-leaf, either--so their contract dictates that a Clover must come to them willingly...or with some sort of pre-installed control."
Lan didn't have much time to digest those rather ominous words. Iris' twin was bending over him now, and although he couldn't see her face, he could almost feel her predatory gaze as she looked down. "Which is why you were brought here, of course," she added.
"...So that we can re-program you."
Lan momentarily stopped breathing. That couldn't mean what he thought it did. She couldn't possibly intend... There was an abrupt flurry of staccato beeps from the monitor beside him, as it kept time with his suddenly racing heart.
"Enough," Iris said firmly, to her sister. She repeated in a quieter voice, "enough. We have a job to do, nothing more." There were metallic clicking sounds then, as of leads being snapped into jacks on a visor. "Let's just get this over with now"
"Yes," Iris' twin agreed.
There was the rustle of cloth as the two sisters joined hands. Two sets of fingertips settled over the electrodes secured at Lan's temples, and he knew despair...
----------
A's power couldn't go far enough to reach inside the dome, but it brought them close enough. They materialized on one of the huge circular metal platforms inside one of the missile silos, this one plain and undecorated without any ceiling or false walls. By glancing upward and doing a quick calculation based on the tower they'd been in before, Gingetsu knew that they were even with ground level now. There were two doors here, set into opposite sides of the tower. He quickly drew up the schematics for the tower on the interior surface of his visor, and moved without hesitation for the nearer of the two doors.
It was locked, but the lock was electronic, and opened readily to the touch of a Two-leaf. Beyond was a large square room, and on the far side was the iron and glass gate that sealed the interior of the dome.
There was also a flat, rectangular box, about the size of a small backpack, lying up against that gate.
"You should get out of here," Gingetsu said, as Ryuu stopped at his shoulder. He heard the other man catch his breath in dismay as his own gaze fell upon the Wizard encrypted bomb.
"What, and leave you here?" he said, only half indignantly.
"I have to get to Lan."
"Forget it."
As Gingetsu looked at him, Kazuhiko folded his arms and set his face in his most stubborn expression. "You promised me. There's no way in hell that I'll let you die before I do."
"Ryuu."
"I said forget it. I'm coming with you."
Knowing better than to try and argue with his mule-headed former aide, the Lt. Colonel walked over to the gate, summoning his katana as he went. Allowing a trace of his Clover magic to flow down into the sword, he tapped the hilt against the glass, cautiously at first, then with greater and greater force. The pane of glass, when he stopped, showed no mark. The reports had been correct. The structure of the dome was impervious to any form of a Clover's power.
Not so, the heavy iron deadbolt securing the gate. The sword sheared through the metal with absolute ease.
Which left the bomb. It had been placed in the exact middle of the gate, so that opening either side would knock into the mechanism and cause its detonation. Attempting to move it would only result in the same. Gingetsu crouched down beside the device, searching the top until he found the leaf mark, the Cord of the Parliament. The only option left was to try and disarm it himself. He didn't have much hope that he would succeed.
"Can we figure out how much time is left?" Kazuhiko asked, crouching down beside him.
Gingetsu's left hand hovered over the surface of the box. If it was synchronized to the one underground, it wasn't difficult to guess.
"Forty-five seconds."
----------
Lan felt Iris' presence in his head. Her touch was gentle, cool and professional, as she and her sister calmly sifted through his mind. Cataloguing his memories, he realized with a sick insight, as the pattern behind her search queries began to emerge. She worked quickly and competently, as if each memory was nothing more than a computer data file, to be sorted and tagged.
Each one was being marked to be erased.
It was a violation far worse than anything Barus could ever dream up. Paralyzed by the combined power of the twins, the Clover magic that he knew useless against this type of attack, Lan was in torment. He saw what they saw, as the multitude of memories that comprised his being were laid out for their casual inspection like a series of photographs, each one charged with emotion.
Contentment: a stolen moment curled on a seat beside the windowsill, sipping tea and staring out into the rain.
Excitement: the adrenaline rush as he hacked an enemy base, bringing down the defenses so that the Secret Colors soldiers and their leader could get out alive.
Loneliness: the emptiness of the house on a week that Gingetsu left on a mission that took him hundreds of miles away.
Satisfaction: the quiet happiness of preparing a meal in the kitchen, on the anniversary of his decision to go Outside.
Lan fought the twins as best he could. He still didn't understand even half of what Iris was doing, but he could comprehend the method in her actions--not so different from the invasion of an enemy mainframe. In his desperation, he called upon every trick he had learned with computers over the years to try and oppose her. Some attempts worked, some didn't. Password protection. Encryption. Firewall. Each time Iris encountered one of his clumsy, rudimentary mental constructions, she dismantled it.
...But Lan was getting better and better at these defenses with every try.
Iris' sister hissed. "He's learning your techniques too quickly. We're going to have to put him to sleep again."
"No," Iris answered distractedly. "I'm almost done."
Iris delved deeper, sifting through memories more private and more personal. Lan became frantic, struggling to put up false trails and barriers, or otherwise do anything that might allow him to elude their control. It did him no good.
Grief: the day Gingetsu had returned from work to tell him that Oruha the One-leaf had died.
Anticipation: heart-tight, in a suspended moment of intimacy, the first time hands had touched bared skin in the dark.
Regret: When he had looked into a mirror shortly after leaving the labs, and not seen A's face looking back.
Four years of memories, reviewed in a tiny fraction of that time. Three memories left, then two, then one. Lan clutched the last to himself, as if by the mere action of holding it close he could keep it from Iris' grasp. But she was merciless even then, prying the fragment of memory from his clutch like a bright coin taken from a child.
Love: The glint of light on metal and glass, as a gift was pressed into young hands. A voice, gruff and uncertain, but colored with the first hints of gentleness. "If you don't have a light of your own, light one for yourself."
It was done. Everything was tagged and ready. All Iris had to do was key the deletion.
If he had been able to, Lan would have wept. As it was, two teardrops gathered under dark lashes and slipped from the corners of his eyes. Gingetsu.
He felt Iris come to a halt. Nothing happened for several heartbeats. Then Lan felt tears that were not his own splashing gently onto his face.
"I can't," Iris whispered brokenly.
Fingertips moved on Lan's forehead, as her twin shifted back in surprise. "What? What do you mean? We're so close, there's no way we can turn back now."
"I'm sorry," Iris said. Lan heard her stifle a sob. Iris' hands lifted away from him, and must have gone to cover her face because her next words came muffled and distant. "I told you from the beginning that this was wrong. I thought I could. But I just can't." She gave a choked noise, a bitter laugh. "It seems that I just don't have the strength after all."
Her twin stiffened with resolve. "Then I'll do it," she said without hesitation.
"No..." Iris said, her voice still heavy with emotion. "No." she repeated, and tone of it firmed with growing determination. "I can't allow you to do it, either."
"Do it!" the other woman snapped out, her voice seething with poorly suppressed rage. "This is no time to have a crisis of conscience. You have to do this, or they'll separate us for good! Is that what you want?"
"I don't. But there has to be another way."
"There isn't! The only other way involves me going to Azurite, and I won't. I won't leave you!"
Iris was silent.
"I don't want to go to Azurite! I won't go to Azurite!!" Her twin's voice was spiraling up into hysterics. "Do you hear me? I won't go to Azurite!!!!"
The ground suddenly bucked underneath all of them like a living thing; and the world became engulfed in thunder and fire...
----------
A/N: Not the end...