Cal had regained consciousness and eaten; another steak was brought to his room, pre-cut so he wouldn't need a knife. Eating improved his condition temporarily, and he entertained the hope that he had overcome the hallucinations. However, they persisted. Now, Cal gazed into the room adjacent to his, where guards maintained a constant watch. This time, however, it wasn't the guards observing him.
It was Leopold.
Cal remained tense and alert, sweat streaming down his face, yet the Assassin made no move to attack. Instead, he simply fixed his gaze on Cal for a prolonged moment before stepping into his room. Through the glass. Cal stared back, confronting his own reflection, but it was altered, marked by scars and tattoos. "This is a hallucination. It's not real," he repeated to himself. "What happens in the Animus is not real, not for me. This is just the Bleeding Effect."
Surprised by the calm demeanor of the image before him, Cal speculated that perhaps his mind was processing the situation, preparing for the Assassin to communicate with him.
And speak he did.
"The hardest thing of being an Assassin?" he began. "It's assuming the roles of judge, jury, and executioner, killing those without trial or law."
His voice, void of warmth, remained steadfast in its delivery, prompting Cal to narrow his eyes in scrutiny. The Assassin's posture shifted towards one side of the wall, almost gesturing for Cal to follow suit. Lynch hesitated for a moment, weighing his options, before cautiously mirroring the Assassin's movement and settling into a seat. The atmosphere crackled with tension as they faced each other, both silently sizing up the other's intentions.
"We exist outside the edges of society," the Assassin continued, his tone firm. "Criminals, murderers, killers — we were branded with all these titles, deemed foolish outcasts."
"It's not an easy thing," he reiterated, a weighty pause punctuating his words. "To walk the path we've chosen, to bear the burden of our actions, knowing they may never be understood or appreciated by those we strive to protect."
"And I'm here to be cured of violence," Callum retorted sharply, his voice edged with defiance. "To break free from the cycle of bloodshed that has haunted me for too long."
"Really? By giving them what they want?" The Assassin simply replied, his expression unreadable, yet a flicker of understanding seemed to cross his features. The silence hung heavy between them, tension crackling in the air like electricity. Leopold stood up, his figure casting a looming shadow as the darkness of his hood enveloped him, concealing his face from view.
"Violence is in your nature, Cal. It's in your blood," Leopold declared, "The Apple and Gensokyo is everything. I'm not going to let you lead them to it."
The Assassin lunged, but this time, Cal was ready. He swiftly raised his left arm, deflecting Leopold attempted jab at his throat, and retaliated with a powerful strike from his right. Leopold feinted, then spun and launched a kick, narrowly missing Cal's stomach.
Cal was no stranger to brawling. He had been in more fistfights than there were stars in the sky since... since that day. But now, for the first time since the Bleeding Effect had descended upon him, twisting reality and seizing him by the throat, Cal was in control of his actions. Previously, the images of Assassins had merely terrorized him: whispering accusations, stabbing him, slitting his throat. His mind had been flooded with irrational fear. But this time, things were very different.
He remembered how Leopold had behaved previously when he was trying to kill Cal. He had succeeded then. This wasn't an attack — at least, not like the others had been. Dimly, Cal realized that this was... sparring. Training. Dodging a kick. Blocking a strike. Executing his own punches. He fell into the motions easily, comfortably. This kind of fight, he knew. In this kind of fight, he could hold his own.
Abruptly, he whirled, kicked out—and nothing was there. Cal paused, barely winded, and scanned the room. Was Leopold gone? Then, he felt a prickle at the back of his neck and turned around.
He was no longer alone. Others were entering the room now. They were his enemies, too, but unlike the angry Assassins who had descended upon him earlier, they wore crisp white uniforms instead of hoods. This was not a hallucination. They were coming to put him back into the Animus, but he would not go quietly.
Two orderlies approached him, but adrenaline shot through Cal. He couldn't go back there. Not again. Even the hallucinations were better than being grasped by the arm and plunged back into a dead man's memories. Cal darted forward, seizing the first orderly and slamming his face into the wall. He then whirled, head-butting the second, before blocking a blow from the first one and flipping him over to land on his back.
Three guards now raced forward, carrying batons instead of hidden blades. Cal took down the one on his left first. He shoved his arm into the guard's elbow, and the black-clad man stumbled. Cal immediately went for the one on his right, landing a solid punch to her jaw and sending her reeling backward.
A fourth guard had entered the room, and he and the middle one managed to seize Cal's arms, attempting to immobilize him. He would have none of it, using their grip on him as leverage to lift his legs and land a brutal kick into the midsection of the newcomer.
But the guard he'd punched had recovered, and she smiled with grim pleasure as she struck him across the face with her stick. It almost, but not quite, knocked him out. His body succumbed even as his spirit raged, and he sagged in their grasp, his world blurry as they dragged him out of the room.
They paused at the door. His head throbbing, Cal blinked, steeling himself against the pain as he raised his head to look up into a large man in a guard uniform with heavy-lidded, expressionless eyes.
"You're up, slugger," the man said.
No. He couldn't do it. Abruptly, Cal seized on his greatest fear and weaponized it.
"I'm crazy," he said through the blood pouring out of his mouth.
They ignored him and began dragging him down the corridor. As fear spurted through him at the thought of again entering the body and mind of Leopold Lafleche, an image from that long-ago day flashed into his mind: the old, battered radio playing the Patsy Cline song "Crazy."
Cal started to sing—or, more accurately, scream—the song.
He sang, wildly off-key, desperate to prolong the inevitable.
It was a simple game of poker, and yet it was anything but. Nathan's turn to deal was up, and he passed out cards with seeming calm. Ordinarily, the guards were kept out of sight, behind the two-way mirrored wall. A few had come out when Lynch had appeared earlier. Now, the place was crawling with them.
Emir glanced up, then back down at his cards. "They're putting him back in again," he said. No one said anything. They all knew.
Moussa picked up his cards without looking at them, his eyes on the orderlies. "They're rushing him. He ain't ready to go back in again, not with a breakdown like the one we saw. Pioneer couldn't even stay steady long enough to eat that nice juicy steak he ordered. That man doesn't even know who he is yet, much less which side he's on."
"Then," Nathan said, fanning his cards out, "we should stop him before he betrays us."
The others were calmer than he was. Nathan had been brought in spoiling for a fight, ready to take a swing at anyone for looking at him wrong. He had gradually learned to exert better self-control, but not completely. Moussa had chided Nathan for his words to Lynch earlier, but the boy wasn't sorry. Everything in Nathan screamed that the man Moussa was fond of calling the Pioneer was a threat. And sometimes it was better to be wrong and safe than right and dead.
Every night, Nathan awoke covered in sweat and absolutely terrified. Intellectually, he understood what was going on. Dr. Rikkin called it the Bleeding Effect, and suggested that, since Nathan was younger than most of the patients at the center, the effects might manifest more intensely with him.
"A man who is fifty has lived with himself for more than twice as long as you have," she had told him in her calm, gentle voice. "He has more memories that are his own. Therefore, he has more to draw upon to remind himself of his own identity when the lines begin to blur."
And she'd smiled, that sweet smile that always made Nathan wonder if maybe he was wrong, maybe she wasn't entirely on the Templar side of things. And even if she was, maybe the Templars weren't so bad.
Of course, that wasn't really him. That was bloody Duncan Walpole, traitor, sticking his nose in where it didn't belong.
Second cousin to Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister; Duncan Walpole, born 1679, died 1715. It sickened Nathan to think that any part of that man lived on in him. Duncan Walpole was a turncoat, just like Baptiste had been. But at least the voodoo poisoner had a right to his anger. He had been born a slave, and later had felt betrayed by the Brotherhood.
By contrast, Duncan had lived an easy life. He had followed the path of a naval officer, but was an arrogant, self-centered prick who balked at taking orders. Unhappy with the navy, he had been seduced by the ideals of the Assassins. It had appealed to his better angels. But even in a Brotherhood where "everything is permitted," the spoiled Walpole eventually grew discontent. He again challenged the older members of the Brotherhood and nursed grievances, most of which were imaginary.
Given an assignment in the West Indies, Duncan learned everything he could about the local Assassin guild while he was there. Then, once he had obtained enough information to be valuable to them, Walpole contacted the Templars, who knew exactly how to flatter him… and pay him.
Nathan had been in and out of school because he was always picking fights. An almost stereotypical East Ender, he'd fallen in with a gang and dealt drugs for a while. The gang leaders sent him to peddle drugs near the local schools because he looked so sweet and harmless. Harmless until he lost his temper; he'd beaten one member nearly to a pulp with his bare hands.
"You'd know about such things, wouldn't you, Nathan?" Emir said now. Once, it would have been an insult. Once, Nathan would have taken it as a challenge. Now, he knew it was an acknowledgement of what—or who—Nathan had to live with every single day.
And night.
Nathan forced himself not to shiver.
He didn't want to be like Duncan. He wanted to be better. He wanted to be more like Moussa, or, when he was feeling particularly hopeful, like Lin or Emir. The two of them — as far as he knew — had no skeletons in their closets.
Knowing how despicable his ancestor had been was why Nathan was always so suspicious of any newcomer. Guilty until proven innocent, he'd been known to say, and let's face it, we're all guilty.
Nathan trusted Moussa's judgment. More than any of them, even the level-headed Emir, he seemed in harmony with his two sets of memories. He acted like a buffoon for the benefit of the guards, but in reality, he was the sane one.
"I do know about such things," Nathan replied calmly. His gaze flickered to one of the guards. They're watching us like hawks. "Moussa's right. They shouldn't be putting him back in the Animus yet. If they're pushing him that hard, that's because he knows something very important. And he might decide to pick the wrong side."
They couldn't afford to give this newcomer the benefit of a doubt — not if, as Moussa suspected, he was going to be either the one to get them out of here, or the one to get them all killed.
Moussa met his gaze; two Assassins who had turned Templar, and who understood one another well. Moussa looked back down at his cards and grunted.
"Well, will you look at that," he said, and placed down four cards. There were two black aces and two black eights. "Dead man's hand."
Four cards. Four guardians of the Apple.
"What about the fifth card?" asked Nathan.
"Fifth card was a bullet to the brain," Moussa said.
They were all in agreement.
Cal's broken howling of song lyrics reached Sofia's ears before the man himself did, and she had to force herself not to wince in empathy. It was too soon — far too soon — to put him back in.
She had heard that tone of despair and terror in the voices of previous subjects. Sometimes, the essence of who that person truly was vanished shortly after Sofia heard that tone… and that person never returned.
Dammit.
"Set the date for the sixth," Sofia told Alex.
Cal's voice, high-pitched and desperate, continued to shriek ghoulishly appropriate lyrics.
Sofia's hands clenched. "If his condition deteriorates…" She took a deep breath. "… pull him out."
Alex turned to her, his high brow furrowing. "But your father—" he began.
Sofia cut him off.
"I don't care what my father said," she murmured, acutely aware that the man under discussion was watching everything from his office window. She strode out onto the floor, and looked as the arm, gripping Cal firmly about his waist, raised him over her head.
Cal all but sobbed now, his face a rictus of a smile, as he wondered along with Patsy Cline what he had done.
He looked terrible. He was bloody from being "subdued" in his room. His eyes were wild, he was sweating, and his chest heaved as he hyperventilated. Sofia's own chest ached in sympathy. Damn her father, anyway; this should not be happening.
Once, as a little girl, she had sat for hours outside her childhood home, patient as the hills, sunflower seeds cupped in her tiny hand, waiting for squirrels or chipmunks to accept her offering. Her body grew stiff from sitting, and one of her feet fell asleep. It didn't matter.
It was all worth it when one small, bright-eyed creature poked its nose out from around a tree. With jerky movements, ready to flee, the chipmunk made an indirect approach. It had just placed its tiny, clawed forepaws on her thumb, staring up at her with big eyes, its heart pounding so fast she could see the motion through the fur on its white chest, when her father had emerged, shouting at the chipmunk to go away. It had vanished in a brown blur. The next day, and the next, despite her father's orders, she had sat outside. Waiting.
It had never returned.
Cal bore more resemblance to a wolf than a chipmunk, but he, too, was wary. And he, too, had started to trust her, she believed. But instead of simply chasing him away, her father had issued instructions that Cal be beaten into submission, hauled forth, and shoved into a machine he barely understood and was obviously terrified of.
It was cruel, it was wrong, and in a bitter irony she knew it was going to, in the end, set them back, perhaps irrecoverably, while her father was so keen on getting results instantly.
Sofia had one shot at protecting Cal from damage, right here, right now, and she had to make it count.
"Cal," she said, her voice strong and commanding. "Listen to me."
He only sang… shouted… louder, trying to drown her out. Trying to put up some kind—any kind—of barrier to protect who he was before experiencing what he was going to be forced to endure. The irony, the danger, was that the only way for his mind to be safe was if he completely embraced what was going to happen. If he did not try to hold it at arm's length, or drown it out by screaming louder than the memory.
"Listen to me!" she shouted. "You have to concentrate! You have to focus on the memories." Was she getting through? Sofia couldn't tell. She pressed on. "You have to stay with Leopold."
The name caught his attention, and Cal looked down, blinking, trying to focus, still madly singing. Except it wasn't madness — it was a fierce bid to keep a grip on sanity.
Sofia had studied this man intently. She did, as she had told him openly, know everything about him. And the man suspended above her, panting and struggling not to shatter, reminded her of the little boy in the old Polaroids so strongly it hurt.
"What was the line from Shakespeare?" she thought distractedly. "'I must be cruel, only to be kind.'"
She had to drum it into him. He would listen, do as she said — or he would become like so many others before him, a body with a shattered brain, caught eternally between the past and the present.
Sofia would not let that happen.
Not to Cal.
She repeated the command. "Cal… you have to stay with Leopold."
There was nothing in this world that he wanted less, she could tell. But she could also tell that he heard her.
And then — he was in.