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DATE:31th of August, the 70th year after the Coronation
LOCATION: Concord Metropolis
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I didn't really feel like walking around all bloody. At the very least I should dry the blood to make the outfit thing more believable.
I didn't want to risk going out and being seen by one of the guards so the smoking area was the best option.
The terrace was warmer relative to the inside, which was the only bad thing about it. Stone railing, a few iron tables with ashtrays that had been used recently. The city spread out in the distance in its usual gray arrangement, lights, traffic and closer were the other pompous mansions of the area.
I leaned on the railing and looked at none of it in particular.
I had come here to find Combine money. To trace it to a face, a name or something Mike could use, something that moved the damned missile situation forward. That was the plan at least.
Instead I'd spent the evening being annoyed by useless people, interrogated by a mind-reader, and had then killed the mind-reader in a room upstairs. The Combine hadn't come up once in any productive sense.
Such a waste of time. Hopefully Pamela or Mike achieved results.
I wasn't even angry about it. That was the worst part. Just… tired. The discussion I had earlier was the most exhausting part.
"Is this table taken?"
I turned slightly.
She was in black and white, a salopette, wide stripes, the kind of pattern that committed to itself fully or not at all. Her mask matched it, same stripe logic across the upper half of her face. Her hair was shoulder lengthed and bushy, a clear white. She had the posture of someone comfortable in their own company who had decided, provisionally, to be comfortable in mine.
"Help yourself," I said.
She stepped to the table, opened a slim metal case, and produced a cigarette with silver paper, thin, the expensive kind that burned slowly and tasted like they'd been made by someone who cared. Certainly planets over the Mabo variety.
She lit it with a small silver lighter that matched the case.
Then turned to me.
"You look downtrodden," she said. Not unkindly. Just observationally, the way you'd note it was cold.
"Do I."
She held the case out toward me without making a production of it.
I looked at the cigarettes. Then at the railing. Then I took one and sighed, not dramatically.
She lit it for me.
I had to take the mask off to smoke it.
We stood in silence for a moment, which was the correct response to a terrace at night.
Then her eyes moved down to my suit. She took a long pull of her cigarette. Back up to my mask.
"That's certainly a bold choice," she said. "The suit".
"Thank you," I replied. "I had it made specially". I was having a hard time keeping sarcasm at bay.
She looked at the red soaking through the white fabric from collar to hip, then back at my face.
"Clearly," she said.
She tilted her head, studying the mask.
"Aionis," she said. Not a question.
"Apparently."
She took another pull of her cigarette, exhaled slowly toward the city below. "Your agency isn't doing too well, is it." The tone was light. Almost fond. "From what I hear." Of course. 'Hear'.
"Depends on your metrics."
"Bodies tend to be a fairly universal one."
"Then we're performing adequately."
She smiled at that, a small one, the kind that arrived without permission. We smoked in silence for a moment. The city below did its city things, indifferent to the terrace and everything on it.
"You've been here all evening," she said. "I watched you come in. What you did downstairs." She paused. "Also the thing upstairs…"
I looked at her sideways.
"Yet another observer huh," I said.
"I'm not particularly on the sidelines."
"No," I agreed. "You're not."
She knew too much. A hero? Or from the Combine? Why meet me after she saw I killed that woman? Or… How would she see it? Cameras? The way she'd come to this specific table meant she wanted something.
It was a bit incessant. Maia already tracked me and now her?
"So what are you?" I asked.
She didn't answer immediately. I waited in silence until she finished her cigarette, then let it against the ashtray's edge still burning.
Then she turned, reached up with one hand and held the side of my face, not hard, just present and with the other raised the mask back onto my face, pressing her lips against the mask where my cheek would have been underneath. Deliberate.
She stepped back. An admirer?
"I was sent by Secundo Manus," she really threw a curve-ball out there.
The city continued in the distance. Someone laughed inside through the terrace doors.
I looked at her.
"That's bold," I said, with no quality in particular. I was perplexed.
"There are bombs in the premises." She said it the way you'd say there's a bar on the second floor. Unbothered. "Have been since this afternoon. The catering staff, mostly. Three of them aren't catering staff." She picked up what remained of her cigarette again. "So yes. I can afford to be bold".
Guess Mike failed. It was entirely different from what he thought would happen. Not that I expected another result. He was just like me. A person who took orders. Going from this to making plans isn't really feasible.
I turned this over.
"Then what is this?" I asked. "What do you want, a negotiation? Are you here to threaten me?"
"The opposite." She looked at me directly for the first time since the kiss, and the lightness had shifted into something more serious underneath. "I'm buying you time."
"For what."
"For whatever you need it for." A pause. "There are people inside that room who will notice what happened upstairs very shortly. Some of them work for us. They'll be looking for you specifically." She pulled on the cigarette. "I've been delaying that." So not only did they have a different plan than what Mike found out, but they even knew of his actions and laid a trap to get us.
"Why."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Because you're my idol," she said finally. Without embarrassment. "I've watched everything you've done since you decided to start." She looked at the city. "You do things that should be impossible and you don't seem to notice or care that they're impossible. That's-" She stopped. Started again. "There aren't many real heroes left. Most of them are just businessmen with superpowers." She glanced at me.
I said nothing.
"So." She straightened slightly. Finished her cigarette and pressed it flat against the ashtray. "You have maybe ten minutes before the room becomes a problem. The east stairwell is being watched but the service stairs off the kitchen corridor aren't." She reached into the metal case and held it out, two more silver cigarettes. "For the road."
I looked at her.
"You work for the man trying to resurrect a god," I said, "and you're calling me a real hero?"
She shrugged, one shoulder, untroubled.
"Everyone serves something," she said. "At least you're honest about what you are." Am I?
"You didn't seem to listen. You work for a man allied with the Combine Gang," I said. "They fund slavers and worse. So explain to me how someone who cares about heroes ends up there."
She didn't flinch from it.
"Because of that," she expressed with conviction. Whether it was blind was another matter. "Because of what heroes became. All these contracts… and the political alignment. Heroes as brand assets for whoever funds them." She looked at the distant city. "Arsenal, Cavalier, Methanos… even the Wondrous. All of them are fake. You know what they don't have anymore? Principles. They'd let a whole neighbourhood die if a redevelopment plan came knocking. No, they already did that. So many times. And so many other crimes!"
"And Secundo Manus fixes that?"
"The new Ultraman fixes that. The purge will be a clean start. No more people like The Matrix deciding who lives because it's convenient." Her voice was steady and certain. Was it really delusional? Can't say I ever bothered to research their crimes. "We go back to what it was supposed to be." Nostalgia is a dangerous drug.
I looked at her.
What could I even say? A fanatic wouldn't listen to common sense. Or was she even a fanatic?
Then I smiled, not warmly. The smile that came when something was so wrong it had looped back around to being almost interesting.
I turned away from her toward the railing.
A new Ultraman. Someone's idea of restoration. As if you could reconstruct a man from his outline and get anything but a copy that didn't know what it had lost.
I felt my hand move before I'd decided it would. I grabbed her wrist.
She froze.
"Are you willing to die for it?" I asked. "Not theoretically. Tonight. In this building. Are you willing?"
She looked at my hand on her wrist. Then at my mask.
"Yes," she said.
No hesitation. Haah, why bother?
I looked at her for a long moment.
I let go.
She ran away through the terrace doors, and the room swallowed her.
I stood at the railing.
What exactly was I supposed to do with that? Walk back into the gala and announce it? 'Excuse me, there are bombs in the building, the catering staff have been compromised, I got this information from a woman sent by the man trying to clone a dead god.' Who in that room would believe me. Who in that room wouldn't assume I was the threat. Given the situation upstairs , the blood currently drying into my jacket lining, the general impression I tended to leave on people… the answer was no one. Not one person in there would hear that warning from me and act on it rather than on me.
Could I even find and alert Pamela or Mike about what was happening? In these short minutes when we were split in a sprawling building? Actually, why bother? Pamela was almost invulnerable and Mike could just teleport away.
Nothing to be done.
I found the elevator, took it down without looking at anyone, and walked through the lobby with the mask in my hand and my eyes forward. The door staff didn't stop me. Luckily, the eagle-masked men at the entrance had rotated. I walked past them and down the hundred meters of ancestor statues without looking at any of them either.
The night air was warm and thick and smelled like the city being itself.
I was perhaps three minutes from the entrance, maybe a little less, when the sound arrived, not sharp, not like a crack, but deep and pressurized, the kind of sound that you felt in your sternum before your ears processed it.
I stopped.
Turned.
Three floors of the Aurelian building came outward in a single exhalation of glass and stone and light, blooming orange against the dark sky before the smoke followed and swallowed the color. The windows on adjacent floors blew inward from the pressure differential. Car alarms started in sequence, one after another, down the length of the street.
I watched it for a moment.
Then I turned back around and kept walking. There was no point in being here when the Civil Militia arrived.
Half an hour later, from a distance, I heard the structural sound, not an explosion this time but a sustained groan, metal and concrete giving up the argument, and turned to see the building fold into itself. Floor by floor. Graceful, almost, from far enough away. The way things looked inevitable once they'd already happened.
The smoke column rose straight up into the still summer air, orange at the base and black above, visible from half the city.
I stood and watched it until it wasn't interesting anymore.
I walked.
The estate district gave way to wider roads, then to the particular nowhere of late-night suburbs with their shuttered shopfronts, the occasional lit window, dogs that barked at nothing from behind fences. The smoke column was visible behind me for a long time, staining the sky orange at the horizon. I didn't look back at it more than once.
Eventually a taxi appeared. Premium, by accident rather than intention. I got in without negotiating the fare and gave him the hotel name.
He didn't comment on the suit.
Professional of him.
The receptionist at the desk did comment. Not with words, with the way she grimaced upon seeming me, mask in hand, carrying a folded jacket that had given up on itself.
"Key," I said. Somewhere along the way it had fallen out of the pocket. "Carter. Room-" I gave the number.
"Mr. Carter, we'd need to verify-"
"Verify it then."
The process took longer than necessary and involved a second staff member and a phone call I wasn't interested in. Guess their keys are seen as important. Eventually a new card appeared on the desk and I took it and went upstairs.
The bath was cold because I ran it that way. Hot water would have been more comfortable, which was precisely why I didn't want it. I stayed in until the water ran clear and the scar tissue stopped stinging and then stayed in a while longer for no particular reason.
I toweled off. Put on the dressing gown the hotel provided, which was white and thick and completely unmarred by anything, which felt faintly absurd.
The chime at the entrance sounded as I crossed the room.
I opened the door.
Pamela was in the corridor, leaning against the wall visibly appearing like she spent quite some time in this position. Her clothes, or what remained of them, were in a state that the word rags covered charitably. The fabric had been reduced to overlapping strips held together by proximity and stubbornness, barely covering anything they were supposed to cover. Someone had found her a large white cloth somewhere, wrapped around her torso like an improvised solution to an obvious problem.
She was not seriously injured, as far as I could tell. But she was gray with dark dust from crown to bare feet, and she smelled powerfully of gunpowder and scorched stone, and her hair was doing something entirely new that the explosion had presumably authored.
When she saw me she straightened off the wall and her expression organized itself into something pointed.
"You ignored me for an hour," she said. Annoyed, not frightened. Which meant she'd processed the frightening part already and had arrived at the more comfortable territory of being furious at me specifically. "I called. Repeatedly." Wow, I stayed for quite a while.
"The bathroom is acoustically shielded," I offered without being prompted to.
She stared at me.
"It says so on the placard," I added. "Above the towel rack."
"That is-" She stopped. Breathed. "Where is your key? I don't have mine."
"I got a new one at the desk." I stepped back from the door to let her in. "What happened to yours?"
She walked past me into the room, trailing dust on the carpet.
"It was in my jacket," she said flatly. "Which was in the building." A pause. "Which is no longer a building."
"Seems like today was a loss," I said.
Pamela looked at what remained of her outfit and at the dust she'd deposited on the hotel carpet and at the general state of everything.
"Yes," she said. "It was."
Silence for a moment. The room was very quiet in the way hotel rooms were quiet.
"Alice is alive," Pamela said. "In case you were anxious about it."
"I wasn't."
She looked at me.
"She got out before the first floor went," Pamela continued. "I saw her on the lawn. Crying, but breathing." Like who cares.
"Good for her."
"William."
"I'm not anxious about Alice," I said. "I wasn't anxious about Alice before you told me, and I'm not pretending not to be now. She's fine. You've confirmed she's fine. We can move on."
Pamela's jaw shifted slightly. She let it go.
"What about Mike?" she asked.
"He most likely got out," I said.
"Most likely."
"Frankly I am not that surprised. They have whole teams for this stuff while people like us do everything alone. He put too much faith into his own competence."
"Don't we all," Pamela said.
She almost smiled at that. Almost. The dust on her face made it difficult to read.
"So," she said. "We went to find Combine money and instead a building fell down."
"Broadly, yes."
"And the missiles are still unaccounted for."
"Also yes."
"Outstanding evening."
"I thought so."
She looked at me for another moment with the expression she used when she was deciding whether to pursue something or leave it where it had landed. She left it.
I turned back into the room and crossed to the couch and let myself fall into it, not sit. The cushions received me without judgment. I stared at the ceiling. Behind me I heard her cross to the bathroom. The door clicked. A moment later the shower started.
I looked at the ceiling some more.
Now this was something.
Had we lost because Emily wasn't doing the planning?
That was part of it. Obviously part of it. Emily would have had a dossier on every person in that building before we arrived. She would have known about the change in catering staff through cameras. She would have known about the bombs, probably, or at least about the risk of them. She would have had contingencies and exit routes and a list of names cross-referenced against Combine personnel, and I would have complained about fighting them and listened anyway.
But it felt like more than that. Emily's absence explained the preparation gap. It didn't explain the rest of it.
The Combine wasn't looking past me anymore. Whatever tolerance I'd operated under, novelty, or perhaps the assumption that I was someone else's problem… That is gone now. I needed to be more careful. I couldn't keep depending on people finding me interesting enough to delay my death. Pity had a shelf life. Admiration even shorter.
So what had tonight actually been?
That woman had said there were people waiting for me inside. People specifically for me. But if the intent was to kill me, the bomb accomplished that more efficiently than anything else. And I'd been in the building for hours, which was more than enough time. So they didn't want me dead.
Capture, then.
For what?
My contract was the obvious answer. If Secundo Manus knew what I was, and he might, the necromancer's knowledge ran in directions I couldn't fully map, then a 'perfectly resurrected corpse' was potentially useful to someone building an army of the dead. Or trying to understand the mechanism of recreating life.
But that woman had been sent by Secundo Manus. Supposedly not alone. And she'd warned me. Which meant either she'd really acted against his instructions out of personal devotion, or those people waiting for me inside weren't his.
Someone else's, then? Operating as Combine members?
I tried to think about whether I'd smelled anything in the building. Ghouls strong enough to survive a bomb would have had a particular quality to them. On Hades, even normal ones smelled like rotten flesh. I hadn't caught anything. Which either meant they weren't ghouls or they were better concealed than anything I'd encountered. The second option was highly unlikely.
Whatever. The thoughts went nowhere useful tonight.
I found the remote and turned the television on and watched it without really watching it.
Pamela emerged from the bathroom eventually. Clean, dust-free, wrapped in the other dressing gown the hotel had provided, her hair doing something damp and slightly less catastrophic than before. She looked at the television. Then at me. Then she crossed the room and fell into the couch beside me with the same energy I'd used. Not sitting, just arriving, gravity doing the work.
She didn't say anything.
Neither did I.
The television said things for us, none of which mattered. Some news programs covering the explosion from a distance with aerial shots of the collapsed building and all the useless commentary that the media is known for. I watched it without particular feeling. Pamela watched it with her knees pulled up and her chin resting on them.
We stayed like that for a long time.
It was, improbably, peaceful.
Outside the window, the city was still the city.
In here it was just the couch and the television and the quiet.