Gemini gambit, p.39
Gemini Gambit, page 39
part #1 of Gemini Gambit Series
All Kim had was skin.
Her hands coruscated with strange, dark patterns. They covered her body, now black as night. The mirrors showed that her wings made the patterns, their movement triggering ripples everywhere. Ripples of power. Ripples of control. The patterns converged on her eyes, which were also a deep black. Her irises did not exist; instead they shone with guidelines of coral-colored energy that lay far behind them as if Kim was a piece of paper placed over a window. They were gorgeous alien things. She reveled in the transformation. In a flash of her weird backward memories, she understood this glorious being was what she had been all along.
Memories unwound continuously, revealing secret after secret. The place was full of dimensions, energy bubbling as entire universes existed and vanished in impossibly short instances of time. It was knowledge both new and very old, happening in a continuous reality that stood above time. The place unlocked knowledge in her soul, instinct on a level Kim had never reached before.
She gathered her first fist of power, but pain blew across the backs of her legs, and she collapsed. The woman had used a long rod against her knees to knock her down. The attack outraged her even as she fell. Before she could get up, they all hit her with the same sort of rod, blows hard enough to break normal bone. All it did was distract her with the pain. The constant drubbing ceased as they all pulled back to hit her at once. The brief stillness was all she needed.
Kim clenched her fist, and the power grew into a nimbus of energy drawn from the smallest scale of the universe. It was a silky thing, flowing through her carrying a heart-pounding righteousness with it. She was its perfect instrument. Kim opened her hand and let it go.
A double-sphered shockwave of crystal-blue force blasted the three off their feet, shattering the thousands of mirrors they’d surrounded her with like windows blown apart in a storm.
This was her birthright. This was the source of her ability, a glorious and infinite place of power. There was no need to be human here, no reason to hide. She stood, trailing static-shrieked lightning from her hands as an overpowering ozone stench filled the space. It was time to end this charade.
The woman on her left, the one with the strange scar, produced a gun of some sort and fired it. The blast threw burning chaos across her body, extinguishing her power and sent her flying. The bolt’s chaos kept her from concentrating again, kept her confused, unable to focus on their assaults. Then they were on her again.
They were fading, their strength drifting away as hers swelled, but it happened too slowly. They were searching. They weren’t trying to convince her or even hurt her now; they only wanted something from her. They were yelling, but their voices bounced backward and forward, echoes of phrases they did and did not say collapsed, and Kim couldn’t understand them.
One of the hands on the tall, handsome one changed into a translucent claw. The sudden tearing in her chest as it pierced her ripped a scream from her lungs. Then an edged agony, like a razor cutting away a diamond, shot through her. It pulled out a token from Kim’s chest.
They’d taken Watchtell’s key. The trio crowed in triumph and stood to run away.
It was the last mistake they would have time to make.
Freed from their attacks, a nova of power blew outward from her center, and Kim spun to her feet. A gestured blast of dark, coral-limned lightning stopped them all, still as stones. She brought them back to her. The equipment they used to breathe fell in pieces at their feet. Frozen in her strange, dark light, she could feel their pulses quicken, because they could not remember how to breathe here. All Kim needed to do was hold them, and they’d soon disappear on their own, forever.
But she didn’t want that. She took back the code they’d stolen from her. Lines and waves traced patterns everywhere and nowhere, on, in, and around her. Uncertainty split billionfold, then collapsed into singularity, and then silently blew apart again. The information it did and did not store defined the whole universe and nothing.
The paradox was completely natural to her now. She wanted to stay and watch its unspeakable beauty, but she had a job to do. These were intruders. She needed to destroy their way in. Kim reached into the core of the place, threw a black-cloaked shield around them all, and took the rest of it for power.
There had to be a nexus, a connection allowing the other three to exist here. She spun them, now so small as to seem like toys in her palm, until the woman was in front of her. With a voice of crashing power Kim said, “I wish to return you to your master. Tell me where to go.”
Hope vied with terror in the woman’s eyes, and Kim’s laughter boomed into the vast space.
“No. I will not end you, but I will end this.” She drew them all closer. “Tell me.”
Their faces were turning purple as the oxygen in their lungs ran out. The woman slapped a pouch on her belt, and a silvery cable appeared, leading away into the distance. By simply willing it, Kim transported them all to its end. She stood next to what seemed like a one-way mirror. A control room was on the other side.
It was dark. Three giant screens near the ceiling displayed metrics and graphs with a picture of each of her captives. Below the screens, they were laid out on hospital beds, eyes closed, surrounded by heavily modified realmspace gear. Old-fashioned control consoles stretched three rows across the floor around them with a score of people operating them.
Kim concentrated the power again. It was silk in her hands, in her mind, completely under her command. As the barrier thinned, warning claxons barked to life on the other side Cracks shot across the wall as she built a ram of power around her fist. With a roar, she smashed a hole through the worlds, and then stepped through.
The people scurrying around and climbing out of the rubble of the rupture stopped whatever they were doing. Her head nearly scraped the ceiling. She threw her onyx arm out and tossed her captives toward their bodies, lying in hospital beds at the center of the room, and as they flew they disappeared in an invisible wave.
Kim stared at them all, and they wilted under her gaze. The strange, dark patterns on her body picked up speed as they flickered. First, their controls. She put out a hand and twisted the dimensions that ran through the devices. They spit sparks like waterfalls and billowed out smoke. Now, the power and data stores. Extensions of her body flowed through dimensions until she found them. Kim clenched her fist and the room shook from a nearby explosion.
There would be no more excursions, no more spies, no more trespassing into the world behind her. She examined them all silently one last time, nodded, and then turned to leave.
“Wait!” one of them shouted, and she stopped. The wings on her back flexed as she held the edge of infinity. “Who are you?”
She turned her head. The truth was futures past, power triumphant and ruined. When Kim tried to speak the language in her head wasn’t even English. It was ancient, lined in marble that had long ago crumbled on a hill overlooking the sea. But the truth of it held, even when translated.
“Victory.”
Chapter 72: Mike
Mike jumped when a nearby explosion shook the room, and then all the doors unlocked and slammed open.
Tonya cried out, “Kim!”
She had collapsed over her knees, breathing, but far too still. They didn’t dare touch her. Right after she fell, a migraine wormed its way back and forth through both sides of Mike’s mind. Somehow, it centered on her. Then the strange pain relaxed with a pop, and Kim’s breathing returned to normal.
She slowly reached behind her and pulled the jacket back on. As she stood and opened her eyes Kim flinched and gasped, trying to get away from Tonya and Mike as her breath lost its rhythm again.
With ferocious effort, she regained control of herself, closed her eyes, and buttoned her coat
“It’s over.” She turned to walk through the door.
Watchtell shouted, “It’s not over! This changes nothing!”
Kim stopped and turned around. It was obvious that everyone was far too close to her, much worse than when they were at the hotel, but she fought through it, slowly walking toward him.
“You’re right, Matthew. This doesn’t change anything. Anything at all. Tomorrow people will be horrible to each other. Tomorrow they’ll be kind. Tomorrow there will be tenderness and safety and order, and there’s nothing that will ever change that. Tomorrow there will be cruelty and murder and chaos, and there’s nothing that will ever change that.”
She was close to him now. “That man died today; do you at least understand that? He’s not even the first. You poisoned people, Matthew. You burned them.”
“Accidents. Incidents. We all knew the risks. We’re working for justice. Nothing else matters.”
Kim leaned down. “He’s dead, Matthew.” She waved her hand back at the corpse. “Do you think he cares about justice anymore?”
“If he were alive he’d say the same thing. Justice is all that matters.”
“No. Your justice is an illusion; a tissue of lies made by the powerful to control the weak. It’s an iron fist that beats and kills and makes us all bow down and kiss it for the privilege. You’re not working for justice. You’re working for pure, naked control.
“You think the rest of us are weak or stupid. You’re so certain you already know the answers you never once think to ask why. You want to protect us from ourselves, and then apologize when it all goes wrong. You just tried to destroy the thing that knits us all together because you can’t make it do what you want.”
He shook his head and tried to stand up against the shackles. “Not destroy it, control it!”
“And if you’d failed?”
“Either outcome would’ve forced justice on to it. Rich people cheat and innocent people are left behind.”
“People are always left behind, Matthew. Nothing can change that. All you can do is push the rest of us backward. Have you ever been to a soup kitchen? Actually helped someone off the street? Mentored a kid? Not by throwing your billions around or forcing the rest of us to do it for you. Have you ever actually tried to help one single person yourself?”
He glared at her and raised his chin. “If we fixed the system they wouldn’t need help.”
“They will always need help. Nothing can change that. So rather than getting out of the way of a system that works, you want to control it, risk destroying it, just in the hope what you do might be better.”
His eyes grew wild. “It will be better! I’m certain of it!”
The slap rang out like a gunshot. “Nothing is certain, Matthew. Nothing. You mistake ignorance for certainty and call it truth. You never question yourself, so you’ll never understand anyone else. People aren’t evil because they’re wrong, Matthew. People are evil because they never once consider they’re anything but right.
“I can’t change the world. It won’t be changed. But I will change one thing. I’ll change you.” She spun around and walked out the door.
Tonya made a strangled noise as she stared at the floor. There was a pool of blood, and Mike tracked the too-frequent drops up to Kim’s hand. She gripped her fist so hard her nails had cut deeply into her palm, and now the ruin leaked her life out on the floor.
They both broke into a run.
Chapter 73: Kim
As her power once knew no bounds, her agony was now boundless. No one could, or ever would, come near her again. In her transformation, the wall built around the desperation of her life had shattered. She used what little energy she had to keep her feet moving, but that was evaporating away too fast. She needed to get away from here. Kim would not collapse in front of that bastard.
She had lied to Matthew. There would be no moving on. Not for her, not after this. Even at a distance, the people around Kim now rent holes in her sanity. Mike would never come near her. The ridiculous fantasy of knowing his touch was just a sad, defenseless dream that screamed inside her as it burned to dust.
Every crutch she’d found over the years now shattered against a threshing maw of agony. It was building and she couldn’t hope to control it. She was alone, would always be alone, in horrible pain without help or hope. It would never, ever end.
But there was one way. The last of that strange, dark power was fading, but it still gave her a way to escape. When she was out of the room, she turned the corner and used her new perception one last time.
She remembered how to die.
There was the sound of running feet and Tonya’s voice. “Mike! No! You can’t!”
She fell. The abyss was dark, welcoming, and she evaporated into it. But then strong arms stopped her fall. They burned. Kim opened her eyes. This was her avatar. She was in a realm. Someone held her in arms so strong they felt like girders, but everything burned. They were walking. She lifted her head up just enough to see a face.
“Mike? What’s happening? Where am I?”
“Kim. I need you to concentrate. I need you to concentrate as hard as you can. You need to stay here with me. You can’t go anywhere else. Don’t even think about going anywhere else. You can’t leave me. You have to stay right here. Can you do that?”
She nodded because that was all she could do. “I think so. Mike, you’re hurting me.”
“I know. I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. Please, concentrate.”
He had actually manifested. This wasn’t a hologram. She floated, just barely, in his arms. His power was what caused her pain. Her avatar was dissolving from the destruction; Kim was dissolving in pain.
But it was a different sort of pain. It wasn’t desperation. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t depression or disgust or shame or any of the other kinds of pain that had ruled her life for as long as she could remember. It was the pain of healing. Through the shards and echoes of her shattered sanity, Kim’s soul was healing in the fire of his embrace.
He carried her through the blanketing calm of a towering forest in an ancient realm. Mike told her stories about crazy spies and strange ladies and the monk who named his mystery. He told her about special places, wild places, secret places forgotten long ago.
She relaxed in his arms and slowly burned completely away.
Chapter 74: Tonya
Tonya stood dumbstruck in the main room of the warehouse. She was a dozen steps behind Mike as they ran. What happened next was beyond her wildest hopes, fears, or beliefs. Mike stopped Kim’s fall, picked her up, and then carried her. Carried her. Kim tightened her embrace, and in the dancing light of a fire outside the huge doors, buried her head in his shoulder. The streams of FBI agents and police rushed in and parted as they ran around them, and the pair slowly walked out into the cold, flickering night.
Whatever he’d done lasted exactly long enough to put her in the ambulance, and then the screams started.
Tonya had been doing shifts on a suicide watch with Mike ever since. She should still be doing shifts on a suicide watch. Watchtell’s rape—sexual or not, that’s exactly what Tonya considered it—had broken her. Kim had spent the past thirty-six hours screaming incoherently and thrashing against her restraints. Every single hour. The doctors couldn’t get close enough to even try a diagnosis. They couldn’t sedate her properly until the drugs the cops and Watchtell had used were out of her system. Tonya loved her dearly, but she couldn’t stand to be in that hospital room for more than an hour. The screams were too weird, and the babbling about lightning and power were worse. Half the time she didn’t even speak English.
Mike was with her always, only leaving when Tonya made him
Until now. The Phoenix Dogs’ raids into Watchtell’s private realmspace had brought back not only terabytes of incriminating data, but also the primary neural access keys of Watchtell’s supporters. Tonya was shaky on the details, but apparently it allowed Mike to hack all their neural interfaces and trap them in a realm of his choosing.
It was time to use the levers they’d found. After some discussion, they decided to put them in Watchtell’s virtual theater.
The audience included every world leader Tonya had ever heard of and more. Since Mike could only be a hologram in realmspace, someone needed to be the public face. Someone needed to confront all these people. Spencer couldn’t do it because he and his team were putting together the packets needed to make the plan work. Tonya didn’t even get to draw a straw.
She was about to confront a roaring gaggle of powerful angry people who did not want to be here. Her lungs felt like they were going to bounce out of her throat, and her eyes stung as they watered. Considering the consequences of screwing up, she was hanging together pretty well. Mike’s attempts at keeping her calm weren’t helping, though.
“I don’t care what you think, Mike, I’m really nervous!”
“You’ll be fine. You look amazing.”
She was dressed in a grandly colorful, flowing dress with long sleeves and a giant matching hat. Her grandmother wore things like this when she went to visit someone who’d really pissed her off. Considering what their toady had done to Kim, it was more than appropriate for this occasion.
“Did you know that fabric is called Aso Oke?”
“Is that Swahili for pissed off black woman? ‘Cause if it is I’m all for it.” Tonya picked at her sleeves, trying to get them perfect.
“Are you ready?”
Kim was screaming and thrashing in a bed. Tonya was talking to a completely new kind of life form. She was about to confront the most powerful people on the planet.
“No.”
She said a silent prayer, then pressed a button. A door over her head slid open, allowing a shaft of light in. A wash of angry voices poured through right behind it. An invisible bell of unimaginable size began to somberly toll, its sound vibrating right through her soles. The lift she stood on gracefully brought her to the floor of the stage.
There were not quite two hundred of them, mostly fat old men, but also a smattering of hard, angry women. They were all people who’d forgotten what accountability meant. Tonya was here to remind them.
The spotlight made her blink, but she refused to squint. Like wolves, they’d see it as a weakness, and right now Tonya was the absolute opposite of weakness. She was a leopard, and they were her prey. When the volume of the bell had fallen, right on cue a fat man in an expensive suit leapt to his feet.
