Bloodsong Ch. 05

"This hardware is ancient. Look here — vacuum tubes! Those haven't been used since the sixties!" Horton went on muttering as he messed with the switches. Having no clue what he was on about, Valerie left him to it, working up nervous energy by the exit until he made a sound that hinted at success.

"Well?"

"Good news. Most of the vintage tech is just for the look of the thing." He pressed a button which to Valerie looked identical to the others in the lineup. The hissing of a fan drowned the room and a screen came on at their left. Horton looked extremely pleased. "I just need to find out which of these terminals is connected to that. It does look like it's password protected, so it's going to take me a bit to get in without using third party programs. You need to access your email and that's all, right? Okay. Give me a minute . . ."

Valerie returned to her spot by the door and wondered how the Front fared down below. They'd been on track to weed out the last pockets of staff when she'd left, but she worried. Almost as much as she worried about Jack's whereabouts. Axis had said that they couldn't find him either, and what to make of that?

Nothing good, surely.

By minute three — she'd been keeping track in her head down to the second — Horton had commandeered a keyboard, turned the screen into a wall of text and complained about Vista users under his breath, but made no progress that Valerie could see. She bit her tongue until they crossed the four minute mark.

"Can you estimate how long it . . ."

"One second! Well, five." It took him twenty, so there was consistency there at least. Valerie hovered like an overzealous shoulder devil, unable to help herself, and lurched over him to type the second he brought up her email provider. She punched in two lines and copied them into a dozen new message fields, all addressed to the Liberation Front's global mailing list. Horton, who'd bent forward so that he wouldn't get in her way, issued a strangled exclamation when he looked up and saw what she was doing. "Delayed delivery! See, I knew you weren't serious about the whole—"

"We still don't have amazing odds of making it out of this in one piece. I'm scheduling the first to send in five minutes, the next ones each a minute after the last. That should give us time to run back and drop down the elevator." Valerie rubbed her forehead, thinking whether it wouldn't be better to up the time and ultimately deciding against it. It'd mean leaving a wider window open for someone to throw a spanner in the works, whether up here or down below. She hit send on the last email and stood. "Out of curiosity, would you have come if you hadn't been sure that calling this a suicide mission was overselling it?"

"I believed it was for real when that guy asked for a volunteer. I just realized it wasn't because you were super over the top with the fire and the flaying speech." If that was the benchmark, Valerie supposed she could give up hope of him ever taking her seriously. "But I think, I do think I'd still have been here anyway. Even if."

"Yes? Why?"

A song erupted overhead before he could reply.

"Eesh!" Horton exclaimed, covering his ears. Valerie gaped at him.

"How in darkness are you able to hear a . . ." Then she realized that the tune was loud in a way no blood song would be, and came with lyrics, and realized what she was dealing with. "Diversion. Keep moving, be on guard, they're coming from somewhere!" No way to tell where with the music blaring, which was the point. At least it wasn't a romantic ballad. She had enough reasons to want to set Jack on fire without him handing her more fuel.

Horton clung to his blaster and opened his mouth to say something.

Whatever it was got lost in a scream as the floor opened under him. A tentacle burst through, sending pieces of tile flying everywhere as it pulled a slab of ground inwards. Horton lost his balance. Valerie got him by the sleeve before he vanished through the gap, realizing a fraction of a second too late that he wore a standard Ki-laar uniform, cheap and poor quality.

The fabric failed to bear his weight, ripping at the seam. She might still have broken his fall if she'd jumped after and caught him, but a second gray limb ripped through the portion of the floor she lay sprawled over, breaking it and upturning it and sending her falling off course.

There was, briefly, light. Then impenetrable darkness.

Valerie got to her feet. Staggered backward, or perhaps forward. Swore aloud, shuddering when the tendrils of void sneaking through the spelled boundary devoured the sound of her voice. The ground wasn't ground, merely an impression of solid matter, and therefore she hadn't hurt herself landing. She only felt like an idiot for forgetting that floor minus seven, right under where she'd been standing, was where the staff kitchen was located.

The staff kitchen, which housed a worldgate.

She'd grown used to traversing them, as much so as any frequent traveler who didn't routinely sift the Great Dark for extra parts. They no longer reduced her to a trembling wreck, although she'd never feel comfortable traipsing through them. This one, however, filled her with a specific brand of unease. Like the Ring of Tescara, that other artifact of magic left behind with Marabeth's demise, the gate radiated a loathing that felt a touch too personal.

Moreover, it felt angry. Volatile, like it might at any moment start crumbling or ignite.

Horton was either dead or hadn't fallen in along with her, else she'd hear him screaming. Then again, if he'd landed a great distance away, the dark might be swallowing his pleas for help. Valerie took a step, then another, until she realized that it didn't matter if she advanced or backtracked. She still couldn't tell one direction from the other. She wished she had a beacon, crystal shades, anything to see by. At this rate she'd tumble out of the wrong end of the black and find herself in Barashi, and that, shockingly enough, would be the lesser evil. How long did she have left until the first email sent? Three minutes? One? What would happen once the countdown hit zero?

However she did it, she needed to get out. Becoming the first person to learn the consequences of standing inside a gate while one of its physical tethers was annihilated was not a prospect she looked forward to.

She could hear Jack's song coming from . . . somewhere. She suspected that the only reason she hadn't gotten jumped yet was that he didn't know her whereabouts any more than she did his, as no light betrayed his presence. His song waxed and waned, at once a far-off murmur and intimately close. She remained on guard even as it started to seem like it floated further away from her. Distance had become such a fudged concept that she couldn't trust it for love or money.

The sudden surge of warmth at her back, the whisper of breath in her hair, the indelible impression of a body pressing into her, a rustling of fabric, a clanking of chains — all of those were ever so much more concrete even before Valerie's face exploded with pain. She reeled back, dizzy, seeing stars peppering the darkness, which was wrong in ways she couldn't readily describe.

"Going somewhere?" Jack drawled, and it was a good thing he did, because that way she knew where to return the blow once she got her balance back. She was off by a bit, as instead of his jaw, hit something which broke under her fist with a crunching like glass. In that time, he kicked her feet out from under her and seized her wrist.

He could see her. Somehow.

Moreover, he had no idea of what she had been cooking up in the comms room, else he wouldn't waste what little time they had settling over her as though he meant to be in that position for a while.

"Jack," she said, sensing his face closing in, thinking that darkness take it, it was worth a try. "I've just realized: I do love you. I always have."

There should be no way for a line like that to work still, after everything.

But it did. Gods above, it did. She would even swear that for a moment, Jack ceased breathing.

Valerie kicked him back and rolled out from under him, on her feet and running before he could remember what world he was on. She broke through an invisible limit, saw light, went blind, still didn't stop. The chances that she'd make it to the elevator were nonexistent. She could only run, run and hope she'd be able to see again in time to find a hard surface to shield under.

Jack crashed into her from behind, bringing her down like so many bricks.

Valerie hissed as she got turned around none too gently and her back slammed into the floor. His features were blurry, but she hazarded an educated guess as to how they looked. Irate. Embarrassed. Which would change, once his focus drifted off her, once he felt the magic around them rear its head and roar. Although considering that it was Jack, that focus was equally likely to remain glued on her for the next century even if the building came apart around them.

Or the rest of their lives; a shorter length of time, now that Valerie knew for certain that the ball had been sent rolling.

She could slightly make out the shape of his mouth. His lips moved in a way suggestive of shouting, but she had to strain to hear what he said over the dissonance erupting, the groaning of stone, the hectic pounding of her heartbeat. Blurry bright columns generated some distance away, and the space was growing swelteringly hot. Parts of it must have caught fire.

"Val. What did you do?!" Jack's distress would be one ray of light to take into darkness with her. As would the ashen look she saw on his face as her eyes became capable of filling in its outline. A trail of blood ran from his brow til halfway down his cheek, crossing over his eye. Valerie took note of the goggles hanging from his neck, one of the lenses crushed. That'd been how he'd been able to locate her in the gate, then. One last mystery solved. "What did you do?!"

She didn't answer. The staff kitchen was alight with magic, strings of it blasting in all directions. Feeling the ground under her shake, watching the walls shiver, listening to the indescribable clamor coming from one floor up, she surmised that something had already blown up, but it'd been a weaker discharge than predicted. It might be that a single message, even one sent to four thousand people, didn't suffice to put the gate out of commission.

Good thing that she'd sent twelve. One minute intervals — how many seconds left now, before the next?

"It's over," she said, addressing Jack but looking elsewhere. Energy pulses laid waste to everything from trays and tables to fridges, the strength of the magic appearing more — 'concentrated', felt like the best word to describe it — with each passing moment. A shape clad in white lay a distance away, fire clinging to it like a full bodied halo. At first Valerie thought it a Ki-laar, but no, Horton. She prayed that he landed one of the kinder gods as his guide. One that looked favorably upon curiosity and didn't mind answering forty million questions about whatever afterlife was reserved for humans.

"No." Jack was shaking his head, shaking her, pulling her to a stand. She allowed it all, unable to let herself be fazed by anything he did. She might be laughing. She felt like it, at least, all the more for how indignant he looked while screaming at her. "No, do you hear me? No."

A wave of magic rocked them both off their feet a second time. Concrete dust rained on them as they were flattened to the tiles, Jack on top of her, shifting, pushing the limits of how many limbs his upper body could accommodate and in the process becoming so heavy that Valerie wouldn't have been capable of shoving him off if there'd been any purpose in trying. He spun the tentacles over them both, providing cover from the falling rubble and diverting the larger pieces of stone. A barrier which held, for now, but wouldn't resist should the upper stories collapse on them.

They would. Far up to their left, Valerie glimpsed — and could only glimpse, as it was impossible to withstand the sight of it for longer than an instant — a swirling, incandescent circle. The eye of the storm, the spell network shrunken upon itself not so that it would conserve enough energy to survive, but so that it had more to lash out with. It might know that it was dying; if so, it had determined that its swan song would be one for the ages.

"I suppose this was always how we'd end," she mused, not fine with it, but willing to acknowledge that it wasn't a bad way to go out. It would accomplish what she'd set out to do. It would even wipe out her worst mistake alongside her. She'd been unknowingly prophetic, in what she'd said as a bluff back in the Rivers' house. Or maybe part of her had known all along that in the end they'd come together, but as fragments and ash.

Either Jack didn't notice the poetry, or it didn't resonate with him. He was still shouting, albeit in a way that suggested that he'd be hissing if he stood a chance of making himself heard above the noise.

"You honestly think that this is preferable to being with me?"

"Yes," she told him, point blank. She lifted her hand to swipe off the blood running over his eye, smiling as she did, knowing that it would send him fuming. Knowing that he already despaired because of how calm she came across, and that he'd do so all the more if he knew her eerie serenity to be genuine. "I did tell you. Multiple times. Not my fault that you refused to listen."

Valerie refused to hear or acknowledge whatever he shouted in response. She pictured trees and fields and sunlight. She watched Jack's face morph from apoplectic to daunted as his body shook with effort to uphold the protective barrier. Through the gaps between the threaded limbs she saw larger pieces of stone, furniture, a body or two, raining on them, very little of it intact and all of it on fire.

She pictured, bringing up a memory happy but tainted by hindsight, standing in a glass tunnel with the ocean around her and an arm slung over her shoulder, a hand pointing out where she was supposed to look — 'There, see the tail behind those rocks? Don't move too much, and it may swim this way.' She remembered their twin breaths fogging the glass as they stood side by side, staring at the water with mounting anticipation.

"I'm sorry," she said, unsure why she stated it aloud. The words weren't meant for Jack. About him, but not for him. She didn't feel sorry for him in the slightest. She lamented all that could have been and hadn't, wouldn't, ever. The tears wasted and the missed opportunities. A man who'd never existed except in lies. "I really am sorry that it was always too late for you to have been better."

Valerie would have liked to know how he'd reply, but the curtain fell on them too soon.