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DATE:29th 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 better option.
The terrace was cold relative to inside, which was the only good 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, the indifferent geometry of buildings that had outlasted everyone who'd built them.
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, something Mike could use, something that moved the missile situation forward. That was the plan. Simple enough that even I couldn't misplace it.
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 borrowed room upstairs. The Combine hadn't come up once in any productive sense.
Such a waste of time.
I wasn't even angry about it. That was the worst part. Just — tired. The particular exhaustion of someone who had aimed at one thing and hit everything adjacent to it.
"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. 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 — silver paper, thin, the expensive kind that burned slowly and tasted like they'd been made by someone who took the whole enterprise seriously. Certainly planets over the Mabo variety.
She lit it with a small silver lighter that matched the case.
She looked at 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, just the sound a body made when it was done resisting small things.
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 said. "I had it made specially."
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."
"Depends on your metrics."
"Bodies tend to be a fairly universal one."
"Then we're performing adequately."
She smiled at that — small, genuine, 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. The argument at the door. The dining room. The woman who ran away crying." She paused. "The thing upstairs."
I looked at her sideways.
"You're observant for someone on the sidelines," I said.
"I'm not particularly on the sidelines."
"No," I agreed. "You're not."
She knew too much for the posture she was wearing — the casual ease of someone passing through. The way she'd tracked my movements without appearing to, the way she'd come to this specific table at this specific moment. None of it was accidental.
Yet it was a bit incessant. Maia already tracked me and now her?
"So what are you?" I asked.
She didn't answer immediately. Finished her cigarette. Set it against the ashtray's edge and let it rest there, still burning.
Then she turned, reached up with one hand and held the side of my face — not hard, just present — and pressed her lips against the mask where my cheek would have been underneath. Warm. Brief. Deliberate.
She stepped back.
"I was sent by Secundo Manus," she said.
The city continued in the distance. Someone laughed inside through the terrace doors.
I looked at her.
"That's bold," I said.
"There are bombs in the premises." She said it the way you'd say there's a bar on the second floor. Informational. Unbothered. "Have been since this afternoon. The catering staff, mostly. Three of them aren't catering staff." She picked up 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. "You've told me you have leverage. You've told me who sent you. So what do you want — a negotiation? A warning? Are you here to move me off the board?"
"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. The kind of quiet that meant the answer was something she'd already decided to say and was choosing how.
"Because you're my idol," she said finally. Simply. Without embarrassment. "I've watched everything you've done since you decided to start. The Academy. The Don. Damos. The mall. Big Head. Even the warehouse yesterday." 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 people with powers who chose a side." She glanced at me. "You're something else."
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."
"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 exactly that," she said. "Because of what heroes became." Her voice had the quality of someone reciting a conviction rather than constructing an argument — something she'd arrived at long ago and stopped questioning. "Agencies. Contracts. Budgets. Political alignment. Heroes as brand assets for whoever funds them." She looked at the distant city. "The Legion. The Wondrous. All of them — bureaucracies with capes. You know what they don't have anymore? Principles. Actual ones. Not the ones printed on the recruitment material."
"And Secundo Manus fixes that?"
"The new Ultraman fixes that. A clean start. No agency politics, no inherited corruption, no Morgan Lefeil deciding who lives because it's strategically convenient." Her voice was steady and certain in the way of people who had found a framework that answered everything. I call that the fell for the propaganda stance."We go back to what it was supposed to be. Teams built on what people believed, not what they were paid."
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 stilled.
"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. No performance of bravery. Haah, why bother?
I looked at her for a long moment.
I let go.
She walked away quickly, back 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 upstairs situation, 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. The eagle-masked men at the entrance had rotated — different shift, didn't know my face. 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 — 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 — the driver had the posture of someone who'd been circling wealthy neighborhoods on the off chance. 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 particular stillness of someone locating the correct expression for a guest returning at this hour covered in dried blood, 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."
She verified it. The process took longer than necessary and involved a second staff member and a phone call I wasn't interested in. Eventually a key 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 with the particular posture of someone who had been standing for a while and had stopped pretending it was comfortable. Her clothes — 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."
"The bathroom is acoustically shielded," I said.
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 — insulated, sealed off, the city kept at a polite distance behind double-glazed windows.
"Alice was 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, with the measured tone of someone delivering information they'd decided to deliver regardless of the reception. "I saw her on the lawn. Crying, but breathing."
"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 to be anxious 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, fall, the full controlled collapse of someone whose body had been filing complaints since approximately midday and had finally submitted them all at once. 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 catering staff. 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 funding structures, and I would have complained about the thoroughness and used it 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, usefulness, the assumption that I was someone else's problem; that was gone now. I needed to be more careful. I couldn't keep depending on people finding me interesting enough to delay killing me. 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 hadn't wanted 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 one.
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 inside a Combine event. Using the chaos of the explosion as cover for something the Combine itself hadn't sanctioned.
I tried to think about whether I'd smelled anything in the building. Ghouls strong enough to survive a structural collapse would have had a particular quality to them. Hell 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 thread went nowhere useful tonight.
I found the remote and turned the television on and watched it without watching it, the way you did when you needed something in the room to be