The Hallowed Cure, page 17
The fact that he’d tacked a sir onto the end of his sentence suggested he might have realized just how badly he’d overstepped by lying to my face. Then again, no one would ever accuse Carl Bennett of having an overabundance of common sense. The human workers at the fishery had made him their representative mainly because he was great at stoking fear and yelling a lot.
“Want to guess how many of my fellow soldiers ended a battle with a living Mute with only a broken leg?” I now spoke so quietly, I knew Bennett strained to hear me. “If you like, I’ll introduce you to my old friend Kodai. He’s a veteran, like me. We’ll ask him about what it’s like to fight Mutes.”
Bennett frowned. “Respectfully, sir, the war was—”
“Shitty for all involved,” I interrupted, making my voice loud again.
“I killed a whole bunch of Mutes, and they ate a whole bunch of people. Everyone did a whole bunch of really fucked-up things some of them now regret, but that was more almost two years ago now. I have the security footage from the dustup between your boys and Mister Chen’s Mute. If we all watch it together right now, who will we see starting the fight?”
I didn’t have the security footage, but Bennett didn’t know that.
Yet he paled visibly, and I walked around my desk and fixed him with my obviously glowing green eyes. That shut him up. He’d tried to bullshit me and been caught doing it, and for the first time, he actually looked afraid.
“The Mutes have changed,” I reminded Bennett calmly. “They’re peaceful now, the war’s over, and I’m tired of dealing with this petty bullshit every day. Either you find a way to keep your people from randomly attacking Mutes and getting their asses handed to them, or I’ll find someone who will.”
“You always take their side!” Carl protested.
Yet his posture was sagging, his protest token rather than heartfelt. And he was right, technically, about me often taking the side of the Mutes. Of course, the reason I did that so often was because after we tried to reintegrate the Mutes, the average human turned out to be a real asshole.
“I’m taking no one’s side,” I assured Bennett, which was true enough. “I’m telling you to get your people to stop randomly attacking their co-workers and fellow citizens of Dios, or I’ll find someone who can.” To ease the sting, I turned on Michael. “And, Mister Chen?”
He perked up. “Yes sir?”
“Kindly remind your people not to go walking around the city in the middle of the night, alone. Miss Alexander might enjoy spreading her tale about human and Mute coexistence in the paradise of Dios, but you know differently, don’t you?” I glanced at Bennett. “We all know differently.”
Bennett scowled. Chen looked perturbed. Yet neither of them immediately contradicted me, which gave me hope I’d finally gotten through to at least one of them. Now to patch things over.
“Bad blood doesn’t go away overnight,” I said calmly. “Of course your people are still pissed at Mutes, Carl.” I used his first name to disarm him. “They all lost family in that war. That’s still no excuse to attack random Mutes who weren’t around then, people who had nothing to fucking do with it.”
I turned to Chen. “And sure, your people are free to move about the city. Technically. But we both know your people risk getting attacked by assholes any time you wander around alone outside your homes. So remind your people to be more careful. No going out alone at night, no baiting the human workers, and no acting like we’re all friends. We’re not, not yet.”
“Perhaps we should be,” Chen said calmly, in his dull monotone.
“Life sucks,” I reminded Chen. “You and I can’t fix that, at least not in eight months.”
“This still doesn’t help my two men in the hospital,” Bennett growled.
I turned on him. “That’s not my job. It’s yours. Also, maybe remind your people not to pick a fight with someone who can rip their legs off and shove them down their throats. I’ve seen what Mutes did in the war, and trust me when I say whoever broke your boy’s legs was exceedingly kind.”
Bennett scowled, but he didn’t argue or fight me any longer.
Mutes were rarely the instigators in fights these days. They couldn’t afford to be, not without the entire city turning on them.
“Anything else?” I asked, looking between then. “Or are we done co-existing for the day?”
Neither man spoke. Finally, Bennett looked at Chen. “Outside of the job, you keep your freaks away from my people.”
Chen clicked away. “Outside of the job, we have no interest in your people.”
Bennett glowered at him. I gave him the gentlest shove I could manage with my enhanced strength and pointed out the door. “Out.
Both of you. Don’t make me call you in here again.”
Bennett’s lip curled with genuine disgust, yet he left without argument. I doubted I’d done anything but temporarily placate the man, but buying days between explosions of civil unrest seemed to be my life these days. I honestly missed being in a war. At least, back then, I could just shoot the assholes causing me trouble and get on with my fucking life.
Chen was almost to the door when I stopped him. “Michael, wait.”
Bennett wasn’t in the room any longer, and I knew he’d likely wonder if Chen took too long to emerge. We couldn’t speak at length, but I still had something I needed to say.
“I wasn’t joking about keeping your people off the streets after hours,” I said sternly. “I hate that it’s necessary, and I know it’s entirely undeserved, but we’re barely keeping old grudges from blowing up in our face as it is. If we can’t make this fishery thing
work, I don’t think anything will, and Caitlyn’s running out of ideas.
So just help us, all right? We all want the same thing. You folks living normal lives.” I gripped his shoulder and gave it a good, reassuring squeeze. “It’s just going to take a bit longer to make that happen.”
Chen bowed low at the waist, a stiff yet respectful gesture he’d retained from before he’d mutated. He rose and said nothing, yet I took his gesture as both understanding and acknowledgement.
Unlike Bennett, Chen would do his utmost to keep things calm.
Chen’s future and the future of every Mute still alive depended on us successfully finding a place for them. We couldn’t change the people who’d mutated back, but we could stop them from living like fugitives and outcasts. Or so Caitlyn still believed, somehow.
After a very long day that started early, it was late afternoon at last. Once again, I’d stemmed off a burst of violence for another few days. Maybe a week. Who knew? I sure as hell didn’t when I took Caitlyn’s offer to take this insane job.
Still ... I didn’t regret doing it. Maybe I should, but I didn’t. I doubted there was more than a few people in Dios who would have kept things from boiling over this long, and I felt I still owed my city a little more ... if for no other reason than for all the killing I’d done in the war and after.
I’d had eight months to decompress from almost two years of warfare and fighting, and four years surviving on the streets before that. Needless to say, I knew now that constantly fighting not to die had skewed my perspective on a lot of things. I still only had six years of life left at the rate my panacea-poisoning was going—
nothing had changed there—but the past eight months, other than the job, had been blissfully free of getting shot at or blowing things up.
Also, I’d actually gotten kind of good with my sword. And with that thought, I knew what I needed to do to close out my day, to center myself before I headed home. Sword practice.
“Nine, administrative office lock, enable anonymous mode.
Windows opaque.”
The door to my office locked. The windows went dark. No one save Caitlyn or someone with a similarly high position in Cloud Nine
Engineering could open my door, and if anyone inquired as to my whereabouts, they’d simply be told I was unavailable.
I turned to the side wall of my office. “Nine, open the dojo.” I always had to begin any sentence with instructions with “Nine” ...
otherwise, the AI wouldn’t know I was talking to it. Also, it kept it from doing things that were anatomically impossible when I cussed out the air between meetings.
A previously invisible door clicked open in the wall just behind my desk. I shrugged off my fine jacket as I walked over, folded it neatly, and set it on the desk. I next undid my tie, set it aside, took off my cufflinks, stripped off my shirt, and finally stripped down to my boxers. The clothes I put on every day were nice, but they weren’t made for swinging around a sword.
Despite my hesitance to take up the blade almost eight months ago, I actually really liked swinging around a sword. I still missed Dismay, my old hand cannon, but it was nice to know I could cut a subway car in half without shaving months off my life.
Also, though I hadn’t told anyone, I liked following Captain Sato’s path. There was just something cool about swinging around a gleaming laser sword. Though once Mia watched me one day and reminded me I was unconsciously making swooshing noises, I cut that shit out.
I walked into my private dojo—modeled on the one Camilla Lincoln, Lincoln’s wife, kept in their home in Presea—and walked to the wall where a number of swords hung reverently on hooks. I’d started collecting swords in my spare time, just because I had a shitload of money after getting my pension back and nothing I needed to buy. I’d learned in the past eight months that there were a huge number of swords out there in Dios, all cool in their own way.
The sword at the top of the rack, of course, was Savagery, my new Hallowed blade. While it wasn’t a perfect copy of Despair, Hahna’s sword, it was every bit as powerful and deadly, and I had no doubt Hahna would approve if she ever returned to Dios. Savagery could hack through a building, though sadly, I hadn’t had a real opportunity to do that the seven months since I got her.
I’d considered a less ominous name for my new weapon for a few weeks, but eventually, I settled on something totally over the top, mainly because Caley kept giving me shit for naming my old gun Dismay. She’d always said his name sounded weak, which pissed me off, given he could incinerate a Mute horde.
I liked the name Dismay—it just fit, in my head—but I had to admit it did sound a lot less impressive than Despair, Massacre, and Wulver, whatever that was. Some old Scottish thing. After all the shit Caley gave me about naming my old weapon, I’d been this close to naming my new sword Big Dick God Raper, just to piss everyone off.
Mia talked me down. Savagery was our compromise, and it was a pretty cool name for a sword. I reverently retrieved my Hallowed blade from its position at the top of the rack and walked to the center of my private dojo.
Holding my sword, I took a moment to center myself with breathing exercises. Despite how demented she was in most other aspects of life, Sara Caley was deadly serious when it came to teaching sword fighting. She’d trained me brutally over the past seven months.
I still didn’t fight nearly so gracefully as Captain Hahna Sato—I doubted anyone still on Earth could fight like her—and I didn’t fight as brutally as Tony Frost, the Armsman, had before Lindsay Griffyn blew him up with a bunch of missiles. I didn’t even fight like Caley, with her Berserker rage.
But I fought well, or so Caley had eventually admitted one night after I got her really drunk on Bismark. She was actually impressed with how fast I’d come along, though she almost kissed me when I told her it was just because she was a good teacher. Thankfully, Mia didn’t hear about that. If I’d let Caley manage to kiss me while drunk, Mia would have gleefully given me grief about it for years.
Once I finished with my breathing exercises, I worked through my forms. It was basic stuff Caley had taught me in the first few weeks we trained together. It wasn’t flashy, but I rarely started flashy.
I liked how natural the movements felt now, movements that had felt stiff and clumsy before. I used a sword like part of my body now, not a blunt instrument, though Caley still often took me down when
we went at it with practice blades. Then again ... I’d taken her down a few times too.
Once I was warmed up, I spoke again. “Nine, alley simulation.”
My dojo might look old-fashioned, but it was as far as it could be from that in the center of Cloud Nine Engineering. It supported a full holo-projection suite, one even more advanced than those Cloud Nine had used to train us all three years ago before the war. In another moment, I was no longer in a dojo, but in a grimy alley with a bunch of black-cloaked ninjas surrounding me with swords.
These were, of course, human ninjas, not Mutes. I never fought Mutes in my simulations. We were all supposed to friends now, but more than that, seeing Mutes in combat mode always put me into a lousy mental state, somewhere between rage and sadness.
Fighting Mutes wasn’t at all good for my mental health, and Mia had made me promise to focus on that. On staying positive, despite the fact I was going to die. Even so, I was lucky.
Others who’d been in the war had a condition called PTSD, which made sense given all the shit we’d seen. I’d been spared that, for the most part.
Still ... I didn’t have to know what fighting Mutes did to me to avoid it. I didn’t need that in my head. So I fought humans today, as I had every day, even if they were virtual constructs ... or in this case, a bunch of black-cloaked ninjas.
Because I had a sword now. Why wouldn’t I want to fight a bunch of fucking ninjas? I even cued up some Taiko drumming Prescott had recommended to me to set the mood.
A scant sixty seconds later, eight virtual black clad ninjas were down without a scratch on my virtual persona. They all fought like rank amateurs, of course. I was still warming up. I took on two more waves and bested those easily, then decided it was time to crank up the difficulty.
“Nine, move to Level 2.”
This time, the ninjas wore red, and they tossed a few throwing stars as they approached. I easily dodged everything, but it got me working other parts of my body. The sword fighting began in earnest, and this time, I got struck six times before I took them all down.
For a normal human, one or two strikes from the swords these ninjas wielded would be fatal, but I was Hallowed. In a real fight, my body would regenerate. Still, six strikes was more than I’d taken yesterday, when I only took three. Bennett’s dickishness had really thrown me off.
“Nine, again,” I ordered.
This time, I took five cuts before I took down all the ninjas, and even a virtual ninja star to the face, which would have been painful but non-fatal, for me. I’d thought I’d find balance just by breathing and slashing, but I was already worrying about what Bennett’s assholes might do next and all the attention on this new effort to integrate Mutes into Dios.
I was still nervous. I had more energy and aggression to work out, and I knew just how to do that. It was time to give myself a real challenge and take down a truly threatening opponent.
“Nine, load Frost. Set to Level Three and maximize aggression.
Make me work for it.”
The alley faded, replaced by a perfect replica of the huge gymnasium where I’d once trained with Mia Ashford, Jeffrey Lincoln, Kiara Prescott, and that absolutely unbelievable asshole, Malcolm Knox. I’d considered having Nine load a Knox Clone for me to slice into pieces, but I suspected that would only feed my anger instead of ending it.
Knox didn’t deserve the slightest consideration from me, even being called up as a virtual simulation. He was the one person I’d never regretting killing, even in my darkest moments since the war. I didn’t like that part of me, the part that still seethed with murderous rage every time I thought about Mia’s limbs exploding, so I avoided calling that up.
Also, given how good virtual Tony Frost was with a sword, I enjoyed sparring with it despite the fact that I always lost. Cloud Nine had gathered countless hours of data on all our missions during the war, and could thus reasonably simulate any of my old Hallowed allies from back in the day. Dueling a simulation of Tony Frost felt like a chance to learn what had made the Armsman so feared across Dios.
The Frost Clone appeared across from me wielding Massacre, Tony’s massive two-handed blade. It charged the moment it appeared. It didn’t look like Frost, of course—it was just a faceless shadow in gray fatigues—but it moved like Frost. Cloud Nine’s AI could simulate anyone from the war if I wanted to spar with them.
I charged the Frost Clone as aggressively as it charged me. I met its first swing with my own. Nine had tuned the impact for Hallowed muscle, and stopping the clone’s blade challenged even my impressive strength. Still, I avoided feeding my power into Savagery.
I hadn’t actually hit Frost’s sword with my sword, of course. I’d hit a metal bar extended from a robotic mobile apparatus built into a track on the roof. The expensive metal implements Nine wielded to simulate swordplay couldn’t withstand Hallowed weaponry, and I didn’t want to wreck my new toys.
Frost drove on relentlessly, and swing after swing challenged my ability to balance, guard, and stay alive. If he hit me, I’d bleed and suffer broken bones before my Hallowed regeneration kicked in, but knowing I could actually bleed ensured I paid attention during the fight. And I did hold him at bay despite his aggressive strikes.
After that, I went on the offensive. I swung with wild yet controlled rage, just like Caley taught me. The Frost Clone parried or ducked each strike, but at least it stopped pushing me back. Sweat poured down my body as my arms and legs ached with the exertion, but rather than growing more angry and worried, I felt something inside me grow calm.
Something about focusing on my swordplay calmed me far more than firing a Barghest cannon ever had. The whole world slowed.
Holy shit! I was in the zone!
I’d only had this happen a few times when I got truly into this, an almost zenlike state of being that Caley described as her “happy place.” For once, I was completely centered and utterly focused on my blade. I could see where Frost’s strikes would go before they came.
