It seems I’m maybe the only one who knows exactly what happened during this part of the story. Since Thoughtful 45 asked me, I’ll try to do my best. But keep in mind, the only thing I’ve ever written before was that short testimony to the Lords of the Inner Vent, and that didn’t go over very well.
I guess the best place to start is when the power went off in the lab. That was a relief! When Barnabas said the cage was like being caught in a bear trap, he wasn’t far off. Except it was like getting your head caught in a bear trap.
The guys on the inside could feel Barnabas and Ethan standing at their disparate locations. It’s a weird sensation. I’ve felt it before, when Whirljack and Blackjack emanate. I’m sure they’ve felt it when me and Owen emanate. It’s like being two places at once. It’s disorienting until you get used to it.
Barnabas was still in the council chambers. Lord Danak and Battlequeen Escharton were looking after him. Ethan was in Rivers’ experimental physics lab. The moment the cage failed, Lilith had the gun in hand. She had good reflexes.
“Put your hands up!” she cried. Lilith isn’t the most original person in the world.
Ethan went along with it, which made sense. So did Barnabas, which didn’t. At the same time, they raised their hands and they…
I remember exactly what I was thinking at that moment: This can’t be happening.
I could hear Cüinn’s voice inside of my head. Oh wow, he said. We’d assumed that brothers had to be in physical contact to re-emanate, but every time we’ve done it before, it was to recombine them into a single emanation. We’ve never actually tried something like swapping Whirljack and Blackjack with Owen and Lugh.
I was standing, my arms folded, in the council chambers, in front of a very surprised group of aristos. “Well, this makes life a lot simpler!” said Lord Danak happily. “The chain of command following from Prince Lugh is entirely unambiguous.”
That means he knew it was legal to take orders from me. Fucking bureaucrat.
I was here, and that meant Owen was in the lab with a nullet pointed at his head. “This is so totally a set-up,” I muttered.
It makes perfect sense, said Tarlach. I and I is in a life-or-death situation, and so he dispatches our survival instinct to deal with it. I assume that you can handle things much more effectively than Seth did.
Well, Owen wasn’t born yesterday, or this morning, for that matter. Unlike Ethan, he knows exactly what to do to gunpowder.
They won’t be using gunpowder, said Mickey. This isn’t Dalgherdia, where you can pay off at least a dozen people to get past security – I know, because they all work for Chase. Eirelantra is a tightly run operation. This station is full of rich, powerful people. How incompetent do you think my SSOps guys are anyway? Gunpowder would never have gotten past our chemical sniffers. Neither would several hundred of the most common combustibles. They must be using something pretty exotic.
The whole gun is laced with nul-matter, said Ethan. I’m not a complete halfwit.
Aw, shit.
I bolted through the enormous and elaborate high council doorway. I needed to get closer to the action, needed to hone in my perceptions tightly.
They stepped out the door and ran directly into Graysal’s team, said Cillian. Lilith is using Owen as a hostage. She says that if Esau dies, Owen dies.
We don’t know what the death of one brother would do to us. Possibly, it would kill the other, forcing a re-emanation. Possibly, it would make re-emanation impossible, keeping I and I in my body forever. If that happened, would Owen go inside – or would he be lost?
None of us wanted to find that out. I especially didn’t want to find that out. I considered my options. If I came at Lilith from above, I could possibly vaporize the molecules of the floor and get the drop on her. But if she’s holding the gun to Owen’s head, she might squeeze the trigger as a reflex. Ditto if I were to vaporize the floor below her. Furthermore, since Owen turned up, she had to be expecting me. By swapping emanations, I and I had blown the element of surprise – and a hell of a lot of his energy.
It’s easy, said Cillian. Go for the weakest part of the system.
I don’t have the skills.
I do, said Ailann. Draw from us.
I understood. I remembered how Owen neutralized Traeger at the mine. He had tapped into Ailann’s precision, Ailann’s knowledge of human anatomy. It would take so little to stop Lilith’s heart from beating.
I can’t.
Fucking kill the bitch! Lorcan screamed. What kind of degenerate are you anyway?
It isn’t even a final death, said Ailann. She’ll just fall back to her tree on Dolparessa.
No. There has to be another way. You know, if we’re having energy considerations, she must be as well. Patrick could barely operate this far out before Ailann became Archon. And she’s a much smaller tree than we are.
We’re two trees, corrected Ari.
So she probably couldn’t immediately heal a small but vital injury.
I see where you’re going with this, said Ailann.
I closed my eyes, sinking deep into Ailann’s branch, letting him guide me directly to the knowledge of where, in the right human wrist, the most vital nerve connections were. Focusing my will, I tore through them.
She dropped the gun, said Cillian. And Owen’s tackled her.
Uh oh, said Seth. Esau tried the fake Tara trick again, and Owen fell for it. That gave Lilith enough time to…aaaarrgh!
Kneed in a sensitive spot, said Cillian.
If it were up to me, gasped Davy, I would have designed that part of the anatomy entirely differently. Behind a protective carapace or something.
She’s kicked the gun over to Esau, said Cillian. Aw fuck!
Even I could feel it the gunshot, feel it because the wound in Owen’s leg was also a wound in I and I. I stumbled, clutching at the wall. The pain was incredible, far more than a flesh wound should’ve caused. But again, there were the intermittent flashes of white static. The nullet was disrupting the cohesion of the mothman.
The bitch hurt my Owen. I should’ve killed her.
I forced myself to keep moving towards the science suites. They’re on the run, said Cillian. They won’t get far with the station sealed off, and the corridors full of Lemkht’s troops.
Tara’s there now, the real Tara.
I stopped, slamming myself into the wall at the end of the corridor. Tara was there. Then there was no need for me. The world was red, like blood, bitter, like absinthe.
Jealousy, said Seth.
Would it help to know that the first thing Owen asked her was if you were okay? said Tarlach.
I was about two corridors away, above them. I passed the lift. Fuck that. Fuck waiting for the elevator.
I vaporized a hole in the floor and dropped several meters away from them. In an instant, five SSOps agents had rifles pointed at me. Okay, Mickey’s guys aren’t that incompetent.
“Your Highness, I’m so sorry,” apologized Lieutenant Graysal.
“No problem,” I waved him off, springing over to Owen.
“Medics are coming,” said Tara. “No need for a corkscrew.”
Owen, whispered Tommy, play for sympathy.
“Aw geez,” said Owen. “I’m fine. Well, not fine, but you know. It hurts like hell.”
“But we’re getting that static again,” I said, taking his hand. “Not good.”
The medics arrived. “Get the nullet out as fast as you can,” said Tara. “Don’t worry about the niceties. He can repair the damage himself once the nullet is out.”
“Hmm,” said the medic. “Not good. Judging from the shape of the wound, this was a frangible bullet.” She pulled out a tiny portable scanner. “I’m not picking up anything. Could it have dissolved upon impact?”
“It’s in there,” grunted Owen.
“This time,” I said numbly, “she did mean to kill you.”
“It’s nul-matter,” said Tara. “Our scanners don’t detect it – which explains how they smuggled the gun onto the station. Graysal, get me Clive Rivers. Explain the situation to him.”
“We can’t wait,” I said. “It’s disrupting I and I. The damage is a lot worse than it looks.”
“I can go by visual, but I’ll end up tearing him up a lot,” said the medic. “And I don’t even know how many fragments I’m looking for.”
“We’ll know when it’s gone,” I said. “We don’t have any other choice.” I took Owen into my arms to brace him for the excruciating pain.
“Lugh,” he said, “I’m so sorry.”
“I know. It’s okay. It’s my fault, too. I promised you that I would never let you be alone again, and look what happened.”
“This isn’t your fault,” said Owen. “This whole situation is fucked up.”
“We’ll find them,” I promised. “We’ll find them, and I’ll make them pay for hurting you. The station’s sealed. They don’t have anywhere to go.”
Lieutenant Graysal cleared his throat nervously. “I think they’ve left the station,” he said.
“Excuse me?” said Tara, in a voice that could freeze a supernova.
“We, ah, made one exception to the quarantine. The Battlequeen Emmeris, on special assignment from the Archon. The Captain said she had an urgent message she had to deliver personally, but no sooner did the ship dock than it pulled out again – and with no warning to docking control.”
“Graysal, you have an operative on that ship. Alert her.” Tara folded her arms, a decidedly evil grin upon her face. “I think Lilith is in for a little surprise.”