Harmony (22 page)
He had brought her here because of her lineage.
So she had been dragged from hell to start a new life in Japan, but for Miach, that wasn’t harmony either. Japan’s society, in its attempt to attain a kind of harmony, let itself be ruled by a strangling, enforced kindness that had produced a mountain of suicides.
Miach Mihie hated admedistrative society as much as she had hated Chechnya.
For Miach, Chechnya and Tokyo were just two different neighborhoods in the same hell.
Had Miach wanted to take us with her into death because she saw harmony on the other side?
“There are always monsters who find sexual attraction in children. These pedophiles among the Russian soldiers forced her to develop a consciousness out of hate, or rather something like a consciousness, and her newfound simulated consciousness despaired and chose death. I found it profoundly moving, and discouraging, that the decision to end one’s own life is a highlevel, conscious act, that only one with a conflicted consciousness can make.”
Dong!
Just then, the kettle my father was holding flew out of his hands.
It shot across the shop, barely missing the half-dozing shopkeeper before crashing into a pile of pots and pans.
I whirled around and spotted a man hiding beneath a large hat. He was about ten feet away, smoke still rising from the barrel of his gun. Vashlov. The gun was pointed toward us.
“Interpol,” he said, reaching in with his free hand to pull a business card from his breast pocket. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Dr. Nuada Kirie. I’m also pleased to inform you that you’re under arrest for the mass coercion of suicides.”
I took a step back, my hand reaching for the gun beneath my jacket.
“Whoa there, Tuan. You don’t move either. You’re related to the accused, after all.”
“Liar,” I said.
“No really, you are related to him. Or did you mean something else?”
I spat on the ground. “You’re not Interpol.”
“Oh, but I am. Look, it’s written on my card.” He waved his card in the air. Seeing the lack of reaction on our faces, he frowned. “Aw. And I thought my cards would be a big hit, what with AR off-line here.”
“You may have Interpol ID, but you’re working for Miach’s group, against my father. You’ve been at the center of this madness all along.”
“An intriguing deduction.”
I took another half step back, further into the shop. “You figured that by putting me into play you could get my father out in the open, away from the protection of the Next-Gen group.”
“Fascinating. And what was I going to do then?” Vashlov grinned, clearly enjoying himself. My right hand moved toward the holster again, and his gun jerked up to point straight at me. “I really wouldn’t do that, Miss. It’s not necessary. I’m only here to take Dr. Kirie into my custody.”
“I don’t suppose taking him back to Geneva is part of the plan.”
“Probably not. I am, as you say, with Miach Mihie.”
“What do you want?”
“Your father is the leader of the main faction within our group, you see.” The barrel drifted over to point at my father. “If I take him in, they’ll lose their focus—it will
weaken
them. The next day or two are of vital importance, you see. If I can keep him out of action just a little while, the balance of things will shift in a favorable direction.”
“And what direction might that be?”
“Well, we—”
While Vashlov was talking—a bit too involved with what he was saying—I had reached behind me with my left hand until I found a smallish metal object with a handle. Now I threw it at him as hard as I could. The pot smacked Vashlov’s forehead with a dull
thonk
and he lost his footing, falling over backwards. I almost laughed out loud at the unexpected efficacy of my attack.
“Dad! This way!” I pulled my father’s hand toward the night street, hoping to lose ourselves in the crowd.
“Stop right there, Kiries! Both of you!”
We had made it about thirty feet by the time Vashlov got to his feet, blood trickling from a gash in his forehead. Not that thirty feet is very far to travel when you’re a bullet. If there weren’t people on the road between us, we would have been dead already.
“Stay close to me,” I told my father.
He nodded. “We have to do something—”
I pulled him by the hand again, pushing our way farther through the crowd. Our progress was made more difficult by the fact that I had no idea where we were going. If I had my AR on, and it was linked up to StreetWatch, I would know where every side street led to before we got to it. Running in an unfamiliar place in an unfamiliar land without AR was like running a race blindfolded.
“I said stop!” I heard Vashlov shouting behind us.
Sorry, pal
.
We ran ahead, dodging a cart filled with fish for making
masgouf
. This place was chaos, filled with the smells of nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon, cumin seeds, perfume, and the bodily odors and bad breath of people without the benefit of WatchMe. Most of the men here were construction laborers who commuted into the medical industrial complex sector to work on the next giant building site. I looked behind me as we ran, but without AR, I had no idea where Vashlov might be hiding in the crowd.
“Sorry!”
We’d reached the restaurant where I’d eaten earlier that evening. I turned, pulling my father along behind me. Ignoring the accented complaint of the proprietor we ran through the shop, kicking through two sets of doors until we were outside again in an alleyway behind the restaurant.
Vashlov was standing no more than ten feet away from us, off to one side, facing right toward us.
In a moment of frozen time, Vashlov and I lifted our guns to point at one another.
Two shots were fired.
One from my gun.
One from Vashlov’s.
Both of them hit their targets.
Target No. 1: Vashlov’s chest.
Target No. 2: My father’s chest.
“Dad!”
My father had stepped out in front of me, between me and the barrel of Vashlov’s gun. As if he were trying to make up for thirteen years of lost parenting with a single act. And now he was dead. I put my hand to his neck but couldn’t get a warm pulse anywhere.
I had no tears. Inhuman, you think?
It was like the thirteen years had erased the father from my father. My sadness was a far gentler, quieter thing than what I had felt at Cian’s death or even at the first “death,” which had been Miach’s. In thirteen years, my father had become a stranger, with nothing to identify him to me, save the unseen, encoded ties of blood between us.
But it hadn’t been that way for him, had it. He had abandoned me and gone off with Miach to his own medical mecca. Yet he had still loved his daughter, even as I felt hardly anything for him at all. Perhaps his stepping in front of me had not been a conscious act but a reflexive one encoded in his DNA. Maybe that was the love I lacked—the love for one’s family.
My father had died for me, so now the only way I could repay him was with gratitude.
“Thank you.”
I reached down and smoothed my father’s half-opened eyelids shut, then stood, listening to the wheezing sound coming from Vashlov’s windpipe. He would be joining my father soon, but if he were still alive, I had plenty of things I wanted to ask him first.
“My father is dead. I hope you’re happy.”
“Works for me,” he said quietly. “I was hoping to abduct— but death is a big win too. Thanks to you sniffing around we managed to drag him out. Finally got Nuada…They’ll have a hard time putting things together now. Very hard. General chaos will take care of the rest.”
“What is it that you want?”
“What do we want? To build a new, post-chaos world. To bring an enduring harmony…”
There was something very disturbing about a group claiming they wanted peace when they had just plunged the world into darkness with a wave of suicides, and then, in the greatest act of terror in history, demanded the survivors kill each other.
“I don’t see a whole lot of harmony out there right now.”
“Things will settle down, as they must. This chaos is merely a step on the path toward peace. Miach Mihie has shown us the way. She is our prophet. She has a vision for mankind…the right path for us to take. You know her from when you were a child. You know that she can see what is yet to come.”
“So she had to make six thousand people try to kill themselves for this future?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s not very convincing.” I grabbed him by the collar. “Where’s Miach?”
I could see blood seeping from Vashlov’s chest with every breath. He had lost a lot already. I must’ve hit a big artery or vein in there. Some of it was getting into his lungs, making it hard for him to breathe. His voice was a whisper, forced out through something that sounded just like I imagined a death rattle would sound.
“The suicides and the threats are just…the catalyst. Things are already in motion. But if you must know, Miach told me I could tell you where she was—but you have to promise to shoot me in the head if I tell you.”
Vashlov’s lips thinned and he formed a warped smile. For a moment, I hesitated.
A pleading look came into his eyes. “This really hurts. It
hurts.
Th-this is what pain feels like. WatchMe and medcare, you bastards, you sure did a fine job of keeping me in the dark about this sensation. Doesn’t that piss you off, Miss Kirie? Please…”
“Fine. Deal.”
I put the barrel of my gun to Vashlov’s forehead and pulled back the hammer. It clicked into place with a satisfying metallic sound and Vashlov breathed out with relief.
“Chechnya. Check with the Anti-Russian Freedom Front in Chechnya.”
“What, Miach is
there
?”
“You’ll just have to go see for yourself.”
Vashlov nodded to signal he was ready.
Something about the way his eyes looked through me made my finger pause, motionless, on the trigger. Here, beneath the rapidly darkening Iraq sky, I was about to kill someone for the first time in my life. Right here, in this very moment. I was making the same decision that had been forced on billions of people across the world.
This would free me from having to make that choice in a few days, I realized. It felt like cheating. The guy was begging me to do it, and I would even be avenging my father’s death. You couldn’t make up a better rationale than that. I steadied my grip on the gun and felt intense self-loathing.
A thought occurred to me. Why had my brain developed this function it was expressing now? In what environment would self-loathing give me an evolutionary advantage?
I pulled the trigger.
