Immortal at the Edge of the World (39 page)

“It doesn’t look like he’s immortal,” Smith said, “and he doesn’t have your immunity, so we’re going to need you after all. But like I was saying, you needed another immortal in order to make a kid, which is why you haven’t made one in so long. Your offspring end up with a better-than-average immunity, but as far as we can tell a normal lifespan.”

“I haven’t made one in so long? I’ve never made one.” To Clara I said, “Can I come to birthday parties and stuff? This is all new to me.”

Smith sighed. He was fiddling with the television monitor feeds, tapping through images of the compound, the majority of which had nothing going on in them. “C’mon, where are they?” he said to himself, confirming that he was looking for something particular and not displaying a nervous tic of some kind.

“Who are you looking for?”

“Your friends. Ah, there they are.”

The satyrs and Mirella showed up in the center of one monitor. It looked like they had been led to the basketball court, which was a few yards from the indoor gym. Overall the compound was actually not a bad place, with decent food and recreational facilities, and the Isle of Mull was really pleasant, weatherwise, a lot of the time. These were the things I thought of as my friends were put into a rather obvious shooting gallery line.

“Now then,” Smith began, “to answer your unasked question, I
know
you’ve made children before. Biologically, it’s actually possible to trace the X chromosome in all human males back to a single parent, and it turns out the owner of that ur-chromosome is you. We found this out when studying little Paul’s genetic markers, which are telling the scientists that he should be about fifty-nine thousand years old. It turns out that a really, really, tremendously long time ago you and some immortal hottie made kids, and those kids had a better immune system than the local stock, which gave them a slight advantage, and boom. So congratulations. You’re not only a father, you’re
the
father. Mazel tov.”

“That’s impossible,” I said, because I couldn’t think of what else to say. It wasn’t impossible, it was just really hard to believe. I didn’t remember having children, but I didn’t remember much from the first few thousand years other than lots of blood and violence, so it was fair to think I could have had kids, and even could have had mates with long lifespans. No, it was
all
possible. Maybe I just wished I had gotten the information from a source I didn’t hate.

“Plenty of time for a dialogue on this later, Adam. I want to get to the important part here.” He tapped a button and one of the screens went from an outdoor shot to an indoor shot of a child’s playroom. Sitting at a little plastic table and working on what looked like a coloring book was my son. He looked like he was very intensely concerned about coloring inside the lines. “Here’s Paul. As I explained to his mother already, the room he’s in can be flooded with cyanide gas any time I feel like it with the push of a button. This is your incentive to play nice while you’re here.”

“How nice?”

“I am never going to be so stupid as to allow you free run of the place, but maybe in a year or two you can have a day without your hands behind your back. That’s probably the best I can offer right now. But the kid gets to live.”

“Doesn’t sound like a great bargain.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not Bob Grindel either. And I think we both know without a pixie flying around to pick locks for you, there isn’t going to be much you can do about it.”

Clara looked like she had been slapped. “What happened to Iza?”

“She’d dead,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

To Smith she said, “You did this?”

“Yeah, flamethrower. It really had to be done.”

For a second or two it looked like leaving Clara’s hands untied was a miscalculation. Had she leapt across the desk at that moment I wouldn’t have bet against her. “I’m going to kill you for that,” she said.

“I’m sure, honey,” Smith said. “Your boyfriend already
made
that threat, but okay. Can we continue? Super.” He turned back to me. “So Adam, there’s your incentive to play nice. And for proof that none of this is a bluff, please take a look at the screen with all of your friends on it. In a second I’m going to give the order and all of them will be shot where they are standing.”

“Why?” I asked. “You have me, what’s the point?”

“There’s your hot little goblin girl, for one. I don’t think letting her go is even a little bit safe. And I don’t know about you but I don’t want to deal with an angry satyr ever. By the way, a squad of satyrs armed with semiautomatic guns is a fantastic idea. I’m gonna steal it. Just not with any of these guys.”

“You know you don’t have to kill them.”

“You’re right, I don’t. But I want to, so I’m going to. This is the thing you’re not getting, Adam. I’m trying to point out to you that you’re not in charge and you aren’t going to get to be in charge, ever. You’re done, you lost, and you’re going to spend however much of the life you have left in this place, until we’re sure we’ve learned everything we need to learn about you. Then we’re going to kill you and we’re going to kill her. If you’re both super cooperative, we won’t kill Paul. This is not a negotiation, it is a display of power.”

Something was happening on the screen. In the foreground, one of the soldiers with a gun had gone from facing Mirella and the satyrs to facing the camera. He wasn’t looking
at
the camera, which was above him and to one side but at something that was out of view of the lens, in the foreground somewhere. It was clear from his expression he didn’t like what he was seeing.

“I don’t think you’re quite as in charge as you think you are, Mr. Smith,” I said.

Smith looked at the screen. “Don’t know what you mean,” he said, but then it was sort of obvious because the soldier wasn’t just looking off-camera he was shouting at what he was seeing. “Huh.”

Smith used one of the free screens to try and get an angle on whom the guy was barking at, but before he could, the man started firing his gun.

“Jesus Christ, what?” Smith said as he fumbled for his microphone. He opened the channel and immediately the room was filled with the sounds of screaming and rapid gunfire. Obviously the soldier we saw using his gun wasn’t the only one.

On the video screen the satyrs had fallen to their knees and crouched over to stay out of any stray gunfire. Mirella wasn’t crouching, and her hands were no longer bound. Assuming nobody got in her way she could probably reach me in a couple of minutes.

“
What’s going on out there?
” Smith shouted into his radio. We heard no coherent response to the question, only more shouting. It sounded like a war movie audio reel.

The smaller screens had all come to life under Smith’s direction, flipping rapidly from a number of benign indoor shots to rampant chaos and more than a little blood. If Smith had kept the entire military force on the base for our arrival it would have been about a hundred people, and from the look of it there was someone out there killing every one of them.

On the main feed at the basketball court, a striking, tall, pale white figure appeared on camera. Clara gasped. “What the hell is that?” she asked, more or less to herself. As tall as the satyrs but thin and muscular, the faery was just as alarming as it had been a day earlier. He had in his hand a silvery curved axe that was dripping blood.

Turning to his left and away from the camera, his movements became a blur when he spun his weapon around the empty air. It seemed like he was attacking nothing, except every second or two a flash came off the axe.

He was deflecting bullets.

Smith looked nearly as pale as the faery. “What the fuck is that thing, Adam?” he asked. “What did you invite into my camp?”

“That’s a faery,” I said. “And I didn’t invite him.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yep. Pretty scary, huh?”

“Yeah, he’s fucking terrifying. Now tell him to stop killing my men or I’m going to gas the kid.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Adam!” Clara gasped.

“No, I mean I can’t because I don’t know how. I’m not in charge of them. I don’t even know how to speak their language. They’re here on their own.”

“They?”

“I’m sure there’s more than one, listen to the audio.”

“Dammit, Adam, I am serious. Paul dies if you don’t—”

“I’m telling you,
I can’t
.”

On the main screen the faery had moved off camera, but the other cameras were still picking up plenty of evidence of a great battle that didn’t appear to be going in a positive direction for the humans. Mirella, meanwhile, was back on camera and cutting the zip ties off all the satyrs. She appeared to be giving them orders.

“You people need to learn to recognize a bluff, and I am not bluffing here,” Smith said.

He must have seen something in Clara because he pulled a gun from his pocket and put it on the desk. “Don’t even think about it, sweetie. I was doing you a courtesy by leaving your hands free. You wouldn’t stand a chance. Now tell him to stop the attack or I’ll gas Paul, and if you come at me I’ll blow your knees off before you make it over the desk. Clear?”

“She’s clear, but you’re talking to the wrong person,” I said.

“I already tried talking to you. I figured maybe a mother’s love would get through.”

I laughed. “It might, I don’t really know. The faeries aren’t under my orders, though. And I didn’t mean me. I meant her.”

I nodded at the screens without elaboration, because none was needed.
 

The red hair is always the first thing anyone notices, even among a bank of monitors showing rampant bloodshed. The owner of the red hair—sometimes we call her Eve—was standing in the room with Paul and talking to him quietly. He looked like he was happy to see her. I wondered if it was the first time they had met.

Smith basically forgot everything else that was happening in his world at that moment and fumbled for a cell phone, and then a speed dial option. “She’s here, initiate the protocol. Initiate the protocol!”

Whoever was supposed to answer this call wasn’t answering, though, even after he progressed to shouting. It didn’t much matter because regardless of what the protocol was, Eve was already gone, and Paul with her. About the only consolation was now Smith had new video footage of her vanishing act to look at.

“
Dammit
,” he said, smashing his phone against the wall. At that moment the door to his office was kicked in. Mirella burst through, her sword out and looking like it had seen some action in the past few minutes. Smith lunged forward for the gun on his desk . . . and came up empty.

It was in Clara’s hands.

Smith stepped back against the wall, as far away from both women as he could manage to get, and turned to the biggest immediate threat. “Think about this, Clara,” he said as calmly as he could.

It’s possible he had more than that to say. Maybe something vaguely persuasive about how useful he would be alive, or something about how killing a man changes you, and maybe a line or two about little Paul growing up with a killer for a mother. I’m sure it was going to sound logical. But Clara didn’t give him the time.
 

She fired, and it was a good shot, right in the center of the forehead. Mr. Smith stopped talking, and all the parts of him that didn’t end up on the wall fell to the floor under the desk.

“Fuck you,” Clara said under her breath.

*
 
*
 
*

Mirella cut me free of the cuffs, and a few minutes later we were all heading for the exit, with her in the lead and Clara trailing behind, still holding Smith’s gun. I felt like I should be talking to her about what she had just done, but I wasn’t sure this was a good time, with Paul still missing and her still being armed.

“What’s it like outside?” I asked Mirella as we ran.

“It’s very violent,” she said. “But those things don’t appear to want to hurt any of us, so mostly the violence is directed elsewhere. They’re faeries, aren’t they?”

“They are. Do you still think you can take one?”

She hit the exit door ahead of me. “No. But it would be fun to try.”

The carnage was just about over. There were parts of bodies all over the place, and a lot of blood, and I could hear someone crying for help somewhere, and something crunchy happening somewhere else. There was no gunfire.

There’s something especially unpleasant about standing in the midst of a fresh battle, especially when that battle primarily involved swords and axes. A war zone in a conflict settled with guns has a fresh gunpowder smell that overpowers a lot of the other odors, but while there was certainly a lot of that in the air, what was overwhelming was not that smell. It was odor of blood and the taste of iron. There was also the sickening warmth. Bodies that had been holding a temperature warmer than the air had been opened up, and now they were letting out steam and heating up the open compound.

It was horrible and exhausting—exhausting because of how tired I was of standing in the blood of other people. Pragmatically, I understood that this was a consequence of living this long, but emotionally every time I found myself alive at the end of one of these things I asked myself why any of it had to happen.

It was thoughts like these that caused me to abandon mankind and go off on my own in the wilderness somewhere for a century or two, but I couldn’t do that anymore because there was no wilderness left.