Ragnarok (37 page)

The fear crawled like ants up his spine. He tried to open his eyes again. He expected blood and fire, but he didn't fear blood and fire. He opened his eyes, and he saw water pouring in. He breathed it into his lungs and vomited into the water around him, then inhaled his own vomit. He was drowning.

“The first day is the worst. After your first year of it, you'll hardly notice it anymore.”

 

 

S
ALVAGE
. T
HE
word kept going through Violet's mind. She would salvage what she could. In time she might be able to speak casually to Vibeke. She might be allowed to stay in the ravine. Or they might not even allow her that, she thought, and another sob hit her from inside.

Her eyes stung, either from the lack of sleep or the tears, or both. She wanted to know where Vibeke spent the night. It seemed important to know.

She hated herself for wondering. All the reasons for self-hatred came pouring out of the back of her mind. Not just for the horrible climax but for all she'd done before. The jokes, the constant pressure, begging. What the hell had she meant to do? To wear Vibs down? To erode her until she did what, fucked her out of pity? She couldn't believe herself. She couldn't reconcile her own name with the pointless mistreatment of a friend, Vibeke of all people. What seemed so important to her felt like nothing compared to what she'd risked with every stolen touch. Like she'd traded her closest friend, so much more than a friend, for a second's indulgence of petty lust. The clarity of it all was so sharp it was a cutting edge, a slice into her skin. She felt tears and snot covering her face.

There was a knock on the door. Violet was suddenly afraid of who it might be. Balder to tell her she was kicked out. Alf to tell her something even worse. “We kill rapists,” Vibeke had once said. Violet was very aware the knock on the door could have been her executioner. She sprang upward and sat up in Vibeke's bed. She quickly skipped over to her own and wiped off her face. At that point she was ambivalent toward death. If that's what was coming for her, she'd let it.

“Come in!” she called.

The door opened, and Vibeke appeared. Her cheek was healed, but her eyes looked like Violet's felt.

“You don't need to knock on your own door, Vibs.”

“It seemed right.”

Nothing was right. Violet averted her eyes and looked at the floor. At the tiny blue and black pattern in the carpet.

“I told Dr. Niide it was a sparring injury.”

Violet knew it was a statement for convenience, not shame or any attempt to protect her. “Did he believe you?”

“I don't think so. I'm not a good liar when I'm not on duty. He probably peeked at the memory.”

Vibeke sat on her bed and felt it with her hand. It was still warm. She knew Violet had slept there.

“I'm sorry, Vibeke.”

“I know.”

No sense of forgiveness presented itself to Vibeke. Violet was unforgivable. If she begged for it, she vowed to slap her. If she even said she was sorry again, she would kick her damn face in.

“This doesn't have to be the end of… everything,” whispered Violet. “We can salvage it. Maybe we can even stay on the same team. If we just need some time apart, then—”

“I don't want to lose my friend and my team on the same night, Vi. Not over this,” she said despite herself. She sounded too lenient.

“I'm so, so sorry.”

“Stop.”

“I'm just—”

“I swear to fucking God if you say ‘sorry' again, I'll bash your goddamn fucking teeth in.”

Vibs was certain that was less lenient. Violet felt relieved at the threat, like Vibeke was still herself. Violet's face must have betrayed a trace of relief because Vibeke made sure to erase it.

“You retarded fucking cunt,” she muttered. Even that wasn't enough. “You ruined
everything
.”

Vibs almost felt guilty for it, kicking her while she was down. Almost. She shook her head. She felt angry at Violet for just taking it, for looking down at the floor like a guilty dog. She wanted a fight. She wanted to drag Violet to the mat and pound her into putty. To break her arm if she tried to punch back. Or hang her up on the range and whip her. She erased the latter thought from her mind because it inspired something else that she absolutely couldn't be thinking.

Violet felt on the verge of tears again. She had said “salvage.” The only word that was running through her mind. She had nothing else to offer. It all tumbled in her head. They sat in silence for too long.

Vibeke wanted to sweep it all under the mat. She'd called her names and said her threats, and it did nothing to make her feel the least bit better. She had to move on.

“We have a mission. Alf said it would be a test of us together. I think we should stick to it. See what we really can salvage.”

“I agree.” Violet snapped it up. God did she agree.

Vibeke was disgusted by her supplication. She still wanted Violet to fight back. To fight back so she could hurt her more. Grab her breast and wrench it as hard as she could and see how she felt assaulted. She quickly pushed the thought away, proud she'd never do such a thing, even to her, even then. And pushed it away fast because, of all possible things, she didn't want to think about her hand on Violet's chest. Nothing sexual could ever happen between them now. Not even a wink.

“It has to be on my terms. We work together. Nothing more.”

“No, no, nothing,” she agreed, and suddenly hated herself for her groveling candor. She hated groveling, apologizing. She hated herself for wanting to so badly. Though she hated herself for other things much more.

They sat across from each other on their beds for several minutes, soaked in hate and regret, tired with it. More tears escaped Violet's eyes, and Vibeke saw them shimmer. And she felt for a second like hugging Violet tight and stroking her hair. Beyond all the hatred she
could muster, she loved Violet more than anyone else alive and
couldn't stand to see her so hurt. The conflict was unbearable. She had to get out of there, to kill someone. To hunt again. She needed a mission.

“Wipe off your eyes,” said Vibs. “Let's go kill Wulfgar.”

 

 

“W
HAT
ARE
your names?” Veikko asked. There was no response. Veikko wanted to talk. Anything to distract from the fear, from the nausea and pressure in his head. And in his heart, he feared he'd have a heart attack. It had beat so hard for so long. How long had he been there? It felt like decades. He suspected it was a day.

“Do you even have names?”

“Yes.”

Veikko tried to open his eyes again. He could make out a red carpet. Black walls.

“There you go. Get some conversation started. How's your mother?”

No reply.

“You're bullies, you know. Overgrown bullies.”

“Valhalla is an overgrown bully. We are the schoolmasters.”

“That's great, Professor Geki. That's really great. Why don't you teach me a few things?”

Silence.

“How do you do that disappearing trick?”

Silence, a wave of fear.

“Or your cloaks, what's up with that? It's
so
1600s.”

Nothing.

“Okay, how about why you didn't care… that a doomsday device made it to Earth? You care about one nuke, but you let the Ares come back to Earth, an indestructible doomsday machine.”

“A hundred doomsday machines exist on Earth, ten thousand nuclear warheads. We only care that they are not used, as you used one.”

“You don't care about shit,” Veikko managed to laugh. He tried opening his eyes all the way. He saw the room and the two Geki inside it. He tried to remember why he was there.

“Balder said… you used fire?”

Silence. Fear.

“So what is it, some kind of plasma lattice? Ionization fields? Do you call it down from a satellite, or is it under your cloaks?”

“Implants.”

“God! You're so fucking forthcoming, I love it!” Veikko laughed. He wondered if he was going insane. The fear stabbed him for laughing, and he wept.

“Are you male? Female? Anything?”

Silence.

“Cuz you know, I'm free later if you're not doing anything. Thought we could hang out, maybe get some dinner. I could tell jokes, you could send the waiters into agony and terror, make a night of it, you know?”

He opened his eyes again. The black room. No Geki.

“It's fucking rude! To leave when someone's fucking talking! God, you're so fucking rude!” He laughed again and no longer questioned that he was going insane. “Does that fear crap wear off on people? Cuz if I scare everyone when I get outta here, I'm gonna be pissed.”

 

 

T
HE
POGO
crossed Mishka's net. She was alerted instantly, awakened by the system through her link.

The pogo was black. It looked like a common driver's vehicle. Fake tags, fake licenses, only Mishka knew they were Valhalla's. She knew she should have killed them there and then, but the alert showed only two people. Likely a passive observation mission. If she waited and followed them, she could get superior intel on her employer's lair. Vibeke could grant her one last advantage before her death. She ejected her eye and sent it flying toward the pogo.

It arrived as the pogo landed in the ruins, unchallenged.
Wulfgar's fortress was nothing but decayed and collapsed buildings on the surface, any weapons would have given it away as something more. Surely the surface was monitored, but that was of no concern to the Valkyries. They were content to walk straight to the front door.

But there was no front door. They sent their Tikaris to scour the small island for any sign of an entrance, but for forty minutes they found none. Nothing came to oppose them. If the surface was monitored, nobody cared. They began to think they might get a free element of surprise. Violet cracked her repaired knuckles and tried not to think of the way Niide had stared at her as he fixed them.

The Tikaris found their way over the crumbling concrete and finally came to an eroded maw in the rock under one of the abandoned concrete towers. The Tikaris sensed warm air coming from the mineshaft, moist and laden with human breath. There were men inside but not near the entry. They set their suits for dull illumination and headed inside.

They were both completely at ease. On familiar ground, the ground of a mission. The night before didn't exist. They felt nothing for or against each other, only complete focus. So complete Violet couldn't even feel the relief it gave her, the absolute calm as she monitored the surroundings for threats.

At first there was nothing but rock, jagged teeth of coal around the sides of the tunnel. Graffiti marred the walls, somewhere between obscene and grotesque, all abstract and sloppy yet somehow deeply offensive to the eye and the mind.

They came to a sharp drop-off, an ancient vertical esophageal passage with a brand new plastic spiral staircase. The Tikaris scanned for traps as they headed downward. Several small rooms branched off, and within them the Tiks could see men, all men at work. As light from the doors took over, they dimmed their suits and went into full quiet mode, passing unseen by the chambers of what appeared to be file clerks and hackers in their offices. Deeper down were chambers containing apparent collections of meat and hair, doors emblazoned with human teeth, and a dim hallway full of what appeared to be men savagely gangbanging a stuffed giraffe.

They reached the bottom of the staircase and found a constricting aperture on the coal ground. It exuded the stink of a crowd on the other side. Luckily a quick look around the edges of the aperture revealed the start of an open-air duct system. They crawled inside behind their Tikaris and looked down through the grates into the massive room below.

It was a bulbous space with a wet floor and raw coal walls, wrinkled from mining and filled with tables and men, all eating. The cafeteria. The stink of the men mixed with the urungus odor of bad cooking. The humidity of the room was overwhelming even from above. The men below bickered and spit as Violet and Vibeke slowly crawled above them toward the opposite end of the room. There the air shaft went straight down. They slid through it.

They could see into side rooms to the main hallway, which curved around and downward. One cavernous room was painted bright green and appeared to be a research lab of some sort, with a large phallic drill at its center. A vicious looking drill with wires and hoses attached, presumably for coal mining but possibly for something else. Whatever it was for, it was still in use.

Farther down the hall was a room that smelled strongly of blood, or at least of iron. But somehow they knew it would be the former. They tried to look into the room, but the ducts didn't favor them, and the hall was too crowded to breach. They continued downward.

The halls became a total labyrinth, and the air ducts even more so. Zones of dampness became more and more frequent. Clumps of mushrooms had begun to grow in the corners and junctions of the maze. But they could see from vent to vent that the manner of personnel was changing. The brutes from the upper regions were growing more and more sparse, and men in black rubber business suits became more frequent. Locks on the doors between segments of the tract all faced back upward. They seemed to be moving in the right direction.

Then the air ducts stopped. There was a door visible in the hall beyond the final grate, and they'd seen no people for several minutes. They left the ducts and stepped into the cave.

The cave was still cramped but felt like an open field compared to the ducts. They were covered in soot and matched the coal walls even without their suit camo. The Tikaris perched on their shoulders and waited for instructions.