Chapter 35 - 34 — Blood Against Blood III (Bonus)
There was a woman behind him, thirty metres back, with an arm around a stranger who could not put weight on his left leg.
She was walking him toward the corridor at about the speed of a funeral, because that was as fast as he could go.
I looked at that for about half a beat.
Then back at my son.
"They have names."
Something went out of me when I said it.
Not temper. I have never had much of one and I did not find one in that road.
What left was the part that had spent eight months building sentences for him, arranging the argument in the right order, waiting for the version he would finally be unable to walk around.
I had been carrying that since the night he went out the door, and I put it down in the middle of a burning street, and the space it left behind filled up with something I liked considerably less.
The next plane I made came out exactly right. Flat, square, instant.
My hands had stopped shaking, and I want to be honest about what that meant, because it was not calm.
He came at me with everything.
---
The next part was the worst of it, and not because he was winning.
He had worked out the actual shape of the fight, and once he had it he used it perfectly.
He hit the escape road, so I had to cover the escape road.
He put Aten at Marek while Marek had both hands full of Passage, so I had to intercept it.
He put a solar arc straight down the open road at Lucia, who had thirty people between herself and the opening and nothing at all behind her, and I bent that one away with a panel I could not spare.
Every single time, I spent force that was not going into him or onto me.
He landed a clean one across my jaw. Then another into the same ribs.
I want to be exact about this, because the version people tell now is wrong.
He had not become stronger than me. Nothing he did in that road would have troubled me for ninety seconds if I had been the only thing I was responsible for.
I was fighting two battles. He was fighting one, and he had noticed, and every choice he made was designed to make me keep fighting the other.
I spent that whole exchange looking past his shoulder at a corridor and counting.
Thirty left. Twenty. Twelve.
Then Lucia put the last interfering Player through a frozen wall, and Marek forced Passage wide one final time with blood running off his chin onto his collar, and the last of the soldiers went through behind them.
Marek’s voice came across the yard, cracked all the way through.
"CLEAR!"
---
Aurelian did not understand why I stopped giving ground.
He had spent six minutes pushing me backward and reading it as progress, and now the man in front of him had simply stopped moving in that direction, and nothing about his own position had changed.
He came in with both. Sol Invictus around the fist, Aten firing at the same moment from the other hand.
I caught the fist on Bastion.
I put a plane around his forearm and locked it there.
And I let the Aten blast hit a second plane at point-blank range, and took every bit of it into Reprisal, and this time I did not hold it for even half a second.
I put my fist into his chest.
Everything he had spent six minutes hammering into me went back through him with my own weight behind it, and he left the ground and went through the yard wall.
He got up.
I was already there.
He swung, and I turned the arm aside with a panel.
He fired Aten from the other hand at a range where nobody should fire anything, and I put a plane almost flat against his wrist and sent it upward into the sky rather than trying to eat it.
Then a Bastion knee into his abdomen, and he folded around it.
I caught him between two planes and put him into the road.
He forced himself back up with the solar mantle burning harder, which is what I would have expected and what I would have done, and I took him apart again.
And again.
The third time, the mantle guttered.
There was blood coming out of his mouth now and one knee would not hold him, and he made it halfway upright and stopped there on the other one, breathing in a way I did not like the sound of.
I closed Aegis around him from four sides.
Above, below, and both flanks. All I had to do was bring my hands together.
---
Soldiers had come back down the escape road by then, and they could see what was in the box.
"Sir." Renn’s voice. "That’s their field commander."
Somebody else, further back and less careful. "Finish it."
Aurelian looked up at me through the planes.
He did not beg. He did not apologise, and he did not say anything about the house or his mother or being nineteen.
"Do it."
My fingers tightened.
The planes came in maybe fifteen centimetres, and his shoulders touched two of them, and he did not look away from me.
I have killed a great many people in this war. I killed four before lunch that day.
One of them was still trying to make the shape that starts his Ability when I finished him, and I felt nothing about it then and I feel nothing about it now.
This was the same motion.
Bring the hands together. That is all it is. I have done it since I was nineteen years old and I have never once had to think about the mechanics of it.
My hands would not close.
I stood in a broken road with my palms six inches apart and told them to move, and they stayed exactly where they were, and the shaking started in the right one and went up into the shoulder.
Something came up my throat and I put it back down.
I could hear my own breathing over the fires, going too fast and too shallow, the way it goes in men I have had to talk out of a doorway, and I could not slow it either.
And the whole time I was looking at his face inside the box, and his face was not the one in front of me.
It was the one that came out of the front door at a dead run and stopped four metres short because he had seen the blood on my coat and did not know whether he was still allowed.
That was Christopher. I know that was Christopher.
It did not matter. That was what my hands were being shown, and they would not close.
The planes stopped.
Then they went out.
Aurelian’s face did something I had not seen on it in eight months, which was confusion.
"Go," I said.
He got one foot under himself, slowly, watching me the whole time.
"You killed the others."
I did not answer him.
He looked at the yard, at the four bodies of his own unit lying in it, and I watched him arrive at the thing I had just handed him.
"But you can’t kill me."
My jaw locked.
"You’re still my son."
It landed exactly the way I have since understood it was always going to land.
Not as mercy. As the final insult.
His father had beaten him in front of his own men, refused everything he believed, and then declined to treat him as a real enemy, because underneath all of it I was still looking at a boy I had put out of a house.
He straightened up as far as the knee would let him.
"If you put civilians behind your attacks again," I said, "I can’t promise you this."
He did not promise me anything.
He went west with the four of his people who could still walk.
I stood in the road until I could not see him, and then I stood in it a while longer than that, watching a piece of burning road where he had stopped being visible.
At some point I noticed that I had a plane up.
Small one, chest height, in front of me, facing west. I had not made it deliberately and there was nothing left out there to make it against.
I took it down before anybody saw it.
Renn came up beside me after a while.
"Sir. Was that wise?"
I did not answer that one either.
I have answered it since. Every year, usually in the same week, and the answer has never once come out the way I want it to.
---
Lucia froze the ammunition section before we left, which slowed the first detonation enough for us to get clear of the perimeter.
Marek closed Passage and then sat down on the road, which is the only time in four years I have seen him do that.
Then Renn armed the charges.
The whole installation went up in a rolling line from the eastern yard to the supply hall, and twenty-six loaded transports went with it, and the light of it was still on our backs three kilometres out.
We brought three hundred and sixty-one people out of that building.
Somewhere over forty did not come out, and eleven soldiers died putting the rest of them through, and the enemy field commander walked away west on a broken knee.
That was the mission. All of it. People write it up as a victory and they are not wrong, and it is still all of it.
---
It took a surgeon and an assistant most of two hours to close my side that night.
Bastion had been up when the arc came around the last panel, which is the only reason it went through muscle and stopped rather than going through muscle and continuing.
It still ran from the hip to the bottom rib, and it still had to be closed in layers, and I stopped counting somewhere in the forties.
I was face down on the table with the second layer half finished when a lieutenant came into the tent and said command wanted me immediately.
There was a map across the whole table when I got there.
An entire defensive position had been crossed out. Not marked as contested. Crossed out, with a hand that had pressed hard enough to tear the paper at one corner.
"Fourteen hundred hours," the colonel said. "Eastern approach, the whole southern line."
"Which unit did it?"
"Not a unit."
He put a photograph down.
"He came himself."
Elias Varga. The former World Number One. The man whose face had been on a poster in my son’s room when Aurelian was eleven years old.
"Six high-ranked Players in that position," the colonel said. "One of them was Serrano’s old teacher. Nine minutes, and there were four survivors out of a position of two hundred."
"Where is he now?"
"That is the point."
He turned the map around.
"He has stopped moving pieces and started moving himself, which means for the first time in four years we know where he is going to be. Intelligence thinks the window is eleven days. After that he is inside their heartland and nobody reaches him again."
Then he started laying files on the table.
Marek Ilyin. Lucia Serrano.
Then six more, and I knew every one of the names, because you cannot fight this war for four years without knowing who has been holding the other fronts together while you held yours.
Eight files.
The colonel put his hand flat on the table beside them, and then he put Varga’s photograph down on top of the stack, and he looked up at me.
"We found him."
He tapped the photograph once.
"And all nine of you are going to kill him."