Beatrice told Lazarus, “It’s my fault. I should have checked on you much more often. I tapped into your room’s feed because I wanted to see how you were resting after exerting yourself today. Imagine my surprise when I find you forcing your protectors to open your door. And hers. Do you know how much danger you were in? What she could have done to you?”
“We hadn’t been fed,” he said. “I was hungry.”
Much more childlike than he’d been two minutes ago. Survival technique. He was protecting himself.
“You’ve been hiding yourself,” Beatrice said. “Concealing your abilities. You could have done a lot more.”
“No,” he said.
He sounded like he was going to say something else, but she planted her hand on the crown of his head, forced him to crane his neck to meet her eyes. “Lie to me again,” she said.
If this went on, he was going to admit to anything. Show her the full scope of his powers. I wouldn’t have blamed him. When you’re that scared, that alone, and that small, you’ll do anything.
I couldn’t let it happen. I said, “It was my idea. I tricked him.”
For the first time, Beatrice seemed to recognize me. She turned toward me, snarling. “Is there anything I could do to you to make you stop lying?”
“I’ve mostly told the truth since I got here. Have you?”
“All you’ve done since you got here is make things worse for me. And for Lazarus.”
Without thinking, Beatrice took a step forward. The meathead to her side remained where he was, still aiming at me.
I was acting on the idea before I’d even realized that it had formed. I took a step backward, as if afraid of her sudden emotional intensity. My heel jammed against the bottom of the sink cupboard.
“I need to tell you one important thing,” I said.
Beatrice wasn’t combat-trained. She wasn’t used to thinking like I was. She started forward. Her escort caught the danger a fraction of a second too late. She was putting herself in his way.
“You should have brought more than one guard,” I said.
I ducked to my right, fast as I could. Toward the tattooed soldier still standing vacantly in the corner. Putting Beatrice between her escort and his drawn pistol.
In so small a space, the report of a gun came close to being the loudest thing I’d ever heard. In a confined space like this, you’d be lucky if a gunshot didn’t rupture your eardrums. The bullet ricocheted off something behind me, and again off the metal door. I saw sparks.
Beatrice’s escort jerked. His weapon hand waved. He’d been struck by, at the very least, fragments of the bullet. My luck looking out for me again. I hoped it was looking out for Lazarus too.
My hand closed around the handle of the vacant-eyed soldier’s M9.
Everything happened in a flash of panic.
I raised the pistol, clicked the safety off, slid my finger into the trigger guard. But Beatrice was on me. She grabbed my shoulder, tried to shove me aside. The jolt squeezed my trigger finger.
The escort’s head snapped back. A cloud of blood droplets painted the wall behind him. He fell.
Beatrice shoved me against the counter. I slammed into it and used the rebound to knock her back. She tried to swipe my gun away, but I raised my knee, stomped on her heel, and then kicked her away.
She stumbled backward. I drew a bead, right between her eyes.
Her lips slackened. She stared straight down the muzzle.
She knew I had her.
“No!” Lazarus cried. I could hardly hear him. His voice was tiny under the ringing.
All my muscles felt on edge. Something deep inside my bones had made a little knife, was picking away at me.
There was an odd cadence to it, and I realized he was trying to use his power on me. Maybe on both of us. Only it wasn’t getting through. The ringing in my ears was too much.
Beatrice was trying to say something too. Trying to speak to me, maybe. Or call for help. She wasn’t trying to hide her fear. If she got away, she was never going to let me get her in a position like this again.
I was only ever going to have one shot at this. One chance to pull the trigger, or decide not to.
“Stop,” Lazarus said.
This time, his voice went straight into the core of my chest. The word squeezed my lungs. Stopped my breath as I drew it.
But it was too late. My finger was already pulling the trigger.
The recoil was a jab of pain in the heel of my palm. It helped keep me focused, from slipping away into Lazarus’s control. The renewed ringing in my ears took away the rest.
Beatrice crumpled. Went down.
My vision went white before she hit the floor. The room fuzzed out. I was pretty sure that Lazarus had stopped singing, but what little fragment had gotten into my head in the instant before I’d pulled the trigger was taking its toll now.
There was a tremendous amount of power in even the tiniest note of his song. It was small wonder that Project Armageddon considered him to be their perfect weapon. I thought what I could do was exceptional, but Lazarus’s power was leagues beyond mine. Or anyone else’s I knew. If Beatrice had succeeded in shaping him like she’d hoped, the rest of the world never would have stood a chance.
When I returned to myself, I was slumped against the side of the break room cabinets, just below the sink. One of the chairs had toppled atop me. I must have pulled it over when, flailing and under Lazarus’s spell, I’d fallen.
Beatrice’s escort had landed in a seated position by the door. He stared, slack-jawed and open-eyed, around the hole my bullet had punched through his head. And Beatrice lay face-up on the floor, her arms askew. Lazarus kneeled by her side, leaning over her, his hands on her shoulders.
My head was pounding. The little knife in my bones hadn’t gone away. But I couldn’t hear Lazarus singing.
He was sobbing instead.
The tattooed soldier in the corner of the room, the one whose sidearm I’d stolen, stared dumbly at nothing. If the gunfire so close to his eardrums had hurt him, he showed no sign of it whatsoever.
With effort, I pulled myself to my knees, and then my feet. All my joints hurt. My chest and stomach stung like I’d been punched in the gut. The kid’s voice had that much of a physical effect on me.
He could have been doing that even now, if he wanted.
I set my hand on his back. He flinched. But he didn’t stop crying.
From this angle, I could see over his head. Beatrice was definitely dead. She could not have survived what I’d done to her. And Lazarus had seen everything. More gore than any child his age should ever see.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had to.”
I could hardly hear myself over the ringing. But Lazarus must have. He turned to me. I caught the only sight that really stayed in my mind – the burning, searing, passionate hatred in his eyes. It was well beyond his years.
I’d earned every morsel of it. He was gone to me.
I told you, when we started this whole thing, that I couldn’t remember her face. I wasn’t joking. I still can’t.
You’d think that after a lifetime spent wondering about my mother – and what felt like three lifetimes searching for her – the instant I saw her, everything about her would’ve been permanently seared in my memory like it had been burnt in with a laser engraver.
At the time, that’s certainly what I thought. Like I said at the beginning of all this. Funny.
Nobody said forever couldn’t also be short. You can fit a whole eternity into the space of a second.
And I was living one of those seconds now.