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At 3am Singapore time, the reception desk of Tower One at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel received a frantic call from an elderly American woman staying in one of the Premier suites on the top floor.
“Someone was in my room!” she screamed at the clerk.
“Ma’am, I assure you that our system of smartwalls is the finest in the world,” the clerk assured her. “No one can get past it.”
“I heard the clap!”
“Let me send security up to sweep the room for you, and I apologize for the disturbance.”
As soon as the clerk hung up, he got another frantic call from upstairs. Then another. And another. Now complaints were coming down to the reception desks in Towers Two and Three as well. The late night revelers and port tourists staggering through the mammoth, trapezoidal lobbies were blissfully unaware of the crisis rippling through the hotel until guests ported down to the desks in their bathrobes, screaming at any staffers they could hunt down. The clerks, collectively desperate to keep the situation quiet, politely refused to issue a widespread alert. They insisted that everything was fine.
Anna Huff had ported into two dozen other rooms before arriving inside the Chairman Suite on the top floor. She felt terrible about breaking in on all those other guests. One guy was drunk and naked and coming out of the shower when Anna ported in. He let out a noise that she had never heard a grown man make. Like a rooster being choked. The rest of the guests she barged in on were asleep, but not for long after she rudely clapped out.
She stood in the center of this suite’s main living room, the sexy glow of the city skyline outside providing the room’s only light. The plate glass windows had snuffed out the noise coming from the fully pedestrianized, and always bustling, city streets below. In the flashing neon, Anna could make out a baby grand piano and hard-edged, modernist furniture. A vase of perfectly cut and arranged orchids changed colors with the shifting lights outside, from deep purple to rose to clementine. She moved toward the bedroom with a lightness, as if approaching the end of a diving board. She was fluid, moving in lockstep with the air circulating through the room.
There was a man in the bedroom, clad in khakis in a black t-shirt, staring at the PortSys lab burning on television and screaming into a wireless headset nestled in his greasy hair. He was sitting at the edge of the bed, facing away from Anna.
“WELL, WHERE IS HE? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU CAN’T FIND HIM? He burned down my lab! Why do I even have you on contract if you can’t find him? This is all my bitch/slut/whore of a sister’s doing. I’ll fucking kill her right now.”
Jason Kirsch hung up and opened PortMaps. But then he felt a presence. Someone was lingering in the room like a faint scent. He turned around and saw nothing. Anna Huff pressed hard against the living room wall, hoping to melt into it. Oh, how awful it was to be in the same room as Jason Kirsch. She remembered the night he blew into Room 24, seeing him loom large over her bed, consuming the room and thickening its air like a noxious cloud. She could feel that cloud billowing again, choking everything in acid vapor.
Jason shook off the odd vibe and clapped out. Anna made a video call to Burton.
“He was in the Chairman’s Suite. You got him?”
“I got him,” said Burton. “Don’t port yourself. I can send you using thermal recognition.”
She hit MUTE on the phone, clipped the phone to her pants without hanging up, and then stepped forward and felt the shiver.
Now she was in the darkened pantry of a lavish apartment, surrounded by luxurious non-perishables: bags of dried pasta from Italy, jars of oil-slicked Marcona almonds, canned Portuguese sardines, German butter cookies, vacuum-sealed packages of mullet roe. Jason Kirsch was in the next room over. His voice was pure spittle.
“What did you do, Lara?” he said.
“Stay away from me.” It was the first time Anna had heard Lara’s voice in months and it charged through her like an espresso shot. She gripped her gun tightly.
“I’m asking you a question, you little sack of shit. No more delays out of you. Mother isn’t pleased with you and neither am I.”
“You’re both sick.”
“She was right about you, Lara. She was right about how substandard you are. You‘re nothing more than an average child.”
“Average children are gonna save this world,” she spat back at him.
“I already saved it. You’re only in the way of me saving it further. You should kill yourself.”
“Stop it. It’s never worked and it never will, you bastard.”
“You should kill yourself now because you’re not gonna like the way I kill you. Do you understand? I was born to hate you. Now tell me where the fuck those notes are.”
“Go to hell.”
Jason lunged at Lara. She let out a half-scream before he covered her mouth with an iron hand. Over a year ago, Jason Kirsch was one room over from Anna Huff, and Anna had done nothing about it. She had slept as soundly as any child that night, only stirring when it was far too late.
But not on this night. Tonight, Anna Huff was wide awake. She slipped out of the pantry and into the Kirsch family living room. They’d only see her shadow first.
Lara was handcuffed to the wrought iron frame of a daybed. Bruises and welts all over her arms and legs. No more bangle bracelets. She was dressed in a white camisole and red skirt, and looked like she hadn’t been allowed to change clothing in weeks. She looked thinner too, a mere phantom of the Lara that had exercised lasting dominion over Anna’s mind. She looked like she had been chained to that daybed for days on end, abused and malnourished. Her normally razor-sharp bob had been reduced to tangles, like it had been brushed with an egg beater. Jason had carved the Conquistadors logo into her upper arm—opposite her adorable Point B tattoo—with his butcher knife. The symbol bubbled up from her arm in the form of a crude scar, looking like a small animal had burrowed under her skin and made a tunnel in that shape.
Jason gripped Lara’s jet black hair with his free hand—apparently, he had been doing this a lot over the past few weeks—and pressed firmly against her mouth with the other.
Anna spotted an upright piano along the south wall of the room. Sitting on top of the piano were dozens of framed photographs, mostly of Emilia and Jason Kirsch posing with industry titans, celebrities, and heads of state. Anna spotted a lone photo of Lara cuddling with a tiny bulldog. There was no trace of that bulldog anywhere in this apartment. She snuck over to the piano and bashed out the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth as loudly as she could.
BUM-BUM-BUM BUMMMMMMMMM.
Lara’s eyes went wide at the sight of her Roomie. Jason Kirsch turned around and stared fiercely at Anna, an eyepatch adorning his face. Anna aimed her gun at the patch.
“Get your hands off of her,” she told Jason.
“You,” he said. “Still alive, huh?”
“I am. Hello, Jason. How’s the eye?”
“I have one good eye and that’s all I need to finish you off.”
“ARRGGHH ye sure?”
“Fucking bitch.”
Jason Kirsch took out his PortPhone and disappeared again. Anna stared at Lara. The noxious cloud receded from the room and Anna felt nothing but hot, spiky light. Lara’s lip gloss was smeared and her cheeks were blood red. She was too stunned to move. Too stunned at her brother’s vicious assault. Too stunned at the sight of Anna Huff alive and well (and armed!). Too stunned at everything. Finally, she spoke.
“You’re alive!”
“Fuck yeah, I am,” said Anna. “How do I uncuff you?”
“The key is over there on the buffet.”
Anna grabbed the key and freed Lara from the daybed. There were welts on Lara’s wrists where bracelets of a different sort had dug in, grinding her skin down nearly to the arteries.
“You got a haircut,” Lara told her.
“It was for an assignment,” Anna said. “I had to burn your mom’s lab to the ground.”
“So that was you.”
“They can try to tell us what to do, but that doesn’t mean we have to listen. You said so yourself.”
“Well, your hair looks great.”
“Thanks. Are you okay?”
“I’ve been better.”
“I wanna take you with me but I don’t think you’re in any shape to tag along right now. I need you to rest.”
“Okay. But where are you going?” Lara asked.
Burton chirped at Anna over speakerphone. “He’s back in Singapore.”
Anna looked at Lara. They were alone again: all her hyperactive imagination had ever wanted. The last thing she wanted to do was leave, and yet...
“I have to go get him.”
At that, Lara’s face turned dark and she flashed a wicked grin.
“Then go get him,” she told Anna. Her voice was lower when she said it, even more seductive. Like talking to a crush on the phone. That voice made it harder for Anna to leave.
“I’ll be back,” she told Lara.
“I know you will.”
Anna stepped forward and Burton ported her back to the suite in Singapore. Alarm bells were going off throughout the hotel: loud PINGS that would make a dog’s head explode. Epileptic emergency strobe lights inside battled with the flashing neon outside.
Anna wasn’t as sly about her entrance this time. Jason Kirsch saw her and made himself huge as a bear.
“How did you find me?” he asked.
“You should be a lot more careful about what you post on WorldGram,” she lied. “You give yourself away so easily when you post pictures of yourself at conferences and what not.”
“What do you want?”
“You’re gonna tell me why you killed my sister.”
“Maybe you should confess to murdering one of our PINE agents in cold blood first, sweetheart. He was so, so young.”
“I never killed anyone,” said Anna. “You made that up, just like you made up that story about me being a neo-Nazi.”
“Don’t you understand who we are, Miss Whatsyourface?” Jason asked.
“It’s Anna. I took your eye, hotshot. You know my name. Get it right.”
“Okay then, Anna. We make the truths here. Not you. If we say you’re a murderer, then you’re a murderer. And if we say you’re a neo-Nazi, then you’re a neo-Nazi.”
“When the world finds out you killed my sister, people won’t be so eager to buy all of your bullshit lies.”
“Sure they will,” Jason insisted.
“They won’t. I have proof that you were in our house that night.”
“Ooooh, Lara give you that, too? I can make proof that says otherwise. It would take nothing. I gave the world porting. I gave it elevated civilization. I made this world and I can break it. I can break you. What have you ever given the world? What good is there in believing the word of a preppy psycho over us? Your loser of a sister killed herself. That’s all there is. She did it because she was selfish and worthless, just like you. You weren’t even awake to save her. You’re a failure.” Jason didn’t have a knife on him, but it was clear that he believed his lethal silver tongue was all he needed to dispatch Anna.
“Why do you do this to people? Why do you troll them to death?”
“It’s my greatest experiment, but explaining it to a girl as common as you would be a waste of time,” Jason told her. Then he made sarcastic puppy eyes, put his hands up in mock innocence, and said in a singsong voice, “I wasn’t even in your sister’s room that night, little angel. I can proooove it.”
“You were there. And now I’m here.”
“So? Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I am war.”
Anna brought the butt of her gun down on the bridge of Jason’s nose, blood gushing out of his nose so quickly that it audibly babbled. This pleased her greatly. She grabbed Jason’s PortPhone and threw it to the ground, digging her heel into the gorilla glass until it cracked and the phone’s guts spilled out.
He rolled his eyes. “You know I can get another one of those, yes?”
“Why did you kill my sister?” she asked him.
“If anyone killed her, it was you. Glomming onto her like a needy child and making her life miserable.”
“You know nothing about Sarah.”
“I know she was a whore.”
“Fuck you.”
“Jesus, you girls and your weak feelings. Your good intentions lie to you. You wanna know why I made your sister die? Because I could. I am the strong and people like your sister are the weak. You’re weak, too. I can see it in your eyes, little piggy. It’s why your daddy left you.”
“You know nothing about my father.”
“Oh, but I do know about Arthur Huff. Like I know that he died. Did you know that? Shot to death by a hooker in Trieste just a couple months ago. Isn’t that fantastic? It’s fun to know things about you, Anna. Don’t you think? I know your father was glad to spend his final years without you or your pathetic loser of a sister dragging him down.”
He’s lying. If dad had died, you would have known. “Fuck you.”
“You didn’t know, did you? Does that news bother you? Did you know he was a member of the Conquistadors? I believe K15 was his handle.”
HE’S LYING.
Arthur Huff was an unremarkable man. Whatever money he made as a restaurant accountant he recklessly spent on anything except his own family: booze, hookers, hands of blackjack at the MGM Grand, everything. At home, he did nothing except fight with Sandy and then stare at either his phone or the wall. Her whole life, Anna got the impression that her dad would rather be anywhere else than with her. He constantly reminded all the Huff women that he was a “great man,” though they never saw any evidence of it.
Every time Mr. Huff left the house in a snit, she and her sister prayed it was for good. They begged Sandy to leave him. But Sandy, ever the misguided saint, assured them both that their father had a good side. That he meant well. He was gone for good before Sarah or Anna ever saw proof of those claims. Once Arthur left the house permanently, Anna couldn’t allow herself to feel relieved because she remained terrified that he would pop back into their lives one day. Sometimes she felt guilty even though she knew she shouldn’t. Arthur Huff swore to his daughters that if he ever deserted them, it would be all their fault. Anna hated believing him. Also, he took the goddamn bulldog with him. It was the surest sign he wouldn’t be coming back, but also the worst one.
“You’re lying again,” she told Jason. “You’re K15.”
“I’m a trillionaire. The most powerful man in the world. Why would I spend any time hanging out online?”
“Because your mommy can’t boss you around there.”
“You’re really too stupid to believe that your father was one of us, huh? I’m shocked you can even make it through the day, you’re such a delicate little flower. How do you think I found your sister, hmm? Your father said she’d be perfect for me. Do you know he sent me a DM after I made her die? Know what it said? It said, ‘ell-oh-ell.’ Classic.”
Jason laughed out loud. It was such an awful thing to live in a world where laughter was a telltale sign of cruelty. Anna became fire.
“Jason,” she said, “I’m gonna kill you, and I’m gonna be rude about it.”
“Did Lara put you up to all this?” he asked her. “I bet you think Lara loooooooves you.”
“Shut up.”
“Everyone thinks Lara loves them. It’s her talent. I admire it. Did she promise you that you’d both run away together if you just got rid of her nasty mom and brother? She promise you Lily Beach? Was that what she sold you when she gave you trade secrets?”
“She didn’t sell me anything. I’m here on my own.”
“Then you’re an even bigger sucker than the puds she usually ropes in. Do you see her here now, coming to your aid? No. She sent you to do all her dirty work for her, so she could steal this company out from under my mother and me without ever lifting a finger. You think you’re so special because you discovered love. The only thing love is useful for is betrayal.”
“Maybe in your hands.”
“What do you think happens after this, you dumb hog? You destroy this family and this company, and then you and my sister live happily ever after? You think you’re gonna change the world? You want the world and you want my sister, but you’re not gonna get either one.”
“I’m gonna get both,” Anna told him. “But first I get to watch you die with a whimper.”
“You got hoodwinked.”
“Shut up.”
He took a deep breath and grew even bigger. He was a skyscraper. His breath rendered the surrounding air unstable at a molecular level. Anna had a gun in her hand and yet she felt as if she were playing defense. All that confidence she had earned over the year was being steadily pulled from her soul.
“You’re being used,” he told her. “When this is all over, it’ll come crashing down on you. You’ll never see Lara again. She won’t give a shit about you, because she never did to begin with. No one cares about you and no one ever has. You’ll be a fugitive and a pariah, and the world will hate you, as it should.”
“Shut up,” Anna said. Her wit wasn’t fast enough to keep up. She was the hottest, messiest mess right now.
“Not so funny anymore, huh? Take that gun and kill yourself,” he said. “Oh wait, I’m sorry. Let me rephrase that. Take that gun and die by suicide, as you so daintily put it.”
“Lara never listened to you and neither will I.”
“Do it. You won’t remember a thing about any of this. You won’t be here. You’ll have ported somewhere new and wonderful and permanent. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
Her hands were shaking. Hacked. Anna’s mind was toying with her as well, right when she thought she had it well-domesticated. Killing this man should have taken nothing at all. Oh, but Jason Kirsch had a lethal knack for disrupting all that certainty. What would it really be like to destroy PortSys and make the world more chaotic than it already is? Will the rest of the world resent you for it forever? Behold Anna Huff: Queen of the Trolls, a child too stupid to know how childish she was being. An unremarkable girl undone by love, like so many other unremarkable girls and boys. Being dead right now would be a relief, wouldn’t it? No wonder your daddy FUCKING STOP IT RIGHT NOW BRAIN.
She thought about that night she and Sandy opened Sarah’s bedroom door and found her, slumped against her own bed, a gaping hole in her throat. Sarah left no note, nor any clues as to who had been tormenting her. Anna saw the body of her sister and it didn’t feel like it was her sister at all. Sarah was gone already, leaving only a piece of meat behind. That would be Anna’s fate too. One day she would die, and there’d only be a limp mess to remember her by. She should have been dead already.
She could feel her wrist turning the gun on herself. Or was that just her mind fucking with her? This was Jason Kirsch’s uncanny power. He could hijack your brain waves and make his inner voice your own. He’s lying about Dad, or is he? After all, why you do think you like being a dick to people? Where do you think that comes from, Anna?
“You really are good at this,” she admitted.
“Thank you,” he told her. “If I were feeling merciful I’d tell you to take 10 Benadryl and a bottle of Tylenol to make it painless.”
“But you never feel merciful.”
“Never.” In fact, Jason told her, he kept what he called a “living graveyard” for certain victims. It was a five-acre plot of arable land he owned outside of Moroni, Comoros. The plot was surrounded by a brick wall twenty feet high and a smartwall that was so advanced as to be impenetrable. Within these walls, he had workers dig rows of graves and then had them lower a padlocked coffin—each one outfitted with an internal camera and loudspeaker—into every hole. When Jason felt the urge, he would port victims, including the occasional child, into a coffin. His workers would fill the hole, and then he would open up his phone to watch them asphyxiate. Using the loudspeaker, he sometimes cheered them on, although not in terribly good faith, as they desperately attempted to claw their way out. Just scratch a little bit harder. You’ll get out. Your coffin isn’t even underground! Aw man, you look like you're losing steam. Don't give up!
“I had one plot marked out just for you,” Jason told Anna. “But Mother thought it would be more fun to put you through the paces. See if you could escape from our little maze. So I went along with her. And frankly, sometimes I prefer watching people die face-to-face. It’s just not the same over a conference call. Watching your sister die, that was a good one. She knew how to die with flair.”
“How many people have you killed?”
He laughed. “I don’t count, little piggy. It doesn’t matter. You don’t matter.”
“But why do you do this?”
Jason sensed his big moment and went into speech mode. “If you could feel the power I’ve felt, you wouldn’t ask such a naïve and stupid question. You will never know the thrill of exercising total dominion over another human. You see, I get to decide who should live and who should excuse themselves from this earth. My mother and I designed an entirely new stage of humanity. All of the world’s real estate is now our estate. And the reason this is so is because we were bold enough to not pretend to care about others.”
“You didn’t design anything. You stole the recipe from Dr. Stokes.”
“Actually, you stole it from me. And for what? Whiny bitches like you like to think you can change people with your limp compassion. With empathy. The bold ones are the ones who know empathy is a grand lie. You cry and gnash your teeth and go crazy when all the BAD things happen, but really you’re as selfish as anyone else. That’s why your cunt of a big sister is dead. That’s why it was so much fun to watch her die, to see that look in her eye when she realized she wasn’t tough enough to hack it. They always look so surprised to die. I see that surprise in your face right now.”
He took a step toward Anna. She moved back. He took another step, chewing up more available space for her to backtrack.
“Do it,” he commanded.
Remember what Lara said. Staying alive and happy is the best way you can make him miserable.
“No.”
“DO IT!!!!”
Jason charged at Anna. She shut her eyes and fired at him, missing wildly and shattering the porcelain lamp on the nightstand. He tackled her and grabbed her waist, digging his long fingernails into her already tender skin. Then he grabbed her arm and smashed it against the hard walnut bench at the end of the hotel room bed. The gun fell to the floor and Jason straddled her. She struggled to be free but it was no use. He casually swiped the gun off the floor and tucked it into his waistband.
There was a knock on the door to the suite. “You okay, sir?” a burly voice asked from outside. “They’re evacuating the hotel.”
“I’m fine!” Jason Kirsch shouted. He loomed over Anna, a heavy fog. He placed a thick hand to her throat. His hand was so strong, she was aghast; she never realized that she could feel that much pressure bearing down on her larynx.
“I’m gonna kill you,” he told her, smiling. “Then I’m going to find Lara and I’m going cut off her happy little head. It’ll look so perfect mounted on my wall.”
Anna tugged at Jason’s sleeve, frantically trying to tell him one last thing before he sent her into the void. He could sense she was desperate, so he let up for a second. This was the fun part for him.
“You were saying?” he asked her.
Her wit didn’t fail her this time. “Look up.”
Jason Kirsch raised his head just in time to see the silver gleam of an aluminum baseball bat come speeding toward his face. He slumped to the ground: his jaw shattered, his teeth pulverized. Looming in the doorway was a girl with a towering frizz of curly black hair alongside a mountain of a boy.
Asmi held the bat up. “I’ve never swung one of these before,” she told Anna. “I’m mad for it. Hold him up so I can do it again.”
“My dear, you are a natural,” Bamert told her.
They helped Anna up as she gasped for air. Jason had choked her so hard, it felt like the sides of her windpipe had been welded together. Now he was curled up on the floor, clutching at his face, the carpet barely muffling his screams. Bamert grabbed the gun and pointed it at Jason’s soggy lump to hold him in check.
Anna grabbed her phone. She was still on the line with Burton.
“Did you get all that on video?” she squeaked.
“Yeah, although you were awfully herky-jerky with the camera.”
“Burton, not now.”
“I can edit the footage. It’ll be on WorldGram within an hour.”
“My goodness,” said Bamert. “Did you hear that, Jason Kirsch? Your confession to manslaughter will be on the Internet within an hour! We get to make the truths this time! The ability to continually shoot video while porting really is a gamechanger. I’ll have to make sure Pegasys incorporates that little technological miracle. Oh, and I’ll definitely have one of my people visit Comoros with a news crew to dig up everyone you buried alive.”
Kirsch was less than pleased. “You fucking pigs!”
“We have to leave, darling,” Asmi said to Anna.
“There’s something I have to finish.” Anna told them. “As long as Jason lives, he can lie.”
“But you can’t.”
Anna looked at Bamert. “Give me the gun.”
“I dare say I shouldn’t,” Bamert told her.
“Give me the gun, and then both of you leave.”
“Anna,” he said soberly, “this isn’t you.”
“It’s about to be. Leave.”
Bamert twirled the gun in his hand and handed it to Anna, butt first.
“Here you go,” said Bamert. “But when we leave, think very hard about whether or not you want to be this sort of person. All right?”
Bamert and Asmi ported out together in a single clap. Whoever was stationed outside Jason Kirsch’s room wasn’t bothered by the noise. Jason Kirsch had always told members of his inner circle, security included, that they were to do nothing without him saying so.
Anna kicked him in his broken face, and then aimed the gun at him. “How do I look to you now, Jason Kirsch? You think I can hack it? You think I can exert total dominion over your sorry ass?”
“No.”
“You don’t look so good yourself, Jason. I don’t think you’d pass my naked test. You know what’s nice about this room is that I already know I won’t come back. I won’t even have to come back to Singapore. There is nothing about this place or this moment that will ever haunt me. I’ll just port out of here and then forget all about it, and about you, because you are the weak.”
“And Lara? What will you tell her, little piggy?”
Anna took out her phone and queued up the pin for Manhattan. She cocked the gun. “I can’t wait to tell Lara what happened to you.”
She was about to open fire when two dozen PINE agents ported into the room, rifles pointed directly at her skull. PINE head Robb Caraway arrived with them, eager to exact vengeance on behalf of an officer of his that got run over in Maine, and on behalf of another officer that Anna had “murdered” in a fit of passion.
“Drop it!” one agent shouted at Anna.
You got too greedy, girl.
She dropped the gun.
“Drop your phone too,” the team leader commanded her.
She took the phone out of the clip and dropped it. A port doctor, one far better than Dr. Fisher, tended to the wounded Jason Kirsch. Emilia Kirsch ported into the room, along with a rigid and angry Dean Vick dragging Lara Kirsch with him. The suite became fully swollen with menace.
“Ah, good,” Emilia Kirsch said to the PINE agents. They were entirely under her control, less human beings than vestigial tentacles that Emilia could use to grab what she needed. She turned her x-ray eyes on her own daughter. “You found Anna Huff. I believe this is the young lady who disguised herself as a PortSys employee and burned down my lab, is that correct? Thank you, Lara dear. Thank you so much for helping us find this terrorist.”
Anna looked at Lara, whose face was still ragged from trauma. Gave her the feline stare. “You told them?”
“I didn’t say a word, I swear.” Lara told her, frightened at Anna’s burgeoning fury. “Emilia is lying to you. Jason pinged them all. They’re gonna kill us both.”
“You know,” said Emilia, “This might be the very first time you’ve made an actual impression on me, Lara. You knew this girl had feelings for you, and you used her to lash out at me and your poor, poor brother. I like that. You might have a future in this company after all.”
“I hate you, Mom,” Lara said quietly.
“Good,” said Emilia. “It’s good to hate. Hate is the primary fuel of ambition. It’s just so sad that you’re still pretending to care about this nothing girl, when you don’t.” She turned to Anna. “I’m sorry, but she doesn’t care about you. She won’t die for you. I barely had to lay a finger on her to get you to give her up.”
“She’s lying!” Lara screamed. As punishment, Vick put her ragged arm in a chicken wing, nearly dislocating her shoulder.
Anna looked into Lara’s green eyes, dying to see the truth. Everything would have been just fine if Anna Huff had just kept all her love and all her anger to herself. If she had just been a quiet, un-intrusive roommate to Lara Kirsch; if she had never jumped off that bridge with her; if they had never made plans for Lily Beach and elsewhere; if she had never told her about Sarah; if she had never resolved to chase Lara once she was gone; if she had tended to her studies and her extracurriculars and not tried to right every wrong and avenge every wronged soul, she could have been all right. She could have survived in this world. She had this love inside her and it felt so real and so good and she wasn’t ready—at all—to reckon with the idea that everyone else found that love to be so disposable. She had doomed herself and she was the only one who couldn’t see it coming a mile away.
“What happens now?” Anna asked Emilia.
“What happens now is that Lara watches you die. I’m afraid that four months locked up in our New York penthouse wasn’t quite enough to give her the edge she needs to compete in this world. So she’ll watch us kill you, and then she’ll watch as we track down your friends and kill them, too. Your friend’s silly Pegasys caper will be stillborn. Dead on delivery. There’s no hope for you, Anna Huff.”
Emilia motioned to a PINE agent. The agent offered Anna a handgun.
“Take that gun,” ordered Emilia, “and shoot yourself. Right now. Do it or we find your mother and kill her in front of you.”
“When you get to hell,” Jason told her, “Say hi to your little bulldog for me. It’s dead now.”
Anna had a gun in her hand, but no matter where she fired it, she would end up dead. Her brain was sputtering; who knew if it remembered how to pull a trigger anyway. Lara was screaming at the agents, all hot wails and smudged blue eyeshadow. Anna put the gun to her own chin, wondering what it would make Lara’s eyes do. Lara stopped screaming and stared at Anna. It was just them now. No Emilia. No Jason. No Vick. No PINE. Just Anna and Lara, locked in each other’s gravitational pull. No place for the truth to hide.
“Lara,” Anna said.
“Yes?”
And then Anna Huff noticed something out of the corner of her eye. It was her phone, on the ground. Still on. She had never ended the video call with Burton. He was still on the line, back in Gould House, frantically mouthing the words STEP FORWARD to her. Charles Vick had loosened his grip on Lara, but was still right behind her, ready to strong-arm her at a moment’s notice like the brainless stooge he was.
It was time to find out if Lara Kirsch was worth loving so much.
“Lara,” said Anna, “This is me, risking it all, asking you to risk it all.”
“What?” asked Lara.
“I’m gonna need you to step forward.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh for god’s sake,” shouted Emilia, “Shoot them both!”
“LARA STEP FORWARD RIGHT NOW!!!!!” Anna screamed.
They stepped forward in tandem and disappeared, leaping together like two girls jumping off a stone bridge and into a midnight river. One second later, a hundred Guardians of Ararat were force-ported, by Burton, into the suite. They were surprised by their new surroundings. None of them had stepped out off of Armenian soil in their respective lifetimes. But they were all conveniently armed with now-standard carbon fiber rifles that each weighed under three kilograms. And they were quite pleased, at long last, to encounter Emilia and Jason Kirsch in person.