Fearful Symmetries

Nohar froze, and that gave time for his brain to start working again. He had screwed up. He had let anger override everything else. Now here he was with his guts leaking out everywhere, his body racked by so many insults that he couldn’t distinguish separate sources for the pain. The pain was an omnipresent haze that he sucked in with each breath. Every few heartbeats his vision would black out for a moment as another wave of agony broke over him.

Seeing Manuel had an almost supernatural force. He could see everything that he had missed before. Maria’s bone structure, the shadows of his own coloring. Manuel’s eyes could have been born directly from Nohar’s mother.

“Nohar?” Manuel had the same husky voice as his mother. He tried to take a step forward, but Krisoijn held him back.

Nohar shook his head and forced the words out, “It’s over. Long Beach, the Clinic, it’s all exposed. . . .”

Nohar stared. “He knows,” Manuel said. He reached onto the console and tossed a ramcard over at Nohar’s feet. “He doesn’t even care about this anymore.”

“Why?” The question felt as if it tore the flesh from inside his stomach. He was beginning to feel dizzy and light-headed. “Why go through with this—” He felt his knees giving way. He dropped next to Henderson’s body. His good hand caught himself on her stomach. Her flesh was blood-soaked deadweight.

“You got what you wanted,” Manuel said. His voice was quick and strained, showing the pull of adrenaline. Nohar recognized it. “Why don’t you go meet your plane—”

Nohar stared into Henderson’s unmoving eyes, feeling his life pump out of the hole in his stomach with every heartbeat. “Plane . . .” Nohar whispered. He barely heard the word himself beneath the sound of his heartbeat.

“You cannot attack such a threat on a single front.” Krisoijn was distant, the Afrikaans accent just cutting through Nohar’s pulse. “Your escape from Gilbertez compromised this operation. The whole enterprise had to be terminated. You’ve done us damage, but you haven’t come close to stopping our effort.”

The operation at Long Beach was only a small part of something much larger. Nohar didn’t know if Manuel realized it, but the fact that Krisoijn had even hinted at that meant he didn’t intend to leave anyone alive. The bastard knew the media were coming, but he planned for them to find an inexplicable bloodbath where his own corpse was absent. The soldiers he had brought in with him, the bodies scattered around this abandoned place, they probably hadn’t known that much.

Nohar forced himself to look up at Krisoijn. The man’s eyes were dead, black, and showed little trace of any emotion. Nohar looked at Manuel and saw the fury burning in him, mirroring his own. Nohar could see the tense muscles, the strain of reining in all the instincts to flee or fight. “I’m sorry,” Nohar said to Manuel. He was apologizing for his failure, the entire string of events that had begun with denying him a father, and ended with him impotent, bleeding on the ground only three meters from his son.

Krisoijn spoke. “We are the dominant species on this planet, and we will not tolerate a threat to our existence.”

Nohar knew that he was about to shoot. He had to do something. He tightened his stomach muscles, and held his broken arm to the wound, pushing himself up against Henderson’s body. “You murdering bastard. There’s no reason for this.”

“No reason?” Krisoijn said, his voice raising. For the first time there seemed some emotion in his voice. Nohar struggled to his feet as Krisoijn spoke. “Do you have any idea what you engineered monstrosities did to my homeland? A whole generation of my family was lost during the war, and in the revolution that followed all of my brothers and sisters—all of them—were killed. I took a machete to the face, and barely survived myself. I was six years old.”

Nohar tried to focus. To fix the room in his brain, to connect the impressions through the fog of pain he walked through. His son and Krisoijn stood behind the central control panel, in front of the giant holo map of the complex. On the map, lights blinked, showing the status of the compound. There were two flashing red lights where the two helicopters had gone down.

Maria was in a corner, sitting in her wheelchair, still unconscious. He could hear her breathing, ragged but steady. Two guns lay on the floor. The dead human’s Glock lay on the floor near his body by the wall opposite Nohar. Less than a meter away from Nohar was the forty-five that Henderson had been using. Beyond that, in front of the console was John Samson, face down. . . .

For the first time Nohar realized that there was no blood coming from John Samson’s body. His clothes were splattered with blood, but from all appearances it was Henderson’s. And, if he concentrated, Nohar could hear him breathing. It wasn’t the slow rhythmic respiration of someone who had lost consciousness.

Krisoijn shook his head. “Every one of you is a danger to the species.” He cocked his head toward the door. “How many people have you killed today?”

Krisoijn pressed the Glock into Manuel’s head and said, “I’ll make you a deal. You give me back one of my brothers, and you can have him.”

Nohar staggered forward another step, and his foot was next to the forty-five. Nohar stared at Krisoijn, keeping his attention. “How many men have you killed, Krisoijn?”

“Royd, Samson, how many others?” Nohar shook his head. It was cruel, but he was hoping that word of his father’s death might prod John into action. “You’re just another fanatic. Just like my father.”

“Do not compare me to an animal.” As Krisoijn spoke, Nohar’s foot kicked the gun gently. It slid across the linoleum and stopped next to John Samson’s head.

“Both of you wrapped up in your own righteousness,” Nohar said. “They wronged you, and they must pay. Datia saw humanity as the enemy, you see the nonhumans—it’s just revenge.”

“And you don’t hesitate to engineer the same kind of weapons that devastated your homeland. Your brothers died in the revolution. Which one of the plagues killed your parents?”

John realized a gun was in reach. He inched his hand toward it. His effort was too slow, especially since Nohar could see plainly that he was on the floor out of Krisoijn’s view behind the console. Samson obviously didn’t realize that, and he moved cautiously.

“I think this has gone far enough,” Krisoijn said. Nohar could see the tensing of the muscles in his arm as he prepared to squeeze the trigger.

“If you shoot him, what’s going to keep me from tearing out your throat?” Nohar tried to take all of his resolve and put it into his voice.

“You’ll be dead before you cross the table.” Krisoijn’s voice was confident, but Nohar could see the hesitation in his arm.

“I know you,” Nohar said. “My family was killed by the enemy, too. My mother died carrying my only siblings, from a virus designed in some human lab. My father was shot down by pinks in the National Guard.”

“We know each other, Krisoijn.” Nohar stared straight into Krisoijn’s eyes as he listened to Samson moving. “You know what drives me. If you put a bullet into my son’s head, you know that nothing will stop me from tearing your heart out.”

Krisoijn was backing away from Manuel, the Glock trained on Manuel’s head. “Maybe so,” Krisoijn said, reaching the wall and edging toward the door. He was angling around the console to bring both of them under the stare of the submachine gun. “Maybe I have to kill you first—”

Krisoijn’s gun moved, just a little, toward Nohar. Samson had been paying attention. He rolled out from behind the console, aiming up at Krisoijn. The automatic fired twice before it clicked on an empty chamber.

The Glock fired as Manuel ducked. Krisoijn fell back toward the wall, the two bullets lodged in his body armor.

The jump at Krisoijn felt as if it tore his intestines loose from his abdomen. His broken arm wouldn’t move, so Nohar shouldered into Krisoijn’s gun arm. The Glock kept firing, blowing holes in the holo map, throwing sparks across the room.

When Nohar’s full weight connected, the drywall gave way and they blew through into the neighboring room, a massive chamber divided into office cubicles.

They stopped moving forward when Krisoijn slammed into a cubicle wall. The Glock had stopped firing. Nohar heard the trigger click a few times before Krisoijn brought it down on the side of his skull.

Blood clouded his vision, it took most of his strength to yell back through the hole in the wall. “Manuel, get Maria and John out of here—”

His words were cut short by a stabbing pain beneath his ribs. His vision cleared enough to see Krisoijn’s hand removing a knife from his side. He slashed again, but Nohar managed to block the thrust with his good arm.

Krisoijn faced him with almost a feral grin as he waved the knife between them. He’d tossed away the empty Glock. “I don’t need a gun to finish you off.”

Krisoijn swung again, and Nohar blocked the thrust with his good arm. This time he felt the blade take a part of his bicep with it. He could feel his strength ebbing. Pain and fatigue were pulling him down with iron bands. There was no way he could hold off Krisoijn for any length of time. Defending himself was pointless as near to the edge as he was.

Krisoijn must have seen the resignation in Nohar’s eyes, because he grinned even wider. He dove with a fatal thrust toward Nohar’s neck.

“. . . but not my son,” Nohar raised his hand for a block, and the blade passed through the palm and out the back. The pain of the knife stabbing through tendon and bone was distant—everything seemed distant, as if he was watching at a remove.

Krisoijn’s expression changed when Nohar’s hand grabbed his own. Nohar’s hand enveloped Krisoijn’s in a crushing grip that drove the knife even deeper.

Krisoijn beat at Nohar’s hand with his free hand, but Nohar barely felt it as he bit into Krisoijn’s wrist. The man screamed as Nohar’s fangs sank into his arm. Nohar twisted Krisoijn’s hand until he felt the bones separate and Krisoijn dropped to his knees.

Krisoijn fell to the ground holding a stump of a right arm. Nohar’s right hand slowly, painfully, unclenched, letting go of Krisoijn’s hand. The hand fell, and the knife slowly slid out of the wound to fall next to it.

Nohar felt his legs give way. He fell, unable to raise either hand to protect himself. He landed on his left side, barely turning to avoid falling on his broken arm.

The world was turning gray. Even the pain seemed distant, felt through a gauzy haze. He couldn’t find the strength to move any more.

Dying wasn’t good enough for Krisoijn. He stepped into Nohar’s field of vision, holding the knife in his left hand. He knelt, putting a knee on Nohar’s chest. Nohar didn’t feel his weight, he didn’t feel much of anything anymore.

Before the blade descended, Krisoijn turned to look away from Nohar. A look of surprise crossed his face. Then a spray of bullets took away most of that expression above the lower jaw. He fell, his scar the only recognizable piece of his face left.

It might have been hours later, but Nohar managed a small episode of lucidity. He opened his eyes enough to see the faces of some pink EMTs manhandling him into another helicopter. He was assaulted by the sounds of dozens of people crowding too close. He saw flashes of sunlight off of vid cameras, past the guys carrying him.

He turned his head and saw the IV bag above his head. He was strapped down, immobile. He could feel burning tightness in his leg, his arm, his hand, and especially in his stomach—which had the weird feeling of having been melted away. He was light-headed and everything seemed far away.

“You’re going to be all right, you hear me?” Nohar turned to see a familiar-looking face. Knew his mother. Nohar managed a friendly expression, through the drugged haze. He tried to say something, but his vocal cords didn’t seem connected to him any more.

Dad. He wondered at the word for a few seconds, then decided he liked it. Manuel, the name came to him finally.

He looked at his son, feeling his head clear for a moment. “We’re going to be fine.” He managed to whisper. “Both of us.”

Manuel nodded, though Nohar didn’t know if he could hear him above the noise of the helicopter. Then the doors slid shut on him, and they were taking off.