Chapter 80
***
Eight hours is a long time when you can move freely across any distance without spending time on the journey, when you have a powerful telepath at your disposal, and when the investigation is giving you its full cooperation. Why do I mention this?
Because from the moment I left Okinawa until midnight — when I'd scheduled my return for the Pack — just under eight hours had passed, and I'd managed to accomplish a great deal.
The first order of business was interrogating X-23, with telepathic memory extraction. Which telepath helped me? Jean.
I hadn't gone to the Professor — he tends to get too wrapped up in his humanistic principles. He might have started making demands, and I had no interest in spending time on persuasion. Jean has a much simpler relationship with that kind of use of her abilities. Much simpler. She didn't even need an explanation. She heard that I needed help with an interrogation, shook out her magnificent hair, and said "let's go." She didn't even ask who or why.
The whole thing took less than five minutes. One minute to find Jean, jump to her workplace, walk to her. Thirty seconds for the conversation. Jump back. One minute for the interrogation. One minute for her to transfer the resulting information package to me.
And then, ten minutes after that, Stryker was lowered into the hard, uncomfortable iron chair next to X-23's. He hadn't managed to escape — he'd been waiting for the mission report.
His head took considerably longer to go through: he simply knew too much. What followed was unraveling the chain and assembling a telepathic package with a list of targets — for the Pack.
Xavier would never have agreed to any of this. He wouldn't have approved, and he would have tried to sabotage it. Jean, on the other hand, was practically eager. She was looking forward to midnight — looking forward to seeing with her own eyes what the Creed Pack looked like when it went out on a hunt of this scale. To be part of something so extraordinary.
The content of the minds she'd just extracted had played no small role in her readiness, it had to be said. I could well imagine how much pain was in one of those heads and how much filth was in the other. And Jean is young, uncompromising, direct. Not exactly prone to excessive pacifism or misplaced tolerance. Enough so that in canon she swallowed an entire star system without a second thought. The Phoenix was pressing hard on her mind at the time, yes, but that's a separate conversation.
Working through the targeting question and figuring out how to deliver the designation packages kept me occupied almost right up until the address at Olimpiysky — organized by Natasha and the other Senior Students, with no small contribution from those two hundred seventy-three officers of the Zero Generation.
I only just had time to take a quick shower, washing off the dust, grime, sweat, and other people's blood, and change my trousers. I thought for a moment and added my Master's sash for the sake of gravitas. The overall effect was, I supposed, appropriately presentable.
The arm — I didn't bother bandaging the stump. The bleeding had stopped. The wound wasn't causing any pain. And it was, slowly, beginning to knit.
What awaited me after the address, though, was something considerably more complicated: getting three thousand Pack members off Okinawa and to their designated targets. Shuttling all of them back and forth like a one-man taxi service was completely out of the question. Something with mass capacity was needed — but also speed. The targets were spread generously across the planet: Canada, Mexico, Alaska, Kansas, Washington, Scotland, Moscow, the Moscow region, Kazakhstan, the Trans-Ural region, even two locations in China and one in Japan. Flying wasn't going to cut it. What was needed was something like my jump. Or a sorcerer's portal.
The Sling Ring was, naturally, the first thing that came to mind. And a sorcerer to go with it. I had a particular one in mind. A Sorcerer, that is. A Supreme one.
Which meant, like it or not, I had to go to my wife.
***
"Are you serious?" I looked up from the Sling Ring lying on the table in front of Suo, and looked at her instead.
She folded her arms across her chest and shrugged.
"You are serious," I concluded.
"Entirely," she said. "I'm simply giving you the right incentive to develop. You are extraordinarily talented with magic. You're perfectly capable of doing this yourself. So why should I do it for you? And besides — I'm not at all pleased with what you're planning. This goes far beyond 'retribution.' In my view, it's an extraordinary excess. And I have no desire to participate in it. I can't stop you — you're more stubborn than a herd of sheep. But I won't help." Her gaze kept drifting to the empty sleeve hanging where my right arm had been. She didn't ask anything, though. "In short, if you need this done, you open the portals yourself. There's the ring. You know where the library is."
I gave a displeased growl and reached with my remaining hand to remove the green trinket from around my neck, where it had been hanging this whole time.
"Leave it," Suo said, putting out a hand to stop me. "You took the Eye of Agamotto yourself. You used it yourself. Now you hold it and you answer for it. It's your responsibility now."
"Have you lost your mind?" I finally snapped. "You're the Supreme Sorcerer! You're its official Guardian. Agamotto himself entrusted it to you!" She folded her arms across her chest again and shrugged with complete indifference.
"And you stole it from me. So now it's yours."
"I'll just throw it out!" I had already removed the trinket and was giving her fair warning.
"Go ahead," she shrugged.
"I mean it. I'll actually throw it out."
"So throw it." Another shrug. "What do I care? Some new Issei will come along and pick it up. He'll certainly know what to do with it."
"Rrrrrrr!" I snarled, furious. The hand that had already drawn back to send the trinket through the window stopped where it was. "Rrrrrrr!!"
"Run out of arguments, have you?" She smiled with insufferable smugness.
And for some reason, the Strange film suddenly came to mind. How easily the canonical Ancient One had dropped everything onto the unsuspecting Stephen. And how that same Eye had been stored in that film — out in the open, no security, no alarms, no traps, no magical wards. Help yourself, whoever wants it. And so the hapless Stephen did. And no one ever even asked him to put it back.
And here, it turned out, the hapless one was me. I'd snarled and grabbed it without thinking.
Now what? This shameless fox face had absolutely no intention of taking it back. And throwing it away — well, some ambitious young man really would come along and pick it up and start bending reality into knots. And then I'd be the one chasing him down and conducting an extended tutorial. This Ancient Nuisance wouldn't lift a finger to help. The fact that she'd go down with the bent reality wouldn't affect her position in the slightest. Who's stubborn as a herd of sheep now!
"Rrrrrrrrrrr!" I gave one final, deeply displeased growl, snatched up the Sling Ring in addition to the Eye already in my hand, and spun on my heel, heading with a distinctly irritated stomp toward the library — to read about how to use this wretched ring. Cancel the Hunt? The Pack was waiting.
As for the trinket — we'd discuss that later. When I wasn't in such a hurry. We'd see who came out on top. As the vice-principal at Vasya-Sensei's school used to say: the night owl always outlasts the day owl.
***
At exactly midnight Moscow time, on Kume-jima, at the center of the ritual Circle, an enormous fiery portal window opened. Two figures stepped through into the Circle: a tall, grim, one-armed blond man, and a tall girl with blazing red hair.
"Pack!" the one-armed Leader growled. "Ready to Hunt?!"
"Rrrraaa!!!" All three thousand Creeds gathered around him roared back as one, flinging their arms into the air.
"Then we begin!" The one-armed Leader spread into a snarl. "Jean will assign your targets now. Each group has a designated objective. I will place you as close to the prey as possible. The prey," — the last words were swallowed by an even more enthusiastic roar from the Pack — "is not needed alive."
"Begin, Jean," he said quietly, turning to her. "And remember what I told you: do not, under any circumstances, go into their heads. Drop the package and close up immediately. Don't let their Beasts break through into your mind. If they do, they will simply consume your consciousness — 'Omega' or not, it won't matter. Like we practiced."
She nodded. She was pale. Her lips had pressed themselves into a thin line. There is, after all, a considerable difference between imagining three thousand bloodthirsty Creeds and standing in the middle of them, entirely surrounded. Even a non-telepath would have felt the wave of it — the bloodlust, the aura of danger, the bright and cheerful predatory hunger that radiated off each of those three thousand as something almost physical. The only island of stillness was her companion. The one-armed Leader of this Pack. He registered as a column of ice standing in the middle of a volcanic eruption. Ice that did not melt. He emanated steadiness, solidity, strength, immovability — and something that was, underneath all of it, deeply calm.
And then the Leader began calling out names, separating groups from the assembled crowd. Jean fed each group the pre-assembled information package on their target, and the one-armed Leader opened a portal window through which the group slipped like swift, silent shadows.
One group, then another, then a third. One after the next. Until of all three thousand, only nine remained. The Leader nodded to Jean then, opened a portal window for her, and she stepped through it, back to wherever she called home. Then the Leader opened one more window and slipped through it together with the remaining Pack members.
***
Kimura was getting nervous.
She was sitting at the base, waiting for word that still hadn't come. From the moment she'd delivered X-23 to Moscow and left her at the safehouse, Kimura hadn't been part of the operation — the point was to leave as few traces as possible. Extraction of her charge from the city and the country was to be handled by Stryker's people, whom she didn't know.
Stryker. He'd been at the base when she returned. Then he'd disappeared somewhere without telling her whether X-23 had been successfully extracted after the operation. That it would succeed, Kimura had no doubt at all. X-23 had everything she needed for it: the knowledge, the skills, the precision, the equipment, the strength, the speed, and adamantium claws.
But the extraction — Kimura didn't trust Stryker's people. She didn't know them, had no way to gauge their professionalism or competence. So she couldn't trust them.
And then there was this Kinney, drifting through the complex like a ghost. Nervous too. A slug, in Kimura's estimation. A spineless hen who whined constantly and still did exactly whatever she was told. Kimura had no respect for her.
Right now, Kimura was sitting in the base's security control room. Out of boredom, she glanced at the monitors from time to time while filing her nails. Being a mercenary and a mutant and a soldier was no excuse for neglecting one's nails or one's hair.
Then something flickered on one of the monitors. Some kind of shadow. A trivial thing, not worth a second thought. Except that the instincts of a battle-hardened veteran mercenary suddenly screamed, and Kimura flung the nail file aside and lunged for the control panel, shoving the operator so hard he went over backward, chair and all.
"Post one! What's going on over there? What the hell is happening?" She jammed the intercom button and barked into the microphone. No answer. "Post one!!" Silence again. She hit several more buttons. "Posts two, three, four — respond to Birdhouse!" More silence. Kimura pressed the next button. "All stations! Comms check! Respond immediately!"
Silence.
Without another thought, Kimura slammed the base-wide alarm button.
The sirens didn't sound. And from behind her came a soft shuffling — and what might have been a wet gurgling. She turned, already pulling her pistol from its holster.
Behind her, a fair-haired young man in old camouflage — the kind you'd only see in a museum nowadays — held the operator's throat in his teeth. Blood ran from under those teeth, and the operator's body convulsed through its final spasms.
Kimura raised her pistol. She didn't get to fire. A blow to her arm knocked the weapon free. And then someone's hand — strong and rigid as steel — seized her by the jaw. One sharp wrench. A crack of vertebrae. For one instant, Kimura saw her own back, and the shapely rear end she had always been so proud of — and then everything went dark.
Her body dropped to the floor like a ragdoll, its head rotated exactly one hundred and eighty degrees.
"Bag her," said the one-armed, feral-looking young man quietly, wiping his hand on his trousers, to two more blonds who had apparently been in the room the entire time, alongside the first one — who had finally dropped the dead operator's body.
The two blonds wordlessly picked up Kimura's body, snapped handcuffs onto her wrists behind her back, and secured her elbows, knees, and ankles with zip ties. One of them grabbed the body by the boot and dragged it casually behind him, out of the room, following the Leader who had already left.
***
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