“Jack Be Nimble”, 4/4

[aadler]

Final installment.

Part 3 here

Part IV

We did, in fact, take a cab, and had it drop us off several blocks from our destination. We walked the rest of the way, while I laid out the facts for Ariel. “Cholk’s an organizer, and he discovered he actually likes building things. Not everything he does is shady, he gets a lot of his income - maybe even most of it - for legitimate activities, filling in gaps for other outfits and keeping things running smoothly. That gives him bank to fund the occasional project of his own, and this is one of them.” I gestured ahead of us. “It’s almost completed, so he’s using this place for his business offices while he finishes polishing the edges. That’s where he’ll have the files I was talking about, and the wards we have to pass through. Which this -” I held up the token she had retrieved. “- should accomplish.” (Assuming she had in fact found the right one, but I was getting the feeling she wouldn’t turn out to be wrong about that. Just something about her … her naïvete made her unreliable in some areas, but I didn’t think this was one of them.)

Ariel was looking ahead as if studying, though I wouldn’t have thought us close enough yet for her to make out any detail. “So what kind of place is this? what is it for?”

For once, I had no answer. I knew the basic layout, the construction timetable, even several of the shift schedules, but I had never thought to inquire as to the original purpose. I glanced at the third member of our raiding party. “Merl?”

“What am I, Wikipedia?” he grumped, but then he waved spindly fingers at the area around us. “We’re a coupla blocks from one of the local colleges, and I think Cholk got the tip they might be expanding a few years from now. He bought the land, and he’s puttin’ together stuff he figures they’ll want. - which’d be a pretty long call, unless he’s got inside info, so he probably does.” He nodded toward our destination. “That one, now, I think it’s supposed to be laid out for, whatsit, flexible purposing, but my ear to the ground says they’re settin’ it up so it can be used as a gymnasium, small arena, maybe event-type hall. Probably mainly the first, ’cause he’s at least checkin’ prices on those swivel-up/swivel-down basketball backboards.”

“Sports arena,” Ariel repeated, as if trying out the words. “Okay, that’ll be a new one … even if I did hear Buffy burned down her first gym, like, forever ago.” Hearing that name, unexpectedly, triggered an involuntary spurt of adrenaline that I had to hope didn’t show; I’d thought I got past that long ago, I had much more important things to focus on now, but apparently it was still a tender area. While I was still checking myself for control, Ariel lifted an eyebrow and said, “Whoa. Glass everywhere, interior lights … that’s going to be really hard to sneak through, why do they have the lights on this time of night?”

“To make it harder to sneak through, naturally.” I shrugged. “And sometimes Cholk has night shifts come in to do after-hours work, and there’s at least one guard-crew.”

Merl stopped where he was. “Seriously? Seriously?! Of all the shruschkuch-damn -!”

“I know you don’t like risks,” I interrupted, trying to head off another puss-out. “I also know you’ll take some for the right reward. That’s why you’re here.”

“I’ll take chances, sure,” he groused. “But that’s when I’m workin’ solo, where I check the layout and I make the plan and I pick out which way I wanna go, ’cause I don’t trust anybody else doin’ it for me! Which you’d better bet includes you! This isn’t my kinda scene, and you know it, and now you’re tryin’ to push me inta some place with a friggin’ demon guard crew -?!!”

“I can handle guards,” Ariel put in, almost casually.

Merl rounded on her. “Can you handle ’em so nobody knows I was ever there? Nah, you’ll bust through ’em ’n’ retouch your nail-gloss and breeze along on your way ’cause you don’t have to worry about whatever mess you leave. Well, I do, and I already said something about that, and if nobody’s listenin’ to me then I need to be some­where else right the hell now!”

Ariel settled back, crossed her arms, and looked to me. Good that she wasn’t trying to take charge, but the message clearly was Let’s see if you can handle this, which didn’t improve my mood. “I don’t need you to go inside, Merl,” I said with as much patience as I could bring to bear.

“No?” He glared at me. “Then why am I here? You keep talkin’ about pay, but I know you’re not payin’ for charming company!”

“Okay,” I corrected. “What I mean is, I don’t expect you to come inside with us. I just need you to go in far enough to get us inside, then you can move on. Like back at the high-rise: shallow penetration, open a door for us, and that’s all.”

He squinted suspiciously at me. “That wasn’t all you wanted from me back there,” he said accusingly.

“No, I knew I’d need someone to get in and find the token, which I knew you could do. This isn’t drift-searching an uptown condo, though, so we don’t need your finer touch, we can handle the rest ourselves once you let us in. You won’t even have to hang around after that, you can move on and we’ll meet to settle up later.” (Which was asking for a different kind of trust, but I’d used Merl’s services before and might need them again, and he knew I understood keeping debts paid in order to leave future prospects open.) “Few minutes more work,” I wheedled, “then you’re done for the night. That’s all it’ll take.”

He studied us both with doubtful, bristly hostility, then his features resumed their normal disgruntled expression. “Show me what access point you got picked out,” he demanded gracelessly. “Then we’ll see.”

He stalked off ahead of us toward the target building, all self-affronted indignation. Ariel looked after him, back at me. “Is he really worth all the effort it takes to handle him?” she wondered.

I sighed. “Usually? yes. Right now? basically a coin-toss.”

She nodded at that, then added, “I notice you’ve stopped bothering to call him Bart.”

After a frozen moment I smiled at her, as if amused. “Well, neither you nor Katie were really buying it,” I said. “And I only started in the first place when I thought I was diverting unfriendly attention from him. Didn’t really seem worth keeping up the charade once I knew what we were headed for tonight.”

(Actually I had plain forgot, which shook me. I can lie smoothly, pretty much effortlessly, so this was a serious lapse in my normal habit. Were Ariel’s dogged attempts to reform me causing enough mental static to break my concentration? That wouldn’t be a good sign, so it was fortunate we were nearing the end of our business.)

We had to get considerably closer before I could make out what Ariel had spotted some distance back, though of course I already knew it. Gleaming white brick, glass on every side and an even larger area in the front with a glass ceiling over the entry enclosure and a huge circular window in the front supplying a ready view of the stairs that went up either side of the interior to the first mezzanine … Architecturally, it was striking; functionally, it was beautifully effective; for a would-be burglar, a nightmare to be scrupulously avoided. Which was the plan.

I led the others on a wide quarter-arc around the perimeter, came in at the rear. The area was clear of the poled lights, and trees and other buildings gave us good shadow cover. “There,” I said, pointing Merl to the spot I had chosen as the weak point. “Right there, third floor. In, down, let us in that door there” - pointing again - “and then you can move along and I’ll meet you at Del’s tomorrow night with your payment.”

Now this was a funny thing about Merl: against everything you would expect of such a character, he never bothered negotiating his fee in advance, at least not with me. I don’t know if it was because he knew I’d pay fair (unlikely, since he made it a life-rule to never actually trust anybody) or because past events had shown I had a good track record and he just liked the argument. We’d spend hours disputing how much he said he was worth against what I was willing to pay, and in the end neither one of us would be satisfied but we’d both decide that was the best we could do. It was baked into the process, and I had learned to accept the tediousness of it as part of the cost: Merl being Merl. So, unsurprisingly, he let that bit pass, eyed the spots I had indicated to him, and rasped, “Already told you that stuff hurts. This is gonna cost you.”

“Don’t I know it,” I acknowledged.

He made a rude noise, and started taking off his clothes. The hoodie, the turtleneck underneath, the skinny-leg jeans … he started with his shoes, actually, and I observed that he’d had to use three layers of socks to get them to stay on his feet. What we had at the end was five and a half feet of scrawny gray-scaled Merl, a neon-yellow Speedo preserving whatever remained of anything he might consider modesty, shaking out his arms and doing deep bends to prepare for the final task ahead. Ariel shot me an inquisitive glance, and I just gestured for her to keep watching: seeing it would trump any attempt at explanation.

“Hey,” I called to him. “Don’t forget this.” I held up the token on its wire loop.

He took it from me with a snort of disdain, dropped the loop around his neck. Still rotating his neck and head and rolling his shoulders, he went to the building, stretched upward, pressed his arms and upper chest against the brick … and stuck. Then he raised one leg, bent like a frog’s, and likewise adhered it to the building side. That secured, he detached his left arm from the brickwork and reached up to press that to a higher spot, used those anchors to hold him while he brought up his left leg. Moving at this rate, a couple of feet every thirty seconds, he crept up the wall like a big warty gecko, stick and pull and unstick to reach for the next pull up. I don’t know if this was something normal to Merl’s species, or if he was a partial throwback to an earlier stage of development, or if he had somehow developed and acquired it as a useful personal talent (I knew something about things like that), but it was a capability that came in handy more often than you would expect.

When he reached the upper area I had indicated, either a really narrow window or a really wide vent, he sort of gradually oozed in through it, a further application of the trick he had used to get past the bars at Cholk’s place. Ariel waited till he had disappeared within before looking to me. “You know the most interesting people,” she said.

There was a deadpan quality to it that made me smile. Her idealism might be unrealistic, but that didn’t mean she was one-dimensional. “Life does get fun,” I agreed.

Another minute, minute and half, the ground floor door opened and Merl stepped out, holding it for us and rubbing at his chest and arms as if they itched so bad he was afraid to start scratching lest he bear down till skin came off. “You got anything else, you better save it for later,” he told me truculently. “This is already about three times as much as I bargained for.”

“No, we’re good for the night.” I reached out to brace the door. “Feel anything from the token?”

“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe the wards’re further in, maybe it doesn’t give feedback.” I held out my hand; he lifted the token from his neck, passed it over, piping snidely, “ ‘Thanks, Merl. Couldn’t’a done it without ya, Merl. You’ll be getting a fat bonus, Merl, ’cause you’re so totes awesome.’ ”

“Thanks, Merl,” I said back. “Probably could’ve done it without you, but it would have been kind of a pain.” (Like you.) “We’ll talk about the bonus.” (Possible, not too likely.) “You want us to wait till you get dressed again?”

“Yeah, sure,” he sneered. “Like I want ta hang around you two a minute more’n I gotta.” He gathered up his clothes and headed out, staying to shadows and aiming for deeper shadow, meanwhile muttering things I seriously doubted were in any way complimentary.

I put the loop-with-token around my own neck, tucking it securely under my collar, then beckoned Ariel inside and let the door close behind us once we were in. “You never need a light with Merl around,” I said to her. “He’s just a ray of sunshine all by himself.”

“Word,” Ariel replied, which almost made me crack up. When did suburban white girls start picking up ’hood slang?

We headed down the hallway ahead of us, the brightness of the lighting inside making any notion of concealment impossible; we’d just have to move swiftly and hope we could avoid running into anybody. “From here on, it’s mostly checking possibilities,” I told her, voice pitched low. “I have some idea of the interior construction, so I know the places Cholk shouldn’t have office space and the places where he probably has office space, but I can’t swear to any of it. The best spots should be up on the levels overlooking the arena-area and the floor right above that, so that’s where we’ll start.”

“Right,” she said, moving ahead with confidence: the high-school girl had taken a leave of absence, and I was now looking at a combat soldier on a patrol that she knew from long habit. From her backpack she’d pulled out something I’d never seen before, a kind of long leather thing shaped like a stretched-out bowling pin; catching my curious look, Ariel slapped the thicker part against her palm, holding the other end as a handle. “Steel shot inside,” she explained. “Like a big blackjack. Non-lethal if that’s how I want to go, nasty enough if I need to get serious.”

I nodded, and kept on without answering. Till now I’d borne some simulation of leadership, simply because I had the plan and understood the basics, but now we were in her territory again and I shifted back into follow-and-support (while taking care to stay level with her) without really having to think about it. If nothing else, it was certainly reassuring to have the strongest fighter rignt next to me …

Halfway up the first set of stairs, I felt the kind of tingling buzz that had been described in the texts I’d studied getting ready for this: the token had encountered the edge of the wards. “Bingo,” I told Ariel. “We’re inside the alarm field, the token worked. Clear sailing from here.” I knew she’d heard me, but she didn’t respond, just forged on ahead, focused and intent. That was good. That was what I needed. This was according to plan.

We were past the second floor, almost to one of the mezzanines, when we hit the guard patrol. No avoiding them: we were nearing the top of that set of stairs, out in open view, and they rounded the bend at the end of the hallway up ahead. They’d seen us in the first instant, of course, and we could fight or we could run but this was a Slayer, Ariel went for them as if she’d just been waiting for the starting gun, and I pelted after her because … well, because for now this was where I needed to be.

There were seven of them, more than I had expected for this site at this hour and quite a few more than I’d ever spied out gathered here as a group. Human-appearing, but they moved just a little not-quite-right, and several had started shifting into something more combat-capable by the time (seconds later) that Ariel hit, driving into them with an impact like a half-stick of TNT.

The halls were roomy enough for a middle-sized game-day crowd, but that’s not the same as effective space for a melee, and the guard crew had to maneuver around each other while Ariel was a one-girl blitz squad all on her own. She slammed into them in an abrupt thunderbolt of violence, using the long-sap with precise, devastating effect, I think she must have dropped two of the guards in the first second or so and the remainder were hard-pressed even to stay upright and mobile. I caught up to where she had hit just as another two angled around her while she was momentarily occupied with three more; I think they might have been thinking of flanking her (or, perhaps, simply running once they were past her), but at the sight of me they decided here was an easier target, and came for me with yelps of unwelcome eagerness.

The hardest part of fighting demons isn’t how tough they are (though there’s plenty of that), it’s that their physiologies vary so much you can never be sure of the best targets. With that in mind, I tried always to have something broad-spectrum at hand, which paid off now. I smacked them both with pepper spray while they were still eight feet away, side-stepping quickly to avoid catching any drift-back myself, then used the taser on the farther one; the closer one had gone to his knees, swiping at his eyes with the backs of knobby hands that seemed to have been in the process of extruding claws, and I skipped forward to snap an instep-strike into his throat with as much force as I could bring to bear while still keeping balance.

He rolled away, making a revolting gargling noise, and the one I had tasered was enough recovered to come at me again, albeit not too steadily. One-on-one was better than one-on-two, but still a long way from my own preferences; I jinked out of his path, slammed a downward-slanting side-kick into his knee as he went past (like throats, knees are fairly reliable as vulnerable points, though different species can require being struck from different angles), and he stumbled and came around again and I really needed a more specific weapon right now but Ariel was next to me with startling quickness, touching my erstwhile enemy on the point of the shoulder with a deceptively gentle stroke of the long-sap, followed by a casual tap to the side of the head that dropped him as if he’d taken a bullet between the eyes. A few steps forward, and she repeated the sleep-tap on the one I’d throat-kicked, and now everything was quiet.

She wasn’t sweating, wasn’t mussed, wasn’t remotely shaken. “Huh,” she said, looking at the still forms around us. “That was more than I expected to run into all in the same place.”

I was sweating, and my adrenaline was running high. “And they really looked like they were following routine about the time they spotted us,” I noted. “Doesn’t seem likely that every guard in the place would be roaming the halls in a clump; that could mean there are more teams out there. I don’t know what type these are -”

“Camber-Pyclet,” Ariel supplied for me. “Not top-class in the muscle range, but they do better than most at operating as a group. And they’re pretty good at passing for human, so the ones that want to, can get the kind of work that needs that.”

“Right,” I agreed. “The thing is, if they were on rounds, we’ve got only just so much time before they’re missed and somebody starts checking to find out why.” I looked up at the third floor. “If we could have got up there, stayed out of sight, we could have spent awhile checking out likely spots, maybe taken the rest of the night and still left without anybody knowing we’d been here. That approach just went out the window.” I was thinking quickly now, rolling possibilities through my head and finding only a limited range of answers. I pointed to the hallway from which the Camber-Pyclet had emerged. “Some of the possible offices are there. Others are upstairs. We need speed now; you check here, I’ll run up to the third floor.”

The speed part was absolutely true, but Ariel took an extra moment anyhow: staring at me intently, doing that impression of trying to see through me into my soul. I couldn’t have begun to read her face. “Okay,” she said to me at last. “Okay. Katie was suspicious of you, I know, but I’m not Katie. I’m trusting you because I know you can be trusted.” She put her hand on my chest, as if trying to impart some kind of benediction to me, and there is just no way I could describe whatever was in her eyes. “I believe in you. You’re a good person, even if you don’t believe it yourself.” She took her hand away. “So go do what you have to do.”

I don’t know if I could have found an answer to that, but I didn’t have to. She turned from me and strode away in the direction I had indicated, and I exited the area in relief, quick-footing my way up the remaining stairs to the third floor.

Now: I hadn’t lied to her, even if I hadn’t told her everything. The way I had sent her did have probable offices, and in fact I suspected that the files I’d told her about were more likely to be there than anywhere else, so I’d steered her right. Upstairs, though …

Upstairs were the areas I had good reason to believe Cholk was using as storerooms.

The last several years have been, for me, an unending scramble for every advantage I can ferret out for myself. I was crazy when I went into the Old Man’s domain, some irrational part of me so caught up in obsession that I was willing to pay any cost to get what I wanted. It wasn’t even that I’d never wondered if it was an acceptable sacrifice: he’d asked me himself, Is she worth it? And I’d already known the answer, and said it: No. But I’d gone on ahead anyway.

Like I said, crazy. Well, obsession doesn’t last forever, and he’d been right: there was no way to hold her, not Buffy Summers. She was gone almost the moment we returned to mundane reality, so quickly that I thought she’d been snatched back like Eurydice till I saw her fighting the surreal demon-biker crew, and fully realized that ‘bringing her out’ and ‘keeping her’ weren’t remotely the same thing. That, also, was when I first began seriously considering the price I’d accepted with so little concern for consequences.

Ever since then, I’ve kept myself concentrated on one fundamental concept: Face reality. Look at the world as it actually is. Never mind feelings, forget ideals, skip past self-image and self-concept and self-actualization. Face reality. I’d let my feelings lead me literally into hell; only my rational mind, holding fast to clear, cold reality, could keep me from returning there.

He’d said he had a long memory for grudges. I didn’t doubt it. He’d said I had an excellent chance of winding up back under his authority. I figured he’d know how that worked better than I did, and so I’d have to take it seriously. I’d outmaneuvered him once, when he hadn’t realized just how much I was bringing to the contest; I wouldn’t have that advantage in any second meeting, and didn’t know any certain way of avoiding such a meeting.

So I had to gather all the advantages I could.

That was what my life had become. Learning, training, accumulating knowledge and experience and artifacts, seeking out everything that might possibly be of use to me and thinking of new ways to use what I found. Magic-users can’t pack enough juice to make much of a dent, he’d said; but, I had established that effective application could deflect and outperform raw power, and if I collected enough different things and practiced endless combinations of how to mix and bring them to bear, that might be enough to tip the balance. My life, my self, hadn’t narrowed to a single perspective; I was still me, still as focused on living as on staying alive, but all the same there were two things now that mattered more than anything else. The first was staying out of the Old Man’s demesne for as long as I could, forever if possible; the second was equipping myself to get out again if I should chance to find myself there after all. The only real way to accomplish the first was immortality (and I was working on that, even if the prospects weren’t too promising). The second, now -

I’d been collecting advantages. Cholk was a collector, too, and over a great deal of time and study I had confirmed that his collection included something I very much wanted.

The bracelet on my left wrist had an inscription on the inside. I turned that around to face outward, pricked the ball of my thumb with the smallest blade on my pocket knife, and used that same blade to carefully sketch a pentagram, in blood, on the round face of the bracelet, breathing the prescribed words of power as the last point of the pentagram was joined. A faint wash of orange-tinged light outlined everything in my vision: it was only for my eyes, but it showed me which way to go.

I followed the path it laid out, kicking in the door when it wouldn’t open and pushing into the interior. I was growing more and more frantic, horribly conscious of the time that might be trickling away and fighting doggedly to keep control of myself; I was probably knocking aside priceless treasures to get to the one I wanted, and part of me knew it, but I’d lost the opportunity to assess other possibilities at leisure, I had to grab this one while it was still in reach. I kept going, sweeping shelves clear of artifacts I didn’t recognize and shoving the shelves themselves out of my way, sticking to the quest-line the basic spell had provided.

I found it, smashed the locked chest against the bare concrete of the floor and pulled the precious sachet out of the revealed cavity. There was a chant, and I had learned it months ago and intoned it now; there was a ritual, gestures and timing and postures and invocations, and I went through them in the proper order; there was a moment when I was to hold the sewn-cloth bag above my head and tear it apart, letting the crush-powdered contents sift down onto my upturned face and into my open mouth and eyes while I inhaled as much as I could, and I did that and held myself absolutely still as I felt the core of the inlaid enchantment begin to seep into me.

Tools were fine, I gathered them and I applied them for best effect. Weapons were valuable, techniques were useful, knowledge was welcome, I sought it all and took whatever came into my reach. This, though: if this worked as the scrolls had promised, it would become part of me, something bound to my essence and all but impossible to take away. Now just give it a few minutes to finish infusing me and becoming bonded to the foundations of my being -

Distantly, but clearly, I heard shouts, and sounds of new combat, and Ariel cried out my name with an urgency I’d never before heard from her. I couldn’t imagine anything Cholk might have hired that could challenge a Slayer (thus my eagerness to have one along), but it was there in her voice: desperation, entreaty, wild overriding need …

… and do you know, I almost started to go to her? I was actually turning toward that cry, my feet about to drive me back out into that hall and down the stairs between us, when I caught myself.

No. No. You didn’t come as far as I had by letting yourself get distracted from essentials. It was a matter of focus. It was a matter of setting priorities and sticking to them. It was a matter of never losing sight of the difference between what-might-be-nice and the-way-it-has-to-BE. I still needed that minute or two for the ritual to have the completed effect. Ariel … Ariel would buy me that time.

I waited, feeling the magic settle into me, permeating every part of me and becoming solid. Listened to her screaming my name over the noises of battle, in despair and anguish and something else that sounded terribly like … grief. You’re a good person, she’d kept insisting, as if she could make it true by saying it. I believe in you.

She should have known better.

The process reached its conclusion, I felt it, a second or so before something else happened: another scream, but this one blasted out with scorching fury and in Katie’s voice. Hadn’t been expecting that but wasn’t surprised, it made sense that she’d indulge her doubts of me by shadowing from a long way off and then come streaking to her friend’s aid when everything went to crap. It also meant I wouldn’t have to worry much about further guards, two Slayers would shred everything around them and any adversaries would either be drawn to that noise or highly inclined to get as far away from it as possible.

I took a deep breath, gathered the new energies around me - groping my way through my first use of them, but it felt right, like buried but newly-awakened instinct - and ghosted, moving out into the hall and away from the redoubled clash behind me. The world around me was laid out in shades of sepia, but the details were etched with unnatural clarity; nobody would see me, nobody could touch me, I was walking inside a different plane of existence and there were so very many useful things that could be done with something like that. Pressing forward, and turning my mind toward the possibilities ahead instead of all that lay unimportant and forgotten in my wake.
*               *               *
So that’s the story of how I almost killed the Slayer, that Slayer. Not because I intended to, not because I had anything against her; she was just a means to an end, and in the final analysis that’s all any of us are to anybody else. I almost killed her because she insisted on seeing the world as she wanted it to be, instead of as it actually is. I don’t hold it against her, and if you want to know the truth, I genuinely hope she someday reaches the point where she can face the necessities in front of her on a basis of reality, instead of wishful thinking.

Whatever she does, though, is up to her, and she’ll do it - or she won’t - without me. Either way, I’ll be where I am, doing what I do.

Keeping my focus where it was always going to be.

- end -

And there you are. Don’t hesitate to offer commentary.
End Notes