DEVIL - Chapter Four, by Pragmatic_Chimp, Azazel/Mystique
“There will be no prison which can hold our movement down.” - Huey P. Newton
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
Chapter Four
The liberation of Emma Frost was almost anticlimactic. As it turned out, the hardest part was figuring out where she was actually being held, and Erik ran point on that. He had a great deal of experience in finding people who didn't want to be found, and that was a skill set that could easily be reapplied to find hidden prisoners inside secret CIA facilities. However, she'd been moved several times since that day on the beach, so it took Erik the better part of a month to find out where she was currently being held. But he did find her, at last. And once she'd been found, they needed to act fast, before the CIA relocated her yet again. At that point, the impetus of the plan fell to Azazel.
By then the hotel's - no, she corrected herself, their headquarters's - phones were up and running. When Erik called Mystique down to the lobby, which had become something of a common room for the Brotherhood, the others were already there. Angel and Janos set across from each other on a couple of couches, talking together in quiet voices. Angel, Mystique had learned, had some Spanish, though not the same dialect as Janos. It seemed that if they took their time they could understand one another well enough to get by, anyway, and they were both learning more together while Angel helped him with his English.
Azazel was leaning over the front desk, his palms braced against the stained marble surface while he studied the set of blueprints and several maps which were unfolded in front of him. Erik stood slightly behind him, reading over Azazel's shoulder. He'd already suited up in his new outfit - costume? uniform? - and a cape hung limply from his shoulders. The newly decorated helmet was held under the crook of his elbow. Mystique did not understand why there was cape or why Erik had done what he had to change the helmet.
“Yes,” Azazel said, turning to look up over his shoulder at Erik several minutes later. “This can be done.” He seemed to hold Erik's gaze for an overly-long amount of time. Reading something there, Mystique wondered, or trying to communicate something to him? He had seemed intensely focused on those maps a moment before, but when he spoke next his voice was completely calm, almost serene. “It will be very simple, comrade.”
“Good,” Erik said, and Mystique jumped at the noise, startled. She had been so focused on trying to read Azazel that she'd almost forgotten about the others. Erik came around to the other side of the desk, and Mystique looked at him - really looked - for the first time that night. What she saw shocked her.
He's barely hanging on by a thread, she realized, and didn't know how she could have missed it before, because once she had noticed how nervous he was it became painfully obvious that Erik was wrestling with a severe panic attack. His forehead was beaded with sweat; it had soaked into his hair, and his bangs hung damp and limp over his eyes.
By a thread, she thought again, but wasn't that how he'd lived his entire life up to this point? Getting by on rage and wits, always alone? But this would be something different and new for him tonight, just as it was for her. In the past, if his plans went wrong only his own life was on the line, but now he had people depending on him, people following him into the line of fire with the expectation that he would lead them through safely. But he had never lead anyone before now. He's trying to remake himself, just like I am. And he isn't sure that he can pull it - or any of the rest of this - off.
And then she thought, He was counting on having Charles by his side. When he stared all this, he thought Charles would be there to help him.
It was funny how quickly a person could grow dependent on Charles. He had a way of making people aware of their innate strength while - completely unintentionally, she was sure - making them feel as though that strength was dependent on Charles's patronage. She wanted to tell Erik that Charles had a tendency to disappoint people when they needed him most, but that he wasn't alone now, that the Brotherhood was behind him and wouldn't let him down - that she wouldn't let him down.
But she was afraid that she'd read him wrong - she wasn't Charles, she couldn't know what was really going on in Erik's head. She might just be projecting her own feelings and fears onto him. She wanted to say something to reassure him, but it was becoming more and more clear to her by then that words without actions were meaningless. Instead, she resolved that she would show him that she could be relied upon through her actions, and grew a bit stronger at the thought that she had the power to help Erik be brave. And she promised herself that no part of this plan would go wrong because of her, and became more deeply enmeshed in Erik's vision, though she had yet to understand it perfectly.
As though he'd seen what was on her mind, Erik slipped the helmet over his head, stepping more firmly into the role he'd chosen for himself. He had done tremendously daring things in his life, worn a hundred different masks; still, when he spoke there was a forced, wood quality to his words, as though he'd over-rehearsed his speech.
“Now is not the time to force a confrontation with the humans,” he said, projecting his voice more loudly than was necessary. He paced the length of the room stiffly as he spoke, the cape rustling heavily behind him. “No, tonight we simply reclaim one of our own. We will enter the facility as closely to Emma Frost as Azazel can get us, we will free her, and then we will leave as quickly as possible. We will not engage in unnecessary skirmishes.” He turned his eyes on Azazel as he said this. Azazel inclined his head slightly and and spread his hands - easy consent. Then he came around the desk to stand beside Erik.
Angel and Janos stood, moving toward the others. Mystique stepped forward too, feeling almost silly. Even after everything that had happened over the last two months, it was difficult to really believe that all this was real and was her own life -
Azazel was holding his free hand out to her. She allowed herself no hesitation, and when his hand closed over her she felt him running his fingers over the back of her hand, exploring the scales and ridging. She glanced down at their hands, and saw that his nails were a slightly brighter shade of crimson than his skin; when they caught the light they shone. The patterning of the the calluses on the inside of his hand and on the backs of his fingers was odd, but then she realized with a start, They come from working with those swords.
On Azazel's other side, Erik had taken his hand, and beside him Angel and then Janos had fallen into line, but she'd barely noticed. And then there was a sudden sensation of movement, as though the entire world had dropped out of existence, and she was falling -
The land they traveled through was as hot as flame and as red as blood, and the air smelled strongly of sulfur. They were there for only an instant. Had Mystique blinked she might have missed it completely.
- and then they were somewhere else and everything was happening very, very quickly. They were in the corridor of a bunker lined in steel. A heavy steel bast-door stood closed at end of the corridor. Erik raised a closed fist then spread his fingers, and the door swelled, the metal groaning as it expanded, warping to jam the door frame.
There was a agent standing near that door, seemly frozen in shock. He glanced around, turning his head with quick, jerking motions, trying to take everything in. His eyes were hazelnut, she saw, and round and glassy with terror. Then they locked on her, and Mystique saw those eyes flood with hate and disgust, and he reached down to his belt to grab his gun and -
Glenn knew he'd hesitated for too long - he'd been too well-trained to make rookie mistakes like that. But so many things that up until that moment he hadn't believed in had happened all at once. The blast door contorting by itself, sealing him inside the corridor without any hope of backup, trapping him with a bunch of monsters who had appeared out of nowhere with a puff of stinking red and black smoke. The higher-ups had been calling these things 'mutants' - that's what they called the frigid woman in the cell he'd been guarding, the one who walked around with her tits hanging halfway out the front of her shirt but who wouldn't so much as give him the time of day, and that's what they called the ones who'd nearly destroyed half the US navel fleet in Cuba a couple of months back - but the minute he laid eyes on this group he knew he knew what they really were. The blue one, obscenely naked and as scaly and lithesome as a snake. The red one, fork-tailed and sharply dressed. They were devils, pure and simple. No doubt about it.
He reached for his gun, and the one wearing the helmet with the little demon-horns on its front made a small movement, and the weapon fell all to pieces in his hand as he drew it from his holster. “Turn your back to the wall, and place your hands over your head,” the demon in the helmet instructed him - Glenn was sure he was a demon, too, though he looked normal. He hesitated again, and the helmeted devil said, “I would love to kill you. Give me any excuse.”
Glenn lifted his hands above his head. He started to turn, and then his eye caught the slight of the girl, and he had an idea.
The agent reached for his gun and Erik disarmed him, and then Erik told him to stand down. Mystique thought he was going to listen. She didn't realize how relieved that made her feel until he actually started to turn toward the wall. On the other side of the twisted door, more agents were shouting, pounding at the metal with something. They didn't matter, it would take them hours to get in here. The only one that mattered was the one that was locked in here with them, and he seemed to know what was in his best interests -
And then he whirled and charged toward Angel. Later, Mystique would spend a lot of time wondering why he had done it, why he had gone for Angel. In the end, she decided it was because Angel was small and pretty. She didn't look dangerous. She must have seemed like the best candidate in the corridor for a hostage.
He got closer to her than he should have been allowed to. No one, it seemed, had really expected the man to do something that stupid. Azazel was moving, drawing his short swords, but by then the agent already had a head start and was building momentum.
He reached out to grab Angel by the shoulders, and as his fingers closed roughly around her flesh she spit in his face. Then his head was on fire, and the high, keening shrieks that came from within the flames were unlike anything human. It was almost unreal. With a movement that was almost too quick for Mystique's eyes to follow, Azazel drove one of the blades into the agent's back. The screaming stopped so abruptly that it was as though someone had turned off a switch.
Azazel withdrew the blade, and the agent crumpled to the ground. Mystique was astonished by the neatness with which it had been done; the man had been less than a foot from Angel when Azazel had acted, and Mystique had been right beside her, and yet she could see not a single drop of blood on their skin or clothing.
The others had already turn and started to walk toward a second, smaller metal door that Mystique hadn't even seen before then, and which Erik was busy tearing from its hinges. Even Angel was moving, though she hugged herself tightly as she went.
Mystique glanced down at the body as she stepped around it. The hair was still on fire, but it was beginning to smolder out, leaving behind a blackened ruin. There was a name badge pinned to his chest, displaying a few sets of numbers that Mystique figured had to do with his rank and clearance level. There was a picture of the agent on the laminated badged, him looking sternly into the camera, and the name under the photo read “Glenn Adams.”
One of the hands gave a sudden spasm, and she stropped cold. Then she reached out, almost blindly, and caught Azazel by the sleeve. He paused at her tugging, turned back to look at her. One of his eyebrows - the one above the unscarred eye - was cocked inquisitively, but his expression was flat, as unreadable as that of the agent in the photo. He did not so much as glance down.
“He's still alive!” she hissed, waving the hand that was not clutching his sleeve at the body wildly. She could hear the panic building in her voice, and hated herself for it. How did I get here? she wondered, not for the first time and not for the last. I want to go home.
“This is not movie,” he said back at her. He was speaking very softly, as though he didn't wish to be overheard by the others. She had the surreal impression that he was embarrassed for her, that he felt that she was behaving badly. “People do not die all at once, so quickly and easily. Nothing does.” He did look down then, but not with much interest. “He will be dead very soon. He knows nothing now.”
She didn't know if that was true or not, though she wanted to believe it; the hand was still groping across the smooth steel floor, and she wanted to believe that it was some sort of reflexive neurological tick. But another part of her said that it was seeking something, that she ought to give it her own hand so it would have something to clutch at, that she ought to be telling him that everything would be okay - even if he was past hearing or understanding, even if it was a lie.
She began to knell. “Comrade,” Azazel said, and there was a harsh note in his voice that she hadn't heard before. She stopped - looked up at him and then toward where he was looking; Erik was sitting the smaller steel door to the side, and Angel and Janos were behind him, peering cautiously through the doorway. There could be anything in there, Mystique thought - more agents or something even more dangerous. The others might need her help - more importantly, they might need Azazel, and yet she was over here, focused on something other than the mission and distracting Azazel in the bargain. She stood quickly, before she could change her mind, and over to the others, Azazel a step ahead of her. She didn't pause to check if the hand was still moving.
When they got to the cell, she found that it was only Emma there. Nonetheless, Mystique recognized that she'd made a mistake that could have cost them all more than they could pay. I want to go home, she heard her mind say again, and beat that thought down, drove it away. Home was a cage. Home was a cage, and Emma might be listening to her thoughts now.
It went exactly as Azazel had said it would.
There was still something awkward and self-conscience about Erik as he addressed Emma, but not as much as there had been an hour before. Emma didn't take one look at him and start laughing, as Mystique had been half-afraid she would. She played it coy at first, but Mystique could tell that she'd decided that she was going to leave with them the moment Erik made the offer.
Then they were lining up again, joining hands with her bothers and sisters - her comrades, if Azazel had his way - and once again Mystique found herself beside Azazel, holding his hand. There was the heart-beat travel through the land of flame and black shadows, and then they were back in the headquarters, all six of them together.
Mystique separated herself from the others as quickly as she could, leaving it to someone else to settle Emma into her own set of rooms. Anyway, she didn't think Emma would be sleeping alone for very long.
She went up to her own room, and laid on the top of the sheets with all the lights on for a long time. Mystique thought maybe she ought to cry - she wanted to cry, or at least a part of her did - but she didn't. She studied her hands, wondering that the red of Azazel skin hadn't come away to stain her own flesh.
Some hours later, when muffled sounds of night had fallen over the city, she got up again.
She knew what she had to do.
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
Chapter Four
The liberation of Emma Frost was almost anticlimactic. As it turned out, the hardest part was figuring out where she was actually being held, and Erik ran point on that. He had a great deal of experience in finding people who didn't want to be found, and that was a skill set that could easily be reapplied to find hidden prisoners inside secret CIA facilities. However, she'd been moved several times since that day on the beach, so it took Erik the better part of a month to find out where she was currently being held. But he did find her, at last. And once she'd been found, they needed to act fast, before the CIA relocated her yet again. At that point, the impetus of the plan fell to Azazel.
By then the hotel's - no, she corrected herself, their headquarters's - phones were up and running. When Erik called Mystique down to the lobby, which had become something of a common room for the Brotherhood, the others were already there. Angel and Janos set across from each other on a couple of couches, talking together in quiet voices. Angel, Mystique had learned, had some Spanish, though not the same dialect as Janos. It seemed that if they took their time they could understand one another well enough to get by, anyway, and they were both learning more together while Angel helped him with his English.
Azazel was leaning over the front desk, his palms braced against the stained marble surface while he studied the set of blueprints and several maps which were unfolded in front of him. Erik stood slightly behind him, reading over Azazel's shoulder. He'd already suited up in his new outfit - costume? uniform? - and a cape hung limply from his shoulders. The newly decorated helmet was held under the crook of his elbow. Mystique did not understand why there was cape or why Erik had done what he had to change the helmet.
“Yes,” Azazel said, turning to look up over his shoulder at Erik several minutes later. “This can be done.” He seemed to hold Erik's gaze for an overly-long amount of time. Reading something there, Mystique wondered, or trying to communicate something to him? He had seemed intensely focused on those maps a moment before, but when he spoke next his voice was completely calm, almost serene. “It will be very simple, comrade.”
“Good,” Erik said, and Mystique jumped at the noise, startled. She had been so focused on trying to read Azazel that she'd almost forgotten about the others. Erik came around to the other side of the desk, and Mystique looked at him - really looked - for the first time that night. What she saw shocked her.
He's barely hanging on by a thread, she realized, and didn't know how she could have missed it before, because once she had noticed how nervous he was it became painfully obvious that Erik was wrestling with a severe panic attack. His forehead was beaded with sweat; it had soaked into his hair, and his bangs hung damp and limp over his eyes.
By a thread, she thought again, but wasn't that how he'd lived his entire life up to this point? Getting by on rage and wits, always alone? But this would be something different and new for him tonight, just as it was for her. In the past, if his plans went wrong only his own life was on the line, but now he had people depending on him, people following him into the line of fire with the expectation that he would lead them through safely. But he had never lead anyone before now. He's trying to remake himself, just like I am. And he isn't sure that he can pull it - or any of the rest of this - off.
And then she thought, He was counting on having Charles by his side. When he stared all this, he thought Charles would be there to help him.
It was funny how quickly a person could grow dependent on Charles. He had a way of making people aware of their innate strength while - completely unintentionally, she was sure - making them feel as though that strength was dependent on Charles's patronage. She wanted to tell Erik that Charles had a tendency to disappoint people when they needed him most, but that he wasn't alone now, that the Brotherhood was behind him and wouldn't let him down - that she wouldn't let him down.
But she was afraid that she'd read him wrong - she wasn't Charles, she couldn't know what was really going on in Erik's head. She might just be projecting her own feelings and fears onto him. She wanted to say something to reassure him, but it was becoming more and more clear to her by then that words without actions were meaningless. Instead, she resolved that she would show him that she could be relied upon through her actions, and grew a bit stronger at the thought that she had the power to help Erik be brave. And she promised herself that no part of this plan would go wrong because of her, and became more deeply enmeshed in Erik's vision, though she had yet to understand it perfectly.
As though he'd seen what was on her mind, Erik slipped the helmet over his head, stepping more firmly into the role he'd chosen for himself. He had done tremendously daring things in his life, worn a hundred different masks; still, when he spoke there was a forced, wood quality to his words, as though he'd over-rehearsed his speech.
“Now is not the time to force a confrontation with the humans,” he said, projecting his voice more loudly than was necessary. He paced the length of the room stiffly as he spoke, the cape rustling heavily behind him. “No, tonight we simply reclaim one of our own. We will enter the facility as closely to Emma Frost as Azazel can get us, we will free her, and then we will leave as quickly as possible. We will not engage in unnecessary skirmishes.” He turned his eyes on Azazel as he said this. Azazel inclined his head slightly and and spread his hands - easy consent. Then he came around the desk to stand beside Erik.
Angel and Janos stood, moving toward the others. Mystique stepped forward too, feeling almost silly. Even after everything that had happened over the last two months, it was difficult to really believe that all this was real and was her own life -
Azazel was holding his free hand out to her. She allowed herself no hesitation, and when his hand closed over her she felt him running his fingers over the back of her hand, exploring the scales and ridging. She glanced down at their hands, and saw that his nails were a slightly brighter shade of crimson than his skin; when they caught the light they shone. The patterning of the the calluses on the inside of his hand and on the backs of his fingers was odd, but then she realized with a start, They come from working with those swords.
On Azazel's other side, Erik had taken his hand, and beside him Angel and then Janos had fallen into line, but she'd barely noticed. And then there was a sudden sensation of movement, as though the entire world had dropped out of existence, and she was falling -
The land they traveled through was as hot as flame and as red as blood, and the air smelled strongly of sulfur. They were there for only an instant. Had Mystique blinked she might have missed it completely.
- and then they were somewhere else and everything was happening very, very quickly. They were in the corridor of a bunker lined in steel. A heavy steel bast-door stood closed at end of the corridor. Erik raised a closed fist then spread his fingers, and the door swelled, the metal groaning as it expanded, warping to jam the door frame.
There was a agent standing near that door, seemly frozen in shock. He glanced around, turning his head with quick, jerking motions, trying to take everything in. His eyes were hazelnut, she saw, and round and glassy with terror. Then they locked on her, and Mystique saw those eyes flood with hate and disgust, and he reached down to his belt to grab his gun and -
Glenn knew he'd hesitated for too long - he'd been too well-trained to make rookie mistakes like that. But so many things that up until that moment he hadn't believed in had happened all at once. The blast door contorting by itself, sealing him inside the corridor without any hope of backup, trapping him with a bunch of monsters who had appeared out of nowhere with a puff of stinking red and black smoke. The higher-ups had been calling these things 'mutants' - that's what they called the frigid woman in the cell he'd been guarding, the one who walked around with her tits hanging halfway out the front of her shirt but who wouldn't so much as give him the time of day, and that's what they called the ones who'd nearly destroyed half the US navel fleet in Cuba a couple of months back - but the minute he laid eyes on this group he knew he knew what they really were. The blue one, obscenely naked and as scaly and lithesome as a snake. The red one, fork-tailed and sharply dressed. They were devils, pure and simple. No doubt about it.
He reached for his gun, and the one wearing the helmet with the little demon-horns on its front made a small movement, and the weapon fell all to pieces in his hand as he drew it from his holster. “Turn your back to the wall, and place your hands over your head,” the demon in the helmet instructed him - Glenn was sure he was a demon, too, though he looked normal. He hesitated again, and the helmeted devil said, “I would love to kill you. Give me any excuse.”
Glenn lifted his hands above his head. He started to turn, and then his eye caught the slight of the girl, and he had an idea.
The agent reached for his gun and Erik disarmed him, and then Erik told him to stand down. Mystique thought he was going to listen. She didn't realize how relieved that made her feel until he actually started to turn toward the wall. On the other side of the twisted door, more agents were shouting, pounding at the metal with something. They didn't matter, it would take them hours to get in here. The only one that mattered was the one that was locked in here with them, and he seemed to know what was in his best interests -
And then he whirled and charged toward Angel. Later, Mystique would spend a lot of time wondering why he had done it, why he had gone for Angel. In the end, she decided it was because Angel was small and pretty. She didn't look dangerous. She must have seemed like the best candidate in the corridor for a hostage.
He got closer to her than he should have been allowed to. No one, it seemed, had really expected the man to do something that stupid. Azazel was moving, drawing his short swords, but by then the agent already had a head start and was building momentum.
He reached out to grab Angel by the shoulders, and as his fingers closed roughly around her flesh she spit in his face. Then his head was on fire, and the high, keening shrieks that came from within the flames were unlike anything human. It was almost unreal. With a movement that was almost too quick for Mystique's eyes to follow, Azazel drove one of the blades into the agent's back. The screaming stopped so abruptly that it was as though someone had turned off a switch.
Azazel withdrew the blade, and the agent crumpled to the ground. Mystique was astonished by the neatness with which it had been done; the man had been less than a foot from Angel when Azazel had acted, and Mystique had been right beside her, and yet she could see not a single drop of blood on their skin or clothing.
The others had already turn and started to walk toward a second, smaller metal door that Mystique hadn't even seen before then, and which Erik was busy tearing from its hinges. Even Angel was moving, though she hugged herself tightly as she went.
Mystique glanced down at the body as she stepped around it. The hair was still on fire, but it was beginning to smolder out, leaving behind a blackened ruin. There was a name badge pinned to his chest, displaying a few sets of numbers that Mystique figured had to do with his rank and clearance level. There was a picture of the agent on the laminated badged, him looking sternly into the camera, and the name under the photo read “Glenn Adams.”
One of the hands gave a sudden spasm, and she stropped cold. Then she reached out, almost blindly, and caught Azazel by the sleeve. He paused at her tugging, turned back to look at her. One of his eyebrows - the one above the unscarred eye - was cocked inquisitively, but his expression was flat, as unreadable as that of the agent in the photo. He did not so much as glance down.
“He's still alive!” she hissed, waving the hand that was not clutching his sleeve at the body wildly. She could hear the panic building in her voice, and hated herself for it. How did I get here? she wondered, not for the first time and not for the last. I want to go home.
“This is not movie,” he said back at her. He was speaking very softly, as though he didn't wish to be overheard by the others. She had the surreal impression that he was embarrassed for her, that he felt that she was behaving badly. “People do not die all at once, so quickly and easily. Nothing does.” He did look down then, but not with much interest. “He will be dead very soon. He knows nothing now.”
She didn't know if that was true or not, though she wanted to believe it; the hand was still groping across the smooth steel floor, and she wanted to believe that it was some sort of reflexive neurological tick. But another part of her said that it was seeking something, that she ought to give it her own hand so it would have something to clutch at, that she ought to be telling him that everything would be okay - even if he was past hearing or understanding, even if it was a lie.
She began to knell. “Comrade,” Azazel said, and there was a harsh note in his voice that she hadn't heard before. She stopped - looked up at him and then toward where he was looking; Erik was sitting the smaller steel door to the side, and Angel and Janos were behind him, peering cautiously through the doorway. There could be anything in there, Mystique thought - more agents or something even more dangerous. The others might need her help - more importantly, they might need Azazel, and yet she was over here, focused on something other than the mission and distracting Azazel in the bargain. She stood quickly, before she could change her mind, and over to the others, Azazel a step ahead of her. She didn't pause to check if the hand was still moving.
When they got to the cell, she found that it was only Emma there. Nonetheless, Mystique recognized that she'd made a mistake that could have cost them all more than they could pay. I want to go home, she heard her mind say again, and beat that thought down, drove it away. Home was a cage. Home was a cage, and Emma might be listening to her thoughts now.
It went exactly as Azazel had said it would.
There was still something awkward and self-conscience about Erik as he addressed Emma, but not as much as there had been an hour before. Emma didn't take one look at him and start laughing, as Mystique had been half-afraid she would. She played it coy at first, but Mystique could tell that she'd decided that she was going to leave with them the moment Erik made the offer.
Then they were lining up again, joining hands with her bothers and sisters - her comrades, if Azazel had his way - and once again Mystique found herself beside Azazel, holding his hand. There was the heart-beat travel through the land of flame and black shadows, and then they were back in the headquarters, all six of them together.
Mystique separated herself from the others as quickly as she could, leaving it to someone else to settle Emma into her own set of rooms. Anyway, she didn't think Emma would be sleeping alone for very long.
She went up to her own room, and laid on the top of the sheets with all the lights on for a long time. Mystique thought maybe she ought to cry - she wanted to cry, or at least a part of her did - but she didn't. She studied her hands, wondering that the red of Azazel skin hadn't come away to stain her own flesh.
Some hours later, when muffled sounds of night had fallen over the city, she got up again.
She knew what she had to do.