Happy Holidays, unovis_lj!
Title: An Audience of Everyone
Author: me, again
Real Author Name: argentum_ls
Written for: unovis
Characters: Amanda, OFCs, surprise minor canon character
Word Count: 4700
Rating: PG-13?
Content Notes: Story includes some gun violence, a hostage situation, and some descriptions of injury to body and clothing. I don’t think it’s much worse than canon typical, though words and pictures don’t always compare well.
Summary: With the proliferation of cameras, recording devices, and near-instant transmission of images, even the most careful Immortal is bound to run into trouble with what people see. Amanda’s never functioned on the same scale as anyone else, so it only makes sense that her trouble would go viral.
The whole country was watching when it happened. The attack on the state capitol building had brought in immediate news coverage and police forces, as it should have. The attacker was a disgruntled man and four of his friends, each armed with a selection of heavy assault weaponry that should have been impossible for a common person to buy. They stormed the building during lunch hour, trapping a hundred people inside the legislative commons. Amanda was one of them. She'd come to the capitol building to check if one of the experts who'd been brought in to give her position on a new potential law was Immortal. She had a look about her that suggested age and wisdom, though her face wasn't one Amanda could recall. As it turned out, she wasn't Immortal. Whether or not she was even wise still had yet to be determined.
The point man waved his gun at the cowering crowd while the news cameras filmed from the rotunda. He wanted the media attention, perhaps even craved it. He had a list of demands, he said. And the government could consider this his official petition of grievances. He wasn't going anywhere until he got redress. Unfortunately, what Amanda soon realized is that the man was a complete whack-a-doon. While he ranted about the need to repeal a law that was not, and had never been a law, which segued into an insistence that a government group that didn't exist needed to be disbanded, Amanda tried to figure out a way to extract herself from the hostage proceedings. Was there a back door she could slip out? A way to stealthily climb into the rotunda? With the right equipment, definitely. Here, with everyone watching and without the grappling hook she had thought to bring with her to a senate committee hearing? No way.
Why the point man selected her to use to make his point, she didn’t know. He gestured her away from the rest of the hostages, his mouth pressed in a humorless grin, and demanded to know if she was one of the politicians he’d come here to file his grievances with. For a second, she thought about telling him he was, except she couldn’t get a read on whether that was the right answer or not. In the end, she settled for the truth. Which turned out to be the wrong answer.
His bullets tore through Amanda so fast that she was left blinking down at her chest, wondering when the pain would start. She'd been shot before. Plenty of times. She'd been shot with every kind of gun that mankind had gotten around to inventing so far. None of them ranked in her top ten list of favorite ways to die. This particular model of gun was going to start a new list: Top 10 items to make sure mankind lost the knowledge to make. That one she could even do something about once she resurrected and had a few minutes alone with a computer. If necessary she could break into whatever secret facility kept the blueprints and make sure they were thoroughly destroyed. In fact, she was willing to do this as often as necessary, and under any kind of working conditions, to make sure this gun never continued in production.
With these thoughts on her mind-and bright red spreading across her chest and ruining her favorite blouse-she slumped to the floor in front of an international audience of newshounds and gossip mongers and died.
Amanda returned with a sucking gasp of air, the shock of resurrection bowing her body. The marble floor was cold and hard beneath her and high overhead she recognized the sculpted ceiling tiles of the Capitol's rotunda. She'd awoken in a morgue often enough to not be surprised when the scenery changed, but this time she was horrified to recognize that it hadn't.
Every Immortal who'd lived more than a few decades-that is, every Immortal who'd been faced with the need to reinvent themselves more than once-knew to plan contingencies against accidental death. One never knew when a car accident or mugging would force the need to abandon an old life. Which also meant that one never knew when a new life would have to be started on a moment's notice. The smaller the world grew with its reliance on video surveillance and computerized record cross-checking, the harder it became to pre-plan that new life. It wasn't like a person could simply leave passports lying around on the off-chance of needing them one day; with as fast as the security technology changed, it was good odds that any passport purchased one year would be effectively invalid the next, and cause for cause for making the terrorist watch list the year after that.
The cameras focused on Amanda the second she convulsed. From somewhere in the echo-y chambers, she heard a shocked whisper, “She's alive?” And an even more shocked, “Nooo!”
“Shut up!” the point man shouted. He was a twenty-something with a scraggly brown beard and a logo-less cap pulled low over his eyes. Everyone in the building had seen his face, which either meant that he couldn't imagine any consequences for his actions, or he didn't plan to leave anyone alive. Regardless, that made him even more dangerous, because only a person who was beyond caring would put so little effort into trying to cover his tracks. “I told you...” he trailed off upon apparently realizing why people were talking.
The amount of damage the gun had inflicted was immense. Even though the Quickening had worked enough of its power to bring Amanda back to life, it still needed more than a few minutes to heal the ribs that had shattered, lungs that had been torn apart, and tissue and blood that was splattered along the row of seats directly behind her. If the shooter had pulled the gun higher, he would have decapitated her. Possibly, Amanda found herself thinking as the Quickening struggled to keep her alive while it worked to heal the injuries, it would have been better if he had. She, at least, wouldn't be the one who'd have to explain what happened after an Immortal lost her head.
Because there was no way to pretend that she hadn't been shot, nor any way to pretend that she hadn't died, she did the next best thing, and the only thing she could think to do while laying in the pool of her own blood. She leapt to her feet, ignoring the ripping of newly healed tissues, and executed a perfect bow, arm sweeping out. Her bullet-rent blouse flopped in wet strands across her chest. She'd been a performer of some stripe most of her life; if there was anything Amanda knew, it was how to play to an audience.
Offering a bright smile that invited everyone to ignore the wounds closing and healing all over her body, she straightened up. “Please contact my agent with all questions and invitations for performances.” She bowed again, this time directly at the gunman, then turned and bowed toward the rotunda and the cameras. So many cameras.
A collective hush fell over the room. Everyone was staring at her, from the hostages who had counted her among them only a few minutes ago (she thought it was a few minutes; it could have been longer) to the camera crews and operators to the terrorists themselves. She felt everyone waiting for someone else to give direction about how to react to this scene. Until they figured it out, she was effectively trapped. The tension in the room wound tighter and tighter. She saw the point man tighten his grip on the stock of his gun, the one that had nearly sliced her in half. She saw the other gunmen shift on their feet, rocking to and away from their point man every-so-slightly as if uncertain whether to race to his aid or to run away before things got really weird.
“Are you kidding me?!” someone yelled from behind Amanda. One of the hostages.
She recognized the voice. It was the expert she’d come here to assess, now breaking free from the rest of the group. The expert stalked across the floor, mindless of the gore she was walking through and came to a stop right at the edge of the platform she had been standing on before the attack. “This whole thing was a fucking publicity stunt?” she demanded to know. She rounded on the gunmen. “And I suppose you were all in on this too. Do you have any idea how many laws you’ve broken?”
Amanda hissed an admonition for the woman to sit down and stop talking, but apparently being an expert on one topic emboldened her to speak on all of them.
The expert starting ticking points off on her fingers. “Let’s start with this whole take-over here. You do understand that it’s illegal to threaten public officials…”
Amanda saw the next few minutes play out in prescient and precise detail, and yet she was helpless to stop it. The lead gunman hefted his weapon and aimed at the expert. He was going to shoot her, then sweep the room and take out as many of the hostages as he could. He’d lost control of the situation; no one was listening to him. What, to him, was serious list of demands that he felt no other recourse in getting addressed was being treated as part of some kind of performance art. The cameras were still rolling, the journalists still taking notes and creating sound bites, and if he could just draw their attention back to him, he might be able to get them to get the people who needed to act to take him seriously. He had support on the outside, family and friends who were pulling for him. He had guns and the command of the Capitol. And he already believed that his elected representatives were a do-nothing waste of space who were only getting in the way of the obvious solutions to his problems.
“I don’t remember what happened next,” she told the cop, later. They were seated in the interrogation room at the station; her hands were bolted to the table with a pair of handcuffs that had no chain. She could get out of them-- it wasn’t like this was her first pair of handcuffs-but there wasn’t anywhere to go after that. The hallway was guarded, the room had no windows.
The cop was a youngish man of ambiguous ethnicity, probably early 30s, with a trimmed goatee of black and gray, and a head of hair that could have started wars in another time. He didn’t take shit from no one-he’d said as much-and he wasn’t interested in listening to her lies when she could save herself a lot of pain by cooperating-he’d also said that. “Because you were playing dead?”
No, Amanda wanted to say, because I was dead. She’d seen how the slaughter would happen and reacted without even a second to consider her decision. A couple running steps, and she launched herself at the point man. Involuntarily, his finger tightened on the trigger and Amanda took another burst of gunfire right into her freshly healed chest. The momentum of her body was enough to knock him down and to direct the remainder of his gunfire impotently into the pressed aluminum ceiling. She hit the floor and a resounding splat, not even enough life left in her to try to roll. She felt her forearm snap and her nose get crushed.
For the second time in only a few minutes, she died.
Rather than telling him this, Amanda bit her tongue, put on her most innocent face, and said nothing. A second later, she added a shrug. They’d allowed her to change out the bloody rags her designer clothes had been reduced to for a pair of prison sweats. They were gray and too big, which meant she’d also been deprived of the ability to use her looks as an escape card if she needed to. Her hair was crusty with dried blood, sticking out from her head. At least she’d been able to wash her face and hands, so she didn’t look completely like the kind of demon spawn that dripped with blood and ate people’s souls.
The cop sighed and drummed his fingers on the desk. He looked exhausted already. The number of witnesses involved in this incident was staggering, as was the pressure from every media outlet and elected official to resolve the case yesterday. Bad press resounded, with accusations of incompetence in everything from the Capitol’s security procedures to the press’s non-interference in the first shooting to the general tenor of modern politics that had led this man on this day to do this thing. There were no TVs in the station, so what Amanda knew about the after effects were already filtered through the general rumor mill of those who were there and those who wished they had been.
“See,” the cop continued, “here’s what I think happened…” He was studying her face closely, watching for the moment when she was going to break. Clearly, he didn’t understand what a thousand years of practice could do to someone’s willpower. Even someone like Amanda. He proceeded to outline the same series of events that he’d already told her was his version of the story. She stopped listening. She was not in cahoots with the gunmen, she had not gone in ahead of time to scout anything related to what they were doing, and she definitely had not pretended to die in order to distract attention from them. If she had done that, why would she have knocked the leader down? Did she suddenly think he’d betrayed her? She was on the verge of asking that, so she bit her tongue even harder and found an interesting spider-web in the corner to stare at. The problem was, she couldn’t exactly correct the cop’s story. She did have a better version of events-the real version-but it included a whole lot of things she wasn’t about to explain to him and that he wouldn’t believe anyway. Never mind that he could see the main points for himself on the news footage, the existence of which made it signficantly more difficult to plead innocence.
“Are you going to charge me?”
The cop let out a dry laugh. “Sweetheart, you’ve been charged with so many counts of obstructing justice and conspiracy, not to mention performing in a public venue without a license, that I’d be surprised if you ever saw daylight again.”
Well, that wasn’t true, but she wasn’t going to correct him on that either. She’d broken out of enough prisons that being threatened with lock-up barely even fazed her anymore. Plus, she was pretty certain that she had better lawyers than he could imagine. Money had a way of doing that, and Amanda had enough resources at her disposal to provide a lot of leeway in what could be considered illegal.
“You think you’ve got this all figured out, don’t you?” the cop asked. “You think you’re a step ahead of all of us here and that we won’t figure out the real scam you’re pulling.”
Amanda straightened up a little at this because this was the first time that anyone had suggested that she’d been participating in a con job. What she might have been scamming, though, she didn’t know. “I’m sorry, officer,” she said, trying to sound contrite. “I really had no idea what was going on. I only went the capitol to try to talk to someone.” She realized as she said it that she might have said too much.
“Talk to who?”
“Whom.”
“That’s what you’re going to tell me!” the cop roared. His face flushed red and he slammed his hands flat onto the table.
“No, I meant … never mind.” She sighed. “I was trying to talk to Ms. Everly.”
“Why? Are you two friends? Partners?”
Amanda scoffed. “We’ve never met before. She wouldn’t know me from Adam.” She thought briefly of the Adam she did know and how apt that comparison was considering his penchant for disguising himself as the most non-descript person in the most non-descript job he could find. “I saw that she was going to be at the Capitol today and I wanted to ask her some questions.”
“You know, you’re not doing a very good job of covering your tracks here, or of taking the fall for your partner.”
“That’s because she’s not my partner and I’m not trying to take the fall for anyone.”
“So you admit that there’s a fall to be taken!?”
“What?”
The cop sat back and drew a few deep breaths, obviously trying to force himself to calm down. “What were you doing at the Capitol building?”
“I already told you,” Amanda said. “I wanted to talk to Ms. Everly.”
“About what?”
“History,” Amanda answered bluntly. “She’s an expert and I thought she might have some insight into a few historical mysteries that I’ve been wondering about.”
The cop blinked at her. “Like the Lindbergh baby?”
“That’s hardly history,” Amanda retorted. An event that had occurred less than a hundred years ago barely seemed worth worrying about. It was like trying to call a piece of furniture that young an antique or a bottle of wine that young worth drinking. A thousand years on a the planet gave a girl a different perspective on what age meant. “And don’t you dare mention Jack the Ripper.”
“Why?” the cop asked, suddenly more suspicious than ever. “Were you planning to copycat him?”
This was getting away from her really fast, so Amanda settled for rolling her eyes in disdain. “Like I said, I wanted to ask her some questions about history.” Like, how much of it she’d lived, and how she’d died, and what kind of sword she used. As it turned out, none of those questions were relevant. Yet. “Is there any chance I could get some water? You’ve been asking me a lot of questions and I’m starting to get a little parched over here.” Truth be told, she was a lot more than a little parched. The blood loss alone had left her dehydrated and aching for a tall glass of water. The dying and healing upped her craving for drink that was a little stronger than water. A bottles of good whiskey would be wonderful right about now.
The cop considered her request for a long moment. She could see how badly he wanted to deny her in hopes that she’d crack sooner and he could get on to the next witness. Alas, certain standards of care did have to be managed. He made a gesture over his shoulder, presumably to whomever was watching from behind the one-way glass. A moment later, the door opened and another cop entered with a glass of tap water. Amanda raised an eyebrow at it. One glass? And tap water? Because her hands were chained down, she couldn’t pick up the water, so she had to wait for the second cop to bring it to her lips before she could confirm that it was indeed tap water and it was luke-warm. She took a long swallow, but only because she could remember a time when this would have been a luxury in its own right. She hated remembering that time, especially since she might have to take a long vacation from modern civilization in order to get away from the notoriety that was sure to be waiting for her outside.
Eventually, the police switched her to regular handcuffs, allowed her to shower and clean up, and moved her to another room. This one had cameras in each of the corners; Amanda couldn’t seem to escape those. At least it didn’t have a one-way mirror.
She was seated at a table and told that her lawyer would be in in any minute. She hadn’t called her lawyer. Since she couldn’t rule out her legal team having seen her on television, she kept her mouth shut and began working through all the scenarios for what could be coming next. An alarming number of them ended with her losing her head. The real question was whether she could fake her death if she had to. She could go into hiding for a decade or two until people either forgot about her performance or talked themselves into believing that it hadn’t happened. Maybe she could get a point or two from Adam about how to turn herself into a myth.
The door opened and a middle-aged woman with her brown hair cut short and a stern expression entered. Amanda had never seen her before. At least her dark gray suit was well-tailored and expensive. Without so much as a word of introduction or greeting, the woman came over to the table, set her briefcase on it, and sat down opposite Amanda.
“It’s no surprise that we have a problem.” The woman folded her hands in front of her, her briefcase remaining closed as if she only had it for decoration. The diamond on her wedding ring was at least two carats; she wore a pendant necklace with an inset emerald as big as a dime. A bracelet on her non-tattooed wrist was solid gold studded with more diamonds. She gave no notice of her own jewelry, which meant she hadn’t affected it for this meeting. “We believe there are still a number of options to explore, though the manner and, let’s say, graphic detail of your ‘performance’ has complicated the situation.”
“Who are you?” Amanda asked. The person was not her lawyer, was not even one of the senior partners. Had the firm chosen to file their displeasure with her case by pawning her off on an associate? With as much as she paid them on retainer, they’d better not have.
The woman stared at her, her pointed chin jutting out as she took in every detail of Amanda’s appearance. Abruptly, the corners of her eyes crinkled with humor. She undid the button on her sleeve and rolled back the cuff far enough for Amanda to glimpse the top edge of the tattoo on her wrist.
Well, that changed things. Amanda raised an eyebrow, acknowledging the new information without saying anything out loud that could be recorded.
“My father said that you’d understand. He told me to send his greetings.” She cocked her head for a moment, remembering. “Actually, what he said was ‘ask her if she has any idea what kind of fire she’d just thrown us all into.’” The inflections and tone were an eerily accurate mimicry of the person they belonged to.
“Joe?” Amanda asked. The woman nodded..Amanda racked her memories. Had she known that Joe had a daughter? Could she have forgotten a detail like that? She was going ot have to give Duncan a stern talking to about withholding important information from her. Unless this was this some kind of ruse to get her to drop her guard even further. “You’re not with Bitner & Thomas?”
The woman pulled a business card from her pocket and set it on the table so that Amanda could see it. Business cards were easy enough to fake; goodness knew that Amanda had faked enough of them in her time. From her angle, the embossing looked authentic, though, and the small picture of the card’s owner in the lower left corner matched the person sitting across from her. Amanda made a note of the name, including the connection to the firm’s namesake. “I am. I’ve been preparing for this situation for a long time.” Her brow creased in thought, then smoothed. “I’m only surprised that it hasn’t happened much sooner. You all are pretty awful at covering your own tracks.”
Amanda opened her mouth to protest, then shut it again with a click. What was she going to say: that she always took care to dispose of the bodies? Like all Immortals, she broke a lot of laws just to function day-to-day: forgery, identity fraud, identity theft, perjury. Then there were the laws she broke in pursuit of her own interests. She had plenty of practice, and was undoubtedly good at what she did, yet she did seem to skip past any real trouble often enough that she’d sometimes wondered if Immortals had an extra dose of luck.
Maybe they did.
While she wasn’t as hand-in-pocket as Duncan was with the Watchers, she had suspected that their version of “never interfere” included a great deal of interference intended to keep the secret of Immortals from the wider world. They did have their own best interests to consider, since it was difficult to be a secret organization if there were no secrets to organize. She’d never cared to pursue the question; though, it looked like she had an answer.
“So, you’re going to help me get out of this?” Amanda asked.
The woman rebuttoned her sleeve and placed her hands back in position. “My advice to you as your counsel is to embrace the opportunity you’ve found yourself in. While we could potentially put the genie back in the bottle, it’s worth pointing out that you are a hero. You stopped a team of terrorists who had every intention of killing those hostages.” She let Amanda bask in this a moment, and bask she did. Amanda’d been so focused on the dying and resurrecting in public part of what happened that she’d forgotten why it had happened. “You will, of course, be the test case. That’s the down side. If it turns out that the world isn’t ready for you, then other contingencies will have to be enacted.”
“Other contingencies?” She scraped a nail across her throat, a gesture that the guards monitoring the cameras might read as merely scratching an itch, or that they might see in its more dire usage. They wouldn’t know that she was inquiring about a literal decapitation.
“Exactly. It’s a risk. However, I believe it’s one that you are uniquely qualified to take on. You’ve always struck me as the kind of person who revels in notoriety and has a taste for extreme risks.”
Amanda sat back. She couldn’t argue with either of those points. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more excited she got at going out into a world that knew her for what she was. Immortals hadn’t always lived in hiding. Go back far enough, and so many stories of gods and heroes had their roots with her people. And it wasn’t like she planned this, or had even brought it upon herself through her sometimes overwhelming tendency to act rashly. “I’ll think about it,” she finally answered.
A nod, and Ms. Brennan-Thomas stood up, gathered back her card and picked up her briefcase. “I brought you a change of clothes for your hearing. You shouldn’t go before the judge in that.” She gestured to Amanda’s gray sweat clothes. “I’ll be back tomorrow so we can go over our game plan.”
At the door, while she was waiting for the guard to open it, she turned back. “Word of advice?”
It wasn’t really a question, so Amanda put on a polite expression and prepared to disregard whatever came next the way she did any unsolicited advice. In the end, it turned out to be the only, and best, thing she could do.
“We’re not the only ones watching anymore. Don’t forget to smile.”
END
Author: me, again
Real Author Name: argentum_ls
Written for: unovis
Characters: Amanda, OFCs, surprise minor canon character
Word Count: 4700
Rating: PG-13?
Content Notes: Story includes some gun violence, a hostage situation, and some descriptions of injury to body and clothing. I don’t think it’s much worse than canon typical, though words and pictures don’t always compare well.
Summary: With the proliferation of cameras, recording devices, and near-instant transmission of images, even the most careful Immortal is bound to run into trouble with what people see. Amanda’s never functioned on the same scale as anyone else, so it only makes sense that her trouble would go viral.
The whole country was watching when it happened. The attack on the state capitol building had brought in immediate news coverage and police forces, as it should have. The attacker was a disgruntled man and four of his friends, each armed with a selection of heavy assault weaponry that should have been impossible for a common person to buy. They stormed the building during lunch hour, trapping a hundred people inside the legislative commons. Amanda was one of them. She'd come to the capitol building to check if one of the experts who'd been brought in to give her position on a new potential law was Immortal. She had a look about her that suggested age and wisdom, though her face wasn't one Amanda could recall. As it turned out, she wasn't Immortal. Whether or not she was even wise still had yet to be determined.
The point man waved his gun at the cowering crowd while the news cameras filmed from the rotunda. He wanted the media attention, perhaps even craved it. He had a list of demands, he said. And the government could consider this his official petition of grievances. He wasn't going anywhere until he got redress. Unfortunately, what Amanda soon realized is that the man was a complete whack-a-doon. While he ranted about the need to repeal a law that was not, and had never been a law, which segued into an insistence that a government group that didn't exist needed to be disbanded, Amanda tried to figure out a way to extract herself from the hostage proceedings. Was there a back door she could slip out? A way to stealthily climb into the rotunda? With the right equipment, definitely. Here, with everyone watching and without the grappling hook she had thought to bring with her to a senate committee hearing? No way.
Why the point man selected her to use to make his point, she didn’t know. He gestured her away from the rest of the hostages, his mouth pressed in a humorless grin, and demanded to know if she was one of the politicians he’d come here to file his grievances with. For a second, she thought about telling him he was, except she couldn’t get a read on whether that was the right answer or not. In the end, she settled for the truth. Which turned out to be the wrong answer.
His bullets tore through Amanda so fast that she was left blinking down at her chest, wondering when the pain would start. She'd been shot before. Plenty of times. She'd been shot with every kind of gun that mankind had gotten around to inventing so far. None of them ranked in her top ten list of favorite ways to die. This particular model of gun was going to start a new list: Top 10 items to make sure mankind lost the knowledge to make. That one she could even do something about once she resurrected and had a few minutes alone with a computer. If necessary she could break into whatever secret facility kept the blueprints and make sure they were thoroughly destroyed. In fact, she was willing to do this as often as necessary, and under any kind of working conditions, to make sure this gun never continued in production.
With these thoughts on her mind-and bright red spreading across her chest and ruining her favorite blouse-she slumped to the floor in front of an international audience of newshounds and gossip mongers and died.
Amanda returned with a sucking gasp of air, the shock of resurrection bowing her body. The marble floor was cold and hard beneath her and high overhead she recognized the sculpted ceiling tiles of the Capitol's rotunda. She'd awoken in a morgue often enough to not be surprised when the scenery changed, but this time she was horrified to recognize that it hadn't.
Every Immortal who'd lived more than a few decades-that is, every Immortal who'd been faced with the need to reinvent themselves more than once-knew to plan contingencies against accidental death. One never knew when a car accident or mugging would force the need to abandon an old life. Which also meant that one never knew when a new life would have to be started on a moment's notice. The smaller the world grew with its reliance on video surveillance and computerized record cross-checking, the harder it became to pre-plan that new life. It wasn't like a person could simply leave passports lying around on the off-chance of needing them one day; with as fast as the security technology changed, it was good odds that any passport purchased one year would be effectively invalid the next, and cause for cause for making the terrorist watch list the year after that.
The cameras focused on Amanda the second she convulsed. From somewhere in the echo-y chambers, she heard a shocked whisper, “She's alive?” And an even more shocked, “Nooo!”
“Shut up!” the point man shouted. He was a twenty-something with a scraggly brown beard and a logo-less cap pulled low over his eyes. Everyone in the building had seen his face, which either meant that he couldn't imagine any consequences for his actions, or he didn't plan to leave anyone alive. Regardless, that made him even more dangerous, because only a person who was beyond caring would put so little effort into trying to cover his tracks. “I told you...” he trailed off upon apparently realizing why people were talking.
The amount of damage the gun had inflicted was immense. Even though the Quickening had worked enough of its power to bring Amanda back to life, it still needed more than a few minutes to heal the ribs that had shattered, lungs that had been torn apart, and tissue and blood that was splattered along the row of seats directly behind her. If the shooter had pulled the gun higher, he would have decapitated her. Possibly, Amanda found herself thinking as the Quickening struggled to keep her alive while it worked to heal the injuries, it would have been better if he had. She, at least, wouldn't be the one who'd have to explain what happened after an Immortal lost her head.
Because there was no way to pretend that she hadn't been shot, nor any way to pretend that she hadn't died, she did the next best thing, and the only thing she could think to do while laying in the pool of her own blood. She leapt to her feet, ignoring the ripping of newly healed tissues, and executed a perfect bow, arm sweeping out. Her bullet-rent blouse flopped in wet strands across her chest. She'd been a performer of some stripe most of her life; if there was anything Amanda knew, it was how to play to an audience.
Offering a bright smile that invited everyone to ignore the wounds closing and healing all over her body, she straightened up. “Please contact my agent with all questions and invitations for performances.” She bowed again, this time directly at the gunman, then turned and bowed toward the rotunda and the cameras. So many cameras.
A collective hush fell over the room. Everyone was staring at her, from the hostages who had counted her among them only a few minutes ago (she thought it was a few minutes; it could have been longer) to the camera crews and operators to the terrorists themselves. She felt everyone waiting for someone else to give direction about how to react to this scene. Until they figured it out, she was effectively trapped. The tension in the room wound tighter and tighter. She saw the point man tighten his grip on the stock of his gun, the one that had nearly sliced her in half. She saw the other gunmen shift on their feet, rocking to and away from their point man every-so-slightly as if uncertain whether to race to his aid or to run away before things got really weird.
“Are you kidding me?!” someone yelled from behind Amanda. One of the hostages.
She recognized the voice. It was the expert she’d come here to assess, now breaking free from the rest of the group. The expert stalked across the floor, mindless of the gore she was walking through and came to a stop right at the edge of the platform she had been standing on before the attack. “This whole thing was a fucking publicity stunt?” she demanded to know. She rounded on the gunmen. “And I suppose you were all in on this too. Do you have any idea how many laws you’ve broken?”
Amanda hissed an admonition for the woman to sit down and stop talking, but apparently being an expert on one topic emboldened her to speak on all of them.
The expert starting ticking points off on her fingers. “Let’s start with this whole take-over here. You do understand that it’s illegal to threaten public officials…”
Amanda saw the next few minutes play out in prescient and precise detail, and yet she was helpless to stop it. The lead gunman hefted his weapon and aimed at the expert. He was going to shoot her, then sweep the room and take out as many of the hostages as he could. He’d lost control of the situation; no one was listening to him. What, to him, was serious list of demands that he felt no other recourse in getting addressed was being treated as part of some kind of performance art. The cameras were still rolling, the journalists still taking notes and creating sound bites, and if he could just draw their attention back to him, he might be able to get them to get the people who needed to act to take him seriously. He had support on the outside, family and friends who were pulling for him. He had guns and the command of the Capitol. And he already believed that his elected representatives were a do-nothing waste of space who were only getting in the way of the obvious solutions to his problems.
“I don’t remember what happened next,” she told the cop, later. They were seated in the interrogation room at the station; her hands were bolted to the table with a pair of handcuffs that had no chain. She could get out of them-- it wasn’t like this was her first pair of handcuffs-but there wasn’t anywhere to go after that. The hallway was guarded, the room had no windows.
The cop was a youngish man of ambiguous ethnicity, probably early 30s, with a trimmed goatee of black and gray, and a head of hair that could have started wars in another time. He didn’t take shit from no one-he’d said as much-and he wasn’t interested in listening to her lies when she could save herself a lot of pain by cooperating-he’d also said that. “Because you were playing dead?”
No, Amanda wanted to say, because I was dead. She’d seen how the slaughter would happen and reacted without even a second to consider her decision. A couple running steps, and she launched herself at the point man. Involuntarily, his finger tightened on the trigger and Amanda took another burst of gunfire right into her freshly healed chest. The momentum of her body was enough to knock him down and to direct the remainder of his gunfire impotently into the pressed aluminum ceiling. She hit the floor and a resounding splat, not even enough life left in her to try to roll. She felt her forearm snap and her nose get crushed.
For the second time in only a few minutes, she died.
Rather than telling him this, Amanda bit her tongue, put on her most innocent face, and said nothing. A second later, she added a shrug. They’d allowed her to change out the bloody rags her designer clothes had been reduced to for a pair of prison sweats. They were gray and too big, which meant she’d also been deprived of the ability to use her looks as an escape card if she needed to. Her hair was crusty with dried blood, sticking out from her head. At least she’d been able to wash her face and hands, so she didn’t look completely like the kind of demon spawn that dripped with blood and ate people’s souls.
The cop sighed and drummed his fingers on the desk. He looked exhausted already. The number of witnesses involved in this incident was staggering, as was the pressure from every media outlet and elected official to resolve the case yesterday. Bad press resounded, with accusations of incompetence in everything from the Capitol’s security procedures to the press’s non-interference in the first shooting to the general tenor of modern politics that had led this man on this day to do this thing. There were no TVs in the station, so what Amanda knew about the after effects were already filtered through the general rumor mill of those who were there and those who wished they had been.
“See,” the cop continued, “here’s what I think happened…” He was studying her face closely, watching for the moment when she was going to break. Clearly, he didn’t understand what a thousand years of practice could do to someone’s willpower. Even someone like Amanda. He proceeded to outline the same series of events that he’d already told her was his version of the story. She stopped listening. She was not in cahoots with the gunmen, she had not gone in ahead of time to scout anything related to what they were doing, and she definitely had not pretended to die in order to distract attention from them. If she had done that, why would she have knocked the leader down? Did she suddenly think he’d betrayed her? She was on the verge of asking that, so she bit her tongue even harder and found an interesting spider-web in the corner to stare at. The problem was, she couldn’t exactly correct the cop’s story. She did have a better version of events-the real version-but it included a whole lot of things she wasn’t about to explain to him and that he wouldn’t believe anyway. Never mind that he could see the main points for himself on the news footage, the existence of which made it signficantly more difficult to plead innocence.
“Are you going to charge me?”
The cop let out a dry laugh. “Sweetheart, you’ve been charged with so many counts of obstructing justice and conspiracy, not to mention performing in a public venue without a license, that I’d be surprised if you ever saw daylight again.”
Well, that wasn’t true, but she wasn’t going to correct him on that either. She’d broken out of enough prisons that being threatened with lock-up barely even fazed her anymore. Plus, she was pretty certain that she had better lawyers than he could imagine. Money had a way of doing that, and Amanda had enough resources at her disposal to provide a lot of leeway in what could be considered illegal.
“You think you’ve got this all figured out, don’t you?” the cop asked. “You think you’re a step ahead of all of us here and that we won’t figure out the real scam you’re pulling.”
Amanda straightened up a little at this because this was the first time that anyone had suggested that she’d been participating in a con job. What she might have been scamming, though, she didn’t know. “I’m sorry, officer,” she said, trying to sound contrite. “I really had no idea what was going on. I only went the capitol to try to talk to someone.” She realized as she said it that she might have said too much.
“Talk to who?”
“Whom.”
“That’s what you’re going to tell me!” the cop roared. His face flushed red and he slammed his hands flat onto the table.
“No, I meant … never mind.” She sighed. “I was trying to talk to Ms. Everly.”
“Why? Are you two friends? Partners?”
Amanda scoffed. “We’ve never met before. She wouldn’t know me from Adam.” She thought briefly of the Adam she did know and how apt that comparison was considering his penchant for disguising himself as the most non-descript person in the most non-descript job he could find. “I saw that she was going to be at the Capitol today and I wanted to ask her some questions.”
“You know, you’re not doing a very good job of covering your tracks here, or of taking the fall for your partner.”
“That’s because she’s not my partner and I’m not trying to take the fall for anyone.”
“So you admit that there’s a fall to be taken!?”
“What?”
The cop sat back and drew a few deep breaths, obviously trying to force himself to calm down. “What were you doing at the Capitol building?”
“I already told you,” Amanda said. “I wanted to talk to Ms. Everly.”
“About what?”
“History,” Amanda answered bluntly. “She’s an expert and I thought she might have some insight into a few historical mysteries that I’ve been wondering about.”
The cop blinked at her. “Like the Lindbergh baby?”
“That’s hardly history,” Amanda retorted. An event that had occurred less than a hundred years ago barely seemed worth worrying about. It was like trying to call a piece of furniture that young an antique or a bottle of wine that young worth drinking. A thousand years on a the planet gave a girl a different perspective on what age meant. “And don’t you dare mention Jack the Ripper.”
“Why?” the cop asked, suddenly more suspicious than ever. “Were you planning to copycat him?”
This was getting away from her really fast, so Amanda settled for rolling her eyes in disdain. “Like I said, I wanted to ask her some questions about history.” Like, how much of it she’d lived, and how she’d died, and what kind of sword she used. As it turned out, none of those questions were relevant. Yet. “Is there any chance I could get some water? You’ve been asking me a lot of questions and I’m starting to get a little parched over here.” Truth be told, she was a lot more than a little parched. The blood loss alone had left her dehydrated and aching for a tall glass of water. The dying and healing upped her craving for drink that was a little stronger than water. A bottles of good whiskey would be wonderful right about now.
The cop considered her request for a long moment. She could see how badly he wanted to deny her in hopes that she’d crack sooner and he could get on to the next witness. Alas, certain standards of care did have to be managed. He made a gesture over his shoulder, presumably to whomever was watching from behind the one-way glass. A moment later, the door opened and another cop entered with a glass of tap water. Amanda raised an eyebrow at it. One glass? And tap water? Because her hands were chained down, she couldn’t pick up the water, so she had to wait for the second cop to bring it to her lips before she could confirm that it was indeed tap water and it was luke-warm. She took a long swallow, but only because she could remember a time when this would have been a luxury in its own right. She hated remembering that time, especially since she might have to take a long vacation from modern civilization in order to get away from the notoriety that was sure to be waiting for her outside.
Eventually, the police switched her to regular handcuffs, allowed her to shower and clean up, and moved her to another room. This one had cameras in each of the corners; Amanda couldn’t seem to escape those. At least it didn’t have a one-way mirror.
She was seated at a table and told that her lawyer would be in in any minute. She hadn’t called her lawyer. Since she couldn’t rule out her legal team having seen her on television, she kept her mouth shut and began working through all the scenarios for what could be coming next. An alarming number of them ended with her losing her head. The real question was whether she could fake her death if she had to. She could go into hiding for a decade or two until people either forgot about her performance or talked themselves into believing that it hadn’t happened. Maybe she could get a point or two from Adam about how to turn herself into a myth.
The door opened and a middle-aged woman with her brown hair cut short and a stern expression entered. Amanda had never seen her before. At least her dark gray suit was well-tailored and expensive. Without so much as a word of introduction or greeting, the woman came over to the table, set her briefcase on it, and sat down opposite Amanda.
“It’s no surprise that we have a problem.” The woman folded her hands in front of her, her briefcase remaining closed as if she only had it for decoration. The diamond on her wedding ring was at least two carats; she wore a pendant necklace with an inset emerald as big as a dime. A bracelet on her non-tattooed wrist was solid gold studded with more diamonds. She gave no notice of her own jewelry, which meant she hadn’t affected it for this meeting. “We believe there are still a number of options to explore, though the manner and, let’s say, graphic detail of your ‘performance’ has complicated the situation.”
“Who are you?” Amanda asked. The person was not her lawyer, was not even one of the senior partners. Had the firm chosen to file their displeasure with her case by pawning her off on an associate? With as much as she paid them on retainer, they’d better not have.
The woman stared at her, her pointed chin jutting out as she took in every detail of Amanda’s appearance. Abruptly, the corners of her eyes crinkled with humor. She undid the button on her sleeve and rolled back the cuff far enough for Amanda to glimpse the top edge of the tattoo on her wrist.
Well, that changed things. Amanda raised an eyebrow, acknowledging the new information without saying anything out loud that could be recorded.
“My father said that you’d understand. He told me to send his greetings.” She cocked her head for a moment, remembering. “Actually, what he said was ‘ask her if she has any idea what kind of fire she’d just thrown us all into.’” The inflections and tone were an eerily accurate mimicry of the person they belonged to.
“Joe?” Amanda asked. The woman nodded..Amanda racked her memories. Had she known that Joe had a daughter? Could she have forgotten a detail like that? She was going ot have to give Duncan a stern talking to about withholding important information from her. Unless this was this some kind of ruse to get her to drop her guard even further. “You’re not with Bitner & Thomas?”
The woman pulled a business card from her pocket and set it on the table so that Amanda could see it. Business cards were easy enough to fake; goodness knew that Amanda had faked enough of them in her time. From her angle, the embossing looked authentic, though, and the small picture of the card’s owner in the lower left corner matched the person sitting across from her. Amanda made a note of the name, including the connection to the firm’s namesake. “I am. I’ve been preparing for this situation for a long time.” Her brow creased in thought, then smoothed. “I’m only surprised that it hasn’t happened much sooner. You all are pretty awful at covering your own tracks.”
Amanda opened her mouth to protest, then shut it again with a click. What was she going to say: that she always took care to dispose of the bodies? Like all Immortals, she broke a lot of laws just to function day-to-day: forgery, identity fraud, identity theft, perjury. Then there were the laws she broke in pursuit of her own interests. She had plenty of practice, and was undoubtedly good at what she did, yet she did seem to skip past any real trouble often enough that she’d sometimes wondered if Immortals had an extra dose of luck.
Maybe they did.
While she wasn’t as hand-in-pocket as Duncan was with the Watchers, she had suspected that their version of “never interfere” included a great deal of interference intended to keep the secret of Immortals from the wider world. They did have their own best interests to consider, since it was difficult to be a secret organization if there were no secrets to organize. She’d never cared to pursue the question; though, it looked like she had an answer.
“So, you’re going to help me get out of this?” Amanda asked.
The woman rebuttoned her sleeve and placed her hands back in position. “My advice to you as your counsel is to embrace the opportunity you’ve found yourself in. While we could potentially put the genie back in the bottle, it’s worth pointing out that you are a hero. You stopped a team of terrorists who had every intention of killing those hostages.” She let Amanda bask in this a moment, and bask she did. Amanda’d been so focused on the dying and resurrecting in public part of what happened that she’d forgotten why it had happened. “You will, of course, be the test case. That’s the down side. If it turns out that the world isn’t ready for you, then other contingencies will have to be enacted.”
“Other contingencies?” She scraped a nail across her throat, a gesture that the guards monitoring the cameras might read as merely scratching an itch, or that they might see in its more dire usage. They wouldn’t know that she was inquiring about a literal decapitation.
“Exactly. It’s a risk. However, I believe it’s one that you are uniquely qualified to take on. You’ve always struck me as the kind of person who revels in notoriety and has a taste for extreme risks.”
Amanda sat back. She couldn’t argue with either of those points. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more excited she got at going out into a world that knew her for what she was. Immortals hadn’t always lived in hiding. Go back far enough, and so many stories of gods and heroes had their roots with her people. And it wasn’t like she planned this, or had even brought it upon herself through her sometimes overwhelming tendency to act rashly. “I’ll think about it,” she finally answered.
A nod, and Ms. Brennan-Thomas stood up, gathered back her card and picked up her briefcase. “I brought you a change of clothes for your hearing. You shouldn’t go before the judge in that.” She gestured to Amanda’s gray sweat clothes. “I’ll be back tomorrow so we can go over our game plan.”
At the door, while she was waiting for the guard to open it, she turned back. “Word of advice?”
It wasn’t really a question, so Amanda put on a polite expression and prepared to disregard whatever came next the way she did any unsolicited advice. In the end, it turned out to be the only, and best, thing she could do.
“We’re not the only ones watching anymore. Don’t forget to smile.”
END