Farewell to a Friend

  Alicia woke to the particular exhaustion that comes not from sleep but from the body insisting on it despite everything else that is happening. The emergency ward had the smell all emergency wards have, antiseptic and recycled air and the indefinite presence of previous crises, and it was full of faces she recognised, which was the first thing she checked.

  Her parents were there. Her mother was holding her hand in both of hers in the specific way of a person who had been holding it for a long time and was not going to stop. Her father was standing at the foot of the bed doing the thing he did when he was very relieved, which was look like he wasn't.

  Alice was in the chair against the wall. Jasmine was beside her. Lyra was not in the room, which Alicia noted and filed.

  Jack came to the bedside when she was alert enough to track his approach. He was moving carefully, with the particular economy of someone managing a wound that has been told it is stable and is arguing the point. In his hands was a small box, wrapped in paper that suggested he had taken time over it.

  "You're back," he said. The words were simple in the way of words chosen because the speaker doesn't trust themselves with more complicated ones.

  "I'm back," she agreed.

  He set the box on the blanket beside her. "Thank you," he said. "For what you do. For what you keep doing." He looked at his own hands for a moment. "I'm glad you're here."

  Alicia looked around the room again. The question formed before she decided to ask it. "Where is Morokana?"

  The room answered before anyone in it did, in the specific way that rooms answer when the people in them have been quietly carrying something and are waiting for the moment it has to be said.

  Jack bowed his head. "Lyra is at headquarters. She'll recover." He stopped. "Morokana didn't make it. His body has been returned to his home country."

  The silence that followed was not the absence of sound. It was the presence of something that doesn't have a useful shape yet, grief at the edge of becoming itself. Alicia turned toward the wall and the tears came without announcement, and she let them, because the alternative was holding them back, and holding things back had stopped being a strategy she had energy for.

  She blamed herself. She knew, in the rational part of her that was still operating underneath the rest of it, that the accounting was wrong, that Morokana had made a choice and had made it clearly and with full understanding of what it meant. She knew that. She also knew that knowing it didn't do the work that time would eventually do, and that time had not started doing it yet.

  The team traveled together the following day to pay their respects at the funeral arrangements that had been made before the body's transport. It was a quiet gathering, the kind that honours without spectacle, and Alicia stood at the grave for longer than the others and said nothing, which was the appropriate amount.

  On the way back through the airport, she brushed past a man in the crowded departure terminal, the ordinary contact of two people occupying the same corridor, and something happened that was not ordinary at all. A flash. Herself as a child, small enough that the rice was above her shoulders. Two friends running beside her through a field that was the colour of late afternoon. Laughter that she couldn't hear but could feel in her chest.

  She turned. The crowd was the crowd. The man was not where he had been. She stood still in the stream of people moving around her and tried to hold the image, but it had the quality of images that arrive without permission and leave the same way.

  She walked on.

  The Siege of Headquarters

  Three days passed in the manner of days that are full of activity and empty of resolution. Alicia and Lyra worked the active case files on Binoshi and Waruyama, tracking movement patterns and cartel communications with the focused attention of people who understand that the window between one crisis and the next is not rest but preparation.

  Alice and Jasmine visited on the third afternoon, arriving with food and the specific energy of people who have been worried for a long time and are channelling it into being present. Jack met them in the common room and sat with them while Alicia finished a briefing, and the three of them talked with the ease of people who share something important in common, which was the specific experience of caring about the same person.

  Jasmine watched Jack talk. He was careful with his words and attentive when others spoke, and his eyes had the quality she had noticed before, the distance-reading quality of someone whose profession had changed how they looked at things. She found herself thinking something she did not intend to find herself thinking, and then she found herself watching the direction of his attention when he asked Alice about Alicia, and she understood, with the particular clarity of understanding something you had hoped would turn out differently, what the direction of his attention meant.

  "How long have you known her?" Jack asked Alice. "I want to know what she would actually want for a birthday. Not what seems appropriate. What she would actually want."

  Alice leaned forward with the enthusiasm of someone who has extensive relevant information and has been waiting for someone to ask. Jasmine looked at her hands and smiled the smile of someone who has accepted something and is in the early stage of that process.

  The siren was not the Center's standard alert. It was the external breach siren, which had a different pitch for a reason, and the reason was that the external breach siren meant what was happening was not something detected at a distance but something arriving now.

  Waruyama's voice came through the external speakers with the particular energy of someone who has been building to something for a long time and has arrived at it.

  "BINGO!"

  The helmet he wore on the screens was encased in glowing syringes, which established immediately that whatever he had planned involved his specific area of expertise at scale. The hybrid monsters that swarmed the building's perimeter came in numbers that the external sensors began registering and then stopped registering because the registration became redundant.

  Jack told Alice and Jasmine to move to the surveillance room with the directness of someone who does not have time for the conversation that would otherwise follow, and they went because his voice left no useful space for argument. He took his position, moving through the building's defensive protocols with the efficiency of someone who has rehearsed them.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  He was managing the situation until he wasn't, because a monster came from a direction the protocol hadn't allocated, and the wound it left in his side announced itself as serious before he'd finished assessing it.

  The woman dropped from the ceiling before the killing blow completed. Her spear found the monster's horn and shattered it, and two more cloaked figures landed on either side of her from access points that were not on any building schematic, and their swords moved in the emergency lighting with the specific economy of people who have been trained for exactly this and have been doing it for a long time.

  "For the sake of the Princess," the spear-woman said, to her companions and to whatever was listening, "fight to the last drop."

  The Final Revelation

  Alicia and Lyra arrived through the north entrance at the moment when the three cloaked women had given more than they had available and the giving was showing. The hybrid monsters that Waruyama had built and sent had the advantage of numbers and the particular quality of things that have been designed specifically to counter the people opposing them.

  Waruyama looked at the state of his operation and then looked at the syringe in his hand. He had the expression of someone who has prepared for this contingency and is not surprised to be using it, only committed.

  The needle went into his neck.

  What happened to him was not transformation in the way that the cartel soldiers had transformed, which was terrible enough. It was incorporation. The bodies of the fallen hybrid monsters around him were drawn into the process, flesh and structure and whatever had been done to them absorbed into something larger and worse, and what remained was large in a way that the room struggled to contain and moved with the specific wrongness of something that has too many components and none of them designed to coexist.

  The smell was the first thing. Lyra turned away. Alice, from the surveillance room camera, looked at the feed and covered her mouth. The tentacles that the thing produced were fast and directional, and one of them found the spear-woman before Alicia could place herself between them.

  She caught the woman before she hit the floor. The woman weighed less than she should have, which was the specific weight of someone at the end of the resources they had.

  "Princess." The word came out of her with the quality of something that has been held for a long time and is finally arriving at its destination. Her eyes were doing something complicated, grief and relief running together in a way that was hard to distinguish. "I can't believe it. You're a teenager now." She pressed something into Alicia's hand, and Alicia felt the cold weight of a chain. "We have looked for so long. We never stopped."

  "Who are you?" Alicia said. The tears were there before she registered them.

  "Your guardian. Sent by your grandmother." She shook her head at her own name as if it had stopped being relevant. "The chain. The Lion Chain. Hold it, and you will understand."

  She breathed twice more. Then she did not breathe again.

  Alicia held the chain.

  The memories did not arrive as images. They arrived as experience, the specific sensory fullness of things that happened to a body rather than things that were told to a mind. Her mother's arms. The warmth of the palace's main hall in the late afternoon. Her father's voice, the specific resonance of a king's voice when he is speaking not as a king but as a father. The alien ship against the sky. The portal opening. The rice field from the dream in the airport. And underneath all of it, the lion, enormous and golden and running through everything she had ever been, a constant that had been there since before she had words for it.

  She understood.

  She stood up.

  Lyra and the team were down. Jack was out of ammunition and managing the wound in his side with the focus of someone who has decided that sitting down is not currently available as an option. Waruyama's construction raised the thing that had been a hand and was now a hammer, and brought it down toward Alicia, and she caught it with her sword.

  She did not brace for it. She caught it the way you catch something that is smaller than you are, because the scale of the thing in front of her had stopped being the relevant measurement.

  "I'm tired," she said. Her voice had a quality it had not had before, something underneath the sound of it, the way certain voices carry a frequency that you feel before you hear. "I'm tired of being patient. I'm tired of being managed and threatened and tested." She looked up at the thing above her. "And I remember now."

  She moved through the tentacles the way light moves, which is to say without negotiating. Each one that reached her was severed before its arc completed, and the thing above her tried the response of substance, drawing itself into a mass that would swallow rather than strike, and the golden light that erupted from within it made that strategy redundant from the inside.

  "I am Alicia de Wulthen." Her voice was in the room and also somehow larger than the room, occupying the same space as the lion she could feel running through her arms and her chest and her eyes. "Princess of King Wulthen. Brave Fire of Astralinium. Witness your end. Nemean Lion."

  She swung.

  "Gladius."

  The explosion leveled half the building and shook the city in concentric rings that people three districts away felt in their floors and described later as an earthquake. When the air cleared, Waruyama and everything he had made and everything he had become were ash and the specific silence of things that have been completely resolved.

  The Return to the Stars

  The fire brigade arrived into a scene that required several additional calls for backup and a significant revision of the initial situation report. Alicia stood in what had been the Center's eastern wing and looked at the sky through where the wall had been, and the sky was the same sky it always was, which was both ordinary and not.

  Her parents came through the security perimeter with the specific energy of people who have been on the other side of it for some time and have been making the case for admission.

  Her mother reached her first. The hug communicated everything that her mother had been doing with the past several hours, which was sustaining the hope of this moment, and Alicia held her and felt the specific weight of a decision that had already been made but had not yet been said.

  She looked at her mother and then at her father and she said it simply, because the love she had for them was large enough to hold honesty without breaking.

  "I know where I come from. I know who I am." She watched their faces do what faces do when they are receiving something they have been anticipating and still aren't entirely ready for. "I belong somewhere that needs me. I have to go back."

  Her mother said please. She said it in the specific way of please that is not asking permission but asking for more time, and Alicia heard it and held her tighter and longer, which was the answer she could give.

  "I will come back," she said. "When it's done. When the people there are safe. I will come back for you."

  Alice and Jasmine were inconsolable in the specific way of people who are choosing to be fully in the feeling rather than managing it, which was both harder to witness and more honest, and Alicia held them both and let them be fully in it, because the alternative was asking them to be smaller than they were.

  Jack came last. He was not crying, which with Jack meant something different than it meant with other people. He was very still, in the way he was still when he was reading something at distance, and his eyes had the quality of someone looking at something they intend to remember accurately.

  He pressed a locket into her hand. Small. Warm from being in his pocket.

  "Don't open it until you get there," he said. "Until you're home."

  "Jack—"

  "Take care of yourself," he said. "That's all I'm asking."

  She looked at him. He looked back. She understood, in the way that things become understood when you are standing at the edge of a portal with the chain of a lion around your neck and the memory of an entire world returned to you, that she had understood for longer than she had allowed herself to.

  "You too," she said. "Become the best shot in the world. Save people. Be okay."

  She stepped into the portal with the two remaining guardians. The gateway pulled the light around its edges in the way portals do, drawing the world toward its own closure.

  Jack's voice came through it at volume, the kind of volume that a person uses when they have decided that the distance is going to hear them regardless.

  "TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF, ALICIA! ONE DAY YOU'LL KNOW. I REALLY LIKE YOU! GOODBYE!"

  The portal closed. The city was quiet. The fire brigade continued their work in the eastern wing, and somewhere in the crowd that had gathered at the perimeter, Alice pressed her face into Jasmine's shoulder, and Jasmine put her arm around her, and they stood like that for a long time.