They kept going, with Violet pushing a little harder, a little faster. They streamed along with the morning workers, just two more fish in a vast ocean school. Their luck had held so far, but the laws of fate were never on the side of the fugitive. It wouldn’t—it
couldn’t
—be long now until Daxus’s forces made their appearance.
“V?” Violet looked down at the boy, but didn’t stop moving. When he spoke, his words were punctuated by his footsteps as he struggled to keep up with her ever-increasing gait. “Back on that rooftop?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Where you were doing your high-wire act?”
“Why are you so good?” He paused, trying to find the right words. “Why are you so much
better
than everyone else?”
Violet grinned. “Aside from All-Pan-Asia Women’s Gymnastics?” She glanced at him, but he didn’t get the joke, so she finally just squared her shoulders and stopped trying to make it funny. “I’m not,” she said simply. “I’m just a whole lot angrier.” Before she could elaborate, the ringer went off on her cell phone, making her jump. She pulled it out and frowned at it before flipping it open. A name flashed across the finger-sized screen and her frown deepened into a full scowl. Panic made her snap the phone shut hard enough to stress the hinges.
Six picked up on the anxiety in her features immediately. “Who was it?”
“Daxus.” Violet felt her heartbeat increase and she struggled to at least keep her voice calm. “My number changes every sixty seconds.” She didn’t elaborate; she thought the boy was smart enough to figure out that meant the ArchMinistry had probably been able to lock on to their location.
Violet quickly led Six deeper into the stream of people headed for their offices, hoping the crowd would at least let them blend in. After a few minutes, just before heading down a staircase to a lower level, she tore off the glove phone and dropped it into a trash can; at the bottom of the stairs she spied a vending machine and they made a detour to it. A few dollar bills later and the machine obligingly spit out a cellophane-wrapped temp phone. She unwrapped it quickly and keyed in Garth’s number. All the while her gaze skipped suspiciously over the faces of the crowd, trying to spot anyone out of place. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Daxus had an entire squad of undercover people, just like the drug teams. If he did, they were doomed; she’d have no way to recognize them and they could be surrounded in a heartbeat.
“Garth,” she said when she heard him answer, “it’s me. They may have been tracking my phone. I’d get moving if I were you.” She closed the phone and scanned the crowd again, then her gaze stopped on Six. He looked small and quiet, like nothing so much as an out-of-place child on an overcrowded city street. And yet, he had so much of that . . . dangerous potential. “Or maybe . . . it’s me,” Violet murmured. A final glance around gave her the entrance to the subway, thankfully only about a quarter block away. She grabbed the boy’s hand and headed toward it. “We’ve got to get under some concrete.”
Once they were past the entrance and headed down again, Violet felt a small sense of relief spread over her. “We’ll be shielded in here,” she told Six. Was it the relief bringing a flush to her cheeks, or her sickness?
But before she could decide which way to go next, Six grabbed her arm and pulled her to a stop. “Violet, wait.”
She stopped and blinked back at him. “What?”
“What are we doing?” he asked. His eyes were clear and guileless, searching.
Violet frowned. “Well, what do you mean? I told you—we have to get you someplace shielded—”
But the boy shook his head and folded his arms protectively across his thin chest. “V, why didn’t Garth believe you when you said you’d take care of me?”
She opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came out. Then, on the edge of her peripheral vision, she saw a security team. They were moving slowly and without purpose, like sharks trolling the waters . . . so far. The quiet was about to erupt into a storm.
Violet knelt so that she could look the boy in the eye and drop out of the guards’ field of vision. “Because Garth is a jaded and cynical being with no faith in human nature,” she said. The instant she said it, she felt like some kind of super hypocrite—how many times had she made it clear that she considered humans inferior? Hadn’t she told Garth only an hour or so earlier that to be human was weak? Well, yes . . . but this was a different thing and one she couldn’t explain right now.
To keep the boy—often he was too smart not only for his own good, but for hers—from catching her inconsistency, Violet managed a smile. “Speaking of which, I’d be neglecting my duties if I didn’t get a growing boy fed, now, wouldn’t I?” She reached down and snapped off the bracelet on her wrist, then pressed it into Six’s hand. When he looked at it quizzically, she told him, “Untraceable single use credit card. Good for the purchase of any and all goods and services.” There was a bank of vending machines only a few yards away and she turned the boy so that he was facing them and gave him a little push in their direction. “Why don’t you go and see if you can rustle us up something worth eating? We’ve got a big day ahead of us.”
Six looked from her to the machines, then back again.
Violet smiled as encouragingly as she could. “Go on,” she prodded. “It’s about time you learned how this world works.”
The child hesitated again, then startled her by handing her the blue jacket that Garth had given him before turning back toward the machines. It wrenched her heart to see the resignation on his face, but she told herself there was nothing she could do about it. She had so little time left—she couldn’t save him anyway . . . and there were other things she needed to do before she left this world.
He’d taken only a few steps when Violet found her voice. “Six.”
He stopped and turned to face her, but didn’t come back. She swallowed. “You should . . . really put up your mask.”
He stared at her without saying anything for a long moment, then reached beneath his collar and pulled up the breathing mask, that useless piece of portable protection that was supposed to keep the uninfected from becoming just that. Before he tugged it into place, he said quietly, “Good-bye, Violet.”
Violet swallowed again. “What . . . what’re you talking about?” she managed, but they both knew the question was a farce. He gave her a final look, then found a smile for her, sad and serene—like the face of a child martyr ready to go on to the final step to canonization. Turning his back, he threaded his way through the crowd and over to the machines.
Steeling herself, Violet turned her back on the boy, then draped the blue jacket over the edge of a waste receptacle where Six, if he turned back to the crowd to look for her, surely wouldn’t miss it. She wasn’t going to need it, and she certainly wasn’t going to be taking it back to Garth. Before she could change her mind—she mustn’t be weak!—she melted into the crowd, striding purposely as fast and far away from the child as she could without drawing attention to herself.
But even so . . . she couldn’t resist one final glance over her shoulder, right before she began climbing the stairs that would take her out of the subway and put him completely out of her sight. Six was still there, right in front of the vending machines where she’d sent him. He wasn’t looking at her—thank God—but he had defiantly pulled down his breathing mask. Now he simply stood there, his face utterly expressionless and his eyes closed. It was almost like he was feeling the press of people around him, their nearness, their passage, while he . . .
waited
for something.
His destiny, perhaps.
Violet had made good time, and she was almost at the top when the first security team passed her on the descent side. She averted her eyes automatically, then realized they weren’t looking for her—oh, no, they were focused on something much more important, something that kept their shielded gazes straight ahead. They had purpose in their step, purpose and . . .
direction.
They knew what they were tasked to find, and let’s face it, so did she. It wouldn’t be long before they had the boy in their sights, literally, and soon after that he’d be dead.
She told herself, again, that there was nothing she could do about it—hell, she couldn’t even help herself, much less save a doomed child. If she tried, all she’d get for her trouble was dead, and that, before her already shortened life span. To make it even worse, trying to keep the child alive would be a futile effort that would break her heart with the final result, and if she was going to die and she couldn’t take out that fucking ArchMinistry like she’d originally planned, shouldn’t she go quietly? Not for the benefit of anyone else, but for her
own
peace of mind, her own sense of go down gracefully and fade away with time. After all, people always said you should grow old gracefully, and she took that to mean she ought to die that way, too.
Another half-dozen strong security team streamed past, again too focused on their mission to notice her. This time, however, she did catch something from them—
“Signal locked on child and are in rapid response!”
—and she shut her eyes as tightly as she could.
A useless gesture, of course. There was no way to erase from her mind the grainy sound of the man’s radio transmission, no way to wipe out the sight of the cruel stone-slash of a mouth beneath the black visor.
No way to forget the face of death.
“Damn it,” Violet whispered. She made herself keep going, up and up, until she came to the last riser of the staircase and realized she was standing in front of the trash can where she’d dumped her cell phone. For the moment there were no more security teams, so after a quick double glance around, Violet leaned over and scanned the trash. There, just under a half-empty cellophane bag of health chips and the crushed remains of a disposable cup—thankfully empty—she saw her glove phone. With a quick snap, Violet retrieved it from the pile of litter and slipped it back on her hand. She’d been foolish to think Daxus had found her via the phone; now it was obvious that he’d gotten a satellite lock on the boy and his computers had simply jumped the signal over to her phone. He might have a lock on the kid, but with the phone turned off, there was no way the Vice-Cardinal could keep tabs on her. Besides, she’d already seen plenty of proof that his soldiers were on their way to the boy and not her. They didn’t even know she was there.
But she could change that.
She could.
“Damn it.”
She jumped at the sound of her own voice before she realized she said it again. She was up and on the sidewalk now, pushing through the heavy crowd and trying to make headway, then suddenly jerking her face to the side as yet another security team barreled past her.
“Damn it.”
No—she couldn’t save him, she
couldn’t.
He was too far gone, she was too far gone—
“Damn it!”
—and she wasn’t some kind of fucking messiah! She strode on, trying desperately to ignore the objects beneath her coat, but suddenly they all seemed too big, with an overabundance of sharp edges that raked her skin and excessive weight that banged painfully into her muscles and made her flesh ache.
“Damn
IT—
”
Barely registering her own frenzied movements, Violet kept surging forward, but this time she was yanking things out from under her coat, those objects that had weighed so heavily on her, freeing herself of them as she tossed them from left to right along the curb and never even registered that they rolled into the dirty street and were instantly lost in the crush of feet and forgotten—
The fuse.
The detonator.
The dozen packets of C-10 explosives that had been strung together around her waist, the chemical composition at least a hundred times more powerful than its early plastic explosives predecessor.
And, finally, all that was left of the small bundle of quick-connect wiring.
Abruptly Violet went down on one knee, but the pain of her kneecap striking the sidewalk did nothing to ground her as her hands came up and cradled her head.
There would be no bomb, no final, beautiful, deadly end to the ArchMinistry.
“DAMN IT!”
Her head was splitting, throbbing with indecision and rage and regret. She couldn’t think straight, couldn’t see, couldn’t make a damned decent
decision.
Someone touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“Damn it,” she whispered, ignoring the voice. “Damn it damn it damn it . . .”
The person touched her again, this time more insistently. “Hey,” he said. “Are you okay?” Suddenly the touch of his skin ate into hers, feeling like a hot poke instead of concern.
Violet’s eyelids snapped open and her face jerked up toward his. He gasped and back-stepped as her eyes blazed at him. “Touch me again and you’ll lose your arm and half your torso with it,” she snarled. The man’s face twisted, first in fright, then in anger and revulsion when he realized she was a Hemophage; without a word, he spun and disappeared into the crowd.
Violet pulled herself to her feet, pushing away the twinge of guilt—the man had only been trying to help her. Was the last of her . . .
humanness
truly gone? Was she like Nerva now, not much more than a cold, hateful vampire, a bitter, bloodthirsty creature without the capacity to care and who existed only for the pleasure of revenge?
Yes.
Maybe.
No—
she would
not
be like that, she wouldn’t
let
herself.
“Damn it,” she whispered a final time.
And turned around to go back to the boy.
Violet started walking, first quickly, then trotting, then finally outright running, leaping down the stairs and back into the subway. She was painfully aware that she’d taken too long to come to her decision, surely the security teams were practically on top of Six already. But things were still quiet, notably free of screaming or gunfire—maybe their orders from Daxus had changed, maybe they were only going to retrieve the child and return him to the ArchMinistry or the Laboratories for Latter Day Defense, back to the science lab where he’d been born and bred, a reintroduction to life as a lab rat. It wasn’t much of an existence, but it was better than nothing, and if they were intent on bringing him back, surely they knew how to stop whatever was in his blood—