Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0131

Chapter 131

The hospital rose out of the white below him, a cluster of pale towers ringed by frozen gardens, and Forge cut his speed the instant its roofline resolved through the snow. The jets beneath his boots fell from a roar to a low breath. He dropped toward the forecourt in a slow spiral, bleeding off the last of his momentum until the landing was almost gentle, the soles of his boots sinking into a hand’s depth of fresh powder without a sound.

A number sat in the corner of his vision. He let himself read it. Even with the road behind him, even with the minutes Savage had stolen on that frozen stretch of dead trees, he had come in under the worst the route had predicted. He had broken his own mark on a night that had spent every trick it owned trying to stop him. It was a small thing to be proud of, and he let himself have the smallness of it for exactly as long as it took the snow to settle around his ankles.

Then he saw the man.

He was coming across the forecourt with his head down and his shoulders set in something that wanted to pass for grief. Dark-skinned, thin through the chest, wearing the pale blue scrubs of hospital staff and nothing warm over them, which was the first thing wrong. No one walked out into a manufactured blizzard in short sleeves to meet a courier. Forge marked it and said nothing, letting the man close the distance, letting him arrive at whatever he had come to deliver.

“You’re early,” the man said. He stopped a careful three steps away. “Faster than they told us to expect.”

“I made good time.” Forge reached back over his shoulder and unhooked the case, swinging it down off his spine and into his hands, the readout on its side still burning a steady green. He held it where the man could see it. “The heart’s stable. Twelve hours of life support in the cradle and I haven’t touched four of them. Where do you want it?”

Something passed behind the man’s eyes, and the grief he was wearing slipped a fraction lower on his face, like a mask that didn’t quite fit the bone beneath. “That’s the thing,” he said. “I’m sorry. You came all this way for nothing. The girl didn’t make it. Complications, an hour ago, before you ever crossed the river. There was nothing anyone could do.”

Forge held the case still.

“It’s a waste, I know it is, after a run like that.” The man put out both hands, palms up, the gesture of a man relieving another of a burden. “But the cradle’s good for a transplant network if we move fast. We’ve already got a second recipient flagged downstate. Let me take it from here. You’ve earned the rest.”

He reached for the case.

Forge drew it back, unhurried, the way a person pulls a cup out of reach of a child who hasn’t been given permission to have it. He looked at the man for a moment, and then he smiled, and the smile had no warmth in it at all.

“You should work on the delivery,” he said. “The sorrow was good. You held it almost the whole way through. But a doctor who just lost a patient doesn’t ask for the organ before he asks for my name, and he doesn’t have a second recipient lined up an hour after a death he had no reason to expect.” He tilted his head. “You wanted the box. You never wanted the girl to have it.”

The man’s face changed. The grief came off it entirely, and what was left underneath was flat and quick and already deciding. He took a step back, his hand dropping toward the waistband of the scrubs, fingers closing on the shape of a pistol he’d hidden against his hip.

He was fast. It made no difference.

Forge’s arm came off his shoulder before the gun had cleared cloth, the green flesh stretching out past anything a human limb had any right to reach, thinning as it traveled, the fist at the end of it arriving across the whole distance between them in the time it took the man to blink. The blow caught him square across the jaw. His head snapped sideways, his knees folded under him, and the pistol fell into the snow half-drawn while the rest of him followed it down.

The arm flowed back into its ordinary shape before the man finished landing.

Forge stood over him a moment, then bent and took a fistful of the scrubs at the shoulder. He turned toward the building, the case riding secure on his back again, and began to drag the unconscious man across the forecourt behind him, leaving a long furrow in the powder.

The automatic doors read his approach and parted.

What lay beyond them was not the worn, fluorescent triage he might have expected. The lobby opened into polished stone and warm light, low couches in pale leather, a desk of dark wood staffed by people in pressed uniforms. It was the lobby of a place that billed in figures most patients never saw, built for clients who would not tolerate the sight of anyone else’s suffering. A dozen of those pressed uniforms were crossing the floor on quiet errands when the doors opened and the cold came in, and every one of them stopped.

He understood the silence as he stepped through it. He was carrying a body, which was reason enough. But it was also the rest of him. The form he wore tonight stood close to two meters, broader at the shoulder than his base, the dark cloak and the darker uniform swallowing what light the lobby offered rather than catching it. He had let his morphology run heavier than usual for the run through the storm, and he hadn’t shed the weight of it yet, so that he came in among them like something the night had decided to send indoors. A nurse near the desk took a step back without seeming to know she’d done it.

He let the unconscious man slide off his fist onto the polished floor and raised his voice into the quiet.

“Somebody here is expecting a heart.”

A man in a surgeon’s coat broke from the far hall at a near run, and the sight of the case on Forge’s back put twenty years back into his step. He pulled up short of the body on the floor, his eyes going from it to the courier and back.

“You’re ahead of the window,” the surgeon said. His glance went to a clock above the desk, then returned, and Forge watched him do the arithmetic and not quite believe it. “Hours ahead. We were told to pray for it, and you’re hours ahead.”

“You might think about praying for better doors,” Forge said. He nudged the unconscious man with the side of his boot, rolling him faceup. “This one met me in the courtyard wearing your colors and a sad face. He told me your patient died an hour ago and asked very politely if he could take the heart off my hands. He had a gun under the scrubs to make the request stick.”

The surgeon went still. He looked down at the man on his floor for a long moment, and when he spoke there was an edge of cold in it. “I’ve worked in this building eleven years. I don’t know this man.”

“I didn’t think you would.” Forge turned his head toward the entrance, where a broad-shouldered figure in hospital security gray had come up at the noise and was now standing well back, plainly unsure whether the larger threat in the room was the body or the man who’d brought it in. “You. Get a gurney. Strap him to it, cuff him to the rail, and call whatever authority answers a call on a night like this. He doesn’t talk to anyone and he doesn’t leave that gurney until they take him off it.”

The guard moved. A nurse came with him, and between them they got the limp form onto a wheeled stretcher and the cuffs onto his wrists, locking him to the frame. Forge watched until the restraints clicked home and only then turned back to the surgeon.

“Before you take it in,” he said, “you should know somebody arranged for him to be here. That’s planning, not luck. If they were willing to put a man on your doorstep, they were willing to put one inside. I’d feel better standing in that operating room myself than wondering from out here who else came to work today wearing your colors.”

The surgeon absorbed it and nodded slowly, the way a man nods when an unwelcome idea turns out to be the sensible one. He stepped forward and held out his hands, and this time Forge unhooked the case and laid it into them, the weight passing between them with the care of something irreplaceable. The surgeon cradled it against his chest and turned toward the surgical wing.

“One thing,” Forge said, and the surgeon stopped. “I’d like to see her first. The patient. Before you put her under.”

The surgeon studied him, then inclined his head. “It’s possible. We have time tonight that we never thought we’d have, thanks to you.” He looked over his shoulder and found a nurse waiting near the desk. “Take him up to her. Five minutes.” He lifted the case a fraction. “I’ll be scrubbing in.”

The nurse led him to an elevator and up, and then down a corridor carpeted thick enough to kill the sound of his boots, and stopped at a door of pale wood with no number on it. She knocked once, opened it, and stepped aside to let him pass. He went in, and she pulled the door shut behind him and was gone.

The room was not a hospital room. It was a suite that happened to contain a hospital bed, the monitors discreet behind panels of the same pale wood, the window a wall of glass looking out over a frozen garden gone blue in the dusk. Everything in it said the same thing the lobby had said, only louder. Whoever lay in that bed had never in her life wanted for anything that money could be made to buy.

A man stood near the window. Tall, still, in a dark suit cut close enough that the bulge under the left arm read as exactly what it was. Behind the dark glasses he wore indoors, his attention found Forge the moment the door opened and stayed there, measuring, the stillness of a professional who had decided not to move yet.

And on the bed, propped against a bank of white pillows with a book open in her hands, was the patient.

She was younger than the news footage had made her look, and the footage had not been kind enough by half. Blonde, fine-boned, slender in a way that the illness had sharpened rather than caused, with the clean symmetry of a face that cameras loved and crowds remembered. He knew that face. He knew it from the broadcasts of the last few days, the careful bulletins about a foreign princess flown in for a procedure no one would name. And he knew it from further back than that, from a life that was not this one, where this same name had crossed his path in a story he remembered the shape of without remembering all its turns.

Princess Tara of Markovia. The only living heir in the line of a kingdom that had never given up the old way of holding power, where the one who wore the crown ruled in fact and not in ceremony, sole and supreme over the land. There were not many such thrones left in the world. There was, as far as he knew, exactly one girl left to inherit this one.

She looked up from the book as he came in, and recognition moved across her face. “I didn’t expect you so soon,” she said. Her voice carried the faint, exact accent of someone schooled in three languages and careless in none of them. “I was told the speedsters would carry the fate of my nation across the snow. I confess I’d half decided no one would come at all.”

Forge let her finish. Then, with a thought, he gave the order to the helmet, and the dark shell of it folded back and down, retracting in a single smooth motion to leave his face bare to the room.

The book lowered an inch in her hands. He watched the surprise reach her eyes and watched her work to keep it from reaching the rest of her, the small fight of someone raised never to show a reaction she hadn’t chosen. A hero did not, in her experience, walk into a room and hand his face to a stranger as though it cost him nothing.

He gave her an easy half-bow, the kind that belonged in a hall hung with banners rather than a private ward, and he made it look as though the room were exactly that. “There were complications on the road,” he said. “The speedsters were needed elsewhere, and the night didn’t leave them a choice. So you have a substitute instead. I’d have liked to tell you he was a worthy one, but I didn’t know until I walked in that the cargo I was carrying was you. I accept the honor anyway, Your Highness, and gladly.”

He said it lightly, and the lightness landed where he’d aimed it. Color rose along her cheekbones, the faint flush of a girl who spent her days among ministers and bodyguards and very rarely among the kind of people she read about. She did not look away from him.

“You’ll know me as Forge,” he went on. “It won’t mean much. I keep a low profile, by preference. I’d rather be the one nobody’s watching.” A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, unhurried and certain. “I’ll only say this much for myself. There isn’t a name in the League I’d step back from. I’ve a great deal of growing left to do, and I know it. But not so much that you should worry about who they sent.”

“Then I’ll thank you, Forge, and not the speedsters.” She set the book aside on the coverlet, marking her place with care, and the gesture was a small dismissal of the lighter mood and an invitation to the heavier one. “Was the road as bad as they feared? Tell me there wasn’t blood spilled over a box on your back.”

“There was an attempt to stop me.” He let the smile go and gave her the truth instead, since she had asked for it plainly. “I didn’t understand the whole of it until I was standing in it. Someone arranged for a storm that has no business in this season, and used it to bury four cities and pin the people who might have helped them. I thought I was only threading the gaps in it. Then a man met me on a frozen road in the middle of nowhere, alone, and I knew it wasn’t weather I was fighting. Vandal Savage. He cost me minutes I couldn’t spare and risked a road full of officers to do it. The point was never to kill me. The point was to slow the heart down past the hour it needed to arrive.”

He watched her as he said the name, and he watched what it did to her, which was less than nothing and therefore a great deal. A girl with no stake in the matter would have asked who Vandal Savage was. She didn’t.

“And when I reached this place,” he continued, “there was a man in your courtyard wearing the staff’s colors, ready with a story about your death and a hand out for the box. Savage to slow it down. Someone else here to take it off me at the door if I made the window anyway. That’s two layers of the same plan, Your Highness, built by people who very much wanted you to die on a table tonight and have it look like the storm did it.” He paused. “I can tell when I’m being lied to. It’s a small gift, but a useful one. What I can’t tell yet is who’s paying the liars. I’d hoped you might.”

He saw it land. Her composure held, but a thin tightness crossed her brow, the involuntary flinch of a thought she’d already had and hated. He pressed it, gently.

“Or perhaps you can,” he said. “You don’t look like a woman hearing this for the first time. You look like a woman having a suspicion confirmed.”

For a moment she said nothing. The bodyguard by the window shifted his weight a fraction, and a glance from her settled him.

“My uncle,” she said at last. “Count Vertigo.” She let the title sit in the room before she went on. “He has never reconciled himself to the order of succession. The throne should pass to me, and he has spent years making it understood, in the quiet ways men like him use, that he considers this a temporary inconvenience. He keeps company with people no member of a royal house should be seen to know. It has put him at odds with your League more than once, and it has put him further from the crown each time, which has done nothing to cool him.”

“I know the name.” Something hardened pleasantly in Forge’s voice, the satisfaction of a piece dropping into a slot. “I had a hand in unmaking one of his arrangements not long ago. A scheme of his came apart across a table I happened to be standing at, with my team’s help. I’d assumed he was answering for it somewhere behind a wall by now.”

“He isn’t.” There was no bitterness in it, which was worse than bitterness. “He travels under diplomatic protection. A crown’s immunity, granted by treaties older than either of us, and your League cannot touch a man it cannot legally hold. So he walks free, and he grows, and his faction inside my own borders grows with him. Every month there are more men loyal to my uncle than to my father’s memory. I’ve run out of lawful moves against him, Forge. I’m not ashamed to say it to the one person tonight who flew through a deliberate winter to keep me breathing. I don’t know what’s left to do.”

She held his eyes when she said it, and there was steel under the exhaustion, the look of someone who had been carrying a country on a sickbed and was tired of being told to rest. He found he liked her for it.

Forge let the quiet stretch a moment, the snow falling past the great window behind her, the monitors keeping their soft count of a heart that would soon be replaced by a stronger one. Then he smiled again, and this time it was not gallant and not cold. It was the smile of a man who had just been handed something he intended to use.

“Well,” he said. “As it happens, I might be able to help you with that.”