Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0132

Chapter 132

The surgery took the better part of the night, and Forge spent every hour of it standing where the staff had told him not to.

They had given him a corner of the observation gallery and asked him, twice, to wait somewhere a man could sit. He had refused both times without raising his voice, and after that they let him be, because there was no polite way to argue with a figure that filled a doorway and kept its face behind a sealed shell. He watched through the glass while the surgeons opened her, while the cradle on its stand gave up the heart he had carried across four buried cities, while gloved hands lifted out the failing thing that had kept Tara of Markovia alive and set the new one in its place. The numbers above the table told the story in a language he had learned to read on the way in. The odds had never climbed out of the single digits. The men working below knew it. They worked anyway, fast and silent, and so did he, in the only way left to him, which was to stand and witness and refuse to look away.

There was a moment near the end when the room changed.

He felt it before the alarms confirmed it, the way a crowd feels a thing go wrong a beat ahead of the announcement. The rhythm on the monitors stuttered, recovered, stuttered again. A surgeon called a number. Another answered it. Hands moved faster, then stopped moving with the particular stillness that is worse than any haste. The long even tone came up through the glass, flat and final, and a voice he could not place said the time aloud for the record, the way people did when there was nothing left to do but mark the hour.

Forge stood through all of it. Then he turned and walked out.

The doors of the gallery were heavy and meant to close gently on their own weight. He did not let them. He drove the first one open with the flat of his hand and heard it crack against the wall, and the second the same, and the sound followed him down a corridor that emptied out of his way as he went. A nurse pressed her back to the wall to let him pass. He did not see her. He saw the road behind him, the dead trees, the broken trunk, the five minutes Vandal Savage had carved out of a window that had no five minutes to spare. He turned in at the first unmarked door he came to and shut it behind him, and the lights woke at the motion and threw a cold, even brightness over an empty consultation room, a sink, a counter of pale stone, a wall of cabinets that held nothing he wanted.

He set both hands on the counter and let his head hang between his shoulders.

If he had been faster on that frozen stretch. If he had broken off the fight a breath sooner, or never let it start, or found the half a kilometer of open sky that would have carried him past Savage instead of into him. The arithmetic ran without his permission, the way it always did, every alternate road that ended with him arriving in time. He had built a life on arriving in time. Tonight the line on the map had ended at a table, and the table had lost.

The footsteps came from behind him, unhurried, crossing the tile without any care for being heard.

“I’d rather be alone,” he said.

The answer was a laugh. Low, pleased, entirely at ease in a building where a girl had just died.

“All that running,” the voice said. “All that snow and noise and heroism, and in the end it changed nothing at all.”

He knew the voice before the sentence finished. He turned on it, and whatever showed on the bare skin under the open visor sent the fury ahead of the thought, so that his fist was already moving, a clean hard line aimed at the center of the smile. It stopped a breath short of the man’s face. He held it there, trembling with the violence he had not spent, while the rest of him caught up with the part that had remembered why the smile needed to keep talking.

Count Vertigo did not flinch. He had not so much as shifted his weight. He was tall and pale and groomed to a shine, blond hair swept back from a high forehead, a long coat the green of deep water over black, and in one hand a slim cane he turned now in a slow, idle arc between them, as though conducting a piece of music only he could hear.

“No,” he said, gently, the way a tutor corrects a promising student. “No, no, no. You don’t want a diplomatic incident, hero. Not here. Not tonight, with our poor princess not yet cold on her table. Strike me and you’ll be explaining yourself to three governments by morning. That would be such an unworthy end to your evening.”

“So you got what you wanted.” Forge lowered the fist. The helmet flattened his voice into something colder than the man in front of him. “How does it feel. Murdering your own blood.”

Vertigo considered the question as if it had been asked in earnest. “Splendidly,” he said. “I’ll be king before the snow finishes melting. There’s a particular pleasure in watching an obstacle remove itself with such excellent timing.” He tilted his head. “You’re wondering how I knew the heart was coming tonight. How I knew the route, the window, the man they’d send when the speedsters were spent. I’m afraid I can’t tell you. A man in my position keeps his sources the way you keep that face hidden. But you may take it as settled that I have ears in every corner of every room that matters. Yours included.”

The words snagged on something old.

It came up out of the dark the way those things did, unbidden, a warning the Team had pressed on him after he came back from the long blankness of the coma, that one of their own was not what the others believed. He had let them tell him as though it were news. In the life he did not speak of he had carried the name longer than any of them had carried the suspicion, had known the shape of the betrayal before there was a single thread to pull. What he no longer trusted was whether the knowledge still held. He had been bending the lines of this world since the day he arrived, small turns and large ones, a heart delivered where it should have been lost, a count baited into a room he should never have entered. A world pushed far enough off its course might no longer keep the secrets he remembered. He filed the thought away with the discipline of long practice. Not here. Not now.

“You haven’t the decency to be ashamed,” he said instead. “She was barely more than a child.”

“She was a verb in a sentence I was tired of reading.” Vertigo’s mouth curved. “An inconvenience standing between a crown and its rightful head. I’ll confess I’m a little disappointed. I would have preferred to watch her go slowly. A wasting thing, a few more months of failing organs and brave little speeches from a sickbed, the whole country grieving her by degrees while I waited my turn with the proper sorrow on my face. This was so abrupt. Efficient, yes. But it lacked artistry.” He sighed, genuinely, the sound of a man cheated of a pleasure. “You needn’t have flown so hard, hero. You only delivered her to me a little quicker.”

Forge let the silence run.

Then something went out of him, and it was not surrender. His shoulders came down. His arms loosened and hung. His head dropped, and his chest rose with one long pull of breath, slow, deliberate, the breath of a man setting something down so that his hands are free for what comes after. When his head lifted again his eyes had found Vertigo’s and settled there, and the voice that came out of the helmet had lost every edge of grief.

“You think that’s all of it,” he said.

He had not meant it as a question, and a second voice answered it as though it were. It came not from him but from the helmet itself, carried on the small external speakers set into its jaw, and it was young, and clear, and a woman’s.

“That’s more than enough,” the voice said. “We have what we need to bury him for a very long time.”

Vertigo went still in a way he had not been still all evening.

He knew the voice. There was no mistaking the knowing on his face, the particular recognition reserved for the single person a man hates above all others in the world. The cane stopped turning. And then the air in front of Forge’s visor flickered and resolved into light, a figure assembling itself out of nothing, slight and blonde and propped against pillows the projection did not bother to hide, looking down at her uncle from the small bright shape of a hologram thrown from the front of the helmet.

Forge’s own voice spread out into the room, warm now, almost amused, pitched to fill the space.

“I knew you’d come,” he said. “The moment word got out that she was gone, I knew you wouldn’t be able to stay away. You had to see the body fail in person. You had to stand over the thing you’d beaten and say it out loud where someone could hear you. It’s the most predictable thing about you, Vertigo. You can’t enjoy a victory you don’t get to gloat through.” The amusement cooled by a single degree. “So we gave you one to gloat through. Tara and I. A death you could believe in, in a building you’d already filled with your own ears, so that every word out of your mouth carried straight back to the one person in the world you’d never have said them to. Shall we see how a princess handles her first traitor.”

The hologram lifted its chin, and Tara of Markovia spoke, and the exhaustion under the voice did nothing to weaken what it carried.

“Count Vertigo.” The accent was exact, every syllable placed. “By the authority vested in me as the last living heir to the throne of Markovia, an authority you spent this night trying to extinguish, I strip you of your name, your titles, and every protection they afforded you. The immunity you have hidden behind for years is the immunity of the crown, and the crown does not extend it to those who plot the murder of its bearer. You confessed to that plot, freely, before a witness and a record, in your own words and your own voice. There is no court on earth that will return you to the open air.” Her gaze did not waver. “You are condemned to imprisonment for the remainder of your life, for the attempted assassination of the sovereign of Markovia. Forge. If you would be so kind as to take this criminal into custody, I would consider it a personal favor.”

The hero inclined his head toward the light.

“As you wish, my princess.”

Vertigo moved on the same breath. He had not survived as long as he had by standing still when a thing went against him, and his free hand came up to the side of his skull, two fingers pressing to the pale skin above his ear where the device sat beneath the bone, the small cruel engine that turned a man’s own balance into a weapon. Forge felt the first edge of it bloom across the room, the floor tilting under him without moving, the lights smearing, his inner ear insisting the world had begun to pour sideways toward a corner of the ceiling.

He was already across the distance before the field could finish closing.

The vertigo took hold of a body that did not entirely obey the rules it was written for, and his physiology shrugged off enough of it to leave him a single clear step, and a single step was the whole of what he needed. The hook came up off his hip with the full weight of a frame he had let run heavy, and it caught Vertigo square along the jaw. The count left his feet. He crossed the half a room behind him without touching the floor and met the wall with the back of his skull, and the field collapsed with him as the consciousness behind it went out, the world snapping level again in the same instant. He slid down the wall and folded at its base, blood at one nostril, the cane clattering away across the tile, an ordinary man with nothing left to make him otherwise.

Forge crossed to him. He worked quickly and without ceremony. The device first, peeled from beneath the skin behind the ear with two fingers and dropped into a pocket of the uniform where it could do no harm, because a man like this was only ever as dangerous as the things he carried and was nothing at all without them. The cane next. He turned it in his hands, found the seam where the elegance hid the edge, and felt the catch under his thumb that would have let a hidden blade out of the shaft. He folded that away as well. Stripped of both, Vertigo was a thin unconscious figure in an expensive coat, and that was all he would be from here forward.

The door opened behind him.

Two men came through it, broad across the shoulder, dark suits, dark glasses worn indoors with the unbothered confidence of people who answered to a crown rather than to a building. He knew the lead one. The same quiet professional who had stood by the window of her suite with a pistol under his arm and decided not to use it, the man she trusted at her back. They took in the room, the count crumpled against the wall, the hero standing over him, and they did not ask a single question.

Forge straightened and stepped clear.

“He’s all yours,” he said. He let the smile reach his voice as he passed between them, and he did not look back at the figure on the floor. “Mind the head. I’d hate for him to miss the trial.”

He went out the way he had come, and somewhere behind him the cabinets and the cold light and the pale stone counter went back to holding nothing that mattered.

The suite was quiet when he reached it.

She was sitting up against the pillows where the hologram had shown her, paler than she had any right to survive being, a monitor counting the new heart’s steady work behind a panel of pale wood. He had half expected to find her unconscious by now, the trap sprung and her part in it done, the strong things they pump into a body that has just been opened and closed finally allowed to carry her under. Instead she was awake, and watching the door, and she found his face the moment the visor folded back and gave a small, tired, entirely satisfied smile.

It struck him again, standing there, what she was made of. He had argued against this. He had told her plainly that she could run the whole of it from the far side of the anesthesia, that he and her own people could bait the room and record the words and she need never surface for any of it. She had refused. She had insisted on being present in her own mind for the moment her uncle hanged himself with his own tongue, and she had held on through it by force of will alone, lucid on the knife’s edge between the surgery and the recovery that was now finally coming for her. He had carried a heart across a manufactured winter to keep her alive. She had spent the first conscious hour of that new life setting a trap and watching it close. He had met a great many strong people. He was not certain he had met many stronger.

“It worked,” she said, as if she still half doubted it. “It actually worked.”

“It worked because you held your nerve when a wiser patient would have slept.” He came to stand near the bed. “I’m glad the surgery took, Your Highness. For a moment in there, I wasn’t sure I’d brought you anything but a stranger’s heart and a poor view.”

“You brought me my country.” Her hand moved on the coverlet, an aborted gesture toward his. “I can’t let that pass unanswered. Whatever you’d ask of Markovia, ask it. I mean that. I won’t be the kind of sovereign who forgets a debt the moment the danger’s over.”

“It isn’t necessary.”

“I insist.”

“Then I’ll ask you to insist on it later.” He said it lightly, but he meant the weight under it. “You’ve been awake for an hour you should have spent asleep, you’ve put a crown back on its own head, and there’s a heart in your chest that’s an hour old and hasn’t learned your name yet. Let the favor keep. It will still be a favor in a week, and you’ll be in far better condition to make me regret asking for too little.” A corner of his mouth turned up. “I’d hate to take advantage of a woman fighting her own medication.”

She tried to argue and lost the argument to a slow blink, the drugs finally finding the gap her will had been holding shut. He watched her surface fight it once more and let it take her by degrees, the way a tide takes a shore. Just before it closed over her she gathered herself for one more thing, and the question came out smaller than the voice that had condemned a count to die in a cell.

“Can we stay in contact,” she said. “After this. I don’t have many people I can simply talk to.”

He leaned a little nearer the bed, so the answer would reach her down through the closing dark.

“Of course,” he said. “Whenever you need to talk to someone. About any of it, or none of it. You only have to call.”