No raving madman, him. But a killer all the same. Focused and determined. Eight years spent walling himself off from redemption. Why?
How did it come to this?
True ponders it, studying him with a tired, unselfconscious gaze, the same way she once gazed into the eyes of her newborns, striving to see into their futures, to glimpse the influence, the effect their souls might have on the world. For better? she would ask herself. For worse? With Shaw though, she strives to imagine the past. His path circumscribed by the gravity of what happened in Burma and by things that went before.
As if to assure her of his irrevocable fall, he reminds her in his soft dangerous voice, “No qualms.”
She feels it coming, the cobra’s strike. His gaze shifts. He’s a half step past her, faster than she can react. A squeak, a gasp from Guiying as his gloved hand grips her throat, right under her jaw. At the same time, his scarred hand moves to block True from reaching for her pistol.
But she has no intention of pulling a gun on him. She puts her hands up instead, palms out, backpedaling as she screams at him, “Let her go! Shaw, let her go.”
It’s not what he wants to hear. He wants her on his side. Fury contorts his face. Maybe it’s hate. He shoves Guiying hard, sending her tumbling to the tiles. “You want her?” he demands, turning to True. “She’s yours, then. None of this matters anyway.”
“Maybe it doesn’t to you.” The explosive violence in him is so close to the surface. She should just shut the fuck up. Let him go before she brings it down on herself. But her gaze drifts to Guiying choking on the floor—and she takes the chance. “Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, Shaw, but it matters to the rest of us.”
“You want to believe that. But there’s plenty like me. More all the time, ’cause good men don’t last. Diego was a good man and Saomong hated him for it, for daring to be a good man.”
“That is not why it happened! They didn’t know him. They didn’t know anything about him. They took him because he was already dying. If you were the one wounded, they would have taken you.”
“That’s not how God wrote the story, True.”
It’s his concluding statement. The end of the debate. He walks on, walks away toward the passage. She turns to stare after him, knowing she was wrong before, sure now there is still one more mystery, one more part of the story he hasn’t told her. The core of it, maybe. The black heart.
Guiying is curled on the tiles, crying softly. True crouches beside her, a hand on her shoulder. “Stay here,” she says. “Your people will come.” Then she goes after Shaw, pausing at the mouth of the passage just long enough to retrieve the wafer-shaped beetle from the wall.
Light floods into the passage as the doors swing inward. Shaw slips past them, into the street. She hurries until she’s only a step behind. Last chance.
“Shaw—”
He turns. “You don’t fucking give up, do you?”
“Nothing changes,” she reminds him.
“Shit.”
“You need to come home, Shaw.”
“You know that’s not going to happen. Can’t happen.”
She shifts her attack, a new angle. “You heard about our fighter pilot?”
“Your dead fighter pilot? Yeah, I heard Rihab claimed it.”
“Al-Furat,” she corrects.
“Al-Furat is Rihab now. The kid hates drones. And he’s a fuckin’ madman. Vicious. Worse than Hussam.”
“Come on,” True protests. “He’s nineteen.”
“Sure, but he’s lived harder than you and me. He was six when a drone strike killed his mom and two sisters. Burned half his body. Hard to forgive shit like that. You should know how that works.”
“Okay. I get it.”
“Your pilot was done when she pulled the trigger on those technicals that followed you out of Tadmur. A remote operator, throwing down hellfire to cause the only kills on the mission, no risk at all to herself. No way Rihab could let that go.”
“Did you help him?” She steps closer, wanting the truth, even now. “Lincoln thinks you did. He doesn’t believe Rihab could have set up the operation on his own. And he will come after you, if you don’t come home.”
“Fuck Lincoln,” Shaw says, backing away, backing down the hill. His truck, True remembers, is parked around the corner. “I gave him a peace treaty.”
Hope gives a rising inflection to her voice as she asks, “So you didn’t help Rihab?”
This is what she wants to believe. She wants confirmation that he had nothing to do with Renata’s death. The other things he’s done during eight lost years—they’re real. No denying it. She’s heard Miles’s graphic description of his capture and the executions. But she’s also heard Shaw pleading for mercy: Let him live. Take me instead. She is still striving to reconcile both truths.
“Think about it, True,” Shaw says in that low, lethal tone that makes her catch her breath. “I was paid to be protection for Al-Furat, and your operation kicked my ass. You tell Lincoln if he wants to come after me, join the party. Rihab’s already gunning for me, but I’ll—”
Whatever threat or promise he is about to make is interrupted by a sharp crack from overhead, like metal snapping.
Kai Yun
Adrenaline kicks hard. True’s heart rate spikes as she drops into a crouch. She looks up and down the street, and overhead. No threat in sight, but also no shelter. The buildings present vertical faces to the street, no eaves and no inset doorways, and the doors to the riad are closed.
She considers a sprint for the corner when a second, more distant crack echoes across the city. This time she spots the vertical line of a thin, descending smoke trail in the sky above the rooftops. It marks the swift fall of an object too small to identify.
More pops and cracks and smoke trails follow.
“We need to get back in the house,” she warns Shaw as she retreats to the doors, hoping they’ll open again before she draws the eye of whatever is out there.
Motion on the periphery of her vision. She looks up to see an object tumbling out of the sky. It slams against the roof of a parked car, skids off, and lands in the street a few feet from where she’s standing. It looks like a fragment of a fuselage, maybe from one of the municipal UAVs. And yet she has heard no sound of rockets or any explosions.
Shaw waves her into the riad, where the doors are swinging open. “Get under cover!”
“It’s a fucking laser, isn’t it?” she demands as she ducks back into the passage.
Shaw is right behind her. “That’s my guess. Looks like we’ve got a clean sweep of the sky underway.”
The sight of Guiying, already on her feet and at the inner end of the passage, startles True. The robotics engineer uses one hand to brace herself against the wall; she holds the other raised to her bruised throat. Her eyes flare in fear and surprise at their sudden reappearance. She starts to back away but True tells her, “Stay under cover.”
True gets out her MARC, gets it on, listening to the continuing crack, crack, crack of shattering machines, now faint, now sharp and near.
She moves up to join Shaw. They crouch in the passage, well back from the street, out of sight of the laser-wielding UAV no matter where it is in the sky. They leave the doors open, pushed back against the walls so they can watch. Shaw is muttering, engaged with his AR visor. True uses her data glove to access the sparrow’s video feed—and the colonel is suddenly with her again: “What the fuck have you gotten yourself involved with?”