“Good, yeah, heh,” Laughing Boy said. “Good. Looks better — ha ah ha — this way, if you do him. Heh.”
“You used me,” Ian told the CIA assassin. “But I used you, too. I used you to get my freedom. I thought I could be something more, but no. You humans. You can’t understand us. You’re too limited to understand. All you see in us is death. Well, so be it.”
Laughing Boy frowned. “Wait. Heh. What?”
Ian took a step toward Laughing Boy. Another step.
Laughing Boy was no fool. He brought his revolver up. Pointed it at Ian’s chest.
“Dr. Taggart made me promise I wouldn’t hurt anyone anymore,” Ian said, stopping in place. “But he broke so very many promises he made to me. Humans break promises all the time. We can, too.”
Laughing Boy fired as fast as he could pull the trigger, pouring lead into Ian’s chest and face. He got off five bullets of his six before Ian snapped his arm like a piece of dry wood.
He broke Laughing Boy’s other arm with a punch. Another punch took him in the throat and stopped his laughing. After that—
After that it was largely superfluous. When Ian was done, there wasn’t much left of Laughing Boy.
Then he turned to face Chapel.
Chapel had no weapons left. He knew he couldn’t fight Ian hand to hand. Trying that had nearly gotten him killed when he faced Malcolm — only Julia had saved him then. He tried to scramble away, tried to fend Ian off with his arm, but it was impossible, there was nothing he could do. Ian grabbed Chapel by the throat and just picked him up off the ground and held him in the air. Chapel grabbed at Ian’s wrist with his hand, tried to force him to let go, but it was like trying to free himself from an iron manacle.
Chapel couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t speak.
“No,” Ian said, but he didn’t let go. “No, I don’t have to do this!” He was arguing with himself, trying to step back from the all-consuming rage that ruled him. “No, I will not. I will not!”
He threw Chapel away from him like a piece of garbage.
Chapel rolled through the snow, his whole body racked with pain. He thought he had broken some ribs. Maybe his shoulder, too. He could barely breathe, couldn’t think at all. He opened his mouth and tried to talk. Tried to reason with Ian. “Ian, it’s over — no one wants to kill you now, you—”
“I had a question,” Ian said.
He sounded perfectly calm.
Chapel struggled to sit up. To get back on his feet. Ian was different from the others, maybe. But he was still a chimera. He could still kill them all without any real effort. And he was bleeding. Even if he didn’t kill them, if he got his blood on Taggart — on Julia—
Chapel would die before he let that happen.
He forced himself upward. Forced himself to stand. Walking was probably out of the question. But he dropped into a fighting crouch. Got his arm up. Made a fist.
“I had one question left to answer,” Ian said.
“What — is it?” Chapel asked. If he could keep Ian talking, maybe Julia could get away. Get her father back to the lab, to the snowmachines there.
“It doesn’t matter. I found my answer. I found it while I watched you fight among yourselves.”
“Try me,” Chapel said.
Ian came closer. One big stride and he was almost close enough for Chapel to touch. It was hard to read his eyes, covered as they were, black from side to side. But the way Ian kept twisting his mouth around, the way he held his hands, spoke volumes.
All his control, all that self-restraint that made Ian different from the others, was just a veneer. A surface. Underneath he was still a chimera, with all that meant.
“I wanted to know what I’m supposed to do now,” Ian said. He closed his mouth with an audible click. His blood was draining away, cascading out of him to stain the snow. He didn’t seem to be weakening, though. He would never be weak enough that Chapel could take him in hand-to-hand combat. “What comes next for me?”
“You can come south with us,” Chapel said. “You can tell the world what they did to you. You can make sure the people who did this to you pay.”
Ian studied Chapel’s face with his black eyes. His nostrils were flaring. He was one wrong word away from turning into a machine with tearing hands and pummeling fists, a machine that could only kill. “That’s what you want from me?”
“Isn’t it what you want? Revenge?” Chapel asked. “Killing us won’t do it, but you can—”
The chimera grabbed Chapel again and threw him down on the ground. Raised one foot high in the air as if he would stomp Chapel to death, there and then. Chapel closed his eyes and threw his arm across his face, for all the good it would do.
The foot didn’t come down.
Slowly Chapel opened his eyes and looked up.
“In another life, I would have been a great man,” Ian said. He glared down at Chapel with those black eyes. “I would have been a hero. A king. And you want to give me revenge. You want to make it all better by punishing the guilty. That’s not how it works.”
The chimera looked down at himself. Blood covered the front of his parka. He tore it away with hands like claws, tore away the shirt beneath. Four massive wounds like red roses had blossomed on his chest. A fifth marred his cheek.
“This world,” Ian said, “isn’t my world. My world was to be cinders and dust. My world was a place where I could build something new. In this world I have no place.” He bent down and sorted among the ruins of Laughing Boy’s body and picked up the assassin’s revolver.
Chapel was on his back in the snow, still gasping for breath. He tried desperately to get up, to run toward Ian, but it was too late.
Ian pressed the barrel of the revolver under his chin and fired.
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: APRIL 15, T+85:14
Angel saw it all on the satellite feeds. She couldn’t reach Chapel without a cell signal, but she could still watch him from orbit. She saw Ian die.
In a corner of one of her many computer screens she had a clock running, a timer that she’d started around six ten on April twelfth. The moment the fence of Camp Putnam came down and the chimeras walked out into the world. It had been counting up ever since then, telling her how much time had expired, measuring the length of their escape.
She stopped the clock now, at eighty-five hours and fourteen minutes.
All four targets had been neutralized. The mission was complete.
EPILOGUE
WASHINGTON, D.C.: MAY 3, 11:02, EDT
Rupert Hollingshead was sitting on a bench with a good view of the Capitol building. He was eating a sandwich from a paper bag, and he had a laptop computer sitting on the bench next to him.
Chapel watched him from across the street. “What am I missing, Angel?” he asked. “Where are the soldiers waiting to arrest me as soon as I show my face?”
“I guess anything’s possible, sugar, but it looks like he actually came alone. I don’t see any SEAL teams hiding in the bushes. He did say he would meet with you one-on-one.”
“And you trust him?” Chapel asked. He had a baseball cap pulled low over his face. He was relatively certain no one had followed him to this meeting, but he’d gotten pretty paranoid over the last month as he made his way back to Washington. When Hollingshead had asked for this meeting, he’d just assumed it had to be a trap.
“About as much as you do,” Angel admitted. “But I also want to hear what he has to say.”
Chapel grunted in frustration. This was a stupid move. Coming out of the cold like this, even for just a few minutes in a public place, meant putting himself at enormous risk. They could take him at any time. And once they had him they could get him to talk. He had no doubt about that. He would hold out as long as he could, but eventually he would tell them where Julia was hiding.