Ultraviolet (13 page)

But he only stared back at her with dead, black eyes, still with that slightly smug smile playing across his mouth. “Can’t be helped.” His small smile stretched to a full-out grin and he glanced around at his men. “But I don’t think you’re going to make it off this roof.”

Violet inhaled deeply, feeling the chilly air up here seep into her lungs. After the stale, overprocessed air inside the building, it was refreshingly cool, revitalizing as it sank into her dry lungs. “Watch me,” she said simply.

The real world wasn’t like in the classic old Chinese martial arts movies that people still enjoyed, where the hero faces a hundred opponents and defeats them one by one. No, the battles fought in real life, the
street
battles, were much more brutal and tiring, devoid of all the showy movements and graceful choreography. There was nothing beautiful about the way they all came at her at once, where it was only a matter of who could reach her first to get in a good shot—competition was the goal here. But, of course, in the end it was useless—they were just humans with nothing but martial arts training. All the years of training and skill in the world just wasn’t going to help them against a fully mature Hemophage with Violet’s deadly expertise.

Kar Wai, however, was something else altogether.

He let his men go down first, one by one, watching and, Violet was sure, learning from their deadly mistakes. Most were simply too slow, and the ones who were fast, just couldn’t cut it in the strength department. Violet could take a blow three times harder than a normal human man could deal before it hurt to any degree, so the little punches and kicks Kar Wai’s men delivered did almost nothing to slow her. When they were all finished, Kar Wai hung back rather than approach her, and Violet wasn’t stupid enough to think it was because he lacked courage. No, he was evaluating her, processing the moves and errors he’d seen from his defeated team and calculating just how he could best use those same things to his own advantage. They had been soldiers.

Kar Wai was a warrior.

He came at her long and low, like a tiger. Indeed, his fighting style resembled that ancient mode: fearless and unpredictable, unbelievably quick.

Kar Wai’s attack on Violet was sudden and brutal. He sprang through the air, and even though he missed—she was way too fast for him—Violet had to admire his attitude of fierceness, the way he seemed to believe that he alone of his men was completely indestructible. Violet couldn’t help but gain a measure of respect for this small, lithe human—his courage was incredible and he seemed not to notice the blows she dealt him. For a little while, it almost seemed as though Kar Wai really
was
indestructible.

But in the end, he was only human.

She held back, the sense of growing esteem for her opponent making her want to see him live, even though she knew she must still defeat him to have any hope of escaping. Time, however, was a precious commodity, and each fifteen-second increment that passed while she toyed with this Chinois martial artist was a deduction on the scale that might slide to freedom for her and the boy. Her patience was slipping as Kar Wai finally slid under her outstretched arm and tried to catch her in a Pencak Silat trap; she turned her body out of range and, with lightning speed, brought her elbow down on the back of his unprotected neck.

Just a little too hard.

Oops.

Even a tiger has to die sometime.

In the end, Violet left them all, Kar Wai included, lying in crumpled little piles on the roof’s dirty black surface.

The final victory over Kar Wai and the exertion left her a little breathless, but when she could stop at last and look around for the boy—

For a moment what she saw took away the rest of Violet’s ability to breathe.

The child had abandoned the area by the stairwell door in favor of the roof proper. She would have felt all right about that—after all, every child likes to explore a rooftop—had he been on the roof’s actual edge—that, at least, was a good eight-inch wide strip of concrete. Instead, the crazy kid was on the quarter-inch-thick wire
above
it, perfectly balanced on the cheap contractor’s answer to a safety railing. Beneath the feet that he was nimbly moving around like a child ballet dancer was a sheer drop to the city sidewalk more than a hundred stories below. The trip down might be like flying, but the landing was going to be one hell of a jolt.

“Holy
fuck,
” Violet whispered to herself. As if just to taunt her, the wind suddenly picked up. Moist air swept over the back of her head and her cheeks; the boy’s hair was cropped too closely to make the breeze visible, but his clothes fluttered briskly. Her heart jumped as she saw the wire sway back and forth; his body moved with it almost instinctively, like a motorcycle rider leaning his machine into a hard curve.

Violet took a cautious step forward. “Hey there,” she said. Was her voice shaking? She was trying to sound soft and calm, no surprises here. What if she scared him enough to make him jerk? She could never reach him in time to stop him from tumbling off that damned guard wire. “Hey—” Before she could think of what to say next, he turned on the wire, moving effortlessly on his toes as if the surface on which he was balanced was flat earth rather than a quarter-inch steel cable. She had to admire that. She also had to resist the urge to scream at him like an angry mother.

“Whatcha doing up there?” she asked, forcing her voice to stay within normal conversation range. She gave him an easy smile, hoping it didn’t look as sick as her stomach felt right now. She’d managed to get directly in front of him, but he didn’t seem concerned . . . about her, about the battle that had taken place only a dozen feet away, about
anything.
The thousand-plus feet between him and the ground and the wind making the wire swing and dance . . . those things might as well not even have existed in his universe. The boy’s face was calm, almost beatific—if Violet could believe the expression on the child’s face, this moment was the penultimate one in his thus-far short life.

The wire swung a little more strongly and Violet swallowed back the protest that wanted to come bursting out of her mouth. “Good view up there, huh?” She smiled up at him as best she could, then cautiously moved to stand directly below where he was balanced. “Help me up. I’d like to see, too.” She looked up at him expectantly, then stretched out her hand toward him, as though there were no reason in the world why she wouldn’t climb out there and join him on that skinny little line fluttering across the abyss of space beneath him.

The boy looked at her hand, then at her, and for a long moment Violet wasn’t sure he actually understood what she’d asked. He had to at least understand
something—
after all, he’d stayed put in the hallway outside Nerva’s meeting room, clutched the cell phone in just the right position as she’d told him. Would he take her up on her request?

He hesitated just a moment more, then offered her his hand.

As quick as a rattlesnake, Violet grabbed his wrist and yanked him off the wire, pulling him toward her and onto the safety of the roof. Now she could let her anger at him show without being afraid the vehemence in her voice would somehow make him fall, the weight of her fury drive him out and into deadly space. Now she could say what she thought of this ridiculous stunt.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded. She fought against the urge to shake him. “Are you
trying
to get fucking killed?”

Before the boy could formulate an answer—
if
he could do so—the doorway to the roof suddenly banged open, belching more of Nerva’s soldiers. The bastards scuttled across the tarred surface like cockroaches coming after a good meal.

“Damn it,”
Violet hissed. Snagging the boy’s arm, she hauled him toward the exit on the opposite side of the roof, moving as fast as she could before they were spotted, although it wasn’t like they wouldn’t find the obvious leavings of her miniwar with Kar Wai.

Later, Violet still wouldn’t be able to retrace the route she took in getting the boy child down to street level. She wasn’t even sure why they’d made it, how they’d negotiated stairwell after stairwell, catching the occasional short elevator ride just to throw off the soldiers pouring down the staircases. Maybe they were successful only because all the Hemophage soldiers chasing them had expected her to go over the edge, bounce from building edge to building edge as she had when she’d first escaped the L.L.D.D. That only showed their ignorance about her equipment and how stupid Nerva was for not sharing the details of their highest technology; none of his poorly briefed soldiers would know that her gyroscope was calibrated only for her weight plus a few pounds for the briefcase—it would not support her weight and the boy’s.

It wasn’t until Violet and the child reached the lobby that it all caught up with her . . . or at least the Laboratories for Latter Day Defense troops. Even if they
had
followed her, Nerva’s troops wouldn’t face off against the ArchMinistry’s, not in broad daylight and in the very building where they had, at least up until now, held countless secret meetings. Violet wasn’t sure how the ArchMinistry’s troops had traced her here, but things weren’t looking on the good side right now.

Before she could lead the boy out of the lobby, more human Command Security Teams than she could count skidded to a stop outside the building. She couldn’t go back, not unless she wanted to face both the Blood Chinois—and boy, they were going to be pissed at her for killing their leader—and Nerva’s ugly-tempered little blood warriors. That left only forward, so Violet yanked out a machine pistol and made chopped glass of the biggest plate-glass window that stood between her and freedom.

The glass shattered and spilled onto the sidewalk, and she and the boy fell with it, easily slipping past a half-dozen Security Commandos who instinctively ducked to avoid the glass rain shower. One of the security vehicles was parked crookedly at the curb and Violet shoved the boy in front of her and they dived into it. As escape cars went, this one wasn’t much—it had no speed and hardly any maneuverability; on the other hand, it was heavily armored and therefore definitely better than physically running the soon-to-come gauntlet of lead and laser. Twisting the wheel and thinking ahead to her escape route, Violet started to ram her foot onto the accelerator—

Then a Deployment Tanker screeched to a halt directly in her path.

Practically screaming in frustration, she twisted around and looked behind her, but that way was blocked, too—at least three more cars had pulled up and parked behind this one in the preparation for the initial onslaught.

They were trapped.

Violet knew there would be no courtesy warning, none of the familiar Hollywood “Drop your weapons and come out with your hands held high!” She pushed the boy down on the front seat and dropped on top of him; an instant later, the windshield of the car was blasted apart by full auto-fire. The bullets chewed up the dashboard and the vinyl upholstery over their heads as Violet tried desperately to figure out how she was going to get out of this one.

“No no no! Stop—STOP!”

She barely heard the shouting above the gunfire, but someone else must have because all of a sudden the gunfire stopped. It was a shocking difference, one that made Violet realize just how much her ears and head were throbbing from all the horrendous noise. And that voice—where had she heard it before? If her ears would just stop ringing and get back to normal, maybe she could identify it. In the meantime, moving as fast as she could while still trying to remain a nonviable target, Violet risked a glance out of the blown-out hole where the windshield had been. Oh, yeah—she should have known. It was Daxus, of course, the darling Vice-Cardinal of the ArchMinistry of Medical Policy. If the Catholic Church had still been in existence, the man would have been the next best thing to the Pope . . . except, at least in her opinion, that would have meant that Satan was running the show.

As Violet peered out at him, Daxus gestured sharply at the dozens of Command Marines standing at the ready, most of whom had their fully automatic weapons pointed at the vehicle in which she and the boy were sequestered. “Seal the building,” he ordered briskly. “Any others inside—I want them hunted down.” As they spun and moved off, Daxus turned back to the nearly destroyed car and approached it cautiously. There was no hiding—Violet knew he’d already seen her. Where was she going to go, anyway? When she bared her teeth and started to bring up her machine pistol, the man pulled off his breathing mask and held up his hands. Both were gestures of goodwill that she didn’t believe.

“Easy now, Violet,” he said in a soothing and clearly practiced voice. “Do you know who I am?”

Violet’s mouth twisted. “How could I not?” she spat. “Tyrant, phobic, egomaniac, narcissist.” Her grip on her weapon tightened reflexively; of its own accord, her finger stroked the trigger. “Horse veterinarian stumbles into a power vacuum in a revolution he didn’t create.” Violet’s lips pulled into an even uglier sneer. “That about sums it up, doesn’t it?”

Daxus pressed his lips together in irritation, then his features smoothed out. She could imagine him thinking that it wouldn’t do to have his men see that this female Hemophage could get to him simply with verbal insults. Sticks and stones and all that. “Yes, Violet, it’s true,” he said calmly. “I may have ‘humble’ origins and my justified sense of pride may sometimes be . . .” He paused and smiled slightly, struggling to think of the appropriate word. “
Misunderstood.
And I may even have quirks.” He shook his head, and again Violet had the impression it was a clearly rehearsed move. He’d clearly passed
How to Deal with Underlings 101.
“But that doesn’t mean I’m stupid,” he continued in an oily voice. “And it certainly doesn’t mean you can make a single move without me knowing about it first.”

Violet almost snorted. “Bullshit. You would have killed me long ago.”

Now it was Daxus’s turn to give her a calculating stare. “Are you quite sure about that, Violet?” he asked.