Persepolis Rising

Chapter Forty-Eight: Clarissa

There were only two ways that she felt anymore. Either she had the shakes or she was exhausted. The shakes part had been nasty when it started because it felt like being scared—jittery and heart racing. And because it felt like fear, she kept thinking she was afraid, and then becoming afraid without any focus or reason. Once she understood it was just her shitty aftermarket endocrine system leaking into her bloodstream, it helped. At least she understood that it wasn’t just her going crazy with amorphous anxiety. She still shook, though.

In the worst of it, she’d go back to her old mantra, the one from prison. I have killed, but I am not a killer. Because a killer is a monster, and monsters aren’t afraid. She felt like she was afraid all the time now, and in that frame, it was almost comforting.

The superstitious part of her kept thinking that she’d invited this shape to come into her life with the sympathetic magic of her words. The rational part thought she’d invited it by paying a shitload of money to have illegal body modifications as part of an insane adolescent revenge fantasy. That and the part where she’d killed a bunch of people.

“You okay?” Naomi asked.

Clarissa lifted her hand in the same Schrödinger’s answer she always had, no matter how she expressed it. Always yes, and always no. Yes, I’m fine in that I am not presently in medical collapse. No, having that be what fine meant didn’t ratify her early life choices.

“You?”

“Fine,” Naomi said in a tone of voice that probably meant the same thing. Ever since Holden had been taken, a light had gone out of Naomi’s eyes. After discovering the Lightbreaker was gone and Holden with it, Naomi wasn’t catatonic from grief, and so sure. Fine.

They were waiting on a bench at the edge of a field on the inner face of the drum. Wheat stretched out to their right, curving up and away from them, ripening in the light of the false sun. A woman in a systems control uniform walked along the path holding a little boy’s hand. He stared at Clarissa as they passed. She could practically hear, What’s wrong with that woman, Mommy? he was thinking it so loud.

It felt a little weird being out among the normal inhabitants of Medina. All of the people going about their lives like they were trying to forget that the Transport Union had ever existed. Picking their kids up from school, eating dinner with their friends, working their jobs and performing their duties as if they’d always done this at the wrong end of a gun. As if Laconian rules were normal. As if there weren’t already things in play that were going to change everything before night.

“I’m sorry about Holden,” Clarissa said. She hadn’t meant to, but she did.

Naomi took a quick breath, let it out. Like someone ripping off a bandage that had adhered a little too much to her skin. A quick pain, and then over with. “Thank you. It’s not … what I was expecting.”

“Yeah,” Clarissa said. “It seems like there’s always the way we wanted things to go, and there’s what actually happens.”

A warning tone sounded through the drum, echoing with the distance and the free air. An artificial voice reassured them with its tone while it repeated, This is an emergency alert. Report to shelters immediately and await official instructions.

“Listen,” Naomi said. “They’re playing our song.”

“Oh my,” Clarissa said, laughing. “We have lived our lives wrong, haven’t we?”

Naomi took her arm, half as a joke and half to give her support if she needed it, and they started toward the rendezvous. Clarissa’s body twitched and shuddered as she walked. Once they went below, into the corridors and halls of the drum, the traffic thickened. The alert sounded from every corner. Businesses closed their doors. Kiosks shut down. Everywhere, people moved quickly, some shouting and angry, but most with a kind of deathly focus. They’d had too many explosions and too much violence for any joking around. The illusion that life was normal for any of them vanished.

She and Naomi waited for a gap in the flow of bodies, then ducked into a public restroom. Clarissa sat on the couch built into the wall. She felt a little nausea haunting the back of her throat, but it wasn’t bad. Naomi went to the sink and washed her hands slowly, not to make them clean but to make it look like they weren’t just loitering in the place should anyone from station security come in.

The plan—their part of it anyway—was simple enough. Or at least it was from Clarissa’s perspective. She’d tried to walk Alex through it once, and she was pretty sure he’d only followed about half. The sensor arrays on the Medina were all linked to the main system, but they all had their own backup batteries. Shutting down the power would keep Medina from seeing where the ships went in real time, but it wouldn’t clear the local caches in all the sensor arrays. As soon as the power grid came back, the arrays would check in, reconnect, and deliver everything they’d saved.

And that process right there had a vulnerability in it. When the arrays checked in to reconnect, the system could request a diagnostic run. The arrays would take about twenty seconds to cycle through their diagnostics and return the results with a fresh check-in. During those twenty seconds, no new data came in. And if the array check-in requests got routed to a false system that only replied with diagnostic requests, they could keep doing that until some poor bastard figured out where the false route was coming from or else physically went out to the arrays and ran a new dedicated line.

When she’d gotten to about this point in the description, Alex’s eyes had lost their focus, and she’d simplified. Make a fake traffic card. Put the fake traffic card in at the secondary power junction. Blow the primary power junction to reset all the arrays. Arrays don’t come back on without a lot of tedious work. She’d gotten a thumbs-up from him then. It had been cute.

It was always strange to remember that she knew things that other people didn’t. Not just about power- and signal-routing protocols. What it was like to murder someone who’d only ever been kind to you. How it felt when the people you’d dedicated your life to killing took you in as family. Even though she knew better, she always defaulted to the idea that her life wasn’t singular. That whatever she’d done must not have been that odd, because after all, she’d done it.

The door opened and the bomb guy came in carrying a ceramic toolbox. Jordao. He nodded to Clarissa and then to Naomi. Between the hunch in his back and his ashy skin, he looked like a sample picture of “furtive possible terrorist.” If we’re going to pull this off, that guy’s going to have to calm the fuck down.

“Hey,” Clarissa said.

“Hoy,” he responded. “Bist bien?”

“No problems so far,” Naomi said. “But we’ve been out of touch. You heard anything?”

“Unauthorized launch,” Jordao said as he set the toolbox beside the sink and opened it. “Nos ew bû?”

“Yes, that’s one of ours.”

“Perdíd,” he said, forcing a grin. “How many plays playing in one day?”

“One less if we don’t move,” Naomi said.

Jordao opened the case and tossed earpieces to her and Naomi before fitting his own. “Katria, she didn’t parle ero que la, right? They’re going to be down on us hard after this. Alles la preva? Look like we were in a kids’ school.”

“If this works the way it’s supposed to, that won’t be a problem,” Clarissa said, shifting the earpiece so it was a little more comfortable. “Just stick with us, and you’ll be fine.”

Naomi dried her hands, pulled her hand terminal out of her pocket, checked it, put it back. “We should go,” she said.

Jordao closed the toolbox, hoisted it onto his hip, and followed Naomi out. Clarissa brought up the rear. The shakes were a little better. A little less. That was sort of a good thing, because she hated the shakes. It was sort of bad, because the exhaustion came next, and she needed to get through the mission. At least enough not to slow Naomi down.

Outside, the halls were emptier. This is an emergency alert. Report to shelters immediately and await official instructions. Naomi turned toward the ramp leading down toward the outside of the station. Clarissa put her hands in her pockets and tried to look bored. Her mind divided itself gracefully between rehearsing the steps that she’d need to take to swap traffic cards and watching for security patrols. When Saba broke the silence, it startled her.

“Evacuation teams are at the docks. Waiting for clear sign, yeah?”

Naomi put a hand to her ear. Hearing her through the earpiece and in person at the same time gave her words a little echo. Like they had more weight than they should have.

“Message received,” she said. “We’re going in.”

It would only take a couple of minutes to swap the card and set the charges. After that, they’d get to the docks if Saba’s people could hold them that long, or if Laconian security retook them, an airlock. Naomi paused at an access panel, checked her hand terminal, and nodded. This was the one. Jordao was sweating and pale. He looked worse than she did.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “We have a surprising amount of experience with weird situations.”

Naomi leaned against the access panel. A security drone passed through the intersection behind them, but didn’t turn their way. Clarissa felt a little surge of adrenaline, but it only served to highlight the growing torpor in her muscles. Do this, she thought. Get this done. You can rest when you’re dead.

The access panel clicked and slid down.

“What are we doing here?” Jordao said. “Got to go, us.”

“We’re doing the thing that makes the next part matter,” Naomi said, then stepped aside. The guts of the ship would have looked chaotic to anyone who didn’t know the things she did. For her, there was a simple logic in every weld, every conduit, every connector. She took the doctored traffic card out of her pocket, plucked the old one out, and slotted hers in. The fault indicator barely blinked to amber, and then went back to a flickering, happy green.

“Okay,” she said, sliding the panel back into place. “Let’s go set the charges.”

But when she started walking, she knew it was going to be harder than she thought. If they moved fast enough, they’d be done before she ran out of energy. That was why Naomi was here, after all. Because none of them thought she could do it by herself. Because they weren’t necessarily wrong.

The worst part was that she’d done it to herself. The damage to her body, the wear and the weariness, were all products of conscious, determined choices made by a girl she hadn’t been in decades. She carried the weight of those decisions like a sack of bones. Like a toolbox full of them.

Some sins carried their own punishment. Sometimes redemption meant carrying the past with you forever. She’d gotten used to that over the years, but it was still pretty fucking inconvenient.

“Down here,” Jordao said, waving them on.

“I know,” Naomi said.

The door to the primary power junction was reinforced. A red border was painted around the frame, with warnings in half a dozen languages that all meant Please be careful. There’s a lot of things in here that we’ll have to fix after they finish killing you.

Jordao opened the door, and Naomi stepped past him into the maintenance way beyond—

And then stepped backward, her arms rising. Running footsteps came from behind her, sudden and loud. A young man in the blue uniform of Laconian security stepped out from the red door, a pistol leveled at Naomi’s stomach. Rough hands grabbed Clarissa by the shoulder and threw her to the floor. Jordao leaned against the wall and sank down to sitting.

“There a problem, sir?” Naomi asked, her voice the perfect echo of innocence.

“Knees,” the pistol man said. “And keep your arms up while you do it.”

Naomi looked down at her. Clarissa saw no sorrow in her eyes, only calculation. And then a conclusion. Naomi sank to her knees. Jordao’s head was leaned back, looking at the ceiling and taking deep gulping breaths. He still had the toolbox under his arm, and she thought he might be about to set off the charges and turn them all to paste, until he started laughing. It wasn’t mirth or gloating, but it was relief. Even before he spoke, Clarissa understood they’d been sold out. She laid her head against the rubber matting on the deck as someone put a knee in the small of her back and started pulling her arms behind her. The exhaustion was coming on stronger now. The deck felt almost comfortable.

“There’s a thing,” Jordao said. “A thing they put behind an access panel. No savvy mé que, but I can show you where, yeah?”

“What was it?” the pistol asked Naomi.

Naomi shook her head ruefully. “Afraid you’re going to have to go fuck yourself, coyo.”

He hit her, stepped forward. Clarissa felt the zip tie going around her right wrist while the guy fumbled with her left. She rolled her head. Five of them, all told. All with guns drawn. The pistol came down, ready to end Naomi where she lay.

“You’re sure you can find whatever it is?” the man said.

“’Course I am,” Jordao said. “Where are your Marines? You said there’d be Marines.”

“Change of plan. They’re statues until we can get the lockdown codes undone.” He looked down at Naomi. “Was that yours too, bitch?”

Naomi locked eyes with Clarissa. The calculation was gone. They were out of options. Which meant, really, that Naomi was out.

Clarissa always had one left.

It was a weird moment. Through the bone-weary tiredness, through the fear and the panic and the anger, something else opened up. Something like rage and joy, and more than all that, a profound relief. Naomi saw it in her expression, and her eyes widened. Clarissa pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, swirled it the way she hadn’t in years. The fake glands in her body triggered, pouring their shit into her blood. It hurt. It didn’t use to hurt, but this time, every one of them ached. Even the pain felt good.

Time slowed down around her. She bucked and the man on her back fell forward. He still had a hand on her right wrist, and he kept his grip as he fell. She felt her shoulder dislocate and heard the deep pop, but there wasn’t any pain. Her legs were under her and she pushed off before he hit the floor. Her right arm was shredded and useless. Her muscles were thin and fragile. Just jumping, she felt the tendons in her knees and hips strain and rip, but she was already rolling, ready to hit the wall and launch again.

Pistol man didn’t shift his aim from Naomi, but the other three were drawing down on her, moving slowly as someone underwater. One pistol barked, but the shot only tore into the anti-spalling fabric on the wall.

Clarissa spun through the air, her ruined arm trailing behind her. She led with her knee, and it felt like dancing. Like flying. Her aim was still good. She brought her bent knee into pistol man’s nose, felt the cartilage give in her joint and his face, the two of them crumbling together.

She’d been sick for so long, she’d let it make her fragile. So much of her life had become nurturing what fading health she had. Rationing it like one canteen that had to get her across a desert. Now she gulped it, and it felt wonderful.

The two who hadn’t fired did now at almost the same instant. One missed, but one bullet dug into the thin meat over her ribs. It hurt, but the pain was distant. She barreled into the closest of them. As they fell, she wrapped her good arm around his head, cradling it carefully so that when they landed, she could snap his neck. She hit the deck hard, pulled, and felt his spine give way.

I have killed. But I am not a killer.

She caught up the gun from his hand as the others turned. Clarissa felt the battle cry in her throat, felt the force of air and sound rattling her trachea. Felt the gun she’d stolen kick. The woman nearest her fired wild, and Clarissa placed a bullet in the woman’s cheek, snapping her head back. That was two. The one who’d been on Clarissa’s back jumped toward her. She put a bullet through his teeth. Three.

Naomi was scrambling for pistol man’s fallen weapon. He was still down, holding his shattered nose like that was his biggest problem. Clarissa shot him twice in the center of mass.

There was only one guard left, and he was close to Clarissa. She could see down the barrel of his gun. She saw the fear in his eyes. He fired. He couldn’t miss. Her leg gave way under her, but she fired a shot on the way down. It took the last guard in the throat. She landed hard, but her blood was still made from light and rapture. She rolled, knelt. Her abdomen ached and it was hard to pull in a full breath. Jordao looked at her like he was seeing the devil.

No! I’m sorry! he shouted in some universe close to hers.

Fuck your sorry. Sorry doesn’t fix shit. She didn’t know if she’d yelled or if it was just in her head. Either way, she shot him—once in the belly and when he doubled over, the crown of his head right where a little bald spot was just starting. Then the rush was over.

It wasn’t as bad as she’d remembered. There was the retching and the feeling of illness. The helplessness. The pain. But at some point all of that had become familiar, so the experience of it wasn’t as bad. Or else she was slipping into shock.

Shock, or something like it.

Naomi cradled her head and she noticed she was lying down. Her mouth tasted like bile. The guards and the traitor were spread throughout the hallway. The air stank of blood and gunpowder. It looked like a scene from hell. All of the years she’d spent living with her regret, doing quiet penance for the lives she’d ended, and now the only thing she could think was That was fun.

Words were happening somewhere nearby. Stay with me, Claire. She remembered Naomi was there and opened her eyes again. She didn’t remember closing them. Naomi was spattered with blood, her face pale. Ren stood behind her. He was wearing some kind of black robe that made her think of Jesuits.

“I’m a monster,” Clarissa said.

No you aren’t, baby. You’re not a monster. You’re not. Which meant Naomi had misunderstood. Clarissa had meant, I’m not afraid. She tried to think what to say that would clarify that, but it was a lot of effort. And what did it matter really if anyone else understood? She knew.

Fuck it, she thought. Some things you take to your grave.

Clarissa Melpomene Mao closed her eyes.