Being in hiding meant that the two zoans never left the apartment. They spent most of every day in Samuel’s bedroom, while the revolutionary kept in contact with his forces through a wristband computer. It was the longest Geir had ever spent indoors in his life.
The bedroom was, at least, much larger than Geir would have expected, probably the same square footage as the rest of the apartment. It was old and none too well kept up, but clean, and climate-controlled. Samuel’s bed faced the door. The maned wolf kept a pistol on the nightstand, and called to have a second brought for Geir. They shared the one bed, just like when they would sneak into each other’s rooms at Brightlove.
The bird was pleased to find that one of the side rooms had been converted into a small gym. Treadmill, weights, punching bag. For the restless idle fugitive. Only the treadmill showed signs of much use by Samuel, but Geir had the punching bag broken in quickly. By the end of the second day they already had to call for a roll of duct tape to cover up where the hard-edged scales of his knuckles were starting to puncture its leather.
Geir told Samuel about his return to Terrace and his time under Grouch, piecemeal. He knew there was no need to hide his most unsavory muscle work from his friend, but he did anyway. But he didn’t hide what an injustice he’d done to Left and Right, Darius and Manny.
“And what do you think happened to Grouch?” Samuel asked.
They sat in the bed together, distracted from sleep by conversation. Side by side and nude, Geir felt small next to the other, even though he weighed half again as much.
“It depends who Palmer is,” he shrugged. “The one who had him under his thumb.”
“Oh. Palmer is the nom de guerre for the daughter of Gentry Aerospace’s CEO. She plays with organized crime like it’s a toy. I borrowed a lot from her.”
“Oh. Then what would she do?”
“She’s in it for fun. She’ll make him squirm.”
“I’m alright with him squirming.”
“She’ll probably hire his people out from under him.”
“That could be good for Darius and Manny.”
“Maybe. I’ll have someone check on them. I guess I could poach them from her if it’s not.”
Geir nodded and clicked his beak thoughtfully.
“You said Sike was zealous,” the bird said, thinking about the money again. “A true believer and all that. That isn’t what I heard about her.”
“Yeah,” Samuel nodded ruefully. He ran the backs of his fingers down the black stripe that gave him his name. “I don’t know what she was doing. We had a plan for how she’d get her faction off the ground, she’s not following it.”
“Do you think she wasn’t genuine?”
“No, she was. She had a fire in her. I’d say she’s just young—but, you know.”
“She never expected to have that much money at her disposal,” Geir suggested. “She’s lost her perspective.”
“Or she’s trying too hard to hold on to it. Overcorrecting, focusing on building a power base before she attempts any real revolutionary praxis, trying not to let herself think she’s ready before she is. But she’s digging herself into a hole, she’ll be stuck in a profit-driven criminal niche if she keeps going.”
“Maybe it was good for her to lose the money.”
Samuel smiled and looked away.
“Okay,” Geir relented. “We can get it back to her. Some of it. After we help Darius and Manny. And maybe Cranberry.”
“You’re saying ‘we’ a lot.”
“Maybe I’m even more ready than I thought.”
The maned wolf let his hand rest amidst the feathers of Geir’s chest.
“We were young,” he said.
Geir didn’t need clarification.
“Yeah.”
“How could we have kept Brightlove going? It was going to fall apart. You saw it. You warned me.”
“My ideas for it were pretty terrible.”
“You were a kid. And I was a kid. And everyone we were trying to help was a kid. There weren’t going to be any good ideas.”
“You had good ideas.”
Samuel shrugged that off.
“The older I get,” he said. “The more I think zoans weren’t born five years old, we were born zero; we were twelve years old at the end.”
“We weren’t babies. We came out of the factories as five-year-olds.”
“We were imprinted with a five-year-old’s motor and sensory skills, and language skills, and some basic epigenetic concepts. There’s a lot of learning we missed, not being alive before that. The second generation is so different from us already.”
“Have you met a zoan kid?”
“A couple.”
“I haven’t. They happened while I was on the rail.”
They were quiet for a while. Even with days together, Geir’s body still tried to reject touch, however much he invited and craved it.
“I think,” he changed the subject. “We keep the Zoan Front going.”
“Oh?”
“I think we can take a step back. Sow some doubt about the Mover station, until you can get out in public again. You can leave revolutionary praxis to Sike—make sure she does it—and start over, like we’re doing the Brightlove House again. You up front, figuring out what zoans need and talking to the humans who have it, me behind you making sure they keep their word.”
“They’re not going to let the bombing slide. It was terrible, and I’ve put my name all over it. And whoever actually did it has a lot of resources to bring to bear if I renege on the deal.”
“Well, I haven’t worked out every kink.”
Samuel laughed, with a tone that indicated he didn’t think Geir’s idea would work. Like he thought it was cute. Geir was always given to trust Samuel’s judgment, but he would take cute if that was all he could get.
The wristband on Samuel’s nightstand buzzed with a message for him. He ruffled the vulture’s feathers one more time and rolled over to check it.
He just managed a wordless gasp, before the bedroom door crashed open. He fumbled for his gun, while Geir was in a daze.
Two figures poured in from the dark doorway, in a quick and efficient military formation. They were zoans, avian, accipiters of a model Geir didn’t know by name. Dark masks over their beaks, fingers on the triggers of suppressed automatics, stalking on taloned-and-scaled humanoid feet like Geir’s. They split up and moved forward, coordinating silently.
Geir was frozen. He was in his room in the Brightlove House, in the arms of his love. He was so far from here, this dark and secret apartment that was being invaded.
The burst from Samuel’s unsuppressed pistol sent a shockwave through Geir’s ears and feathers. His shot went wide; he’d had barely a second to aim. The powdery explosion of plaster, drywall, and wood far behind the hawks was a slowly expanding halo Geir’s eyes would not pull away from for an eternal fraction of a second.
Both hawks pulled their triggers. Part of Geir braced for the shot—but both guns were aimed at Samuel. The revolutionary’s body leapt and danced, chunks of flesh exploding around his ribs and abdomen in a mist of blood and pulverized bone. Three shots from each assassin: and a fourth each in the head after they came another step closer. Samuel was a shredded ruin before Geir regained the cognizance even to roll off his side of the bed, gun in hand.
Half of Geir was crying out in shock and despair. The other half was automatic. He had little experience with firearms, but he could aim it in the direction of the hawks and open fire. Like Samuel he didn’t come close to hitting, but he made the hawks back up enough that he had room to dart past them. A shot grazed his thigh as he passed the door, but it didn’t slow him down.
Something struck Geir hard in the face, when he dashed out the door. It knocked him back, but didn’t put him down. With the pounding in his head from the first gunshot, this wasn’t much worse. But it took him a moment to recognize that the assailant he ducked to tackle was another hawk, the butt of his rifle now wet with blood. Geir drove this one into the opposite wall with his shoulder, drove fists into his armored abdomen and bit his gun hand hard. The hawk wore protective gloves, but they didn’t stop Geir’s beak from crushing bone, enough that the hawk couldn’t hold on to his rifle.
The two who had killed Samuel had been slim, but this one was tall and broad. An inch or two taller than Geir, even. For a brief moment, that only meant that he was a better target. The vulture drove his fist, with a force he hadn’t even shown Manny, into the assassin’s face, below the eye and behind the cere. Withdrew it, and struck again. In his rage, he wanted to keep going, to reduce the skull to splinters, eradicate the killer, even if this hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger. But there wasn’t time. The others would be on him soon. Geir gave the hawk one last crushing blow with his own forehead, and ran.
The bodies of other zoans littered the halls. All of Samuel’s guards, and at least a few bystanders who may have posed a threat to the assassins. Geir stumbled over them on his way.
One door was open a crack. Geir crashed through it, knocking the elderly human away from where she had been peering out at the noise. He ignored someone’s calls for help, and a baby’s crying, and made for the window opposite the door.
There was no fire escape on this window, but the building across the alley from it had one. Geir collected himself on the windowsill, didn’t look back, and leapt. He caught the metal rail on his chest, after a drop of ten feet. It knocked the breath out of him, and the fiery pain across his body told him it had cracked a rib at least. He scrabbled but failed to hold his weight against it, dropped, and caught himself by one arm on the floor below. Shoulder, elbow, trapezius and latissimus muscles exploded. But he kept his grip, and heaved himself over to fall on his back onto the wire platform.
He took a moment to catch his breath, and then another, and then another. Part of him screamed out, insisting that every second wasted was death. The rest of him knew, laying naked and bleeding on the cold, sharp metal, that the hawks weren’t coming. They’d been there for Samuel; they probably hadn’t even bothered chasing him.
Something about that made it worse.