At first Dastou imagined Vaiss and Milser would come back with torture implements of some kind, hoping to make him comply with their request for the Academy’s gathered information. Well, Vaiss’ request. Milser appeared to be the worst kind of pawn, the kind that knows they’re being used and wants what they’re promised badly enough not to care. However, they’d been gone for something like ten minutes, and Brute had an air of duty about him, not expectation.
Of course, Dastou was not just waiting to be poked, prodded, or awkwardly touched on his face. Since the very minute he was left alone he’d been working on loosening the sewed-in edges of the sheath at the small of his jacket’s back which held a combat knife, his fingernails doing some good work. A simple rule the Saint inked into DSF prisoner handling guidelines – they had yet to have one, but it was better to have procedures in place – was to never tie a captive’s hands behind their back since you can’t see what they’re doing. Luckily whoever tied the thin rope that was digging into his wrists didn’t figure that out. Also thanks to his bonds, any non-slight movement could be masked as an attempt to be more comfortable, so he worked without worry. Dastou was close to getting the knife loose, a few more strands to go, and started talking up the guard.
“Hey, nice weather, isn’t it? Or lack of, anyway. I bet it’s always a nice fair temperature down here. Cave-like, I’d say.”
Brute grunted, his back to the jamb and eyes at the half-open wooden door like it might steal his wallet. Okay, the guy wouldn’t respond to only humor. How about poking at some zealotry?
“Vaiss,” Dastou added, “has you idiots wrapped around his finger, to the point you’ll get yourselves killed for him. Who is he to you?”
“Quiet,” commanded Brute in a low, angry rumble.
Got it, Dastou thought. “And Milser, who acts about half-a-meter taller than he is, doesn’t seem to care if you people live or die, either. That’s not exactly good leadership. How can you follow people who don’t care if you die? They clearly know what I’m capable of, what my people can do to those foolhardy enough to oppose us, yet they sent your friends on some ambush against me as if they’d live. I snapped necks like twigs and they barely realized I was ever there.” Dastou had never used the word “foolhardy” once in his life, but the whole thing irked the big guy talking.
“I said be quiet, Saint. Our leaders will free us from your corruption. Your words mean nothing.”
That was a bizarre statement. He sounded rehearsed, like the Blackbrick Council’s Jandal Tryst. Was that related to how Vaiss convinced them to become fodder in the task of capturing him?
“What corruption?” Dastou asked. “You were here when we talked, and you heard me say I want to break the Cypher and Vaiss wants to keep it going. Do you ridiculous brightseers actually think I’m in the wrong?”
Dastou never liked the phrase brightseers, a general term used to describe people who didn’t have gray eyes. It started out as an insult, an ironic twist to mock those that could see stars, unlike Saints, as if they were lesser, and had over time become dulled. It was off-putting to say it out loud with its intended connotation. After the insult, there was a pause, then Brute responded.
“The system is our way of life,” the big guy said, “and you are... the last.” Brute scrunched his face at that odd statement, as if he mixed something up.
Dastou was also confused, wondering what Brute had been trying to say. There was obviously something else in there, in the rehearsed reply, and Brute seemed to forget it halfway into speaking. It took a moment, then he looked in Dastou’s direction, brow creased in concentration, his voice a quiet, assured rumble.
“We see the light because we are the light,” he continued with more confidence, the words clearer. “You wrap yourself in darkness, in the void, and claim to be of substance. You are nothing, and Citizen Vaiss will make sure you don’t taint the world and its workings any longer.”
Again, it all sounded studied, as if this person was given those answers for later use, or was quoting something he heard as perfectly as possible. Brute sounded like Citizen Vaiss, the words and arrogance hitting a familiar note. Was it simply repeats of speeches and pep talks the latter man used to convince others to join him? Milser said something about being returned to the Cypher, too. However it was done, Vaiss got a bunch of hungry, unkempt, homeless outliers to attack and kill, risking their lives in the process rather than keep themselves safe and hidden.
Dastou was still working on the sheath as he got lost in thought, almost surprising himself when the job was done. The sheath dropped into one tied-up hand, and the Saint coughed to cover up the minor sound of the leather hitting his palm. Dastou slowly slid the knife out with the other hand and spoke up to mask any further noise.
“I’m not nothing, trust me,” Dastou said about Brute’s statement. “Brightseers are. I am in control, and when I’m done with your leaders I’m going to break the Social Cypher and watch every city burn itself to the ground in the emptiness. Then, I’m going to hypnotize you and all your traitorous friends, make you clean up the piling bodies for the rest of your lives.”
The knife was free, and now Dastou needed to talk over the sharp blade cutting through his bonds. He turned up his rarely used villain-voice and went for it.
“I’ll erase your minds, but let you keep a sliver of who you were, somewhere down deep, let you remember how you couldn’t stop me. It will torture you and you won’t be able to understand why. I might visit the mass graves where you’ll be tossing corpses, bring those families and friends you all had, make you throw their bodies in personally. Did you have kids before, a wife, a husband? Make sure you tell me their names so I can find...”
The guard had been staring at him during these last few sentences, struggled to keep his composure, but lost it at the very end and rushed the seemingly helpless prisoner, preparing to rearrange Dastou’s facial bone structure with the butt of his rifle. When Brute was a step closer to him, the Saint ripped free of the cut-through ropes, and let the awkwardly held knife fall to the floor with the distinct ping of metal on stone. With Brute close and coming for him, time was the definition of precious, and he pushed his seat away when he stood and got to work.
Dastou first jabbed the enemy’s throat, giving the protrusion a hard, fast hit. The attack served as a completely surprising, stunning assault, forcing the big guy into doing not much of anything for a second. The Saint then grabbed Brute by his ragged shirt, pulled hard to spin him around in a quarter-circle. Dastou moved directly behind the guard and hopped up to wrap his forearms around the tall man’s neck in the best choke hold he could manage while his feet dangled in the air. Brute clawed impotently at Dastou’s forearms the whole time. After a long, excruciating hold, the guard dropped to his knees but continued to struggle, swiping up and back with exhausted arms. Another few seconds and he was barely moving. Dastou kept the choke hold going until the guy went limp, a long minute.
The Saint laid the body down on the floor gently. The guy was still alive, and killing him now would be pointless. Dastou hadn’t heard anybody pass by in the few minutes he waited for Vaiss and Milser to return, and hoped it meant no one was nearby to hear the chat or the fight. Dastou picked up his knife and slipped it onto his belt to the hilt since the sheath was useless now. He looked down further to just below his waist, staring at the partially tattered hem of his jacket and sighed. The piece that was ripped off in the pseudo-struggle behind the soup restaurant ruined his favorite piece of clothing, though he admittedly had several identical jackets. This one happened to be the most worn in, and he shook his head at the damage.
Speaking, or thinking, of clothing, Dastou realized he should search this guard in case he found anything miraculously useful. While patting down the choked-out, shaggily-clothed Brute he found nothing of interest in pockets, but did see the edges of a small tattoo on his ankle. When the curious Saint lifted the pant leg to get a better look, he suddenly became dizzy, nauseated. He felt himself pop up from h
is bent position as if he just spotted the most poisonous spider known to man. A shockingly intense and surreal hallucination entered his mind, and all he could see now was a series of strange images and sounds mostly involving Citizen Vaiss giving orders in a distorted voice. A flashing of overly bright colors accompanied every syllable, colors that the Saint felt under his skin, chromatic snakes slithering in his veins.
Dastou threw himself backward as he shot up, the hallucinations happening in the minuscule amount of time it took him to get fully upright. He tripped on his own feet and fell against the half-open door. The door swung fast on its hinges and slammed against the outside wall, making a racket. Dastou landed on his rear in the hallway and stayed there, hands holding him upright with his feet toward the room he fell out of, his attention pointedly not on the guard or his tattoo. Within the sound bites that streamed into his head during that hallucination was one of Vaiss saying part of what Brute repeated to Dastou, word for word. The rest of what he said was a jumble, impossible to discern. The Saint must have accidentally thrown himself into Open Iris for a fraction of a second, because during that time he grabbed a few important clues in the hallucination. He saw the assault rifles the camp folk were carrying, the embassy, hand-written plans, a hand-drawn map with two escape routes.
He had never quite experienced something like that hallucination. Could that tattoo be some kind of hyper-advanced Stitch? It was the only explanation Dastou could come up with while his mind raced, but it was almost too much to handle. The best his kind had been able to achieve was simple commands, at most three layers deep. That hallucination was far more complicated, with visualizations, something he could never come close to. It was the most intensely specific, powerful hypnotism Dastou could believe possible, and it was clearly Citizen Vaiss’ doing. Who was that man? The Saint asked himself the question, and found fear was the only thing his brain allowed when thinking of him, possibly a remnant of the tattoo’s effect.
Someone yelled, their voice muffled by distance. “I heard a scream! It came from the pantry we put the Saint in, come on!”
A scream? Did Dastou scream when he was hit by that Stitch and not realize it, and was it actually louder than him hitting the door or the door hitting the wall? His throat did hurt, felt scratchy all of a sudden, meaning that he really did cry out at an intense volume without hearing himself at all, which was a frightening truth. For now, there was no time to think on it. Dastou grumbled and stood up, making sure to keep his eye line away from the exposed tattoo, and turned his gaze to the hallway he was in. More stone brick construction, and plenty of light thanks to diode bulb lanterns on the walls, halfway up a ceiling twice as tall as he was. He had the option of going left or right, both ways leading to sharp corners that he wouldn’t be able to scout around without being seen. Dastou could hear three sets of footsteps getting closer with only one pair of feet coming from the left, and went that way.
He turned the blind corner without hesitation or noise and spotted an open door leading to another room a couple meters ahead and on his left. He entered, saw a simple wooden bed, a small square of a window that featured a view of dark-brown natural stone, and a nightstand. Sleeping quarters, though it was the very definition of sparse. With no light in this room, Dastou would not make a shadow if he simply waited by the door, leaving it ajar to not risk a rusty squeak of hinges. The footsteps jogged closer until the enemy’s own shadow gave away an exact position in the hallway while passing the small room.
When the enemy went half-a-step past the door, Dastou rushed out. The man turned to face where the noise came from, and his eyebrows were halfway up his forehead in surprise when Dastou shoved the guy’s head into the other wall hard enough to knock him out without shattering bone. The enemy’s gun flew out of his hands as his body went limp and Dastou would have needed twice the reach he had to get to it in time. The weapon clattered to the floor and luckily didn’t fire, but it was still too noisy.
“Shit,” Dastou muttered to himself.
He grabbed the stranger by the arms and pulled him into the small room, ignoring the musty odor emitting from all over the unkempt man. Needs-a-Shower’s body was dragged completely into the bedroom and laid peacefully on the cushion-less wooden bed. The Saint wasn’t sure if every one of these people was in some way controlled by that complex tattoo Stitch, but killing any of them without desperate need was immoral and unfair at this point. He went back outside and took the rifle off the floor. He removed the magazine and chambered round, hid both under the sleeping, stinky man. He also he bent the rifle’s trigger away from its spring with the point of his knife, then left the weapon next to the dozing enemy.
“I’d say maybe trade that useless thing to someone in the black market for soap or deodorant,” Dastou advised in a whisper.
The other two sets of footsteps were getting closer, running faster now. The dropped gun might have actually made enough noise to alert the other two. Dastou left the bedroom with its door wide open and ran further up the hall, continuing away from the pantry he’d been bound in. He passed another open door for a bedroom before reaching a second sharp right that he again took blindly. There was a door a few paces away on his right, opposite a hallway path that formed the long end of a T-intersection. The door would lead to whatever large room he had been circling, and the hallway would let him get out of this squared walking lane. Going either way would not be helpful in his escape; his enemies would either trap him in the room or chase him down the hall. Dastou only had one way to assure his safety for now, and a scant few seconds to get it done right.
The door to the central room was closed and featured a lever handle. There was a diode lamp giving the intersection most of its light, and the Saint reached up to find a thumb switch, then turned it off. In the semi-dark, he listened. The footsteps slowed, stopped for barely a second, then started up again, heading in this direction. Dastou shoved the door lever in his other hand down quickly, and threw open the door as loud as he could, grunting for effect, and immediately pulled it closed just as hard. He backed away from the door with a light step and went a few paces into the connected hallway. He turned off a diode lamp directly over his head, which made the area dark enough to hide in properly, and put his back against the wall. He stopped breathing with the combat knife in hand, waiting.
The two remaining hunters, a man and a woman that looked as homeless as the others he’d been dealing with, showed up at the door, and glanced at each other with confidence that they’d trapped their prey. The pair stopped to synchronize their entry, not noticing Dastou three meters behind them. Each of them stuck to one side of the door, the direction they would search when inside, a poor imitation of the DSF and Counterbalance breach procedures, which made Dastou wonder where they learned that at all. It was like watching children play at soldier with only half the references needed for the game to work right: their timing was off, their view lines out of synch, their movements too stiff. The man nodded his readiness and began to enter, rifle barrel not up high enough. The guy hurried into the doorway and, since it was not big enough to let them enter simultaneously, the woman was left a step behind, still standing outside the room for a moment.
The combat knife was not a dagger meant for throwing, not slight in size or balanced properly, but Dastou made it work the way he needed when he threw it smoothly at the woman. The weapon hit her hard halfway up her thigh with a dryer-than-expected thud and the blade sunk in a third of the way. She cried out in shock and pain, began to fall to her knees, and the man turned to see what happened. His eyes popped open wide focus when he saw the Saint running in his direction.
The woman was in the doorway, between Dastou and the man. Only partly halting his momentum, Dastou grabbed the woman’s head, which was at waist level while she was in mid-collapse, and threw it forward. Her forehead slammed the guy in his abdomen, right below his sternum, with a simultaneous squeal from her and air-releasing grunt from him. The force was enough to jar him, send him ree
ling. The Saint struck the back of the woman’s neck in a sensitive area almost hard enough to knock her out, and then pulled her back by her dirty hair. She sprawled backward, clearing the entry and landing in the intersection. The Saint rushed the man as he lifted the rifle again after recovering from his stagger. Dastou slapped the barrel of the weapon to the side, took another step to close on him, and gave the man a vicious elbow to the nose. The bone broke between and a couple centimeters below his eyes, a small splash of blood splurged out. The Saint side-stepped to avoid the spray and in the same movement gave the guy a hard hooked punch that echoed into the room and knocked him out completely. Broken-Nose flopped to the floor like a dead fish, his gun smacking and rattling to the floor next to him.
Dastou turned to face the woman, who was struggling to stay awake and looking at the rifle she dropped when she got pulled back from the doorway. She hadn’t been knocked out yet because the Saint needed her conscious for a small test. He stepped out of the center room and back to the hallway, stopped when he reached the woman’s feet, which were almost to the door. Taking the chance of accidentally screaming like a little girl again, he lifted her pant leg above the ankle by millimeters, enough to see a glimpse of the same Stitch tattoo that ravaged his mind earlier. Not seeing the whole thing like he did with Brute, he thankfully felt only a trivial nausea. The fact that the tattoo was there proved what he assumed earlier, and this group from the subway could all be under Vaiss’ control thanks to his magnificent Stitch work, which was somehow capable of taking hold in naturals. Trenna Geil was examined in the Caravan, and she had no tattoo. If Trenna’s immunity truly meant nothing in the face of such overwhelming suggestion, she didn’t have to be left to die in the bombing. Why she was spared would need to be addressed more thoroughly.
Now for the experiment. Dastou removed a rectangular piece of paper, a normal Stitch, from an inside jacket pocket. It was a sleep command, written in three coded symbols. He stepped past most of the woman’s body, kneeling next to her head. Her eyes were only half-open, but that would be fine. The Saint put his Stitch in front of those droopy eyes, and she managed to look away. He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at the slip of paper in his hand. Somehow, she fought the suggestion, trying to push her face away against Dastou’s firm grip, as if to refute a lesser form of hypnotism than Citizen Vaiss’. In a moment, she finally slept, unable to fight it off any more. Typically, that Stitch was near-instant, with at most a second or two before a deep slumber came to its target or targets.
The purpose of that test was to see if the tattooed Stitch made his own weaker, and it apparently did. That meant his best defense, something that would have gotten him out of a lot of trouble – and one of the reasons he didn’t arm himself heavily – was half-useless against anyone that Vaiss was manipulating. Dastou was lucky it worked at all, or the ignore suggestion he used in the subway hub during the ambush would have been worthless.
The Saint put his Stitch away and lifted the woman’s leg to safely remove his knife from her thigh. He ripped off the sleeve of the shirt she wore and wrapped it around her leg where the knife wound was to keep it from bleeding heavily, the improvised bandage work not too tight. She’d be asleep an hour or so if his hypnotism worked as it usually did, though he was only hoping at this point, and she wasn’t to bleed out from such a clean, narrow wound in that time. He wiped off his knife on the woman’s pant leg, stuck it back in his belt, and started down the hallway.
As he walked, he hoped that he didn’t run into any more people from Trenna’s homeless group. A thirst for vengeance and his ridiculous arrogance had brought him down here only to find that the people that fueled his anger were just sad pawns of a strange, manipulative man. Dastou found his mood slipping downward while thinking of those he hurt or killed already, and made himself remember that he couldn’t have known better, and was protecting innocents and those he cared about. It didn’t help.
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