CHAPTER 44 - FISHER

“So, let me get this straight,” Fisher said.

That line was about as far as his mind would go. He paused yet again, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. For once, he was glad for his prosthetic hands—they wouldn’t shake with stress and frustration, wouldn’t reveal the extent of his agitation. He took a deep breath, felt his chest swell, and counted to three.

Mark had always said that you had to count to three, like it was some secret code to being a good leader. It helped, if only a little. Before Mark, he’d had a tendency to fly off the handle. Most capes did—hell, it just came with the territory. But some were more explosive than others.

Impel had been very explosive.

But Pavel Fisher would not explode. There’d be one cool head prevailing tonight, even if it had to be his.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “I wake up to the sound of Sam screaming bloody murder, only to find out—in fact—that the three of you had gone out there to commit bloody murder. Now, eight people are dead, and Revenant is out there in the kitchen trying to make sure it doesn’t become nine. Is that a good, accurate, reasonable assessment of the situation?”

“Yeah,” Leopard said.

He was sitting on the couch, chrome helmet on his lap. His face was blotchy and swollen, and as unreadable as ever. It could’ve been shock, Fisher knew, but he was leaning more towards sociopathy. Sabra sat on the other end of the couch in a matte black and grey undersuit, with a nasty cut that had just missed her right eye. Scattered before them, like some blood treasury, were the spoils that Leopard had taken from their little adventure: a bunch of id cards and a smattering of hard currency.

Fisher knew the word for this: clusterfuck.

“They were Syndicate capes,” Leopard said, “with half an enforcer team with them. I told you—they came here, they were looking for us.”

“And so you went and picked a fight.”

“Better to pick the battle than let it be picked.”

“Oh, please.”

“He’s right, Pavel,” Sabra said.

“I expected this from him, Sabra, but not from you.”

“No offense, but you don’t know me very well. I hate to say it, but Leopard’s right.”

“You didn’t have to go with them.”

“Yeah,” Sabra said, “I did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“If I hadn’t, then they would be dead, and we might be too. And without them, we lose our shot at Promethea. Without that, we lose the whole goddamn game, Pavel. And I don’t know about you, but I didn’t come this far to lose.”

“And how exactly is that lead going?” Fisher asked.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Leopard said. “By the way Arachnicide was talking, the Syndicate was looking for me and Tiger. But they also didn’t know who Defiant was.”

“Might’ve been the new armor,” Sabra said.

“No. Even when they placed your accent, they still had no idea who you were. So, it seems like they were really looking for us, and they didn’t even know about the three of you.”

“How does that make sense?” Fisher asked.

“There’s only one way—the Syndicate is looking for Monkey, too,” Leopard said. “They thought Tiger and I were with him. Arachnicide and his guys were here before us. Monkey must be nearby.”

“Why would the Syndicate send out a hit team for him?”

“I don’t know,” Leopard said. “As far as I know, him and Gate were on good terms.”

“Then you need to track down Promethea’s location,” Fisher said. “We’re racing two timers now, before Monkey’s trail goes cold, and before Star Patrol gets involved. Because if they aren’t crawling over that crime scene as we speak, you can bet your ass that they’ll be on top of it soon.”

Leopard just stared at him.

“Okay,” he said.

“That’s it, just 'okay?'”

“Okay,” Leopard repeated.

“Are you even comprehending anything I’m saying?”

“I said okay, so, I’ll do it. I’ll get right on it.”

Leopard stood up and walked out of the room. Fisher watched him go.

“Sabra,” he said, turning to her, “I need you on my side here.”

“There aren’t any sides. I told you, we have to trust them. It doesn’t mean we have to like them. Look at it this way, at least we know that Leopard hasn’t led us on some wild goose chase, that’s something, right? And in the interest of full disclosure, Pavel, there’s something I should tell you.”

The door opened, and Sabra shut up. Revenant stepped through, making her way over to the couch. “Speaking of full disclosure,” Fisher said. “First, how’s Sam?”

“She’ll live,” Revenant replied.

“And what’s your name?”

“Revenant.”

“Cut the act, kid,” Fisher said. “My partner was doing the dark and brooding thing before you were born.”

“It’s the only name I have,” Revenant said, then turned her attention back to Sabra, examining the wound on her face. “The most human part of me is my shadow.”

"Oh, Christ above!"

“She’s a robot, Pavel,” Sabra said.

“What?” Fisher said, frowning. “Are you fucking serious? Oh, this just gets even better.” It was a shock, but not a surprise. The first thing anyone learned about operating within the system was that the rules didn’t apply to the ones who made and enforced them. The IESA might’ve banned self-aware intelligences after the SHIVA incident, might've had a whole Taskforce dedicated to ensuring they stayed gone, but there were no checks and balances on their authority.

“Artificial intelligence is the more accurate term,” Revenant replied. “You may use whatever nomenclature you prefer—robot, android, gynoid.” She raised a finger and a beam of golden light touched the top of Sabra’s wound, and she began guiding it downward. “Hold still, Kasembe.”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

She did. “How bad is it, Doc?”

“We may have to amputate,” Revenant said.

“Aw, man.”

“You only use it to headbutt people, anyway.”

Fisher frowned. Were they... flirting? Regardless, whatever was happening there wasn’t good, either.

“I would’ve liked to have known earlier, Revenant,” he said. “Sabra, how long have you known?”

“Since the night we left Asclepion.”

“And you didn’t mention it?”

Sabra shrugged slightly. “Wasn’t exactly my secret to tell.”

"But you just—" Tact, Pavel, Mark said. For God's sake, tact! “You said you had something to tell me?”

“In a minute.”

Revenant stopped working on Sabra’s cut. “There,” she said. “There may be some scarring.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” she said, already heading for the door. “Pavel,” she said, giving him a nod, and then she was gone. Sabra reached over to the scattered amount of loot on the table and began pawing through it.

“I’m going to be honest with you, Pavel,” she said. “Like, extremely honest. And you need to not laugh at me or tell me I’m going crazy or anything. You want to know why I went with them? Fine.”

“Whatever explanation you’ve got, Sab, I’m dying to hear it.”

“Be careful what you wish for, man.” Then she took a deep breath and said, “I can see the future.”

Fisher couldn’t help it—he scoffed. For that single, immediate second, he’d taken Sabra’s words for a joke. And then he saw the grave expression on her face, and he remembered the gravity with which Blueshift had spoken, and the icy fury of her mother. He opened his mouth to say something, but no words followed.

Tact, Pavel, tact.

“You just laughed,” Sabra said.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said, but it sounded as lame as he thought it did. “It’s just that precognition is such a rare ability, and just about anyone with the supposed capability is a gibbering wreck.”

“But I’m coherent, that’s what Revenant said.”

“You’ve discussed this with her?”

“Briefly. Didn’t want to hear about it. Something about the IESA.” She found a coin and picked it up. “You think I’m joking, don’t you?”

“Sabra, look—I think you have some kind of empowered ability, and I’d say you’ve been pulling on it without knowing. I’d say it’s how you defeated Taurine. But precognition? I can’t even remember the last time I even heard of a stable precog.”

She flicked the coin in his direction, and he caught it in the palm of his hand.

“I think,” she said, trailing off. “I think if you flip that seven times, you’ll go heads, tails, heads, heads, tails, tails, heads.”

Would he? Suddenly, the coin felt especially heavy in his hand. Fisher clenched his fingers around it. Sabra was many things, but she’d never struck him as particularly duplicitous. She was as honest as a brick through the window.

Or was it that he just didn’t want to know, because he knew what that meant?

He tossed it back to her. “I’ll take your word for it.”

Sabra caught it, threw it back in one easy motion. “No, you won’t. Go on, flip it. You want to solve a mystery? Then let’s close the book on this one.”

This time, he kept it.

“Why is this so important to you, Sabra? Okay, I believe you, let’s move on.”

“I hear you, but I don’t want faith, y’know? I want you to know. So, flip that coin.” Her gaze drifted into that mid-distance again. “Tails, tails, heads, tails, heads, heads, tails.”

Huh, Fisher thought. It’s different now.

“Fine,” Fisher said. He shook his head and flipped the coin. He caught it in his hand, turned it over against the back of his palm.

Tails.

He glanced to Sabra. Her green eyes were intense and intent, leaning forward with her elbows on her thighs, staring at him. He flipped it again.

Tails.

Again, and again, and again.

Heads, tails, heads, heads.

Tails.

----------------------------------------

Fisher paced on the other end of the lounge room, and Sabra held her place on the couch like a silent sentinel. Every so often, when coherent thoughts broke through the weird fugue he found himself in, he stopped pacing and looked at the coin that he still held clasped in his left hand.

Fisher didn’t know the numbers. Mark had always been the more numerically minded of the pair, and he would’ve had the percentage in an instant. Fisher had to take out a pen and paper and run the numbers on the probability he’d just beheld: seven correct guesses were below a single percentage point.

Sure, the ability to get such guesses all correct in a row was possible, Fisher had told himself, but certainly not probable.

There had to be another explanation. Pacing back and forth had felt like it’d help him find it. There had been capes over the years who had claimed to have cracked the secret of consistent good luck. What if Sabra was one of them? Surely that was more likely than genuine prescience.

Jesus, Pavel, this is why she had you flip the damn coin.

What he wanted was a way out. It was correct, her ability, but surely it wasn’t true. Perhaps she had just been lucky. Perhaps she was playing some kind of weird long con, and everyone had fallen for it. Maybe she was playing on his love of mysteries to make him feel better about the eight counts of murder that’d been committed overnight.

Some part of him found the fact that he still cared about that remarkably maudlin. After all, that part of him said, what were eight more bodies upon a total of three point four billion?

“Sabra,” he said, “how many people know about this?”

“Just you and Revenant, and she’s not letting herself know about it. So, maybe just you.”

What on Earth did that mean?

“How long have you known?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “A long time, I think. It started with dreams—nightmares, really. Sometimes, I'd get these moments of just... absolute zen. But I think whatever happened with Taurine, that really kicked it into gear. Since then, I’ve been getting these... flashes.”

It made sense. Some people had their abilities from birth, but most of them encountered them later, often in response to an intense event. Being beaten to death by Taurine would track with that, but that’d been after those dreams.

“And these flashes, are...?” Fisher prompted.

“Well, like earlier tonight—I saw Tiger and Leopard dead. Then, when I was there, I heard Leopard warn me a split second before he did. That’s why I only got this slash down my face.”

“Okay,” Fisher said. “But Tiger and Leopard aren’t dead.”

“Yeah,” Sabra replied, “I know.”

“Then the future isn’t set.”

“Maybe,” Sabra said. “I don’t know. I hope it isn’t. Because I think I’ve been seeing the end of the world in my dreams since I was fifteen years old. And I think it’s Monkey who causes it. I feel like my whole life has been leading me here.”

Had it been anyone else, he would've shaken his head. Dismissed her as a curbside prophet bereft of her sandwich board. But she was so softly spoken, so certain...

She'd completely lost it, or she was a prophet.

“Sabra, what have you seen?”

“I don’t remember. But I’ve tasted ash, and had the screams of thousands ringing in my ears. So many people screaming my name, for me to help them. I haven’t seen what happens if we win—how we win. But I think I’ve seen what happens if we don’t.”

If there was any doubting her, Fisher only had to look into her eyes to see the folly of it. It was true enough, real enough, that it got under Sabra’s skin and cut her to the bone. Fisher stepped over to the couch and set a hand on her shoulder. Fisher had never wanted kids, but he figured the pang in his chest was something akin to fatherhood.

“Then we’ll just have to make sure we win.”

“What if we can’t?” Sabra asked. “Would you really want to waste your time if you knew it ended badly?”

Fisher frowned. The question felt pointed. Would he have made Mark such a part of his life had he known how it would’ve ended?

It wasn’t a question he could answer, and something about that made him glad.

“Nothing is inevitable, Sabra. You changed things tonight—you said it yourself. Things changed just now with the coin. We’ll stop Monkey. The world won’t end. The five of us? We’ve got this handled. Get some sleep, okay?”

“It’s so weird that you sound more confident than me,” she said, but nodded. “Abacus?”

He smiled. “Abacus.”