CHAPTER 64 - SABRA

Monkey staggered back, stricken and dying, dropping The Engineer’s weapon and reaching for his eye socket, and Jack was there to catch him. The inlays in the wall flashed and flared and strobed in strange, halting patterns, casting victory into nightmare. It reminded Sabra of someone struggling for breath. Perhaps SHIVA was dying just as much as Monkey was.

Jack guided Monkey to the ground, holding him in his arms. Monkey made an odd choking sound, trying to say something. Jack reached up, removed his Leopard helmet, and dropped it to the floor. “It’s okay.” he said. “I’ve got you. I’m here.”

“Hey, buddy,” Monkey whispered.

Sabra climbed to her feet. They’d dealt with Monkey, but he wasn’t the threat—SHIVA was, and the key that was The Engineer’s Staff of Command. She stomped over to it, left leg hitching.

“I just wanted to make the world a better place,” Monkey murmured.

Jack sighed, and he sighed with every breath. “I know you did, man. I know you did.”

“I don’t hate you. I just wanted things to be different.”

“I know. I wanted them to be different, too. I wish— I wish they could’ve been.”

Sabra stood over the staff and raised her armored foot. She stomped down, once, twice, and then again and again until it was nothing but fragments and shards of broken crystal, the emerald light fading like fireflies on the wind, and the pieces crumbled away into dust.

“Still,” Jack said. “You got to see the world. Just like you always wanted.”

“Yeah,” Monkey replied. “Yeah... What did we always say?”

Sabra turned. Jack’s face was pressed against Monkey’s neck and shoulder, sobbing without giving voice to it. “To the ends of the Earth and back again. Me and you.”

“I guess we got there, huh?” His breathing was slowing, hitching. “You’re not gonna leave me?”

“I’m here now, aren’t I?” Jack’s smile was plastered and fake, yet sincere in a way she’d never seen from him before. “This friend of mine,” he continued, “she’s got this saying: I am because you are. It took me a while to figure it out, but it just means we’re all human, I think. And no one deserves to die alone.”

Monkey nodded but said nothing, his expression slackening, his body relaxing and mind ebbing.

“Jack,” he whispered, eyes widening, “I—”

And then something final gave way inside of him, and Sabra listened to him die.

For a time, nothing happened. And then Jack curled over his middle, over Monkey’s corpse, grimacing, his back and shoulders heaving. Sabra left him to his grief and made for SHIVA’s altar. She pretended not to see Jack press his lips to Monkey’s brow and murmur something. She didn’t hear it, but she knew the words.

The knot had lost one thread, a single note dissipating back into the background of the abyss, lost forever. Monkey hadn’t been anything special, but even now, even after everything, Sabra knew there were no bad people. Monkey hadn’t been anything special, and yet he was as special as anyone else.

What could he have been if things had been different?

Monkey was no different to Jack. Flawed, but in a different way. For a time, their flaws had been complementary but contradictory, and that made them destructive. In the end, that was it, the cycle of humanity—death and love, love and death. And she had taken no joy in his death, and certainly no satisfaction.

Monkey hadn’t been anything special, and that meant he wasn’t evil. It was true, as her father always said: this one death left her with nothing but ash in her mouth, a sense of diminishment. But to have resolved it without violence would’ve necessitated undoing the entire chain of events that had set him and Jack on this path. And while she could see the future, she couldn’t change the past.

And, perhaps, even her path had been set years before. Perhaps it wasn’t a series of chains, but a web.

But then, what was at the center? The Engineer, or something else?

Christ and Allah, one person dies, and you get all philosophical. Focus on the mission, Kasembe. Play the game. Win. She needs you now.

Revenant stood where she had connected to the altar, immobile, golden eyes blazing bright and mouth open as if in rapture—or agony. Cables snaked into the ports and slots in the silver band that ran around the back of her head. Sabra closed her hands into fists. If anything happened, she knew what she had to do.

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“Hey,” Jack said.

Sabra turned. There he was, walking closer. Monkey’s body lay behind him, arms crossed over his chest. Jack’s helmet and Monkey’s revolvers sat atop his hands.

“Is she okay?”

“I don’t know,” Sabra said. “I think so.”

“Right.”

The pair stood there in silence.

“I’m sorry you had to kill him,” Sabra said. “I know he was your friend.”

“Yeah,” Jack replied. “But it had to be done, and it had to be me. I won’t say I wish I did it sooner, but... it might’ve been easier for all of us if I had.”

“Yeah.”

Sabra glanced back towards the corpse. “You sure you don’t want to bring him with us? Give him a real burial?”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t even know where it’d be good to bury him. Besides, he’s been touched by one of the Seven. I bet they’d cut his corpse up and study it until there was nothing left. No, it’s better this way.”

“No family?”

“Just me.”

“You did good, Jack.”

“It doesn’t feel like it.”

“Well, we’ve all gotta start somewhere, right?”

“Guess so. I know this doesn’t make up for anything I’ve done, Sabra.”

“Sure. Maybe you should think of a career change.”

“Probably. But I’m not very good at making the right decisions. I’ll probably end up in a cell on the return trip. But if that happens, it happens. Maybe that’ll be my atonement.”

“That’s not atonement, Jack.”

“I know.”

Silence.

“Look,” she said, “if you ever want to talk about any of this...”

“No,” Jack replied, “I don’t. No offense, Sabra.”

“None taken.”

“Maybe later,” he said. “But not now. Maybe never.”

It was all better than anything he’d said previously, Sabra thought. The silence was not uncomfortable, here in the heart of the mountain. Felt almost appropriate for a place like this. But the mountain trembled, and never came earlier than she expected.

“Did you feel that?” Jack asked.

Another tremor ran through the floor again, deeper and more threatening than the first. A rumble that cascaded up through Sabra’s armored boots and into her bones and made her teeth vibrate. The floor lurched forwards and Sabra lurched with it, only just keeping her footing.

Jack grabbed her by the arm. “This place is about to come down around our heads! Someone’s not happy about losing his cards! Sabra, we have to go!”

She whirled about to find Revenant. She was still and quiet, and the inlays around the temple still pulsed with sputtering malevolence.

“We can’t! SHIVA’s not dead—this is to kill us, not it! I’m not going anywhere until she’s done, but you can!”

Jack hesitated, mouth falling open. The mountain shuddered again, and one of the great columns came crashing down. Sabra pointed to the exit. “Jack,” she barked, “Go!”

That did it. He broke into a backward stumble, then turned and got himself into a loping run. He vanished into the dark as the mountain trembled and shook as if in the hands of an angry god—or, perhaps, a god who had left the mountain stumbling, and was winding up for the knock-out punch.

Sabra forced herself to smile. It was important to stay optimistic. After all, how many people got to say one of the Seven took such a personal interest in their death? With everything she had seen, maybe that was for the best.

There’s that Kasembe optimism!

Revenant was still connected. Sabra glanced at the cables. Could she yank them out? Should she? She didn’t know enough to make the call. It was a race now, between Revenant and The Engineer, and it was entirely out of Sabra’s hands. So, she took Revenant’s left hand in both of her own. Maybe that’d help.

“Come on, baby,” Sabra whispered. “Don’t leave a girl hanging.”

The crimson pulses blinked and flashed and flared, faster and more erratic. Every spluttering pulse illuminated the catastrophe unfolding around Sabra, the rock and debris falling from the ceiling, crashing all across the temple floor as the mountain shook itself apart.

She wasn’t going to make it. A great jagged shard crashed down to Sabra’s left like the tooth of some great behemoth and plunged through the floor into a vast chasm. The entire floor began to crumble away into it, a jigsaw torn apart. The fractures spread out beneath her feet.

They were out of time. The crimson light crashed into darkness, but still Revenant didn’t move. It was as good a sign as any—Sabra began pulling cables free, plucking them out one by one, and then in a great handful, and yet she remained motionless. That was bad, that had to be really bad. But she could find out how bad on the surface.

She gathered Revenant into arms, and the systems in her suit whined in protest. She shifted her feet and lowered her center of gravity, ignoring the hitch in her leg, ignoring the impossibility of survival. Running was meditation. It was as easy as breathing and as natural as a dance, even as an entire mountain came down around her head. She let her awareness flow in with her thoughts, and outward with her breath. In her mind, she heard the starting gun, and a voice.

Stop trying to run, Kasembe, and run.

Sabra pushed off and into a sprint just as the mountain staggered one last time, the world imploding in front of her and falling away behind her, and the crushing darkness became so much more physical.