Will McIntosh - Defenders

Then Danika was gone, and it was just Lila and Clete. Lila wasn’t sure if she wanted to stop them or not. She hovered in the middle of the room, deciding whether to scream, try to get past Clete, or do nothing. In the end, she took a seat in a stuffed chair by the window.

“How will you know if she’s successful?”

“We’re close enough that we should hear the blast.” Clete pulled the briefcase off the bed, took it to the little hotel desk, and pulled out a laptop.

Curious, Lila leaned in to see what he was doing. Clete opened Earth2 and got an avatar up and running.

“Is that your means of relaxing during stressful situations?” Lila asked, knowing full well what he was doing.

Clete looked up from the screen, said nothing. Lila moved closer to the computer so she could read what Clete was typing.

It was nothing surprising or enlightening. He was communicating with an avatar named Sandovar, saying all had gone well so far. He was keeping the message intentionally vague.

After a few minutes he signed off and closed the computer. He stood, sniffed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Now comes the hard part.”

“The hard part? We haven’t gotten to the hard part yet?”

He gave Lila a hard, direct look. “We have to make it look like this happened against your will.”

That had crossed her mind. After the explosion the defenders would assume she was the one who bombed the facility. When they found her alive, she’d be a prime suspect, and they weren’t ones to wait for a trial, or even facts, before they started meting out punishment.

“And how do we do that?”

Clete looked at the floor, like he was suddenly feeling terribly sad, or ashamed. “It has to be immediately obvious to them.”

Then she understood, and felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. It had to be immediately obvious, as in, she had to sport the bleeding, swollen face of someone who’d put up a fight. She wasn’t convinced their plot would do any good in the long run, yet they had dragged her into it, risked her life, and now they needed to kick the shit out of her so the defenders wouldn’t kill her. She was supposed to stand there while this asshole beat her.

She looked up, returned Clete’s level stare for a moment, then punched him in the face.

Teary-eyed with pain, Clete clutched his nose. His fingers came away bloody. “ Why did you do that? ”

Lila punched him again, in the eye this time. The blow landed with a satisfying smack .

Clete started to fight back. His first punch felt like a hammer blow to Lila’s cheek.

October 15, 2047. Washington, D.C.

The man at the front desk called, “Jesus, are you all right?” as Lila stumbled past. She kept walking.

She couldn’t see out of her left eye. Although she knew it was because it was swollen shut, a small, scared voice in her was sure she’d been blinded. Her nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. Before he left, Clete had said that was good, let the blood pour all over her shirt. She had the worst headache of her life, and felt like she had thick clumps of mud plastered to her cheek, her lower lip, her forehead. Lila wondered if the kicks to her face had been planned ahead of time, or improvised.

Outside, she texted Kai to meet her at home while she waited for a cab to happen by.

The cabby, a woman in her seventies, said nothing about Lila’s injuries. She nodded when Lila gave her the address, and took off. Lila had to get back to her house—to Erik’s house. When he saw her face, Erik would believe her story and protect her.

She still hadn’t heard an explosion. As the taxi hurdled over the cracked, pothole-laden streets, Lila guessed the explosion must have happened by now. She must be out of hearing range.

When she got home, she went straight to the freezer. She found a defender-sized bag of frozen brussels sprouts, collapsed on the couch, and gently pressed the bag over her eye.

She jerked the bag from her eye. What was she doing? She didn’t want the swelling to go down. Easing herself to her feet, she tried to jostle her pounding head as little as possible. She had to find Erik, tell him what happened. Maybe she could act like she was trying to warn him, trying to prevent the blast.

The door flew open. Erik stormed in, flanked by two defenders in combat gear.

“Erik.” Lila stumbled, fell to her knees, and caught herself on Erik’s ottoman. She was acting, and she was not. It was easy to act like you’d been beaten senseless when you had. “They’re going to bomb the facility.”

In an instant Erik was at her side. He helped her lean up against the ottoman, then studied her face, her bloody shirt. “We caught her. She was trying to pass herself off as you, but I know what you look like.” He reached out, then brushed her hair with the gentlest of touches before turning to the soldiers. “Find a doctor.”

Both soldiers froze. “We were told to kill her.”

“Did you hear what she just said? How do you think she sustained these injuries?” Erik shouted. “By helping them?”

They left to fetch a doctor.

“It was a coordinated attack. Five of our production facilities were hit.” He studied her face.

“What is it?” She touched her nose. “Am I bleeding again?”

“I’m trying to read your expression. Part of you must be glad about these attacks, even if you tried to stop them.”

The front door clicked open. “Lila? Lila. ” Kai rushed to her, pushing between her and Erik. “Oh my God. What happened? ”

“I was attacked by rebels,” she said.

Kai slid his hand behind her back. “We have to get you to a hospital.”

“I’ve already sent for a doctor,” Erik said. “I have everything under control. I’d suggest you make sure your son is safe. Things could get bad out there.”

“Where is he?” Lila tried to sit up further.

“He’s at Charlie’s, down the street.” His voice tight, he added, “I’ll get him.”

Erik relaxed visibly after Kai left. If anything ever happened to her, she wondered if Erik would kill Kai. She was confident he’d make sure Errol was taken care of, but she worried about Kai.

“What did you mean, ‘things could get bad out there’?”

Erik turned on the TV, tuned it to the channel that was not a channel—the Eye in the Sky, the live feed only defenders could access. He tuned it to a surveillance camera on a street corner in a city Lila didn’t recognize, where defenders were going berserk. The air was hazy; in the background smoke poured from the broken windows of a wide, flat building Lila recognized as the Moscow production facility. They were pulling people out of a grocery store and lining them up against the wall. A defender was going down the line and shooting each person in the head. Three men broke away from the wall and ran: They were torched by a defender with a flamethrower. In the street, four defenders in a jeep were strafing the upper floors of office buildings with automatic weapons.

“I’m so relieved you weren’t involved in this. I knew you wouldn’t be.”

Lila looked at her hands, to avoid having to watch the screen. Most of the people being butchered hadn’t been involved in it, either.

“They’re going to execute the woman who impersonated you tomorrow. Why don’t you join me for the execution? I have excellent seats.”

After nearly choking with surprise, Lila managed to say, “I’d like that.” Erik had presented it as an invitation, but Lila knew he wasn’t asking her, he was telling her. Her presence would prove her loyalty and give the other defenders in power a chance to see what had been done to her face.