Something Wicked 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)

20: Everything I love

Fuck.

The shitty motorcycle that Sylvia had commandeered for me musta been ninety per cent putty. Bald tyres skidded on dirt. The engine gave a sad groan with each turn of the throttle. Yet somehow its sputtering cylinders delivered me to the mile of scrub that fringed the Alcor compound, before dying in a cloud of black smoke.

"Cover your face." Sylvia's voice crackled in my ear as I heaved the excuse for a bike into a drainage ditch before the poor fucker exploded on me. "Are you at the perimeter fence?"

I tucked my black keffiyeh tight over my beard and pulled my hood lower. "Almost."

Five minutes of belly-crawling through dirt and scrubby bushes, and I saw him. The first ring of Alcor's security system: a sniper lounging against a balcony built high into a fir tree's canopy. Stupid motherfucker was checking his phone. How many times had I told my men never to take their eyes off the approaches to the Alcor complex? I'd expected standards to slip since my arrest, but I hadn't expected the new Head of Alcor Security to be a negligent fucking idiot. I crawled on, unseen.

Sylvia's voice wavered. "You should have taken more weapons."

Five months since I'd held a gun, the cold metal of Sylvia's pistol bit my palm. I shook my head to dispel the creeping nausea. "I got all I need."

If she got between me and Dante, I'd shoot her in a heartbeat. I'd have to.

"Jason, remember. Abort mission as soon as you get news that Dante has rescued Rayan. Sergeant Jones's squad is ready on the outskirts of the city with explosives. She'll move in once you've gotten out."

"If I can't get out, I'll tell the Marines to blow this entire fucking place to ash."

"If you can't get out," Sylvia's voice was like lead, "I'll order Kate Jones to drag you out."

"It's OK, Sylvia," I whispered. "Really."

Wasn't scared of dying for Dante. Besides, if the unthinkable happened and he didn't make it outta there, then nor would I. And nor would she.

Thorns and scrubby branches caught at my hair as I crawled to the weakest point in the system—the sewer. I'd often campaigned for tighter security, Zaki acquiescing until we'd lifted the inner courtyard's drain cover and had peered into a waterlogged and shit-filled sewer tunnel. We'd concluded that nothing inside the Alcor complex was tempting enough for intruders to endure that haraam journey.

But I wasn't an ordinary intruder. Everything I loved was on the other side of that wall.

The concrete-set manhole cover slid aside with an ear-piercing scrape, decades of dust billowing into the sewer tunnel beneath. I closed my eyes, murmured a quick "Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim," and leaped down the stinking hole.

The tunnels wound in endless loops, filth seeping into my boots until my socks squelched. Unidentifiable sludge and debris bobbed past me in the slow-flowing stink. But I knew the sewer's every twist and turn like I knew its mirror image of pathways above ground. I trudged on until the cavernous chamber of the Alcor complex junction ended. In front of me lay a single tunnel upward to the complex's inner courtyard.

My heart sank into my boots. The tunnel exit was constricted by a mountain of filth, the tight ladder up toward the courtyard blocked by a brown mass the size of me, and then some. Only one way into Alcor: I had to clear the blockage.

Fanboy reveries of Dante on the clock tower kept me sane as I plunged my hands into the putrid mass of sludge and shit and fuck-knew-what else. My hands hit something hard: bone. Shit-covered fingers slithered along the ridges of broken ribs. Clawing away fistfuls of watery sewage revealed more bones beneath. A stringy skeleton lay decaying in the water, both femurs broken, one hand chopped off at the wrist. Dread raked through my mind like claws.