CHAPTER FOUR
Focus
So, I had the clues, I had the theory. Now it was time to put my supposition to the test.
“Run the recording,” ordered Bulwark. “From the beginning.”
The tech nodded, but Bull’s attention was riveted to the screens, which showed several views of Harmony’s cell. Harmony was seated on her cot, which was one of only three pieces of furniture in the transparent cube inside a second transparent cube in the middle of the room. She was wearing standard ECHO prison issue: gray scrubs with no drawstrings that a prisoner could use as a weapon or means of suicide. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t seem to be looking at anything.
Suddenly, she started, as if in shock, as the door opened, and a small blonde figure dressed head-to-toe in brown entered. It looked to Bulwark as if Harmony had been taken completely by surprise—that she somehow had not sensed the presence of a visitor before the visitor arrived—which would be quite out of the ordinary for Harmony, given the range her senses were known to extend to.
The young woman closed the door behind herself and made certain that it was secure. Then she turned to face Harmony.
“Hello, Harmony,” said Victoria Victrix, in a completely neutral tone of voice. She stepped forward, and surveyed the prisoner for a moment.
This was not a Vickie Bull had ever seen before. There was no fear, no hesitancy; this woman was focused. She was also…well, gaunt was not quite the word Bull was looking for. Refined, perhaps. Honed down to the essentials. Thinner than he remembered her being; leaner. Then again, he hadn’t been going out of his way to look in on her, and of late she seemed to be spending every waking and sleeping hour in her Overwatch suite.
Harmony had already recovered from her start of surprise, and stood up, arms crossed over her chest. “Operative Victrix, the voice of Overwatch,” she replied in a tone of amused irony. “Do you realize this is the first time we’ve met face to face? To what do I owe the honor?”
“I don’t think I’d be mistaken in presuming you made very certain we never met face to face in the past, Harmony,” Vickie replied, slowly beginning to circle the cube, reminding Bulwark of a hunting cat circling around something it was unsure of. She wasn’t so much walking, as stalking. “You know very well that if we had, I’d have spotted you as being something other than what you seemed. As for why I’m here…probably the same reason why you kept that meeting from ever taking place. Some things just don’t translate to a monitor screen.”
“They never do,” Harmony agreed. “But that doesn’t answer my question. Why are you here, Victrix? And why now?” Harmony was turning in place to face Vickie, her eyes never leaving Vickie’s face, as Vickie finished one circuit of the cube and began a second.
“To answer the last question first, because this is the first time I’ve had a free hour since Tesla was murdered,” Vickie replied, still in that even tone. “To answer the first, it’s because I have a profound dislike for things I don’t understand when they’re in my specialty.”
“Your specialty? I assume you mean the arcane, and not computers—” Harmony shrugged. “Oh, this should be very entertaining. Pray, continue.”
Vickie finished the second round of the cube, and began a third. “It was obsessing me a bit,” she said. “What you did to Bull, that…feeding tube you stuck in him that I broke…it acted like a spell, but it wasn’t a spell. But it wasn’t a meta-power either; Upyr confirmed that.”
Harmony happened to be facing a camera as Vickie said that, and the close-up of her face showed her pupils flaring and contracting for a moment. “So…you’re the one that broke it. And here all this time I’d been assuming it was the angel that so completely preoccupied Dom.”
“Sera never does anything we can already do for ourselves,” Vickie said flatly. “I knew you weren’t a mage; mages leave fingerprints all over their spells that other mages can read. What you did was clean; it was also more primitive than any spell I’d ever seen before. I couldn’t figure it out—how could you pull off something that was like a spell, but wasn’t a spell? So I came here to confirm a few suspicions.”
Harmony turned, and glared at Victrix. “If you seek answers, I am always ready to deal. We could help each other, Victoria. I could do a great deal for you, should I choose to.”
Vickie stopped, back in the place where she had started. She gave Harmony a good long stare, and her brows furrowed. “Cut the crap, Harmony. What you do is like a spell, because it’s magic. You aren’t a magician, but you’re no meta. You’re made of magic; a magical creature like an elemental. And like an elemental, your abilities leave no fingerprints. They work at a primitive level. What you did is a natural ability, isn’t it? Never mind, don’t answer that.”
Victrix exhaled, and seemed to relax, though her eyes continued to bore into Harmony. “You don’t conjure anything,” she continued. “You don’t command the elements, you don’t bind energies or seem to focus them. What you do comes from what you are, and what you are seems to be quite rare. I can’t say I’ve come across anything quite like you. That might scare some people. It should. But I’m not scared, and you can tell, can’t you? I’m not scared at all. What I am is very, very curious. I have a pretty good idea, but I’ve been told in some ways I have the soul of a scientist. I just need confirmation. And if I’m right, I have to wonder…”
Victoria’s eyes grew wide. In surprise? In wonder? Delight? Bulwark frowned, unable to place it. He felt a shudder as it came to him, and was shocked at the stark ferocity of it. The Victrix he knew, that they all knew, was a timid woman—a woman who hid from the world and fought her battles from behind locked doors. He had observed her hiding in the background, desperate to avoid the spotlight, content to exert her considerable influences from the shadows. She had enormous strength, he knew that, but he often wondered if she would ever break free from her self-imposed exile. He had never given up on her, but this was beyond anything he could have conceived. She stood there, not with a newfound strength or courage or determination. It was stronger than that. Her look could only be described as feral. She was hungry.
“Tell me, Harmony,” Victoria said. “Are you the first of your kind, or the last?”
Bulwark watched as Harmony turned away from Victrix and sat down on her cot. She came to rest in lotus position and closed her eyes.
“You can pretend to ignore me all you want, Harmony,” Vickie said, “but I will have answers. I’m a mathemagician. I see magic as equations, and I have over twenty years of learning how to unravel those equations. You can’t hide what you are from someone who can see the math behind the deceptions.” Her lips twitched a little. “Also, while you were distracted, I thrice-ringed you. Once I did that, you lost any protective coloration you had, magically speaking.”
Harmony appeared to ignore the little mage. Vickie’s lips thinned and her chin jutted out aggressively. She crossed her arms over her chest, and became as immobile as a statue. There was a long, long pause during which neither of them moved. Then there was a flash of light; the camera whited out for a moment simultaneously with Vickie’s gasp. When the camera view came back, Vickie had raised her hand, interposed between herself and Harmony. Was she shielding herself? Or something else? Magic, notoriously, did not show up on camera, as Vickie had explained long ago—only the bleed-through effects in the real world.
Vickie continued to stare at Harmony, but after a moment her face softened, and she nodded in satisfaction. “Thought so,” she said. Harmony didn’t answer. Perhaps she hadn’t heard what Vickie said, perhaps Vickie hadn’t expected her to answer.
“This isn’t over.” Vickie said at last. “Not while ECHO can use you. You cost us too much to let you die. Besides, blaming you for what happened to Bruno would be like blaming a cobra for striking at what cornered it. Your abilities are primitive, Harmony, and so is your essential nature, no matter how much of a veneer of civility you put on it. If anyone’s to blame for Bruno’s death, it’s me. And you’re still useful. So I’m not going to let you starve. But, seeing as I can’t let you feed on anyone here either…” She made a series of three swift gestures in the air between them.
There was nothing visible in the monitors as Vickie closed her eyes and bowed her head, but the effect on Harmony was dramatic. She jerked, flung her head back, her fists unclenched and she spread her arms a little, as if she was braced against a welcome wind.
And moments later, Harmony began to change. Bulwark had not realized how pallid she had been, how shrunken her cheeks, until color suffused her face and it took on the look of vibrant good health again.
They stood there, like that, for ten full minutes by the clock on the recordings. Then Vickie looked up, and chopped her hand through the air between them. “That should hold you for a while, and I’ll be back when you run low again,” she said, a little hoarsely. Then came that wry twist of her lips. “Sorry it isn’t as tasty as what you were getting from the buffet.”
“There’s something to be said for bitter, but strong,” Harmony replied. “But how are you—”
“Hiding that from Bella, the empath who lives next door?” Vickie snorted. “Practice, practice, practice.”
“Why did you—” Harmony narrowed her eyes. “You want me to owe you.”
Vickie tapped her finger on her nose and pointed it at Harmony. “Got it in one. That’s the lore, right? Freely given, not stolen, nor taken by stealth, means you owe me. Right?”
“Right.” Harmony actually growled the word. “Damn you, Victrix.”
“You’re not the first to say that,” Vickie shrugged. She flicked her fingers, perhaps dismissing the thrice-ring, turned, and left without a word. The door closed behind her. Harmony glared at it, muttered something, and slowly lowered herself down on her cot. She continued to watch the door.
“Pause it, there!” Bulwark snapped. “Close in on her.”
The monitor froze on a brief twitch that broke Harmony’s calm and uncaring demeanor. For a moment her nostrils had flared, her lips had curled, and angry lines had appeared across her brow. Bull knew that look. It promised murder.
“You want to tell me what you think you were doing in there?” he asked.
From her seat, tucked neatly in the back of the room, Victoria sighed and stood up. She strolled up beside him, and crossed her arms in defiance.
“My job,” she said, looking up and directly into his eyes. “I’m the only expert you have on magic. Harmony’s magic. We need to know what she is and what she can do. QED, I was doing my job. And for the record, you folks would never have been able to deduce what I found out.”
“So what is she?” Bull asked.
She told him.
“Come again?”
She explained it. “Mind you, that doesn’t mean I’ve figured out everything she can do. So there could be some…surprises down the road.” She was banjo-wire tense; despite her calm expression, every muscle was clenched. Waiting for something.
Probably his response.
“Right,” he grunted, and favored her with patronizing look. “You’re telling me we’re living in a penny dreadful. What next? Werewolves that work for the Feds?”
Victrix coughed. “The job needed doing. I did it. There’s your intel.”
“Well, you’ll excuse me if I don’t ask you for a written report. You can’t possibly expect me to sign off on something like that.”
“It would look a bit odd,” she agreed, still tense.
Bull glanced up at the monitor. “You see that? That look there? That’s her, Victrix. Whatever rules you think she has to play by, whatever you think is binding her, that’s who she is. She means to end you. And she’s not looking to make it clean or quick. You had no business going in there like that.”
The odd thing was, he expected an explanation, an excuse, or anger. The look in her eyes was…none of that. It was the flat despair of someone who didn’t care anymore.
“You never would have given me permission,” she said. “And this was something you have to know.”
“You’re damned right…”
“Of course I am…”
“You’re damned right I wouldn’t have given you permission to go in there and paint a giant target on yourself.” He held her with a stern look. “You’re too important. And we’ve lost too many as it is.”
She got a guarded look. “Not that important. You’ve got the Colt Brothers now. And I’ve got…stuff in the works. No one can be irreplaceable around here.”
“You think I mean just your value with Overwatch?” he asked, and shook his head.
“Yes, I do,” she said flatly, that look of despair flashing across her eyes again. “I’ve already cost you too much. That’s the only thing that keeps me valuable.”
“I’ve heard some pretty asinine things in my life,” Bull muttered. “That one ranks, I think. What do you think I do here, exactly? What have I been working for, all this time? I teach people their worth, Victrix. No one is expendable. And if you truly think you are, then perhaps you don’t have a place here.”
Her eyes went empty. “That’s what I’m working towards,” she said, and turned away to go.
“Now wait a moment…”
Vickie flinched as Bull reached out for her. He caught himself and grimaced, and drew his hand back, cautiously.
“I went too far,” he said simply.
“No. You were just blunt.” She looked back at him. “You think you know what a person is worth, Bull? You. Know. Jack. Shit. Everyone’s telling me how important I am, how I can’t ever give up. Hell, Red even made me promise. And it wasn’t the sort of promise I can just break. I can’t walk away from this, do you understand? It’s on me, I have to do everything I can, no matter what it costs me. Every decision, every choice I make I’ve had to consider what it means to the greater good. Never mind what it might do to one person, it’s everyone as a whole that counts, right? Do you have any idea how tired and numb and broken I feel?”
She rubbed her eyes with an odd defiance, and straightened up. “Doesn’t matter. I can’t let it matter. I’ve got a job to do, and no one is going to stop me from doing it. I’m going to fight to the end, and I don’t suppose I’m going to make it. Can’t really say if it’s going to be a Krieger blast that takes me out, or the way I’m killing myself night and day to make things work, or yes, maybe it’ll be Harmony. I can tell you what it won’t be though. It won’t be because I didn’t balance all the risks against the rewards.”
Bull began to answer, but stopped, confused.
Vickie sighed. “It won’t be by committing suicide by taking deliberately stupid risks for small rewards.”
“This isn’t all on you,” Bulwark growled. “You can’t take on all of this yourself. There’s a reason for us, for ECHO, for the CCCP, for all the nations banding together in this fight. You can’t expect to take on the burden of a war all by your lonesome. None of us fight alone. You keep going like this, someday you’ll have me send you out alone to die!”
Vickie glared back at him, and nodded. “If that’s what’s needed, if you have to, then I expect you to do it.”
“Like you did with Bruno?”
He regretted saying it immediately. From the moment Bruno had died, Bull had hidden his feelings from Victrix. A part of him blamed her for the boy’s death, as much as he blamed himself, as much as a part of him would always hold Scope accountable for driving Acrobat towards a suicidal fight with a killer like Harmony. But he held it back, he kept it tucked away, never to be brought forth and used as a weapon. He did that a lot, he knew, but it was his way. His trademark stoicism wasn’t a product of upbringing or indicative of an extremely introverted nature. It was a choice he had made long ago. In truth, it was all a mask for the boundless levels of rage he felt most of his days, a rage he controlled most carefully. It had hurt people, years ago, and badly enough that he had sworn to never let it loose again. It was a promise he had broken over the years. Once, it was released in a mighty blow that had brought a building down on top of him. Usually, it barely registered as little more than pointed jabs, harmless vents of scalding words easily passed off as stern reprimands. Here, he had revealed a bit too much. He had mentioned the boy, and all those months of pent-up frustration over another preventable death seeped out. It was the last thing she needed to hear. Yes, a part of him would always blame Victrix for Acrobat’s death. And now she knew it.
The blood drained from her face. But she didn’t drop her eyes. “Yes. My dad says that one FUBAR cancels out a thousand attaboys. My FUBAR was Bruno. And I can never, ever make that up, but I’ll die trying.” Her eyes were blank, looking somewhere other than him. Carefully, she turned back towards the door, walking as if every joint was made of broken glass.
He watched her leave, and cursed silently. “We all die trying, Vickie,” he murmured. “My fear is that you’re trying to die.”