The Demon hurled me at a guard before I'd caught my breath. I dove within his reach and wriggled between him and his rifle, sending it clattering to the floor in a hail of bullets. A stray bullet took out the second guard's ankle, who crumpled to the ground in a pool of his own blood.
The sight of it all had the Demon screaming for more. It launched me at the fallen guard in a frenzy, making me tear at his keffiyeh to expose the soft skin of his neck. I bit down. The Demon's needles writhed in ecstasy as the metallic tang of the guard's blood gushed over my tongue. He screamed, perhaps more at the violation than the pain, but the Demon drank in every scream and wail and yelp, overjoyed at the chaos. I smiled—more of a demonic rictus than a smile—and bellowed out a laugh that was not my own.
By the time the second guard had reclaimed his rifle, the Demon's bloodlust was thrumming in my ears and rushing through my veins. I lurched off the fallen guard's prone body and swung at his comrade, catching his knee and locking my elbows tight around it. He dragged me around the floor, his balance too unsteady to aim his AK. The Demon had me clawing my way up the guard's legs while he tried to prise my fingers clear. A brief struggle for his rifle ended with me pummeling him on the nose with the stock. He crumpled in a heap at my feet.
Where the fuck was Mira? I'd at least expected a jambiya blade to the face while fighting the guards. A fleeting glance across the room revealed Mira al Assad stood there, looking bored as fuck.
Of course. My dance with the guards had followed the rigid Alcor protocol that Mira had devised, and Zaki had enforced, to test new recruits. She knew that her guards were no challenge to me, and I could tell that she was itching to fight me alone, just as she had done the first day I'd met her. But this time it wasn't a spar to find my place in Alcor's pecking order. It was a fight to the death. I leaped toward Mira.
She was faster than ever, a blur, prancing and feinting around me while I lumbered across the room swinging my kris. Outmatched, still my dumb ego had me casting out threats I couldn't keep. "I win, and you let Dante go."
The Demon shoved me forward, pounding my kris hilt into Mira's cheek as she flew out of reach.
"You can't beat me, Ahmar." She sprang toward my knee. Her blade sliced through my jeans, narrowly missing skin. Her jambiya cut through the air again. "After a period of atonement, you will stay with me, Rayan, and the Demon Star."
My kris raised sparks in a last-second parry, a splinter of steel flying off the blade with the impact. "I'd rather die."
"Thanks to my work, our family will live forever." Mira spun on her heels. Her singing jambiya took a nick outta my earlobe. "Don't you want that, Ahmar?"
"You're not my family."
The Demon was slowing. My attacks were barely on target. My muscles sizzled in lactic acid. Mira looked as fresh as if she'd just woken up from a damn good sleep. I stalled with a few feinted kicks that sent her lunging toward me, and managed to pin her by her hair. Without a second thought, she swiped at the trapped hair with her jambiya, beautiful black locks fluttering loose around the room as she whirled away.
On her second attack I got within her guard and flung her as far as the Demon could manage. She crashed against an ornate screen, tearing through the wickerwork. I thought she'd been knocked out, but she wrestled herself free and flew at me again. Her jambiya hilt crashed down on my forehead.
Blackness clouded my vision. My kris slipped from my hand. Head swirling with nausea, hands grasping at anything I could find, I hurled a colossal vase with all the Demon's might. It crashed against Mira's side, sending her rolling across the floor. Her jambiya flew outta her grip.
I raced for her knife and dove toward her, but she'd somehow found my kris, slashing it jerkily across my chest. The blade scraped at my sternum. Blood trickled out in steady gobs.
The blood loss had me dizzy, barely able to hold off Mira. She pinned me over and over. The Demon surged up to release me, its hold weaker on my limbs each time.
She'd been right all along. We'd both known it. I couldn't beat her.
Even if I could beat her, I didn't wanna kill her. She'd taken my mother. She'd enslaved me. She'd killed Stephanie Grey. But I still could never kill her, just like Dante hadn't been able to go through with ending me in Jeddah five months earlier. We weren't killers like she was.
Mira held my kris to my jugular. "Rest now, Ahmar. It's over."
No. It couldn't be over. I'd lost Dante. Rayan was a prisoner. I was to live forever as her slave, thanks to her eternal-youth machine.
I called for the Demon, but it had vanished into the Riyadh night, taking with it the last wisps of my strength.
Yep. I'd definitely reached the lowest low.
Then, my fingers brushed against a bloody jambiya blade.
Fuck it.
I could go lower.
If I couldn't kill her, I could kill myself.
"My name is not Ahmar," I whispered, eyes closed, fist curling around the blade. "My name is Jason."
I'd always thought my final words would be something more remarkable than saying my own name.
A muted thud, and Mira let out a whimper somewhere above me.
My eyes shot open to see her body shaking with recoil. She clutched at her heart. Disbelief, then anger, then dread rippled across her face. A bloody rosette bloomed on her chest, and began to soak into her tunic.
"Mira!" I scrambled upright, pulling her to me.
Pistol. Close-range to the chest. No fucking way.
"Mira!" Her eyes rolled in their sockets, her body lolling in my arms. "Don't die!"
No fucking way! She couldn't die! She needed to stand trial for marketing illegal tech. She needed to answer for all the men she'd killed. For Stephanie Grey. For Mamá.
"Mira!" I shook her frozen limbs and rubbed at her graying skin. She looked tiny, hardly more than a girl. "You can't die!"
Her mouth hung slack as she whispered, "The Demon Star is rising."
"Stop saying that! It's over!"
At that, she laughed. A pitiful gurgle of a laugh, but a laugh all the same. "It's just begun. The Demon Star is rising."
"I don't understand! Tell me what you mean!"
The laughter became a murmur. "You're so simple, Ahmar."
Then, her eyes fluttered closed, her breaths quickening a little before she lay still.
Had to give it to her; lying cradled in my arms she'd used her last breath to tell me what a fucking idiot I was. What had she meant? How could Demon Star have just begun?
Sergeant Kate Fucking Jones strutted through the debris pulling the silencer off her pistol with a sharp twist. She kicked a crawling Alcor guard outta the way as she approached. The complex was suddenly overrun with Marines in desert combat uniforms, zip-tying fallen guards and stacking up tablets and laptops.
"Dante!" I clambered to my feet, my head pulsing and puke churning in my gullet. "Ibrahim Zaki murdered Stephanie Grey, and he's gonna kill Dante Russo too!"
Sergeant Jones caught me as I almost swayed head-first into a Marine carrying a tangle of cables and modems. "Leave Zaki to us, Mr Torres. You're severely injured."
She turned to two of her squad and barked orders at them. They bolted through the living room doors, another Marine hurrying after them into the darkness of the gardens. Had Zaki hurt Dante badly? Was Dante even alive? No time to fret. My boyfriend was the best. He'd hold on.
Sergeant Jones eased me to the floor with a strong hand. "Sorry we got off on the wrong foot way back when, Mr Torres."
I shrugged off my hoodie and placed it over Mira's chest and face. "I've had worse."
"My squad is confiscating all hardware and tech. Incendiary detonation of the entire Alcor complex T-minus ten minutes." The Sergeant then crouched down and whisked my hoodie off Mira's body. "Not a bad shot after all. Thought I was getting rusty."
This fucking woman.
I snatched my hoodie outta her hand and placed it back over Mira's face. I'd always thought I'd dance for joy if Mira al Assad were to die. Now that her still body was right in front of me, all I thought about was how it wouldn't bring Mamá back. And, of course she'd die having secured some death-proof plan for her illegal tech. How could Demon Star just be beginning if Mira was dead and Alcor dismantled? Eyes closed and arms outstretched, I recited four takbirs for the killer of my mother.
"Incendiary detonation T-minus nine minutes, Mr Torres."
"I gotta do something first. Please find Dante and Rayan before Zaki..."
The Sergeant's forehead furrowed. She wasn't used to taking orders from gang members in bloodstained T-shirts. "Sylvia Payne gave me specific instructions to extract you with immediate effect."
"And I'm overruling her."
"Don't be a dickhead."
I smiled. "It's OK. If I'm not in that meat wagon out front in nine minutes, blow this place to fucking dust."
"Fine. What do you need?"
"Your pistol."
She handed me her gun with a groan and marched toward the cluster of Marines at the complex entrance.
I snaked between bound Alcor operatives and stacks of computer towers toward Mira's bedroom. If the Demon Star project was so precious, it was certain to be in Mira's private residence.
Paintings came off walls, panels and bookshelves were heaved to and fro. No sign of any secret entrances. The practise room where Mira and I had sparred so many times stood silent, weapons on the walls, punchbags and crashmats everywhere. I shifted a mat, then another, then a third. A trapdoor was set into the floor, barely visible nestled among patterned tiles.
I tugged at the latch. Nothing. I guessed that was what the good Sergeant's pistol was for. The lock blew off with the second gunshot. The trapdoor swung open for me.
Five minutes until detonation, and my heart was a fucking wardrum beating in my chest. But I'd found Mira's secret lab. I wandered between dimly-lit benchtops that hummed with electronics, the lights of consoles and sensors winking on and off in the gloom. I'd found it. Demon Star.
Two long glass chambers stood before me. The first one I came to was clearly the prototype. Small and Mira-sized, it was worn and chipped in places as if it had seen decades of use. Cables trailed from glass ports to a huge bank of driver electronics, the apparatus a complex mix of tech: clunky decades-old circuit boards and sleek modern microfluidic cells sat together. The second chamber was bigger, perhaps standardized to fit a large man, its sparse driver electronics were just two slender gas canisters and a matchbox of microfluidics. This second chamber musta been for me, and was probably the prototype that the Vogel production model was based on. I peered at the logo etched into a corner of the glass.
Lazarus.
What the fuck?
It was meant to say Demon Star, not Lazarus.
Unless...Mira had been running two tech projects all along. The Lazarus project was to prolong human life, but what was the other project, Demon Star, for? And where was it?
Four minutes.
Fuck fuck fuck.
A door in the corner of the lab was the only place I hadn't checked. I shot the keypad off the wall. The door clicked open. It led to a smaller lab, again dim inside but for indicator lights on a colossal hive of electronics.
On top of a desk surrounded by meters and monitors and sensors was an oblate sphere of glass, covered with a cloth. Just like the glass sphere the María PD SWAT team had seen at Casper Vogel's spa when they'd arrested Zaki.
I crept closer, uncovering the lower corner of the sphere. It was filled with a clear fluid. Etched into the corner was the project name: Demon Star.
It couldn't be.
So, Mira had been right. It had just begun. My heart had been that fucking easy to reach.
I understood then how Mira woulda kept me by her side forever. She'd known that I'd never displease her, never leave, never hurt myself, never take my own life, all for the sake of my Star. My heart began to throb and tumble in my chest, a burst of hot tears falling.
I dragged at the cloth covering the glass chamber, letting it flutter away to the floor.
Just like Mira had said, my Star was inside. Curled up in the chamber she slept, legs crossed, eyes closed. I put my hand to the glass, so gently, so not to startle her. She slept on.
Wisps of black hair on her head, teeny tiny almost-there nails, she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. My Star.
A cord ran from her belly to a mass of white polymer gel in the corner of the chamber. Microfluidic engines pumped and measured and extracted, maintaining hormonal stability, monitoring chemical levels as they passed through an extracorporeal membrane. Not a life-support machine, or an eternal-youth machine. The Demon Star project had been an artificial womb.
Broken images from Casper Vogel's meeting at Sirius Labs flashed into my head: they musta been using lamb embryos as test subjects. I'd seen the first successful baby lamb that had been born on the Demon Star project bleating outside the business meeting. To Mira, Demon Star had been both a lucrative business venture and a perfect replacement for Rayan. My little Star wouldn't have stood a chance against Mira: not even in control of the hormones flowing into her, she'd have been obedient, programmable, property more than person.
She slept on, her body jerking rhythmically. My heart heaved in my chest. She had hiccups.
Three minutes.
The timer on the base of the chamber didn't bode well: thirty-four weeks gestation. She wasn't due yet. But she looked like a big girl, strong, healthy. She'd forgive me.
No lid, no hatches, no way to open the chamber. I slid the final throwing star out of my sock with a sigh. Buzz-saw was etched into it in the tiniest writing. I'd risk hurting my little Star, but there was no other choice.
I took a couple steps back, held the star between two fingers, and flicked. It flew across the lab, embedding itself in the lower corner of the chamber. A shrill buzz as the blades bit into the glass, then a steady whirring as sharpened steel ate away at the chamber wall. The tank's lower corner cracked in a whoosh of amniotic fluid. Impatient, I punched the glass, the chamber yawning open like an egg.
I reached in and gathered my little Star to my chest, fluid sloshing around me. She awoke, mewling like Sylvia's cats, eyes still closed, slippery limbs shivering for purchase as I hacked at the umbilical cord with a scalpel. I held her to my chest, tiny fingers grasping me.
She was so beautiful. The most wondrous thing. I loved her more than anyone could love anything.
Two minutes.
I pulled off my T-shirt, swaddling my Star as best I could. She'd begun to cry, huge gasps and wails. But it all sounded like sweet music to me. "¡Shh, mijita-mi-cielo-mi-vida!"
One minute.
The compound gates hung open on crumpled gateposts. Not a single Marine was left. Had Dante and Rayan gotten out? I covered my Star's head with a section of bloodied T-shirt, wrapped her up in my warmth and sprinted through the scrub beyond the compound entrance.
Thirty seconds.
Cradling my entire universe in my arms, I ran on.
Ten seconds.
All I needed to do was make it to the treeline, and she'd be safe from the explosion.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
I didn't make it to the treeline.
Boom, baby.
Blistering hot rubble rained down on us. My back was on fire.
I ran on, for my Star.
It was too much. Every gram of flesh separating my Star from burning shrapnel sang with delicious agony. The treeline was so close. Would anyone find us? Had Dante escaped before the blast?
I ran on, for my Star.
My head began to whirl. I was bleeding out. I staggered toward a tree, my vision wavering. My Star couldn't die, not after everything.
I brushed my lips to her little head, consciousness losing its grip. I was dying. But my Star would be OK. She'd have Dante and Rayan.
Besides, I was glad to die knowing who I was. Jason Torres. The father of my Star.
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Translations:
Takbir - Arabic, the phrase "Allahu Akbar" is called the takbir, and it means "God is the greatest" and is recited at funerals (and on a lot of other occasions)
¡shh, mijita-mi-cielo-mi-vida! - This is Jason saying a ton of cute stuff to Star. Mijita means "my little daughter", mi cielo means "my heaven" and mi vida means "my life". All of these phrases are things that spanish-speaking parents say to their kids all the time.