CHAPTER 53 – Kiss With a Fist

Veritas.

Truth.

That great and nebulous capture of personal reality.

Vaughan’s sophistry hung in the air with the weight of a sword by a thread of human hair, smelling simultaneously of metal and sulphur. With a [System] like hers, she half expected there to be an Ariel and a Caliban popping up on either side of her shoulders, but it was only Prospero’s bony hands that weighed down on her mind and soul.

What will you do now? That was the implication of Vaughan’s message. Show me who you really are.

Her mentor’s sentiment felt like loam after a summer squall, present, heavy, real.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Yet, Juliana was wrong. Her [System] told her so. Her [Wisdom], in conjunction with her [Script Analysis], would not allow the inter-textual obfuscation to pass. In the play, Hamlet was NOT being sincere. He was testing his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, these men who called him their bosom companions. He gave them every opportunity to repent. He asked them twice if they had exercised their God-given goodness, and twice, they had deflected and lied. Choice by choice, step by step, the men chose their own death.

Hamlet had then shaken his head and responded with the modern-day equivalent of, “Heh.”

Hamlet was the ploy laid by her chief curator. There was a duality to Juliana; she could see it now. The bright-eyed genius who had married into the Vaughan estate and guarded her husband’s dream for five decades. It was impossible to think that such a woman wouldn’t have a Machiavellian side.

Such was Juliana’s theatre of cruelty.
She was a terrifying woman.

Unfortunately for Vaughan, Eppie never liked Hamlet, not even outside AP English. Hamlet was a righteous cunt. Hamlet had qualified, soliloquised, deferred, and let his Uncle live for four acts, and Ophelia had died to feed his revenge. The way that philosophical thespian had treated Ophelia was a crime. No. In Eppie’s revenge, she would not allow Ophelia to die, spy or not, traitor or otherwise.

She would not play in Vaughan’s theatre; she had another play in mind.

Eppie looked at her presumed teacher, the lady of the house, the mentor who had dressed her up as Andrey and showed her a world that not even Lana could reach with all her capital.

“Between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma,” she quoted Brutus to her erstwhile mentor with Cooper’s theatre voice, resplendent with the fatalism of Antigone’s unwavering faith in the law of the Gods, not men.

Vaughan looked back, and her expression was the expression of a woman waiting for the opera to start. Perhaps she had read the programme and knew the ending. Perhaps she was waiting to see how the new production would surprise her.

Her mentor did not respond.

Eppie looked across the gallery, through the press of bodies and the amber light and the chandelier, her [Perfect Pitch] picking up the clinks and the laughter. In the time that she had been held hostage by indecision, Valorie and Grein had gone to perform their merry deed.

Fuck.

Thankfully, the double French doors to the outside were askew. It was obvious where they had gone.

“Excuse me,” she said politely.

She leapt. Her action said fuck your sophistry.

For a second, Eppie considered showing the guest the incredible, once-in-a-lifetime sight of a girl in Givenchy leaping from the second floor in four-inch Chanels. Instead, she half-slid down the polished granite bannister, her skinny buttocks taking the punishment as her heels landed with a click, pushing her [Agility] to its utmost not to snap her ankles.

She knew what to do.
Calm rationality dictated that Val was old enough to set William on her victims and so could take responsibility for herself.
Cold calculus deduced that what she had done to Mio was far worse than what she could herself consent to.

And yet.
And yet.
She was Brutus in the orchard, left with nought but the act and the reasons.
The reasons to save Valorie were insufficient. And yet she didn’t need sufficient reason to pull a girl from the grasp of a [Karmic Parasite], just as Brutus knew that human fallacy lay not in fates or stars or the fixed machinery of a world indifferent to intervention.

The fault was in ourselves.

The intent was all.

She threaded through the crowd, who had yet to notice her. Unlike Valorie, she was a feline personified, her presence a mere slipstream. She thought about kicking off the heels, but by the time her brain had caught up, she was already at the French doors.

Like a cat, she slipped between the gap, ready to grab her redhead and drag her back into the room.

Eppie stepped out into the cold.
The frigid wind wrapped around her bare legs, then blasts of warm air from the interior dispelled their hold.

Where the fuck—

Her heart sank.
She was on the wrong balcony!
OF COURSE, she was at the wrong balcony!
Who the hell takes a senator’s daughter out for a salacious deal and leaves the door unlocked? Did Grein want people to hear? To see? To witness the glorious moment that Valorie’s spine went supine?

Her eyes scanned the dark, taking their god damn time to adjust.

Outside the manor, there were three semi-circular balconies, all hanging from the front facade, overlooking the terrace gardens, above which hung the cold light of a New York December. Each terrace had its own manicured, tiny Christmas tree in an oval ash-white terracotta pot. Her balcony sat on the far right.

She saw them.
Grein, Valorie, and Marie, their silhouettes unmistakable in the dark, backlit by the galleria’s light. Grein, his mass unmistakable, had his back toward them, standing to the right edge, facing Valorie. Valorie stood still as a greek statue, her face illuminated by the amber light, facing Grein with a fatalistic expression of drunk optimism. Marie stood at the double doors, barring anyone from entering or exiting. With the drapes as an additional barrier, there was little reason anyone else would witness what was about to transpire.

Grein was speaking. He had now migrated past Valorie’s elbow. While one hand gesticulated, the other was already beside her bodice.

One second, the fingers were visible. The next—

THE MOTHER FUCKER!

Am I too late? Eppie despaired, her heart pounding in her throat. For a second, she seriously considered the possibility of using [Agility] and [Strength] to parkour across the balcony’s spaces. It was three odd meters at best. With her enhanced body, surely she could make it. Besides, even if she didn’t, another rooftop event might just trigger Valorie enough to think twice about continuing to get jiggy with Grein.

With one white calf up the balcony’s balustrade, her eyes caught sight of the Christmas trees in their terracotta pots.

It was the kind of pot made for the lobby of a country estate—wide as a large cat, planted with a topiary that had been trimmed into a perfect cone, sitting on a stone plinth beside the balustrade. It was, conservatively, thirty-five kilograms of fired clay, five kilograms of soil, and five kilos of tree.

Eppie dropped to the floor.

Lift with your knees, not your back, said the OSHA manual.

And that’s what she did.

With her [Strength] of 20, capable of lifting her own body weight with complete ease, she lifted her [Noblesse Oblige] from the plinth. Then, like a hammer thrower, she spun, destroying her Chanels in the process, keeping her balance through sheer karmic resolve to launch her [Noblesse Oblige] in an arc.

The [Noblesse Oblige] travelled through the air lazily, shedding tree, soil, rainwater, and pebbles.

Her [Noblesse Oblige] fell short.

Instead of reaping Grein with her utmost and heartfelt expression of [Noblesse Oblige], the terracotta struck the balustrade, then shattered into ten thousand lesser shards of [Noblesse], transforming into grapeshot.

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It was a [Sublime] moment. So sublime that Eppie did not realise the Christmas tree had caught onto her Givenchy folds and tore the slip of a dress to shreds. She had not noticed that, in the heat of the moment, the accumulated December rainwater had sloshed over the dress and drenched her singularly shattered Chanel shoes. She did not realise that the effort, the weight, the sheer catharsis of bestowing Valorie her [Noblesse Oblige] had torn her nails, scraped the skin from her wrist, her palm and her upper thigh, and that the tree had cut her cheek and nicked her ears.

But in that moment, she had become Brutus.
The noblest Roman of them all.

Then she fled from the scene like Remi from Ratatouille.

On the third floor of the Vaughan manor, above Eppie, above Grein and above the party, Aziz Malouf could not believe what the fuck he was seeing.

He knew what he should be seeing, seeing as Héloïse, the party photographer, had informed him ten minutes ago that Grein was making a move on the redhead.

He was on loan to Madam Vaughan, arranged through Lady Mirabelle, his current contractor. Aziz had recently returned from Darfur, and his photojournalism work had been shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize. The Madam had told Aziz that they would be catching monsters tonight, and Aziz had happily taken the paycheque and the prestige.

Nobody noticed Aziz. The thing about photographers at a Gala was that they were invisible. It was the strangest thing, yet it was true. One might think that a lad hoisting a full-frame flash and three lenses might appear intrusive, but the opposite was true.

When the trio appeared, Aziz shot twelve frames in the first minute.

He did not stop when Grein’s hand slipped under. Fucking animal.

He shot eight more.

He was starting to feel artistic when the god damn terracotta pot arrived. It was only on the second snap that Aziz saw a dark bloom of soil, joined by what looked like a torn tree, erupt like a cannonball from the Pirates movies against the balustrade.

SNAP— Grein took the blast to the back, his body shielding the girls, the force laying him flat on the sandstone like a scene from Darfur involving a UN Jeep and an RPG.

The redhead fell back, brushed by the blast hard enough to hit her head on the French door, jarring the locking mechanism.

Grein’s co-conspirator suffered almost no injuries until the soil blinded her and she fell to one side.

In a split-second, before the chaos even landed, Aziz’s camera spun.
He was a war photographer.
He pointed at the source, and he snapped away.