Chapter 79 78
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The jump back to the library — with Logan's cloned daughter dangling limply from my grip like a kitten caught by the scruff — was fast. Instantaneous, to be precise. Distance makes no difference to my jumps. I simply connect two points in space into one and step from one to the other, without moving at all relative to myself. Time isn't involved in the process whatsoever. I can say that with certainty, because my jumps work even in a freeze-frame — when there's no such thing as time at all. The two forces don't touch each other, as if they exist in separate dimensions. Which, in fact, is exactly what they do: meters and seconds will never intersect. You can't subtract meters from seconds. You can't add seconds to meters. Dividing distance by time does carry some meaning, admittedly, but that's all just idle philosophizing.
My emergence from the door of the library's storage room surprised everyone present — except Natasha, who had made it back from the entrance in time. Surprised is perhaps too mild a word. Shocked is more accurate. And then scandalized by my appearance: the sweater and shirt I'd been wearing when I arrived in the reading room had been reduced to rags, which I'd discarded, leaving my torso bare. My feet were also bare — the ruined remnants of my shoes had been shed somewhere along the way. My trousers, however, had survived.
For two reasons.
The first: I am meticulous, always, about selecting that particular item of clothing. Every pair of trousers in my wardrobe, regardless of how they look on the outside, is custom-made and meets the most demanding operational requirements imaginable. Only the toughest fabric — including Kevlar threading — goes into them. Every seam is double, triple, quadruple-stitched, and the thread itself is specialized. I don't skimp on this. I got tired of ending up bare-assed every time I pushed my body anywhere close to its limits. Got tired of it during the War, in fact — always having to scavenge something roughly the right size after a fight. From corpses.
The second reason my trousers survived in any form: this is Marvel. Even the Hulk's trousers stay on. They may undergo what you might call an elegant transformation into shorts, but they survive. Mine did too. Above the knee, at least. Below the knee — no. I genuinely have no idea how that happened. But you can't argue with the laws of the universe.
My hair, previously combed neatly into a respectable side sweep, was now wild and unkempt, no longer masking the feral quality of my — face. The Eye of Agamotto, never returned to my wife, hung from my neck in the center of my bare chest. While I'd been crawling and sprinting along the trail, I'd held it between my teeth so it wouldn't swing around and distract me. I'd only let it out of my mouth twice: once to say something to the student who'd recognized me, and once to address the little kid. I was fairly sure I hadn't chewed through it or punctured it. To confirm this, I removed the trinket and examined it carefully. I even built an activation circuit — unpleasant as it was to deal with magic — and the thing worked. That meant no lecture from my wife. The trinket wasn't mine.
A sigh of relief escaped before I could stop it. After which I carefully wiped the amulet clean of my saliva on what was left of my trousers, and put it back around my neck.
"What?" I asked the crowd still staring at me. "Here's your killer." I gave the girl lying on the floor beside me a light nudge with my foot — trussed up hand and foot in rebar. "Or do I have to conduct the interrogation myself too?"
That question broke the paralysis that had taken hold of the room. The KGB officers stirred, started moving. X-23 was hauled away.
"Where are you headed now, Viktor Ivanovich?" Natasha came up beside me.
"Okinawa," I told her. "Want to come?"
"N-no," she said, with clear reluctance. "I'm needed here."
"Then go to the Federation. Get things organized with Bruce. I'll be back in a couple of hours. I'll address everyone."
"Understood!" She straightened up, practically coming to attention. "Permission to proceed, Comrade Colonel?"
"Proceed, Comrade Major," I played along. "General Assembly of the Federation. The Field Seminar begins at nineteen hundred hours."
Romanova's face broke into an involuntary smile of genuine delight. The people around her, on the other hand, twitched visibly and seemed to draw their heads down into their shoulders. The Chairman of the State Security Committee glanced with some concern at his wristwatch. And, if I wasn't mistaken, set a timer. Or an alarm.
I didn't particularly care either way. I slipped back into the library storeroom and jumped to Okinawa. To Kume-jima, specifically.
Yui was in the middle of a class at his dojo, which was where I emerged — in one of the less conspicuous corners, not wanting to advertise the jump any more than necessary. At this point, jumps had long since ceased to be a secret, but I still saw no reason to put them on display.
Yui noticed me the moment I came around the corner of the building, and raised a hand in greeting to get my attention.
"Ohayo, old man. Still breathing?"
"You'll wait a long time before I don't," I said drily. "Come on, we need to talk."
"Let's go," he said, not arguing. No one argues with the Pack Leader, as a rule. Defiance carries consequences — and serious ones at that. Certain liberties were permitted in words. But in practice… Iosif had been right. I'm a tyrant and a dictator — especially within my Pack. It's hardwired into us by nature itself. I will demand obedience, I will enforce obedience. And I will be obeyed without question, for as long as I have the strength to defend my right to lead. Until Yui — or Tatsumi — throws me a Challenge and proves he is stronger. Proves he is the new Pack Leader.
The Pack. Others, from the outside, will never understand it.
"Carry on," Yui said to his students. "Kazuki, you're in charge," he told a large Creed in the front row wearing a black belt over white dogi. The young man nodded and stepped out of the line, took Yui's place, and resumed the sharp, guttural count that my arrival had interrupted.
"What happened to you?" Yui asked, falling into step beside me as we left the dojo. "You look… distinguished."
"I was hunting," I told him, and ran my tongue involuntarily over my fangs.
"Oh," Yui said, with naked envy in his voice. "Was the prey worthy? Did it let you enjoy the chase?"
"Yes," I said, and my lips stretched into a satisfied snarl.
"Ah… I haven't hunted in a while," Yui said, going quieter.
"How come? Pirates dry up?"
"Pirates…" He gave a short, humorless laugh. "Pirates have been giving our waters a wide berth for about forty years now. You couldn't lure them back here for any amount of money. All we've got left is smugglers. But those ones we do business with — you don't hunt a business partner."
"Missing it?" I considered.
"The Pack needs to let off steam," Yui said. "The Circles aren't enough on their own. You know that better than anyone."
"True enough." I thought for a moment. "All right. You'll have your hunt. Can everyone track 'by the trail'?"
"Not everyone. But not everyone needs to. I only want to air out the senior ones."
"Fine. Midnight. Wait for me in the Circle. Only those who have already shed real blood. Don't touch the 'clean' ones. This hunt is going to be… bloody."
"We'll be waiting!" Yui's lips spread into a predator's snarl, and his eyes flashed with something dangerous. "Where are we going now?"
"To the crypt," I said shortly.
"It's not That Day?" Yui frowned.
"They've had enough time lying around. They need to get up," I replied.
"You found a way?" His head came up sharply.
"I did. Let's go."
***
The crypt was the same as I remembered it: dry, clean, well-lit, stone. The windows were different now — plastic frames, proper double-glazed panes instead of the old wooden ones — but the coffins stood in their same orderly rows. Imposing and grim. Exactly alike, black, without a single ornament or pattern, just as we had placed them in forty-five.
No, I was wrong. It wasn't only the windows that had changed. The lids of the coffins had changed too. They had been lacquered plywood before. Now they were transparent plastic.
I approved of the change. Practical.
I moved to the center of the open space between the rows, squared my stance, let out a growl of distaste, and built the control circuits around my right hand.
The second time was considerably easier than the first. And considerably more unpleasant. Back in the library there had been urgency, no time to think — here, time was no issue at all, and the absence of urgency left room for every bit of revulsion I felt toward the work.
But I crushed the irritation and aversion through sheer force of will. Decades of training one's self-control exist for moments like this. I had, in fact, learned to be the master of myself and my instincts.
The beautiful, rotating green chains of symbols, the geometric constructions, and the force that hummed behind them made Yui step back involuntarily — and even give a low, muffled growl, every hair on him standing up.
Hm. Was that it? My hatred of magic — it wasn't solely Issei's doing? It's innate to our kind? Instinctive? How interesting.
But this wasn't the moment for that train of thought. Calibration. Grid step selection. Begin rewinding.
And that was… considerably harder than it had been with Stalin. With him, I'd been counting minutes. Here, it was years. To move my arm required an effort like shoving a Tiger tank sideways by the track — by hand. And the resistance grew with every millimeter covered, every year rewound.
I was snarling with pain and strain, with fury that some Zen-forsaken something dared resist me. The fury rose higher and higher, rolling in like a tidal wave, blazing up like a wildfire through Taiga pines.
I snarled. I roared. Yui had been pushed back to the very entrance of the crypt, where he stood on all fours, arching his back like a cat about to strike — if he wasn't hissing outright, it was only because I couldn't hear it over the noise I was making.
And the coffins in front of me kept looking newer, fresher. The lids were plywood again. The smell of fresh lacquer grew stronger. Stronger still.
And then the coffins simply ceased to exist, and the bodies fell to the floor. They fell and, before my eyes, began to restore themselves — healing, becoming whole again.
And then the moment arrived: my children rose to their feet. Alive.
I stopped my arm.
What was left of it.
From the shoulder down, there was nothing. The symbols, the chains, the circuits — all of it hung in the air, suspended around nothing.
I extinguished the circuits with an act of will and closed the Eye.
The arm wasn't growing back. The bleeding from the stump had stopped on its own — no longer gushing the way it had during the working, though it still seeped. And the stump itself wasn't clean. It looked like the arm had exploded from the inside. Which, now that I thought about it, was possibly exactly what had happened — I simply hadn't noticed, too busy pushing and pushing something with no substance, not registering that there was no longer anything to push with.
That explained the pain.
Well. The fact that the bleeding stopped on its own — no tourniquet, no cauterization — that was a good sign. It meant the regeneration was still functioning. Just very, very slowly.
An interesting side effect that the Book of Cagliostro hadn't mentioned. Or perhaps had mentioned, and I hadn't caught it. The language in that book is ornate enough that you'd need to be half out of your mind to parse what the author actually meant half the time.
Didn't matter. If it didn't grow back on its own, I'd commission a prosthetic from Stark. Or think of something else. This was Marvel, after all.
"Rise and shine, sleepyheads!" I said with a friendly growl, pulling my lips back in a welcoming snarl. "We've got a hunt waiting."
And mirror-image snarls began to spread across the faces of the fair-haired young men and women in World War Two camouflage as, from the tips of their fingers, formidable claws emerged — splitting through the skin.
***
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