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“Once you come to terms with that unalterable fact, you can decide rationally how best to serve the people you are responsible for. While the Lifeweavers are still here you have some negotiating power. As they have told you, the best arrangement you can hope for can be achieved now, with their aid. After they depart, you lose your leverage, and offers will be less generous than this one. The longer this destructive insanity goes on, the worse your deal will be. Qu
estions?”
“When do you need an answer?” a delegate asked, fortunately for Duvalier in English.
“We would like a vote tonight,” the president said.
“They’re necessary for our security.”
“Time to choke a squid,” Duvalier said. “I need to go to the bathroom. Coming, Ahn-Kha?”
The mighty Grog flexed and broke off a chair leg. He handed it to Rolf.
Rolf tested the break. The hollow tube made the improvised stabbing spear look like a huge cardiac needle. “Not sharp enough.”
Duvalier took a little stiletto and shoved it into her tube-steel leg. “I think this’ll work.”
Ahn-Kha tried again with another chair. This time, he twisted the tube as he broke it. The break formed a sharp corkscrew.
“Much better,” Rolf said.
“Can we kill four? With these?” Duvalier asked.
“We just need to distract that Kurian,” Rolf said. “All we need are a few seconds of confusion.”
“Confusion is my middle name,” Duvalier said. “Give me a couple minutes, then come in like you’re security stopping a disturbance.”
She crept into the auditorium, discreetly, as though embarrassedly returning from a bathroom break, and found a seat next to Pistols and Sime.
“Don’t suppose either of you can sing backup?” she asked.
Standing up, she decided on an old number from her chanteuse days at the Blue Dome. It was way vintage pre-2022, but it always got a good response:
One way, or another, I’m gonna find ya, I’m gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha…
The “Q&A with a Kurian” sputtered out like a candle hit by a fresh breeze. The president looked at her in shock as she did a little hip grind and pointed at the Kurian. She tried to work up the courage to take off her shirt, like a surprise stripper gone terribly wrong.
“I’ll take care of her,” Ahn-Kha said, moving leisurely across a nearly empty aisle toward her. He’d acquired a security vest somewhere. Rolf moved toward her going down the stairs.
She took a few steps toward the Kurian, still singing the golden oldie. Sure enough, the Reapers moved up to form a protective wall between her and their Kurian.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, girl?” Sime shouted.
There was pandemonium all across the audience, with some standing to object, others tentatively moving to help, and still more diving for cover between the rows of seats.
Ahn-Kha, with one gentle vault of a long arm, made it to the edge of the stage, shielded somewhat by the piano.
In midline, with hands on shimmying hips, she drew and threw the stiletto in one smooth motion. She struck the midstage Reaper full in the eye.
Ahn-Kha hefted the piano and hurled it at two of the Reapers. The polished black wood shattered into a thousand sad little notes, the last the piano would ever play. The local pianist would have to import another instrument for the next Kokkola music festival.
Rolf leaped, used a chair to vault, and was on the stage in an instant. A Reaper moved to intercept, and he stabbed it hard enough with the improvised spear that the point came out black on the mid-back. He pried the dead thing off as Duvalier made it to the stage, ready to bury her teeth in the Kurian if she had to.
Ahn-Kha and Rolf were fighting the Reapers knocked down by the piano.
The Kurian was a diffuse blur, fleeing toward the stage door opposite the wreckage of the piano. But she was faster, and snatched it up by what turned out to be the crotch between two of its longer legs.
“Gotcha,” she said.
