The Viper's Queen

Chapter 11 — The Shift in Strategy

The blanket slid off the bed.

Cold air hit my legs and I was upright before I was even fully awake. One hand drove under the pillow looking for a knife that wasn't there.

It was never there. I knew that. My hands looked anyway.

The lights came on hard and bright.

Varek stood at the foot of the bed.

Not in a suit. Not in anything dark and severe. Just worn blue work pants and a gray shirt with a scuffed leather holster on his belt. The shadows under his eyes were deep and heavy, the kind you got from spending a night doing something that needed a clear head.

"Get up," he said.

Pushing up on my elbows sent a dull deep ache through my ribs where the armor had pressed all night. The kind of pain that was going to get worse before it got better. "What time is it?"

"Time to make sure you survive the week." He turned toward the door. "Boots. Sixty seconds."

Out without closing the door.

I got up.

Head like wet concrete. Syris's voice is still scraping around the inside of my skull.

She was killed. On purpose.

The sick feeling sat in my throat and I swallowed it down hard. It came back. I swallowed it again and kept moving because that was the only thing that worked. Canvas jacket on. Boots laced over bare feet. One breath in the doorway before walking out.

Tor was in the hallway by the stairs.

The look on his face was different than before. Not the flat blank assessment of a guard checking a door. Something older than that. The look you gave something you had been told was gone and had just walked back into the room.

Filed. Keep moving.

Varek opened a panel near the end of the hall. Behind it was a heavy lift with metal doors. We got in. As it dropped the air pressure changed and my ears popped.

The scratched metal doors reflected both of us back in pieces. Varek stared at them. The smell coming off him was strong coffee and old gunpowder. Nothing unnecessary had been said since the car last night and the feeling in the lift was that nothing unnecessary was coming now either.

The lift hit the bottom hard.

Doors opened.

The nice parts of the estate were gone. Just a big concrete box cut into the rock. The air system overhead was loud and losing the fight against the stale air. The smell reached me the second I stepped out... sharp chemicals and something flat and metal underneath.

Guns. And the stuff you cleaned them with.

A shooting range.

A black pistol came up off the table. Magazine pressed in, top pulled back... the sound of it very loud in the concrete room. Set back down.

"Syris knows your face now," Varek said. Not looking at me. "He knows you were standing at that pillar alone. He knows how long you were there before I came back." A turn. "He'll read that as a weakness."

"It wasn't a weakness."

"I know what it was." A hand closed around my wrist and walked me to a faded yellow line painted on the floor. Fifteen steps away a paper target hung on a wire. "In this world it doesn't matter what it actually was. It only matters what it looked like."

Coming in close behind me, shoulder against mine, the gun pressed into my right hand. Not careful about the space at all.

The grip was rough against my sore palm.

"Both eyes open," Varek said. Voice dropping low under the sound of the air system. "Front sight. Don't think about the trigger. Just breathe out and let it happen."

His hand wrapped over mine. A boot nudged my feet wider, setting them the way he wanted them.

I let him move me.

Down the barrel at the paper target. The locket was heavy in my jacket pocket.

You move like you were trained for it. He'd said that the first night. Before I understood what it meant. Before the crest. Before Tor's face went white in the doorway.

I understand it now.

"Breathe out," Varek said. "Let the trigger go when the air does."

Breath out.

And something under my thoughts took over.

Not a choice. My body just moved. Hips dropped. The left hand came up and wrapped around the right. Wrists locked at an angle that wasn't what he'd set them in. The whole stance shifted into something lower and tighter and more ready.

Not his way of standing.

Something older.

The chest behind me stopped moving.

His hand was still over mine and the grip changed... not tighter, just different. The way a hand changed when it was reading something it hadn't expected to find.

"Fire," he said. Tight.

The trigger went.

Bang filled the concrete room. The gun pushed back hard but the wrists held and the muzzle barely moved. Hot brass spun off to the side. The smell reached me immediately... sharp and burnt and real.

Gun lowered.

One hole in the target. High on the chest. Not the center. Higher. The spot that stopped someone fast.

Varek let go and took one full step back.

Turning to look at him, the expression on his face wasn't surprising. It was something quieter. The look of a man watching something confirms what he had already feared was true. Eyes moving over the angle of the wrists. The shape the body had made without deciding to make it.

The range was very quiet.

Just the air system. Both of us were breathing.

"That way of standing," Varek said. Carefully. The way you talked around something that might break if you hit it too hard. "Where did your father teach you that?"

Gun kept down. Muzzle toward the floor. The way you held it when someone had shown you right.

"He didn't," I said. "I just knew it."

A long moment. His jaw moved once.

Then he turned and walked to the table. Another magazine came up and was held out without looking back.

"Again," he said.

The magazine went in. The top of the gun pulled back.

Steady hands. The locket sat heavy in my pocket. Gunpowder in the cold air.

Just knew it.

That was the thing I couldn't explain and couldn't stop thinking about. Not learned. Not drilled. Just there, living in my body, the way breathing was there, the way catching myself before a fall was there. My father had put a thousand things into my hands and my legs and my wrists over twenty years and I had always been able to trace them back to him. To a specific cold floor and a specific instruction and the specific sting of getting it wrong.

This didn't trace back to anything.

Which meant it had been there before him.

Which meant it had come from somewhere else entirely.

Front sight lined up.

Trigger pulled.