Episode 100

(Washington D.C., August 9, 2019)

The big challenge would be protecting Daryl’s family, but this wasn’t optional. Without them, his redemption would be impossible. There would be no nobility in sacrificing everything if he had nothing to sacrifice. When only a single course remained him, choosing it would merit neither approbation nor censure. It would say nothing about his character.

The boy needed a choice. Without that, Rin could not be certain of him. He had to be given the opportunity to make the right decision, to remedy that critical error from years ago. Now that he had experienced what it meant to be ordinary, life with Rin would be far more appealing.

Yes she would kill him — eventually — but he had always known that. Why else would he have sought her out back then? Getting murdered was one of the perks of being with her. Karkov hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already understand. She couldn’t blame that man or his machinations for the choice Daryl had made. Perhaps the boy really was a coward all along.

As an emblem of her magnanimity, Rin would allow him to return to her side for a time. Would he have the strength to extricate himself from his mediocrity and embrace the proffered salvation? It was said that Hannibal entered Capua with one army and left with another. A single winter of the comforts afforded by that decadent place had softened his men beyond repair. For all his brilliance, the general had not managed to restore his army’s lost manhood.

Rin had many lifetimes’ more experience, and Daryl was a single subject. Perhaps repairing him would not be beyond her skill. Besides, Katrina and a couple of screaming brats were a far cry from the enticements of ancient Capua. Most men would risk battle and death to escape such a fate.

Did he even realize what he had become? Perhaps it was like a lobotomy, and he would never sense that something irretrievable had been taken. If so, Daryl was long gone and there would be no reason to bother killing the stranger who had assumed his place.

There was only one way to find out. She would offer him a choice, a chance to walk by her side once more. However, he would have to do more than just choose correctly. He would have to make the right choice for the right reason. Why he chose Rin would determine how long their walk together would be. Either way, his eventual end would be a kindness. What greater gift could she offer? There was no purer act of love than to save him from the indignity of existence.

Rin wondered whether she was being overly indulgent. How many people got a second chance at life, let alone at her? Death one day by her hand was surely preferable to life every day with Katrina. No, it was unfair to pin everything on her. That woman hadn’t turned him into this any more than a pet dog could turn its master into a fawning fool. Daryl did this to himself, and only he could undo it. For this, he had to have a meaningful choice — and that meant keeping his family alive.

But, how to proceed? The first thing Rin wanted to ascertain was why the government was targeting her. They could have various different motives, and these demanded very different approaches. Ordinarily, such nuance was immaterial, but here Daryl’s safety depended upon it.

The whole thing could be part of a general dragnet aimed at catching Proteges. Rin had long suspected that the government employed at least a few Proteges, and the man she had interrogated confirmed as much. Their “specials” either had been recruited or were being coerced. Judging from the government’s high-handed tactics so far, Rin was pretty sure they weren’t volunteers. This meant they probably were low numbers.

If the enemy was attempting to use Daryl to control Rin, she would let them. As a tool to secure her cooperation, he would be safe. They either would release him once she acquiesced or they would keep him as a hostage, but they wouldn’t kill him. They’d probably hang on to him and dangle the prospect of his release as a carrot. Either way, he wouldn’t be mistreated as long as she was a good little soldier. It would be easy to persuade them that they were in charge, especially given their general arrogance.

The ideal scenario was that they didn’t know much about her. They probably suspected that she wasn’t a low number. Otherwise, they would have employed direct physical coercion. A hostage meant that they wanted leverage, something needed only for higher numbers.

However, this was far from certain. They could just be using Daryl as bait to capture Rin, without realizing that she wasn’t a low number. It was unclear what this would entail for the boy’s prospects, though. If they didn’t see her as a threat, they quite possibly could release Daryl as a token of good will. Alternately, they could kill him to show they meant business. They wouldn’t worry about earning the enmity of a low number, especially a slave.

If they did think she was a higher number, then Daryl probably was safe. He would be their only means of controlling her, and Rin doubted they would risk that. There also was the possibility — albeit remote — that they somehow knew what she really was. In that case, they certainly would play nice. If they wanted immortality or the means of producing it, they wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize their chances.

Things would be a lot easier if she knew how much information they had. If they did know about her, they probably heard it from Karkov. Perhaps he had not anticipated that they would target Daryl or just did not care. Even after all these years, she had no idea why the man did the things he did. It seemed unlikely that he would imperil Daryl after all the trouble he went through for the boy, but “unlikely” wasn’t “impossible”. And things changed. If there was one thing Rin knew for certain, it was that nothing was certain where Karkov was concerned.

Boiling it all down, the key relevant unknown was what they would ask of her. To a large extent, it didn’t really matter. Any difference in strategy would arise later in the game. At this early stage, all the scenarios called for the same approach. Rin would let them “recruit” her. She would appear servile, afraid, or pliable as needed to ensure Daryl’s safety. This would have the additional advantage of securing her access to a pre-assembled team of Proteges. She’d be sure to thank the government for this bountiful buffet — right before having them for dessert.

The question was how to get recruited. She couldn’t make it seem too easy, or they’d grow suspicious. She needed to get their attention in a natural way, and this was bound to be messy. It would be an intricate dance, and any missteps could redound on Daryl. She would have to ensure that the right people had the right motivation at the right time.

However, there was something more pressing. She first had to safeguard the card she had, and this meant relocating Katrina and the kids to safe longer-term accommodations. Once Rin went to work, things could get ugly. In fact, she was counting on it. Any known associates would be in obvious danger, and Daryl’s family doubly so. Before she’d be able to resume contact with them after that, she would need to become unrecognizable. If she was being extra cautious, the family would be on its own for six months or longer. And if things spiraled out of control, as they well could, it could conceivably stretch into years.

The more she thought about it, the more Rin reached the inescapable conclusion that attacking the most powerful government in the world to save a human captive while simultaneously protecting that captive’s family was utterly infeasible on her own. She needed help, but human help would not suffice. She would have to go outside her usual channels for this one, and that meant relying on Proteges. The fact that she had driven most of them into hiding made recruitment somewhat challenging.

Which ones to use? They would have to be Proteges who could not possibly be under the government’s thumb. This meant Eights. Eights or higher. No, just Eights. Karkov was quite possibly the cause of this whole mess. Even if it wasn’t his doing, he would be too damned insufferable. The man credited himself with bringing Daryl and Rin together, and he announced it at every opportunity — of which Rin gave him few — yet somehow failed to mention how he also was responsible for convincing Daryl to leave her. There were limits to how much of his malarkey she could stomach.

Rin could just see his smug, knowing grin when he learned that she had been stalking Daryl and now wanted to save him. She would have a hard enough time putting up with that, let alone all the manipulative, condescending games before he finally agreed to help. If he agreed to help, though she was fairly certain he would.

But there was an even bigger problem with the idea. She could not rely on the man. Though she certainly didn’t buy Karkov’s protestations of love and devotion, he did have a certain sense of honor. Rin was confident that if he agreed to help, he would do so in good faith. He would intend to do his part and would be extraordinarily competent about it. There would be no intentional betrayal, but that didn’t mean there would be no betrayal. Betrayal was in the man’s nature. Karkov was not capable of playing the obedient soldier. He would get bored or think he knew better or decide to spice things up a bit.

The man would always act as he saw fit, and there was no telling in advance what this would be. When the whole operation collapsed in a heap of dung peppered with the corpses of Daryl and his family, Karkov would croon that this was what she really wanted all along and that he knew her better than she knew herself.

As a youth, Rin had found his irrepressible willfulness alluring. Now, it just seemed like narcissism. She had wanted an equal as her husband but had not realized how imprudent this was. A husband was an enemy, and only a fool would desire an enemy to be their equal. Karkov was a poor choice back then, and he would be a poor choice now.

Not for the first time, Rin wished she had Sree to turn to. Though encumbering her beloved sister had not been her desire, she had done so anyway. Nothing in the universe could change that. What was gone was gone. Time and entropy moved in only one direction, even for immortals. However, this itself gave her an idea.

She could recruit those two knuckleheads. He was responsible for Sree’s suicide, and his sister was responsible for him — and a lot else. They both owed Rin a great deal, not even including the immortality she had bestowed upon them — which she felt it would be unfair to count, given the horrific way she planned to turn it against them.

Yes, the two of them would do just fine. The brother would be even less reliable than Karkov — though for very different reasons — but the form of his disobedience was predictable and manageable. There was nothing subtle about the man. What you saw was what you got, unappealing as that was. If things got out of hand, his sister would keep him in line. She’d just fuck him into submission. Heck, she’d probably do that even if he didn’t get out of line.

There was one tiny problem. Unlike most Proteges, these two actually knew that Rin was the one hunting them. At least, she was fairly certain they did. Even as a child, she never had been able to outwit that woman. She sometimes wondered why she had made someone so dangerous into an immortal, but it felt inevitable. If anyone had a claim to that gift, it was her.

However, the woman would soon learn that her claim was to a curse not a gift. Like so many of her compatriots, she would spend eternity wishing she was mortal. Rin may not have been able to outmaneuver her as a child, but she was much more experienced now and had forever to succeed. However, that would be a problem for another day. The problem for today was how to get their help, especially if they knew she was hunting them.

Fortunately, the problem also furnished the solution. If they did know, they could be bargained with. They weren’t fools, or at least she wasn’t — and she’d bring her brother around. Rin had something to offer them, something of great worth.

She would offer them time. Not all of it, as they surely would hope and demand and plead for. But they would accept the deal anyway. After all, who on their deathbed didn’t beg for another day, another hour, another minute? The question was how much time would be enough?

Yes, this would work nicely. Best of all, the two of them would be easy to find. All Rin had to do was type a few words. The only reason she hadn’t already encumbered them was that, for quite different reasons, they were at the bottom of her list. Did they realize this, or were they just reckless?

Maybe they wanted to die. If so, would they be interested in such a deal? She could offer them an easier form of damnation, but Rin wasn’t sure she wanted to. Was Daryl’s family worth such a thing?

Having made her decision, she turned on her computer. Finding them would take only a quick search online. They weren’t exactly inconspicuous. After all, he fancied himself a superhero.