“She’s sleeping,” Alister said, closing the door lightly. The heavy metal doors of the Lunar Dial weren’t exactly meant to close silently, but he still tried so as to not wake Dorothy. Gideon sat just outside, reading a book in a chair that he had dragged out to the hall. He was still fully armed from his own excursion out into the city. A precaution Alice had insisted upon. There really wasn’t so much space in the cramped vessel walkways for him to be fully geared out with a chair, but Alister didn’t complain. It might be necessary.
“I was convinced that she was an insomniac from how she wandered about the ship at all hours on the way over here.”
“Well, she’s had a rough day.”
“She’s not the one who got shot.”
“She isn’t a soldier. Bullets whiz past us every week and we barely blink an eye by the next evening. Alice is… Alice. Dorothy is just a young girl. A civilian barely out of high school.” He shook his head. “Try to keep that in mind. She is more of a guest aboard the ship. Someone to be escorted for her safety. That doesn’t mean that she’s a prisoner. However, Alice doesn’t want anyone seeing her. She doesn’t think we have any traitors aboard given that nothing happened between here and Gibraltar, but we’re still taking care. No one outside the Core is to be seeing her.”
“Yeah, I heard Alice’s orders same as you. No need to repeat it all to me,” Gideon said, looking back to his book. Another one of his regency romance novels. Alister had tried reading one once on recommendation. The thing was so dry and… relationship heavy. He had barely made it a paragraph in before wondering if the whole thing was some sort of practical joke. But they were one of the few things that Gideon actually seemed to enjoy, so he wasn’t about to rain on the old man’s parade. Though he almost commented when Gideon pulled out a small cigarette from somewhere on his person and hung it on the edge of his lip, where he just left it as he turned a page. The old man never made a move to light it. A wise decision given the temper tantrum Alice would throw if he actually started smoking aboard her ship.
Speaking of… “Where is Alice? Still in the infirmary?”
“Last I heard, Doc was tearing her a new one.”
“Of course.” Alice had been walking around, putting pressure on her leg, and otherwise agitating her injury. Precisely the things Doc hated to hear. “I’ll leave you to it then, though I might check up later.”
“Yeah, yeah. Even an old man can handle guard duty,” Gideon said, turning a page.
Alister left the curmudgeonous old man behind, heading up a few levels until he reached the closed infirmary door. He knocked twice and waited until he heard Alice shout out that it was alright to enter. He opened it to find Alice lying on an operation table on her stomach without a scrap of clothing on. Scars of varying shapes and sizes covered nearly her entire body from her shoulders down to her feet. Her forearms and hands were wrinkled and red with the remnants of ancient burns. Somehow she had managed to keep her face almost completely free of damage. There was just a little scar that ran from her eyebrow back toward her hairline that she normally kept covered either with sunglasses or her black hair.
Doc sat at the foot of the table, just finishing wrapping up her leg in some fresh bandages.
“A full inspection?” Alister said as he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. Nothing in the room was anything he hadn’t seen before. Anytime she was even suspected of being injured, Doc had to give her a full rundown. Alice literally couldn’t tell if she was injured without seeing the wound. Her body didn’t register pain at all. Frankly, it was a wonder she had survived childhood. Most of her scars were from before she had even turned eight years old. “There was only the one bullet wound, right?”
“Better to be safe than sorry. Half the time, she doesn’t report an injury even when she knows she has one.”
“Half the time, I have more important things to do than get stripped down and looked over for ten hours.”
“Nothing is more important than your body’s wellbeing,” Doc said with a firm tone. “I swear, we’ll pull your body out of a morgue locker one day and it will still manage to rise up and say ‘I’m fine.’ Now, I don’t want to see you walking until I say so. If I do catch you walking, or anyone else does,” she added with a pointed glance toward Alister, “I will sedate you for a full month if necessary.”
A throaty giggle from the corner of the room stole Alister’s attention away from the operating table. There were a few bunk beds pressed against the wall, one of which had someone in it. “Holly? What are you doing here?” She should have been healed enough to sleep in her own bunk in the crew quarters.
“What?” Her voice came out with a heavy rasp, like she had smoked for the last sixty years despite being only thirty-one. “These are more comfortable. And more private.”
“Don’t talk,” Doc snapped. “You’re agitating your throat. It isn’t fully healed yet.”
Holly stuck out her tongue at Doc’s back, but leaned back in the bunk bed and did a poor job of pretending like she wasn’t paying attention to them. Alister just shook his head. If Alice thought her presence was fine, he couldn’t really argue. Instead, he moved around Alice’s operation table to the adjacent one, the only other one in the room. It was occupied, but not by a person.
The sniper rifle Tatyana had liberated from its former user sat atop, propped up on its attached tripod. It was short, maybe around half the length of the KSVK, with its box magazine set behind the trigger. Though the actual magazine was detached. The chamber was open as well with a zip tie shoved through it, showing that the gun was empty as well as holding the chamber open. It wasn’t a model that Alister recognized. Upon noticing the rounds, he found himself more confused.
He picked up a cartridge and looked it over. The tip was copper coated, much like the one Alice had picked up at the warehouse. Fairly standard so far. But the casing was odd. Rather than the usual brass, it was painted a brown color. And the cartridge, slightly larger than a standard 5.56 NATO round, was lighter than it should be for its size. “Steel?”
“It’s a Chinese rifle,” Alice said. “QBU-88.”
“Chinese? What’s it doing in Mexico?” China did export weapons, both above and below the table, but most of those weapons stayed around the Middle-East and Asia. North Korea, Iraq, Syria. Turkey was really as far west as they got. His first thought was that the assassin needed a weapon on the cheap, but there had to be a number of American rifles around that not only would be cheaper because of their availability, but would fire rounds much more prevalent in the area.
“A decent question. It wouldn’t be too strange on its own, but there are several other things that make it even stranger.” Alice sat up on the table, pulling a thin teeshirt over her head. She almost hopped off right after, but Doc pressed a hand to Alice’s shoulder and gave her a death glare. It was the one thing that could make Alice look nervous. She edged away from the doctor ever so slightly, though made no move to try to hop off again. “I think we can both agree that the assassin was trying to kill Dorothy. The bullet came nowhere near Rafael and was clearly not going to do any real damage to me. Or anyone else around. It’s either that or he was an exceptionally poor assassin.”
“No. If it was just the one shot, I might have believed it. But, at the very end, he was aiming for Dorothy, not for you.”
Alice nodded her head. “My thoughts exactly.”
“Couldn’t it have been mistaken identity?”
Doc whipped her head around. “Holly, I will sedate you as well.”
“It is a valid question,” Alice said, pulling attention back to herself. “I don’t think so. My evidence is that Dorothy was covered up like Alister and Flash while I had on a dark suit. I was obviously speaking with Rafael, not her. I have black straight hair and she has wavy blond. If he mixed us up, he is an even worse assassin than if he had simply missed me.”
Alister shook his head. “No. You weren’t the target. If it wasn’t obvious from afar, you getting in his face with a medical kit should have clued him in.”
“So the question is: Why is she being targeted?”
“Isn’t that related to how you two met in the first place?”
“She told me everything that she overheard and I don’t think she’s the type to lie. It sounded like nothing more than an assassination attempt on my brother. The details of which matched up with an attempt that he thwarted while we were sailing here. Now, maybe they were just holding on to a grudge.”
“Halfway around the world seems like a fairly long way to keep a grudge.”
“And the assassination on my brother was probably doomed to fail anyway, though the perpetrators might not think so. He’s dealt with things that make what Tatyana tried to do to me look like two school children having a mild disagreement. From the way he tells it, this was a simple bomb-instead-of-a-client switcheroo. Not even a backup sniper attempt for when the bomb inevitably failed.”
Deciding not to comment on anything she had just mentioned—for madness laid that way—Alister focused on the primary topic of Dorothy. “They must have thought she overheard more than she actually did.”
“There is another interesting, and strange, point in all this. The language the assassin spoke. Dorothy mentioned Nahuatl, which, annoyingly, is not spelled how it sounds. I looked it up. Nahuatl is spoken by nearly two million people, most of which are in the Mexico-Central America area.”
“So you were able to translate what he said?”
“No. I don’t think it was Nahuatl at all. I tried getting someone to translate it only to get back nonsense and confusion. My theory why ties back into Greece. The whole reason Dorothy listened in on that conversation that got her in trouble was because it was being spoken in an odd—an old dialect of Greek. Being a nascent omniglot, she got excited and wanted to go talk with them to learn it until she picked up on enough key words that she could translate to realize what they were talking about. At which point, she panicked. I think the assassin’s words were a similarly unknown or obscure language.”
“She was just going to go up and talk to random strangers in a foreign country?”
“It’s how she learns languages. She researches a bit to get some vocabulary down, then she seeks out people and talks to them. Usually people on the internet. This was her first trip outside North America, she was planning on staying in Greece for a few days then head over to Italy, then France, then Germany, and finally end her first European tour in the United Kingdom.”
Alister didn’t bother asking how she knew all that. If she said it, it was probably true. What a terrible way to start her vacation. It sounded like a bad case of worse luck, just stumbling across people talking about an assassination. Then she got shot at, sailed across an ocean, and got shot at some more.
The idea of some international assassin’s guild that exclusively used obscure dialects to talk in public spaces was laughable at best. There had to be something more to it than that. But regardless of how they operated, they were dangerous and had resources. The black and white ship that had attacked them when leaving Gibraltar was enough evidence of that. In retrospect, it had likely been targeting Dorothy rather than Alice or the Lunar Dial. But unless Alice’s information network turned up something soon, there wasn’t much good in throwing around every possibility that occurred to them. There were more immediate things to worry about.
“So, theories aside, what do we do with Dorothy now?”
“If this was a one-off thing and thought they were going to give up, I’d say that we should send her back home.” Alice paused, looking at Doc then Alister. “I had been mostly joking about her being a new member of the crew, though it would be nice to have a universal translator aboard. But they have invested a significant amount of resources in trying to take her out already. The assassin even tried to finish the job rather than opt for medical aid, which he desperately needed.”
“It is possible that he would have been killed if he failed anyway.”
“Which just means that these people are serious. Dropping her off in America might just be a death sentence.”
Author’s Note:
Character Page updated.
Thanks for the chapter.
—
> the curmudgeonous old man
‘curmudgeonly’ is in my spell-checker, and at least one online dictionary says that it’s an adjective.