62. Akira

CHAPTER 62

Akira

A kira blinked once, twice, but the mirage remained. A tall blonde picked their way gingerly through the ruined foyer, eyes slitted to protect them from the dust, and coughed bitterly into the elbow of their once-black jacket. A stocky man trailed just behind them.

"Indira?" Akira croaked. "Indira, is that you?"

The lead figure's arm dropped from her face. "Master Epsilon?"

"Help me!"

Indira and the man – Bensen, Akira realised, Kyle's softly spoken cousin-in-law – rushed to where he was crouched next to the huge hole in the floor. Indira's brows were furrowed in that typical and indiscriminate Randall concern, but her look of horror intensified tenfold when she caught sight of what he was holding tightly onto.

"Is that-"

"Help, damn you!" he roared and the two of them snapped into action, grabbing hold of fistfuls of Kyle's shirt. Together they dragged his limp, unconscious body up out of the ragged gash in the floor and rolled him onto the relative safety of the ground beside it.

Akira heaved in a desperate, pained breath. He'd seen Kyle fall as if in slow motion, and had thrown himself towards him without thought or care.

The building in which House Epsilon resided had always rested on a layer of sturdy concrete that formed the base of Level E and the ceiling of F below. Or at least, it had seemed to be sturdy, having stood firm for eighty years.

Now, there was a huge hole in it that still exhaled screams and thick clouds of dust as the air displaced from lower down.

Akira had managed to catch Kyle's wrist before he fell to his death, but the other man had been knocked out by tumbling lumps of concrete and metal and Akira hadn't had the strength to lift him free on his own, not with the mess his body was in. They'd been stuck like that, gravity doing its best to tear them apart in the same way everything else seemed to want to, for twenty minutes or more.

It had been sickening in the reminder; a twisted reflection of when Akira had held onto Kyle in the same way when he'd almost lost him to five kilometres of open air and an unforgiving planet below. Why was Kyle always falling?

Bensen stared wide-eyed at the void in the floor, flinching as its edges quivered and then crumbled, widening the destruction inch by inch.

"Call an ambulance," Akira wheezed at the others, already mentally cataloguing each of Kyle's injuries and vowing to inflict worse on himself. Blood scored a line down from his temple. His leg was angled in the wrong direction, perhaps the result of where his body had slammed brutally against the edge of the fracture when Akira had grabbed him. Scrapes and worse on every inch of his skin, and stars , he wasn't waking up.

Indira lifted her head. Her blue eyes, so like her cousin's, shone with misery and helplessness. "It won't come. Kyle can't afford an ambulance."

"I can," snarled Akira.

Bensen drew his runepad from his pocket with shaking hands.

"You dial Xerxes' emergency line," ordered Akira, "and you fucking tell them that the fucking Master of House fucking Epsilon needs a fucking ambulance. You hear a single ‘no', and you threaten their funding, their jobs, and their very lives, you understand me?"

Bensen didn't answer. He was already activating the screen of his runepad to make the call, something Akira appreciated more than any verbal confirmation.

He heaved out a breath.

"Kyle," he murmured then, adjusting his aching, screaming body with tentative micro-movements so he could press his palm to the man's cheek. Was his skin too cold? Or was it too hot? Akira wasn't sure he was even capable of feeling temperature while his body was damaged like this.

"Please, sweetheart, come back to me. I'm sorry. I'm so, so very sorry."

"It's not your fault, Master," Indira said dully. She stared at Kyle's motionless face, her own flitting through an array of emotions. "It's mine. The explosions were my doing."

Few things could have pulled Akira's attention from the unconscious man in his arms, but that was one of them. He stared at her. "What? What happened ?"

"We…a group of us engineers, not that I found it, but I was there when they did," she added, already flustered. "That is to say, we discovered some runic equipment near the engines that wasn't supposed to be there. Explosives."

"Mayor Mackenroth," Akira spat, unequivocally certain the prick was the cause. Indira swallowed and then shrugged. "What did he do?"

"They…he…whoever did it was going to blow the whole city up," Indira whispered. "Separate Xerxes' lower levels from the engines so the runes wouldn't have as much trouble if they only had to support the surface. I know it's hard to believe, Master Epsilon."

It wasn't. Akira didn't hold a scrap of fucking doubt that Benedict Mackenroth would murder millions of people to save himself and his rich friends. Engines struggling to hold up the entire city? There was a simple solution for that: trim the fat, and don't give a second thought to all of the people – all the innocents and the children – who would be cast loose to the planet below.

"We were trying to disarm the explosives," Kyle's cousin continued, her hand unconsciously tracing the long line of the wand at her hip. "But the runes were too big, too deeply scored, and some men arrived to stop us…everyone started fighting. Time was ticking down, so I thought I could…"

"Indira," Akira coaxed. He tried to keep his voice gentle, but it was a hoarse, broken mess and he was forced to spit out blood every few seconds to stop it pooling in his mouth. "Whatever you did, it wasn't your fault."

"But I redirected the blast," she said bitterly to her knees. "I thought if I could keep it away from the connection points they'd targeted, that Xerxes would stay in one piece. Instead, I almost made the whole city crash."

Akira remembered the terrifying sensation of falling but he'd almost convinced himself it had been nothing but delirium, for when he came to, Kyle had been kneeling over him and calling his name, and Xerxes had still been in the air.

"You didn't do that," he said shortly. "Mackenroth did. It sounds like you saved us."

"A lot of people are dead, Master. I saw them on my way here. Crushed by collapsing walls or ceilings. Trapped. Fallen. Dead," she said again, baring her teeth at him. "Dead, dead, dead!"

"Alive," Akira countered with a croak, pointing at her and then himself. And then laying that hand on Kyle's weakly moving chest before pulling him close and clinging tightly to him. "Kyle's still alive because of you."

Indira sighed. She looked exhausted, as if she didn't have the energy to continue defending her guilt.

"Now the city is sheared in two," she whispered. "Connected by only a handful of cables and steel beams, can you imagine? Upper and Lower Xerxes are well and truly separate, just like they've always pretended they were."

Akira stared at her. What?

She sighed again. "At least, that's what people are saying. I ran. I just…I needed to get to Bensen and make sure he was safe. Then I…Kyle, and…"

They both fell silent. Through the bleariness of his pain and terror, Akira saw three small, cat-shaped balls of fluff slink past the top of the stairs. Thank each of the stars.

"That ambulance will be for the both of you, I think," Indira commented after a long moment, suddenly seeming to notice the state of him and raising an eyebrow. "I know my cousin can play rough, but you've seen better days, Master."

"This wasn't Kyle," Akira said shortly, ignoring his nudity and his injuries as he sat in the rubble of his House. None of that mattered. Only the faint wail of sirens did, and the way they were steadily getting louder as the ambulance drew closer. The emergency line would have received tens or even hundreds of thousands of calls tonight, but only the Uppers and the rich would get the benefit of its services. Just another shitty reality of this city: if you were unable to pay for your health and your life, then you were likely to lose them.

But Akira wouldn't be losing Kyle Randall. He'd use his Coterie position and remaining credits – those real, and those assumed – to demand and bully his way into the best medical care Xerxes had to offer. He also knew that once he woke up, Kyle likely wouldn't thank him for it.

Because Akira was the reason Kyle was hurt. Physically, emotionally, every way that mattered.

By the stars, he hadn't explained it right to Kyle when he'd tried, before. He could never explain things right. He was good for giving orders or taking them, and that was it: when it came to being human, to communicating like everyone else seemed to do with ease, he failed.

Icy bitch , Master Theta had called him. He'd been correct. A lump of heartless ice that was incapable of working in the same way as a real human being.

Ice that had been lucky enough to drift into the orbit of the brightest star in their system, the perpetual ball of sunshine that was Kyle Randall, and instead of melting to nothing, somehow became more. Kyle made him better. Made him think and feel and want and hope and dream .

Because of Kyle, Akira dared believe that he deserved to be loved. And damn it, it was Kyle's love he wanted, and now that he'd had a taste of what that could be like, he only wanted it more.

So Akira was going to deal with all the shit his decisions had wrought. He'd apologise, properly this time. He'd explain everything to Kyle. He'd beg for his forgiveness and bring him hot dogs for breakfast and buy him a hundred 80s rock band t-shirts and listen to Kyle loudly belt out their lyrics, and then hold him, just hold him, for the rest of their lives.

Just as soon as he woke up.

Akira stared at the tattoos on his wrist. Remember, they told him in a language barely anyone left alive knew. He'd had the kanji engraved into his skin as a permanent reminder of what he risked in letting anyone know about his family – about sweet Sarah, and his wonderful, beautiful Roberta – and yet hiding their existence had also caused damage to someone he loved.

Now the four symbols mocked him, forcing him to remember everything that had happened tonight.

"The ambulance is here," Indira whispered in his ear, in the insistent tone of someone who had repeated themselves several times. Red and blue lights flashed across the fallen concrete and patches of dusty carpet peeking out from beneath the rubble. "Master Epsilon, you need to let go of him now."

No. He didn't.

Akira was never letting Kyle go.

Ever.

THE END