Suddenly, the gatehouse door burst open and several Resistance fighters, led by Betsy, surged through. The wights on guard in the room fired, but the Resistance managed to behead them before anyone was too badly injured.
The gatehouse was a room in the palace’s outer wall; the room’s one window looked out on the main gates.
Betsy slammed the door behind them, sliding the deadbolt to lock it, then ambled to the window and glanced down. A line of wights and shambling corpses were still making their way into the palace. This flow of wights was problematic for the Resistance’s designs on the palace.
Two large levers were set into the floor on either side of the room. Betsy wasn’t intimately familiar with the designs of the palace, but it didn’t seem like a particularly unreasonable deduction to suppose that these levers controlled the gates.
So she gestured to the levers, and said, “Let’s try to stem the tide of bad guys, boys.” Two of the Resistance guys went to the levers, and pulled them in unison.
Gratifyingly, the palace’s main gates began to grind slowly closed. That would delay the wights. At least until they noticed the big holes the Resistance had put in half the side doors. Which, in retrospect, seemed a bit ill-advised. Oh, well. Live and learn.
There was a smash from the other side of the room’s only door, as wights or corpses tried to retake the gatehouse.
Perhaps ‘living’ was not to be. But everyone knows the ‘learning’ part is paramount, anyway.
In one of the palace’s many identical corridors, Helen sat slumped next to Kate’s body, numb to the world, utterly defeated. She almost didn’t notice when a section of wall slid open nearby, disgorging Julian.
Glancing around, he spotted Kate’s twisted body. His shoulders slumped slightly. He’d rather liked her. It had seemed like she was the only one in the Resistance with any sense. He mumbled, to himself more than to Helen, “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
Helen looked up, her eyes bloodshot with grief and fury, her face streaked with tears, and Julian knew that he had spoken unwisely. In a bitterly quiet voice, she said, “You didn’t mean for innocent people to die? What, when you declared war on the world? What did you expect, flowers in the streets? When you meddled with forces beyond human comprehension? When you let the wights get away from you? Did you really expect you could achieve anything good at the head of an army of soulless zombies?”
Julian quailed slightly under this verbal onslaught. It had once seemed so simple, but he was starting to see some wisdom in Helen’s position. “I didn’t think –”
“You didn’t think!” Helen grabbed her sword from the floor, and somehow managed to stagger to her feet. “You just acted, and to hell with the consequences!”
“Everything I did was for the greater good –”
“You talk all lofty about the greater good, while everybody dies.” Helen advanced on Julian, waving her sword a bit unsteadily at him.
Julian, his hands up in a gesture of mollification, backed away. “You can blame me for your husband, but you can’t blame me for everything that’s ever gone wrong. You can’t blame me for this.”
Helen roared, “I can and I will! You’ve killed everyone! Everyone I ever loved is dead because of you!”
“I didn’t kill Kate! You did!” Every step of the way, Julian had given specific orders that Kate and Helen not be harmed. It was Helen who had given the Artifact all the tools it needed to usurp Julian’s control. And he rather resented it, along with her accusations. “You sent Adam after me, you brought the Artifact to power! It was you, not me!”
Helen made a garbled noise, waving her sword, and managed to roar, “You made it necessary!”
Julian’s fists were clenched in anger. “I brought peace to the world, only your Resistance was too blind to notice!”
“Your ragnarok brought nothing but death and horror!”
“And you let me! You brought me to the Artifact!”
This rather low blow collapsed Helen’s defenses. Julian was only the second person Helen blamed for the ragnarok. Now he had pinned the other half of the blame exactly where Helen had, privately, all these years.
Collapsing against Julian, dropping her sword and giving up the fight, Helen could only squeak out, “I know. I screwed everything up.”
Julian, baffled, supported Helen as she spent a few long moments sobbing.
Eventually, she recovered her composure, wiping her face with the back of her hand. Looking up at Julian, she demanded, “Where’s the Artifact? We need to bring her back.”
“…excuse me?” Julian had a sinking feeling he knew where this was going.
“We need to bring Kate back!”
“That’s really not a good –”
“Even if she comes back wrong like Adam did, at least she’ll have a chance to be with him! You know how she felt about him!”
Julian was taken entirely by surprise by this reasoning. Flabbergasted, he could only respond, “You’ve gone mad.”
“Everyone I loved is dead because of my failures and your successes! I have nothing left; maybe I can at least give Kate what she wanted!”
“I really can’t let you –”
“Why not?”
This stumped Julian. He really wasn’t sure why not. Helen’s reasoning made a twisted sort of sense. There would be as much left of Kate as there was of Adam – which is to say, probably none at all – so it wasn’t like they would benefit from both being wights. But it wasn’t like either one of them would benefit from not being wights, either. He kind of felt like he owed Kate a favor, and he wasn’t sure that bringing her body back as a wight would be in her best interests.
Eventually, Julian produced, half-ironically, the only answer he could think of: “Because I have too much respect for the dead.” This wasn’t a particularly accurate approximation of his feelings on the matter, but until he had time to analyze them in more detail, it would have to do.
Helen looked bewildered; respect for the dead was the very thing the Resistance had spent fifteen years accusing him of lacking. It was why Carl had gotten into the Resistance in the first place, and why Helen had been pulled in.
Julian shrugged wryly, “I know, it’s a weird feeling. But I won’t help you make Kate a wight.”
Helen just stared for several seconds, mustering her composure and her strength.
Suddenly, she shoved Julian awkwardly away, yelling, “Then die!” She swung her sabre at him, but he ducked and rolled out of the way.
She swung again, but Julian scooted out of the way and ran headlong down the corridor.
Helen tried to pursue, but collapsed against a wall after a few steps, panting, weakened by grief and exhaustion and her two-day-old injuries.
She managed to spit the single expletive, “Balls.”
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