Irina sat on the corner of a small iron bunk, half a room away from Jack, who was pacing as best he could with one ankle tethered to his own bunk. Since the moment the guards had deposited them in their cement-walled, windowless cell and ankle-cuffed them, Jack had not stopped pacing and talking. Irina had yet to move or say a word. She merely watched him as she tried to force her thoughts to make some sense.
They wouldn't. How could you grasp the reality of your situation when there was no longer any such thing as reality?
"The ankle restraints have titanium threads at the core." Jack gestured at his foot. "We're not going to be able to cut them."
A destiny that is fixed, yet changeable. That was what Kovalenko had said, and it had never made any sense to her, none at all. Perhaps it hadn't made any sense to him, either. But now she knew - you lived out your destiny in one life, then fell prey to The Telling. After that, you had a new destiny. Still fixed - still leading ultimately, irrevocably, to the next turn of The Telling -- and yet changed from what it had been before.
"Obviously, amputation is not an option. We could possibly break the bones in our ankles and feet and escape from the cuffs that way. But after we get out of this room, we still have to get out of SD-6, and we can't do that if we're severely injured." Jack stared at the offending tether, then at his own iron bunk. "These beds might possibly come apart. Remember Latvia?"
She had seduced and betrayed Jack - had lived out that mission, had once wielded the sword that he had used against her. Had her betrayal been undone by The Telling's change? Or was it still there, beneath all memory and experience? Did she and Jack have matching scars?
Jack shook the bunk's frame once and scowled as he began rolling up his shirtsleeves and loosening his tie. "It's been welded together. That doesn't mean there aren't any weak points. I'm going to check."
How she'd mocked Romeo and Juliet - foolish romantics who committed suicide for love. Tristan and Isolde, lying down to die together because it was their only ending. Queen Dido singing that the world should remember her, but forget her fate - maybe Irina's fate, too, had been forgotten and lost in time. All those star-crossed lovers she'd disdained, and she'd been one of them her entire life. She just hadn't known it.
"My bunk's solid. Yours?" Jack frowned at her. "Irina?"
She cocked her head to study him. "You make a very awkward Tristan."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Equal parts confused and pissed off, Jack gestured at her bunk. "Check the bunk. We don't have a lot of time here."
Twelve hours, Sloane had said. If that. "Not much time," she agreed, double-checking the bunk. As she'd suspected, it was solidly welded together and soldered to the floor. "Or all the time in the world."
Rambaldi had sworn he'd had proof of eternal life; Irina had never fully believed that, not even at her moment of deepest faith in Rambaldi's works. Now she knew he was right. Immortality was hers and Jack's to share, a mute, unknowing immortality that made death a blessing by comparison.
Jack ran one hand through his steely hair. "We have to get out of this cell."
"We have to face facts," she replied.
"You're giving up already?"
Irina didn't respond to the taunt. "If we get a chance, we'll take it. But there's no point in tearing ourselves apart looking for an escape route that doesn't exist. For us to get out of here, something about our situation will have to change profoundly. We have to wait for that."
"Dammit, Irina, we're not going to get anywhere if we just sit and wait. I wouldn't think I'd have to remind you of this." He cast an appraising look at an air vent, despite the fact that it was far beyond their reach. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but apparently we have about half a day until the apocalypse. I think stressing the need to hurry should be unnecessary."
"Rambaldi's apocalypse has already taken place." So this, she thought, is what follows the end of the world. "The first of his apocalypses, I mean."
They were quiet together for a while. Jack finally asked, "You believe Sloane, then."
"As do you. You don't want to believe it. But I can tell that you do."
The harsh glare from the one fluorescent light above them darkened the deep shadows beneath Jack's eyes. He looks like hell, she thought absently. I suppose I do too.
"I always thought there had to be something to it. The Telling, I mean," he said. "If I hadn't, I never would have agreed to - I'd never haven taken the assignment in Russia in the first place."
Irina raised an eyebrow. "Then you believed in Rambaldi more than I did, at first."
"I remember talking you into it." And he had, hadn't he? Irina would have felt doubly a fool - and angry all over again - if the fate facing them had been any less absolute. As it was, she simply knew a dull kind of bewilderment at the malleable girl she'd once been. That was a very, very long time ago. Jack took a deep breath and added, "But I always thought it was something we could control. Something we could use. Nothing like this."
"Perhaps that's the true curse of Rambaldi, or of the love of his work. You see this power hanging before you - so close, you think you can touch it - but then you discover that that it's much more than any one person can ever bear."
"Unless you're Arvin Sloane." Jack's jaw clenched, and his fist tightened, and Irina wondered if he was in danger of slamming his hand into the wall.
"What is the line from 'Macbeth'? Out like a candle," she said softly. "Both of us, and everything we've known - only one small flame, after all. Sloane is blowing out the candle."
Jack's face was a grimace of pure pain - gone as quickly as it had come, but Irina knew what she had seen. The anger flowed out of him, went to some other place, as he slumped down onto his bunk. "I thought my friendship with Sloane had only become - poisoned - these last few years. But all this time, since even before I met you, he's used me. He's played me. And I did everything he asked."
"As did I." Irina thought back over the organization she'd built, Mr. Sark, Katya's errands, all of it; she'd told herself that nobody was her master. Instead she was simply a puppet who hadn't seen her strings. "Jack - what Sloane told us -"
"Which part?" Jack said wearily. "About the fact that I was somehow a worse father to Sydney the last time? That had to take some work."
He looked so tired, so - defeated. He was sitting on the edge of his bunk, still tethered, his hands balled in fists against his legs. Irina knew those hands, that profile, the strength in his body, the reasons for all the lines at the corners of his eyes. How had she ever convinced herself that she didn't know him? How had she failed to see that all the lies of his mission had still contained one truth?
"Sloane said that you came back for me, that night. You didn't just try to find Sydney. You tried to find me, too."
Jack met her eyes then, his eyebrows drawing together in what almost looked like confusion. "Yes, I did."
"That never occurred to me." The KGB had even shown her the tape of Jack in the basement - on the second or third day of her imprisonment, she couldn't be sure; by that time, night and day and time all ran together in a haze of pain. When Irina denied that her husband, her gentle and loving Jack, could ever be a top CIA operative, her jailers had showed her the images captured by the surveillance cameras in the building stairwell. They'd laughed at her reaction as she watched Jack gash open a man's throat. His savagery had shocked her as much as anything else she'd discovered in those terrible days. And yet she had never wondered if he had been fighting for anybody besides their daughter. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"By the time I had a chance, it would've sounded like an excuse." Jack shrugged, but he did a poor job of feigning diffidence. "And by then it didn't make a difference anymore."
He was right, in one way. Had Jack attempted to tell her such a thing when they'd first seen one another again in Latvia, she would certainly have lost control and shot him - and she wouldn't have missed that time. But in another way, he was very wrong. "It makes a difference. Tell me the truth, Jack. Why did you come back for me?"
His voice was low and grave when he answered. "You know why."
"But I want to hear. I want you to say it. In all this madness, I need something real."
Jack sighed, and then he could no longer meet her gaze. "Because I loved you."
That fragile truth had survived despite all his lies, despite the governments whose battles had separated them, despite her own fury and coldness and destruction. Irina felt something in her flow free, something that had been dammed in for far too long.
"You weren't just stalling, that night at the opera. You were going to tell me everything."
"And get us out together, if I could. Another two hours, and we would have made it. We were that close to defeating Sloane." Jack's voice was weary. "Two fucking hours."
"In the past - the one that was erased - I betrayed you."
"Yeah, I heard that." He gave her a tired, half-hearted glare. "I don't suppose I'm allowed to get mad about it."
Did he understand what that meant to her - the knowledge that in one reality, she had been the one in control? That she had been the one to be certain of his love for her, to know the one absolute truth? No, he couldn't. If she could have talked to the Jack that had been, the one she couldn't remember, he would have understood.
And the woman she had been - that woman would have understood this Jack, and the choices he'd made.
"We'll get another chance, you know." She tried to make her voice light, as though this was a reason for hope and not despair. "Sydney will always be born. That means that you and I - we'll always -"
"We'll always get new chances at fucking everything up."
Irina felt the tears spill down her cheeks before she even realized she was crying; her quick weeping was the one emotional reaction that she could never fully control. Ashamed of the impulse, she ducked her head, letting her hair fall across her face.
Jack was undeceived. "Irina, don't. I'm sorry."
"No, you're right. What terrible lovers we make." She remembered meeting Jack, the two of them staring down at an illustration of a woman in a book, a woman who wore a diaphanous gown. "There's always been a sword between us, ever since the day we met. Do you think that means we're innocent after all?"
"Not us." More quietly, he added, "Stay with me." His words, steady and calm, forced her to regain some kind of balance. When she lifted her face again, their eyes met.
Out like a candle. The world around them, the history of their lives, was insubstantial as tissue paper, meaningless and lost. Only she and Jack and their daughter would ever be real.
Irina rose from her bunk and took a few steps toward him - only to feel the tether around her ankle pull taut. Groaning, she sank to her knees to tug at her bonds, as though that would do any good.
She heard Jack doing the same and turned. Both kneeling on the ground, she thought, if they both reached as far as they could -
Her hand touched his cheek, and he stared at her in the instant before he covered that hand with his own, holding her there. For a few long breaths they stayed like that - touching and yet not touching, close and yet too far away.
"Come here." Irina pulled him as close as they could get, which thank God was close enough.
And then she was in Jack's arms again, his embrace closing around her. He folded her against his chest and exhaled in what sounded like the deepest relief as she hugged him back. How simple it was, how easy: breathing in the scent of him, feeling his heartbeat against her own, letting go of everything else in the world.
He was whispering her name; she was turning her face toward his. I hate this man, she told herself. I have hated him for twenty years. The words were empty, sounds without meaning. They weren't real. Jack was the only thing in the whole world that was real.
She paused at the last moment - the second before their lips would touch. Jack's breath was warm against her mouth as he brushed two fingers along her hairline. The stubble of his cheek was rough against her palm, and she took her time, caressing his face, bringing her fingers up beneath his chin. His eyes closed in pleasure, relishing the touch, asking for nothing else.
Irina kissed his forehead, his eyelids, the bridge of his nose, tasting the salt of his skin. She remembered every inch of him - the lines of his eyebrows, the wiry texture of his hair, even his ears. Somehow, despite everything, she could feel a smile stretching her lips, making her kisses thin.
When Jack began to do the same - to brush feather-light kisses along the line of her jaw - Irina sighed. Jack had such a wonderful mouth - that full lower lip of his, kissing her cheek, her nose, her chin --
Their lips met, quickly and gently, as if each of them was still uncertain, still testing the other's desire. But Irina felt the electric pulse of need between them, as strong as it had ever been, and kissed him again, deeper, more insistently.
Jack's tongue pushed between her lips, his breath quickening with her heartbeat as they began devouring each other. It didn't matter that her mouth was bruised, that their kisses tasted faintly of her blood. All that mattered was that they were tangled together again.
Oh, God, it was just the same -- the way their bodies fell into synch, knowing each other perfectly despite all those years apart. They kissed at different angles, different tempos, different depths, a hundred variations that each had the power to steal her breath away. Yes, she remembered this - not with her mind, but with her body, the way that they caught each other's energy and longing, shaped it together, made two halves whole.
Irina was drunk on him already and knew that Jack was just as lost in her. She couldn't kiss him deeply enough, couldn't hold him tightly enough - it would never be enough, not unless she could be with him, completely, lovers once again.
She tried to move toward him, at least to hold him more tightly - and felt the painful tug of the cuff around her ankle.
"Chort vosmi," she gasped, trying to catch her breath. "Damn Arvin Sloane for not chaining us to the same bed."
Between kisses, Jack murmured, "For lots - of reasons - but -- that one - too."
How close could they come? Irina said only, "Touch me." Jack's hands slid up her belly, over her breasts, down her back. Every place he touched made her go hot, then cold, shivering with the nearness of him. Their mouths parted as he began kissing his way down her throat; with shaking hands, Irina began tugging at the knot of his necktie until she could slide the loop over his head.
As she let the tie fall beside them, Jack took her face in his hands. "Irina - this - what are we doing here?"
"The same thing as ever." She gave him her greediest smile as she ran her fingers slowly down his chest. "We're taking everything within our reach." Her reward was another kiss, even more passionate than before -
WHAM!
The metallic clang against the door echoed through their cell, so loudly that it hurt her ears. Irina's body tensed instantly, and she could feel the change in Jack; in an instant, their desire was gone, replaced only by the knowledge of a crisis and the need to act.
WHAM! The clang was even louder this time.
"Somebody's coming through," Jack said. "Obviously someone unauthorized."
Who the hell would that be? Irina didn't like the sound of it, regardless. Quickly, she began unbuckling Jack's belt. When he stared at her, she huffed, "Be realistic." She slid the belt free from its loops and popped it taut in her hands. "Got anything else that could be a weapon?"
"That's almost it." Jack grabbed the necktie - it wasn't as strong as the belt, of course, but it would still make an effective garrote if used properly.
WHAM! The cell door's hinges shook, and rusty powder crumbled toward the ground.
"If I get the chance, I'm going," Irina said. "I expect the same of you."
"Understood." What went unsaid was the fact that probably they'd get no chance, that probably anything they were about to do was going to be to no avail.
So, armed with a belt and a necktie, they waited on their knees for the attack before the end of the world.
**
Go back to the last chapter.