When the cavalry arrived - in the form of a helicopter and ground forces from Lucca’s family, it set off a new panic. Cell phones and walkie-talkies were working again, so Lucca barely managed to hold them off before everyone on campus started firing at them.
The faculty and guards have already gone into recovery mode, searching for the injured and the dead, getting the power back on. They’ve trained us well; students are working alongside them as if we do this every day.
There’s smoke everywhere, glowing embers that float in the dark like sharp, stinging fireflies when they land on skin. Muffled cursing as people trip over pieces of stone torn from buildings and splintered wood.
“Turgenev!” It’s Lucca’s brother Dario. He’s hard not to like, he’s such a smartass. I think things are thawing between himand Lucca faster than Giovanni, but his being the Don makes everything more complicated.
“Hey, thanks for coming to our rescue,” I grin, “not that we needed you.”
Looking around at the shattered buildings and the torn-up grounds, he shakes his head. “Yeah, I can see that.”
“Fuck off,” said Lucca irritably, “we were lucky we got communications up quick enough to keep them from blowing you out of the sky, too.”
Dario refuses to take offense, chuckling and slapping his brother’s shoulder. “You all did a hell of a job and you know it. Did you two really take out one of the Blackhawks on your own?”
“Yeah, thanks to Larry, he took us to the good stuff,” Lucca says before it hits him. Larry’s death. Both of us watched him sacrifice himself by taking out that Blackhawk. How he looked up calmly at the rain of death that buried him under a mountain of shattered glass.
Dario’s brow furrowed. “Larry?” He thinks for a moment, “The gardener?”
“Larry was a gifted gardener.” Professor MacTavish said from behind us. He was covered in soot and blood, but he still looked like he should be on the cover of one of those terrible romances my sisters were always reading. “But in another life, he was Karl Lawrence Brennan.”
“No,” Dario said, obviously stunned.
Lucca and I looked at each other, perplexed. “Who?”
“He was born to a major crime family in Texas, they controlled most of the southern United States,” MacTavish explains. “Hebecame a Navy Seal instead of staying in the family business. He won the Medal of Honor for not only saving his entire platoon in an ambush in Vietnam, but the village full of innocents, too. He was a tactical genius, ferocious in battle.”
“Why have we never heard of him?” I ask.
“Karl left the military after fifteen years or so when most of his family was taken out in a cartel war over border territory,” Dario said, “do I have this right?”
“Aye,” agreed MacTavish. “He was just as smart and ruthless in destroying the cartel responsible and ending the territory war, but then he found out his uncle betrayed his family and made the deal to murder everyone - Larry’s parents, his sisters, grandchildren - everyone, and he finished him off, too.”
“He’d lost everyone,” Dario said. “I know he dissolved his family’s mob empire and gave all the money to the families affected and that’s the last I’d heard of him. He disappeared.”
“He came here,” MacTavish said. “He wanted to erase the past and be someone else. He and the Dean are close friends and she obliged him. He didn’t want anyone teaching his history and his techniques, so no one of your generation likely knows of him. He was just Larry, as he wished.”
“But you recognized him?” Dario asks.
“My great-uncle was British SAS, he worked counter-terrorism with Karl - ah, Larry - for a while. He came to our house occasionally for dinner when I was a lad. I never forgot the stories,” MacTavish has a small, wistful smile on his filthy face and I can picture him as a little boy, hiding behind a door, listening to two old men tell stories of battle and glory.
Nobility like that is not a thing we see much of in our world.
“We saw him,” Lucca says suddenly, “at the end. He didn’t even hesitate, standing in the ruins of his gardens and looking up-”
He turned his head.
“Thank you for telling me,” MacTavish says, a little hoarsely. Must be all the smoke. “You should share that with Dean Christie. Not now. But tell her.”
Mariya…
Something has cracked in our strange criminal microcosm. Shifted a tectonic plate in the Academy’s structure, a three-hundred-year-old behemoth, this ageless place and remade us all into something different.
We fought shoulder to shoulder, all these different families filled with a murderous rivalry against one another, and none of it mattered.
“There you are, nice to see you survived.” Jamilla is leaning heavily on Günter‘s arm. She’s wearing a sling on her left arm and looks pretty beat up.
“Are you okay?” Tati said, touching her shoulder, “What happened?”
