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Lessie met Wax’s eyes.
They both knew what to do in this situation. Last time, he’d been the one captured. People always tried to use them against each other. In Lessie’s opinion, that wasn’t a disadvantage. She’d have explained that if Tan hadn’t known the two of them were a couple, he’d have killed her right off. Instead, he’d kidnapped her. That gave them a chance to get out.
Wax sighted down the barrel of his Sterrion.
– The Alloy of Law, Brandon Sanderson
Lessie was calm, far calmer than most people would be in this scenario.
Her husband had a gun trained on a point perilously close to her head. Warm blood trickled down her leg and arm where Tan had shot her, soaking her clothes, but she stood steady enough. The sharp cold of Bloody Tan’s garrote was a gruesome reminder of what would happen if she moved, pressed against her throat like a necklace clasped far too tight.
A small part of her was annoyed. Getting shot was sloppy. Getting shot twice was just reckless. Still, she’d wanted to be the one to take Tan down. When she’d stumbled upon his lair, she’d blessed her luck. Now she was sure she’d get an earful from Wax about how dangerous it had been for her to rush in on her own like that, though they both knew he’d have done the same thing if he’d found Tan first.
Still, he worried for her, and that was what mattered. She loved him for it. She trusted him implicitly.
She trusted him with her life.
Lessie met his eyes across the room, noting how his finger was already pressing gently against the trigger. He was waiting for her signal, so she gave it. She blinked, once, twice. On the third blink, he fired.
But Tan moved. In the same moment, her eyes still opening from the last blink, she felt the killer’s grip tighten on her arm as she was yanked to the side.
Wax’s bullet hit her right above the eye.
What happened next was purely instinctual: she collapsed into a crumpled heap on the floor. Tan’s garotte sliced a shallow cut under her chin on the way down, but it didn’t matter. That headshot was fatal. The pain exploded through her skull, though it lasted for only a moment, and then it was gone, the nerves in her brain falling inert as her body stopped functioning correctly.
This was far from the first time she’d been mortally wounded, and the reactions, playing out the death, were automatic. The body she had created knew how it was supposed to work under such conditions: it simply wasn’t. She was sprawled on the floor, heart already thudding its last beats, bodily functions stilling before her consciousness had even fully grasped what had happened.
It was the sound of the second shot that shocked her numb thoughts back to awareness.
She heard Tan’s body hit the floor beside her, then he fell into her field of view. Though her eyes stayed still, dead and glassy, the way Tan’s body landed just happened to be in sight of where her head was pointing. Wax’s shot had taken him perfectly in the center of the forehead, she noted with pride. There was still a sick, satisfied smile on the serial killer’s face.
Lessie felt a powerful, dark thrill at seeing herself avenged so swiftly. Then the realization set in: Avenged. She was dead. Wax had missed and he’d shot her in the head.
No, no that wasn’t right. Tan had known where the bullet was going to go and had moved her.
Atium came to mind immediately, memories swimming up from the deaths of her past, hundreds of years of Mistborn and accuracy too perfect to be counteracted. But there was no more atium, not for the likes of Bloody Tan to get ahold of or use. He’d said something, she remembered now, piecing the events of the last few moments together in reverse. Right before she’d blinked the signal to Wax.
“Something else moves us, lawman.”
Harmony, she thought, seething.
Though the thought had been more of a realization, it was answered as though it were a call. Paalm.
That name echoed through her skull as though the shot had cleared out space for it to resonate. Hearing it spoken to her in that soft, gentle voice felt like more of a shock than the bullet that had just ripped its way through her head. It had been so long since she’d heard it.
Mentally she fought against everything that name threatened to dredge up from her. She didn’t want to be Paalm again!
She felt ‘Lessie’ slipping away from her, the falsehood she had taken up falling away to reveal only the imitator beneath. It was like trying to take hold of running water, grasping ineffectually as it slipped through her fingers. Everything that was Lessie was melting away.
You did this, Harmony, she accused. Tan was moved. I felt it!
It was not my doing, Paalm, Harmony said, ever-serene, even in the face of volatile thoughts towards him. You know I do not work in such ways.
Confused disbelief welled up within her. There wasn’t anyone else, not anymore. Was there?
But if not you–
There are dark forces moving in this world, he said. Some beyond my control and knowledge, even. As I have tried to explain, this is one of the reasons Waxillium is needed.
Wax.
As though Harmony’s mention had summoned him, she felt the thump of his knees against the floorboards beside her body, followed by his hands reaching for her. Two fingers jabbed into the side of her neck, as though her pulse were simply a thing hidden deeply rather than a thing now ended, something Wax would be able to find it if he simply delved far enough.
“Lessie! Lessie, no, please. No, no, no….” His voice broke over the words, denials devolving into sobs as the reality of what had happened overwhelmed him. “Please… You can’t be gone. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… It wasn’t supposed to…”
The sounds of his anguish were like jagged glass, tearing through her with a pain far worse than the shot. He thinks I’m dead. He thinks he killed me. I can’t let this happen! I can tell him, show him I’m alive, explain the truth!The muscles of her heart stirred faintly, wanting to beat again.
Paalm, Harmony’s voice said, calm but stern. You do not need my foresight to know that revealing yourself would only hurt him further. Things would not go back to the way they were before.
I can explain it to him! I can make this right! He doesn’t have to–
You have protected him well here, but now you must let him go. He will grieve, but he will recover.
There was a part of herself that was surprised at how difficult that concept was for her. The role of Lessie should have been dead, as dead as any other identity she’d ever assumed. She was Paalm again.
And yet, the idea of no longer being with Waxillium felt viscerally wrong. Her concern for him should have been a part of the act, something she should be able to leave behind like another set of bones.
You wanted this, her thoughts snarled at Harmony. That letter he received, the estate. You had me killed so he’ll go back to Elendel! He doesn’t belong there! He hates that life! He should be here in the Roughs, doing what he loves.
She only barely managed to keep her thoughts from fully forming the idea that would have followed that: ‘He should be with me.’
Harmony probably guessed it anyway.
We must all do things we do not wish for the greater good, Paalm, Harmony said. There is too much at stake, I am afraid. I am sorry.
Wax’s fingers brushed her hair from her face, and as he leaned over her, her motionless eyes had a perfect view of him. Perhaps the last true view she would ever have of him, she realized. He wept openly, clutching her body with such desperate strength, no longer searching for signs of life within her. Her will nearly broke right there, Harmony be damned.
In all the times she had died, in all the lives she had lived, had anyone ever mourned her like this?
Hundreds of years as spy, infiltrator, and assassin. Innumerable deaths. She’d been stabbed, tortured, shot with coins, even dismembered on several occasions. She remembered what that had felt like, enduring the full brunt of the pain back when she was a younger kandra, before she knew how to manipulate her nerves with the precision she could now.
Nothing from her past seemed to compare with the torture she felt there in Wax’s arms, listening to his agonized cries.
It shouldn’t have hurt her so. But it did. This was Paalm, this was her true self beneath the act, and it hurt just as much. The realization was a sharp, awful truth she could no longer deny.
I love him, Harmony.
The voice answered with a deep, weighty regret. I know, and I am sorry for that as well. I wish I had foreseen, that I might have spared you this.
Harmony’s apologies felt empty, doing nothing to assuage the hollow void within her now. She had served him, pledged her life with the utmost loyalty after the Ascension. She had followed his commands with as much fervor as she had ever obeyed the Lord Ruler before.
And he had let the man she loved shoot her in the head.
I will never forgive you for this. The motivation behind the thought hardened in her mind, as what had been molten anger now tempered into steely conviction.
A pause. I have seen that possibility. I hope it will not come to pass.
She did not answer that. She had nothing left to say to this so-called ‘God’ of the world. Let him burn for what he’d done to her, for what he’d done to Wax. For making the two of them endure this.
She lay perfectly still, a perfect actress even in death, cradled in the trembling arms of the man she loved. She knew with perfect clarity she would never hold him again, never kiss him softly, never hear his warm laugh as she and Wayne traded jokes. If she ever met him again, she wouldn’t be Lessie. She couldn’t be.
Water splashed against her cheek, a tear fallen free from Wax’s face. The smallest twinge of jealous longing plucked at something within her as she felt it slide down her face.
She wished that, for all she had lost, she were allowed to shed just one tear of her own.