Forever Or By A Thread

It was supposed to be an easy job.

The instructions had been crystal clear: infiltrate, locate, and copy the command base’s hard drive before burning it all to the ground, before burning it all to the ground, even with the knowledge that “all” meant a centuries-old catholic temple.

Surrounded by old buildings, the Cathedral was a magnificent heritage site in the city’s wide plaza. The architectural embodiment of popular devotion, completely above suspicion.

But not tonight.

Especially not with the heavy guard detail posted around the perimeter.

In total, eight armed men patrolled back and forth around the Cathedral. They rotated with other guards on even-numbered hours; on odd-numbered ones, they swapped posts among themselves.

“Got the attention of some asshole on the other side of the gates.” Nico’s voice crackled through the comms, making Adra grit his teeth.

From the rooftop of one of the buildings flanking the Cathedral, Adra watched the lanky boy, his brown hair held back by a black bandana. With one hand stuffed into his jacket and the other gripping a large gym bag as if he were just heading home from volleyball practice, Nico smiled at nothing, knowing exactly where Adra’s sniper scope was tracking him.

“Alain, status,” Adra cut Nico’s flirting short.

“No movement from my vantage point.”

“Yannick?”

“Guards holding formation.”

Alain and Yannick aimed their rifles from the tops of different buildings, covering opposite positions. While Adra had a wide view of the Cathedral’s front, Yannick and Alain covered the flanks, keeping clear firing lines across the temple’s diagonals.

“Nico.”

“Finally,” the boy huffed, sounding bored.

“Keep a low profile, Valentini,” Xiahou warned over the comms.

“I’ll be the picture of discretion, Xia.”

Xiahou Yunlong was pretending to read a book and grunted at the nickname that sliced his surname in half. With a backpack slung over one shoulder and round, wire-rimmed glasses, he sat on a bus stop bench on the other side of the plaza. The calmness on his face and the severe shape of his dark eyes gave him the look of just another foreign student waiting for a late-night ride. He was Nico’s only ground support.

Adra shifted his scope back to Nico. The guard who had been exchanging smiles and glances with Nico stepped closer.

The man seemed shy. Even when he reached out to touch Nico’s face, there was a hesitation. Nico was only sixteen, but his smile was hard to resist.

“What is he doing?” Xiahou broke the silence.

“Being discreet,” Alain deadpanned, something he rarely did.

Adra’s finger tensed on the trigger, with the crosshairs locked right between the guard’s eyes. He felt the cold metal beneath his index finger, steadying his breathing so the rifle barrel wouldn’t sway.

The gate swung open. They walked up to the Cathedral in silence, the guard signaling to another and getting a nod in return. When the heavy doors closed behind Nico and the guard, Adra finally eased his finger off the trigger.

“Was putting him in this situation really necessary?” Xiahou muttered in protest.

“Quiet,” Adra ordered.

The silence between the four of them gave way to the sound of heavy breathing over the comms, then a short moan followed by a long gasp. Nico’s moan, Adra realized, gritting his teeth.

Then, nothing.

“Nico?” Alain called out, and Adra didn’t reprimand him for it.

The line stayed dead. Adra considered that Nico’s earpiece might have been switched off during the scuffle or damaged. Both scenarios put him on high alert.

The comms crackled.

“Holy shit, you guys gotta see the inside of this place.”

The collective sigh of relief was so clear that, for a split second, Adra forgot the distance separating them.

“Status?” Adra demanded.

“Amazed! The walls, the sculptures, everything looks like gold and... Fuck me! Look at this high altar!”

Adra rolled his eyes. Nico admired the myths, the legends, clinging to an almost innocent belief in a savior. To Adra, it was all just useless flaunting of dogma he had rejected a long time ago.

“Nico, report,” Adra insisted.

“You’re a fucking buzzkill, you know that?” Nico muffled a laugh. “The guy didn’t last long. Guess he couldn’t get it up.”

“Nico,” Alain cut in. “Are you alright?”

Nico clicked his tongue. Alain was probably the only one who actually showed he cared.

“Yeah. I knocked the guy out. Think he’s dead. Who cares?” He paused briefly. “This place is massive. It’s gonna take a while to plant the charges.”

Despite his fascination with the sacred, Nico was competent. He knew explosives inside out and exactly how to use them.

“Man, what a waste when all of this goes up in smoke...” Nico lamented.

“Who goes there?!”

“Huh?!”

Adra, like the rest of the team, stayed dead silent the moment they realized someone else was inside the Cathedral with Nico. They waited for an alarm to go off or for the guards to be called in. Everything hinged on Nico’s reaction.

“What are you doing in here, boy?!”

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“Guard—!!”

Nico’s act was cut short by a sharp crack.

Adra tightened his grip on his rifle, waiting for the sound of a falling body or a scream that never came. There were several seconds of absolute silence before Nico’s voice returned like a ghost of a whisper.

“I’m definitely going to hell now.”

“Guards on the move,” Yannick warned.

The priest’s interrupted shout hadn’t just echoed in their earpieces.

“Covering fire!” Xiahou urged, sprinting across the plaza.

Adra took the shot.

The first guard dropped, his body tumbling down the front steps. Yannick caught the second in the leg; the man collapsed with a scream, instantly silenced by Alain’s shot straight through the chest.

Xiahou didn’t wait. He scaled the iron gates with the agility of someone who had trained for this since childhood and vanished into the darkness of the Cathedral.

***

Xiahou wrinkled his nose at the man slumped between the pews. He noticed the guard’s uniform pants were unzipped, and a pool of blood was spreading from the wound in his neck where Nico’s knife was buried. Further ahead, a priest lay lifeless with a hole dead center in his forehead.

“Xia, you came to keep me company?”

“Targets eliminated,” Xiahou reported over the team comms. He gave Nico a quick once-over. The boy seemed to be waiting for something, an expectation Xiahou had no time to decipher. “Valentini is...” Xiahou assessed Nico one last time, watching him stare solemnly at the murdered priest, and finished, “...in one piece.”

“Proceed,” Adra ordered. “Enemy reinforcements incoming. Make it quick.”

“Finish planting the charges, Valentini.” Xiahou pulled the parts from his backpack, assembled a shotgun, and racked it.

“You got it!” Nico paused abruptly. “Hey, Xia, let me borrow your gun for a sec.”

Xiahou handed him the shotgun. Nico moved swiftly between the pews and took aim. A flicker of something passed through Nico’s eyes, and he forced it back before blasting the guard in the head.

“Much better,” Nico exhaled.

He didn’t hand the weapon back, and Xiahou wasn’t about to ask Nico for anything while he was in that state of faux tranquility. Instead, Xiahou pulled a pistol from the bottom of his backpack and waited.

“You know what I like most about you, Xia? You never ask questions.”

“I’m just here to make sure the mission isn’t compromised.”

“Right.”

Xiahou ignored the sarcastic tone and counted the gunshots outside. Screams echoed from every direction. The Cathedral’s massive stained-glass window shattered over Nico moments before he finished setting the last charge in the area.

“Holy shit!” Nico grabbed the gym bag and sprinted, shoving the shotgun back into Xiahou’s chest. “Let’s go! Tick-tock, Xia, tick-tock!”

Xiahou hurried after him, not questioning the route as Nico clicked the safety off his own pistol.

“Since nobody else has shown up here, I’m guessing the party’s down in the crypt.”

They headed down. Underground, the biblical frescoes gave way to walls lined with white tiles and fluorescent lights—a sterile, hospital-like atmosphere that felt like a worse blasphemy than anything they had done upstairs. A heavily armored door with a keypad blocked their path.

“Could they make this any more of a pain?” Nico hooked up a decoder to the panel and let his fingers work their magic.

The triple-layer encryption broke line by line, and the click of the heavy door unlocking was accompanied by a theatrical flourish from Nico.

“Show-off,” Xiahou grumbled, his weapon already raised.

Xiahou didn’t ask who the people in white lab coats were when they stumbled into the corridor Nico had just opened. He fired twice, staining the sterilized floor red. They were in the way, and the two of them needed to get through. Fast.

A massive laboratory sprawled out behind a set of double doors. Desks, computers, test tubes, and other medical paraphernalia were scattered everywhere.

Xiahou shot one of the men holding a clipboard. Blood splattered across the white coat and straight onto monitors displaying genetic graphs.

“Did they say this was a command base or an underground Botox clinic?” Nico mocked, putting a bullet in the head of another tech still sitting in his chair.

To Xiahou, it didn’t matter.

Fresh gunfire whizzed behind them as guards swarmed down from the upper level, forcing them to duck for cover behind pillars and desks. A blast from Xiahou’s shotgun blew the heads off two armed guards at once. The silent Cathedral had given him the false impression that he wouldn’t have to rack up such a high body count in one go, and it annoyed him.

He caught a glimpse of Nico dodging behind a counter to reach the most heavily guarded computer. A man in a lab coat darted through the crossfire, trying to yank the cables out, but Nico dropped him with a single shot. They needed the data sitting on that hard drive.

“Fuck, Adra!” Nico yelled, gunning down a female doctor. “It’s like a damn anthill down here!”

“Did you copy the files yet?”

Xiahou saw a doctor wrap Nico in a rear-naked choke. It was either an act of pure desperation or of sheer bravery. The sound of Nico struggling for air became his entire focus. Xiahou raised his pistol. He lined up the shot and put a bullet straight through the attacker’s head, giving Nico a split second to gasp for air.

“They’re surrounding the Cathedral. Get out of there. Now.”

“No fucking way I came down here for nothing,” Nico gasped before scrambling to the computer.

Xiahou would have left that hellhole in a heartbeat, but just like his partner, he refused to abandon the mission.

“Valentini, hurry!” Xiahou fired, dropping a guard sneaking up on Nico’s flank.

Nico pushed forward, killing two uniformed techs in his path.

“Fuck yeah!” He jammed the flash drive into the terminal and started extracting the files.

There were too many people in that room—panicked staff and armed guards pouring in through a concealed side door that had suddenly sprung open. Xiahou couldn’t stop a burly doctor from grabbing Nico by the throat. The large body blocked his line of sight, but it only took one scream from Nico for Xiahou to unload his magazine into the man’s massive frame.

The man collapsed, dragging Nico down with him.

“Valentini!”

“Nico?”

“I-I’m good,” Nico coughed. Xiahou had no way to be sure; the kid stumbled as he got up, and Xiahou had to gun down two more men who burst through the back door.

Nico’s hand clutched his chest, and he groaned in pain.

“Nico, status!” Alain’s voice crackled, laced with anguish.

“Got the fucking files!” Nico grunted, leaning heavily against the desk with one hand while yanking the flash drive out with the other.

Xiahou dodged a fresh volley of bullets as Adra barked, “Get out of there! Now!”

Before Xiahou could react to the order, Nico sprinted past him, grabbing his arm.

“Fifty-two seconds, Xia!” Nico warned, bolting ahead of him.

The timer on the final explosive was counting down beneath the mainframe desk, perfectly synced with the rest of the C4 Nico had rigged to the Cathedral’s load-bearing pillars.

“Boom... Boom... Boom,” Nico chanted.

Together, he and Xiahou blew past the Cathedral pews where the two bodies from their earlier sweep lay, rushing out of the temple and vaulting down the steps straight for the gates.

They scaled the iron fence, but before they could jump to the other side, the shockwave hurled them through the air. They slammed into the hard pavement, the blast leaving them disoriented.

***

The moonlight glowed over the rubble and the dead, exposing a brutal side of the war that unsettled them far more than they would ever admit.

In war, you were either part of the problem or part of the solution. Xiahou had chosen to be a bit of both, and anyone who stood in his way faced the harsh judgment of his fierce ideals of freedom. He was entirely different from the young man currently sitting in the ruins of the Cathedral their enemies had used as a safe haven.

Nico’s brown hair whipped in the hot wind rising from the scattered fires still licking at the bombed-out structure. He rested on a slab of marble that used to be an altar.

“Is it too late for my soul to be saved, Xia?”

Xiahou couldn’t say.

They didn’t share the same religion, nor did he know the criteria for a soul to be spared after committing such crimes. They were killers—no matter how righteous the cause, no divine forgiveness would ever wash away the blood on their hands.

“We got the data. Orders are to fall back and prep for the final strike,” Xiahou reminded him. “You can figure out what to do with your soul when this is all over. And stop calling me Xia.”

It was easy to deal with Nico as long as he avoided the trap of actually engaging in a conversation with him.

Nico let out a soft, resigned laugh in a way that was entirely his own. Xiahou was on the verge of risking a question, but asking meant getting involved.

“Regroup,” Adra’s voice cut through the static in their earpieces. “And make sure there are no survivors left.”

A chuckle slipped from the young man sitting on the ruined altar.

“Man, I wonder why they call us terrorists, huh? So unfair.”

Adra ignored Nico.

Xiahou knew well enough that Nico despised the cleanup operations at the end of their raids. “No survivors” was a knife to Nico’s chest. Xiahou had seen it in his eyes when he stormed into the Cathedral just moments after Nico had shot the priest.

Xiahou admired him as Nico adjusted the black bandana on his forehead to keep the messy brown strands at bay.

“Have you ever had your heart broken, Xia?”

The question came out of left field, catching Xiahou off guard. His mind flashed back to the lab, to Nico’s scream of agony, and to the sharp tightness in his own chest at seeing him in danger. If Nico had turned around, he would have caught Xiahou hesitating, the answer caught in his throat.

“What kind of question is that, Valentini?” He found his voice before his partner could notice.

“The kind you’re not going to answer, right?” Nico turned to him with his usual teasing smirk. “Let’s wrap this up before Adra kicks our asses.”

Nico’s shoulder brushed against Xiahou’s as he walked past.

The brief touch, far from rough, left enough warmth in Xiahou’s chest for him to be absolutely certain of the answer.