[denial]

By: tatufreak

Part Three Chapter Two, Part Three

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Lena glanced left and right before crouching at a grille beyond the brightly-lit reception area. Sliding a screwdriver from her belt, she quickly undid the bolts and slid them into her pocket for later replacement. Very carefully she removed the covering and laid it flat on the ground, slipping into the shaft without a sound. Once she was in she turned to pull the grille up against the opening behind her, and then she paused for a moment. Detaching her ni-glo's from her belt, she slipped them onto her head and adjusted the brightness so that the shafts appeared in front of her. Green-lit corridors stretched away in every direction - it was imperative that she took the right one. Closing her blue eyes, she saw the carefully memorised map and traced her position on it. Then her eyelids flew open as she began to crawl silently onwards.

Yulia swung herself up hand over hand. She grunted with the effort, but scaled the vertical scaffolds like a sailor. Quickly she made her way up and onto the first floor fire escape, careful not to be seen or heard. Below her feet a security guard emerged, patrolling the grounds and carrying a Uzi.
Yulia paid him no attention, quickly making a dog-check before turning her face upwards. She scanned the side of the building above her, eyes lingering on a large flagpole extending from the second storey.
Now she snapped back into action, climbing up to balance on the handrail of the fire escape. Carefully she reached up and jumped to catch the base of the next exit, grunting as she pulled herself up and onto the scaffold platform.
"Only twenty-three more to go..."

Lena had reached a fork in her shaft. Her forehead wrinkled as she contemplated it, trying hard to remember the map. Left or right?
Finally she decided to turn left, crawling until she met a large propeller. It turned with a dull throb, cooling her sweaty forehead.
"Damn."

Yulia was scaling the fifth floor. She had run into a spot of trouble regarding a loose rail, but her lightning-quick reflexes had saved her - not for the first time either. Now she was just about to pass the fire exit when a sudden movement made her duck into the shadows. A security guard emerged into the lighting, headed straight for the door.
Yulia quietly reached up for the base of the sixth floor fire exit, wrapping her hands around the strong horizontal supports. She carefully lifted herself up and flattened herself against it, muscles shaking from the effort.
The exit creaked open as the man looked out. He half-closed it behind him as he stepped out, walking towards the railings as he leaned over to look at the scaffolds below him. After a cursory check, he lifted his walkie-talkie to his mouth and pressed the talk button.
"Fred, there's no one on the exits. False alarm. Must be the other-floor alerts malfunctioning again."
There was a pause, and Yulia clamped her eyes shut with the effort of remaining pulled up to the base of the sixth story escape.
I can't hold on much longer!
The radio crackled a response.
"If they're malfunctioning, guess I'll turn 'em off for the night. We'll get the engineers in to look at them tomorrow. Thanks Bob."
The guard opened the door and disappeared back inside. Yulia counted to ten before letting her feet drop. She swung them up behind her onto the sixth floor, hooking them against the railings. Then it was a simple matter of a sit-up to complete the motion, leaving her on the next fire escape.
"Why weren't we told about an alarm?" she mused, annoyed.

A few minutes later, Lena finally reached her intersection, taking it quickly as she raced against time. She turned a corner, then another. Finally the shaft reached a dead-end, and Lena grunted in frustration. She shut her eyes tightly and tried to remember...ah yes.
Quickly she braced herself and kicked the shaft end wall, hard. It buckled and folded away. Lena pushed her way past it, into a separate passage.
Suddenly she pulled up short as she found herself face to face with the heart of the colossal building - the electrical centre shaft.
The entrance was through a large round screw door at her feet. Quickly she spun the wheel and lifted the hatch, descending the interior ladder before closing it behind her. She found herself in a tiny room, about five feet by six. In the centre was a large, padded chair and a ring of surrounding computers.
"Hmm...this I like," she commented, but decided not to take the seat. Instinct told her it would probably not be such a good idea.
Now she crouched below one of the larger computer terminals, supported by a rack on the wall. Quickly she unstrapped a wire from her belt and plugged one end of it into her laptop, which she pulled from a bag on her back.
With the other end of the cable in one hand, she got onto her knees and looked at the back of the computer above her head.
"Now where does this go?"

Yulia was hanging off the rail of the thirteenth floor when she saw the lights in the building flicker slightly.
Something's wrong.
She yanked herself over and hurled her back against the wall, checking the doorway while lifting her right wrist to her mouth.
"Ta! Ta, what just happened?" At first she heard nothing, but then the voice of her partner came through, sounding extremely pissed off.
"Power surge, my laptop's fried. I can still get through on one of theirs, but we'll have to keep it tight to avoid complications. Where are you?"
"Halfway."
"Got it. Speed it up."
Yulia switched her device off and continued climbing, putting the new problem aside for a brief second.

Meanwhile, Lena was now attempting to hack into the building mainframe using their own computer. The client had provided a password, but somehow she didn't quite trust them. Quickly she wrote her own and tapped through the firewall, closing her eyes.
A sudden beep made her open them as a little message flashed up, outlined in red. A few lines of code were added, and Lena quickly and furiously countered with her keyboard. She typed fast, disregarding normal protocols.
A few seconds later the message disappeared and the operating system opened up in front of her eyes.
"That's gotta be the dirtiest damn hack I've ever done," she smiled, humourlessly. "Now let's get down to business."

It was time. Yulia pulled herself onto the twenty-sixth floor fire escape, arms aching and sweat pouring down her forehead. She placed her ni-glo's over her eyes and flicked them on before checking the hallway for intruders. There were none, so she carefully let herself into the building, grateful that the fire escape alarms had been turned off. After backing down a few corridors she arrived at her target, a corner office with a grate below the desk. She pulled a key from her belt and slid it into the door handle, twisting it to let herself in. Now she turned her device back on.
"Ta, I'm in position."

The call came just as Lena accessed the mainframe.
With a smile she entered a command and hit the enter button. A second later the little room was plunged into darkness, as was the rest of the building. The row of computer monitors went dark, and through her ni-glo's Lena could see that the power was completely off - even the backup generators were offline.
Suddenly the hatch above her head flew open. A scrawny men half descended the ladder, a torch in one hand. He flashed it at the chair hurriedly, checking for any signs of tampering. When he saw none he climbed the ladder again, disappearing out of sight.
Lena waited until her heart rate returned to normal before smiling at her insight.

An electric thrill passed through Yulia as the lights flickered, then cut out completely. It was time.
She lifted the grille below the desk and slipped into the shaft below, closing it behind her. She dropped noiselessly and landed on all fours like a cat. She had no problem remembering the route; her photographic memory led her unfalteringly.
Eventually she reached the grille in the shaft floor that led downwards into the office of James Donahue.
Closing her eyes, Yulia breathed in. Right now, Lena would be making her way out of the building many floors below. In the mean time, there was a living, breathing man below her feet that she must concentrate on killing.
It was up to her, now.
Yulia wrenched her ni-glo goggles off and stuck them into her belt. She didn't need them.
She balanced over the grille on four points, staring down below her. The room was dark, and there was the sound of a man breathing heavily. She knew that James Donahue was waiting for the lights to come back on, patient but annoyed.
Here we go!
Yulia jammed one knee into the grille, pushing down with her other foot and forcing the cover from its bolts. As it fell and clattered onto the office floor below, she gripped the edge of the opening, swung herself down into mid-air, and then nearly fell as with a low throb the office lights came on brightly.
Twenty five floors below, Lena stared up at the building in rising horror. The power! The power was back on! But...how?
She closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands, ice settling around her heart.
They knew we were coming...they knew.
Suddenly her eyes flew open and she stared upwards in utter terror, uttering one word in a strangled half-sob.
"Yulia!"
In the office, the dark-haired girl stared as everything seemed to slow down. The CEO was standing at his desk, a gun levelled straight at her. Three armed men stood beyond him, Uzis raised. Bullets began to fly through the air towards Yulia, and without thinking she turned a flip in the air, throwing herself forwards towards Donahue.
The amateur gun-handler dropped his weapon in surprise as the girl landed almost in his arms. A little hand jerked out and caught his belt buckle, and before he or his guards could respond he was yanked through the air as the girl began another flip.
The man spiralled through the air gracelessly, towed by the ballistic actions of the dark-haired Assassin. They reached the windows, and without thinking one of the guards opened fire with a barrage of bullets before the screams of his superior sank in. The shots riddled Donahue's body and made several shatterpoints in the glass beyond him.
As the guards threw down their weapons in horror, a girl emerged from the other side of their boss's bloody corpse. She faced them as she gathered her momentum for her final flip, and in that brief instance her sad, dark eyes searched and understood the three horrified men. Then she was gone - framed for an instant against the huge glass windows and the stormy, heavy sky.
The next moment her back smashed through the glass and she fell towards the earth, instinct causing her to twist as she plummeted.
This is it, Yulia Volkova. The thought flashed through her mind like white-hot lightning. She quieted herself for the final moment, her mind growing strangely clear. She was ready to go. Below her she suddenly spotted Lena, standing far away on the street pavement. Her eyes were terrified and wide, and held something Yulia didn't expect - fear. Fear not for herself, but for the fragile little girl plummeting towards certain death so, so fast.
In that moment, the girls connected. A bond formed that blazed into both of them, something that couldn't and mustn't be broken.
It gave Yulia the will to live for that one instant, and it was just enough.
Her arms snaked out into the darkness and caught the second storey flagpole that she had noticed earlier. As she slammed to a muscle-wrenching halt, she closed her eyes and let her body twist into a natural curve, flipping up and over the pole to exhaust the murderous momentum of the fall.
She dropped the last twelve feet and rolled as she hit the ground, rising to her feet almost as she touched. Then she was away, running like the wind.
She tore around the block, cut through a riddle of passages and emerged at the abandoned carpark, twenty-two seconds before deadline.
At first she thought she was alone - that Lena had deserted her. Had she been set up all the time? No, she couldn't believe that - she wouldn't. As she turned a movement caught her eye, and as her watched beeped the final count, Lena stepped out of the shadows. The two girls approached each other wordlessly, stared into each others' eyes for just a moment, and then the blonde suddenly wrapped her arms around Yulia's little body. The latter slowly reciprocated the hug, and they stood together for a long time under the streetlights, aware of nothing else.
"I thought you..." Lena began to choke back a sob of mingled relief and fear. "I thought you would..."
Yulia reached up and wrapped her curls around her little fingers, comforting the older girl.
"It doesn't matter...shhh...it's ok now."
"But I should have realised it was a set-up..."
"You had no way of knowing. They were very good."
"It must have been the relatives of a previous target..."
"Nevertheless, we completed their mission, and they have to pay us, don't they?"
Lena gave a watery smile. "Yeah..."
The irony of the situation was not lost on her - how the older, sophisticated Parisian socialite was clinging desperately to the comfort of the young, troubled amnesiac.
But for once in her life, it didn't matter. She'd realised how close she had come to losing the younger girl, and it had terrified her. Tomorrow she would once again become a cruel, heartless antagonist - but for now she could cry, and she did.
Tears ran down TaTu's faces as they held each other, and their bond very slowly began to heal both of their bruised and bloodied souls.
A passing young man stopped and sneered at them, displaying a mouthful of gold teeth as he shouted, "Lesbians! Get off the streets!"
As one, Yulia and Lena quietly drew each others' guns from each others' belts. They didn't have to look as they aimed, still holding each other with one arm.
Two identical shots rang out in the night, and then all was still.
In the distance, wailing police sirens were drowned out by the clock striking eleven.

The heavy skies roared.

It began to rain.