Committed Chapter 20

Ariadne was nearly out of breath when they finally reached the bottom floor.  Taking over thirty flights of stairs was exhausting.  She’d almost fallen twice, Paris once.  Both times she’d been able to recover her balance.  Same with Paris.  But they were both winded now as they made their way down the final set of stairs into the parking garage.

            They burst out into the underground complex, cement walls and ceilings keeping the ground above them from caving down on her.  Ariadne saw cracks forming in the rectangular pillars supporting the roof, saw it in the walls.  Would the garage choose this moment to collapse down on top of them?  Or was she just imagining the imminent collapse.     

            “Over here,” Ariadne said.  She hurried over to what looked like a garage door just to the left of the stairwell exit.  There was a keypad next to the garage door.  She had the keys to her father’s car, which was just behind that door, but she hadn’t expected the key pad.

            “I don’t know what the passcode is,” Ariadne said.

            “Try your birthday.”

            “My dad has known his whole life that he’d eventually have to hand me over to Janus to be his wife-slave.  What makes you think he would choose my birthdate-“

            “Just try it!”

            Ariadne gave a sigh of exhasperation and quickly punched in her birthdate.  The screen above the pad blinked ACCESS GRANTED and the garage door began to rise.

            “See,” Paris said.

            Ariadne didn’t say anything.  The two of them ducked down under the door without waiting for it to finish rising.  Paris stopped dead in his tracks when he saw the car sitting there waiting for them.

            “Oh, no, you have got to be kidding me,” he said, eyes wide with amazement.

            “Get in,” Ariadne said, stepping around to the passenger’s side of the car and clicking the remote to unlock the doors.

            “Hold on Ariadne, we need to treat the lady right,” Paris said.  He took a step forward and lowered his hands to the hood of the car as though he were going to touch it, but kept them an inch above the surface of the car as though out of respect.  “Hello, gorgeous.”

            “Paris.”

            “Ariadne, I am about to climb into this car,” Paris said as he walked around to the passenger’s side, keeping his hands just above the car all the way.  “Do you have any idea how fantastic that is?  I have never even seen one of these in real-life let alone thought I’d ever get to drive around in one.  Let me take a moment to show my admiration.”

            The garage door had risen all the way up now.  The garage door faced out into the underground parking perpendicular to the opening of the stairwell door they’d come down from.  Ariadne was already inside the car, turning the key in the ignition when the stairwell door slammed open.

            She looked up and saw the same man from the elevator burst out and look around wildly for them.  Before he had finished doing a one-hundred and eighty degree scan of the underground parking area, Paris had yanked open the passenger’s side door, plopped himself down in the seat next to her, and buckled himself in.

            “Go, go, go!” Paris cried.

            The man’s eyes locked onto Ariadne’s through the windshield in front of her.  She felt a surge run through her, as though a secret message had been sent through the air between them.

            I’m going to catch you.

            Ariadne felt the coldness continue to spread out into her limbs from her heart as she put her foot down on the accelerator.  She wondered how long before the cold rendered he completely immobile.  Frozen.

Achilles locked eyes with Ariadne Helen, sitting in the driver’s seat of the car.  She had her hands on the wheel.  She was driving, not Paris.  Was that the normal behaviour for someone who had been kidnapped against her will?

            Achilles saw that Paris was seated in the passenger’s seat next to her.  There was no sign of any weapon pointed at Ariadne.  No sign at all that he was coercing her to drive.  Stockholm Syndrome perhaps?  Or was he looking at everything backwards, courtesy of the perspective his client had selected for him?

            The car they were in hummed to life and pulled out of its private garage.

            For a moment, Achilles just had to admire the sleek metal vehicle pulling out towards him.  Marble white metal with a slash of black ribbon just behind the door on either side.  A smooth, curved design for maximum speed and aerodynamic movement.

            A split second later, the Arthur Helen’s Audi R8 shot past Achilles like a blur, heading for the underground parking’s exit.  Achilles instantly took off after it, pumping his arms like mad.

            He chased the Audi up the ramp into the daylight, furiously propelling himself forward.  He had no delusions about catching it on foot.  Luckily, he had not wanted to leave any exit from Hellenistic Inc. unsecured and had parked his own vehicle in the parking lot behind the building.  His escorts, Officer’s Antenor and Seth, had parked their vehicle in the front of the building.

            The Audi shot down the rows of cars while Achilles slid over the hood of a sedan separating him from the vehicle he had selected from Janus’ private collection.

            He had left the Mercedes SLR unlocked when he’d entered the building and was behind the wheel, pulling out after the Audi in less than three seconds.

            He reached for the radio that his escorts had given him.  “Ariadne and Paris are in a white Audi R8 licence plate Hotel, Echo, Lima, Echo, November, Golf, Echo, November, Four, Eight.  We’re behind the building turning left.”

            “Got it,” came the reply from Antenor.

In the background Achilles could hear the voice of Officer Seth on the police radio.  “All officers we have a code three in progress, driver is suspect wanted in the kidnapping of Ariadne Helen.  Vehicle’s licence plate is Hotel, Echo-“

The radio cut out at that point as Antenor released the talk button at his end.  Achilles didn’t both to radio back and inform them that Ariadne was in fact the one driving, not Paris.  His instincts told him to keep that detail to himself.

Achilles dropped the radio back onto the passenger’s seat and cut the wheel sharply to the right, cutting into traffic behind Hellenistic Inc. HQ after the Audi.

The Audi handled like a dream, but that didn’t stop cold sweat from rolling down Ariadne’s brow as she cut left and right, dodging between the scattered vehicles on the street around her.  She was pushing the Audi as fast as she dared in the traffic, dancing the speedometer between seventy and ninety kilometers an hour.

            She cut left, screeching in front of a pickup truck that braked just enough to avoid a collision.  Momentum shoved her to the right but she held onto the wheel tight and levelled out, punching them forward up the new street.

            Paris was turned around looking back behind the vehicle.  “He’s in the Mercedes!”

            Ariadne glanced quickly into the rear-view mirror just before cutting around a SUV in their path.  She found herself suddenly in oncoming traffic, having lost track of which lane she was in.  A sedan sang out in terror, the horn like a scream, and Ariadne found herself blocked on her right.  Taking the only option available, Ariadne nudged the Audi to the left, missed the sedan by a hair’s breadth, before forcing them back over so the traffic was no longer coming directly at them.

            “If that’s how you plan on losing him, that’ll work,” Paris cried.

            Ariadne risked a glance at her side mirror and saw that traffic was strewn across the roadway.  Cars had spun out in attempts to break and avoid the Audi and were slowly trying to recover.  The road was pretty choked up as a result of her driving.

            But through a gap between two vehicles the Mercedes glinted into view, cutting across the asphalt like a gray spectre.  Just like the man behind the wheel.

            Ariadne whipped her gaze back onto the road.  Hair flicked across her vision and she cursed, slapping it out of the way.

            Suddenly, there was a dump truck directly in front of them.  Perfect T-bone collision material.  They had reached a four-way intersection and the Audi had the red light.

            “Hold on!” Ariadne had time to scream.  She pulled the emergency break and flipped the wheel to the right.  The Audi’s tires shrieked as they fought the opposing forces of the emergency break and her foot still planted on the accelerator.  The Audi lost just enough speed to let the dump-truck pass in front of it.  The rear end of the car drifted to the left and Ariadne dropped the emergency break.  She slammed her foot on the accelerator and shot through the narrow gap between the dump truck and the van that had been tail-gating it.  Horns blared and Ariadne felt her hands slip on the wheel.

            For one terrifying moment, it looked like they’d end up wrapped around a street-lamp directly in their path.   But Ariadne’s hands found grip again and she yanked the Audi to the left, skidding past the lamp post but catching some curb in the process.

            Paris grunted in shock, his head smacking against the roof of the car.  He barely seemed to notice as he yanked himself back into a position to see out the back of the car.

            “He’s still with us!” Paris cried.

            Sure enough, Ariadne saw the gray spectre slither through the same intersection, pulling a nearly identical move to slip between two cars.

            “Damnit!” Ariadne cried as she slammed a clenched fist against the steering wheel.

            A street appeared on her right and she cut into it.  She slid across the road into the oncoming lane and found herself almost nose-to-nose with another vehicle.  She jerked the wheel and shot past the vehicle, climbing onto the deserted side-walk alongside it.

            There was a heart-wrenching screech of metal against brick as the Audi rubbed shoulders with the building to their left.  Ariadne yanked the car back onto the road and shot back across the oncoming lane.  She cut straight through and turned right onto another road.  This road was wide, three lanes in either direction, a giant river through the centre of New Carthage connecting the downtown area to the adjacent universities and the student ghetto of apartment buildings and convenience stores.

            “Say something witty,” Paris cried.

            “What!?” Ariadne demanded.  She swiped a hand across her forehead to clear the cold-sweat but found her hands were clammy and did very little to help.

            “Are you still with me!?  Say something witty!”

            “Shut up Paris!”

            Ariadne cut right, squeezing between two cars.  Ahead, she saw the glow of red and blue police lights lighting up the windows on a building.  A moment later, two police cars leapt onto the roadway ahead of her.  The gray spectre of the Mercedes was still directly on their tail, having closed the gap to only a few meters as Ariadne weaved between cars.

            “Find the anger, Ariadne,” Paris said.  “Find it and let it fuel your need to fight.  Don’t give in to Janus just because a computer screen shows you a bunch of names.”

            “But those names were me, Paris!”  Ariadne screamed.  “Maybe you don’t get it but I do.  They were me.  I can’t get away from him.  Every time, every time I die and I come back, he finds me again.”

            “Then don’t let him get you again!  You are strong, Ariadne!  He can’t take you unless you let him!”

            “The ring-“

            “I don’t care about the ring!  I don’t care about the Curse of Cain or reincarnation!  What matters is that right here, right now, you scream it at the top of your lungs so that you never forget it, even if he gets that ring on you.  Because if you can’t do that, if you can’t keep fighting, then he doesn’t need the ring anymore.  That’s when he owns you, Ariadne.  Not before.  So scream, damnit, scream because I can’t let him take you away without a fight!”

            Horns blared around them, sirens screamed.  Ariadne felt the coldness almost reaching her fingertips.  She was tired.  She was sweaty. She wanted to give up.  She felt like any second it would end either with them getting pulled over or in a mess of metal as the Audi crashed into one of the cars all around them.  It all seemed to be pressing in on them from every side.

            Then, suddenly, her face felt warm.  She felt her cheek heat up, reminding her of Janus’ hand against her face, striking her.  The memory of the slap seemed to fill her face with heat again.

            Suddenly, the fire was shooting through the rest of her.  Her entire body light up, burning again with an unimaginable determination.  She would never let him strike her like that again.  She would never let him take her again, let him make her his again.  She would fight until her dying breath and even then she wouldn’t let him have her.  She would never be his.  Never.

            Ariadne screamed, letting the surging heat flow through her vocal cords as she shouted.  She drowned out the sounds of the cars and sirens around her.

            Paris was beaming next to her when she was done.

            “It’s starting to feel a little crowded,” Ariadne grinned.  Defiance permeated her body like a drug.  “I think it’s about time we lost these bastards.”