Rendezvous - Chapter 5: Introduzioni

Desmond was curled in his sleeping bag, but there was no way he could relax right now. He couldn't shake the image of Shaun strapping on his blade, the recollection of his words: "We've nothing else to do it with." She is innocent. Even stupid paranoid Shaun should be able to see that.... Maybe he was just trying to freak me out.... Maybe he was just trying to act like a badass instead of a bookworm for once.... If this is his idea of a prank, I'll kick his ass.

He heard footsteps echoing from the entrance tunnel. Sitting up abruptly, he tried to discern whether there were just two people approaching, or three...

He didn't have to wonder for long. Shaun's voice soon called out to him and Lucy. "All right people. It seems this chapter of our little 'cult' is taking on a new colleague." He was back to his normal annoyed tone, rather than the cold, emotionless way he had spoken earlier. "...Here she is, the fabled Alexis."

Desmond was instantly at her side. "Lexie!" He wrapped her in a sudden hug. "I hope these two creeps didn't scare you too much."

"We're creeps now?" Rebecca sounded hurt. "We were just looking out for you. For all of us, really."

"And I'm still only about eighty-eight percent sure she's not a pawn of the Templars, so she's not off the hook yet. Remember what happened with Uberto!"

"I'm okay, Des," his friend assured him, patting his back. "All they did was snoop around the place and then question me a little bit." Does she realize her life was just on the line?  "Who's Uberto?" she asked.

"...Templar who killed most of my- most of Ezio's family." he muttered, hating to be reminded of the painful memory. "Pretended to be their friend."

"Daamn. No wonder y'all are so cautious about new people." Sensing his anguish, she quickly changed the subject. "So, this is your safehouse?" Her eyes were roaming, taking in the scattered crates, the marble statues, the sleeping bags, the stone chunks fallen from the vaulted ceiling. "I guess I was thinking too literally. I was expecting more of a... house."

"The safety part is a whole lot more important." Lucy said.

"Safety... of course." Her gaze lingered on the huge boulders.

"Hey, that only happened after the Pope hit it with a million cannonballs!" Rebecca reassured her. She was already back at the computer.

"All right, all right... So where should I put my stuff?"

"Pick a spot, any spot. We're not concerned with feng shui around here. My name's Rebecca, by the way."

"Yeah, Desmond told me you're the tech guru of the squad." Alexis set down her suitcase between two of the statues. With all the scrutiny she'd just endured, she hadn't expected this kind of laid-back atmosphere, but she was glad for it. "So by process of elimination, you must be Lucy." She turned to face the blonde.

"That's me."

While the girls were getting acquainted, Shaun pulled Desmond aside. "What now?"

"Look, sorry I had to be a hardass earlier, but you can't just be revealing stuff willy-nilly. Don't go telling her anything else without running it past one of us first."

"Oh, now I have to have permission to talk to her? You still don't trust her? Don't trust the Eagle Vision?"

He scoffed. "We don't have any real data on how that works. It seems pretty reliable for finding hidden objects and codes, but people's motives and allegiances are a lot more complex. Maybe it's just influenced by preconceived notions of who you think is on your side. Or maybe your vision isn't as good as your ancestors' yet."

"Whatever. Thanks for not killing her, at least." Desmond shuffled back to the others, clearly not wanting to talk to him anymore right now.

"These are some neat statues." Alexis was saying. "What's this symbol they're all wearing?"

"That is the Assassin... logo, I guess you could say." That's surely okay to tell her. It's no secret.

"Logo? Are we a business now, Desmond? Like Abstergo?"

"What do you call it then, Becca?"

"Symbol, sigil, crest, emblem, whatever. Just anything besides 'logo'." Rebecca made a face of disgust at the word's corporate implications.

"Fine. It's the Assassin... crest," he decided. "They're statues of ancient Assassins, Lex. From different places and times, but all united by the same crest and creed."

"How poetic."

"Ah, bollocks."

"Hey, they are Assassins, don't try to tell me I'm wrong about that!"

"That wasn't a 'you're wrong' bollocks. It's 'I've just realized we only have four sleeping bags' bollocks."

"...I'll just share with Desmond," Alexis proposed.

Shaun made an exasperated noise. "Fine, but no monkey business, you two."

"Don't mind him, he thinks he's standing in for my dad or something." Desmond said under his breath. "We don't all sleep at the same time anyway; there's always somebody keeping watch. I like your idea, though."

He was finally able to relax. The other Assassins had accepted her, albeit tentatively. For once, Desmond slept soundly, the warmth of Alexis comforting him.

---

When Alexis awoke, she was at first confused by the unfamiliar surroundings, but then the events of last night rushed back through her mind, and she bolted upright. The others were already up and eating what looked to be a fast-food breakfast.

"You sure you don't want to sleep in a little?" Desmond asked as she pulled up a chair. "You had kind of an intense night."

"No way I could go back to sleep now. I'm totally wired." She winked at Shaun. "Don't worry, I mean 'excited' wired, not like 'I'm actually a spy and I'm recording this conversation' wired." Shaun didn't laugh.

As the meal wound down, Lucy spoke up. "All right people. I know we had kind of a weird turn of events yesterday, but we can't let that throw us off track. We're sticking to the schedule."

"Okay, I guess it's Animus time then." Desmond polished off the last bite of his panino, then settled into the sleek red "Baby", putting his arm in its slot as Rebecca checked the tuning of the apparatus on the head end.

"That lounge chair is the Animus, huh... You just lie there? Don't have to plug it into yourself, like the Matrix?"

Silly girl. She saw me naked, she knows there's no headjack on my neck, Desmond thought.

"Pull up a seat, Lex." Rebecca motioned to her. "We keep track of what's happening on these monitors."

The DNA timeline twisted across the screen, with the start point labeled "1459, Ezio Auditore". "Auditore? The guy who lived in this villa?"

"That's the guy. He had the Apple of Eden and hid it somewhere during this memory sequence." She pointed a gloved finger at a blacked-out segment of the timeline. "But that data is all scrambled. Desmond has to complete these previous memories before he can access it."

Making little scrolling motions with his fingers, Desmond selected Ezio's next memory. The room around him dissolved away and was replaced by the blankness of the Animus loading area.

While Rebecca and Alexis were focusing on Desmond and the Animus, Lucy approached Shaun and spoke in a low voice. "Were you serious when you said you were only eighty-eight percent sure about her?"

"Well, she's certainly no Templar. But it's possible she was sent here as a decoy to lure Desmond out. I made sure she doesn't have anything on her that could transmit a signal, though. We should be all right as long as we keep an eye on her. Right now, I'm trying to figure out how to explain this to Bill." He nodded towards his monitor, where he was composing an email.

Alexis watched with fascination as Ezio infiltrated a lavish party, hiding amidst the revelers, sending out women to distract guards, then taking a seat on a bench, seeming to relax, until suddenly, he leapt up and plunged his blade into a fat man with a wide-brimmed red hat.

In reply to the question she had been about to ask, Rebecca said, "That was Juan Borgia. He financed Cesare's military campaign, among other things... and he liked to throw parties."

Alexis made an inscrutable "mm-hm" sound. He doesn't sound all that evil. But Desmond just killed him... well, simulated killing him, I guess... But, he's only doing it, because his ancestor did it. And he needed to do it for Italy to be free, right? She recalled Desmond's words: "Good guys sometimes have to kill bad guys." She had accepted this, but actually seeing it happen, even if just on a computer screen, really brought it home.

Subject: The new girl

William,

We've had to make an unexpected addition to the group. Her name is Alexis Chandler (or so she says). She was a friend of Desmond before all this kicked off. He'd made contact with her multiple times before telling any of us about her. He told her too much for her own good, so we brought her in last night. From what I can discern, she's an outsider to all this; no connections with either side. Where would you go from here?


He looked over the message once more, then added "PS: What do you know about Eagle Vision?" before finally sending it, then closing the Hephaestus window to get back to the Animus feed.

Ezio was back at the Rosa in Fiore, but was informed that some Borgia thugs had beaten him there, in pursuit of the banker's money. He opened the door, braced for a fight, but everyone was surprised to see that Claudia had already dispatched the goons.

"All right! Girl power!" Rebecca whooped. Alexis realized she was really going to have to get used to seeing dead people.