The Lore of Prometheus

by Graham Austin-King

  The sensible thing would be to walk slowly and calmly towards the door. The eye is drawn to movement, she knew, and a mad dash for the door would only increase the chances that a bored guard sitting in front of a bank of monitors somewhere would spot her. Of course, it also meant she’d be on the screen for less time.

  “Fuck it,” she muttered.

  She was done being a mouse. She was stronger than this. She threw herself around the corner and sprinted up towards the door. The beep from the card reader seemed impossibly loud as the lock clicked and she eased the door open.

  The woman wore a white lab coat. She turned at the sound of the door and froze, staring wide-eyed at Mackenzie. The two of them stood, rigid with indecision in some kind of ridiculous Mexican stand-off, until the woman jerked her head to the side, gesturing towards a line of metal cabinets that stood against the wall in the narrow hallway that opened out into the room.

  She glanced over her shoulder and said something that Mackenzie didn’t catch. It wasn’t a language she recognised, but the tone seemed casual enough. Her hands clasped a clipboard in front of her and she jabbed her finger again, pointing to her left.

  Shaking herself, Mackenzie finally moved, pressing herself down against the wall beside the row of metal cabinets. Her view was blocked as she pulled her legs in tight, hugging her knees, but she could still see the woman’s legs.

  Christ, what am I doing?

  She had no reason to trust this woman. The guards could be coming for her right now; but then why would she tell her to hide? She bit down on her lip, hating the feeling of helplessness. The woman was clearly speaking with a man on the other side of the room. Her tone was light, and she laughed at something the unseen man said.

  Footsteps receded across the room and a door closed a moment later. The woman turned and rushed to her, urging her up and ushering her across the room, speaking urgently. It was Pashto, Mackenzie realised, though not a dialect she recognised. Her meaning was clear enough despite this, and Mackenzie rushed through the lab, past white and clinical counters and desks filled with computers, microscopes and scientific equipment, to another door.

  “Where does this go?” she asked.

  The woman grimaced. “Up. My English, not well. Go! Go!”

  Mackenzie reached for the woman’s hands, clasping them tight as she smiled and whispered a thank you.

  The woman touched her key-card to the door and pulled it open, pushing at her to move. The message was clear enough and Mackenzie went. Whatever the woman’s motives for helping her, she was putting herself at risk. Somehow, Mackenzie doubted she knew just how much of a risk she’d taken.

  The door led through to a poorly lit hallway. A faulty fluorescent strip-light flickered behind the plastic panel in the ceiling, lending an odd feel to the place. Wherever the woman had sent her, it didn’t seem to be in as regular use as the rest of the complex.

  The doors here had no maglocks. A quick peek behind the first three showed them to be storerooms. The corridor turned twice, and her steps slowed as the realisation struck.

  She had no real idea how big this place was. Other than the vague goal of heading up through the levels, she had no idea of where to go. Would she even know when she hit the ground floor? If the complex above-ground was big enough to have interior corridors and rooms with no windows, then how would she know she’d reached the ground floor?

  She stopped, resting her hands against the wall as the panic rose and threatened to overwhelm her completely.

  “Just keep moving,” she whispered.

  The corridor ended at a lift, and another door with a key-card reader. As always, the doors had no windows and no indication of what might lie beyond. She leaned in, pressing her ear to it and listening for any moment.

  A siren blared and she bit down on a shriek.

  The siren was a piercing, cycling wail that could mean only a handful of things, and somehow, she doubted it was a fire alarm. They knew. They were looking for her now. The clock was ticking, time was against her, and she still had no idea of where to go, or how she might cope if she did manage to get outside.

  She pushed through the door and found another stairwell, plain concrete steps starkly lit with more fluorescent strips set into the ceiling. Mackenzie ran until she heard the voices—loud and laughing, heading up towards her.

  She froze for a moment before cursing herself for the stupidity of the action, and began to run. Her tennis shoes were light, but they weren’t silent, and she moved as quickly as she dared. The door opened in front of her just as she was rounding the turn in the stairwell, and the guard that appeared seemed as shocked as she was. He froze for a moment before reaching for the gun as his hip.

  Mackenzie backed away as he barked orders at her. The words made no sense to her. Panic overrode any chance she might have had at translating and understanding. She was a primal creature now, a wild animal hemmed in and cornered.

  “Don’t do this,” she begged, holding a hand out to the guard as he came closer. “Please, just let me go.”

  She watched as his other hand reached around for a pair of handcuffs. Panic gave way to anger. She’d come so far, risked so much. To be stopped now, this close to escape, seemed almost cruel. Her anger mounted as he reached for her, and gave way to blind fury.

  Her first blows were feeble scratching things. He swatted her hands away, grabbing her arms and pushing her down against the wall. Her fury raged and she smiled as the first few sparks danced from her fingertips.

  The guard fell back as the flames touched him, crying out as he clasped his hand to his chest. His skin there was scorched, already turning to an angry red. He raised the gun again as he backed up the steps. Mackenzie barely noticed it, it was his eyes that held her gaze. He looked at her with a mixture of fear and disgust, horror twisting his features as the gun shook in his hands.

  The fire surged within her as the gun went off, the sound loud enough to strike like a physical blow, and she flinched away from the stone chips exploding from the wall beside her. Flames flew from her hands, washing over the guard’s body as he screamed, and the gun clattered down the steps, the weapon lost in his pain. Mackenzie watched on, and the tears coursed down her cheeks at what she was doing, at what she would continue to do, at what she had become.

  She could feel the flames roaring within her, begging to be released. They wanted to burn, to destroy, and she would let them. Janan would have what he’d wanted now. He had created a monster, and unleashed, she would turn this world to ash.

  “Do not move!” The order made her jump and she turned despite herself.

  She barely had time to register the two guards before the needles hit, twin probes with wires trailing after them. She didn’t scream—there was no time to draw breath before the pain hit. Instead, a low, hissing, moan escaped from between her clenched teeth as the taser clicked over and over. Her back arched as the electricity coursed through her.

  And then she was down, her body a mass of spasms as her muscles convulsed.

  She didn’t pass out. On some level she had expected to. Instead she lay there, her body still wracked with pain, surging through muscles that were no longer her own.

  The guards approached warily, the taser held ready as they argued over who should bind her. This was what she was now; an escaped animal to be feared and hunted.

  She lay on the cold stone, unable to fight as they bound her and left her face-down on the concrete. She stopped listening to the voices, lost in her misery until she felt fresh hands on her. Medical gloves touched her skin, followed by the prick of a needle, and then they retreated, waiting until the drugs took her hand and led her into the darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Mackenzie licked at her lips in the darkness. Her tongue felt dry and hard, as if caked by something, and a dull ache throbbed behind her eyes. Overlaying it all was a vague fuzziness, as if she was experiencing everything through a fog.

  She’d been drugged again. The thoug
ht was slow to come, and even when it hit it took long moments for her to process it.

  She hung in the darkness, the familiar cuffs taking the weight of her arms as she dropped back into a half-doze, waiting for the drug-induced haze to clear.

  Water.

  She craned her neck, reaching for the tube but there was nothing. They wouldn’t chain her up with no water, would they? Panic found her and she thrashed back and forth, casting about with her face as she felt for the tube.

  The plastic tube spattered droplets over her face as she made contact, and she flinched back before searching for it again, and then drinking hungrily. Water helped, as she knew it would, and she felt the effects of the drugs clearing as she lay back against the inclined wooden frame.

  “Hello?” she called out. The darkness took her words and swallowed them, leaving only silence.

  “I know you can hear me,” she shouted. “Answer me!”

  There was no response. She was back in the cell again. Alone in the darkness with only her thoughts and her fear for company.

  She hadn’t expected this. The attempt at escape had been an act of desperation. She hadn’t given any real thought to what might happen if she failed, but she hadn’t expected to live through it.

  Her worry grew. Would dying have been better?

  The thought evolved slowly, an insidious whisper that spoke from the darkest corner of her mind. What if she had never actually left the room? What if everything she thought she’d experienced outside the cell was only a series of delusions from the drugs? What if she was simply losing her mind?

  No, she shook her head. It had been real, too real to be a figment of her drug-addled imagination. The memory of the last moments of her escape danced in her head, of the fire surging up within her, and the ease with which she had become the monster.

  She was a nurse. She’d spent years at university and in hospitals learning how to heal. Even once she’d qualified, she’d worked in war-zones and relief camps trying to help the injured and sick. Taking a life should have been an alien concept to her, but she’d done it. She had killed without giving it much of a thought.

  Bile rose in her throat. Not only had she done it, she had enjoyed it. Not just the surge of fire, but the power she’d held over that man. The ease with which she’d forced him back. The fear on his face. That was the true monster within her. Not the woman who controlled fire, but the creature who enjoyed inflicting it on those around her.

  She shuddered and pushed the thought away, but the memory of the fire refused to go. She had called it. Always before, during all of the experiments, she’d either controlled a lit flame, or ignited something simple like a candle.

  The fire during her escape had been nothing like that. Instead, she’d produced flame in its purest form—a fire without source or fuel. As if responding to her thoughts she felt the flame stir within her, straining against her efforts to control it, like a rabid dog pulling on its chain.

  There was something on her arm. She could feel a dull ache and a pressure, but in the darkness, it was impossible to tell what it was. The ache felt somehow sharp as well. An IV line she decided, probably held in place with some kind of brace.

  Her stomach growled, making her jump in the silence and she snorted a laugh at herself as she reached for the feeding tube with her mouth. It was harder than finding the water tube and she cast about in the darkness for long minutes until she realised the truth—it wasn’t that she couldn’t find it, it wasn’t there.

  Somehow the feeding tube was the catalyst, and she snapped. She’d come so far. She’d risked everything in the escape attempt, and now she was bound to this ridiculous frame, naked in the darkness, like something out of a bad erotica novel.

  “Let me go!” she shouted, tears spilling down her cheeks. “Just let me out of here…”

  The sprinklers sprang to life and she broke off into a shriek as they rotated around her. Last time she’d been bound to the frame, the lights had snapped on at this point, now she simply dripped and shivered in the darkness.

  The room was warm enough for her to drip-dry and she fell into her old habit of dozing as much as possible. Always before she’d had the lights going on and off to help her mark out the days. Now, she would only have the spray of icy water from the sprinklers. Her stomach growled at her and a throbbing headache grew as the hours passed.

  By the third day, her stomach had stopped growling. She no longer even felt especially hungry. The room felt colder, and the icy water that blasted over her each morning was enough to leave her teeth chattering for over an hour. Her body had given up, she knew. It had entered a starvation mode, and would be busily eating any surplus fat she had left before it moved on to protein and her muscle mass.

  She was going to die.

  The thought was a small one that took hold in a quiet corner of her mind and put down roots. It wasn’t fear exactly, or even a worry; instead the thought was a certain knowledge—that it was not a matter of if, but when, her body would begin to fail, and she would die.

  How far would they take it? That was the real question. Was this all some form of punishment that would end once they decided she’d learnt her lesson? Or would they keep her locked up until she starved to death? It wasn’t as if Janan had any compunction about letting people die. Armond had taught her that.

  The memory of Armond’s death brought the fire back to her mind. She had controlled it. It had taken a raging fury for her to do it, but she had; the fire had come when she called, followed her whim. Could she do it again now?

  She strained, trying to reach within herself to where she had felt the flames stir. She felt nothing. Had she really done it? The hunger was beginning to make her doubt herself. How long had she really been here? She shook her head in the darkness.

  “No,” she muttered. “No, the fire was real. It was all real.”

  The wound in her mind couldn’t be denied. The jagged edges of it pressed on her like a migraine with teeth; fangs clamped down onto the edges of the tear in her consciousness and digging deep enough that she’d never get free without ripping herself apart.

  She bit down on the inside of her lip, hard enough to hurt. Somewhere there was a camera watching her, recording everything. She would be damned if she was going to put on a display for them.

  She froze as she felt the shift within her. It was a small thing, almost feather-light, but she had felt it. The fire moved sluggishly, like a great beast shifting in its sleep, but it had moved.

  It was still within her.

  Anger, she realised. Anger was the key—it always had been.

  Think about Janan, she told herself with a grim smile.

  She forced the image back into her mind—Janan smiling as Armond burned to death. His stupid, childish laugh as the poor man screamed. The fire in her stirred, shifted, and surged, straining at her to let it free, to burn and to rage.

  Control, that was the key. If she was to be more than the monster Janan had created then she would need control.

  She let the fire slip through her body, sending it along her arm until it reached her fingertips. Her hunger was gone now, the aches and pains of her body were nothing compared to the feeling this power brought her. More powerful than any ecstasy, the fire was better than sex. It was her drug and she knew then that the final battle would be against the flame before it consumed her.

  But right now, none of that mattered. She needed the flame. She needed its strength, its heat, and its chaos. She would deal with the consequences later, if she lived through what was coming.

  The spark was minute, but in the pitch black of the room, it flared like a tiny sun. It drifted from her fingertip until it hung in the air before her, and she wondered at it as she let the fire grow. She nurtured it, coaxing it until it was the size of a candle’s flame, burning without wax or wick as it hovered in the air. Her anger faded, forgotten in the presence of this strange magic. The fire flickered, guttering and failing. Mackenzie forced the image of Janan
back into her mind and the flame flared anew.

  Her eyes swept over the room, lit by the glow of the hanging flame. It was only slightly different to the first cell she’d been held in. The sprinklers were set in a different configuration. The water tube was set slightly differently. The food tube was tied back, out of her reach and empty besides.

  She sent the flame in a small circuit of the room, using the view of her prison to fuel her anger. The small room was as bare as the first prison she’d been kept in. The same black glass wall reflected the light of the fire back at her, and as she ran her eyes over it, the same tiny red light as the video camera behind it winked into life.

  The tiny red light stoked her rage, goading her like a bull under the stick. They had thrown her into the darkness, chaining her like some kind of animal, and someone on the other side of the glass had watched her—yawning though her screams and panic until she did something worthy of hitting the button to record it.

  “Bastards!” She fed her fury to the flame and forced it against the smoked glass. The laughter bubbled out of her as she pictured the technician panicking as the camera recorded nothing but flame.

  Her laughter became a shriek as the sprinklers spurted into life around her, icy water hosing over her in an effort to break her hold on the power. The flame guttered and shrank down to a pinprick.

  “I don’t think so, you fuckers,” she snarled, spitting water and shaking droplets from her face. Where before she had been consumed with fury, now a cold determination filled her and she stared at the tiny ball of fire, eyes narrowing as she bore down. The flame did not increase in size, instead the colour shifted from the comforting yellow-orange of an open fire, through a pale blue, to a blazing white.

  The smoked glass had never been designed to withstand anything like this, and it distorted and sagged as glowing orange rivulets ran down the panel. Panicked shouts reached her as the flame burned through and the hole grew.