She fled into a corridor, deep below where they had taken up residence, found an experiment chamber.
That's where she found Eddy. Only, he wasn't Eddy anymore. Something was coming out of his mouth.
She shuddered.
A fucking nightmare.
Maybe she should stop watching the experiment logs. But they were her only clue as to how many rooms there were in the facility, and those rooms gave her a better idea of which cameras to focus on. The facility itself was too damn large to cover everything in any reasonable amount of time. Hell, it had once housed an impressive crew of over five hundred people, and about five percent of them had been devoted to managing security.
She hated to admit it, but Mathias might have been right; she needed some help.
"Can't sleep?" Nico's voice came from the doorway.
She shook her head.
He nodded, walked across the lounge and grabbed himself a cup of coffee, sat opposite of her. He wasn't sweating anymore, but he was still only wearing his long johns.
"Make any headway?" he asked.
"Got the cameras running," she said, taking another sip of her coffee.
His eyes opened wide. "That soon?"
"Yeah..." She couldn't lie, the look on his face was almost alarming. "Got a problem with that?"
"No, not really."
She took another sip—but paused, almost spitting out her coffee when she noticed it. There was a splotch of fresh blood soaking into the collar of his long johns.
"Something wrong?" he asked.
She swallowed deep. "Did you hurt yourself?"
She gestured to the front of his collar; he arched his back and examined himself, wiping at it with his thumb. When he removed the material, she could see the faint outline of scratch marks on his collarbone. Her face flushed with heat; her pulse quickened.
"I must have cut myself shaving again," he said.
"Right." What if Mathias had been right about Nico? "You should be more careful."
He nodded and let his collar flap back down into its natural position.
"I just remembered—" She set her coffee mug down and stood up. "—I have something I have to do."
"Yeah, good talk."
She rushed out of the room and sprinted down the corridor into the elevator. She entered the numbers for floor B-2 and waited for the doors to close before she allowed herself to collapse, sobbing, on the cold aluminum floor.
She caught her breath and fought off panic. She had to keep her cool. If Nico had done what Mathias suggested, she'd need more proof than a little bit of blood—but—how else could it have happened? And the scratches—
The elevator dinged. She stepped off into another corridor, rounded the bend into a darkened tunnel. Her feet felt numb, like they belonged to someone else.
She'd have to check the room she’d seen Nico exit first! Where was it again? Second—or third-to-last floor? To hell with it, she'd just search all the rooms.
She stopped.
Something wasn't right. She heard footsteps further down the hall.
They opened up a gateway here. The words from her nightmare echoed in her mind.
"Is someone there?" she asked.
The footsteps got louder.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap tap tap.
The peach fuzz on the back of her neck stood on end. She thought she could make out a shadow in the dark.
Her legs had a mind of their own. She backed up.
If the beast doesn't get you, then Lai'thamia will.
"What are you?"
The shadow seemed to snake around in the dark, as if it wasn't totally aware of what it was doing or where it was. It avoided direct contact with the light. She thought she could hear faint laughter, or a deep snarling breath, as it snaked away out of sight. Out of mind.
She backed off and sprinted down the corridor in the opposite direction.
It was strange, because she didn't realize that she'd been screaming.
Then she found herself pounding on Mathias' door, wondering how she'd even gotten there.
He opened the door. "What are you doing here at this hour?"
"I panicked." She stormed into his room; it wasn't much, like her own, just a cot and his backpack. "I saw something, and I ran."
"What did you see?"
"Blood." She covered her mouth. She’d been about to tell him about the shadow, but how could she be sure she wasn't just going crazy? All those experiment logs. She hadn't been sleeping much. What if this was a nightmare too? "Blood on Nico's long johns...and scratch marks on his collar bone, signs of a struggle."
Mathias nodded, his eyebrows furrowed together. "I see."
She took a seat on his cot and let her head fall into her hands. "What the hell? What if you were right, Mathias?"
"What I said was out of line, and a result of pure paranoia," he said. "I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation for this."
"Yeah? Like what?"
"Well..." He fell silent for a while. "Well, I don't know, but it's decidedly uncivilized to jump to conclusions."
"He's my brother, you think I didn't fucking think of that?"
"I know, I know."
"I don't think you do know. He's my brother, but sometimes I don't even know who he really is. Not since he returned from that god forsaken war. The way he looks at Eddy, it's like he thinks he's trash. When I lashed out at you earlier, I did so out of love for him, but...if he murdered my Eddy, I—"
"Don't do that to yourself." She felt a blanket cover her and Mathias's scrawny arm find its way around her shoulders.
She convulsed and lunged into Mathias's chest; her tears drenched his shirt. The sorrow twisted inside of her, heaving and writhing. All she could see when she closed her eyes was the image from her nightmare: Eddy's mouth open, gnarled roots growing from deep within, his eyes aglow, bulging, and her brother, she remembered her brother had been in the nightmare too, laughing incessantly.
It was all out of her control, wasn't it? As it always had been. Ever since she was a child, she'd always been too reliant on others, keeping to herself, nose in a book, staying quiet. Even when the ice fell, all she did was stick close to Nico, afraid to stray too far from him.
She owed him everything.
Scratch marks on his neck, redness on his pale skin, blood on his long johns. And he just expected her not to question him?
She remembered watching Lena stitch up Eddy’s neck wound. Now that she thought on Mathias's observation, it was clear that it couldn't have been made by a cougar. But her brother's tactical knife...
She sobbed until her tears were spent and she felt only a deep and unrelenting rage. Mathias's arms were not a comfort, as much as he tried; his weak grip only reminded her of the embrace she'd had with Eddy, and the fact that she'd probably never feel it again.
"Look, maybe we can summon the others and discuss our fears?" Mathias said.
"No." She stood up, wiping the last of her tears away. "I'm not taking that risk."
"What do you intend to do?"
"I'm going to kick his goddamn ass!"
She stormed out of the room, heading for the elevator. She was tired of being pushed around—and aside—by everyone and everything. This was the last straw.
Her fists clenched up tight; she entered the elevator and returned to the floor where Nico would still be sipping on his coffee.
His back was turned from the door.
He didn't see her coming, not when she pulled the chair out from behind him, and not when she picked it up and threatened to beat him with it.
"What the hell, Ira?" he said, his eyes wild with shock.
"You son-of-a-bitch!"
He stood up, his hand extended out at her. "What's wrong with you? Put that thing down!"
"No, not this time. We're going to get to the bottom of this."
"Bottom of what?"
She lunged out and attempted to hit him with the chair, but he twisted, g
rabbed it, and struggled to wrest it from her grip. They spun around, struggling to gain the upper hand. He'd trained her to fight, but he was far stronger than she was, and far more experienced.
Still, he had one serious weakness.
She pulled him forward and kicked at his prosthetic leg, then, when he was off-balance, grabbed at it and ripped it off his stump. He tumbled to the floor, and she towered over him, threatening it at his face. Now his back was to the open door again. His eyes opened wide, his teeth clenched, and for a moment, there was a vague doubt in her mind...
Then, a loud smash sounded through the room, and before she knew it, Nico was on the floor, lying lifeless.
Mathias stood above him with a small frying pan in hand.
"I didn't know what he'd do," Mathias said.
Ira found herself at Nico's side, feeling out his pulse.
"Is he breathing?"
She nodded, relieved. "But he's going to be really pissed in the morning."
"Let's move him somewhere secure where we can question him."
She nodded, and they moved to grab his leg and arms.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The rattling and shaking caused Ira's head to shoot up. She struggled to remember why she wasn't in her cot; once she saw the iron bars, she remembered. She was in a detention room, one of two scattered throughout the facility that Mathias had helped her find.
The clanking was coming from Nico, banging on the bars from within his cage.
"Let me out of here," he said.
She really wished she could. "I can't do that."
His knuckles turned white with his grip around the bars. "You better unlock this cage right now, Ira. I'm not fucking playing!"
"Or what?"
He bared his teeth and slammed his arm against the bars. "Let me out!"
"Did you kill Eddy?"
"Are you fucking kidding me?"
Her grip tightened on the metal seat. "Answer the question."
"You know that I didn't kill him! Lena's still getting vitals from him!"
"Actually, no, she isn't, they flatlined last night, probably about the time you showed up in the lounge in your long johns."
"What the hell makes you think I killed him?"
"Think about it, Nico. You fought for the Feds, he fought for the Revolutionists. You may have tolerated him for his abilities, but deep down we both know that you hated him."
He was quiet for a moment. His cold, calculating green eyes searched the room, searched her.
"That doesn't mean that I'd just kill him, and besides, you have no proof."
"What about the blood on your long johns, or the scratches on your collarbone?" She shook her head; it took everything she had to hold her composure together in front of him. There was a time when he would only have to bark an order, and she would have followed it without question. For so many years she had been ordered around by him and stomped on by so many others. She was done being led around by the whims of others, done being made to follow someone else's plan. "I told you that I got the security cameras running, remember? One of the first feeds I saw was you, coming out of some dark room in your long johns, sweating profusely."
Nico backed away from the bars and fell back on the barren, stiff bed inside the cell. He gripped at his prosthetic leg and smiled wryly. He must have put it back on when she was asleep.
"You went straight for my prosthetic," he said. "That was pretty smart."
Was he actually proud of her? "Answer my question."
"I can't."
"Why the hell not!" She jumped from her chair and approached the bars. "You owe me an explanation!"
"I owe you nothing!"
She stopped just short of arm’s reach from the bars. "You knew how I felt about him!"
"If it weren't for me, you'd all be corpses six feet under the snow. So. Yes. You owe me your trust, your loyalty, if not for the fact that we are family, then for the fact that I've saved your life more times than I can fucking count!"
"The wound in his throat." The air in that dead chamber seemed to freeze when she said it. "I know what a knife wound looks like, thanks to you."
His eyes opened wide; his face almost looked red.
"You cut his throat, didn't you?" she said.
He was silent for a while. He wasn't making eye contact.
"Just admit it, Nico!"
His eyes stabbed up at her. "It was a fucking accident! I was having a panic attack and he snuck up on me!"
She fell to her knees, tears hitting the concrete. "I didn't want to believe it. I didn't want to believe that you could."
"He was a traitor," Nico said. "Maybe it was God's judgment?"
She wiped her tears and stood.
"Listen to me very carefully."
His eyes stabbed at her, quavered with a miserable loneliness, but as much as she wished things could just go back to normal, her anger raged through her like a wildfire. There was no backing down.
"If you killed him," she said. "Then you and I are strangers, and I can't be blamed for what I do to you."
"Sweet little Ira," he said. "Gonna get her hands dirty?"
"Yes. After all, I had a damn good teacher."
"I didn't teach you everything. I guess I know why now."
"One way or another, I'm going to find out."
"And what happens when you find out that I'm innocent? Huh?" He chuckled. "I brought him back alive, didn't I? I told you it was an accident, and that's the truth."
"Fact is, I still can't trust you."
They sat for a while, not saying anything. Nico crossed his arms and eyed his stump.
2
The time was near.
Mathias ran his hand over the page. There were strange ink drawings of symbols, triangles and circles and ornate markings which he would likely have scoffed at in his college days.
The fool he was.
He looked up from where he'd set the book down, through the two-way mirror, into the room where Eddy now rested, soaking in a vertical tank. Somehow, he knew he needed this page to complete the circle in the experiment chamber. To complete the bargain and stop the nightmares. To stop the harvester of the abyss.
Then, he would be free to unlock the secrets of the grimoire and escape this frozen hell.
Still, it would take some supplies and planning to make the necessary preparations for the circle around Eddy's tank. The symbols Weber had used in this room were all wrong. Somehow he knew that. That fact alone simultaneously frightened him and caused him to chuckle.
There was still one piece of the puzzle missing. He could feel it coming, though. Yes. It was almost time.
3
The great waking dream.
That's what Eddy started to call his time in hell. It wasn't that he had ever been very religious, but what else could he really call it? He couldn't tell how long he'd been forced to endure it; but in the time that he'd been floating there in the void, he'd witnessed the deaths of his comrades as well as his wife and child; the birth of stars; the death of galaxies; and the soul-crushing cries of an alien species whose lives were extinguished by the awe-inspiring collision of a massive comet.
The world which the aliens had inhabited, though, kept turning, kept orbiting its parent sun, and that sun continued to glow a bright red-orange. It was a thing he'd never really taken time to think about when he was alive, but, now that he wasn't, it was all he could think about. He understood now. Humans, when you thought about the size of the universe, were painfully insignificant. A speck of dust to be swept away by the ever-growing push broom that was the cosmos.
The void was quiet now. He saw nothing but an endless blanket of stars and galaxies. Maybe, unconsciously, he was gaining some control over where his soul wandered? If it was wandering at all.
He hadn't thought about his former life in a while, about Ira... His heart still ached, of course it did. But, if there was nothing he could do, if this was his existence now, perhaps it wasn't so bad?
&n
bsp; He caught a faint glimpse of a massive shadow across the vast blanket of stars. It was so big, his mind could barely rationalize it. It reached out a clawed, tentacled hand, scooped up a cluster of stars, and pulled them into its own bulbous blackness. When he looked again, they were gone—just gone. A void, light-years in diameter.
He tried to look away, fearing that it would notice his gaze and swallow him too.
Could souls be eaten by such beasts? Was he a soul at all?
It seemed to shift, as if noticing him, and its mass began to grow, enveloping the blanket of stars until it was all that encompassed what he could see. Two crimson eyes opened, peered down at him.
He tried to ask it what it wanted, but no words came out.
It squinted its eyes at him.
If there had ever been a time to contemplate the existence of God, now was the time. Was this terrible thing it? Or, was it something else, something worse? He couldn't be sure, but the shadowy thing seemed to have a great amount of contempt for him, or perhaps, maybe, it was indifference?
Even in death, his mind was not built for science, or for existential questions. He just wanted his life back, even if it had been miserable, even if it was insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
He cared nothing for stars, or planets, or aliens, or gods.
Do you hear me? He thought. I don't care about you.
The great shadow closed its eyes, sank away into the distance, and vanished into the stars. It hadn't noticed him after all.
No.
He wasn't worth noticing. The stars seemed washed-out in the wake of that cosmic beast.
No.
He was falling somehow. Eddy could see ripples echoing from where those stars had been consumed. He could feel his essence getting dragged in by something, a portal or perhaps a gateway.
Before he could say anything, he found himself lying on the surface of a broken platform of some kind. Looking up, it was almost as though he were at the edge of a dead star system. The star did not brighten the sky; somehow it made the air feel colder to him. He could see the remains of broken moons and asteroids drifting high above the horizon, dimly outlined by the scarce light.
He peered down and found that he had hands once again; in fact, the rest of his body was intact as well.
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