The Assumption Code

by Melodee Elliott

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Margi calmed her breathing as she remained in place. A thought came to her, but not of finding Tolman. She didn’t feel that he was on the same floor.

  She made her way down a narrow hallway. The room where Rolo had given her exam was to her left. She kept going until she came upon an interior room. She entered.

  There before her in a vat of solution lay her waiting clone body, one that was days away from fulfilling its destiny. She walked the circumference of the tank, taking her time to observe the body outside of Stavon’s insistence of his plans for her and it. She knelt eye level to the vat, examining the body that had been intended for her. Its hair had grown longer in the short time she had last seen it. The eyes now were hidden under opaque lids. No arteries showed.

  She remembered that woman of her youth and with it the memories of college, her first love, a first paycheck, and awkward adult moments. This body was innocent of the nature of things and what it represented. In a way, she had a fondness for it as she had for her former body on Earth during those times.

  Neither had seen the days that would come—the responsibilities at having arrived in her profession, the stress of keeping that position, the pretenses of giving voice to that which she abhorred, the shopping, the nanobots to satisfy those who laid eyes on her. She was the second loneliest person she knew.

  She slowly stood and stepped backward. She raised the gun and aimed at the body’s head, then pulled the trigger. The body jolted as the glass shattered, sending liquid gushing to the floor. What lay at the bottom of the vat was someone’s idea of who she should be.

  “At peace,” she said and sloshed through the fluid on her way out.

  She moved among the series of laboratories, occasionally startling from the blinking of indicator lights on displays that flashed their warnings after being left unattended.

  Something forbidden wafted through the air, not the chemical odor of the solution from the vats. Something encroaching, like death from afar and the sweet ashiness of smoke.

  She entered the stairwell once again and heard the banging and yelling of the mob from far below her. They had gained entry. She rushed down the stairs to the floor where she last saw Tolman. Once inside she looked for a way to bar the door. A cabinet stood on an adjacent wall. She shoved at it, but it wouldn’t budge. She climbed atop and pushed against the wall until the cabinet toppled over, jumping clear of it on the way down. She sat on the floor to brace her back against the unit and pushed her feet against the floor. The metal screeched as it inched toward the stairwell. She continued pushing until the corner reached the stairway door, then stood back to assess the scene.

  She held the pistol ready to shoot at whatever sought her. All was clear, save for the shadow mirages in the blue light and twirling yellow sconces. She ran toward the lab where she’d last seen Stavon and Loz.

  The slab remained empty in the center of the small room. Loz’s body had been removed from the floor. She searched the room. Her heart pounded against her chest, making her hands heave the pistol in her grip.

  She continued on in the direction The Ward said that Stavon had fled. The lock had been blasted through. Yellow pulsed against the blue generator lights, casting shadows at her every glance. A display presentation faltered and regained its image showing Ferli giving her pitch. No audio carried.

  She advanced through the room, peering around the lab benches, and then moved to another room.

  A thick door stood to one side. She opened it and caught a blast of frigid air in her face. The fog of the cold dissipated to reveal bodies stacked uniformly on shelving units. Too many bodies. But this freezer wasn’t cold enough to be a cryo chamber—this was temporary storage. Possibly, stock for additional experiments.

  Loz’s body lay on the floor near one set of shelves. She quickly closed the door. As she turned around, her hand rose instinctively and aimed the gun at the figure before her, but stopped with the sudden realization of another gun pointed to her.

  “Here we are,” Stavon said.

  She kept her stance and sized him up. He wore his suit from the office and the attitude becoming of the role. He didn’t fire.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” he said and strolled behind a lab workbench.

  Still, she didn’t respond. The man standing before her was another’s husband, only Margi’s for a short time, inherited from the mechanism of social engineering that was beyond wicked. She didn’t have to answer to him for any deeds—good or bad.

  “We could have had fun.”

  “Fun? Living in a sacrificed body?” she clarified.

  “I did not do this to you.”

  “You did enough. And you were planning far worse cruelties.”

  “You enjoyed it for a time. No?”

  “What choice did I have?”

  “You always have a choice.”

  “No, not really,” she said.

  “To enjoy?” He paced.

  She kept aim at him as he paced the room, his gun trained on her.

  “That was a choice. You made that choice. Make it again,” he insisted.

  She had pretended to be okay with her situation with Stavon, not as Rivner would be but as herself. She had made that choice to lie to herself just as Rivner surely had. But she no longer needed to offer herself a choice of who she should be to satisfy her circumstance. She couldn’t help but laugh at herself.

  She regained her composure. “Did you love Rivner?”

  “Do you love me?” he countered.

  “Did you love her?” She repeated the demand, yearning for any redeeming quality in him that would make her sense of the world sane once again.

  He didn’t answer. The gun didn’t waver in his hands as he kept his cool gaze on her as if to pluck weakness from her very soul.

  Margi had the capacity to care and couldn’t hide it. It didn’t matter whether she cared for him or another, he would use this virtue against her as if it were her vice. She remembered the night on the balcony. That wasn’t caring. He couldn’t use that against her.

  Yet he had wielded his cleaver at her willingness to be Rivner, adopt her life, her viewpoint. He did so while Margi demanded he confess his love for Rivner, as if it would relieve her of her own guilt.

  She sobered. “It’s a simple question.”

  For the first time, she saw a weakness in his resolve. He couldn’t answer the question. Perhaps the notion was a sufficiently foreign concept that he confused it with another. Perhaps he did love Rivner and sacrificed her freedom for it. Somewhere in the depths of his soul, in the vastness of potential, at one moment in time, possibly he knew. And never again.

  “Is it ever simple with you?” he said.

  “Perhaps she came the closest,” she responded.

  “Not quite.”

  Rolo was right—Margi was his weakness. She had unwittingly teased the predator in him with a conquest when she assumed her role as Rivner.

  “We can start anew,” he said with reserved delight, still aiming the gun at her.

  “An idea.”

  “Yes,” he said with a gleam in his eye. “Always new ideas.” He stepped nearer. “You will be at my side. Forever.”

  “Too many words,” she said and discharged her pistol.

  Stavon locked his gaze on her as if taking in the last sight of her as he fell against the workbench. Vials tumbled with him to the floor.

  He hadn’t fired his gun. The act was a glimpse into what was possibly his long lost innocence that manifested as his most consuming aspiration. He wanted a partner or something.

  He lay on the floor among the emptied vials, his body sprawled out as if reaching, yet his energy was gone, giving his body a restful recourse from the malice for which it was used. His fingers twitched, and then no more, as the body purged itself from the last of it all.

  Margi waited for her composure to return. She calmly proceeded from the room. She navigated a hallway similar to the back hallways in the operat
ions area. The doors along it were all locked. She heard a voice and retraced her steps back to the last door and pressed her ear to it. Someone was inside.

  She stood back and fired at the latch, then burst into the room.

  “Tolman!” she exclaimed and ran to the energy barrier.

  “You made it,” he said.

  She stood back to assess the situation.

  He pointed to the console behind her.

  She fired upon it, shattering it, hoping that their care for security was lacking compared to the other cell. The energy barrier began to dissolve at one corner and unraveled as it went across the face of the shield. It worked this time.

  Tolman leapt through and wrapped her in his arms.

  She felt his grip on her that would have kept her there for all of time if she could have it. He was real. He was here, even through the brokenness of his body still bloodied from his beatings.

  “Where’s Rolo?” she asked.

  His grip loosened. The light in his eyes dimmed.

  The question was an unintended good-bye. She looked away as she felt the loss she was about to inflict on him.

  “I have to go,” she said as she cradled his hand. It wasn’t a decision. She felt the truth in the matter that transcended an idea. Returning home was an impulse, the knowledge of what must be, beyond all considerations. She must leave Danu and the man she loved.

  He nodded and peered into her eyes.

  “You understand,” she begged. If ever she needed to be understood on a matter she could never explain to its depths, she needed it now. She needed to return home. And while her heart yearned for him to always be with her, she had to go.

  He stroked his palm across her hair. A moment later, she saw him ease with the truth of the matter. “I don’t know where Rolo is,” he answered.

  “Did The Ward come through here?”

  “The guards brought me here and left. I haven’t heard anyone except the fighting outside.”

  “He would be coming from the roof. Zarnel told me.”

  He looked past her. “Where is she?”

  “Gone.” She looked away.

  He paused as she stood in reflection.

  “Let’s go,” he said, breaking the loss, and pulled her from the room.

  She followed him into the hallway where blue and yellow lights still mingled.

  “We need to get to the stairs,” she said.

  They made their way through the labs.

  Margi stopped. “Do you smell something?”

  He pointed to the vent. “It’s coming from there.”

  A string of gray smoke dissipated into the air.

  “It’s a fire.”

  “Where from?” She darted to the vent as if to see the origin.

  “It would come from below,” he said.

  “We need to get to Rolo, fast.” She ran out of the room with Tolman after her.

  They came to the main warehouse and splashed through the liquid on the floor.

  Tolman glanced at the bodies that lay haphazardly among the broken vats. He said nothing and continued on.

  They came to the stairwell.

  “Wait.” He climbed onto the barricade and placed his ear on the door. “I hear something.”

  She leaned in. “The mob.”

  The noise got louder. Something slammed into the door from the other side. Another slam. A dent appeared in the door. Another slam.

  “Get out of here,” she said.

  “Where to?”

  “We need to get to the next level. Rolo will be there if he got through.”

  “We need the stairs for that.”

  Another hit to the door and a small crack appeared.

  Margi and Tolman sprinted down the main hallway. At the far end a cloud of smoke was gathering density. They ran in the opposite direction.

  “Look,” Margi said. She pointed to the window wall and saw the angle of the building where Stavon’s office jutted out a mere one floor above them.

  A rope dangled from his office on its opposite side, where the glass floor had dropped. The rope pulled upward and was gone. Then a man appeared on the roof.

  “Hey!” Tolman yelled. He pounded on the window.

  “You know him?”

  “Yes, he’s with The Ward.”

  Margi hit the glass. The man disappeared from view.

  “We’ve got to get to the other side,” she said.

  They ran down the hall to another window wall and peered upward, into the gap that lay in Stavon’s office floor and surrounding walls.

  Again, they pounded on the glass and yelled.

  “Stand back.” Margi retrieved her gun and shot the window wall repeatedly until the glass shattered and fell into the skies.

  They yelled against the wind rushing through the opening.

  “Rolo!” Tolman called out.

  Someone’s hands reached over the floor’s edge and then a head appeared. It was Rolo. Margi felt excitement bursting within.

  “My lab is on this floor! Get to this floor!” Rolo shouted.

  “We can’t. A mob’s gathered in the stairs,” she yelled.

  “Hold on.” He disappeared from view.

  A member of Zarnel’s army peered over the ledge, waved his hand, then spoke to someone behind him and disappeared.

  Minutes went by and there were no signs of Rolo. Then, she saw a rope being lowered from Stavon’s office.

  Rolo appeared once more. “Tie it around you. I’ll lift you up.”

  “What?” she heard herself ask.

  He disappeared again.

  Margi looked downward and imagined falling through the clouds like Ferli. Patterns at street level were barely visible. She decidedly did not want to be there.

  Tolman pulled the rope inside and began tying it in knots.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “This is your time.”

  She was struck both by abject fear and the fact that this man would sacrifice himself for her one goal, to make it come true for her simply because it meant so much to her, without her pleading or justifications and reasons why.

  If she had one wish in this universe in all the lives that she would ever live, she wished Tolman could join her on Earth. Such a cruel reality that those whose evil had succeeded so long, the ideas they forced to fruition, survived through the multiple lifetimes of those whose lives they consumed.

  She stepped into the loops Tolman had created in the rope.

  He fashioned a makeshift harness around her waist.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re ready.”

  She wasn’t.

  He led her to the edge. The wind blew her backward and on its release, she almost fell forward through the window. She braced her hands on the sides of the opening. Rolo and the kid from Stavon’s office hung over the edge of the floor, urging her on.

  A loud noise came from behind her and Tolman. They jerked their heads back to see from where it came. Tolman ran to the door and closed it. No barrier to block the intruders and their smoke.

  He rushed back and kissed her in a moment that transcended words. Then, he pushed her into the light of oblivion.

  She screamed as if it were her last act. She swung wide as she sank into the ropes that now cut into her flesh. She dangled there tilting downward with her arms reaching for the clouds below her. And for an instant, they looked as if they would give a soft landing.

  The rope hitched and jerked as she felt her body rise. Another lurch upon another until someone grabbed her by the waistband of her pants and pulled her to the solidity of the floor above her.

  Hands tore at the rope to free her. She crawled out of the harness and saw a young man toss it below, swinging it against the wind that had begun to gain force.

  He hauled the rope up and tried again. Another try and it landed in Tolman’s grasp. Tolman disappeared with the end of the rope and didn’t emerge.

  Too long, she thought.

  She hung over the ledge
along with Rolo and the young man to catch a glimpse of him.

  Tolman came into view, entwined in the ropes as he fell backward against the window wall with another man atop him.

  “Tolman!” she yelled and had half a mind to leap to his aid.

  “Grab the rope!” Rolo shouted back at the two of them.

  Margi and the young man took hold. She looped the rope around her hand and leaned back. She was not letting go. If Tolman plummeted, then so would she.

  The rope went slack and then pulled taut. Desperation of the unknown plagued her mind—she couldn’t see the events unfolding. Then, the rope yanked, and she went airborne. She felt the young man grab her shirt, and she hit the floor.

  Rolo had also taken hold of the rope. “Pull!”

  Voices shouted into the wind from below them.

  Margi pulled and with each heave she felt Tolman’s every breath, every movement, and very will to reach safety. She wouldn’t fail him.

  Together, they pulled the rope, and at last she saw Tolman’s hand grab the ledge. Rolo embraced him to ease him up as Margi kept pulling. She vowed not to stop until he was clear of a fall.

  Tolman rolled over and collapsed on the floor. She rushed to him and held him tightly, covering him in her impulse to protect. He gripped her and held only for a moment. “They’re coming,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “We must get to my lab,” Rolo interjected.

  He and the young man helped Tolman untangle from the harness.

  As they were leaving the room, Rolo knelt by Zarnel’s body and whispered in his wife’s ear. He lingered a moment longer as he caressed her hair.

  Margi had no thought that could describe the respect of their love. Such an experience would admit no substitute.

  He rose and led them from the office. Together, they fled down the hall. Smoke filtered through the ducts. They heard the mob below them and in the stairwell, and kept running. As they rounded a corner, they met face-to-face with a small group of them.

  “You did this!” one jeered. He had the look of a man who had given himself a mission. His posture was ready for what might come, at any cost.

  “We’re not with DanuVitro,” the young man at Margi’s side said.