by Lucia Ashta
The dim light that circumnavigated twists and turns to reach me was just enough to highlight the corners of my cage, though now I had thoughts—or delusions—that I might survive to die another day.
Finally, too, I was able to hear my father’s voice. He was there. I couldn’t make out all of the words being spoken, but I could make out enough. I abandoned concern for Dolpheus (assuming that he wouldn’t continue to freeze with other drawers open, and that his drawer wasn’t one of those opened since there were no sounds of surprise or alarm) and trained my sluggish mind on what was being said. Even half-dead as I was, I remembered: Ilara was out there. I would do whatever it took to bring her back where she belonged, with me.
Right away, my mind began to shrink away from the task I assigned it. I imposed my will upon it, with all the might that I could gather, forced it to listen and, more importantly, to remember.
The voices came to me as if from a faraway distance. A bit garbled and a bit pointless, they reached me in fragments. I exerted what effort I had left to piece them together into something useful.
“The temperature’s set too low.” Yeah, no shit, I thought. “It’s a degree too low.” This was my father, the perfectionist, who didn’t realize that the temperature was much too low by many, many degrees, and that there, right next to him, he was slowly killing his only son and heir. He might not have cared, but I like to think that he would have, that the father I loved as a child was still in there, somewhere, and that I (and Dolpheus as a favor to me) would have been spared.
“Fix it.” Again, father was stern. The ring of his voice came through clearer than the almost-indistinguishable voices of the two—or three?—people accompanying him.
“Is everything set to proceed with the splicing?” Father again. Deferential mumblings followed. “Were the protocols set to my specifications, exactly?”
Even though I couldn’t make out the timid response that followed, I could guess it. The fear of the person speaking wound around every corner it needed to reach me. I understood this fear. I’d experienced this same fear, of disappointing my father and receiving his unforgiving judgment countless times as an adolescent, until I outgrew it. I eventually found my own strength apart from it. I’d had to or risk withering in the man’s shadow. I chose to step into the sun. I never knew where the strength to do this came from, but I was grateful for it nearly every day of my life.
“And what made you think you should vary my specifications?” My father’s voice was harder than the metal I lay on.
“If you had a good reason for it, what made you think that you shouldn’t have asked me before doing it? I don’t care if I was unavailable. You should have waited.” I knew the double edge to this story. Father’s assistant would have gotten into the same amount of trouble for disturbing him when he said he was unavailable, or for delaying until he could be reached. There was little winning with father, except for Aletox, who was an exception to most of my father’s rigid rules.
“Thanks to your actions, we can’t proceed with these three right now. And that’s a very significant problem. The time frame in which we can extract the eternality and reinsert it without damage to the person is brief.” Father’s voice took on a lecturing tone. I was certain that the employees in the room had heard what he was about to say many times before. I, however, set my ears alert and willed them to register every sound that wound around the metal bends.
“After we’ve lowered the heartbeat, the body temperature, and the brain waves down to the necessary rates, we have only three days to pull out the eternality and reinsert it before permanent damage is done to the client. If we don’t proceed precisely during this time period when it’s safe to do so, then the mind will register that the eternality has been removed from the body. It will believe the person dead, or at the very least fractured, and that’s never good. We have but one chance to do it. It becomes more dangerous each time we interfere with the body’s normal functions. Each time we slow clients down, there’s an increased chance that we won’t be able to speed them back up again, that the body will resist our meddling. This is one of the reasons why it’s so important that you follow my directions precisely, and this is why your error in judgment is a very big problem. This is why I haven’t hired you to make decisions. I’ve hired you to follow my orders.”
Some apologetic mumblings before, “No, what we will do is what I say, and only that, understood?”
More frightened mutterings. I found myself empathizing with whichever poor fools were doing the unsuccessful backpedalling and wondering whether Aletox was there with them. I hadn’t heard his voice, always clear and pronounced. I didn’t think it would fade into meaninglessness as did the voices responding to my father.
“What we’ll do now is we’ll all go to the dining room and enjoy a nice, steaming pot of hakusha. We’ll go over every specification together so that you’ll be exact in the preparation for the splices. You’ll do as I require of you. Or you’ll find yourself relieved of your duties.”
Only father would enjoy the steaming pot of hakusha, its bitter leaves an exotic, acquired taste. His employees would be too afraid to enjoy much. But they would do as he said. Precisely.
The drawers about us clinked shut with crisp clicks. I strained my ears to hear what I knew would come. It took much longer to arrive than it should have, but when it finally did, the sound of the door to the room opening, ringing out our freedom, I’d never before in my life been more grateful for my father’s daily indulgence in the hakusha plant. He’d once, in a moment of rare candor, attributed much of his brilliance to the hakusha. The plant, he said, allowed him to access an entirely different world than the one of which we were normally aware. From this alternate perspective, he could bring back its ideas.
I didn’t care if he traveled to the wild deserts of all the worlds and back. All I cared about was that he’d just traveled out of this room.
I gathered strength from places unknown and thrust my drawer open a second after Dolpheus did the same.
Nineteen
The triumph of bypassing the force field was gone, vanished, evaporated on the clouds of our cold breaths. Dolpheus and I sat on the hard floor and leaned against the metal drawers. We’d managed only to tumble out of the drawers that contained us and to close them. We collapsed just beneath them, dazed, huddled together for warmth. We rattled against each other, shivering, teeth chattering, swords and knives clinking.
“I feel,” Dolpheus began, “as if… I’ll never… be warm again.”
I agreed with him fully but couldn’t get my lips to form the words I might have responded.
I uncurled my legs with difficulty and flopped them out before me. They seemed like big, unwieldy blocks of ice. I might have wondered if they still worked if not for the pain their warming was causing. I sunk back against the drawer fronts, without leaving whatever warmth I could gain from my friend. My head lolled to the unsupported side before I snapped it back upright.
That got my attention. Just because we were out of the freezer drawers didn’t mean we were safe. So long as we were inside my father’s lair, we were never safe. I had to pull myself together, and I had to do it now, even if my body wanted no part in the idea.
Dolpheus spoke for me. “We need to get out… of here.”
I managed to nod my agreement. Even if my father said they were all going to enjoy a pot of hakusha, and I knew about how long this daily ritual of his took—at least an hour—there were no guarantees. Someone could walk into this room for any number of reasons, at any time. We were exposed and vulnerable, and both of those conditions had to change right away.
After our success in crossing the force field to gain entry, I thought there was a decent chance that we could also exit by manipulating the force field. If we had our normal faculties in place. If we could think straight without our brains rattling from the remnants of cold. If we could guarantee uninterrupted time so that we could focus and still ourselves until we were able
to do what we needed to do to get out of here that way.
But we couldn’t meet any of these requirements. We’d have to find a way that was easy and simple, because that’s all we could handle right now. If my usual humor and ability to reflect hadn’t still been thawing, I might have found it funny that I’d taken on battle-proven opponents of great skill, and lived to tell the tales. Now, a refrigerated metal drawer had proven my equal, and had come uncomfortably close to winning my final battle.
“Where did you find that sterile suit last time?” Dolpheus’ back was against my side, his arms around his shins.
I’d thought it pretty reckless to don a sterile suit and walk straight out of the lab and the building the last time. I’d gotten lucky, very lucky. I’d encountered no one on my way out, no one to question the irregularity of my actions.
I didn’t think concealing ourselves within sterile suits a good plan for escape this time either. However, I was desperate enough to try almost anything. “It was hanging on the wall right there.” My tongue felt as thick as a log and equally limber. Dolpheus only understood what I said because we knew each other as well as we did, or perhaps because his brain was thawing at the same rate as my tongue.
Our heads swiveled in the direction I’d indicated. The mountings for a sterile suit were there, bare. Of course, I hadn’t returned the suit I took, and there had only been one. Surely a facility such as this must have others, but not within the splicing lab.
“At least I know the way out of here now.” Last time, it had taken a few wrong turns before I discovered the direct route out of the building.
A sound from far away, down one of the hallways, reached us through the closed door of the lab. Dolpheus and I stood right away, with an appalling lack of grace. Plan or no plan, we couldn’t just huddle here until we were discovered. It wasn’t a question of whether someone would find us, rather, it was a question of when.
I walked to the door while Dolpheus swept his head back and forth across the room, searching for any solution to our immediate problem. I peered out of the miniscule resin window that was set within the door at eye level, but could only see the blank wall across the hall. So I flattened my ear against the window.
Dolpheus joined me when we heard another sound. An indistinct metal ping followed by a silence that pounded in my head with alarm.
“We can’t wait, Tan,” Dolpheus whispered with appropriate urgency.
“I know.” My voice was heavy with resignation. Resentment toward the King and my father was growing with each passing moment. The King was a bully for forcing me to put myself in this kind of danger (and consequently for putting Dolpheus in danger). My father was an asshole for making it unsafe for a son to be in his father’s building, for erecting an empire of secrets between him and me, an impenetrable edifice that kept me from the relationship a son might have with an ordinary father.
There were no more sounds that I could hear. I pressed my face against the resin window, straining to see a few feet to either side of the door. It appeared to be all clear, but Dolpheus and I were well aware that we were taking a big risk by walking out into the hallway. In battle, risks as high as these could be fatal. I hoped they would be less within the supposed civility of a building of science.
I pulled in a breath, leaned one hand flat against the door, and began to turn the door handle with the other. Dolpheus was right behind me, his hand at his waist, next to the hilt of his sword. I got the door handle all the way down without an audible click. I pulled it toward me and stopped. I peered through the gap. At least in this direction, the hallway was clear. Slowly, I pulled the door all the way open and peeked out in the other direction. Clear.
I exchanged a quick glance with Dolpheus, then slipped out into the hallway. A few seconds later, I heard him pull the door closed behind us, almost without sound.
We were tall men of strong build, and we moved quickly, our steps little more than a muffled pattering against the tiled floor. I led the way, Dolpheus half a step behind. At each intersection with another hallway, I stopped and peered around the corner first. But once I stepped onto the new course, I carried my head with confidence. The secret to carrying out any deceit was to behave as if it were no deceit at all. I walked as if I belonged here, hoping we wouldn’t be stopped, but if we were, that the leaping pulse at my throat wouldn’t give us away.
We wound the last of the corners. The exit door was up ahead, at the end of this long hall. We traversed half the hallway before I wondered if father had designed the facility this way intentionally. If this labyrinthine layout were a defense since I’d seen no monitoring devices anywhere.
We were thirty feet, forty at most, away from the door. I had to tamp my urge to break into a run. One purposeful stride after another, soft and confident. Twenty feet. I wanted to sigh in relief—that I’d done the impossible, twice, and survived my own recklessness—but I knew better than to celebrate prematurely. There was nothing more likely to jinx things.
Ten feet. My eyes were fixed on the door up ahead, on our liberation. I saw nothing but it.
BAM. I was hit from the side. I reeled, off balance, caught by surprise. Dolpheus’ hand shot out to catch me before I could fall.
Then we both turned to see what had thwarted our getaway when we were so close to surviving our impudence with no more to recover from than lingering cold.
Twenty
A nervous moment slunk by in relative silence. The woman that ran into me so unbearably close to the lab’s exit sat on the floor, hands behind her, legs sprawled out in opposing angles. The crash stunned her as it had me.
But now her eyes came into focus to land on me. Chances were high that she was about to scream.
Dolpheus moved first, but I was only a fraction of a second behind him. He reached for her mouth, the most dangerous part of her. He clamped his big hand around it.
That’s when the shock wore off. Her eyes bulged. She thrashed against Dolpheus’ hand, doing what she could to yank her head away from him. But by then I was behind her, crouched in a squat. I wrapped my arms around her torso, pinning her arms to her sides.
This wasn’t our first rodeo. Dolpheus and I knew what would come next. In a second, she’d realize she couldn’t get free of my hold, and that the hand clamped across her mouth wasn’t going anywhere. She’d do two things. She’d attempt to bite Dolpheus’ hand (with no success, he’d tighten his hand around her face so she couldn’t move her jaw) and begin to buck against me. She’d try to head butt my face, pulling her legs in to gather some leverage to topple me over.
She wouldn’t manage any of this, of course. But she’d try.
We didn’t waste a moment on signaling each other. We knew what to do. I gathered strength in my legs and then exploded upward, taking the woman with me. She thrashed her head back, trying to make contact with my face, shoulder-length brown hair loose and wild, tickling my nose. But she didn’t make any contact that was to her advantage. My face was turned to the side, out of the range of impact. She hit my collarbone once, and I think it hurt her as much as it did me.
I was taller than her by at least a foot. Her feet dangled at my shins where she attempted to kick them with the back of her shoes. If she’d hoped that would work, she shouldn’t have worn soft slipper-like shoes.
“Let’s get her out of here,” Dolpheus whispered, with as much urgency as his suggestion deserved. I nodded curtly and began moving toward the door. We had no choice but to take her with us. I didn’t want the complication, but leaving her behind would be far worse. If we left her in the lab, dead or alive, we’d be found out, immediately or eventually. Our breakin needed to remain secret. My father could never know that I—or anyone else—had been able to break into his facility. If he found out, he’d alter the building’s security to make it truly impossible to bypass. And I had to be able to break in one more time. Once I received knowledge of Ilara’s exact whereabouts, I’d need my father’s equipment to bring her back where she belonge
d.
Dolpheus looked to each side of the hallway to make sure that no one else had spotted us. Then he slid the door to the outside open. Three bodies moved together as one: Dolpheus shadowed my movements to retain a firm grip on the woman’s mouth, I carried her out in front of me, pressed against my body. Awkwardly, yet efficiently, we shuffled out the door. Then I backed up so that Dolpheus could reach to close the door.
Once free of the building, we walked as quickly as we could, Dolpheus with his hand pressed to the woman’s face while I focused on maintaining our momentum forward despite the woman’s resistance. We cut a direct line to the place where Dolpheus and I first began this expedition: the thick copse of trees that hid us from sight of any comings and goings of the lab. The foliage would be enough to hide our captive, even if it could do nothing to keep her scream from reaching the building.
When we walked through the force field, a surge of energy shocked my system, but it wasn’t enough to disrupt it. We’d made it in and out of my father’s lab. And we’d have been free of any suspicion if not for the complication that wriggled most uncomfortably in my arms. Ordinarily her struggling, even continuous over the distance we’d covered, wouldn’t have been difficult to resist. But the cold of those lifeless drawers had drained me of much of my strength. After the several hundred feet I’d walked with her in tow, my biceps and shoulders ached, and I wished I could just fling her to the ground where she could thrash all she wanted.
Once we reached the copse of trees and walked into their cover, I said to Dolpheus, tersely, “I need to put her down.”
“Over there.” He pointed with his free hand, farther into the density of green. The arm he clamped around her mouth was tired too.
When we reached “over there” Dolpheus and I sidled over to a tree. We maneuvered ourselves so that I was able to slide out from behind the woman, replacing my body with the tree. With her back flat against the tree trunk, I pushed my hands, with all my weight behind them, into her upper arms.