24
THE RED DOOR
THE COOLER WASN’T a cooler but a passageway.
We’d already more or less guessed that, but it was still an odd feeling, going inside.
It led down a staircase, one that twisted in loops with nothing but cement walls on every side. It was pitch black inside, with no illumination whatsoever.
At the bottom lived another door.
Dalejem found the control panel quickly with his infrared, and jerked it open.
Like the door from the pet store, the lower door also had no engaged locks. Dalejem opened the panel and hit a flat, round button inside, which immediately flashed blue.
The door began to retract into the wall.
It had only opened halfway when Dalejem walked through in front of us, his rifle raised to shoulder-height, his boots making no noise on the cement floor.
I followed cautiously.
After a second short staircase and an even shorter passageway that we all had to duck down to get through, we found ourselves in another tunnel.
That one had a slightly taller ceiling but narrower walls. Like the cooler, it wasn’t lit, which wasn’t a big deal because of the infrared settings on our headsets, and our access to the Barrier––but it created a more intense feeling of claustrophobia.
I wondered if we’d end up lost down here, trapped in some kind of underground maze.
Feigran didn’t have a headset, but the dark didn’t seem to bother him. He continued muttering just like he had been, not slowing either his blurred speech or his shuffling footsteps.
I found myself thinking again that Revik would absolutely hate this. I doubt we could have gotten him down that tunnel at all, to be honest, not without heavy sedation.
Maybe not even then.
Shoving my annoyingly ever-present husband out of my thoughts yet again, I gritted my teeth, as if that might somehow help me stop thinking about him.
Strangely, it worked. More or less.
I could feel the lights of those other beings stronger now.
I could also feel their pain. The majority of that pain didn’t feel new; in fact, it felt like it had been there for longer than most of those beings could remember.
Some of it felt new, though.
For some reason, the newer pain bothered me.
Like had been true all over the complex, I felt those strange threads of organic material in the walls, clearly alive in some way, yet dormant… asleep.
I didn’t try to figure out how it was possible that time, either, but took snapshots with my light and let it go, concentrating instead on the living beings I could feel on the other end of these snaking passageways.
Sharp turns broke the lines of the tunnel probably every hundred or so feet, making it pretty much impossible to gauge the distance with anything but time.
We’d been in here too long.
An awareness of that fact lingered in my mind, too.
I checked the timepiece compulsively inside my headset. Another twenty or so minutes passed as we navigated the featureless tunnels in the dark.
I felt the person on the other end pulling on me again.
Impatient now. Wanting us to hurry.
He was impatient, excited, exhilarated––
He.
I gripped my gun tighter, remembering it only then, even though I held it in both of my hands. I kept it pointed at the floor instead of straight ahead like Dalejem, but the fact that I’d almost forgotten it still gave me an idea of where my head was at. My throat went dry as we reached another corner in the tunnel.
Something told me this was the last one. We were close now.
He was close.
“He’s waiting for us,” I muttered. “Do you feel him, Dalejem?”
Dalejem flinched, then glanced at me.
“Yes,” he said, his voice neutral.
Somehow, amusement found me, even in that. “Is it okay for me to call you by your first name?” I said. “If that was too familiar, I apologize, brother. I heard the other infiltrators calling you Jem. If you prefer, I can––”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said at once, cutting me off. “It’s fine. Either is fine.”
He didn’t lower the rifle. Nor did he look at me.
I felt a lot more behind the name thing than what he was saying. Now was definitely not the time to get into it with him, though, whatever the story there might be.
You probably don’t want to know the story anyway, my brain thought.
Even as I thought it, I realized my stupid brain was right. Whatever it was he’d reacted to just then, it had something to do with Revik.
I didn’t have much time to think about that, either. Thankfully.
Dalejem turned the next corner, following the squared lines. Within a few more steps, both of us faced a metal door. A dark red in color, the metal showed up shockingly bright in the infrared.
It took me a few seconds more to realize the organics in this door weren’t dormant.
These ones were wide, wide awake.
Not only that, the door was thick. Crazy thick––like maybe four or five feet of solid organic, semi-organic and dead-metal material combined. My aleimi explored the different layers in curiosity, only able to see the functionality there in bits and pieces.
Whatever lived on the other side of that door, the mechanisms in the door blinded me to it.
My suspicions had been right. Feigran had been showing us what lived behind that red door. Jem and I wouldn’t have felt it on our own. Like he could with our tanks and collars, Feigran could see past that wall. He was helping me and Jem see past it, too.
I wondered if whatever or whoever stood on the other side might be able to see through that wall, as well.
“Sorry, sister,” Feigran muttered. “Sorry, sorry.”
Dalejem looked at him, frowning. “What are you sorry for now?”
I shook my head, dismissing both things with a slashing gesture.
I knew what Feigran meant. He was apologizing for deceiving us. But it was too late now, and I didn’t see the point in explaining to Jem how our light had been manipulated.
We could talk about the particulars later.
For now, I wanted us out of here as soon as fucking possible.
“Is it locked?” I asked Dalejem.
My voice was lower than a whisper.
“Yes,” he murmured back, equally soft. “But the lock is strange.”
Nodding, I slid my light into it, cautiously––
––when suddenly I felt Feigran there, in my light.
It happened so fast I barely knew he was there. Then I was watching him do something inside my light, something I could barely feel at the higher levels of my aleimi. Abruptly, I felt the mechanism in the door in front of me shift.
Then the lock I’d just started to look at disengaged.
Flinching, I turned, staring at the other Elaerian through the dark.
He had already retracted his light. He huddled on the far side of the door, muttering in a slow stream under his breath as if nothing had happened.
“Did you just open the fucking door?” Dalejem said, incredulity in his voice.
“Sort of,” I muttered. Feeling Dalejem’s attention sharpen on my light, I sighed. “Feigran did. But he used my light to do it. Don’t ask me how.”
Dalejem stared at me, then at Feigran. I could feel him frowning between the two of us in the dark and I exhaled, motioning with my gun for him to open the door.
“It’s done now,” I said.
I felt him trying to decide just how stupid this really was.
Then he reached out, grasping the metal wheel in the center of the door with both hands. He cranked it hard, counter-clockwise. I could almost feel the seal as it let go.
The Barrier field shifted around us.
I felt Dalejem jump, right before he looked back at me, panting.
“Did you feel that?” he said, his voice heavily accented. “Fuck.”
/>
Fighting to keep my own mind level, I tried to place the accent, couldn’t. Something Asian. If Chinese, then not the accent I usually heard from seers born in China.
“What the fuck was that?” he said again, his accent worsening.
“Barrier containment field of some kind,” I said. Blowing a reassuring warmth over his light, I kept my voice nonchalant. “It’s okay, brother. I already figured that much out. That’s what Feigran referred to before.”
Despite my words, I held my gun up, two-handed.
I also focused on the door as I spoke.
“Like the tanks,” I explained, gesturing vaguely with one hand, still gripping the gun with the other. “…You know.”
I felt his understanding, even as his light calmed slightly.
“We’re going ahead with this?” His voice held skepticism, yet his hand still rested on the L-shaped door handle below the wheel. His fingers looked strangely white through the virtual infrared image of my headset.
“Yes,” I said, nodding.
Too late now anyway, my mind muttered unhelpfully.
Dalejem gave me a look, but he was already pressing down on the brushed metal door handle, balanced lightly on his toes in a semi-fighting stance. He gripped the rifle tightly in his other hand, balancing the stock on his shoulder and aiming it at the opening.
He opened the door so softly I barely heard the click.
The corridor was immediately flooded with light.
25
MIRROR, MIRROR
MY INFRAREDS SWITCHED off, adjusting to the change.
The scene flipped in the same set of seconds, negative to positive, and I blinked, fighting to make sense of the images in front of me.
It was like blacking out, then whiting out in the same millisecond. The pause had to have been really short––as in, less than a second short. Unfortunately, it felt a lot longer.
Probably because this immediately felt like a combat situation.
When my eyes refocused, no one was firing at me, though.
Dalejem and I faced a perfectly round room with high ceilings. Something about the circular shape immediately threw me. Or maybe it was the weird layout.
We stood on a meter-wide walkway, elevated at least ten feet off the next highest level of the room. Our level circled the entire rim of the room, as did the long drop between us and the center circle on the bottom. Ladders on the far wall appeared to be the only real way down.
It looked like a steep amphitheater, only with no seats.
My mind went to one of those zoo cages for bears or lions I remembered from when I was a kid.
The bottom level lived below a much steeper step than the one right below us, like a pit surrounded by a few rings of observation decks. I didn’t see a ladder on that one either, which made me wonder if it was something you needed a passcode or some other security measure to extend.
The steep drop both accentuated the circular shape and did something strange to my depth perception, making it hard to get my arms around the size of the room.
It was big, though.
For a few blinks I felt almost like I might lose my balance and fall.
Despite the strange layout and the absurdly high ceilings, I saw more or less what I’d expected to see at the end of Feigran’s twisted scavenger hunt. Meaning, below me existed clear signs of a version of the fucked up lab I’d seen in my head.
Green mirrored, organic walls shone from all of the levels, reminiscent of the original tank where we’d held Revik. I didn’t see metal cages with bars, but I did see walled compartments with transparent dividers and windows in my glimpses of those lower levels, kind of like human-sized display cases or really big pet store tanks.
Each case appeared just big enough to act as a prison cell for a single person, if a brutally small one. An average-sized adult human could maybe take two full strides in any direction before they’d smack into one of the walls.
The ceiling was just high enough that most could have stood upright.
I saw what might have been human or seer shapes inside a few of those cells, although it was hard to tell from the angle where we stood. All of those I saw appeared to be lying on the floor, not moving.
I found myself thinking they were dead.
As if to confirm my suspicion, I noticed blood on the floor outside several of those cells and on a number of the transparent walls.
Alarm bells kept ringing in the background of my light, impossible to ignore.
Something definitely wasn’t right here.
Well, something besides the obvious.
The place was too fucking quiet. I didn’t see or feel anyone here working in an official capacity. No guards. No creepy doctors. No tech-guys. No “scientists” of any kind. I didn’t feel any real security features, either––none that triggered any level of my aleimi.
The place felt like it had been broken in some way, stripped of its original purpose.
Only the inmates remained in the asylum now.
Did their keepers intend for them to die down here, as Feigran had said? Just starve to death quietly and out of view? Or were they meant to be preserved at the basest level, like the trees upstairs in that frozen city? Were they just another form of biological machine maintained via timed irrigation, fertilizer and fake sunlight?
As I thought it, my gaze returned to the center of the room. A single raised platform stood there, like a stage set in the middle of that circular floor.
My eyes had glanced over it as I cased the room. Now, when I finally went there for real, I realized the platform was covered in yellow-tinted spotlights. A man stood there.
He was staring at us.
Actually, he was staring at me.
My mind stuttered briefly when I met those clear eyes.
Colorless, like faintly tinted glass––like cracked crystal.
His face blurred to me, lost in shadow and indistinct boundaries, but those eyes glowed up at me, twin points of living light.
Some part of me got lost there.
The familiarity hit me like a punch to the gut. I doubted it even as I saw it––the way I got lost in details on other faces and bodies, sure I saw Revik in every one of them.
The same thing happened to me in all those months trapped in the Forbidden City, where a certain kind of deep-toned male laugh could get me to freeze, scanning faces and bodies until I’d determined the source and knew it wasn’t him.
Lately I saw pieces of Revik in everyone.
I saw him in the way some of the mulei fighters moved, in gesturing hands and narrow mouths, black hair or light eyes or even just an infiltrator’s stance, a too-long stare––the way someone clicked at me or carried a gun.
The way someone laughed. Or smiled.
But the instant I felt this other male’s light, I knew it wasn’t Revik, no matter how much I could see him in those eyes.
My stare shifted down the rest of him then, really taking him in.
Even so, most of my attention remained on his light.
I felt the charge there, an intensity that ran through my aleimi like live current, sparking the higher structures in my light, nearly dragging me out of my body. I saw geometric shapes rotating silently above his head, multicolored like Revik’s––but unlike Revik’s or my own in ways I couldn’t even begin to catalogue.
He had structures I’d never seen before.
Even so, enough base similarity lived there with Revik and I, with the telekinesis and whatever else, that again, the resonance caught my breath.
I fought to pull myself together, to control my light.
Dragon.
This had to be Feigran’s Dragon.
He hadn’t looked anywhere near so much like Revik in Feigran’s drawings, but as soon as I thought it, I knew I had to be right.
Instead of being covered in burnt and frayed combat clothes and boots like he had been in the drawings, this Dragon was entirely naked. His body looked disturbingly like Revik’s t
oo, but also not. He was bigger, closer to the size Revik was when he worked for Salinse, without Revik’s tattoos or the scars I knew, without the same way of standing or holding himself at all.
His skin was darker, but I suspected that was from dirt and sweat.
He had a thick, white scar along one leg I’d never seen before; it looked almost like his leg had been split from his calf to his thigh.
Even so, the similarities were enough to throw me completely for those few breaths.
A bare handful of seconds had gone by since I’d first locked eyes with him.
Still lost in that frozen moment while he watched me look at him, I returned my gaze to his a second time. That time, I looked at his whole face.
I realized only then that the blurriness I’d caught around his features came from most of his face being covered. In that sense, he looked almost identical to Feigran’s depictions. A dark organic muzzle fitted around his mouth and most of his lower jaw, wrapping around the back of his head. It looked like something alive, but also like a helmet, leaving his eyes shining at me from beneath an uneven shag of black hair and only slightly less dark skin.
I’d scarcely seen the mask, it blended in so well with his face––and the shadow where he stood.
His clear eyes continued to watch me, holding an intensity I knew, but so different in flavor than Revik’s I could scarcely make sense of it. His eyes blazed at me with an inner light, but something in that light held chaos instead of stillness––a profusion so intense I couldn’t hold his gaze that time, either.
I had to look away.
It was only then that I noticed he wasn’t alone.
Another person lay on the raised platform in front of him.
When I looked at her, I realized he had an erection. My mind fought not to notice how similar he looked to Revik there, as well.
She stared up at me, gagged with a strap, her light blue eyes wide in her face.
Emotion hit me as soon as I met her gaze, even before I saw the pleading, begging look in her eyes. Physically, she looked like a seer with Asian features, light-colored irises and long limbs… but her light was strange.
Looking at only her light, I couldn’t tell for sure what she was.
Dragon_The Final War Page 28