Panther in the Hive (The Tasha Trilogy Book 1)

by Cole, Olivia

  “AZALEA.”

  It’s like a slap. Z starts, looks, then throws herself into the elevator, dragging Tasha and Ishmael in with her. She jabs her finger on the Door Close button just as the woman wearing the fur takes a step toward them. Others have rallied with her, a teenage boy wearing a Roosevelt University shirt among them. He is quicker, heading toward the elevators in a limping trot. The door between them closes slowly, not to be rushed after being held open so long. It dings with each inch, the Roosevelt kid barking with each step, quickening his pace.

  On his t-shirt, Tasha can see the smaller print—“We Did It!”—as the door closes in his face. Malakai, who has said nothing, breathes a heavy sigh. Z looks around at them.

  “My bad.”

  Tasha and Ishmael shrug.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. Okay to proceed, Tasha assumes he means, but it’s not like she has a choice at this point.

  “I guess. I don’t know, it’s just that I saw those cops on State Street and I saw all the Minkers in their stores at their jobs and I felt like…like the world was over.”

  “Well, it is,” says Tasha, trying to sound sarcastic but instead just sounding sad. Dr. Rio has pressed 103, and they’re moving now, but here at the Apiary again, Tasha feels like she’s standing still.

  “I guess I meant I thought I was going to die. My world was over,” Z insists. “Like this elevator was gonna take me to hell or something.”

  Tasha just stares at her.

  “Or maybe I just hate shopping,” Z adds, and they both smile.

  The sides of the elevator are glass, like everything else in the Apiary. As they rise higher in the atrium, level by level, they can see each floor’s flocks of Minkers swaying around the walkways, loitering inside stores, standing around entrances, gaping. Looking down, Tasha can see a bit of a crowd gathering where Roosevelt and the fur-wearer had sounded the alarm. Tasha thinks they will probably have dispersed by the time Dr. Rio has done whatever he’s come to do. Or maybe, with the cure, the crowd will have gone from barking freaks to confused, sleepy Chicagoans, rubbing their heads and wondering where the time had gone and how this blood got in their teeth.

  They pass Level 51 and Tasha peers out, hoping to catch a glimpse of Fetch Fetchers. She doesn’t really know why—she hated that job. But it’s like driving past the scene of a crime, the yard wrapped in yellow tape: one needs to see it, just to know. Her mother’s ring is in there: it’s like a beacon. She feels it pulling on her, tugging her sleeves.

  “You can put your badge away, Tasha.” Dr. Rio nods to her. “We don’t need it to get in once we get to Cybranu. I have my own badge for that.”

  “You didn’t turn it in?” Tasha can’t help but mock.

  He smiles, unperturbed.

  “No. Although I’m sure they would have liked it back very much.”

  The elevator smells like cabbage and almonds. It must be him, Tasha concedes. He’s too dignified to smell like cabbage. It’s really a shame, creepo or not.

  The elevator sighs to a stop.

  “You’ve reached the 103rd floor,” the benign male voice of the elevator tells them. Its accent is British. If Tasha were alone she would thank it in a British accent.

  Malakai steps out first, followed closely by Ishmael. They even look like brothers from behind: something about the shape of their heads. The fact that they both wear backpacks now adds to the similarity. They could be schoolboys waiting for the train on the first day of school.

  Z steps out beside them, then Dr. Rio, then Tasha. The 103rd floor, like most of the upper floors, is much dimmer than the shopping floors of the Apiary, with many fewer windows. Wall sconces, painted a deep crimson, decorate the walls. Tasha feels as if she’s been swallowed by a tall, long-throated beast; a beast that has also swallowed numerous lit matches to light the way for its prey. The beast has also conveniently posted a directory for directions to its various stomachs.

  Dr. Rio approaches the directory. While he studies it, Ishmael turns to Z.

  “Really though, are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay now. I’m good. I was freaking out. I don’t know. Sorry.”

  “Oh shit!” Tasha has never heard Malakai curse before, and she almost reprimands him before she sees the cause.

  A man in a blue suit is approaching them, his swaying, lurching gait unmistakable. He lunges for Z, who sidesteps nimbly and slashes with her box cutter. It connects with his neck, but she hadn’t clicked the blade out, so the neat strike accomplished nothing. Still, Tasha is pleased to see her acting like her old self. Tasha is stepping forward to take the guy out when Ishmael swings the axe. The force of the blow knocks the guy in the suit over, almost severing the head, but Ishmael has struck on the wrong side of the neck, and Tasha can see the light of the Chip flashing against the carpet as it attempts to knit the gaping hole back together.

  Z bends down, her box cutter ready this time. She gives the guy a push, rolling him onto his other side and exposing the side of the neck with the Chip.

  “Gross.” Malakai says what they’re all thinking at the sight of the reaching membranes stretching across the wound like tentacles. The guy is snapping his teeth at Z and flopping. She digs the box cutter into the flashing flesh and pops the Chip out like a battery from a remote. It sparks and lies dead. So does the man in the suit.

  Dr. Rio turns back to them from the directory.

  “It’s down the…oh. Well. I’m glad I brought you four along,” he chuckles.

  Tasha can feel her mouth hanging open. Is he for real? She exchanges a look with Ishmael, who shakes his head once. When all this is over, he seems to say, I’m transferring to a different captain.

  They follow Rio down the dim hallway, weapons at the ready. Tasha feels like the Secret Service, escorting the President through a haunted house filled with assassins. She also feels a bit like an assassin herself, though who will be assassinated remains to be seen.

  “Here we are,” Dr. Rio says, as if they’ve just arrived at a tea party.

  The door of the tea party is a fogged glass entranceway, large windows—equally opaque—on either side. The door bears a plaque, labeled simply “Cybranu” in small white letters. It could be a doctor’s office, a therapist’s.

  Rio reaches into his pocket, withdrawing a wallet; the old-fashioned leather kind. When he opens it, Tasha glimpses several photographs in the little plastic protector most old folks’ wallets have, and she cranes her neck to see, but he guards them as carefully as she had guarded her Apiary ID. He pulls a badge from the wallet and swipes it through what looks like a credit card terminal on the wall beside the door. It beeps softly and a female voice—also with a British accent; what’s with the British accents—says “Welcome, doctor.” A muted click sounds inside the door’s steel casing and Dr. Rio gives it a push.

  Tasha expects to find more suited guardians inside, but there is only a large, open room containing a long wooden conference table lined with chairs, and a whole wall of bookshelves. It looks more like a study or a library than a lab where billion-dollar schemes were hatched. Tasha blinks in the sudden brightness. The entire back wall of the room is a window, and on the 103rd floor they are above the mottled mammatus clouds that have dappled Chicago’s skies for as long as Tasha has lived here. The brightness reminds her of Kentucky. Looking out over the clouds, she could be anywhere. She forgot it could be so bright. Tasha moves toward the window in wonder, like a cub whose eyes have just opened, seeing the sun for the first time. Malakai joins her, his mouth slack.

  “I’ve never seen it like this,” he says, squinting a little. He was probably only two or three when the clouds rolled in, low and quilted. The two of them stand close to the window, peering down. From here the city looks like a collection of pillars rising out of mist. Some buildings aren’t tall enough to break the mammatus layer, and Tasha can barely make out their rooftops below the gray surface. The Chase building rears its head brazen and blue a little to the
west. Somewhere at its root, deep beneath the surface of the clouds, waits their Chevrolet, their little lifeboat on the titanic deck of Chicago.

  Ishmael and Z have come to look too. Tasha hears the gentle click, click of Z toying with the box cutter. Up here it’s easy to pretend nothing has happened. You could pretend you were already in heaven up here, Tasha thinks. An angel with bloody jeans and a kitchen knife, far removed from the horror below.

  Tasha turns from the window and looks for Dr. Rio, who is uninterested in the view. He’s standing at one of the great oak bookshelves that line the wall, his hands behind his back, gazing fixedly at something on the shelf ahead of him. Tasha’s curiosity is more powerful than her dislike, and she moves closer to see.

  “Greatest Medical Breakthrough,” he says as she approaches. He’s reading a large shining plaque, one of many that adorn the shelves in place of books. There are ornamental trophies too. One statue looks like an Oscar, but it’s silver and the figure’s hands are clasped above its head like a prizefighter.

  Malakai has come to stand behind Tasha. The room is quiet except for the vague drone of wind outside the window.

  “This is the room where they would sit and congratulate themselves,” Dr. Rio says, running his finger over the inscription on the plaque. “Masters of the universe, peacekeepers, money-makers. People called us geniuses…” His voice trails off.

  “They didn’t know this would happen…” Z says from the window, looking sad and maternal. She has momentarily forgiven him for all his creepiness, not to mention the incident with the car, Tasha guesses.

  Dr. Rio looks at her, and his face brims with something hot, something like hate.

  “They knew. They knew, I knew. And now we’re all dead. They sat in this room with their glasses of champagne and toasted to our destruction. They are rich, and we are dead.”

  The air in the room seems to be crackling. Tasha feels the hair on her arms rising as if someone has rubbed a balloon over her flesh.

  “Where is the cure, Dr. Rio?” Ishmael has joined them by the bookshelves.

  Dr. Rio’s laugh, a harsh bark, startles Tasha. He does it again, seeming to enjoy the sound.

  “It’s on your back, dear boy,” he says, returning his gaze to the plaques on the shelves.

  Ishmael stares at him for a long moment, then slowly removes the backpack, setting it on the floor. Dr. Rio has walked away from them, still talking as he walks to the window. Tasha wonders at his speeches. Maybe he’d been drinking before they’d piled into the Chevy.

  “I spent months preparing to leave the facility,” he says, hands behind his back once more, “gathering supplies, reading files, mining information from my colleagues. I was worried from the beginning. I had a family. The whole thing didn’t sit right with me. I compared some of the notes on the initial model to the schematics of the conclusive model, the one that went to production—the plans were different. Someone had approved tweaks that I’d never heard of. The Expiration Dependence Fuse caused the implant to protect the body, but override the brain. Neuroimaging on the test subjects showed the brain going dark…all except one tiny, obscure part in the center, deep inside the hypothalamus. The body was protected, but only that tiny part of the brain showed any activity. It was lit up like a Christmas tree.”

  He snaps his fingers several times in a row, staring out at the clouds.

  “I tried to tell them. They bought me a car.” He laughs. “A Porsche! I drove it all the way to Chicago from Arizona, with all my supplies in the backseat and trunk, all my findings. I hid with them in the church after I shoved the car into Lake Michigan. They found it, of course. But not me.”

  Ishmael has unzipped the backpack. He’s peering inside with his eyebrows low.

  “I didn’t know when it would happen, but I knew it would happen.” Rio’s voice is rising. Malakai moves closer to his brother. “Certainly not on this scale. Certainly not all at once. I don’t know how they managed that. My contacts in Minnesota handled their location, but I wasn’t ready. I thought I could get here before it all happened.”

  Tasha has no idea what he’s talking about. She’s angry, but she’s also afraid. The sane layer of the good doctor is peeling back. His body is trembling, his claw-hand a rock.

  “There’s an on switch, my dear,” he says, still staring out at Chicago. “But no off switch. Not here. I should have been able to reach the base before the switch was flipped.”

  He’s rambling. Incoherent. Dr. Rio turns away from the window to face them, spreading his arms wide. His face is open, the magma free flowing, hot and bright. He chuckles.

  “Better late than never!”

  “What is this?” Ishmael starts to reach into the backpack.

  “Leave it,” Dr. Rio snaps. “You don’t need the cure.”

  “Dr. Rio,” Malakai’s voice is soft, “what are we doing here?”

  “I’m here to cure Chicago. I only wish they were here to see it.” He gestures at the empty conference table, its fifteen swivel chairs. Dr. Rio, always gesturing at empty chairs.

  “Cure it?”

  “Did you think there was a cure other than this?” Rio’s voice becomes a howl, and they all cringe. “This perfect piece of sabotage? Did you think there was a pill? A button? A magic spell?”

  They had. They all had.

  “This won’t be enough,” Rio says. “It will only fry communication for the Minker population in range of this base’s signal. And there are so many other bases…”

  “Bases?” Tasha snaps. “What are you talking about?”

  “This is only one,” Rio says, his eyes drilling into her. “We can’t get them all, but if we take out the big ones—”

  “Dr. Rio…what is in this fucking bag?” Ishmael interrupts. He has left the pack on the floor and is standing with both fists clenched.

  “The same thing that’s in mine.” His voice is soft again. He unslings the backpack from his left shoulder. “And Malakai’s. Put it down, Malakai, thank you.”

  Malakai does as he is told, staring at Dr. Rio with something between fear and bewilderment. Any reverence has been replaced by the feeling a blind man gets upon realizing that the tabby cat he’s been petting is a tiger.

  “Dr. Rio…?” Malakai doesn’t ask the question, but Tasha knows what it is. Are you there? Is that you? The tabby cat is gone.

  “Dr. Rio,” Tasha says, trying to make her voice sound less like jelly and more like a stone. I am not a pineapple, she thinks. Be a stone. A stone fruit. “What…is in…these bags?”

  He looks at her and blinks, the magma roiling.

  “Why, bombs, of course. Bombs.”

  Chapter 33

  Time stretches like taffy across a hot tongue; long, stringy, melting.

  “Cyclonite, to be quite specific. I’m sorry for that terrible smell of cabbage. It’s the odorizing taggant. They mix it in the explosives so the canines can smell it on bomb sweeps. No dogs here, of course.” He chuckles.

  “Where did you get it?” Z has moved instinctively toward the door. She is no longer the rabbit from the lobby. Her body is a wire snare, ready to spring.

  “I have low friends in high places.”

  Tasha bets he does. His smile is the stoat, charming baby birds from the branch.

  What do people in movies say when a lunatic is threatening to blow them all to hell? She’s seen all the movies but the words sound hollow and brittle in her head. You don’t have to do this. There’s another way. We can fix this. Step away from the bomb. Think of the children. These are things people say.

  Tasha wonders about the blast radius. How do bombs even work? This wasn’t part of her Liberal Arts education. Will it take out the whole block? Just the building? The entire city? Judging by the size and heft of the backpacks there must be close to eighty pounds of—what did he say? —Cyclonite, if not more. Even if it blows off only the top floors, will the building collapse? Will everyone in it and under it be crushed by pieces of the Apiary, by it
s burning, buzzing inhabitants?

  “Are you going to do it now?” It’s the only question she can think to ask. She’s standing right beside one of the backpacks. Malakai, his eyes huge, is standing even nearer. They’re toast.

  “It’s already been done. The detonators for all three packages are on a single timer. I started the timer the moment we entered this room.”

  Tasha doesn’t know how Z crossed the room so quickly, but her claws are already in Tasha’s arm and she’s dragging her to the door. She’s got a hold on Malakai too. She fumbles with the sleek metal door handle, her nails making faint screeching sounds before she finally yanks it open. Ishmael is right behind them.

  “This won’t fix everything, but it’s a start! You have about seventeen minutes,” Dr. Rio calls after them. “If you’d be so kind, take care of Arizona for me. Give my best to your sister.”

  He turns away. As the door shuts, Tasha sees him at the window, looking out onto the tops of the clouds. His shoulders are shaking, whether from sobs or laughter she’ll never know.

  There’s another Minker in the hall, another business suit. Tasha sends him flying with a stunning kick to the stomach. If she isn’t blown into a million pulpy pieces when all this is over, she thinks she’ll see if any senseis survived the Change and learn a little karate.

  Z slams her palm against the down button. Nothing happens.

  “Badge! Badge!”

  Tasha’s fingers are fumbling; they are made of giant slabs of meat. She juggles the badge before finally pressing it against the entry pad. The elevator opens immediately, as it never left their floor. Malakai enters first, then Tasha, then Ishmael, then Z. Tasha drops the badge as she enters the elevator. As the steel doors whisper shut, she sees her make-upped face on the floor of the 103rd story of the Apiary. That’s where it will stay.

  It was only a short sprint from Cybranu to the elevator, but they’re all panting. Their breaths are ragged, clashing with the inappropriately cheerful elevator music. Tasha hadn’t noticed it on the way up, but now it’s distracting. She thinks she recognizes it as an instrumental of an old Nicki Minaj song she recognizes from a Classics stream online. The singer says her heartbeat is running away. Tasha thinks her own heart has already started its escape.