Wayward

by Skye Knizley

  “Not bad,” Cadence said.

  Ethan buffed his nails on his vest, and Cadence couldn’t help it. She smirked and said, “for an old man,”

  Before he could reply, she was hurrying down the corridor. The elevator was across from her, and the corridor disappeared to the east and west at a forty-five degree angle. The guards would be visible to anyone coming either direction.

  “Old man, huh? Come on, there’s a supply closet back there, let’s put the sleeping beauties in there,” Ethan said behind her.

  It took only a few moments to drag the men into the closet and lock them in, then they were in the elevator heading deep underground. Cadence had a sinking feeling and it wasn’t just the elevator. She didn’t like being underground, it made her nervous and claustrophobic. She took deep breaths in and out through her nose in an effort to keep her nerves under control.

  The elevator stopped at the sixth subfloor with a gentle thump and the doors opened into another corridor identical to the one above. It vanished in three directions, each with intermittent doors, cells or storage rooms, Cadence couldn’t tell which.

  Ethan unrolled his ill-gotten map and held it under one of the lights. “Looks like we want to go east.”

  The corridor didn’t curve, it was angular, with hard-welded corners and steel walls that were damp from the moisture and pressure of being this deep. It still bothered Cadence to think they were so far beneath the earth, but she knew worrying would do no good. It wasn’t like this place was about to collapse around their ears. Not without help, anyway.

  Ahead were more guards standing at an intersection. They were speaking in Russian, which annoyed Cadence to no end and sharing a cigarette beneath some kind of exhaust fan that dragged the smoke away into the caverns around them.

  She didn’t slow, she merely raised her finger like a gun and ‘shot’ them both, muttering “zap!” under her breath. Both men fell to the ground and she stooped to pull them into the side corridor, where she’d spotted another convenient closet.

  “I don’t suppose that works on people with abilities?” Ethan asked, helping her drag the men away.

  “I wish. I think it tickled Stoneface, and a guy who called himself Quasar just laughed when I tried it on him,” Cadence said.

  “Handy though,” Ethan said in a conversational tone as he kicked the guard into a closet.

  “Better than using my scream on them. I think that kills normal people and tends to attract attention,” Cadence said.

  She straightened and looked around. “You know, when I’m an evil overlord, my lair won’t have so many closets, it’s a bad design.”

  “You have plans for world domination, do you?” Ethan asked, fighting a smile.

  Cadence smiled back. “Only as a hobby.”

  She closed the closet and continued around the corridor. She realized they were on the outer ring of the structure, it was designed like an upside down Yule tree, with each layer or ring being slightly smaller than the one above. Even so, the place was huge. They passed laboratories with full biohazard facilities, empty treatment rooms, unlocked cells that looked more like dorm rooms than holding facilities… there was even a trash chute, though Cadence couldn’t picture where it would come out. In a furnace, probably, or some crevasse beneath the earth.

  At the next intersection, Ethan stepped into a side corridor and stopped outside a heavy steel door. The sign bolted to the wall beside it was covered in warning labels, from biohazard to radiation.

  “This is it, Ceej, you sure you want to go through with this?”

  Cadence ‘zapped’ the security camera down the hall and nodded. “Yes. I need to know what the hell is going on here.”

  Ethan turned back to the door and pressed the open button stuck in the wall. The door slid aside, into the metal frame and Cadence entered the room. It was a round chamber, twenty or thirty feet across. The walls were battleship grey, the floor was covered in clinical white tile and in the middle of the room was a machine connected to a bank of equipment that looked as if it belonged in a NASA control room. The device itself was a tank of some kind, held at a forty-five degree angle above the floor by steel cables that ran to the ceiling. The front was half glass half metal and it looked, from the door, to be full of a glowing blue liquid.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Ethan said in a soft voice.

  Cadence walked into the room as if in a dream. She had memories of this place, they rose to the surface, unbidden and frightening. She remembered feeling like she was drowning, thick, glowing fluid filled her nose and mouth, choking her. She remembered someone helping her from the confines of the device, but she couldn’t remember who, and gentle hands. She also remembered pain and injections that seemed to go on forever.

  She moved closer and peered into the tank, half expecting to see herself lying there, still covered in the thick goo, but there was no one inside.

  Her voice shook when she spoke. “What is this place?”

  “I don’t know,” Ethan replied. He’d moved to the bank of controls and was fiddling with the computer that was attached. “Most of this is in Russian, I can only pick up bits and pieces. The substance inside is an organic material, I understand that much. It’s being kept at a steady 98.6 degrees.”

  “Body temperature,” Cadence said. “By organic material you mean−”

  “Some kind of living tissue,” Ethan finished. “That stuff in there is alive.”

  Cadence felt tears in her eyes. She’d accepted being different, accepted that she was smarter and stronger, even the powers she’d taken in stride. But this? Her hands started to shake and she sank to the floor, fighting the tears.

  “Was I made here? Am I… a thing out of that tank?”

  Ethan was suddenly there, by her side. He knelt and hugged her close. “No, CJ, you’re not a thing. You’re a person. Most of you, the parts that really matter, are one of my oldest friends. No matter how you got here, you’re not a thing. You’re my partner.”

  She couldn’t help it, the tears spilled over and she sagged against Ethan. She wanted to believe that she was, somehow, the original Cadence or the war hero’s granddaughter, anything that was something human, something she could understand, but every inch of her said she’d crawled out of that tank. She could remember being inside it, remember the taste, that horrible, stickiness on her tongue. It was the oldest memory she’d had, so far. Maybe it was her oldest memory, period.

  “Shh,” Ethan whispered, kissing the top of her head. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “How can you say that?” Cadence asked.

  “CJ, this world is full of strange things. I’m almost two hundred years old, I’ve seen demons walking the plains, huge beasts crawling beneath the desert sand, Nazi soldiers raised from the dead, and I haven’t seen half of what’s out there,” Ethan said.

  He brushed the hair from her face and dabbed at her tears with a fresh handkerchief.

  “We don’t know what this is, but I know nothing on this earth can create a human soul. Nothing. It’s the First Rule of Magik, in fact. Its why we can’t raise people from the dead.”

  Cadence took his hankie and blew her nose. “How do you know I even have a soul?”

  “Because I’ve seen the things that don’t have them, and they are monsters. They don’t worry about killing people, CJ. A thing without a soul wouldn’t have saved those guards, wouldn’t have tried to protect her lover, she would just let them die,” Ethan said.

  His words helped, but some of them made her even more confused. Was he two hundred years old? The best friend she could remember was ten times her age, and that felt weird, especially since he kept making her the leader. And if magik couldn’t bring people back from the dead, if it was beyond science, what was she?

  “Ceej? Come on, partner, we’re in the h
eart of enemy territory. I need you,” Ethan said.

  He was right. At any moment the guards she knocked out or the nurses were going to be noticed and they would be in the shit. She could cry in the hot tub later.

  She stood and wiped her eyes on her sleeves. “What else did you find?”

  Ethan stood and raised his hat to run a hand through his hair. “I can’t make heads or tails, but it looks like there’s a floppy drive, maybe we can save the information and translate it later?”

  He waved his cards over his hat then drew a box of floppy disks out of it like a magician conjuring a rabbit. Cadence took the disks and stuck one into the machine, then commanded it to dump as much information as it could onto the disk.

  “It will to take a few minutes to save,” she said.

  Ethan put his hat back on and drew his pistol. “I’m not sure we have a few minutes.”

  He nodded at the door and Cadence saw that red lights were flickering in the hallway. It was a good bet that someone had noticed the missing personnel and set a general alarm. Getting back out was going to be tricky.

  “Watch the computer,” Cadence said. “When it’s done, take the disk and get out.”

  She strode toward the door and Ethan grabbed her arm. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “To buy us time. You told me that I was a hero, maybe its time to start acting like one,” Cadence replied. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

  She pulled loose and walked backward a few paces. “Trust me.”

  “Its not you I don’t trust,” Ethan said. “It’s the bad guys.”

  ***

  The corridor was quiet, like an old tomb undisturbed for centuries. There were no warning sirens, no sounds of booted feet on the walkways, just the eerie flashing lights casting shadows on the walls around her. Cadence walked as quietly as she could, sticking to the shadows where possible and moving fast over open ground. Her goal was to draw any guards away from Ethan so he could steal the data. He had a better chance of getting out with his portal ability than she did, and they couldn’t both go without risking both of them getting caught. At least that was the theory.

  She reached the end of the corridor and, for the first time, noticed there were signs bolted to the wall at the end of every section. She was in section three, level six, corridor C. If she’d had Ethan’s map that might have meant something.

  “Hey! Stop right there!”

  Four white-uniformed guards were approaching from the other direction. They were carrying submachine-guns at waist height, and for all the world looked like they’d stepped out of a movie.

  “Hi, um, Gary sent me?” She tried.

  “Gary who? Where’s your pass?” The lead guard asked.

  “Gygax. Isn’t this the Keep of the Evil Overlord?”

  “Blast her!” The leader said.

  Cadence raised her shield and drew her own pistol, hoping the threat of her powers would be enough to make them back off.

  “That was a short conversation, how bout you guys run away, now?”

  The guards looked at one another and opened fire. Cadence widened her shield and ran down the side corridor as bullets ricocheted around her. She hated being shot more than she hated being underground.

  “Stop shooting at me, damn it! I could be a valuable test subject!”

  To her surprise, the shooting stopped, and she peeked around the corner. The four guards were standing there, weapons ready.

  “You do look a little like Shockwave,” the leader said.

  “Similar powers, too…” Said another.

  Cadence raised an eyebrow. “You boys aren’t hired for your brains, are you?”

  She raised her index fingers and zapped them into unconsciousness, then stooped and snatched up one of their weapons. A little voice in the back of her head recognized them as Beretta M12’s, but she couldn’t really have cared. It was lightweight, had an extra magazine and was something she could use to hold the guards off, and that was all that mattered.

  She smiled and waved at the video camera above her head, then zapped it and ran off in the opposite direction. Though the general layout of the sub-floor was simplistic, portions of it seemed to have been added after the original construction. This was one of those sections. She descended a ramp and entered another darkened section lit only by the dull red glow from the floor. As she ran, her eyes adjusted to the strange lighting and she realized she was pounding across a catwalk suspended between two sides of the cavern beneath the facility. The glow from the depths was magma flowing from one chamber to the next, a slow-running river of thermal energy that was likely used to power the base.

  A wave of vertigo hit her, and she grabbed the railing to keep from slipping off the catwalk into the nothingness below. She’d never been this high up and wasn’t sure she ever wanted to again.

  Once she caught her balance, she gripped the railing tight and closed her eyes, trying not to vomit.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered. “Its worse than a Bond movie down here. I swear, if I get out of this I’m never even going back into a basement again. I’ll move to Florida and live on the beach.”

  She waited until her stomach stopped screaming at her, then opened her eyes and continued across the chasm. On the other side, she climbed a short flight of steps and entered a computer center, the control room for the generators that powered the underground base. Cadence grinned at her luck and dropped into the chair behind the controls. The screen came to life and she could see energy output in thermal units and joules, but she had no real idea what any of it meant. The base was using massive amounts of power drawn from generators that were somehow powered by the magma, but that was as far as advanced placement physics could take her. This facility was way beyond anything possible through conventional science.

  She wheeled the chair away from the console and started rummaging through the drawers. There had to be an instruction manual around here, nobody ever made a huge piece of machinery without an equally huge manual to go with it. She just hoped it wasn’t written in Russian.

  “Cadence Phoenix,” a voice said. It was deep, with a hint of youth.

  Cadence whirled and her eyes widened, she didn’t know anyone could sneak up on her! Standing ten feet away was a young man with black hair, startling yellow eyes and a lithe physique. He was shirtless but wore leather pants and boots. His torso was covered in ragged scars, the kind left behind by whips and blades.

  “Um…hi,” Cadence said, standing. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “They call me Blade. Surrender and I’ll make your death painless. Specter no longer has any use for you,” he said.

  “Blade? I’m pretty sure your boss stole that from someone. Listen, um, I don’t really want to fight, especially near all that magma, so what do you say we play checkers, winner goes home first?” Cadence said, backing away.

  “Coward!” Blaze said. “You make me ashamed of us!”

  A blade of sparkling energy rose out of his hand and he sprang forward, slashing at Cadence’s head. She blocked with her shield and fired a burst from her borrowed Beretta, but Blade had already danced out of the way and was standing on the console. Before Cadence could adjust her aim he flipped over her and sliced the weapon in half, almost taking her hand with it. She hissed at the pain in her wrist and backed away again, hoping he hadn’t sliced through the artery. She healed fast, but Ethan had made it pretty clear that dead was dead.

  “Okay, no guns, got it. I don’t have a sword, so unless you’ve got one in those extremely tight pants of yours, I’m going to have to sit this one out.”

  Blade slashed again, then spun and attacked with a powerful backhand blow that crackled across her shield and made pain lance through her skull.

  “That’s the problem with practici
ng defense instead of offense,” he snarled between attacks. “I’m going to kill you slowly, one piece at a time.”

  Cadence could feel blood trickling down her lips from his attacks. He was powerful and fast, and he’d obviously had training she hadn’t.

  “You should see a counselor about those homicidal tendencies,” she said. “Didn’t your dad tell you that killing people is wrong?”

  “Specter was my father,” Blade said. “They taught me to fight.”

  He attacked again, and again, each one seeming to be more powerful than the last. Cadence found herself backing across the catwalk, fighting to keep her balance and her shield in place. Her head was killing her from keeping the shield up against the onslaught from Blade and she was getting tired.

  She punched him with her shield then dropped it and snapped a kick at his head that caused him to spit a tooth. When he riposted with his sword, she raised the shield to block, then dropped it again to punch him in the throat. He gagged and backed away, giving her a moment to recover. She didn’t know how she knew how to fight like this, but she was grateful the skills were there when she needed them.

  Blade spun and twirled his blade in a figure eight, and Cadence backed away, spinning into a cartwheel that put distance between her and the maniac with the energy sword. She was almost to the middle of the catwalk where the main brace ascended to the bedrock above

  “Listen, can’t we talk about this? Maybe go share a couple McD-LTs and have a heart-to-heart, just two powered people? Like, how do you make that nifty sword?” Cadence said.

  “I’m going to kill you and bathe in your blood!” Blade growled, swinging his sword overhead and bringing it down on her shield. Cadence let the shield fall and flipped backward to come down on one knee.