Three doors further down the passageway, Rudolfo stopped. He waved the back of his left hand over a spot on the wall, she heard a clunk, and watched as Rudolfo pushed the door open.
This cell was identical to the last one she had been in. The exception was the floor here was clear of inmates—everyone had made it to a bed. She assumed the late hour accounted for that difference.
Rudolfo found the subject of the night’s Task in a bunk second from the top, straight ahead of them. Her Mentor scanned and confirmed he had the right person.
After removing his gloves, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the vial of Oil. He dipped his right index finger into the glass vessel, extracted it, and replaced the Oil in his pocket.
Next, he removed the Solution from another pocket. For the second time, Francesca was struck by the total blackness of it, absorbing all light that touched it. And the way it moved in the glass tube. Once again, to her, it appeared alive.
With his left hand, Rudolfo gripped the vial, disarmed the secure lid, and slid it open. He carefully inserted his finger into the dark liquid, covering his skin up to the first knuckle then withdrew it.
Sliding the lid closed, he turned to the inmate in the bed and reached out with his stained hand.
In a flash, there was movement and the shimmer of metal flying through the air. With surprising speed, Rudolfo leapt backward.
The blade missed him but struck the vial still in his left hand. With a tink, it flew end over end and landed on the concrete floor.
The inmate flew out of his bunk, spinning and jumping to the ground. He charged at Rudolfo with the force of a rhino. In the process, his heavy foot landed on the vial shattering it, the contents oozed out onto the floor.
The inmate pinned Rudolfo against the wall, a forearm pressed hard against his face. The inmate’s other hand held the blade. Rudolfo held 3916’s wrist, struggling to hold it at bay. The inmate gained ground, and Rudolfo’s strength was not up to the task.
In seconds, the blade would be buried in the Mentor’s stomach.
Francesca stood shocked, at a loss for what to do. She had to do something.
She took a step to leap onto the inmate’s back when she saw the puddle. The small black puddle, now a perfect circle of colorless liquid on the floor between her and them.
As she advanced, she bent and dragged her right index finger through the puddle. She stood, took another step, and pressed her fingertip to the back of the inmate’s neck, just below the skull.
A brief pause and he froze. His back arched violently against itself, the blade clattered to the floor.
With a great, wailing gasp the inmate collapsed to the floor dead. Open, blank eyes stared back at her.
Rudolfo’s now empty arms shook. With wide eyes he peered down at the dead man, then to Francesca, then to her blackened finger.
He locked eyes with her and muttered, “Foolish.” Then, he was on her. A rag flew from his pocket and he wiped her finger, furiously twisting and pulling on it.
“No oil,” he said. “Foolish. It will hit you full force.”
Whether it was the shock of what she knew was coming, or the Solution taking its toll, she didn’t know, but suddenly her legs felt weak. They could no longer hold her weight and buckled. She fell to her knees then fell back. Faint sounds of footsteps outside the cell came to her. Her finger turned to ice.
“He was going to kill you,” she whispered.
“Foolish. The guards would have—”
His voice faded; it sounded like she was under water. The coldness in her finger traveled to her core. Ice formed in her belly. At the same time, her skin heated up. The fever radiated inward from her flesh to her organs.
She could have been in a furnace. She had to get free from whatever was smothering her body with this heat.
As if answering her wish, the heat seemed to dissipate. As it did, she felt herself falling, melting into a void like a pillow graciously swallowing her.
Sounds of rain came to her, the heat left her. She opened her eyes. She stood at a window. She was small, low to the floor. Her tiny hands pressed against the cold glass in front of her.
The window faded as darkness crept inward from her peripheries.
The heat returned, engulfing her in invisible flames.
Pink light pierced her eyelids. She opened them. She was in a dimly lit, gray room on her back. A man stood over her. She didn’t know this man.
She tore at her clothes, pulling and tearing at whatever this man had covered her with.
Darkness again. The heat faded.
She felt cool. Opening her eyes, she was at the window again.
She stared out a window at a lawn drenched in rain. It poured from the heavens, puddles forming in the short grass. The sky had opened like a sieve, pounding every surface. It ran like sheets from the edge of the porch’s roof beyond the window. The farmhouse around her thrummed with the beating of the water. The tin roof sang out in a harsh cacophony like an endless tide of sound.
Thunder clapped and she jumped, startled.
“You okay, hon?” A tall woman to her left had appeared out of nowhere. She wore a flat periwinkle cotton dress printed with deep purple flowers. Her hair hung loose and wild from a low pony tail, but her face was kind and pleasant.
Francesca knew this woman.
“Yes, mama.”
Her mother bent low to look out the window with her.
“Really coming down out there, huh, Frannie?”
“Yes, mama.”
Her mother squinted and with a sly grin, she said, “Let’s do something crazy.”
She stood and pulled Frannie behind her, past the row of windows, through the dining room to the front door.
A second more and they were on the porch. The cool air stuck to Frannie’s skin. Her mother looked down at her.
“Ready?”
“For what, mama?”
Without another word, her mother bounded off the porch nearly jerking Frannie to the ground.
She caught her footing and ran by her mother’s side, splashing with bare feet through the puddles. Her nightgown soaked up water from the puddles while the rain ran down her hair and shoulders. The two fronts of water chilled her to the bone.
The two of them ran, Frannie taking three steps to every one of her mother’s. The exertion warmed her up—that and the feeling of elation out here with her mother.
Her mother’s zeal for life had always warmed her.
“It’s a tempest!” her mother cried, spreading her arms wide as they went. They ran across the wide front lawn, into a field of short wheat grass. The ground was softer here, so they slowed.
A moment later, her mother stopped. She threw back her head and spread her arms palms up. She let the rain beat her skin. The water clung to her, pressing her dress tight to her body, plastering it over every contour of her narrow frame.
A flash of lightning over the nearby forest and a thunderclap brought Frannie out of the glorious moment. She huddled into herself, pulling her arms in tight against her chest, suddenly very aware of the cold. She pulled at her mother’s dress.
“Mama, I’m scared,” she shouted.
This snapped her mother out of her reverie. She looked at her daughter. She smiled with soft eyes. Water dripped down her face into her eyes and mouth, but she didn’t wipe any of it away nor did she shield herself from the downpour. Strands of hair stuck, pasted to her cheeks.
She bent a knee to be eye level with Frannie. She gripped her daughter by the shoulders.
“Good,” she said. “Fear is good. You won’t know who you really are until something scares you out of your wits.”
The darkness came again. Once more, the void engulfed her, emptiness pressed on all sides.
Frannie found herself in the woods, walking along a narrow lane. Old growth forest grew on either side of her. The ground rose steeply to her left and fell just as steeply to her right.
She stood further from the ground
now. She was older. She walked behind a man. He wore a thick canvas coat and high boots. He looked back at Frannie and smiled.
“How’s your brother?” he said.
Frannie looked back. Her little brother Hank sat in a homemade wooden wagon. He slapped his thighs in delight and babbled in the incoherent language only a toddler understood. Occasionally, he looked into the trees to find the source of some strange noise. Frannie pulled him, careful to make the ride as smooth as possible.
“He’s fine.” She smiled back at her dad.
It was just the three of them now; her mother had died almost a year ago. The sick irony was that Hank’s birthday would also mark the anniversary of her death.
Frannie threw her braid of bright blonde hair behind her shoulder. They were on one of their frequent “walkabouts” as her father called them. They’d taken more of them in the months since her mother passed, but Frannie enjoyed them. It took all their minds off the hurt for a while.
The sounds of the forest and the smell of the earth made her feel small but also whole. There were larger things happening in the world, but she was a part of them. That made her feel good.
Her father stopped dead in the path ahead. Frannie slowed. He looked up into the forest on the high side of the path, up toward the ridge. He turned his head like he was listening for something. A second later, she heard it too—a rumbling high up on the hill.
It grew louder in the seconds since she first heard it.
Her dad ran back to her and Hank, lifted the baby from the wagon, grabbed Frannie by the wrist and pulled her down the path. They didn’t run down the hill but across the path of whatever came toward them.
She ran hard next to her dad. She gasped for breath in the cold air. She could barely keep up with him, but he pulled her along, his iron grip ensuring she wouldn’t fall behind.
Two seconds later, she could see it in the distance to their left. A brown mass amongst the trees slid down the hill, shaking the trees, pushing everything in front of it like a bulldozer.
The mudslide was fifty feet from them when her father threw his free arm around her waist and lifted her bodily off the ground. She bounced under his arm against his hips that dug into her.
He darted into the forest to their right, downhill. A thick maple tree stood there, its branches bent and twisted wide from the trunk. Nothing grew under it.
He threw her onto a limb, the lowest the tree had to offer, but he stretched just to reach it. Looking down from the branch she could see the first trickles of water and mud swirling around her father’s feet.
Looking up the hill on the other side of the path, the ground churned. Trees quivered.
The earth itself looked alive—marching toward them in a boiling brown wave.
He handed Hank to her and she hugged the baby boy for dear life.
“Climb, Frannie! Now! Get as high as you can.”
She couldn’t move, she sat clutching her little brother, frozen to the limb and shaking.
Her father held onto the limb and tried to swing his leg up and over the branch. On his second attempt the wall of mud and debris came. A tidal wave of brown muck knocked his legs out from under him.
He dangled there for a moment, staring up at his children. His fingers desperately clutched the limb. Frannie reached out with one hand and tried to get a grip on his wrist.
In another instant, his fingers slipped. The dark tide swept him away like he was just another twig.
Frannie watched in disbelief as her father bobbed weakly in the dark sheet of liquid mud.
His shoulders and chest were sucked under then, a second later, his head. His hand lingered above the muck briefly before it too was swallowed up.
The tree under her trembled but held strong through the passing waves of destruction. It kept her and her brother safe.
Hank cried. She patted his leg.
“It’s okay, bud. It’s okay.” She said the words over and over. In a way, she hoped the words would sink into her own mind and eventually she’d believe them too.
The world around her dissolved into nothingness. The void overcame her.
Moments passed and the heat returned. With it, came an ache, a soreness in every inch of her body.
She opened her eyes. A gray ceiling overhead, no sounds other than the rustling of pages nearby.
Francesca lifted her head. Her Mentor sat at a small table turning the pages of a large book. Her head fell back into the pillow; the energy required to lift it was too much right now.
“How long?” she whispered.
“Two days.” His voice scraped her eardrums. Her body was oversensitive to every stimulant.
A chair made a scraping on the floor, splitting her head. She heard soft footsteps nearby.
“Foolish thing you did.” She couldn’t open her eyes, but she felt his presence. “Brave, but foolish.” A pause. “Rest. We’ll talk more about this later.”
Francesca followed his order and allowed herself to sink, not into the void this time, but into sleep.
17
Liz Reynolds
Deputy Inspector Liz Reynolds of the New Aberdeen Metropolitan Police sweated through her shorts and shirt in the hot, humid summer heat. Her feet pounded the pavement in quick succession as she checked and rechecked her pace on her watch. Her skin reflected the city lights, bright and numerous enough to simulate dusk even now in the middle of the night. Her brown hair, pulled back in a tight ponytail, bounced against her neck.
She loved running at midnight. The streets were clearer; the air was cooler. She felt more alone, which she liked.
Liz pushed herself along her usual route—south from her apartment building, then east toward the docks and away from the false lights of the city’s commercial center.
As she traveled east, through a heavy residential district, it still looked like dusk around her. She would have to reach the warehouses to experience anything close to real darkness.
She ran especially hard tonight. Her muscles and lungs protesting from the very start, but she didn’t pay them any mind. Her thoughts were occupied with Ryan Grant, murdered in his home. She couldn’t shake the feeling that his death wasn’t some random break-in or someone he’d arrested just out for revenge.
As she thought about it, her mind drifted to the same nagging feeling she’d had for weeks—that they’d left something undone in the OFP case. Could Grant and the case be connected was a question she’d been asking herself. She prayed it wasn’t.
The investigation into One Front for the People, Boarding School Syndrome, and the bombings had yielded results—the killing of the men behind both, or so it appeared. But the thought that those men were merely part of something else, as Martin Aubrey suggested, that someone far more dangerous orchestrated the entire thing left her uneasy.
She knew Aubrey continued the investigation on his own after being unceremoniously dismissed from his volunteer duty with the police. She also knew Aaron Lewis helped him. To what extent remained a mystery.
She thought back to the day Aubrey burst through the door of the bombers’ apartment, when the terrorists had everyone pinned down and she was trying to drag a severely injured Ryan Grant from the chaos. Aubrey helped them turn the tide; without him they’d all have been killed.
As if on cue, her left shoulder sent a dull throb down her arm. She rotated her arm as she ran, working the joint. Its scar tissue and implanted hardware was a remnant of the battle.
She ran harder, hoping the exertion would work out some of the pain. Her breath came faster, with it the smell of salt from the nearing docks.
Up ahead she saw the first of the warehouses looming in the half-darkness just outside the halo of the city’s simulated dusk. Three more blocks and she would turn left for the marina and more warehouses.
How far had Aubrey come, she thought. What answers had he dug up and how much closer to the truth was he?
The recent discovery of the two children with BSS had rattled her. There wa
s a new team investigating the Jorgetson and Binns-Lourdes kids, the detectives handpicked by the Chief herself. Reynolds suspected they wouldn’t find anything new, they’d only confirm that the children were residual cases from the original attacks.
That was the Chief’s line of thinking and the team would echo it.
No one mentioned the person who called in the discovery of the kids. The individual was being treated as a confidential informant. Rumors were that it was Aubrey. Aaron Lewis refused to say, but she thought it had to be him. No one else was looking into the case anymore, much less discovering new victims.
For once in her career, she considered leaving the police force to join Aubrey. Ironically, she would have to quit the police to continue the police work she wanted to do.
Reynolds turned left around a corner and the smell of the docks assaulted her. It was the same as it always was—sea air mixed with diesel and the earthy aroma of sludge—and she loved it. Everything at the docks felt foreign against the backdrop of the city’s polished and gleaming façade.
It transported her away for those brief moments as she dashed through the yellow lights, past the long storage facilities and under massive H-frame cranes stretched out overhead. The Colossus of Rhodes stood guard over commerce.
The yellow flood lights cast dull circles on the concrete. Buildings to her left, water to her right, she considered this the home stretch of her runs. A mile and a half of this and then she’d take another left to make her way back home.
Artificial intelligence automated the loading and offloading, and the scant number of people who actually worked at the docks were mostly security. Solitude was the main reason she liked it there.
So, when she saw the person ahead, she knew something was wrong. The figure lay on the ground a quarter of a mile ahead, only partially visible—half in a circle of light and half in shadow.
Executioner's Lament Page 17