After hanging up, Gage lay staring at the ceiling for a good ten minutes, worrying about the careful balance they were all striving to maintain. It felt like only half a misstep would be the downfall of everyone, and too much hinged on what they found out tonight. He went over the plan in his head, still uncomfortable with not being inside the apartment himself. Then he went over it again.
He’d never fall asleep like this. He got up and dug out a pair of earbuds, connected them to his phone, and selected a hard-rock playlist. With Wolfmother filling his head, he rolled over, buried his face in his pillow, and tried to visualize someplace calm and neutral. The beach wouldn’t stick—too far away and foreign to his state of mind. He put himself at the helm of a Cessna, instead, empty sky all around, the earth a checkerboard of remoteness. That was better. Someday he’d like to take Marley up. She could use the freedom of the open sky, so far from the dingy darkness she lived in now.
His brain drifted, untethered, the way it did whenever sleep finally approached. But the images morphed, and he was no longer in the bright sky but in a dusty barn, with Marley wrapped in his arms.
Finally, his body relaxed, and he slipped the rest of the way into sleep.
Chapter Nine
Beware hubris, for it shall ever be our downfall.
—Ancient texts kept by the oracles for the gods
“W
hat’s your status, Viper?”
Marley rolled her eyes at Gage’s inquiry over her comm but didn’t mind taking a second to rest. She laid her forehead on her hands to ease the strain in her neck and stretched out her legs behind her. “About halfway there. Why am I Viper, again? Isn’t that your car?”
“Yeah, and you’re hot and sleek and rev my engines. Or something like that. No, wait. You’re like a snake, wriggling through the ductwork. That was it.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “Just call me Marley. Did Anson connect with J and V yet?”
“Negative. Cowbird has not made contact.”
Gage was having way too much fun with his nicknames and spy jargon. He’d emerged from his room wearing a deeper seriousness than she’d seen on him before, but when she asked about it, he’d turned on this false enthusiasm for his role as “mission leader.”
“Signal me when you reach the target,” he said.
“Affirmative,” she grumbled. He laughed, and she tried not to be pleased.
She lifted her head and used her elbows and knees to push herself a few more inches. She’d worn a snug, long-sleeved shirt with stretchy jeans, the clothes gliding smoothly inside the metal rectangle, flexible enough to give her maximum range of motion when she climbed in and out of the system. Her boots were clunky and noisy, so she’d kept her feet bare. Despite her nap and a high-protein dinner, this trip was more challenging than the first one. She blamed the wound, which flared each time she moved her right knee and jabbed each time she twisted her torso. She’d remembered to take the antibiotic Anson had gotten for her but had skipped the pain meds. She wanted her head clear. But it turned out pain was just as bad as medication for damaging her focus. Who knew?
Anson’s voice came over her comm. “Marley, where are you?”
She frowned and halted again. “I’m at junction eighteen,” she said, sarcasm dripping. “I don’t know where the hell I am. Where are you? You’re not supposed to be wearing a comm.” He’d put on a lapel pin with his fraternity logo hiding a tiny camera, but an earbud would have been too noticeable.
“I’m not going in yet. I had to check something else out. Seriously, where are you?”
She gave him the markings on a nearby cross vent.
“Good. Turn left, go about twenty yards, and come down through the ceiling vent. It’s an empty closet.” He didn’t wait for her response. “Gage, come meet us. Room VP4325.”
“What’s going on?” Gage asked. “We don’t have time for deviation.”
“We’re ahead of schedule, and Marley will still get there on time. Just come now. There’s something you two have to see.”
Marley had never heard such urgency in his voice. She wriggled around to follow his instructions, and a couple of minutes later dropped down into the “closet.” It was large and empty but lined with industrial shelving. Definitely not a bedroom closet.
Male voices at low volume came through the door. She recognized Gage and Anson and opened the door to join them.
They weren’t alone. She stared, slack-jawed, at the jumble of bodies sprawled all over the floor. “What the fuck?”
The men turned. Anson’s implacability had tightened into grimness, but Gage’s face was contorted with rage.
“Who are these guys?” Their ages ranged from probably teenager to somewhere around midlife crisis. Some wore nice clothes in a disreputable state, while others were well groomed in threadbare rags. Marley counted at least a dozen men and boys either unconscious or drugged out. She pressed the back of her hand to her nose. The room was cool, but body odor—and worse—tainted the air. God, what were they using for facilities?
“You tell me,” Gage ground out.
Marley blinked at him over her hand. “I don’t recognize any of them.”
“Don’t just look at their faces.” He jabbed a finger. “Look.”
He had to mean look for flux, but it usually teased her awareness as soon as she got close enough. This many guys should have blazed in her head. “I don’t—” But then she focused, actually looking for it, and covered her mouth in horror. There was flux in there, all right, but not in the same way she’d seen it in others. It was heavy, sluggish, dim. It reminded her of the sludge she’d had to periodically get pumped from the oil tank at the inn.
“This is… I can’t believe it. They’re addicts. But—” She looked harder, trying to identify any sign of Numina.
The guy closest to her rolled onto his back and blinked up at them. “Cressida?” His voice was high-pitched, begging. “Is it time? We’re ready. We’re hungry.”
His increased alertness seemed to animate the rest of him, and Marley could detect a very, very faint hum that reminded her of Numina.
Gage strode across the strip of open space in the front of the room and pounded a fist against a blank whiteboard. “What is this place?”
“It looks like a meeting room,” Marley said, though she knew he didn’t mean that. “These must be…clients. But they’re not like the others.”
Gage threw her a scathing look. “You think?”
“No, I mean, they’re not full Numina.” She swept a hand out to encompass all of the bodies. “They must have minimal Numina ancestry. I can sense it, barely, in a couple of them.” Only the guys closest to her side of the room. She didn’t want to wade into that mass. They writhed and rolled occasionally and were entirely too horror-movie setup for her.
“Nullify them.” Gage was back at her side in two steps, his hands gripping her shoulders. “You’re the only one who can help them.”
“But—”
The fury fell away, smoothing out the harsh lines it had carved into his face. “I know. You don’t know what it will do. They’ve obviously been on it longer than anyone else you’ve nullified.”
“Yeah, exactly.” But it was more than that. She didn’t want that sludge inside her. The flux she’d taken before had been fresh and not all that different from the energy she used to draw through crystals when she was a goddess. But this… Her entire being cringed away.
Anson edged up next to her. “It’s no different from what yours was like when you took it from Sam.”
She pressed her lips together so hard it hurt. He was probably right, but she hadn’t been able to sense it then. Besides, that power had been hers to begin with, so even poisonous, it wasn’t the same as…this.
She crouched next to the guy who’d spoken to them and looked him over more closely. His skin had a yellowish cast, and when his eyes rolled back in his head, the whites did, too. Before she could hesitate herself into refusal, she tapped her hand against his. He
cried out, shuddered, and went limp.
“Is he—”
“He’s just unconscious.” Marley stepped over him and quickly made her way around the room, touching each man as lightly as possible. Some of them smelled like the sewer she’d dragged Anson out of, and every one of them had the same reaction as the first guy. Some almost screamed before passing out. One guy went into convulsions, but he’d had so little flux left he had to be deep in withdrawal, anyway.
Her focus was on getting through the room fast, not on the flux itself. Once it was done, she returned to where Gage and Anson waited. She couldn’t stay in here much longer or she’d lose her lunch.
Gage wrapped his hand around her elbow and studied her face. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Fine.” At least, she seemed to be. Instead of the throbs she’d felt with Josh and Gashface, these had been mere blips. She braced herself for room spinning or green fog but nothing happened.
She turned to Anson. “How did you know about this?”
“Right before you guys woke up, Brad said something about the meeting room and the throwaways. He sounded tense. The mic cut out before they said anything more, so I dug into the reservation information for the public rooms residents can book. And I found this.” He waved a hand.
Gage tugged Marley toward the door to the hall, not seeming to realize he was doing it. As if he wanted to keep her away from the addicts. “What the hell is this, though?”
Marley laid a hand on her churning stomach. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was another tier of customers. Obviously not ones who rate a full-blown ceremony.”
But they were still people. People being treated like trash. How could anyone treat them like this?
Don’t be naive. It’s done all the time.
“What are we going to do?” She stared at the men on the floor. They seemed more relaxed now, sleeping rather than unconscious. A snore rose from a far corner.
Anson looked at his watch. “Do you want to abort the plan? We’ve got about ten minutes before the meeting starts.”
She was tempted but shook her head. “Now more than ever we need to stop her.” She looked at Gage, her eyes dry and burning. “Do you think this is what they meant by doing their thing with Cressida? They’ll come up here after the ceremony and dose them or something?”
“I imagine it’s something like that.” His rage was gone, and it had left behind a quiet coldness. “I don’t know what her game is, but it’s obvious that Chris and the gang are more lacking in humanity than I could have ever guessed.”
“I’ll call the police,” Anson said. “Anonymously from a burner phone. And I’ll send a picture so they don’t dismiss it. We don’t want to be tied to this,” he said when Gage opened his mouth, clearly about to protest. “We’d get bogged down in the investigation, probably as suspects. It would alert Cressida and the others, and they’d leave town and disappear. The blowback would fling crap all over the Numina leadership, no matter how strong the barriers they’ve built.”
“What will happen to them?” Marley fixed on one kid, the youngest-looking of the bunch. He smiled in his sleep and hugged a lower leg that happened to be in front of him like a teddy bear. He reminded her of Bobby, a young guy who used to help her at the inn. So much innocence hiding so much hardship.
“They’ll be taken to the hospital, probably treated for dehydration and malnourishment. The cops will want to identify them all and make sure there aren’t any warrants or missing persons reports on them. Then they’ll be released to family or, if they’re okay, just released.”
“How do you know all this?” Gage asked. His fingers flexed on Marley’s arm before he released her. She hadn’t realized he was still touching her until the comfort of it disappeared.
Anson shrugged. “Are we cool? We gotta hurry if that’s what we’re going to do.”
“Yes.” Marley yanked open the door to the closet, suddenly desperate to get to fresher air. “Back to the plan.”
Gage took a step to follow her, grimaced with frustration, and turned to leave out the main door. Marley used the shelving to climb back up into the vent. The effort it took to slither faster but still silently had her panting by the time she reached Chris’s apartment.
“I’m in place,” she whispered into her comm.
“Me, too,” Gage reported in. “Anson’s in the lobby with his camera pin on and the comm off. He texted me that he made the call.”
Leaving those guys in the meeting room left an acrid taste in Marley’s throat that had nothing to do with unwashed bodies. She accepted that she’d done what she could for them, and no way did she want to be caught up in a police investigation. Her activities over the past six months would be very suspicious in light of what was in that room. No job, no home—it would focus the investigation in the wrong direction.
Not that she knew what the right direction was. Part of her couldn’t have cared less about blowback on Numina. But she did care if that blowback hurt Gage.
She had to focus on the immediate task in front of her. The apartment was silent. She really hoped that meant nothing had started yet and not that they’d missed the whole damned thing.
“Anson’s talking to a couple of guys,” Gage told her. “Not sure if they’re his contacts. I can’t see their faces; they’re too close. But if it’s them, they’ll be on their way up soon.”
“Roger that.” Marley maneuvered around two corners to access the vent she wanted. After everything, the damned plan had better work.
When she got to the end of the last section, she let out a grateful sigh. The space was just big enough for her to get her body through. Now she had to see if she still had the control and precision to do this silently.
She slithered the rest of the way and peered out the vent into a dark room. The crack under and around the door gave her enough light to make out the washer and dryer below her and a shelving unit to her left.
She worked her fingers under the edge of the bracket holding the grate in place, pulling and twisting. She winced at the grooves that had been dug into her skin by the thin metal. She grit her teeth and worked the bracket until it bent wide enough to slip it off the screw. She stuck her sore fingers in her mouth to soothe them while she worked the other side.
There was a noise in the apartment. She froze. The clunk had been faint enough to be unidentifiable but not a random settling noise. Someone was out there.
Seconds ticked by in silence. Marley worked the metal cover out of the frame and slithered forward again until she leaned out the hole. Dammit. The drop was too far to set the vent cover on the washer and dryer without making a racket.
Cursing, she wiggled backward as far as she could, carefully turned the cover around, and pulled it inside a couple of inches, not letting it touch the metal duct. Wiggle back, pull the cover, reposition her grip. Too long later, she laid it down and belly-crawled on top of it. Panting and cursing the metal edges digging into her elbows and knees, she pushed forward until she hung halfway out the opening.
Another noise outside the laundry room—this time a whistle approaching the kitchen. Marley froze with her hands curled over the top of the washing machine. The edge of the vent opening cut into her lower abdomen, and she grunted with the tearing burn in her stitched-up side. The whistler entered the kitchen outside the room. A cupboard banged. The refrigerator door opened. After a few clatters, the whistling stopped. Then, mercifully, music blared. The Silent Comedy would cover any sound she made.
She pressed up on her toes and pulled her lower body the rest of the way out of the vent, lifting her legs up into a handstand. Her arms shook. She tightened her core and curved her legs over until gravity kicked in. Then she finished the flip and landed in a crouch on the cold linoleum tile.
Her breath rasped in and out. The muscles in her shoulders, thighs, and abs all burned. This had been the biggest test of her muscular control so far. Much harder to move her body like that than to hold still or line up a shot, but
she was in.
“What’s that noise?” Gage asked over her comm.
She chose to believe he wasn’t talking about her ragged breathing. “Music,” she murmured. “I’m in the laundry room.”
“Good. Anson’s on his way up.”
She stood and turned to face the machines, hoping Gage was right about the two-way mirror into the living room. Yes. It was still there.
Mini-blinds bled a tiny amount of light into the laundry room. Marley slowly hitched herself up onto the dryer, flinching when the metal flexed and gonged under her weight. But the music was still loud enough to mask it.
“Tony!” the guy in the kitchen yelled. “Get the door!” He banged something on the counter and turned the music down. “They’re late,” he added with a note of disgust before grumbling low enough that Marley only caught a few words. “Common decency…food…cold…a schedule is a schedule!”
She took a long breath and let herself settle. They’d made it.
She got onto her knees to feel for a way to open the blinds. Her fingers brushed slick metal and sharp edges, then found a rod on the right side of the window. She rotated the blinds just in time to see a guy she assumed was Tony lead two younger men into the living room. Anson trailed behind.
Brad came into the room from Marley’s left, carrying a six-pack of green-bottled beer. He handed them out and said something to the new arrivals that Marley couldn’t make out. Sound did penetrate somewhere, though. She squinted and made out a type of speaker below the window. She examined it with her hand and realized it was just an opening through the wall, with a tiny slide handle. She pushed it open until the voices came through clearly. Not that they talked about anything interesting. A car chase in some movie they’d just seen was her best guess.
New energy surged into her awareness. Three fluxheads had just entered the apartment, adding to the two already there. Marley’s hands closed into fists as she watched them move about the living room, exchanging wrist clasps and back slaps. It would be so easy to run in there and sweep the room, take that energy from all of them. Craving gnawed at her. She’d touch them, one at a time, and the power they didn’t deserve to have would go inert and sink into her.
Sunroper (Goddesses Rising) Page 15