by S E Holmes
We hopped out of the car and gathered on a slim verge of patchy dirt and clumped grass in the vicinity of the boom gate. Every vehicle granted entry idled while the guard surveyed under its chassis with a mirror on a rod. Credentials were checked fastidiously.
“Remind me to pop an economy box of motion sickness pills the next time I take a vehicular journey of death with you, Vee.” Hud stretched and massaged the small of his back.
“At least my driver’s licence is valid. And just because I don’t drive like my grandmother on her electric shopping-scooter. If you were behind the wheel, Hud, we’d get here tomorrow.”
“Minus the bruising,” Hud protested. “My coccyx is throbbing.”
“Your coccyx is not a topic for polite conversation.”
“What is this place?” I asked.
“Peabody and Sherman are sketchy on details,” Hud said. “If we’re going to pole vault the fence or something, we might want to make it snappy. Looks like we’re drawing interest.” A couple of guards, their dogs keen for action, headed our way across manicured grass that wrapped the facility in a broad skirt of green.
“Bear?” Smithy said. “How do we do this?”
Oh, god! I held up my wrists so the Deltas were on display. “You can see these, right, Hud?”
“Um, I’m not Iffy.” The guard dogs strained on their leads and began to bark, hauling their handlers towards us.
“Don’t freak out. And don’t break contact.”
“Huh?” Hud regarded me suspiciously.
I grabbed his hand, Smithy on the other side, and touched my Deltas together. We vanished. The two dogs halted and whined, dropping onto their bellies. One of the guards looked at his mate.
“What’s wrong with them?”
His partner stood with a perplexed frown on his face, lifting his cap to scratch his scalp. “I could have sworn I saw three kids …” He pointed. “Over there by the fence.”
“I don’t see nothin’.”
“Let’s move,” I urged. “I don’t know how long I can keep this up.”
“Keep what up?” Hud peered at me, more baffled than ever.
We took off at a steady trot, slipping into the grounds via the open end of the boom gate and progressing up three black-slated steps and inside tinted sliding glass doors without incident.
The grey waiting area had all the warmth of a hospital foyer. They hadn’t even bothered with fake-flower arrangements. Rather, framed bits of machinery decorated the walls. Robotics Today and Inside Programming magazines were scattered over a round piece of glass that perched upon a low chunk of rock, veined with bright blue copper. An assortment of angular chairs closer to the judge’s modernist sculptures than furniture, grouped around the coffee table. The anodyne secretary, who’d been surreptitiously shaping her nails, hurriedly hid the file and gazed at the door. She adjusted her glasses carefully and frowned.
Hud winked, plastering on a smarmy grin. The girl ignored him.
“Hmm, hard to get. I like a challenge.”
He made a beeline for her, dragging from my grip and abruptly visible in the foyer. Her jaw fell and she planted her hand on an alarm, which burst out in shrill ringing.
“Security breach!”
“That’s not very nice.”
I huffed in frustration and lunged for his hand. “Don’t break contact!”
Hud vanished. The secretary blinked in shock, her eyes darting about the spot he’d just vacated. A guard lurched inside the foyer from outside.
“Was there …?” Mr Security trailed off, his squint competing with growing confusion. “Haley, turn the alarm off.”
“I swear, Ted, there was a boy. Right there!”
Next to her secretarial nook on my right, an opaque door with a glaring red warning of ‘Do not proceed beyond this point’ signposted where we needed to go. I oriented myself within the building and mapped potential escape routes. It was almost the same as pulling up three-dimensional blueprints in my head. Attuned to the empty space internal cavities, stairwells and electrical ducts created in the building’s skeleton, I learned what projected above ground was mimicked many times in the depths below us.
The secretary pointed at the bare spot. Vee and I hustled Hud towards the door, his protests rising.
“I’m a man, not a boy. A manly man. Hey, what kind of circus act is this, Vee? What are you guys doing?”
“Shut up and move, Hud. Don’t make me carry you,” Smithy threatened.
“Yeah, I saw them outside,” Ted was saying. “We’re checking the plates on their car.”
“Them?
“Three teens. Magicians, apparently,” the guard said ruefully. “Lock down the facility, Haley. Secure every section and I’ll coordinate a search. No one in or out.”
This was definitely not going the way it should. I peered overhead at all of the cameras recording our every misstep and worried about the Mini giving the warehouse away. It might have been smarter to try and explain to Hud before we entered the building, but we were committed now. And as if he’d have believed us without a demonstration. I barely believed any of it myself.
I projected into the locking system of the barricade with red lettering and telekinetically disengaged the system. If I wasn’t worried senseless over the looming impossibility of our task, I might have considered it very cool. The door slid ajar and we whispered through. Still, the action gained notice, the guard drawing his taser, plus a baton for good measure, and attempting to pursue his mysterious quarry. The door sprang back behind us, blocking his progress. I heard him swear and shout commands over his walkie-talkie.
“I think we’re kind of crap at this.”
“I disagree, Bear,” Smithy muttered. “We’re exceptionally crap.”
We hurried deeper inside, ever downwards, hauling an increasingly resistant Hud. My palms were hot and sweaty, my fingers numb from holding on tight. Nervousness and hunger warred unpleasantly in my hollow belly.
“Nearly there.” Pressing ourselves against walls when guards ran by, we passed interminable labs where I detected the odd activities of their occupants in electronically fortified areas. “Why can’t you have normal friends, Smithy?”
“I guess if they were normal, they wouldn’t pass the enlistment test.”
“Who are you calling abnormal?” Hud asked. “And I’ve had enough of the weird cloak-and-dagger. Tell me right now what’s going on. Why can’t those guards see us?”
He tried to pull his hand from my grip, but I clung like a barnacle. I wondered if the Crone’s plans unfolded with such a lack of dignity and smoothness. Maybe our ineptitude gave us the advantage of unpredictability. It was a lie I couldn’t maintain, even in my desperation.
“This is the one.” Psychically releasing the locked door, triggering yet another blast of alerts, we finally stumbled into a rarefied terrarium teeming with my least favourite creatures.
Eleven
“What the hell?” Andie yelped, ogling us from her stance bowed at a workbench in the centre of the lab.
She wore a white lab coat over funky street clothes, her hair twisted back in rows that ended in sparkly clips. Belted to her forehead a large, square magnifying lens bulged one eye, pinched between her raised fingers a fine insect wing. She removed the contraption from her head and carefully deposited the wing in a container.
I froze, as the door slid shut to trap me in a personal hell. Two centipedes the length of my calf made serpentine circuits of the long, rectangular room, unimpeded by technical-looking workstations – similar to a dentist’s chair – with more suspended magnifying glasses. Every table sported a technical-looking microscope. Coiled tubing hung from the middle of the ceiling attached to strange implements that resembled drills, and an array of huge computer screens were fixed to the wall in front of me. The bugs simply slithered over or around obstacles, using long feelers to guide their progress.
On large parallel benches in the middle, miniscule machinery parts and wiring were
ordered in labelled, stacked plastic trays. A melon-sized tarantula scuttled about this city-in-miniature like some B-grade shocker where a giant spider attacks the town. Two colourful dragonflies winged overhead, one monster swooping to hover centimetres from my face, fanning me with its movement. The lab was alive with buzzing, clicking and humming.
“What is this place?” I asked again, rooted to the spot.
“No.” Andie raised one finger as though admonishing a naughty child. “You get to explain how the three of you breached lock-down security before we give you jot!”
“Ditto.” Bickles appeared from a battered, squishy lounge and an assortment of mismatched chairs around a knee-high table on my right, at the end of the lab. His demeanour was less than friendly.
He pulled a thin electronic pen from his pocket and rapidly tapped it on a streamlined wrist-monitor. The insect population scurried or flew away from us to a shiny, metallic wall on my left, spreading and deactivating to form a macabre mural. Apart from the incessant bleat of the alarm, the noise ceased.
“Don’t ask me, man.” Hud lifted his palms as if confronting the nasty end of a shotgun. “I feel like I’ll wake up any second, cursing that last Red Bull.”
“Vee?” Andie threw him an accusatory glare.
“Do you think you could do something about that alarm? Please?”
“And the security battalion descending on this room?” I added, watching in my mind’s eye.
“Crap,” Bickles said. “Hide in this locker until we use our Jedi powers on the Storm Troopers.”
Andie chuckled. “Good one, Ty.”
“I don’t see the humour,” Hud blurted, while Bickles pushed him first into the cramped cupboard behind us by the door.
Smithy went next, followed by me, and then the door was unceremoniously crammed shut. The three of us squashed in a space no bigger than a commercial refrigerator, fighting coat hangers, jackets and each other for a comfortable position. A clicked padlock sealed us in. I probably could have disappeared us all again, but didn’t see how that would improve our position given Andie and Bickles’ likely reaction to something so unexpected. If we got over this hurdle, that was still to come.
“Cosy,” Smithy murmured, wrapping his arms about my waist with my back to his chest. All things considered, it wasn’t the worst thing to happen today.
“Maybe for you two lovebirds. This is not my idea of a threesome.”
“Be quiet, Hud.” We heard Andie snap.
A second later, authoritarian voices invaded the lab. Minutes ticked by at the pace of a Galapagos tortoise, the rise and fall of an argument filtering into our chamber, which seemed to shrink rapidly. Hud began to squirm. Inside grew hot and fusty with our breaths, and I became more and more aware of Smithy’s taut muscles pressing the length of my body. He seemed mindful or our intimate coupling too, softly clearing his throat. The padlock rattled and we all went rigid. Light abruptly flooded in, framing Bickles.
Hud tumbled out. “What a relief.”
“You want me to ask Bickles to shut the door for us?” Smithy said wistfully in my ear.
“Tempting. But we’ve got a job to do and our time is running down.”
He sighed and released me. “Yeah, time’s really got us in a bind. Among other things.”
Bickles gave me his hand and heaved me into the lab. Smithy exited and we all retired to the lounge, my anxiety hurtling back. Andie and Bickles took the divan opposite the coffee table divide, folding arms over their chests and mutely staring us down. Hud occupied a chair on their side, both physically and figuratively.
Smithy offered me a helpless shrug and took my hand. “Just show them.” I tapped my triangles together and we vanished.
“See!” Hud exploded. “See what I’ve been dealing with all morning?”
Startled, Andie and Bickles looked at each other. “I don’t get it,” she said.
“That’s some magic act. How are they doing it? It’s got to be an illusion.”
Bickles surged from his seat and waved his hands through the void where we’d been seated, futilely testing his hypothesis. Smithy and I had already strolled across the lab, materialising as far as possible from the wall of terror.
“There they are,” Andie squealed. “Do it again.” This time, I just popped in and out a couple of times. “I repeat. What the hell?”
We joined them at our original spots. “Give me your hands,” I said.
Bea maintained the barriers separating our minds should start to dissolve between Trinity members – as my connections with Smithy and recently, Daniel, implied – and this was to be our first test of her theory. The three leaned over to tentatively place the tips of their fingers in mine, and I played the events of the past days for them, as if I’d pressed that same button on a DVD movie. Their eyes went wide and remained so when I’d finished and pulled away. I felt mentally exhausted, not looking forward to the trial of escaping this place.
The pregnant pause that ensued could’ve grown an elephant. It was at least thirty seconds before they started talking at each other, firing one sentence on top of another.
“Occam’s razor?” Andie asked doubtfully.
“No way, Andie. How can the supernatural be the simplest explanation?” Bickles said.
Hud shook his head, his afro bobbing. “Man, I am really going to have to reconsider some of my beliefs, throw a prayer out there every now and then, just to cover all bases. Finesse is really hot.”
Andie smacked the back of his head. “How can you say that?
“Ouch. Well, she is.” He massaged his cranium.
“We need to scrape you up a proper girl. Preferably someone other than the Antichrist,” Bickles said.
“Or Cherie the Snake-charmer. She’s no lady either,” Andie said primly.
Hud grinned. “That’s kind of the point.”
“This definitely puts a novel spin on the metaphysics debate. So much for hardcore scientific principles based on the rational,” Andie said.
“Makes trekking the unexplored jungles of Borneo kind of tame.”
I hadn’t dared take this encounter to its conclusion, but a reasonable guess wouldn’t have included such easy acceptance. I glanced at Smithy, who slouched glumly beside me, looking like he’d expected this all along.
Bickles glanced from me to Smithy. “I think I speak for all when I say, you can count on us.” The other two agreed. “And I’m glad we don’t have to plan an intervention for your dependence on human growth hormones. We couldn’t believe you’d do steroids, Vee, but there wasn’t any other explanation for your superman abilities.”
Andie nodded vigorously. “Shame our second assumption on your imminent elopement wasn’t true, though. I dibbed best woman.”
“There’s a reason it’s called the institution of marriage,” Smithy muttered darkly. I rolled my eyes. For smart people, his friends were truly dumb to broach their friend’s least tolerated topic. “And thanks a bunch for sharing with the judge. He thinks I’ve knocked Bear up.” He peeked at me with a glint in his eye that clearly conveyed how much he’d enjoy trying. My cheeks turned a shade of red bright enough to provoke a bull.
“Ahem,” Hud said. “So, what’s our role? What can we do to help?”
Andie sat back, her features smug. “I’ve a few very good ideas on that.”
Bickles reached across for a fist bump. “If you’re not living on the edge …”
“You take up too much room,” she finished.
“Like I said.” Smithy hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “Mad bastards.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Hud said. “And you’re no one to judge.”
“Leave it with us. We know what to do,” Andie said.
“We do?” Hud said.
“Aren’t we wasting time with all this yakking, Vee?” Bickles said. “The witch will fly over on her broom and you’ll still be sitting around with your hand on your stick.”
“As long as you all unders
tand the potential outcome, which may be disadvantageous to your ongoing health.”
“Have you ever been to Borneo? Intestinal parasites the length of your ‘stick’,” Hud smirked. “They worm beneath your skin and have to be scraped out with a scalpel. Flesh-eating ulcers, pustules to rival the plague and some of the fevers put you in a coma for years.”
“Yes, but we established long ago you’re deranged,” Smith said. “You saw Winnie’s family tree. Hardly anyone survives the association. In fact, Fortescue’s the only outsider still living.”
“Fortescue’s a legend. I’ve always wanted to learn how to throw a spear.”
“This is a private research facility contracted to a host of secret organisations,” Andie said. “We’re the best in the field at micro-robotics. Most of our rivals couldn’t put Ikea together. Let alone the stuff we do here. It’s not for the faint-hearted.”
“Can anyone put Ikea together?” Hud asked.
Andie continued as if he hadn’t interrupted. “I draw your attention to the fact you’re in the outsider category with us, Vee. And we thrive on risk. All of us were considering jumping from a hot air balloon from the edge of space in squirrel suits next year. We were going to invite you. I guess we’ve found something better.”
“Like I said. Lunatics.”
“And what happens to people if that witch gets her Stone back?” She challenged Smithy with a look.
“Anything she wants,” I said.
“Objections done. Come with me, I’ll get you two out the back way. Hud, you stay and be useful.”
“For once,” Bickles said.
“I’ll try really hard. You’re not going to perform weird experiments on me, are you?”
“Only to improve you. The work will be extensive.”
“I want bionic eyes.”
“We’re best at eyes on stalks. Or you could have a pair of compound eyes where your ears are.”
“Hot! I’ll be even more of a babe magnet.”
“Or remain on par. Sub, that is.”
Their voices muted as Andie led us from the lab out along the hallway in the opposite direction from which we entered, up several flights of concrete stairs and into a slim back alley. She gestured up another set of stairs streaming overcast daylight into the urban canyon.