Skinner Luce

  She stares bewildered at the stone stairs leading down, the way dimly lit from below.

  “Go, go, go!”

  Coutreaux pushes her in. The three of them squeeze into the narrow space. Coutreaux heaves the door closed, plunging them into pitch dark.

  Noise of breathing, rustling, metal knocks.

  A light switches on, and Lucy blinks into the barrel of Coutreaux’s weapon, above which is the bright circle of a torch light.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” he asks. “Are you trying to get us killed? Do you want to die?”

  She takes a shaky breath. “I’m new,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just got boosted!” Lucy screams back at him. Her body a rigid frozen explosion. She could rip his head off, one-handed. She could smash his skull into the stone like a melon.

  They’re wide-eyed statues. She hears Coutreaux swallowing, notes the swift shove at Lefevre, silencing him. “O.K. That’s O.K. That’s fine. How about you get yourself under control, and we’ll figure out what to do.”

  “Mais qu’est ce qu’on fait là?” Lefevre interrupts. His voice is pitchy with anxiety. “C’est fou, çà! Ç’est pas notre problème!”

  “On continue,” Coutreaux shuts him up. “We go on with the mission,” he says, for Lucy’s benefit. He switches the channel on his earpiece. “Gabriel Sentry, come in. Gabriel Sentry.”

  There is a pause filled with the noise of their breathing and the steady oppressive crush of the compressed space. Then Coutreaux rapidly describes their situation. Listens. Repeats that yes, they have the sentry called Lucy. Yes, there should be more than one entrance. They will proceed with caution. If they locate the Nafikh they will wait for backup.

  “Wait. I want to speak to Gabe,” Lucy says.

  Coutreaux removes his headset, hands it to her. Adjusts the mic for her, his eyes brushing hers, full of wariness, mistrust.

  “Gabe, are you there?”

  A crackle, hissing. The connection’s bad. He says, “You O.K. with those two?”

  “I think so. Are you coming?”

  “We’ll find you soon. Hang in there.”

  “Sure,” Lucy says, her mouth suddenly filled with dust. “O.K.”

  Her eyes meet Coutreaux’s in the glow from the mounted torch. She feels acutely the closeness of the stone walls, no going forward or back. She removes the headset, hands it over.

  He says, “You all set?”

  “C’est terrible, ça,” Lefevre mutters, pale with anxiety. He gestures at Lucy. “Elle va toute fucker!”

  Lucy goes rigid, her muscles suddenly bunched, ready to explode. “You shut the hell up, you understand?”

  Lefevre is amazed. “Elle est folle! You are crazy!” he adds, enunciating each word with his forefinger rolling at his temple.

  Coutreaux takes one step, blocking her. “Settle down,” he tells Lucy, lowering the machine gun a few inches, just enough to make his point. She meets his eyes dead-on. Weirdly, she’s unafraid.

  Because in her mind’s eye: the single motion of plucking the weapon from his hands and crushing his skull with it. There’s truth there, stark as her own feet rooted to the ground. Though she’s not sure how, exactly. Just knows she can.

  “Ça suffit,” Coutreaux says over his shoulder. Then, to Lucy, “Protocol is we team up, and we stick to it. You’re the sentry, so you tell us what you want to do.”

  They regard one another in the shifting yellow light. She reads in his eyes a latent willingness to buck his precious protocol, if pushed a mite too far, even if it’s a losing proposition.

  She says, “The Nafikh is being held somewhere down below. We have to try and find Her.”

  “Then that’s what we do,” he nods. “Enweille,” he tells Lefevre.

  They set forth down the stone stairs, Lucy in the rear. She falls back, filled with distaste at their stench of sweat. The space is suffocatingly close, the ceiling so low she has to hunch her shoulders. One step, then another, and in the oppressive close passage, she becomes aware that her knee is throbbing and swollen, her whole body’s battered into a limping, trembling wreck. And yet, there’s a tense readiness in her muscles, the knowing that if need be, she could smash her way through another iron door. And another.

  It’s the boost. What she’s been through is about as bad as the worst Service—and she hasn’t slept in what, two, three days now? And yet she’s still going. Her hand unconsciously squeezes into a fist, recalling the door handle, the crrack! of snapped metal reverberating through her flesh. It was so easy.

  She wouldn’t mind trying that again.

  The light from below brightens, and they arrive in an equally narrow tunnel lit with buzzing fluorescent bulbs hung at intervals on the hewn stone wall. The tunnel curves to the right, the way not visible. It’s so quiet down here, one would never know the surface was ablaze with fire and violence. The ceiling drips moisture, increasing her acute sensation of the weight above them.

  Coutreaux nods at the tunnel ahead. “Can you hear anything?”

  Lucy shoulders by to get ahead. The heat coming off them sends prickles of discomfort across her back. She listens. Beyond the silence, there’s a faint drumming shudder, steady and rhythmic, what she felt upstairs. There’s something else, too. An odor, very acrid, singeing her tongue with bitter. She licks her lips.

  “I hear some kind of motor.”

  “Like a generator?”

  “Maybe,” she says. “There’s the smell of something burning, too.”

  There is a pause, the possibility sinking in that Nafikh-fire is making its way down the tunnel towards them.

  “We can’t wait here for backup,” Coutreaux says at last. “No point. Move on.”

  “He should stay,” Lucy interrupts, nodding at Lefevre. “Keep checking upstairs for the fire dying out. In case they don’t find the other entrance.”

  “That leaves you and me against a Nafikh,” Coutreaux shakes his head.

  “We aren’t against Her.”

  “Will She know the difference?”

  “She should, with me here.”

  “But you don’t know for sure.”

  “If She doesn’t, it won’t matter that we have one extra.”

  He rubs his jaw, and the gesture stabs her with recognition: Bedrosian, a thousand years ago, it feels like. “You make a good point. Lefevre, reste là.”

  Lefevre mutters something unhappy. He backs a few paces, takes up position at the foot of the stairs.

  They keep moving forward, and soon Lefevre falls out of sight. The walls run with moisture; Lucy’s throat tightens, she can’t shake the immense weight of earth and rock above, all of which could bury them in an instant. She loathes the idea of continuing deeper into that dank, claustrophobic darkness.

  She reminds herself that Theo wouldn’t stand for a poorly made tunnel.

  The thud of the generator gradually becomes audible to Coutreaux, as does the burning smell, which is so strong now it causes her to swallow repeatedly, her tongue thick with the acrid taste. Coutreaux twists in place, touching his nose, gesturing What? She mimes that she doesn’t know. But it’s not far now: she can feel the heat inside her flaring up, her whole body at the ready. The lights flicker on and off farther ahead, popping and buzzing as if they’re about to bust. Her tension causes her to sweat profusely into her eyes, down her sides.

  Coutreaux halts and points: up ahead on the left is a door, iron like the one above. Just beyond, Lucy is aghast to see a wall of earth. The tunnel dead-ends. There’s no way out but back.

  Coutreaux edges close, whispers, “If there’s another exit, it’s through there. My guess is there’s got to be. Elander anticipated the possibility of being found. He was ready upstairs, he’s got to be ready down here.”

  “So we should wait for Gabriel?” She reads a mounting frustration in his expression, so she says, “If you think we should go in, fine.”

  “That’s your call.”

>   He’s really nervous, she can see it in the twitch in his jaw, the tautness around those sharp blue eyes. His whole body is a tight, hard effort not to let on.

  “Let’s go in,” Lucy says. “I’ll deal with Dara-Lin. You take care of whatever else is going on.”

  He looks around, as if someone might pop out to lend advice. Then he sucks in his breath, exhales hard. “O.K. Let’s do it. If there’s another exit, take Her out that way.”

  They look at each other and nod.

  They move forward.

  Lucy reaches out to touch the door’s surface. It is warm. The thudding from within is loud and steady. Coutreaux edges around to the other side of the doorframe. Their eyes meet. He gives a slight nod. She seizes the door handle, wrenches it with one massive effort. The metal cracks, the noise ringing in her ears, and she swings the door wide. Instantly, Coutreaux steps into the doorway, gun cocked at his shoulder.

  “Jesus,” she hears him whisper.

  She peeks around him, then edges by.

  The smell in here is sickeningly sweet, like a thick perfume. Smoke clouds the air, stings her eyes so she can hardly see. The room is a mess of large metallic shapes, glass surfaces, white walls. It is huge, she can tell that much. She can hear trickling water, rustling noises, and now breaths, harsh and ragged. All beneath the steady hollow thumping.

  At last, she registers what Coutreaux saw at once: up ahead a figure, seated in a chair. He isn’t getting up, which seems odd. The breathing is coming from him.

  “Is that you, Lucy?”

  Her heart pounds hard, fear spiraling up inside. “Theo?”

  “I didn’t expect to see you again,” he says, each syllable exhaled with a crackling, hissing noise.

  She edges forward, Coutreaux at her side with the gun to his shoulder, turning this way and that. Her hands crush themselves into fists, ready to fight with all her strength. But Theo still doesn’t get up. Every step she takes, she gains courage for the next, because he doesn’t react. There’s a glass domed case behind him. Inside, she makes out a huge, pale, muscled body. It is writhing steadily, sinuously, like a worm. Her eyes travel, searching, until she finds Dara-Lin’s face.

  Her breath catches: the Nafikh’s expression is one of absolute terror, eyes popping wide, teeth bared like a dog.

  The head turns, slightly, the Nafikh drawn to Her sentry. The despair seeping from Her is mind-numbing, it sucks the strength right out of Lucy’s limbs. It’s unbearable, unthinkable. The Nafikh mouths words that Lucy doesn’t understand. But she feels their meaning in the deepest parts of her bones: Help.

  “Well, well. You’re different,” Theo utters through gritted teeth.

  She’s been seeing him for the past several moments, but only now the full horror begins to seep in. His face is a purpled, hideously swollen parody of itself, pouring with sweat and, weirdly, smoke. A thick tube leads into his chest, the entry wound wrapped in bandages and surgical tape with a tidy precision that seems ridiculous given how the patient is actually faring. He looks dead. Like a bloated, discolored, seeping corpse, but he’s not aware, she understands. He doesn’t know he’s on fire. The sweet stench is of his flesh burning from the inside out. The smoke slips languidly from beneath the bandages, from his ears, from his eyes, from under his nails, from his limp penis and his belly button. It seeps from his skin itself. More in some places than others, where pores have opened up into holes, their edges crimping, blackening.

  He is the source of the tremendous heat, pumping in waves off the bloated body. He grips the chair arms with such ferocity his veins pop from his skin, and his neck is corded with strain.

  “It hurts,” he hisses. “I knew it would.”

  He seems to want to continue but can’t. His dark eyes fix on her, the whites bloodshot, tears streaming down his purpled cheeks.

  “Theo,” Lucy says. It’s a miracle she can speak at all. “I don’t think it’s working.”

  His mouth twists into a snarling grin. “You’d better run, Lucy.”

  He seems to be powering himself up for some kind of attack. But all he manages is to lean forward an inch or so, his whole body shaking so hard his hands slip off the chair arms. They clutch their way back, seize the wood again.

  “When it’s done,” he hisses and spits, “I will be restored.”

  For a second, she believes him. She does. Maybe because he’s so convinced. Because how can he possibly have been wrong, after all these years.

  But he is.

  We were never Nafikh.

  The words pile up in her mouth unspoken. What’s the sense in telling him? He’s as good as dead. Her throat constricts—that she can feel that pathetic, daughterly sadness for him, even after all he’s done, it’s unbearable—

  “Hey,” Coutreaux barks. “Come here.”

  She drags her gaze away. He’s over on the right side of the room, gun angled down at someone slumped on the floor against a lab bench, splayed legs ending in shiny black dress shoes.

  It’s a person, not a serv. Dark Indian guy with black hair and a long, bony body slack in a lab coat, gray suit underneath. His shirtsleeve is rolled up high. Lucy notes the needle on the floor beside him, next to some empty vials. She nudges his chin off his chest. His dark eyes look dulled, confused. “Who are you?” she demands.

  His mouth moves, but all he emits is a strangled noise.

  She pries at his hands, which are clutched as if in prayer at his chest, protecting something. His fingers loosen without much resistance. She extracts a tiny vial. She holds it up, squinting. Detects the wavering, silvery mist.

  “You took some grabs?” she asks in amazement.

  “It’s my reward,” the man whispers.

  “For what? For helping him? What’s your name?”

  “Doctor Raminder Singh.” He gazes at her sadly. “He said I could live forever.”

  “He lied. People can’t absorb this,” she holds up the vial. “How do I get the Nafikh out of there?”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  His shoulders lift a little. “It wasn’t designed that way.”

  “So this was the plan?” Lucy says, pointing at Theo’s smoldering form. “No? So what’s gone wrong?”

  His gaze travels sideways, trying to see, but the lab bench blocks his view. “The alien didn’t respond to the sedatives. She is resisting. But I don’t think it would have worked,” he mumbles. “As soon as I realized, I told him, again and again. He wouldn’t listen.”

  “Realized what?”

  “The substance animating Her is not the same as the Source. It’s similar, but not the same. I believe the Source is a derivative element, like a little tendril,” he explains, his fingers opening and spreading, miming shoots.

  Coutreaux loses his patience. “Go on, get up,” he commands, prodding him with his boot. “Tell her what to do!”

  Raminder Singh slumps, falls over. He lies at their feet in his slick suit and shiny shoes. His mouth hangs open, bloodshot eyes fixed on the nothing zone.

  Lucy closes her hand around the vial, then tucks it into her jeans pocket. “Do you see an exit?”

  Coutreaux points across the room. They round the lab bench. She sees the source of the trickling sound: a small, limpid pool, beyond it a path leading to another iron door, this one hinged into the rock face. They’re in a cavern, which Theo remodeled into a lab. God knows how much time and money this whole setup consumed, never mind orchestrating kidnapping a Nafikh. No wonder Theo wouldn’t listen to Singh, when it turned out to be all for naught.

  She says, “Take him. I’ll get the Nafikh.”

  “How?”

  She turns back, bracing herself. The Nafikh has not broken Her terrible stare, and the feeling is of being bowled over by a tide, so potent Lucy’s balance shifts, she sways like a drunk, overwhelmed by emotion. Dara-Lin stares and stares, pulling Lucy into the pit of Her misery. Her splendid, muscular body squirms against the torture being inflicted upon Her. Sh
e is helpless, buckled down tight with leather straps. Tubing protrudes from Her chest, held in place by bandages and tape soaked with blood. The tubing loops out of the chamber, delivering its yield directly into the bloated, smoking body outside.

  “How?” Coutreaux repeats in a hiss. “It looks like She’ll just bleed to death.”

  “You just get him out of here,” Lucy snaps. “Get Gabriel.”

  He seems a little taken aback. Maybe relieved. Lucy returns to confront the bloated, stinking mess that is Theo. His face works away as soon as he glimpses her; an attempt at a smile.

  “You got a boost,” he rasps. “Aren’t you special.”

  “Fuck you, Theo. How do I get Her out?”

  He clamps his lips, grinning.

  “Do you know what’s going on, because of you? Do you know how many people got killed?”

  “You think I give a shit about people?”

  “Then what about Julian, or Ernesto? Jesus, how could you?”

  A scratching sound carves its way into Lucy’s hearing: the Nafikh’s nails, clawing at the glass. The great, devouring eyes filled with pain.

  “It’s just like your dream, isn’t it,” Theo wheedles, and his body shakes a little with his effort to chuckle. “This should make you happy, Lucy.”

  Her most cherished dream: to stand tall over a Nafikh, watch It wail in terror. But it’s nothing like she ever imagined. She’s not happy. She’s physically ill with grief, she can’t bear the Nafikh’s suffering. Maybe it’s the boost, all those crazy feelings, she thinks desperately. She can’t tell. All she knows is, she can’t bear it.

  “Did you do that to the arrivals?” Lucy blurts, pointing. “Is that what you did? Because that’s hurting Her, Theo. You said it didn’t hurt. You swore!”

  His eyes swivel in confusion and alarm. “Of course not to them,” he wheezes. “I’m not a monster.”

  Lucy drags her eyes away, plunges straight back into the Nafikh’s silent yowl. Her huge black eyes are fringed with white lashes, the incongruity mesmerizing. They’re like cosmic kids on a bungee jump, someone said once. They want to see what it feels like, to be scared to die.

  Except now, it could really happen. It’s the first time Lucy’s witnessed any sign of self-consciousness in a Nafikh. All she’s ever experienced with Them is detached, remote violence, need, curiosity. She’s never seen Them in any kind of danger. This Nafikh conveys a terror that goes far beyond anything Lucy’s ever felt. She’s always been scared of dying, of course she has. But she’s also always known it will come. Dara-Lin, She never once imagined it could truly happen. She never once conceived that sometimes, the bungee cord snaps.