by Anna Lewis
“They do,” Maksim replied. The doors were now halfway open. With a single, smooth motion, the mercenary shrugged the rifle off of his shoulder. Then, with one hand bracing the open door of the elevator, one of his broad boots bracing the other, he carefully wedged his rifle between the doors so that they were held apart. It left a space barely wide enough for him to squeeze through. “Not just actual mirrors. Anything with a strongly reflective surface. Windows, puddles, the sides of glass-paneled buildings—it does not matter. The mirror turns black, and something steps through, coated in a film of black muck that sticks to everything and drips off of its body.” Maksim carefully squeezed between the braced doors, careful not to dislodge his rifle. Then, to Reilly's surprise, he leaned out into the elevator shaft, so far out she was sure he was going to fall. A moment later, she heard a great, vibrating pulse—one that she recognized as the rippling of a heavy taut cable. There were a series of loud clicks, and a moment later, Maksim stepped off from the edge of the elevator doorway and into the darkness. Reilly's heart leaped up into her throat, but the big mercenary didn't fall. Instead, he hung suspended in the air, his expression utterly calm and composed. He held out a broad hand to her and beckoned. “Come on. We need to go.”
Reilly hesitated. But before she could hover there for long, the same throaty trumpeting sound echoed through the vast building. This time, the cry was much closer. This time, she could hear that the unearthly sound had more in common with the anguished shrieks of a person than the dumb cries of a beast. For just a second, she had the strange notion that she should go and see what the poor author of that terrible scream might need, but as the bellow repeated itself, she became aware that whoever or whatever it was—they were coming closer. They were coming down the stairs toward her. And there was a distinct note of threat in that horrible bellow. Maksim beckoned urgently. Reilly gritted her teeth and slipped between the elevator doors, holding out her hands toward the indistinct shape of the suspended mercenary. For a single, terrifying moment, she thought she would fall forward into the darkness, and her heart began to thunder in her ears, almost drowning out the tortured roars that came ever closer. Then Maksim's strong arms were around her, firm and immovable as if they'd been carved from stone. One arm circled her waist, and the other let go, but he seemed to have no trouble holding her fast with one arm. The mercenary leaned slightly back toward the edge of the floor, and with a quick movement, he plucked the rifle from its position, letting the doors slide smoothly shut to enclose them completely in darkness.
For a moment, all that Reilly could hear was Maksim’s easy, unhurried breathing. Then, there came the snap of a thrown switch, and a tiny motor began to whine from just above her head. Though she could see nothing, she could feel them rising, more and more swiftly. Maksim clicked on a light, and Reilly followed its beam to see that they were both being dragged upward by a little boxy contraption. The rope ascender consumed the cable above it, only to spit it out below, and despite the combined weight of two people, it seemed to have no trouble in dragging them up through the shaft. Reilly blew out a breath, trying and failing not to think about the vast quantity of darkness beneath her. “Mack,” she whispered. “You rode this down?”
The unsteady light of Maksim's light showed only the white flash of his teeth as he said, “No. I took the elevator.” Reilly frowned, even though she knew he could not see her expression. He could not have taken the elevator. The power had been out. Mack continued, chuckling. “I cut one of the cables and secured one of the cut ends at the top of the mechanism. Then I released all but one of the brakes and rode the car down to your floor. The car went on without me.”
Reilly’s frown deepened. “Even if you somehow controlled the descent of the elevator car, stopping yourself would have put a lot of force on your body. And unless I’ve completely lost my mind from shock, I’m pretty sure you kicked a steel door out of its frame—hard enough to warp it and throw it across the room.” She narrowed her eyes in the dark. “How are you doing all of this?”
Maksim laughed again. “The whole world is coming apart, and you’re suspicious of me?”
Reilly winced, but she didn’t drop the question. “I haven’t seen the world outside just yet. Just my Door, that monster you killed, and you. You’re the only one of those things that I can begin to wrap my brain around right now.” She laughed bitterly. “I need at least some answers so that I don't go insane.”
Maksim was quiet for a long time. “So you don’t know how this happened? You didn’t…mean for this to happen?”
Reilly was incredulous. “You think we did this intentionally? What do you think I was working on?”
Maksim didn’t answer. Something solid began to loom in the darkness above them, and the mercenary slung his rifle over his shoulder again and reached up for the ascender machine. Just before it would have pulled them right into the cable mechanism that usually ran the elevator, Mack switched off the little device. He spoke again, his tone cool and professional. “Hold on to me, and don’t let go. I need both of my arms.”
Reilly should have been terrified of the prospect of Maksim letting go of her, leaving her suspended by nothing but her own strength over the thirty-story elevator shaft. But at that moment, she was so outraged by the idea of Maksim thinking any of the day's crisis to be intentional that she forgot to be afraid. She wrapped her legs around his waist; her arms wrapped tightly around his neck. Even irate as she was, she couldn't help but notice his heady, masculine scent, which lay somewhere between the smell of sweat and the acrid edge of some machine oil.
For his part, Maksim seemed fairly unconcerned by the presence of a woman wrapped so intimately around him. He moved smoothly and carefully, with an attitude of complete confidence and control, as if he regularly clambered out of elevator shafts like this. He repeated the same process that he'd used to open the doors below, though this time, he was doing so while suspended in the darkness by his tactical harness. The door opened slowly, the heavy, unpowered mechanism resisting him all the while. No doubt such resistance was a safety feature, to keep people with more mischievous curiosity than brains from falling to their deaths. But Maksim was unconcerned by the door's unyielding inertia. Soon, he was holding the elevator doors apart with both arms. He forced one foot onto the ledge, bracing the door open, then hooked the other door with his other leg so that the lower half of his body stood on the concrete edge even while his upper body hung out over the darkness. He gestured for Reilly to climb down with a curt nod.
Reilly grimaced, but she shimmied down his body, gingerly reaching out with one leg until she could touch the solid ground. Then, with a little shout, she flung herself off him and into the hallway beyond. If her leap had disturbed Maksim's hold on the doors, he didn't show it. Instead, the mercenary changed his grip on the door, taking most of his weight into his arms and off the harness. Then, with a swift, deft motion, he disconnected his tactical harness from the ascender mechanism and tipped himself into the hall. Before he let the elevator doors slammed shut, he reached back into the darkness and disconnected the little, geared mechanism from the severed cable, and hung it from his harness by a small strap.
Reilly breathed out a sigh of relief that they were both standing on the solid floor. She looked out along the dark corridor. Black, crumpled forms lay at the end of the hall, just below a feebly flickering emergency light. Shadows played across the twisted shapes so that it was impossible for Reilly to see what they really were. Maksim grunted and stepped past her, his rifle in his hands again. “Some of the creatures that came from the mirrors. I killed them on my way down, but I should check them again before we pass, just in case.” Without waiting for a response, the mercenary glided smoothly down the hall in a curious, bent-legged posture, keeping his upper body utterly still and level. The rifle and its attached light aimed at the first creature, and then the second. Maksim straightened up and looked back at Reilly. “Okay, we're—”
Something exploded out of the wal
l beside Maksim in a shower of debris and plaster dust. It hit him so hard that he was slammed bodily into the opposite wall. He might have gone through the wall and out the other side, if the creature, its shape shrouded in the haze of white dust, hadn’t seized him in a great, clawed hand. It snatched him back with incredible speed and hurled him into the room from which it had come, tossing the large man with the same ease that Reilly might have thrown a softball. The scientist didn’t have time to react. Before she could even process what she had just seen, the massive, broad-shouldered shape turned toward her and roared.
The sound was incredible; it was so loud that she could feel it pressing hard against her eardrums, against her skin, against her eyes. For a moment, she thought she might be crushed by the sound alone. The alien beast took a step forward, and she got a clear look at it. It was built like a silverback gorilla, with a musculature to match, though its body and waist were too narrow to belong to any ordinary specimen of the species. It might have been covered in fur, but it was hard to determine through the stinking black muck that coated it from head to toe. The only details she could discern in the midnight daubed face were the glitter of its furious eyes and the great stained fangs that jutted from its gaping jaws. It raised its hands, which had only two fingers and a thumb, rather than a primate's five. Where it should have had thick fingernails, it instead had long, wickedly curved claws, more like the talons of a predatory bird than those of any mammal. It lumbered a step closer to Reilly. She froze, unsure of what to do. Was Maksim dead? If he was, how could she hope to escape such a monster? She was no fighter, and besides, she had no weapon! She groaned with despair as she realized that she didn't even have time to try to come up with an answer to the question. Any moment now, it would—
The monster lunged forward, exploding toward Reilly with all the inevitable force of a locomotive. With nowhere to run, no Maksim to help her, and no hope of fighting the thing, Reilly acted completely on instinct, sure that she was about to die. She held out her hand as if the monster might see the gesture and stop, and a terrible scream of her own ripped its way out of her throat. Her scream was equal parts fury and fear, despair and defiance. She was certain that these were her last moments, and she would be damned if she died whimpering in a corner.
Then something completely unexpected happened. Instead of smashing Reilly into a pulp, the monster stopped, as abruptly as if it had run headlong into a concrete wall. There was sound like someone striking a massive iron gong, and the walls, the floor and the ceiling all around the monster were pulverized by a tremendous force, warped and crushed in the shape of an enormous disk too wide to fit in the hallway. Bones crunched beneath the horrible ogre's matted fur, and it let out a scream of rage and pain as its weight and momentum snapped its limbs and crushed its spine. This time, however, the sound of its anger did not reach Reilly directly. Instead, she heard it muffled as if she and the monster were separated by a very thick pane of plate glass. For a moment, she just stared as the beast writhed on the shattered tile before her. Her body was alive with a strange, buzzing sensation, as if she'd bitten down on a live wire. Then, as suddenly as the sensation of terrible, vibrating power had come, it disappeared.
Something dripped onto the floor at Reilly’s feet. She looked down, her ears ringing with deafening silence, and was confused to see that something bright red had spattered the floor at her feet. Her face felt warm, and she tasted copper. The same brutal migraine that had struck her during the opening of the Door seared its way into her mind, like a super-heated knife lancing straight through her brain to cleave her head in two. The world seemed to tip sharply sideways, and she lost all grip on what was happening besides the all-consuming pain.
***
Reilly woke to fathomless dark eyes staring down at her. They were strange and confusing. It took her a moment to identify them as Maksim's eyes, and a few moments longer for her to realize that the reason they unsettled her was that they were dilating and focusing in a way utterly unlike the behavior of normal eyes. Instead of expanding and contracting, the blue-black rings that were the mercenary's irises moved and rotated and focused more like the lenses of incredibly fine and intricate cameras. In that moment, as her brain began to pull itself back into consciousness, she knew with utter certainty that she understood the answer to her question. No ordinary man could ride a plummeting elevator car and survive. No normal human mercenary could kick a steel reinforced door out of the wall. It all made sense, the smoothness of his movements, the firmness of his grip, the precision of his every action. She took in a deep breath and spoke the answer, softly, into his concerned face. “Maksim Sokolov is a cyborg.”
The eyes, and the face surrounding them, pulled away. Reilly blinked several times and sat up. Her head was pounding in time to the beating of her heart, and she ached all over as if she had just run a half-marathon. Maksim knelt beside her, concern written all over his face. Then something twisted his broad, handsome features, and he turned away and stood. As he straightened up to his full height, Reilly could see that he had not survived the ogre’s onslaught unscathed. There were numerous cuts over his face and neck, and his shirt and trousers were half-shredded all along his right side. The skin along that side of his neck was similarly tattered, and something too dark and thick to be blood was leaking from the lacerated skin and oozing down toward what remained of his collar. Reilly stared up in wonder at his battered right side. Where his skin had been torn, she saw dull gray metal, fashioned into the shape of a man’s arm and leg, and composed of hundreds of tiny bundled cables and connections. These lines bunched and released as he moved. Just like muscles, Reilly realized. Maksim’s body, at least on the right side, had been augmented, or perhaps wholly replaced, by bionic prostheses more intricate than any she had ever seen before.
Maksim smiled bitterly, his cheeks red with shame, and Reilly could see the bionic muscles in his neck bunching as he tightened his jaw with tension. Neither of them spoke. Reilly wiped a thin runnel of blood from her nose and stood, painfully. She faced Maksim, who seemed not to want to meet her eyes. After a long, awkward silence, she said, “Are you alright?”
The mercenary grimaced, showing his teeth in an expression that was most certainly not a smile. “I’m fine. I can patch the skin myself given the right equipment. Everything seems to be moving well enough, and any damage done was minor.” His not-smile grew a little wider. “When they put me back together the first time, they decided to make me a lot harder to kill.” Then, as if he noticed the ring of destruction wreaked on the hallway for the first time, he frowned down at Reilly, his expression troubled. “Are you alright?” He looked toward the pulverized, still twitching shape of the ogre, then swiveled his gaze back to Reilly. “What the hell did you do to it?”
Reilly was suddenly struck by a wave of vertigo, and she swayed on her feet. Instantly, Maksim was beside her, getting his arm—the metal one—beneath her shoulder and propping her up. She shook her head, blinking until the vertigo passed. “I don't know. I don't know what's happening to me. This happened when the Door opened too.”
Maksim swept the battered hallway with his fierce dark eyes. “We need to get you to a doctor. Who knows what kind of damage…this…did to your brain.” He helped her shuffle toward the end of the hall where the monster lay destroyed. At one point, he made an abortive move to pick up his rifle from amidst the rubble, but he spat in disgust as he realized that it had been bent into a forty-five-degree angle during the ogre's ambush, and it was utterly useless now. He swore.
Reilly's thoughts began to clear again as they passed the ruined beast. Maksim led them to the maintenance roof access door around the corner and pushed it open. The latch had been taped over so that it could not auto-lock. Only a short flight of utilitarian stairs separated them from the roof. They were only wide enough for one person to use them at a time. Reilly disentangled herself from Maksim and plodded heavily up the stairs until she reached the door at the top. She turned the latch and stepp
ed through onto the roof. Maksim followed close behind her. “Where is your friend?” She asked. The roof was wide and flat, and utterly devoid of aircraft, gunships or otherwise.
Maksim didn’t seem concerned. “Abdul was a combat pilot during the third Gulf War. There’s no way an old veteran like him could stay in one place during a mess like this. He’ll be circling, trying to make himself and his bird a difficult target until I call him.” With that, he drew a slim rectangle of silicon, aluminum, and glass out of his pants pocket and put it to the side of his head. “Ready for pickup. LZ is clear for now.” The mercenary listened for a moment, then nodded once and returned the nondescript black phone to his pocket. “He’ll be here in ten minutes.”
For a while, the two stood together in silence, not sure what to say. It was Maksim that spoke first. “I’m sorry I implied that your team did this on purpose. I know your colleagues must have died, and what I said was inappropriate.” His tone was flat and uninflected. There was no emotion in his words; he was simply stating the facts as he saw them.
Reilly took this for what it was worth. Some kind of emotional appeal from the mercenary would honestly have been more disturbing than mollifying at this point. “It’s alright,” she replied quietly. “It’s been one hell of a day.”
“It has.” A long moment passed in silence.