by wildbow
Come on, Mary, I thought. I felt genuinely disappointed. Did you really think I have the ability to surprise and murder the convicts’ leader in a brawl? What did you think the next step was? Were we going to go with Sub Rosa and expect her not to notice that her pet convicts weren’t coming with?
Worst of all, I could see it on her face. That she knew I was disappointed. That she’d been tested, and she’d failed. Under the pressure, she’d defaulted to doing what she’d been created to do.
Mary hated failing.
“That so,” the convict leader said. He gave me a look. “That so?”
“Probably,” I said.
“Freak of nature is still working on the door,” the convict leader said. “Kill the little bitch.”
“No,” I said.
“Do it,” the convict leader said.
Baldy-beardy stabbed, but Mary slipped to one side in the same moment, and the spike only touched the side of her neck. She flinched, strength momentarily going out of her as though she were a marionette with the strings severed. As the spike moved to follow her as she tumbled toward the ground, she put her hands out. Something made a sound, a hard object striking the metal, and the spike was knocked aside. Something in her sleeves that didn’t conduct.
She landed on her back, beside the wall. Convicts with Academy augmentations in front and to either side of her.
She was quick, trained, and she clearly had something in mind, but even in this situation, there wasn’t a lot she could do.
But there was an advantage to the fact that she was surrounded. There was a pause as each of the three convicts worked to figure out who would deliver the final blow.
I saw Gordon tense. He had an avenue for attack here. He met my eyes, and I shook my head.
“She’s a mad dog,” I said, in the most casual tone I could manage.
The final blow was delayed another moment.
I was doing my utmost to avoid rushing my words. If I wanted them to listen, to stop and listen, even, I needed to phrase things carefully. “She’s the most complete of any of us.”
“Complete? What the hell are you saying?” the leader asked me.
“Why are you even listening to the little fuckspittle?”
“Sh,” the leader answered, a short, sharp sound.
“Complete. They wanted to make us all like her. Killers. I think they did too good a job with her. It’s not her fault. Just have to keep her on a leash,” I said.
“Fuck leashes,” the man Mary had tried to kill spat the words.
“Killers,” the leader mused.
“Ones you wouldn’t expect,” I said, quiet, giving him my best deadpan stare. “And right now, we’re just killers who want to hurt the Academy. Your buddy there probably did something like get in between Mary and her prey.”
“Mm,” the leader said, but it was a sound that didn’t come across as particularly convinced.
“From what I saw of those two,” the older man said, indicating Gordon and Helen, “Makes a lot of sense.”
They’d played along. Chances were good the people they’d ‘killed’ were alive, like the one I’d gone after.
“Mm,” the leader said.
“Little girl here didn’t do much,” shaggy-beardy said, indicating Jamie. “Watched while I took a roomful of people to pieces.”
“Boy,” Jamie said, staring the man down through his own long hair. “I’m a boy.”
“Whatever. You didn’t come off like some special killer.”
Damn it, I thought. Not that I was too surprised. Jamie was slow to act when caught off guard. Devising a plan for faking someone’s murder was hard enough. Doing it off the cuff was harder still.
“He’s not as far along,” I said.
“There’s this one too,” the woman said, looking Lillian’s way.
“She’s even less far along,” I jumped in.
“Put ten kinds of needles in people in that room over there,” the convict woman said. “One was foaming at the mouth. It was… something.”
The convict woman wasn’t so bloodthirsty, it seemed. Angry, yes, but not bloodthirsty.
I met Lillian’s eyes.
She looked scared. She wasn’t clever or controlled enough to hide that.
But she’d done it. She’d danced the dance, played the game, and she’d done it even without the benefit of playing a hundred rounds of Hayle’s game with the rest of us.
“You take that girl,” the leader told me, pointing at Mary. “You watch her. If that rabid dog of yours pulls another stunt, I’m finishing off the both of you.”
He jabbed the spike toward my eye. It took more than willpower to avoid flinching. I had to trick my senses, change my perception of what the spike was, so I wouldn’t flinch instinctively.
Only a gesture.
“You’re letting her live? She tried to put a knife between my ribs!”
“I’m fucking letting her live!” the leader said. “You’re arguing with me? I like this little fuck, I want to see what else he’s capable of. If this fucking place created him and he wants to get them back, I want to see it happen! Do you really want to say otherwise?”
Baldy-beardy scowled, but didn’t open his mouth.
“I’ll hear you out if you want to say something contrary!”
“No,” Baldy said.
“No? You sure?”
“I’m sure, yeah.”
“Yeah,” the leader said. “Sure hope you are.”
While they were talking, I walked over to Mary. I gave her my hand. She used it to stand.
I could see the hurt in her eyes, the anger that was directed at herself more than anything.
“Got all the rooms here?” I asked.
There were nods.
“There’s a few more that way,” I said. “We’ll get ’em.”
The convict leader glanced at me, unhappy with my initiative, but he gave me a nod.
I was his buddy now. He liked me, and I doubted he liked any of the other members of his little gang.
Letting me do this, giving the go-ahead, it was a way of asserting his authority in an odd way.
We left the convicts behind. We passed by the door that Sub Rosa was still working on. She hadn’t even started prying at it. She was elbow deep in mechanisms at the frame.
We headed down the hall in the direction the leader and I had gone. Two rooms. I tried to hold Mary’s hand, and she pulled away from me.
I didn’t dare meet the eyes of the others or try to say something. The convicts were watching. We had one ally among them, the most important one, but I didn’t want to foster any doubt.
Two doors. One without a slot, the other with.
I knocked on the one without a slot. I heard a murmur of a response.
“Jo Anna Kelper,” Jamie said. “Let us in.”
There was the sound of a lock. The door opened.
“You,” the woman in the lab coat said. She was older.
“Your life is in danger,” Gordon said, flashing the badge. “We need to fake your death.”
She frowned.
Lillian held up a syringe. “Tranquilizer. I’ll also slow your system. Induced hibernation state.”
“I’m old, I might not wake up from something like that.”
“If we don’t do something like this, those guys down the hall will make sure you don’t wake up at all,” Gordon said.
Jo Anna frowned, then nodded.
Lillian administered the dose.
It was only after the syringe was emptied into Jo Anna’s arm that Lillian gave another syringe.
“This will make her seize up,” Lillian said. “Not fun, but it’s ugly to look at, and they’ll think she’s dying, even as they don’t sense much of a heartbeat or breathing. Turn her on her side.”
We did.
Sure enough, the old woman in the lab coat started having fits a couple of seconds after the dose was administered.
We started to vacate the room, and I glanced at M
ary, who was standing watch in the hallway, jaw set, an angry look in her eyes.
People were so hard to manage.
Mary wasn’t the entirety of the group. I looked at Lillian.
My hand found hers. I gave it a squeeze.
“Don’t give me that shocked look you give me every time I’m not mean to you,” I murmured, my head tilted to be closer to her ear.
“What are you up to?” she hissed.
“Right now, I’m saying you did a fantastic job,” I whispered. “You came across like a true Lamb. Good work.”
She didn’t react to that. We made our way out into the hallway, and she tugged her hand from mine.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. You get your kicks by being all nice-nice and then the moment I let my guard down, you kick me in the shins or something.”
“No kick, no shins,” I said. “I meant what I said.”
I left her with those words. She stared at me as I went over to Mary. She wasn’t holding my hand, so I bumped her shoulder with mine. She gave me an annoyed look.
Still, she didn’t outright murder me when I put an arm around her shoulders.
Last door.
In the absence of my badge, I plucked the one from Mary’s uniform jacket pocket and put it in the mail slot.
“We got company,” Gordon observed.
Damn. It couldn’t be easy.
Sub Rosa was on her way, and the convicts were behind her.
The door opened just as Sub Rosa arrived.
The man on the other side, skinny with circular glasses, dark circles under his eyes and tufty hair at the top of his head, let his mouth go agape, his eyes widening.
Recognition. Answers. Yes!
“You’re—” he started.
Sub Rosa reached out and grabbed his head.
It took her relatively little effort to crush his skull with the one hand. Once the bone gave way, the rest followed fairly quickly after.
My answers! No!
“Door’s open,” my new buddy the leader told me. “She apparently wants us with.”
I nodded.
Sub Rosa shook the bits of scientist-head off her hands, turned, and started her way toward the door.
I didn’t look at Jamie, but I knew that he’d be staring at me, willing me to remember that the daughter of the man who had created Sub Rosa was on the other side.
More importantly, the last easy chance we had to get answers was on the other side.
Question was, how did we get the girl out alive?
Previous Next
Lips Sealed 3.5
Convicts, as it happened, smelled. Problem was, I was now the convict leader’s new best friend, and he was staying close to me.
It had its benefits and drawbacks. For one thing, so long as I kept Mary close, it meant our new benefactor was protecting her. For another, it meant I didn’t have a great range of movement. He was keeping me close, he was talking to me, and I couldn’t wander off and try to get ahead of Sub Rosa.
On the plus side, we had a few minutes. The Bowels were built around a cylindrical shaft, a few hundred feet deep, two-dozen feet wide. The hallway here extended in a semicircle around to the far side of the shaft. Extra protection, extra thickness, and more room for someone to pull a lever or seal off the area.
Sub Rosa had to stop to work with another panel in the wall. It gave me a second to think.
My new buddy elected to distract me, instead.
“I was a skinny little fuck like you, once,” he told me.
“Really?” I asked, more to be polite than anything else.
“Bad combination, being tall and scrawny. Tried to eat and even did some farm work when I coulda done something else, just to bulk up. But all the energy went to making me taller. A lot of people learn they can make themselves look better by messing with someone taller than them.”
“Gotta hurt them bad enough they don’t try it again,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”
Sub Rosa resumed walking, another set of safeguards effectively cut off and removed.
“Is that how you wound up in prison? Because you hurt someone?” I asked.
“Huh? Eh.”
“Eh,” I echoed him, acting disinterested.
“Was a woman. Around the time I started being able to fight back if someone messed with me, I was working on a factory floor, went out for drinks. Guy picked a fight with me to impress his woman, I won, I took my prize. Spectacular piece of work, and at the start, that was only in the best way… but I don’t suppose you get that sort of thing, young as you are.”
“I do. I get it,” I said. I realized I sounded a little defensive, then said, “I spend a lot of time with these girls. They’re pretty.”
“Thank you, Sy,” Helen said, brightly, from the tail end of the group.
Mary gave me a look I couldn’t read.
He gave me a condescending look, and I mused about possibly sticking him with my knife.
“Well, good for you,” he said, sounding very unimpressed. “My girl was top notch, as girls go. Raised the standard for womenfolk everywhere. But she wanted a bad boy and didn’t realize it. She’d yelp at me and growl at me for most everything I did, for drinking, for being rough, she’d get fed up, run away, and she expected me to chase her, tell her I was sorry, that I was reforming my ways.”
“And?”
“I didn’t. I told her straight-up who I was, how I was. If she didn’t want me, she could go, and she did… except she kept coming back. Hoity-toity dad, y’know? Rich, laid down the law with her, so she’d run off to slum it with me. Decided she didn’t like me, went back home. Would’ve been annoying, but oh, she was gorgeous, and when she came running back, hungry for me…”
He paused, looking down at me. I met his gaze.
“Yeah,” he said. “I figured it would do. She decided otherwise. One night, she ran off home to her daddy, only she told tales. Charges laid against me for shit I didn’t probably do. Old man even pulled strings, I’m betting. I didn’t spend more than a year in prison before I got brought here.”
“What do you think you’ll do to him when you get out?”
He gave me a funny look. “Out?”
“Sure,” I said. “Out.”
“I gave up on getting out a while ago,” he said. “Don’t lie to me. Don’t lie to yourself. This is where we live out the rest of our very short lives before we die.”
I glanced up at him. I could see the hardness in his features, the look in his eyes beyond the simple anger on the surface. A kind of hopelessness that went beyond simply being a monster.
That hopelessness was, in part, the source of his inhumanity, the willingness to hurt others.
I suspected he was irredeemable, if this was left alone. As a human being, flawed and violent and probably beating his girlfriend on the regular, he’d probably been fixable, but that was no longer the case. His humanity had taken too much of a beating, and there was no light of hope in his eyes.
“We’re going to get out,” I said, in a matter-of-fact way, turning my eyes forward.
“How do you think that works?” he asked, and he sounded almost angry.
“How many Academy students are down here, do you think?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
“Enough. Hundreds, probably. Now think, each one of those people has family. They have connections, friends who will ask about them,” I said. I would have been lying if I said I wasn’t touching on the convict leader’s past, and the circumstances of his incarceration. He’d been caught because his girl had had connections. I was doing my best to speak in a language he understood.
I was also bending the truth. Not everyone was guaranteed to be down at their stations in the Bowels, and I wasn’t sure that the Academy would value their lives so highly. It would be easy to sentence all of the people down here to death and then point to legal
documents they’d signed.
“Uh huh,” the leader didn’t sound impressed.
“Now think, how many projects are down here? We’re one, you’re one, she’s one. How much money is invested in all of this? It’s not like they can just take a new student and tell him to go pick up where someone else left off. The question is, are they really willing to abandon all of this, all these people, all the money and investments?”
“You don’t think so, huh?”
“No,” Gordon said, backing me up.
“No,” I said, echoing Gordon. “It costs them too much.”
The convict leader gave me a look. I could tell he was having doubts. It was only natural—he’d accepted his death, and now I was giving him a new lease on life. He was experiencing dissonance.
In reality, though, it was easier and safer for him on a mental and emotional level to hold to his old ideas, that death was certain. To hold onto those ideas, he had to doubt me.
“One of the scientists that worked on us, Lacey, she was terrified of being down here. It’s what the scientist in charge of us told her,” I said. “I overheard. Of course, things are different if an entire section gets locked down, since then they can evacuate the rest, but we have her.”
Sub Rosa, still leading us down the extended, curved hallway, glanced back at me.
“And she’s making it so we can’t get locked inside one part of this place,” the leader said, as if I hadn’t implied it already.
“Exactly,” I said. “Eventually they’re going to have to decide whether it’s better to condemn everyone and everything in here, or if they’re going to open things up and let us out.”
The convict leader was quiet.
“Sounds too easy,” the woman convict said, behind me.
“It’s not easy at all,” I said. “There are a lot of problems. For one thing, they’re going to have a lot of stitched and a lot of guards up there.”
“Uh huh?” the leader grunted.
“Probably. And there’s probably other safeguards down here. Supposed to be a big monster.”
“Glutton?” the leader asked.
“Gorger,” the oldest of the convicts said.
“Gorger, right,” the leader said. He looked back, as if expecting Gorger to be coming down the hall behind us. “If she can get us past the protections, she might have a way of dealing with that thing.”