by wildbow
She gave me a smile and a curtsey at that. “To be interesting is the highest of compliments when coming from you, sir Sylvester.”
I smiled back.
“I’m bleeding,” Jamie said. “You are too, Sy.”
I felt the back of my neck, where I’d been touched, and my fingers came away crimson.
“Here,” Helen said. She handed me the jar of powder Lillian had been using.
Rather than use the dabbing sponge, I reached in, grabbed some, and slapped it on the general area where it was sore, before handing it to Jamie.
Onward, upward.
Third floor.
We made our way through, my eyes following the number of each lab.
Twenty-two, I thought.
We reached the lab, and I pounded on the door. It swung lightly ajar at that.
“If this turns out badly, I’m going to be silently judging you,” Jamie said. “While we die, anyway.”
“Noted,” I said.
I ventured into the lab, and scanned the surroundings. A small size, as labs went, ten paces by ten paces in size.
The counter on one end of the room featured a glass tube, capped with metal at both ends, the two caps held together by a locking mechanism. Crimson fluid swirled within.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Gas. One more weapon for the Academy created weapons of war to use on the enemies of the Crown,” Jamie said.
I nodded.
“It won’t stop her. It might distract or weaken her, but that’s only going to buy us a chance,” Jamie told me.
I nodded.
“And, I feel the need to stress this, we’re not immune.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. I looked at the fluid. “I get that.”
Jamie had been searching through every memory of paperwork and every interview he’d participated in, to figure out what we might be able to use against Sub Rosa. Things that might hurt her or set her back.
But he was too clever a boy. He searched through his head, but he did it with rules. He didn’t allow himself to consider weapons that were as likely or more likely to hurt us than to hurt Sub Rosa.
This was one such weapon, the size of two paint cans, stacked one on top of the other.
While Jamie and I talked, Helen was going through cabinets. I joined her in doing the same.
We found two more canisters, much like the first, but the fluids inside were crystal clear.
I looked to Jamie.
“Water,” he said.
My face fell.
“But we can use it,” he said.
I smiled. “How?”
“It’s a dispersal system. We’re filling the air with a thick gas, diluted with water vapor. We use these, we dilute it further, but we make the cloud bigger.”
Decreasing the chance we miss.
The mental pictures were becoming clear in my mind’s eye. This wouldn’t kill her, it wouldn’t even hurt her that badly.
If it touched us, if we screwed up, then it would hurt us badly, if it didn’t kill us outright.
My struggles with Sub Rosa thus far had been because she’d been implacable, unstoppable.
Now I had the means to push and pull. I had the strings with which I could move Sub Rosa, for the briefest time.
But what play to enact with the puppet, for the greatest effect?
“What are you thinking?” Jamie asked.
“What exactly does this stuff do?”
“Flesh eating virus,” Jamie said.
“Really?”
“Essentially.”
I looked at the red tube with a newfound respect.
“Don’t drop it,” he said.
“I won’t.”
“You could. In fact, I think I’ll take it, just to be sure.”
“I won’t drop it!”
“Let me have it. You can hold my book.”
“No. I wanna be the one to unleash the flesh-eating plague!”
“I’ll hand it over when it’s time, but I don’t want you unleashing it on us.”
“I won’t!”
“Not intentionally, but—”
“Boys,” Helen said.
Our heads turned.
“I’m taking it,” she said. “I’m physically incapable of dropping it by accident.”
“But—” I started.
“Carry the other ones, please,” she told us.
“But…” I said, trailing off. She met my puppy dog eyes with that infuriating, cute little smile of hers.
I walked to the cabinet with the canisters of water, then grabbed the first.
I was sweaty, and I had the powder on my hand, which hurt traction rather than helping it. The glass case tipped over and clunked hard against the floor.
“Shut up,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything,” Jamie said, in the smuggest of tones.
“It didn’t break, anyway.”
“Uh huh,” Jamie said.
“Shut up,” I told him, again, before grabbing the thing and heaving it up and off the ground.
Jamie considered a moment, then left his book behind, taking the thing in both hands.
“We have the means of moving Sub Rosa the way we need her to move,” I said. “We could bring her up. With the right tools, we might even be able to send her down. We can make her stand still…”
“But?”
“We don’t have the means of stopping her, when it comes down to it,” I said.
Therein lay the rub.
A person was only technically dead when their heart stopped, but even that definition was vague, because the Academy had kept people alive without hearts in their chests, using machines to pump.
Heart and brain. When one or both ceased to function, Sub Rosa stopped.
We lacked the tools to destroy either. There might be guns here and there, but that relied on luck. Severing the brainstem, or striking the heart, through the armor-like layer of the cocoon.
“Ideas, Sy?” Jamie asked.
“Some,” I said. “It depends on things.”
“That’s amazingly vague,” he said.
“I’m feeling inspired by some of the villains from the dime store novels,” I told him. “We need to think big.”
“Okay.”
“How mad do you think Gordon would be if I used Shipman as bait?”
“He likes her,” Helen said.
“I don’t think he fully grasps it,” Jamie commented. “But yeah.”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m asking,” I said.
Jamie nodded. “He’d probably forgive you, but…”
“But he’d be mad,” I said. And what we’re not saying is that time is limited. Do I really want months or years of time with Gordon to be eaten up with him upset at me?
“Why?”
“It’s something Sub Rosa wants,” I said. But we can work around it. We should drop these off and scout. See where she is and what she’s doing.”
There were nods from the two.
This felt doable. The lack of a means to deliver a sure killing blow was a big hole in the plan, but one that could be worked around.
The possibilities that unfolded in my mind were good ones, fun ones.
Ones that people would remember.
We carried the glass canisters halfway down, to the fifth floor, and we left them at the exit of the hallway, just by the stairs.
Slowly, we crept down, past the swarm of bugs who refused to land on us, past the black wall crawlers, who snorted and honked, while refusing to draw near. Warning sounds, I presumed, passed from one group to the next.
Social creatures.
Past the sixth floor. A whole section of railing and stairway was broken. From the fight between Sub Rosa and Gorger.
From the bodies in the hallway, though, I could assume that Gorger hadn’t gone into the hallway. If he had, he would have scraped them against the floor.
Down another floor. Seventh. The way was locked, the door broken, but not broken away.
Gorger hadn’t gone there either, and I doubted he would have left Sub Rosa to her own devices.
Down to the eighth floor.
Bottom floor.
Sub Rosa was there. People in lab coats were working to tear away wall panels, while she stood there, a metal spike extended in their general direction. Another cluster of people in lab coats was gathered against the wall, huddled together. Twenty, thirty, maybe forty.
Gorger lay against the opposite wall. He breathed, but he was limp, the fight gone out of him.
He’d lost to Sub Rosa, who had been his father in a way. Yes, she was female, but she’d had a fatherlike role in his creation, providing the seed and the means for the man to become the monster, and now she had struck him down.
We couldn’t use the gas like this.
“We need to use Shipman, to draw her up,” I whispered.
There was no response from either of the others. They were studying the scene.
Are they making a way out? Or is this like something I suggested to Helen? A weapon cache? A tunnel? A last-ditch measure?
On the broad bottom of the shaft, a doctor happened to look up, and saw us. I could just barely see the whites of her eyes.
She gestured. Telling us to run, maybe.
Rescuing the children.
She gestured again.
“Let’s go,” I whispered. My legs were already feeling like lead, from so much travel up and down stairs in short time. I had the information I needed to put a plan in action.
But my memory wasn’t good. Just to be safe, I looked back, ready to commit the scene to memory, so I could better move the pieces when it came down to it.
It was only that last glance that let me see the subtle events unfold.
The gesturing movement, urging us to run, it had been seen by others in the crowd. Many of them looked up at us.
Sub Rosa, watching over the crowd out of the corner of her eye, turned. Not all of the heads were fast to look away or distract.
She followed their gaze, and she saw us.
It seemed she was still angry. She moved, as fast as she was able, ascending the stairs.
Chasing.
At least we won’t have a problem baiting her upstairs.
Problem was, I now had zero minutes to pull off a serious deathtrap I’d expected to take ten or twenty.
Previous Next
Lips Sealed 3.9
We weren’t going to get away this time.
She was taller, stronger, and as hurt as she was, she kept going without faltering. Her face still had a gaping hole in the side of it where several bullets had hit, filled with what looked like a big blood clot, and she had other injuries she might have sustained doing battle with Gorger, but she wasn’t staggering anymore.
I’d expected that, even if we’d been seen, we could outrun her or match her pace. She was healing, however, or she’d pulled herself together. She was making good time. Better than we were.
I was quick on my feet, and I had a good sense of where my body was and how to move. Jamie and Helen weren’t runners. Humans had evolved not to outrun prey, but to keep running. Helen wasn’t human, and as fine a piece of craftsmanship as she was, there were tradeoffs when playing to different strengths. Jamie just wasn’t quick or coordinated, he stumbled, I caught him, he faltered, and I pulled him onward.
She was going to catch us. The next hallway was still a little ways up, the canisters of water vapor and plague more than a little ways up. We wouldn’t reach it first.
Those people who had stared at us and warned us to run had doomed us.
I looked back, still running, and I saw Sub Rosa’s steady advance. She kept one hand on the railing, hauled herself up with arm strength as well as strides.
I contemplated throwing myself toward her. Ascending the stairs, there had to be a point where, with a push or a collision with a leaping eleven year old, that she’d tip over backward.
The fact that she was gripping the railing, hauling herself up, gripping it, hauling herself up, a steady pattern, it narrowed that window of opportunity.
What were the odds? One in twenty? One in fifty?
Wait for the right moment, pivot, leap. It would barely inconvenience her, maybe break the glass cases attached to the body that she was using for the spike. It would kill me, or she would kill me shortly after, yet the other two would have a chance at getting away.
An hour ago, I wouldn’t have waited to do it. Jamie’s speech made me hesitate, want to be absolutely sure there was no other choice. I glanced back, gauging distance, helped Jamie run, then checked again, to see how fast she was gaining on us.
In the spaces between where her lips were sealed together, the lips parted, sucking in and huffing out breath. The fluid flew through the tubes that had been implanted in her.
I let go of Jamie’s hand.
Jamie seized my wrist a heartbeat later, and this time, he was the one that hauled me up and forward. A second wind, or a surge of desperate strength.
I kept going, only because I didn’t want to slow him down by fighting him or lagging behind. In my heart, I knew it wasn’t enough, but I couldn’t simply acknowledge the fact, accept it and carry on with the original plan when he was trying so damn hard.
Somewhere along the line, I failed to estimate things right. I misjudged how much time had passed, or Sub Rosa had managed a second wind or burst of speed in the same way Jamie did.
Jamie startled, his uniform jacket pulled tight against his chest, and he let go of my wrist.
He looked at me, not Sub Rosa, in the moment before she swept him into the wall. A swiping motion, right to left, but it had enough force to break him. Two dozen individual parts of Jamie cracked and percussed against the wall all in one horrible sound, before his body slumped to the stairs at the base of the wall. His book tumbled down the stairs, and it just kept going, end over end, opening, carrying down, then closing itself before sliding down another few steps.
I continued another few steps up on momentum alone, tripping and almost falling because I wasn’t looking where I was going, before reality caught up to me. Sub Rosa had stopped, so I stopped and turned to confront her.
Jamie’s book came to rest, the hard cover bent.
Bugs swirled, the wall-crawlers continued their eerie movements along the surfaces around us, but we were still. Sub Rosa was just a step away from being exactly in between me and Jamie. Helen was further up the stairs, but only by a bit.
My blood pounded in my ears, my mind raced so much I wasn’t sure I trusted it, as I tried and failed to see a way forward, something that would help Jamie.
I couldn’t get by Sub Rosa, bait her downstairs, and keep her busy somehow while sending one of the doctors to help Jamie, assuming he was alive. I wouldn’t make it. I knew it. I couldn’t outrun her, I didn’t have the tools, and the doctor wouldn’t risk Sub Rosa’s wrath by going. She’d had them cowed, down there. The dead bodies suggested how.
I couldn’t scream for them to come up and help him, again, because they wouldn’t go, because they wouldn’t hear.
I couldn’t go down and force one to come with me and help Jamie on pain of death, because that would mean Helen had to deal with Sub Rosa.
I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t. The thoughts dissolved into a haze of couldn’ts and the haze was an angry one, the pounding of blood in my ears and eyes intense enough that I could see my heart beating, my field of vision throbbing.
It was the polar opposite of what I’d experienced in my moment of near death. My thoughts then had gone quiet. I’d been able to stop thinking. Right now they were anything but quiet.
My thought was crystal clear, and it was well modulated, not a scream or an incoherent shout.
This is what it’s like to see red, was my thought. Which was odd, because things seemed more blue-green, as if we were underwater.
I wished it was more productive. That my surge of emotion and the clarity for my most destructive thoughts could prov
ide a way to end her right this moment.
“Sy,” Helen said, behind me. She sounded so normal.
“Yes?” I asked, my voice just as everyday as hers.
“There’s nothing you can do.”
Sub Rosa wasn’t holding onto the railing anymore. If I could knock her down the stairs, so she might fall like Jamie’s book had… no. It wouldn’t hurt her enough.
“Sylvester,” Helen said, with more emphasis.
I want to tear those staples out of her mouth so she can talk, then challenge her, call her out, break the arrogant, insane bitch.
“I know,” I admitted, aloud. “But Ja—”
I stopped, cleared my throat so I could speak more clearly, found no word came out, and only managed something on a third try, changing the affect of the word, making it flat, whisper-quiet. “Jamie.”
“You know he doesn’t want you to.”
Doesn’t, not wouldn’t. I looked at the body, my eyes automatically moving away from the broken form, then made myself look again. I blinked, and my eyes stung with the sweat mingled with the stuff I’d rubbed on my skin and in my hair to keep the bugs off and make the wall crawlers less inclined to hold on to me.
He was breathing.
The relief was so profound I found myself grabbing the railing to steady myself.
Anger was replaced with fear.
Sub Rosa still had the spike extending from her left hand. She was closer to Jamie.
“I’d like to talk,” I said.
She shook her head slowly.
“Sylvester,” Helen said. “Jamie doesn’t want you to take the risk. Let’s go.”
Jamie doesn’t want to die. If we leave him with her, he’ll die. If we leave him without getting him help, he’ll die. We’re all supposed to live, aren’t we?
I couldn’t voice the words. I needed to open a dialogue with Sub Rosa, find a chink in the armor, a weak point, or something.
Her attention moved to Jamie. Helen’s fault.
“Supervisor,” I said, my voice firm, authoritative. A desperate stab at evoking something from the days when she’d had a different sort of power.
It worked. Her head turned a degree.
“Earlier, not long after we crossed paths, you stroked my hair. The others, the people who remember, they’ve painted you as a monster, the person you once were and who you are now. They laid the blame at your feet, saying you’re why the Academy is so strict and results-focused.”