by wildbow
She saw the change in Arandt’s body language. Anger. Fury.
Frustration.
Arandt was very clearly debating killing her. It showed in the way he planted his feet, took stock of the room, and clenched his fists.
“Go,” she said. “But be sure to come back. For the next day, at least, you’re mine. You do everything I say. And be sure to take her with you.”
She gestured at Kinney. Then she realized the professor couldn’t see well in the smoke. He wouldn’t see her if she jumped on the spot and waved her arms.
But the man seemed to have gotten it, or he had guessed that the ‘her’ was Kinney. He approached, and Evette backed off, giving him a wide berth while holding the wrench.
He collected Kinney and led the way in retreating from the room.
It left only Evette and Shirley.
“There,” Evette said. “That’s only the first step. I can give you the explanation you deserve, but you’ll have to bear with me. There’s a lot to do in the meantime if I’m going to pull all of this off.”
Shirley only nodded, breath rasping through the mask.
Evette walked over to the large tanks of pressurized gas and found the one that Arandt had said was methane.
Standing in the midst of the multicolored clouds of gas, she had to fumble for a scalpel.
Using the scalpel, she began lifting the edge of the label from the canister. It took time. In the meantime, Shirley approached, silent but for the noise of the gas mask.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice distorted.
“Changing labels around,” Evette said. “That canister of gas over there is going to retire. This little gem… well, with luck, they’ll fill up some stitched with it, and we’ll have ourselves some exploding stitched. All gathered up in Academy ranks, ready to strike out against Mauer. And because they’re filled with the mildest, most inconvenient poisons, people won’t think to be overly careful.”
“You’re siding with the Reverend, then?” Shirley asked.
“No,” Evette said. “No, I’m not siding with anyone. But that’s too complicated to get into. Too many variables. I’m going to get my ticker fixed, I’m going to look after you, and I’m going to destroy them all.”
A blaze of glory, she thought. One that might consume me.
Previous Next
Thicker than Water—14.12
She’d cracked the whip. Now the whipped were working the way they were supposed to.
The collected stitched were being modified, surgically outfitted with contained bladders, flesh added to encapsulate these growths and other internal structures given to allow the growths to be triggered remotely. Arandt was handling the mental programming so that hearing the right word would prompt the bladders to burst and the pressured gas within to be released. He was nearly done the batch of stitched, tying a purple ribbon around the arm of each stitched that was primed and ready. Once they were filled with gas, the ribbons were replaced with other colors.
The warbeasts had already been handled. Other gas canisters were being loaded and prepared.
The work had gone on all through the night. But for a detour where Evette had escorted Shirley to her own quarters, lending her bed to the exhausted young woman, Evette had spent the night awake, watching, and thinking.
The chatter of the Lambs was a constant background noise. Slowly, things had taken shape.
Mauer’s men had taken the paper that had the ‘shape’ of the man’s agenda on it. Not too important. Her focus over the course of the evening had been to recreate it, and figure out the general shape of the Infante’s plans.
She watched as the doctors pumped stitched full of flammable methane instead of gas. The labels had been changed around, the canisters moved. The trap was set and primed, just a short distance from her.
There was a knock on the door. It didn’t surprise her in the slightest.
“Come in,” Kinney said. She looked considerably worse for wear after her poisoning. A little bent, a little worn around the edges, her eyes rimmed with red and then by further dark circles. She’d showered and changed into fresh clothes and a black lab coat, but fat had been stripped from the bone, metaphorically speaking. The makeup rinsed off, the little touches of style gone. Only the hardness and faint hint of madness that any professor needed to make it this far, now.
Evette didn’t recognize the man in the black coat who entered the room, but she did find him a very interesting person. He was a professor by rank, and had an emblem on his sleeve she didn’t recognize. Between the decoration and the way he’d styled his hair and the fine clothes he wore beneath his coat, she knew he was someone with money to fritter away.
Infante, she thought.
“The Infante will be here in a moment,” the man announced. “Please ensure that you are not busy and that there will be no interruptions during his visit.”
“Yes sir,” Kinney said. Arandt’s voice echoed hers by only a moment.
She had anticipated the visit. She had also wondered how it would be approached; it was folly to enter any lab without warning about one’s presence. Some work wasn’t to be interrupted at all, and even a knock was a grave mistake that could get people killed.
Yet, at the same time, to knock was to ask permission. Nobles did not ask permission.
To send a delegate was one of the two way she had reasoned the Infante would make his entrance.
The doors in this building were large, reinforced, and heavy. It took some effort for the fancy man in the black lab coat to position himself where he could see down the hall and still hold the door partially open.
After several long seconds, he moved back, opening the door wider, and knelt, still holding it open.
The Infante was large enough that he almost couldn’t pass through the door. Kinney and Arandt had already stepped away from their work, dropping into deep bows, so they were already bent low as the Infante entered.
They bowed even lower as he passed through the threshold, to the point that it had to be painful.
As the Infante turned her way, Evette was sure to bow as well, hopping down from the table, timing it so she was lowering herself into the deepest part of her bow as he set his eye on her.
“Give a man free rein, and his actions soon reveal a great deal about him,” the Infante said.
“Yes, Lord Infante,” Evette said.
“How are things progressing?”
“Quite well, Lord Infante,” she said. “I think we’re one or two hours from being finished.”
Likely two to three hours, but it was good to crack that whip a little more.
“You were gone for some time yesterday.”
“Yes, my lord,” she said. “I was looking for Mauer.”
She’d realized, on seeing her tail, that she was being followed. Since leaving the Infante’s company, she had likely been followed by one of his people or experiments. On leaving Mauer’s company, Mauer would have his own spies on her. That was, if he hadn’t already been keeping an eye out from the moment she’d been taken off the train by the group of young nobles.
“Do tell.”
“I’m sure the others told you about my heart problem, Lord Infante,” she said. “I tried to get closer to Mauer and dialogue with him, using our… pre-existing relationship, if you will. It could have gone better.”
“I asked you to kill Mauer, and gave you resources to handle the task. Yet you ‘dialogue’ with the man.”
“Yes, Lord Infante. For my plan to work, I needed to position him. Left alone, he’ll carry on doing what he’s been doing. Every time the Lambs have dealt with him, he’s been careful in how he positions himself.”
“So I have seen.”
Evette nodded. “He treats these things like a game of chess. No piece can be taken without retaliation or consequence. It goes for everything from the lowliest pawn to the rooks, knights, hunters, to the king and queen. But he and I have faced off. It goes hand in hand with his plans
being disrupted. Tell a man you have a gun pointed at his privates, and even if he knows your hands should be empty, he’ll want to be sure, because he values his privates. He’ll betray a glance, or move to better protect his privates from this phantom bullet. By showing myself and invading Mauer’s inner sphere, I can make him wonder at his plans. He’ll betray some subtle clue that lets me see what he’s really doing. And he did.”
The Infante was unreadable. She had to fight to suppress her fears and worries. Everything was so precarious in the here and now. Which was exactly why the Infante was here, and why she’d been so sure he would reveal himself.
“What did you dialogue about?” the Infante finally asked.
“We didn’t, Lord Infante,” she lied. The lie made her already precarious position feel even more so. “I was bludgeoned in the head and imprisoned in a bathroom. I tried to escape and was summarily impaled through the heart and neck. But I had sources that informed me what Mauer was up to, I was able to catch his attention before I bled out. He opted to keep me alive. But they made the mistake of trying to drug me. It didn’t work. I was able to slip away.”
“How fortuitous,” the Infante said.
He doesn’t believe me? Or is he being droll?
Evette and the Lambs had rehearsed this conversation a hundred times over the course of the night. Various permutations, likely scenarios and points to cover. The Infante scared her like nothing else did, because he could so easily destroy her. Physically, taking away the things she valued, changing her circumstance, or crushing her psychologically. Worse, he could do it all with no effort at all.
She still wasn’t sure how to handle this. She bowed deeper, remaining silent.
“You have a sense of what Mauer is doing and where he is, then.”
“Yes, Lord Infante.”
“That is a statement that invites answer. Do not toy with me,” the Infante said. “You know what I expect.”
“Yes, Lord Infante, but I can’t provide the answers you want without putting myself in danger.”
Anyone else might hear what she was saying and jump to a conclusion. That she’d betrayed him, that her dealings with Mauer were less than genuine.
How the Infante reacted would be telling.
“Then come,” the Infante said. “This way.”
His hand was extended, ushering her forward.
She straightened, collected the satchel with the ticking heart in it, and bowed her head slightly as she moved past him. The hand he extended to her left served to set her path for her, palm out and angled so as to indicate the door.
Out into the hallway.
The Infante must have signaled his personal professor, because the man shut the door behind them.
There were no people out in the hallway. The fact that the Infante had come this way meant that people weren’t permitted to use the corridor. Subordinates had no doubt limited passage and access. The hallway was long, wide, and decorated well with fine art along the one wall, above and to either side of doors that led into individual labs. On the other wall, there were windows that pulsed faintly in time with the movement of the fluids between them. Each pane and fragment of glass was surrounded by vein-like growths. Something between stained glass, a broken window, and a living thing.
Pillars were set at regular intervals along that one side of the hallway, and it was one of these pillars that Evette was pushed up against, as the Infante scooped her up off the ground and shoved her back, pinning her into place.
He didn’t give a rationale. He didn’t explain why he was doing this. He saw fit to crush her, and there was little she could do.
She didn’t fight. She simply felt her much abused neck and throat constrict fraction by fraction in his grip, and she hung limp, working to meet his eyes.
“Wretched creature,” the Infante spoke. “If you think that my pity for your circumstance will spare you, you are wrong. If you think your audacity entertains me and that I might enjoy you too much to kill you, you are wrong.”
Evette managed a nod, despite the meaty two fingers and thumb that encircled her neck.
He dropped her, and she made something of a point of collapsing onto the floor rather than landing on her feet. He would like, even on the smallest, most insignificant level, that she was prostrate before him.
“I hope, for your sake, that whatever it is you were afraid of speaking of is something you can tell me here, in private, and not something you’re unwilling to divulge altogether.”
“Mauer’s plans and activity, Lord Infante?”
“Indeed.”
She swallowed hard. “He took me to Gomorrah, my lord.”
“Gomer’s Island.”
“Yes, Lord Infante. Gomer’s Island.”
“The place is often said to be a bastion for the religious and the rebellious in the Crown States. Mauer’s like are often at home there.”
“So it is said, my lord,” Evette said.
Her response was coded, much as the Infante’s statement had been. Talking about something without admitting or pointing to it.
Gomer’s island was far from being a bastion.
The Infante hadn’t replied to her, and she suspected his patience was running low. He wasn’t invested in her fate, and if she failed to justify her continued existence, he would kill her and carry on with the remainder of his day, likely not giving her a second thought.
She wasted no time in sharing, “Lord Infante, he brought me there, drugged, with the intention of finishing me off, I think. A hidden area within Gomer’s Island. From the way he talked to his lieutenants, and from what I was able to infer…”
Something had shifted in the mood. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she sensed that what she said here could see her killed for entirely different reasons. The Crown had killed a great many people to silence whoever had been at that location and keep any secrets they held.
“…My Lord, he’s as dangerous as I’ve ever seen him. When he was at Radham, the very first time I saw him, and he addressed the crowd, he was fire, he was intense, he was taking the first concrete steps in carrying out a greater plan, and there was no sign of anything coming to stand in his way. The Lambs hadn’t yet made their move. What I saw, yesterday evening, there was a similar look in his eye, but it wasn’t that newly kindled fire.”
“Dispense with the poetry,” the Infante said.
Evette stared at the noble’s feet, still on her hands and knees. “Lord Infante, that was the beginning of what he was trying to do. Four years ago. My mistake in dealing with him was in thinking he wanted or needed me. But he’s close enough to the end, or a end, that he didn’t want me around to interfere with what he’s setting in motion.”
She waited, tense in mind and stomach, while she tried to keep the tension from showing in her arms, legs, shoulders, or back. She couldn’t give the Infante anything that might suggest she was being deceptive.
“If he truly believes he’s close to any measure of victory, then he’ll be gravely disappointed,” the Infante said.
“If you say it is so, Lord Infante, then it’s so, and I feel sorry for the man,” Evette said.
She wondered for a moment if she’d pushed it too far. If she came across as disingenuous.
Then again, whether she came across as Evette or as Sylvester, she sounded disingenuous when she was being genuine.
“Feel sorry for him indeed. Mauer has set himself up to fail,” the Infante said. “Still, I’ll be happy to see him die, so long as he has the guns and the will to face down the Crown and Academy both. Carry on with what you’re doing. I’ll send my doctor to you in two hours, with every expectation that you’ll be ready to act.”
“Yes, Lord Infante,” Evette said.
“Stand,” the Infante said.
“As you wish, my lord.” Evette stood.
The man’s large hand reached down, and it brushed her hair out of her face. Sylvester’s hair out of his face, to be fair. The act made the angle of her
head change, so she looked up at him.
He stared down at her with those eyes that were far too sharp for his massive, bulky frame. It felt like he saw straight through her.
“Hm,” he said.
With that, he turned his back to her and started walking down the hall. Raising his voice enough to be heard, he said, “Sir Charles.”
The door opened. The well-dressed professor stepped outside, closing the door behind him, gave Evette a glance, and then walked briskly in the direction of the Infante, who was already a fair distance down the hall.
By the time they had reached the end of the long, straight hallway, Evette had surrounded herself with Lambs.
“That was interesting,” Jamie said.
“Dangerous as all hell,” Gordon said. “That nobleman does not like being lied to, and you lied through your teeth for most of that, Evette.”
Evette was silent, watching the Infante’s back.
“But you shook him,” Gordon said. “You got his attention.”
Evette nodded, to Gordon and to herself.
“Was he telling the truth?” Mary asked. “About this being something so dangerous and problematic that it might hurt Mauer? Hurt us?”
“It’s not out of the question,” Gordon said. “It’s equally possible we spooked him, and he played it cool. More possible even.”
“Look at how he acted in the past,” Jamie said. “He’s always been impervious, untouchable, unmovable. He’s powerful in a way that, when we imagine him dealing with the Duke, it’s a power difference as vast as the one between the Duke and ordinary civilians. Maybe not quite that extreme, but…”
“He moved,” Gordon said. “He reacted, took an extreme stance, then course corrected.”
Evette stood in the hallway, thinking, letting the Lambs talk, while she waited for her thoughts to stop racing, badly out of sync with the tick of her temporary heart, which wanted so badly to beat madly in response to her fear.
Which was as good a reminder as any.
She made her way back into the lab.