by Rachel Caine
The room, upon inspection, was a plain concrete box, no windows, nothing. There was a faintly antiseptic smell, as if it had been used for storage of medical supplies, but there was nothing left but us, and a small hand-sized drain in the centre of the floor. My dad had already said that a human body could fit through any size of hole large enough to accommodate the head; it was just a matter of dislocating enough bones. Yeah, he was fun that way.
But this hole wasn’t even big enough for my clenched fist, never mind my skull. So that was out. Fortunately.
I checked the door and the ceiling and the corners. I didn’t see any cameras watching us, but I didn’t think I could rely on privacy; tech had gotten way too good for that. We’d been spied on once by someone we’d thought of – wrongly – as a friend, and I wasn’t about to spill my plans, such as they were, to Douche Bag Davis and his friends.
I was scared for Claire. Heart-stoppingly scared. She was all alone, surrounded by wolves who could take her down at any time, and the only thing she had to use was her guts, and her wits.
Fully armed, then. But it still scared me.
I put my hands in my pants pockets and slouched, like any street corner punk. Give me a backward cap and saggies and a sports jersey, and I’d have nailed the whole look. But it wasn’t just attitude. It gave me the chance to figure out what Eve had managed to shove down my pants – a thing that I wasn’t going to tell Claire about, incidentally.
It was a piece of rusted metal, probably some kind of flange to hold the sink drain in. About four inches long, jagged on the end. As weapons went, it was jailhouse-nasty. Pretty much perfect, actually. Too bad I hadn’t gotten a bathroom trip; there must have been plenty of other opportunities in there for fun mayhem-makers. You could kill somebody with a bar of soap, if you tried hard enough.
‘So,’ Eve murmured, head down so any cameras wouldn’t see her talking. ‘What’s our play, then?’
‘Still hating me?’ I talked to my shoes, too, and kept it quiet, in case there were microphones as well as cameras.
‘It’ll take a little bit longer for the burn to go away, yeah. Why? Am I hurting your little tender feelings?’
Yes, I thought, but I said, ‘Bitch, please. You know I ain’t got no feelings.’
‘About that plan?’
‘Yeah, about that,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’re going to have to kill me.’
‘Goody.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
What have I done?
It kept running through Claire’s mind at breakneck speed, over and over … that moment when Anderson had pulled the trigger, and the Myrnin she knew had just disappeared. What was left was a crying, shaking wreck of a man who didn’t even seem to be a vampire, just a shattered relic of a human being. If she’d passed him in a doorway, she would have assumed he was a homeless, mentally disturbed wreck.
Which, technically, she guessed he was. And she’d done it to him.
Claire had rarely felt so alone. She’d thought coming across the country to MIT was a new start; she’d thought she was here to learn, to grow, to change. But instead, it had been a scam from the start. Anderson had never intended to teach her a thing. She’d just wanted VLAD, and Claire was the means to the end.
Speaking of VLAD, Dr Anderson had been hard at work on it, apparently, and she’d taken it from concept to harsh execution while Claire had been thinking they were going back to basics. All that she’d been doing, she understood now, had just been busy work, so Dr Anderson could perfect what she’d already done.
And test it.
‘Can I see it?’ Claire asked Dr Anderson, who was still holding VLAD; she’d added a much-needed support strap to it, but it was probably starting to feel really, really heavy. ‘I just want to understand what you did. I was thinking of adding a modulator to it, but—’
‘Don’t even think about it,’ Anderson said. She adjusted the heavy weight a little, which meant that she was starting to feel the strain, just as Claire had hoped. ‘And we’re not going to talk about the tech.’
‘But I – I thought you wanted me to help you—’
Anderson gave her a brief, cool, impersonal smile. ‘Don’t try it. You may have given Myrnin up, but that doesn’t mean I trust you with the toys yet, Claire. That, you have to earn. I believe you as far as I can throw your boyfriend right now. And he’s a pretty solid-looking guy.’
She looked tired, Claire thought, and a bit shaky herself. She was watching Professor Davis, who was trying to get some kind of blood sample from Myrnin; he was having a time of it, not because Myrnin was fighting him, but because he couldn’t hold still. Finally, it took three armed men to pin Myrnin down flat, and he made a sound halfway between a wail and a sob that tore Claire right down to her soul. I did this. I did all of this.
She swallowed hard. ‘So what now?’ she asked. Her voice had gone harder, and she couldn’t seem to soften it. ‘You’ve got Myrnin, and Oliver, and Jesse, and Michael. You’ve got Shane and Eve. What else do you want?’
‘I want data,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘You’re a scientist, Claire. You realise what a rare opportunity this is, I hope – we have vampires who can be tested in lab conditions. We can break down the biology, which is something Dr Davis has been looking into for some time. We can win.’
‘I didn’t know we were at war.’
‘Of course we’re at war. And we were winning for a while; the vampires were sick when I left Morganville, and getting sicker. If you’d left it alone and let nature take its course, it would have been over by now.’
‘Did you make them sick?’ Claire asked, horrified. Myrnin had never completely believed the idea that Amelie’s vampire father Bishop had developed and spread that disease. Had it happened right in front of him?
But Dr Anderson was shaking her head. ‘No. I can’t claim credit for that. I just made sure that the research went nowhere on how to fight the illness. Seemed like for once, nature was favouring humans instead of vampires.’
Claire shivered. She’d thought she understood Dr Anderson; she’d thought they were alike. But they weren’t, deep down. They’d both survived Morganville, but they’d come out of it completely differently.
‘If you didn’t think we were at war,’ Anderson said, ‘then why did you make this?’ She patted VLAD’s metal frame.
‘I just wanted – I wanted a way for us to stop them if it came to a fight. That’s all. It’s supposed to be for defence.’
‘Well, you know what they say: the best defence is a good offence. We’ve been working on enhanced anti-vampire weaponry for some time. Including biological weapons.’
‘Dr Davis was running experiments,’ Claire said. ‘That bat-thing that killed Derrick. That was his?’
‘Yes,’ Anderson said. She was watching Myrnin, but not with any compassion or regret. It was all clinical, the look in her eyes. Clinical and bitterly cold. ‘He’d made considerable progress, but our samples were degraded. We’d had to rely on what I brought with me out of Morganville, and it wasn’t much. I was working on getting Jesse to cooperate with me, but for all her friendly ways, she’s smarter than that. Too bad. If she’d just done it peacefully, I wouldn’t have had to take the steps I did.’
‘Is Jesse—?’
‘Alive? Yes. Happy?’ Anderson shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to do it. But she pushed me into it. I’ve got a monitor on her. So far, the effects haven’t worn off. I’m starting to wonder if the beam does permanent neural damage.’
‘Permanent? What did you do to VLAD? It was never supposed to be that powerful—’
‘I made it work,’ Anderson snapped. ‘Your job now, if you want to stay on the right side of the fight, is to take the model that Dr Davis was using and make it work as well. I didn’t have time to complete it before this crisis erupted. Myrnin’s arrival pushed us into an accelerated timeline. I think we’ve gotten the situation contained, but if any communications made it back to Amelie, we may have a fight on our hands, and I need
at least one more working device to be safe. So, you do that, and I’ll make sure your boyfriend and your other friends get out of this in one piece. Clear?’
‘Clear,’ Claire said. ‘Dr Davis’s gun didn’t work? That was a bluff?’
Dr Anderson shrugged. ‘I thought you’d recognise it, and it would slow you down so I could use the one that did.’
It was good strategy. Shane would have approved.
‘We’re ready here,’ said Dr Davis. His goons were strapping Myrnin into some kind of harness. Oliver had been taken out already, locked in a similar straitjacket. ‘Back to the farm?’
‘As quickly as possible,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘Nobody’s scheduled to come into this building until ten, but an early arrival could compromise everything. Let’s move out. We won’t be coming back here.’
The farm? Claire didn’t know if that was some kind of shorthand code, but it didn’t sound like the MIT lab, anyway. She went along with them quietly, and ended up sitting next to Myrnin. He was wrapped up like a mummy in the thick canvas jacket, and his head lolled forward so his dark hair cascaded down in waves to veil his face.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered to him. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She could feel the animal shuddering of his body, wave after wave of what was either pain, or terror, or both. ‘I never meant for this to happen, Myrnin, I swear. I just – I just didn’t see it.’
He turned his head toward her. She saw a red flash from his eyes from behind the curtain of his hair, and felt a brief pulse of something from him – hunger, anger, blind rage. Then he sighed, slipped to one side, and rested against the metal wall of the van. Chains clinked as he shifted. They hadn’t taken any chances, she saw; the chains were coated with silver, and so were the manacles around his wrists and ankles. It was burning him.
Oliver, across from her, was in a similar state, but he wasn’t trembling quite so badly. Maybe he’d just had more practice at handling fear and pain, or maybe he hadn’t gotten quite so bad a dose of VLAD’s medicine. But he didn’t look by any stretch good, either.
Last of all, they loaded Jesse.
She looked awful. Her red hair was tangled into a dry net; her lips were dry and pale and crusted, and her eyes were glowing a pained, painful red. She looked alien and strange and pitiful, all at once, and she, too, was wearing the padded jacket and chains, and they locked her down next to Oliver. She didn’t seem to see Claire, or if she did, to comprehend any of what was going on. And she looked dangerous.
But the sight of her seemed to somehow make Myrnin a little better. He stopped shaking quite so much, and sat up straight again. So maybe there was something still inside there, after all.
Claire hoped so. The alternative was way too awful to consider.
It was a long, silent ride. Dr Davis was up front with Dr Anderson, and Claire’s only company, besides the out-of-it vampires, were the three armed guards crowded inside. None of them were talkative. She wasn’t even sure they blinked. She had plenty of time to observe them, in the dim interior lights – there were no windows back here, which was probably lucky for the vamps. Three men of about the same age, thirties to forties; the oldest had some grey in his hair, but not much. All fit. All wearing what seemed like similar dark suits. Claire was no expert, but they didn’t look expensive – more like … uniforms.
And they were all wearing a pin on their lapels. A rising sun pin.
This looked less and less like the government, and more and more like something private that Dr Anderson had gotten herself in deep with. Private, but well funded. The Daylight Foundation. The people Jesse had been so worried about.
Somehow, that was even less comforting than the idea the government knew about the vampires.
‘So,’ Claire said to the man sitting next to her. ‘Are you, ah, from Boston?’
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look at her. He did look at his watch, though, and adjusted the grip on his gun. He seemed calm enough, but she wasn’t going to get anything out of him. Or any of them. Shane might have; he liked to be provocative and confrontational, but it was a tactic that Claire knew she wasn’t good at.
So after a few more lame attempts at conversation failed, she waited.
It seemed to take forever, but they finally bumped off the smooth main road onto something that seemed a lot rougher, and then finally pulled to a stop crunching on gravel. The daylight that streamed in when the door slid open made the vampires flinch and squeeze their eyes shut, but they were all old enough to bear a little sun without injury. Still, Claire ached for them as their skin began to steam in the merciless glare. Oliver’s broke out into little tongues of flame before they unlocked him, and they hustled him out quickly.
Claire climbed out, and was immediately grabbed by the man who’d been sitting beside her. ‘Hey!’ she protested, but that got her nowhere. So she looked around instead as he pulled her onward.
Farm hadn’t been code. It was an actual farm, and there was an actual barn and a square two-storey farmhouse with a porch. She hoped for the farmhouse, but instead they headed her off to the big, dark-red barn.
She expected hay and horse stalls, but inside, the structure had been turned into a lab, a nice one that had a thick concrete floor, clean-room walls, steel tables and cabinets and bright overhead lighting. It was full of equipment, too. Some of it Claire recognised, but a lot was new to her. Dr Davis took charge of the three vampires and had them led over to the right side of the large open space, where he had them manacled to large steel staples in the floor. All three promptly collapsed into protective crouches.
‘This way,’ her guard said, and dragged her left, after Irene Anderson.
That part of the lab was a replica of what Dr Anderson had at MIT, with a few changes; one of the most vivid being that two tables were neatly laid out with parts and schematics. Claire recognised one of them as being the constituent parts of VLAD; the second table, though, was different.
That was the pieces of the mod, Claire realised. This would tell her exactly what Dr Anderson had done to make her device into an offensive weapon. Claire picked up the plans and studied them, took each part and looked it over. She was still examining things when Dr Anderson thumped down the heavy weight of VLAD on the table … not the working one, she realised. That was still slung across Anderson’s chest.
This was the prototype model that hadn’t yet been upgraded.
‘I’m pretty sure you can figure this out,’ Anderson said. ‘The plans are right there. You wanted to be my lab assistant. Do your job. Any funny business, and I promise you, your boyfriend will suffer for it. Got it?’
Claire nodded. She focused on the plans first. Anderson was right – it was a straightforward enough job, but a lot of it required her to disassemble the base model, and reassemble in the new configuration. She studied the schematics, and examined each piece that she was to add into the machine. That was an amplifier, capable of boosting the signal at least a hundred times beyond what she’d originally planned. That piece, snapping on underneath, was an inverter that changed the signal from something that enhanced to something that cancelled – which was what she had originally intended, to be able to remove a vampire’s desire to attack instead of having to fight in the first place. These were the modifications she’d have made in the course of her studies … something that would have made VLAD a mostly benign defensive weapon.
But the last piece was the most sinister. It was a complex combination of several different pieces, but from what Claire could puzzle out, it was designed to trigger a different set of emotions. Fear, obviously – overwhelming, paralysing terror. It also seemed to have some other component. From what Claire had seen of its effects, it must have sensitised nerves and created a strong pain reaction. Like a taser, only more intense, and very long lasting.
‘What are you doing?’
She jumped. Irene Anderson was staring at her, cold suspicion in her gaze.
‘I’m sorry,’ Claire said. ‘I just wanted to b
e sure I understood what I was doing first. I didn’t want to make any mistakes.’
‘Don’t,’ Anderson said flatly. ‘You’ve got an hour. Move it.’
Claire took a deep breath, put the nonworking VLAD in the centre of the worktable, consulted the plans one last time, and began the work.
She built the thing, piece by piece. The tools were all right there, everything precise and perfectly laid out for her. Anderson was watching her, and she made sure that she did nothing, absolutely nothing, that would draw any suspicion.
Not even Dr Anderson could keep her focus completely on her forever. Claire felt when it started to wander; it was like pressure coming off of her, and she had to work hard to not give any kind of physical signal that she knew something had changed.
Just do the work. Do the work.
By the time she was down to the last of it, Anderson’s focus had mostly moved on, though she remained close. And when Myrnin suddenly convulsed and cried out, writhing in his restraints, it drew Dr Anderson’s complete attention for a critical few seconds, just as Claire fastened the last piece of the machine on board.
She’d already identified the opportunity, when she’d been going over the plans. The last component had switches built inside. They were tiny, not meant to be manipulated without specialised tools, but she’d deliberately chosen the smallest possible screwdriver, even though it was the worst tool for the job she was apparently doing.
It fit into the tiny slots just far enough to slide the switches in opposite directions.
I have no idea if I’m modding this right, she thought. But all she could do was reverse the order of the switches, and hope that it worked.
As she finished and put down the screwdriver, Dr Anderson was right there to take control – even before she’d managed to take the weapon off its stand to hand it to her.
‘Good job, and done in time, too,’ Anderson said. She handed it to the man who’d been Claire’s shadow and guard all this time. He didn’t bother with the safety strap. ‘It’s time to see if you’re reliable, Claire. If you aren’t – if you decided to try to pull a clever one and sabotage me – then we’re going to find out right now, and it won’t go well for you. Or for your friends. This is your final exam, do you understand? Pass, and you win the lives of those you care about.’