Underworld (Shadows of the Void Space Opera Serial Book 5)

by J. J. Green

  Flinging open another door, she found herself in the waiting room she’d seen from the front. Bright lights oscillated over the walls, shining in from outside. The police had arrived. A car door slammed. They were coming over to the clinic. Did they have a key to the place?

  Where were the supplies? Sayen spotted another door. She sped through it. At last, she was in the supply room. It was full of cabinets and refrigerator units. All were locked, but they bore signs. Her eyes roved feverishly. She must have only seconds. She saw it.

  Sayen grasped the handle of the unit containing the blood bank and forced it down. The lock snapped off, and the door opened. She grabbed handfuls of bags of artificial blood, expecting every moment to feel a police officer’s hand on her shoulder.

  She raced out. Passing through the waiting room, she caught sight of an officer standing outside the front door, looking in. At the same moment, the officer saw her. He raised his hand to his belt and shouted. Sayen ran out of the waiting room door in a heartbeat, through the office and treatment room, and outside into the yard.

  “Hey, catch these,” she yelled and flung the bags of blood over the fence, praying that the others were still there and waiting; praying that they were good at catching.

  From behind her came the sound of movement. The police were in the building. She had to jump the fence immediately, but the yard was small. She had hardly any room for a running start. She backed to the clinic, ran, and leapt. She didn’t make it to the top of the fence. Her fingers tried to grasp the smooth panels before she slipped down and landed heavily.

  “Stop where you are. You’re under arrest,” shouted a police officer.

  She had less than a couple of seconds before it was all over. Sayen took another run at the fence. This time, she jumped onto one of the garbage bins and launched herself upward. Her hands gripped the top of the fence. She’d made it. She pulled herself up. Below her, a bright laser beam shone out and sizzled against the fence.

  She dropped down into the street, but it was empty. Where were Erielle and the underworlders? Where was the car?

  Then she saw two vehicle reverse lights heading her way. The car was traveling backward to reach her. Sayen raced up to the opening rear door and threw herself in headfirst. The car sped away, Sayen’s feet in their oversized shoes hanging out the open door.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Makey’s life hung in the balance over the next few hours. Erielle had transfused the artificial blood and carefully sutured closed the wound in his neck, but he didn’t seem to get any better for a while. His pulse was weak, and he remained clammy and unconscious. Sayen, Jas, Carl, and Erielle took turns sitting by his bed so that someone would be there when—if—he woke up, or in case he got worse.

  Sayen was asleep in the early hours of the morning when the news finally came. Carl shook her shoulder to wake her. “Makey?” she mumbled as she came to.

  “Yeah. He’s woken up. I think he’s going to be okay. Do you want to come and see him?”

  She sat up and pulled on her shirt and pants. She was in a sleeping bag in a communal bedroom. Underworlders lay around her in various states of sleep and wakefulness. She tiptoed out of the door that Carl had left open and went down one floor to the medical center.

  The kid didn’t look good. He was still as white as a ghost, and dark circles lay under his eyes. The wound on his neck was covered in a dressing, but angry red skin was visible at the edges, and fresh blood reddened the white gauze. Nevertheless, he managed to smile at Sayen as she went in. Erielle, Jas, and Carl were already there.

  Makey’s arms and hands lay listlessly on top of his bed coverings. He raised a finger. “Hi, Sayen. I guess I must look how you did when I first saw you aboard the Galathea, except you looked worse.”

  Realizing that he was reacting to her facial expression and was trying to calm her concern for him, she smiled in return—reassuringly, she hoped. “Yeah, well, you only have a scratch on your neck. I was nearly brain dead.”

  Her attempt at humor lightened the mood in the room a little. Jas and Carl chatted about what had happened in their failed attempt to capture a Shadow. Makey couldn’t remember being shot, nor anything much after the shooting had started. No one was talking about what their next plan of action might be. It was enough for the moment that Makey hadn’t died. Jas and Erielle seemed to have made their peace with each other.

  The kid’s eyes began to close, and Erielle suggested that they leave him alone to sleep and regain his strength. Carl volunteered to stay with him. As Sayen and the rest left, Erielle told Makey that he could drink some soup in the morning if he felt up to it.

  She invited Sayen and Jas up to her room for a late supper or early breakfast, but Jas said that it had been a long night, and she would rather sleep. She left them on the second floor, and Erielle and Sayen continued up to the top of the building in a slightly awkward silence.

  They went into Erielle’s room, which was empty. Some dishes of food awaited them, along with a jug of some kind of home brew and beakers.

  Erielle gestured for Sayen to sit down. She chose a cushion near the underworlder, across the table corner that separated them. Erielle’s eyes were downcast as she ate.

  After a while she said, “I didn’t get a chance to thank you for what you did earlier. I was in too much of a hurry to get the blood into Makey.”

  “You don’t have anything to thank me for,” Sayen replied. “He’s my friend. I was only doing what I could to help.”

  “If you hadn’t been there, I don’t think he would be alive now, and I would probably be in a holding cell.”

  “Like I said, I was just doing what I could.”

  Erielle lifted her dark brown eyes to Sayen’s hazel ones. “I’ve gotta say, that’s some modding you have. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “It isn’t modding. My body’s enhanced. We told you about the Shadows on our last prospecting mission, but we left out the fact that I nearly died. Jas saved my life, and she made them keep me in stasis until we got back to Earth. They couldn’t revive me, so the doctors cloned my body and uploaded my mind into my new brain. Before they recreated my body, they offered me the option of choosing a few enhancements.”

  “Really?” Erielle’s gaze lingered on Sayen’s arms and chest. “Can you do anything else as well as you can run and jump?”

  “I have super-sensitive vision and hearing, and my skin’s extremely tough.”

  The underworlder reached out a hand, then hesitated, hovering over Sayen’s bare forearm. “Can I?”

  “Sure.”

  Erielle’s fingers lightly stroked from her wrist to her elbow. A shiver ran up Sayen’s spine.

  “Strange,” Erielle said. “It feels normal.” Their eyes met for a moment.

  “But you’re modded too, right?” Erielle asked. “You got the works at conception, didn’t you?”

  “You can tell?”

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious. You’re flawless. Your face and body are completely symmetrical. The chances of being born looking so perfect naturally must be millions to one. And your intelligence is dialed right up too, isn’t it? What’s your speciality?”

  “Math, I guess. I was a navigator. I am a navigator, I mean. When this mess is sorted out, I plan on returning to my job. Only this time I want to take advantage of my opportunities and not hide away from them. That’s what I used to do, till I came close to dying. My parents were a little protective as I was growing up and—” She gasped.

  “What’s wrong?” Erielle asked.

  “I forgot. My parents had me fitted with a tracker. I need to get it out in case the Shadows find out about it and use it to locate me.”

  “Your parents had a tracker put inside you? Wow. That’s more than a little protective, I’d say, hun.” Erielle frowned. “I might be able to get it out, but I’d have to operate on you in the medical center, and I don’t want to move Makey. Things are still touch and go with him. If he’s looking better tomorrow
, I’ll see what I can do then.”

  “Are you sure you can do it?”

  “I used to be a doctor,” Erielle said.

  “You did?”

  Smiling wryly so that her scar pulled her eye a little out of shape, Erielle said, “Is that really so hard to believe? I guess I don’t look very professional anymore.”

  Sayen’s gaze dropped to the underworlder’s lean, bare arms before returning to her face and its disfigurement. “What happened?”

  “Did you think I was a natural? I guessed you did. After all, why would anyone choose to live like this? It’s true, most of us underworlders are naturals, but not all. I was modded at conception like you. I was given my smarts with a stroke of a geneticist’s gene splicer too. I don’t think my parents’ payment was in the same league as yours, but I did okay from it. Got into a good university, then medical school.” She paused and laughed. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  “Go on, I want to hear,” said Sayen. Her privileged upbringing was rare, she knew. She’d always been curious about what regular lives were like, but it had always seemed crass and insensitive to ask.

  Erielle sighed. “I went into cosmetic surgery.” As Sayen raised her eyebrows, she touched her scar. “I know. Ironic, huh? Anyway, you wouldn’t think there would be much call for facelifts and so on these days, but you’d be surprised. Modding produces beautiful children, but after they grow up they get older, just the same as people always have. Sure, there’s plenty of aging treatments these days, but nothing as effective as the surgeon’s scalpel.”

  Erielle’s tone was quiet and intense. Sayen waited patiently to hear what she had to say next. As the underworlder spoke, she was breaking a piece of bread into tiny pieces.

  “One day, I got asked to do some pro bono work. I agreed. My job paid well, and I had time on my hands to do a little good in the world. It wasn’t until I saw my patient that I realized how much in need of good the world was.” She took a deep breath and released it. “It was a little girl. She was badly disfigured. I thought she must have been in an accident. But my contact—I never met the girl’s parents—my contact told me that she’d been born like that.”

  “How come?” Sayen asked. “Was she a natural?” She had heard about the many genetic abnormalities that modding had just about eradicated.

  “No, she wasn’t a natural. That was the point. It was all done very secretly. My contact brought the little girl in the evening and asked me not to put anything in the system about the operation. The nurse who assisted agreed to never tell anyone. I had to record the anesthetic and other resources as wastage to account for them. The poor girl looked terrible. I wanted to do all that I could to help her lead as normal a life as possible.”

  “Hold on,” interjected Sayen. “You’re sure she wasn’t a natural? I mean...I don’t get it.”

  “Sayen, my contact swore to me that the child’s deformities were the result of modding gone wrong. He said that there were more like her, but the parents were bribed or threatened to silence. Their fee for the genetic modification was refunded, and they were offered a second treatment free of charge. And the babies with the abnormalities...” She swallowed. Her eyes were wet. “The babies were whisked away somewhere. I don’t know where. The parents of the girl who was brought to me had insisted that they wanted to keep her. But they had to keep her hidden away. Our world barely tolerates people conceived naturally these days—people who look normal, let alone anyone who’s different.”

  Lowering her fork to her plate, Sayen tried to take in what Erielle was telling her. “You’re saying that sometimes the process goes wrong, but they can’t tell until the baby’s born?” A thought chilled her: what if she’d come out not quite right, after all the modding that her parents had paid for? Would they have abandoned her?

  “It’s one of the many sickening secrets of our world,” said Erielle. “Just one of them. After that, I tried to continue working as normal, but I found I couldn’t. I would look at my wealthy clients, who wanted a little fat removing here, a slight wrinkle smoothing out there, and I’d wonder if they’d given up a baby who’d failed to meet their expectations; if they’d returned a child who wasn’t up to spec.”

  Sayen was suddenly not hungry. She pushed away her plate.

  Silent tears rolled from Erielle’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Sayen said. She lifted a hand and slowly wiped away one of Erielle’s tears with her thumb, brushing her scar. Erielle met her gaze. “How did you get this?” Sayen asked.

  “Car accident. When you don’t use autodrivers, they happen.” She shrugged. “I could have fixed it up a little, but it seemed kinda hypocritical. I’d left my job by then. I just couldn’t stomach it anymore. I couldn’t stomach living in the sick, fake world we’ve created. I came here and joined the underworlders. They’re my people now.”

  “And I guess I represent everything you underworlders hate?” Sayen asked.

  Erielle smiled and wiped her eyes. “Yeah, you do. I’m sorry for being a misborn to you before. Try not to take it personally. After what you did for Makey, I know you’re not like some digifreaks I’ve met.”

  “What am I like?”

  For a long moment, Erielle didn’t answer, and the silence stretched between the two women. Their eyes didn’t leave each other’s faces.

  It was Erielle who made the first move. She leaned over the table. Sayen met Erielle’s lips with her own.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Carl woke up. He was sitting in a chair, and his head and arms were on a bed. Disoriented for a moment, he sat bolt upright and looked around. As he realized where he was and remembered what had happened the previous day, he immediately swung around to Makey. The kid was motionless, and his skin was like alabaster. Carl leapt up and grabbed his shoulder.

  “What?” exclaimed Makey, his eyes snapping open.

  “Geez, I thought you were dead,” said Carl.

  “Ahhh,” Makey said, wincing as he eased his shoulder from Carl’s grasp, which made him move his neck. “No, I’m still around, thanks.”

  “Sorry. How are you feeling? Are you hungry? Or thirsty? Would you like me to get you something to drink?”

  “Yeah, something to drink would be great.”

  Carl left him and ran up the stairs two at a time to Erielle’s room to tell her the kid was awake again and needed her attention. He burst into the room without knocking. The underworlder was there and so was Sayen. Erielle was looking out of the window and Sayen was lying on some cushions beneath a cover. The two had been talking when Carl interrupted them, though he hadn’t caught the gist of the conversation. They both looked at him.

  For a brief moment, Carl wondered what Sayen was doing there. Everyone else slept in one of the several communal rooms on the second floor. As the realization dawned, he said, “Oh, krat. Sorry,” and he began to back out of the room.

  “It’s okay. What is it?” Erielle asked. “How’s Makey?”

  “He’s woken up, and he’s thirsty. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “I do. Thanks. Could you get him some water from the kitchen? I’ll be down in a minute.”

  Carl ducked out and went to get the kid a drink. By the time he returned to the convalescent’s room, Jas was there. She was talking to Makey.

  “It’s out of the question,” she was saying. “Even if you were well enough, which you aren’t, it’d be far too dangerous.”

  Makey said, “But—”

  “Look, I overreacted in Antarctica,” said Jas, “and I apologize for it. But the basic facts hold true. It was totally idiotic of me to allow you to come along on that trip yesterday. I should have made you get out of the car and picked you up later, no matter what Erielle had said.” As Makey tried to voice further protests, she continued, “No. You aren’t ready. But listen. I will train you, I promise. If we have the opportunity, I’ll start as soon as I can. But we’ve got to make our next move, which is to capture a Shadow. For now, I’m
ordering you to rest and get better. Are you going to follow my order or not?”

  Makey glowered. “I’m going to follow your order,” he said eventually, with an air of disappointment.

  “Are we continuing with the plan?” Carl asked Jas as he handed Makey a beaker.

  “I don’t know what else we can do,” she replied. “Erielle’s right. Without proof, the Transgalactic Council have no reason to believe us. If these scanners that detect Shadows exist, we can show them that we’ve caught one, and they won’t be able to deny that they’re here on Earth. Under the Transgalactic Treaty, they’ll have to help us.”

  “It’s a shame that bugger Alef got away last night,” Carl said.

  “Yeah, it is. Shadow Alef, you mean.”

  “Yeah, Shadow Alef. You know they aren’t the same as their victims, but that doesn’t stop you from feeling like they are.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Carl remembered the Shadow of the army officer Jas had killed on Dawn. He cringed. He seemed to be constantly putting his foot in it that morning.

  The door opened, and Erielle and Sayen came in.

  “How are you doing, kid?” Erielle asked.

  “I’m feeling better by the minute,” Makey replied. Some color had returned to his cheeks, and his eyes were brighter.

  “Great.” Erielle went to the door and bellowed, “Sark, soup,” before shutting it. “If you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to move you out for about an hour while I perform a small operation.”

  “An operation?” Jas asked. “Was someone injured in the raid last night?”

  “No, we all got away unharmed, thanks to this woman,” Erielle said, putting her arm around Sayen and giving her shoulder a squeeze. “But I want to do this operation as soon as I can.”