The doors opened to a starkly lit, smooth metal interior, without mirrors to counteract the sense of claustrophobia. It was an elevator designed to contain and intimidate. The Meat dragged Supercollider in and the rest of us followed, standing as far from him as we could.
The elevator started to move, but very slowly. A laser scan passed over us and I felt a fresh rush of panic.
“Unable to register facial recognition. Please face the doors,” said a calm, cheery robot voice.
“Ah shit,” Vesper said. Ludmilla stepped closer to me, protectively, as though she were going to be able to fight the elevator robot with her fists.
“Get him up,” I said. “Hold him up so his face is where it should be.”
The Meat grunted and lifted Supercollider higher off the ground. The lasers swept again. The robot again pleasantly informed us we’d failed the scan. “Two more attempts. Please face the doors.”
“Higher,” Quantum said, “he’s taller than that.” Her voice was even and authoritative but the set of her shoulders had become tense.
The Meat groaned and hauled Supercollider’s torso—he was really all torso now, his face lodged somewhere in the center of his chest and grotesquely blended and elongated, like the Blemmyes in the Nuremberg Chronicle.
“It’s not going to work, look at his fucking face.” There was raw panic in Vesper’s voice.
“I am trying not to. Shit. Shit.”
The lasers screened the elevator a third time, cool and efficient. “Unable to register facial recognition. One more attempt. Would you prefer a retinal scan?”
“Yes, we would prefer that, for fuck’s sake.” Vesper was rattled. He didn’t like enclosed spaces.
“Unable to process your answer, Supercollider.”
Quantum had her phone in her hand, her brow furrowed. “Shut up,” she said, frantically hunting. “One second, one second.” She put the phone to her ear.
“Are you taking a fucking call right now or—” I kicked Vesper to shut him up while Quantum glared daggers at him. I motioned for everyone else to be silent.
“Would you prefer a retinal scan?” the robot sang.
Quantum’s face lit up. She switched her phone to speaker and played a clip. It was tinny and weird, but Supercollider’s voice. “Yes, I’d like that. Can we—” She cut it off.
“It sounds like you would prefer a retinal scan. Is that correct?”
Quantum played the clip again. “—message. Yes, I’d like that. C—”
“Retinal scan indicated. Scanner active.” A panel slid open and a rectangular box descended from the ceiling. It came down to face height for someone around six-four. There was a thin slit of glass in the device. “Please look into the mirror, Supercollider.”
Ludmilla and Quantum moved to help the Meat position the ruin of Supercollider’s face exactly right in front of the aperture. He couldn’t do much to resist, but he was trying. He wriggled like a pupa about to split open before the cicada emerged from the husk.
“Please look directly into the mirror, Supercollider,” the robot chided. “Unable to register retinal scan. Please try not to blink.”
“Keep his eyes open,” I said. “He’s not looking.”
“I’m not sure I can hold his eyelids open without damaging them,” Quantum fretted. She was visibly sweating from both physical strain and focus.
“I don’t care, none of us are dying in this box.”
She gritted her teeth. Of everything she had done to him, this was obviously the most horrific for her, the most difficult. Supercollider squalled pathetically, and one of the Meat turned his face away suddenly.
After a tense second, the robot chirped happily.
“Retinal scan confirmed. Thank you, Supercollider. Proceeding to special containment.”
The collective sigh of relief was immense. Everyone dropped Supercollider to the ground, unable to keep supporting his bulk, and he lay in a grotesque puddle as we continued our descent. Quantum turned to one of the walls and rested her forehead against the cool metal surface, looking defeated. I approached her and she raised a hand, telling me to let her be.
“It’s almost over,” I said. “That should be the last thing you have to do.”
“I don’t think I can—”
“You won’t have to. It’s done. You’re done now, okay?”
“Okay.”
I resisted the impulse to touch her comfortingly, knowing it was the last thing she wanted, and moved as close to the doors as I could. I wanted out of this metal box as quick as possible.
After a distance that seemed impossible, the elevator finally ground to a merciful halt. The air had become so thin and close and sour I felt like I was suffocating. The doors slid serenely open and I slipped a little in my haste to get out; I didn’t want to think too hard about what might have made the floor slick.
Everyone stumbled and staggered out of the elevator with the almost sobbing relief of people who had been trapped underground for weeks and were just experiencing fresh air again. The landing we reached wasn’t much to celebrate. There was just barely enough room for all of us; the space wasn’t much bigger than the elevator itself. It was gray and sterile, sealed concrete. There had been no attempt at all to make the space hospitable or comfortable. It was clear this was not somewhere anyone came very often.
The ceilings were low and the short corridor in front of us was narrow enough that two people could barely stand abreast, tight enough that the Meat lifting Supercollider had to switch their grip so they were carrying him like a piece of furniture, with one in front and the other behind.
The corridor led to a pair of doors with a short foyer between, which was at least better lit than the hallway in front or behind it. The foyer housed a pair of negative-pressure doors, the kind that might be found in an isolation unit on a hospital’s critical-care floor. A sign told us brusquely the second set of doors would not open before the first was sealed, to prevent contaminants from either entering the rooms beyond or escaping out into the rest of the facility.
“We can’t all fit between the doors at once,” Vesper said, rubbing the back of his neck.
“I’ll stay here,” Quantum said, too quickly.
I turned, surprised. “You sure?”
She nodded once. She looked as unwell as I had seen her, gray and clammy, her lips almost bloodless.
“You deserve to be there. We can go through in shifts. This is your moment too.”
“I’m fine.” She flinched at how loud her voice was in that lonely space.
I realized that she was terrified, and backed off. It was easy to forget that to her Leviathan was still the boogeyman; to most people he was still the scariest thing in the world. Even underground, even imprisoned, even in whatever condition he was going to be in, she’d spent all of her career as his adversary, thinking he was the incarnation of everything to be fought against in this world.
“No problem. Guard the exit.” She was visibly relieved, and seemed especially so to have a job to do, an excuse not to enter Leviathan’s cell.
I gritted my teeth before speaking again, realizing that the best way forward was going to put me in a terrible situation. “I think we can only fit three at a time. In case we need to disarm another fucking bomb with Super Meat Sack’s farts or something, one of you”—I pointed to the Meat—“and I should take him through first.”
The Meat looked at each other, stuck their fists out, and threw a round of rock-paper-scissors (they’d propped Supercollider against the wall as we problem-solved, like a piece of luggage). The loser (rock) swore and turned toward me. “Can you help me carry him through? He’s heavy.”
“I’m not sure how useful I can be, but I’ll help you drag him.” I was wearing a harness that had a special loop for my cane; I was able to sling it across my back to get both my hands free. I had avoided much contact with the sheer abjection of Supercollider’s present physical form, but there was no way I could avoid it now. The two Meat go
t him through the first set of doors, but then one of them left and I had to take his place. The doors closed behind the three of us and then—but for one bullet-headed enforcer with a blond high-and-tight—I was alone with the ruined bloat that the hero had become.
Most of his costume had torn, having been used over and over to lift and reposition and drag him. There were still shreds and chunks of it, grotesquely woven between the places where his flesh was folded over, effectively creating handles to pick him up with. He was awfully heavy, almost impossibly so; I suddenly had a deep pang of sympathy for the Meat who’d been taking turns dragging and carrying and hoisting him throughout the facility.
Despite his indestructibility, his flesh was still warm and elastic, still had the deceptive give that made me think it would be fragile. It made me wince to drag him across the floor, imagining that flesh catching on the sealed concrete, but I couldn’t scrape or abrade him if I tried. It would have taken Leviathan’s most advanced technology to so much as make him bleed a little.
I hated touching him. He was damp all over and actively wet in some places, sweat and drool and possibly piss; I couldn’t tell which orifices were folded up where or how, and frankly I didn’t want to look closely enough to have that clarified. His eyelids were mercifully not destroyed, but they were swollen now and his eyes were oozing with thick, clear lymph. He wasn’t making sounds anymore, and his eyes were closed as much as they could be. I decided he must have lost consciousness.
Sweating, negotiating with the exhausted Meat about who needed to lift what and who needed to shove when, I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt tired and full of revulsion. I was anxious to get to Leviathan at last and also secretly terrified about what I would find, how he would be. I was just raw and scared and wanted it to be over.
After too many struggle-filled minutes we got him to the other side of the doors, set our burden down, and got them sealed. I leaned heavily against the wall, my face pressed against its comforting immovability and coolness with my eyes closed, for the much quicker span of time it took for everyone else to get through the negative-pressure lock. I didn’t move until Vesper came and put his hands on my shoulders; I felt the internal whir of his finger joints tightening to give me a small squeeze. When I didn’t move immediately he took my cane out of the harness across my back, and handed it to me when I wearily turned around.
There was only a single door now. It was more like the entrance to a vault, with a heavy rotating lock mechanism. The handle looked like something that would open an ancient submarine. There was also a keypad, and a flat panel that looked unhappily like it might be another biometric authenticator.
“Want me to try and talk to the lock?” Vesper offered kindly, digging in the pocket of his tactical vest for a cable he could plug into his temple.
I made a noncommittal sound and walked a little closer, trying to figure out a plan of attack least likely to get us gassed or nuked. A proximity sensor went off when I got a bit nearer, and the panel hummed to life.
“Welcome, Supercollider, we’ve been expecting you,” the robot said solicitously. I hissed a curse. “Streamlined access still active. Please stand on the pressure plate for final scan.”
I suddenly realized there was a round spot on the floor, right in front of the door, that was inset in the concrete the smallest margin; it must be weight sensitive.
“Set him down there, slowly,” I ordered the Meat. “Put half his weight down and then the rest of it, like he’s taking a step onto the plate.”
“We’ll try,” the thick-necked blond said, and laboriously began to maneuver Supercollider onto the pressure sensor.
“Streamlined access!” Vesper was disgusted. “I bet the asshole doesn’t even have two-factor authentication enabled.”
I chose not to remind Vesper that streamlined access was probably the only reason we were able to do this. Ludmilla drew close to me, expecting things to go badly as always. Her pessimism was one of the most comforting things in the world, steady and unchanging as the tides.
“Thank you, Supercollider,” the robot hummed. “Please deposit a DNA sample to be granted access.”
A tiny slot opened in the blank panel by the door, containing a buccal swab.
“Of course.”
I gingerly took the swab in my hand and made my way to Supercollider, careful not to step on the edges of the plate. Mercifully, he was “face”-up, his features emerging from the swollen and irregular landscape of his chest like a volcanic island rising out of the ocean.
He hadn’t been able to speak since Quantum had sunk his head into his body; his muscles were so out of place, and his jaw anchored by the flesh around it. His lips were parted and bunched over to one side, out of which he’d been drooling steadily. I got the scraper end of the swab in the dribbling aperture, ran it roughly over the inside of his cheek, and stepped back.
“Pick him up,” I ordered. “The robot needs to think he’s dropped the swab in himself, and it won’t work if he’s still on the plate.”
The Meat was not excited about having to lift Supercollider so soon. “You sure?”
“Better safe than sorry.”
He hefted Supercollider off the plate, arms shaking, and I waited a beat before dropping the swab into the little slot. It disappeared into the mechanism next to the door and the computer hummed happily.
“You can drop him now,” I said, almost as an afterthought, and there was a sound like a side of beef hitting the floor of an abattoir that made me wince.
The door thought for a moment and then obligingly slid open.
“Thank you, Supercollider,” it said serenely.
The room beyond was painfully bright. I flinched and squinted, waiting for my eyes to adjust, at once wanting to rush in and wanting this last delay to stretch out into infinity.
Anxiety had my stomach in a vise grip. Being in Leviathan’s presence was always a nerve-racking experience, no matter how much weird affection grew between us. There was no real way to gauge if a force of nature returned or was even aware of one’s attachment. The few weeks we had been apart made me awkward and forgetful; I was suddenly gripped by the stupid panic that I wouldn’t know what to say to him.
I also didn’t know what state I would find him in. His near-invulnerability was a great comfort, but Supercollider was supposed to be indestructible too, and we’d been able to do unspeakable things to him. The Draft had far more resources at their disposal, and Supercollider was not as intelligent or creative, but certainly matched us for malice. I was worried I would find Leviathan in pieces. I was worried he would be an empty shell.
He didn’t smell like a human who was suffering confinement—the stale body odor and accumulated filth, the sourness of starvation. The smell in the room was dry and warm, kind of brittle, a bit like fallen leaves late into the autumn, after frost had touched them and they had just begun to decay.
The room was bare to the point of featurelessness. The light further washed it out and made the space seem unreal, at risk of melting away. A toilet and a sink were set firmly into the wall and floor. There was a weird hum I could feel more than hear, which I suspected was interference from a Faraday cage.
The light made it difficult at first for me to locate him on the infrared scale, so the first thing I saw when my eyes were still adjusting was a smear of ultraviolet defiance. He was seated with his back to the wall, legs bent and arms resting against his knees, a pose that was strategically defensive but appeared almost rakishly casual. His head was down but carefully angled, cocked and listening.
Ludmilla strode past me into the too-bright room and went to stand by her regular place at his right side. She left a careful distance, ready to help him up, but not moving to touch him until he gave assent. I allowed her momentum to propel me forward, coming to stand in front of him.
“You look better than I thought you would,” I managed, hearing my voice crack and letting it happen.
He didn’t move or respond for a lon
g moment, and I felt an ugly rush of panic in my gut. Maybe what I had first seen as hypervigilance was in fact crushed defeat; maybe what looked initially like careful wariness was emptiness.
Then, he lifted his head an infinitesimal amount. “Now, this is new. This is interesting.”
Of course he thought this was a tactic, another piece of whatever psychological warfare he’d been subjected to. I didn’t try and reassert my own reality, didn’t beg him to recognize me. The best way to convince him was to be steadily, stalwartly real.
“Can you stand?” I asked.
A ripple passed across him, a kind of grim amusement. “How kind of you to ask.”
“Leviathan. Are you hurt, Sir?” I felt a sour welling in my throat. I rolled my eyes up, trying to will myself not to cry, but the lights were too bright and my eyes started watering immediately, the exact opposite of what I wanted to happen.
He lifted his head a little more at the smell of salt water on my face. “This is good, this is very good. Your best so far, in fact.”
I felt a little bewildered, unsure what the most helpful thing to do or say would be. I looked behind me for support; the Meat were waiting respectfully in the hallway, unnecessarily guarding Supercollider, while Vesper stood warily at the threshold. The openings of his eyes were tightened as much as they could and the brightness was obviously horrifically uncomfortable for him, so he was keeping a bit of distance between himself and the full intensity of the light.
I turned back. “You can leave whenever you like,” I said, clearly and steadily. “Let us take you home.”
He sighed. “The voice is very convincing, I’ll give you that.”
“Leviathan, it’s me.”
“You would have me hope. It’s crueller than you usually are. You would have me stand and try to walk out the door, perhaps even let me get a step through, before whatever you have devised next as punishment befalls me. Clever indeed, but not clever enough by far.”
Hench Page 34