The Perfect Soldier

by B D Grant

  “I can see that,” Mick says, still watching us.

  I keep my eyes on the floor. I suppose they must have been students at the Rogue school with Kelly; Jessica and Mick obviously knew him well enough to see that he isn’t at all himself. He’s an Elite now, whatever that means.

  All three of my escorts stay in formation around me as we go up a couple more floors. By this point, I am positive that we must be in the skyscraper that was next to the track for us to be up this high up. Everything smells newer, or least that’s what I tell myself as I take in a deep whiff stepping out onto a new floor. It could just be something my mind is making up since I know that the buildings connect. I wish I’d gotten a better look down from that side of the track; maybe I could’ve seen whether there was a skywalk. We make it to the next floor when I hear a deep, mechanical humming coming from outside.

  “They’re here,” Mase announces.

  “I know, I hear,” Flea snaps.

  Their earpieces must be informing them of Kian’s whereabouts. Besides the humming I haven’t heard anything else. “Anyone got an extra ear thingy?” I ask, trying to ignore the fear that’s creeping over me.

  “You don’t need to know” Mase says coldly.

  I knew I wasn’t going to like him.

  Flea looks over his shoulder at Mase, but Kelly beats him to it. “Don’t engage,” he commands.

  “I was just—,”

  “He will replace you,” Flea warns.

  Glad that Mase is being reprimanded, I look over my shoulder at him. Who’ll replace him? Not Kian—he’s not even here yet. Mase looks at Kelly, surly. Does he have the authority to replace personnel?

  We turn down a corridor, and through wide glass windows I see that nearly all of them are identical: long conference tables surrounded by chairs, a few of which are occupied. The first occupied room is full of men and women all watching a projection on the blank wall behind the conference table. I don’t think much of it as I pass, but in the second room there is an identical projection playing on the back wall. Everyone is standing, despite the available seating. The profiles of the Rogues I can see watching the projection are full of excitement, their eyes lighting up as a couple of them exchange grins before turning back to watch the projection. I catch bits of sound through the doors: hear pieces of what the projections are saying as it talks about break-through scientific discoveries and repeatedly hear, “We are going to change our way of life,” from the exuberate voice coming from the speakers of the projection box.

  Eventually, the corridor divides branching left and right.

  We stop just short of the split. No one makes a move to head in either direction.

  I glance around, waiting for someone to fill me in. I’m just about to ask what the deal is when I hear movement off to the right of the corridor.

  Doors open and shut, and I hear a few sets of footsteps on the polished wooden floor. I hear talking for a moment, but it dies off, and some of the footsteps fade away.

  Flea, in front of me, steps to the side as a man rounds the corner. He looks to be in his seventies, very well preserved still having a little muscle tone in his arms that most have lost by their fifties. He’s dressed like I imagine a CEO would look on casual Friday with a comfortable, but sleek, cream colored shirt that has an international feel with its mandarin collar. His khakis could pass in the boardroom or on a golf course.

  “Welcome,” he says to me in a warm baritone that almost sounds familiar. He folds his hands behind his back when he stops a few yards from us. I don’t bother offering him my hand to shake nor do I step forward closing the space between us having to remind myself that even though he looks like a nice old man he works for a group of people known for the dead bodies they leave in their wake. “You must be Taylor,” he says with a gleam in his eye that’s making me feel self-conscious. I nod.

  He looks around at my three escorts. “Thank you, gentlemen, for showing Miss Jameson to me.” Kelly and Mase bow their heads quickly in a rehearsed nod. Then, in unison, they retreat down the hall. I’d rather not see Kelly leave, no matter how weird he’s acting. Just having him close by has been a relief; it’s good to know that even if there is something wrong with him, he’s still alive, being fed and taken care of in some sense.

  I want to cross my arms over my chest, but with effort, I let them hang at my sides. I don’t want to look uncomfortable. I try my best to look him in the eye. “Are you Kian?”

  “I am.”

  Flea has given him a wide berth. “Should I call you, Mr. Kian?”

  “Whichever is fine,” he says, sounding genuine. He watches me for a second and then steps past me. “Come with me.”

  Flea follows us, keeping several feet back so that I suspect that Kian and I can talk without being overheard. Kian takes me past the conference rooms turning down a hallway I haven’t been. The walls are adorned with framed photographs of groups of young men, Dynas if I had to guess by the overly muscular physiques visible underneath the thin wrestling singlets they are wearing in every frame. We turn into what appears to be an office that is for show only. The desk has an oversized calendar laying on it in front of the chair, but nothing is written on it. The bookshelf standing behind the desk and chair only has a couple of books on it and a small potted plant that looks to be plastic. Kian goes straight to the second door in the office that’s on the right side of the desk. It brings us into another, smaller room that had to have been designed to be some kind of large closet versus an office. Flea doesn’t even bother following us into this room, instead I catch sight of him going to the chair behind the desk and plopping down as the door shuts behind me. There is no furniture in this room only another door on the opposite side of the room and a window next to it. He goes straight to the window and stares out. I have to get much closer to him than I would prefer in order to see what he’s looking at.

  On the other side of the glass is a large gymnasium where Dynamar—at least, that’s what it seems from their size—are tussling in pairs on spread-out mats. Instructors weave around the mats, watching and occasionally giving instruction.

  This would be minutely captivating if they were wearing the wrestling singlets I’d seen in the photos lining the hall outside of the office behind me, but they’re in gym shorts and sleeveless shirts. As it stands, my interest isn’t in the gym or those in it. Instead, I tilt my head ever so slightly to the side to study Kian. He isn’t intimidating in the same way as Flea and the other Rogues I have dealt with here. I note the deep wrinkles across his face and neck.

  In front of us, a particularly aggressive Dyna throws his partner to the ground. Throughout the gym, hulking Seraphim slam their partners into the mats. He’s taken me here to intimidate me I’ve decided.

  “Your thoughts?” I’m startled by his voice, and I jump more than I’d care to admit.

  “What?”

  “What are your initial thoughts of the place?”

  “It’s really big,” I say looking at him this time. “How high up does this place go?” The first elevator I got on with Gradney had only five floors listed. After that, every elevator I entered had various amounts of buttons; they hadn’t even bothered to number most. At this point, after being led up and down elevators and through one hall after another, the building has started to feel infinite.

  “The one we are currently in has fifteen stories,” he says without hesitation.

  It’s the first straight answer I’ve gotten in a while. I don’t know whether to be pleased or concerned. “Minus the thirteenth floor, then?” I ask, interested to see how far this chat is going to take me.

  “We aren’t the kind to be skittish over a number,” he tells me. “That being said, the contractor saw to it that the number thirteen was skipped.” He watches one of the adults as he walks past the window. The man looks at us.

  “Plus a basement?” I ask as I lift my hand left hand and wave at the man. He looks right at me, but his expression doesn’t change as he stares for
a second before turning his attention to the pair sparing next to him.

  Kian gives me a somewhat puzzled look. “There are no basements, just parking garages.”

  He’s telling the truth, but my eyebrow raises skeptically at him. “If there isn’t a basement, where are you torturing the captured Seraphim?”

  He inhales sharply at that. He turns his head away as if my words cause him physical pain. He crossed his arms in front of him. “I was devastated when I was told about the complex beneath that school.”

  I copy the gesture, folding my arms loosely over my chest. “Devastated because of the terrible things your people were doing down there? Or because it was destroyed?” I’m watching for it, the give away of his true demeanor, the one that exists behind this old man’s exterior, maybe his expression will darken or he’ll give me a sly grin for such a brief moment that I’ll think I’ve imagined it. He can’t be anything but a monster if he’s in charge.

  His expression hardens, but not in the way I’m expecting. “I was not a part of that school, nor did I know that they were holding people against their will.”

  I don’t let his sincerity throw me off. I want to know who was responsible if not him. “Who was the CEO over at that place then?”

  He looks down at me confused. “The what?”

  I wait, but he continues to stare at me. “You’re the CEO here, right? That’s what they said.” I point behind me at the door where Flea is probably getting comfortable behind the desk. “So who was in charge over there?”

  He opens his mouth but says nothing. I wait. “I am,” he admits, tilting his head to the side and staring off in the space between the window and me as if he hadn’t thought himself the boss until now. He uncrosses his arms. The two guys wrestling closest to the window disentangle themselves and step back to separate ends of the mat. The one on the left looks to the window. It’s when he starts wiping something from his cheek and then runs both hands through his hair as he stares at the window that it dawns on me that the window Kian and I are standing at is a one-way mirror.

  Kian walks around me and goes to the door behind us. “Come with me.”

  Kian takes me back the way I came, down the hall with the conference rooms. Now that I’ve seen the place before, I don’t bother looking around until he stops in front of me. He opens a door, one of the less ornate. It doesn’t have any panes of glass like most of the others down this hall. It’s placed between the windows of the surrounding conference rooms—I doubt I’d have noticed it was any different from the others if we hadn’t stopped. Wordlessly, Kian holds the door. What a gentleman.

  As soon as I take a step inside I stop. The room isn’t a room at all, but a concealed entrance to a private elevator. The space between the door and the elevator is so narrow that only a handful of people could fit once the door to the hallway is closed. Flea walks in behind me, forcing me to move deeper into the small area.

  I wonder if whoever constructed this place had a hard time keeping track of what was where.

  Kian steps inside the waiting elevator and presses one of the two buttons on the panel inside. Once again, I am forced to get much closer to Kian than I would prefer.

  We only go up two floors but the air has changed when the elevator opens. A wall to the left of the elevator and six feet ahead of us gives us no choice but to turn right. This is the first time that the elevator has opened with one place to go. Flea exits the elevator with us, but he doesn’t go more than a couple feet before Kian gives him a look. Without complaint, he positions himself against the wall as if he were a sixtieth century suit of armor at a museum. He remains there, keeping watch as Kian and I continue on.

  It’s another windowless corridor making me wonder if any of the windows I’d seen on the outside of the skyscraper had been functional of if they’d been walled up from the inside to keep people from seeing out. There’s nothing decorating the walls and no doors besides the one at the end of the corridor that we’re heading for. It smells clean, like this area has been scrubbed down recently to the point of being sterile. The scent heightens when we end our short walk opening the door into a laboratory of sorts. There aren’t any microscopes like we had in science lab, but the counters lining either side of the lab that run the length of it thirty feet or so have various scientific, heavy-duty machines sitting on top of them. This is where they’ve spent their money. I wouldn’t even try to guess how much these complex machines set them back. A few of them are making buzzing sounds or vibrating lightly against the counters. The few people working around the machines are all wearing white disposable lab coats that puff around their arms and midsections, making them look like human marshmallows. All of them are too busy with their tasks loading and unloading machines to pay us any mind. Two of them are quietly discussing the results from one of the bigger machines on the far left of the room.

  “The underground shelter at that school was originally built for this,” Kian tells me, motioning at the lab in its entirety. “Mark my words, the research we’re doing here will change the world.”

  One of the workers closest to us finally registers our presence and stops. His hand flies to the back of his ear, and he says a couple of hushed words before reaching for his test tubes, taking particular care with them.

  Kian walks me slowly through the lab giving me time to look at what the people are doing. A woman is jotting down notes on the margin of a lab report before sliding the report in the sleeve of a binder that’s nearly full. Opposite her at the other counter is a man taking out a slide that would go under a microscope for examination. He has a clear dropper in one hand and picks up a new microscope slide form the stack propped up in a wooden case. He carefully dips the dropper into an open test tube in front of him sucking up the tiniest bit of the liquid is from the test tube and then dropping even less onto the middle of the microscope slide. He tosses the dropper into the trashcan at his feet and then takes out a thin circle of glass from the wooden box and gently lays it over the slide where he’d placed the tiny droplet of liquid.

  “The people who work for me are not bad people,” Kian says as he ushers me along. “And the people in that—what did you call it? A basement?” I nod. “Well, the people in that ‘basement’ weren’t bad people either.”

  “Yeah right,” I say under my breath but he hears me and holds up a hand to stop me.

  “At least, not at first.” He nods at the next woman we come up to who looks up at him from the array of test tubes she’s organizing. “We are working towards better understanding and improving our kind. I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the believed religious origins linked to the creation of our kind?”

  “I’ve heard some of it.” Most Seraphim grew up on the beliefs that a holy being placed a hand on us, thus implanting the gifts that have since defined us as Seraphim. I, on the other hand, was not.

  I had just turned sixteen. It took my dad and the Angelos being taken that my mom finally told me that my parents and I, like the Angelos, were Seraphim. While she filled me in on the lifetime of knowledge she had kept from me she mentioned the beliefs of our origins. So yes, I’ve heard of it. But, at the time I was too absorbed by the entirety of what had been kept from me. Maybe if I’d known all of it, Seraphim and Rogues, I’d have been able to protect my family, and maybe I wouldn’t be here, with him.

  Kian stops walking to watch a small machine working feverishly. The circular lid on top of the machine is thick but see-thru. The contents are spinning at such a high rate that it’s unclear exactly what it is swirling around. “With the resources and technology we have here, we can determine precisely what it is that sets us apart, what makes us Seraphim.”

  “You don’t think God had anything to do with it?” I ask, staring at the machine. I can feel him looking over at me.

  “Personal beliefs are not what drives this facility; it’s much more than that. Think about it: Wouldn’t it be nice to know what makes you and me Seraphim?” It’s a rhetorical question, but t
he fervor in his voice and intense way he’s looking at me I can tell that he fully expects me to be as enthralled by what they’re doing here as he is. “How about someone who has no family history of being Seraphim, and yet their ability is just as refined as someone whose ancestors have been Seraphim since the beginning? Wouldn’t you want to know?”

  A scene from a comic book I read as a kid comes to mind as he’s talking. It was a superhero story about that kid who came into contact with a meteorite one day and woke up with the power of invisibility the next. I think about telling the meteorite theory to him as something he could explore, but know that he won’t find it too amusing. Maybe it’s because I’m so new to the community, but I really don’t care that much about the science that makes me a Seraphim; I’m just happy to be one.

  The spinning machine we are watching slows to the point that I can see that it is full of test tubes. Kian pulls a drawer open and takes out what looks like weird metal pinchers with a slot in the middle. When the machine stops, Kian opens the see-through lid and extracts one tube full of a dark red liquid from the machine. He sets it in a test tube tray next to the machine, which already holds four similar tubes of dark liquids. He reaches into the machine to grab the next tube but pauses without explanation. The woman closest to us looks up sharply at Kian and then glances over at the guy who had stopped when Kian and I first walked in. He hurries over.

  “I got it,” he says to Kian, taking the test tube holder from his hands.

  Kian steps back, lost in thought. I stare at him curiously. “Lets keep with the tour,” he says curtly.

  As we leave, I glance back to see the man in front of the small machine whispering, his hand behind his ear again.

  Kian doesn’t stop to let me in first as we enter the next room connected to the lab. For a second I think about kicking him hard in the back, slamming the door shut, and running for it. I imagine a best case scenario if Flea were still standing by the elevators.