“Oh, no.” She didn’t realize she’d said that out loud until she heard her voice echo off the walls.
A dozen scenarios flashed through her brain: Frémont had somehow co-opted Didier and gotten him to contact her; together, Frémont and Didier would overpower her and make her help them escape; Frémont had killed Didier and would get her next—
“Oh, thank God, Jhena.” The voice didn’t belong to Frémont. It belonged to Didier.
He stepped into the light. He was a burly man, mostly muscle, and his uniform made him look more formidable than the android guards. Although at the moment, he didn’t look formidable at all. The red light bathed his bald pate, and put his eyes in shadow. He seemed creepy, almost like a prisoner himself.
“I’m not coming any closer until you tell me what’s going on,” she said.
“Um, it’s better if I don’t say. You need to look.”
She shook her head. She wasn’t getting near that light, particularly now that a smell was reaching her. It was foul—as if someone hadn’t cleaned the toilets in this section ever.
“I’m going to throw your evidence bags at you, and then I’m leaving,” she said.
“Okay,” Didier said, sounding like it wasn’t okay. “But then you’ll miss your only chance to make a small fortune.”
“I’m not helping a mass murderer escape,” she said.
“Oh,” Didier said. “There’s no need to worry about that. Frémont’s not going anywhere.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“I told you,” he said. “Take a look.”
But shut off your links, he sent through her private link. All except emergency links.
She bit her lower lip. She hadn’t shut anything down, not yet, and that little request would be recorded. If she complied, it would mean—what? That she had conspired with Didier? Or that she simply didn’t know better?
God, she hated second-guessing.
“If you don’t join me in fifteen seconds, don’t bother,” he snapped.
She still couldn’t see his face. That worried her.
But she would probably get in trouble just for being here, especially if something had gone wrong. After ten seconds clicked off on the timer she displayed on her right eye, she shut down all the various recording links, then shut down her contact links except for the emergency links.
As she did, the timer in her eye vanished.
Oh, great. She had forgotten the timer was connected to the network. Now she wouldn’t know how much time had elapsed. She could probably set another timer with her emergency links, but that would require a jury-rig, which she doubted Didier would give her time for.
She stepped forward.
The red light was actually warm or, at least, warmer than the rest of the corridor had been.
“What the hell’s going on?” she asked, trying to ignore the way her stomach flopped at the stench. It felt like a live thing, as if the air itself had sewage molecules, and they were coating her.
Didier nodded at the cell.
She could barely see inside it—the cot that extended from the wall was still out, not recessed like it should have been at this time of day. The toilet didn’t look like it had overflowed, but it was hard to see in the deep red light.
Frémont was nowhere in sight. Had Didier let him out? Was Frémont going to attack her?
Her heart rate went up even farther, although she hadn’t thought that was even possible.
“Hurry,” Didier said.
She looked around. The walls nearby were black from the closed cell doors. She couldn’t see any androids at all.
There was, as far as she could tell, no place for Frémont to hide.
Her mouth was dry. She swallowed against it anyway. She couldn’t remember ever being this frightened as an adult. As a child, yes, but as an adult—
Her mind skittered away from the thought.
She took another step, and then another, not sure how she was managing to make her feet work. Somehow she was, though.
Somehow.
She peered over that bed, and finally saw Frémont. He was sprawled on the floor, legs twisted, one arm still on the bed, the other extended toward the toilet.
The smell was coming from him, and it was so bad here that her eyes watered.
“What the hell…?” she muttered, but she did so not to be answered, but because she couldn’t remain quiet.
Something had dried around his mouth, and there was a lot of liquid on the floor. His face was bloated—or it seemed that way. She couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the light.
“What the hell?” she repeated, this time looking at Didier. “Is he dead?”
Didier smiled at her. “Yep,” he said. “And we only have a few minutes before the administration finds out.”
THREE
JHENA STOOD NEAR the entrance to the cell. She stared at PierLuigi Frémont’s feet because she didn’t want to see any other part of him. Certainly not whatever was causing the stench that seemed to get worse with each passing minute.
She kept a hand over her face, and really wished she had worn an environmental suit. Then, at least, she would be able to breathe fresh air, with the proper amount of oxygen, and she wouldn’t be so cold.
“You didn’t report his death?” Jhena asked. “My God, do you realize what they’ll do—”
“They won’t do anything. Not if we act fast.” Didier looked like some kind of alien she’d never encountered before with his black guard’s uniform reflecting the flaring red emergency light.
With that thing on, wouldn’t the authorities know something was wrong?
She let out a small breath, warm against her palm, reminding herself that she and Didier were the authorities. At least for the moment.
“Surely, someone will come to check. My links seem to be off,” she said. “And you know that triggers terrible alarms. Everyone will come here shortly, and we’ll get in trouble—”
“Believe it or not,” Didier said with a grin. The red reflected off his teeth, making them seem sharp. “Frémont severed the links, not me.”
He couldn’t have. Jhena knew that much. Prisoners in Earth Alliance Maximum Security prisons couldn’t access systems.
Of course, prisoners couldn’t kill themselves either. They didn’t have the tools. They didn’t have access to the tools.
She glanced at Didier. Had he provided Frémont with something that would kill him? She didn’t want to know if that was the case. She wasn’t going to ask.
She wasn’t going to ask anything.
Jhena crouched.
The stench seemed milder down low, or maybe she was just getting used to it. Still, the smell of feces and bodily fluids was so strong that she pinched her nose closed, which then made her breathe through her mouth, which was a mistake. She could taste the smell now, and her stomach turned again.
Frémont must have shut down more than links, because the environmental systems should have cleared out the smell by now, certainly cleared it enough that it wouldn’t be so strong that she could almost feel it.
She shivered, and knew it wasn’t just because of the cold. Her head ached, and she wondered how long she’d been here.
“Why would he do that?” she asked. “I mean, if he could do that, shouldn’t he have tried to escape?”
“Escape where?” Didier asked. “He could have roamed this facility or maybe even made it to the dock, but that’s where he’d get caught, and he knew it. He could manipulate systems inside here, maybe just the once. But he couldn’t manipulate the entire prison. No one can.”
She knew that. She was just so shaken that she hadn’t thought it through.
“Besides,” Didier said, “he did escape. He died. We can’t prosecute him now.”
She glanced up at Didier. He still looked odd in the red light, almost as if he were enjoying this.
“Surely the punishments wouldn’t have been that bad,” she said.
“I don’t t
hink it was the punishment he was worried about,” Didier said. “He knew he wasn’t ever going to get out of prison, and that he would become just another bad guy in a whole universe full of bad guys. This way, his people will still do his bidding—those who are free—and he will always have this doubt connected to him. Did he really do all those things? Or did someone set him up?”
She shook her head, then wished she hadn’t. It made her dizzier. She almost put out a hand to catch herself, then thought the better of it.
“Why would he care about that?” she asked. “Wouldn’t he rather be alive?”
“This was a man who had people worship him.” Didier sounded excited. Why would he sound excited? Shouldn’t he be worried? “He liked that. He believed he was important, and they believed it too.”
“Until, what is it called, Abbondiado?”
“See?” Didier said. “You know what happened to him, how he was captured, how things turned on him. You know it, and therefore, you think he’s important. You don’t know that about the other prisoners here.”
That wasn’t entirely true. There were some Xelen imprisoned in a far wing for eating their human companions on a supply run. If she thought hard, she could come up with a dozen other examples.
But she understood Didier’s point. She knew about Frémont. Everyone knew about Frémont.
“You think this is important,” she said. “I mean, beyond us getting in trouble for his death.”
“Oh, we won’t,” Didier said. “There’ll be a big investigation, and everyone will wonder how he got whatever it was that he ingested, and then—”
“He ate something?” she asked.
Didier shrugged. “I’m no coroner. But that pinkish foam around his mouth suggests poison to me.”
How he knew the foam was pinkish in this light was beyond her.
“And they can’t trace it to us?” she asked.
“Not unless you gave it to him.”
She shivered again. She needed to stand up. She was cutting off her own air here—what little air there was.
“I never met him before today,” she said, sounding stupid.
“You haven’t met him now,” Didier said, but he was grinning. “You’re not used to the low-oxygen ratios are you?”
“No,” she said, and she sounded as sick as she felt. “Can I go?”
“Nope,” he said. “I need your help.”
“For what?” she asked.
He helped her up, then grabbed some evidence bags from the box.
“You and me,” he said. “We got about ten minutes before someone notices something off. I figure the best we can do is five, because I want to jump ahead of this thing. So, we get as much DNA as we can.”
“What?” Chills ran down her back. Didier wanted her to touch Frémont? What if he wasn’t dead? What if he was?
Her stomach did a slow flip.
“Ah, sweet child, do you know why people work in prisons?”
She suspected the answer wasn’t as simple as they need a job. “Why?”
“Because, if done right, there are a lot of money making opportunities here.”
Somehow she hadn’t thought Didier was one of the guards who sold things and made a profit. No prisoner ever flagged Didier as someone who traded on the prison black market. No one ever marked Didier’s file for possible illegal activity.
She had thought it was because he was unassailably honest, but she was beginning to realize that maybe he was just unbelievably cautious.
“I don’t sell things. I don’t want to make money,” she said. “I just want out of here.”
“We’re talking millions,” he said.
Her gaze met his. Millions?
“And you wouldn’t collect right away, so no one would ever know what you did here. If you get busy doing.”
Millions. Never getting caught. She was already half a step close to trouble. And she hated it here. She hated it period. Imagine if she were in charge of her own destiny. Imagine if she…
She was lightheaded and not thinking clearly.
But she knew this much: she knew that she would be asked about everything anyway, and the best way to protect herself was to pretend to participate. That way, Didier wouldn’t blame her. He’d see her as a co-conspirator.
She could report him after everything was over.
Whatever “over” meant.
FOUR
JHENA’S EYES WERE getting used to the flaring red light. Except that as the light increased and decreased, it created shadows in corners. Shadows that looked like they moved.
Maybe they were moving.
Or maybe she was hallucinating from stress and lack of oxygen.
She had a headache. One hand still covered her mouth and nose, but she’d stopped pinching her nostrils, for what good it did her.
Bile rose in the back of her throat. She swallowed hard, hoping she wouldn’t vomit right now. She couldn’t vomit. She had no idea what Didier would do to her if she did.
“I’m not touching that man,” she said. She was looking at Frémont’s corpse, its head still hidden from her by the bunk. She thought maybe she saw the foam that Didier had mentioned, although she couldn’t be sure.
What she was sure of was that some kind of stain was inching its way toward the only good pair of shoes that she owned.
“I don’t want you to touch him,” Didier said. “You’re strictly the help in this instance.”
The…what? She had never heard that phrase before, but it didn’t sound good. She didn’t like it at all. She took a deep breath, then wished she hadn’t, since that foul taste accompanied it.
It didn’t matter what Didier wanted. She would be passing out soon, whether he liked it or not.
“Then can I leave?” she asked.
“No.” He crouched. “Hand me the bags when I ask for them.”
Bags. Evidence bags. Which she was still clutching. Getting her own DNA all over them. DNA, fingerprints, hair, fiber, all kinds of things that would identify her, but not Didier.
Too late now. It was all too late now. She was here, she was involved, and she would betray this son of a bitch before he knew what hit him.
“Oh, hell,” he said. “Just give me the damn box.”
Had she missed an instruction? It sounded like she had. His irritation suggested it.
Which was good, because his DNA, his prints, his hair and fiber, would be on the box as well.
“DNA,” she said. “That’s what you want.”
It wasn’t quite a question, or maybe it was. She struggled to wrap her sluggish mind around what was going on.
“You want to sell DNA?” she asked.
“Something like that.” He pulled a scooping tool she hadn’t seen before out of one of the many pockets of his uniform, and set to work.
He didn’t scrape up the fluids (oh, thank God, because she wasn’t sure her stomach could handle it), but he did scrape the skin on the back of Frémont’s hands.
Didier put the scrapings inside the first bag. She couldn’t see anything, but the bag’s exterior changed color, like it was supposed to when something went inside it, going from clear to pale yellow.
Then he reached backwards, the bag dangling from his hand.
“Take the damn thing,” he snapped.
“And do what?” she asked.
“Hold it until I tell you otherwise. What happened to your brains? Move it.”
She took a step closer, careful not to walk in anything, and took the bag. It was warm against her skin.
He didn’t look at her. He was touching Frémont’s face, swabbing or scooping or doing something to his mouth, eyeballs, nose—
She had to take another deep breath just to keep herself from throwing up. Even though the deep breath was as big a mistake as the previous one. She was so dizzy and nauseous and ill.
He handed her another bag, then another, and another.
She lost count after a while, clutching the bags as if she had gone on a
shopping spree gone awry.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, Didier stood up.
“Time’s up. We gotta get out of here.”
She would have thought that time was up months ago. Years ago.
She thrust the bags at him and he shook his head, putting out his hands.
“You get to keep them,” he said.
“But—”
“I’m going to guard the scene like a good prison employee. I’ve got a handful of empty bags here, just in case someone needs them.”
“What am I doing?” She was slurring her words. She sounded drunk. She had Oxygen Deprivation Syndrome, which the prison called ODS. The oxygen was too low. She was not well, at all.
“You’re going to stuff those bags back in that box, and get them out of here,” he said.
She looked at the bags. They were a different color than the other bags—orange? Maybe yellow. She couldn’t tell in this light. If someone (something; some android) looked inside the box, they’d see that the bags were full.
“How…?”
“You can take things out of here,” he said. “It’s bringing things in that they’re most worried about.”
She knew that was right; it sounded right anyway. She wondered if it really was right.
God, ODS was like being drunk. She remembered that from previous times. Earlier times. That was why she had her timer.
Which was shut off.
If only she could think clearly.
“And if you don’t get out of here, then they will find the bags,” he said.
“What do I do after I get out of here?” she asked.
He grinned. “Exactly what you’ve been wanting to do all along,” he said.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Puke,” he said. “Head to the ladies room and puke.”
FIVE
JHENA CARRIED THE box under her arm, and prayed she wouldn’t get caught.
Half a corridor away from the cell, her links came back on. She was supposed to notify everyone else as soon as she reached the entrance to the cell block, and she was supposed to blame ODS on the delay.
The Peyti Crisis: A Retrieval Artist Novel: Book Five of the Anniversary Day Saga (Retrieval Artist series 12) Page 2
