The Kobalt Dossier

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Blood spurted, he gave a cry of surprised pain, and she snatched the pistol away from him, used it to parry the knife stab the woman directed at her. Lifting her right leg, she smashed it down on the side of the woman’s left knee. Her leg immediately buckled and Lyudmila raked the barrel of the pistol along her temple, scoring a deep gash that welled blood. She took her weapons as well, then used the tip of her boot to send the man with the smashed nose into unconsciousness.

  “Well done!”

  She turned to see Hel, the compact warrior with the gold cross chained around her neck.

  “But now, sadly, your journey is at an end.”

  *

  “You don’t get to do that,” Ana said. “You don’t get to claim them as your parents.”

  “What do you care?” Evan replied. “You and your sister Luzida have renounced them.”

  “Irrelevant.” Ana leaned forward again, chin jutting out, eyes glimmering. “You’re an interloper, a trespasser. A fucking alien to everyone.” The corner of her mouth twisted up. “And for your information my sister’s name is Lucinda, not that ugly version Konstantin gave her.”

  “I don’t care how many times you change your names, Ana, you’re both still batshit crazy.”

  Ana struck her across the cheek, a backhanded blow that made Evan’s head spin. She’s strong, Evan thought. Stronger than she looks. That backhander wasn’t an attack; it was retaliation. Finally, she had gotten under her sister’s skin. Kostya and Rebecca said she was crazy, and they weren’t wrong. Everyone has a weakness, she thought, including me. She had to pray she could work Ana’s to get herself out of here before her sister found her own.

  Ana pressed a button, tilted the slab Evan was tied to into a diagonal angle. “I want to show you something.” She lifted her shirt above her navel, pushed her trousers down, exposing herself while Evan looked on in fascinated horror.

  “Contrary to the received wisdom of my family history I wasn’t born barren.”

  Evan found her gaze riveted to the ziggurat of scars crisscrossing her sister’s lower belly. First, a vertical scar from the center of her pubis to halfway to her navel. A shorter horizontal scar slashed across it just above her pubic mound, making an upside-down cross. On each side smaller, angular scars made up the ziggurat.

  Evan shook her head, part of her disbelieving. When she spoke, her voice emerged as a husky whisper. “Ana, you experimented on yourself.”

  “While I was at the clinic. Jon Pine assisted me like a good little major domo. I was the boss’s daughter, after all.” She covered herself up, then stepped forward, delivered another backhand slap. “You’re pitying me? Every scientist on the verge of a major breakthrough experiments on herself first. I wanted to create a new kind of baby—a better child, one born without Original Sin, with no relationship to Adam and Eve.”

  Evan licked her lips. “How is that even possible?” She was appalled. Just the fact that she asked this rational question was evidence that she was falling further and further down Ana’s demented rabbit hole.

  “Gene manipulation. With the CRISPR Cas9 technique I am editing the human genome, taking out all undesirable traits, adding new ones, creating the perfect human without any of the seven deadly sins, which over and over again have caused one catastrophe after another, one worse than the next.”

  “You’re not a geneticist.”

  “How naïve you are.” Ana’s tongue against her palate made a disapproving sound, like the clicking of nocturnal insects. “Konstantin and Rebecca don’t know I’m a geneticist. If Konstantin had he’d never have given me a position at the clinic. That’s not their field at all. But I needed a safe place to experiment with my preliminary findings.”

  She pressed another button and the head end of the slab rose high enough for Evan to see beyond the low pebble-glass barrier to the left of the bay she was trapped in. She gave an involuntary indrawn breath. “Wendy … Michael,” she whispered, seeing them lying side by side on surgeon’s tables, seeing her worst nightmare for them a reality.

  “So lovely, don’t you think?”

  “Whatever you’re planning to do to them, I beg you not to.” Evan squirmed under the blanket, her fingers working, working the tiny edge weapon she had secreted, hidden from view.

  “Let me tell you something, there’s nothing worse than knowing you’ve been abandoned. First it seeps into you, then it burrows its way into the very core of you, and when it sinks its claws into you it never lets go.

  “That’s what happened to me, Robin. Rebecca rejected me. My first memory is of her turning away from me, while a nurse picked me up, cradled me. Neither of them ever held me, fed me, soothed me when I was ill, when the nightmares began, even when the roller coaster of elation and despair sickened me beyond all understanding. They just shoved drugs at me.”

  Ana lowered the slab, and the children disappeared behind the pebbled glass partition.

  Evan was on the point of breaking in two, of being slammed from one family revelation to another. She felt bruised and exhausted. Still, there was no other choice but to go on. “Use me, Ana. Just let them go.”

  “Mm, no.” She stepped closer so she could look down on Evan. “Here’s what’s going to happen, sister dearest. I’m going to work on them. That should take a good five or six hours and, lucky you, you’ll have the perfect view to watch the procedures.”

  “No, no, no.”

  “And then, after a short break of stretching and a snack, I’ll start on you.” She smirked. “That should be most interesting, us being sisters and all.”

  The blade had cut through the leather strap, freeing her right hand. It wasn’t enough. Like it or not she would be forced to wait until Ana went into the next bay to prep for her experiments on Wendy and Michael. By then it might be too late. She felt despair welling up. She could not help feeling like a swimmer out of breath and stamina, about to go down for the last time. She fought to banish the hopelessness lest it overwhelm her.

  Where the hell were Ben and Lyudmila?

  *

  While Ben was stalking and being stalked, Lyudmila had her hands full.

  “Fight like a human being,” she said with no particular inflection, and certainly no edge, to her voice. Vocal nuances were important, she had learned, especially at the beginning. It was animal instinct, the lizard brain seizing control. The situation could get out of hand before it had a chance to begin. “Not like a man.”

  Hel regarded her with night-dark eyes. She seemed dark all over, as if she were composed of shadow. Except for the glint of gold on her tiny cross. Lyudmila knew there was something worth doing here when Hel set down her PB semi-automatic without ever taking her eyes off Lyudmila.

  “All right, let’s take the more painful road.” Hel shrugged. “It’s your funeral.”

  There was no space between that last word and her leap at Lyudmila. That was okay. She stood her ground, feet planted beneath her, unmoving. Time slowed down, as it always did for her in these situations. The last thing you wanted was to act precipitously. She waited until the last moment, when Hel’s charge had reached maximum velocity, one leg striding forward, the other behind, balancing her. From absolute stillness to a blur of motion, grasping Hel’s wrist, swinging her hips, then her torso into the direction she was pulling her arm, using Hel’s own momentum against her, dragging her around and down onto the ground. She heard the snap as the back of Hel’s head hit the floor, but she felt no gratification. Too soon for that feeling—for any feeling. She had emptied her mind; her body was all momentum.

  She stamped on Hel’s chest—a mistake. Hel grabbed onto her ankle and twisted so violently that Lyudmila was taken off her feet. She rolled, but Hel, on her feet now, kept hold of Lyudmila’s ankle, kept twisting it. Lyudmila swung her body around, absorbing a vicious kick to her thigh. For a moment, her leg went numb. Hel was expecting this, for she had aimed at the main nerve running along the outside of the bone. She grinned, smelling victory.

&nb
sp; Which was just what Lyudmila wanted. Locking her hands behind Hel’s knee, she brought her crashing down, the impact causing her to release her hold. On her knees, Lyudmila punched Hel in the face, then again and again and again, until it was unrecognizable through the bloody pulp.

  Scrambling to her feet, she swept up the PB, took one last look at Hel’s unmoving form, hesitating for just a moment. No time to go back for the backpack now. She and Ben had been ambushed. They had taken too long getting past the guards. Evan needed them, assuming Ben was still alive and in one piece.

  She whirled, hearing stealthy footsteps, and prepared herself. Then she saw Ben, bleeding, noticeably the worse for wear. They stopped eight feet apart, took each other in with their professional gazes. Then, as one, they grinned.

  “The meat-grinder,” Lyudmila said.

  “And yet here we are.” Ben looked down at the body sprawled on the floor. He went over, couldn’t tell from the face, a bloody mess, but he recognized the bandoliers crisscrossed over Hel’s chest and, between them, the glimmer of gold. Crouching down, he thought of Leonard Pine, thought of his desperate request. Reaching out, he jerked the thin chain and its pendant from around Hel’s neck and pocketed it.

  He groaned as he rose to his feet.

  “All good?” Lyudmila asked, a hand on his shoulder.

  Ben swept his arm out. “This way.”

  When he turned, she saw the bruises and lacerations on his back through his ripped jacket and shirt.

  57

  INSIDE

  “She’s afraid of you.”

  Ana had been about to step away, to head over one bay to where the children slept, all unknowing. “What?” Now she turned back to stare at Evan.

  “That’s right,” Evan said, thinking this was her only hope of digging into her sister deep enough to alter the outcome of this night. “Terrified, even.” She shook her head. “It’s not that she never loved you, Ana. She was scared of what would happen to her if she did.”

  “I don’t believe you.” But the look in her eyes, the sudden cloudiness, told Evan that she did.

  “Believe what you want,” Evan told her. “That’s what you’ve always done, isn’t it.”

  Ana’s eyes narrowed. “How dare you assume you know me!”

  There it was again, the verbal blow, and her use of “How dare you!” That outrage, raw, full of the pain only a child deprived of love could feel. “You don’t know me at all.”

  “Oh, but I do. D’you think you’re the first person who longed to be held and never was?”

  Ana extended her head again, adderlike, her face within inches of Evan’s. “For nine months I was a part of her. For nine months I had to share her, even while I was inside her. Then she split open like a melon, and where was I then? Who was I ever to her?”

  Evan’s right hand snaked from under the blanket, the edged weapon she had hidden flashed like a bolt of lightning. A moment later blood welled from Ana’s sliced cheek. Ana gasped, staggered back, hands to her face. Evan sawed through the strap restraining her left hand, but she was still glued to the table by her feet. As she sat up to reach for the right strap, Ana twisted Evan’s wrist. The knife clattered to the floor. Ana’s hands, bloody, clawed, wrapped around her neck, thumbs against her windpipe, pressing inward. Soon enough Ana would throttle her to death. Seconds left, under a minute surely.

  And so even as the oxygen in her lungs guttered, even as her wildly beating heart began to shriek its warning, she understood that her intent was correct, her aim was true: she had slipped through the one chink in Ana’s psychological armor, reaching in and holding on to her vulnerable spot.

  “Do you think you’re special?” Her voice like gravel in a cement mixer. “Do you think that you’re different from everyone else?”

  “Of course. Mother made it so.”

  In her desperation, Ana had slipped mightily.

  Black spots winked in and out of Evan’s field of vision. “Mother, as we both know, is insane, Ana,” she lied, but lies were all she had left. “Just like you.” Lies feeding into everything Ana had been telling herself. Then a sharp veer away, to play on Ana’s deepest fear. “The two of you are insane in exactly the same way. You’re both monsters.”

  Ana’s scream was bloodcurdling. Her agitation reached its apex. Taking one hand from Evan’s throat, she drew her arm back to deliver yet another backhand slap. Evan used the opening, slashing the edge of her hand down into the junction of her sister’s neck and collarbone.

  A snap like a dry twig trod on in the middle of the forest.

  Then the gunfire began, short rapid bursts like the dread tattoo of soldiers beating on war drums.

  *

  Three down, thought Ben

  And Lyudmila thought, How many more?

  There were six, as it turned out, but Ben and Lyudmila had already been through the Omega meat-grinder and were still standing. Besides, they were weaponized now, and they used the PBs to good effect, backing each other up, splitting up and coming at the enemy from two sides in a pincer maneuver. That ploy was only useful once, then they had to go on to the next: an enfilade where Lyudmila stood her ground in a vaulted room with a sword and concrete cross at one end with three Omegas arrayed against her. Ben, entering through a doorway on their left, raked them with three bursts of fire.

  Through the smoking remains, Lyudmila said, “Where the hell are they?”

  Ben, stalking down the line of bodies, found one woman still alive. Crouching down beside her, he said, “Where are they?”

  The woman looked up at him with bloodshot eyes. He had shot her in the chest. Blood drooled from the corner of her mouth. She licked her dry lips, tasted her own blood. “Fuck you.”

  Ben understood how much effort she put into those two words and knew he didn’t have much time left with her.

  “My name is Ben. Tell me yours.”

  “W … why?”

  “Because …” He bent closer. “You deserve to be called to God by your name.”

  “Jo … Johanna,” she whispered.

  “So Johanna, I need to make you understand. I’m looking for the children. The children, d’you understand. I’m their uncle. They’re my family. Your Mother Suspiria is going to operate on them, murder them. Is that what you want? Two innocents killed?”

  Johanna blinked and tears welled up, overflowed her eyes, leaving tracks down her cheeks. She shivered. “I’m cold … so cold.”

  Ben took off his ripped jacket, spread it over her. “There you go, better now.” He smiled down at her. “Johanna, please, tell me where they are.”

  Johanna’s eyes were glazing over, her breaths became harsh rales. “They’re …” She spasmed, coughed violently, vomiting up a gush of blood.

  “Johanna, stay with me.”

  “Ben.” Lyudmila stood over his left shoulder. “More of them are coming. I can hear them.”

  He ignored her, gripped Johanna’s shoulders. “Just … please tell me where to find them.”

  Her eyelids fluttered. Her bone-deep shudders ran up his arms, through his hands, on the verge of blacking out. He felt the approach of her death as if it were his own. His body trembled.

  He bent closer, his ear almost against her blood-slick lips. “In … in the operating theater.”

  “Ben, for the love of God!” Lyudmila was pulling at him. “They’re almost on top of us!”

  Still ignoring her, fully concentrating on what he had to do. “Where?” His voice had taken on a terrible urgency. He was so close; he couldn’t lose her now. “Johanna, where?”

  “Beyond …” A great sigh: she was going. “Beyond the cross.” A soft hiss, as of a membrane punctured. She convulsed once. Her heels beat against the floor. Her left leg twitched, but she might already have been gone.

  *

  She would not give up. The human body, so frail in many ways, vulnerable to disease, radiation, poison, was in other ways difficult to kill. The body, all instinct, fought to stay alive throu
gh all manner of abuse.

  Despite a broken clavicle, Ana seemed only to gain in strength. And Evan, hampered as she was by being pinned by her ankles, was at a disadvantage, even though Ana’s left arm was greatly weakened and she could not raise it up to shoulder height.

  “You may be insane,” Evan said with a weak cough, “but you’re not stupid.”

  Ana, concentrating on pressing her right thumb into her sister’s windpipe, seemed oblivious to anything else. Evan was gasping, choking. She grasped Ana’s wrist, trying to wrest it away, but her lack of oxygen had robbed her of strength. She felt as weak as a day-old foal.

  “The gunfire means my people are close. They sneaked in through the storm drain.”

  A gleam in Ana’s eye. “I had prayer warriors waiting for them. Guess who told me?”

  Evan had a good idea who had betrayed them, but that was a matter for later. If there was a later. “And yet here they are,” she said, “coming closer and closer.”

  “But not quickly enough to save you, sister dearest.” Ana bore down on Evan’s windpipe. “I’m going to squeeze the life out of you.”

  More bursts of gunfire, louder, nearer.

  “And …” Evan coughed, tried to catch her breath, but her windpipe was now completely cut off. She was underwater without an air tank or hope of surfacing. Her sister was holding her in place. She thought of her recurring dream of Bobbi climbing on her in the river, holding her under the water. “And you think of me as an enemy.” Her voice was thin, strained.

  “The only enemy is yourself. Look in the mirror, Ana. What d’you see? Not yourself, no. You see your madness. You see your mother. That’s the way you’ll go. That’s your fate, locked inside your own insanity.”

  Ana shrieked, her eyes opened so wide Evan could see the whites all around. Then she jerked forward, slamming into Evan, and her grip dropped away.

  Evan had no idea what happened until blood spurted out of Ana’s mouth.