by Gow, Kailin
Richard shakes his head, looking momentarily angry. He starts to gesture towards the Others holding my family, but then stops. “Stay out of this, Grayson.”
“How can I?” Grayson looks around at me, then at the glass-walled room we’re in. “I’m in here just as much as anyone else, and it’s Celes you’re trying to hurt. I’m not going to let you do that.”
Richard glares at Sebastian. His voice, when it comes, is tight with anger. “This is your doing, isn’t it, old friend? Taking my son and twisting his mind. Turning him against me, so that he thinks I’m the one doing something wrong. That’s what you do, after all, isn’t it? That’s what you always did, even with your own family. You pretend that you’re helping people, but all you ever do is hurt them. You control their minds, change their lives, and play God, as though you have any clue about what’s best for them.”
“You were happy enough to help me at the start, Richard,” Sebastian says, still apparently unconcerned by what’s going on around us. “You worked with me on the original operations. You even helped me to set up many of the protocols I used.”
“And then I learned better,” Richard shoots back. It’s obvious that this is about more than just the Others and the Underground. Or maybe it’s at the heart of that rivalry. After all, the two men are very high up in their organizations. Maybe those organizations wouldn’t exist without whatever’s between the two of them.
Grayson asks what we’re all wondering. “Dad, what happened? Whatever it was, it can’t be enough to justify you hurting people like the Caines. Let them go. They don’t know anything. They shouldn’t be part of this.”
“You shouldn’t be part of it,” Richard says. “Yet they’ve taken you and twisted you, until you aren’t even my son anymore. Can they put you back to the way you were? Can they give you your old memories back?”
“Dad…”
“And what about my family?”
“Grayson’s your family,” I point out.
“Not my first family.” Richard sounds furious now. “Not the wife and daughter your Underground friends took from me, making it so that they didn’t remember me. So that I didn’t remember them. I married Grayson’s mother when he was just a toddler, not knowing any better.”
“You’re my stepdad?” Grey asks. “But I always thought-”
“You were a toddler when I married your mother, but I raised you as my own,” Richard says. “You were my son, until Sebastian twisted you.”
“I’m still your son,” Grayson says, “and I don’t think you’ll let your friends shoot me.” He steps out of the glass walled cell, raising his gun to point it at his father. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t shoot you. Mr. and Mrs. Caine, Bailey, go over to my friends now.”
My family look confused, but they start to move. A couple of the Others start to intercept them.
“Stay back or he dies,” Grayson promises.
Richard sighs. “Haven’t we been here before, Grayson?”
He moves, trying to grab the gun from his son, but Grayson kicks his feet out from under him, pressing the gun tighter to his father’s head. “Yes, we have, and you caved in that time, too. Now, if your people don’t put their weapons down, then I will shoot you.” Grayson reached down to pull Richard’s head back, so that the gun was pressed beneath his chin.
Richard looks frightened. Frightened, but also angry that his son should be doing this. “You don’t even remember who I am, do you?”
“I remember,” Grayson says.
“No, you don’t. Not really. You wouldn’t be able to do this if you really remembered. Sebastian has messed with your head so much that you think I’m the enemy, rather than him and the crooks who work with him.”
“Shut up,” Gray says, pushing the gun harder into his father. “When you went after Celes, ready to kill her, when you used me to get to her, that’s when you became my enemy. This… all of this just confirms it. You’re evil. You need to be stopped.”
Down on his knees, Richard shrugs. “Then stop me.”
“I will if you don’t tell your men to drop their weapons.”
Richard shakes his head once more. “We went through this the last time you put a gun to my head, son. I am not commanding my men to stop.”
“Then I will,” Grayson says, looking around at the assembled Others. “You might not care what happens to you, but they will. You’re too senior for them to risk. Now, all of you, do you want to get him killed? No? Then drop your weapons.”
They hesitate only briefly, before the first rifle clatters to the ground. More follow. Soon, the Others are unarmed, while the Faders have snatched up their weapons again, moving out from the cell to take the weapons the Others had away from them.
FOURTEEN
“Now what?” Richard demands, once his followers have been disarmed. “Are you going to kill us? It’s what the Underground and the Others do when they meet, isn’t it? Fight to the death.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Jack says, but he’s looking at me as he says it, and I know he isn’t going to kill anyone. Even Sebastian seems to concur on that point.
“Take their means of communication away and lock them in my cell,” the Underground leader says. “It should hold them until we are all well clear of this compound.”
The Underground’s Faders rush to do as he orders, taking away radios and phones from the Others before herding them into the glass cube. With the lock damaged, the best they can manage is to wedge it shut, but it looks like it should be solid. Besides, there’s still the outer door to lock as well.
I go over to my family. They look frightened and confused, even when Jack comes over to let them out of the handcuffs holding them. They look at me suspiciously, as though they aren’t sure what to think about me.
My mother speaks. “They said before that you were… that you’re our…”
“That doesn’t matter right now,” I say, trying to be firm so that she doesn’t see how I really feel in that moment. I can’t go back. I know that. It’s better just to pretend like I never existed, because for them at least, I never did.
“But who are you?” my father asks.
I shake my head. “That doesn’t matter either. What matters is that we’re going to get you out of here.”
“Celes here has a point,” Lionel says, moving over to the door to the room and peeking out. “We should be going. Everybody form up on me. The Caines and Celes should stay close to Jack. You too, Sebastian, at least until we can get you armed.”
Sebastian picks up one of the Others’ guns. It’s a bulky combat rifle that seems at odds with the man holding it. “There, is that better?”
“Except for the parts where you aren’t wearing body armor, you’ve only recently escaped captivity, and you aren’t much of a shot at the best of times?” Lionel asks.
“Aside from that.”
“Then everything is fine. Come on. Or were we going to stay until every enemy in the Fortress shows up?”
We get moving, hurrying after Lionel. Jack sticks close to his father, near the front of the group, obviously intent on keeping him from harm. Grayson stays close to my family, presumably to help protect them. No, I realize, not just for that. He’s staying close because he’s a face they know and trust, whereas everyone else, including me, is just some heavily armed stranger. It’s enough to make me push closer to the front, not wanting the pain that comes every time their eyes skim over me without the faintest hint of recognition.
That’s why I’m there when Jack comes skidding to a halt, grabbing Lionel and yanking him back almost quickly enough to send everyone else crashing into him. I only just stop in time as he kneels, hand raised for us to hold our positions.
“What is it?” the major asks.
Jack nods to the floor. Or, more accurately, to a space about six inches above it. He takes something from his bag, an aerosol spray of some kind, and sprays it, revealing a series of crisscrossing red beams of light.
“Alarms,�
� he says.
“They weren’t here when we came in,” Lionel observes.
Sebastian steps up for a closer look. “Well, they’re here now. Richard must have turned them on as he came in after us. If I know him, they’ll be wired up to the lockdown sequences for the building. Trigger the alarm, and we’ll quickly find ourselves trapped.”
That doesn’t sound good. Particularly not with a whole group of angry Others operatives just a few hallways back from us. “Can we disarm it?” I ask.
Jack nods. “If I can get to the control panel, at least.”
“And that is…”
Jack points to the other end of the hall, beyond the beams, and I can just make out a small panel on the wall. “Everybody else, wait here.”
It’s hard to watch as Jack tiptoes his way through the beams. It’s not just that he could hit one at any second, though I know he could, even though he was somehow able to pick up on the danger presented by the beams before. It’s also how far in front of the rest of us he has to go. If one of the Others were to come in now, he’d be incredibly vulnerable.
A guard rounds the corner at the far end of the hall. I go to shout a warning to Jack, but I know it’s already too late. There’s nothing I can do as the guard starts to raise his…
Pfft.
I can’t place the sudden noise until the guard falls back, dead, and I look around to see Lionel lowering his silenced rifle. It’s an impressive shot. A very impressive shot.
“Just like being back in… well, never mind.”
Jack makes it to the end of the hall, and it turns out that the guard has a key card for the alarms. Jack uses it, and we’re able to move on, trying to make up lost time. At least, we hurry until Sebastian stops outside one of the Fortress’s many doors.
“What are you doing?” Jack asks. “We don’t have time to stop.”
“We’re in the heart of one of the Others’ key operations,” Sebastian says. “Some of their biggest secrets are in this building, and this might be the only chance we get to uncover them.”
“It’s also a chance to get us all killed,” Jack retorts. “This is meant to be a rescue. We have Celes’… the Caines to think of.”
“We have the whole future of the planet to think of,” Sebastian says, and reaches for the door handle.
Jack’s eyes widen. “Wait!”
For once, he’s not quick enough to stop what is about to happen. Sebastian tries the door handle, it turns just a fraction, and then an alarm sounds. It’s piercing. It’s shrill. Worse than that, if Sebastian was correct before, it means that the whole place is about to go into lockdown.
Lionel takes one look at Sebastian, shakes his head, and bellows back at the rest of the Faders. “Run! Everybody run! Now, unless you want to be stuck here!”
He sprints for the next junction of corridors, and the Faders jerk into action, taking off after him. Grayson pulls my mother and father into motion, while Jack grabs Bailey, forcing him to keep up. I run with them, confident thanks to the part of me that isn’t human that I can easily move quickly enough, yet unwilling to leave them behind. Even if they can’t remember me, I can remember them.
The Fortress is starting to wake up, its inhabitants roused by the alarms and stumbling out bleary eyed into corridors. Jack shoots a guard who comes out of the wrong door, while Lionel takes down another with a blow from the butt of his rifle.
The alarm starts to be accompanied by an automated voice as we run. “Base lockdown initiated,” it says. “All personnel, please remain in your designated safe areas.”
We don’t have much time left, from the sound of it. A scientist moves out in front of us, slowing us down for less than a second before Jack smashes him aside. More guards rush out, but Jack and Lionel shoot them on the run. Lionel isn’t as fast as Jack, but he doesn’t move like an old man by any means.
Lights start to come on above doors around us, and I hear the loud snap of locks engaging, but that doesn’t affect us. We’re just trying to get out of the building. We run back through to the loading area at the front of the place, where the great steel doors that opened to let us in are. There are a couple more guards there, but they don’t last any longer than the others we have run into in the course of our rush to escape. Though the sound of shouting somewhere behind us suggests that they will be along in greater numbers soon. We have to be out of the building by then.
That should be easy, except that the doors in front of us are starting to swing shut. By the time we’re out onto the main floor level of the loading bay, they’re more than halfway closed.
“Quick,” Lionel says, “everybody through.”
As if to underline the urgency, he sprints through the gap. Sebastian does the same, along with the first few Faders. Jack looks back at me, and I look back at my family.
“I’ll get them out,” Jack says.
“But Jack…”
I don’t get the chance to argue. He shoves me bodily through the closing gap in the doors. I stumble and fall outside, hitting the dirt hard and rolling so that I’m looking back at that ever closing gap. Faders come through it, hurrying even more now as their opportunity for escape literally starts to disappear before their eyes.
Grayson appears, pulling Bailey through. I mouth a silent thank you to him as my mother and father follow, pushed through by Jack. The doors are closing tighter now, so that there’s barely room for someone to squeeze through.
“Jack,” I call back, “hurry up.”
Jack leaps through the gap, making it through easily, and a final couple of Faders try to follow him. The first makes it, barely. The second, an older Fader who I’m sure must be one of the instructors from Location Two… the second isn’t so lucky. The great steel doors slam shut on his leg as he tries to throw himself through, clamping shut like the limb between them is nothing and slicing it above the knee. The man screams. I’d never thought that someone could scream like that. I start to move to help him, but he passes out. I reach down to try and pull him clear of the doors, but Jack pulls me away from him.
“There’s nothing we can do for him,” he says. “If you move him, he’ll bleed out in seconds. I know it’s hard, but we need to keep moving.”
I force myself to nod. I know he’s right. The man behind us has given his life trying to get Sebastian and my family to safety, I won’t dishonor that effort by wasting the time that we have to get away. I turn to make the run back to the cars through the surrounding darkness, and that’s when I see lights come on towards the perimeter of the compound. By those lights, I can just make out a dozen or so men in black combat armor, carrying very intimidating looking assault weapons.
“Oh dear,” Lionel says from the front, hefting his rifle, “it seems that we’ve kicked a hornet’s nest here. Do those look like elite troops to anyone else?”
“They’re not that elite if they light themselves up neatly rather than ambushing us in the dark,” one of the Faders points out. Then he dies, shot from the side, away from the group under the lights. They’re nothing but a distraction. We’re under attack!
FIFTEEN
Grayson pushes my family to the ground as bullets fly past us, and suddenly, it’s like I’m in the middle of a war zone. The Others come at us from all sides, and for cover, we only have the buildings around us. I try to stay near my family. I know they don’t remember who I am, but I’m going to keep them safe, no matter what it takes.
The Faders around me react in different ways. A couple of the ones from Location Six panic, firing blindly. It just makes them targets for the gunfire coming our way, and they’re quickly brought down by bullets. Jack and the rest work on getting low, finding what cover they can before firing back. Jack fires in his customary careful bursts, always seeming to know exactly where the danger is coming from. A little way from him, Lionel has managed to scramble onto the roof of one of the compound’s outbuildings, letting him pick people off with that rifle of his.
One of the Others comes into
view, heading for us with his gun raised. I react on instinct, firing off two shots with the pistol Jack gave me, and he falls back. In the darkness, I don’t know if I have killed him or not. Right then, I’m too busy worrying about where the next threat will come from to even think about that.
There’s an almighty bang and a blinding flash of light then, and a second after, I find that two of the Others have a grip on my arms as they move in close behind their flash grenade. Grayson, who’s just a feet away, charges forward even though his own ears must still be ringing. He kicks one of the Others viciously, whirling away as the second tries to go for his gun, releasing me in the process. Grayson goes into him hard, throwing punches and knees that don’t give his opponent time to react. He forces the man back long enough that Grayson can clear his weapon, and two shots later, the fight is over.
“Thanks,” I say, but Grayson is already moving again, rejoining the fight. He fights well now, and I guess those lessons with the Fader instructors must have done something, though there are plenty of other people there who can fight better. Jack, for one. He isn’t even affected by the flash grenade, and I realize it’s because he had the foresight to move back from it even as it landed. His whole fighting style is like that. It’s like he knows exactly what each of his opponents is going to do before they do it, so that he’s always ready, turning to face them with his gun ready to fire, or meeting them with a quick attack as they come in.
Lionel’s down from the roof now, and he pauses just long enough to throw one of the Others to the ground before waving over at us.
“We need to fight our way clear. Make for the vehicles.”
He’s right, of course. We can’t stay there. We scramble for the gap we made in the fence, and I herd my family towards it. Sebastian helps, which makes me think a little better of him, though I guess it’s just because he doesn’t want them slowing us down. Behind us, the fight goes on. I see Others and Faders struggling, and it’s hard to tell who is winning, though I worry about our side. Some of the Faders from Location Six have minor injuries, while the instructors from Location Two can’t have been on a live operation recently. Even though they seem to be holding their own for the moment, this was never meant to be a full scale battle situation.
