No time to dress, no time to arm themselves. She simply slipped out of bed and ran barefoot after him down the hall, mind now consumed with the idea of being too late.
If they got there quickly enough, they could use the sentries. The shutters…it would probably be too late for the shutters. But the guns would pick them off like flies—as long as they were still outside. And judging by Sergei’s first choice of action, he felt the same way. He wasn’t running for the gun locker downstairs, this time. He’d taken the sidearm he kept by the bed and another from beneath her desk, but he didn’t preoccupy himself with any further arming.
Instead, he worked on firing up the system and locating targets, darting from screen to screen in a way that seemed too quick for a man his size—and too agile. He barely knocked against her once as they worked, despite the limited space.
And boy was it limited. The room had never felt so small, so dark. The monitors that dominated one wall seemed an inch away from her face, and the more time ticked on the worse that feeling got. The images on screen expanded, the number of intruders multiplying until they were all she could see. There were so many at the front door they’d become a kind of dark mass, many-limbed and more frightening by the second—and not just because of the number of them.
They had laser cutters. They had laser cutters, and were gradually eating their way into a place she’d come to think of as home. God, when had she started thinking of it as home? She didn’t know, but somehow she had. She had, despite how crazy their world sometimes seemed and how unreal. She understood that now, even if the knowing had come far, far too late. They couldn’t stop and enjoy domestic bliss now. They were about to be invaded—a fact that had seemed uncertain at first but was getting more sure by the second.
She watched Sergei lining up the guns, waiting for that feeling to come again. That tight feeling…that sense of some justice that she should just let happen. But when it didn’t swamp her, she immediately understood why. She understood before he hesitated, finger poised over the icon that would fire those weapons. “Maybe we should just let them take the labs and free the clones,” he said—a sentiment that would have usually filled her nights with endless wonder. And yet it didn’t here, for one very good reason.
“They’re not seditionists.”
She’d seen it straight away, but the idea had taken a while to sink in. Too long to sink in, if she was being honest. Time was really racing now, and that cutter was getting close. In another few minutes they’d be through, so why hadn’t she just grasped what was obvious? Seditionists didn’t wear uniforms, like the ones she could see onscreen. They wore borrowed balaclavas and mismatched boots…carried used weaponry they’d stolen or found or fought their way to.
They weren’t like this. And once she’d said, she knew that Sergei could see it too. She saw it dawn all over his face, those laser eyes running over every scrap of evidence on the monitors—even though they didn’t really need any evidence at all. There was one other enormous clue that both of them had already comprehended, before Sergei took the next step. She almost heard the sound of silence before it happened.
And then he hit fire on the sentries, and there it was.
Nothingness. No pop of those compression rounds, no flashes onscreen.
They’d cut the power to them, and they’d done it because they had resources. They had money. They had all the things that seditionists would never have, and all the terrible motives her imagination could now make up, and they were still coming through the fucking door.
“Fuck,” Sergei spat, and she had to echo the sentiment. She echoed it all over her body, from the suddenly sweaty upper lip to her stupidly shaking hands. It felt as if someone had her head in a vise, and each new problem or revelation tightened the screws a little more. Soon she wouldn’t be able to think at all, and that was oh so bad because right now…she needed her thoughts more than ever.
Sergei was already outlining crazy plans in a voice she’d never heard before, and none of them were what she wanted to hear. They couldn’t wait at the goddamn door with a rocket launcher, or escape through the patched hole in the roof. They just couldn’t, they couldn’t.
She had to think of something else, something smarter, something sharper. Something that would keep them both safe…or at least something that would keep him safer than the ideas he was currently coming up with. She watched him say the words I’ll just rush them in a kind of nightmarish slow motion, the image of his broken, bloody body rising and rising in her mind until it was all she could see and all she could feel and no, no there had to be a better way.
There was a better way.
“We can seal ourselves into the labs.”
He stopped mid-insane idea, and that was good. But the amount of time they had left—that was bad. He was going to question her, she could tell.
So she cut him off at the pass.
“All we have to do is trigger the failsafe and we’ll be shut into an impenetrable steel block. Not to mention the nerve gas that will be released once we’re down there. It’s meant as a final measure once we’re clear, but there’s no way of being clear here. So we shut ourselves in and—”
“It won’t work. As soon as it’s triggered the labs seal. We won’t have time to get down to the elevator. We won’t have time to do this.”
“We will. We can—if I break the connection just long enough for you to get down there too.”
“And what if the system jams for good? What if you can’t get it up and running again? You’ll be fucked, Margot.”
“The chances of that are next to nothing, honestly they—”
“Okay.”
She came close to doing a double take—though she wasn’t sure why. Because she’d expected him to put up more of a fight? Maybe, maybe. But there was something about the way he interrupted her too. Something in the heavy, final weight of his okay that brought her up short.
Of course, she should have known then. She did know then, on some level. But onscreen that line of heat was starting to show through the front door. They had maybe twenty seconds to do this, and twenty seconds wasn’t enough time to see the major problem with her plan.
It was just enough to get down the stairs, his fleeting kiss still lingering on her lips. One last look from those eyes like winter fire, burning bright with an emotion she didn’t recognize. Though she should have, she should have. It was the kind of look people see in their dreams, after someone close to them has died.
Yet she didn’t let it penetrate her consciousness. She focused on the panel inside the elevator and the wires that lay underneath instead, disconnecting some and clamping off others. It was a simple thing really—but so fiddly, and so tense. From where she was standing she could just about see the front door. She could see that line of fire growing brighter and hotter, the sound of the cutter now a deep and identifiable whine.
But she was almost there. Her fingertips brushed the wire required, and a little more pushing into the exposed nest of wires would get it. She just had to twist a little closer, and maybe look away from the door for no more than a second…
Though she would later wish she hadn’t. Maybe if she’d been facing forward she could have done something in time. A hand between the elevator door and its frame would register as organic material, and possibly stop it closing. Possibly.
Either way it didn’t matter. She wasn’t turned the right way. She didn’t see it start to close. And by the time she registered it she was already too late. All she could do was make a sound of stupid shock and scrabble frantically at the steel as it slid firmly shut. It slid so firmly shut no one on earth could have denied what had just happened, yet somehow she found herself trying all the same.
She stared dumbly at the curve of burnished steel, still completely uncomprehending. Had he triggered it too early, for some unfathomable reason? Maybe seen something on the monitor that suggested she’d succeeded? Surely he knew to wait for the thumbs up, or a word through his earpiece. T
he latter was working just fine, she knew it was.
She knew because a second later there was his voice in her head, so perfectly matter-of-fact she couldn’t stand it. His meaning was clear before he’d even explained.
“It’s okay, Margot,” he said, and suddenly she could hear someone making a terrible sound. She’d heard something like it before, in movies about losing the love of your life. In tales of grief so deep you could never escape it, never recover.
Only the person who would never recover was her. She was the one making that sound. She was the one with a hand at her throat, trying to strangle this feeling out of herself—but no matter how hard she tried it was still there.
Had he really done this on purpose?
Surely, surely he couldn’t have done it on purpose.
“It was just too much of a risk. You know that. You know there was a chance it wouldn’t have worked.”
Oh God, he really had. He’d sealed her in before she could break the connection, based on that one infinitesimal possibility of failure. Based on nothing, she thought desperately, based on hardly anything. He was going to die over hardly anything, though even as she thought those words she understood the error in them. He hadn’t done it over hardly anything.
He’d done it for her. He’d done it because not only was he willing to risk his life for her, her was willing to trade his life for hers.
And that meant only one thing.
She was wrong. She’d been wrong. Oh, could anyone have been more wrong than her? He wasn’t incapable of deeper feelings at all. He just revealed his feelings with every action, with every move he made and gesture he offered, and most horribly oh God most terribly she simply hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t understood his panic, his terror, his every step on a road that only led to her.
But now she did.
Too late, too late, she saw it all clearly. And just in case she was the least bit unsure—just in the event that some small part of her was still left uncrushed—he said one final thing as gunfire rang out, and the static swept him away from her forever.
“Goodbye, my Margot. I love you, I love—”
Chapter Twelve
She knew what she had to do. There was only one thing to do. All other possibilities had been rescinded. Her survival did not matter. The only thing that mattered was getting back to the surface, while armed to the teeth.
Fuck whatever obstacles were in the way. The nerve gas would have been released, but she could deal with it. She could deal with anything in the state she was currently in—body juddering as if she’d been given an electric shock, last nerve shredded by the long, slow wait for the fucking elevator doors to open.
“Come on,” she screamed at the faceless steel. “Come on.”
Because every second was a second he would be exposed to toxins. Every second was a stray bullet, a bleeding wound, a casual knife in the gut. The longer it took the less of a chance she would have to make this right—and she had to make this right. She had to, and not just due to the fact that he was worth more than this. No, no. The real pain was the knowledge that she hadn’t said. She’d kept it inside and kept it inside like a fool, and now he would die not knowing that she felt the same.
And so she ran when the door opened. She burst into the containment room and grabbed everything she could possibly need—two oxygen masks, two sidearms, a C7 rifle, grenades, flak vests—all dumped back into the elevator.
She could suit up and strap it all to her once she got the fucking thing going again, because really getting it going…that was the hard part. That was the part she was going to scream and bleed over, she knew, she knew. Somehow she had to convince the system that there had been an error, or force it into a feedback loop, or just something, anything, there had to be a way.
She refused to believe anything else—not even after she’d yanked at a dozen wires and hacked into the fucking masterboard. Reset reset reset her mind buzzed, but resetting just wasn’t possible from down here. Something like that could only be done from the control room, and even then…
Even then it had to be in response to something catastrophic. Something that caused the power to fail, or suggested a threat to the clones. An explosion, her mind whispered, and she understood then what she had to do. It would probably kill her. But she no longer cared. If her life had to end in the effort to save him, she would do it. She would do it without wavering, without fear.
In fact, a certain sort of blankness seemed to come over her as she went through the tasks she needed to accomplish. First she had to find a space inside the walls of the elevator—somewhere she could place the grenade while doing the least amount of damage to the structure and mechanisms. Then there was actually getting this shit done, while sweating and shaking and cursing.
The panel she chose wouldn’t come all the way open, and by the time she’d managed to force the thing into a twisted, jagged metal shape she was bleeding. Her fingers were bleeding. Her palms were bleeding. And once she’d jammed her arm into the tiny gap, she was bleeding there too. It looked as if she’d put her entire limb through a ceiling fan, but she kept going.
She pushed harder, armed grenade clenched tight in her sweaty fist, forever on the verge of letting go too soon. But after she’d reached a place she was comfortable with, it wasn’t as easy as simply letting go. She had to be able to let go then draw her arm out quickly, or wind up missing an important part of her body.
She couldn’t save him with a bloody geyser spouting off her right shoulder. She wasn’t even sure if she could save him with both arms intact, so this part had to work, at least. It had to, despite what she now knew pretty clearly—she was close to being stuck. If she yanked the limb free, she was going to flay her flesh right down to the fucking bone. The metal edge of the panel she’d yanked open was too sharp; the space was too narrow. She just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it.
She closed her eyes and just fucking did it. All in one big wrenching painful rush—one two three go—followed by a sensation like lightning striking her shoulder. She wanted to scream immediately, but screaming wasn’t an option. Screaming took energy, it took time, and that energy and time was needed to slam her boot against the open panel repeatedly, while the clock ticked down.
Ten seconds…
Five…
Four…
She kicked with all her might, though of course her might wasn’t quite good enough. Her might was weighed down by a badly injured arm—so bad all she could see was red out of the corner of her eye, so bad it just seemed to hang at her side as she fought to close that panel up.
And when she couldn’t get it entirely there, and the countdown hit three, she did the only thing she had left. She crouched in the farthest corner of the elevator and covered herself with a flak jacket. There was just no other choice, really. If she hid around the corner in the containment room, there was an enormous chance she wouldn’t get back inside in time.
Too big a chance.
So this was how it had to be. Her sheltering beneath something that wouldn’t help if the panels blew, mind full of the conversation she remembered from basic training. It isn’t only the fire and shrapnel formed by the blast. It is also the sheer force of it, her instructor had said, only now he said more. His weathered face suddenly turned to her, mouth working around words she already understood.
That force is going to crush you into jelly against the wall, he said.
And then the countdown hit zero.
It walloped zero.
The end of the world echoed in that small chamber, so loud she could hear it through the fingers she had put in her ears. She could feel it through those fingers, like a fist to the side of her head. Something terrible happened to her right eardrum—so terrible she knew she would never hear properly with it again. She knew, and yet she hardly cared. A loss of hearing didn’t matter, her arm didn’t matter.
The blast had been contained by the steel wall of the elevator.
And more importantly�
��
It had worked. Dear God, it had worked. The elevator was rising, she could tell. She was dazed and thick-headed on one side, but she understood what she was feeling. It wasn’t just wishful thinking or some unexpected gravity-based side effect of being in a small space when a grenade went off. A new countdown had begun.
And that meant she had to get her shit together, now. She had to clamp the wires that might make the elevator go back down in the time it took her to get to Sergei. This took effort, and patience, and precious seconds. Then once that was over with, she needed to suit up. Get that flak jacket on, despite the pain getting it on caused.
Something hard and plastic-y brushed against something wet and raw, and she did her best to stamp it out. She gritted her teeth and hummed a distracting song as she tightened the straps and clicked things closed. Christ, her arm was a fucking mess, but she couldn’t think about that at all—because now came the oxygen tanks, oh the oxygen tanks. Both as heavy as fuck and twice as awkward. She actually tangled with them briefly, elastic straps twanging against terrible, terrible stuff. Eyes watering, body screaming, everything telling her to just lie down lie down now please.
It was a miracle that she managed to resist, and get to the guns. Just looking down was a nauseating experience, because somehow the floor had turned all red and sticky. And trying to strap two rifles together while sliding around in your own blood was not an experience she relished. Her hands were tacky by the time she’d done it. Everything was aching and aching, and in such a frightening way.
Plus, she was going to have to do this left-handed. She could see that before she’d even attempted to grasp the stock and test out her trigger finger. Her right hand just wasn’t working as it should, and her arm didn’t want to take any weight—but it was fine. It was good. Once she was at the door, rifle ready, mask in place…nothing could have stood in her way. Not the wrong hand, not an army of mercenaries, nothing.
The pain winked out as though someone had flicked a switch. All focus was on whatever lay beyond the door, before the door had even opened. She could see them all quite clearly, standing between her and Sergei, and it wasn’t an exaggeration to say that if her mind had been a bomb, everything beyond that steel would have been laid to waste. Whoever was out there…they were fucked.
Almost Real Page 14
