by Jones, Isla
I dipped back into the Lab Maze.
I’d mapped the route Mason had taken, each corridor we turned onto, what rooms we passed (the retreat room, not the garden-farm). It made it easier for me to sneak through the corridors and worry about running into a solider or a white coat, than worry about getting lost. Time was short, I couldn’t afford delays. Soon, Summer would notice her badge was gone.
I had to be quick.
It fluttered my stomach to be back to my old tricks. Not the nice flutter, the one of dread—
Especially when I turned a corner and saw a door swing open ahead.
Panicked, I froze a mere second. Footsteps and muffled words came first. I rushed through a cupboard door and held my breath.
Before I could close the door, I heard the other one click shut. Any movement would give me away. I backed up to the hinges.
A wedge of light pierced through crack of the door. I stared at the light, heart pounding—I pressed my hand against my chest to muffle it.
I couldn’t be seen.
This wasn’t the restricted RV with Leo and Castle. This was the CDC.
I heard the footsteps before the shadows moved into the light.
Summer’s quiet voice slithered through the ajar door. “How was his performance in the VC experiment?”
“Underwhelming,” came Dr Wong’s clipped voice. “Side effects included a rash on each of his bite scars and blue formations at the scratch marks on his left shoulder blade. Fifty-two minutes post injection he experienced a short seizure.”
I heard the scratch of a pen on paper. “We’ll cease treatment and transfer him to the FD experiment.”
The footsteps stopped near the door. Dr Wong’s short tone lowered, “You want to reopen that programme? I suggested a prime candidate for it and you denied.”
Summer tutted once. “The patient was a liability. Treating him for the sole purpose of entering him into the programme would have been waste of our resources.”
“We could recruit some of the other new arrivals. The remaining delta combatants and the one who cooks.”
“Who?”
Dr Wong hummed. “I don’t recall his name. He wears glitter.”
“Mason mentioned him. Oscar Thomas.” There was a pregnant pause; so quiet I couldn’t let my breath out just in case. “Find a place for him in the experiment. Assign Mason to the cover story, he did excellent work with the delta’s death.”
My balance wobbled.
I leaned against the wall and cupped my hands to my face. They killed Mac.
Summer had ordered it.
Castle was right, but ... Summer was my sister.
Then, she tore out my breath and heart in one swift move.
“Remove the remaining deltas, admit Oscar into the programme, and the others—Leave them.”
“Yes, of course.” Dr Wong didn’t sound terribly pleased. “Do you want the corporal and his subordinate terminated or admitted into the programmes?”
Summer didn’t take a breath before she answered; “Terminated. It isn’t worth the risk to keep them around, even in confinement.”
A scribble of pen on paper—then their clacking shoes carried on down the hall.
Eventually, I dragged myself out of the cupboard.
Even with the extra load on my mind, I couldn’t afford to waste any more time. There was only one place I could think of that Leo would be kept prisoner.
The Rotter Rooms.
I bustled through the halls, as fast as I could manage with squeaky shoes.
Castle and Leo … I couldn’t let them be killed. Adam, I didn’t care for. Maybe I could strike a deal with Summer? Adam for Castle and Leo. But then I’d be handing over a life in exchange for other lives. I wasn’t comfortable with that. Even Billy’s death sickened me at the time.
My thoughts screeched to a stop as I did. I staggered into the corridor from earlier where I’d seen Summer. Faint noises came from the same room.
I inched closer and peered through the glass.
Mason picked through files on the desk. His head jerked up. Before he could see me, I flattened myself to the floor and cringed.
There was nowhere for me to hide.
I crouched under the window, my eyes swerving all around. There had to be some way I could hide—I had to turn back. But then, I heard the crackle of a walkie and froze.
“Did you find it?”
I recognised her voice even through the crackle of the speaker.
“It’s not here,” said Mason. “I’ve looked everywhere.”
Silence filled the entire hall. I laboured my breathing and glanced down at my hand. Fingers coiled tight around Summers ID badge.
A sigh came through the walkie. “You were assigned to watch her, Mason.”
“There’s only so much I can do bar of stalking her. Your sister’s a hard woman to befriend.”
Summer cursed. “If it’s not there, we can safely assume Winter has stolen it.”
Mason muttered under his breath before he asked, “Orders?”
“Find her.” Summer’s stern voice made my spine shiver. It was her guttural growl. “I’m on my way.”
I scrambled back down the hall on my hands and knees.
Just as Mason stormed out of the lab, I shuffled around a corner and crouched behind a bin. Mason marched down the other corridor and I let out a breath of relief.
I peeled myself off the floor and ran back to the corridor. But I slammed, hard, into a wall.
Staggering back, I lifted my eyes to dark ones.
Mason cocked his brow.
Slowly, he brought the walkie to his face his pressed in a button. “Found her.”
*
They had me cornered.
Mason had taken me back to the lab as we waited for Summer. The longest minutes of my life.
The whole time, I glanced at the window and hoped to see a delta pass by. My fingers trembled and my heart pounded so hard that it punched against the dip of my neck.
I folded my arms. Mason became my new prison guard. He stood, bulky and tall, in the doorway and shadowed me with his gaze.
Seconds ticked by. I marked them with nervous taps of my foot on the floor, until Summer marched down the corridor. She didn’t even glance at me through the window.
But I saw her—her clenched jaw, tightly set lips and slitted eyes.
Mason leaned to the side to let her by.
Furious gaze on me, Summer stopped and put her hands on her hips. I watched anxiously as she pursed her lips, her jaw working.
Any apology I could give would’ve been a lie. I deserved answers—to not have the soldiers that saved my life and protected me across the barren country end up in some warped experiment or the incinerator.
I matched her stance with a hard look. “Where’s Leo?”
Shaking her head, Summer scoffed a sound of absolute disbelief.
“WHERE IS HE?” I shouted.
“Winter,” she snapped. “Naivety is for children and optimists. You know where he is. Leonardo is most valuable as a test subject than a member of staff.”
My face twisted with angry tears brewing. “He’s in with the rotters, isn’t he?” My shaky voice matched my hateful glare. “How could you do that?”
Summer fixed me with an impatient stare. “Your ignorant innocence was once cute, when we were children. Not anymore, Winter. You need to grow up—this is about more than juvenile crushes. If you widen your perspective, you’ll see that Leonardo is our only path to a vaccine.”
“To save who?” I spat. “A bunch of maniacs in underground facilities across the world? Their lives aren’t worth saving if this—all of this—is what it took to get a vaccine. I can’t you let do this, Summer. I won’t.”
Summer let a small smile slip onto her face. “I’m afraid it is not your decision to make, Winter. You are either on board with my decisions or you are against them.”
“I’m against them.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “I wish mum and
dad were alive right now, just so they could see you—all that potential they said you had, and you use it like this.”
Summer spread her hands and cupped air. “We have contrasting perceptions of potential, Winter. We always have. And that, unfortunately, has left us here at a crossroads.”
Mason tensed behind her, as if sensing silent orders.
I swerved my gaze between them. Summer was still my sister, no matter what we disagreed on. But would our bond stop her from locking me up while she carried out her plan? The thought ran through my veins with cold dread.
Summer stepped back and gestured for me to follow.
“Before you come to any rash decisions,” she said, “I would like to show you what we are working on here. You need to understand why I am doing what I am doing, why it is the only option we have.”
My lip curled. “There’s nothing you can say or show me that would make cold-blooded murder ok.”
She turned back to face me, her eyes glittering with restrained anger.
“Viruses can evolve,” she said. “For now, the virus is contagious through contact, but what happens in the event that it becomes airborne, or can contaminate soil? The entire world will be uninhabitable. That is not a possible outcome for us, Winter. We have a clean slate. Generations to come will walk out of this facility into a fresh world with a fresh start. To protect them—to protect the last of humanity—they need to be vaccinated against any remaining strains of the virus.” She shrugged her shoulders delicately. “Those are the facts. Let me show you what I mean.”
Again, she gestured for me to follow.
Hesitantly, I did—and flinched as Mason swept around us to lead the way through the corridors. He never led the way … Normally, he would follow at the rear.
For a moment, I wondered what Summer had planned. I doubted it had anything to do with enlightening me. And by Mason’s tense back muscles, I sensed a different outcome.
A horrid churn in my gut warned me.
I wasn’t so sure the others of my group were the only ones in danger.
We walked in silence until we were deep into the halls and Summer hesitated in front of me.
Her gaze shot from an open doorway back to me. I frowned and looked into the room where Adam stood at a low desk, crouched over. He paused his typing and met my stare.
Summer wrapped her fingers around my arm and, with a firm nod at Adam, she steered me down the corridor with Mason. Before the room was out of sight, I mouthed two words to Adam. Help me. I don’t know if he understood, or if he cared.
Adam’s face had stayed poker straight, leaving me to be led through the maze.
The corridors narrowed the further we went; the lights dimmed until it was so dark that our shadows stretched along the linoleum floor. I almost asked where we were going until I saw it. A sign on the left wall with one word carved into its rusty plate: ‘INCINERATOR’.
I hugged myself and rubbed my arms firmly, as though my caged arms were a barrier. My instincts are what kept me alive for the first five months of the plague. My gut-feelings have never failed me. And they didn’t fail me that day, either.
But Summer read me all too easily. She must have sensed my blanketed panic, saw the cracks in my mask.
It happened all at once. A jumbled memory of panic and movement.
I jerked out of Summer’s hold. Mason reached around his back to his holster.
She grabbed for me; Mason spun around, gun raised. Before the first shot could hit, I burst through a glass door and slammed it shut behind me. I fumbled with the lock, wide eyes on Summer—
Aimed through the glass at my face, Mason pulled the trigger.
25.
The bullet bounced off the thick glass. I flinched, too stunned to realise that the bullet zipped back and hit Summer right in the bicep.
A terrible scream ripped through her. At least, I think she screamed. I didn’t hear the horrid sound, but her face twisted, her mouth tore apart, and she dropped to her knees. Blood ran down her sleeve.
Mason rushed to her side.
He wound a strip of her jacket around the wound. They forgot me for a moment. But I hadn’t forgotten them or their treachery.
Shocked, I watched through the (apparently bulletproof) door.
Summer had let him shoot at me. She’d probably ordered it without my knowing—they’d been taking me to the incinerator.
I realised, I was something to Summer that she’d never been to me. Disposable.
Mason hoisted her up onto her feet, his worried glare swerving to me. Summer gritted her teeth and hissed silent words to him.
I scrambled with the button panel on the doorframe, fumbling the ID card through it. On my third try, the green light blinked red and the heavy clank of the door locking shuddered through the room.
With my hands flattened against the glass, I pleaded with her in my gaze alone. I watched as she gestured curtly to beside the door.
Tucking away his gun, Mason led her over and—pulled out his ID card.
My hands dropped to the handle and held it firmly in place. Mason swiped his card and slammed in his code with bloodied fingers. A button panel on my side beeped. The small light stayed red. His card couldn’t override Summer’s.
I slumped with relief. But my relief was short lived.
Mason typed on the panel again—the door didn’t unlock. Instead, a crackle came from the small speaker beneath my panel.
Summer’s hoarse breath, thick with pain and rage, crept through to my side of the door.
I didn’t speak. I had nothing to say. Questions swarmed through my mind, but they tangled together like strands of uncombed hair, and muddled everything I knew.
What could I say to her? Could I ask her why she wanted me dead? Why she was willing to kill me to protect her work? I couldn’t ask any of those questions—the mere thought of them burned my throat with bile.
Summer wasn’t as affected. She pressed her blood-stained hand on the wall and glared at me through the glass door.
I couldn’t believe the iciness in her eyes. With a stare, I was snatched back to the day I met Castle, when he looked at me like I was nothing, mere filth, a nuisance. But unlike that day, Summer’s cold stare was a bundle of knives that gutted me clean.
She slammed her bloodied fingers against the panel. It took me a moment to realise she wasn’t trying to open the door like Mason had been. With each punch of a button, she held my gaze.
“You think you’re safe in that room?” Her voice rattled through the speaker, heaving with the pain of her bullet wound.
A pain I’m all too familiar with.
Only, Summer’s tone hitched with the restrained fury that sparked her eyes into the shards of glass.
“This is the CDC, Winter. I can reach you anywhere down here.”
My face twisted as I rested my forehead on the glass. Tears blurred my sight, stung my eyes, brewed by her.
“Why?” I spoke in a strangled whisper. “Why are you doing this? It’s … me.”
Those words—those simple words—packed a punch hard enough to sober some of the pain on her face, leaving a glimmer of sorrow.
A heaved sigh crackled the speaker before she said, “Winner, I love you. But if I need to sacrifice you in order to discover this vaccine, I will. It is my duty, it is what I have worked for my entire adult life and more.”
At my horrified look, her sorrow crept into a smile that destroyed me more than anything else in this world has ever done before—more than Castle or Leo, death and rotters. Maybe more than when I’d thought Cleo had died back at the farmhouse.
My knees wobbled, threatening to give out under me. I leaned more of my weight against the door and spoke my shame in a whisper; “I would never sacrifice you to save the world.”
The greater good was for the noble. Neither Summer or me were noble.
“The world?” Her smile turned dark, menacing, and matched Mason’s airy chuckle. “The world will be gone before the vaccine is b
ottled. Even if some survive, the vaccine will only be distributed to those chosen before the outbreak. Let me clarify—I will sacrifice you for my career, to be the one who made a rebirth of humanity possible.”
I paused a moment to catch my breath, to slow the dizziness that swayed me. The humidity in the room made it hard to fight for a breath deep enough to soothe or steady me.
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Winner. If you can learn to live with my process, then is…” —She gestured between us with her bloody hand— “doesn’t have to happen. You told me that you broke halo some time ago. It’s merely a matter of keeping it that way.”
“And what about Leo?” I snapped. “Am I just supposed to look the other way when you’re using him as a fucking pin-cushion?”
Summer nodded. It wasn’t a nod of confirmation, but one of realisation. She understood that she couldn’t sway me. I chose a side. And she wasn’t it.
The speaker static silenced. She’d turned it off.
I watched through blurry eyes as she typed something into the panel, then we locked gazes.
‘Sorry,’ she mouthed.
Before I could slam my fist against the glass door, Mason swept Summer away.
I shouted her name—until my voice was drowned out by a deep rumble from above. Slowly, I lifted my chin and looked up at the ceiling. A droplet fell from a brass faucet. Not a sprinkler, I realised, but a spiked tap of sorts.
The droplet landed on my forehead. I crinkled my nose as it trickled down my face to my nostrils. Then another droplet.
In a blink, water sprayed from a dozen faucets like forked streams.
The ID card almost slipped from my wet fingers as I tried to jam it into the card swiper. Nothing happened. The blink of the panel had stopped. The power must have been cut by Summer on the other side.
Clutching the useless card in my hand, I took a step back and ran my wide gaze over the soaked floor. The room was filling.
And it was filling fast.
26.
The water crashed down on me.
Each time I tried to move out of the onslaught, another faucet burst open and shoved me back down. I couldn’t keep my head above water. It poured into my mouth and dragged me to the floor. The force spun me around like I was trapped in a washing machine, and I pulled myself out of the tumble.
