by P. T. Hylton
Owl spent most of her time adjusting the daylights, preferring the technology to the action.
All in all, Alex was impressed. They were working as a team. They’d fallen into an easy rhythm that reminded her of the way the GMT had operated back in the days when CB was running things and Simmons and Drew were on the team. It made her smile. Maybe she wasn’t such a bad captain after all.
Once the building was vampire-free, the engineers came in and got to work.
Firefly stood next to Alex, the two captains overseeing the mission.
“Your team did a great job today,” he told her.
She was a bit surprised at that. Firefly wasn’t normally one to pass out compliments. “Thank you, Garrett.”
“If we can keep this pace, the whole prison will be ready by the end of the week. Fleming will be ecstatic.”
She lowered her voice a little. “Let me ask you something. Do you think this can work? Like, do you really believe it?”
Now Firefly looked surprised. “Resettlement? Of course I do. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
“Come on, man. You’ve seen the vampires at night. You know what they can do. The others, Fleming, they’ve never seen it with their own eyes, so I get their optimism. But you?”
“It’s Fleming. I’ve seen him do the impossible before. His plans always work. I believe in him.”
“I did too, once.”
“When we come back here tomorrow, you’ll see,” he said. “These buildings will be free of vampires. This plan is going to work.”
She looked up at him and saw the dark circles around his eyes. “Are you doing okay? Have you been sleeping?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been busy. Between the missions with you and all the other Resettlement stuff, I haven’t had a lot of time.”
“Garrett, listen to me. Fleming’s plans have worked so far, yeah. But maybe sometimes the cost is too great.”
He looked away, the unspoken cost hanging in the air. “And sometimes sacrifices are worth it to accomplish something truly historic.”
Before she could reply, one of the engineers spoke.
“We’re all set here, Captain Eldred. Building Two is good to go. Should we move on to three?”
Alex glanced at her watch. “No, there’s only an hour of daylight left. I’m calling it. Let’s go home.”
20
The laboratory was a bustle of activity. Brian and Sarah worked side by side near the center of the room, with a dozen techs hurrying around them. Most of them appeared to be assembling daylights as Brian worked on the individual components.
Alex was a bit taken aback. In her experience, the lab had always been quiet, a peaceful place where Brian could work on his innovative designs away from the hustle and bustle of the rest of the ship. But it appeared that tranquility was a thing of the past.
She walked over to Brian and put a hand on his shoulder. “McElroy, what up?”
He looked up, startled, and Alex smiled. The lab may have changed, but Brian never did.
Although, now that she was looking at him, he looked paler than usual. Thinner, too. It appeared the GMT weren’t the only ones Fleming was pushing to the limit.
“Hey, Alex, what’s up with you?” he asked.
“I just got back from, um, Fort Sterns.” She almost choked on the name. “I was about to grab a bite to eat. Care to join me?”
He glanced down at the work in front of him. “I don’t know. We’re way behind, and—”
“Don’t be an idiot. Even you can’t work all the time. You need a break.”
He nodded slowly. “Maybe a short one.”
Sarah leaned toward them, a friendly smile on her face. “Great idea. Mind if I tag along?”
Brian shook his head. “This is too important for both of us to leave. You keep at it, and you can go when I get back.”
Her smile wavered for a moment. “Come on, boss. We all need to eat.”
“Sorry, Sarah,” he insisted. “I promise I won’t be too long.” With that, he turned and walked away. Alex hurried to catch up to him.
Ten minutes later, they were sitting at a table at Tankards shoveling cheap but delicious bar food into their mouths.
“I tell you, that woman’s driving me crazy,” Brian said, then took another huge bite. The poor guy was going at the food like he hadn’t seen any in a week.
“Sarah’s that bad, huh?”
He swallowed his food, then answered. “She’s on me like glue. I’m in that lab sixteen hours a day, and I can’t get five minutes of it away from her. And she’s trying way too hard to impress me.”
“You know she’s reporting back to Fleming on you, right?”
“I’m not an idiot, Alex. And even if I were, she’s being pretty damn obvious in her attempts to win me over. She’s constantly touching me, coming up with excuses to be alone with me, stuff like that.”
Alex raised an eyebrow. “Wow, Brian, sounds like you could finally get laid.”
“Yeah, if I didn’t mind screwing a two-faced traitor.” He paused to take another bite. “Speaking of traitors, how are things coming on the Firefly front?”
She laughed and shook her head. “I don’t know, man. He’s tough to read. And Fleming… let’s just say changing the direction of the city and staging a coup is proving to be more difficult than I expected.”
Brian took another bite and she watched him, really looking at his face for the first time since they’d sat down.
“I say this in the kindest possible way, Brian, but you look like absolute shit. You need to take care of yourself or you’re going to end up in the hospital.”
He looked back at her. “And I mean this in the least creepy way possible, but you look great. How are you dealing with the stress?”
She thought about that a moment. Although she was tired, she hadn’t felt like she was reaching the breaking point like Brian and Firefly appeared to be. “I think it’s because I’ve been so focused on my team. Seeing them come into their own has been… Well, it’s been exhilarating. My focus has been on training and working with the team. On making sure they stay alive.”
Brian was quiet for a minute. “Honestly, even when I do go to bed, I have trouble sleeping. I can’t stop thinking about the friends we’ve lost.”
Alex nodded. To her surprise, tears sprang to her eyes. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Drew, Simmons, and Hope. Hell, even Sterns, though he was a pain in the ass. They died for something, every one of them. If hundreds of people die during Resettlement, it’ll be like our friends gave their lives for nothing.”
Brian stared down at his plate.
“I just wish Fleming could have seen how our friends died,” she continued. “There’s no way he would be trying to bring more people to the surface if he had seen that firsthand.”
Brian’s voice was thick with venom. “He’d never set foot down there. He’d rather risk other lives than his own. So he won’t see a vampire until it’s too late. And brining one up here isn’t exactly an option.”
Alex set down her fork, her mouth suddenly wide open.
“What?” he asked. “What did I say?”
“Holy shit, Brian. You’re are a genius, and I'm kind of an idiot."
“Wait, what are you talking about?”
She put her hand over his. “I’m sorry, but I have to go.” She stood up from her chair. “Finish eating. Then go take a nap. You’ve earned it.”
Brian watched slack-jawed as Alex hurried out of the pub.
“What’s this about?” Fleming asked.
“We only need your patience for a few more minutes,” CB said.
Alex, CB, and Fleming walked down a long, sunlit corridor. It hadn’t been that long ago that Alex had taken this walk for the first time herself, but it felt like another lifetime.
They reached the door at the end of the corridor and CB typed a five-digit code into the keypad mounted on the wall.
“Why haven’t I seen this area before?�
�� Fleming asked.
“I promise, you’ll find out in a few moments,” Alex assured him.
CB pulled the door open and gestured inside. “After you.”
Fleming hesitated, and Alex saw a tiny flicker of fear in his eyes. It suddenly struck her that they were asking a lot of him. They’d asked him to accompany two of his subordinates who he knew opposed him to a mysterious room in an isolated part of the ship.
It also said a lot about Fleming’s unshakeable self-confidence that he’d gone along with them.
After a moment, the flicker of fear disappeared, and Fleming walked into the sunlit room.
“What is all this?” Fleming asked, his voice filled with wonder. He stared at the steel box in the corner.
CB gestured to a monitor on the wall. “See for yourself.”
Fleming turned to the monitor and froze. For the first time since Alex had met him, Fleming was stunned into silence.
The monitor showed the inside of the steel box and the Feral huddled inside.
“My God,” he said finally. “How long has that thing been here? Who the hell brought a vampire aboard my ship?”
“His name’s Frank,” CB said, “and he’s been here from the beginning. He was one of the original crew of New Haven. He volunteered to be used like a canary in the coalmine from the old days.”
“I don’t know that reference,” Fleming said.
“We meant to use Frank as a gauge of how the vampires on Earth are doing,” Alex explained. “When he died, we’d know it might be safe to go back to the surface.”
Fleming turned to CB. “Why wasn’t I told about it?”
CB frowned. “It’s a closely guarded secret, for obvious reasons. People might not act rationally if they knew a vampire was on board. Only the head of the city council, the director of security, and the field commander of the GMT are meant to know about it. Since the transfer of power didn’t follow the, er, normal procedures when you took over, I guess it sort of slipped through the cracks.
Fleming looked back at the monitor and shuddered. “It really is the stuff of nightmares.”
“That’s not all we brought you here to show you,” CB said. He walked over to the cage.
“You’re not going to let it out, are you?” Fleming asked.
CB chuckled. “I’m not a madman, so no.” He reached into his pack and removed a blood pack he’d gotten from the hospital. He pulled out the sliding metal tray in the door and set the blood pack inside.
“How often do we feed it?” Fleming asked.
“Poor Frank here hasn’t eaten in one hundred fifty years, but that’s about to change.” With that, he slid the tray through to Frank’s side of the cage.
As Alex watched on the monitor, Frank immediately leapt toward the tray, snatching the blood pack with both hands. He tore into it with his razor-like teeth. Blood splashed across his monstrous face and onto his ashen-gray body as he slurped at the bag.
As soon as the blood entered his mouth, Frank began to change. His skin shifted and moved, like it was suddenly made of liquid. It rippled as it reshaped itself to the changing structure beneath, and its color began to change. Legs straightened. Arms thinned. The face shifted to a completely new shape.
Fleming, CB, and Alex watched in rapt attention, unable to tear their eyes away from the macabre transformation.
Frank’s spine straightened and he cried out; whether in pain or relief it was impossible to tell. He put his hands to his changing face, and his claws seemed to retract into his hands.
But to Alex, the most terrifying and wondrous part of the transformation was the eyes. The animalistic rage left those eyes as the irises shrank and the whites began to show. An intelligence appeared behind the eyes, even as they widened with the shock of what was happening.
Alex wanted nothing more than to look away, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.
Finally, after what couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds but felt like much longer, Frank’s now-human-looking fingers uncurled and the empty blood bag fell to the ground at his feet. Then he collapsed to his knees and began to sob.
“My God,” Fleming muttered.
“Jaden was telling the truth about the Ferals,” Alex said. “This proves it.”
Fleming didn’t respond. His eyes still fixed on the monitor, he said, “We could kill him. Let him out and the sun would take care of him, right?”
“It would,” CB confirmed.
“Will he regain his humanity? His intelligence?”
“Maybe in time,” CB said. “I think we should observe him and find out.”
Alex put a hand on Fleming’s shoulder. “Now that you’ve seen one of these monsters up close, you understand more about what we’re up against. Don’t you think we should slow the Resettlement down and try to learn more about them?”
“I… I’m going to need time to process what I’ve seen today. Thank you for showing me this. Both of you.”
George woke the same way he did every morning: to a blaring alarm at exactly four thirty a.m. He hopped out of bed and started his daily routine.
Everything in Agartha was based on a strict schedule. This was mostly because the city leaders were hundreds of years old and liked things to be done in a certain way, but also because there was only so much you could do inside of the city. In George’s case, rising early gave him an opportunity to spend a little time with the vampires before they turned in for the day.
He took a quick shower, threw on some clothes, and headed down to grab a quick bite to eat before the daily briefing with Jaden. As he walked to the mess hall, he tried to enjoy the moment. The city was at its most peaceful this time of day. The vampires were all finishing up their tasks for the evening, and there was only a handful of humans awake. George treasured these moments. In a confined, crowded city like Agartha, it was rare that you got a moment to feel alone.
George walked by the empty school and for some reason thought of Jessica. He’d always been focused on his work, but meeting the woman from New Haven had made him consider other possibilities. Though she was nearly ten years older than he was, she was a woman that he could envision sharing a life with. It would be a long shot at best for anything to happen on that front, but a guy could dream while he walked alone in the city.
George walked into the mostly empty dining area and observed the tables spread out before him. Across the room, Jaden sat alone at a table. That was uncommon. As rare as it was for George to get a moment alone, he knew it was much worse for Jaden. There was always some human or vampire who wanted a moment of his time. There was always a decision to be made or an approval to be signed off on. George didn’t envy the old vampire’s heavy load of responsibilities.
George intended to leave Jaden alone, but the vampire spotted him and waved him over.
“Morning, George. Grab some food and join me.”
“Of course.” George was surprised at the offer. He’d only ever spent time with Jaden in professional settings before, usually in Jaden’s office. Though from the papers spread in front of him, Jaden was working. It wasn’t like he’d suddenly developed a taste for oatmeal.
George had been looking forward to a quiet breakfast, but he supposed it was time for him to jump into work too. He got his food and sat down across from Jaden. The vampire had his hands folded on the table, and he watched George with a slight smile on his face as he took his first bite.
“Is everything okay?” George asked.
“I’ve just gotten a little stuck in my routine. I thought I’d mix things up a little this morning.”
“By coming to the cafeteria and watching people eat?”
Jaden laughed. “Sure. Why not?”
George took another bite. Having a conversation with Jaden was always a weird experience. The vampire’s ten centuries of life had given him an odd perspective. It was almost as if everything was a joke to him. Sometimes, when he looked at the humans of Agartha, he bore the same expression as an indulgent pare
nt might have when watching a child do something harmless but silly.
“Something wrong?” Jaden asked.
George hadn’t even realized exactly what was bothering him until Jaden asked the question. “Yeah, I guess there is.” He looked around to make sure no one could overhear him before he asked his question. “I don’t understand why you let Mark and Aaron go. Isn’t that putting the entire city in danger? I mean, we’ve got two rogue vampires out there running around planning who knows what.”
“They’ll be dead soon enough.” He paused for a moment, as if considering how to explain. “I know it’s odd from a human perspective, but what Aaron and Mark did wasn’t entirely their own faults. They didn’t know any better.”
George set down his spoon. “Sorry, they didn’t know any better? Turning on the people who took them in. Trying to kill you and take over the city. They didn’t realize these things were wrong?”
“Before the infestation, things had a set order in the vampire world. Each master taught his progeny for a hundred years. He taught them how to control their almost uncontrollable urges and how to use their powers to their fullest effect. Mark and Aaron didn’t have that. They were like children forced to grow up in the wild, with no parents to guide or protect them. Letting them choose their own fates was the smallest of kindnesses. I feel I owed them that.”
George tried to see things from that perspective, but couldn’t quite get there. “I don’t know. They were traitors. I still think it would have been better to end their lives nice and cleanly.”
Jaden smiled. “Agartha has stood for one hundred fifty years. I don’t think two rogue vampires of below-average intelligence will change that. Our bigger problem is New Haven.”
George raised an eyebrow at the unexpected shift. Jaden had briefed George and a few of the others after his conversation with Alex, but he hadn’t brought it up since. “Yeah?”
