by Aja James
He tilted his head slightly, regarding her with unblinking eyes.
“Would you like to see our progress while you’re here?” he asked for the first time since she joined the team.
Ava hesitated.
Something was not quite right. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled in awareness. It was very late and very dark in the research building, the lamps around campus not providing much illumination through the windows.
But she was excessively curious about what the other team was working on and the progress they’d made. If they were close to a breakthrough, their research could be used immediately to save lives, whereas Ava’s work stream had a longer gestation period.
Ava thought of her father.
“All right,” she replied, “lead the way.”
“After you,” Shinji said, gesturing for her to precede him.
Ava walked, but kept looking over her shoulder because she didn’t really know where she was supposed to go.
“Down to the secure level,” Shinji instructed, as if hearing her thoughts.
That was strange. Why would they be doing the experiments there?
“I thought that level was for hazardous chemicals and such?” Ava inquired straight out.
“There is an operating room beyond the first section of labs,” Shinji explained. “We use it after hours because it’s smaller, more energy efficient and doesn’t require starting up all of the facilities’ expensive equipment.”
Sounded somewhat reasonable, Ava thought, but she still had a strange feeling about this…
When they arrived at the air-tight corridor doors, Shinji used a special key card, punched in a series of codes, and scanned his retinas to gain entry.
Ava’s claustrophobia started to kick in. She didn’t like entering places she couldn’t get out of by herself. And Shinji was just a little bit creepier than usual tonight.
“You know, Shinji,” she said, taking a step back from the corridor entrance. “I can have a look on Monday, there’s no rush. I don’t want to disturb the team.”
He stayed where he was by the security panel, but his eyes tracked her every movement intently.
“So… I’m just going to head home and leave you to it,” Ava said, then hastily turned around to open the door to the stairway that they just came through.
Locked! How did it lock all of a sudden?
When she turned back around to go down the hall, her forearm was snatched up in an unrelenting grip.
“I do insist you come and witness the experiment, Dr. Monroe,” Shinji said in that same toneless voice. “I am sure you will find it enlightening.”
Ava tugged at her arm, then tried to use her other hand to peel away his manacle-like fingers. No use. He held her tight and was pulling her inexorably toward the now open steel doors that led down the secure corridor.
Ava was never a screamer. Couldn’t hit a high note to save her life, and she didn’t start now. Instead, she concentrated all her strength in getting free of Shinji. So the stairway door was locked. She’d run down the hall and try one of the other doors, or the elevator, but first she needed to get her arm free.
She dug in her heels and dangled all of her weight, which, granted, wasn’t much, on her arm, having long abandoned her hobo on the floor. She clawed at Shinji’s hand with her nails, but he just ignored her efforts and dragged her bodily by the arm through the corridor gate, which closed with a suctioning sound behind them, enclosing them in darkness except for a dim glow of light coming from the end of the hallway.
Ava resorted to extreme measures and chomped down on Shinji’s wrist as hard as she could, her teeth breaking his skin, her tongue stinging with the taste of metallic blood.
No response. No shout of pain. He didn’t even pause in his progress with her down the corridor.
This was not good, Ava thought, half of her strangely calm, knowing there was nothing she could do anyway now that the doors had sealed them inside and she without the clearance to open it; half of her pulling-out-her-hair frantic, because she’d watched too many Criminal Minds not to worry for her life.
Finally, he pulled her through a set of double doors, and then another, that opened automatically for him by visual recognition.
Tugging her to stand in front of him after they entered a small operating room, he finally let go of her arm, which she rubbed absently as she stared slack-jawed at the scene before her.
There were maybe three or four people in the room clustered around the operating table, not including herself and Shinji. A few assistants, from the looks of it. One other surgeon who raised his eyes toward her. Despite the mask that kept half his face hidden, she recognized him as Tōshirō Aizen. He was standing on the other side of the operating table.
Nanao Ise was on it.
Hooked up to monitors, seemingly unconscious. Her arms and legs bound to the sides. And her chest was…
Ava involuntarily took a step closer.
…her chest was cut open. Ava could see her heart beating regularly behind her breastbone, exposed and bloody.
A wave of nausea hit her hard, but adrenaline due to fear and shock counteracted it.
“Wha-what-” she tried to speak but couldn’t find the words to adequately express her horror.
“Nanao graciously volunteered to be our subject for this operation,” Shinji explained patiently a few feet beside her.
“Clamp,” Tōshirō said as he continued the operation, as if there was nothing abnormal about this whole situation.
Ava frantically looked around her. Some cabinets with surgical instruments and medical products. A couple of stools. The operating table. And nothing else but shadows.
She looked from one assistant to the next. If they met her eyes, theirs remained uncomprehending and blank, as if no real person existed behind their gaze. Yet they followed the surgeon’s instructions to the letter flawlessly.
Ava did not expect any aid from that quarter.
Shinji was pulling on new gloves and a surgical mask, preparing to assist Tōshirō.
Did they not even care she was here as a witness to what amounted to murder? She didn’t believe for a second that Nanao, a perfectly healthy, if skinny mantis-like woman, would have volunteered for such a risky procedure. But there was nothing Ava could do to stop it. For one thing, she might cause the surgeons to make a mistake, risking Nanao’s life further, and for another, she wasn’t sure she could fix things if she stopped the surgery midway.
The last time she operated was on a cadaver in med school. She’d quit that track before she got to living, breathing patients.
Ava stood still for a while, trying to channel invisibility. No one seemed to care that she was there. Because the corridor was locked down, there was no place she could go even if she tried.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked in a remarkably calm voice.
“Medical advancement, of course, Dr. Monroe,” Tōshirō answered, not bothering to look away from his work, his voice muffled by his mask. “Just trying to help evolution along.”
“Why are you experimenting on someone healthy?” Ava figured she might as well try to understand what was going on while she still could. She didn’t want to think about what happened next.
Murderers didn’t usually let witnesses to their crimes go free.
“Are we healthy, Dr. Monroe?” Tōshirō asked in return, extending a hand for a pair of scissors, which was promptly placed in his grasp. “Since the moment we are born, we begin to die. Don’t you think there’s something wrong with that?”
“It’s called life, and it has meaning because there’s an end to it,” Ava said.
“Very philosophical,” he mused, as if appreciating her statement. “But I don’t think there’s any harm extending life if one could, I don’t think it would be less meaningful.”
Ava’s eyes were drawn to a small movement on the operating table.
Nanao’s left hand twitched, her fingers flexing.
�
�Is… is she under general anesthesia?” Ava asked, afraid for the condition Nanao was in.
“Not quite,” came Tōshirō’s careless reply. “Anesthesia can sometimes cause suboptimal reactions and we want to make sure we have the best conditions for a transplant success. She is fully aware and conscious.”
Ava’s eyes flew to Nanao’s face, which she saw was turned toward her now, the eyes opened so wide they were bugging out.
Holy…! Ava lurched forward toward the operating table, to do what, she didn’t know, but somehow she needed to help Nanao. The woman was in excruciating pain and terror.
But before she could take a full step, the floors cracked and started collapsing as if the building was sitting on a major fault line and just got hit by a 8.0 earthquake.
Or at least she thought it was an earthquake for the way everything started to shake and the ceilings rained dust upon them. Monitors started going off in deafening beeps and the building alarm added its sirens to the cacophony around them.
“We have to abandon the experiment!” Tōshirō shouted over the deafening alarms and cracks and crashes from falling debris.
“What about her?” Shinji shouted back, pointing to Ava, who had quick enough reactions to duck beneath the operating table.
Tōshirō tried to drag her out but she kicked at him like a donkey and landed one foot squarely on his face, smashing his nose.
“Leave her,” Shinji said from the double doors of the operating room, already on his way out. “We don’t need her anymore.”
Tōshirō leapt up and scrambled for the exit. The assistants remained where they were, unconcerned about what was happening around them. One of them got crushed under a large steel medical cabinet and didn’t even make a sound.
Ava tried to get out too, but the ceiling caved directly overhead, concrete blocks crashing onto the operating table with Nanao on it, squashing the heavy metal on top of Ava.
Miraculously, she wasn’t hurt, the metal bending around her in such a way that actually protected her from the debris.
But she was stuck.
She tried to claw her way out, but her nails could gain no purchase on the slippery epoxy floor.
She tried to see through the rain of dust and debris that clouded the operating room in a choking haze, and could make out the light from the tight corridor between the double doors just beyond. Shinji and Tōshirō were about to pass through to the security gate farther down.
It was then that Ava saw the black shadow descend upon them seemingly from out of nowhere.
Instead of getting through to the other side, she saw first Shinji crumple to the floor, then Tōshirō, the undefined shadow moving from one to the other so fast her eyes couldn’t quite track it.
Well good, she thought rather bloodthirstily.
Maybe they got their just desserts for whatever evil they’d been up to. It would hugely piss her off if she and Nanao died in vain, and the villains got away.
Suddenly, the shadow flashed in front of her and coalesced into a solid arm and hand, both covered in black leather.
“Give me your hand.”
Ryu?
Ryu?!
“Now, Ava.”
She shot out her hand without further ado and he extracted her from beneath the operating table just before it fully collapsed under the weight of the floor above them.
As he pulled her to her feet, she didn’t even have the chance to inhale a breath before he dragged her along behind him, moving rapidly down the corridor, through the double doors, to the security gate.
Barely pausing, he rapidly punched in some codes, hauled a lifeless and open-eyed Shinji to the retina scan and got the door to slowly creak open, the crumbling building around them having jammed the frames.
He pushed the doors wide enough to fit first him, then Ava as they slid sideways through the narrow gap.
But just as they got free of the security gate, he shoved her away from him and barked, “Stay back!”
Ava did as instructed without thinking, stumbling several feet back, bracing herself against the wall, as a swarm of shadows descended upon Ryu.
And then, before her very eyes, Ryu became a shadow too.
All she saw were twists and blurs of black masses tangling together, muffled sounds like flesh hitting flesh, bones cracking, grunts of pain, metal slashing. But she couldn’t see anything beyond the nebulous mass of shadows that seemed contained around where Ryu had been standing just moments before.
The only other sound and sight was the splatter of blood against the ceiling, the walls, the floor, around the collective of shadows.
A lot of blood.
Until the entire hallway became drenched in it.
Ava didn’t understand what she was seeing. Where was Ryu? Was any of the blood his?
But then she noticed a black shadow ooze in her direction like a meandering serpent. She backed away as fast as she could, even as she was almost hypnotized by the sight.
The shadow slid from the floor to the wall to the ceiling and kept coming at her.
Ava slipped and fell to the ground hard just as the shadow loomed directly above her. A part of it seemed to drip something black from the ceiling downwards in a vertical string.
The black ooze coalesced into the shape of a sword, which glinted sharply in the light reflected by the moon through the hallway window, and swung toward her—
But just as the blade was about to cut into her shoulder, another black shadow absorbed the one dangling above her. A muffled scream and more splatters of blood later, one of the shadows dropped to the floor before her and disintegrated into ashes.
The other one coalesced into Ryu Takamura, his features almost entirely concealed by sweat and gore.
Chapter Ten
He should have known she wouldn’t obey him.
Ryu was seething with fury as he fought off the shadow Ninjas that had been sent to deal with them.
Who sent them, he’d find out later, but he knew where to start. They could only have been trained by one Master going by their sword skills, and Ryu knew him intimately.
He grabbed Ava’s hand and hauled her to her feet once more, running with her down the hallway away from the stairwell. The explosives he’d set were to go off in rounds. This floor was about to implode any second now, the operating room its nexus. They had no time to go up or down. They had to go through a window as far away from the source of the blast as possible, and fast.
As he rounded on the hallway window on the farthest side of the building from the operating room, he released Ava long enough to leap once, twice, between the hallway walls, and on the third leap, he tucked and rolled to increase velocity and broke through the double-paned window with his feet.
Ava only managed a small “eek!” as he swung her into his arms and leapt out the window just as the hallway decimated in a torrent of fire behind them, shattering all of the windows on each floor of the building, spewing bricks everywhere like a machine gun.
They were leaping out from the second floor onto grounds covered in thick grass, but the fall would still be brutal, especially since the aftershock from the blast hurled them across the lawns with twice the force of the leap itself.
Ryu enfolded Ava’s small body with his and twisted so that he landed first, her collision cushioned by his body. Before hitting earth, he rotated so that they immediately rolled as they connected with the grass and dirt, dulling some of the impact.
Still, pain exploded everywhere in Ryu’s body, but he knew that nothing was broken. Cracked and bruised, yes, but unbroken.
He hauled Ava up and thankfully didn’t have to drag her because she was moving on her own, keeping pace with him as he led them away from the collapsing building to his Kawasaki, parked a safe distance away.
Without his telling her, she swung onto the seat and put on the helmet he handed her, wrapped her arms around his middle as he got on in front of her and held on, right as the engine roared to life and he sped them away from
the collapsing building and sinking grounds around it like a bat out of hell.
Within nanoseconds, Ryu calculated their safest route and hideout.
He was taking them to his safe house. They might have a few days before their enemies tracked them.
And they would come after them. Because Ryu had the embryo. And because Ava was also now a liability.
He didn’t intend to wait long enough for his enemies to find them. Just until he could heal up a little and make contact with the Cove, and/or Inanna and Gabriel, who were already on their way to Tokyo to rendezvous with him.
He needed reinforcements.
This was much bigger than the Dark Queen suspected. If his Ninja Master had allied himself with whoever was behind all this, it was a lot more complicated and deadly than Ryu could handle alone, especially when he was on the edge of starvation for blood and had just sustained heavy injuries.
But the first thing he was going to do when he had them both safe was tie Ava Monroe to a bolted piece of furniture so she couldn’t get into any more trouble while he rested.
His vision was already blurring, his strength seeping out with his blood from multiple sword and dagger wounds, not to mention cuts from exploding glass and debris. He wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on her. He’d be lucky if he didn’t pass out before they got to the safe house.
Saving her had screwed up his plans royally.
The explosives were supposed to take care of everything and everyone inside the building without his having to engage. The shadow Ninjas had been an unhappy surprise, but even they couldn’t spread wings and fly to safety. His plan would still have succeeded. He would have stayed close enough to eliminate any stragglers, but far enough to avoid the worst of the blast.
But just as he was about to trigger the explosives, she arrived, and even moving at top speed from the roof he couldn’t get to her before she followed Shinji Abarai into the secured laboratory, not when he had to deal with shadow Ninjas along the way.
Weakness. She was his weakness.
And now he knew why his Master had tried to harden him against it.
She’d almost got herself killed!
