by Jess C Scott
Just then, she heard someone whisper, “Tavia!” The voice was coming from somewhere in front.
The only available light source came from the moon outside. Tavia didn’t want to bring out her crystal pendant, to see better in the dark. The flash of bright light might attract unwanted attention from a guard at another area in the building, that was out of her immediate line of sight.
“Nin,” she hissed, tentatively. “Is that you?”
She peered into the open space in front. She was to follow his orders, so Nin said. His orders were to go, if he and Anya got stuck behind. But Tavia felt she couldn’t do that—she’d do her best to help, if they did get into some kind of trouble.
“Nin…” she called out again, under her breath, as she lurked in the shadows. She went right up to the edge of the corridor, where Nin and Anya had been just moments before they had entered the janitor’s room.
A hand came out of nowhere, and went over Tavia’s mouth. She kicked and struggled—nailing somebody, or something, in the ribs—but all the strength from her body ebbed away in two seconds flat.
Everything went black.
* * *
Anya could hear the main power supplies shutting off, one by one, throughout the Omega unit. Each sounded more and more foreboding, signaling that time was running out. Each hum of the power supply shutting down echoed the nervous thump in her heart.
She wanted to ask Nin what was going on, but decided not to distract him from getting through the red sensor lines. Relying on their crystal pendants for some light, they engaged each other in a dance in the dark, as they helped each other dodge the sensors. Nin helped Anya with her balance, while Anya looked out for any sensor lines that Nin might have missed, as a result of his compromised faculty of concentration.
Nin swung his head back, looking up to the ceiling and stretching his neck from side to side, and then all round, before they started going up the ladder. He was back on full alert, having survived a room saturated with the fatal element of pure iron.
“Are we meeting Tavia?” Anya asked Nin as they were halfway through the secret passage.
“I told her to go if we got stuck,” Nin replied, unapologetically. There was always a reason behind his instructions. “I’ve been trying to get an update from Dresan, but the connection’s been cut since the second lockdown warning came on.”
Anya hoped he had an actual plan to get them out of the building, if Tavia had indeed gone off first. But for the most part, Anya was glad to see some life returning to Nin already. While they were still in dimly-lit surroundings, which prevented her from seeing if some color had returned to his face, his movements had regained their characteristic light, firm step. He seemed ready to defend or attack, which was more favorable than being weakened right down to the bone.
“One step closer to getting out of here,” Nin whispered over to Anya.
Anya and Nin placed the discarded CPUs in their former positions when they reached the janitor’s room. Anya was just about to take a step forward to unlock the door, when Nin grabbed her hand. She saw why, and felt her blood start to congeal, when she saw some shadows moving alongside the lower edge of the door.
“Step back,” Nin whispered in the lowest voice he could, to Anya, stepping in front of her. He drew one of his laser pistols. This time, it wasn’t due to a fake call or the presence of sentinels.
Outside, a guard had drawn his own weapon, and had one gnarled hand around the handle of the door. The bruises and scars on his hand and face were tokens from his glory days as a former boxing champion.
Anya realized with horror that she and Nin had forgotten to lock the door behind them. They had been too elated at having gotten into the janitor’s room safely. There was nothing to stop the guard from opening the door, at any millisecond.
Anya prayed that there was only one guard, and that Nin would be faster with pulling the trigger. She hated how unfair it was. Nin’s laser gun would only stun, or erase one’s memory, at most. The guard’s bullet could cost Nin much more.
“Report to the main square,” a voice came over on the guard’s walkie-talkie.
The order was too muffled for Anya to make out the message. She was fighting back images of a bullet hitting Nin, or anyone she was close to, for that matter. Anya thought she would die too, if she ever had to watch a friend spend the last few moments of their life, lying in her arms.
The guard grunted when another order from his superior came in. A squeak against the polished floor indicated that the guard had swiveled on his foot. Nin and Anya heaved a momentary sigh of relief once they heard the guard’s receding footsteps.
“Lucky us,” Anya whispered, bumping against Nin’s frame, when he stayed in place as she took a step towards the door. It felt safe, against his body. He smiled, before opening the door, ever so thankful that the hinges of the door didn’t creak.
Nin had arranged with Tavia earlier, to leave one of the windows on the ground floor a crack open. The window was down the corridor, and down some stairs, at the other end of the open space. Nin and Anya hurried over to the window. The chilly draft of night air that trickled in let them know that Tavia had gone through with the instructions.
Nin lifted the window once he had checked to see there were no stray guards lurking around outside. Anya never felt so exultant before, to be able to run, as she and Nin made their way back to the compound, keeping close to the edge of the building, watched only by the stars high above in the night sky. They were free! They had made it out alive, together!
“Let’s go,” he said to her, as he grabbed her hand.
They hid behind a hedgerow, upon reaching the garden compound. They exchanged a tight hug. They both enjoyed the thrill of adventure—and fed off their growing love for danger and excitement…and each other.
Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside. It seemed to be the only kind of love that the citizens of Zouk City knew and spoke of.
Anya indulged in a few moments of grandiose projections of Nin. She thought he could be larger than life, do all sorts of crazy, fantastical things, and get away with it all…without even lifting a finger, if he didn’t have to, or want to. Was it her fault that he happened to be so dashingly handsome too?
Nin gazed back at Anya in a similar way. He liked that Anya didn’t whine, or sit around waiting for things to happen. He liked that she wasn’t all talk and no action. One of Nin’s biggest secrets (which he wasn’t even aware of himself) was that he had always wanted, almost desperately, to fall in love with someone he could call a best friend.
“Could you be the one?” he asked with his eyes.
Anya waited for Nin to make the next move. The glint of his wrist device reminded her of the parchment piece that was in it. She couldn’t wait to see what the piece would unravel.
Nin tugged on the wire on his earpiece, untangling some strands of his hair from it. “Dresan said Tavia’s waiting for us outside.”
Nin and Anya quickly surveyed the compound, but found no sign of Tavia.
“She must be downstairs,” Nin said in a low whisper, as he led Anya to the tree he had the key to. He remembered telling Tavia to go, if he and Anya got into any trouble. Maybe she’d taken off once the second unplanned-for lockdown activation came on. It might explain the incoming feedback too, which temporarily blocked off the communication with Dresan.
Dresan and Leticia were chatting and laughing about their shared penchant for electronica music, when Nin and Anya came down the stairs, and into the train carriage. They had been keeping a careful watch on the trio’s movements, from the safety and comfort of their underground station.
“Well done!” Dresan said as he exchanged a quick, tight hug with his Elven leader, before giving him a
high five. They looked so much like people on the street that way. Anya wouldn’t have guessed they came from vastly different backgrounds.
“We were flipping out when you were in the vault,” Leticia said to Anya, holding her friend’s hand tightly, overjoyed to see she was safe. “I said several Hail Mary’s that you’d be able to escape.”
Dresan was halfway through querying Nin about the second lockdown, when Nin gazed around. He stopped listening to Dresan and asked, “Where’s Tavia?”
Dresan took a step out to the side, as he looked behind Nin’s shoulder. “I thought she was with you.”
Nin stared back at Dresan, straight in the eye. “She wasn’t outside the building.”
Dresan frowned before immediately reaching for his laptop. “According to the screen…she’s still outside.” The earpiece could detect their exact locations within a certain distance—Tavia was apparently in the garden compound, near the very hedgerow Anya and Nin had been just minutes ago.
“I’ll go up and get her.” Nin turned and headed off toward the stairway.
“We looked,” Anya said to Dresan, baffled. She felt a nauseating sense of dread threatening to engulf her again. A knot formed, deep in her gut. “There wasn’t any sign of her.”
Then where is she? was the question nobody dared to ask, apart from Nin who had done so a few seconds earlier.
Nin took the stairs two at a time, all kinds of thoughts racing in his mind. He had no idea about the iron elements in the hexagonal vault, until he stepped in—everything had been going well up to that point. The iron particles troubled him. It said something about Varian Gilbreth’s knowledge on elves and iron. Why would a person go to such great extents? Weren’t ordinary sensor lines sufficient enough, to safeguard the vault?
Nin made a dash for the hedgerow, when he stepped out of the tree’s door. The coolness of the night air on the back of his neck was like a cold caress from the fingertips of Death. He could still see some of the guards streaming back in various directions into the Omega unit.
Nin didn’t know if she was inside. The guards didn’t seem to be in a rush. There was almost a sense of annoyance in the way they shuffled back into the Omega building, like they had been called out for a briefing that was essentially, a waste of their time. That wouldn’t be likely, if an intruder had actually been caught.
“Where are you, Tavia?” he muttered under his breath.
This was the first time anything like this had ever happened. This wasn’t even supposed to happen—elves were wiser, better, and could outsmart and outdo the average human in most cases. That’s what they had been told since the dawn of time.
He searched the perimeters of the compound from behind the line of shrubs, till he slowed down and looked on the surface of the ground. He’d go on his hands and knees to comb the ground for any clues, but he didn’t need to.
What he found was Tavia’s clear earpiece, which had been cast onto the grass.
Chapter 12:
Nin crouched on the ground, thinking hard, feeling despondent at the same time. His cousin was missing, and nobody knew where she was, or what had happened to her. He felt somehow responsible. What had gone wrong, and at what point, aside from the second lockdown? It could have been Varian Gilbreth’s form of a diversion, a kind of payback for having trespassed into his secret vault.
Everyone on the team—Nin, Tavia, Dresan, Anya, and Leticia—had been in danger from the moment each agreed to be a part of the midnight operation. Whether it was of free will or coercion, Nin had always taken a certain level of pride and enjoyment in the concept of “them” going against “the authorities.” It was what made leaving Helli’sandur and a life of meaningless luxury worth it. Now, he questioned the very ideal that he had so closely adhered to.
Dresan came up to the compound. He had told Anya and Leticia to stay behind, where it would be safer for them. He moved stealthily to join Nin, careful to remain unseen. He got the message when he saw the clear earpiece in Nin’s palm.
“We could spread out,” Dresan said to Nin, with a blunt edge in his voice. He too, felt somehow responsible that Tavia was missing. “I tried contacting her,” Dresan tried to explain, his voice sounding strained, “but I couldn’t get through. I thought—”
“You and I should check the Omega unit,” Nin interrupted, not rudely, but out of a sense of urgency. “Maybe one of the guards saw or heard something.” And just maybe, they might overhear some of that information.
In the train carriage, Anya and Leticia discussed the events that had led up to Anya and Nin’s entry into the vault.
“I heard Tavia tapping on a metal banister,” Anya related to Leticia, who nodded.
“We could hear it too,” Leticia said. “She seemed to be a little impatient, on the second round of tapping.”
Anya could still hear the metal clinks, and the Elven melody Tavia had sung. It was strange, how she had goose bumps then, and now. In the first instance, it was the beauty of the language that had thrilled her. This time, the little hairs on her skin stood on end due to fear. The possibility of an atrocious outcome was too much to handle.
“The last thing we heard her say was, ‘I’ll be waiting here for them.’” Leticia had been making sure the correct fake security tapes were playing on the targeted screens, as Dresan concentrated on coordinating the movements between Tavia, Nin and Anya. “She was hiding behind the staircase…she went forward…and then she went out into the compound. We thought she did that to escape a guard that entered the open space.”
It was ironic Tavia had been the one to find herself in trouble. Anya had assumed all along that she and Nin would have had the most amount of risk to face, since they were the ones who would be committing the larceny. She felt safer and more secure then, as compared to now when they realized Tavia was missing.
Just then, she remembered the photo she had seen in the vault. She wondered if Leticia knew anything about it.
“There was a photo of Julius’s father, in the vault,” Anya started, wishing she had taken a photo of it on her cell phone. “He knows Varian Gilbreth.”
Leticia frowned. She hadn’t met Samuel Lycata many times, or heard any mention about Gilbreth either. “Jule’s never mentioned him before. Gilbreth, I mean.”
Anya was sullen. She wondered what Varian Gilbreth really knew about the medieval parchment pieces he had in his collection. She was sure it would explain the pure iron particles embedded in the red sensors. Worse, she wondered if Julius’s father, or Julius himself knew anything about the parchment. She felt a sudden trepidation go through her body.
“Where was the photo taken?” asked Leticia.
Anya could remember the caption. “Croatia.” She didn’t know what the rest of the country looked like, or where it was on a world map. Anya continued, when Leticia raised an eyebrow. “They were standing in front of a medieval fresco.”
“Medieval? Like the parchment?”
Anya nodded, though she couldn’t make any link between the elves’ parchment, and the Dance of Death.
Anya was worried for the elves’ lives. Her imagination started to run wild.
“What if Gilbreth has a room in the Omega unit, that’s made of nothing but pure iron?” she asked Leticia. The fortifications could be right down to the cement that held the tiles on the ground together.
“Maybe he wants the parchment pieces that the elves have?” Leticia suggested. The pieces were right there in the train carriage, Anya noticed. Dresan had brought them in along with the laptop.
“I’d give up the pieces, in exchange for their safe return,” muttered Anya. Leticia would have done the same. The elves already knew what was written on the pieces they had in their possession.
“Have faith,” Leticia said. In moments of truly great stress, Leticia seemed to be able to hold herself together. It was a trait Anya had always admired.
Anya thought of Nin. Her heart went out to him. She had an inkling that he would be feeling a sense of d
espair, even guilt—that all the fun and excitement was jarred by the interruption of this crucial, unforeseen event of Tavia’s disappearance.
Anya was right.
* * *
Nin and Dresan entered the building through the window that had been left a crack open. They devised a quick plan on the spot: they would search the Omega unit, from end to end, level by level, keeping out of sight. They didn’t know of any other secret rooms besides the vault in the Omega unit.
“End to end?” Dresan asked Nin, who answered by nodding.
Nin and Dresan cleared each level from opposite ends, meeting each other at an approximate halfway point, before continuing in opposite directions to get to the other base point.
The magik mushroom was beginning to wear off, but Nin sensed some movement from the corner of his eye. He held up his arm, deflecting a bullet with his arm guard. He whipped his plasma gun out, taking down two guards that had crept up behind him. He dragged the two bodies into the corner of one of the empty rooms, without making any noise—they’d be down for 48 hours.
“Stefan—you said you heard something?”
Nin paused behind a water cooler, listening in on a conversation between some of the guards in an adjacent room. There was the sound of paper shredding, then crumpling, and a soft, scratchy kind of rustling—Nin guessed the guards were tossing wads of paper into a wastepaper basket.
“Sho’ did,” the guard growled, as he hit his fingernail against the metal leg of the chair he was sitting on. “Locked the Janitor’s room with my master key.”
“Door was open?”
“Naw—it weren’t locked. Went into the ‘V’ room. No sign of nothin’.”
