She nodded. She had no choice. Her face throbbed, her shoulder hurt, and she was pretty sure her right forearm was fractured, but she would walk, goddammit. Moses helped her to stand.
“We will have to climb up to get out,” he said.
She limped over to the ladder, her ankle feeling incredibly tender, and looked up the two floors they would need to climb.
“Can you can do this?” Moses asked her. “Perhaps I could go for help alone.”
“No,” she said. “You stay with me, Subjugate-52. You’re my witness.”
“Your witness?” he asked, confused.
She nodded. “You saw the caretaker attack me. You’re my evidence. He’s a bad man, Subjugate. We need to stop him.”
Climbing onto the ladder, she began to make her way up slowly to the top floor, both arms and her ankle making her movement slow and awkward. But she’d be damned if she was going to let Bander get away. When she made it to the top level, her eyes instantly searched for her gun, but it was gone.
Bander had taken it.
“Shit!” she hissed. Would she find his next victim killed by a bullet from her own gun?
She crawled onto the floor and scrambled over to the hatch. Moses was soon by her side and she motioned for him to open it. He pulled down on the handle, but it wouldn’t budge.
“That is odd,” he said calmly, taking hold of the hatch arm again and tugging hard.
“No, it’s not,” Salvi said, stepping back. “He’s locked us in.”
“The caretaker?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Why would he do that?” Moses asked, looking back at the door. “He knows I do not have a pass to get out.”
Salvi studied him; tall and broad, nearly twice her size. “Because he wants you to kill me.”
Moses looked back at her, a deeper furrow now in his brow as he marked the cross upon himself. “I don’t understand.”
She looked down at the flashing red light beneath his uniform. “You ever gone without an injection before, Subjugate-52?”
He looked down at his alarm light. “No. I haven’t. I must attend to it urgently.”
Salvi nodded again. “How long until someone knows you’re missing?”
“I’m due for my medication. If I don’t collect it, they will come looking for me. It is crucial to our wellbeing.”
“And if the caretaker lies and tells whoever gives you your medication that he’ll take care of it?”
Moses stared at her blankly. “I don’t understand.”
Salvi’s mind raced. Her car was still parked onsite. Someone would notice that it was still there. Someone would have to come looking for her.
But would Bander just leave it there, or would he move it? Hide it? He could always erase the drone footage afterward.
“Do you share a room with anyone, Subjugate-52?” she asked.
“We sleep in wards, but we each have small personal enclaves. We sleep alone in these sealed enclaves.”
Salvi nodded again. “So, if the caretaker lies, says you’ve had your medication and that you’re in bed asleep, is there anyone else who might check on you in the night and note you’re missing?”
“No. There is not.”
Salvi sighed and looked around the silo. “Is there any other way out of here?” She glanced up high. “What about the ventilation window?”
Moses stepped forward, clasping the rail and leaning forward to look up at. She eyed the halo around his skull carefully. “It’s been closed.”
Suddenly the artificial lighting in the silo went out. Salvi and Moses stood there in darkness, broken only by the green glow emanating from the large BioLume vat below.
And Subjugate-52’s flashing red personal alarm.
“Why have the lights gone out?” he asked. “Have they forgotten we’re in here?”
Salvi heard the generator still purring, could see the stirrers still stirring.
She turned back to Moses. “How long until someone will notice you’re missing?”
Subjugate-52 stared back at her, his face tinged with green and splashes of red. “If I do not show for breakfast, my personal escort, Serene-41 will notice I am missing.”
“What time is breakfast?” she asked.
“We dine at 7.00am.”
She tried to remember what the time was when she’d arrived at the Complex. “Fourteen hours,” she said. She looked back at the flashing light beneath his uniform. She had to remain calm, and she had to keep Edward Moses calm. She closed her eyes a moment, trawling her brain for whatever Attis Solme or Dr Remmell had told her about the program. She had to adhere to their strict protocol. She had to keep his mind focused on the present, on serenity. She had to keep his past erased. She must never call him Edward Moses.
Like Bander had just done…
She cringed, thinking of what Moses must’ve heard in her conversation with Bander. Slut. Whore. Sex. Violence.
“Subjugate-52,” she said firmly, “we need to get out of here before then. Is there another way out?”
“No,” he said, looking back down at the vat of BioLume. “The silo’s exit chute only opens from the outside.”
“Well, how does the BioLume get in here?”
Moses pointed across to the opposite wall. “When a vat has been mixed it is sent through the transfer pipe. As each silo’s vat fills, we direct the flow into the next silo until all six silos are at capacity. The six silos are always at capacity.”
Salvi looked up to the closed air hatch again. That wasn’t an option, even if they could get it open. It was too high up and from memory there was nothing on the outside to cling onto. She looked back at the transfer pipe.
“Can we move through the pipe? Will that lead us back to the factory?”
“It does, but the pipe is not much larger than myself. We would need to crawl through BioLume for at least a hundred meters in cramped conditions.”
“A hundred meters?”
“Yes,” he said calmly. “But it would be dangerous to expose ourselves to the BioLume. Its effects on the human body are not yet fully known.”
Salvi subtly wiped her green hands on her jacket. “How full is the pipe at any one time? Could we keep our head above the sludge line? Keep our faces out of it?”
Moses studied her, his face still a mixture of the BioLume glow and splashing red from his personal alarm. “The pipe would be at capacity, which is approximately half full. Then we would need to account for our weight displacement. It is too dangerous, Detective. We should wait until someone notices that I’m missing.”
“Meanwhile the caretaker is out there and another woman gets murdered,” she said, then looked back at Moses, who was marking a sign of the cross upon himself. “Or maybe two of us do.”
“I don’t understand,” he asked, brow furrowed again.
She cursed herself for using a banned trigger word. Murdered.
“The caretaker is supposed to help us,” Moses said, his face taking on the appearance of an innocent boy’s. “He will come back and help us.”
“The caretaker is a bad man, Subjugate-52. You know this.”
He shook his head. “You must not talk like that. The caretaker helps us. He ensures we do the right thing.”
“He’s a coward,” she said. “He’s using you, Subjugate-52. He wants to blame you for all his victims.”
Another trigger word. Victims.
“I-I don’t understand,” Moses said again. “I am a Subjugate. I am soon to be a Serene.”
“But you’re not a Serene yet, are you? He’s going to make it look like you failed, like you killed these women.”
“No.” Moses marked another sign of the cross. “I am soon to be Serene,” he said quietly, a slight furrow in his brow as he looked back to the vat below. “We must not hurt others or we will be punished. The caretaker will punish us. God will punish us.”
Salvi squeezed her eyes shut and realized she’d just reminded Moses of his past. Oh, to hell wit
h the trigger words. She needed to get through to Moses the seriousness of the situation.
“The caretaker is punishing you, Subjugate! He’s going to tell lies about you. Very bad lies. He’s going to tell the mayor you did very bad things.”
He turned his face back to hers, his brow furrowed still, and for the first time, she thought she saw emotion flash in his eyes. Confusion, maybe hurt, perhaps betrayal. He was upset at not fully comprehending what was happening. Upset that someone might think he’d done something bad. Upset because parts of his brain had been numbed and he couldn’t quite respond to the situation correctly. Is this what stress did to them? Is this why Remmell wouldn’t let her speak with Subjugate-12? Could their brains, their programming so-to-speak overload, glitch, because they couldn’t express things like normal people could? Is this why the Complex worked hard to keep them in a constant state of serenity?
“I am good,” he said, brow still furrowed. “I am Serene.”
And then she saw it.
A spark of ice blue flash along his halo.
It was only brief. Very brief. But it had been there – like a flicker of lightning in the distance. She was sure of it.
Moses’ halo had sparked, however briefly, a code blue.
She tried to hold her surprise. How was it possible? Moses had had the augmentation, the numbing tweaks. Perhaps he hadn’t had enough…
Or perhaps he was just smart enough to choose good behavior over more torture, more tweaks. Whether his brain was simply overloading, or whether he was losing his own control, Salvi needed to act. Fast. And carefully.
“We need to get out of here, Subjugate-52,” she said calmly. “If you get me out of here safely, you will become a Serene, I promise. I won’t let anyone take that from you.”
He stared at her a moment longer, then looked back at the opposite wall below, to the transfer pipe connecting the silos to the factory.
“Alright,” he said. “Come with me.”
Salvi looked over the silver transfer pipe to where Moses studied its console. She eyed his halo, searching for any signs the code blue would return, but the device remained silver.
And she wondered then whether Bander had planned this all along. Had he known Subjugate-52 was a risk? Had he planned to set the Subjugate up to take the fall for his murders if the police got close? But how was Bander planning to overcome the DNA? Had Bander screwed up? Had he not known he’d left his DNA behind?“
It’s at fifty-four percent capacity,” Moses said. “That is standard. We should be able to keep our faces above the BioLume, but we will need to be very careful.”
“We don’t have a choice, Subjugate,” she told him. “I need to get out of here. I need to stop the bad man from hurting other people.”
Moses eyed her, then gave a slight bow. “Then I shall assist, Detective.” He ducked below the transfer pipe and reappeared on her side. He stepped up onto an elevated platform which enabled him to access the top of the pipe. He began rotating a metal arm attached to the entry hatch. She watched his face tighten, red alarm still flashing, as the muscles in his arm flexed and he gave a hard yank and pulled it open. His face was then immediately spotlighted by an intense circle of the green BioLume glow. He leaned into the hole and looked down each side, then leaned back again.
“It will be tight,” he said, then looked at her. “For me at least.”
She joined him on the platform and peered inside. It would be tight. While the wide streets of Bountiful had made her feel agoraphobic, this made her instantly feel claustrophobic. Second thoughts rushed through her. Did she really want to be trapped in a snug pipe of BioLume with Edward Moses? She leaned back and looked at him again. The Subjugate was staring down at the flashing red light emanating from his chest.
“This is very distracting,” he said, a crease of concern beginning to show across his forehead.
“There’s no other way you turn it off?” she asked. It was annoying her and it wasn’t even right in her face like it was his.
“No,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
Moses pulled the neck of his beige tunic down and Salvi stepped back in response at what she saw. Surgically implanted, the square flashing light sat beneath his skin, giving it a see-through appearance.
“It is embedded in our flesh,” he told her. She eyed the surrounding skin, saw faint lines like white veins where tattoos had been erased.
“They implant it beneath your skin?” she asked.
Moses nodded. “It becomes part of us. We must always obey the light. It is the light of God.” He glanced at her, a faint trace of worry in his eyes. “I must have my medication,” he whispered. “Or I will be punished.”
“Is it attached to anything?”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Is it connected to nerves or heart muscle or anything?”
“No. It simply sits beneath our skin and reads our biological systems.”
“So, you could cut it out?” she suggested.
“We must never remove it,” he said firmly, eyes staring at hers in earnest.
She studied him. Maybe the tweaks, the brainwashing, the torture had worked.
She nodded and looked back to the pipe’s opening. “Well, the quicker we get back to the main building, the quicker you can have your shot and shut that thing off.”
“Yes,” he said.
She glanced into the pipe again then looked back at his big frame beside her. She pictured his hands around her ankles as she dangled above the vat. She stood back.
“You first, Subjugate-52.”
He gave a slight bow then climbed up into the pipe and awkwardly wriggled down so that his feet were behind him, green BioLume splashing around as he did. He looked back at her. “If you get into trouble, Detective, please let me know.”
Salvi nodded at him. “Thank you, Subjugate-52. And if you get in trouble, please let me know the same.”
With that, he dipped his head into the pipe and began crawling through the BioLume sludge. She watched his feet shimmy past the opening, his heels kicking the roof of the pipe as he disappeared. When she saw sufficient distance between them, she pulled off her jacket, climbed up and stepped inside the pipe as well, then shimmied her body down to lie on her stomach.
She wasn’t sure what to expect, but the BioLume in the pipe was room temperature and of a consistency somewhere between thickened cream and not-quite-set jelly. Lowering her head inside, she saw the tunnel of neon lime green luminosity before her, punctuated with the intermittent red flashes from Subjugate-52’s alarm as he crawled away on his stomach. The wet moss odor was particularly overpowering, making her gag and cough a little, but she was just going to have to deal with it.
Using her good arm but injured shoulder, she pulled herself along, unable to take much weight on the throbbing forearm Bander had hit with the baton. She had just enough room to move, certainly more than Moses, but had to keep her head tilted up to avoid the splashback from both hers and Moses’ movement. The runny gel occasionally kissed her earlobes and chin, but as long as she managed to keep her nose, mouth, and inner ears dry, she felt she would be OK. She would deal with the fallout of the contact on her skin later; sure she could take one of those special cleansing showers that Attis had told her about. Right now, her focus was getting out of this pipe without ingesting any of the gel.
She continued onward, soon catching up with Moses whose movements were restrained due to his size, like trying to squeeze a foot into a tight shoe. There was an eerie silence in the pipe, broken only by their breaths of effort. Moses’ feet were just ahead, and they were large. She eased off to allow a little distance between them, wanting to be well out of strike range. Accidental or otherwise.
It seemed as though they had been crawling for some time before Moses stopped suddenly and raised a hand to the roof of the pipe.
“What is it?” she called out, coming to a stop also.
“The hatch for Silo 5,” he
called back.
Salvi stared at him. “We crawled all that way and we’re only at Silo 5?”
“Yes, Detective,” he replied, continuing onward, red alarm bouncing off the tube around them.
Chapter Eighteen
Broken
Salvi paused to rest. Her arm, shoulder and ankle were hurting, her face throbbing and swollen from Bander’s punch, and maybe from smacking into the ladder when Moses had caught her fall. Either way, she couldn’t wait to get out of this pipe.
Crawling along at a slow pace, focusing on Moses’ shoes before her, they’d passed another three shut hatches.
Only two silos to go.
She willed herself onward. We’ll be out soon, we’ll be out. Just keep going…
She pictured Faith in her mind, pictured the three dead women whose lives had been stolen from them. She mustered her strength and began pulling herself forward again.
She had to get to Bander and stop him before he killed anyone else.
Salvi looked up ahead at Moses.
“What’s wrong?”
He grunted, trying hard to open the hatch that led into the main BioLume factory, red light still flashing in his face.
“It’s stuck, Detective,” he said.
“It’s locked, or it just won’t budge?”
“I’m not quite sure,” he said, tugging at the handle again, sending small waves of BioLume her way. She turned her face and tilted her neck, trying to keep away from the bright green sludge.
She glanced behind her. The thought of reversing back six silos was one she didn’t want to entertain. She looked back at Moses. The space was too confined, making it difficult for him to get good leverage to twist the handle.
God, she didn’t want to die inside this pipe.
She closed her eyes and thought of Mitch. How long had it been since he’d seen her? Would he be looking for her? Or given the way she’d shut him out this morning, would he be giving her space? If there was ever a time for him to be the control freak over-protective cop, now was it. Then she realized she’d thrown her iPort onto her bed. There was no way for Mitch to trace her. She fought the helpless feeling inside. She had wanted to do this alone, but the truth was, she should’ve done this with her partner.
The Subjugate Page 34
