by K. Gorman
“You know,” she said, swallowing past the tremble in her throat. “I’m suddenly feeling mighty comfortable in here.”
“It’s amazing how prison cells can grow on oneself,” Marc agreed. “Still…”
“You want to go out there, don’t you?”
“If I can get this door open, yes.” He cleared his throat. “This may be our only chance.”
She closed her eyes and counted back, taking a deep breath to shove the panic down, then forced herself into action. “Okay. You check the door, I’ll grab our shit.”
There wasn’t much shit to grab. Her own clothes had been returned at some point while she’d been healing, which was nice of them though she’d have to check them for trackers later. She scooped up his pants and shirt, jammed her runners on her feet, and gave the counterspace and kitchenette a brief rummage for anything useful while he busied himself with the door. She heard him slap at the panel, then jiggle its faceplate. After a few tries, he changed tact and moved to the door itself.
The sound of dead, winding gears ground out from inside the wall as Marc slid it back on its track. She turned just in time to see him catch the newly-displayed edge and haul the rest of it back, leaning into the pull. She joined him as he stuck his head through the gap and looked outside.
“Oh, Clio.” His shoulder bumped into her as he recoiled. She heard him swallow. His breaths came slow and shallow. “The guard’s down. I—” He hesitated, then his tone went stony. “Prepare yourself. It’s bad.”
She didn’t have to ask how bad. Already, the sickly smell of the man’s demise had come to her nose. Her fist clenched as memories came to her—some of Nomiki’s more grotesque kills that she’d encountered in their escape, full of blood and gore—and she couldn’t help the small, instinctual chill that made her shoulders shiver.
She helped Marc shove the rest of the door open, deliberately not looking down, and she took a large, careful step around the slumped figure in her peripheral vision, keeping her vision on the blank ceiling. With the lights out and only her power to guide them, it gave the place an odd effect, the shadows more muted and washed out than if she were a simple multi-direction lantern.
Only when she was a few steps away and the smell had faded a little did she turn around. She winced at what she saw.
The man had been cut open and mauled, a deep wound that either started or finished just under his left shoulder, ripped through his tactical vest, and went to his right hip. The center of it had been punched and ripped, organs and muscles and other viscera gleaming under the shine of her light along with a shock of broken bone. Blood spread in a pool underneath. More of it smudged and splattered on the wall. Some of it had smeared against the door they’d moved aside.
Suns and stars and all the fucking gods and saints. She swallowed hard, fighting to control the nausea that threatened her stomach as she forced herself to look at the man’s face. He was young—younger than her, anyway—with a neat cut of black hair and a square face that hadn’t been touched in the carnage. With his head turned to a downcast, and his mouth relaxed and half-open, he could have been asleep. A small tattoo of a stylized roman letter sat on the side of his neck. If what they’d heard was any indication, the man had died quickly.
“Well,” she said, gathering her breath. “That’s not Nomiki’s work.”
“Not unless she’s grown big teeth and turned cannibal.” Marc squatted down next to the man, avoiding the puddle of blood. After a moment’s hesitation, he reached over and lifted the guard’s keycard from the ripped pocket of his uniform. “If anything, this necessitates our escape.”
“No kidding,” she said. “There are fucking monsters out here killing people.” She swallowed, catching sight of the ID on the back of the card. “I don’t think either of us can pass for him.”
“If it comes to that, we’re probably screwed, anyway. Might as well find an air vent to crawl out of.”
She watched as he reached over and collected the man’s blaster from his hand. “I think you’ve been watching too many movies.”
“Perhaps, but I bet they’d never expect anyone to actually try that.”
“Probably because air vents are about twelve centimeters wide these days.”
She knew he was joking to keep her in the moment, away from panic, and she appreciated it. She’d gotten through a lot in her life, dead bodies included, but that didn’t change her reaction. Her hands had begun to shake some time ago, and she could already feel her mind unspooling, rejecting the vivid disembowelment on display in front of her. Two sides of her mind warred, one ready to break down and go crying and screaming in a corner, the other shutting down and going cold, like she used to do when Nomiki went on the kill.
With effort, she forced the cold to win.
“I don’t think your hips will fit through that,” she said, continuing the joke a few seconds late.
“My muscles, you mean.”
“No, definitely your hips. Very good for child-bearing, though.” She cleared her throat as her tone wavered upward. “So, plan?”
“Yeah. Stay behind me.” He found a knife in a sheath at the guard’s ankle then stood, exchanging the weapons for his clothes that she held and taking a few moments to pull them on.
She held out his shoes. “Do you know where to go?”
“No idea.”
“Hmm.”
So, then, it didn’t matter which way they went, did it? Both were a crapshoot.
She glanced around, sending her light farther down both sides of the hall, first to her right, where she’d gone before, then to her left, which was new.
New was probably better. If they were looking for them, they’d probably look in places she’d been before. She nodded to the left and took a step forward. “This way.”
Marc nodded and stepped past her, taking the weapons back. “Okay, let’s go.”
Chapter Thirteen
Since stealth was their goal, they agreed to douse her light and use it minimally as they made their way through the complex. Fortunately, it only took two sets of hallways before they found an outer wall.
A set of windows cast dim, gray squares of light at angles onto the walls and floor, giving them enough light to see. As they moved along, several dents and scrapes became visible in the wall, along with a long, skidding smear of blood on the floor below.
Eyebrows rising, she allowed a slip of light to leak out of her hand and dart over, giving them a deeper study. The plaster had impacted inward in three separate places, each about thigh-high. On the last, something had sliced straight into it, cutting through part of the underlying support beam, as well. Its metal shone with a sharp edge in her light.
Marc met her raised eyebrow with one of his own. “Let’s not meet whatever did that.”
“Agreed.”
But what had done that? She assumed it was the same thing that had killed their guard and made the grinding sound against their door area—something she assumed was, therefore, not part of the Alliance’s defense budget. Were they under attack? And, if so, by whom?
Marc moved with a soldier’s stealth, his steps not quite the soundless slink she was used to with her sister but a near cousin. Unlike the taps and squeaks that had, despite her best attempt to be quiet, come from her shoes. She’d removed them after the first hallway, carrying them in one hand and hoping that they wouldn’t come into a situation where she’d have to sprint around a corner on the complex’s slippery pre-fab floors.
Her jaw clenched tighter as she followed Marc to the next corner, moving with quick, tense steps. After a long listen and a quick look around, he started up the next hall. Silence filled the air around them. Once, they heard a yell, and the far-off sound of blasters firing. She swallowed, keeping quiet, clutching the keycard tight in her hand so that it wouldn’t click against its holder. Every few minutes, a new shiver of worry rolled through her back and shoulders, making her tense.
Like the other hallways, doors lined the walls i
n even spaces, their panels as dark and unresponsive as their own had been, which made her think that, however this had started, the building was undergoing a true power outage now rather than just the weird light thing from earlier. So, not only was the place under attack, but someone had cut the power, too.
On the bright side, that took care of any distraction they might need. If there really were only twenty-four people in the facility, they’d be stretched thin trying to defend it.
As they came even with one of the windows on the wall, Marc glanced out of it, then stopped dead, eyes widening. “Sol’s fucking child.”
She jerked her head to where his gaze fell on a segmented rooftop below and sucked in a sharp breath. Her heartbeat ramped up a few notches.
‘Creature’ didn’t quite describe what she saw. ‘Demon’ might be a more appropriate term. After her three-month-long continuous adventure of curing people of Shadows, she had a bit of experience with things that people described as demons—and, at first, the thing did look like a Shadow, albeit a weird, malformed one. It was made of a similar substance, anyway, a kind of depthless dark fog that stuck together and blurred at the edges, so black that it was hard to look at, except, for some reason, she got the impression that this thing was more solid than the Shadows. As if, instead of trying to reach into her mind with its fingers, it would simply try to bat her head off.
It was also not humanoid, a fact that she registered about three seconds after she saw it, her brain too shocked by its appearance to move any faster. It had a reptilian head, a large-scale version of what she’d seen on Komodo dragons, or one of the more predatory dinosaurs that she’d seen in books, with a strong, refined jawline and a snout that came to a blunt, tapered point, but its legs functioned more like a deer or gazelle’s. Thicker, and ending in claws instead of hooves, but with a similar bone structure that looked bred for speed and agility. A thin, whip-like tail slashed through the air behind it.
What caught her eye most, and what froze her brain for two full seconds of breathless panic, were the pair of sickle-shaped blade formations that curved up from under the creature’s forelimbs. As if someone had decided to throw a bat into the thing’s chimeric mixture, but instead of wings had given it weapons. In the thin light of the half-moon above, the blades glistened like metal. She tried not to think about the guard’s body, and how it had been sliced apart, and failed.
“Well, I guess we know what killed the guard.” She breathed shallowly, through her nose, trying to calm the rising panic and regain the cold she’d had before.
“Yes. Is that a Shadow?”
“It looks like one, just not a…” She struggled, flinching as the creature moved—a quick jerk of the head that gave them an example of just how fast it was, in case they hadn’t figured it out by how quickly it had killed their guard earlier. She took a deeper breath, cleared her throat, and got control of the tremors in her jaw. “Not a human one. Or any animal I’ve ever seen.”
“I guess Dr. Sasha is getting creative,” Marc said.
Good to know that he was coming to the same conclusions as she was. Dr. Sasha might very well be the system’s foremost mad scientist, and she’d already shown an ability to both create, either through her own power or Tylanus’, and manipulate Shadows—and she had a serious god complex. Why wouldn’t she be branching out in new areas of monster creation?
“Gods. And I thought I’d seen the end of crazy in that whole pocket-dimension shit,” she said. “Any idea whether—”
The creature moved, then. A sudden, slithery jerk that registered as wrong on every single instinct that Karin possessed, and she failed to stop the shudder than ran through her shoulders. As it spun around, part of it actual, visible movement and part of it a weird transition in its Shadow parts, the shudder extended down her spine. She grimaced as it scaled the wall beside it with a movement that was part gecko and part spider—its gazelle-like limbs snapped into an awful-looking sideways angle for the motion—and leapt onto the next rooftop, returning upright and taking an eel-smooth bound away. She craned her neck, bumping into the window to track its movement until it had vanished from sight behind another wall.
She blew out a breath. “I want to avoid that.”
“Me, too,” Marc said. “I hope there’s only one of them.”
Her upper lip peeled back from her teeth as she winced. “Good fucking gods, I hope so.”
He opened his mouth to say something more, but, in the pause before he spoke, a not-so-distant bang broke the silence. The sound of a door being forced open. Her heart thumped harder as she recognized the tramp and stomp of soldiers’ footsteps.
She exchanged a glance with Marc. Without another word, they slipped back across the hall and continued down, as fast and quiet as they could. Shouts started up as they ducked into a stairwell, at first sounding alarmed, then angry. “I guess they found out we’re missing.”
“Missing with our guard dead at the door,” Marc corrected her. “Let’s not stick around.”
Up wasn’t really an option for them. Even if it got them away from the soldiers several halls away, they didn’t know what was up there, and they had exactly zero desire to be anywhere near a roof after seeing the creature.
As sneakily as they could, using the barest amount of her light to see in the pitch-black stairway, they raced down to the next level, pausing at the landing.
Marc pressed his ear to the door, then pushed it open, ushering her through. “We need to find a map. Get a layout of this place.”
“Shouldn’t there have been one in the stairwell?” she asked. “I thought that was a safety requirement.”
“Guess they forgot that detail. Let’s see if we can find a fire station or e-call.”
“What if we just go out a window? They’ll probably be watching the exits.”
“Windows are usually alarmed in buildings like this,” he said.
“So are emergency doors,” she pointed out. “Plus, the power is out.”
He paused. For a few seconds, only the steady tap of their footsteps broke the silence. She glanced around, adjusting her eyes to the new dimness. The set of windows at either end of the hall provided only enough light for them both to not crash into a wall. In front of her, Marc was barely a silhouette. She felt more than saw where he was. Her shoes swung in her hand, socked feet picking up every seam and break in detail from the pre-fab floor. Her big toe skimmed over a metal lip midway down the corridor.
“Actually, that’s a good point,” he said. “But we need to get lower down.”
“Yeah, I don’t want to be clambering out a window four stories up while that thing is out there.”
Even without seeing the effortless, lizard-like way it had scaled the wall, she didn’t want to be anywhere near it. The safest place was probably behind a secure set of doors—if what they’d heard earlier was any indication, it had already proven hard-pressed to open them. Either that, or it just hadn’t noticed that there’d been two other people within reach behind the doors and had focused only on the guard.
A sick feeling crept up in her throat as the image of the dead man replayed through her mind, but she pushed it away. She could think about it later, when there was time to grieve. When they’d gotten away, she could break down.
But not now. Now, she had to focus.
Marc paused. She felt more than saw his head turn back toward her. “Are you okay?”
Her eyebrows twitched. Okay, so my boyfriend is psychic.
Actually, there was a lot to be said for intuition, and Marc was one of the more-sensitive people she’d met, reading into situations and emotions with detail. Except, apparently, when it came to asking people on dates. In that, Soo-jin seemed to be the master. If their friend was any indication, both she and Marc had wasted two entire months fawning about at various tasks.
At least, that was on track now. Even if they had been abducted and imprisoned together.
“Yes, yes.” She waved her hand, forgetting that he
couldn’t see it. “It’s nothing. Let’s go.”
The hall led into another almost identical one, branching into it with a boxy, ninety-degree turn, and she reactivated her light as the darkness closed in on them. Doors passed on either side. Offices, closets, a washroom, a few unlabeled. One had the biohazard symbol on a green and yellow sign. Through the silence, above the quiet ebb and flow of their breaths and the rustle of their clothes, they caught the occasional sound from elsewhere. Everything seemed still. She doused her light again as they came to another series of windows, looking out of them as they went by. Slowly, an image of the complex’s layout formed in her mind.
It had a boxy shape, all squares and rectangles and about eight stories high by her count, and sat on the lot in a U-shape, with two wings thrust out from the main building to form a small courtyard that looked like it had been used for training drills recently.
On the end of the left-hand wing, the building funneled into the recognizable square of a loading bay—not for spacecraft, she thought, unless they were particularly small spacecraft. On the other, the building’s appendage simply ended in a stump. Beyond, a surface of old, buckled concrete spread out in streaks and repaired patches, the lines and guidelines worn and broken. The lack of light, and the darkness of the treeline that rose beyond the fence in a deep, pitch-black mountain, made it impossible to see the curl of razor wire on the top of the fence, but she assumed it was there. It was always there, in Alliance military installations. And it would probably be electrified, too.
She hoped the current power outage had taken care of that problem. Either way, they had to hurry.
Taking a few quick steps, she caught up to Marc. “Let’s try to find a window on the second floor. Think we can get lost in the trees?”
An entire mountain full of what looked like dense forest rose up beyond the pale, straight-angled roofline. Alliance probably had cameras and other surveillance in there, but it seemed like a good bet. She liked forests. She and Nomiki had spent quite a lot of time hiding in them as kids—and during their escape. It felt almost natural for her to return to that history now.
