Chapter 10 #3
“Oh, condolences, I know that heartbreak.”
“Yeah?”
“Mm. I did a lot of cooking when I dated Clayton. He always says I’d save more money by not ordering out.”
“Pass on taking financial advice from a billionaire.”
“Breaking news, billionaires might just know a thing or two about money.”
“Uh, even more breaking news,” Ellis says in a mock weathercaster voice, pivoting the conversation. “This just in, rumor has it Steel has been sleeping on the couch. Ms. Vigil, care to weigh in on what it takes to kick a billionaire out of bed?”
He pretends to tilt a microphone toward me, wiggling his eyebrows. I blow out a breath.
Fine, I’ll play along. I narrow my eyes at him, putting a hand to my ear as if I had a headset. I don’t need his imaginary microphone.
Volleying back in my street correspondent voice, a little deeper and full of faux seriousness, I say, “Uh, it takes friendship and understanding, Ellis. Some people can still act like adults when they end a relationship. As it’s not yet official, we’re holding off on going public about our breakup. Back to you, bad guy.”
“And how long have you been holding off on telling people? Back to you, Lacey.”
I falter, pausing to count. “Five months.”
“Five months?” Ellis repeats, dropping the voice, looking genuinely astonished.
“Yeah, five,” I echo, uncertainly, a little more hushed. “Is that bad?”
Ellis runs a hand through his hair, glancing away from me. “I mean . . . uh, how long is that till . . . ?”
“He said something about waiting for the right spot in the news cycle. But I don’t know what he’s waiting for, exactly,” I say, teeth worrying into my lower lip.
Ellis nods, hand over his mouth, clearly trying to withhold judgment and not doing a great job of it.
“Uh, back to you,” I mumble, glancing away. Ellis links a couple of his fingers through mine, giving them a comforting squeeze.
In the silence that falls over us, the TV is just loud enough for us to hear Clayton say, “And I would like to thank the support of the council members, Mayor Anders, and of course, my girlfriend, Lacey Vigil—”
The word sinks to the pit of my stomach. Girlfriend.
A little too quickly, I mute the TV, like swatting a mosquito out of the air. I knock a couple of empty paper coffee cups to the ground in the process.
The cup rolling on the ground is the only sound in the room for several heartbeats. Ellis’s too-observant eyes pierce me.
“Ellis—”
He pulls away with a shrug. “You know, you don’t have to go to his thing if you don’t want to. But it seems like you’re still pretty attached.”
It doesn’t escape my notice that Ellis lets go of my hand as he speaks, I feel the loss of connection keenly.
“I’m not attached,” I protest, fully ready to lay out the boundaries I’ve set with Clayton as proof. “He’s been really kind to me and not like, kicking me out of my apartment until I find a new place—”
“Yeah, but you’re not looking,” Ellis replies. It’s not just an assumption, it’s an accusation.
He seems to realize he went a little too far with that, balking at his own words and reaching out a hand to me.
I swallow uncomfortably and turn away. I take a few steps away from Ellis, barely looking where I’m going.
There’s a hallway, and I just need a few feet of space to grapple with the realization that it’s been this long, that I’ve let things go on this long.
Have I become complacent in my own captivity?
I feel so physically trapped by it I just need to be able to move.
I don’t have the capacity to be cautious; I just need to move.
“Lacey . . .”
I don’t want him to see me freaking out like this. I just keep turning away, and he keeps following me. “He didn’t do it on purpose, I’m sure he’s just been busy, that’s not—I didn’t . . .”
I hate that I’m trembling so much I can barely speak. I can’t even begin to voice how angry I am that it’s been this long, and I didn’t even realize—all of it rushes forward at once and chokes out.
Words stop seeming to matter at all when I turn a corner.
A chill creeps up my back, goosebumps raising on my arms. I feel like I’ve been here before. It’s too reminiscent of Maestro’s laboratory, the dim light, the dripping sounds, the row of large, cylindrical tanks filled with foggy, iridescent liquid.
There’s someone in there.
The glowing tanks are the only source of light in the dark room. I shuffle in, barely daring to breathe as I approach a tank further down the line that has a dark shape within it. The hair on the back of my neck stands up.
“Lacey, slow down,” Ellis calls after me, voice hushed. He cuts off as he steps up behind me.
My heart nearly stops as Ellis looks at the tube, watching for the recognition in his expression. There’s an accusation in my heart that I won’t put to words, stuck in my throat.
There’s a big guy floating in the tank. Some small plastic tubing leads into one of his nostrils, and every few seconds a few air bubbles drift out of his mouth. Occasionally, he twitches a little, hands flexing and loosening. IVs attached to his arms feed in various liquids floating around him.
He looks human in many ways, but at the same time, clearly not. His skin looks green and scaly, fins growing out of his face and limbs almost like an old Hollywood lake monster.
My head is still spinning, but I’m glad for any reason to talk about anything else.
Ellis frowns deeply but steps closer to where I am. “Is this one of the guys he’s fought on TV?”
“I haven’t seen him before,” I breathe. He’s not quite as strange and shambling as some of the raging mutants Steel has faced before, but he’s not too far off. God, I don’t want to think about him right now. I can’t.
There’s a clipboard hanging off a hook with several pages attached, and I pick it up and flip through the pages, clutching at any distraction. There’s a few different pictures of this guy, and every next one he looks a little more human.
“So, like, he’s a new one?”
When Ellis says that I wonder if this is where the mutants attacking the city are coming from. If they’re not naturally occurring, but someone is making them, here in this lab.
I look at Ellis and swallow. Someone is making mutants, and it looks very much like Maestro’s setup for his own.
Ellis’s brow furrows as his gaze meets mine, and I look away quickly, hating that I have to consider it as a possibility. I’m not in a headspace to process what any of it means. Maybe right now I don’t have to be, and I can just collect evidence and think about the larger implications of it later.
“Greg, come on, boss said he wasn’t paying for any overtime,” a voice further down the hall calls out, and we both look up immediately.
The tank wobbles uncertainly as I try to hide behind it, calling more attention to us as a pair of footsteps approach. He stops, just at the edge of visibility in the dim glow of the building, light glinting off a plastic laminated employee ID badge clipped to his shirt.
He glares at us over his clipboard. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
I wouldn’t call it my best thought necessarily, but it is my first thought to shove the tank a second time.
The man yells and seems caught between trying to steady the tank and jumping out of its way.
His hesitation spares him from getting crushed by the tank as it tips over and crashes on the ground, shattering on impact.
Pieces of glass and gallons of the strange liquid explode through the room as the mutant inside falls to the ground.
The room fills with a blaring alarm and red strobing light.
I watch, just barely able to see the webbed mutant start to stir, growling as he pushes up onto his elbows and pulls the IVs out of his arms. With each new one out, he starts moving a little faster, snarling even more.
“Yikes, ok, nope, nope,” Ellis says, breaking me from my stare. He grabs my hand and nearly dislocates my shoulder pulling me back, and as soon as I’m running with him we’re leaving the way we came in.
We’re out through the door in a heartbeat, tearing down the hallways.
I don’t remember the way out, but soon that’s the least of our problems. We don’t even turn one corner before I slip off the narrow ledges we spent all that time tiptoeing across, and land right in the water.
All that slushy snow runoff cushions my fall, instantly soaking through most of my clothes, but my elbow still hits the bottom hard.
This is the worst cold plunge I’ve ever done. Not to mention the grossest.
But there isn’t really time to freak out over landing in the water and appreciate just how truly awful this is. I try to climb back up onto one of the side ledges, slipping almost immediately.
A loud metal bang ricochets through the tunnels, followed by a monstrous roar.
Ellis grabs my hand, and we run down the middle of the tunnels, crashing through the water.
The sound is thunderous. The world feels like it’s tumbling through a washing machine.
It’s endless, zigzagging, diving around every turn and corner there is, each step plunging again into the knee-deep, freezing, gray slush.
We duck around a corner, hitting a dead end where trash gathers around a grate, and Ellis stops me, tugging me to crouch down against the wall with him. My heart is hammering in my chest, I’m both overheated and freezing at the same time.
Every little sound echoes off the brick, every drop, every movement in the water, every breath. The water around us quickly stills, but not quite enough to conceal our position as the low growl of the escaped mutant meets us.
My throat is tight with panic. I’m sure I’m breathing too loud, even as my lungs are pained trying to catch my breath and not breathe too much at the same time.
Ellis’s hand on my shoulder gives a little squeeze as we wait, and when the moment feels like it will never end, finally the footsteps recede into a different pathway, low snarling growls disappearing. Suddenly I’m grateful for what a twisty maze the city storm drains are.
Now, the only thing colder than being soaked in icy drainage and ooze is the thought of getting out of it to freeze to death while walking back home.
Somehow, the thought of confronting Clayton about making our breakup official is worse. I might just stay in the waterways forever.