57. Hope
57
Hope
T he Beftac Center for Injured Beings was absolute chaos.
Indianna was guiding Nina, Ciaran and Hope through side corridors that were mostly empty, save for a couple of beings that had been crushed under what appeared to be shelves full of machinery.
Hope had caused this. Her panomquake had killed them. Even if she had countless lives in her hands, these deaths made a tight knot in her chest, very similar to the one her mother’s death had caused. A growing knot of Cardinals-damned guilt.
Luckily, they had encountered no roixers yet. Had the distraction in the Houses made them be focused elsewhere? Or perhaps roixers were never around the Beftac Center, except in the security vaults of the fifth floor on the Southern wing.
Every single door in the building had to be opened with the badge, which was both ridiculous and extreme in equal parts. The doors were extra layers of security, especially if roixers were never around here, but they were not soundproof.
The screams, cries and desperate sobs of the beings had been filling Hope’s ears and brain since she had entered the building through the tunneled wall. The worst part was that not all of them were adult voices. No. Even running across one of many maintenance rooms, it was obvious. There definitely were infants and children suffering too.
Suffering because of her . Because of her newly released magic that had almost killed her, because of her direct connection to the Cardinals, or the Fifth knew exactly what it had been. She would have stopped to reflect if there was anything that she could have done differently. Anything to avoid such a panomquake with disastrous consequences. Except she was using those disastrous consequences as a distraction to rescue her friend’s brother.
Cardinals guide her. But right now, Indianna was the one guiding her. Through maintenance rooms full of broken equipment and a couple small fires Ciaran had extinguished, making water appear from his hands; laundry rooms flooded because of destroyed pipes; and multiple laboratories where it had been a miracle that none of them had tripped over parts of microscopes and shards of glass from vials and flasks.
The areas where patients lived were close enough to still hear the despair and pain of the beings and the multiple beeping monitors and alarms, but distant enough to not see them.
“Southern wing, everyone,” Indianna said, placing the metal badge against the crystal door that opened an instant later, revealing a circular room with a ceiling five-stories high above them, leading to multiple corridors in each level. Hope had underestimated how big a healing center could be.
Indianna turned towards the second on the left, running in silence as the other three followed her. There were beings agonising here, and other rooms were dead quiet, the only noises of gas escaping from ports on the walls. Hope saw Indianna’s steps faltering, her pace slowing down as if she was going to enter the rooms and help the patients. Deep down, Hope wished Indianna did exactly that. These people didn’t deserve to die. But Indianna didn’t enter those rooms, instead she started sprinting, as if trying to resist the urge to go in a completely different direction.
Steps, door, badge, more doors, more badge-touching, change of corridors, more steps. Hope’s sense of orientation was very refined, and yet she doubted if she would be able to walk all the way back in the first attempt.
On the next turn of a corner, they faced a wide-eyed healer with dry blood on his forehead holding onto a pole. He swallowed, his eyebrows lifting as he looked at Ciaran and Hope. “Weapons are forbidden in the Beftac Center.”
“They are with me, John,” Indianna said, a reassuring smile on her beautiful face.
The ginger-haired man’s face frowned, as if he was trying to make sense of what his colleague had just said, and then glanced at the daggers that Hope was now gripping in each hand, and shook his head vigorously, taking a step towards the wall where a big, triangular, red button was.
“Don’t—” Indianna started.
But the man was too close, his index finger mere inches of the button that no doubt would alert the whole damned Beftac Center if not also the Organ House. Over Hope’s dead body, this mission was going to be risked by someone not listening.
The dagger hit John’s skull right in between his eyes, and his body hit the floor a heartbeat later, his finger safely away from the red button.
Hope would have said sorry if it had made a difference. But it didn’t make any.
Stepping over his dead corpse, they continued their way to the fifth floor. If she hadn’t lost count—and she knew she hadn’t—they were one floor away. Indianna’s badge let them in another set of stairs, and they rushed up.
Compared to the rest of the Beftac Center, the fifth floor of the Southern wing was too damn quiet.
Indianna put a finger on her lips and Hope felt a tickle on her skin as a violet message appeared on her forearm. Ciaran and Nina also read Indianna’s ink on their bodies.
The message was gone, and Hope nodded. The other end , where the second group, the one formed by Lenna, Jake, Sasha and Theon, would arrive shortly, if everything had gone well and if by some Cardinals’ blessed miracle hadn’t gotten lost in the labyrinth that this place was.
Ciaran moved his hand and Hope knew it had not only tickled her skin but also every other member of the three groups.
Dark green ink.
Dark. Green. Ink. And that handwriting…
Hope gasped, looking at Ciaran, unable to read the blue eyes staring right back at her.
It couldn’t be. It certainly couldn’t be.
Another prickle on her forearm, and the message was golden this time.
That must be Lenna and her group. Which meant that Brendon, Carson and Ayla hopefully would arrive soon. Less than a minute had passed when the ticklish sensation was followed by a silver handwritten sentence:
This was it. Hope grabbed her favorite daggers firmly, the side of her mouth curling upwards at the familiar adrenaline sensation rushing through her veins. Whichever deaths happened from now onwards, she would have no remorse or guilt.
Her back was on the edge of the wall, cornering both corridors. Ciaran was next to her, his biological biceps against the leathers of her own biceps. She didn’t wait to read Ciaran’s message. She didn’t need to.
As soon as she felt the prickling sensation on her skin, she stepped forward, using the first part of a heartbeat to locate the closest two targets in their Cardinal-red uniforms, and the second part to send her blades flying. They simultaneously struck home, the first roixer down with a blade crossing his neck from side to side, and the second with a blade across his still-opening mouth.
On the other end of the corridor, Lenna and Jake were standing over a couple of other roixers who were choking on the floor, grabbing their throats and kicking desperately in silence.
“So cruel, Jake,” Lenna whispered, something similar to a frown on her face, “to make them suffer like that.”
Lenna closed her hand and exhaled dramatically. Jake looked at her. “What did you try to do?” His voice was also low, presumably to avoid alerting the roixers inside the security vaults that they were about to be attacked.
“Take their hearts,” Lenna said, with both hands on her generous hips. “But it didn’t work.”
“Feral, Brachyan,” Jake’s voice was low and graver, and was he…? Yes, that was definitely a proud grin. “Organs can’t be Taken, but they can be Harmed.”
Next to Hope, Ciaran moved his arm, and the roixers stopped moving. “This is not the fucking place or time for one of your lessons.” His voice didn’t leave room for argument.
Ayla, Brendon, and Carson entered through a door right in front of the vaults.
“Did we miss all the fun?” Brendon asked, disappointment in his eyes.
Someone was trembling next to Hope, and she didn’t need to look to know it was Nina. She couldn’t even imagine what she would feel being so close to her brother, after having risked her own life so many times in order to be with him and keep him safe. She would have held Nina’s shaky hand, but Hope was just cleaning her bloody blades on the red uniforms of her recent kills.
Sasha chuckled, “These panoms are too desperate to kill.”
Indianna walked towards the door of the security vault closest to the end. As soon as the rest gathered around her, she whispered, “One roixer and three healers inside of each vault.”
Two more roixers to kill, in total. These four had gone down like flies. Nice and easy.
Jake and Lenna went towards the door of the other vault, in case the roixer inside came out to see what was happening.
As she felt Ciaran right next to her, Hope nodded to Indianna, who touched the badge against the door of the security vault and moved to the side as the crystal door opened wide.
Hope’s daggers left her hands as soon as she located the target.
Except there wasn’t one roixer in there. There were at least two dozens, and all but the four whom her daggers and Ciaran’s powers had just killed were looking at them, as if they had been waiting patiently for their arrival. And behind them, immobile in a bed, a white-haired man was peacefully unconscious.