Chapter 24
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
RISK
I know.
Even before Arc’s opened the door.
She’s definitely gone. Kissu too.
Arc rushes to search the house, and I check my gun’s power charge before I go down to my workshop and grab the torch. The door out to the caldera is open, snow flurries whirling inside.
I don’t close it.
Shock is waiting beside the door when I get there. He grabbed two more guns, a long knife, and… a fire extinguisher.
The small silver canister clips onto his leg like one of our guns would.
I don’t ask what we’ll need it for. If he’s bringing it, we will. That’s all I need to know.
Cutting the door open is easier than it should be, the air inside is stale.
We still step inside with guns drawn, but it’s empty as well.
“Kissu’s gone too,” Arc says as he stops beside me.
“I know.”
“We can’t waste time with this, we have to go after them.”
“We have to clear this first,” I tell him.
“Why?”
“We’ll find out when we get down there.” Gun back at my shoulder, I nod at Shock, and he hauls open the machinery disguising the access points.
Two of them are too small to get down. Vents of some kind.
Arc moves toward the third, flicking his light on and probing the darkness. “Why didn’t we ever check?”
“We never had a reason to,” I state the obvious. “Before now.”
“We should have checked when Kissu said there were ghosts.”
“Probably.”
Shock hands me one of the fully lethal weapons. “We’re not going to leave it to chance this time.”
Arc already has one. He adjusts his suit and says, “I will put a bullet in his skull before I let him hurt any of us again.”
“And I’ll hack him into tiny pieces to make sure it sticks.” Shock twists the long, curved knife in his hand.
“You’ll have help,” I tell them.
… After we spring this trap. And now, I know it is a trap.
Arc takes one step down, and I pull Shock into the stairwell before Arc hits the third step.
It shifts under his weight, and I prevent him from tumbling as we pass.
The room behind us fills with fire and it licks into the stairs, catching the back of Arc’s suit. But Shock already has the extinguisher out.
“Gas vents.” I look back at them and take another step into the well. “The only way out is down.”
Arc uses his knife to cut his burnt suit away. It’s a good thing temperatures don’t affect us. “Do you know what’s waiting for us down there?”
“No… but we’ll find out soon enough.”
CHRYS
My grandmother used to say that only boring people get bored. She was wrong. Obviously.
“Do you keep sending these out to die, just so you can keep the guys close?” I look down at the creatures and wonder aloud, “Or were they another one of your mistakes?”
“They got a little out of hand, I’ll admit. For a while I’d thought the boys were my only hope for dealing with them. But once I developed this handy little bioorganic control chip, they’re easy enough to direct.”
The air is bitterly cold, but Atker is colder.
“Did they start killing people before or after you got them under control?”
After.
The word whispers in my mind with his voice, and I hate it. “Oh my God. Why did you kill all the women?”
“My creatures didn’t kill them.”
“But they said…”
“They needed a… what do you call them? Scapegoat.” He laughs and makes a little bleating sound.
“Many of them left. Some of them died—enough to write history the way it has been, I suppose—but there’s so much to this planet that they’ve kept from you.
So much that they think you’re too fragile, too weak to understand.
If they told you what really happened… no more women from Earth, no more weeuns…
and we’re right back where we started again. ”
“Then what really happened?”
“Perverse science.”
“I’m sorry… what do you call this?”
“What I have done is going to move us forward. What they did…” he grits his teeth and glares at the screen.
He actually looks like he might throw up.
“When my son was born, I thought he was a miracle. I thought there was no greater purpose than to protect him. But I couldn’t protect him from what they’d done.
Do you know what it’s like to watch a child struggle to breathe, to keep his eyes open, to exist in this world he never asked to be brought into?
Have you ever held the answer in your hand and been forbidden from doing what needed to be done in order to save someone you love. ”
“No.” The hopeless look on his face makes me shiver. “I’m sorry your son died, but that doesn’t justify hurting other children.”
“Saving him did. He will hate me for the rest of his life. But he’s alive.”
“And how many others aren’t?”
“You don’t want the number. I could tell you.” He glares down at the data in front of him. “I could tell you every name of every child who wasn’t strong enough for what I needed.”
He looks up at me, not an ounce of remorse on his face. “I did not want any of them to die.”
“Ask me if I believe you.”
He doesn’t.
“Monsters don’t like to call themselves monsters.”
“It’s strange how willing you are to provoke someone you call a monster.”
“If you didn’t need me, I wouldn’t be here. So I have a little time before you kill me, right?”
He exhales heavily, and I know the look he gives me. It’s the one I’ve gotten on a semi-regular basis since childhood. He’s questioning all of the choices he made up to this point to have to deal with me.
One of the cavrinskh makes a noise, pulling all of his attention away from me. I finally sit down.
The chair is so comfortable and I almost resent it for that. I scoot it closer to the bars so I can keep watching him.
“Well,” he taps around the screen, “it looks like I pulled the last of your data just in time.”
I indulge his obvious need to gloat. “Just in time for what?”
“Your bondmates are about to die.” He mutters his hope that Kissu will go with them.
He won’t. I refuse to believe that Shock would have let Kissu get hurt.
“But, I have good news! My plans worked exactly as intended.”
He turns a screen to me, and I almost dismiss the information. I already know I’m pregnant, but…
“Does that say triplets?”
“Humans have a strange propensity to ask questions they already know the answers to.” He turns another screen toward me. “If you’d taken another minute, you would have seen all of this in your initial scan.”
I stare at that screen trying to remember anything Jess ever said about this.
She said so many things… gestation was accelerated, pregnancy was easier… multiples were unlikely… maybe impossible.
It shows the exact date of conception. It shows complete genetic readouts, and… as if my physiology wanted to be fair, all three of my mates are going to be fathers.
“Do you see the best part?” he asks, tapping at the screen. “She’s a girl.”
Okay, creep. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“And those two are boys.”
“Congratulations, you can read an ultrasound.”
He ignores my misidentification of the scan.
“It’s a miracle, you know… that our species can procreate. Kiro and Tylen and the others… they tested hundreds of species, and out of all of them, only humans had viable pregnancies. Kiro still hates that. But, his research has been incredibly helpful, so I can’t damn his methods too harshly.”
“I think you could.”
“Just be glad I came to collect you before he could send one of his people to do it.”
“No. I don’t think I’m going to be glad that you kidnapped me.”
He’s quiet then, and I’d rather keep him talking.
“Two boys, one girl, what does that matter?”
“Sian-human mating has never produced non-identical weeuns without medical intervention.”
“Okay, so you can only have identical twins or triplets or more. That’s not a problem, pretty sure multiple identical kids are rare here too.”
“You misunderstand me. Every weeun from the same bonded pair will be the same child.”
“That can’t be right.” I would know if that was true. It would have come up at some point.
“I know you’re not the scientist of the family, so you’ll just have to trust me on that.”
“Even if I did trust you, which… I don’t and won’t. How do I—how do we change that? Three men, three children. Even if they’re all different… you won’t know until I’ve had more kids and I can’t do that now. I mean… since you think you’re going to kill them.”
“I know, because their genetic read outs are all different… but they all have the same biological father.”
“You’re right. I am not the scientist of the family, but… I do know how to read. All three of them are up there.”
“Here, let me color code it for you.” He taps in a dozen commands and the screen flashes with four bright colors. “This should help.”
I screw my lips together, because I hate that he’s being a dick, but he’s also right… It does help.
Three ladder-like columns, mostly pink, with green and yellow and orange rungs all around… but green is the second most prominent color.
“It doesn’t really change anything, does it?” I ask, “I mean… isn’t what you’ve done also medical intervention?”
He doesn’t answer me, either he’s not listening, or I’m right.
Groaning, I slouch against the bars. “I’m bored. So, you can keep talking to me, or I can figure out the best ways to annoy the fuck out of you. Your choice.”
“I didn’t change you or the weeuns. I changed them. I thought that was obvious by now.”
“So… if you want to make this work, you’re going to have to mutate the entire planet’s population? Who would go for that? Especially knowing your history.”
“I don’t need to ask them.” He closes out of the screen I can see. “We have always done what we needed to and they have always accepted what they were told.”
A shiver crawls down my spine, and I’m not bored anymore. My imagination has decided to throw a gruesome party.
ARC
The stairs keep going further and further down, random steps triggering more flames that push us deeper. As if we had a choice.
Neither of them know what’s waiting for us at the bottom. We just know it can’t be good.
“I’m sorry I strangled you.”
“It’s okay. If I ever let our mate go off into certain danger again, I expect you to do the same.”
“I’ll try not to.”
Another loose step, another set of flames, and I almost wish the heat bothered me. I hear it, but don’t know how close it is. The chemical reaction of it touching my skin will eat holes through me… it would be nice to have better warning.
When we finally reach the bottom, I don’t have to worry about it. The stairs are a tunnel of flames behind us, but the lab…
“This was under us the whole time?” I ask quietly, even though we’re the only ones here.
“The Maker built these places,” Risk says, unsettled by the knowledge his mutation has just provided to us. “The experiment never ended. Our cage just changed.”
The screens have been left on. Years of data from our medfac. Notes on the cavrinskh we were sent to kill… My routes around the Zone.
“He was laughing at me the whole time.”
They don’t tell me I’m wrong. They can’t.
New information on Chrys… recordings of us…
“No wonder he wanted the woman at the zurgle cafe to get Kissu away from us.” Every image he’s in is broken into fractals.
Zurgles don’t show up in digital data. I didn’t realize how much they distort it.
There’s a flashing button on the console and I reach for it.
“Don’t.” Risk stops me. “It starts a countdown and a video he recorded for us. We don’t need to hear his gloating or trigger the timer. We’ve already got a time limit.”
He looks back at the flame-filled stairwell, and then the wall to its left. Fuel cells.
It felt like we went further down, but he’s never wrong. And if the fire reaches the fuel cells in the garage, it doesn’t matter what else the Maker has planned for us.
“Alright. He lured us down here to kill us. He should know we’re here. Is he watching us?”
“He was.” Risk lifts his gun and shoots out five different cameras.
“Good. Now, how do we get out?” I look around the room, waiting for Risk to think it, but he doesn’t. “If he was getting in and out, there has to be another exit. Right?”
Risk shrugs and goes to the wall, searching for the doorway that logically has to be there.
I go to the opposite, but Shock stands at one of the consoles, glaring at the information. “There’s a password lock on this. Any chance you know the code?”
“Zero. Two. One. Four.”
“Arabic numerals?” Shock screws his face up in confusion as he punches them in, and misses when Risk nods.
I check a seam in the wall for drafts, scanning all the shelves and cabinets for hinges where they shouldn’t be.
“I think he expects us to panic and fight until there’s no time left.” Shock tabs through the information.
Risk calls him names in his thoughts. “He studies us for as long as he has and got it that wrong?”
“I mean, I did strangle Shock. Have you forgotten that already?”
Risk looks sharply at the wall that separates us from the fuel cells. “Our time just got shorter. If you haven’t found a detailed floor plan, we need you to help look for the way out.”
Shock points toward the floor in the corner. “Trap door.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell us before?”
“Just found it.” He does three more things on the screen and looks up at us. “I needed to send that information to Kimba. It’s why we had to come down here.”
“Why didn’t he destroy it?”
“He didn’t think we’d know his daughter-in-law’s birthday.” Risk’s head twists to the side and his eyes narrow. “She’s not his daughter-in-law yet.”
“Fascinating.” I kick at the floor in the corner, looking for a handle. “We can talk about that after we get our mate back.”
Risk goes to a panel of switches on the wall, looking at it for two seconds before he presses one. The floor slides away, right where Shock said the trap door would be.
“One last thing before we go.” Risk walks to the console and slaps the flashing button.
The Maker’s face flashes to life on two dozen screens. “Hello boys.”
I don’t listen to the rest. I don’t care to give him any more time to lie or gloat.
Dropping down into the tunnel with them, I look up at the square of light as Risk closes it again.
We thought the Maker died in that fire… Now we get to return the favor.
“We have three minutes before the cells blow.” Risk flicks on his light and starts down the tunnel. “Let’s make it out before that.”