Chapter 20
Iknow I need to steal the centrifuge before I get Claudia down. But seeing her strung up like that, murdered for sharing the truth… it only strengthens my purpose and the deadliness coursing through my veins.
Gagging, my furious tears well as I take a step back.
The automatic glass doors stretch open before me from the motion, just as the sentry whips his head in my direction.
“Hey!” He grabs my arm, twisting me around forcefully and pulling me right into the line of the camera I was trying to avoid.
Hopefully, the Guardians are distracted just as much as the other sentries.
“Do you have permission…” Recognition dawns across his face as he peers under my hood, and his mouth curls into a disgusting smile. “You’re that Chosen One who—”
Swinging my free arm, I land a fist to the side of his head, knocking him out without letting him finish his sentence. Before he can crumple to the ground, I lower his body and drag him until he’s slumped against the wall, cringing at what I just did despite the necessity of it.
He almost ratted you out, and you’re feeling guilty for silencing him? Lucan asks incredulously, still lurking in my head.
Well, I probably gave him a concussion. But more than that, I can’t bear the thought of taking someone’s life while Claudia’s dead body hangs overhead. The only ones I want to kill right now are the Guardians themselves. Which I will do. I’m sure of that now.
Good thing he’s right next to the Healing Center, Lucan grumbles.
Without glancing at the camera, I whisper a promise to Claudia, then slip inside the building as the doors seal closed behind me.
Apparently, the rioting, beatings, and execution didn’t touch my old favorite place, because it’s business as usual here. Or at least the facade of business as usual.
Two patients sit in the waiting area, eyes cast downward, while an information clerk sits behind the desk, her blonde head buried in her computer. Before any of them can look up, I disappear behind the first door to my left.
The hallway is empty, but I pull my hood down tighter around my face. The cameras here blink from every corner, operable as always.
I stick as close as I can to the walls, trying to act as normal as possible as I navigate the maze to the laboratory.
Each healer I pass politely nods their head without looking too hard at my face. They don’t peer too hard at anything. They don’t question or think. The Rules are ingrained too deeply, I realize, and Claudia’s death just makes them too frightened to look up and peer even closer at the truth.
Which is why when I turn the corner and see Gaia, I swallow my nostalgia and keep my head down.
“Good evening,” she says as she passes me.
My ribs clench. It’s so good to hear her voice, to know that she’s alive. I wonder if she participated in the riots, or if she kept her head down and clung to the Cardinal Rules. Probably the latter, judging by the lack of bruises or scratches on her face.
Masking the tone of my voice into something slightly higher-pitched, I repeat, “Good evening.”
Then her footsteps recede, unaware that anything is amiss, as I slow.
The laboratory door looms ahead of me, closed. The frosted glass distorts my view of the inside, so I have no other choice but to take a deep breath and swing it open.
Instantly, cold, sterile air hits my face. Several refrigerators hum on the far end of the room, while other analyzing machines whir and clink and emit a high-frequency pitch that my new vampire hearing can’t block out.
I can smell the blood, too. Old blood, new blood, blood in vials, blood everywhere but nowhere in sight at the same time, locked away in one of the many metal cupboards lining the wall above a counter that spreads across the room…
Where one man, hunched over a microscope, looks up to find me still standing in the doorway.
“Hello.” He blinks rapidly, as if trying to adjust his eyesight. “Can I help you?”
It’s him—the healer who turned me in for arguing with Gaia what feels like a lifetime ago.
Making a split-second decision, I say casually, “Dr. Edward asked me to get him a few things. Would you be able to show me where they are?”
Dr. Edward, I know, is the Healing Center’s leading pathologist, so it’s not like I’m pulling a random name out of my ass. It could be true.
The healer, however, squints at me, rubbing at his eyes with a frown as he takes in my cloak and hood—not healing scrubs.
Shit. Maybe I should have just knocked him out like I did the sentry, but I really don’t want to give a second person a concussion in the same night.
Even if he kind of deserves it for reporting me to the Guardians all those months ago.
“I’m sure if Dr. Edward needed anything from the laboratory,” the healer says coldly, abandoning his microscope and standing up to face me slowly, “he’d know that all lab equipment stays in the lab. Now come a little closer and tell me your name.”
I sigh. If he insists…
In three powerful strides, I’m in his face with the tip of a dagger pressed under his chin.
Two days ago, I wouldn’t have even dreamed of doing such a thing, but Claudia’s body strung up in front of the Healing Center door lit every fuse in my body.
This man had to have walked under her corpse to get to work today, and he’s worried about who I am?
Maybe he should be worrying about who he is, deep down.
“Name’s Saskia,” I say with mock brightness.
“I believe we’ve brushed shoulders before.
” The man gapes as he takes in my face, my eyes, and the cold touch of metal against his skin.
“And right now, a very talented doctor needs some equipment to leave the lab, so I’d appreciate it if you could direct me to where I can find them. ”
That’s my girl, Lucan coos.
I wouldn’t actually use this against him, I argue, glancing down at my blade.
You wouldn’t have to. You could use your bare teeth to rip him to shreds.
I swallow thickly, trying not to inhale the sweet scent of blood pulsing through the scared, trembling man in front of me, and some of my anger deflates. I wouldn’t do that either.
That’s my girl, Lucan says again, pride lighting up his voice.
My attention returns to the healer, who finally manages to splutter, “What does this doctor of yours need, then?”
“A centrifuge to start with,” I answer immediately.
The healer wets his lips nervously. “What kind?” I blink at him, and a slow, triumphant smile spreads across his mouth. “Benchtop, gas, high-speed? Surely, your doctor specified the type you’d need.”
I dig the dagger just a tiny bit more into his neck, until his smile bleeds away.
“Anything portable,” I say, and pray that’s the right answer. “One with a back-up battery.”
The healer raises his hands and takes a step back, so I follow him, dagger still pointed an inch away from his chest, around some tables in the center of the room and to the opposite side. There, he nods over his shoulder—
At a small, cube-shaped machine with digital buttons lining the bottom and a circular porthole on the lid up top. A centrifuge.
I snatch it up with my free hand and manage to squeeze it into an inside pocket of my cloak, although the bulge of it presses against my waist. “Great! Thanks! Now I need…” I silently recall the list of other requirements Taika gave me earlier. “Sodium hydroxide, sodium chloride, pepsin.”
Too slowly, the healer takes me to various cupboards, and I stuff my pockets with bottles of liquids and powders with labels that I make sure to check, just in case he’s trying to lead me astray. But he doesn’t, and the laboratory doors don’t fly open. Nobody storms in to stop me.
Finally, I have everything I need.
“Well, it’s been a pleasure working with you,” I say politely, giving the healer a mock bow and finally removing my dagger from his space to twirl around.
“Now, wait a second!”
I don’t wait a second. I burst out of the laboratory door and pick up my pace in the hallway, using all of my restraint to not break out into a run.
He keeps shouting at me, but I don’t stop, don’t glance back, just keep twisting and turning my way through the Healing Center until I’m almost to the main entrance again.
That’s when the loudspeakers crackle.
“Saskia.”
Arad’s maniacal voice fills the hospital, vibrating through my bones along with Lucan’s growl of warning in my mind.
One of the cameras’ blinking red lights slowly swivels toward me, training its sights directly on me.
A few passing healers stop in their tracks, eyes widening at the intercom in the corner.
With no time anymore to spare, I finally break into a sprint.
“My favorite Chosen One,” Arad laughs through the speaker, his voice following me around every corner. “So eager to return to me.”
The centrifuge in my pocket thumps against my thigh with each step. When I burst out into the main entrance of the Healing Center, every head cranks my way and the information clerk shrieks with a hand on her heart, but I don’t slow. Out the double doors, I don’t hesitate for even a moment.
Twisting, I find the closest foothold and heave myself upward with all my vampiric speed and strength, scaling the metal doorframe, up, up, up, until I reach Claudia.
Then, grabbing my knife again, I saw through the ropes until they snap, one by one.
Claudia’s body slumps into mine. I gather her carefully in my arms before launching myself back down to the ground, all in the matter of a few blinks.
Then I jump past the still-unconscious sentry and skirt around a herd of other sentries converging onto the main street.
They shout after me, demanding I stop, threatening to kill me as I start to run faster.
Slow down, baby, Lucan says soothingly. Right now, the sentries by themselves are no threat to you. But if you run too fast, you’ll show your hand. And all twelve Guardians will come after you in a heartbeat if they realize you’re more than they think you are.