Darkhaven

I stood where I was until the trembling became too severe and I sank back into the couch, trying to push out the feelings of shame and embarrassment – state secrets indeed – and terror. Not for myself. Now, any fear I’d harboured for myself last night and this morning had vanished. But Alex. Zenna. Cecelia. How did the Taskforce even know? What if they ruined Alex’s career that he’d worked so hard at all his life? Or Cecelia’s, before it even started. And Zenna. I knew she was having a rough time, but I had no idea she’d seen her doctor about it. Some friend I was.

I realised, then, alone in the windowless office that only looked inwards, that I was the one jeopardising the lives of the people I loved, and I’d made that choice when I refused Stephen’s offer to go home and forget. Or transform and leave them to live their lives, happy and fulfilled. I’d decided for them. I’d decided they wouldn’t cope if I “died”. That would have been a tragedy, a sad occurrence, but ultimately, something that had happened to someone else. In that moment, I’d traded one tragedy for three, three events that wouldn’t pass and fade into the background, but things that would hobble them forever. If I’d loved them, I’d have let them go. Let them lose me, grieve me, and move on while I chased another dream. And if I’d really loved them, I’d have given it up, forgotten, stayed with the people I supposedly loved. Maybe I could have been happy too. I let that fill me with hopeful regret for a moment.

But the most crushing thing was knowing that even now, I still couldn’t have chosen to forget. I wouldn’t do it differently. I rushed out of the room, back to the elevators, past the now-vacant reception desk. I had no idea where Dad had gone, or how long before Sean came back. I hammered the elevator button and stood in front of the sliding metal doors, fighting back the waves of despair. No, a small part of my mind said. The least I could do was try to fix something. Luci had to be here somewhere. Stephen would be listening, waiting for me to find her. If I left now, the mission failed and my deal was off.

I stilled my emotions and sank into my calm place. I knew, somehow, that the floor was largely deserted. Sean had left me to sweat. I also sensed that there was something to be learned around here. The plaque on the wall above the elevators said I was on level two. I slipped back down the hall. I didn’t bother with the glass offices I could see from the corridor. I knew they’d be more of the same – empty notebooks and false drawers. Instead, I followed the corridor around until the glass stopped and came to a small room, brick instead of glass, with a solid door. I ducked back around the corner as the door opened, pressing myself into the wall. My intuition told me to stay, still and silent. I pulled my phone out – still no signal – opened the camera app and poked the phone just far enough around the corner to see the back of a dark-haired woman disappear into another room.

I ran on tiptoes down the corridor and ducked into the room she’d just left, rolling my ankle on a pile of cables inside, my heart thumping at the noise. I shut the door, forcing it over the wrinkled mat, and kicked off the cable I’d trailed along the floor. The space was dark and narrow – some sort of server room. Tiny LEDs flashed and fans whirred from a stack of computers on the right, and a workbench ran along the left, scattered with cables, tools and equipment I didn’t recognise. A filing cabinet stood at the far end of the room, hidden in shadow.

A monitor on the bench had some server management software open and a swipe card rested next to the mouse. Even with the computer already logged in, I didn’t have the skills to know what I was looking at. I stared at it for several seconds, hoping for some intuitive nudge, but intuition didn’t fill gaping holes in knowledge.

I turned to the racks of computers behind the bench. At chest height was a machine with several slots, a disk sticking out of one of them. I gave it a tiny experimental tug. It slid out of the slot without a sound. I paused, waiting for some kind of computer alarm to go off, but there was nothing. I looked at the disk, but there were no markings of any kind, except one side had a sort of holographic print on it. I tucked it into my back pocket and turned to the filing cabinet just as the door at the other end of the room cracked open.

I froze. The door caught on the mat. I ducked into the shadows beside the cabinet, but if the woman came down to the monitor, there was no way she’d miss me. She stepped into the room, kicked the mat flat and shut the door, the aroma of instant coffee swirling in the air.

Trip. Spill the coffee. Never had I wished so hard for anything. Even if I could fight my way past her – and it was unlikely she would be worse than me in a fight – I wasn’t sure if I could escape the building without Dad’s swipe card, at least not without triggering door alarms. And I didn’t really want to tip anyone off that I was snooping. Maybe she was just cleaning up the cables. Perhaps she’d pick them up and leave.

But she wouldn’t have brought coffee back if she wasn’t planning to work in here. She was heading for the monitor. Please trip.

I almost felt bad when her toe caught on the cable I’d trailed down the room and she stumbled, splashing coffee down her shirt and over the floor. She cursed, set the cup down and left, the door swinging behind her.

I snatched up the swipe card and peeked out the door. No one in sight. Skin tingling, I dashed down the hall, resisted the urge to glance over my shoulder, reached the elevator and pressed the button, praying that it wouldn’t make me wait forever. I heard cables whizzing over pulleys before the doors silently slid open. I leapt in, slapped the security card against the panel and jabbed a random button as I heard footsteps down the corridor. The doors slid shut.

I took a deep breath and examined the space in more detail than when I’d come up with Dad.

Labelled buttons showed the upper levels and the podium. Below those were three unlabelled buttons. I’d managed to mash the first unlabelled one and it glowed orange. Anxiety jittered over my skin like ants, but curiosity drove me on.

The elevator moved down, the doors sliding open when it stopped. I peered out at an underground car park. There was nothing down here, just a few of the black SUVs parked up. I ducked back into the elevator, debating.

Just looking at the lower buttons filled me with terror. In my gut, in the place where I’d felt that my poker bluff was going to fail, I knew it was risky. But I’d come all the way here. I might not get another chance. And Stephen and Donovan were waiting, listening in for word about Luci, ready to move. I hoped the tracker worked this far underground.

I pressed the bottom button. Pressure squeezed across my chest.

The elevator dropped, flying further down. I took a deep breath as the doors opened and I peeked out. The corridor was deserted, but fear gripped my stomach.

It was the floor from my interrogation with Luci.

I clenched my jaw. No use going back now. I made my way along the corridor, pausing at each door, wondering if I should open it, but I couldn’t feel into my calm place. All I could feel from there was an urge to turn around and go back. Get out, it said. Get out while you still can.

One of these doors led to my interrogation cell, and I had a feeling, deep beneath the rising panic, that they were all much the same. I kept going down the corridor and crept around the corner.

I stifled a gasp. The corridor opened into a room full of cages. Not the miserable kind of cages I’d have expected, but spacious, stuffed with hay and green leaves and plush beds. A man in a lab coat sat next to one of the cages, cuddling a large black-and-white rabbit. Two more people in lab coats stood at a long workstation with their backs to the room, busy at computers. I ducked down below the cages, tried not to think about what the animals might be for and crept to the door at the other end. It opened noiselessly into another, larger room. My insides were screaming at me to go back, get out. But I had to find Luci.

I tiptoed in. This time I had no squeal. I stared in shock. The room contained rows of beds, and in each bed, a child – some infants, others maybe ten or twelve – all asleep. Or comatose, I couldn’t tell. In the middle of the room, a woman in a white coat, mask and cap waved her hands in a spiralling pattern over the kid’s body. Sparks of static electricity jolted from her fingers while the man opposite her – also head-to-toe in white – observed and made notes on his clipboard.

That was strange enough, but then I noticed the pair of rabbits sitting on the end of the bed, alert, sniffing around. As I watched, their ears dropped and they lowered their heads, hunching up into balls. Weird.

I glanced at the chart hanging at the foot of the bed closest to me: Subject #3.8. The kid was strapped down.

The combination of words and numbers triggered a memory, one of files labelled “Subject #1.1″ and “ Subject #1.6″ and I realised, with a sinking feeling, that the Taskforce wasn’t eliminating the Praegressus program. They were continuing it. I had been part of the first group. This was the third cohort of children who had been subjected to the virus, and whatever crazy things these people were doing with clipboards and hands full of static sparks.

My stomach dropped. Sean didn’t want to kill me. He was trying to collect me, make me part of his laboratory, study my transformation. My legs turned to liquid under my body, held together only by my jeans and a thin thread of nerve. I clung to it and cast about for somewhere to hide before the people in coats spotted me.

At the far end of the room was a cluster of filing cabinets and beyond them, another door. If I ducked below the middle row of beds, I could crawl to the cabinets and get to the door unseen, but before I could move, another white-coated figure stood up from behind them, eyes on his handful of files. My pulse tripled until I recognised the familiar shock of scruffy hair. Keraun looked up and met my gaze, a tight smile flashing across his lips. I let out a quiet breath of relief.

The boy in the bed next to me groaned.

Keraun dropped the files, alarm striking his face. The two workers with the rabbits glanced over. Too late to hide now. But before I could run, the woman lowered her mask. Her cold green gaze was unmistakeable.

Luci. My hand went to my wrist to touch my tracking bracelet, to reassure myself that Stephen and Don—

It was gone. The bracelet was gone, and the feeling of Sean clasping my wrist while he looked me in the eyes shivered over my skin. He’d dropped the clipboard on purpose, a ruse to touch my arm. I had no phone contact. Stephen and Donovan weren’t coming.

Time froze as Luci looked at me and I stared back, locked in moment of uncertain disbelief. I could see my lips on her face, my nose, the jut of my chin. I had her hair underneath the dye. She’d known who I was before, but now I knew her. And I could see in the twitch of her jaw and certainty of her gaze that she knew I knew. The years hung between us, heavy in the disinfected air.

‘Mum,’ I whispered, barely audible even to myself. I stood up straighter. ‘Luci. We’ve come for you.’

She gave a minuscule shake of her head, but whether in warning or denial, I couldn’t tell. The man next to her recovered from his initial shock and pulled a radio off his belt, muttering something into it about a code two.

Then he dropped his chart, scattering the rabbits, and charged towards me.

‘Run!’ Keraun yelled. He vaulted over the filing cabinet and rushed the man, tackling him to the ground. Buying me time. But I had to be sure.

I glanced back to Luci, who was gathering up the rabbits. ‘Come with me,’ I said. ’Stephen said –′

She tipped her head back and laughed, a closed, hard sound. ‘That was always Stephen’s problem. Thinking I needed to be rescued.’ She settled the rabbits back on the end of the bed and picked up the fallen clipboard, reviewing the notes and peering at the supine figure on the bed while I stared in disbelief.

She spoke without even looking up. ‘Get out of here while you still can, Gabrielle.’

I didn’t know her, had never known her. She hadn’t died when I was a baby. She’d given me up. It shouldn’t have mattered, but shame and loss and abandonment welled like a mountain in my chest anyway, pushing reason aside. I bolted through the rabbit room, so fast the workers there didn’t have time to react before I was gone, tearing down the corridor. Crashes and yells rang behind me.

I reached the elevator and pummelled the button. There was a door next to the lift – the same one Keraun had taken me through last time I was here. The lift pinged and the doors opened, but I hesitated. The stairs must lead me to the podium door he’d used, although it was probably all unlabelled, and I didn’t know where I was going. On the other hand, I knew where the elevator went, and how to get out – but the lifts relied on electronic access, and they could easily shut those down. I wrestled for an agonising moment before I remembered to gather my nerves and let my intuition guide me. I took a deep breath, shut everything out and found my calm place.

Stairs it was.

I staggered up, making sure to count the flights. Two flights for a level. But there were too many. The sub-basement lab was deeper underground than I’d realised. I stopped at the second door I came to and peeked through it. The car park was bustling with cars moving and suits running and shouting. I ducked back into the stairs and kept running up. My fingers slipped on the handrail as I neared the podium level landing – I hoped it was the podium – and I scrambled up the last few steps, stubbing my toes on the concrete.

There were two solid doors, one to each side of the landing. I didn’t know which to take. Fear and fourteen flights of stairs had stripped me of any sense of direction. My memories of Keraun’s rescue were too fuzzy to be useful. I hoped he was okay. I sank into my calm place again, waiting for my intuition to show me the way. Panic rose like a tide, and I struggled to shove it down.

The door on the left.

I stumbled through. For a moment I was weightless d off my tangled legs, then I melted in horror. Two men in suits held me still. A third man stepped up to regard me with a cold sneer. Sean.

I frowned, confused. There was an elevator door next to the stairway door, and a plaque marked “P”, so I had to be correct … then angry tears filled my eyes as I looked up and down the white-tiled corridor. Opposite me was a room full of computer monitors: the security offices on the podium level. The stairwell must open on both sides. Right floor. Wrong door.

‘I might have been more impressed if you’d known which door to take.’ Sean’s voice was smug.

I lifted my head to glare at him, forcing a sob down with gritted teeth. ‘People know where I am,’ I said, more defiantly than I felt, struggling against the two pairs of arms holding me.

Sean smiled. ‘This?’ He asked, holding up my fake bracelet. Or what remained of it – part of the plate was gone. ‘I’ve sent the GPS on a mission of its own. Your friends are heading in the wrong direction across the city. It still records sound’ – he tapped the link in the chain that concealed the microphone – ‘but we’ve jammed the signal for this whole block. So go on. Shout.’

‘Leave them alone,’ I growled, imagining Stephen running into an ambush.

Sean smirked. ‘I will catch them anyway.’ He dangled the bracelet. ‘Last chance. Join me and help your real friends.’

‘Fuck you.’ I didn’t usually swear out loud; Alex didn’t like it. The word tasted metallic on my tongue.

Sean sighed. ‘You only have yourself to blame, then.’

He flicked a nod to one of my captors. I followed his glance and saw the suit preparing a needle and syringe. I struggled, fighting with all my remaining might against the relentless arms, but I wasn’t strong enough. Apparently Donovan was right, and even for a superhuman, strength had to be gained through training.

‘Stop!’ A commanding voice ricocheted along the hard-tiled hallway. The suits froze. I looked up. Dad strode across the tiles, shoes slapping the floor with percussive purpose.

Sean recovered first. ‘Stick her!’

I struggled and felt the prick of the needle against the skin of my neck. The next second, something shoved past me as Dad, with one neat elbow strike to the head, knocked the syringe-bearing suit away from me, sending him crashing to the floor. The needle fell out of my neck and clattered on the tiles. Dad took my shoulders and held me up straight. The other suit stepped back, apologetic. Once I was steady, Dad stepped around me to glare at Sean.

‘I have authority for this,’ Sean muttered, unable to keep the whine out of his voice.

‘Not if I say otherwise.’

I’d never heard that tone before. It was unquestionable authority, belonging to someone you obeyed without question.

Sean flung the broken bracelet at Dad. It jangled onto the tiled floor. While Dad bent to pick up the silver chain, Sean stepped up close to me. ‘I’ll get you,’ he whispered, voice burning in my ear. ‘I will make it so you have nowhere else to go.’

Dad clamped a hand on Sean’s shoulder and wrenched the man back, flinging him to the floor like a wooden puppet. Sean scrabbled up against the wall, pressing his lips together so firmly they turned white as he pummelled the elevator button. His eyes glittered. ‘I’ll make you pay!’ he spluttered, still half-slumped on the floor. ‘You might be untouchable, but your brother isn’t!’

Dad regarded him with his sternest warning expression. It sent shudders over my skin.

Sean stood, brushed off his jacket and limped into the waiting elevator. There was an awkward silence while he waited for the doors to close, and I allowed myself to relax slightly, taking a deep breath. Sean looked over, directly at me. I sank back into my calm place, thinking of the jasmine-draped pergola at Darkhaven, Liam’s sun orchid catching the light. In a sudden rush, from the pit of my stomach, I was hit with an overwhelming feeling of doom. Before I could place it, it was gone.

Dad didn’t take his eyes off Sean until the latter was firmly sealed away behind the elevator doors. Then he knelt by the suit who was still on the floor, examined the man’s head and beckoned to the other suit, still standing to the side.

‘Help Tim to the infirmary,’ he ordered, but his voice was kinder now.

‘I’m fine,’ Tim mumbled. The other suit nodded and began to drag his colleague to his feet. Dad ushered me through a door into the main foyer, out through the wide glass front doors and into the waiting car.