Participants:
Scene Title | Her Place |
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Synopsis | Some know it, others must be told. |
Date | December 13, 2020 |
There have been so many late hours.
Michelle Cardinal sleeps with her head in folded arms at a desk in front of the lambent glow of her laptop's screen. Mechanical equipment whirrs softly in the open room at her back, LED lights bright against the dark of the lab. Chel is roused from her sleep by a series of loud beeps coming from her computer. She sits up, staring with a squint at the screen. A test has completed its final cycle. Wheeling her chair over to another computer, Chel opens up a terminal window and enters a few commands and a nearby machine whirrs to life, a panel opening and a cylinder spiraling out with a hydraulic hiss. Chel rises from her chair and goes over to pull out the clear glass cylinder, looking at a tissue sample within suspended in two flat panes of glass.
Turning back to her laptop, Chel carries the sample over and sets it down with a clunk on the desk. She calls up the report from the tissue analysis, looking over the data. Chel's chest rises and falls sharply, excitement in her eyes. She snaps her fingers and them slams both hands down on her desk, hops back and claps both hands above her head with a howl of victory. Blue eyes are alight with excitement and the weariness from before is replaced by the adrenaline rush of discovery.
She only needed to read one line on the automated report:
Tissue Degredation: .074%
Meanwhile
Rikers Island Prison
Evergreen Cell Block
December 13th
4:18 am
There is a silence in Rikers Island Prison at night. The private cell blocks are insulated from the outside by thick walls and solid doors. There are no bars to the outside, but rather the comforts of what feels like a private suite. This isn't a prison designed for its inmates to suffer, but to rehabilitate. Still, Sabine Hazel wakes in her bed as though she heard a noise. As if someone had whispered sharply in her ear. Her eyes adjust to the relative dark, swinging her legs off of her bed and sitting up to look at the door to her cell; closed. Just a dream.
Standing on bare feet, Sabine walks over to a small table, picking up a bottle of pills. She rattles them around, pipping one and taking a swig of water from a nearby glass. The pills go down hard, but it doesn't matter. They're working. Sabine catches something, a shadow out of the corner of her eye. Movement through the narrow window in her cell door. There's no lights on in the corridor. The guards don't move around in the dark. Sabine grabs the water glass again, finishes it. Her eyes are on her cell door when she hears the lock click and the door slowly push open to a dark corridor outside. Two security guards that usually work the loading dock to the kitchen are on the other side of the door, one with a pair of handcuffs and the other a gun. They look surprised to find Sabine awake.
"Boys," Sabine says with a rising tension in the back of her neck. "You're early for breakfast." The two guards are momentarily frozen, and she's sizing them up in that instant. They're nervous, fretting their choices, neither of them wants to go deeper into the room but fear is motivating them to. She knows they should be afraid of who is in the cell, but that they're not means something worse is goading them at their backs.
"Gotta move you," one of the guards — Foster, judging by the nametag on his jacket — says with an unconvincing smile. "Security issue." Sabine raises her brows in responds, watches the two creep further into the cell. Her shoulders square, brows furrowed, eyes wide.
Meanwhile
Raytech-Yamagato Greenhouse
Raytech NYCSZ Campus
Jackson Heights, NYC Safe Zone
Michelle catches movement out of the corner of her eyes. A small, dark shape moving through the greenhouse and into the—
"Mrow."
Chel shakes her head and smiles. "Mr. Richleau," she says with a shake of her head, her elated smile not once faltering. "What are you doing here?" She asks, walking over to the cat and taking a knee. Richleau pads over and sniffs a hand held out in offering, then rubs his head against her palm. Chel looks past Richleau for a moment and notices a shadow in the glass partition between two cubicles in the lab. A chill runs down Chel's spine and she turns, looking up just in time to see a man in black clothing with a balaclava over his face. She starts to move and Richleau scratches her hand and hisses. The sudden attack divides her attention and she misses the intruder draw a gun and fire. Chel crumples to the ground on her back, then kicks with her heels across the floor, trailing a dark red line across the tile.
Richleau scrambles at Chel, hissing and clawing and she struggles with the cat, not understanding his sudden aggression. As she throws the cat off, her attacker fires again but misses when Chel dives behind a glass partition that proves to be resistant to low-caliber gunfire. Clutching her side, Chel scrambles for the door and hits a panic button. Security alarms sound within the building, red emergency lights click on across the facility. She turns and looks back to the attacker as he phases through the glass wall and raises the gun while halfway through.
Meanwhile
Rikers Island Prison
"'Course," Sabine says with pump of her brows, right before she smashes the water glass against the table and lunges at the closest guard. The broken glass winds its way into his neck. Lacking her superhuman strength, Sabine doesn't take his head clear off of his shoulders. But she still saws the side of his throat open with a gurgle and a warm pulse of blood down her arm and hand. His gun goes off and Sabine feels the shock and blinding pain. Slams the guard against the wall and the gun falls from his hand, the broken glass is wrenched out of his neck even as the second guard comes barreling at her.
Sabine is struck in the side of the head, staggers to the side but keeps her grip on the broken glass shard. The guard manages to get in close, tries to use the handcuffs to choke her out. Sabine drives the broken glass into his inner thigh and carves up with a practiced levering motion. He screams, recoils, and she kicks him in the chest and knocks him back. Alarms are sounding, lights are coming on, and Sabine scrambles for the gun. It's only when all the lights in the cell block come on that she sees how badly she was shot. Dark red blossoming at her midsection.
Meanwhile
Raytech-Yamagato Greenhouse
The phasing attacker fires and Chel is hit a second time in the arm, falling back against a back of computers. Her feet give out from under her and she sends office chairs scattering on wheeled feet. Dragging herself across the floor, Chel cries out for help. The attacker looks at her, then back over his shoulder and phases back through the glass pane. He unclips two metal canisters from his side, placing one on the laptop and throws another at the machines. Two blasts of white phosphorous ignite inside the lab, melting through Chel's laptop and the tissue sample nearby as well as destroying the lab equipment used to test it. The intruder quickly moves over to another computer, bathed in a glow of the white phosphorous and places his hands down on it. His pupils ignite with a pale red light and eyes take on a distant quality.
Behind the glass partition, Chel sees the attacker from behind, scrambles for a desk and yanks open a drawer. Beneath stacks of notepads she withdraws a Beretta 9mm and clicks off the safety, then drags herself across the floor and up onto her knees. There is a drizzled trail of blood following her. Chel sees the intruder standing motionless, eyes tracking from side to side, light flickering between fingertips and computers. She processes what is happening on a multi-threaded cognition; it doesn't take a super-genius to recognize what is happening. Chel grits her teeth, raises the gun, and fires.
Meanwhile
Rikers Island Prison
Sabine raises the gun at the guard on the floor, only to be struck by the high-pitched scream of a Banshee from the doorway. She howls, gun fumbling out of her hands and knees buckling. Sabine collapses onto her side and two emergency-response security officers come bursting into the cell. They see injured guards, blood, at least one person dead and are awash with confusion and alarm. Sabine is wrestled onto her stomach, bound and restrained while another guard calls in what they've discovered.
"We've got a code red in Evergreen. Cell F-8. Two men injured one possibly fatal need emergency medical down here ASAP!"
Meanwhile
Raytech-Yamagato Greenhouse
Michelle Cardinal slouches against a glass wall, leaving a streak of blood in her wake as she does. There is a large spatter of bone, brain, and blood on the wall where the intruder was standing. Some of it is scattered across the computer's keyboard. Richleau is nowhere in sight. Chel collapses onto her knees, eyes blurry, vision swimming. She looks at the corpse of her attacker, still training the handgun on him. Her eyes flutter shut and she falls to the side.
Alarms blare across the Raytech Campus.
Meanwhile
Elsewhere…
"Thank you for the update, Shahid."
In a white-painted office, a dark-skinned woman dressed in eggshell shades holds a cell phone to her ear. She watches a camera feed on her laptop showing Rikers Island Prison from a distance across the bridge to the island. The feed cuts out and her dark eyes move to the panoramic view of the city from her office. She tabs over to another screen where an alert indicates: Download Terminated.
"This is a disappointing return." She says matter-of-factly. "I can only hope we had more luck with Ms. Hazel. But, I believe this will set the board back into its proper alignment." She rises from her desk and walks across the floor, moving toward the window overlooking the city. The panorama digitizes and collapses, revealing the massive windows to be little more than digital displays in the white room.
"Keep me posted on any further updates," the woman says as she turns from the screens, walking to a seam forming in the pale white wall revealing the outline of a door. "You as well. Peta babkama luruba anaku." She says like a mantra before ending the call and stepping out the door.
The room falls into darkness.