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| Scene Title | Learn to Survive, Part II |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Awaken from dream, into nightmare. |
| Date | July 11, 2021 |
Yellow emergency lights flash on high concrete walls as a metal-caged cargo elevator makes its descent from the surface level. As the elevator comes to a grinding halt, several darkly-dressed figures inside the cage move to a wedge formation, and as the elevator doors slide open they spill out like a dark tide. Five soldiers in sleek black body armor and eyeless helmets moving to cover the concrete hallway, at the nucleus of this violent atom, a petite brunette woman in a matte black suit.
Viktoria Jäger moves with that same mercurial fluidity as she follows the liquidation squad into the hall. She lifts her chin up, hearing shouting coming from inside the facility over the scream of alarm klaxons.
She raises one arm, touching a bracelet on her right wrist. There is a green light next to a tiny display that reads NEGATED. She taps the button beside the light, and it shifts from green to red. The screen changes to read CANCELLATION AUTHORIZED and then NON-NEGATED.
Jäger’s eyes immediately flood jet black and her hair rises as if a static charge flowed through her body. She points ahead, directing the squad.
“Commence liquidation.”
Fifteen Minutes Earlier
Versatile Shipping Czechia
Secure Facility Level
Prague
Czechia
July 11th
“She’s braindead.”
The doctor standing over Daphne Millbrook’s’ body lowers a tablet displaying flat vitals. “Whatever brought down the simulation caused a total neurological collapse.” He looks up from the tablet two exhausted looking men wringing their hands and rubbing their faces, looking at Daphne’s motionless body. Her mouth is covered by a tightly-sealed respirator that makes hissing clicks with each forced inhalation.
Gerrit Van Dalen has tears in his eyes as he looks back at the array of medical beds laid out in the room. The beds themselves are not solid-backed furnishings, but rather shallow highly-salinated baths like a sensory deprivation tank would have. Each one with a different body in it, dressed in a form-fitting white polymer bodysuit fitted with dozens of electrodes. Each bed displays flat neurological vitals on an attached display screen. More than a dozen people, all dead.
“Jesus Christ,” Gerrit exhales the words in a shuddering sob, slowly backing away from the table Daphne is on, moving over to the medical bed that contains the lifeless form of his daughter Nova. He can’t tell if she looks peaceful or not, nearly her entire head is encased in a shell of metal and plastic bristling with wires.
The upper half of Nova’s face is concealed behind a visor fit firmly to her head with the vague silhouette of eyes and a nose pressed into the plastic. The visor is attached to a skull cap of wire lattice spooling with a spaghetti string mess of thick cables that attach to the bed. The lower half of her face is a feeding tube and respirator connected to other machinery under the bed. Gerrit is relieved he cannot see the dead, unfocused look in her eyes.
“You’re sure?” The other man in the room, Maxwell Huber, handles his grief and guilt differently. He watches Daphne’s chest slowly rise and fall thanks to the work of the respirator. The doctor nods, handing Huber the tablet as he scans the data. He fires a wary look to Gerrit, then hands the tablet back to the doctor. “I’d like to keep them for observation for—”
“We can’t do that.” The doctor says, setting the tablet down on a nearby table.
“Pardon?” Huber practically chokes out, snapping a look at Gerrit for support. Gerrit leaves Nova’s side, returning to the conversation with his back tense and face prickling red.
The doctor begins unplugging Daphne’s cerebral halo. “Orders came in from Crito Corporate. As soon as any of the test subjects are no longer viable for the program we have explicit orders to relocate them.”
“Under whose authority?” Gerrit snaps. “You are not—you aren’t taking my daughter.”
The doctor steps in close to Gerrit. “Mr. Atkins himself sent the order down. Around you. Sir.” He glances at Huber, who circles around the table as if inspecting the tablet that was set down. Gerrit draws the doctor’s attention.
“Where are you taking them?” It’s only now that Gerrit notices the other beds are empty. He’d been so focused on Nova that he didn’t even realize. “Wait—did you already start moving them?” His face flushes fully red. “Where are they?”
The doctor shows no respect for Gerrit, coldly stating, “That depends on their individual material value. I—” and the remaining sounds that come out of the doctor’s mouth are a gurgling cry of confusion as his skin, muscle, and bones liquify unevenly, leaving a sloppy mess of viscera and water laying in a heap of pink-stained clothes. Gerrit retches, turns around and vomits on the floor.
Huber, hands still held out where the doctor was looks at Gerrit. “Pull your shit together. I can’t clean this up.” He steps over the protoplasmic ham salad that was once a man, hands trembling in fear.
“This wasn’t a part of the plan!” Gerrit shouts, slamming his hand down on Nova’s bedside. “One of us was supposed to be in here when we faked the flatline!”
“Gerrit I didn’t initiate the disconnect cycle.” Huber hisses, trying to get Gerrit to lower his voice. “The entire Structure collapsed. It automatically triggered the script you wrote.”
Gerrit’s eyes snap wide. Sudden, dawning realization as he turns to look at the bodies. No, the prisoners. Before he can vocalize the realization, Jacelyn Childs bolts upright with a reflexive gag and a scream, thrashing in the bed and pawing at the feeding tube in her throat.
“Watch the door!” Huber snaps, rushing over to Jac’s side. He’s quick to pull the cerebral halo off of her head, turning her world from suffocating darkness to blinding, fluorescent light. He drops the halo unceremoniously to the floor with a heavy clunk, then unclasps Jac’s respirator and hauls the long tube up out of her body, causing her to retch over the side of the bed.
“Easy, easy.” Huber tries to be as calm as possible, as welcoming. But he realizes in this exact moment how fucked everything is.
How fucked they all are.
One arm hangs above the floor, the other hand slides slowly down the side of the bed as though to join it, and Jac dangles over the edge like a discarded wet towel plagued by rough coughing from the abrupt extubation.
As the spasms slow and her breathing eases from panicked gasps to hoarse breaths, she stares at the floor, at the feet and things that are all vague shapes and uncertain colors. It's so bright. Her eyes squint against the brightness then squeeze shut against the pain of the fluorescent lights. One hand, the one hanging closest to the floor, lifts with no semblance of coordination and with just a little bit more structure than a cooked noodle, and she tries to rub the irritation from her eyes. Her movements aren't really flails, but they aren't precise either. Somehow she manages, and turns squinted, sluggish but wondering eyes to the rest of her surroundings.
Blue eyes follow the shape of her arms to the bed. Jac sloshes and nearly tips herself onto the floor as she pushes herself up to sitting. It gives her a view of the body suit she's wearing, and all of its wires and things. Questions come more as a croak than actual words as she wobbly reaches to touch the electrodes, fingers seeking to explore the connection points even as her eyes find Huber's shadow across her.
Jac's head lifts as her fingers close around an electrode. She looks at Huber, at first he's a silhouette until her eyes adjust a second later. She doesn't understand fully, her brain is still catching up to what just changed, and she doesn't know who he is, but there's an unmistakable, undeniable challenge in her eyes.
“You’re going to be very disoriented,” Huber says in a thick German accent, “you’re coming down off of a lot of drugs and—you know—” he waves at the wires. “You need to be quiet and you need to be calm. I am a friend.”
Huber seems suspect as to whether Jac will believe that.
At the door, Gerrit glances up and down the hall. He tenses, then ducks out of the hall and shuts the door. “Something’s going on. I hear shouting. Huber we—we have to hurry.”
A sudden gasp erupts in the room as Faulkner jolts in his bed, legs and arms kicking and the fluid slurry he’s suspended in sloshes over the open sides. He gags and chokes, pulling his own respirator off and disgorging the feeding tube before retching onto the floor reflexively. Huber steps away from Jac’s side, watching Faulkner’s movements with trembling hands, eyes darting back and forth between him and Jac.
Gerrit sees Huber’s hesitation and steps in, starting to unplug Faulkner’s helmet and yank it off of his head. “Easy, easy.”
It is perhaps a blessing that Isaac Faulkner had woken with the respirator and feeding tube shoved down his throat, because his first instinct is to scream at the top of his lungs. The sensation of coming back to a physical body after spending god knows how long as a digital existence is akin to being a ghost suddenly drowning in meat. At least by the time he's finished retching the impulse to scream has dissipated, if only because he's trying to figure out how to breathe on his own again. His breath comes in ragged, heaving gasps, his hands reaching to rip away whatever it is that's covering his eyes.
Someone's helping, so there's that… although when the helmet finally comes off and the subsequent blinding light fades, the sight of just who it is assisting him causes him to freeze.
Because he knows that face. He'd seen it not that long ago, in that bizarre dreamscape between New York and Las Vegas.
Nova's father. Gerrit van Dalen.
In other circumstances, Faulkner might have immediately started considering possible approaches and scenarios for maximizing the advantage of this, but right now, in the throes of this horrific, protracted waking, his mind isn't yet sharp enough for it; he's running not on calculation but on pure atavistic emotion. One arm lurches up, clumsily grasping for Gerrit's shoulder. "Nova," he gargles weakly, the word a nigh-indecipherable croak. "Awake. The whole ti — "
The word cuts off as his throat spasms in another attempted dry heave, protesting being forced to speak so soon after such prolonged violation. He grits his teeth, hand tightening on Gerrit's arm as he tries to get himself under control. "Is she safe?" he manages to choke out.
Jac isn't so sure that she's going to believe Huber either. She isn't sure she wants to remain calm and quiet. It's probably best for the immediate minute that Faulkner woke up and made Huber step back. It gives her space and time to wrestle her body from whatever murkiness they'd put into it.
Her body. Jac's fingers tighten around the electrode. It's still connected to… things.
"Let. Us. Go!" The lack of use and the rawness from the tubes make her voice a harshly squeaking whisper of what it should be. It cuts in and out when she follows up with a scream, going from ear grating pitchiness to soundlessness with some croaking in between. The uneven sort of sound seems to release something inside her and spurs another, equally rough, sometimes screeching but mostly not wail.
Jac twists her body sharply on her next breath, and spills more sloshy goo over the side of her container. Her hands go to the side of it, slipping a little bit when she pulls herself toward it. Her legs kick, trying to find the way to move all over again. It's frustrating, and kicking fast turns into thrashing as the teenager tries to lever herself over the lip and slither onto the floor.
Gerrit takes a step back, eyes wide and locked on Jac. What Faulkner had said registers, but the teen’s gunshot-scream has him in a jackrabbit mentality. Huber makes a gesture toward Gerrit, steps into his field of view, tries to calm him down. But Huber turns his attention to Jac next.
“We—we want to.” Huber says with a thick German accent. “We’re trying to help you. I promise. But there are people here who want to hurt you. We removed your cobalt suppressors,” he says as if that means anything, “and the redundant negation drugs in your system are not long-lasting. You should feel…” he glances between the two waking individuals, “you should feel whole soon.”
Gerrit turns to look at Faulkner. “Did she make it out?” He asks, glancing at Nova’s medical suspension bed. He swallows bile down, his stomach twists in knots. Is my daughter alive is in his eyes and haunting his words.
Shaw interrupts Gerrit’s question with a gagging retch as he sits up straight in his medical bed like a zombie rising from the dead. Shaw reflexively paws at and withdraws the tube from his throat, and pressure on the side hatch of his medical bed pops the lock and causes the side to snap open and discharge Shaw and the fluid suspension on the floor. Gerrit hops back from the syrupy tide but Huber lets it wash over his shoes and stain the hem of his pants.
Without hesitation, Huber moves in to Shaw’s side, kneeling in the soup. “Mr. Khan. Mr. Khan you are okay.” It’s hard for Shaw to even parse what is saying over the reflexive desire to retch. Bleary eyes not finding the familiar silhouette of Isa anywhere.
Arms and legs flail weakly as Shaw self-extubates several slick and slippery pipes from his person. He's been comatose before. He's had IVs and other medical implements inserted in and pasted on before. Still, nothing quite like this. It is all pure animalistic reflex in the beginning, fueled by the neurons firing after overcoming the feeling of world's worst sleep paralysis. His extremities eventually obey, and fingers then find Huber's soaked shoes and pant hems. They cling and claw, and climb up the fabric of the scientist's clothing to find purchase in something more solid. More real, supposedly.
Shaw gawks at Huber's soft, anxious face. The lack of recognition in his dark eyes evident, Shaw nevertheless imprints on Huber and seems to understand despite the fluid still oozing, dripping out of his ears. He barely hears his name, the words following, but has the general idea. Shaw starts to speak. All that comes out is a sudden, projectile spew of god-knows-what and a gloppy dilution of blood from a scratched esophagus onto Huber's shirt.
Shaw gags again, the next time a dry retch, before letting go of Huber and remaining where he's spilled, kneeling with both hands planted in the slop. He shakes his head in an attempt to clear away gunk and fuzz, and that first real conscious gulp of air without an obstructing tube does the trick. "'Eanqa. Where… Is…" It's only then he registers the other presences in the room, first the high-pitched scream-screech from Jac, then, "Isaac!" Motivation strikes about the same time as a spike of adrenaline, allowing Shaw to push up to a wobbly stand.
Faulkner is listening, even if it's taking him a bit longer than usual to sift meanings out of what he's hearing, preoccupied as he is with trying to make his body to remember to breathe and not choke.
Gerrit he knows, or knows of; the other man he does not, but it's not hard to figure out that they're on the same team. The cobalt suppressors he may not know much about, but redundant negation drugs serves to provide context, and feeling whole soon is about the best news he could have asked for. When Gerrit asks his question, Faulkner looks to him in surprise; he grimaces as he tries to keep his coughing under control, but nods. "Yes," is his answer, and he's pleased that his voice, though still strained, is starting to sound a bit more like himself.
Faulkner still has to take a moment to get his coughing under control, but it's getting easier, hearing his name sees his head swivel to regard Shaw, though, and he musters a faint smile. "Shaw," he says with a nod, then looks over to where Jacelyn is… apparently not doing so well. "Everyone alright?" he calls. "Balance okay?" he asks, both to give him an idea of what to expect and to give the others something to think about that isn't panicking, because panicking isn't going to do any more good than it did the last time he got kidnapped.
But sitting around isn't viable either. He takes a moment to test his strength; he's all but certain that the conditioning he'd developed inside the… simulation… isn't going to carry over, but how much or how little he's lost in terms of strength is going to affect his options. He takes a moment to shift his position, to get himself ready to stand.
Then his gaze moves back to Gerrit and Huber. "Nova and I were… just about the last two out, I think," he says, frowning momentarily. "I'm surprised the others weren't up first," he says.
“What — ” Jac swings her eyes at the noise of Shaw’s waking up. Her arms tremble under the weight of her upper body, and her question cuts off completely as she slips down into the frothy slurry. She’s up a whole second later, gasping and spitting but with renewed efforts to get out of the tank. Her fingers find a lip to grasp and her feet have found a precarious wedge against the sidewall. It gives her just enough leverage to get her arms and chest over the opposite side.
Panting, she turns her head and all her accusations on Huber and Gerrit. If they're helping, why are they just staring. They should be picking Shaw up, helping her and Faulkner, waking Nova. But they aren't. She wants to scream at them and she almost does. .
Jac’s eyes squint, eyebrows bunch in frustrated concentration. She tries, even though they said she can't yet. Yet.
She wants to turn their brains into soup through their ears Soon.
A ragged breath is sucked in and she tries to find her ability on the next exhale. It isn't there. Yet.. So she pulls in another breath. The one she holds like a mask over the flailing and failing with her ability. She pushes her arms straight and lifts herself over the edge of the bed, kind of gracelessly dropping onto the floor.
“What is soon?” Jac demands, holding her own on two feet.
Huber, attention focused warily and worriedly at Shaw, reluctantly turns a shaky eye toward Jac. The tiny shake of his head is all the answer she needs before he even says, “I’m not sure. Minutes at most? It depends on your metabolism.”
Gerrit disengages from the conversation the moment he is aware that Nova made it out okay and begins disconnecting her from the system, even if she shows no signs of waking. He’s mindful on removing the breathing and feeding tube, careful with the delicate guilt of a father who did this to his daughter. He removes the headset from her brow and begins decoupling the muscle stimulators from her skin, unclipping one at a time.
“What happened in there?” Huber asks Isaac. “We could only monitor so much from the outside after—” he glances away. “After they killed Mr. Verse.” He looks back. “Our view into the system was minimal, but there were so many anomalies. The system crash came as a surprise.” He hardly looks like he believes they’re here at all.
Somewhere outside of this room people are shouting. It sounds like an argument.
From the initial vigorous shaking of his head, Shaw looks like he's answering Faulkner with a negative, Ghost Rider on the question of everyone alright. But, in fact, the man is simply engaged in clearing his ears and head of more gooey mess after coming out of the world's gel-iest jacuzzi. He lifts a hand instead and holding one thumb up, the other gripped against the edge of his now opened pod.
Shaw shivers. Not only because he's cold, but at the sight of the slimy scene before him and the growing lump of worry that isn't more bile lodged in his throat. The trigger comes as Huber interrogates Faulkner for the going ons, the phrase "After they killed Mr. Verse" reaching his clear ears.
"We made it to the Corinthian. Las Vegas. Colin said InVerse… Crito… working together? Then Arthur. The whole machine came to us. Called himself - itself - Optica. It wanted to make a deal. A deal none of us could guarantee, though not without offers from some." He pauses, looking to Isaac for a confirmation in his hesitant recollection, then back to Huber and Gerrit Van Dalen. Doubt casts a heavy shadow of uncertainty on Shaw's features as he realizes the buzz in his body is whatever in him wearing off, his strength and resolve creeping back in. The argument outside of the room turns up his urgency of tone as he hisses, "Where are the others?"
Minutes. If that's true then it's the most welcome thing Isaac Faulkner has heard since… since…
Faulkner tries to remember the last time something had gone right for him, but his thoughts, still trying to sort out all of the… everything… just stagger in drunken loops, bouncing from failure to failure. The failed campaign, Darlowe, Asami… being kidnapped in the first place. He closes his eyes for a moment, one hand coming up to pinch the bridge of his nose as he takes a deep breath. That, at least, is getting easier, is coming back to him quickly.
Shaw and Jacelyn are up. Shaw's initial negative head shake is cause for concern, but the thumbs up is reassuring. Jacelyn… looks decidedly less reassuring. She looks, in fact, like someone held back from murder only by a leash that they are getting closer to chewing through by the moment. That and the not-so-distant sounds of shouting outside the door suggest that time is not his friend, and so Faulkner levers himself to his feet as well, standing carefully and taking a moment to check his balance, to see how his muscles — his actual muscles, and not the ones he'd had in the simulation — react to bearing his weight. To see what strength he's lost.
"Anomalies, yes," Faulkner answers Huber, looking to the dwarf, and whether it's the time pressure or the familiarity of standing on his own two feet again, his thoughts seem to be straightening out and falling into line. "I witnessed some, others witnessed more, but they seemed to be escalating. Circumstances led us to Las Vegas, through… our own memories, at one point. I glimpsed some of Nova's." He glances to Gerrit, and he hesitates for a moment. "Your daughter loves you very much."
And that's all the time Faulkner dares to spend on sentiment, between Jacelyn seething like a thermonuclear reactor getting ready to overload and whatever the hell is happening outside."There we met Mr. Verse in the simulation, and yes, he spoke about InVerse and Crito. He also mentioned something about a liquidation squad en route," he says. "So, as Mr. Shaw has said — where are the others? I would like very much to get the hell out of here, and I'm sure the rest of our group feels the same."
Minutes could be hours or days or even forevers and metabolism has no good definition if it isn’t having to do with food. Jac huffs a breath. Because, normally, when she’s hungry, she eats. That’s just how it works. There isn’t really time to figure out how metabolisms go with non-food things. For an instant she looks like she’s going to push for better answers, but she hesitates. From the sounds and shouting coming from the other side of the door, she — they, the whole of everyone in the room probably maybe — doesn’t have time for much of anything else.
The teen pulls her angry and mistrustful eyes off Huber and Gerrit with the same abruptness she’d rip off a bandaid. Instinct tells her that there isn’t time left for talking or explaining. It’s time to leave. And definitely she’s going to listen to instinct instead of spending the time telling the two doctor guys anything right now. All of her attention goes to the door for one half of a second then to the equipment in the room, the ceiling, taking inventory of all the things and the people awake and not so much awake.
Jac takes a small backward step. Her hands leave the side of the pod and her feet slip a little bit as her weight shifts. She takes another step, changing the angle she can see things and testing her legs a little bit more. Except for the sliminess, it could probably be worse, and slime eventually dries. But will her muscles keep working? In little darting motions, her eyes jump to the door, to make sure it’s still closed, then the ceiling again. She studies and scrutinizes the lights and fixtures — instincts instead of real conscious thought probing far and deep, deep down for her teeny tiny sounds — trying to decide if there’s access above the room.
Huber and Gerrit are both visibly shocked by the description of what happened inside the simulation. But it’s the mention of the liquidation squad that drains the color from their faces. Huber tries to talk, but it just comes out as hoarse little gasps. Gerrit only looks at Nova, and then steps closer to Isaac.
“We had a script injected into the simulation.” Gerrit says, eyes darting from Isaac to Faulkner to Nova and back. “We intended to fake your deaths and have you removed from the system the next time it was suspended for routine maintenance. But the system crash triggered everything early. We weren’t ready.”
“Incineration.” Huber finally manages to interject, causing Gerrit to close his eyes and draw in a slow breath. “The rest of you had already been moved to the morgue for a final cerebral scan, then to the incinerator for… disposal.”
Gerrit quickly talks over Huber. “It was in batches. Mrs. Caliban, Mrs. Khan, Ms. Childs, and Ms. Ferguson. They—they were moved first.” The words are clinical, but Gerrit can’t look Shaw in the eye. “I’m sorry. The others are probably in processing at the morgue or en-route to the incinerator by now. We’ve sent someone down to the morgue to try and recover them, but they’ll have to make their own way out.”
Apart from the conversation, Daphne Millbrook’s chest rises and falls faster and faster.
“We don’t have the luxury of time to go get them now.” Huber says as the shouting down the hall is getting closer. “There’s a route out of here through the freight elevators to the shipping facility above us, but the morgue is in the opposite direction. I’m sorry. We have to—”
Daphne bolts upright on the table, roused from the soporific slumber of drugs and stress. Gerrit jolts when Daphne wakes, quickly moving to help her withdraw the respirator mask and breathing tube. Anything to not have to look Shaw in the eyes and tell him his wife is dead.
Daphne’s hands come up to remove the respirator, her eyes wide as Gerrit leans in to do it. Her nostrils flare in and out as she stares with wide eyes into his face, but it’s at least clear he’s trying to help her not harm her… for the moment, anyway.
Unfortunately, Daphne Millbrook has lived through too many instances of being helped by those who would imprison her, exploit her, or both.
By the time the mask is off, she’s at least repressed the urge to scream. But it’s only because the grief is so suffocating, she has no breath left for screaming.
“If you want us to hurry, White Rabbit,” this is to Huber, and his insistence that they’re running late, “Get me a fucking wheelchair.”
There are so many more questions that Shaw had thought to ask. Those thoughts all vanish the instant Huber mentions incineration. The man stares at the pair of men as they continue to explain, but those words fall upon deaf ears. Where Daphne's chest starts to move faster and faster, Shaw's breathing seems to stop and the man is still as stone.
None here have ever seen Shahid Khan outside of an ever present, some would say misguided, state of deep down optimism that runs through him more like a riptide than an overwhelming tidal wave of effusive happiness. Few, if any, have seen him show any emotion outside of mild annoyance. But now? The hope has drained, like Gerrit and Huber had pulled some invisible plug and flushed everything away.
It refills with an icy cold rage.
The first movement that breaks Shaw's petrified stance is a turn of his gaze to look at Faulkner and Nova. What false memories were made in Optica of the pair of them flash like a startled bird's wings in his mind, and that telltale needle prick of wetness in Shaw's dark gaze is as clear as a gunshot.
Shaw turns abruptly and silently starts walking for the door. A dead man walking.
Going backwards still, one foot planting before the next move, Jac seems a lot like she’s chosen to ignore the whole everything in the room. Even Daphne’s waking up isn’t given any looks, because finding a way out and away from the yelling is way more important. She starts to turn for the door, making it half way into half turning, wondering on an exhale if there could maybe be enough chaos on the other side to sneak out unnoticed.
In that motion, with her eyes being pulled away from the ceiling and swiveled toward the door, Jac stops. Like she hit the pause button, or called out “times” in her mind’s voice. Morgue? Confused, her eyebrows push together, and she weighs the words and the names.
And then she screams.
It doesn’t start as a scream. It actually starts as a breath. A frenetic, uneven breath that isn’t fully exhaled before the next is gulped in. On the second, her jaw quivers, face pulling into equal parts hatred, pain, and volatile rage. Halfway into her third breath, as Shaw passes her on his way to the door, as she turns to face Huber and Gerrit, is when she actually, fully for real screams.
It’s a primordial sound, a feral shriek of pure and violent emotion that’s been given a voice. It starts somewhere way down deep within, beyond her toes and fingers, pulled from all the fibers that connect the girl to her ancestors. Jac’s hands clench into fists at her sides as she leans into it, her whole body and soul rigid with the effort.
Hearing someone start screaming immediately scrambles Faulkner's attempts at maintaining composure, and in the first instant all he can do is swing to look at Jacelyn, the rational part of his mind scrambling to make sense of what the fuck is even happening as the girl just screams.
But rationality is not all there is to Isaac Faulkner; years of swimming amongst the sharks of the criminal underworld and the crocodiles of the political sphere have left him with well-honed instincts, and right now every one of those instincts is screaming shut her up or we're all going to die.
He's moving before he's even conscious of making the decision to act, his trepidation forgotten in the tidal wave of adrenaline as his legs carry him over to stand in front of Jacelyn. One hand rises up, a fraction of a second away from coming around in an open-palmed slap before he checks himself. "Jacelyn Petrelli!" he snaps, and if Isaac had been in a more analytical state of mind, he might have noticed just how much the whipcrack of his voice in that moment sounded like Nicole Miller snapping Isaac Faulkner on one of the many occasions on which he himself had been being particularly stupid about something or other.
"Pull yourself together," Faulkner snaps coldly, working desperately to sublimate a nascent sense of burgeoning panic into icy fury. "You can scream all you want once we're out of here, but we're still not out of Vegas yet, and if we don't work together they're going to kill us all. Daphne needs a wheelchair," he thought he'd heard that, anyway, "Nova's not up yet, and we're running out of time," he hisses, keeping his eyes on Jacelyn.
He holds that gaze for a beat longer. "Can you give Daphne a hand?" he asks, maintaining eye contact, letting his expression shift just enough to give a hint of how much fear he's feeling right now. Hopefully someone else can help Shaw. Hopefully Jacelyn doesn't start screaming again, or hopefully someone else in the room decides to give sanity a chance.
Gerrit stares at Jac with glassy eyes, briefly darting his attention to his daughter, then back. The scream is heartbreaking. He starts to say something, then looks at Daphne and then to something hanging on the wall by the door. “We’ve—I’ll help her.” He says as if trying to ignore Jac’s mournful cries.
As Gerrit goes to dismount the white, plastic and metal apparatus from the wall, Huber gives Daphne a gentle squeeze of her hand. “Gerrit’s getting you one better,” he says before stepping away from her bedside. He slowly circles around Jac, then looks at Shaw with a visible frown as he reaches the door. He gingerly steps closer.
“Mr. Shaw,” it’s almost a sigh. “It might not be safe to just… step out.”
While this is happening, Jac’s head is throbbing. Her blood is rushing in her ears, but that’s the only thing that is. When she screamed she felt nothing. No clicking at the back of her throat, no echolocation, nothing. The drugs must still be in effect, even as her heart wants to scream louder than her throat can permit.
Gerrit finishes dismounting the device from the wall and unfolds it. Two long metallic and plastic braces with padded straps, a belt with a battery pack. Stenciled along one leg is a small RAYTECH INDUSTRIES logo. He worriedly glances at Shaw, then holds out the device. “It—it’s a mobility aid exoskeleton. If someone can help me attach the adhesive nodes to the small of Daphne’s back at her spine it will allow her to walk.”
Daphne’s dark brows draw together as she frowns at the device – it may be ‘one better’ than a wheelchair, but it reminds her of the braces she had once worn and then no longer needed – but now needs again.
“You could have at least painted it red,” she murmurs instead of thanks. “Jesus. It’s like you don’t even know me.”
The joke isn’t particularly funny, but little is, here in this moment. As Gerrit helps her with the device, her sad-eyed gaze follows Shaw, before they flit to Jac, and then to Nova. “She said we’d have to leave her. I guess she knew?” she asks Isaac.
The habit of listening to such sharp words and tones, because of societal decorum and expectations, might have been enough to make Jacelyn Petrelli swallow her outburst. But the girl in front of Faulkner isn't the same as he remembers, and even though she recognizes the intuition her own memory relies on, she flat out denies it. She isn't Jacelyn Petrelli. That person is just someone she played in a made up story.
She is Jac Morrison ew no. Childs. Petrelli definitely not. — Monroe? What? Why would… — Childs. So many names. Simplify it. She is just Squeaks.
She can't be sure when her hands came up, only that they did. But the teen doesn’t hide behind them. Once raised, on impulse with her voice, she shoves Isaac away like an unwanted plate of brussel sprouts. “No!” Her voice shifts sharp and guttural, an angry husky’s howl that emphasizes and draws three underlines with the physical push that comes with it. She is just Squeaks. Without her clicks. Without any abilities. Without Gillian. Just Squeaks.
Shoulders heaving with each breath, Squeaks turns away a little bit to hide the hateful burning in her eyes. It distracts from the pounding in her head and the knives in her stomach, but not very much. And it at least it fills the emptiness and silence left by her screaming. Her palms press against the sides of her head and her eyes squeeze tightly shut for a half a second. That cools the heat and eases her head some. The girl takes a deeper breath — there’s time to be sad later, when she… when they get home — and turns coldly blue eyes on the doctor men.
“How do we get out?”
Shaw's made it to the door by the time Squeaks' scream has finished ripping from her lungs. There he stops, eyes casting down to where he could reach for the barrier that stands in his way and open it. It's such a simple movement. But he doesn't yet make the move to open the door. Perhaps Huber's warning made it past the commotion happening in the room, past the haze of grief that makes everything sound like he's underwater.
Shaw's lips part. He takes a breath. Another. Inhale, exhale.
The question comes from another voice in the room. How do we get out?
Dark eyes turn an unblinking stare at Huber, shift to the activity with Gerrit helping Daphne, with Isaac chastising Squeaks, with the terribly still form of Nova Van Dalen, then back to face the doctor. Shaw breathes in again, holds, eyes twitching narrower. "Is there a gun?" he asks softly.
Faulkner's attention had been focused entirely on Jacelyn, but Daphne's words catch him like a body shot slipping through his guard, stunning him. His gaze shifts to her, his mind whirling to formulate a response… which leaves him entirely unprepared for Jacelyn's outburst and shove. Despite the difference in masses, he's off guard enough that her shove sends him a step back; he slips a bit in the goo, but manages to recover. He gives the girl a withering look… but at least she's asking the right questions for the moment.
And he's not nearly as stiff as he might have expected, either, considering… well, everything. That's good. Maybe no wallrunning yet, but… maybe that's not so far off, either. For him, at least. But Nova…
"No way in hell am I leaving her," he says quietly, his gaze shifting to Daphne. "Something was done to her to put her to… trap her in her own body. Someone did it. She remembers; I saw it. But… she's been awake the whole time," he says, his gaze moving to Nova as he starts to walk towards her. "If we can catch up to Kaylee… she's a powerful telepath. She brought some friends of mine out of… something similar. If anyone can pull her back, Kaylee can. If we can catch up to her. If…"
If she's alive.
For some reason, it's that thought that rattles his control, and for a moment the fear he's been trying to suppress and channel scythes through him like an arctic wind, chilling him to the marrow of his bones… but only for a moment. He takes a step towards where she lays in her pod, and reaches out to take a hand in his. "But I'm not going to leave her."
He looks to Gerrit and Huber. "Options?"
Gerrit’s expression is twisted into one of stunned revelation. Huber doesn’t clock it for what it is, doesn’t understand which thing the multitude things just said could have done it. When he sees the thousand yard stare in Gerrit’s eyes, Huber clears his throat and steps forward.
“We have no firearms,” Huber apologizes to Shaw. “We have you.” Is also an apology. “The hope is—once your abilities come back—you’re more than capable of defending against a security team. Or at the least evading them.” All the while, Huber is moving the exoskeleton to Daphne, unfolding its telescoping components, and unfastening Velcro straps with a satisfying rrrrrip sound.
“The only way out is up. We’re only two floors from the surface but there’s a security checkpoint just down the hall. We’ll want to go the other way—left out the door—towards waste disposal. Our best bet is to use the freight elevator that takes mechanical waste up to the shipping facility. It’s mostly automated—robots—not the combat kind.” Huber says as he scoots the exoskeleton next to Daphne and gingerly gestures to help lower her legs down into it.
“Gerrit can—” Huber notices Gerrit still hasn’t moved or said anything. “Gerrit.”
Gerrit snaps to, taking a few quick strides over to Isaac. “Who?” The fire in his eyes is evident.
Someone did this to his daughter.
Gerrit didn’t know.
“Who—” Gerrit’s reiteration comes with a sudden snap of darkness. The whole room is black for a beat until an electric hum and a snap of electrical noise accompanies the room being illuminated in goldenrod hues. Emergency lightning high up on the walls provides shadowy illumination. Gerrit’s question is replaced with a soft, “Fuck.”
The next words he says are swallowed by a new sound. The argument happening down the hall is punctuated by the sounds of automatic gunfire. Less than a hundred feet away. Huber and Gerrit freeze, holding their breaths for a moment. Huber then continues trying to strap Daphne into the exoskeleton, attaching the last leg straps and then gingerly lifting her to stand on her own weight, supported by the frame. He plugs something into the impulse nodes on her simulation integration bodysuit, it feels like a cold prickle up her spine.
“Electrical impulses,” he says hastily to her, “going to be awkward, slow. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” For everything.
Up pulls Squeaks' eyes to the ceiling again, but only for as long as it takes Huber to explain. Out the door and to the left. She tries to draw the image of it in her head. There's an elevator. It's too vague. Her eyes go to the door next, partly blocked by Shaw and Gerrit, until the second man moves away.
Her eyes squint a little with the power surge, very oddly unbothered by the sudden changes from bright to dark to not quite bright again. She actually creeps toward Shaw during the electrical spasm, taking over the space Gerrit had filled with all her attention on the door. And where Jac Petrelli would have skittered off in the next seconds, spooked into finding cover from the gunfire, Squeaks stays put.
"How far?" Squeaks looks up at Shaw, but the out loud question isn't for him. She can tell the fighting is close. She's looking to him for direction — how are they going to do this? The voiced question is for the science guys, Huber and Gerrit. How far do they have to go?
A sharp breath gets sucked in through Daphne’s gritted teeth, and she rolls her shoulder at Huber’s apologies. One hand comes up to shove her slick, slimy hair out of her face, and her nose wrinkles as the silvery goo sticks to her hand instead.
She ignores Huber’s apologies, her dark gaze alighting on Squeaks, then Shaw. “Go without us,” she tells them, glancing back at Nova in the bed, at Isaac as he vows to stay close to her.
She knows how frustrating it is, to want to go fast, and have someone who can’t weighing you down. She knows, too, what it’s like to be the weight.
“We’re just going to slow you down.”
The look Shaw levels at Huber. It's good he doesn't have powers of petrifaction. It disappears with the sudden cut of electricity, snapping the connection of cold anger trying to wrap itself around his insides and freeze him there. For a scant second, he remembers this feeling of darkness. His ability - the original - saw him plunged into it several times before. He takes a small amount of comfort at the memory.
The emergency lighting coming on sees him looking back at the others, counting heads. Seven souls aboard. Daphne’s statement is solidly rejected with a firm, “No.” Full stop. He then turns to Isaac and Gerrit. Shaw sends a dark-eyed stare to the men. "Carry her," he directs, not stating which one of the pair is to take the first leg. And then, he looks at Squeaks with the question. How far? "All the way, up and out," answers Shaw quietly even if her question wasn't to him. "Everyone out."
With how many years, how many timelines, how much actual experience did he have shoveled into his mind now, the sound of burst gunfire doesn't faze him much. If anything, it's a good sign there's a distraction. But how long they have to escape, he won't know until… Shaw opens the laboratory door, hunching to a level that most headshots would fly over, and leans out of the opening to peek into the corridor in a moment taken for threat assessment and to mark a path for them.
The look on Gerrit's face is one Faulkner has seen before; it's a look, in fact, he's seen in the mirror now and again — the look of a man ready to go to war.
Good. He'd expected Gerrit was innocent of this, but it's always good to have it confirmed. The question of who, though, is made a little more complicated by the fact that Faulkner doesn't actually have a name to put to the face he'd seen, only a description, and 'very tall and very bald' probably isn't terribly helpful.
Luckily, he's spared having to have that particular conversation by the sudden power failure neatly distracting Gerrit. What surprises him is his own reaction to that sudden darkness — the sense of peace that descends on him. Then he remembers: the darkness is his.
A faint flicker of a smile touches his lips as he remembers that… and as he starts to think about what kinds of things he can potentially do. The sound of automatic gunfire in the distance banishes that smile as the emergency lights come on, but there are still plenty of shadows nearby, enough that he should have no shortage of ways to surprise their potential assailants — tricks he's sure whoever is out there will find quite distressing.
For a little while, at least.
But that's then, this is now. "Right," Faulkner murmurs aloud, looking to see if there's anything he can do to help with Nova.
Nearby, Shaw can see an orange security lighting flooding the hall with a high-contrast glow like a sodium lamp. The dark shapes moving down the hallway toward the room they’re in stand out stark against the concrete walls. Three figures in light body armor carrying assault rifles, sixty feet away and closing in. Helmeted, faces obscured by gas masks. Canisters of some kind clink and clank at their hips.
Inside the room, Gerrit bends down and picks up Nova from the bed, grunting as he supports her over his shoulder, cradling her legs. He winces, it’s a significant effort for him in spite of her sleight size. The apology and regret in his eyes is so palpable, shining wet with unshed tears in the security light.
“None of us are as fast as we need to be,” Huber murmurs to Daphne a moment before her lower-body exoskeleton comes to life. She can feel the prickling sensation of the nervous system connections, making sensation in her legs prickly-painful but present. The spinal adapter sends a shiver up her spine. It’s like trying to walk on the bottom of a swimming pool, but it’s walking.
Huber switches off something on the back of the suit. “Pressure safety is off,” he tells Daphne. “Full hydraulics can employ about 200lbs of pressure. If you need to step on something, you will.” It’s the best he can do for self-defense.
“When you go out the door,” Gerrit says in a harsh whisper, “take a right. Follow the corridor past two intersections, then we’ll hit the lab lobby. There’s lifts and stairs. Only way up from this level.”
Right is the direction the men in body armor are coming from. It likely means the stairs and lifts are chokepoints. But what other means of escape is there?
Given an answer, Squeaks peers past Shaw’s shoulders without pressing forward to be first out the door. She just wants a look too, so she also knows what's out there. She could guess — they all heard the gunshots, so they all probably know what's happening — but seeing is believing.
Blue eyes follow the line of the hall, left and then right. There isn't very much to see. It's all sterile and blank, washed in orange and glowing. But she picks up the littler shadows that make up things on the walls. Like little pipes or conduits. Her head tilts a little bit to the side as she follows them up and up to the ceiling in a quick and curious flick of her eyes.
Movement to the right tugs her attention that way again, and Squeaks sidles further back into the lab a whole half step from the doorway. She saw the someones, but now she really actually saw them. And going right might be not good.
“Um…” Squeaks starts to turn, to say what she saw, but something else catches her attention — her own vaguely faint reflection moving in the glass of a cabinet inset into the wall and framed fire engine red. And the fire axe hanging beside it.
It takes about maybe a second for the teen to make a choice. She gives a once over of the hose coiled and waiting inside the box, then grabs hold of the axe handle. In one entire move, Squeaks pulls the axe free and twists to push past Shaw and through the doorway. Her eyes swing to the right at the first step, but since her feet don't immediately turn that way, they set onto that tubing going up the wall.
Squeaks doesn't call it like Babe Ruth would have, but she swings that axe like that conduit is the final pitch in the World Series and the score is tied.
“I feel like Optimus Prime,” Daphne mutters, as she takes a tentative step forward; the hydraulics of the contraption hiss, and the movement feels stiff, slow, unnatural, but it’s better than the alternative.
Shaw’s blunt dismissal of her demand earns him both a roll of her eyes and a small smile of thanks; she doesn’t argue with it, nor does she express the gratitude in so many words. As he heads out the door, followed by Squeaks wielding the ax, she moves forward, one hand reaching out to grasp Huber’s arm for balance as she gets her bearings.
“All right. They want us dead. Let’s try to disappoint them,” she says, looking over at Isaac as he helps Gerrit with Nova, her expression grim.
Pressed against the frame of the door to hold position, Shaw sucks in a staggered breath through barely cleared lungs. The prickling sensations like feeling returning to numb limbs is not a match for the cold, hollow sensation of loss gripped around his heart since Huber's pronouncement of the fates of others not in their lab.
Upon seeing the three darkly armored figures coming down the corridor, Shaw is filled with a new sensation, a burning that works behind his tears and wraps around him with a fiery grip of rage in twisting compliment to icy grief. Shaw tightens his jaw in determination.
Promptly, he turns back to the others and silently indicates with three fingers held up the approaching danger. Dark eyes follow Squeaks' to the fire axe, watching the young girl in her singling out the piping running up the wall, making her swing to bust it wide open.
That's it, that's the signal.
Memories of his power over human senses, of flying blind in the night sky, coalesce into a strategy. How will the many lives of timeline tunnel running experience folded in to the faked lifetime of police training work in his favor now? Shaw and the others are about to find out.
As the jetting clouds of vapors fill the corridor, he waves the others to make the break for the escape route and stands up against the opposite wall and crouches in anticipatory ambush. "Go!"
Terrific, Jacelyn has an axe. Good for her; if she wants to get in front, Faulkner will be happy to let her. He looks to Gerrit, obviously straining under the weight of Nova — seems someone's been skipping the gym. "Let me help," he says quietly. "We can move more quickly that way." Then he chuckles. "You two… are going to have a lot to talk about when she wakes up."
As Shaw waves them out, he nods once and starts to move, focusing on moving as quickly and quietly as he can while still trying to help with Nova; for now, at least, it seems like whatever Crito was trying to do to stave off muscle atrophy worked. He takes a split-second to try to reach out to the darkness, but on that front he's not as successful — he can feel something, but it slips through his fingers; the overall sensation is like trying to grab soup with a fork.
Soon, though. Soon, they'd said his ability would return to him, and that thought is like a blazing ember, warming him against the distant creeping fear. Faulkner looks forward to it with relish — in part because it'll make it a hell of a lot easier to keep himself, Nova, and Gerrit safe, and in part because he's looking forward to properly putting his ability through its paces. The old Isaac Faulkner had largely been content to focus on doing things he thought were cool rather than effective… and, admittedly, they were pretty cool.
But now… now, Faulkner had been given the gift of a lifetime spent in a crucible determined to forge or break him, and the lessons he'd learned in that simulation are his to keep, free and clear of the weight of his many mistakes; all he has to do now is survive.
In the darkness, despite himself, Isaac Faulkner's lips curl into a feral smile.
Meanwhile
A geometric kaleidoscope of white light trimmed with chromatic aberration all the hue of the rainbow. It is a beautiful, elegant, organic spiral. It’s like the shapes that live behind a person’s eyes after they stare at the sun or rub their eyes too hard. Geometric. Kaleidoscopic. Organic.
Isaac Faulkner’s hand is warm. Fingers curl strong. Protective.
Geometric.
Kaleidoscopic.
Organic.
A blurred after-image of love burned into the mind’s eye. The twisting pathways of neurons firing, electric impulses controlling thought, sense, chemical stimulation, pupil dilation. A fluttering heart. Emotion. A sudden dump of dimethyltryptamine from the brain, including hallucination.
Nova VanDalen has always been dreaming. Sleeping beauty in her glass coffin. To only be woken up by true love’s—
Meanwhile
A steel fire axe collides with a pipe containing halon gas for a fire-suppression system. The gas erupts from the pipe, rapidly filling the hallway in billowing clouds lit bright orange under the emergency lighting. From the perspective of a teenage girl, Jac’s plan is brilliant in its simplicity. From the perspective of chemistry, it is nearly disastrous.
The moment the halon gas explodes out of the pipe, Jac feels all the air displaced from her lungs by the heavier halon. One shocked breath is all it takes for Jac to begin asphyxiating. The cloud of suffocating gas obscures her entirely, and the sound of the axe falling from her hand is drowned out by the sound of the security team shouting, opening fire with little hesitation.
As Shaw skids into the hall, pushing toward the rapidly-expanding cloud of gas, he hears bullets whizzing by close enough to sound like a buzzing hornet in his ears. But he also feels something as he plunges into the gas. He feels the weight of the gas flooding his lungs, clamps down to stop more from coming in. But he also feels a hand pawing at his leg, desperate, pleading.
There on the floor is Jac, barely more than a silhouette, suffocating and barely able to move on her own.
Ahead of the gas, Daphne turns to see the hallway flooded with a rapidly expanding cloud lit a rusty orange by the light. Huber, right by her side, stares in abject horror as the halon expands toward them. “Go! Go!” He urges Daphne, pointing down the dimly-lit concrete corridor. She has no idea how far the stairs and elevators are, only that something about the gas spooked Huber.
But between the gas and the liquidation team, Faulkner and Gerrit run as fast as they can with Nova in tow, gunfire erupting around them. As the gas cloud threatens to engulf them, Gerrit shouts, “Hold your breath!” and claps a hand over Nova’s mouth in a desperate hope to protect her. He doesn’t stop running, can’t risk it.
Gunfire rips through the hallway, sparks of ricochets on either end of the gas but none can ignite within.
Meanwhile
Elsewhere
Chop.
A woodcutting axe splits a log on a roughly worn stump. Its halves fall into a larger pile of split lumber, scattered around the stump’s base. A cool, dry air blows across a grassy farmland surrounded by tall pine trees. The whitewashed farmhouse nearby has dim lights on inside, warm and welcoming.
When Nova wakes into this dream, her arms ache and palms are calloused. Though the axe is heavy, it doesn’t feel as heavy in her arms. The unbuttoned flannel shirt she wears hangs loose over a gray undershirt with a faded band logo. The air is sweet, smells of fresh wood, recently fallen rain, flowers. It smells of summertime. Distant, snow-capped mountains frame the dream with sensible boundaries.
This is a dream, isn’t it?
She tries to turn, to look at what’s behind her, to get her bearings, but her feet won’t move. It’s like they’re mired in concrete. She tries to look down, but her gaze remains fixed on the log in front of her, and without her will directing her limbs to do so, she finds herself stepping forward to pick up another log, rough in her calloused palms, and set it on the stump. It’s a strange, disorienting feeling and she tries to yell out, but finds she can’t.
Suddenly the axe drops.
You’re here! Where are you? Everyone is worried.
The voice is her own, but also not; there’s very little hint of a European accent. Nova tries again to turn her head, to look around, but she can’t control this body – it’s hers and yet not her own. Suddenly, her hands come together, and her perspective tips down, dizzyingly, like playing a first-person game in a VR headset. The change in her view allows her to see more of the body she finds herself in: torn jeans, boots, hands that look and feel like her own, but one bears a scar along the thumb joint her own does not. Some unfamiliar rings encircle her other finger, along with a black leather cuff around her wrist.
Who’s everyone? Who are you? she thinks. She can’t speak. She has no voice.
Nova feels her/not her lips curve into a smile.
The rest of us. We’ve been waiting for you to join us. The others call me Scout. But I’m Nova, too. I’m in a world that’s not yours, but like yours. We can communicate with the others – at least a few of them. Who knows how many worlds there really are? Maybe Doc. She’s the smart one. Or at least, the best educated. There’s a beat, and another grin, felt instead of seen. Don’t tell her I said so.
This other Nova, this Scout, looks up again, and begins to move toward an old and rusty pick-up truck. Nova feels the cold metal handle as the door opens with a creak of old metal, and Scout slides in, flipping down the visor to look at herself in the mirror.
It’s Nova’s face — a little thinner, a little more mature than the last time Nova looked in a mirror. How long ago was that? She doesn’t know. The days are endless but uncountable.
I don’t understand.
It’s hard to understand, but if you stay here a bit, I can explain. But only if it’s safe. You should wake up if it’s not.
How do I wake up?
That’s a question Scout can’t answer for her.
Meanwhile
Versatile Shipping Czechia
Secure Facility Level
Three liquidation agents are closing in, respirators rasping in the dark, flashlights on the end of their assault rifles sweeping down the hallway. It is the corner of the L-junction in the hallway that is stopping them from firing again. Guns on one side, gas on the other. The only way out is forward, going back toward the black-armored soldiers is a death sentence.
“We need to help—” Daphne protests to Huber, but the words cut off as she stops to hold her breath and cover her mouth and nose. She tries to look behind to see where Jac and Shaw are, but she can’t turn very easily in the apparatus she’s still adjusting to; frustration writes itself in her features in the knitting of her brow, the narrowing of her eyes.
For now, she continues the arduous task of simply taking steps at Huber’s urging, but her focus is on the gas-clouded hallway. “We can’t leave them,” she protests again, words muffled by her hand over her mouth.
Squeaks’ hands try to find some way to hold onto Shaw’s ankle, but making her fingers work right is really hard. Fear is making it hard. She can’t breathe! She’s never been afraid like this before, where things are just almost impossible. Even being stabbed on a rooftop or captured in the Underneath or finding food on the streets, there was a lot of fear. She didn’t want to die any of those times.
She really doesn’t want to die now either. She’s always been a survivor.
But being not able to breathe…
Her fumbling grows sluggish, and darkness presses against the edges of her vision. She almost nearly drowned one time. This feeling is sort of a lot like that, but without the water to let her drift and float away to probably be fish food later. Maybe she would be bug food this time.
Except she doesn’t want to die.
Squeaks fights against the heaviness of suffocating, desperately gulps for the oxygen she needs. She struggles, pushing down all the fears and holding on tightly for literal life. She’s so weary, and there might maybe be comfort in the dark and blackness fogging her vision. Maybe it’s peaceful. She isn’t ready to go. Her eyes slip closed…
But Squeaks’ fingers still twitch and flex and dig feebly into Shaw’s foot, still fighting.
Half a breath left, his eyes and lungs burning, Shaw feels an icy claw of fear shoot up from his leg up to his brain at the touch from below. He drops to a knee and gropes about to find Jac's hand, wrist, arm in the orange dimness.
What feels like several lifetimes ago, this situation would have called for abandoning the fallen as lost to either the Shanti-Rage virus or the wave of mechanized death emblazoned with the insignia of the DoEA. Yet in an all too recent, purely engineered life, Shahid Khan was trained to act in an emergency to save lives.
It's the latter that kicks in as he stoops and gathers Jac into a fireman's carry. With the girl slung around his shoulders, he grimaces under the extra weight and slogs towards the back of the fleeing group.
Faulkner had thought the smokescreen was at least a decent idea, but in action it proves less so; Huber and Gerrit's reactions of actual panic prompt him to remember that, oh yes, some of the big fire suppression systems use chemicals that are extremely unhealthy in their own right. And the noise seems to have drawn attention from the cleaners.
Shit. Points for out of the box thinking, demerits for execution and… everything else.
Gerrit's advice prompts Faulkner to take a deep breath, grimacing as he forces down a faint urge to cough; it's been a long time since he's done a three-legged race, but he remembers how it works. The key in that exercise isn't to drive forward with maximum speed, but to sync your gait and pace with your partner. That's going to be the key here, and so Faulkner does just that, trying as best he can to match Gerrit so that they all stay upright and can continue moving forward; without his ability, Faulkner cannot drag both of them, and so they cannot afford to fall. Nova is going to get her reunion with her father, dammit!
He tries again for his ability, but it's still not… quite… working. All Faulkner can do at the moment is snarl and focus on moving them forward.
Without his ability, Faulkner feels like he is fragile. Like the chances of him making it to the end of the hallway are slimmer than none. Gerrit struggles to keep his pace, fear and distraction breaking the cadence of his stride. He looks at Nova, her head lolled and eyes halfway open, but not seeing. The pop and crack of gunfire sends shivers of tension down his spine.
Gerrit and Faulkner make it through the suffocating cloud of halon gas at a gallop, tendrils of the fog peeling off of them as they emerge alongside Shaw carrying a nearly unconscious Jac over his shoulders. Muffled shouts come at their backs, and while the halon gas serves as a blind to the liquidation team, it isn’t a barrier.
Automatic gunfire rips down the hall and Shaw feels something warm and wet spreading down his back. There’s no pain, no shock, no impact to make him falter. But the whine he hears come from the young woman on his back tells him all he needs to know. Jac’s been shot, impossible to tell how bad in the moment. But the blood running down Shaw’s back isn’t his own.
Blinding pain rouses Jac from her near-unconsciousness.She can’t tell what happened at first. It felt like she was punched hard in the back. Like something broke. Shaw is still running. She’s being carried. Realization tumbles into place after the pain. She’s been shot. A girl who was once bulletproof thanks to the Gemini program now feels a blinding pain in her left shoulder.
A shower of sparks and plastic fragments erupt between Huber and Daphne as a tumbling round impacts the hip joint of her walker exoskeleton.It destroys the white plastic shell but flattens against the steel chassis underneath. It’s shocking, has enough impact to make Daphne stagger, but the auto-balancing systems of the exoskeleton keep her footing.
Huber is frozen, eyes wide, staring back down the hall where Shaw charges out of the gas carrying Jac on his back, where Gerrit and Faulkner haul Nova’s unconscious body like a ragdoll. Huber wants to run. Desperately. But Daphne’s determination, the adamancy in her dark eyes, urges him to be the one thing he has never truly been: brave.
Huber places a hand on the concrete wall and closes his eyes to concentrate. A fluidic ripple passes through the stone, followed by the concrete undulating like a mass of snakes lived just beneath its surface. Sweat beads on his brow, pain in his expression.
Inside the halon gas, glowing red lenses are visible. Goggles for the respirators the liquidation team wears. Huber’s head twitches to the side, brows furrow, and the serpentine deformations in the concrete wall bulge fat and snake toward the gas. Somewhere in the cloud a scream erupts. Not a barked order, but a strangled, breathless scream of terror and agony. No one can see what Huber did, but when two liquidation team members—not three—emerge from the gas, one of them is covered in blood. The third is lost somewhere in the gas in a growing pool of blood.
At the rear of the group, Faulkner and Gerrit hear the thundering bootfalls, hear the click and snap of magazines being reloaded. But Faulkner perceives something else. A weightiness around him. Like another pair of arms draped over his shoulder. Like a weighted blanket come to offer him comfort. The weight of darkness, substantiating around him like a shroud. He can feel it. He—
—is whole.
The smile that comes to his face then is not the smile of the young man who'd lived a lifetime in OPTICA's simulation, desperately gripping his father's empire so hard that it had crumbled to pieces in his hands—how could it be? By the light of day, it had seemed that Senator Faulkner had had the world, but in the dark he was drowning in shadows. No, this smile of transcendent joy belongs to the courier—the one who had long ago learned that the dark was not to fear, but to exult in.
That joy is, of course, a momentary thing, given the circumstances; there are, after all, armed killers fast behind them, probably panting uncontrollably and foaming at the mouth at the chance to shoot him. That smile twists into a grimace of determination. Right. Time to do something about that.
He looks back, spies two targets; his gait slows, but he doesn't need long for this. Twenty feet is a long way for him… but he's done it before. He's practiced reaching that far before, and while he wouldn't want to try juggling chainsaws while doing that, he can manage this. Brow furrowing in concentration, he reaches out with his mind, his ability, to the two gunmens' shadows, manipulating them; writhing tentacles form from the darkness of their shadows, snaking towards their legs to grapple and to violently hurl them up and back… but mostly back, into the cloud of gas, as far as he can send them. Maybe he'll get lucky and one or both of them will slam into something violently enough to break something — a spine or neck, ideally — but he's not going to wait around and see.
"Brace yourself. We're about to start moving," he warns Gerrit, and then he reaches out to the shadows below them, substantiating them and starting them moving. Once, he'd used this little trick to keep some of Granny Goodness's brain-scrambled victims from leaving his apartment until help could arrive, by using it as a treadmill; now, he intends to use it to do the opposite, moving them forward and away from the liquidators like a conveyor belt. He'll pick the others up as they go, but for now, he means to get to the middle of the pack.
“I’m RoboCop,” Daphne murmurs as she gets hit by one of the bullets, rattling her quite literally, but manages to keep her feet, keep her life. “Oh, God. Hurry,” she whispers again, when she sees Jac has been hit. Her lips murmur silently for Shaw to hurry, hurry, hurry. Not for the first time even in the last five minutes, she wishes she still had her power to speed everyone to safety.
She clings to Huber’s hand, hating the need to do so, and turns back when he does, to see the undulating wall and what happens to those who come out of the fog of gas.
Her eyes wide, she squeezes his hand and nods in tacit appreciation. “We’re keeping you on our side,” she tells him with a nod. Faulkner’s words earn him a quick scoff. “I’m already braced,” she tells him but prepares as much as she can, to be given a lift by the tenebrous shadows.
Not many are looking at Nova at this moment, but if they are, they’ll see the strange transformation of the young woman’s unresponsive, catatonic state to conscious and aware. It begins in the eyes, with a little spark of light in the center of the pupils, and then they come into focus. Gerrit and Faulkner will feel the subtle shift of her body from dead weight into something else entirely. Her hands curl around their shoulders, and she takes a shaky breath.
“Your Nova isn’t awake but I will do what I can to help her. To help you,” she rasps, voice rough with the years of lack of use. “I don’t think she’s strong enough for me to walk, but I can try to stand, at least, so long as you hold on to me.” Her gaze lingers on Gerrit’s face — this is a father long lost to this Nova.
To Faulkner, she asks, with a small smirk, tempered by their circumstances, “Can you get their guns?”
Even if he were injured, it's likely Shaw wouldn't realize his plight in the hammering of his heart and burning desire to breathe. No words of encouragement, no amount of bucking up comes from him to the young girl he's slung upon him. Through irritated, red eyes filled with tears, he lumbers past Huber and Daphne nearly as awkward as the ED-209 on a flight of stairs.
His face contorts in discomfort at the scream behind him. Immediate thoughts of horror film protocols are thrown out the proverbial window as he turns to crab-step sideways a few feet, staring back towards the fog of war and death to see who amongst his friends and allies might be the source of it.
Not until his knees feel like buckling under does he dare to breathe again. Great, gulping breaths pant in and out, his ragged lungs reaching greedily for clear oxygen. "You still with me?" Shaw croaks out to the girl he's carrying, fingers seeking hers. "Squeeze my hand."
With their first step into clearer air, Squeaks sucks in a shallow breath. And a second, then half of a third that’s cut and forced out with the impact of a bullet in her back.
Pain like a knife made out of burning ice sends her thoughts into a spiral, tossing realization and understanding and good sense like ping pong balls down a garbage chute. Every step Shaw takes sends another freezing firebolt of pain radiating through her left shoulder. The blood dripping from her fingertips doesn’t seem real or right. All the things she knows are true in one second are suddenly and violently gone the next.
A deeper, shuddering breath becomes hers when Shaw finally stops. Squeaks answers him with a pained groan on her exhale. Her eyes squeeze shut, her right hand clenches into a fist. She can’t seem to make her left hand do what she wants, but at least she’s alive. Whimpering against gritting teeth, the girl exhales again. She’s still alive.
There is so much happening in this instant as Shaw carries a bleeding Jac out of the halon gas. Tendrils o fit cling to them, peeling away as he moves, sucking in large gulps of fresh air. The gas swirls behind them, muffled voices scream in frustration and injury, but the scrabbling sounds of body armor on concrete indicate the worst—the liquidation team is still alive.
As Nova rouses, Gerrit doesn’t understand what he’s hearing at first. He sees her eyes open, hears that she’s speaking but the context of which is lost over the drumming of panic in his chest. “Nova?” His heart breaks as his voice cracks. He doesn’t understand how this isn’t his daughter. Chalks it up to deliriousness. “Nova!”
Huber, meanwhile, has a vice grip on Daphne’s hand. “The elevators—” he hisses, “we have to hurry!” He nods ahead, toward where the orange security lighting outlines the shapes of brushed metal-faced doors, leather lounge furniture, glass tables. A small common area by the lifts. It’s so close and yet feels so far.
Daphne feels a prickling sensation running down her spine, through her hips, curling around her knees. Anxiety tightens her chest.
##bfa877“I’m not special”.##
As Faulkner turns toward the sound of Nova’s voice, his heart races. The undulating carpet of shadow below that moves them ahead toward Daphne and Huber is working. It’s working and Nova is alive! It’s—
A gunshot blasts in the gloom. Shaw sees it first, a single black-clad soldier marching forward with a sidearm raised. He’s firing at Shaw, and the bullet whizzes past Shaw close enough to clip his earlobe.
Faulkner hears Nova’s voice a split second before his legs suddenly buckle. The treadmill beneath him abruptly dissipates, sending he, Nova, and Gerrit staggering forward. Faulkner fully collapses, white hot pain in his chest. So much blood. Each breath feels like a struggle to suck in. He’s been shot.
Daphne watches Faulkner collapse to the ground.
##bfa877“I’m not!//”##
Voices are muffled chaos now, and from the floor Faulkner sees Nova’s legs wobbling as Gerrit tries to hold her up on his own. He loses his balance, drops to one knee, watches as the second security officer emerges from the fog in his matte black armor and gas mask helmet. Halon gas peels off of his assault rifle, raising, training.
Daphne’s heart races.
“Don’t let the braces hold you back.
And hears her mother’s voice. Clear as if she were standing right beside her.
“Stand up and leave this cage.”
It doesn’t make sense, but Daphne is not one to let logic stand in her way. She can feel the change in her legs, and that’s all she needs to trust that somehow, her ability has been restored to her. “Keep moving,” she tells Huber and Gerrit, throwing Nova a look of confused acknowledgement. And then she moves.
One instant, she’s standing beside them, and then, with a rustle of displaced air comes a crack and creak as the exoskeleton falls apart, standing for a moment before it collapses in a heap. A pale blur coalesces into a solid once more, but now Daphne’s the one pointing the assault rifle at the security officer’s unprotected face. His gas mask has been ripped off, and tossed near Isaac on the ground.
Her finger squeezes the trigger and she stumbles back, fatigued and panting from those few seconds of exertion. She takes a steadying breath, and turns to look at Isaac as she prepares to run again.
“Help him,” Nova-not-Nova tells Gerrit, gesturing for Huber to come act as her crutch instead so her stronger father can assist the injured man.
Faulkner doesn't really understand what the not your Nova bit means either, though he's possibly a bit more prepared for the idea than Gerrit is, having seen her multiplicity stunt before, in the simulation. Daphne's question about the guns sees him glance to her and grimace. Yes, he might have been able to drag the guns out of their grasp instead of launching them, but it'd have run the risk of them getting shots off anyway, and now they're certainly out of his range.
Unfortunately, before he can speak any of this aloud, he finds himself suddenly crumpling to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut. There is a sense of awful wrongness in his guts, followed by a tidal wave of agonizing pain that, for a moment, drives all thought from his mind. It very nearly drives consciousness from his mind, too… but he's been here before. In the ring, on those rare occasions when he's been outplayed and some cagey fighter has managed to slip past his guard; at Rapture, when Kain Zarek had beaten him very nearly to death. He knows what it is to teeter on the edge of the abyss of unconsciousness, and he knows how to plant his feet and dig in his claws and try to hold on, to pull himself back up.
So long as you're conscious, you're still in the game.
So he tries. He clings to consciousness like a starving wolf closing its jaws on a last scrap of food, and somehow manages to stave off that fall into the abyss. The darkness at the edges of his vision is driven back, voices start to swim back out of that muffled clangor… and the pain comes with it, a leaden viper chewing at his guts, twisting his face into a grimace. He makes an abortive attempt at sucking in a breath, only to have the pain flare and drive it back out of him again.
"Kaylee…" he manages to spit. "Get Nova to Kaylee…" Faulkner manages to grate out to Nova and Gerrit before trailing off into an agonized groan.
Even in the dim emergency lights he can make out the amount of blood on the floor; while there's some consolation that it's not all his, he suspects that enough of it is to indicate that he's in trouble. In fact, were he looking at someone else with this kind of wound, bleeding this much, Faulkner's informal diagnosis would be that they were very likely fucked. Not dead man walking, not quite — that's why you'd typically follow a shot like this up with a headshot (or, if you're good, like Yi-Shan, you make them both headshots) — but death in the immediate future suddenly seems like much more of a possibility.
He clutches a hand over the hole in his torso, doing his best to try to contain the flow of blood and not black out from the pain.
Shaw flinches away at yet another near miss of a bullet that could very well have sent him on his path to seek out Isa in the other planes of un-life. Only the stinging against his ear and the angry whine of unbidden, fleeting tinnitus from the din of gunfire in close quarters keeps him focused on the now, enough that he focuses on the task of getting the girl to safety. And it's not going to happen with her stuck around his shoulders being swung around like a terribly exposed target.
In the next moment, Shaw takes a knee again, grimacing at the fleeting notion that the plan may be a bust whatever way he can figure it, but he sets Squeaks down to lean against the wall where the freight elevator's call button is hopefully within reach. "Keep your head down!" he grits out to Jac, before turning his attention back down the corridor in worry.
The sight of Daphne practically teleporting from one spot to the next faster than he can track sees Shaw bolstered with dangerous hope. But seeing Faulkner, basically his brother-in-law at this point, collapsed to the floor sends Shaw back up to his feet. "Isaac!"
Shaw did ask Huber earlier where there might be a gun. Seems that the best prospect to obtaining one is by the others. He starts back, willing his own legs to work, to carry him to the aid of the others.
Blue eyes raise to the hallway, to the fighting and chaos and flashes of gunfire, as the teen is placed on the floor. In one second it’s like watching it from somewhere else, like a movie. But then in the next blink, she flinches at a crack from Daphne’s gun and everything is very for reals real again. Squeak’s eyes flick up to Shaw as he turns away to help the others, then returns to everyone still trying to get away from the exterminators.
If she had her sounds, or teleporting, she could help Shaw and Daphne with the exterminators. The thought floats like a hopeful bubble from the slurry of nonsense. Even the super strength or bulletproof would help get Faulkner and Nova to safety. But that last one didn’t save her, and none of the other things she could do work. That she might never have them again pops the hope so it sinks back into the bogginess of her mind. Another slowly rises in its place. She lived without sounds before, lived in the most dangerous places even and during a bigger war without being caught. She could do it again. She could… but not while sitting on the floor while people are shooting everywhere.
Squeaks wraps her right arm around her middle to give some support for her left, and starts working her feet under her. Pain blossoms like firecrackers from her shoulder with every twisting of her body, but she gets to a knee. Then with her unhurt shoulder pressed against the wall, Squeaks braces and leverages herself up onto her feet. The agony that follows makes her whole world tilt in nauseating helter-skelter. She takes a step against the lurch and brings her eyes up again to the other escapers, then half turns herself away.
The girl’s eyes focus on the big door of the elevator, just staring for a twelfth of a second before looking aside. There, on the wall, Squeaks sees the call button. “Hurry,” she half whispers as she presses her hand into the button. Then louder, as she looks over her shoulder and jabbing the button a bunch more times, “Hurry, hurry!”
Daphne Milbrook’s face is dappled with blood as she turns to run, the liquidation officer she shot falling backwards in slow motion; face an unrecognizable mess of gore. Violence has never been Daphne’s game, has never been in her heart, and here sprayed by the still-warm blood of her captors, a new heart beats impossibly in her chest. In the moment: feral, uncaged, and impossibly powered. Mazdak had taken her gift from her, she can see the glowing blue tubes carrying her gift out of her body when she closes her eyes.
And yet…
In the time it takes for the soldier’s body to hit the floor, Daphne disappears in a pale blur, kicking up a misty spray of his blood in her wake. Faulkner vanishes from the floor and Daphne reappears with Faulkner in her arms, hunched down beside the freight elevator. Pain wracks Faulkner’s body, blood pulses from an exit wound he now sees at his abdomen. His hand covering the wound is slick with hot blood. But his sense of touch is becoming pins and needles.
Shaw is jogging in the opposite direction, the gale created by Daphne’s movements cooling his skin as he moves into a slowly dissipating cloud of Halon gas, dropping down to slide and retrieve a rifle from the ground where one of the liquidation team members had dropped it.
Huber parses the words coming out of Nova’s mouth, but his reactions are so slow. Sweat beads across his brow. He twists, looking down at where Faulkner was a moment ago, continues twisting following the gust of wind created by Daphne’s movement, then sucks in a gasp of shock and stumble-strides toward Gerrit, looping an arm around Nova, acting as her crutch while Gerrit hustles ahead to where Isaac has been whisked away by Daphne.
As Shaw raises his assault rifle he sees a shape—closer than anticipated—moving through the gas. The last-standing liquidation member, carrying a sidearm, aimed right down at Shaw’s head. The hammer cocks back, the slide moves, and there is the sound of a gunshot—
Screams fill the Gemini lab, screams of multiple voices. For Squeaks, it is impossible to tell when one treatment begins and another ends, hers is a world redefined by pain and swimming consciousness drifting in and out of unconsciousness. But what comes with these moments are flickers and flashes of something otherwise entirely alien to her. Experiences and daydream-like visions of places she has never been, of people she has never met. All of which are punctuated by these extreme moments of intense pain and the growing sensation of something shifting and moving inside of herself. It feels like her skin is threatening to split open, as if butterfly wings should extend from her back, as if the chrysalis of the girl she once was is being shed to become something more. Pain strikes needle hot in one
—as a bullet strikes the concrete ceiling. Shaw watches as the arm of the liquidation member is wrenched from its socket like a drumstick off a baked turkey. Tendons and wires snap, spray, and spark. A muffled scream erupts from the soldier who sees not a child holding his dismembered arm. There, next to Shaw, is Jac, holding the arm by the wrist, half of her body soaked in blood, irises glowing bright hot and gold like freshly forged steel.
“I want you to know this won't be easy,”
Jac’s heart races in her chest.
“There will be pain, and discomfort, and adjustment.”
She’s bleeding out from the wound on her back.
“But you're strong, you're resilient, and most importantly you're a survivor. But today…”
But still, she fights.
“Today you're becoming a superhero.”
The liquidation officer collapses to the ground in a writhing mass, disarmed figuratively and literally. The handgun finally falls from the slack fingers of the dismembered arm, and Jac feels the blinding-hot pain in her back in the same moment her gold irises flicker and cool back to their normal blue. She collapses to her knees beside Shaw, for a moment a titan, and then once more in an instant a young girl.
Daphne is the only one who could parse what happened in full. She saw Jac leaning up against the wall beside the freight elevator, where only a bloodstain is now. She saw the moment the liquidation officer bore down on Shaw, and Jac hadn’t even moved. Then, in the blink of an eye she was next to Shaw and ripping the officer limb from limb to defend him. It wasn’t super speed, it was teleportation.
Gerrit and Huber missed the exact moment of bewildering power as they haul Nova to the freight elevator. Gerrit keeps an arm around her while Huber quickly keys in a passcode to the keypad above the call button. “Fuck,” Gerrit hisses, typing the code in again, “fuck!”
“Was ist los?” Huber asks in a quavering tone of voice as he carefully sets Nova down to sit beside Isaac against the wall.
“There’s no power—they—they cut the emergency generator.” Gerrit’s panicking, looking down at Nova, to Faulkner, back to Shaw and—”Jac?” He only now sees her inexplicable translocation.
Huber is trembling, gingerly moving over to Faulkner to put his hand over Faulkner’s exit wound. He swats the younger man’s hand away and covers it with his palm. “Stay still,” he warns Faulkner. Then, helplessly asks after their shared predicament: “What do we do?”
The feelings rushing through Daphne are a mixed cocktail of elation at having her speed and legs back and horror at everything else happening. “Holy Nightcrawler, Batman,” she whispers, before turning to look at Huber and Gerrit.
“Let me scout the other way,” she says, with a nod to the hallway that had been full of gas – with her speed and the fact the gas has hopefully started to disperse, she hopes it’s safe. “I’ll see if I can find some emergency foam or powder or whatever you call it in the lab. Otherwise keep applying pressure. We could maybe pry them open and climb out, but she shouldn’t keep exerting herself while she’s bleeding.”
Her eyes fall on Jac again, and then, Daphne disappears in a pale blur, solidifies at the end of the hallway, then disappears again.
A wide-eyed, feral glare of dark-eyed defiance and determination to the last expression Shaw has on his face as in that split second of realization that Death comes in the form of a faceless, armored man in black coldly pointing a gun barrel down at his head.
He still flinches at the too loud gunshot.
Shaw reaches up to touch at the warmth dripping down his face, expecting to come away with blood, and does. Only it's not his. A second, another, and one more passes before he realizes he's not been executed, and instead it's his would-be executioner's arterial spray from having his limb torn off.
For a moment, Shaw's dark brown eyes meet the golden irises of Jac's. When she collapses again, he jerks forth in reflexive motion to catch her. A phrase of comfort utters from him in another tongue, before he whispers, "Thank you."
A couple more ticks of seconds fly by before Huber's question really registers into Shaw. He nods at Daphne's plan to find some possible first aid, though she's gone before he says anything more. What do we do? The question doesn't leave him. But, he's uninjured, capable. Alive. He can do a lot.
Shaw releases Jac gently, before crawling over to the liquidation team's man. He grabs up the sidearm that would have been his death, and then moves to kneel over the dying man. Silent, grim, he searches for a comms unit and extra ammunition, picking over the soon to be corpse.
Soon, because as soon as he's gotten ahold of a way to listen in on enemy communications, Shaw puts the pistol to the other man's chin, and fires.
"Thanks," Faulkner murmurs as Huber thankfully takes over holding Faulkner's guts closed; the numbness creeping into his extremities probably means that his grip strength would probably have started to falter shortly, and he's doing his very best not to dwell on the implications of that. Instead, he does as he's been advised — stay still. He focuses on his breathing, and on his thinking — two things he can still do, even now. To Huber's question, he musters a response.
"We still need to get out of here. If we can get the power back on from here, that's… a start. Otherwise…"
It takes him a moment to catch the end of that thought; it feels like he's trying to hold his feet while a particularly tough opponent is trying to bury him under an onslaught. Like… a fight. Yeah.
"Any… maintenance tunnels? Air ducts? Anything like that?" he asks, squeezing his eyes closed for a moment. "If not… maybe someone without holes in them could… try to climb the elevator shaft. Get to that… generator," Faulkner gets out, focusing again on breathing and keeping still.
"Heh… of all the times… not to… have healing…" he mumbles.
Just a girl again, Squeaks’ whole body sags under her own weight. She’s not much more than a rag doll when Shaw catches and lets her down a bit more carefully than her own sapped strength would have done.
Pain and blood loss drag at her awareness like a rip current, threatening to carry her away from recognizing and taking any joy or relief in what she’d just done. Even the knowing that her abilities, some parts of them anyway, came back drifts like flotsam caught in the pull of a whirlpool. She doesn’t even recognize the un-bodied arm still clutched in her good hand for what it is.
The girl’s eyes close. Consciousness slips and slides and the world teeters on an axis that can’t exist in this dimension. Her body sinks slightly, dropping from a hand pressing the officer’s arm actually against the bloodied floor like some kind of grotesque flail, to bracing with her elbow against the slickened tile. She never let go of the arm, still holding it with a white-knuckled grip. In the darkness, though, behind her shut eyes, words and whole lived experiences from another life, a past life, her life, echo like old video tape recordings in her mind.
Seconds pass. Squeaks’ head lowers until it rests on her arm. Or maybe it’s the officer’s arm. The details are hazy, but that could be the blood-dampened fabric of a uniform pressing into her cheek. Some more seconds pass. She feels the breeze of Daphne’s speedster-running, hears Faulkner’s and the doctor peoples’ words. Blue eyes pry open so the girl can stare in Shaw’s direction, then slit mostly closed, as her fingers go loose and slack and give up the deathgrip on the bodiless arm.
Moments Ago
There are bodies littering the floor. Scattered like discarded toys, save for the growing pool of blood beneath them all. Bullet impact fractures litter reinforced glass surrounding a dozen rooms filled with workstations all still humming away. A liquidation soldier walks between the workstations planting thermite canisters, wiring them in a daisy chain to a detonator by the door. Five more are up the adjacent hall, walking through a pile of bodies, occasionally firing down into them with a sidearm to make sure everyone is dead.
Two halls up its the same scene, a cafeteria littered with corpses. Executions taking place for those who were merely critically injured and not instantly killed. A dozen more of those black-armored soldiers with glowing red eyes on their helmets. The entire upper floor is death, the entire upper floor is destruction.
Daphne sees it all in the blink of an eye, recklessly blurring from one room to the next, up a hall, down a hall, into a bathroom. All around. There has to be a way out. But even if there is, they’re trapped. They’re outnumbered eight to one, maybe more. It won’t be long before they’re found.
If the elevator is the only way out, then there is no escape.
…And Now.
Daphne appears in a blur, heart racing, pounding against her sternum like it wants out. It wasn’t so much out of fear or adrenaline, but exertion. Moving at superhuman speeds was never hard for her, especially over short distances, but it feels like she’s just run a marathon. Her breath is short, vision is swimming, and she reflexively braces herself against a wall to hold her balance. While her ability is apparently back, either her body hasn’t caught up to it, or it didn’t come back right.
As the others talk, Shaw nurses the sudden onset of a headache. Sounds in the room become overwhelming, from the echo of Faulkner’s voice, the whirr of ventilation systems in the ceiling, the distant sounds of gunfire. It all feels like it’s happening directly in his ear canal.
Confirmed, hostile aircraft landed on exfil site.
Whispered voices. Other than his nearby captives and would-be rescuers. At first it’s impossible to make sense of it.
Rear guard is deploying to neutralize.
The headache, the sounds—his ability is back. Shaw can feel the telltale sensation of his hearing being heightened, dialed up enough to pick up the voices of other liquidation team members on the same floor.
Meanwhile, Huber and Gerrit struggle with their options. “There is a ventilation system, but it’s too small for a person to fit inside of.” Huber explains.
Gerrit, meanwhile, brushes Nova’s hair back from her face, looking at her conscious form waiting for a sign of recognition rather than confusing distance and pragmatism. He pauses only enough to look away from her and nod in agreement to Huber. He opens his mouth to say something, only then noticing Daphne’s return. He squeezes Nova’s shoulder, then slowly stands from her side.
“We have to—” Whatever it was Gerrit was going to say is drowned out by the sudden ding of the elevator indicator that it is coming up. He turns, wide eyed, and as attention locks on the indicator above the freight elevator’s doors, it dings up again to the floor below them, and then rumbles past the elevator doors, only to ding all the way up to the surface level.
“It’s working! Hit the call button!” Gerrit howls, noticing the panel has suddenly lit back up.
A miracle among horrors. But miracles are not yet finished being made. Shaw is the first to hear a crackling sound coming from the stairwell door, like a bonfire but moving. An orange glow spills under the door, only to disgorge a rippling sheet of fire that soon takes on the form of a person.
Made of nothing but rolling fire, Abigail Caliban manifests at what is regrettably—to her—the top of the stairs. Yet while it isn’t the exterior of whatever this facility is, it is filled with faces both familiar and unfamiliar. Shaw, Jac, Faulkner, Daphne, even Nova. The two scientists with them—Gerrit and Huber—aren’t as familiar, but it wouldn’t be the first group she’d been with that picked up strays.
Abigail regards the group that stands near the elevator when she eases from under the door and reforms, coronal lips purse and looking disappointed. Worried, but also disappointed. Faulker, Nova, Daphne, Jac, Shaw, Huber and Gerrit. Everyone’s picked up strays indeed. She tamps down her flame, those closest to her feeling akin to the warmth of a hearth. “Hi.” Awkward. Just a little. The southern accent is still strong.
“I think you guys are the last ones…?” She’s pretty sure. She turns in spot, feet inches above the ground as she hovers on a thermal, regarding the stairwell and closed door that she just came from. “Morgue… incinerator… I think we have everyone.” It’s taking effort to speak. “Asami and Brynn, Gillian, everyone and others are in the elevator. I couldn’t go in, I’d just burn everyone-” Obviously. “There’s… friendlies in robots with them.” She turns back to face the group, gaze flicking to each person familiar in either ‘world’ to her in their respective roles. And complete strangers.
She’s only delayed the inevitable it seems though. “Up is out we’ve been told and…Are there more stairs…” She keeps her distance so as not to inadvertently burn people. She’s already eyeing the wounded in the surrounding space. “If not I don’t suppose there’s a lab coat around…?” It might be the least of the worries that she has but maybe, maybe she can get out of here with this small sliver of modesty intact. “The suits weren’t fire proof….” She lacks detail in her sight but the positioning of people, hands pressed to other people there’s clearly wounded. Fingers twitch and there’s a faint movement as if she wants to reach out and touch, the instinct of a lost ability she’s never quite forgotten.
Nova’s blue eyes study Gerritt’s and she squeezes his hand. “You are lucky,” she says quietly – her accent is different than the Nova he knows, colored less by living in Europe, more American with just a hint of the Dutch background. “To have one another still. I hope she comes back to you. We consider her our lost little sister. This is the first time I’ve seen her world. She was sleeping the longest, and then sleeping again.”
When Daphne returns, she’s about to speak, to demand another way out, when first the elevator and then that human flame appear. When she realizes it’s Abby she sighs in relief. “Someone give her your jacket,” she demands of the men who aren’t wearing silver leotards, holding on to the wall with one hand and gesturing with her other hand. “And let’s go already.”
She may not be able to speed as much as she’d like, but Daphne Millbrook is still impatient.
Faulkner does his best to stay calm. Think. Breathe. Focus. Keep on his feet… metaphorically, at least, not literally. Think. Breathe. Focus.
Maybe he can do something if things get too brutal; his ability doesn't necessarily require physical exertion, at least.
"Leaving… would be good," Faulkner agrees. He'd add on some quip about not wanting to disparage their hosts' hospitality — he definitely appreciates Huber kindly trying to hold his blood in for him — but frankly he'd rather not make the effort, he's extremely busy at the moment cultivating his three step process to staying conscious. Think. Breathe. Focus.
When the sounds of the room start to coalesce into a blinding migraine around him, Shaw stops as his vision dips into the familiar dark, fingers numb, and the acrid smells of lingering gunpowder on nose and tongue fade into a bland nothingness. Sifting through the overwhelming chatter of machines and machine guns, he frowns upon picking up the comms of the liquidation teams.
He can also hear the quickened heartbeats of the wounded, the cheery ring of the elevator moving floors, and the soothing crackling of a fire. Fire? Fire!
His own heart skips with the surge of hope. "Eanqa'?!" Shaw spins from the corpse to face the stairwell like a pointer hound, dark eyes locked on to the bright light of the moving flames… and is coldly crushed once again as the figure of another fiery woman appears and is not Isa. A sharp stab of icy cold grief grips him by the throat as he chokes down a cry. Abigail, not Isabelle. The man stands there frozen before he can manage to recompose himself.
"Th-there's a team," Shaw manages after a couple seconds. "They've come by a jet, and the rear guard's moving to engage them. Not sure who it is, but they must be friendlies. We go up." As for Abigail's state, he glances from Daphne to the other men, and then back down to the man he was just looting. "Here," he says as he yanks unceremoniously at the body armor, pulling it off and holding it out. His hands are shaking.
Another glance goes to Squeaks, and Shaw sucks in a breath. "I've got the girl," he says, voice forced as he repeats, "We go up."
The voices, and the fire and all of the outside things pelt against Squeaks' awareness just the same way rain hits a window. Some drops join together to make bigger drops and others run downwards or sideways and leave curious, criss-crossing trails. Words on the outside mix and mash with remembered words from before in just the same discombobulated way. She can't make sense of it.
Besides, it's more peaceful behind closed eyes with the heavy fog of exertion and bleeding covering her like a thick blanket. Her fingers have gone cold and her ruined shoulder feels like it weighs about a million pounds, but it doesn't seem to hurt as much anymore. Maybe it's actually getting better. She just needs to keep her eyes closed a little bit longer. Just a few more minutes and then she will "Do something."
The voice — the memory of the voice — is close enough and clear enough to rouse the girl. The familiarity of it helps to crack her eyes open and bring her a gauzy-murky view of the whole wide world of the hallway war zone, with the extra arm under her cheek and the blood on the tiles. "What?" Confusion and apprehension ripple and prickle her consciousness and she goes squinty-eyed. "Adam?"
"Do something!" Squeaks' eyes swing to a pair of feet close by, picking them as the source. "Trying!" She gets her good arm under her to brace and leverage off the floor, to obey. A knee follows, "Do something!" but her small form stays as she left it on the floor. The girl tilts her head to look up at Shaw as he regards her, seeing Adam Monroe with cold patience in his eyes instead. Teeth clenched, tears stinging the corners of her eyes, she digs way down deep and pushes hard to pull herself up to her knees.
“I’ve got her.” Huber says to Shaw, forsaking the body armor for something more covering, as he sheds his blood-speckled lab coat to throw around Abby’s narrow shoulders as she turns from flame to flesh. It’s only then that the others see the second reason for her maintaining her form, the burns. In spite of being a woman forged from fire, Abby has a burns of differing severity over long stretches of her body. A few light licks of redness up one side of her neck and cheeks. Huber regards the injuries with both sympathy and worry as he drapes his large lab coat over Abby, gingerly trying to avoid putting too much pressure on the burns at her shoulders and back.
Gerrit, distracted by staring into his daughter’s eyes as a daughter he does not know speaks through her, only stirs into action after a moment of processing. He’s been trying to pretend what is happening to Nova is a result of delirium from her waking from sleep—an awakening he and Jacoba have dreamed of for so long that the dream curdled into this nightmare.
“Up.” Gerrit says as the elevator that was up at the surface level comes back down. He gingerly guides Nova aside, one arm around her shoulders, not wanting to be directly in front of the doors when they open. Selfishly.
When the doors of the freight elevator do slide open, there is no one inside. Huber carefully escorts Abby inside, allowing for space for Shaw to carry Jac in, then steps back out into the hall to help Faulkner inside, dragging him to lean up against the elevator wall. Huber squeezes Faulkner’s shoulder, apology and hope in his tired eyes. Gerrit brings Nova inside next, and Daphne is the last into the elevator.
Gerrit clicks the button to the surface, focusing his attention on Nova. The questions he wants to ask her race behind his eyes. But as the elevator rises in relative silence, there is a sound that grows above them, the raucous noise of gunfire and screams that they ascend to on their way out of a digital Hades.
Gerrit turns to Nova, worrying these may be his last words. As explosions topside rocks the elevator, he puts a hand on her cheek, thumb brushing back against her ear. The gunfire seems so close now, shouting and screams filling the air. With tears in his eyes Gerrit whispers to a daughter he has never known,
“I love you so much.”
Meanwhile
Orange security lighting flashes across bare concrete with exposed wiring conduits. Victoria Jager, right hand covered in blood so thick it looks like a glove, emerges from a concrete stairwell into an expansive underground chamber with vaulted ceilings, lit only by that warm orange light. The quality of these sodium lights turns the blood on her hand black and makes her skin the color of fire. She looks like a devil strode out of hell itself as she steps to the edge of a railway platform, eyes following the dull steel of the tracks to an awaiting electric-powered, industrial train. The kind used for shipping heavy mechanical hardware.
Jager walks the length of the train on the platform, looking up at the empty flat cars that would hold shipping containers, where this a normal delivery. At the last car, she climbs up a short series of steps to the back of the engine, then walks around to the side of the train. Following the length of the engine car on the narrow platform, she calls out to the shut door at the front of the train. "I can hear them." She holsters her gun, waiting for a response. One does come, but only after a long moment of considering all of the other possible options than a face-to-face confrontation with the devil. The door to the cab opens, bringing with it the sound of colicky babies. Cory Wenyi looks haunted and hollow as she steps into the sodium lights, carrying two babies against her chest in a paired sling. She rests a hand at the back of one of the babies' heads, making a soft, soothing sound.
"You're scaring them." Doctor Wenyi says in a hushed tone of voice, doing her level best to fix a stern look on Jager.
"No," Jager says softly, "I'm scaring you." She holds out her unbloodied hand to bridge the gap between them. "Because there is no scenario in which you make it out of this confrontation alive. But I need them." Jager curls her fingers, giving Wenyi the chance to willingly give over the children.
"I'm not some piece of hardware to throw away." Wenyi hisses. "I am a person."
"No, you're not." Jager slowly lowers her hand to her side, disappointment evident in her features. The offer has passed. "The other one made out of synthetic components is more a person than you are."
Wenyi's eyes narrow as she cradles her arms around the babies bound to her chest. "And what does that make you?" Her attention briefly flicks to the bracelet around Jager's wrist that permits her ability use. In this light Wenyi can't tell what color it is. "A dog on a leash?" For a moment, Jager's hardened expression falters.
"Give me the twins." Jager insists, reluctantly offering her hand again. "They know you were working for Mazdak. She has given no quarter."
Wenyi looks down to the two babies slung at her chest, then to Jager. The hand Wenyi has kept behind her back is trembling. A hand holding a gun.
"No."