It was good strategy. Shane would have approved.
‘We’re ready here,’ said Dr Davis. His goons were strapping Myrnin into some kind of harness. Oliver had been taken out already, locked in a similar straitjacket. ‘Back to the farm?’
‘As quickly as possible,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘Nobody’s scheduled to come into this building until ten, but an early arrival could compromise everything. Let’s move out. We won’t be coming back here.’
The farm?
Claire didn’t know if that was some kind of shorthand code, but it didn’t sound like the MIT lab, anyway. She went along with them quietly, and ended up sitting next to Myrnin. He was wrapped up like a mummy in the thick canvas jacket, and his head lolled forward so his dark hair cascaded down in waves to veil his face.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered to him. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She could feel the animal shuddering of his body, wave after wave of what was either pain, or terror, or both. ‘I never meant for this to happen, Myrnin, I swear. I just – I just didn’t see it.’
He turned his head toward her. She saw a red flash from his eyes from behind the curtain of his hair, and felt a brief pulse of something from him – hunger, anger, blind rage. Then he sighed, slipped to one side, and rested against the metal wall of the van. Chains clinked as he shifted. They hadn’t taken any chances, she saw; the chains were coated with silver, and so were the manacles around his wrists and ankles. It was burning him.
Oliver, across from her, was in a similar state, but he wasn’t trembling quite so badly. Maybe he’d just had more practice at handling fear and pain, or maybe he hadn’t gotten quite so bad a dose of VLAD’s medicine. But he didn’t look by any stretch good, either.
Last of all, they loaded Jesse.
She looked awful. Her red hair was tangled into a dry net; her lips were dry and pale and crusted, and her eyes were glowing a pained, painful red. She looked alien and strange and pitiful, all at once, and she, too, was wearing the padded jacket and chains, and they locked her down next to Oliver. She didn’t seem to see Claire, or if she did, to comprehend any of what was going on. And she looked
dangerous
.
But the sight of her seemed to somehow make Myrnin a little better. He stopped shaking quite so much, and sat up straight again. So maybe there was something still inside there, after all.
Claire hoped so. The alternative was way too awful to consider.
It was a long, silent ride. Dr Davis was up front with Dr Anderson, and Claire’s only company, besides the out-of-it vampires, were the three armed guards crowded inside. None of them were talkative. She wasn’t even sure they
blinked
. She had plenty of time to observe them, in the dim interior lights – there were no windows back here, which was probably lucky for the vamps. Three men of about the same age, thirties to forties; the oldest had some grey in his hair, but not much. All fit. All wearing what seemed like similar dark suits. Claire was no expert, but they didn’t look expensive – more like … uniforms.
And they were all wearing a pin on their lapels. A rising sun pin.
This looked less and less like the government, and more and more like something private that Dr Anderson had gotten herself in deep with. Private, but well funded.
The Daylight Foundation
. The people Jesse had been so worried about.
Somehow, that was even less comforting than the idea the government knew about the vampires.
‘So,’ Claire said to the man sitting next to her. ‘Are you, ah, from Boston?’
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even look at her. He did look at his watch, though, and adjusted the grip on his gun. He seemed calm enough, but she wasn’t going to get anything out of him. Or any of them. Shane might have; he liked to be provocative and confrontational, but it was a tactic that Claire knew she wasn’t good at.
So after a few more lame attempts at conversation failed, she waited.
It seemed to take forever, but they finally bumped off the smooth main road onto something that seemed a lot rougher, and then finally pulled to a stop crunching on gravel. The daylight that streamed in when the door slid open made the vampires flinch and squeeze their eyes shut, but they were all old enough to bear a little sun without injury. Still, Claire ached for them as their skin began to steam in the merciless glare. Oliver’s broke out into little tongues of flame before they unlocked him, and they hustled him out quickly.
Claire climbed out, and was immediately grabbed by the man who’d been sitting beside her. ‘Hey!’ she protested, but that got her nowhere. So she looked around instead as he pulled her onward.
Farm
hadn’t been code. It was an actual farm, and there was an actual barn and a square two-storey farmhouse with a porch. She hoped for the farmhouse, but instead they headed her off to the big, dark-red barn.
She expected hay and horse stalls, but inside, the structure had been turned into a lab, a nice one that had a thick concrete floor, clean-room walls, steel tables and cabinets and bright overhead lighting. It was full of equipment, too. Some of it Claire recognised, but a lot was new to her. Dr Davis took charge of the three vampires and had them led over to the right side of the large open space, where he had them manacled to large steel staples in the floor. All three promptly collapsed into protective crouches.
‘This way,’ her guard said, and dragged her left, after Irene Anderson.
That part of the lab was a replica of what Dr Anderson had at MIT, with a few changes; one of the most vivid being that two tables were neatly laid out with parts and schematics. Claire recognised one of them as being the constituent parts of VLAD; the second table, though, was different.
That was the pieces of the mod, Claire realised. This would tell her exactly what Dr Anderson had done to make her device into an offensive weapon. Claire picked up the plans and studied them, took each part and looked it over. She was still examining things when Dr Anderson thumped down the heavy weight of VLAD on the table … not the working one, she realised. That was still slung across Anderson’s chest.
This was the prototype model that hadn’t yet been upgraded.
‘I’m pretty sure you can figure this out,’ Anderson said. ‘The plans are right there. You wanted to be my lab assistant. Do your job. Any funny business, and I promise you, your boyfriend will suffer for it. Got it?’
Claire nodded. She focused on the plans first. Anderson was right – it was a straightforward enough job, but a lot of it required her to disassemble the base model, and reassemble in the new configuration. She studied the schematics, and examined each piece that she was to add into the machine.
That
was an amplifier, capable of boosting the signal at least a hundred times beyond what she’d originally planned.
That
piece, snapping on underneath, was an inverter that changed the signal from something that enhanced to something that cancelled – which was what she had originally intended, to be able to remove a vampire’s desire to attack instead of having to fight in the first place. These were the modifications she’d have made in the course of her studies … something that would have made VLAD a mostly benign defensive weapon.
But the last piece was the most sinister. It was a complex combination of several different pieces, but from what Claire could puzzle out, it was designed to trigger a
different
set of emotions. Fear, obviously – overwhelming, paralysing terror. It also seemed to have some other component. From what Claire had seen of its effects, it must have sensitised nerves and created a strong pain reaction. Like a taser, only more intense, and very long lasting.
‘What are you doing?’
She jumped. Irene Anderson was staring at her, cold suspicion in her gaze.
‘I’m sorry,’ Claire said. ‘I just wanted to be sure I understood what I was doing first. I didn’t want to make any mistakes.’
‘Don’t,’ Anderson said flatly. ‘You’ve got an hour. Move it.’
Claire took a deep breath, put the nonworking VLAD in the centre of the worktable, consulted the plans one last time, and began the work.
She built the thing, piece by piece. The tools were all right there, everything precise and perfectly laid out for her. Anderson was watching her, and she made sure that she did nothing, absolutely nothing, that would draw any suspicion.
Not even Dr Anderson could keep her focus completely on her forever. Claire felt when it started to wander; it was like pressure coming off of her, and she had to work hard to not give any kind of physical signal that she knew something had changed.
Just do the work. Do the work.
By the time she was down to the last of it, Anderson’s focus had mostly moved on, though she remained close. And when Myrnin suddenly convulsed and cried out, writhing in his restraints, it drew Dr Anderson’s complete attention for a critical few seconds, just as Claire fastened the last piece of the machine on board.
She’d already identified the opportunity, when she’d been going over the plans. The last component had switches built inside. They were tiny, not meant to be manipulated without specialised tools, but she’d deliberately chosen the smallest possible screwdriver, even though it was the worst tool for the job she was apparently doing.
It fit into the tiny slots just far enough to slide the switches in opposite directions.
I have no idea if I’m modding this right
, she thought. But all she could do was reverse the order of the switches, and hope that it worked.
As she finished and put down the screwdriver, Dr Anderson was right there to take control – even before she’d managed to take the weapon off its stand to hand it to her.
‘Good job, and done in time, too,’ Anderson said. She handed it to the man who’d been Claire’s shadow and guard all this time. He didn’t bother with the safety strap. ‘It’s time to see if you’re reliable, Claire. If you aren’t – if you decided to try to pull a clever one and sabotage me – then we’re going to find out right now, and it won’t go well for you. Or for your friends. This is your final exam, do you understand? Pass, and you win the lives of those you care about.’
Claire met her eyes. ‘And what if I fail?’
‘Then we have acres and acres of farmland waiting for fertiliser,’ Dr Anderson said. ‘I’m fighting for the human race. I’m not going to flinch from whatever I have to do to save innocent lives for the future.’
‘Neither am I,’ Claire said. ‘You should have trusted me. I’m really tired of people not trusting me.’
Shane would have recognised that tone. But Dr Anderson missed the warning altogether.
Anderson led the way to the other half of the room, through the clear glass door that separated the two parts. The three vampires knelt where they’d been left, all still submissive. Dr Davis had blood samples laid out on his lab tables, neatly labelled, and he was talking to a lab geek in a white coat – but one, Claire noticed, who also had the rising sun pin on his lapel. He looked up when he saw Anderson, Claire, and the guard, and nodded.
‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘We’ve been waiting.’
‘You can afford to lose one, Patrick? Just in case Claire’s tried to do something interesting with her project?’
‘I have redundancy now,’ he said. ‘So, yes. If I had to pick one, I’d say the older-looking one. He seems like the most trouble.’
‘Oliver?’ Anderson nodded. ‘Very well. He’s got quite the reputation as a killer. I think that seems appropriate.’ She turned to the guard, took the heavy weapon, and held it out to Claire. ‘Take it.’
Claire didn’t hesitate. The weight settled in her hands, throwing off her balance, but she felt better for having it. Stronger.
‘Before you try using it on me,’ Anderson said, ‘please remember that my friend here has a weapon pointed at your head.’
Claire glanced aside, and saw that the guard behind her had drawn his sidearm, and yes – it
was
pointed at her, steady and calm. He wouldn’t hesitate, she thought.
‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked. But she already knew.
‘I want you to shoot Oliver,’ Anderson said. ‘I want you to prove to me that I can trust you. He looks as if he is recovering faster than the others, and I want you to render him nonthreatening. Then I want you to continue shooting him. Do you understand?’
Claire swallowed hard, and looked at Oliver. He hadn’t raised his head. He looked frail, and unexpectedly old and vulnerable. ‘Why?’
‘Because I need to be certain we can kill them this way,’ Anderson said. ‘The simulations say it will work. I need to prove the theory, and document how long it takes to accomplish it. You wanted to be a scientist, Claire. This is what it takes.’
Oliver looked up. It seemed to take a vast effort, from the shaking of his body, but he raised his head and met her gaze. His eyes weren’t red. They were dark, and human, and afraid.
‘Please,’ he whispered. ‘Please.’
Claire didn’t honestly know what he was asking. She didn’t know what he wanted. But she knew what she had to do. It had to be done fast, and confidently, and above all, it had to be done without hesitation.
She took a deep breath, said, ‘I’m really sorry, but she’s right. I have to do it.’
And then she raised the weapon and held down the trigger.
It seemed to take forever. Oliver was caught in the beam, twitching, eyes wide, mouth open, and the chains rattled against the hasp like chattering teeth … and then, he collapsed. Dead weight. He fell hard, with no attempt to save himself, and hit the concrete limp and lifeless. All the colour that remained had drained from his face, leaving it eerily blue-white; his eyes were open, dark, and blank. His fangs were down, his mouth half-open.
He didn’t move.
‘How can we tell if he’s actually dead?’ Davis asked. He sounded completely unaffected by the whole thing. Claire felt hot, unsteady, numbed into stillness. She couldn’t look away from Oliver’s eyes.
Dr Anderson went to Oliver, knelt down, and used a silver knife from her belt to cut him. No reaction, though his skin still burned and sparked along the edges of the cut.
She stabbed him. Nothing.