Chapter 60:
Jane versus the sky
Jane stared down the storm like she would another fighter, tensed and ready to move.
She knew she didn't want to use the same method she employed the last time — charging blindly into the blackening clouds; but somewhere in there, Jane also understood, was a girl, not unlike her, trapped with strange powers and feeling very much alone.
Instead, Jane shot straight up into the sky.
Breaking free of the cloud cover, those ambient rainclouds that rode the storm's energy like lampreys, the gold light of day bathed her. Sun soaked into her skin, creeping into her veins, from eyes to fingertips. Jane felt warmer, stronger. She paused, hanging in mid air, so close to the skin of the earth's atmosphere she could see the stars.
And then she turned around and headed right for the eye of the storm.
Letting gravity do most of the work, Jane saw her opening, the spinning, empty eye, the calm heart of a storm bigger than entire states. She wondered, momentarily, where Emily was, and if she could see her approach, but then Jane was in the thick of it, the storm sensing her presence and launching fast tentacles of clouds at her. She battered her way through these claws, fighting against a wind that seemed to turn an inhuman will toward preventing her from entering the storm.
In an instant, there she was.
The tempest swirled around her, an epic turbine of clouds and rain and hail, but Jane drifted on the soft winds in its eye. The silence was painful, an eerie emptiness with only the whispering song of the storm itself humming in the distance. Her cape yanked and danced on the light breeze.
"Where are you?" she said. "Please come out. I'm not here to hurt you."
A hand emerged from the swirling clouds, gray-skinned, mottled like dark marble. Then another, and then an entire person, a girl, small, elfin, with hair the color of a summer sky and lightning flickering all around her like fireflies at play. She examined Jane curiously and, with a movement that would fit just right on a mermaid, she swam to her across the empty air.
"I can't stop her," the girl said.
"You can," Jane said. "The storm is you now. And you're the storm. You're linked."
"I don't want this," the girl said. "I need to go home."
"You can't," Jane said. "They . . . it's impossible to live without her. And she can't live without you. I'm sorry."
The girl turned her lightning blue eyes away, taking in the vast storm all around her.
"So, if I die, the storm dies?"
"Yes," Jane said.
She turned her strange, alien gaze back to Jane.
"You have to kill me, don't you?"
"I will not," Jane said. "I'm here to help. You can control the storm. This is you."
"I've tried," she said. "Tried so many times."
"You have to fight her," Jane said. "I don't want you to — "
"Oh no," the girl said.
"What?"
"They're back."
More of the winged creatures Jane had seen attack the girl before came burrowing out of the cloud cover. Burnt red skin, green eyes glowing, horns made of scar tissue jutting from their faces, they flew directly toward the girl, gleeful malice on their faces.
Jane launched towards them.
The first seemed genuinely surprised when Jane's fist, engulfed in orange flames, slammed into his nose. He chattered in pain, speaking some language she hadn't heard before, something that sounded old and filthy at the same time. A second creature attempted to fly past, but Jane grabbed him by his skinny neck and held on. He clawed at her hand and arm, trying to wrestle free, but his yellowed nails couldn't break her skin. Then a third and a fourth headed for the girl, and Jane tossed her captive toward the ocean and caught the others by their tails; scaly and lizard-like, they felt like hard muscle beneath her fingers.
The demons all turned on Jane as one, punching, biting. Not strong enough to hurt, they tangled and distracted her. One flipped her cape over her eyes and cackled as the others continued to attack. Jane ripped it off at the seams and flung it away. More of the little demons emerged, laughing scratching, seemingly forgetting their original target.
The girl yelled.
"Leave her alone!" Valerie said. "Look at me!"
Their attacks subsided as the creatures — all these skinny, misshapen little monsters — turned their attention to the gray-skinned girl a few meters away.
The girl pointed at them.
"Leave her alone," she said.
And a web of lightning lanced from her fingertips and splashed into the closest demon. The creature screamed, illuminated from the inside. The lightning arced to the next creature, then split in two and electrocuted two more. The little monsters fell away, pinwheeling on the breeze and plummeting to the ocean below.
"How did I do that?" the girl asked.
Jane gazed at the clouds and saw another monster, bigger, with horns curling out of its forehead, climb out of the mists.
"I don't know, but can you do it again?"
The girl extended both hands, lashed out with more lightning, and the bright blasts skittered across the monster's skin. The large demon screamed, yet still clamored forward on huge wings the color of burnt meat.
Jane soared to meet him.
She grabbed a horn in each hand and yanked. The creature howled in pain, its bone-like material of horns flexed and strained. Jane kicked her knee straight up, clicking the monster's jaw shut and then pulled again, pushing with both feet planted against the monster's collarbone.
"Hit him again!" Jane yelled.
More lightning flashed, this time from above, a pure strike. Electricity illuminated the monster from the inside, the current tingled up Jane's arms, and caused her heart to skip a beat. She released his horns and punched him once, twice, three times between the eyes. The monster blinked, bared his teeth, then went blank before he too fell from the sky toward the ocean below.
The wall of clouds grew near, the eye of the storm closed in.
"Any time now, guys," Jane said.
Chapter 61:
Wegener's legacy
Kate discovered the office at the bottom of a flight of sea-rusted stairs, some sort of forgotten storage room converted into a lab.
She pushed the door open, surprised, but not completely, to find it unlocked. Inside, neglected computers illuminated the room, their screens emitted an unhealthy glow of monitor blue. Sheets of paper with scribbled notes were scattered all around. Kate picked up an open book and inspected a sketch of a type of mutant: half-man and half-reptile, the caption 'Cretaceous Man' was scrawled above it.
She cocked her head, listening for Titus, but heard nothing except the lapping of the water below her. Kate sat down in front of the computers, typed the password Wegener gave her onto the keyboard and launched a program labeled "controls."
When it opened, she found a set of virtual monitors that tracked the vital signs of a dozen beings. Some were clearly deceased, including two labeled Tinder and Hyde. She read Bedlam's vitals — they appeared healthy — and noticed the spiking adrenaline of another subject labeled Valkyrie.
There were others, as well — Cretaceous, Megalodon, Harpy, Tremble, Plague. Still more, whose names simply consisted of a random string of numbers and letters. According to the program, most were still alive.
Where are they? Kate wondered. Out there, on the run like Bedlam? Or, still in captivity?
With a few keystrokes, she could terminate all of them right now. Put them out of their misery. Remove the threat. She wasn't interested in finding out what havoc a lab experiment named Megalodon or Plague could cause.
But so far, every single one of them had been a victim. Hyde was a little jerk, yes, but in the end, even he'd been sincerely repentant, just another pawn caught up in these experiments. There was no guarantee they'd ever find any of them. They might never know the threat they posed.
Kate inspected each control panel again. The terminate button was easy enough to identify. Red, with a multi-tiered command set. No accidents.
But there existed another command. Release. Could that mean she'd unleash them on the world? In the case of Plague; would there be a person roaming the countryside spreading some unknown pestilence?
Might be easier to destroy them all, she thought. Click a few buttons, put them all down. Save the world. Nobody would have to know if she killed them. Not even Titus. He would believe her, that she had no choice. It was the right thing to do. Titus wouldn't — couldn't — do it if he were here. But he was upstairs. Possibly dying. Possibly dead.
Then she found the third command. Deactivate. Terminate, release, deactivate. Murder, set free, and . . . disarm?
She browsed around, found various dropdown menus for each experiment. It had to be more complicated than that. Had to be clearer. Had to be something else.
Kate wished Wegener had survived just a few minutes longer. Then, she could have asked for better instructions.
She scrolled up and down at random and stumbled across a command simply called "the red wire." Of course it's the red wire, she thought. Wegener must have possessed a sense of humor, once upon a time. Snip the red wire.
And so, one at a time, beginning with Valkyrie and working her way up the list, she cut every red wire. Even Bedlam's. When nothing around her exploded — she suspected at least a few of the lab experiments were housed here on the rig, like Bedlam had been — Kate slumped back in her chair, exhausted.
This room housed everything, she thought. Information on all the experiments. Where they were, what they were. She could try to steal it, take it with her. Find these other kids. Help set them free. But there didn't appear to be a way she could save everything. And here also was the method for making monsters. If this ever got in the wrong hands, someone could build an army. A fleet of ogres.
The door creaked open. Kate leapt to her feet, ready to attack. She paused, though as the figure in the doorway leveled a squat, angry-looking gun at her.
He seemed ordinary in a lot of ways. Almost. Neither tall, nor big — nor handsome, or ugly. Stubble-headed, with a lined face, a weary but strong gait. Just a man, despite the glowing red of a cyborg eye, the silver glint of cybernetics on his face, the gleam of an entire arm rebuilt by science. That arm held the gun, which seemed to flow into the man's hand as if it were integrated, a part of him.
"I wondered which one of you would find Wegener's stash," he said.
Kate waited. She inched her hand toward the taser discs on her belt.
The man shook his head. "Come on now, I could empty my gun into you before you reach your belt," he said. "What did you do in here?"
"I deactivated the cortex bombs," Kate said.
The man nodded, almost imperceptibly.
"Never liked that, myself," he said. "Seemed wasteful to me. Cruel."
"Everything you people have done is cruel," she said.
"No point arguing that, I suppose," he said.
"Are you sure you could shoot me before I take you out?" Kate said.
The man shrugged.
"Probably. I'm not going to shoot you, though."
"What?"
The man gestured around the room with his free hand.
"To be honest, I was never comfortable with all of this," he said. "I mean, look at me. Once upon a time, I was one of these kids."
"You're not going to try to kill me?"
"I'm done with this business of killing children," the man said. "Besides, the check cleared. I'm only sticking around as a professional courtesy."
"You're not going to fight me?"
"You were hoping for that?" the man said. "Listen, I've seen you on video. You're good. But I've been killing people for twenty years. Professionally. And you're no killer."
Kate huffed out a sharp laugh.
"So you're just . . . going to leave?"
"I saw her, you know," the man said. "The girl in the storm. Before they made her into this. She was just a kid. Like you, I imagine. But the money was good and the job seemed easy and . . . Ah, hell, you don't need to know all that. I'm just done with their game is all. Time to move on to the next one."
Kate stared, half-expecting him to change his mind, to pull the trigger. Instead, he unclipped something from his belt and left it on the closest counter.
"Do me a favor, kid."
"I don't owe you any favors."
"No, you don't," he said. "But you might want to begrudge me this one."
He backed out of the door, the gun never wavering from Kate's body. He stopped.
"When you're done in here, pull the pin on that thing and run like hell. Sink Wegener's garbage into the ocean. Let it float away like he did."
He left, and the door clanked shut behind him.
Kate raced after him, tearing the door nearly off its hinges when she opened it. But, he was gone.
"Not bad for an old man," she said.
She stepped back into the office and looked at the egg-shaped device he'd left behind. Just as she suspected. A grenade. A simple, ordinary, military-grade grenade.
Kate tapped her earpiece.
"Solar from Dancer," she said. "Valkyrie is free."
Kate picked up the grenade, pulled the pin, and flung it into the office, where it clattered beneath Wegener's computers.
And, just like the man instructed, she turned and ran like hell.