Page 19 of Even Robots Die
I don’t react much to anything either, in any type of situation.
I walk to the dreaded first floor. Other than me, no one is authorized here.
The men and women who followed me here are almost all people who got caught in Versailles with me. They didn’t turn their back on Elhyor, they just had more trauma in common with me.
So when I moved here, they followed.
But they know better than to wander in this part of the castle.
It’s been cleaned, but everything is as it was when I was saved, from what I’ve been told.
All the graphics and documents are still in the neat piles they were, and I didn’t find it in me to look at them.
Not that I would understand much of what is written there.
There is a reason why Elhyor and I became friends in the first place. There is a reason why my daughter loves books so much. I like words and stories. In school, I studied history and met Elhyor around that time. But like him, I also enjoy fighting and I’m damn good at it. But like I said, I’m a man of letters, not of numbers, and I don’t understand anything science related.
Plan ‘A’ was to get Florentine’s father to do the job, but I discovered quickly that he’s just a technician. A very good one, but still a technician. Every weapon that has been sold with his name on it for the past ten years was not of his conception.
It was his daughter’s.
So I moved to plan B.
Actually, Florentine triggered plan B all on her own.
I was going to send her father back home, maybe with a little scare because not once during the time he was detained did he mention he needed to be back to take care of his girls.
I might not feel much anymore, but I still have my memories. I still know what I felt when I brought up Cassiopé, and I would have done anything to get back to her.
He didn’t.
Once he realized he wasn’t going to get hurt, that he would be treated decently and that I would compensate him for the work, he simply started to act like all of this was normal.
It’s not.
I know it. I don’t care, but I know it.
I wait at the door to Michaël’s lab.
I still have nightmares of this room. I need this to be over soon, but for the sake of explaining once again what’s wrong, I’ll stay here for a few more minutes.
12
Florentine
Brice didn’t tell me to follow him, but since someone is blocking the path back to my room when I get out of the dining room, I follow him anyway.
Maybe I’m finally getting the explanation I’ve been waiting for since I’ve been kidnapped.
Oh, I know. I served myself on a silver platter, but that doesn’t change the fact I’m now Brice’s hostage.
When I cross the threshold of the room he’s waiting in, I gasp.
The room looks like a very clean lab. It’s not something someone would expect inside a medieval castle so it surprises me a bit, but the more I look at the room, the more I feel unsettled.
On the walls there are pictures of open bodies showing muscles, and I don’t mean drawings or those high resolution AI generated pictures. No, these look like real pictures of real people opened up just for the sake of science. I know people used to give their bodies to science for research, but it doesn’t look like that’s what these pictures are.
Because those cracked open people … they have their eyes wide open and I can see the terror through them.
