Page 64 of Defiance
Hexane metabolized. Assuming control of internal temperature.
What I thought were bruises around my wrists began to move in the holoscreen’s glow. A swarm of tiny black particles beneath the surface of my skin, racing along the lines of my bionic scaffolding. I felt Jharim’s parumauxi like tiny bubblespopping against my nerve endings, tickling all the way up my spinal cord and into my brain.
When I thought too hard about it, I heaved again, mucous smearing the corner of my mouth.
My holotab went dark again, and I closed my eyes. Maybe I slept. I was drained, fighting just to blink or form complete thoughts. I couldn’t say the moment my stomach felt more settled, but suddenly I was alert and noticed how my hips and shoulder ached. I tried to sit up, elbows wobbling as I planted my weight on my palms.
The place I was in was still cold, but my chest was warm like I’d taken a shot of poitín. Even if I couldn’t see, I felt my breath steam in the air. The walls were as unforgiving as a bank vault and I knew without a doubt that I was underground.
I opened my holotab to use the holoscreen to see and feel back on my ass with a muffled scream. The light flailed around the tiny stone room, bouncing off of Imani’s face like a naked light bulb in a basement. She didn’t look at me, even if her eyes were open and a slow trickle of breath warmed the air from her nostrils.
It was like looking at one of those wax statues of a celebrity. A pristine replica. I reached my fingers out to get her attention, then pulled them back without touching her. What if she was warm?
What if she wasn’t?
I hugged my bare middle with a shiver, taking a closer look at her face. A fine layer of dust covered her eyeballs. Another muffled, mountainousboomrang through the walls from somewhere far above.
Two more dolls of meself were stacked on the floor. These weren’t nearly as pristine. Pink lipstick smeared one’s mouth while the other had gotten her hair chopped unevenly, as if people had been taking souvenirs. Jacks were set in the napes oftheir necks, and upon investigating Imani, I found that she had the same, hiding under her fuzzy black hairline.
“Feck’s sake,” I swore, leaning back on the cold wall.
They’d expected Imani, not me. Guei had a perfect replica of her ready to go. What if she’d been late to all the festivities because she’d had to scramble to find a me doll that would pass muster?
It was the cloying scent of early decay that brought me out of a conspiratorial spiral. All three dolls wore a simple shift, but the mouths of mine were dark. I undressed one of them to steal the white gown, trying my best not to dwell on the dark purple and black blood pooling in the side of her body where she’d been laying on the floor. I tried not to think about how I’d been curled up just like that when I first woke up either.
When I was done, I turned away from their ghosts with a crawling sensation at the back of my neck that I ignored.
“They’re just mannequins,” I mumbled to myself, searching for the seams of a door.
Not only did I find a door, but it had an emergency access panel without a lock. When I pushed it open, a stream of harsh, white light filtered in. I looked back at the dolls—the otherwomen—and knew that Guei had stashed me with them because she thought I was dead.
“Imani?” I murmured with a tremor.
The doll’s eyes turned to me without blinking and I just about crawled out of my own skin.
“Are you coming?”
She looked straight ahead again. I waited, heart in my throat, but she didn’t move. At least she knew where the access panel was. I stepped back from the door and it slid closed.
The subterranean passage was endless and straight with strip lights in the corners of the floor and yellow pipes and bundles of thick black cables racing along the ceiling. I chose towalk right, my knees knocking together in fear. Anyone could find me wandering around.
I just hoped the first person who did was Novak.
29
Novak had known the rush of the chase many times. The invigorating tang of a target’s fear and sweat. Holding his breath in the rafters of a warehouse, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. With a career defined by a trail of bodies, his resume was longer than any other agent under Ferulis’s command.
It’s what advenans were made for.
Killing. Finding. Disappearing.
Novak did what he was evolved to do in the Hunt for Charlie. He opened hiscolearato its fullest, burning his senses until the world simmered like oil in a pan.
Sparks of pink drew him into the Medial Palace, where he leapt from the archways and banisters in his BDRE suit, invisible to their security drones and silent on his feet. He locked down his hardened feathers, so that when a patrol did sense him, he’d conduct the electricity from its stunner out the tip of his tail in an arc of lightning.
Charlie had been taken to a suite to lay down in a bed that had been draped in new sheets. Director Caher, La?we Sath, and Chairwoman Guei had been with her. Caher? Smelled anxious. Sath, drowning in fight or flight, heavy emphasis on the fight. Guei, though, was her perfect self. Luxury powders, triumph, and serenity. Then Charlie left on a gurney with Guei and someone that smelled like a medbay.
Novak followed Charlie’s faint sparkle, walking across the rooftops of Hja Qiyua. She hadn’t been transported outside but through the underground passages that connected the Medial Palace to HIXBS medical center, a vast network beneath the surface. He gleaned herchemiatrail from cracks in the blue marble sandstone and grates from above, trying to tap into her holotab, searching for Jharim’s parumauxi, but there was nothing.
