Chapter 68: Worse Than Dying (Patreon)

The meeting ran close to an hour, the three of them sitting while Dan and Lessa told her everything about their world. It was strange for them, the way she asked her questions, as if she stood outside the thing she was asking about. What made it worse was doing it under all those bodies, none of them sure yet what they were really looking at.

“Thank you for telling me all of it,” the Operator said. “It helps. More than you know.”

“You saved our lives back there.” Dan reached over and took Lessa’s hand. She was still on edge, her fingers tight in his. “Telling you what we know is the least we can do.”

“Operator, ma’am.” Lessa’s eyes went back up to the glass. “Do you know what this is? What all these bodies are?”

“I’m putting it together. Starting to, anyway.” She let that sit. “Once I’m sure, I’ll tell you. Right now, what’s your plan?”

“We’ve got no way back to the cleaning bay where we were safe. No way up. Nowhere to go.” Dan looked at her. “If it’s not too much trouble, could we stay with you?”

“That’s fine. But if a way out opens up for you, I’ll tell you, and you take it.” She glanced around the level. “Once I finish what I came to do, I won’t be able to stay with you.”

She pointed at the equipment lining the nearest wall.

“Place this size has to have gear. Find anything you can use to protect yourselves. Somewhere this big has a security station, so if you come across rounds, grab them.”

Then she looked up toward the catwalk.

“That kid wants to show me something, and she knows this place. I think she’s from down here.”

“From here?” Lessa’s face pulled tight. “From this section? From where all these bodies are?”

“That’s what I’m trying to work out.” The Operator was already moving. “You two handle the gear. Let me see what the kid wants. If I still don’t get what this place is after that, we’re gone.”

She crossed to the catwalk stairs and started up.

“Tera. What do you make of what they said?”

You heard what they believe, Operator. One walled-off continent, one nation, and every other country gone in some old war. That’s the whole world to them.

“Raised on it for hundreds of years. None of them has a reason to doubt it.” With one hand on the rail, she climbed. “But Dan said something. Reconnaissance ships, every week, out looking for survivors.”

Yes.

“And that’s the part that doesn’t sit right.” She kept her voice low. “Back where Dan and Lessa come from, no massive disappearances. No reports of it. So these people, all these millions down here, aren’t theirs. They’re from outside the continent. Taken and brought here for this.”

That fits.

“Sick son of a bitch. Killing millions for one formula. There’s something broken in him.”

The girl’s up there. She’s waiting for you.

The Operator looked up and found the kid higher up the stairs, watching for her.

“Yeah. Right now all I want is out of this place.”

The girl ran down to meet her, took both her hands, and started leading her along, back toward wherever she’d been before.

“Show me, but make it fast. We have to go.”

The Operator went with her, still talking to Tera under her breath.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with this kid, Tera.”

One thing at a time. We look, then we deal with it.

Hand still in hers, the girl led her into a short corridor. At the end of it stood an open door, the kind set into a vault, close to eight feet tall. She kept pulling at the Operator’s hand, smiling, eager to show her whatever waited inside. They stepped through, and the lights came up around them.

The girl let go and ran to a pile of toys on the floor, then sat down beside them to play. The Operator took the room in. All white, toys in the middle of the floor, a metal bed frame with no mattress, drawings on the walls, a wide pane of glass set into one of them. She didn’t need a skill to understand it. They had watched the girl through that window.

Then she saw the bed. Beside it stood a rack of tubes and connectors, built to lock onto something, or someone, and feed the containers resting on the floor, the same setup as the Kanryx tanks on level nine. The Operator stepped closer to read them.

The labels told her enough. She knew the formula. It was the same one, only these versions started with an S instead of a K.

Looking back at the girl, she saw her smile and turn to her toys again. She crossed over and crouched beside her. “Sweetheart, let me take a look at you. I just need to check something. That okay?”

The girl nodded.

Easing her shirt up, the Operator found metal connectors built into the child’s body, like the ports a person would have if they were made to plug straight into a machine. Small inlets set across her in different places, each one shaped to fit the tubes in the room.

Operator. Tera’s voice slowed. Those connectors. The bed.

Looking at the room again, the Operator put it together. The bed, the tubes, the containers, the S formula, and the girl in the middle of all of it.

Operator. This kid.

“That girl is a Kanryx,” the Operator said.

A voice came out of an intercom somewhere in the room. “Or a hybrid, if we’re being technical.” Eron’s voice filled the space. “She didn’t give us what we were after. You will.”

The Operator knew the voice the second she heard it. Eron.

Dan and Lessa came running at the sound of the voice carrying through the room, their faces white with it.

“I know what travelers like you are. You finish your mission, and you’re gone. And you’re worth far too much to let walk out of here.”

The Operator stood still and listened.

“Alive would have been better. The problem is that you can leave at any moment. A corpse can’t. And a corpse I can take apart and learn from.”

Down on the floor, the girl stayed with her toys as if none of it was happening.

“You could have worked with me,” Eron said. “None of what comes next had to happen.”

“That was never going to happen, you sick fuck.”

For a few seconds, nobody said anything.

“Then this is on you.”

The transmission cut out, and the room went quiet. Then an automated voice came back, filling level thirteen end to end.

Deactivating cryogenic suspension across multiple capsules.

The Operator heard it and ran out to the balcony overlooking the level. She reached the rail. Out across the hanging rows, the capsules were changing; the ice pulling back off the glass while red lights blinked on across all of them.

“What’s happening?” the Operator said.

Dan, Lessa, and the girl reached the balcony and looked out beside her. The voice rolled out again.

Installing mutation formula S-47 in subjects.

A few seconds later, another capsule lit up.

Installing mutation formula S-12 in subjects.

Then another.

Installing mutation formula S-83 in subjects.

The numbers changed from one capsule to the next; the voice calling the installations out across the level. People of every age started waking inside the capsules: children, women, men, the old. All of them looking around for help that wasn’t there. The space inside the glass was too tight to move an arm forward or back, barely enough to turn a head side to side.

Then they saw the first faces in front of them: the Operator, Dan, Lessa, the girl. Many of them screamed.

“Help!”

“Please!”

Others screamed in languages she couldn’t follow. A few spoke the language she’d learned, but most of them used tongues that meant nothing to her. She didn’t need the words. The meaning came through anyway, panic, desperation, begging. Some of them were crying.

Then something moved through the pipes along the ceiling. Fluid ran through them and started feeding down into the capsules. The Operator counted as it went. Ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred. More than a hundred capsules with people inside, every one of them taking it in.

“Stop!” the Operator shouted. No one answered.

“Why?” Lessa was beside her. “Why is Lord Eron doing this?”

The Operator turned to her. “Who is he? What is Eron?”

Lessa looked back, lost. “He’s one of the Winged Ones.”

“The Winged Ones?”

“That’s what they call themselves. They stand above us. Almost immortal. They’ve led us for hundreds of years. They protect us.”

Her eyes went back to the capsules. “Why would he do this? Why to them?”

“Because he can,” the Operator said.

The screaming went on for a few more seconds. Then the conversions started. In the same instant, the first row lit up. The glass cracked, and the people inside changed.

The Operator fixed on one of them, a boy who couldn’t have been more than seventeen. He was looking right at her, screaming for help.

“Help me! I want my mom! Please!”

Then his back arched, and something moved under his skin. His arms lengthened, the bone pushing past where bone should stop, and the growing body started cracking the surrounding glass, the cramped capsule no longer big enough to hold what he was turning into. The scream that tore out of him climbed past anything human, then broke. His jaw stretched wide, the skin splitting at the corners of his mouth, new teeth crowding up through the gums. His eyes stayed human the longest, wide and fixed on the Operator, until the skull behind them cracked and pushed forward, and the face was gone.

A few capsules over, a woman. She wasn’t looking at the Operator or at anyone. Her eyes were down, on her own stomach, where the skin had swollen against the crystal. The case cracked as her body pushed out past its walls. Her belly stretched and split open, no blood, just a wound widening into a wide mouth lined with teeth, and she was still a woman above it, staring down at the thing growing out of her own gut. Then her spine snapped backward, her body folded into a new shape, and the failing case shattered the rest of the way. What pulled itself out was no longer her.

The Operator couldn’t look away. She knew what every one of them was going through in there, awake for all of it, feeling their own bodies turn while they could do nothing but feel it. She had lived through the same thing once.

They’re still in there. All of them, still in there while it happens to them.

Her eyes had gone wet, and she didn’t fight it. Down the rows it spread, twenty, then more, body after body breaking open into shapes that had nothing human left in them. They dropped to the floor as they finished, and whoever had been screaming a moment before was buried somewhere inside the thing that stood up in their place.

An automated voice rolled out again.

Activating additional test subjects. Deactivating cryogenic suspension in additional capsules.

More capsules lit. The Operator took a step back.

“Tera, help me figure out what we can do here.”

With the mutation you’ve got installed, you can take hits. Maybe even bites. But Dan, Lessa, and the girl? A hundred percent chance they die down here.

“The girl, though,” the Operator said. “She’s a Kanryx.”

She’s still partly human. We don’t know what she’s capable of, or how her body holds up. You want to bet their lives on a maybe?

“No.”

She turned to them. “Dan, Lessa. Back to the girl’s room, now.”

“What about you, Operator?” Dan said. “Come with us.”

“If we all lock ourselves in there, that room turns into a tomb. Get inside. Don’t argue. Let me work the problem.”

Dan, Lessa, and the girl ran for the room, and the Operator went with them. At the door, she hit the control panel on the wall beside it, and the vault door began to close.

“Please be careful,” Lessa said, crying.

“I haven’t been careful since I got to this place.” A small smile pulled at her. “Don’t expect that to change now.”

The door closed between them a little at a time. On the other side, Dan, Lessa, and the girl kept their eyes on her until the gap was gone.