As was typical for the newly dead, his form was real and solid looking. All ghosts tended to cling to the shape they’d worn in life initially, but most soon realized that doing so drained their energy far too quickly.
What was interesting about this young ghost, however, was not the fact his ghostly flesh looked real, but rather that it didn’t, in any way, resemble the body that lay in the crib. Instead of wraith features, this ghost had black hair, blue eyes, and a smattering of freckles across his sharp little nose.
So why the change? It was something I’d never witnessed before and it had intuition stirring.
He continued to hover over the crib and the scientists trying to revive him for several more seconds, and then his gaze rose to mine. He could obviously see past the light screen, but then, ghosts generally saw the world as it actually was rather than whatever front or guise was being presented, be it via magic or psychic skill.
Like the others in the restraint cribs, he appeared to be about two years old, but—as with the little girl—there was a much older soul shining out of his blue eyes.
I half reached out, unsure how he’d react or if it was even wise to make an attempt to talk to him. But I needed to know what was going on within this lab and, if he were anything like my little ones, then he would at least be able to give me some idea even if he wasn’t capable of anything too technical.
He continued to study me for several more seconds and then slowly drifted forward. His hand touched mine and energy tingled across my skin as a connection formed—and that meant he was either of shifter origin, or that my inability to use my seeking and psi skills against humans had faded right along with the inability to kill them.
Who are you? I asked softly.
I don’t know.
His mental tone was somewhat harsh, as if communicating was something he was not used to. But then, those who’d raised déchet hadn’t exactly encouraged conversation with their creations, either.
Are of you of this place?
This place is all that I can remember.
Which wasn’t a surprising reply, and yet it was something else that tugged at my instincts. What are they doing to you here?
They test their drugs. It changes us. He paused, his gaze drifting back to his body. It is painful. It is why they strap us down. It is why we are kept quiet.
My fury deepened at his words. The mere fact that these kids were being used as guinea pigs suggested they weren’t lab created but rather born of natural means. It also meant the fourteen kidnapped children we’d been trying to find weren’t the only ones Dream and her cohorts had been experimenting on.
But the kids here weren’t being used to test pathogens capable of altering the DNA of a human to make them vampire—which was a warped means of understanding the process so that they could reverse it—but rather to make wraiths.
Are those of you in this room the only ones they’re testing on? I asked.
Yes. He paused, his gaze moving past me. None of us will survive what they do to us. None of us want to survive.
Even as he said that, another monitor went red. It was the crib next to his. Two of the scientists quickly repeated the recovery procedures, but the result was the same. Another soul rising.
You must end this madness, the first child said. Please, you must help those of us for which there is no hope. Promise that you will.
I hesitated. Making such a promise would go against the one I'd made to myself so long ago, and yet if I didn't accede to his wishes, I'd only be condemning these children to more pain.
You cannot save us. No one can, he said. All of us will die; it is simply a matter of when, and in how much pain.
His words stirred the memories of melting flesh, and tears stung my eyes. I rapidly blinked them away. I promise.
His form had begun to fade. At first I thought he could simply no longer maintain the fiction of his flesh, but then a smile twisted his lips, and his form began to glow with a warm, golden light.
The tears that had been threatening to tumble finally did; they came not from sadness, but rather relief and happiness.
His soul was being called on. He was being given the chance of rebirth.
It was a gift we déchet would never receive, although I had no idea why. Nuri had forced some of the déchet ghosts haunting a military bunker we’d been investigating onwards, but I very much suspected the place she’d sent them and the place these little souls were being drawn to were two completely different things.
As the second soul also moved on, I raised the dart gun and shot the guard and the two men. None of them registered the attack—the scientists were still trying to bring the second child back to life and the guard was too engrossed in the unfolding drama. I hooked the dart gun onto my utilities belt and waited for the drug to take effect. As the two scientists and the guard collapsed in quick succession, I lunged forward and grabbed the woman by the neck.
“Scream,” I said, as I shed my light shield, “and I will kill you.”
Her eyes went wide and the stink of her fear stained the clinically clean air of the lab, but all she did was nod.
“What are you doing to these children?”
She hesitated. I tightened my grip just a fraction, and she hastily said, “Testing a series of pathogens on them.”
“Wraith pathogens?”
Her eyes went even wider and she all but stammered, “Yes.”
“And the children here? Were they created in this place?”
“No. We bought them.”
Bought them? Why in Rhea would any parent sell his or her own child? “And where exactly does one buy a child’s life?”
“I don’t know!” Her eyes darted desperately for the door, undoubtedly hoping for salvation. “I just work here.”
“And your work involves testing pathogens created from the DNA of the Others on human and shifter babies!” My voice was no louder than hers, but it was filled with the deep anger that coursed through me. The stink of her fear sharpened. “Do you expect any of these children to live?”
She hesitated again. “We do have an extremely high fail rate—”
“Define high.”
“One hundred percent so far.”
Even though that was exactly what the child had said, part of me had hoped it wasn’t the case—that the death toll here wasn’t as bad as the déchet program had been at its worst.
What was she thinking? What were any of them thinking? In the name of Rhea... it was all I could do to not shake her, to not rant and rave at both her stupidity and her inhumanity. To not end her life here and now, just as she and her cohorts had ended the life of who knew how many children—slowly, and painfully.
But there were still things I needed to know. “So you expect all the children here to die?”
“Yes.”
There was no remorse in her voice, not even the slightest hint that she felt anything close to regret for either her actions or for what they were trying to achieve here. Something within me hardened—the same something that had killed the soldier whose uniform I now wore.
“But we do have great hopes for the latest bacterium batch,” she continued. “Subject forty-five certainly hasn’t shown any of the side effects we’ve witnessed previously.”
Which meant forty-four other little ones—including all those within this room—had been forced to bear the unbearable before their deaths. “I gather you’re talking about the little girl on her own?”
“Yes.”
“And how long have you been here, doing this?”
“Me? A couple of years.”
“And this site overall?”
“Ten years, at least.”
“Does that mean the lizard men who guard this place are a result of your testing?”
“Yes.” She licked her lips again. “It was one of our more successful development streams—just over fifty percent of the test subjects lived.”
“Because you were using DNA from this world?”
br /> “Yes. But those men were all volunteers, and well paid.”
I couldn’t imagine there’d be any amount of money that would ever make up for what had happened to their bodies. But then, as Nuri had noted, it wasn’t like I was at all familiar with what it was truly like to live as one of the poor in a city such as Central.
“What was the end aim of that program?”
“To create supersoldiers,” she said. “To create beings capable of battling the Others.”
I snorted. Given Sal had told me their end game was to completely erase the stain of humanity from this place, I doubted they’d actually be creating a fighting force capable of matching blows with the Others. It was more likely they were aiming for a force capable of going where the Others could not.
“And the wraith pathogen? How long have you been testing that?” I asked. “And why aren’t you testing it on adult volunteers rather than babies?”
“That particular pathogen has been in development for close to a year, and we did initially start with adults. All the test subjects died within hours of administration. We started using children after similar explorations in other labs—but with different drugs—proved they were better test subjects.”
My fingers tightened, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to force them apart. Nothing. Her face mottled and her breathing became shuddering, shallow gasps, but I felt no sympathy for her. “Other labs?”
“In Central,” she somehow said. “And in Longborne.”
I had no idea where Longborne was, but the lab in Central was undoubtedly the now defunct Winter Halo. “How long have the children in this lab been here?”
“The ones in the restraining cots have been here the longest, the little girl at the end the shortest. She’s only received two shots so far.” The woman paused, her breath wheezing in and out of her lungs. I still couldn’t ease my grip on her. I was barely resisting the urge to do the opposite. “Look, I only work here. I was just doing what I was told—”
“You were torturing goddamn children. You’re trying to create a pathogen to allow wraiths full light immunity.”
Her eyes widened further, and I hadn’t thought that was possible. “No, I swear, we’re trying to find a means to kill them!”
“By first turning human and shifter babies into wraiths? There’s only one world in which something like that would be acceptable, and it’s certainly not this one.”
“You have to believe me—”
I didn’t. Not one iota. There might be fear in her, but there was no guilt or doubt, and surely there should have been at least a fraction of either. How could anyone truly believe that testing alien-based pathogens on humans and shifters would lead to a means of killing wraiths? If that was truly their aim, why wouldn’t they be testing any drug developed on wraiths? Granted, they were very deadly and extremely hard to capture alive, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. The DNA they were using in their pathogens had to come from somewhere, after all. For all I knew, there were government approved lab facilities that had the Others in captivity, and that were currently researching various means of destroying them.
But this lab was not one of them.
Not given it was a false rift that had led me here.
“Is this lab the only one containing live subjects?”
She nodded. “We did have two other production labs in operation here, but babies have been hard to come by of late.”
Before I could reply or respond in any way, the door into the lab from the antechamber opened and another scientist walked through. “Betts, I need you to—”
He stopped abruptly, his expression shifting from confusion to horror in quick succession. I snapped a gun from my belt and fired, but his reactions were just as fast as mine. He dove out the closing door, and the bullet pinged off the metal and went who knew where.
My time here had just moved into the red zone.
I shifted my aim to the scanner that controlled entry into the room and blasted it. Sparks and black smoke flew as the screen went dead. Though the door was now locked shut, I doubted it would keep anyone out for long.
As a siren began to sound, I killed the woman then stepped over her body and walked across to the chemicals cabinet. I'd made a promise to the soul of a dead child, and I intended to keep it. Had there been any sort of hope for the little ones within this room, I might have hesitated, but the scientist had basically confirmed what the child had told me. It was far better that they die a painless death now than spend who knew how many more weeks or months in unremitting agony.
I was all too familiar with such a death. I would rather break a vow than allow it to happen again.
If this lab was anything like the labs that had developed us, then there would be some means here of putting down unwanted test subjects. After a moment, I found what I was looking for—pentobarlazol—a newer, swifter-acting form of an eons-old drug. It was basically both a sedative and an anticonvulsant, and in higher doses it gently put the subject into a deep sleep even as it shut down heart and brain functions. I’d seen déchet injected with it, and knew it to be a quick and peaceful death.
I clipped the gun back onto the utilities belt and then grabbed the bottle and several syringes. It didn’t take long to inject the pentobarlazol into the feed lines of all the children.
In all the lines but one.
I just couldn’t do it to the happy little girl. She, out of all of them, had some hope of survival. She deserved a chance, and I was going to do everything in my power to give it to her.
I put the pentobarlazol back into the cabinet, dumped the syringes into the medical waste chute, and then primed two of my remaining four RTX devices. I stuck one under a bench near the cribs, and another on the wall behind one of the metal cabinets. As the sound of approaching steps began to echo in the antechamber, I pulled off my stolen jacket, detached the drip feeds from the little girl, and carefully constructed a sling so that I could carry her.
She made no sound. She merely placed one little hand on my chest, right above my heart, as if drawing comfort from the sound.
The footsteps stopped outside the door. I hurried across to the guard I’d darted and quickly stripped off his body armor. I loosened the side straps, then carefully pulled it over my head. The guard was much taller than me, so not only did the heavy vest drop past my hips, it completely protected the little girl. Once I’d tightened the straps, I wrapped a light shield around the two of us and hurried over to the internal door. Fortunately, this one wasn’t scanner locked, and it opened to reveal another laboratory—one that appeared to be at the epicenter of their pathogen development. I concealed another RTX and then drew a gun and walked over to the corner of the room near the door that led back out into the antechamber.
Even as I stopped, five soldiers quickly but silently entered the room. Three moved toward the other lab while two positioned themselves either side of the open door. My fingers tensed around the gun, but attacking either man really wasn’t the best option right now. To have any hope of getting out of this place in one piece, I needed to slip past without being sensed.
I eased off my boots and hung them on the back of my belt. I was no master at walking silently, and the combination of the boots and these floors meant there would at least be some noise, no matter how quiet I tried to be. It might not have been obvious when everyone had been intent on helping the fallen scientist, but there was no such distraction now.
I drew two guns and then sucked in the light shield as tightly as I dared. It would shimmer if it touched either man and that would be enough to at least raise suspicion. They might not know what a light shield was, but they would undoubtedly suspect something odd was happening and react accordingly.
After crossing mental fingers and praying that the luck I’d been gifted with so far continued, I headed for the door. But just as I was going through it, a third soldier appeared and tried to do the same. I had little choice but to thrust him out of the way and run.
/> The two soldiers guarding the door immediately spun and opened fire. One bullet caught my leg and sent me stumbling, but I somehow retained balance and jagged sideways, running to the right and around the outer ring of the antechamber rather than directly across it. Bullets pinged off the walls, floors, and ceiling, deadly missiles that came very close but didn’t hit. The noise of all the gunfire was deafening, but the soldiers themselves were quiet.
As was the child. She just gripped my shirt fiercely, as if intent on hanging on no matter what happened next.
A gruff order was barked, and the gunfire immediately ceased. I slid to a stop, trying to control both the sharp rasp of my breathing and my surging fear. The tunnel—and the safety it represented—was close. So damn close. If I could get into it, become nothing more than shadowed particles, I could avoid the worst of the gunfire by rising to the ceiling and moving swiftly out of this place.
But there were still soldiers piling out of the tunnel; some formed a line in front of it, blocking any hope of an easy exit, while others were beginning a methodical sweep of the antechamber. If I remained still, I’d be caught. Not just by those soldiers, but by a lack of strength that would surely happen sooner rather than later if the amount of blood now soaking my pants was any indication. Even if it wasn’t currently dripping onto the floor, it soon would be. And that, in turn, would be a very easy path to follow, shield or no shield. At least there weren’t any shifters amongst the soldiers—there couldn’t be. They would have scented both the blood and me by now.
Not that it really mattered, because the soldiers were drawing closer and my options were fast running out.
I took a deep breath, raised my guns, and unleashed metal hell as I ran full pelt at the tunnel. Even as some went down, others returned fire. A bullet grazed my cheek, another my lower thigh. Others thudded into both the sides and back of the body armor, and it felt like someone was pounding me with a heavy wooden bat. But even though each successive bullet hurt like hell, and breathing was becoming more and more difficult, the armor was working. So far, there’d been no hits to my chest. The little girl remained safe and untouched in her cocoon.