“No,” Dekka said. “Like I said: I did this once. I was Sam’s soldier, I did this. I did it and I am not going to do it again.”
“Dekka, we need you. Your country needs you. The human race needs you.”
Dekka looked at the carpet for a long time but saw only memories. And with those memories came pain: the visceral memory of physical agony; the memory of grim decisions that cost lives; the memory of Brianna. And poor Edith Windsor, not a very sweet-tempered cat, but the closest thing to a friend Dekka had.
Had.
“I’m not your girl,” she said at last. “Call me a coward, but no, Peaks, I am not signing up for another tour of hell.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. He tapped his keyboard and six thousand volts blasted from Dekka’s chair. She was unconscious within a second.
Dekka woke hours later. She was on her back, on cold steel. She raised her head but found that a steel band was around her neck so that she could rise no more than an inch, barely enough to let her see what she felt: great, cold weights on her hands.
She saw a cubic foot of concrete, rough rectangular blocks imprisoning her hands, resting on purpose-built additions to the gurney. A jolt of terror went through her.
Cementing!
It was the crude countermeasure Caine and Drake had devised in the FAYZ, once they discovered that most (though not all) powers tended to be focused through the hands.
She had been cemented.
Peaks was there beside her now. “I’m sorry to have had to resort to this, Dekka,” he said. “But you were given a choice between lab rat and soldier. Now you’re a lab rat.”
An IV line was in her left arm at the elbow. Sensors festooned her head. Wires rose from her chest.
“I like you, Dekka. I admire you. But one way or the other, you will help us.” Then he snapped his fingers, remembering. “But I brought you something.” He reached into his briefcase and drew out Dekka’s framed photograph of Brianna. He propped it on a table and turned it so Dekka could see. It was not her original frame, and the picture itself had been damaged, looking as if a rat had chewed the edges. “It mostly survived the shredding. I had what’s left reframed. So, there you go: just like home.”
And then he turned and walked from the room as techs in white jumpsuits closed in around her and she roared curses at his back in helpless rage.
Unlike Drake, who had cemented his early victims with no thought for the putrefaction of flesh that would result, Peaks’s people had molded the cement into halves held together by steel bands and fastened with massive locks.
Dekka reached into her mind for the transformation that would unleash her new and terrible power. She was not about to accept this fate. She was not about to be reduced to life as an experimental subject or wired with control devices.
No!
She felt the change begin, a stomach-turning nausea, a creeping of the flesh. Her hands swelled within the cement blocks. She felt pressure, felt pressure become pain, but she glanced at the picture of Brianna for strength and gritted her teeth, bearing the pain.
But then the transformation stopped.
The cementing had worked. She was helpless, her power blocked.
Hours and then days passed, time evident to Dekka only because of the changing of the staff who poked and prodded and stabbed needles into her veins. What they were pushing into her bloodstream she did not know. Her questions were ignored; her threats were ignored; her demands, her recitation of her constitutional rights as an American citizen, all ignored, ignored as if they were all deaf, as if no sound was emerging from Dekka’s throat. All communication was one-way: they would speak to her as if she was a child, and her every response was ignored.
“We’re going to take the blocks off and give you a bath,” a technician said on what Dekka believed was her third day. “Don’t worry, though, it will be all female staff.”
Dekka rolled her eyes to see him. Youngish with a silly ginger beard.
“What I’m pushing into your veins right now is propofol,” the tech explained. “It will put you into a trance state. You will be unable to resist. You will be barely able to move, let alone focus enough to morph.”
It was Dekka’s first time really hearing, internalizing that word, “morph.” But that was not what caught her attention. Rather, it was the careful way the tech explained how she would feel. Because the thing was, she did not feel fuzzy or unfocused or sedated. The propofol was flowing, she could see it drip, drip, dripping in the plastic bag hung just over her head.
Nothing. In fact, if anything she felt energized, clear, aware to a degree she had not since waking to find herself cemented.
She met the tech’s gaze. He had eyes of an uncertain color, maybe green, though in this light it was hard to pin down. She shot a questioning look at him. After a furtive look around the room, he leaned close, stretching over her to unlatch her left hand. And in the barest whisper he said, “Remember me, goddess. Remember my service to you.”
Goddess?
Dekka said nothing. She gave the most minimal nod, then stared blankly at the ceiling, faking the drug-induced coma she knew all too well.
Female techs maneuvered her into a wheelchair. She sagged convincingly, like a big sack of potatoes. They pushed her down the hall to a room with a deep claw-foot tub, like something from Restoration Hardware.
They began stripping off her flimsy hospital gown and socks, chatting among themselves as if she wasn’t even there. They hauled her by main force to the tub and settled her into warm water.
It was delicious on her skin, so sensual that for a moment she hesitated to disrupt the animal pleasure of warm water. But only for a moment.
She’d had no time to experiment with her new power, but she’d had long experience of reaching that part of her mind.
She hoped she wouldn’t kill anyone this time. She reminded herself to take care, to try not to kill anyone. They were just government employees, after all, just techs and nurses, no different really from the three she’d accidentally slain during her first display of power.
She pictured the power, imagined it, tried to define it, to find a way to focus it. Where to strike? How?
The room had tile walls and no window. No way to know for sure which direction to take. So Dekka picked the largest expanse of wall. And she let her mind go where it had rarely gone since the days of the FAYZ.
The change began.
Dekka felt her skin crawling, sliding over her bones, fur sprouting from flesh, hair moving of its own accord. It was eerie, not painful but deeply disturbing. She looked at her hands as five black fingers melted together to make four. This time she forced herself to pay attention, to observe. Not four fingers, really, four full length and one that shrank and rotated toward her palm.
Cat paws, that’s what they reminded her of, these hands, though with longer fingers and no . . . But wait? Did she have claws?
“What the . . . ?” one of the techs yelled suddenly.
The others turned to the tub, gaped, then retreated in a hurry. There was a red panic button on the wall, and one of the techs reached for it.
“Stand back,” Dekka said in a voice that was not her own.
She sat up in the tub, drew her legs back, and saw that they, too, were changed, fur-covered but still otherwise human, down to the human-shaped feet. No time to freak out, no time to stare or to run searching for a mirror. Dekka rose in a single effortless motion, held up her freed hands, furry palms out toward the wall, opened her mouth, and screamed.
MmmmmrowwwRRRRRR!
Then a second sound, less biological, as the world around her passed through that invisible blender.
Grrrraaaaaccckkk!
It was a noise like a hundred chain saws biting into a hundred trees all at once.
The wall exploded outward in a storm of shredded tile, wallboard, wood, steel, pipe, and wire. And suddenly she was looking at a large room full of office cubicles. A dozen faces covered in dust and debris stared ope
nmouthed at the space where a wall had once been and where now stood a naked, damp, furry, snake-haired . . . monster.
“Run!” Dekka yelled. “Run away!”
They did.
Something tugged at her, a hand on her shoulder. She spun, ready to do whatever she had to do, and found herself face-to-face with Ginger Green Eyes.
“I thought you might want this.” He handed her something rectangular wrapped hastily in a plastic bag. Dekka knew what it was.
“Remember,” he said.
Dekka nodded. “I owe you one. Maybe even two.”
Dekka raised her free hand, shrieked, and blew out the next wall. Now she was looking at a debris-strewn cafeteria and, finally, through the cafeteria windows: sunlight!
She exploded that final, exterior wall and ran toward daylight. She stopped on seeing a large, portly man lying quivering on the floor. “You,” she snapped. “Give me your clothes. Now!”
By the time he had stripped off a dress shirt and slacks and Dekka had put them on, the guards came rushing, weapons leveled.
Dekka aimed at the scattered chairs and tables, exploded them into shreds, and without thinking hurled the debris tornado at the guards. That last move was almost a flourish, a twist of her hands and a directed gaze.
Oh, there are tricks still to be discovered in this body, in this power!
Dekka gazed with intense, almost physical longing at the outside, the weak sunlight, the wedge of blue sky. But the courtyard was filling with armed men and Dekka did not want to hurt them, so she spun around and ran up the corridor, moving now beyond any place she’d explored. Behind her came armed men and women, boots clattering on floor tile, and now there were sirens everywhere and a loudspeaker announcing, Condition Yellow, Condition Yellow, this is not a drill in a flat computer voice.
Some part of Dekka vaguely resented the idea that she was only a Condition Yellow. Surely there was a Condition Red, and surely she deserved that designation.
Suddenly, she ran out of corridor, which was just as well since she was terribly out of shape and feeling it—a reality not helped by days locked down and cemented.
“Not as young as I used to be,” she panted, hands on knees, doubled over with a stitch in her side. Or else, she thought darkly, this body, this . . . this morph . . . this bizarre, terrifying body that seemed to incorporate elements of cat and Medusa wasn’t big on endurance. Behind her the guards yelled, “Freeze! Freeze!” and rushed. Ahead the corridor ended in what looked a lot like a bank safe’s vault door. There was a control pad, but she didn’t exactly have time to play around with guessing passwords.
Time to test the limits of her powers.
She shoved the precious wrapped rectangle into the back of her borrowed pants, raised her quasi-feline paws, and with a roar the massive steel door began to peel apart, layer after layer of steel shreds, revealing more steel just behind, and the guards were yelling, “Halt or we open fire!” in voices barely audible against Dekka’s howl.
Dekka tried what she had not yet attempted: as the steel shards come loose, she formed a cup with one of her hands, and the shards of steel formed obediently into a swirling ball two or three feet across and growing by the second. The swirling ball of steel shrapnel spun, and Dekka focused her thoughts on a simple thought: Hard but not too hard.
She sent the spinning shrapnel ball flying. It whirled away down the corridor, straight at the guards, who fired futilely into it and turned too late to flee. The steel shredded uniforms, gouged eye covers, cut exposed skin, lacerated exposed jaws and hands. Guards screamed and Dekka, feeling sick at the pain she had caused, turned back to ripping open the steel door. The last layer was coming apart and a familiar male voice yelled, “I don’t give a goddamn how hurt you are, shoot! Shoot! Kill her! Take her down!”
Bullets flew, but Dekka had raised her left hand and as the bullets neared they fell, torn into smaller bits.
The steel vault door collapsed, a hole big enough to step through formed, and Dekka wasted zero time doing just that. She leaped through into a very, very different place. The familiar, prosaic corridors of the Ranch—corridors that might as easily have belonged in any government office building—were not part of this vista. She stood now at the rail of a steel platform high above a vast open space carved from living rock. Parts of the dirt and rock walls were held in place by orange plastic webbing. At the corners of the cavern stood three-story steel towers, four of them, each a fortress, with weapons—recognizable things like machine guns, and less recognizable things that still, by their positioning, by the number of uniforms on or near them, and merely by their dangerous look, could only be weapons as well.
The towers were pierced by windows with glass so thick the men behind them were distorted and the light within shone a sickly green. There could be no question that these were guard towers, more massive and sophisticated versions of the guard towers at any maximum-security prison.
And there were prisoners.
Two tall cell blocks were cut into the rock walls, ziggurats of steel and bulletproof glass, five levels in some places, four in others. Each level was a tier of cells, their doors made of glass that in some places was further strengthened by lattices of thick titanium straps.
The facility was obviously still under construction. At the far end of the yawning cavern, cranes and scaffolds festooned a third cell block. Sparks flew from welders’ torches, the engines of huge earthmovers roared, low-built trucks slowly hauled great loads of steel, while an overhead conveyor belt trailed cables carrying funnels full of wet concrete.
Dekka did not want to go down there. She did not want to go down there at all. But when she looked back she saw a startling sight: guards dressed head to toe in bulky flame-retardant suits were advancing, spraying liquid fire ahead of them.
Kill or run? And part of her mind thought, How many times have I faced that choice?
How many lives had she already taken, in the before and in the now? How many was the right number to die for Dekka’s freedom?
She ran down the stairs, her feet slippery on the steps so that she clattered, half sliding, down to the next landing. But her strange morphed body felt pain only distantly, and while this body might be low on endurance it was strong as hell and quick, and Dekka rose instantly. Guards from below rushed up the stairs toward her.
Flamethrowers behind, automatic weapons ahead.
Just how much punishment will this body take?
Dekka gathered herself up, sucked in a deep breath, muttered something that was either a prayer or a curse, and leaped over the railing into the void, fifty feet above the unforgiving packed-earth ground below. As she jumped she spun in midair, raised her hands, howled, and shredded the levels of stairs and catwalks and platforms as she fell, destroying everything below the flamers and everything above the gunmen, cutting each off. The shrapnel fell in a rain of steel, and it would cut and it would bruise, but—Dekka hoped—it would not kill.
She hit the ground. Her legs buckled, her spine was a single long, stabbing pain—yes, it seemed there were limits to her body’s pain tolerance—but she rolled with the impact and lay winded, facedown. She inventoried her body: Her legs could move. Her arms could move. And to her amazement, when she stood up her muscles lifted her effortlessly.
Okay then, that’s great. Now how the hell do I get outta here?
There was an exit door directly below the now-shaky platform, but if she shredded her way through that door she’d likely bring the rest of the catwalk down on her head and kill the men still clinging precariously above. She turned the other direction and ran, ran past parked earthmovers, threaded her way through piled construction supplies, and dodged a truck whose driver saw her and promptly ran his vehicle into the base of the nearest guard tower. Dekka emerged from the construction mess face-to-face with the lowest tier of cells.
She stopped, staring in disbelief. On the other side of the glass was not the narrow jail cell she expected to see, but a room the size of a
double-wide trailer. The sides of the room opened onto still more glass-and-steel barred cells. This facility was far larger than she’d imagined.
How many prisoners is Peaks holding?
But that question was quickly replaced by another one.
What in God’s name is he doing?
The room beyond the glass was dominated by a stainless-steel table bolted to a stainless-steel floor. Beneath that table hung a thicket of wires, blue, green, yellow, and red, and threaded through those wires was a maze of clear plastic tubes pulsing with fluids.
Atop the table were four glass bell jars.
And within each of the bell jars, a head. A human head.
B-r-r-r-r-r-r-t!
The bulletproof glass of the nearest cells starred from the rapid-fire machine gun coming from behind Dekka.
Dekka dropped, turned, and saw a drone flying on four horizontal propellers, zooming toward her, gun blazing.
She turned it to scrap metal in midair, but she could see the guns of the two nearest towers now pivoting toward her.
“Condition Red, Condition Red, this is not a drill,” the loudspeakers blasted.
Red. That’s more like it.
Dekka had begun to learn a valuable lesson: regular people thought of walls as walls, but to Dekka they could be doorways. So could bulletproof glass.
She raised her hands and shredded the glass that came flying off in a shower of crystal shards, whirling around to form a tornado of random-shaped diamonds behind her. She leaped through the hole she’d made and into the chamber beyond, meaning to cut her way right through the far wall and the earth beyond and up into the sunlight.
And then, one of the heads opened its eyes.
“Aaaah!” Dekka yelped.
She stared in shock so profound, it paralyzed. What she’d imagined was some bizarre morgue with decapitated heads mounted for study was quite a bit worse than that. The four heads, the heads without bodies, were alive! Alive and watching her, their eyes wide, their mouths moving soundlessly.
But maybe not really soundlessly.
Dekka spotted a handle in the side of the nearest bell jar, lifted the glass, and hurled it aside. And now the mouth was no longer silent. In a wheezing but unmistakably human voice, the head said, “Don’t hurt us!”