title: littlest sister
series: sibling rivalry (01)
by: jane, the frog on the wall
rating: R, for Ben-esque crazy people.
spoilers: "and jesus brought a casserole"
disclaimer: Once upon a time, there was a little girl. And she was verry little, and didn't know much about copyrights or complicated things with big words. And one day this little girl wrote a fic, using somebody else's characters, which was very illegal. But then she told people they weren't hers, in a disclaimer, and it was a little less illegal.
notes: The siblings find out Max is alive, and decide to take her back. But they find out something unexpected, and things go a little nuts. "She" is Syl, in case you're confused.
feedback: send all questions, comments, death threats and everything else concerning the fic should be sent to Happygirl_com@yahoo.com
+++
She crawls through the cold, metal tunnels that are the Manticore air ducts, nothing more than a dot on the map to anybody but herself. Her feet are cold as ice, and she wishes she'd been able to keep her boots. But she knows shoes are a liability, that clanking rubber soles echoing through the air shafts are a bit of a giveaway. And if she gives herself away, if she doesn't make it to Max, she'll be a failure. She'll run away and die, and then Cam will be the littlest one.
She knows Jondy could have been the one to do this, she's not that much bigger. She knows that Zane could have been on the ground by himself, because he's strong enough to take Max down, and he was always the best one on the search-and-rescue drills they used to do. But he hasn't seen Jondy in eleven years, and he wants to catch up on things because Zack would never give away addresses and phone numbers. Of course, Krit's taken over the contact number since then, that's how he found Jondy and Zane and everybody else. That's how he got Cam to hack the Manticore files when Logan was too wrapped up in being selfish, and got hold of a map of the ventilation system. She wonders, idly, what kind of person draws maps of these tunnels. She pictures a tiny, balding man who squints through his coke-bottle glasses, crawling through the ducts with rolls of paper and pens. And a cell phone, and a sandwich so he could drip ketchup onto the maps.
Imagining the midget with the sandwich makes her realize how hungry she is, that in the excitement of the past few days she's forgotten to eat. She considers asking Zane if he has anything to eat in his van, but doesn't do much with it. He'd probably just start talking to her about food, annoying her into making noise and giving away her position. Bad idea. She comes to an intersection, and waits for instructions that don't come. She whispers Krit's name into the microphone on her collar, and he tells her to take the left shaft, which she does. They engage in the kind of friendly banter that only people on television and Manticore-engineered soldiers can keep up, which soon degenerates into Krit calling her a fragile butterfly and leaving. She makes a mental note to kill him when she gets back to Seattle.
She goes left, comes to another intersection, and asks Krit for help. It's not Krit, he's in the kitchen making a snack. It's Logan, and he's not nearly as interesting as her brother. Krit calls her irritating pet names, making things up as he goes along. She realises how much her big brother's irritating jokes keep her from getting scared, as she talks with Logan. He's all business, calling her "Syl" instead of "cupcake" or "darling desert flower" or "sweet thing." She turns right, paying attention to the floor to make sure she doesn't crawl overtop of the vent that gives her a view of the dormitories in ward A-15, where Max should be sleeping.
The buttons on her coat dig into her belly as she presses it against the edge of the grate and looks down into the room. It's not Max, it's the X-7s. She panics, blinks, feels sick, starts to breathe again as she looks down at the eerily familiar group. She can see Max, Ben, Zack, Tinga, Krit, Zane...herself. She knows they're not Max or Tinga or Syl, they're other names. Maybe they don't have names at all. She wonders if maybe they were the only ones that had names, thinks that maybe the names made them stronger, like a secret can of spinach hidden between the matress and the bedframe. But they were never Popeye, she knows enough about pre-pulse comics to recognize herself as one of the X-Men. She crawls backwards until she can't see the grate anymore, and wedges herself into a sitting position between the sides of the duct. She relays the information back to Seattle, hoping it's Krit. He makes a choking sound, and she asks if he's alright. "Yeah," he tells her, "I just forgot to swallow some sandwich."
"What kind?" she asks, feigning indifference.
"Tuna and radish," he says, "with mustard. And pickles."
She wrinkles her nose, hoping he's only joking about the pickles and the radishes and the tuna. "Krit, that's disgusting," she says in a disapproving tone. "I know you had a scarring time during your childhood, but Manticore shouldn't have fucked you up that much."
She hears laughter through her earpiece, muffled by Krit's latest mouthful. "Cupcake, I know you're only kidding," he says, because she is. It's all part of the joke. She sighs at the name, but he pretends not to notice and continues. "And because you've been such a good girl, crawling through the ventilation systems in Manticore - how is that, by the way? - I'll save you some."
She sticks her tongue out at him, even though he can't see her, and sounds exasperated as she replies. "It's lovely, my little horsefly, but I wouldn't touch anything you'd eaten with a ten foot pole. Where else would she be?"
There's a pause, and then, "I don't know...try taking a right toward the training rooms, I'll get Logan on it. Horsefly?"
She flattens herself again, and begins to crawl toward the next right turn as she keeps up her end of the conversation in a low voice. "Yeah...you're ugly, annoying, and persistent."
He gasps in mock-hurt, and she chuckles to herself, trying to remember that the situation is serious and she can't get too loud. "Rose petal of mine, I'm hurt," he says, and she has to bite back a laugh. "Your technique is so...so base. I'm more of a toad."
"A toad?" she asks, truly intrigued. "Explain."
"Well, you know me," he begins, pausing for effect. "I'm lumpy, covered in warts, slimy, native to Wyoming, and..." he pauses again, and she can picture the smile on his face as he finishes. "...horny."
She rolls her eyes and decides not to dignify his commentary with an answer, when she comes to another intersection. "There are times I'm glad we're not blood-relatives. Left or right?"
"Straight, actually. I'm going to go find Logan now. Think you'll be okay without me, my sugar-spun princess of perfection?"
He leaves before she can deliver another cutting remark, and she crawls forward into the tunnel. She likes the times she can spend with her brother, aware of the almost-irony that comes from the biggest and the smallest being the closest. After Logan, his reckless humor is refreshing, almost comforting. But now that Krit's gone, she's hyperaware, on edge. She *knows* about everything around her, without looking, and it occurs to her that the feeling is familiar. It's the feeling she had the night of the escape. It's the feeling she got an hour before Zack called her for help. It's the feeling she got when Max died. Suddenly paranoid because she knows that the ceiling is exactly eighteen inches above her head, she has a loose thread on her shirt and her hair is brushing ever-so-slightly against the floor, and it means that something's going to happen.
She comes to another vent, and inches forward on her belly, not daring to breathe. She looks in at the room below and fights the urge to vomit. There's a body on the table below, giving off the stench of death and covered in bite-marks. She recognises the remains from the drills they used to do that drove Ben crazy. The ones where they'd get put out into the forest with a criminal and kill them. She hears the door open, and six sets of footsteps enter the room. She looks down at their faces and her stomach tightens. They're X-5s. Brin, Saaraa, Brent, Allie and Max. Max, with a look of insanity and obedience in her eyes, her face and teeth stained with blood. She doesn't really hear the woman - new director of whatever and whatever, it doesn't matter - she doesn't her the woman congratulating them on a job well-done. She doesn't really see her hand Max a uniform and congratulate her on completing her training.
She crawls back as quickly as she can without making noise, feeling the bile rise in her throat and quelling the urge to reintroduce whatever she last ate to the world. She suddenly realizes that Krit's been talking to her for the last few minutes, yelling into her ear from somewhere near downtown Seattle. She tells him to shut up, but her voice is shakier than she'd anticipated and he knows something's wrong. Turning a corner and wedging herself between the sides of the vent, she starts to breathe again - shaky gasps that sound so *loud* after the silence of shock. She calms down, stabilizes her breathing patterns, finds enough voice to answer Krit. "Max."
Krit sighs, and she can almost hear him shaking his head, "Yeah, I know," he says, happy-go-lucky and unaware of the situation. "She's not there, cream puff, she's assigned to security detail. Zane and Jondy are handling her outside."
She can't find the energy to say something witty, doesn't know how he can make jokes. "Krit," she says, and her tone immediately makes him pay attention. "Tell Zane and Jondy to remain in position." He tries to interrupt her, but she stops him. "I'll explain. Just tell them to stay where they are and keep out of sight. Now."
Her voice was even, for a little while, and she hopes she can keep herself together for a little longer. He comes back, a little confused, and asks her to explain. He doesn't understand yet, but he's getting that hyperaware feeling that comes with something being wrong. "Syl...are you okay?" He tries to sound genuinely concerned, because he is, but he can't keep the panic from showing. "What did you see?"
"There was a body in there."
"So?" he asks, still confused. "You've seen bodies before. It's not all that..."
She cuts him off, whispering so he can barely hear her. "You know those drills we used to do back at Manticore? Where we'd go into the woods with authorization to terminate?"
There's dead silence, but she knows he's still not thinking the worst when he says, "Which ones?"
Not the X-7s. If it was X-7 soldiers that did that, it'd be okay, because they're young and Manticore-bred and they don't know any better. They don't have names. If it was anybody but Max.... "Max, Krit. It was our Max."
Something shatters, her finely-tuned ears place the sound of a plate breaking. She can hear his breathing, his gulps as he tries to get himself under control, the almost inaudible crunch that has to be Logan's table splintering in his grip. When he talks, his voice is hard and angry. "Take a left," he says, with the kind of authority that comes from being crazy with grief. "When you come to the vent, go into the room and down the stairs."
She obeys, but she's scared of him now. He's never this angry, because Zack's the one with the anger. Dead Zack, she remembers, as she pads down the stairs in her sock feet. She worries a little that her biggest brother might turn into a Zack, crusty and driven and stripped of capacity for feeling. She crouches under the bottom step, and asks him, "What are my orders?"
When he speaks he sounds crazy, and the part of her that can make jokes when her siblings are losing their minds and sending her on possible suicide missions wonders if it was the sandwich that did it. "Go into the hallway, talk to the people in the cells. We're going to free the 'nomalies."
+++
For an instant, she panics. For a fraction of a moment, hiding under the stairs in enemy territory, she almost screams. But her fist is in her mouth, so she can't scream, and as she takes it out and dries it off, she wonders how it got there in the first place. She can hear her brother speaking into another microphone, telling Zane and Jondy to capture Max and tie her down in the van. The drugs and violence it's going to take to keep Max quiet makes her slightly sick, but she fights it down as she follows orders with a grim determination. She will follow Krit's orders. She will free the 'nomalies, she will help them tear the place apart from the inside, because attacking the DNA lab didn't do anything. It was a minor inconvenience.
She pads into the hallway, startled at the fact that there's lighting and unprepared for it. There are no guards in the basement, of course, because nobody wants to work around drooling monsters. It's dark in the basement - not as dark as the air shafts - because the crazy people don't deserve to see each other. After the silence of the ducts and the stairwell, the padding slapping crunching dripping mumblings are loud. A horrible din of unfocused insanity. She has to stop herself from looking at the barcodes, because she knows they'll have numbers that are horribly familiar and sickeningly *real* and close to home. X-2 452. X-2 599. X-2 734. X-2 493.
The first cell is a decaying cricket, a bouncing girl with matted blonde hair who speaks in riddles. Cricket is barely tall enough to reach the top set of bars, and as she bounces and sends flecks of foam into the air and onto her clothes, there's something familiar in the set of the eyes, the angle of the jaw, the shape of the lips. She realizes that it's her, her predecessor by three generations. X-2 Syl, X-2 589. She asks what her name is, but Cricket won't answer, will never answer. She just bounces. 589's bare feet make meaty slapping sounds on the concrete of the floor, as she capers from one end of the cell to the other. She tries reasoning with her, asking for help, begging, pleading. She won't answer, and she moves to the next one, and the next.
They don't talk to her. None of them talk, and it occurs to her that maybe they don't know how, when she hears the creature in the fifth cell. He babbles to himself about death and war, frothing and twitching as he rambles on and on.
/: deathcakes me big crunchem bones eatem all killum good makem pay bigbigdeath...weseewholaughingnow makem starve notme nonono food for me eat bonesnblood and killum good deathcakes... :/
She crouches near the bottom of his barred door, because it's easier than standing on tiptoe and having her fingers scratched. "Hello?" she says, her voice far too loud and echoing off the concrete walls.
No answer. He keeps babbling, rocking back and forth on his heels as he studiously ignores her. She listens to him, and wonders if his ramblings are the kind of English they speak. Nonsense English, not unlike the writings of somebody named Lewis Carroll, the one classic author she read and enjoyed. The idea of a little sane girl plunged into a world of crazies appeals to her, somehow. "Deathcakes?" she whispers, hoping he won't hurt her for stealing his dialogue.
They're all pressing forward in their cells now, ears straining to listen to her, because theirs is the only language they understand, and it gives her the idea to maybe continue. "Wantum deathcakes?" she ventures, relieved when he nods. "I help."
No response, she tries again. "Mehelp?" There's a shuffling, and a collective nod from the group. "Where...?"
She turns her hand, trying to motion a key. The spokesperson beside her shakes his head, there is no key for the raving mistakes. She stands and examines his lock with the eye of somebody who knows their way around breaking and entering. As she reaches into her pack for a knife, she wonders if being able to conduct conversations with crazy people makes her crazy. And if so, how can she tell? Sanity is relative, after all, and it could be that the 'nomalies in the basement are the only creatures that are truly sane. Of course, this is the kind of thought that drives people to insanity, and she concentrates on the lock. Through her earpiece, she hears Krit tell her that Zane and Jondy have Max, and that she can go ahead with whatever she's doing. He sounds a little saner now, like maybe his anger's worn away, a little.
She turns to the next cell down the row, and begins working on the door there, thankful for whoever decided the locks in the basement should be identical. She frees the last 'nomaly in the hall, and turns to them. She places a hand on her chest, and looks around at her troops. The word sounds foreign in her mind, wrong and ill-fitting and something Lydecker would say, she realizes. "Helpme goleave?"
They nod, and she's suddenly in the middle of a marching squadron of madmen, four rows of ten. She counts as she walks, feels a spark of jealousy as she realizes that they haven't lost a single soldier to autopsies, or gunfire, or strange genetic diseases. Their matted hair and chipped, yellow fingernails don't bother her, relative to the eerie sound of bare feet marching in perfect unison around her. They take the center stairwell, marching in perfect unison, slaughtering the guards they meet with their bare hands and screams of demented laughter. She's shaken, scared that maybe she could be like that someday, that maybe Ben was like that before he died.
There's silence in the hallway, silence except for the fading sound of bare feet, as she realizes they've all left her but one. The spokesman, her 'nomaly, is waiting for her, waiting to lead her out. She doesn't wonder why he knows his way around the facilities beautifully, because she doesn't want to know that maybe they got a chance to explore. She follows him to the window, smiling with relief and something she won't acknowledge as gratitude as he sprints back the way they came, following the laughter and gunshots that echo down the hall.
She kicks through the window he took her to, and freefalls the two floors to the ground, slick with mud. She sprints forward and leaps the fence, dashing into the trees even as the searchlights find her. She climbs a tree and waits...one minute...two minutes...five minutes to see if they've noticed her, to see if they can free up enough soldiers to recapture her. Nobody comes, but she takes a moment to watch the building, knowing that the alarms screaming mean it's being torn apart from the inside, that they're finally getting justice. There's an explosion in one of the wings closer to her tree, the wing she recognizes as her own. She watches for a few minutes longer, before she jumps to the ground and starts running for the van she knows is hidden in the bushes.
She pauses after a few minutes, to wipe the blood off her face, her face burning from slashing branches. She finds no cuts, and realizes the wetness on her face is tears, not blood. She dashes over to the drivers' side window of the van, and hugs Zane as tightly as she can. He laughs a little, but she can tell it's forced, and she looks in the direction of his gaze. It's where Jondy's looking too, back at the burning Manticore complex. The alarms stopped sounding a while ago, but she can hear the screams from where she stands, a mile from the fence.
As she climbs into the van and takes a seat between her siblings, Jondy speaks. "What did you *do* in there?"
She looks at her with a smile that's secretive and smug but feels wrong, and tells big sister that she didn't do anything. Big sister wants to know what's happening. "That," she says, with a smile that flashes white teeth, "Is God catching up with them."
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[[[End]]]
series: sibling rivalry (01)
by: jane, the frog on the wall
rating: R, for Ben-esque crazy people.
spoilers: "and jesus brought a casserole"
disclaimer: Once upon a time, there was a little girl. And she was verry little, and didn't know much about copyrights or complicated things with big words. And one day this little girl wrote a fic, using somebody else's characters, which was very illegal. But then she told people they weren't hers, in a disclaimer, and it was a little less illegal.
notes: The siblings find out Max is alive, and decide to take her back. But they find out something unexpected, and things go a little nuts. "She" is Syl, in case you're confused.
feedback: send all questions, comments, death threats and everything else concerning the fic should be sent to Happygirl_com@yahoo.com
+++
She crawls through the cold, metal tunnels that are the Manticore air ducts, nothing more than a dot on the map to anybody but herself. Her feet are cold as ice, and she wishes she'd been able to keep her boots. But she knows shoes are a liability, that clanking rubber soles echoing through the air shafts are a bit of a giveaway. And if she gives herself away, if she doesn't make it to Max, she'll be a failure. She'll run away and die, and then Cam will be the littlest one.
She knows Jondy could have been the one to do this, she's not that much bigger. She knows that Zane could have been on the ground by himself, because he's strong enough to take Max down, and he was always the best one on the search-and-rescue drills they used to do. But he hasn't seen Jondy in eleven years, and he wants to catch up on things because Zack would never give away addresses and phone numbers. Of course, Krit's taken over the contact number since then, that's how he found Jondy and Zane and everybody else. That's how he got Cam to hack the Manticore files when Logan was too wrapped up in being selfish, and got hold of a map of the ventilation system. She wonders, idly, what kind of person draws maps of these tunnels. She pictures a tiny, balding man who squints through his coke-bottle glasses, crawling through the ducts with rolls of paper and pens. And a cell phone, and a sandwich so he could drip ketchup onto the maps.
Imagining the midget with the sandwich makes her realize how hungry she is, that in the excitement of the past few days she's forgotten to eat. She considers asking Zane if he has anything to eat in his van, but doesn't do much with it. He'd probably just start talking to her about food, annoying her into making noise and giving away her position. Bad idea. She comes to an intersection, and waits for instructions that don't come. She whispers Krit's name into the microphone on her collar, and he tells her to take the left shaft, which she does. They engage in the kind of friendly banter that only people on television and Manticore-engineered soldiers can keep up, which soon degenerates into Krit calling her a fragile butterfly and leaving. She makes a mental note to kill him when she gets back to Seattle.
She goes left, comes to another intersection, and asks Krit for help. It's not Krit, he's in the kitchen making a snack. It's Logan, and he's not nearly as interesting as her brother. Krit calls her irritating pet names, making things up as he goes along. She realises how much her big brother's irritating jokes keep her from getting scared, as she talks with Logan. He's all business, calling her "Syl" instead of "cupcake" or "darling desert flower" or "sweet thing." She turns right, paying attention to the floor to make sure she doesn't crawl overtop of the vent that gives her a view of the dormitories in ward A-15, where Max should be sleeping.
The buttons on her coat dig into her belly as she presses it against the edge of the grate and looks down into the room. It's not Max, it's the X-7s. She panics, blinks, feels sick, starts to breathe again as she looks down at the eerily familiar group. She can see Max, Ben, Zack, Tinga, Krit, Zane...herself. She knows they're not Max or Tinga or Syl, they're other names. Maybe they don't have names at all. She wonders if maybe they were the only ones that had names, thinks that maybe the names made them stronger, like a secret can of spinach hidden between the matress and the bedframe. But they were never Popeye, she knows enough about pre-pulse comics to recognize herself as one of the X-Men. She crawls backwards until she can't see the grate anymore, and wedges herself into a sitting position between the sides of the duct. She relays the information back to Seattle, hoping it's Krit. He makes a choking sound, and she asks if he's alright. "Yeah," he tells her, "I just forgot to swallow some sandwich."
"What kind?" she asks, feigning indifference.
"Tuna and radish," he says, "with mustard. And pickles."
She wrinkles her nose, hoping he's only joking about the pickles and the radishes and the tuna. "Krit, that's disgusting," she says in a disapproving tone. "I know you had a scarring time during your childhood, but Manticore shouldn't have fucked you up that much."
She hears laughter through her earpiece, muffled by Krit's latest mouthful. "Cupcake, I know you're only kidding," he says, because she is. It's all part of the joke. She sighs at the name, but he pretends not to notice and continues. "And because you've been such a good girl, crawling through the ventilation systems in Manticore - how is that, by the way? - I'll save you some."
She sticks her tongue out at him, even though he can't see her, and sounds exasperated as she replies. "It's lovely, my little horsefly, but I wouldn't touch anything you'd eaten with a ten foot pole. Where else would she be?"
There's a pause, and then, "I don't know...try taking a right toward the training rooms, I'll get Logan on it. Horsefly?"
She flattens herself again, and begins to crawl toward the next right turn as she keeps up her end of the conversation in a low voice. "Yeah...you're ugly, annoying, and persistent."
He gasps in mock-hurt, and she chuckles to herself, trying to remember that the situation is serious and she can't get too loud. "Rose petal of mine, I'm hurt," he says, and she has to bite back a laugh. "Your technique is so...so base. I'm more of a toad."
"A toad?" she asks, truly intrigued. "Explain."
"Well, you know me," he begins, pausing for effect. "I'm lumpy, covered in warts, slimy, native to Wyoming, and..." he pauses again, and she can picture the smile on his face as he finishes. "...horny."
She rolls her eyes and decides not to dignify his commentary with an answer, when she comes to another intersection. "There are times I'm glad we're not blood-relatives. Left or right?"
"Straight, actually. I'm going to go find Logan now. Think you'll be okay without me, my sugar-spun princess of perfection?"
He leaves before she can deliver another cutting remark, and she crawls forward into the tunnel. She likes the times she can spend with her brother, aware of the almost-irony that comes from the biggest and the smallest being the closest. After Logan, his reckless humor is refreshing, almost comforting. But now that Krit's gone, she's hyperaware, on edge. She *knows* about everything around her, without looking, and it occurs to her that the feeling is familiar. It's the feeling she had the night of the escape. It's the feeling she got an hour before Zack called her for help. It's the feeling she got when Max died. Suddenly paranoid because she knows that the ceiling is exactly eighteen inches above her head, she has a loose thread on her shirt and her hair is brushing ever-so-slightly against the floor, and it means that something's going to happen.
She comes to another vent, and inches forward on her belly, not daring to breathe. She looks in at the room below and fights the urge to vomit. There's a body on the table below, giving off the stench of death and covered in bite-marks. She recognises the remains from the drills they used to do that drove Ben crazy. The ones where they'd get put out into the forest with a criminal and kill them. She hears the door open, and six sets of footsteps enter the room. She looks down at their faces and her stomach tightens. They're X-5s. Brin, Saaraa, Brent, Allie and Max. Max, with a look of insanity and obedience in her eyes, her face and teeth stained with blood. She doesn't really hear the woman - new director of whatever and whatever, it doesn't matter - she doesn't her the woman congratulating them on a job well-done. She doesn't really see her hand Max a uniform and congratulate her on completing her training.
She crawls back as quickly as she can without making noise, feeling the bile rise in her throat and quelling the urge to reintroduce whatever she last ate to the world. She suddenly realizes that Krit's been talking to her for the last few minutes, yelling into her ear from somewhere near downtown Seattle. She tells him to shut up, but her voice is shakier than she'd anticipated and he knows something's wrong. Turning a corner and wedging herself between the sides of the vent, she starts to breathe again - shaky gasps that sound so *loud* after the silence of shock. She calms down, stabilizes her breathing patterns, finds enough voice to answer Krit. "Max."
Krit sighs, and she can almost hear him shaking his head, "Yeah, I know," he says, happy-go-lucky and unaware of the situation. "She's not there, cream puff, she's assigned to security detail. Zane and Jondy are handling her outside."
She can't find the energy to say something witty, doesn't know how he can make jokes. "Krit," she says, and her tone immediately makes him pay attention. "Tell Zane and Jondy to remain in position." He tries to interrupt her, but she stops him. "I'll explain. Just tell them to stay where they are and keep out of sight. Now."
Her voice was even, for a little while, and she hopes she can keep herself together for a little longer. He comes back, a little confused, and asks her to explain. He doesn't understand yet, but he's getting that hyperaware feeling that comes with something being wrong. "Syl...are you okay?" He tries to sound genuinely concerned, because he is, but he can't keep the panic from showing. "What did you see?"
"There was a body in there."
"So?" he asks, still confused. "You've seen bodies before. It's not all that..."
She cuts him off, whispering so he can barely hear her. "You know those drills we used to do back at Manticore? Where we'd go into the woods with authorization to terminate?"
There's dead silence, but she knows he's still not thinking the worst when he says, "Which ones?"
Not the X-7s. If it was X-7 soldiers that did that, it'd be okay, because they're young and Manticore-bred and they don't know any better. They don't have names. If it was anybody but Max.... "Max, Krit. It was our Max."
Something shatters, her finely-tuned ears place the sound of a plate breaking. She can hear his breathing, his gulps as he tries to get himself under control, the almost inaudible crunch that has to be Logan's table splintering in his grip. When he talks, his voice is hard and angry. "Take a left," he says, with the kind of authority that comes from being crazy with grief. "When you come to the vent, go into the room and down the stairs."
She obeys, but she's scared of him now. He's never this angry, because Zack's the one with the anger. Dead Zack, she remembers, as she pads down the stairs in her sock feet. She worries a little that her biggest brother might turn into a Zack, crusty and driven and stripped of capacity for feeling. She crouches under the bottom step, and asks him, "What are my orders?"
When he speaks he sounds crazy, and the part of her that can make jokes when her siblings are losing their minds and sending her on possible suicide missions wonders if it was the sandwich that did it. "Go into the hallway, talk to the people in the cells. We're going to free the 'nomalies."
+++
For an instant, she panics. For a fraction of a moment, hiding under the stairs in enemy territory, she almost screams. But her fist is in her mouth, so she can't scream, and as she takes it out and dries it off, she wonders how it got there in the first place. She can hear her brother speaking into another microphone, telling Zane and Jondy to capture Max and tie her down in the van. The drugs and violence it's going to take to keep Max quiet makes her slightly sick, but she fights it down as she follows orders with a grim determination. She will follow Krit's orders. She will free the 'nomalies, she will help them tear the place apart from the inside, because attacking the DNA lab didn't do anything. It was a minor inconvenience.
She pads into the hallway, startled at the fact that there's lighting and unprepared for it. There are no guards in the basement, of course, because nobody wants to work around drooling monsters. It's dark in the basement - not as dark as the air shafts - because the crazy people don't deserve to see each other. After the silence of the ducts and the stairwell, the padding slapping crunching dripping mumblings are loud. A horrible din of unfocused insanity. She has to stop herself from looking at the barcodes, because she knows they'll have numbers that are horribly familiar and sickeningly *real* and close to home. X-2 452. X-2 599. X-2 734. X-2 493.
The first cell is a decaying cricket, a bouncing girl with matted blonde hair who speaks in riddles. Cricket is barely tall enough to reach the top set of bars, and as she bounces and sends flecks of foam into the air and onto her clothes, there's something familiar in the set of the eyes, the angle of the jaw, the shape of the lips. She realizes that it's her, her predecessor by three generations. X-2 Syl, X-2 589. She asks what her name is, but Cricket won't answer, will never answer. She just bounces. 589's bare feet make meaty slapping sounds on the concrete of the floor, as she capers from one end of the cell to the other. She tries reasoning with her, asking for help, begging, pleading. She won't answer, and she moves to the next one, and the next.
They don't talk to her. None of them talk, and it occurs to her that maybe they don't know how, when she hears the creature in the fifth cell. He babbles to himself about death and war, frothing and twitching as he rambles on and on.
/: deathcakes me big crunchem bones eatem all killum good makem pay bigbigdeath...weseewholaughingnow makem starve notme nonono food for me eat bonesnblood and killum good deathcakes... :/
She crouches near the bottom of his barred door, because it's easier than standing on tiptoe and having her fingers scratched. "Hello?" she says, her voice far too loud and echoing off the concrete walls.
No answer. He keeps babbling, rocking back and forth on his heels as he studiously ignores her. She listens to him, and wonders if his ramblings are the kind of English they speak. Nonsense English, not unlike the writings of somebody named Lewis Carroll, the one classic author she read and enjoyed. The idea of a little sane girl plunged into a world of crazies appeals to her, somehow. "Deathcakes?" she whispers, hoping he won't hurt her for stealing his dialogue.
They're all pressing forward in their cells now, ears straining to listen to her, because theirs is the only language they understand, and it gives her the idea to maybe continue. "Wantum deathcakes?" she ventures, relieved when he nods. "I help."
No response, she tries again. "Mehelp?" There's a shuffling, and a collective nod from the group. "Where...?"
She turns her hand, trying to motion a key. The spokesperson beside her shakes his head, there is no key for the raving mistakes. She stands and examines his lock with the eye of somebody who knows their way around breaking and entering. As she reaches into her pack for a knife, she wonders if being able to conduct conversations with crazy people makes her crazy. And if so, how can she tell? Sanity is relative, after all, and it could be that the 'nomalies in the basement are the only creatures that are truly sane. Of course, this is the kind of thought that drives people to insanity, and she concentrates on the lock. Through her earpiece, she hears Krit tell her that Zane and Jondy have Max, and that she can go ahead with whatever she's doing. He sounds a little saner now, like maybe his anger's worn away, a little.
She turns to the next cell down the row, and begins working on the door there, thankful for whoever decided the locks in the basement should be identical. She frees the last 'nomaly in the hall, and turns to them. She places a hand on her chest, and looks around at her troops. The word sounds foreign in her mind, wrong and ill-fitting and something Lydecker would say, she realizes. "Helpme goleave?"
They nod, and she's suddenly in the middle of a marching squadron of madmen, four rows of ten. She counts as she walks, feels a spark of jealousy as she realizes that they haven't lost a single soldier to autopsies, or gunfire, or strange genetic diseases. Their matted hair and chipped, yellow fingernails don't bother her, relative to the eerie sound of bare feet marching in perfect unison around her. They take the center stairwell, marching in perfect unison, slaughtering the guards they meet with their bare hands and screams of demented laughter. She's shaken, scared that maybe she could be like that someday, that maybe Ben was like that before he died.
There's silence in the hallway, silence except for the fading sound of bare feet, as she realizes they've all left her but one. The spokesman, her 'nomaly, is waiting for her, waiting to lead her out. She doesn't wonder why he knows his way around the facilities beautifully, because she doesn't want to know that maybe they got a chance to explore. She follows him to the window, smiling with relief and something she won't acknowledge as gratitude as he sprints back the way they came, following the laughter and gunshots that echo down the hall.
She kicks through the window he took her to, and freefalls the two floors to the ground, slick with mud. She sprints forward and leaps the fence, dashing into the trees even as the searchlights find her. She climbs a tree and waits...one minute...two minutes...five minutes to see if they've noticed her, to see if they can free up enough soldiers to recapture her. Nobody comes, but she takes a moment to watch the building, knowing that the alarms screaming mean it's being torn apart from the inside, that they're finally getting justice. There's an explosion in one of the wings closer to her tree, the wing she recognizes as her own. She watches for a few minutes longer, before she jumps to the ground and starts running for the van she knows is hidden in the bushes.
She pauses after a few minutes, to wipe the blood off her face, her face burning from slashing branches. She finds no cuts, and realizes the wetness on her face is tears, not blood. She dashes over to the drivers' side window of the van, and hugs Zane as tightly as she can. He laughs a little, but she can tell it's forced, and she looks in the direction of his gaze. It's where Jondy's looking too, back at the burning Manticore complex. The alarms stopped sounding a while ago, but she can hear the screams from where she stands, a mile from the fence.
As she climbs into the van and takes a seat between her siblings, Jondy speaks. "What did you *do* in there?"
She looks at her with a smile that's secretive and smug but feels wrong, and tells big sister that she didn't do anything. Big sister wants to know what's happening. "That," she says, with a smile that flashes white teeth, "Is God catching up with them."
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[[[End]]]