37 - Infiltration

We didn't waste time in setting our plan into action. The next morning I was loaded into the back of a stolen transporter and chauffeured by no one other than my daddy dearest. Unlike Erik, Fang wouldn't die if a piece of his hair stuck out from under the mask—his coloring and physical features were so similar to the Collectors he almost didn't need one, actually—but I couldn't help but double and triple check his outfit several times over before we left, just in case there was a feather or another giveaway sticking out from somewhere.

We had also taken much more care in making the transporter authentic than Erik had. No two-way communication, no food or supplies stored in the back, and all prisoners (i.e., yours truly) were properly cuffed and shackled and wearing an appropriate uniform, since that's how you'd normally arrive from a processing camp. Nudge had emailed the transfer order to the Citadel this morning, and Fang carried a copy of the papers in the front so that he could show them to the guards at the unloading garage. Once we were inside the garage, it was game on: there'd be no well-wishing glances, no good luck smiles, Fang would just take me there, drop me off, and then drive away.

And then the rest was up to me.

I'd practically spent the entire night before planning my escape. It wasn't a bad plan, I had to admit. Not only could I free Ella (and a select list of other high-ranking CSM agents deemed important enough to rescue) and make it out of the Citadel in one piece, but I had figured out how to get in and out without anyone ever knowing how we did it. Was I scared? Oh yeah. But at least I felt like I had a shot at pulling this thing off.

Even though the drive seemed to take an eternity while I was sitting in the back of the transporter, the ride seemed all too short when we finally came to a halt and someone opened the back hatch. I am officially in the Citadel. I struggled to keep calm as the guard beckoned me out and took a firm hold on my arm.

One of the other Collectors was reading through the paperwork Fang had given them. "A two-monther, huh? Let me guess—shoplifter?"

"Uh-huh. Her parents are fed up with her shenanigans," he told him, matching the Collector's gruff tone of voice, "so they pulled a few strings and landed her a couple months in here on lenient load."

"Ungrateful brat," the Collector muttered, handing the papers back to Fang, "I know the type. They own everything in the world, but they steal just for the thrill of it." Fang nodded, and without saying another word he got back into the transporter and drove out the garage door.

And then I was left alone with a group of unsympathetic Collectors who thought I was daddy's spoiled kleptomaniac. "This way," said the guard holding my arm, "you'll be given a number and put in a waiting area. When you hear your number called, answer immediately. Patients who give the nurses a hard time will be assigned to more mentally strenuous data allotments."

Patients, is that what we're called in here? Still, I nodded and did my best to play the part of a scared little rich girl. Just as the Collector had said, I was given a number and sent into crowded into a giant hall full of other prisoners—er—patients. The room was big and stuffy, with people squished up together side by side like cattle. Every couple of minutes a nurse's voice would call a string of numbers over the intercom system, and the corresponding patients would shove their way to the front of the hall, where the door was. But for every ten prisoners leaving, it seemed, there was another twenty arriving.

It must have been hours before they called my number, and when they did I didn't waste time getting to the door. The Collectors didn't have to worry about people not answering when called—whoever stayed in that room longer than they had to must be insane. The nurse who had announced the numbers stood at a podium beside the door, and as she read the label tacked onto my uniform she nodded and had the Collectors nearby usher me to the next area, which, of course, was another room full of people.

This one, though, was a lot smaller and had thinner crowd—about two hundred patients as opposed to five hundred. And this time we were moving fairly quickly through line-ups, passing through a series of detectors. I made it through without a hitch (I guess Citadel security staff aren't trained to look for wings with those full body scanners), and as the day progressed I found myself constantly swapped from waiting room to waiting room.

After the scanning, though, I was put through a series of tests and given several injections. It was demeaning, the way the nurses tried to be cordial but obviously viewed you as less than human. They were preparing you, like an animal is prepared for butchering. "This will help your body adapt to the suspension liquid," or, "Here honey, this will pass any solids out of your system before they tank you," or, "Let me cut your hair, it will make things easier for the technicians." All the kind bedside manner was just a ruse, a way of dressing you up for the nightmare.

I finally got my chance to act when they sent me into a small cubicle to shower and change into a wetsuit. I was alone for the first time in a good ten hours. There was some sort of electrical communications cable running along the top of the cubicle roof, I noticed, so I pointed my finger at the cable's plastic covering and melted through it with a beam of energy. I was a little worried about using electricity in here, since my feet were touching a wet floor, but all that was irrelevant once I made contact with the Citadel's system.

Carefully I riffed through the torrent of security measures and video feeds, until finally I found what I wanted: the security video archive. Carefully I selected an archived feed recorded a week ago and fed it to the security system, making it believe that the old recording was the live footage it received from the cameras. The guards watching in the security room might notice the difference, but I doubted it—with so many people passing through the camera's eyes hour after hour, who would take notice of a flickering screen and a couple of misplaced faces? Once that was taken care of, I disengaged and took my shower, acting as if nothing unusual had happened. I was now invisible to the cameras.

I felt half-amphibian when I emerged from cubicle: my skin was damp, my wetsuit clingy, and my annoyingly short hair was sticking to my face like a bunch of soggy threads—it was over a foot shorter than I normally wore it. At least they'd left me with a couple inches instead of giving me a buzz cut or something, I told myself. Still, it was going to be a frizzy mess when it had a chance to dry.

After that I was taken to the final waiting room, which was the smallest and nicest of all the rooms by far—perhaps they had opted for several of smaller rooms as opposed to one big one, to make the patients feel more comfortable. And I had to admit, the sterile metal chairs with tweed cushions, combined with the pale yellow walls, provided a much more relaxing atmosphere than the rest of the Citadel had to offer. It was almost homey, like the waiting room in my dad's medical clinic in England. Almost.

The wait was relatively short, so when I was finally called I felt like I'd barely had a chance to get my thoughts together. What did I need to do next? I asked myself. I remembered that now my main goal was to get sealed into a tank and transferred to the storage area without being sedated. Woo-hoo.

I was escorted by a nurse to a team of technicians, who explained the process to me, gave me my breathing mask, and helped me into the tank. It was hard, willing myself not to inhale—not only was I completely submerged in liquid, which made me feel like I was going to drown, but I had a mask feeding me cool, clean oxygen. But I knew I had to resist the temptation; one whiff of that stuff and all my plans would be down the drain faster than a bucket of dishwater. So I held my breath, forcing my chest to move in and out shallowly so the technicians would think I was taking the sedative in. Eventually, though, not breathing actually became fairly comfortable. After a couple minutes of fake breathing I allowed my body to relax and my fake breathing to stop, and I felt the technician reach down and remove the oxygen tube. Next they attached the probes, which stung a little, but I was able to grit my teeth and bear it long enough for them to seal me in and send me off.

Once I was out of sight on the conveyor belt, I breathed a sigh of relief, watching the bubbles escape through the mask's one-way seal. I didn't inhale, just in case there were still traces of the sedative in the mask, but by then I didn't really need to. Even though the natural instinct was to breathe, my body was receiving so much oxygen from the green liquid that, other than a stuffy feeling in my chest, I felt nothing. It was easy to forget about inhaling and exhaling in an environment like this.

But enough about my adventures in alternative respiration; at that point I was being hoisted into place at a connection point in the Citadel, like one more canister on a shelf of canned goods. My vision was blurred a little by the fluid, but I could see that I was surrounded by numerous tanks, all of them cylindrical like mine and containing an unconscious person. It was a chilling sight. I didn't spend too much time thinking about it, though—I had to focus! Any time now my tank would establish connection to the Brainworks, and if I let the information stream catch me off-guard I could be in huge trouble—

And just as I was thinking that, the data flow caught me off guard and swept me off my proverbial feet.