Fun fact: I had no plot when I first wrote this in 2017. I still don't.

Title: Under The Water - AURORA

2 – Under the Water

'I honestly don't understand what Macbeth was going for with this thing,' Newton said quietly, turning away from the screen where he'd input all his data. 'It makes no sense – a bug that knocks people out, but also causes intensive bleeding? Logically that would kill them, but she's never done something like that before.'

'It might have been a prototype for something,' Zero put in, looking up from where she'd been absently staring at Vin's index finger for the past five minutes. 'The thing that bit him could've been some sort of failed experiment that escaped.'

'Maybe . . . I just – why would she make a creature purely with the purpose of incapacitation? I mean, really!'

'Sadie Macbeth, Newton. Are you really fucking surprised?'

'So you really think there's no easy solution to this?' Trixie asked, draping a blanket over Vin's still form, tucking it in around his shoulders.

'I'm sorry, Trix, but there's no doubt about it.'

They all fell silent.

Headquarters had been nearly overturned due to what had just happened. When Trixie and Newton had finally gotten to Zero's room, they'd found a near-hysterical Zero and an unconscious Vin, both of whom were completely drenched in blood. Zero wasn't exactly proud of how she had responded to the situation, but then again, none of them had been bleeding quite like this before. They'd managed to patch up Vin and bring him up to Headquarters, where they spent the next hour doing everything they could to analyse and treat the wound. Newton had then discovered it was far from a natural bite.

Now Vin was lying on the table draped with a clean sheet, and hooked up to a number of Newton's gadgets to ensure he didn't flatline suddenly. Blood was still trying valiantly to seep through the bandaging Trixie had applied. The sight of it all made her sick to the stomach.

'Well,' she said, her voice a bit gravelly, 'if there was a way of extracting the poison, maybe his body will heal on its own.'

'That's what I've done,' Newton replied grimly. 'Now all we can do is wait.'

'Considering the average lifespan of a fly, which is most likely what it was, that thing should die in a few days – if it hasn't already,' Trixie mused, tapping her pen against the corner of her mouth. 'I don't think anyone else is in immediate danger.'

'Yeah, well since that's all good and fixed,' Zero replied, brow creasing into a frown, 'what are we going to do about Vin? Soper's going to notice when he doesn't turn up to class, and we can't pretend he's just got the flu or something. It's a bit hard to do that when he's comatose.'

'We could treat this whole incident like your traditional spider bite,' Trixie said after a moment's pause. 'You know, get him admitted to hospital and everything. Except that would draw more attention to the situation than we'd like. Especially from Macbeth.'

Zero's lips curled in a snarl. 'I'll give her a piece of my mind, and then she'll be seeing the bottom of the garbage can.'

'Zero -' Trixie began, eyes pleading.

'Look, if I hadn't been there, Vin would have died of blood loss all alone up in that damn vent. Died! From something Macbeth created! I don't know about you, but I think this time she's gone too far. Someone's not gonna live out the year.'

'I know; I'm upset too. But we've got to think this through rationally, otherwise there's going to be more casualties. She could have a lot more than just a bug up her sleeve.'

'Oh yeah?' Zero said in a low tone, rising from her seat. 'Try me. I'm not going down that easy.'

'I know!' Trixie snapped again, finally succumbing to the hostile energy surrounding them and striding forward. 'But what the hell do you expect me to do, huh? Go in to face Macbeth with guns blazing, possibly blowing our cover? Get ourselves expelled blindly fighting a battle we know nothing about, or worse, killed? Because I sure as hell know Vin would much rather have you alive than dead, and that won't work out if you're in a casket come next week!'

'Guys . . .' Newton started, staring at one of the computer monitors with an apprehensive look on his face. He went ignored.

'Who says that's what's gonna happen? Maybe - I dunno - I won't get myself killed! But even if that is the case, I'd rather go down trying.'

'Trixie, Zero -'

'And what situation does that leave us in, huh?' Trixie shot back, voice rising an octave. Her eyes had begun to gloss over - whether in anger or fear, Zero didn't know. 'If you die, then something happens to Vin, that leaves Newton and I all alone! Alone! Do you understand what you're saying?'

'Would you listen to me, goddamnit?' Newton's voice cut in as Zero opened her mouth to retort, and they whirled to see him pointing to the monitor, eyes panicked. 'Look at this!'

The two of them froze as they were made aware of a diagnosis in a highlighted section of the screen. Zero had no clue whatsoever what any of the words meant, but Trixie's expression slowly shifted from anger to horror as her eyes travelled down the paragraph. When she finished, her jaw slackened slightly.

'Oh my god.'

'I know,' Newton agreed, pushing off from the computer desk with his feet and sending the swivel-chair rolling across the floor. When he reached the chemical cabinet on the other side of the room (where the main door had formerly been, several years ago), he began pulling out a number of bottled substances, comparing and considering each of them.

'Would someone like to bring me into the loop, here?' Zero posed irritably, her eyes moving between the two of them. Trixie, who had just pulled out her phone in a hurried attempt to Google something, paused.

'I don't know how to explain it,' she admitted sheepishly, watching Zero with a calculating expression, 'but, well . . . remember the voodoo shampoo?'

'Could I honestly forget?' she deadpanned. Trixie sighed.

'And the love potion experiment?'

'. . . what? How is that related?'

'Well, look at these two situations side by side – the zombies incapacitated me, right? The poison got into my bloodstream and my body shut down in reaction to it, so I wouldn't die. And the love stinkbombs, with the way Macbeth manipulated them, it gave her complete control over those affected by it.'

'And?'

'The chemical make-up of the bug's poison is disturbingly similar to the voodoo analysis; that's what the computer's been trying to tell us. It also contains a stimulant that weakens an individual's control over their own brain and leaves them susceptible to outside interference.'

Zero paused, brain working madly, and looked at Trixie for a long moment before words came out, albeit haltingly. 'And the bleeding?'

'The poison – it's almost corrosive,' Newton muttered, squinting at the bottles as he began mixing together a number of chemical compounds. 'It cut straight through the muscle tissue almost like it was . . . seeking out the main arteries. Once it found a satisfactory conglomeration of blood vessels, the corrosion stops, and the poison allows itself to be carried throughout the blood stream.'

'You've got to be shitting me.'

'I assure you, I'm not,' he mumbled distractedly. He rolled the chair to a stop beside Vin, before carefully pouring a trickle of water down his throat. He followed it up with a small, white pill, before scribbling something else down on the back of his hand and rolling back to the computer.

'So, since you know what it is, does that mean you can fix it?'

'I can try,' he said with a shrug. 'So it starts with this.' He picked up a bucket, now wheeling over to the sink he'd installed a few years earlier. He filled it up, came back, and promptly dumped the water on top of Vin.

Zero hissed as the spray hit her and recoiled like a cat, looking at Newton with wild eyes. 'What the hell?'

'Sorry, but this is all I can do until I get a decent sample of the venom.'

Trixie looked at him incredulously, before getting a towel out of the cupboard and mopping up the mess. 'And what was this supposed to do, exactly?'

'Shock the nervous system, actually. I was hoping that would give me some sort of response that would help me figure out what to do next.'

'Just give him antibiotics or something,' Zero snapped, grabbing the towel from Trixie and drying Vin off as best as she could.

'You really think antibiotics are going to fix this?'

'Well fine, then. I'll go look around Macbeth's office. There's probably clues there.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Trixie cut in, looking at her sharply. 'And what if there's more of those bugs?'

'Well I won't be stupid enough to get bitten. I like to think I'm a hair brighter than Mr Good-Looking over here.'

'That'll be hard to avoid. Look, we have to think rationally about this. We can't handle it like every other situation – bravado and blind stupidity only gets us so far. The stakes are higher here.' Her eyes flickered to Vin.

Zero growled, even though she knew this was an argument she'd lost a long time ago. She pointedly looked away, and made a show of roughly towelling Vin's hair dry. A moment later she nearly laughed aloud as she realised his indignation at such mistreatment. This boy and his looks, honestly. What was he going to say when he found out he had a welt the size of the European continent on his throat?

'Hang on . . .' Newton stared at Zero, his brow furrowed in deep thought.

'You better have a solution here, Ginge, or I swear to God -'

'No, I think I do,' he said, becoming animated as his eyes widened with some strange sort of light. 'What if it's not the venom, but the pheromones that are poisonous? Well, to a degree. But all the same, it'd be capable of incapacitation. What if the infection would respond to a stimulant, or something along those lines?'

Trixie inhaled sharply, clapping her hands over her mouth. 'You don't think -'

'Maybe. But it makes sense. It means the prey in this instance has no way of recovering before it dies of malnutrition. We're dealing with some serious Amazon-jungle style shit here. But how on earth did Macbeth get a hold of something like this? And why hasn't she been bitten?'

None of this was making any sense to Zero. Newton was contradicting literally every statement he made, and it was sending her thought process all over the place. However, this didn't seem to be a problem to the others.

'I don't think it does make sense. What's her overall plan here?' Trixie asked, frowning as she pulled one of Vin's eyelids back and studied the bloodshot mess beneath. 'I can't see an end goal, unless -' She froze, and stepped back, looking up as her mouth slipped open in horror. 'Unless it's a diversion.'

Zero nearly choked. 'What?'

'The safe,' Trixie whispered faintly. 'What if there was a timer – something that activates itself the moment anyone who isn't Macbeth walks into the room, through motion sensors or something – which released the insect . . . to protect whatever's in . . . the safe.'

Newton's eyes widened. 'We left it up in the vent.'

Suddenly it all clicked. The bug, Vin –

For a split second Zero thought she was going to vomit. 'And I left a bloody trail that leads straight from it to my room.'

Macbeth had already planned the endgame, long before they had been expecting it.

And now it had begun.

From what they knew, the safe was supposed to contain a small, mechanical robot that could crawl into the dormitories at night and inject its victims with a fluid that would turn them into what was essentially the mere shell of a human. A better word for it was probably "zombie".

Now, Newton and Zero were sitting up in the vent and staring at a slip of paper which sat where the safe had been half an hour ago.

Time's up.

It was printed in standard Times New Roman font, with black ink, on A4 printer paper. Not particularly terrifying. Yet something about those two words was enough to send the slightest thrill of fear through Zero's heart. She exchanged a worried glance with Newton as he picked up the paper and looked at it with an expression of dumb horror on his face.

'We're done for,' he whispered quietly. 'She'll kill us all.'

'No,' Zero snapped, snatching it from his hands. 'She's not that crazy. She's just stupid. And we can beat her – we always do. We just need to fix Vin first, and we'll figure something out.'

'We're gonna have to think fast, then,' Newton muttered. 'Because she probably knows you're a part of I.N.K., now, if she followed the blood to your room. She'll single you out, and then we'll really be in trouble.'

'Then fix Vin.'

'Fine,' Newton said abruptly, his tone becoming sharp as he raised his hands in defeat. 'Fine. I have an idea – a bad one at that - but it's worth a shot. Give me an hour.'

Zero certainly hadn't lived the most wholesome of lives.

When she was four, her grandmother had legally disowned her from all inheritance or financial support she could have received from extended family, purely because she was a bastard child. Her mother had never believed in marriage, or something of the sort, and until she turned fourteen, she never quite realised why. After all, she had been sixteen when Zero was born. That probably had an awful lot to do with it. So she never saw any of her mother's family again, and since her dad had been an orphan, there was no one she could turn to besides her parents.

At six, she was told she was going to be a big sister. This concept was awfully foreign to her – she'd never quite gotten on with the other kids, and now she was supposed to be some sort of mentor to one – but for some reason it excited her. This, she told her dolls, was her chance to prove she was going to be the best big sister in the whole wide world. They'd only stared silently back at her with their plastic faces and blue-painted eyes, but she knew they agreed with her. She was intuitive that way. However, when her little brother finally arrived, he was stiff, blue-lipped and cold. Zero didn't really understand why, at the time, but he reminded her an awful lot of those dolls. Maybe that was why she threw them all in the garbage later that night, shaking and tearful. Every single one.

Her mom had seemed almost as sad as she was. She'd cuddled Zero in her lap and told her that these things happen sometimes, and that not all little baby brothers quite make it into the world, and that all they could do was hope that next time they were a little luckier. Though she believed her, Zero knew no one had loved that baby more than she did.

There never was a next time.

When she was ten, her mother disappeared. She left nothing behind except for the letter she put on Zero's bedside table in the middle of the night, saying that she really was very sorry, and she loved Zero more than anything in the world, but she had to leave. Zero didn't understand why she'd done it. Looking back on it however, her parents had fought on a particularly disturbing level. Maybe sometimes those spats had turned violent – she'd been too oblivious at the time to notice – but the point was that her mom had left her. For some reason her dad had never seemed quite as comforting.

A month later she ran away.

Through some strange miracle she'd managed to avoid falling into the grasp of social services, and hid herself in the city streets for a few weeks. She'd realised that if she didn't want to get hurt, she would have to be the one to hit first. So she taught herself basic self-defence, and five days after her flight from home, as she stared down at the unconscious body of a man who had grabbed her unawares on the subway, she realised with some strange sort of clarity that she had a gift for finding weak spots.

(From then on, the people on the subway were particularly wary around the ten-year-old who had somehow managed to incapacitate a grown man.)

Her freedom was short-lived, however.

She was caught trying to steal a man's wallet in the middle of November, too driven by her own freezing limbs to consider discretion. Nevertheless, she was caught and hauled down to the local police station, kicking and screaming.

'DON'T TAKE ME BACK DON'T TAKE ME BACK DON'T TAKE ME BACK –'

One of the officers brought her a blanket where she was balled up in the cold corner of the precinct, and though she had kind eyes, Zero reluctantly took it before shying away again, eyes flitting around in panic as she tried to source a way out of the situation. Though her brief time in the streets had turned her somewhat feral, she was still particularly sharp-minded for a child.

The man with the wallet somehow managed to see straight through her. While the police were busy with finding out where the hell she'd come from, he spoke to an officer in another room, shooting her furtive glances through the safety glass. Zero didn't care – she was too busy feeling both angry and terrified, balled up beneath the blanket and trying to warm her aching joints. Finally, an agreement was reached.

His name was Cosmo Soper. He was the principal of a recently established experimental-school which had the capabilities of catering to the needs of – putting it lightly – "problem children". It wasn't intended to be a large establishment; only approximately twenty children, all a similar age group.

Here was the catch – he was happy for Zero to attend.

It was a boarding school, he told her, eyes meeting hers in a way that said he knew exactly why she'd run away. It could, for the meantime, be a new place to call home. Unfortunately, her family would have to be contacted to provide a small amount of funding – the rest would be handled by the government – and to legally enrol her, but she wouldn't have to go back to her dad, save for the summer holidays.

It had seemed too good to be true.

Obviously, it was what happened in the end. Between, however, was a lot of feral screaming, hissing, and bolts for freedom, because ten-year-old Zero was as irrational then as she was at sixteen. Not to mention she didn't trust this nice man one bit, because people were never nice. Her mom was the only nice person in the whole world, and her mom was gone. The kids at school were awful, her grandmother was awful, her dad was awful, that man on the subway – people weren't nice.

The world wasn't nice.

But somehow, she was being offered a way out.

In the end, she took it.

So here she was, six years later, sitting by her best friend's metaphorical deathbed, and though she wouldn't admit it, holding his hand in so tight a grip her knuckles were white. Here she was, loving like she hadn't since Mom left. Here she was, part of a secret agent group of all things. Here she was, messing around with weird gadgets and chemicals that Newton had made. Here she was, scraping together what little she knew about the world to write a half-decent essay. Here she was, filled with a true sense of belonging, of love, of home –

Here she was, with a family.

It was dark when Vin woke up. Zero nearly fell over in surprise, and then let out a shriek of horror when she realised he was vomiting.

But it wasn't vomit. It was too dark a red for that.

And red was the last colour she needed to see.

10/12/2021