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The flickering of the lights cast shadows she could appreciate as she prowled from darkness to darkness through the silent halls, only the background hum of the generator just within her hearing, not enough of a distraction to divert her senses from picking out intruders. Her domain. Her territory. Her killing-ground. She licked the last traces of blood from her lips and stalked on.
"Ms Riley, the only request I have of you is your absence, go away."
Jude bit back on her immediate inclination to see just how far a test-tube could be pushed up Adam's nose and spun on her heel to leave.
"Wait."
The deep temptation to keep walking warred with her orders to be of whatever assistance she could. Her feet seemed to be pro-rebellion, while her neck followed the Scabber route and twisted treacherously to let her look back over her shoulder as she slowed her pace.
"Yes?"
Adam was standing looking at her almost distractedly, none of the acid that had been in his tone visible in his expression.
"There are two things you can help with."
"My absence and my resignation? Or would Seppuku with a blunt paperclip suffice?"
"What?" He blinked, and then shook his head irritably as if to both clear it and negate her words. "Don't be ridiculous. No, I need you to get me a sample of blood that does not contain the mutant chromosome."
"You can have mine. And?"
There was a puzzled little frown, he obviously hadn't even considered she wasn't one of Genomex' Children. Honestly, the greatest mind in the county and he hadn't noticed she wasn't exploding all over him with terminal prejudice.
"Can you try and radio the island. Brennan is about half an hour from going critical, I want to make sure he's taken the sedative."
"And Mr Mulwray will listen to me when I tell him to take it because...?"
She had a good point. Adam actually stopped watching the test-tube reaction with one eye to give her is full attention as he considered, then shrugged and turned back to it.
"Because he's not stupid, because he has the well-being of the team to consider, and because you're an attractive female he probably has designs on despite himself. See Bennett to give the blood sample before you go, please. When you've done all that, I'm sure you have people in stasis from before this outbreak, those with the gene and those without it. I'll need samples of both, with clear care to avoid any kind of contamination."
Her arm stung a little, the bruise from a rushed needle job already forming despite the pressure of the cotton swab and tape over the little puncture wound. But she ignored it as she tried once more to reach the infamous headquarters of the Mutant X team, and received nothing but hissed silence for her trouble. If there had been a power outage, there would have been crackling white static, so something else had obviously gone wrong. Naturally. God forbid anything should go right after all. The shock of it might kill her.
"Grrrrrssssssssss"
Well, that was new.
"Brennan?"
What could only be termed a growl came again, louder. Her mind blanked for a moment, then clicked too sharply for her comfort into focus. Clearly Shalimar had somehow escaped and was now a large hunting cat wandering about a base with highly dangerous elements in it, even when there was no power. Just for once she would really like to see whether she could withstand the shock of things going well. Just once.
"Shalimar?"
Her voice croaked and she tried again, attempting to sound a little less like a tasty frog and more like a soothing, purring, yet dominating older cat. She couldn't say she loved her chances.
"Shaaalimar, talk to me."
"Sssshalimar huntsssss."
There was a moment of what sounded suspiciously like something hitting random buttons at the other end, and the static came at last. Looked like she wasn't getting the Oscar for "Best Supporting Actress In The Role Of A Cat Feral" after all. Damn. Jude stood from the chair, surprised to find herself rehearsing the best manner in which to tell Adam, rather than the best manner in which to tell the man she would see first.
Not only was he starting to make a habit of people slamming into him with force, he was starting to make a habit of waking up groggy and darkly suspicious of something less than healthy happening to him, or around him. They were harder vices to break than smoking.
Brennan took a breath before opening his eyes, the stab in his ribs telling him that bouncing to his feet and delivering a spinning high kick would probably only result in him falling over and coughing blood. So, maybe not then. Under his lashes he could just about make sense of the blurred forms around him. The lab, he was lying awkwardly on the floor looking up at a shifting ceiling, one numbed leg folded under the other with his arms down like he'd been dragged by the scruff of his neck and dropped.
He wanted to be sick but knew that to be high on the list of his bad ideas. His entire head hurt and moving just a little felt the same sharp pain there as well. Apart from broken ribs, a torn neck, nausea, dizziness and oh yeah, the sensation of being about to burst with the energy crackling around him, he was fine. On the down side, the meds that had been in his pocket appeared to be entirely gone. Wonderful.
With more care than he usually gave to anything except bypassing a particularly sensitive alarm, he bought his feet under him into a shaky crouch. So far, so good. Actually standing look a little longer, but he made it, all the while trying to ignore the fact he had no idea what time it was. Did he have minutes left? Seconds? And where the hell was Shalimar?
The last thing he recalled was her teeth on his jugular, at any other time it would have been a pleasant surprise, but the gnawing had been a bit of a turn off. Not to say he didn't have ex's with the same approach, but there were pretty much ex's for just that reason.
"Okay Mulwray, focus." He had time. He was sure of that. The electricity was building, but he had a little longer before he blasted himself and everyone else into kingdom come.
The room still wasn't coming into focus, he added concussion to his list of injuries and staggered towards the still shapes lying where he had left them. Unable to touch for fear of flash frying them, he leaned instead on a chair and tried to use eyesight in bad light alone to determine their states.
Both were still breathing, though Jesse was hazy around the edges in a way he was certain had nothing to do with his current vision problems. The kid looked like he was having some good dream though, lips curled with that half serene, half amused quirk that he'd come to recognise as cover for a hundred and one things. Surely not while he was sleeping too though … nah.
Under his breath, uncaring of the possible proximity of the literal man-eater his other team mate had become, he murmured.
"Hang with it man, Adam'll come through, no sweat."
Feeling a little steadier now, he crossed around to Emma. She wasn't smiling; her expression seemed caught in a permanent wince of pain. Even in sleep she couldn't escape what the world was giving her, pure and unfiltered. Maybe the sedative only made it easier on them not to hear her scream. He wanted to brush her damp hair away from her forehead, try in someway to make her more comfortable. But he hazarded a guess that the equivalent of an electric chair delivered to her head probably wasn't going to do that and kept his hands firmly gripped on the slowly melting plastic chair.
"Hey sleeping beauty. I don't know if you can hear me at all right now, maybe. Sorry if it hurts ... I gotta take a walk." He smirked with dark humour. "I may be some time." And instantly regretted introducing that little bit of morbid cynicism into her psyche, trying to think calm and remorseful thoughts in it's place.
"Shalimar is out, the meds are gone, but you're going to be okay, she wouldn't hurt you. Adam will be back, really, really soon. I..."
And she was there. Not waking, not a vision, but there all the same, he could feel her all around him.
"Em?"
There was heat, not like the fire in his veins that was slowly cracking his skin, but heart warmed. Comforting and affectionate, a little sad but optimistic, flighty but grounded; it was Emma. And then it was gone.
It took him a moment to find his voice, when he did it was with a smile and an almost amused shake of his head. "Yeah, you too."
That was it. There was nothing else he could do. If he tried to take Shalimar, he'd fail and probably kill them both. If he based his luck on the training area's force field holding against him, he'd probably kill everyone. Time to go.
"Yes"
It was low, barely more than a whisper, but held enough force and almost vicious triumph behind it that every man and woman sweating over their assigned research in the labs turned with almost disbelieving hope to look at Adam.
He was staring bright eyed down at the petri dish in his hand.
"It's not a virus. Oh, it's good, it hides well enough as one, but it's not."
Eckhart's command came over the loud speaker, apparently sharing no one else's sudden hope at the breakthrough, but rather a vexed tone.
"Well, spit it out, what is it?"
"Human."
She wanted to follow him, but he had been swept away quickly on the river, waterfall, that her mind had become. His lake drowned out by the flood in an instant. There had been something she so desperately wanted to tell him, warn him of, but now she was forgetting it, losing that last little piece of herself to the ocean. At last, Emma fell into it, only half regretful, let herself be carried away from the clawed shadow that stalked them in the guise of a disease.
Perhaps it was for the best.
Notes
Heh ... been a while. And not only that, people're gonna think it's a dern rip-off now. But this was started way before the end of S1! Honest! If anyone does remember this and have been waiting for the next chapter, sorry.
I make no promises when the next one will be out, but it will, really!