Disclaimer: Kay, Paige, Sate, and Jacob are mine. Not a bad bunch if I do say so myself. Except for Sate, he's a bit creepy.
Black Ice
By Be Boring
Chapter 13: Making Plans
Kay wasn't quite sure how she felt when the young woman, who she'd learned was Lucia Madigan, told her that she could get dressed again and led the other two familiars out of the room. On one hand, she was relieved the procedure was over, but on the other, she knew this meant that it wouldn't be long before several other women were pregnant with the embryos that she was meant to carry. She had no idea how many they were planning on creating, but she could have as many as fifty children in nine months. Of course, they would all be killed right away, but it didn't make their existences any less important.
Jacob knocked on the door a few minutes later. "Are you ready?"
She leaned against the table, wishing they would just shoot her and get it over with. "Yeah, I'm ready."
He opened the door and stepped in, taking in her sullen appearance. "Come on, let's get going." She walked towards him, half smiling when his fingers tightened on his gun. She had no intention of attacking him, that wouldn't exactly help her cause. She didn't even slow down as she passed him, she just continued straight out the door. He turned and rushed out after her to make sure she headed in the right direction. When he was walking along comfortably behind her, he commented, "I'm surprised you didn't try to attack me. After all, we both know you're quite a bit stronger than me."
"What's the point? I wouldn't even get twenty feet before I'd have thirty of you people on me, and even I can't deal with that. I may as well keep around the only person I can joke around with. I haven't seen any of your friends even show potential for a sense of humor."
"I guess I'm supposed to take that as a compliment."
"You can take it however you want," she replied wearily. She just wanted to be alone again. For some reason that procedure had made the reality of her situation come crashing down on her. Just before they reached her cell, she turned around to face him, forcing him to stop before he ran into her. "Can I ask you something?"
He stepped backward, unsure what to think. "I guess," he replied tentatively.
"What do you really think getting rid of the ordinaries will accomplish? What's in it for you? You'll have a full out war on your hands with the transgenics, and once they're gone, if you can beat them, you'll have no one to be stronger than. All you'll have managed to do is seriously cut down on the population of the world. I'm sure some races will even be completely wiped out. I don't think I've ever seen an oriental familiar. Then you won't be superior to anything. There'll be millions of jobs that you won't have enough people to fill, and what about the children who haven't been initiated yet? Couldn't the Coming kill them? Besides that, there's going to be billions of bodies that you'll have to find something to do with."
Jacob gestured for her to walk into the cell before he bothered to answer. "The war with the transgenics was never meant to be, but seeing as how it's inevitable, I don't think it will be much of an issue. I don't think you fully appreciate how many of my people are out there. We outnumber your kind twenty to one. After that, I think the deaths of the ordinaries will be a relief. We've been hiding for so many years, it will finally be our chance to live freely. I don't think you'll need to worry about races being decimated, we've managed to include so many in our breeding program that I doubt anyone's been left out. Just because you haven't seen them doesn't mean they don't exist. As for the children, I've worried about that as well, but we have to put our faith in the strength of our blood."
Something about the look in his eyes when he talked about the children aroused her curiosity. "Do you have kids that haven't been initiated yet?"
He glanced down at his left hand, where she noticed the wedding ring on his finger for the first time. "My wife is pregnant with our third child, which means it will be my first baby to live. Naturally my wife will die in the Coming, as was to be expected, but my baby won't even be six months old if they set it off right when your offspring are born. Of course I worry about that, but if he or she doesn't make it then I'll just have to pick up and move on."
Kay couldn't help thinking that was a very cold way of looking at things, but she bit back the response she dearly would have loved to give. Be nice, Kay, otherwise you'll never get him to trust you. "I wouldn't envy you then. I couldn't imagine that kind of pain."
Why was he even having this conversation with her? He had absolutely no idea. "Are you thinking about your daughter?"
Kay smiled inwardly. He was so easy to manipulate, she knew exactly how she could steer the conversation in the direction she wanted. "Yeah, I was just wondering how she was doing. Before you guys caught me, she had hit her head on the ground and was unconscious. I hope they got her to wake up. I shouldn't bother thinking about it though, it's not like I'll ever find out. So, are you hoping for a boy or a girl for your first kid? I'll bet you're hoping for a boy." She knew she couldn't keep the discussion depressing for long or he wouldn't want to talk to her again.
Just as she thought, that brightened him right up. "Yeah, I'd like a boy first. A girl might be better though, because for some reason girls have always been able to survive the initiation easier. It must be the fact that the key is a girl. Apparently the virus gets along with females better. Why am I even talking to you about my kid?"
She shrugged carelessly. "I don't know, you tell me. By the way, what do I do about a bathroom? Am I supposed to knock on the door and announce every time I need to take a leak?"
He rolled his eyes at her choice of words. "Very ladylike of you to ask that way. Yeah, I guess you just knock. Don't share that much detail, though."
"Fine, be a prude. Can I just go now so I don't have to ask Sate later? I think he'd pull some kind of trick on me, like making the toilet try and buck me off."
He grinned in spite of himself and gestured for her to follow him. "Come on, let's go before you put any more weird images in my head."
As they neared the college, Ben could tell right away that they wouldn't be able to get too close. One of the familiars from earlier was sitting outside of the garage Logan had mentioned smoking a cigarette. "Just go around the block," he ordered quietly, trying to get a look inside the garage. The three main doors were closed, but a side door just meant for a person was open and he managed to catch a glimpse of a semi inside. "I think she's in there," he told Logan, wishing he could have gotten a better look. "Go around the block again and I'll see if I can catch the logo."
Logan circled the building, studying the people as he passed. Strange how everyone here seems to be in great shape, he thought sarcastically. Even though he had never taken a close look before, now he couldn't believe he hadn't realized what this place was. There wasn't a single overweight person in sight, or anyone who looked overly skinny. It was almost boring to look at a scene with such little diversity. He averted his eyes quickly when a girl walking along the sidewalk glanced their way suspiciously. The last thing they needed was to find themselves surrounded by an entire school of hormone-driven familiars. When they reached the front of the garage again, he pulled over to the side of the road and pretended to be looking for something in the back seat. Ben stared unabashedly out the window, not caring who saw him. Familiars weren't much faster than typical humans, they could easily get away if he saw them coming early enough.
"Hey, I thought I saw her!"
Logan looked up, peering through the door in the distance. "Really? Are you sure?"
"Yeah, but it was only for a second. Some guy was walking behind her with his gun out, so they must have been moving her somewhere. They weren't heading towards the main building, though. It looked like they were going farther into the garage."
"I wonder if they built a containment area into the wall of the garage somewhere? This side doesn't look like it's very thick to me, so it must be on the other side."
"Go around again, I'll see if I can spot anything."
Once again, Logan drove around the block, slowing when they reached the other side of the garage. "This must be the side that the original construction workers made, because it looks the same as the main building. It's very possible that they could have made it double layered and hid a holding cell in there somewhere. How would they hide the door on the inside?"
"If this place only has familiars, why would they have to? You can probably see the door clear as day from the inside."
Logan immediately aimed his Aztec for home. "Don't even think about it right now."
Ben looked at him innocently. "Think about what?"
"You were thinking of going in there right now to see if the door was visible, I could see it all over your face. Not that I blame you, it's going to be hard enough to run in there and find that door if it happens to actually be hidden, but it's just not a good idea without backup and a better idea of what we could run into. We still don't know what made Kay stop moving like that. If they have a telekinetic person in there, we have to be prepared. I think we're going to need everyone for this, even though I'm sure Max will make me stay home." He sounded so sarcastic when he said that that Ben looked at him with his eyebrows raised.
"That's probably for the best, you know. Now that the electricity is back on, you can use your computers to help keep an eye on things. Besides, someone is going to need to watch Paige."
"I've never so much as held the kid, and I'm not especially good with children. I don't have any natural instincts when it comes to them. By the time I'm done with them, I'm on the verge of suicide."
Ben smiled briefly as they pulled onto Logan's road. "Yeah, that's how I felt when I first got Paige. I'd never been in the same room with a baby before, and suddenly I had to feed her and change her diapers. That last part was a learning experience, I have to say. After a while though, it wasn't such a big deal. I figured it all out and I started to get used to her. She's not too bad for a baby."
"Maybe not before, but she has a head injury now. You know, I know that nobody is going to like this, but nothing says we have to go after Kay immediately. They'll want to keep her around at least until the first litter, excuse the term, is born. They'll be expecting an attack right now, but if we give them enough time to think that no one is going to bother coming after her, which also gives us time to come up with a solid plan, I think our job will be much easier. I think we should at least wait a month, but I wouldn't let it go much longer."
"Why not?"
"I don't know if you know who Gem is or not, but she's an X5 who had a baby because of the Manticore breeding program. I guess she was one of the few that they never got rid of her heat cycles for study purposes, and she said about six weeks after she stopped breastfeeding her baby, she came back into heat. From what I know, that happened with a few other X5s as well, so we have to assume it will happen with Kay. She's already been separated from Paige for a little over a week, which gives us four perfectly safe weeks, then another one where we'll have to be nervous. We don't know if it could happen earlier, but I don't think any of us want her there when she's in heat."
Ben had never thought about that. Kay probably wouldn't even be thinking about it either, but she would have to if anything happened and they got her out afterwards. How would the others react? How would he feel about it? It was just a heat cycle, he knew better than to take anything a female X5 did during that time seriously, but would it make some distant part of him even angrier with her? That was the last thing he needed, he already wasn't looking forward to having her around again if their plan succeeded. He was sick and tired of dealing with emotions, but having her around would bring out the most painful feelings inside him that he'd ever experienced. That's how it had been last time.
"What are you thinking about?" Logan asked tentatively. He had watched Ben's expression grow darker and darker, and he really didn't think it was a good idea to let it go on any longer. The last thing he wanted was to have to deal with a self-destructive X5. Ben wasn't just any X5 either; if he blew up, he was bound to take someone out with him. My timing always has been impeccable.
"Just wondering how everyone would respond to Kay having another fling with the enemy. She screwed things up enough last time, I don't think Max and Brin would be too happy if it happened again."
Logan shifted uncomfortably in his seat as he pulled over in front of his house. "Well, I know it's not my place to say it, but I think everyone's being a little harsh on Kay. After all, it's not like she just decided to sleep with someone for the hell of it. She thought you were dead, everyone else thought she was dead too so there was no chance of anyone coming to get her, and she knew the Conclave would kill her. Things didn't really become fubar until after Zack pulled his little stunt. Then she got pissed at him and things went out of control after that. I know he regrets it and he's probably the only one out of all of you that is even on halfway decent terms with her anymore, but if it weren't for him, things wouldn't have been so bad. If he hadn't done that, I think Brin and Max would have been able to get over that one mistake and move on. Listen, I've been with her for the past several days and she still seems like the same person I remember. She was more stressed than usual, but considering the circumstances, I think that was to be expected. After hearing from Zack what went on in Crash when she tried to see everyone again, I really can't imagine what she's going through right now. It's like everything is against her, almost to the point of being ridiculous. If it weren't for Paige, I wouldn't blame her if she had killed herself a long time ago. When we get her out of there, I think I'm going to get her to tell me about everything so that I can write a book. It would probably make enough money to fund Eyes Only for another sixty years, providing I'm still alive at that time."
Ben smiled slightly. He could see what Logan meant. If he weren't so involved in the situation, he would probably be overwhelmed by the amount of things that had happened to all of them, not just Kay, in the past couple years. He himself had been a serial killer, killed by his own sister after asking her to do it so he wouldn't be recaptured by the undercover genetic engineering operation that had created him, who got him anyway and brought him back to life, then blew up so he escaped again and he found himself falling in love with the one person who he had hated more than any other as a child. Next second, he was "killed" again and nursed back to health by a man who had an implant attached to his brain stem to make him incredibly powerful and this time he found himself raising the product of the woman he had loved and the man who was dead set on killing his kind. How had he ended up in this damned soap opera anyway?
When they entered the house, they found everyone sitting around the living room. Paige was sound asleep in Brin's arms, Brin and Alec looked like they were about to doze off at any moment, and Max and Zack both seemed to be lost in thought. Max smiled when they walked in, appearing every bit as weary as she felt. "So, did you guys see anything?"
Logan nodded. "They're definitely holding her at the college, but it's absolutely jammed with young familiars on the alert. It wouldn't surprise me if they all knew she was there, even if they're not all directly involved. Did you get anything out of White?"
"Well, he admitted that the college was dangerous, which you already found out, but other than that we didn't get anything. We decided to stop kicking him around for now, though. If we kept it up much longer, we probably would have killed him."
Ben made his way automatically over to Brin so he could see Paige. She didn't even wake up when he lifted her out of Brin's arms, as though she knew that he was the one picking her up. "How long has she been asleep?"
"Maybe ten minutes," Brin slurred groggily. "So, when are we going in?"
Logan glanced around the room, feeling slightly staggered that an entire room of X5s were staring at him, waiting for him to respond. "Well, I don't think we should do it too soon. I realize that she's in danger, but it's not immediate. They'll want to keep her alive until the first round of keys is born, and if we attack now, they'll be expecting it. I think we should wait a safe amount of time before going in after her. A month would probably be enough, and in the meantime we should be gathering every bit of information we can. That'll be much easier now that the electricity is back on, and you guys can easily do any footwork. Seeing as how we're dealing with familiars, we'll need to make this plan as foolproof as possible. That way," he glanced with some amusement in Zack's direction, "we won't have to rely on any kind of luck to get us through."
Zack didn't look very happy about Logan's plans. "I don't want to leave her there so long. These people are messed up, who knows what could happen to her while she's there? Tinga's heat cycles came back about two to three weeks after Case was born and Kay is past the two week mark."
Logan's eyes widened in alarm. "Two to three weeks? Gem's and some of the other X5s' didn't come back until six weeks after they stopped breastfeeding."
Alec sat up, frowning down at his hands in his lap. "What about those pills we always took in Manticore? We managed to get a lot of those out with us, so Gem has been taking them all this time, but I don't think Kay ever bothered with them once we were out. They were supposed to regulate everything in our bodies so that we were always running perfectly, and I think the X5s that had heat cycles used them almost as a birth-control pill. It's not like it was preventing them from getting pregnant or anything, but it kept their cycles perfectly regular so that Manticore could schedule missions around them. If I remember right, they can't take them while they're pregnant, so they all just picked up on the pack where they had left off as soon as they were done breastfeeding so that the hormones in the pills wouldn't affect the babies. Everyone was always working along the same schedule with those pills so that nobody had to figure out who got what pill that day, so I'm sure they would all get their heat cycles in the same period of time after they started taking the pills again. Without anything regulating her, Kay could have her heat cycle any time her body felt like it. It may not necessarily be the same as Tinga's, but it more than likely won't be the six weeks everyone else has been having. She could go into heat tomorrow for all we know."
Zack groaned out loud in frustration. He knew that most of Logan's plan was sensible; if they wanted to have a good shot at succeeding, they needed to take the time to come up with a really organized plan, but how long could they wait? Kay had been on those pills before, so her body might still be sticking to that schedule even though nothing was forcing her to stay on it. She could very well go longer than six weeks before going into heat. "Ok, here's what we're going to do. First, I think everyone could use some sleep, so that's first on the agenda. Tomorrow, we're going to start casing the college and Logan, you're going to get us the plans for the building. Even if they don't include the room she's in, we'll be able to see vulnerable areas of the building. What we really need is for someone to be able to get inside and identify the people who are guarding her. That's going to be the tricky part."
"I'll do it," Max said automatically. She was used to this kind of thing with Logan's Eyes Only missions, so how hard could it be?
"Absolutely not," Zack snapped immediately. "Everyone knows who you are, you're the last person we should be sending in. Ben and Alec are too recognizable as well, so they're out too. I've had serious confrontations with two familiars before that easily could have described me to the Conclave, so I'm not much of an option either. I think Brin's the one to do this mission."
Brin was wide awake in an instant. "Me? I'm supposed to go into a familiar-infested school without backup?"
"What about Jondy?" Max said quickly. "I know she was caught by White's men once, but I doubt he considered her of enough importance to send her description to the Conclave. True, she's not Kay's biggest fan, but I think she'd go in if it was just as Brin's backup."
Alec cringed doubtfully. "I don't know about that, her feelings run pretty deep."
Brin frowned and crossed her legs, knowing that Alec wouldn't be happy with what she was about to say. "Actually, I think I should be the backup." When both Alec and Zack started to stand up to protest, she held up a hand and signaled for them to sit back down. "Listen to me, it makes more sense. Although I'm not as well known as the rest of you, I was at the big fight too. I'm sure plenty of those college familiars were there as well, so some of them might recognize me. It's easier to disguise Jondy than it is to disguise me. You could dye my hair if you really wanted to, but I still think I'm a pretty recognizable girl. If we changed Jondy's hair and really went nuts with makeup, we could turn her into an entirely different person."
"Brin," Zack admonished, as though he were speaking to a young child, "Jondy's pregnant!"
"Your point being what exactly? She's still early in the pregnancy, she's perfectly capable of doing this. As long as she's careful she shouldn't have to worry about getting caught by the familiars. I think our biggest concern is going to be convincing her to do it. I'll be the backup and I swear I won't let anything happen to her, but she's better suited for the actual job."
Alec sighed and opened his hands in defeat. "You've got a point, Jondy's all geared up for an infiltration gig. I'll talk to her tonight and see what she says. I need it to be clear though that I'm not going to push it; if she's not interested, I'm not going to bend over backwards trying to talk her into it. If it becomes that much of an issue, I'll go in there myself, and to hell with anyone who recognizes me. We're all at risk at least a little, even Jondy."
"If we're going to do this," Zack said, sounding slightly disgruntled, "I think both Alec and I will be backup as well. No matter who is going to be the main infiltrator, Brin or Jondy, we need to be as careful as possible. We're really going to need everyone in top form for this, so we don't want to end up in a fight while we're just casing the place. I guess we'll have to wait to see what Jondy says before we really get going with this, so I suggest we all head home and get some sleep."
Everyone mumbled their agreement and rose to their feet. Max watched as everyone headed out the door, then she turned and followed Ben as he took Paige back to the guest room. She could hear Logan moving around in the kitchen, he apparently knew how badly she wanted to talk to Ben. "Hey," she said quietly as Ben started designing another pillow nest at the head of the bed.
He turned and smiled when he saw her leaning against the doorframe. Once he was sure Paige was comfortable, he sat down on the edge of the bed and looked up at Max. "We really haven't had a chance to talk," he commented. "It's been kind of a busy day."
Max rolled her eyes and sauntered in to sit on a wooden chair near the bed. "Tell me about it. It's so weird, you've been alive all this time and you never came to see me, not even when you were on the farm. Don't get me wrong, I'm not mad at you, but it was really hard on me when you asked me to kill you and it just seems so out of character for you to stay away and let me go on believing you're dead. How come you didn't at least call?"
Ben rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably. "Well, it was never really the right time. I did come to Seattle once to see you with Kay, but that definitely wasn't the right time. That blind friend of your dog pal was killed, we even saw it happen. After that, things became pretty busy, and then of course I died again, which didn't help matters at all." She didn't smile at the joke, so he continued as though he hadn't said it. "Anyways, then I spent a long time recovering from getting shot in the head, and after that I just started moving around on my own. I wasn't really ready to be around you guys again. Even right now is much earlier than I expected to see any of you again."
Max sighed and glanced at the ceiling, not wanting to see his face when he answered her. "You're back to doing your same old stuff, aren't you?"
Even though it hadn't happened with anyone else, hearing her say the words made him feel a sharp pang of guilt shoot through his insides. It had been his extracurricular activities that forced her to make such a tough decision last time, and now he was back to doing it again. He didn't even want to know what was running through her head. "Yeah, pretty much. I'm not quite on the same level I used to be, but I still do it. Don't ask me why, either, because I know you were going to."
"No, actually, I was going to ask you why you stopped before. That had to have been a good six or seven month span you went without killing, and that's not even including the time you spent healing. Why did you stop during that time?"
"Isn't that kind of obvious? I suddenly had other things to do with my time."
She looked sternly at him, wishing he would at least give a better answer than that. "If I thought that all it took to get you to stop killing was to sit you down and play some Scrabble or Monopoly with you to keep you busy, I would have done it a long time ago and you wouldn't have died the first time."
He half-smiled indulgently, but it slipped off his face almost too quickly to be seen. "You know that's not what I meant. When I was on the farm, I had Kay. I can't really explain farther than that, but I don't have her now so I went back to my old habits."
"So I take it you know everything she did?"
"Yeah, I do. We talked at the big fight, which pretty much convinced us both that it was over. It probably wasn't more than two hours later that she found out she was pregnant."
Max bit her lip nervously, she could already see a dangerously dark expression coming to his face. "Hey, why don't you tell me about your adventures with the little rugrat here? It sounds like you've had your hands full." She smiled when he immediately started out with, "Oh, it's not that bad," and continued on to regale her with his various experiences in the world of babysitter-hood. As he delved animatedly into his time with Paige, she realized how different he was right now than from what she remembered. Her only memories of him as a grown man were from when he was still going strong with his killing spree. Back then, his eyes had always glittered with the dark look that had threatened his features only moments ago. Now, however, he seemed so much more normal. It was like she was in a room with two different men. One of them was a happy, relaxed, curious man that reminded her strongly of the creative boy she had known at Manticore, but the other was a dark, frustrated, frightened, angry, confused child that didn't know how to cope with the trials in the world around him, so he lashed out in the only way he knew how: very violently. The only thing she couldn't quite figure out was which one was he? Who was really Ben? Every last fiber in her body hoped that it was the man talking to her right now, but the tortured, aggressive soul she had met two years ago had seemed just as real. Her eyes wandered to the fitfully slumbering baby sleeping next to him. She just hoped that no matter which personality came out on top, that innocent little girl wouldn't get caught in the crossfire.
Author's Note: As always, please read and review!