Chapter 6 – Saboteur

Inque stood at the back entrance of the old chemical factory. There was always reason for a rendezvous point. And she thought she had ruined that part of Curaré's plan. She thought. She morphed and slipped in through the gap in the door.

It seemed that she had been expected. The moment she was through, solvent-covered playing cards whizzed around the corner towards her. She divided herself into ten thin strands and spiralled towards the source of the cards, avoiding them as she did so.

But when she rounded the corner, Ten was no longer there. So she crept along the corridor. Abruptly she came to a locked door. It still used keys. She slipped through the keyhole.

She was in one of the storage chambers. There was no one there … except … a single limp form lay in the middle of the floor. Inque was by its side in a second. It was Deanna. There was a rope burn around her daughter's throat. Deanna was not breathing. Dead.

Suddenly the tip of a blade appeared in the centre of her abdomen. Inque laughed, a mirthless, gloomy sound. Blades could not hurt her. Then she saw the micro-wires. She threw her head back and screamed as a thousand volts of electricity coursed through her body.

Terry saw Melanie, dressed as Ten, sitting on the pavement outside the main gates of the abandoned SynPlas factory. She looked up as he climbed out of his vehicle.

"Terry!" she called when he tried to duck into a corner. "Wait! Curaré threw me out for not being hardhearted enough. I … I'll help you get in … she's going to kill Inque and Deanna."

He went to her despite himself. "Inque? Inque is here?" he asked.

Melanie's face seemed to twist in a scowl for a moment. Then she was just looking grave again. "Yes," she replied. "Come."

She ran her hands along the chain holding the doors closed. She found a weak link and unwound the heavy chain. Slowly, she pushed the door open so that it would not creak. Terry followed warily.

Melanie led Terry through a corridor and into a storage chamber. It was dark. There was no sign of Curaré, Inque or Deanna. He turned to her. "What –"

She shoved him backwards, hard. His back hit something hard, and he felt cuffs snap shut around his wrists and ankles, holding him to the hard surface behind his back.

Melanie laughed and threw a light switch on. A woman's dead body lay in the centre of the floor. Deanna's dead body. She pressed another switch. A spotlight flared over a transparent storage vat.

Inque lay unconscious on the bottom of the vat. There was smoke rising from her body. Electrocution. Curaré stood by a lever in the wall beside the vat. "When that lever is pulled, five hundred litres of solvent will rush into that vat," Melanie gave the commentary with glee. "First, you will watch that metamorphic blob die. Then you will die."

Terry tore his eyes away from Inque to look at Melanie. "Why?" he asked her.

Melanie's mood changed abruptly. Tears began to trickle from her eyes. "You! I never did have a place in your heart, did I? There was Dana. And now there is that freak in the vat!" she shouted almost incoherently. She lowered her voice into a menacing whisper, "If I can't have you, no one else will, either."

As if taking a cue, Curaré pushed the lever down. The mouth of a large pipe opened, and liquid solvent rushed into the vat, submerging Inque within seconds. The near-opaque liquid obscured her from Terry's view.

"That was all we ever needed Deanna for. To open the old pipe linking the vats in this factory to the new one next door. When it was done, she became … expendable," Melanie said.

The vat was filled, and Curaré closed the pipe. Terry started to struggle against the cuffs holding him to the wall, but they were made of reinforced steel. Curaré came over and handed her power-charged scimitar to Melanie.

"Stab through the heart, plus electrocution," the Melanie who was no longer the Melanie Terry knew murmured. "No mistakes." Curaré went to a high crate about twenty metres away, vaulted onto it and sat as if on a throne. Melanie drew the scimitar back.

A hole suddenly appeared in the storage vat's thick glass wall. Inque shot out of it in a blur of black. Melanie whirled around and slashed at her with the scimitar. The metal passed through Inque's liquid body, causing no harm. She seemed to be insulated or immune to the electric shocks, somehow.

Inque was angry, angry, angry. They had killed Deanna. Now they were going to kill Terry, too. She had guessed their plan correctly. She was strong now, stronger than she had ever been. She did not even feel the electric shocks from the scimitar. Splitting into five tendrils, she started assaulting Ten from five different directions.

Then Curaré jumped from the high crate. Just as she did, the glass vat shattered, ending huge shards of glass and waves of chemical crashing to the floor of the storage chamber. The blue-skinned assassin was bowled over by the wave. A curving piece of glass splashed into the liquid where she had fallen.

Pushing Ten away, Inque spread herself over the space in front of Terry, deflecting flying shards of glass. When it was safe, she dragged Ten from the wet floor and hung her by her wrists in the air. A third tendril clouted the barely conscious girl over the head, and she fainted.

Inque returned to her human form, dropping Ten and breathing deeply. She glanced over at the floor beneath the high crate. Curaré lay there, miraculously alive, conscious and not very badly hurt, pinned under the large piece of glass that had fallen on top of her.

Ignoring the struggling Curaré, Inque fished some keys from Ten's pocket and used them to unlock the cuffs holding Terry to the wall. The wave of mutagen had slammed his head against the wall, knocking him out. Mutagen, not solvent. Smiling, she passed an eye over her adversaries. Amateurs. Don't you know you're messing with a saboteur?