It was the doorlock that did it. It was a popup stud kind, and as Kat tried to concentrate on using the right terminology in the final paragraph of her amended report, a ka-chunkka-thonk sound told her that Escher had found it. The noise repeated itself, once, twice, three times, f-
"LEAVE THE FUCKING LOCK ALONE!"
Kat's yell was of startling volume in the enclosed space of the car, certainly beating the radio. Escher's hand dropped from the lock as if it had stung her, and she stared at Kat in shock. The older girl tried to conceal her surprise at her own outburst by looking down and shuffling through her finished papers, and for a while after that there was nothing but a brittle silence in the car, as the two young women stared out of their respective windows.
"Sorry," said Escher, eventually. She was apparently addressing the passenger-side vent fan, but the word was clear enough. Kat sighed, and decisively shovelled all the loose papers into her case.
"So am I. Come on." She opened her door and got out, waiting for Escher to do the same before locking the car with her keyfob remote and setting off down the empty street in the direction of the asylum. Escher caught up with her, giving her a look that doubled as a question.
"Change of plan," said the psychologist, increasing her speed a little, sort of power-walking in fact. "Never mind this heap of crap," she gave her case a shake, "we're going straight up to Otto before we go anywhere else. In fact," as they turned the corner, the asylum looming into sight like a lurking and oddly angular dinosaur, "we're gonna make sure no-one sees us getting up there. I just have a feeling about this, as Chet might say."
"What if someone does see us, though?" said Escher, somewhat breathlessly. What she was doing to keep up was more like uneven jogging. Kat gave her a sideways grin, pausing before the asylum's porch.
"Well," she said, "you can always pitch another fit."
The asylum's corridors were totally deserted as the two of them hurried through, filled with harsh light and the sort of spooky wrong ambience that empty hospitals or schools or any other institutions generate when the people that give them life have gone for the day. It felt rather like being in a haunted anthill.
"So they said they weren't sure if they could wake him up?" said Escher, eventually, as the lift doors slid shut behind them.
"They said they'd try."
The younger girl looked a little happier. "Oh, well, generally when the tentacles go all out trying to do something, it gets done."
"Yeah," said Kat, "or it explodes."
There was a silence. Then the lift dinged and opened, revealing the lonely expanse of the seventh-floor corridor. They set off again, and this time Kat found herself hurrying after Escher.
"Listen, we have to take this carefully," she called, catching her up around the door of 705. "We probably shouldn't hope for too much." Kat made an uncertain gesture with her shoulders, thinking of when she had left earlier in the day, how the tentacles had been alive, nudging Otto slowly towards the path of remembrance. He would get there, she knew. She had faith in the actuators, as strange as it was to say, and faith in Otto. They together could do anything.
Including throwing off a year's worth of trauma.
But she still didn't want to raise false hopes, whether in her own mind or in that of her companion. Out loud she said; "The kind of state he's in, it might take days for them to bring him back. I should have brought a light, then I
WHUNNGG
WHUNNGG
WHUNNGG
WHUNNGG
Kat and Escher whirled, staring up the corridor to where, around the curve, they could just about see the heavy metal surface of the door to 712. It lookedoddly lumpy. Only for a moment, though. Then, with a massive, reverberating -
CLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG
-the door simply shot upright across the corridor and hit the far wall, shaking the tiling beneath their feet and filling the air with plaster dust that shook out of the ceiling with all the enthusiasm of an indoor blizzard. Then, as the echoes subsided, they heard a voice through the floury fug. It was deep, angry, and fractured on every second or third word. For both Escher Griffin and Katarina Morrigan, however, it felt like the most welcome sound in the world.
"I told you to wait FOR them, not-" A pause, then closer, "You know damn well what I meant!"
Neither girl spoke. They just looked at each other, eyes alight, then turned as one and ran into the subsiding dust.
Blinking hard, shielding their faces, they soon made out a human shape, standing in the (slightly enlarged) doorway of 712, his indistinct shape framed by four other shapes that were definitely not human. As the cloud thinned, details emerged, and Kat found her eyes drawn straight to the central figure.
He was standing in the doorway, his head half-turned from where he had evidently been yelling at the nearest actuator claw. As he spotted Kat and her companion, he turned to face them, his hand reaching up to scratch an itch near the top of the neural ridges that ran up his spine. Yes, his arms were free, she saw, each draping white sleeve turned back and trailing a strap with an end that had been cleanly ripped from the buckle.
Her eyes travelled upwards to his stomach, where it was clear to see the man had lost a bit of weight. Chest, arms, face
two eyes of the deepest chocolate brown looked back at her. They were swathed in bags, both of the healthy, natural kind, and the unhealthy kind, the kind that one got from not sleeping enough. Those eyes were vividly mocha, barely flecked with nearly invisible crimson. They were wrinkled, but not in a bad sort of way. Framed by a thick, heavy brow on a well-set forehead, with lines upon lines creasing a forehead that was under a head of russetty hair that desperately needed to be washed, and not just washed, but conditioned and nursed back to health.
The eyes, the nose, a slightly large nose that seemed a bit crooked, over a pair of clean-shaven lips that spoke, slowly.
"Kat? Escher?"
a pause.
"OTTO!" cried Kat, running over and hugging him tightly. So great was the force of the hug that one tentacle had to stand behind him to keep him upright, "Otto! You're back! You're finally back!" She leaned her head against his shoulder. "I missed you so much!"
He uncomfortably patted her back, "Yes, Kat, I'm here. I'm here as myself."
"Oh my god Otto, I'm so happy you're back I mean... I... I. Oh god, I'm so happy I can't even talk straight!" She hugged him tightly, then looked at the actuators. "Thank you. "
Otto smiled as he disengaged from his old-time friend. His eyes strayed to the other girl. "Escher?" he asked, half-amused. "I had no idea you were considering a career in psychology."
"Never have, never will." Escher told him, with her brightest high-score pinball smile.
"Then what are you doing here?"
She took Kat's place as the resident Otto-hugger as she told him; "Saving you, of course. Isn't it about time I paid you back?"
He grinned again, shaking his head, "You've gotten bigger. Both of you."
"And you've lost weight," replied Kat with a smirk. "Are you feeling all right?" Her face smoothed over a bit as she asked, "Everything working up there in the Otto-brain?"
"I believe so." He stood back, looking at Kat and Escher with an expression which suggested he still wasn't one hundred percent sure he was really seeing them, which was probably the case. "It feels good to be back."
"How long have you been awake', Dr. Octavius?" asked the younger of the girls curiously, watching him. "Long?"
"Otto," he corrected vaguely. "Fully so?" He thought for a moment. "An hour or two? Can't be much more then that."
"How did they get you back to normal?" Kat looked over at a tentacle. Otto followed her gaze, gave the actuator a private smile, and shrugged.
"It's a secret...between us." One of the claws chirped apologetically to the two girls.
"It's good to have you back, tentacle-boy," said Kat, beaming at him, "When I first saw you, I thought I was going to die."
Escher nodded in agreement, still looking up at the doctor. He made her feel younger, she realised, something which was going to take some adjusting to. Kat had known him as a young adult, more or less the same as she was now, but for Escher the five years between then and now had spanned one of the most packed and transforming passages of her life, and to suddenly feel fourteen again was, in a word, bizarre. "Sowhat have you been doing all this time?"
"Thinking," he responded, a quiet chuckle in his fast-recovering voice.
"About?" prodded Kat.
Otto smiled at Kat, then closed his eyes, licked his lips, and began to recite: "Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction, remaining a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose-garden. My words echo thus, in your mind."
There were two pairs of polite clapping hands and a host of happy, screeching tentacles. "I used to know the whole thing." he said after a moment. "But not any more."
"It'll come." said Kat. "Considering all the illegal crap that asshole shot you with, I'm ama-" She stopped, suddenly, awkwardly, remembering the memory that the actuators had showed her, and the deadly look on her friend's face as he had sworn revenge. Otto gave her a sharp glance, as if he knew perfectly well why she'd cut herself off.
"Yes, where is John?" he said. "There's a few, ah, points we'd like to discuss with him." The upper actuators snapped open at the relevant word, hissing.
Kat scanned his expression carefully for a moment, then grinned.
A few minutes before Kat and Escher had heard the first impacts coming from 712, John Mereii had in fact been on the verge of leaving. At 11:07, certain that Katarina wasn't going to show up with her report that night (despite his order to the contrary, he thought, fuming, and it was clearly going to take some time before the irritating young woman understood exactly who was in charge around here) he had finally saved the mail he was working on and powered down his laptop. At 11:09, he was filling in the usual rotation forms for the staff's morning shifts, and at 11:16 he stood up, straightened his jacket, and crossed his large, severely tidy office to the door. Had he left right then, he would probably have been out of the building before anything untoward had a chance to happen.
It was then, however, that Mereii made a mistake that he was probably going to regret for the rest of his life. He turned back at the light switch, as always, for a final check, and spotted that one of his diplomas was hanging crooked on the wall. Not a little, a lot. Almost twenty degrees off kilter, in fact.
Mereii frowned, and walked back across his darkened office to straighten it. He guessed that it had probably been disturbed earlier, when the girl had had her attack and he'd had to supervise her lying on his floor for a good half hour, until she was able to breathe normally and looked a little less like a glue-factory candidate. In the morning, he intended to have a few words with Katarina about bringing physically disabled people onto the premises. It was asking for trouble.
He adjusted the diploma carefully, and made to turn away. Immediately, a series of muffled but heavy reports thudded from somewhere overhead, and the frame slid slightly off level once again, this time accompanied by the ones above it.
Mereii's nonplussed expression deepened as he pushed the frames straight with an index finger. Fireworks, maybe, he thought, or the construction site on the corner, that's three times I've had to ring up and c-
The next impact made the room shake, and the diplomas bounced off their nails and clattered on the carpet, joining various other small items from around the room. This time, however, he ignored them completely, all his attention instead riveted on the bank of LEDs set under a neat dark-tinted shield on the desk. In the dark, most of them glowed a steady, reassuring green. Most of them.
He walked slowly closer, drawn like a moth to a flamethrower. One light, one tiny, innocent LED, was blinking a vicious red. Blink. Blink. Blink. As Mereii stared, the redness and the blinking spread along the line, rapidly infecting the greens on either side until the entire seventh row of LEDs were pulsing on and off in smug scarlet harmony.
Behind him, unseen, the wallclock snapped from 11:17 to 11:18.
"OhGodno," said John Mereii, in one breath. Then he turned, snatching a small grey box from a shelf by the door, and sprinted from the room.
Kat poked at the cell door's ravaged hinge, and stepped back quickly as part of it fell to the floor. "Gotta say, Otto, you still know how to make an entrance."
Otto walked carefully up the corridor, his eyes scanning the ceiling. The actuators hovered anxiously around him, reaching out one way or the other at intervals to support him against the walls, but otherwise he was moving quite well on his own. "Don't blame me," he said. "I wanted to be discreet. They decided they knew better."
Escher followed the doctor's searching gaze. "Uh, D- Otto, what are you looking for?"
"Cameras."
"Are there any?" said Kat.
"No," said Otto, "but there'll probably be one in the lift, and definitely one in the stairwell." He shielded his eyes against the glare of the long fluorescent strip lights, his expression drifting inwards for a moment. Then, appropos of nothing, "Yes, and it's too damn bright in here anyway. Take it down a notch."
The upper pair of claws darted upwards, in a fast staggered movement that allowed one to close around the glass shielding of the light and tear it from the ceiling, barely a second before the other arrived and propelled itself into the dark wire-spilling hole that this created in the polystyrene tiles. It buried itself up to the throat in the gap, bunching to worm itself deeper to the accompaniment of several serious-sounding graunches and the zip and sizzle of breaking wires.
"Careful," said Escher, nervously.
"Don't worry," said Otto in a distant voice. He had his eyes shut, and seemed to be concentrating hard. "Is it blue for live and brown for earth, or the other way round?" Then he opened an eye and grinned at their stricken expressions. "Just kidding. We know exactly what we're doing."
There was a solid, angry ZZZWAT from the hole, and the corridor was plunged into total darkness. A moment of utter silence, punctuated by a satisfied hiss -an incredibly eerie sound to hear in a pitch black void- and then the emergency power kicked in. One after the other, the remaining strip bulbs lit up with a pallid, slightly green glow (apart from one at the end which simply flipped on and off while making sad little plunkplunk sounds, as is the custom). Kat breathed a sigh of relief as she watched a still-intact-and-unelectrocuted Otto stepping back to withdraw his actuator from the ceiling.
"That should take care of the cameras," he said. "Now, if w-"
Footsteps clattered up the stairwell. Otto spun, three claws gaping in the direction of the sound, the other tentacle sweeping protectively around in front of Kat and Escher. A pause, and then the owner of the footsteps rounded the bend in the corridor and came into view, skidding to an abrupt halt not ten yards from where they stood.
"-Hello, Dr. Mereii," Otto's tone was mild, conversational. "We were just talking about you."
At the sight of Otto, standing calmly in the middle of the corridor (and nearly filling it, if you counted the bulk of his extra limbs,) Mereii's face went through a good half dozen expressions before finally settling for Stunned, with a side-serving of Utter Dread. For an instant his eyes flicked to Kat, who tilted her head and grinned in silent mock-apology. He took a step backwards, another, stumbled, then simply turned and fled like a man with the fear of God in him. Or, more accurately, the fear of tentacles.
Mereii hurtled back down the hallway, slammed bodily into the door to the stairs and bounced off it like a window dummy hurled at a trampoline. He shoved at it frantically, thudded his palms against the unyielding surface, then froze as a quartet of clanks and a gradual rising rattle stirred the air right behind him.
Very, very slowly, he turned.
"That one's a pull', John," said Otto, as the actuators set him down barely two feet from his erstwhile tormentor. Inside his head, the voices were screaming in a sort of cacophonous harmony.
Him!
That's him!
Let us kill him, Otto!
Please, Father, may we?
Their host frowned, and shook his head slightly to clear it. He had forgotten how powerful their voices could be. Hypnotic and wheedling, they chipped away at his resolve, overpowering his senses until he felt almost drunk, lulled by their dizzying and reassuring words into a detached state where he could just stand apart and watch them act for him
kill for him
"No," he said, faintly, and then again, stronger. "No." He blinked till he could see straight and focused on the man in front of him, who was flattened against the door watching him like a gecko watches a cobra.
But, Otto-
"I said never again." hissed Otto, in a voice so deadly that even the actuators fell silent, their claws closing and dipping in resignation. Relief flooded him, along with a renewed confidence in his own strength of will. He felt them making an effort to control their temper, and he knew that the control was tenuous, but nevertheless-
Mereii, however, took the tentacles' submissive lowering as a sign that he was safe. He straightened up from his former cringing posture with a self-conscious twitch of his jacket, and smirked.
"Hah. I knew y-"
His sentence was terminally interrupted by the arrival of Otto's right fist.
The two girls hurried up behind their friend just in time to see Mereii hit the door again, backwards this time. He slid down, landed heavily on his knees, then keeled over forwards. Spark out.
"Wow," murmured Escher, after a moment.
"You have no idea," said Otto, shaking some life back into his hand, "how satisfying that felt." He could hear the tentacles protesting in a cheated kind of way, but they didn't sound that angry; it had, after all, been a very good punch.
Kat nodded grimly. "I think I can imagine."
Another noise, this time from the opposite direction. The three turned just as Chet Karos emerged from cell 709, still struggling with his straitjacket. He'd gotten a sleeve over his head, but was evidently unable to move it any further without dislocating his shoulder.
"A little help, Katarina?" he said, with as much dignity as could possibly be assumed by someone who appeared to be in the middle of an extreme yoga workout. Kat hesitated for a moment, then went across and started to unbuckle the straps that held his arms together.
"You have to listen to me," he said, urgently, as soon she was finished. "If you want to escape without being seen, you have to-"
"Sorry to butt in, but who the hell are you?" said Otto, sharply. Chet looked up at him, in an easy glance which took in the straitjacket and the extra limbs before stopping on his eyes.
"Hello, Dr. Octavius," he said. "My name's Chet Karos, and I think I'm pretty much your only hope of getting out of here."
Otto blinked at him, and above his shoulder an actuator parted its claw in a mystified eeeek. In the end, it was Escher that broke the silence, her footsteps loud on the plastery floor as she approached the precognitive patient. "Okay, Chet," she said, and her voice was nervous yet steady. "How do we do it?"
For a moment, Chet looked taken aback. Kat, watching, realised that he had expected to have to fight to be believed, as he'd probably been doing for most of his life. Then he closed his eyes, rubbed his newly-freed hand across them, and straightened his head.
"Right," he said. "Okay."
There was a pause.
"What's he-" started Otto.
"Shhh," hissed Escher, who in truth had undergone something of a complete reversal of opinion since her encounter of that afternoon. Kat shot the bewildered doctor a quick I'll-explain-later glance, but before she could say anything, Chet started to talk.
"You weren't seen, no-one saw you except for one for. him we have to we have to take him with us." he said, his arms lifting limply about two inches from his sides, the buckles clinking where they dragged on the floor.
"What!" yelled three voices, in unison, accompanied by a quartet of angry rattles. Chet didn't react, apart from a slight crinkle that chased across his brow and then vanished. With his eyes closed and his long pale hands open like strange leaves, he looked frighteningly otherworldly as he stood there in the centre of the rubble-strewn corridor, swaying very slightly.
"We need we need to go up one floor" he continued. "Not the lift, the stairs we need to go now." When they didn't move, his eyes snapped open for an instant, the green more vivid than Kat had ever seen it, blazing beneath the darkness of his pupils like ink in a well. "NOW!"
His scream broke the spell. Kat started forwards, Escher following her and grabbing Chet's unmoving wrist as she went. Otto took one last look back up the corridor, the smart arms snapping round to scan the area, then turned after them into the stairwell, ducking instinctively to make sure the upper arms remembered to clear the top of the doorframe. Apparently as an afterthought, a tentacle snaked back through the doorway and grabbed Mereii by the ankle, dragging the unconscious doctor swiftly after it through the closing gap.
The door swung shut. Seconds later, at the far end of the seventh-floor hallway, the lift dinged.
In the stairwell, Chet suddenly stuck out an arm, which Kat almost fell over. "Stop," he hissed.
They froze, and in the silence that followed they could hear every word that floated up from the corridor they had just left.
"You hear something?"
A short pause.
"Nope."
"You think it was a false alarm?" murmured Chet, making Escher jump.
"You think it was a false alarm?" said the first voice from below.
"False alarm nothing. Look at all this, wouldya?"
At this, Otto half-turned and gave his actuators an accusatory stare.
"Jesus, what were they keeping in here? The Incredible Hulk?"
"I dunno, but it ain't here now."
"Or" said the first voice, thoughtfully, "maybe it is"
There was another, longer pause.
"I think we should go get backup." the second voice said, eventually.
"I think that's a good idea."
Fast-receding footsteps, the ding and whoosh of the lift. Then silence. In the stairwell, there was the sound of four people starting to breathe again.
"That was quite something," said Otto, eventually. "How did he do that, exactly?"
Kat prodded Chet gently. He had come to a halt with his face almost up against the stairwell wall, and didn't seem interested in improving his viewpoint. She leaned in a little closer and saw that his eyes were open, focused calmly on the plaster in front of his nose. Laying a palm on his shoulder, she was startled to feel the feverish warmth of his skin, radiating even through the cloth. He wasn't shaking in the slightest, neither was he displaying any other signs of sweating or tension. He was justsuperheated. Kat wondered if this was normal for him, or if this weird trance was harming him in any way. Even if it was, she decided, she had no idea how to snap him out of it. He certainly didn't seem in distress; in fact, this was the most tranquil-looking she'd ever seen him. The general impression was of function, of something in him that was busy doing what it had been created to do. "Chet sees the future." she said, matter-of-factly. "II think he's trying so hard to see what's going to happen next that he can't see what's happening right now."
The doctor raised an eyebrow. "Well, that makes sense, I guess," he said. "Is he sane?"
Kat scrunched up her nose. "There's a question. I don't think he's totally insane, if that helps any."
"Thanks for that vote of confidence, Katarina," said Chet. His return to life was as sudden as lightning, and every bit as startling. Grinning wryly at their expressions, he added; "It's room 816 we're heading for, and we need to hurry. This place is just about to get busier than Macy's over Thanksgiving. I-" He broke off, a worried frown clambering across his forehead, and shook his head heavily, like a bear with earache. " something isn't"
"What is it, Chet?" said Kat, urgently. The man looked up at her, his gaze confused yet intent, as if he was searching in her face for the answer to a riddle that was hidden there.
"Proof?" he said, slowly.
"Proof?" repeated Kat, mystified.
For a moment, there was silence as everyone looked at Chet. He looked confused, which put a terrible feeling in Kat's stomach. Confusion and Chet did not often go togetherShe shook off the thought.
"Why room 816?" Otto asked suddenly from behind then. An actuator chirped
"That's where it is" Chet trailed off. His voice was decidedly unsure, and this unsettled the two girls (who knew all about Chet's inability to not be sure) greatly. Neither of them wanted to solidify the insecurity that was seeping off the precogniscient man, but of course there was one other present who was conscious, and he was as curious if not more then the two girls.
"What is it?"
Chet turned to Otto and shrugged. "I don—" He started, then cut himself off, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. "It's important."
An actuator chirped next to Otto's ear, and he shrugged, opening his mouth to question again. He hadn't formed the first syllable when he noticed Chet was halfway up the stairwell. Kat and Escher followed, and Otto was last, dragging his unconscious captive behind him. It was likely that Dr. Mereii would remain in this state for quite some time, given how each time Otto climbed a step, John's head flopped against said step. He was going to have a wonderful collection of bruises on the back of his skull to show off when he awoke.
"I wonder why we're going up for this thing," Kat said vaguely to Escher, who didn't quite get the reference. She was, after all, an artist, and not a psychologist. Off Escher's look, Kat explained. "The higher floor you get, the worse the patients."
"Star's not a bad patient." Escher replied, now even more confused than before.
"Star is inexplicable. As is Chet. And Otto. Seeing a pattern?"
A sudden understanding dawned on the younger girl's face and she nodded.
As they strode across the hallway, a sudden thud in cell 812 made Escher and Otto jump. Chet was back to his normal calm self and said nothing, just looked that way and shrugged. Kat, as she had said many times over, was very good with dealing with creepy things and people and therefore was very good at hiding her creeped-out-ness. Because she was also very creeped out and didn't show it. But that was besides the point.
The motley crew stopped in front of room 816, eyeing the door. Doors, actually, as there were two 816(a) and 186(b).
"B." Chet said. He tried the door, for the hell of it, but knew (of course) it was locked, "Dr. Octavius, if you would?"
Otto looked the door. It was the same as every other door in the hallway, the same bleak steel with white observation window, the window now shut. An actuator rose up as he pulled his shoulder back, and then both released.
Steel window-covers and thrice-reinforced glass was nothing to the actuators of Otto Octavius. The tentacle slunk inside.
".of course there's no handle!" Otto said suddenly. Kat did jump this time, with Escher. It took a second for both of them to realize the same thing as there was pause and he spoke again, "They're not supposed to get out!Idiots."
All three of the other humans, this time, exchanged weird glances as Otto struggled with the door. The actuator behind it extended its full thirteen feet and pummelled it forward. After vicious beating, the door simply fell to the ground in front of them, and Otto, Kat, Escher and Chet walked inside the dimly lit room.
The room was, as already said, dark. There was nothing but a few lamps and such here and there. The most distinguishing thing about the interior was that the floor was hardwood. Three of the walls were padded, as was the ceiling, but the floor was hardwood and there were outlets in it. And the last wall, the one opposite from the door, was mostly surrounded by a wide, glass window - which, amazingly, didn't look as strong as the observation ones. It was a wide, circular window, and looked more like it would fit in a living room rather then an insane asylum. Three of these outlets were filled up, and one was half-full. Escher traced the cords with her eyes to the various lamps and finally to the only thing of value as Kat stared at the floor.
"Kat!" she called. "It's a computer!"
Kat's head snapped up and she rushed over to look. A sleek silver laptop sat upon a cheap wooden desk with a spinnable padded chair. The laptop was open, and the light of it reflected against the padding on the back wall. As if it would attack them, she and Escher crept over quietly, the older of the two sitting down. Otto simply dropped Mereii on the floor so all four actuators and himself as well as Escher could peer over Kat's back.
Chet, meanwhile, was staring out the window, his face twisted in concentration. "Shit" he swore softly, turning to the rest of them, who were sifting through the files, their expressions getting more and more bored by the minute.
"There's nothing here, though there probably was," Kat said with a resigned sigh. "And I think whatever was here, was majorly important. I mean, I don't know why else he'd keep it in here."
Escher nodded distractedly, wandering over to a cyan box in the corner. She flipped it open, revealing steel machine tools. Frowning, she pulled out the first layer of tools in foam moulding, revealing a second layer of tools underneath.
"Hey, guys, what do you think these were for?"
"What are you talking ab- oh." Otto turned and peered over Escher's shoulder. The actuators chirped behind him, sullenly.
"What did they say, Octavius?" Chet asked, and if the expression in his eyes meant anything, he already knew what Otto was going to say.
"Mereii used these tools to make the inhibitor collars."
A sudden realization from the girl on the computer; "Because the actuator plans were on this computer, but when they were done, he didn't need them anymore. I bet he put them" Her sentence faded off, her voice sickly.
"On his other computer," Chet finished.
"Which is"
"Downstairs."
"The place where all the cops are," she said weakly. "And we have to get this?"
He nodded firmly, green eyes burning.
"Andyou're absolutely sure."
"Katarina, have I led you wrong yet?"
Otto looked at the two of them. "We should send as few people as possible. Chet knows what he's doing, so that automatically includes him. And—"
"Katarina will come with me," Chet said calmly, looking at her. She looked on the verge of freaking out, but thankfully didn't.
"Chet, if something REALLY important doesn't happen with this laptop, I am so going to kill your ass."
He smirked back at her. "Yes, I know that."
Kat sighed, palmed her forehead for a moment, then nodded. "Okay. Come on."
The seventh floor was still deserted when Kat and Chet passed it, the flickering emergency lighting splitting their shadows against the stairwell as they walked quickly down towards the sixth. Chet, Kat noted as he paced ahead of her, looked a lot calmer than she felt, which reassured her a little. Halfway down the next flight, he turned to her, his voice barely above a whisper.
"The power's on a floor-by-floor failsafe, so past here the cameras are working," he said, pausing right in front of the fifth-floor door.
"As long as you can see how we do it, I don't care," said Kat. Chet looked pained, and shook his head.
"Katarinathis is hard to explainI can't see how we do it right." He waved a hand hurriedly as Kat opened her mouth. "It's likeI can see how we could get caught, how we might go wrong. So it works out the same. See?"
"No."
"Look, trust me. I don't know how or why it works, but it does. As long as we do the opposite of what we could have done, we'll be fine."
Kat blinked at him. "Chethow the hell are we going to get past security cameras without being seen? If there's one place that's going to be popular right now, it's the security booth. There's a screen"
He grinned at her. "Oh, that part's easy. We just follow the golden path."
"The what?"
"You'll see."
Kat shook her head. Whatever Chet was talking about, she thought, it sounded utterly crazy- but if she had learned anything by this stage, it was that craziness was relative. And, she had to admit, there was something about Chet in this frame of mind that inspired confidence.
"Show me," she said.
Chet nodded, took her hand, and stepped through the door.
There was no-one visible in the corridor, but Kat looked up instinctively to the nearest corner and saw the dark glass eye of a camera, aimed straight at her. She didn't have time to react, however, because as soon as they were through the doorway Chet set off at a brisk stride, towing her after him. He reached the bend in the hallway and stopped, waiting for a handful of seconds before setting off once more, this time in a diagonal that fetched them up against the lift doors. Kat saw another camera directly above their heads, and gulped.
"Chet," she said, as calmly as she could, "please explain why you just dragged me past two working cameras. Now, before i kick your head in for all the nice people downstairs to see."
Chet laughed, and pushed the lift button. "The cameras work on a rotation," he said. "They switch, in order, from one view to the other. They don't move, and they never change the pattern. And if we can use that pattern, we can walk straight past the cameras and never be seen once. That's the golden path."
There was a moment of silence as Kat thought this over. "Sothat can't see us." she said, staring up at the glassy eye.
"Nope. We're in its blind spot. And the other one saw us, all right, but its feed wasn't in use while we were there." He closed his eyes for a moment, then took hold of her wrist and pulled her backwards, halfway down the right-side wall, and into a recess that held a desk and a chair for a duty orderly. She copied him as he flattened himself against the wall, still explaining under his breath.
"We're in luck, Kat. This building isn't as well-protected as you'd expect. There aren't enough cameras, and the timing's lousy. If I was feeling uncharitable I'd suggest that someone's beenwith the security budget."
Kat smirked. "Great. But, uh, why are we going to use the lift? I mean, if there's a camera in there, surely it's way too long-"
"Oh, the lift wasn't for us." said Chet, pressing further back against the wall. "It was for him."
"Wh-"
Ding.
The footsteps started even before the swish of the door stopped, indicating that their owner was in an almighty hurry. Kat felt her breath seize in her throat as the armed policeman thundered past the recess, looking neither left nor right, his gun drawn. His tread echoed around the bend, then faded away.
"I thought that might get his attention." said Chet, the shock of his voice next to her ear drawing Kat's attention to her own temporary lack of breathing. She gasped to catch up, glaring at him.
"Thatwas astupid risk."
"No, it was a necessary risk. The stupid risk would have been to do what we're going to do now," and he suddenly stepped out of the alcove and started off back in the direction the policeman had taken, pulling her after him, "to go downstairs, while he was still down there waiting for us." Pausing at the bend, waiting for the cameras to perform their invisible switch, he looked back to her and smiled.
"Don't worry, Kat. There's only four floors to go. We'll be fine."
Six minutes and thirty-nine seconds later, Kat wasn't feeling any more relaxed about her position. Her position, specifically, being crammed behind a locker halfway along an empty corridor, completely on her own, having just gone through what had felt like the most nerve-racking few minutes of her entire life to date. Evidently, Chet had a somewhat abnormal definition of the word fine.'
A low whistle echoed from somewhere ahead of her, and she squeezed out from behind the lockers and hurried down the hallway, heart pounding, wishing for the tenth time that minute that she had at least two more pairs of eyes.
Suddenly, an arm shot out of a half-open door to her left, causing her to nearly bite her tongue off as she clamped down on her first impulse to yell. It grabbed her wrist before being followed by its owner, who grinned at her and pulled her into Mereii's office.
"There, we made it," Chet said, letting her go and padding further into the quiet room. Kat allowed herself a second to recover, closing her eyes and trying to get her pulse down from a whine to a more appropriate beat, then followed him.
"Yeah," she replied, heading straight to the desk in the centre. "Probably only took about five years off my life, too."
The laptop was exactly where she had expected it to be, turned off but still open on the desktop. Kat took a moment to disconnect the cable, then snapped the lid down and hefted it under her arm.
"Okay, ready." she said. Chet, who had been poking in a random filing cabinet, looked up.
"Mm?"
"I said, I got it, let's go."
"Look at this," said Chet, distantly. He had pulled a thick file binder from the cabinet, and now he was flicking through it, absorbed. From where Kat was standing, the words CN(In) KAROS, C were just about visible, printed in neat capitals on the spine.
Kat made an impatient nervy sigh of a noise, walked over, and looked. Then she blinked, and squinted.
"Is thatyou?" she said, after a moment.
Chet nodded.
Kat stared at the passport-style photograph, stapled neatly to the top page of the file. "You lookdifferent." Younger, she might have said, but that would not have been tactful. Sane, that was another option, but again, that could (and probably would) be taken the wrong way.
"Yes, well, this place isn't exactly the ultimate rest cure," he said, dryly, still turning pages. "You don't have to guard your words with me, Katarina. I'm not as crazy as you think I am." He snorted. "I know you don't agree with me."
"You don't help." She looked up at him, and his eyes met hers. She was startled to see that the familiar edge of the razor blades gone from their emerald depths. He looked tired, suddenly, drained by some old anger.
"I couldn't turn it off." His voice wasn't so much a protest as it seemed defensive, as if he was trying to clear his own name from some crime.
"What?"
He looked back down at the file for a moment before he spoke. "When he" He cocked his head at the binder, presumably to indicate Mereii, "first assessed me, I was still open to the possibility that people like him might be able to help me. I told him a lot of things, a lot more than I should have. He decided that he might be able to profit from mytalents, and convinced some people, experts, to see me - I warned him against it, but then, of course, I'm crazy." He shook his head. "Anyway, they were also veryscientific. Ran tests, scans, you name it, then unanimously rejected the results. Insisting that I couldn't be precognitive. Insisting that I must have known something, been told something previously. They didn't like the idea of a nutcase that they couldn't analyze. So they told him, chewed him out for wasting their time. You can probably guess what happened next."
He pulled back a sleeve to reveal puncture wounds beyond number. Not as many as Otto had, but still more then enough to make Kat pale and gasp silently as she looked at them.
"Ironically enough," Chet continued, rolling his sleeve back down, leaning on his hands on the open filing drawer, eyes glinting with that familiar hard edge, "it only made my abilities stronger. I could predict more, with surprising accuracy - without the extra medication, I could have never told you that you'd save Otto, for example, let alone have seen how to get us down here safely. But it also killed my ability to turn it off."
"Turnwhat off?"
"You see it in my eyes, don't you, Katarina? The hardness, the coldness. The sort of green that poisons you. I could wear and remove that look as I chose, once. AfterwardsI lost the ability to turn it off and on." He blinked again, the daggers flashing before his eyes reverted to sparkling green diamonds. "Soit was both a blessing and a curse. Can I hate him for it? No, I suppose not."
Kat opened her mouth to speak, but was interrupted. "But I can hate him for sticking me in a rubber room and a straitjacket. And I can hate him for forcing hours of so-called therapy' on me, although he mostly came out more disturbed then I did, so" He paused, unable to resist a spooky grin. "I felt reasonably successful about that at least."
Chet shut the folder with a fwap, and stood there for a moment in silence, staring at the neat beige of the cover. Something about his bitter thousand-yard-stare made Kat feel compelled to stand up for not so much her profession as the human race in general.
"We're going to get out of here, Chet." she said, on impulse. Chet blinked, and looked at her unguardedly for a second before his creepy grin returned at full strength.
"I know."
The duo scurried out, ducking into areas behind columns and against the walls, avoiding police and the (as Kat fondly dubbed them) psycho-SWAT-ninjas. They dodged and ducked and weaved and thankfully, went unnoticed.
Until the eighth floor stairwell, at least. As Chet climbed the metal steps, careful not to make a sound, Kat followed. He moved briskly, and she had no choice but to follow at the same pace. On the third step, she tripped, CLANG reverberating through the stairwell. Kat cursed loudly under her breath and Chet cast her an angry glance. What made both of them go wide-eyed was the way that the laptop bounced from Kat's gasp and fell down the steps with an extremely loud chorus of bangs and clangs. As if to laugh at them, fate decided that one of the psycho-swat-ninjas decided to open the door to the stairwell. He heard the clangs and looked up, but he couldn't get a clear view of the girl with the blond shock of hair that grabbed the plastic grey thing.
He reached for his walky-talky at the same time she got the thing, and they ran upstairs as his own backup ran after them.
"Okay, we have to go, NOW!" Kat shouted, running into 816 and holding the laptop as she jumped onto Otto's back. The doctor staggered slightly under the weight and Kat grappled to hold on to the laptop and Otto at the same time. After a while, Escher took the laptop for her.
"Chet," Otto said hurriedly. The boy was staring at the doorway, not acknowledging the doctor. "Take Mereii and let my actuator wrap around you. Escher, I'll carry you in my arms with the laptop."
Chet looked like he'd prefer the police to hauling John's body around as he pulled the KO'd psychiatrist up and held him. And actuator wrapped around them both. "You so owe me," hissed the precog.
"I could always leave you here," replied Otto sarcastically. Chet shut up, but a tentacle shrieked so loud that the girls both winced. The reason was clear to all: booted footsteps coming near. Otto and the three remaining actuators took off once the doctor had gathered Escher in his arms. She herself clutched the laptop. An actuator slammed into the window, shattering the glass, and the doctor climbed, heading upwards.
A brisk wind blew eight stories high, making Chet and Otto gasp slightly . Kat realized that she could probably count on her fingers the minutes of fresh air the patients had gotten during their separate incarcerations in the rubber rooms, and understood the gasp. Otto ordered the actuators to be quiet, so they scaled fairly silently to the roof.
"Where do we go?" he asked quietly.
"We could- no." Kat frowned. "I have a roommate."
Otto nodded as they sailed through the air. Escher glanced back to notice the police glancing out of the eight floor Sporlock window, but they apparently couldn't see the bundle of arms, legs and tentacles flying through the air.
"We could go see my sister," Chet offered.
"Does your sister live with anyone?" Escher asked.
"She didn't six years ago."
Kat and Escher exchanged looks with the doctor over his shoulder. "Escher?" Otto asked.
"Uh, I have an apartment alone- 'cept Jelly"
"Jelly?"
"Er. My cat."
Otto's wrinkles in his forehead soothed. "Oh. Okay. Can we go there?"
Escher looked thoughtful for a moment, then nodded.
"Direct me." the doctor ordered.
She did so.
