Chapter 3
Napoleon regained consciousness slowly. He took inventory and found he'd picked up an assortment of scratches and bruises and a nice-sized goose egg on the back of his head, which he rightly assumed was responsible for his dizziness, blurred vision, headache, and nausea. His stomach roiled to warn of oncoming retching. Not soon enough, it quieted down to plain, old nausea.
Just what I need—a concussion. He picked at the rips in his suit. And making matters worse ... He sighed his resignation to the inevitable chewing out Waverly and Accounting would certainly give him.
He sat up slowly and stayed that way to wait for the world to stop spinning so fast. In the meantime, he thought of Illya.
He tried to be mad with his friend and partner, but Illya had made the right call in sending him careening down the rocky embankment. It was his own fault for not tumbling correctly as he'd been taught at Survival School. Regardless, if they'd both been captured, they'd surely be facing involuntary suicide. With him free, they stood a chance of success. Nevertheless, he fought back the increasing worry that the most important person in his life may already be dead.
Get on with doing, Solo. He raised his arm rather than move his head to check his watch. Though the crystal was splintered, the UNCLE-issued timepiece still ran. He estimated that he'd been out close to two hours. Don't even think you're too late.
Napoleon could tell his gun was snug in its holster. He felt for his transceiver; it wasn't there.
On his hands and knees, not yet daring to stand, he began the tedious search for his lost communicator. Fifteen minutes later, he had it, pleasantly surprised it was intact. He depressed the tiny button on the clip that switched on the tracking component. He smiled at the rhythmic beep; Illya had been able to activate his signal. At least he wouldn't have to search each of the six structures on the old plantation.
Between his brain not quite firing properly and his choking fear about what was happening to Illya, it didn't occur to him to notify Waverly of his situation and Kuryakin's capture.
Taking a deep breath, Solo began the laborious climb up the hill, falling frequently but managing not to add further injury.
MFU
Kuryakin was spending less and less time in a drug-free state. During these breaks, three voices chattered away loudly in French, discussing their observations of him—pulse, respiratory rate, pupil size, ability to follow commands, time to return to baseline and awareness of pain, extent of his self-inflicted injuries. They pressed him to tell him what he was experiencing but he refused to respond and endured the inevitable punch or slap from the German woman. Instead, he worked on unsolved mathematical problems such as Lyapunov's second method of stability and the four exponentials conjecture.
Each time he was dosed, the amount he was given increased. After a series of gold-colored injections, the color of both the serum and the pulsing light changed to blue. After the blue series came the green series. With each change, he felt something different, including how he wanted to harm himself. Sometimes, they'd leave him cuffed, and he would fight violently against the restraints, hoping to break them so he could satisfy the urge to beat, cut, or strangle himself, or claw at his neck to rip open the carotid arteries and jugular veins, or rip out his trachea or the arteries in his wrists.
And each time he came down from the drug, he felt an artificial power racing through him. Each time he came down, he felt his sense of self drift away more and more, evaporating into the ether. Felt the biting, fiery pain in the eroding soft tissue of his wrists and ankles. Now he couldn't even recite the first 21 Fibonacci numbers, knowledge that had been his since early childhood.
"Our little experiment comes to its inevitable ending, Mr. Kurryakeen—yours."
The light became reddish and pulsed at a different rate than all the times before. The injection felt like fast-moving molten lava. He arched his back in agony, tugged harder at the restraints on his wrists and ankles, and screamed until that sound was abruptly extinguished along with him, no longer wandering lost but gone. His last thought was Napoleon.
Now all he was, was his executioner, nameless and soulless.