Chapter 18
When Mara awoke, she felt pain everywhere. Both the good and the bad. She had known he was angry, and something primal in her had wanted it. So, as she stretched gingerly, she learned to deal with the consequences.
She rolled over in the bed, finding that he had gone. For some reason, she wasn't angry or offended—she instantly knew that he could not be above A-Level for long without Pierce going Freakazoid Manhunter on him.
Mara smiled, finding that he had left a souvenir—his thin leather belt, tied around her wrist. It wasn't tight, and it wasn't the first time it had been there in the last few hours. She grinned, yanking it off and tossing it to the floor.
She could feel soreness on her arms and neck, and vaguely recalled his grip on them. She shivered, knowing how dangerous and primitive that was. He could easily snap her neck, but instead knew exactly how much was too much.
She stood, reaching for her clothes and rubbing her eyes.
She peered through the semi-darkness at the clock on her nightstand. 9:38p.
It had been 10am when Khan had burst into her room, the training session beforehand causing the subsequent bruising. And now she had slept through half of the day.
Shit.
As she was deciding whether it was even prudent to put clothes back on, the phone rang. She smiled, wondering if he had now figured out how to tap and hack the phone system. Something told her he probably did.
"Hello?" she drawled with a smile.
"Mara!" Director Pierce's voice was rushed and frantic.
"Yes…" she asked worriedly. He never called her Mara.
"Khan is crashing, get down here!"
"What do you mean he's cra…" she began to ask.
"JUST GET DOWN HERE! F-LEVEL!" he yelled, soon followed by a dial tone.
Mara's heart leapt into her throat, and she threw on new clothes faster than they had been torn off.
After an aggravatingly slow elevator ride to F-Level, in which she said words to the elevator that her mother would have been very ashamed of, Mara ran into the labs with no direction whatsoever.
"Doctor!" a yell came from one of the side-labs, and Mara found Pierce waving her inside urgently.
The room was positively buzzing with lab techs, so it was difficult to get a good look at him. But when she did, she could have screamed at what she saw.
He was lying on a gurney, his body seizing as if in acute shock. Blood was running from his mouth and nose, far more than Mara had ever seen in one of The 73. And he was choking violently on the blood in his throat, causing sprays to cover some of the technicians.
"What happened!" she yelled, pulling on nitrile gloves as fast as she could, and letting a tech pull a coat on her. She really didn't see the necessity, but these science types liked to keep to their rules.
"Lorran called it in," Pierce said, trying to hold a respirator over Khan's lips and only getting it covered in blood as he violently choked again. "Said they were sparring and he just collapsed… started having seizures."
No, no, no, no, Mara thought over and over, panic gripping her heart. I knew it. As soon as I said it, I knew something bad would happen.
She shoved her way to the front, looking down on him with pity and anxiety.
"What do you know?" she asked, looking to his face and finding nothing but blind agony.
"Hypoxia," one of the techs said quickly, rushing forward and attempting to put a syringe of something, Mara couldn't tell what, in his arm.
Another vicious seizure wracked him, and he yelped, his arms flailing out and his spine arching. He choked, again spraying blood across the pure white coats.
As Mara was about to turn to the techs to begin her routine, one of Khan's hands flew out and grabbed her wrist.
She looked down, finding that he was holding something in his violently trembling hand. She stilled, her heart leaping up her throat as she recognized it as an empty pill bottle. She took it, her hands beginning to shake as she raised them to read.
"Oh God," she breathed, her whole body going cold and beginning to shake with horror.
Hydrogen cyanide.
"Christ!" she screamed, grabbing a handful of hair as panic began to grip her.
"What!" Pierce yelled, running to her side.
"Hydrogen cyanide!" she practically screamed back at him, and Pierce's face lost all color. "Can he survive that?" she asked frantically.
"I don't know…" Pierce replied in a monotone, his shock turning him to an immovable statue.
Mara stormed back to the gurney, grabbing a handful of Khan's shirt and leaning over him. "What the fuck is wrong with you? Why would you do this?" she screamed in his face.
Through a seizure of pain, he managed a smile.
Almost instantaneously, a series of four massive explosions could be heard throughout the compound, causing the lights to go out and backup generators to come on, leaving nothing but pale blue light filling the lab. Sirens and alarms began sounding throughout the entire facility, and Mara could smell smoke and broken cement.
"No…" Pierce gasped. "No! You bastard!" he cried, running from the lab. "They're breaking out! Get us in lockdown, get this elevator running! Why isn't this elevator running?"
"They've bombed it, sir," a tech said in a deadpan, looking as shocked as he was afraid.
Pierce turned back to the labs, looking down at Khan. Khan still managed to smile as he choked through the blood.
"Don't create what you can't control, Pierce," he said, falling back as another seizure overtook him.