Double update, and usual disclaimers apply. Also, we're getting rather violent in this chapter.
"How the hell— wait. J-Jane?" Anna stuttered into the darkened office.
Jane heard heavy shuffling near the window and saw Anna's silhouette fade in and out of her vision, as if one moment Anna was hers to look upon and in the next the girl was less than a ghost, more than a memory. Present, but not visible, not tangible. Not hard as diamond, nothing Jane could steal, or hold, or possess. Anna was her own being, unpredictable and erratic as a free electron.
"Jane? Is that you—"
"Do you love him?" Jane whispered, and that muddled image of Anna, kissing Hans, in the middle of a smoking room, emerged from the recesses of her consciousness. Another memory surfaced that included Anna, beside her, drugged, and talk of genes and DNA and sequencing and relations— sisters.
"Jane!" Anna gasped. The woman careened into furniture in her spasmodic blindness.
Jane used the dark as her momentary shield, for when she waved and brought the lights up, she had trained her face into impassive and unforgiving stone. Her hand fell back to her side and Anna was two feet in front of her, fine, she's completely fine, gaping with the classic Anna emotional spectrum: happiness-to-guilt-to-embarassment-to-despair-to-joy-to-frustration.
"Do—you—love—him?" Jane asked, clenching her jaw.
A jaw the exact same shape as Anna's.
Anna had the decency to look scandalized. "No, Jane, no, you don't understand! It's not him, it's you, it's always been you—"
"I just needed to know whether to come back for you," Jane said, stalking back towards the vent. "Or if you were content with your current lot."
"It's not what you think," Anna returned, reaching out to grab her arm.
Instead of discarding all semblance of rationality, Jane turned, slowly, and carefully removed Anna's hand from her bicep. She took a deep breath, trying to exert control over her tempestuous psychological spiral. She had been an Ice Queen once.
She probably still was.
"You wouldn't know what I've been thinking," Jane said carefully. "I've been conveniently locked away for weeks thinking only of you and your safety… and you're fine. Physically, you're…you're…" Jane's voice wavered. She felt a hiccup building, diaphragm betraying her at the most inconvenient time. "If missed dinner reservations are your most pressing concern, it implies that you are safe. That you are free, Anna."
Anna's eyes darkened. Her eyeballs ping-ponged rapidly between Jane and the computer at Hans's desk. "Jane, there's no time right now, you could ruin everything—"
"I could ruin everything?!" Jane hissed. "I could—but you've been… you're right," Jane took another breath, as if inhaling and exhaling would help her solve this entire equation. If she could keep breathing, through the pain, through the doubt, perhaps both sides would balance and the situation would remedy itself.
But not now. She was down to a nine-minute head start, if the fifth floor security sweep from Hans's phone call had already been completed.
"We don't have time for this, as you said. I'm going," Jane turned on her heel toward the open maw of the vent.
"Okay, just let me finish this."
"You're not coming with me. You...you told him how to find me," Jane said, perplexed, but the accusation in her words held fast. "You told him to check the elevator shafts, you… you faked those screams? Do you know what that did to me, Anna?"
Jane's throat felt raw and prickly, as if she had gulped a mouthful of bleach. She turned from Anna, and leaped on top of the side table below the vent entrance. The table shook, and a platinum picture frame of Hans christening his yacht fell over the side and shattered. Anna stared up at Jane, aghast.
"You can't leave me here," Anna reached out to Jane again, seemed to war with herself, and stopped short of grabbing hold of the blonde's ankle. "I know you're scared, and confused, but—"
"I'll come back for you, and you can explain then. Think carefully about what you have to say to me, Anna. As you said, we've run out of time."
"Jane—!"
Jane was almost through the vent when the window behind Anna caught her eye. Instead of climbing another twenty feet and wasting precious energy, she hopped from the table and ignored Anna's stricken countenance. She popped the latch and hefted herself onto the sill, as she had in St. John so many months ago.
Same retreat.
Similar building.
Same company, looking at her helplessly.
Then why does everything feel so different? So irrevocably charged and changed?
"You can't escape like this, you don't know—"
"You're right, Anna. I don't know," Jane mumbled, surveying the stacked window frames, judging distances, calculating trajectories. It was comical how easy the descent would be. "I don't know what you've been doing, nor do I think I want to. And this is me, trying to understand your motives, trying to get out of this place that's been crushing me since the moment they acquired me. But unless you can be down on the ground floor in... eh, two minutes, you can't come with me. You have to let me come back for you… or I don't know. Get out yourself. You seem to be doing fine without me."
"They won't stop Jane. We have to fight, and I can't do this on my own. I have been, but you still have a part to play," Anna's eyes were misty. Her hands' tight clutch against the sill cast a marshmallowy pallor on her knuckles. "You can't run from this!"
The lights in the office flickered behind her, Jane's abilities gone rogue under Anna's pointed scrutiny.
"Watch me," Jane challenged.
Jane shot down, fingertips fidgeting against ledges, finding footing (bare but surefooted), leaving Anna, or A, or whoever the hell that woman was up in Hans's office. Because Anna loved her, but A didn't trust her, and how could they be one in the same? The tears welled and fell somewhere around floor six. Her descent was textbook, muscle memory taking over where concentration and mental acuity faltered. And her feet ached against gravel, then slid through slimy, sultry blades of grass until she reached the front drive of the facility. Stars twinkled above and headlights shined listlessly down the drive, unaware or uncaring of the mayhem inside the main building. Summer insects buzzed around the streetlights overhanging the parking lot. All was still in the yard.
"Jane, stop!" Anna shouted, throwing open a side door and sprinting after her. "You have to let me explain!"
"How did you get down here?" Jane asked, ducking behind the corner of a nearby Quonset hut. "The building's on lockdown."
"I overrode the elevator system. I had the security codes. If you'd just take me with you, give me a chance to explain—"
"Explain what, Anna!?" She searched for truth on Anna's freckled face, but half of it was cast in shadow from the building. A teal eye peeked out, brightened by the street lights above. Jane wondered if she'd only ever known half of the woman at her side. "Explain that you haven't been willfully manipulating me this whole time? That you're not really in love with the man who basically took you in off the street, taught you all of your survival skills? That—that those people in there, think we're—we're sisters, on top of everything else?"
Anna retreated back into the shroud of shadows, but reached forward and gripped Jane's hand tightly. The shock against skin was involuntary, but it must have stung. Anna jerked back and her body thudded against the side of the building, breath catching in the uneasy night.
"You don't understand the extent of this operation, Jane," Anna breathed. "They will keep coming for you. There are others, like you. And WGT has details on them, just like on you. There's a father, and they're talking about taking his kids Jane, to see if something in the genetics could be passed on—"
"And that's why they wanted us alive, isn't it?" Jane asked, gritting her back teeth. As if she could grind the words and their corresponding theories into dusty particles of nothing. "Because we're sis—"
"Ladies, if you would move out from behind the hut, we can put this whole thing behind us!"
Weselton's voice was crackly through the megaphone. He was backed by a team of a dozen SWAT-like men trussed up in insular rubber suits. They looked like a flock of anti-electric penguins. Hans flanked the team who had emerged from the service entrance, eyes ablaze and gun in hand.
"You have to take them out," Anna murmured. An undercurrent of the sinister strained her voice, something that Jane had once considered pure. And Anna had encouraged her before, to go to extremes... We do what we have to, to get what we want... Jane was shell-shocked, again, flabbergasted and disquieted at the lengths Anna... no, A would go to in order to achieve her goals.
"The whole place, it has to come down," Anna continued. "And I know where the substations are, because it's what I've been doing Jane. Why I haven't tried to get you out, because I couldn't, risk it, not yet. You have to understand, I was running the long game—"
"Anna, I can't just take it down. What if I hurt—"
"Anna!" Hans yelled. He broke away from the pack, who had arched into a semi-circle in front of the fifteen-story building that housed WGT headquarters. Jane glanced about the fenced-in grounds, and to the burnished fields beyond.
Sunflower fields. How poetic. Anna and I, escaping through rural New Jersey sunflower fields.
The nearest ambient light of civilization shone dimly, at least ten miles off. Probably further.
"Time to get you two back to your rooms. This little stunt will cost you in the long run," Hans threatened.
Jane clutched at her head. She wanted to ram the side of the Quonset hut with her body, to melt into the earth, to drift away like a flower petal on the wind, to be anywhere but here. Anna tried to grab her hand again (Solidarity? Manipulation?) but another shock more powerful than the first caused the grifter's fingers to twitch, so much that Anna whimpered and cradled her jolted hand into her torso.
"If I go and talk to them, will that give you time to run?" Anna gasped.
"If I had done this like I planned from the beginning, I would've been halfway to those lights by now," Jane said, somewhere between wistful and resigned. "But you never would let anyone run their own plan, would you? How could you be so caught up in your noble quest that you didn't see how this would affect the both of us? Reckless, negligent-"
"I was focused on the endgame! Jane—"
"Is that even my name?" Jane croaked. "I heard Hans say 'Elsa' in the office. Is that it?"
"I will put a bullet in the one we don't need if you two don't come out right now!" Hans shouted, and loosed a warning shot into the night.
"We need them both!" Weselton screeched, and Jane saw Hans swat the spindly little man from his side like an irritating gnat.
"He's only posturing," Anna said, and stepped out, hands raised.
"Anna, what are you—"
"You too, Elsa!" Hans demanded.
Jane and Anna stood, thirty feet away from Weselton, Hans, and the recovery team. Charges blossomed in the air like spring time flower boxes in Amsterdam, like Birds of Paradise on a Caribbean Island in the off season, and like the oblivious sunflowers just outside of the WGT gates. Jane's power unfurled along the stem of her spine and branched out to her flexioned limbs: an uncontainable, unnatural Nature.
Sparks started flying.
Jane had never seen Hans look frightened before, not until this moment, when his crazed, terrorized gaze was locked on her.
"Stop her, Anna!" he yelled.
"Or what?!" Jane shouted, a bolt zinging wildly above the WGT group's heads. It hit the building with such force the exterior brick crumbled, black and charred with windows shattered, glass pouring down the length of the floor. Flames appeared in a middle window. "What more can you do to me! To us?!"
Jane was losing it. The power, the stress, the tears, the questions, all enveloped her in a crushing embrace, squeezing the discharges and voltages from her skeleton.
"I don't have to kill you, but I will shoot you," Hans retorted, but his voice was as shaky as Jane's.
"I was thinking the same thing," Jane said, and extended her fingers out to either side of her body. Energy inundated her system. Her nerves were livewires, her pupils shifting into a goldish hazel gleam. Her power was audible, and her body hummed.
And because she was so far gone, she turned on Anna.
"What have you been doing?!" Jane shouted.
"Jane, we can't do this, not while they're—"
"Tell me!" Jane begged, and another bolt zapped the exterior of the building once more. The power was intoxicating, so much better than alcohol yet tamer than her lying lover.
"And you!" Jane shouted, throwing an arm towards Weselton. The energy pulsed from her in a sickle-like wave. Hans, the doctor, and a handful of men possessed the wherewithal to duck, but the remaining four on security were struck, intensely, and flew back ten feet from their positions. Jane didn't care. She was harming and injuring or maybe killing and she didn't care. She was Zeus or goddess or Ice Queen and she only wanted the truth.
"What did you do to me?"
Weselton was cowering in a fetal pose on the gravel, and Hans had one hand covering his head.
"Someone answer me!" Jane screamed, and lightning burst, unbidden and frenzied from her torso. Shingles and brick fell around her, dirt and dust kicking up so that she stood in a shallow crater of her own invention, her power literally wearing away the earth beneath her feet.
"I have been manipulating you, but not willfully," Anna whispered.
Jane's head was spinning, and she was sobbing, and it took everything in her that made her human to curtail the charges, to govern the unruly energies scuttling along her dendrites, tunneling out from her pores, from under her fingernails. She looked at the ground below her. Anna had hunkered down at her side for the duration of her breakdown. The girl stretched a hand out to her, timid, and stroked her ankle. Anna didn't jerk away, for Jane—or something inside of Jane, innate and purer than the power overrunning her body— hadn't shocked her.
"I've been trying to insinuate myself into the everyday operations of this facility. I sent you a juice box, you know?" Anna smiled brokenly up at her from the ground. Jane registered a stinging sensation on the balls of her feet, and finally pieced together that Anna was wiping the blood off of her gravel-shredded flesh. "Bates was… I was talking to him, and might have influenced him. I was trying to comfort you in the only way I knew how without drawing suspicion. Comfort-by-proxy."
The men positioned near the building were regrouping. Jane saw two large SUVs pulling up behind her and Anna, attempting to circle them in. But Anna was giving her the truth that she craved it. Jane cast her arms to the side and delivered several streaks of white-hot energy, blasting the car engines into flames and crumpled steel, knocking another of the SWAT men to the ground. Shouts peppered the night like shrieking meteorites.
"I was manipulating you so that I could manipulate them," Anna sat up and gripped Jane's tattered lab coat. Jane's body was an undetonated grenade, but here Anna was, caressing her side, unafraid, maybe even loving the lightning monster in the parking lot. "A long con, Jane. I've been getting everything I could on this place. And it's just taken a while, to build the trust I needed, to be granted access, to steal the clearance codes. I'm not in love with Hans. I was, perhaps, once upon a time. Or I convinced myself I was, when I was young and idealistic, but I know that's not what love is anymore. I'm in love with you. I've been trying to save you. And it was wrong of me, to keep you waiting this long. But I thought I could do it, that I might be strong enough to save you. I thought too much of myself, went to great lengths just to save..."
"We have you surrounded!" Hans hollered. During Anna's confession the remaining SWAT-like security had moved to either side of them, and a large black Escalade shined belligerent beams upon the pair. "You are going to pay for this! And I can see your gears turning, Anna. Don't think for a minute I fell for that charade you've been pulling—"
"He totally fell for it," Anna grinned, devious and playful despite the apocalypse surrounding her. "He was just narcissistic enough to think I still wanted him."
"Or maybe he was playing you," Jane murmured.
"Maybe. Probably. Trust is… not something I'm familiar with."
Hans didn't take kindly to being ignored. "If this is your big move, then you've seriously fucked it to hell—"
"Shut up!" Jane yelled, and cast a series of bolts in Hans's direction. He ducked, and dived, but a wily strip of light collided with his kneecap and he fell to the dirt, convulsing. The SWAT wannabes held their fire at Weselton's insistence, but one decent soul knelt down to check on the foul-mouthed German.
"Jane," Anna hummed, and reached to still her hand.
Just like that, the power stopped. Anna was the switch to her circuit breaker. Anna had been taken from Jane for weeks, and it turned the blonde volatile. But back to honesty, or, at least Anna's version of honesty, and Jane could cap the wellspring of jolts and jitters with eerie ease. As if Anna herself was tranquilizer or sedative.
"Jane, I… your name is Elsa," Anna breathed, finally standing to grip Jane's elbows. She leaned heavily upon her, and Jane leaned into Anna. They held each other up, and brought each other down, and both cried because they couldn't negotiate the crushing paradox of their dependency.
"Elsa," Jane tasted the word, but it seemed fragile and insubstantial on her tongue, like shaved ice in a snow cone.
"Yes, Elsa Arrendale," Anna muttered, averting her gaze momentarily. "And I'm your sister."
"You're my—"
"Yes."
"But we… I—"
"I still love you," Anna warbled fiercely through the tears. "I'm still in love with you. And even if we can't have what we did, I don't care. But I need you, Jane. Elsa, whoever you want to be, because I've only ever wanted— no!"
Anna shoved Jane to the ground with such force she only heard the reverb of the shot. A hollow echo lingered in the night air, and time stilled for one electric woman.
Nanoseconds turned to minutes, and Anna stumbled forward in slow-motion, movements retarded and sluggish, crimson pooling at the hem of her shirt. Jane whipped her head to the opposite side and Hans was sitting upright with the gun still pointed, maniacal, self-satisfied sneer carved into his features.
"I can take the collateral damage," Hans seethed wildly. "But never would I allow some warped little whore to best me. To steal my prize."
Jane threw a bolt at him, and Hans retaliated with another shot.
The bullet disintegrated in mid air before her, a bubble of pure energy shielding her and Anna from the barrage of the semi-automatic.
Jane brought the building down in less than two minutes.
Time was irrelevant. In this harried state, she superseded temporal limitations. Jane was unburdened by trivialities like spatial reasoning and metaphysical laws. The orb of energy pulsated outward from the core of her body, no longer frenetic but concentrated on the facility. Bricks crumbled as Anna bled, and screams pierced the night with the same violent crack as the gunshots. Hans was gone or buried under rubble or dead or MIA, Weselton the same. Bones and cement were crushed and sparks and blood rained. Generators and substations blew apart as Jane offered her entire self to the sensations, to saturating WGT's systems with so much unmitigated energy that they burst from overloaded discharges. The building collapsed and silted grey dust covered Jane's sweaty form from hairline to toenail. The Quonset hut ten yards away looked to be sweating or crying, until Jane realized that the metal was actually melting from her heated energies.
Then Anna.
Anna.
Pale as moonvine and growing paler, gasping against the floating debris.
"Anna!"
When the damage was done, Jane fell to her knees and propped Anna's (her sister's!) head in her lap.
"I'm sorry," Anna cried, clutching her stomach and the maroon stain on her shirt. It was slick and warm but at least it wasn't spurting. "It… it hurts, Jane."
"Anna, don't do this, don't you dare do this to me right now—"
"I saved you, though," Anna rasped, and she began to twitch in Jane's grasp. She clawed against the side of her jeans.
"Sure, Anna, sure. But s-s-s-stop moving, let me see if I can g-g-get a van or some—"
"NO!" Anna coughed, and gurgled. It was the weakest protest Jane had ever heard from the woman. "I saved you," Anna repeated, and shoved a tiny black stick into Jane's blood-stained palm.
A USB drive?
She saved… she SAVED me.
"Anna, you can't… how dare you do this to me!" Jane shouted. "I'm so fucking pissed at you, and you're— you're—"
"Dying."
"Incapacitated," Jane shrieked tearfully. "Just… don't move."
Jane removed the lab coat she had been wearing during the implosion, noting with grim distaste that it was covered in ash and foreign stains of crimson.
Not exactly sterile cloths in the present environment.
She twisted it into a clump, then said something genius like, 'apply pressure'. Then there was a car and Anna was wailing harder, sobbing, because Jane had hefted her into a seat on pure adrenaline and malignant fear. Time was inconsequential again because Jane was hurtling down the road and towards those lights. There was a phone or a GPS or a navigation system and it seemed to direct the bulky SUV toward the hospital of its own volition. Anna was deathly pale, and Jane was screaming at her from the front seat, and still screaming as startled nurses lifted Anna's body from the car and transferred her to a stretcher.
But sparks weren't flying because she was drained, physically, emotionally. People spoke to her calmly but she was shaking, and she couldn't keep her footing because, oh yes, my feet are bleeding. And it felt like it had two weeks ago when she was in that drugged stupor, conversations overheard but not understood:
"— brought her in with a GSW to the abdomen, necessary blood transfusion—"
"—and where that car came from—"
"—all of the monitors going haywire in the ER—"
"—see her feet? And she looks malnourished as—"
"—that's my SISTER! You have to save my sister—"
"—name please, miss, and then we can get you some—"
"— can't even talk right now, she's in shock—"
"—bring in something to sedate her—"
One of those voices had been hers. Jane shook violently, but clutched the trim plastic stick in her palm. The information was her connection to Anna, one final gift from the only person in the world she had ever loved. Anna had saved her life.
Had saved her life.
At some point she closed her eyes.
Jane succumbed, of course, of course, to acute and terrifying shock.
The End.
Ohmygosh, no, totally just kidding. I hope you were able to hang on there during that wild ride! Happy Saturday, and leave some feedback if you feel so inclined.