Chapter Twenty-Six
After what felt like an eternity, huddling on top of the toilet seat and staring at the stall door, the tablet strapped to Seven's wrist vibrated. A message flashed on the screen, saying, "I'm in. Limited access, but it should work."
Claws clacking against the screen, Seven replied, "Track my progress, ping me if a patrol's coming, and deactivate security devices in my path. Two pings if you need time."
In reply, Thoth wrote, "Wait one minute. Guards passing outside your current position." As Seven read the message, she could hear the footsteps stomping against the concrete floor just outside the bathroom. They faded into silence, but Seven waited the full minute before opening the door.
The way deeper into the prison proved even more arduous than Seven had feared. Long, narrow corridors that gently sloped down guarded the cells deep below ground. Sight lines extended for a hundred feet, without a single shadow to hide in. Thoth stopped her numerous points along the way to crack firewalls on cameras and deactivate anti-malware systems guarding alternate servers. Each time, Seven had to huddle against a wall and hope no guards would pass by, and each time, at least one pair of guards, walking shoulder to shoulder, would round the path and walk towards her. Each time, she made herself invisible, clambered up the walls, and pinned herself against the ceiling, sucking in her gut so she wouldn't bump the hats the officers wore. More than one hat brushed the fur on her belly.
Each time, the illusion came up more slowly, the invisible straps bound her tighter, the unseen knives loomed closer, and more phantom needles plunged into her arms and legs. Even with her invisibility banished and sight returned, the tight, close walls reminded her too much of the cell. Each breath caught in her throat, and her arms trembled. She dreaded the too-familiar twinge on her arms as the tablet alerted her to the next ordeal.
"No," she muttered with each breath. "I won't. Go back. Never. Won't go. No cage. I'm human. A person. Won't. No." Step by plodding step, her words grew less coherent until each breath was a wordless snarl. The deeper she went, the dimmer her sight became. The lights overhead couldn't keep the darkness at bay. Scalpels prodded her along the path, straps pulled her onward. Tongs picked at her teeth, tweezers pried her eyes open, and ghostly liquors crept along her veins, leaving trails of burning fire and icy cold she could trace with a finger.
Then she felt a twinge in her throat. Seven's eyes widened in recognition. Above all other pain she suffered in the dark operating room, that one cut the deepest.
"No," she hissed. "I'm done being a test subject, I'm done! You don't have any more power over me, Ghetsis! You're dead, I'm alive, and you can't hurt me!"
But the pain kept coming. She could feel the tendons in her throat part around a scalpel as it sliced through her Adam's apple. Tiny metal hooks wriggled into her vocal chords. Knowing what came next, Seven frantically rummaged in her hair and wrenched out the first object her hands grazed. It was a bag of beef jerky. She jammed the whole bag in her mouth, not even opening it.
One by one, she felt the cords in her throat get sliced away. Each cut brought a muffled scream as jolts of pain shot up her neck like spiked bullets. Forty-seven slices, that's how many it took to slice through the bottom, followed by six injections into the severed area, then forty-two above the hooks. This time, she could feel the part of her, her lost vocal cords, dangling on the ends of metal hooks as the Ghetsis eased them out of her throat with his own hands.
The pain subsided as the new cords were stitched into place and smeared with a warm, soothing jelly. Then she heard the words.
"Say your name," came the whisper in the dark. "Go ahead, speak."
The words caught in her throat. Tears streamed down her face, and searing pain clouded her sight, but the words came all the same.
"I'm Subject Seven," she said.
"Good," said the quiet voice, reaching her ears from beyond the grave. "Now you can speak just like us. Now you will be more useful to us. Aren't you happy?"
Seven shook with sobs. All her 'humanity,' not even a gift, but an added feature, forced on her through needle and scalpel. And yet, she felt the words "Thank you" pass her lips, as soft as a caress on the cheek, as painful as a white-hot brand pressed into her flesh.
"Get up." Dimly, through Ghetsis' words, she saw the same message on the tablet. Its dim, harsh light tapped on the darkness like a finger against a pane of glass. Staring at the screen, she stood up and growled at the voice in her head.
"You're dead. You're dead and I'm free."
"Free?" She could see the Ghetsis' gentle, mocking smile and feel his bony fingers brush through her hair. "Freedom is a lie. We're all frogs in the bottom of a well, looking up at a thin sliver of sky. Any frog that thinks there's anything more, that scrapes its fingers raw climbing the slick stone walls, that starves itself reaching for that sky, that heaves itself over the side, finds another set of walls, another circle overhead." The man in her memories shrugged, and his grin widened. "It's a bigger well, and maybe you can't see the sides yet, but it's still a well, and you're still at the bottom." Then invisible bullets punctured the vaporous image before her. Red mist streamed from the holes, and his smile bled across his face. "Get going. Another patrol is coming."
She blinked. The image was gone, and instead, she was staring at the tablet. Those last words flickered before her, and she heard echoes of the whisper as she read them again and again.
Footsteps brought her back to her task, loud and heavy against the cold concrete floor. This time, while invisible, she sprinted towards them, making only the tiniest shuffling sound with her padded, silent shoes. If the guards felt a breath of wind as she flew over them, they dismissed it as a draft and kept walking without a single glance back.
She raced through the last minute of her descent. During her hallucination, Thoth had hacked everything ahead, and Seven moved quickly enough to avoid the next patrol. Once down to the main facility, she ducked into a laundry basket full of soiled towels and watched her surroundings.
The real Stonebough, the one buried beneath a mile-high hill of concrete and steel, held forty-one prison cells. Reserved for society's worst criminals, whose crimes were filed on reports thick enough to crush them to death, these cells had the highest security the state could provide. Each door had encrypted digital locks, whose passwords changed at random intervals, each area had security cameras with submachine guns mounted beneath them, and each cell had vaporous green barriers on all four sides. The bare cells had floors of steel and no furnishings. A hole in the middle of the floor, about three inches thick and rimmed with barbed wire, served for a toilet, and a greasy brown stain marked where their food was dumped.
The prisoners, two or three to a cell, huddled in their cramped confines, clothed with just enough skintight white fabric to offer some semblance of decency. Every single one of them had vacant, gaunt, hollow-eyed faces that stared absently at the shimmering plasma.
Officers and their Pokémon patrolled the floor. Each block of four cells had a Pokémon circling each cell and two officers on standby in chairs at their center.
After some observation, she noticed that each block of cells was split off by a giant steel wall, necessitated by all the weight pressing down on the ceiling. As a result, each group of cells was isolated. Wide double-doors with encrypted locks and fiberglass windows connected each cell. Two, the patrols, with a wide variety of Pokémon, moved at different speeds. With correct timing, she could silence the guards and Pokémon before any other cell noticed anything was amiss.
Seven waited outside the first area, staring through the window until she saw a gap in their patrols. She tried the knob, but it was still locked. Grimacing as the opening vanished, she hurriedly typed orders on the tablet.
"I was busy making sure those cameras wouldn't kill you," Thoth answered. "The first door will be tricky, but the rest will be quick." Then, a minute later, "Okay, ready."
Once she had another opening, she darted through the door, slipped between two cells, and rushed both officers from the side. Before they could turn and shout, she slammed both their heads together. One slumped in his chair, but the other struggled in her grasp. With one hand, she reached for the pokéballs on their belts and recalled their Pokémon, and with the other, she squeezed his throat. He clawed at her wrist, hard enough to draw blood at first, but the man's hands fell to his sides and his chest went slack. A finger to his neck told her he still had a pulse.
Seven checked the other doors, one opposite the one she just entered, and the other to the right, both leading to other blocks of cells. Neither set of patrols noticed anything. Then, turning back to the cells, she considered the green barriers walling in each cell. She brushed her fur against it and felt it burn to a crisp as every atom of hair that entered the electromagnetic field got fried by a stream of ions flitting through it.
"Can you turn off the cells?"
"Not without alerting the whole facility," Thoth answered. "I could reroute the power, but that would take days."
Seven shrugged and typed back, "I have a better idea."
She went back to the door she opened and studied the hinges. Then she called out Ra.
"Burn through the hinges," Seven told the Torkoal. Ra grunted, and a plume of smoke shot out of the holes in its back. Flame shot out of her mouth in a tiny blue stream, searing steel like a welding torch. But even though the steel turned white hot, it refused to melt.
With a grunt, Seven wrenched on the door. The combined heat and stress snapped the hinge in two, leaving the door hanging loosely on the other hinge. Ra and Seven repeated the process, and with a high-pitched squeal, the door's electronics popped out of the wall.
"Careful with that," Thoth warned with a flurry of pings. "If you disconnect the lock, it'll set off alarms."
"I need the door," Seven told it.
"I can't imagine why, but if you want it that badly, cut the fifth red wire from the top and the third black from the bottom at the same time. You'll have four seconds to bind the ends together. After that, you'll have your door."
Seven took out her knife and rummaged through the exposed electronics. She counted the wires twice before taking the two wires between her fingers. With a single deft motion, she sliced both wires, pressed both ends together, and had Ra melt them together.
"Perfect," Thoth said, "But I still don't see how it'll help."
Using the butt of her knife, Seven smashed through the fiberglass. Large jagged shards clattered across the floor. The remaining hole was just large enough to crawl through.
She approached the first cell. Only one man sat in this cell, a man so huge he took up enough space for two. Muscles the size of bowling balls, bulging beneath drawn, pasty skin, twitched as the man regarded Seven. His stare was expressionless, but a small smile touched his lips. His long, lanky hair hung in matted clumps around his face, but Seven could still recognize the Vice-Admin for Mad Hax, a bruiser known as Blacksmith.
"Giovanni sent you?"
Seven turned the door up-side-down and pushed it into the barrier. Sparks hissed and crackled off of it as the barrier parted around the metal.
"Mind the edges, they're hot and covered in jagged glass."
Blacksmith's shoulders were almost as wide as the door, but he wriggled through without a scratch. He stood, brushed off his pale, hairy legs, and looked down at Seven.
"About damn time someone made it this far," he said flatly. "Make sure you don't fuck this up."
"I won't," Seven replied. "But before we move on, I have a favor to ask of you." She took the pistol from one of the guards and handed it to him. Without looking at it, Blacksmith turned off the safety and cocked the gun.
"By Giovanni's orders, your former Admin, Mad Hax, is not to leave this place alive."
"And you're worried that he'll kill you before you kill him." Blacksmith chuckled. "Smart man." Then he paused and frowned. After a minute, he jammed the gun into his loincloth and said, "You can count on me, sir."
Changelog
10/27/18 - minor edits