Chapter Fifteen
The Elevator
She's a vagabond in the trappings of her own mind. A paradox, squeezed between two truths.
The first one is simple:
She's gone.
The second is not:
Against all imaginable odds, Zofia remains.
The top of a lighthouse is her bastion. It is wide and perfectly circular; endless and yet no larger than a shoe box. She can't tell if she's been the one to shape it, or if the lighthouse has shaped her. All she's certain of (as certain as she could be, with her mind brittle) is that up here, Zofia remembers her name. A worn out, ragged thing it might be; stepped on, driven in the dirt. But it was hers. And as long as she's up here, the black flames devouring what's left of her (what's left of Harran) cannot reach her.
The lighthouse (her lighthouse?) is a spear made from bleached bone, driven deep into Harran's rotting heart. It juts out across the city, leans for the ocean it will never reach, and far far far blow at its base, lives darkness.
A Forgetting.
It calls for her; persists with a soft chime she hasn't ever been able to shake from her mind.
Bing—
The elevator doors tremble open.
The elevator itself comes and goes. Sometimes it sits in the middle of the endless—yet no larger than a shoe box—lighthouse. Yet a heartbeat later it might not and instead she sees a window which looks out across a homely village built upon the promise that it would hold watch until the morrow and keep everyone safe.
There's a postcard stuck to the window's wooden dividers, held there by a paper clip wedged in tight. The card has yet another lighthouse on it; the same one she's in and yet a different one entirely.
The window is gone now, of course. All she's got is the elevator, its door open. The cabin's black and white floor with its diamond pattern is clean. The light inside flickers. It always flickers.
Zofia suspects that if she steps inside, she'll leave her name behind. Have it severed from her when the doors close, but she expects the same will happen regardless of what she does. Step in. Stay. It won't matter in the end.
But the elevator certainly won't help.
Voices ooze from it and bound up its endless shaft. They warn her to stay away and they call her for her at the very same time, wanting her to get it over with already.
She doesn't actually understand them, but she recognises them like one might recognise a pattern in the world without much thinking. The screams that creep up the walls are those of people she's met. The weeping flowing from cracks in the concrete, some of that is her own. The laughing that drums against steel and the singing that flutters alongside muffled crying; they're all memories she can't bring herself to form into clear pictures.
The only voices she does make sense of are those that fall against the lighthouse from the outside. Like thunder, almost. They're invaders, from beyond her bastion—
"Okay. Looks like she's responding. This is good— Ollie? Keep an eye on the marker and tell me as soon as we see a green indicator."
"She's stable?"
"Not quite," Waltz said. He pried her eyelids open. A shock of white light followed. It was too bright, too sharp, and drove itself to the back of her brain. "But we're getting there."
"And then you and Mére can stop fighting?"
Waltz scoffed. His shadow swam by, circling her at the edge of her vision, where colours weren't colour-ing right and most everything was out of focus. It took him leaning over her to really see him; the white coat, the beard, the blackened blood vessels and scars.
It made her angry. She lunged for him.
Nothing happened. She barely managed to lift her shoulders before the restraints pulled her back and every attempt to raise her head was stopped by something wide chafing over her forehead.
Waltz looked down.
"Look who decided to burn through her sedatives already," he said, then pressed his thumb down on the small plastic bit on the IV that'd regulate how much poison it would drip into her. Or so she'd thought, until barbed ice burnt through her and she managed to fumble for a coherent thought. The sensation was familiar and told her that wherever she'd been about to go, Waltz was pulling her back.
"I'm relieved," he added. "An hour ago I was convinced you'd turned."
Zofia didn't bother with a reply. She needed every pinch of strength elsewhere, chief among them the need to fit together what she heard and saw and built a proper picture out of it. One which she could understand. It was hard work.
Waltz's arm fell away to somewhere beyond her right shoulder. The bed she was strapped to jolted. Bit by bit, it tilted her torso upwards until she was no longer lying down flat.
"Imagine my surprise when you responded to an Inhibitor." His eyes cut to the side. "How's her marker?"
"Still all red," said Ollie.
"Curious. And promising. We'll have to hold her under observation for tonight and keep her dose steady."
"Out on the chair? That'll be uncomfortable."
"I would say a bit of discomfort for the night is better than death in the morning, don't you think?"
"I guess. And then what?"
"And then we try again," Waltz said, even as his focus shifted to the doors at the end of the laboratory. Since Zofia faced the same way and couldn't well look anywhere else, she had no choice but to do the same.
The doors opened. A Hound came through. He pushed a cage ahead of him. The cage held a Volatile. It was kept in place by thick bars of steel and sheets of UV light hemming it in, while a second Hound had a wire noose wrapped around its neck.
The Volatile was quiet. That was unusual, she knew that much. Its cleft jaw hung open and its body heaved, but there was no screeching. No howling. Nothing more than laboured breathing emphasised by stuttering clicks.
Zofia's muscles pulled taut.
The Lady Séraphine walked alongside the cage. She pushed anger in front of her and Zofia didn't much appreciate how it climbed up and down her spine in spurts of static. No one in the vicinity liked it. Movement stirred in every prison. The Banshee scuttled back. The Hound turned Speedster walked into a wall. And behind the thick door with its slit, her neighbour (Luc) stopped muttering to himself. (He muttered so much, his voice had become an integral part of her surroundings).
"What are you—" Waltz sighed. "My lab isn't a zoo," he added, his tone having grown (of all things imaginable) tired.
"Your lab will be whatever I so please it be," the Lady Séraphine bit back.
"As you wish." A pause. "I take it the Concord didn't go as you expected?" Waltz asked as he stepped into the cage's path, bringing the Hounds to a stop.
When the cage rattled to a halt, the Volatile inside of it hunched lower, falling onto its haunches.
"It didn't work." The Lady Séraphine swung an arm up, pointing it at the Volatile's back. "I hear them much clearer now, but will they listen to me in turn? No. So—" She waved her hand at Waltz. "—go do what you must. Double my dose, squeeze the serum from her brain for all I care, but get it done. I am through with being ignored."
Zofia heard the words fine enough, but they evaded her when she tried to get them to make sense. Weary, in pain, confused, and with the ice still travelling her blood, Zofia managed to turn her head by just enough to land her eyes on the Volatile.
It was close; close enough for her to smell death roll from it and to make out every mark on its thick skin, including the hint of embers burning deep in its veins.
Beyond that, Waltz and the Lady argued. Soon, their words lost all meaning. Or importance. Zofia's attention had shrunk to a pinprick, pulled under by the Volatile's shoulders rising and falling and its steady breathing.
In.
And out.
In.
And out.
A soft chime pings off the back of her mind.
Zofia breathed in.
And out.
In.
And out.
Her restraints grew tighter. Her skin grew too warm. Everything that touched her touched her wrong; her clothes, the air, the loop around her neck and the ring lying against her skin. Let alone the needle—
The Volatile's head jerked aside and its sunken, lidless eyes fixed on her. They were a murky amber, run through with blood.
She breathed in.
She breathed out, and their fear slithered through her; the fear of two trapped nightmares wanting to wake up. With the fear came hatred. Hatred for the voice that shouldn't be. Hatred for the invader. The imposter. Their aspiring gaoler who'd make them forfeit their right to abide no one but themselves.
Oh, if they could tear her throat out, silence her forever, drag her bounty back to the warming embrace of the hive—
—Bing, the elevator chimes. It shudders open and bares its impeccable floor. The light flickers and between one flicker and the next, Zofia stands not outside, but in the cabin.
There's dirt on the floor now. Dirt she tracked in with her shoes. She scuffs those shoes over the floor and feels a bit guilty. When she looks up again, an arm (not her own) gets in her way and reaches for the elevator buttons.
It's a familiar arm, still dressed in the same grey-blue button up shirt he wears rolled up to his elbows. Crane presses the last button, the one that'll go down nineteen floors, and when Zofia looks up at him with the same fear she'd felt when she'd first met him, he's gone.
The elevator wobbles.
Its descent begins.