Chapter Five
Gift of Old Nick
2028
Every once in a while, a life is changed by a moment so small, so insignificant, it is easy to miss. We might not see the moment at all, might miss it entirely and never be any the wiser. But there it was. Reorganizing a life in a blink.
Zofia noticed.
For her, it didn't come and go unseen.
First, the kettle went off, whistling at her from the stovetop. She'd been in the loft. Hiding there, to be precise, after she'd fled a particularly bad morning to spend an hour in the company of a book, rather than in the company of her anxieties.
And as her hour had come to an end, Crane had put the kettle up.
She appreciated the effort, the reminder she had to be a person again, to people, so to speak. And she appreciated how he went about it. Not by shouting. Not by ringing a bell.
Nah.
The whistle of the kettle was the promise of warm tea.
And Zofia liked warm tea.
Did that mean she'd enjoy peopling? No. But she'd do it. With her teeth snapping together, Zofia closed her book (a book she was, frankly, woefully uninterested in, but it'd been what she'd grabbed first) and climbed down the ladder. Miss greeted her the moment her toes touched the floor, her tail wagging at a respectful pace and the rest of her having a go at deep-pressure therapy by means of leaning her heavy shoulder against Zofia's legs.
Zofia appreciated that gesture, too, even if it put her a wee off course.
Then she walked past the sofa. Past Crane sitting there. Past Theodore in his high(ish) chair, a mess of pureed pumpkin on his cheeks— Oh, bother. Her anxiety spiked the instant she looked at them in passing. Its company was as familiar as it was tiring.
She pulled the kettle off the stove.
A mug stood on standby already, with a halfway-filled tea strainer in. Hibiscus, mostly. With some rosehip and dried strawberries. She kept her eyes turned down as she poured the water, all while her nose picked up the scents curling up from the mug and her ears couldn't not hear the giggling behind her.
Theodore had only recently begun to grasp the rules of the world; how things were meant to work and how they didn't. And when someone (Crane, usually) broke these rules, Theodore noticed.
Hence the giggling.
When Zofia turned, her fingers cradling the hot mug and her intention to go over there and just sit, her moment struck.
There was no warning.
No buildup.
Her eyes snagged on Crane and Theodore like a cat's claws might snag on a sweater. It didn't matter how much she wanted to look away, she couldn't. It was—a bit—as if now was the first time she'd ever seen them. Every time before, they'd been ink blobs with terrible shapes to them, a constant Rorschach test she kept failing, day after day, night after night.
If you could, in fact, fail a Rorschach test, but never you mind.
This was different.
Crane was leaning over the gap between him and Theodore. He'd been trying to feed him, with the spoon hovering in the air and all, but pumpkin-cheeked Theodore was far too busy giggling at Crane to bother with the food. Specifically, the glass Crane had sucked over his mouth.
It made it look as if Papa Crane had a snout.
And Theodore—with his newly discovered grasp of reality—knew that Dad was not supposed to have a snout.
Hence, giggles. Lots and lots of giggles, and grabby, pumpkin-smeared fingers grasping for the 'snout'.
That's your family, her moment said.
Not as if that'd been the first time she'd had that thought. God no. Though each time before, the thought had always been followed by a but.
But I don't deserve them. But I can't stand being a mother. But I can't stand them.
But…
But…
Not today.
That's my family, she echoed back. That goof with the fogged-up glass cupped to his mouth who should've shaved like a week ago, he married me.
Zofia settled back onto her heels. The mug in her hands might have been uncomfortably hot against her palms, but she had more important things to worry about.
And that pumpkin monster is my son.
My. Son. She cocked her head sideways, just a bit. I love them both.
Her moment was a sun blooming in her chest. Warm. Wide-reaching. Relief. Elation. Love. Love. Love. They all pushed at her from the inside out, got her heart to knock wildly against her ribs, and made her stand there, quiet, unmoving, and maybe a bit slack-jawed.
Yes. Zofia noticed her moment.
Crane did, too, if how he plucked the glass from his mouth and pinned a smile to his lips instead was any indication.
It'd been in her eyes, he'd tell her later. He'd seen a light in them which he hadn't caught a wink of in far too long. A figurative one, of course. Not the one where they misbehaved in the dark.
And naive as he often was with her, he'd thought it'd last.
2036
Zofia wasn't claustrophobic.
She often slipped through tight spaces without batting an eye. Had to, really, what with Crane's unwieldy shoulders not exactly squeezing well. Windows. Gaps in collapsed real estate. Unusually large ventilation ducts. Drain pipes. You name it; if she fit, she'd go.
No. Zofia wasn't claustrophobic. What she was, was reasonably allergic to rooms of various sizes she had to spend too much time in. Especially when she had no say in the matter.
Such as this one.
It was small. Cold. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, they were all made from stone, and as far as comforts went, she'd been left with a low bunk bed bearing a thin mattress, a single, round rug in the greyest of greys, and a dirty curtain drawn around a toilet and 'sink'. Said sink was no more than a faucet jutting from the wall, with a bucket under it.
The room had no windows. Not a one for her to squeeze through, which she suspected was down to how she was underground. She remembered stairs and a steady down and down. Much as she remembered fighting the entire way.
The fighting had done her no good.
Zofia stood. She'd been sitting on the thin mattress, quiet and small, while every second and minute that'd ticked by had been filled with her waiting for some grand idea or sudden revelation on what she could do to get herself out of this.
No idea had come by. The revelations stayed clear, too.
Slowly, Zofia moved across her small cage. Slowly, because there was no other walking for her. They'd snapped restraints to her ankles and tied them together with a wire of sorts. It hobbled her, leaving her to shuffle forward at a snail's pace.
Her skin around the hard shackles was bruised. She'd scratched herself bloody trying to get them off, only stopping once she'd realised the only way they'd come loose was if she chewed her foot off.
Not quite so desperate yet, she'd let it be.
Besides, even if she unhobbled herself, what then?
The door to her cage was solid metal, safe for a hatch at the bottom and a window at around eye level. The hatch was for food, Zofia suspected. The window so she could look outside and witness awful science being done. Neither was big enough for her to squeeze through. Obviously.
She kept on hobbling until she reached the door. A camera watched her from the corner up on the right, its fat, round lens tracking her from the bunk all the way to over here. The other corners of the room had UV lights set into them, their bulbs protected by thick glass.
They were off.
The only light she got was a fluorescent tube.
She hated its glare. It was far too bright and made her feel more exposed than ever. Hard not to suffer under its exposure though, not after they'd taken most of her clothes. What they'd left her with was an oversized pair of joggers and her flimsy top. They'd even taken her shoes.
Zofia stopped her shuffling and pulled her shoulders in tight.
She could still feel their hands on her, crawling over her, unkind, cold, hard. The phantom sensation hollowed out her chest and had her glitch to the side, driven from her own skin by how she couldn't shake it.
She'd screamed at them not to touch her. Screamed at them to let her be. She'd shrieked. She'd mewled. And all the while—all the bloody while—she'd thought that any second now she'd see an opening.
A chance.
A moment.
Something that'd help her turn the tables. Or someone that'd help.
But no one had listened.
No one had helped.
Wasn't like it'd come as a big surprise then that she'd walked back in time, past Theodore, past the Fall, all the way to the gates of Rais's garrison.
Her moment hadn't come.
The needles had instead.
Zofia's hand hitched up until her fingers found the small square of cloth taped over one of the punctures those needles had left behind. Why Waltz had bothered with an alcohol swab before he'd shoved the needles in, and why'd gone as far as to cover the punctures afterwards, escaped her. Baffled, really. The gesture had been out of place with everything else: with her being strapped to an examination chair, with her dignity torn from her, with her cage waiting just off to the left, the door wide open.
It'd thrown her. Enough to send her sliding back into a haze of simmering fear. She'd stopped fighting. Had become quiet. Compliant.
No, her moment hadn't come, but maybe she could make herself one, she'd thought. She'd wait. She'd watch. She'd listen.
Zofia reached the door. Its small window was at an inconvenient height, giving her no choice but to rise up on her toes and hook a finger into the window's bottom edge to hold herself in place. And even then she had to raise her chin and tilt her head, all while her eyes scanned left and right and disliked everything they saw.
Out past her cage, stood an industrial flavoured laboratory. She didn't know how many lab safety precautions it defied (her guess was all), but with OSHA deader than a fossilised turd, who remained to care?
What did did have was one of those squares walled in by see-through plastic sheets and a matching plastic flap to get through. It reminded Zofia of the makeshift labs Carina had sometimes set up in the early years between their escape from Fraser's lab and the immediate aftermath of the Fall.
Far to the left of Zofia's cage, stood a large and fancy metal door, with lights rimming it and a GRE access panel on its side. The panel lacked the GRE key socket and instead came with a card reader, which she'd seen Waltz use to close it behind them after she'd been dumped on the examination chair and the sack had been torn from her head.
Even if she somehow managed to unhobble herself and get out of her cage, she'd need that card. Or a card.
There weren't any other ways in or out of the lab, not from what she could see. There were other cages though. Some literal (like the ones across the room, which were no more than stalls with tight metal bars up front), and some more like hers (prison cells with windows to look out from). Two of the smaller cages were occupied. One had a Hound in it. A freshly turned one, at that, with a gritty muzzle clapped to its mouth.
Virals were rare these days. For anyone out in the territories, at least, where where most people knew better than to allow themselves to turn. They had plans in place in case they got bit. Final ones.
But Villedor was different, wasn't it?
The Viral's neighbour was a Witch. She was slight and reedy, and while the Viral seethed and growled, the Witch sat withdrawn in a corner, her thin limbs tucked in tight. The only light in her cage was the light she carried herself: an eery golden-red glow shed from more luminescent pustules and thick veins than Zofia had ever seen on a single Infected.
Zofia had a neighbour, too. That one had stared at her from his small window, much as she stared out right now. She hadn't seen much of him, but it'd been enough. A bald head. A flat nose. Large, clever eyes that held an amber glow. And a chin split down the middle, where it'd torn the wire that'd once put it back together.
She couldn't see him now, but she could see Waltz.
Waltz—who hadn't wasted a second after she'd been hobbled and thrown into her cage—obviously belonged here. The whole industrial post-apocalyptical lab aesthetic fit him, something Zofia did not consider a compliment. The years and whatever of his research he'd sampled had chewed through him, leaving his arms and neck to bear dark veins and his cheeks scarred and bruised. His hair, once black from what she remembered of the photograph on his personnel file, had dulled and grown a little grey, as well as quite a bit longer. He paused often, combing it back. Like right now.
Another lab safety violation, Zofia suspected, voiding whatever precaution he might have taken by donning a pair of silicone gloves. Especially while handling a petri dish as he currently did.
Zofia ground her teeth together. When Crane and she had gone chasing after Waltz, they'd hoped he'd still be capable.
But not like this. Being reduced to the curiosity swimming in her blood had not been part of the plan.
She'd nearly dropped back down so she could shuffle back to her bunk, when a familiar head appeared on the other side of the window. The one with the broken nose.
Ollie, as Zofia had found out. That was what Waltz had called him when he'd asked Ollie to stay behind, while the two girls and the three Hounds who'd helped get Zofia down here had left. Yes. It'd taken quite a few hands to transport her, strip her, and tie her down. She'd not made it easy for them.
Since then, Ollie had cleaned the blood from his face and had removed all the white clothing from his gear. Clothing which seemed to constitute some sort of uniform for him and his…
Zofia's mind tripped.
…his what?
Brothers and Sisters in Experimental Weaponisation?
Either way, without the white he was all scraggly and wild-looking; not like a child turned man-made monster, but a beastie right out of an old woodsy faerie tale, with antlers, mud-caked hair, and unnatural eyes.
"Hi," he said. His nose had swollen up, but his voice was clearer now than it'd been right after her foot had cracked into it. "How do you like your room?"
Zofia scowled.
"Ollie. You're perfectly capable of keeping an eye on her without antagonising her," Waltz said, which Ollie responded to with a quiet (and unsettlingly playful) growl.
"No one's antagonising anyone." With his pale eyes fixed on her (they had some green still left in them), Ollie reached up to grab both of his antlers. "I'm trying to do small talk." He gave the antlers a quick twist, rotated them once, and pulled both right off.
Zofia's stomach lurched sideways. Turned out the antlers were sheathed in a grooved metal base and screwed into plates. The plates were set into his skull, their edges protruding and rimmed with scars.
"But I don't think she likes it," Ollie added.
Zofia thought she heard a hint of genuine disappointment, underlined by a shy smile hitching the boy's stitched-together lips upwards.
"Are you hungry? We interrupted your cooking if I remember right."
. . .
Zofia levelled her flattest of stares at him.
Ollie shrugged. "I'll get you something to eat anyway," he said. Then, with a look over his shoulder, he asked Waltz the very question which had stuck to the tip of Zofia's tongue ever since she'd gotten here. "Why all the fuss about her anyway? What makes her so special over the other two?"
"You."
Waltz's answer confused both Zofia and Ollie. Ollie shot a look back at her, blinked his odd eyes, and emoted an obvious What? before he moved aside and gave Zofia a chance to glare at Waltz.
"She made you possible, Ollie," Waltz clarified. "You, Rosa. Luc—" At the mention of the last name, Waltz looked up from whatever lab equipment had held his attention and glanced to the cage neighbouring Zofia's. "—all of you."
"You're joking," Zofia managed, her voice still sore from all the screaming. But he had to be, there was no way she was in any way responsible for this. Her eyes flicked to Ollie, who studied her like she was a particularly colourful bug.
Yet another shy smile pulled on the boy's mouth. "She speaks again."
"I may be oversimplifying, yes." Pulling off his gloves, Waltz rose to his feet. "But joking? No. Yes, it's monumentally more complex, as most things in life are—" He paused and regarded her quietly for one far too creepy second. "What do you prefer I call you? Sirota? Miss Sirota? Zofia?"
"Zo?" Ollie suggested, and Zofia couldn't help the sudden rush of anger bullying its way past her fear. She shot him (what she hoped to be) a scathing look.
"Not Zo." Ollie's eyebrows shot up into his mud-smeared forehead. "I felt that, I think."
Her anger traded places with confusion. Was everyone in this forsaken city hopping mad?
"Zofia, then," Waltz said. "I expect you might have wondered why Fraser was willing to trade you to me all these years ago."
"He didn't need me."
Waltz gave a slight nod. "He thought he didn't need you. Fraser firmly believed his breakthrough began and ended with Kyle Crane. Crane and the original specimen they extracted from Harran."
Her anger shouldered its way forward again. "His name was Theo," she snapped. It'd become instinct at this point, what with the number of people who'd not bothered learning his name before they'd judged him having been far too high. Her included, she admitted.
"Theodore Rodson," Waltz said, "the younger brother to Matheo Rodson, Fraser's last two subjects before the GRE first severed their ties with him in 2015. Did you know Theodore means 'Gift of God'?"
Zofia's throat clamped shut.
"Fraser found this… poetic. Maybe even a little prophetic. This Gift of God did most of his work for him and nearly perfected Windfall without him having to lift a finger. First Theo. Then Crane. Especially Crane. The effect Windfall had on his cellular recovery and neuroplasticity was exactly what Fraser had been chasing: a body which repairs and sustains itself on its own, much as THV does to any of the infected that turn, but without the undesired effects of its mutations. Immortality, in so many words, a body capable of healing nearly anything safe for the most severe of traumas."
Like two lucky shots to the heart, she thought. That'd been severe trauma enough for Theo to die.
As Waltz had talked and talked and talked, he'd left his equipment behind and now stood in front of her cage. He kept a distance which allowed her to see him plainly; his straight-backed posture, his raised chin, and the way he folded his hands over each other.
He had a biomarker just like her. The UV lights mounted above him kept it a solid green (light he denied her). Ollie though? And the other's like him who'd attacked her in Old Villedor?
They'd not had any and Ollie's wrist remained bare even now.
"But he was wrong," Waltz continued. "They were a dead end. The most he was able to do was to stabilise Windfall, which, by itself, is already a great achievement. Having an inhibitor capable of not only halting THV's end goal for its host but retaining a fraction of its regenerative properties as well? Eureka! But it wasn't enough. Windfall remains lethal to many, and it has no lasting impact on its host. All its benefits are lost within hours, and repeated exposure will always be fatal some time down the road." Waltz looked at the Viral in its cage. "Those are kinks Fraser did not get the chance to iron out before his death, and most of that is down to how he didn't know which one of his subjects had the answers." He pointed at her. "You. You had them. A short-sightedness I aimed to exploit—"
Waltz's eyes cut to the left, just as Zofia heard the affirming beep and click of the lab's doors opening. When he spoke again, his voice had a distracted quality to it, but no matter how far she leaned forward, Zofia couldn't see around the corner enough to be able to tell what had drawn his attention.
"—until you managed to take that way from me," Waltz finally added.
"So, that's what you want?" Zofia pulled herself closer to the window. "To pick up where you left off and I'm— I'm what? Your blood dispenser?"
"You're his one hope," said a new voice entirely. A woman's. It took another beat before she'd finally stepped close enough for Zofia to see her—at which point Zofia thought maybe she'd gone a touch made herself. The woman must have walked out of an old faerie tale painting — and if Ollie was a woodsy beastie that'd sprung from the same tale, then the woman was the titular fey.
She stood taller than Waltz. Maybe taller than Crane, even, and wore a sleeveless dress that clung tight to her lean figure. The dress was mostly white, from its thin halters hanging off her pale shoulders all the way down to the subtlety widening skirt. But once it reached below her knees, the white cut off, replaced by sooty black fabric stitched onto it with thick thread. The black length of cloth was cut to trail behind her, dragging on the ground.
It was accented with non-sensical patterns in a bloody red.
"Our future," the woman added and looked to Zofia.
She wore a mask just as Ollie and the others had. It rode on the bridge of her slim nose and exposed sharp cheeks and an equally sharp chin. One perfectly ordinary blue eye shone from the mask, while the other (the right one) was so uncannily blue it couldn't possibly be real. Which it wasn't, Zofia suspected. It must have been glass, but that didn't make her stare any less unsettling.
Her hair was pitch black and ridiculously long, and what Zofia had first mistaken for a single antler on the right side of her head, was anything but. It hadn't come from a deer, for one. And it hadn't needed to be bolted on. No. It'd grown just fine on its own.
She also wasn't alone. She'd brought a wheelchair with her, and in it sat a frail girl with long brown hair and dressed in comfortable everyday clothes. Jeans. Sweater. Sneakers. Her clothes looked good as new, and certainly in better shape than the rest of her. She might have been a teen or in her twenties; it was impossible to tell with how haggard she was.
She, too, wore a mask, but an entirely different one. It was of the oxygen variety, and she currently held it pressed to her nose and mouth.
"Mére," Ollie said in greeting, and the woman traded him a soft smile, followed by a warm, "Oliver," before her eyes slid back to Zofia's window.
"Why, you're many a thing." The woman's chin dipped briefly, long enough for her to regard the girl in the chair as if to underline what she said next. "Though he prays you're his salvation, most of all."
"What are you doing down here, Séraphine?" Waltz's demeanour had changed the moment he'd faced Séraphine (Lady Séraphine, from what Zofia remembered hearing, the head of that Church everyone had been on about). It'd tightened up in a way that reminded her of a dog squaring off with another, potentially larger, dog.
Which wasn't unsettling at all.
"Me? Why, I've come to see my children, Vincent, and to bring you yours. You've been down here for hours already and she's oh so missed you." Séraphine took a slow step forward, pushing the wheelchair on ahead. "Haven't you, Mia?"
Zofia pinched her brow.
Mia?
His stiff-as-a-board routine abandoned, Waltz crossed the gap to the chair in one hurried step. He sank to one knee. "Is everything alright?"
Zofia's mind (and all the thoughts it ought to carry) momentarily malfunctioned. A bit as if her head was a boot and the scene she witnessed a patch of deep mud. There was Waltz, the man who'd (likely) thrown Aiden to his death and who'd kidnapped her, drugged her, caged her — and now he was down on a knee, with the girl in the wheelchair lowering her oxygen mask and meeting him with a tired smile.
Yes. Zofia had definitely gone a touch mad.
"I'm fine, dad," Mia said. "She's being dramatic. I think she wanted an excuse to see what you've been up to."
Dad?
Waltz shook his head. "She shouldn't be down here," he said to Séraphine, who'd abandoned the wheelchair so she could roam the room.
Séraphine tsked at him. "Your pets won't hurt her," she said, even as she passed the first cage on the far wall. The Viral—which'd been leaning by the gate the entire time Zofia had been here, huffing and snarling—shrank back. It grew very quiet. The Witch in the next cage stirred as Séraphine passed her cage, scuttling over the ground with her claws scraping on stone and her lungs squeezing out a dim, breathless cry.
"And Luc—" Séraphine had crossed the room and reached Zofia's neighbour. "Well, Luc still has some manners, don't you?"
Said neighbour answered by rattling his cage's door. The words he spat were garbled.
"Hm. I stand corrected. Sit."
The rattling stopped immediately — and Zofia was inexplicably overwhelmed by the impulse to do exactly that.
To sit.
It came at her suddenly, carried on a buzz of static thrumming in her ears. By the time her thoughts caught up, she'd already fallen back onto her heels.
There were no words for what followed.
Disbelief didn't cut it. Neither did denial. Or shock. Much as there had been no label for the gamut of emotions Zofia had experienced when Harran had fallen and she'd seen her first real-life zombie, there wasn't anything in the dictionary that'd do this justice, either.
It was a bit of an existential flattening.
A bulldozing of the mind.
With her fingers twitching and her heart squeezing wildly, Zofia retreated from the door.
She'd not sit. She would. Not. Sit. Even if she nearly tripped over her bound feet, there was no way— no way— no way—
Séraphine's mask appeared in the window. She had to stoop to look. "My," Séraphine said, her one real eye fixing on Zofia with an intensity that made Zofia's stomach wish it could liquefy. "Will you look at that? She hears me. Don't you, puppet? Hear me singing in your blood?"
Zofia froze on the spot. Her mouth was so dry, every word she might say would grind itself to pieces moving through it.
"Vincent?"
"Yes?"
"I take it all back. My doubts, my harping. You might have been right."
"I am right."
Tsking once again, Séraphine vanished from the window. "I'll concede. Now what about the key? Did she have it?"
"No, it's with Crane."
Zofia clenched her teeth hard enough to make her jaw ache, while her knees grew unsteady and her head buzzed on something fierce. But at least the outside pressure—the static—had vanished.
And yet, she couldn't find the right words.
Much as she couldn't find her moment.
"But I'm working on it," Waltz said. "Every man has his limits, and now that he's alone, a pack of Hounds should do the trick. We'll have him and the key soon enough."
"Oh, but he isn't."
A pause.
"Where is he?"
"He and his pup followed you to the centre and are hiding in the Fish Eye. And loathsome as it may be, but we're not ready to pull them out from under Frank's skirt by force and break the treaty. First the key. Then the breaking. Until then— oh, Vincent, I have the most delicious idea. Have him work for us."
Séraphine reappeared in the window.
"Promise him he can come visit his puppet, under the condition he runs a little errand for us. Say, the factory. Send him there, have him do all the hard work, and if he makes it, we're one step closer. And if he doesn't, we'll go pick the key off his corpse. And, Vincent?"
"Yes?"
"Be a darling. Go yourself. If he won't bite, then give him a chance to break Frank's rules all on his lonesome. He won't have anywhere to go once the Fish Eye spits him out."
Séraphine winked, reached up, and slid the window closed.
Zofia, her knees finally buckling, sank to the floor.