Blake - 64

Blake lay exactly where they had left her, back on the narrow cell bed, staring again at the ceiling – but this time with far less freedom than before. Restraints pinned down her wrists and ankles. They were all going to die. There was nothing more certain in her world. Muttering under their breath, the guards had lifted her from the pool of red they’d found her in, one slipping in the bloody mess. She had a faint recollection of them handling her far more gently than she would have expected. One of them had even wiped down her face, clearing it of her blood, tucking her hair back behind her ears and whispering, ‘I’m sorry,’ as they’d strapped her down.

As if her sister’s death could be excused. A mistake that could be forgiven. Of course, no one had said it outright, not a single one had uttered Kira’s name. No one had the balls. And not a single person would look at her directly. The three guards who remained, taking up position outside her cell, had their backs to her, and had been that way for the past twenty minutes. Not speaking. Casting the odd, furtive glance towards Azrael’s cell.

These morons had no idea what sorry was. ‘Not yet,’ she whispered.

Blake turned her head. They had left her that freedom at least. The joints in her neck cracked and popped with the effort. Nothing about herself fit right anymore. Her bones were too big for her body, her skin stretched too tightly. This body was a cumbersome, infuriating weight. And her brain, that part that had never failed her, did so now, offering no solution to her current predicament. Blake lay there. A prisoner in the house she had built, watching her greatest achievement hang from his metal cross. The positioning of the bed and her place in it afforded her a prime view of Azrael. Motionless, but eyes wide open. A glorious shade of sea green she could make out even from this distance. Hours had been spent on finding that exact shade, one that truly captured the changeability of the ocean.

Blake continued her countdown. Opportunity would come. It had to come.

Then watch them all fall down. All going to burn.

‘All going to burn.’ Blake nodded to the viper. Not fighting the sting of it. ‘All going to burn.’

Azrael would burn with them. Changing that was beyond her. The concrete and stone and iron and emptiness above pushed down at her. She intended to take everything from Tamas. But the truth was acrid. Blake had already lost everything in return: her knowledge, cultivated and tended to the expense of all else; her sister; her creation. Even Perry had abandoned her. If he had ever stood by her to begin with.

Lifting her head, Blake strained to catch a glimpse of the hand that held the Starpoints. Her fingertips were so numb it was impossible to tell if she dug at her skin as she intended. The IV and its stand had been removed from her cell. The same guard who’d apologised had removed the needle and done a very basic clean-up job. Certainly no medic. No Cym.

But why would they waste time on her? Someone who would no doubt be disposed of shortly. Azrael had been found. She was in no state to attend to any work necessary on the carapaces, even if need did arise.

Blake dropped her head back against the thin pillow, abandoning her attempt to dig her fingers in beneath the bandaging on her hand, breathing through the resulting wash of spasming muscles.

The guards shifted, backs straightening, shoulders pulling back, murmurs passing between them. They pressed against the glass of her cell. Whatever had caught their attention came from farther up the corridor. Blake craned her neck, and stared at a lopsided world.

Eron paced down the length of the short passageway.

It was the first time Blake had laid eyes on him since the catastrophic arrival of the Four. Since he’d shoved her clear of the falling crane. He had saved her life. She did not expect that of him again. But she would seek something else from him.

‘Eron. Eron, listen to me.’ Blake twisted her shoulders, trying to wrench her hand free of the restraint. The metal dug with cruel accuracy into the tender skin around the splinter at her wrist, and she choked back a cry. ‘Please, Eron. Is she gone?’

He wouldn’t even need to say it. A yes or a no were irrelevant. His expression would tell her all she needed to know.

And Blake needed to know.

But Eron was listening to no one. Didn’t glance at the guards as he passed them, would have walked right over the top of them if they weren’t pressing back against her cell wall. That Eron was striking could be debated by no one. And at the epicentre of that attractiveness was his silken movement. The way he held himself. A dancer poised before a routine. Blake watched him move now.

All the lightness had gone, a driven, leaden footfall in its place. His disconcerting eyes – pits of endless white – held only one focus. Azrael.

Eron reached the cell door, and the glass slid open. Azrael remained still, no physical indication that he sensed the arrival. Eron turned, and for a brief moment Blake thought he was about to look at her. But his gaze travelled back up the corridor where another Syranian moved into the space. Seder.

The youngest of the god-soldiers. A vapid and uninteresting specimen who seemed incapable of speaking, or breathing, unless Captain Nex directed it. Blake and Seder had shared barely a handful of words over the years, most of those being messages relayed to or from the captain. Seder, if nothing else, was an adequate personal assistant.

He, like Eron, paid no mind to Blake in her cell.

Seder joined Eron alongside Azrael. Their difference in height was exaggerated by the lowered angle Blake viewed them from. Eron towered not only over Seder, but over Azrael. Her masterpiece appeared far more diminutive than he was. Eron moved up close, lowering his face so that he and Azrael were eye to eye. He placed a finger at the base of Azrael’s throat and traced a line down his chest, coming to rest just above the material of the ripped black pants Azrael wore.

The Syranian had never frightened Blake. She’d never held any concerns for Kira’s safety when the truth of her involvement with Eron became evident. As disinterested as she was in such things, Blake wasn’t blind to the body language between her sister and the alien. No harm was intended by either side. And Eron’s effeminate disposition induced a certain ease.

But Blake failed to find that ease now. He postured over Azrael, menace emanating from the lock of his body and the set of his mouth. This was not the graceful, anxious Syranian who had crouched over her on level eleven.

Eron spoke to Seder, who handed him something. A knife of sorts perhaps, though not one Blake recognised from either human or alien inventory. The blade of this one curved almost entirely in a rounded O shape.

‘Get away from him, Eron.’ She kicked her feet, fighting against the bands that dug into her ankles. ‘Get away from him.’ But she was as invisible as Perry had complained of being. Damn it, Perry had to come back. He had to be real. ‘Eron, I said get away from him.’

She said it no louder than before, but Eron’s head tilted. A bird of prey’s jerky movement towards a sound. Blake had spent years around the Syranians and their white-eyed stares. In all that time she’d never shrunk from it. Not until this moment. Eron’s eyes pinned her down, burrowed into her, and straight through her. He lifted the finger that still rested against Azrael’s body and pressed it against his lips.

The bastard was shushing her.

His eyes didn’t leave her as his free hand drove the circular blade into Azrael’s back.

Azrael’s body jerked against his restraints, his mouth widening until it threatened to split the skin at his cheeks. No sound reached her, and she was grateful for it.

‘Shit,’ Blake whispered. ‘Oh shit.’

Eron struck again, his face a contorted, ugly mess beneath his rage. There was a brief pause, and Eron grabbed a handful of Azrael’s hair, yanking his head back so they were again face to face. The Syranian spoke, or rather, yelled at his captive. A few inches between his mouth and Azrael’s. The answer he sought wasn’t forthcoming. Azrael’s lips closed. Eron launched another assault, driving the blade deep into Azrael’s back again, holding it embedded there, twisting it into whatever lay beneath the careful engineering and high-density Telteriun.

On and on it went. The silent agony. At least a dozen more blows before Blake could watch no longer. The power to stop Azrael’s torment literally lay in her hands. Hand. So desperately close, but for all their usefulness, the Starpoints might as well have been on Syrana itself. Perry was not the only one to desert her. Even the viper lay low, leaving her alone to witness the brutality.

Blake was so intent on keeping her eyes averted that she didn’t realise the guards had entered her cell until one of them touched her shoulder.

‘Get off me.’ Her cry came at far greater decibels than the light touch warranted.

‘Just take it easy,’ came the ludicrous advice.

A few metres away, her greatest achievement was being undone. She could not, would not, take it easy. Blake lashed out with the only weapon still available to her – biting at the limbs that moved around her.

‘Fuck’s sake, Blake. Don’t make this harder on yourself.’ The directive came from her right, so that’s where she went with her teeth.

‘She’s fucking insane,’ someone else whispered.

‘This whole bloody place is,’ the ‘take it easy’ verbaliser decided. ‘Blake, Blake, listen to me.’

The slap to her cheek was not particularly brutal, but it accomplished its task. Blake slumped against the bedding, her chest heaving. A figure leaned over her, and she blinked to draw focus. A broad face with a trimmed black beard and searching amber eyes.

‘Blake, are you with me?’

The man’s voice held no aggression, nothing to suggest he was about to set on her the way Eron did with Azrael. There was substance in his expression. Light in his eyes. Though Blake was not with anyone, she nodded.

‘Good. My name’s Boyd. Okay. We’ve met a couple of times, don’t know if you remember.’ He paused, and she couldn’t give him the answer he was looking for. The silence was brief. ‘I’ve come to relocate you to level eleven. Boss wants you closer.’ He threw the neighbouring cell a veiled glance. ‘And I think the view is a hell of a lot better down there. Now just work with me, Blake. Okay?’

He was moving her to the heart of the Facility. The very core she craved. In a thud of quick-tempered heartbeats, Blake hedged her inadequate social skills on reading this man correctly. If she were to make an assumption – and she did – he was no enemy. ‘Kira. My sister. I want to know. Have they killed her?’

The words came from her as the inanest would. She might as well have just enquired whether she could have milk with her coffee.

‘Sir, we should get moving.’ The voice came from her feet, but Blake’s eyes didn’t leave Boyd’s.

He answered with a curt nod. ‘One moment.’

‘My sister,’ Blake said. ‘Is she dead?’

‘Undo her ankles.’ Boyd ushered the two guards at her shoulders away and scooped his arms beneath her, lifting her off the bed. Only once she was resting against him did he answer, voice lowered, words uttered close to her ear: ‘They don’t know where she is, but they know she is alive. Kira is alive.’

The viper, for all its vitriol, was no oracle after all. Its fangs were not half as sharp as they appeared.

Did you hear that? You were wrong. Her challenge went unanswered. No hiss from the blackness.

‘Set me down.’ Blake reached for the edge of the doorway, grasping it hard. A sudden buoyancy pushing her up and over the pain that came with using her injured hand. ‘I will walk. Set me down.’

There was no doubt a simple twist of his body would have seen her handhold broken. But it did not come. Boyd lowered her, setting her feet on the ground and waiting until she steadied herself against the glass before he stepped back.

Two guards settled in front, another three behind her. An excessive security detail, in Blake’s opinion, considering it took every shred of her willpower to even stand right now. But no one valued her opinion anymore it seemed.

Boyd stayed at her side. ‘Very well then. Let’s go.’

‘Wait, sir.’ One of the guards in front, a woman with a harsh crew cut and down-turned lips gestured up the corridor. A couple of workers, clad in the dark khaki of the general maintenance team, approached. The gofers of the Facility, assigned a variety of what appeared on the surface to be menial tasks but which ensured the smooth running of the entire complex.

Her security team shuffled her back inside the cell, allowing the passage of the two approaching workers. They passed by, one of them carrying a toolbox, the other a singular rectangle of metal. Telteriun. The dull nonreflective surface was unmistakable.

‘What are they doing?’

But no one answered her. She was jostled out of the cell, leaning hard against Boyd, grateful that he did not attempt to support her. At the end of the corridor, a left-hand turn allowed her one last glance down towards the cells. She drew in a sharp breath, feigning a misstep that caused her escort to stumble and step on her bare toes. Painful, but it caused the delay in movement she hoped for.

Perry had not abandoned her. He stood right by Azrael’s side. A wavering, unsettled image that moved in and out of visual lucidity. Blake opened her mouth, his name on her lips, only to find a new horror rush another’s name from her.

‘Azrael.’ She struggled against Boyd’s attempts to move her on. ‘No. Azrael.’

Eron took possession of the piece of metal that had just been marched into the cell. He raised it over Azrael’s eyes. Seder stepped forward, holding one of the drills the engineering team had designed especially to work with the incredible tensile strength of the alien metal. Perry turned and found her. His repulsion was evident even though his image struggled to hold form.

Beside him, Azrael strained and screamed and writhed as Eron and Seder drilled the plate into place. Across his eyes. Plunging Azrael into darkness.