There was no way to tell time down here. Eventually, my cell door rolled open.
I was on my feet instantly. Beatrice, in a crisply pressed set of fatigues (still with the nametag and shoulder sleeve insignia torn out), was waiting for me – along with two armed Project Armageddon guards and, distantly behind them, Lazarus.
My blood froze at the sight of Lazarus. Reflex reaction. Like placing my hand on a hot stove and yanking it away. My unconscious self had learned to fear him.
Bristling, I tried to stifle as much of my reaction as I could. But I couldn’t help the twitch, or stiffening.
Beatrice smiled.
“Come along, dear,” she said.
I couldn’t fight. Not with Lazarus so close. I stepped out. With a prod of his shoulderslung rifle, one of the guards directed me down the hall. I think he was one of the men I’d clobbered last time. That explained the hard jabs to the small of my back.
Lazarus, I noted, trailed well behind. Well out of reach of me.
They led me through the vault door, into the facility proper. From there, down a winding sequence of hallways, all deserted of people, empty even of paintings. Worth noting. However Beatrice had really gotten control, she had inherited a facility far larger than she had people to populate it. Maybe the people who’d worked this section had refused to follow her. Maybe they had ended up as ash and bones in that incinerator.
I idly wondered if it had happened to any of the lab coats I’d used to know. I would not shed any tears.
Our destination was behind a pair of double doors, sized for gurneys. Beyond was a mix of a physician’s examination room and a laboratory. The room was ringed with counters, desks, chairs, and computers. Diagrams of human skeletal, nervous, and muscular systems were tacked to the beige walls, along with those of a few other organs – a dissection view of an eyeball, a human brain, a heart, a spine. Quick references, meant to be used on the fly. And, at the center of everything, was a surgical table with restraining straps hanging off its side.
I halted. The guard’s rifle dug into my back, but I didn’t care. Even with Lazarus behind me, there was no way I was going to get on that–
“Fortune makes a fool,” Beatrice said.
I was getting better at resisting my post-hypnotic trigger, but not so much that it didn’t stun me. It felt like my spine had formed little needles, poking into me. I couldn’t keep myself upright.
But it did not have the impact on me that it had had when Lazarus said it. There was something in the kid’s voice. When he wanted, he could turn the words into an electric prod jammed straight into my nervous system. Beatrice wasn’t anywhere near as intense.
By the time I recovered my will to move, the guards had slammed me onto the table. One cinched the restraints tight around my wrists and ankles, and the other tugged something tight over my upper arm. It was a blood pressure cuff.
I tried to swallow my panic, but either this place, or what Lazarus had done, had brought out the worst in me. I must have looked much more terrified than I’d wanted.
Lazarus bit his lip. His hands were shaking. He didn’t want to see this. Beatrice, my doting mother, just raised her eyebrow.
“Her post-hypnotic trigger is a relic,” she told Lazarus. “I’m sorry to have to use it. The old Project Armageddon staff knew, by the time she was five years old, that none of her class were the perfect weapon that they’d hoped for, but they still wanted to get some use out of them. Trained agents and spies, mutants with abilities that they’d help hone. The post-hypnotic phrase was a method of control of last resort, a way to shut them down on the battlefield if they ever went rogue.”
Lazarus sat still. He was accustomed to listening to her go on. I doubt he understood half of what she’d said.
“You’ve used trigger phrases before, like you had to, and you did a very good job,” she said. “But you can already see that she’s getting better at resisting it. It’s a handicap, Lazarus. It’s like a crutch. You can control her without it. Do you understand?” He nodded. “You can do it without relying on the trigger phrases.”
“I’m right here, you know,” I muttered.
She turned to me, without missing a beat in the conversation. “The old Project Armageddon staff were monsters. All of them. I’m sure you know that. They didn’t think that you were people. They thought of mutants as livestock. And, later, diseased livestock. They would have eventually gotten rid of you, too.”
The two armed guards had remained in the room. Beatrice nodded in their direction. Now one of them wheeled some kind of heavy device over to the head of the examination table. From my perspective, I couldn’t see much of it. Some kind of steel hoop, split in half, connected to a larger machine behind it. The hoop slid over my skull, just above my temples, without touching me. Some kind of scanner.
“You were the closest the old Project Armageddon got to the ‘perfect weapon’ before Lazarus. I knew right away that there was something special about me, about my genes.” I braced myself for a speech about how special and unique and important she was, like I’d heard from a hundred narcissists before her. But she was content enough with just the insinuation that she was special, beyond human, Christlike.73 “I told them wso, but they still only used my genes to clone one of their next batch of subjects. And it was my child who finally fulfilled their project.”
Villains and their exposition, I swear. Best not to interrupt. The trick with this woman was that she didn’t seem to realize she was a villain. She thought she and I were just having a conversation.
She returned to Lazarus and set her hands on his shoulders. A caring, supportive mother. “I know this is difficult for you. Remember those meditation exercises we went over? This would be a good time to start them. Get warmed up.”
He nodded again, folded his legs onto the seat of his chair, and closed his eyes. His expression was completely flat. In spite of his age, I had never seen anything childish in him.
She grabbed a chair of her own and rolled it over to the side of my table.
“Comfortable?” she asked.
If she had been in range, I would have bitten her. “What happened to the kids who used to be in all the cells around Lazarus’s? You killed them?”
“I told you – the Project Armageddon staff were monsters. That was why I took over.”
There had been an awful lot of gurneys in the corridor leading up to the incinerator. I doubt they’d all been left there for months or years. She was playing fast and loose with the timeline. But I couldn’t press her on it. I didn’t have all the facts, and pushing would have just given her another opportunity to spin lies.74
She said, “It would be much simpler if you were to relax. I know it’s difficult. But it will be easier on you.”
I forced my voice to stay even. “What do you think you’re doing to me?”
“This may sound kind of funny, but it would interfere with the results to tell you.”
“That does sound kind of funny. And you only kind of sound like you’ve lost it.”
“You and I and your brother can change the world, Neena.”
“That’s not helping your case.”
As if to make a show of being self-effacing, she smiled. One of the guards, seeing it, chuckled too. But there was no humor in Beatrice’s eyes. “I was just hired to be an office manager, you know. But someone in the recruiting pool must have known I carried the X-gene. I certainly didn’t. They only sprung it on me after they had me trapped in an underground facility, and I’d cut off all my ties to the surface. Too late to go home.”
“I know you’re lying.”
She raised her eyebrow. “There’s no reason for me to lie.”
Narcissists always exaggerated the challenges they’d faced. “You may not have been in charge when you came here, but you had a lot more power than that. More than an office manager.”
She rolled her chair over to the side of my table. “What makes you so sure about that?”
“Rudolpho Boschelli.”
Her scowl set in instantly. “I never should have trusted him with you. And if I’d had as much power as you said I did, I never would have needed to.”
She’d had plenty of followers. Enough to get me safely smuggled out of the Project Armageddon facility. I didn’t think Father Boschelli had lied to me, but what he’d told me had been vague enough that I would probably never know the truth.
The only thing I was sure of was that Beatrice was lying. And that she was a pathological liar, too – she lied about things that didn’t matter. There was no reason for her to have told me that she was just an office manager, except to pointlessly try to impress me with the scope of the challenges she’d faced. I wondered how many times she’d told that lie to her followers here, even people who knew better. And how many of these people had decided that their own memories were wrong.
“It must’ve really bothered you that he left, didn’t it?” I asked. “You kept trying to draw him back in. Making him offers he couldn’t refuse.” Keeping him involved with the project by sending him me. She’d known he couldn’t have tossed me out into a Chicago winter.
“Not many people get involved with the project and choose to quit. I owed it to him to do everything I could to bring him back into the fold.” Her scowl deepened. I’d struck a nerve. “Rudolpho was an immense disappointment. He had so many opportunities to come back and refused them. And then he raised you. Made you what you are.”
I could not help a bitter laugh. “He’d be astonished to hear that last part.”
All told, I’d lived with Father Boschelli, in the Church of the Sacred Heart, for less than a year.
“He never even told you about me,” she said.
Gingerly, as if stretching, I tested the strength of my restraints. “He told me,” I said. I understood now. He hadn’t said anything more because he’d wanted to protect me from what he’d seen here. He knew that, at some point, I would have gone looking for her, and gotten drawn into her web. Especially at that age, I would have had no defenses against her.
“I had thought,” Beatrice said, “that once I had settled things here, I could send someone out to find you. Bring you back. But you disappeared into the world. And when we found you later, I didn’t care for what you’d become.”
“You cared enough to check up on me.”
“You’re my daughter.”
“I don’t believe that, either.”
That, at least, caught her attention. Her gaze snapped to me, more sharply than it had the last time I’d called her out.
It made me wonder if she wasn’t telling the truth, after all. She certainly cared whether I believed this part of her story.
“You’re my mother, Lazarus is my brother… sounds like delusions. Fantasy. Trying to wrap a neat little narrative around things.” I didn’t know what I believed. I was mostly saying it to provoke her. Anything to keep her from doing whatever she was about to.
Beatrice set her hand on the examination table. The closest she could come to caressing my head without actually risking coming into my range.
“I really wish you hadn’t come here,” she said. “We’ll do the best that we can by you.”
“Thanks… Mom.”
She opened her mouth to answer and then stopped. As if a timer in her head had gone off, she turned to Lazarus. “Are you ready?” she asked.
He opened his eyes and nodded.
“You’re going to have Lazarus root around in my head again,” I said. Saying it turned the dread into something more concrete. Something I could fight.
“The first time was an emergency, dear, and very artless. Lazarus is capable of much more.”
Against all my instincts screaming to do anything else, I looked to Lazarus. He and I locked eyes. For a half second, he looked as terrified as I felt. One deep breath later, and he was back to his practiced stoicism.
“He can do so much more to help you,” Beatrice said.
Lazarus opened his mouth.
This time, I heard a sound – a low, inhuman hum, like a diesel engine buried deep in the earth. A snap-spark of electricity jolted through me. Made me jerk against my restraints. It was like somebody had discharged a static shock into the base of my spine.
I waited for it to get worse. It didn’t. The humming persisted, and the deep low-down growl of the vibration worked its way into my bones. But that initial shock was as bad as it got.
The guard standing above me said, “Pulse spiking. Blood pressure rising.” The others didn’t seem to be hearing the same thing I was – or, if they were, they weren’t bothered by it.
“Her brain?” Beatrice asked.
“Some blood vessels dilating.”
“That’s all?”
My joints felt like they were grinding together. There was no way that kid’s throat could produce the sound I was hearing. It had to be inside my head. Telepathic resonance. Telepathic shock. The lab coats would have had different terms for it. Definitely some component of it was linked to sound. The rumble stopped when the kid closed his mouth, inhaled through his nose. Resumed when he opened his mouth.
I tried to meet his gaze again. He looked right at me. I have no idea what I must have looked like to him.
If the kid had really wanted me to leave him alone last night, he could have made me. Even a low-power rumble like this, and I would have shut the hell up fast.
My throat seized up when I tried to speak. Eventually, the rumble built up into a kind of pain. Like sitting through aircraft turbulence for too long. I could tolerate the first few minutes, but eventually the sheer sensory shock of it started to be too much. The table felt like it was rattling, but I’m sure the shaking came from me.
On and on it went like that, into what seemed like hours.
Finally, Beatrice shook her head and waved her hand in front of Lazarus. He stopped at once.
She stepped around the back of his chair, set her hands on his shoulders. Just for a moment – a gentle, encouraging mother.
“Look at her,” she said. “Your sister’s depending on you to do better than this.”
He nodded. No complaints, no excuses, just agreement.
I stretched my jaw, made sure I could still speak. “You’re still trying to get your ‘perfect weapon’ to work.”
She shook her head. The only answer she was willing to give.
I had more of my wits about me than I’d had after the last time Lazarus had screwed with me. “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Letting me know will ‘interfere with the results.’ So let me guess. You’re trying to get him to change me permanently, aren’t you? Turn me into someone I’m not. Someone more malleable.” A “perfect weapon” was a gun that, fired once, never needed to be fired again.
I asked Lazarus, “Is that what you want to do to me?”
Very minutely, so much that I almost didn’t notice but for a shift of muscles under her wrist, Beatrice tightened her grip on Lazarus’s shoulders.
If Lazarus had even heard the question, he gave no sign of it.
“With a little work and development, your brother can change the world,” Beatrice said.
“You’re delusional.” I nodded up to the man standing over me. “You two meatheads know that, right?”
It was like I hadn’t even spoken. They did nothing. And Beatrice said, “They’ve seen enough of the outside world to know that something has to change. It’s full of people like what you’ve become. You don’t see past your moment. You don’t plan for your future at all. Not next year. Not next decade. Never. You just try to swallow up as much as you can right now.”
I shrugged, as far as my restraints would allow me.
“Don’t you pay attention to the world, Neena? See how many heroes and monsters and villains are battling it out for the fate of humanity every week? How many times was the world ‘saved’ this year alone?75 How many times in the next decade is the Earth almost going to be lost, or civilization doomed? In the next century? The next ten thousand years? Do you really think humanity can survive into deep time, looking like it is? We’ve always been on the cusp of destroying ourselves, or being destroyed.”
She glanced up to make sure that the two guards were following her. For all her calm voice and clinical attitude, she was a creature of deep and psychotic emotional need.
“I know what the future looks like,” I said. One of my oldest friends, Cable, had told me a little about it. It hadn’t been nice. Cable had come from the future. He had fought in wars beyond what I was capable of understanding. He was the one who’d gotten me into mercenary work, and in more ways than just showing me the ropes. The glimpses he’d given me of his future had cemented my thoughts about spending all my energy living in the present. Always eat the marshmallow when it’s offered. Never count on the second to arrive.
Beatrice wasn’t wrong about the future. Ours didn’t look bright.
“We need to make ourselves better,” Beatrice said. “We need something that will make us better, because I doubt we’re capable of doing it on our own. I hate the outside world, Neena. I hate what we’ve done with the chances we’ve been given. We’ve come up with ten thousand ways to destroy ourselves.”
“Give or take,” I muttered. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn this had been part of Project Armageddon’s ideology from the beginning. Beatrice was more tied into it than she admitted.
“How many thousands of nuclear warheads do the nations of the world have poised to fire off at each other on an instant’s notice? And, if we don’t do ourselves in, how do you think we’re going to face the threats that we know are out there? The alien warlords, the planetdevourers, the multiverse-ending catastrophes? We can’t scrape through by the skin of our pinkie fingers every time. Some part of this rotten, hateful species has to give. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. People need me.”
“You mean they need your ‘perfect weapon.’”
I’m not sure she caught the barb. Or she chose to let it go. “I should have given up years ago. I should have left this place, left this world, a long time ago.”
I’d been waiting for it to come all the way back around to her. It almost felt reassuring to hear, to know that my read on her had been right all along. But most of me was still too busy feeling awful.
“But I didn’t,” she said. “And here we are. I’m not sorry, Neena.”
With that, she nodded to Lazarus. Enough resting time, apparently. Lazarus opened his mouth again. The noise ground my bones together, made my teeth feel electrified. Even though I was sure the sensation wasn’t physical, I couldn’t convince my body of that. It felt real.
Lazarus could have done worse. I was sure of that. He had done worse to me before. But he was holding off this time. I watched him. He couldn’t quite meet my eye.
For a while, I was afraid they were forcing some deeper, more insidious change onto me. Something I wouldn’t even perceive. Like I would wake up tomorrow with half my personality extirpated, a happy little zombie. But, when the last session ended, Beatrice was scowling.
“You’ve got to do better than this next time,” she told Lazarus. Her voice was tight.
He just nodded. Used to agreeing with her.
Beatrice nodded to the guard above me. He wheeled back his scanning device and undid my restraints. I considered punching his throat in. But something, a reflexive fear, made me glance to Lazarus first, and I caught the look in his eye.
Very briefly, he shook his head. A plea, or a warning. I didn’t know.