Gareth studied the secret lab Talyarkinash had taken him to. They had passed through a door hidden by a swinging bookcase, gone down a level, and entered into a smaller space that reminded him more of a dentist’s office than anything else.
The scents in here were almost nothing, layered over with floral hints and something subtle his brain kept wanting to interpret as Talyarkinash herself. Recessed lights filled the room with bright white illumination.
One wall was a glass window that felt heavy enough to stop bullets when Gareth had tapped it.
She and the two lizardmen had gone through another door and sealed it up tight behind them. They were on the other side of that glass now, watching him intently.
“First, I’ll need to scan you, Gareth,” the Nari woman said over a speaker. “Please make yourself comfortable in the chair and let it adjust itself to your body.”
Dentist chair. Mad Scientist Dentist’s chair.
Xiomber had said that a male Vanir could be over seven feet tall, with the females close behind. This chair would fit them.
For once, he actually felt rather like a juvenile Vanir, by comparison.
But he climbed in. Let the cold leather warm slowly against his back, with his jacket and flannel shirt hanging on a hook by the door. He had only the tight, white, t-shirt against the chill, but that cold was in his soul.
The air in the room was a pleasant seventy degrees.
Slowly, the chair moved. Gareth would have jumped up, but she had warned him.
It seemed to shrink under him, adjusting and accommodating until it fit like a hammock.
After a moment, it tilted itself back, giving Gareth a view of a device hanging from the ceiling that was in no way something so simple as the X-ray machine to take pictures of his teeth.
“Ready?” the woman asked nervously.
She sounded more emotional than he felt right this moment, but Gareth supposed she was expecting a Viking Berserker to break loose in her lab. He just needed to get this over with so he could go out and hunt down the man who had once been his fiercest rival.
And his best friend.
“Ready,” Gareth said.
“I’ll need to hold you in place while I scan you, Gareth,” she reminded him for the fourth time. “Tell me when you are comfortable.”
“Go ahead,” he called, holding all his emotions tight inside.
They were long since past the time to panic. Or to stop.
Gareth locked all his muscles as the dentist’s chair seemed to unfold itself a second time. Metal bars slid over his wrists and shins, binding them tight against the chair. Another strap crossed his chest, and a helmet lowered itself to cover most of his head, leaving only his mouth and part of his nose uncovered.
He wasn’t claustrophobic, but the feelings weren’t that far away right now.
“This is only supposed to tickle, Gareth,” she said over the intercom. “Please let me know if you start experiencing pain.”
“Will do,” he said.
Ants. Walking across his skin but not biting. The leaves of a weeping willow as he walked through them. The cool chill of a morning fog as he jogged around the track, back at the Institute, watching the sun come up higher on every lap.
A bright light passed through his eyelids and bored a tunnel into his mind like a three-quarter inch bit being driven by a three-quarter-horse-power motor.
Gareth ground his teeth together and refused to make a sound.
“Everything okay?” Xiomber asked. “Vital signs just jumped.”
“Sharp, but controllable,” Gareth called back, willing everything to stillness again. “Keep going.”
Hunt the man down. Bring him to justice, whatever that looked like here.
Whatever the cost.
The ants were biting now. Nasty, Texas fire ants pouring acid into his veins. The willow was a rose bush, slashing him with thorns. The fog was an icy pond he had just fallen into, through the ice.
Whatever the cost.
Something changed in his brain. The pain was there, but pushed to one side. He could think through it, or at least around it. Gareth focused his will, pushed, and the pulsing turned outward, as though he was somehow driving the drill bit backwards and closing the hole up, faster than the machine could tunnel.
Everything let go so suddenly Gareth thought he would pass out.
The pain was gone. The fire. The cold. Everything.
The chair let go and moved him more or less upright.
Gareth swung his feet over and stood up, only wobbling slightly.
“How are you doing in there?” Morty asked carefully.
“Headache,” he replied. “But it’s going away now.
“You had pain?” the woman asked. “It’s not supposed to do that.”
“I overcame it,” Gareth growled. “What’s next?”
“Come in here and we’ll watch the readouts,” she said. “It will only take a few minutes to process everything.”
The door unlocked noisily and swung open on silent hinges. Gareth stepped through into a sound studio.
One long console sat under the window, filled with hundreds of gauges, knobs, and sliders. Gareth had no idea what it all did, but he recognized the human outline on a large monitor beside the window.
The writing on the screen was mostly words he could make out, but Gareth was completely lost as to what they said.
He took a chair in a far corner and concentrated on breathing and reducing his heart rate.
It felt like he had just run from Marathon to Athens in a single instant.
A machine spit out a long strip of paper, clucking to itself like a hen.
Talyarkinash was studying the readout, holding it low enough for Morty and Xiomber to read it as well.
Someone whistled, low and startled.
Gareth looked up and studied the three scientists.
“Gareth,” she said carefully. “Where would you say you rank, in terms of expressed, human potential?”
It took him three tries to process her words into something that made sense.
“Probably near the top, in terms of mental, physical, and emotional,” he replied through his exhaustion. “Sky Patrol Institute is a grueling test that lasts four years. I graduated at the top of my class. Marc Sarzynski was a very close second.”
“You went to school together?” She was aghast.
“I told you that.”
“I thought that meant you knew of him,” she countered. “How close were you?”
“He would have been my best man at my wedding, one of these days,” Gareth said firmly. “Now I’ll see him buried under the jail, if it’s the last thing I do. Why?”
“So we scanned him then, but not to the level we just did with you,” Morty explained as the Nari woman fell mute. “Plus, I know roughly where we put him, so I was looking for what we could do to improve you. We’ll probably only get one shot to do it, and I want to get all we can. You’ll be facing both Maximus and the Constabulary at the same time. Neither will play nice.”
“So what did you learn?” Gareth felt some level of anxiety creep into his voice.
“It’s just that…” Morty’s voice tailed off.
Xiomber stepped up and gave Gareth a level gaze.
“What he’s trying to say, I presume diplomatically, is that you appear to be using fourteen percent of your expressed, genetic potential, Gareth,” Xiomber said. “For comparison sake, members of the Accord are generally fixed at right around ninety-eight percent. We can tinker with ourselves, but nothing significant.”
“Meaning?” Gareth asked. He was tired, sore, and his head hurt.
“Meaning we were able to turn Sarzynski into a genius-level Vanir, Gareth,” Talyarkinash explained. “But we stopped there because we apparently didn’t dream any bigger.”
Genius-level Vanir.
Seven feet tall. Three hundred, twenty-five pounds of hard muscle, trained to be as dangerous as an Agent of the Sky Patrol could be. With an IQ of two hundred.
And that was dreaming too small?
“How big should we dream?” Gareth finally asked.