21.0 - Remember, page 18
part #21 of Girl Out Of The Box Series
“What have you done?” June asked me as Gert screamed in rage at her missed toss.
“Kickstarted the most epic party this place has ever seen,” I said, rolling sideways as Gert leapt—rather dramatically and stupidly—between us. June moved, too. It wasn’t difficult. If I’d had my powers, Gert would have come down to her death, because telegraphing a jump like that left her wide open to a solid counterattack.
But I wasn’t in much of a position to counterattack. I was slow as snot on a January day in Minnesota compared to Gert. She landed and was after me again immediately. Someone trying to flee darted between us and caught one of Gert’s fists as she swung it at me, and boom, just like that, another stupid idiot prisoner got ended by accident. They went flying and I wait to see where they landed.
I bolted for the next table, catching movement that wasn’t orange jumpsuited out of the corner of my eye.
Bletchely’s guards had reached him and were hauling ass for the exit.
Shit.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I said, taking off after them. Gert was not that far behind me, though, which was going to prove a big problem. I needed these idiots to dump suppressant on this joint, though my prison riot seemed to have floundered into a prison fight. I needed to put Bletchely in real peril, get these stupids to depower all these moron inmates.
We’d see who the queen of the damned jungle was then.
“Graaaaaaah!” Gert roared behind me, and I could sense her leap. It was a high-arc one, because she was an idiot. She should have leapt low, off the ground for a shorter period of time, more forward momentum and less upward. She could have bowled me over.
As it was, I had time to react, and my reaction was to dive and roll to the side. Bletchely and his goons were opening up the gap between us, pounding toward the exit, one of the guards already screaming in his walkie-talkie mic to get it open. I guess they didn’t want to go into lockdown until after they’d saved the warden’s lily-white ass from possible trauma.
Gert landed in front of me, blocking my path forward. She had apparently figured out my game, or at least figured out I was heading this way and not really caring about her, at least for the moment.
“Why can’t you just take a number and get in line?” I asked, readying my remaining dagger. I’d bury the damned thing in her face or her fist or whatever I could, and maybe that’d distract her for a minute or two—
A blur of orange blasted past me and slid, jumpsuit against floor, under Gert. I blinked at the blurry speed.
It was June.
A toxic cloud of purple gas burst out of her hand as Gert bent to swing at her. The big woman took it right in the face, dazed for a second, and then she started choking, all thought of flinging a punch forgotten, hands grasping for her throat.
“Nice timing,” I said, and hooked wide around Gert as she thrashed, slamming to the ground face first, motor control failing. Having been hit by her stray swings once, I didn’t feel the need to experience that again.
“What the hell is your plan here, Nealon?” June asked, running with me as I hauled ass for the door. Bletchely was standing there, waiting for the buzzer to sound and open it.
“Well, it was to start a riot and get everyone suppressed so I could even the odds and beat their asses—”
“There are like a hundred inmates in this block! Your odds would still be a hundred to one!” She kept running but paused for breath. “Or to two, I guess, since I seem to have thrown in with you. Either way, those are not great odds, especially if I don’t have my powers.”
“Yeah, but I like my odds better when everyone else is as disarmed as I am,” I said. “I can work with that. A shit ton of people throwing powers at me when I’ve got none? What the hell am I supposed to do against that?”
“Keep your head down, serve your time, and hope it all blows over?”
“That’s a loser’s plan, Randall.” I hauled ass for the door, trying to catch Bletchely. “And I mean to win this shit.”
The door buzzed. Bletchely’s guard threw it open, and they dodged inside, dragging the warden with them. The second guard was a little slower to get in, but once he was, he started slamming the CLOSE button as the first guard kept dragging Bletchely forward, toward the next door.
I threw a glance over my shoulder. The guards from the upper floors were coming at us, but they had a disadvantage of distance, having to funnel through the lone stairwell, way on the other side of the Cube. One of the guards who’d been searching a nearby cell came swinging at me, and I dodged, meeting his baton with my broken hand. It hurt, but not enough to make me do anything but scowl, which surprised him.
Kicking him in the gut, he doubled over, and I laid an elbow like a hammer across the back of his neck, stole his baton, and raced after June, who had a real advantage in distance over me now.
Man, I needed my powers back.
June was clashing with the guard at the door, gassing him. He staggered back as the door started to close, a split metal jobby that worked like teeth, super reinforced steel with gel packs laid over it. I remembered them installing it, going back and forth about the advantage of using it versus a traditional cell style door.
Advantage: it was super heavy, sealed with gel to keep bad metas in even when they used their powers.
Disadvantage: it moved really slow.
“Come on, come on!” June shouted.
I sprinted for it, baton in hand, and leapt as it started to close. I barely made it through the teeth before they shut, locking me out of the Cube—
“What now?” June asked, halfway down the hall. She was out of breath from the run, and up ahead was the intersection where the ovoid loop branched left and right. Ahead lay the exit, which, of course, was massively guarded and also included a very long elevator ride. That was not going to be the way to go.
Bletchely … was already out of sight. Which meant he’d hooked right or left, not fled for the exit. Smart move.
I looked at June quizzically. “What do you mean, what now?”
“Your riot plan failed,” June said, staring at me, cheeks slightly flushed. “The warden is …” She waved a hand toward the right branch. “We missed him. Gert’s back there, down for a short bit, but … when she gets up …” June shook her head. “And when we go back in … they’re taking my powers for sure.”
“Yep.” I nodded.
“You better have a plan here, Nealon,” June said, running fingers through her hair, which was all manner of tangled from the fighting and running and nominal rioting. “Please tell me you have a plan.”
“Sort of,” I said. Because I sort of did.
“Oh, man …” June slumped. “‘Sort of’? I threw my powers away for weeks on ‘sort of’?”
“We’ll make it work,” I said, “it’s inescapable fate.”
She just stared at me, then turned, looking down the hallway. “Fate? Wonderful. I love being in the hands of fate.” She sighed. “So … what now?”
“Now,” I said, “we do the only thing we reasonably can do at this point.”
She looked at me again, face scrunched up in non-understanding. “Which is … ?”
“We escape,” I said, and took a right turn at the intersection, headed down the corridor after Bletchely.
Because it was really the only thing left open to me at this point.
34.
“I’m sorry,” June said, catching up to me as I started running, “but aren’t you the same person that just talked to me the other day about—facing consequences and being tired of running and—and—and—something about—”
“Look,” I said, the stale, quiet corridor air slightly suffocating, like a tomb. The normally white overhead lights had all shifted to red, and I couldn’t help but notice the overwhelming number of surveillance cameras that lined these hallways. We were being watched right now. “I wanted to end my run because I thought maybe—just maybe—I’d get a fair trial. Be judged on the merits of the things I’d done, get a chance to argue against the things I hadn’t, but—no. They not only didn’t give me a fair trial, they shammed it so hard it made an arranged marriage to a child bride look totes legit by comparison. Which, fine—I mean, not fine, but fine-ish. I could cope with that. I could deal with the proposed lifetime prison sentence.”
The corridor was long, curving slightly to the right, steel walls with no gel-pack coating stretching into forever. I ran along it. “I figured … maybe I deserve this. I’ve done some nasty things. Some of which I was pardoned for. Some of which … I wasn’t even accused of. Okay, sure, they convicted me of a lot of stuff that was really me defending my own life against people trying to murder me, but y’know … if you’re a real lily-white knight pansy ass, I could see the argument against me doing that stuff. It’s not absolutely unreasonable, just pretty far from the way I view the world. I could see that as an honest disagreement thing—‘She’s a terrible person who sows chaos and violence everywhere she goes.’ Makes sense. I mean, I’d argue against it at trial—if they’d let me.
“But they didn’t,” I said. Another toothy security door waited ahead, locked open, as the corridor curved, circling around the gen pop area we’d just escaped and into what—in my day—had been prepped as expansion areas for administration. Back then, there had been a complex of buildings up above, where my agency had run. There’d been no real need for admin offices down here then. But since those buildings were no longer standing … I was guessing they’d moved operations down here.
“They railroaded me,” I said, “and then, as if that weren’t enough of a kick to the teeth, they toss me in here, hobbled without powers while everyone else gets a free shot at Sienna. Okay, that could be a misunderstanding, up to a point. I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt again here.
“Up until the second round of fighting where my opponents got to keep their powers,” I said. “And suddenly, we move from not-so-benign neglect into the realm of forced assassination attempt. Which was really stupid on their part, because the whole thing keeps getting me into trouble is that I violently, violently, violently—seven thousand more times ‘violently’—react and possibly overreact when someone tries to kill me, someone I care about, or an innocent person. Not necessarily in that order.” I reached the open door and eyed it suspiciously. It should have been closed by now, but it stood open.
“So you’re saying they’ve made you mad,” June said, keeping pace with me easily.
“It took a little bit,” I said. “I was willing to just deal with the immediate threats—Gert, Clara, Marta—but no, they had to make it obvious that ‘they’—somebody with power, somebody who wanted to use that power to crush me—were running this show from outside. The sham trial was strike one, trying to kill me was strike two. I don’t go for three. The justice system is being twisted against me, and I have no remedy through said system.” I raised my fist at her. “So this is my remedy. And I’m about to ‘remedy’ someone right in the face with it.” I clenched my fist, and it reminded me that I’d broken it. “Ow. Never mind, never mind.” I raised my black baton, held tightly in my left hand. “This. This is going up the person responsible’s ass. Sideways.”
“You really think taking the warden hostage—assuming we can catch him—is going to result in our escape?” June asked. The corridor was still taking a slow bend around. It circled gen pop, and at roughly every quarter of the circle lay a corridor that ran perpendicular, in this case the one leading to the admin offices. We were less than a hundred yards from the turn.
I frowned at her. “I’m not taking the warden hostage to escape. I can escape without his sorry ass. I ran this place, I know the way out.” I shook my head. “I’m going after the warden because I want to know who’s responsible for my current unjust predicament, and I’m going to beat it out of his soft sister ass one way or another.”
“This … is the thing we’re wasting time on instead of escaping?” June’s eyes went wide, and she pointed at the cameras. “They’re watching us right now. Probably loading up the riot gear, putting on their vests. They could be prepping to gas us with suppressant—”
“Maybe,” I said. “That’s more of an issue for you than me—”
“Confronting guards with riot gear is going to be an issue for both of us!”
“The guards will be coming from that direction,” I said, pointing back. “That’s the way to the exit, see. It’s where the guard quarters are.”
“What the hell is this way?” June asked. “Wait—there’s no way out in this direction?”
“Technically, there’s only one way in and one way out of the Cube,” I said, shaking my head, continuing my leisurely jog. “And we’re buried under so many tons of earth that tunneling would be a problem for anyone short of an earth-type meta, any of whom inside are probably under some sort of special protocol, suppressant or something, to keep ’em from tearing through the place. So no, the way out is back there.”
“We’re … why couldn’t we have just gone for the damned exit?” June asked, her mouth hanging slightly open. She was in now, no point in sugarcoating it. “It was straight ahead at the intersection, right? I mean—”
“It’s a no go,” I said, shaking my head. Our footsteps clunked along the corridor, and ahead I could see the turn into the admin areas, as well as the continuation of the circle loop, running straight ahead until it curved out of sight. “They may not have had the Cube itself, where we inmates were, under control, or even this ovoid ring—which is weird—but trust me, the exit goes into super guard mode if so much as a cafeteria tray goes missing. A dozen guards with real big guns cover the hallway, ready to fire with the least little hint of warning.” I’d seen those slitted walls when we came in, hiding the guards behind them with orders to kill on sight anything that tried to escape. I presumed they were still back there; they’d certainly been there in my day and I doubted there was anything in the Supreme Court decision that would have changed that up.
“But … you know another way out?” June’s voice had a trill of hope.
“Probably,” I said, knowing full well we were being watched. “Maybe. I dunno. It was a long time ago, me running this place.”
“Oh … for crying out loud,” June said, the air rushing out of her. “What the hell have I done? I didn’t even want to escape …”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “But I gotta admit, I’d have thought twice about sending you here if I’d known exactly how effed up things were in this dump.” I hooked a left into the admin area. The corridor here was short, leading to one door, marked ADMIN. There was also a metal staircase ahead that looked like it had seen better days.
“Thanks,” June said. “Given where we are, what I’ve done, and what’s ahead … that means almost nothing.”
“Hey, lady, it’s all I got,” I said, hitting the stairs and hustling up. June blew past me, pouring a little of her anger—and meta speed—into the climb.
We came out of the stairwell five flights up, huffing. I’d checked every door on the way up, and they all read ADMIN, which suggested to me they were not exactly what I was looking for, so I kept going. Now we were on the same level as the men’s part of the prison. I didn’t know what time of day it was, thanks to there being no windows, and the lighting level, which normally might have indicated whether it was night, was turned to red for escape. I did appreciate that the escape klaxon was turned to a very manageable level—for me, anyway. June was still cringing. But that could have been at the situation in general.
“Right here,” I said, nodding at a doorway at the end of the hall. It read WARDEN. Bingo.
“Was this your office back in the day?” June asked.
I shook my head. “Mine was up in the facility above. But when we engineered everything, this was where the office part of the complex was placed, in anticipation of expansion. And this,” I pointed at the door, waiting, forbidding, hanging open just slightly, as though the locks had been disengaged, “is the biggest office in the place. Ergo, Bletchely, in his supreme egotism …” And I headed for the door.
“Gotcha,” June said, following me. She eyed the ajar door. “What’s up with the lack of lockdown?”
I pressed my lips together, frowning. “I don’t know, but … whatever. You set?”
She nodded, once, and took up position behind me.
I took one long, deep breath. I had one broken hand, the pain was producing a nice sizzle that had dipped toward not-quite-numbness, and a baton. And I was about to storm the warden’s office, where at least one guard waited for me.
Hubris, thy name is Sienna.
I came around, kicking the door open, baton raised over my head.
35.
Bletchely’s office was about what I’d expected from that officious ass. Desk in the middle of the large room, a circular conference table in the corner covered in papers as a secondary desk. TV displays mounted both behind the desk and along the wall to my left. The whole space was twenty by twenty, I remembered from the blueprints, and the vast majority of that space did not have any humans in it.
With one exception:
A guard was waiting to my left, but I raced through the door a little too fast for him. He brought his baton down in an overhead swing that missed my hair and grazed my shoulder blades, a pretty egregiously dumb error on his part. If he’d swung sideways at me, he could have just about clotheslined my head off.
Instead, June came charging through the door after me and grabbed him by the arm, slamming him into the TV monitors mounted on the wall behind him. It wasn’t a pretty thing; she lifted him bodily and hurled him into them. He hit them, shattering two, and bringing a hail of broken glass down with him as he thudded to the floor, helmet slipping off to reveal utterly slack features, the loose jaw and closed eyes of a man who was completely out.
