She heard screams while she slept. Then she heard her name.
“Chloe, come on, get up.” A hand lifted her head off the ground and then came the first signs of stirring into consciousness. Taste returned to her, and numbness started to fade. Someone dragged her into an upright position, then felt for a pulse. A hand tapped her in the face repeatedly.
She groaned. “Go away.”
A sigh. “This might sting a little.”
A slap followed, one that almost knocked her back to the ground. With the slap came a sharp jolt, the sort that caused her eyes to go wide open, that caused memory to flood right back. She blinked once. She blinked again. Slowly, her vision refocused, regained some clarity.
Crouched in front of her, half his face bloodied was Lucas. Behind him, Migue—no, that didn’t make sense. She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head slightly, as if trying to clear up any hallucinations.
When she opened her eyes again, Miguel still stood behind Lucas, clad in the same attire Nightman had been in, except he was without the mask now and had his hand against a slightly swollen forehead.
“What—,” She looked around. Andre was still on the ground, but was starting to come to. “Where’s—,”
“Possibly beneath us,” Miguel answered, as Lucas helped her to her feet.
“You,” Chloe said, looking at Miguel, confused expression on her face. “What—how—why?”
“Now’s not the time for that.” Miguel stooped to grab his mask from the ground then fit it back onto his face. He threw the goggles on next, and then the voice modifier before placing the hat atop his head. “We’re not done here. Not yet.”
“Can you still fight?” Lucas asked, staring straight into Chloe’s eyes.
She nodded, then looked around. “Where’s Aiden? Is he—,”
“Alive.” Lucas nodded. “Things are pretty hectic up there. Bridge let the Helmets loose. They’re tearing the District apart.”
“What?” Chloe’s expression darkened.
“He means to buy time,” Andre said. He was awake now and was already pushing himself back to his feet. “He wants to split our attentions between trying to get to him and trying to stop what’s happening up there.”
“We need to go help your friend,” Miguel said grimly, his voice once again distorted by the modifier. “If the Helmets are running riot, he won’t be able to handle it on his own.”
“Some of the guards are helping too, but Miguel’s right,” Lucas agreed.
“I have to find Jon,” Chloe said, turning her attention to the elevator ahead. “And Jin. The rest of you go help Aiden.”
“No.” Lucas shook his head. “I’m coming with you.”
“Lucas, n—,”
“Kaia’s down there somewhere.” Lucas’s tone was hardened, almost vicious. “I have unfinished business with her.”
“The two of you go.” Andre nodded, flexing his hands slowly as if to confirm that he was still capable of making a fist. “Miguel and I will help out above. But please, try not to die, alright?” His eyes were focused on Chloe’s when he said this.
Chloe nodded at him.
“See you on the other side,” Miguel said, patting Chloe and Lucas both on the back. He reached behind him then, and unstrapped Yuri’s scabbard from his back. He placed it in Chloe’s hands. “If she’s still alive, she will be needing this.”
Chloe nodded as she accepted the scabbard, watched as Miguel turned and ran down the hallway. Then she looked to Andre. He lingered for a moment, eyes focused on Chloe’s. Then he turned too and was gone in an instant.
“Right.” Lucas nodded and drew a deep breath. “Seeing as it’s just the two of us now, maybe we could be a little honest. We’re going to die down there, aren’t we?”
“Yep.”
“Well, no better day than today.”
The two of them headed for the elevator at the end of the hallway. Lucas called the elevator with a button push and they waited. A moment later, the steel doors slid open and they stepped inside.
There were three buttons in the elevator. One simply labeled U, and two more labelled SL1 and SL2. They were already on SL1.
“Down we go,” Lucas said, before hitting SL2 on the elevator. The doors slid shut after a moment and then the elevator started to descend. While they went down, Lucas cleared his throat. “Uh, so Andre, huh?”
“Shut up.”
Lucas chuckled and Chloe looked at him, an odd expression on her face. “Why are you happy right now?” she asked. “You know, not brooding or anything.”
Lucas shrugged. “We might be dying today. Something oddly exciting and uplifting about that.”
The elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open, revealing a large, sprawling room. A laboratory of sorts. The lights there were red, flashing somewhat. An alarm.
There was no one in the room, none that they could see, at least. No scientists, no doctors, no engineers, nothing. Just long, steel tables and rows of shelves that held vials and jars filled with random-color liquids. There were pods and tubes and cylinders and centrifuges. On some tables, syringes were strewn across haphazardly, some of which had fallen to the floor and shattered, their crimson contents which Chloe assumed was blood spilled everywhere.
She and Lucas made their way through the lab slowly, side by side, two of them rotating to get a good look at everything. Chloe spotted a sort of engineering station where the suits she’d seen on the children were held in displays and the helmets that had been on them were on a table, wires hooked up to them connecting into a computer.
There were other computers around, screens lit, casting light blue glows into the red of the room.
They took a turn into another section of the lab and Chloe felt herself go cold all over immediately. There were more tubes here. Glass and steel tubes, from the looks of it. And unlike the first they’d seen, these weren’t empty.
There were people in them, suspended in some sort of fluid. And they’d been torn apart. Stomachs had been sliced open, and their innards looked to have been harvested. Their eyes were wide open, stuck in the expressions of agony in which they’d spent their final moments. She recognized their faces.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
In two of the pods, Liam Heller and Estelle Park.
In the others, the rest of Yuri’s squad. They’d all been gruesomely sliced apart in some way, but not nearly as horridly as Liam and Estelle had been. Daniel’s eyes had been plucked, but the rest of his body was intact and Chloe realized, from the way his brows still furrowed within the pod that he was still alive.
The same was true of the person in the immediate next pod. Mason. He was missing an arm, but somehow, oddly, there were strings of flesh extending from where an arm should have been, bits of revealed bone too. Like his body was slowly putting itself back together, regenerating.
They’d been experiments. The last of the pods had Lucy in it, and like Mason and Daniel, she was alive and looked to have been cut apart the least. Or perhaps, she’d just managed a full regeneration already.
Chloe heard a sobbing sound and looked in the direction it had come from. Just across from where they were, on the floor and bound together in a manner where they had no choice but to look at the pods, Jon and Yuri.
Jon’s head was slumped, hair matted to his face with blood and one hand was at an odd angle. Broken. But he was conscious. He simply refused to look at the pods. Yuri was a mess too—clothes stained in blood and dirt like she’d been dragged through a construction site, her face bruised almost beyond recognition. But her eyes were wide open and focused on the pods, and tears ran down her cheeks.
“Oh my God,” Chloe croaked.
At the sound of her voice, Jon shifted slightly. He raised his face slowly and stared directly in their direction. His eyes remained hollow, dark, almost like he thought this was some trick. He blinked once, and then his eyes went a little wide.
“Chloe?” He sounded weaker than she’d ever heard him.
Chloe raced toward them both, sliding to a crouching stop in front of Jon and lifting his face in her hands. Her hands went wet at once with his blood.
“Oh God,” she said, her voice cracking.
“It’s okay,” Jon said weakly. “Get us out of here, would you?”
Chloe looked to the binds that held them. Chains. Done in a manner that they couldn’t attempt to free themselves without hurting each other, particularly with Jon’s broken hand.
Chloe straightened to her feet and withdrew Yuri’s sword from the scabbard. She drew a deep breath as she aimed for the chains. And then she swung with all of her strength, steel striking against steel.
Yuri’s steel was stronger. The chain shattered as soon as the sword struck, and dropped to the ground around them.
Jon was the first to his feet, scrambling up while clutching his broken hand. Chloe noticed then that bone was jutting out. Her stomach sank even deeper.
“I need you to help me force it back in,” Jon said, extending his broken hand toward her. “I’ll start to heal once it’s done. Can’t do it myself, the pain—,”
Jon trailed off into a shaky breath. He looked like he wanted nothing more in the world but to cry, and was doing everything he could to hold himself together. But he was very evidently at the limits of that composure Chloe often envied.
Chloe let Yuri’s sword drop to the ground and took Jon’s hand. She met his eyes and gave him a nod. “On three?”
“On three,” Jon agreed.
“One,” Chloe counted. Jon squeezed his eyes shut immediately.
“Two.” She forced the bone back into place immediately, and Jon roared, doubling over in pain and almost wobbling to one knee.
She let go of his hand then, wiped the blood off against her pants. Jon clutched the hand, remained bent over for a moment, breathing loud and quick. Then he started to slow his breathing.
After a few seconds, he straightened. “You said three.” He turned then and helped Yuri to her feet. Yuri walked away from them at once, stooping to pick up her sword as she marched to join Lucas in front of the tubes that held her unit.
Chloe felt an almost overwhelming amount of pity for her. But she couldn’t get sidetracked by that.
“Are you okay?” Chloe asked, looking at Jon.
“For the most part. Kaia, she—,”
“We know,” Chloe said. “Have you seen Jin? She took her.”
“I’ve been in and out of it but I think so,” Jon said. “I heard some screaming earlier. It’s what woke me.”
“We have to find her,” Chloe said. “And the sooner the better. Bridge let Helmets loose on the District. We need to finish down here and make sure things don’t get out of hand up there.”
One of the tubes shattered then and Chloe spun around in time to see Mason fall right of the tube that had held him, hitting the ground with a splashing sound. Yuri struck at the rest of the tubes with her sword, getting all of the others out.
“Yuri—,” Jon began.
“Go,” Yuri said, without looking in their direction. “Find Jin, find Bridge. I’ll find you.”
“Yuri—,”
“GO!” Yuri yelled, crouching next to Mason and lifting his face up slightly. “Just go! We don’t have time for this!”
Chloe looked at Jon. “She’s right. Come on.”
Chloe continued through the lab. Lucas and Jon followed her. The lab was a lot larger than it’d looked when they’d come in. There were other sections of it, connected to the main lab by small hallways. They checked section after section, and found nothing. Then just as they turned down one section, someone charged at them.
Chloe heard the buzzing of electricity and ducked just in time. She heard Lucas grunt, heard the sound of a fist colliding with something, then the clatter of metal dropping to the ground.
She looked to see the prong on the ground, then turned and found Lucas with a hand at Kaia’s throat, pinning her to the wall.
“Kaia.” Chloe’s eyes turned bloodshot red almost immediately.
“No!” Lucas growled. “She’s mine. Go!”
Despite her reluctance, Chloe continued ahead with Jon. They ended up in a room akin to an infirmary. Strapped to a bed there in metal binds was Jin, dangerous looking needles jabbed into her, siphoning blood out of her. The room looked a mess—there was some blood on the floor, a monitor had also crashed to the ground, bits of shattered screen everywhere.
She’d put up a fight.
“Help me get her out!” Chloe said frantically, rushing to the bed and immediately undoing the straps at Jin’s feet while Jon fumbled with another set around her thighs. She finished with the feet and moved on to undo straps around her waist and together, she and Jon undid the binds around her wrist.
She unhooked Jin from the needles, tossed them aside and raised Jin into an upright position, doing so tenderly.
“Jin!” she yelled.
Jin groaned and cracked an eye open. “Hey,” she said softly. “Chloe.”
“Can you walk?”
“In a moment,” Jin answered. “But I don’t think you’ve got that.”
“What?” Chloe frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“My blood,” Jin said, before gesturing to a small fridge Chloe had missed. Jon darted toward the fridge and opened it. He pulled out two large vials filled with blood. “Bridge has it,” Jin continued. “He’ll change. Stop him.”
“What is she talking about?” Jon queried.
Chloe looked at Jon. “Shit,” she murmured. “I think Bridge plans to turn himself into a Pandoran,” she said. “Or something worse.”
“Like the Helmets?”
“With Jin’s blood?” Chloe’s expression turned grim. “He’ll be a lot stronger.”
“That’s what he’s been doing this whole time,” Jon said, realization dawning on him slowly. “Abducting Yuri’s unit, the Helmets…we thought the children were his attempts at a perfect soldier but they were only—,”
“Prototypes,” Chloe finished. “And now, with Jin’s blood, he could create the real deal.”
“We need to go. Now.”
“I can’t leave her—,”
“Chlo,” Jin said and squeezed Chloe’s hand tightly. “Go. I’ll be fine. I just need a few minutes. I heal a lot faster than you bozos, remember?”
Chloe met Jin’s eyes. She squeezed back at her hand. “If you die, I’ll kill you.”
Jin chuckled. “Sure. Oh, and Chloe?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“See, was that so hard?”
“Just so you know—we’re still not even.”
Chloe smiled. Then she straightened to her feet and turned to Jon. “How’s your hand feeling now?”
“Good enough that I can swing with it,” Jon answered, then stared at the vials he was holding. “But I think it could be even better in a moment.”
Chloe walked to him, took one of the vials. “Bottoms up,” she said. They emptied the vials down their throats and immediately felt that rush of enhanced strength. “Right. Now let’s go kill a Chancellor.”