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hypnoticwinter · 3 years

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Down the Rabbit Hole part 28

A scratchy little voice is crooning in my ear. Major Fracture Detected. Joint Dislocation Detected. Pneumothorax Detected. Blood Loss Detected. Mild Nerve Damage Detected. T. Jacksonii Spore Residue Detected. Diagnosing…acute deceleration injury. Poisoning. Spore inhalation. Begin treatment?

There’s a little friendly dinging tone. Someone near me shifts, and then I feel a warm hand slip into mine momentarily and squeeze. For a second I’m willing to let myself believe it might be Elena, but then I run my thumb lightly over the knuckles pressing against my fingers and give that up right away. This hand is much too soft to be Elena’s.

I try to crack my eyes open but it’s far too bright for that right now. I’m having a little bit of trouble thinking straight. And a little bit of trouble breathing but for whatever reason it feels as though wherever I am right now is very far away and separated from the rest of my body. I can feel a stab of pain on the right side of my chest whenever I take a breath but at the same time it’s as though I’m observing it from such a far distance that it barely is of significance. Maybe it’s happening to someone other than myself.

Begin treatment? the voice repeats and next to me the person holding my hand sighs and says my name. I recognize their voice but not who they are.

“Are you awake?” they ask, and I try to say something but my tongue is very thick and heavy. I swallow hard; my throat hurts.

“Roan,” they say again, “I don’t know if you can hear me but I’m going to have to start the treatment procedure soon, okay? You really did a number on yourself falling off that cliff, and then the spores you’d been breathing in for about three days weren’t helping any.”

I try a little harder to say something but I know it doesn’t come out right.

“This might feel a little weird,” the voice says. Now I do recognize it; it’s Makado.

Begin treatment? The tiny scratchy voice says again and this time Makado shifts next to me and hits the button. There is a hiss and a whine of moving machinery and then a sharp prick in the skin above my hand. I make a little noise, try to move my hand away, but something hard has grabbed onto it and isn’t letting me go.

Sedative administered, the voice says, and then everything fades very quickly. I have just enough consciousness left, circling the drain as it is, to feel Makado’s hand slip from mine, and then I am moving, or rather I am being drawn into something, and then something comes down over my head and cradles my neck. It’s very dark and I feel as though I ought to be afraid, but before I can open my mouth to voice my fears, to scream perhaps, I flutter out entirely.

* * *

I can hear talking. I’m laying in a bed curled over onto my side and in the other room I can hear talking.

My head is remarkably clear. I breathe in deeply and let it gust out slowly through my nose. There is a mild ache in my ribs, nothing more.

“Yes,” Makado says, “I’ve got her. No, she didn’t give me any trouble. She’s pretty beat-up, a kitten could have knocked her out and carried her up to the surface.”

A pause. I open my eyes with an anticipatory wince but the light is cool and grey and clinical, filtering down through a sheet or curtain drawn around the bed; there is a wide-paneled fluorescent set into the ceiling but it’s switched off.

“No,” Makado says, after a pause, then repeats. “No, that won’t be necessary. Just be ready to receive us, that’s all.”

There’s an IV in my hand and the jaw of a heartrate monitor clamped around my finger. I think about it for a moment and then reach down and take it off. The machine the IV feeds into gives an interrogative chirp.

“Yes, I have the handcu - hang on, she’s awake.”

I hear the screech of a chair sliding back along a hard floor and then a door opens and someone comes in.

“Hey,” Makado says softly, and I almost feel like crying. “You okay in here? You awake?”

“Makado,” I breathe, and she pushes back the curtains and sweeps her eyes over me, then blows her breath out.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m – I’m good,” I say, taking a moment to think about it. I sit up a little more fully and yawn. My jaw cracks like a gunshot. “How long was I out for? And what are you –“

Makado laughs. She motions at my legs and I scoot over a little, let her sit down at the foot of the bed. “So, um. You were out for about a day and a half. That’s how long it’s been since you fell off the cliff.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. I brought you down here,” she gestures, “put you into the autodoctor unit that they had, let it do its thing. It isn’t ideal but it uses a ton of ballast, so I figure you probably feel pretty decent, at least. When we get out of here we’ll get you to an actual doctor for a checkup.”

“Autodoctor?”

“It’s an old Anodyne thing,” she says. “DUSA has the last functioning one, they get a little use out of it. Runs off an old AD biocomputer. It was supposed to be for a military contract, put a bunch of them overseas, hard to reach places. Can do surgeries and treatments and diagnose like that,” she says, snapping her fingers. “Not a lot of flexibility, though. But plans fell through of course and the few that were left are museum pieces now. The one they’ve got here is the last working one.”

I chew on that for a moment. “DUSA?” I ask finally.

“Oh, right. This place,” she says, gesturing. “Dura Urgens Staging Area. DUSA. Some people call it Medusa. As like, a pun.”

“That doesn’t really help me understand what it is.”

Makado nods. She reaches up and runs a hand through her hair; I’m busy watching her eyes. Something about this place is important, I think; something here means something to her.

“Below us,” she says finally, “about eighty or a hundred meters down, is the largest known nerve bulbule in the Pit. There might be others someplace else, someplace deeper, someplace we haven’t explored yet, but this is the biggest one we know of. The Pit doesn’t have a brain the way you or I do. Whatever common ancestor it shared with humans, if it ever had one, was so far back that it was before the development of the central nervous system. The Pit uses a distributed nervous system instead; it has nerve bulbs all over the place and they handle reflexive and autonomous reactions for the general area that they’re in. Then, you move deeper by another five hundred meters and you find another bulb. It’s like a web, or a road network, and all of these bulbs are the cities.”

“But this one below us is the biggest.”

“Yes. That doesn’t mean it’s the main one, just that it’s…bigger. Handles more things. And DUSA – well, there’s a reason that they put it right over the big one.”

I blink at her. “Wait, is this where the - ?”

“The Contingency Plan?” she says, clearly saying the words with big important Capital Letters. “Yeah. That’s here. This is the facility for it.”

Something about the way she grins at me makes me shudder. I think back to the story Peter had told me – god, poor Peter – and his horrible descriptions of the way that the contingency had fucked their brains. I look at the woman before me, at the mottled flesh beneath her eyepatch and the hearing aids poking their heads out of her ears, at the acid burns and digestion marks lining her arms like vitiligo, and I can’t reconcile her tiny excited smile with the picture I had of her when Peter was telling me about her.

I blow out a big sigh and flop back in the hospital bed. There’s a warning twinge in my ribs and I wince; Makado picks up on it instantly. “You alright? Do you need anything?”

“No, I just – how was that thing able to fix me so fast?”

She shrugs. “Lots of ballast. The tank was still nearly full when we got here, it used a few gallons on you it looked like.”

Again I shudder. I’m trying not to think back to the horrible, terrifying crawl through the tight, sucking, fleshy tube to the ballast bulb, about the abject terror I had felt when Crookshank had crawled in there with me.

Crookshank…he’d be dead now, almost certainly. I realize that I don’t remember seeing him die, I don’t remember what happened to him. My memory of the attack down in the barrows is just streaks of gunfire sliding by my faceplate, the rhythmic, chest-squeezing thundering of the slug rifles, and the shrieks of the copepods. I wonder for a moment whether I’m going to have PTSD, whether I’ll ever be able to eat lobster again. I shake my head.

“Mak, this is fucked.”

“What is?”

“This whole – this whole thing. This is –“

“Relax,” she says, putting a hand on mine. I can feel the cool, clammy skin on the inside of her palm where the acid had burned her. It feels like something that’s been microwaved about twice as long as it needed to be and then let to cool down and I have to stop my lip from curling. “It’s not active. Not yet, anyway. Once we get that crystal back we can go about getting it carved down and –“

“I don’t think that crystal’s going to be an option any more.”

I tell her, briefly, about what happened after Erica and Marcus had ambushed us, how they had shot the Sergeant, how they had shot Elena and gotten us separated. “Do you know where she is?” I ask, realizing with a faint feeling of guilt that I hadn’t asked already.

Makado stares at me. “Who?”

I blink. “Elena. I don’t know where she is, did she – did she make it out?” The thought of Elena laying there hurting somewhere in some throbbing corridor of this place is almost too much for me to bear. Or worse, laying there dead –

I break the thought off like a plank of rotten wood. She is not dead. She can’t be.

I almost missed the calculating look that had flashed across Makado’s eye, and I realize I’ve grabbed onto her arm rather tightly. I let go but even so I can’t stop myself from biting my lip out of sheer worry. “She’s fine,” Makado says finally.

“She is?”

“Yeah. She came stumbling into Control a few days ago, they got her up to the surface, far as I know she’s still in the infirmary. That’s how I knew to come down and get you, she told us what was going on.”

“Oh thank god,” I blurt. I hug my knees to my chest and squeeze my eyes shut. She’s okay, I tell myself. I can feel the tears coming but at least this time they’re out of relief. After a moment I hear Makado sigh again and then she shifts closer to me and puts her arm around me.

“You must really like her,” Makado ventures after a moment. I laugh but it comes out as more of a sniff.

“Yeah,” I say after a moment. “Yeah, I think I – I do, yeah.”

For a short while it feels as though Makado doesn’t know what to say. Then finally she shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she tells me.

“For what?”

“For dragging you into this,” she says. “I never thought that all of this would happen, it was going to be just routine,” she says, massaging her temples. “The copepods, they never would have done anything if it wasn’t for the damn Leechman, they never would have attacked, nobody would have had to die…”

“It isn’t something you could have predicted,” I say gently. Makado continues on as though I hadn’t spoken.

“And then Erica, goddam Erica, Christ…”

“She was doing what she thought was the right thing,” I say. “I don’t think she meant for things to go the way they did.”

“That doesn’t really make it any better,” she groans. I think about Peter again and wish fervently that he were here. I lean back and navigate my arm around so that now I’m the one holding Makado.

“I’m sorry about Peter,” I tell her.

Makado is utterly silent. She’s looking away from me, over into the other room. I can see the muscles at the base of her jaw working as she grinds her teeth. For a moment, just a moment, I get a feeling of foreboding. She seems horribly angular and purposeful and mean all of a sudden, sitting there at the foot of the bed like an axe about to fall on me. I start to say something else but she looks over at me and nods. Her eyes are very hard.

“Yeah, I’m sorry too. It sounded like a rotten way to die.” I look over at Makado, look at her carefully. She glances over at me after a moment. “What?”

“Nothing,” I say finally. I swing off of the bed, get up and stretch. “I feel good,” I observe.

“Yeah,” Makado says, rising to her feet as well. “With that much ballast in your system you’ll probably be riding pretty high for a couple of days at least. Now, be careful though, because –“

“What are we going to do about the FBI?” I ask her. I undo the hospital gown and let it fall, gaze down at myself. There’s a ragged weal of a scar along my ribs on the right side but it already looks long-healed. I put my weight down on my other foot and nearly stumble. Makado gets up and rushes to me but I caught myself on the railing around the cot.

“You alright?”

“Yeah, my leg, it –“

“I was going to tell you,” she says. “The autodoc wasn’t able to set it properly. You’d fallen on a calcium deposit and your tibia and fibula broke. It cleaned out the fragments of bone but there wasn’t enough left to just set it and let it heal, so it put in a synthetic replacement, used ballast to meld your skin and muscle around it, but that leg is going to be weak for a long time.”

I sit back on the bed, reach down and feel the leg. It doesn’t feel much different but whatever caused the weakness is still lurking inside there, maybe a muscle not connected properly, maybe something else. I can feel a dull, bone-deep throb of pain, steady and regular and hard-edged, just waiting to boil up to the surface the second I put a foot wrong. I shake my head.

“I’m going to need like, a boot or something. If we have to climb out of here –“

“We’ll figure it out, it’s okay. I just wanted to tell you before you, you know, figured that you were totally fine.”

“What about this?” I ask, turning to her, pointing to the scar across my ribcage. “I know that wasn’t there.”

“Just repair work on a rib, I think. I read the summary it spat out after it was done but I’m pretty sure it didn’t reinflate your lung by going through your rib cage.”

“Jesus Christ,” I murmur, craning my neck and squinting down at it.

“Are you breathing alright?”

With only a little trepidation I take a deep breath and hold it, then let it blow out long and slow. There’s a little pain when I hold it, in the right lung only, and then as I’m nearing the tail end of the breath it rattles somewhere deep down, but I shake my head. “A little rough but it’s okay.”

“You need to know that you’re still a little, you know, doped up. Ballast would have kept most of the pain down and kept your head pretty clear but that’s going to come back with a vengeance if you overdo it.”

I nod. “Alright, I get it. Take it easy for probably the next year or so.”

“There’s an extra jumpsuit over on that chair.”

And so I get dressed, and eat a nutrient bar and Makado shows me around DUSA. I have to hang on to her every now and then when my leg threatens to buckle beneath me but she bears it without complaint and lets me hobble around with my arm around her shoulder like we’re old friends.

DUSA looks just like all of the other ranger stations I’ve been in so far, if maybe a little cleaner. She shows me the door to the room that has the big scary capital-letter Contingency Plan inside of it, but even though I ask she won’t let me in to see it.

Outside the inch-thick windows the Pit’s flesh is squeezed tight against the walls. A few small stents hold it back here and there to let a metal gantry and corridor file through and out into a vent but otherwise it’s like this place was just cut open and the small lozenge shape of DUSA was slipped in and then the Pit grew back around it. Unlike some of the other ranger stations this one is tall rather than wide, maybe four or five floors of various facilities. There’s a dormitory, a kitchen and eating area, the small infirmary with the autodoctor, now revealed as a squat, many-legged machine a little like an MRI machine and a metal octopus had a baby, and on the fourth floor room after room of workstations with dark screens and dusty keyboards. Servers lie dark and dormant, tucked against the walls and tied down with cloth straps.

We end up sitting on the roof of the place, after Makado opens the hatch and lets a ladder telescope down from the recessed sheath it was hiding in. She helps me up it methodically and then we’re there, the fleshy wall of the ceiling barely a dozen feet above our heads. It gives me a sense of disorientation somehow, like I’ve just crawled upside down from the bottom of DUSA and am now standing with my feet glued to the ceiling, staring down at the floor. I blink hard and it passes.

Makado leans out over the railing and groans. “Everything’s fucked,” she growls. “This whole place ought to be full of people, getting things ready for when that crystal gets here. Instead it’s just me and – and you.” She’d gotten more and more pessimistic the further into our little tour we’d gone. I reach over and put my arm around her. She stiffens when I touch her and then seems to relax. I feel rather comradely, I feel like laughing. I guess I had convinced myself that I was going to die and now that I’ve received an unexpected reprieve I can’t hardly believe it.

“It’ll be okay,” I tell her. “What’s going on with the FBI?”

“Admin’s stalling them, but they’ll come back with a writ or a warrant or something and when they get their hands on our files there’ll be some shit. Right now they’re fighting with the DoI guys over jurisdiction, I think.”

“DoI?”

“Department of the Interior,” she says, waving her hand. “Normally that’d be who would handle this type of thing, they’re in charge of National Parks, but the FBI want in because this isn’t a park any more, I think technically it’s a preserve or something and that’s different…somehow. Not sure on that one.”

I nod. I start to say something else but Makado heaves a huge sigh, glances sidelong at me. “There might be some trouble but I think we’ll be able to get you out of it,” she tells me, and I laugh.

“I’m more worried about you. Klaus said they were gunning for you, that you were going to go down hard.”

She rolls her eyes. “We’ll have to see,” she says. “Especially if he’s dead, it might be a little more difficult for that to happen.”

I get a little wrench in my stomach as she says it but I swallow hard and let it pass. I did what I had to and if I hadn’t I would be dead.

I wonder for how long after this I’m going to be seeing that grin and that knife in my dreams.

“So he was a mole, then?” I ask. “That’s basically what he was saying.”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “He’s been here for a long time, Klaus has. I don’t think he ever was, you know, an undercover FBI agent or anything, I think he was just their guy on the inside. An informant. I read his personnel file, he’s an ex-con. It makes sense that there was someone giving them information but…” she trails off. “It’s hard to say,” she finishes. “It’s too bad, though. Too bad we didn’t get that crystal. We could have done a lot of good with it. If they just hadn’t shattered the first one…”

We sit there on the roof of DUSA for a long while, until Makado finally groans and gets to her feet. I glance up at her and then take the offered hand, let her pull me up. “What happens now?” I ask.

“Now?” she laughs. “Now we get out of here.”

* * *

Getting out is easier than getting in. Makado gets me into a ranger suit and we march off into the wet, tumescent depths of the Pit. Except, as Makado explains to me, we aren’t nearly as deep as I think. DUSA is far higher depth-wise than the dense fungal hell I thought I was going to die in. When I asked her how I had gotten here, then, she explained, as though it were simple, that she had just taken an IAV.

Peter had mentioned them briefly, the acronym standing for something like ‘Internal Anatomy Vehicle’ or similar. I’d even seen some, parked down below in the meager garage at the control center, what feels like ages ago, lurking like snub-nosed, aerodynamic lozenges, there in the dark. But here is one of them, its big chunky wheels soaked in gore, its prow stained red from apparent hours pushing panicked through venterial folds, rushing to DUSA with me in the passenger seat, strapped in as tightly as Makado had dared.

“It was tight,” she tells me. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it. I went as fast as I possibly could but it was still a near thing.”

“It was those fucking lizards down there,” I mutter. “I touched one, they’re covered in some kind of – poisonous goop, I don’t know what –“

“Yeah. The autodoc scrubbed your system and breathing clean air for long enough got the spores out as well, but you’re just riding on the ballast right now,” she reminds me, pressing a combination on a keypad near the low-slung waist of the vehicle and then stepping back to let the hatch open. It smells like oil and disinfectant but I clamber in eagerly. The interior is space-age, or at least it would have been in the 90s or so. The interior lights are all in red for some reason; when I ask Makado about it she explains it’s to help maintain low-light vision while still letting you see. When she grins at me her teeth reflect back cherry-stained and I have to shake my head to keep from thinking of it as blood. She looks carnivorous, hungry, frightening.

The ride is bumpy but uneventful. Once Makado flattens something that looks like an overgrown louse the size of a small pig. It shrieks as the wheels crunch over it. I glance over at her and she shrugs. “We’re in a hurry,” she explains.

After that we lapse into a comfortable silence that grows slowly more frosty the closer we get to the Control Center. I can see it approaching on the three-dimensional map readout on the dashboard, a blinking line of waypoints leading us back to the garage. Makado’s answers become shorter and shorter and eventually I just stop trying to make conversation at all. She’s just tired, I tell myself.

After we park Makado helps me out of the IAV and guides me up a set of stairs and into the Center. My leg twinges a little whenever I really put weight on it but if I limp it isn’t nearly as bad. The stairs are rough though, and I have to cling on to her and take them one step at a time just to get up them.

Over the last hour of driving or so I developed a little bit of a headache but when I mentioned it to Makado she nodded and explained it was probably just the ballast starting to wear off. It’d keep me going for a while longer but I’d need to rest and let my body heal. I had grinned. “Fine with me,” I told her, and she offered me a faint smile and then turned her attention back to the wet, bloody folds ahead of us, nudging the nose of the IAV through one muscular ribbed sphincter at a time.

The stairs take us to sort of a tool room or machine shop, and then we pass out into a hallway and then up some stairs that I recognize. Beyond the next inch-thick submarine-style door is the control room, still as messy as a few days ago, with two or three of the geeks present before still in residence. They look up when Makado enters but make no comment other than a perfunctory greeting or two; clearly we’re expected. Then I step into the room and catch nothing but eyeballs.

One of the nerds frowns. “Wait,” he asks Makado, staring at me, “is that…?”

I start to answer but Makado nods, shuffling me along with her hand in the small of my back. “Yes, it is,” she assures him, but the look he gives me after she does so is more than a little confusing. I glance at Makado but before I can say anything there is a burst of pain in my leg that forces a groan from my lips and makes me stumble. Makado catches me before I fall and then I’m good again. My leg feels like it’s made of glass, or rather that it’s two glass blocks stacked on top of each other, and if I’m not extremely careful about how and where I put my weight they slide apart and the most excruciating -

“You okay?” she asks, and I nod.

“Yeah,” I grunt. “Once I’m out of here I will be.”

“They already called the elevator down,” she tells me. “I radioed ahead for us. Twenty minutes and you’re through.”

“And I can see Elena?” I ask. I feel a little like a baby saying it but it just tumbled out when I opened my mouth to say something a little less pathetic like ‘thank goodness’ or similar. Makado stiffens next to me fractionally, and I frown. “Are you –“

“Yes, you can see Elena.”

We hobble out of the control room and down the corridor to the gondolas. I don’t even know how to feel; I don’t even know what time it is, whether or not it’ll be light out. Something about the way Makado took too long to answer has me worried, though, and I glance over at the woman as we make our halting way towards the waiting gondola car.

Her jaw is clenched tight and though I can’t see her one good eye from the side I’m on, I can see her brow is downcast and furrowed. I lick my lips and try to quell the sudden stab of fear that’s gone through me. “Mak, is Elena…is she okay?”

Makado opens the door to the gondola and helps me inside. “She’s fine,” she tells me. “Just try to rest. Sit down on the floor if you need to.”

As soon as she says it, as if on cue, a wave of exhaustion passes through me and it’s all I can do to keep myself standing. Makado shuts the door and fiddles with the controls for a moment and then with a sickening lurch we’re moving upwards, and with the motion it’s as though all the tension exits my body. Even the twinging in my calf doesn’t seem quite as bad now that we’re moving. I look at Makado and she offers me a tight smile. “See?” she says. “We’ll get you out of here soon.”

“And Elena’s alright?”

Makado doesn’t meet my eyes. “She’s fine,” she tells me again, but the way she says it just makes me worry more.

“Do you promise?” I ask her. She looks up from her wrist computer.

“Hmm?”

“Do you promise,” I say slowly, “that Elena’s alright?”

Makado stares at me and I see something dark and unnameable shifting behind her one remaining eye. After what feels like entirely too long she nods. “Say it,” I prompt her. “Please.” I know it’s irrational and stupid but the way she’s acting is like she’s hiding something from me, it’s like she’s –

“Roan, calm down,” she says. Her voice is smooth and serene. “Elena’s fine.”

“Promise me she is,” I whisper.

Makado takes what feels like a moment longer to respond than she should. “Okay,” she says finally. “I promise.”

“Okay,” I say. I try to will myself back to the relaxed, relieved state I’d been in as soon as the gondola had started moving, but I can’t find it. Makado’s put enough worry into me that I feel like a spiky ball of it, hard-edged and serrated. I eventually do take her advice and sit on the floor and rest a while.

I try to make conversation with her but the answers she gives me are flat and eventually we both let it peter out. I assume she’s nervous about the FBI and the investigation I’m sure she’ll go through. I already told her on the way up that I didn’t mind hanging around and giving a statement or whatever else they need exactly, but it barely seemed to make an impact on her. Maybe it’s Peter, and if it is, I don’t know what to say to her that could possibly make it better.

But I go ahead and stick my foot in my mouth anyway. “Mak,” I say, breaking the – well, not silence exactly, for the grinding and swaying of the gondola is far from quiet, but my words still seem overly loud inside the car, “are you okay?”

She blows a breath out and looks at me. She starts to say something, then stops. “I’m sorry,” she ends up telling me, and I frown.

“What for?” I ask. “I know it didn’t – it didn’t go how it was supposed to but none of it was your fault, you couldn’t have predicted –“

“No,” she says. Her voice has a catch to it as though she might start crying. “It isn’t that. It’s – look, can I show you something?”

“Sure.” I’ve got no clue where she’s going with this. Outside the window I can see the first hint of real sunlight that I’ve glimpsed in probably about four or five days, pouring down into the Pit like an orange cascade. It’s far-off and dim but it’s real. Looks to be somewhere around the middle of the day or so. Makado reaches down for me and with her help I manage to clamber to my feet. I’m still a little unsteady on the right leg but I think it’s getting better. I think I just needed to rest it for a while. “What is it?”

“I’ll show you,” she says. “Turn around real quick.”

“What are you –“

“Just do it,” she nods. Her eyes flick over to the window then back to me. “You’ll miss it.”

So of course I turn, not thinking anything of it. I hear her shift and then come and stand just behind me. There’s a clink of metal, a small subtle sound. I don’t see anything out the window.

I start to glance back at her and then she grabs my wrist and tugs it backwards and snaps half of a pair of handcuffs around it. “What!” I blurt, jerking away from her before she can grab my other hand. Her face is tight and calculating.

“Give me your fucking hand,” she snarls.

“Makado, what the fuck –“

She punches me. I see it coming but I don’t react in time. Her fist slams into my gut and the breath whooshes out of me in one go, folds me over like a pressed shirt. I reach for her and try to slap her back but she grabs my hand and then she’s got me by the wrist – her grip is like iron. I bring my leg up and knee her in the hip and she grunts, but then she draws her leg back and kicks me in my newly repaired calf and the explosion of pain is so intense that I scream. I draw my leg back and falter and then fall to the floor, landing heavily on my elbow, and then Makado grabs me and heaves me over onto my stomach, jarring my leg again and forcing another scream from between my teeth as she cuffs the other wrist.

“What the fuck!” I yell, as soon as I’ve caught my breath.

“I’m sorry,” she says, breathing heavily, smoothing off the front of her suit. “I’m really, really sorry.”

“You fucking bitch!” I shriek. “You fucking bitch, get me out of these fucking cuffs!”

“It wasn’t anything personal,” she says, sounding more like she’s trying to convince herself than she is trying to convince me.

“You bitch!” I say again. I apparently become rather uninventive when I get stabbed in the back. Makado growls, a low wordless snarl, and then rolls me over onto my back. The cuffs cut into my wrists, sandwiched between myself and the floor, and I cry out.

“Shut the fuck up,” she tells me. Her voice is icy calm and that scares me more than anything else she could have said. “I have to give someone to the FBI. I have to let someone take the fall.”

I open my mouth to say something and she puts her booted foot over my throat and presses down gently. I can feel the blunt cleats on the bottom dig into my neck. I try to wriggle away but she just puts a little more of her weight onto it and then I can’t breathe and so I stop, staring at her desperately, hoping she has the sense not to choke me.

“There is too much at stake right now,” she says, “for me to go down for something as fucking stupid as human trafficking. Especially when my contribution was just looking the other way. So you’re going to go down for me. That’s all. There’s still a chance I can get that crystal back but I won’t be able to if I’m rotting in a federal prison somewhere.”

She takes her foot off my throat and I heave the air in while I still can. “Tell me,” I wheeze. Makado looks down at me. “Tell me you weren’t lying about Elena. Tell me she’s okay.”

Makado is silent for a long while. “I lied,” she says finally, in a small voice. “I knew you wouldn’t come with me if you thought she was still in the Pit. I don’t know where she is or if she’s alive. The tracker in her suit is dead and nobody’s heard from her in three days.”

The gondola grinds to a halt and the doors hiss open, and sunlight and fresh air pour in. I hardly notice. Makado steps over me and walks out while I lay there, my hands cuffed behind my back, bawling my eyes out, and then three men with badges and pistols come in and pick me up and carry me off somewhere. I don’t notice where, I don’t see it. All I can see, my eyes squeezed shut in a vain attempt to keep the tears from leaking out, is Elena, poor Elena, trapped somewhere at the bottom of the Pit and calling out my name, not knowing I’ll never come.

Continue with Part 29

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