Seth, with his hand still on the wall panel, glanced nervously between Chase and I.
“No. Not on the same team,” Chase said with a smile, answering Seth’s unasked question. “I was the one who started this game of cat and mouse. Nick is just the party crasher.”
“You’re Chase, then. I must say I’m at a bit of a loss as to what your stake in this. The lapdog here has it out for Organ out of some sense of naive morality. But you don’t strike me as another wannabe hero.”
Chase placed a hand over his heart. “I’m hurt. You don’t see me as the hero? Well, I’m here because I talked to someone who got cold feet. They saw what you have in that briefcase and they decided they would rather leak secrets to an outsider than deal with what comes out of that briefcase. They prefer opening the Pandora’s box they don’t know to the box they do know, if you catch my drift.”
Seth tightened his grip on the handle of the briefcase. “I don’t blame them. I only blame their weak will, unable to do what is necessary to ensure our future.” As he spoke, he took his hand off the panel. There was a beep and a passage slid open, the seams hidden by the wood paneling on the walls. Water immediately began to pour down the newly revealed steps that descended into a gray concrete hallway. There was already water inside as well, making it unclear how deep the water truly was in that passageway.
Chase nodded in satisfaction. “I knew it was down here. You had the chance to escape further up and you didn’t. You knew there was a better way to lose me.”
“I don’t recommend following me,” Seth said. “Organ’s personnel may have left, but they didn’t take their creations with them.”
“You’re on the wrong side, Seth,” Chase said.
Seth replied while inching towards the passage. “I think not. I’ve chosen correctly. Organ is doing what must be done.”
Chase grinned wider. “That’s not what I meant. You’ve chosen the wrong side of Organ.”
Seth stopped, face blank.
“Any luck making him drop it?” I murmured quietly into my headset.
“I can’t grasp his arm. The only explanation I can come up with is that it isn’t living.”
I stared at Seth’s arm, unmarked by the bites of fish.
A prosthetic?
“That’s right. I’m aware,” Chase said. “Organ isn’t as united as everyone was led to believe. There was a sticking point, something that wasn’t discussed for a long time because everyone thought everyone else was like-minded. The question: what happens when the Beacon works? I know what that weapon is for. It’s for controlling, or maybe fighting, what the Beacon is calling. I doubt I need to explain to someone of your intelligence, Seth, that either of those options is wishful thinking.”
Seth stiffened. “We cannot let whatever entity is up there dictate the future of humanity. It must be controlled.”
“We? You mean you’re just taking that to people who know better, right? Giving it up. Taking your turn in watching others achieve greatness.”
“They’ve been watching, researching, preparing for years. It would be foolish to ignore that. The wise heed the experts.”
“That’s odd. I swear you were just speaking about those with weak will.”
Chase exerted his influence. Colour seemed to seep from the room. Seth’s muscles slackened. I reminded myself that I was supposed to care about this outcome, but I couldn’t muster an iota of emotion.
A blur of inky smoke shot towards Seth through an open window. I saw the winged arms of the Fisherman stretching out towards the briefcase.
But then a large figure loomed behind Seth from the hallway. An arm double the size of any human pulled him inside. They splashed backwards through the water, disappearing down the passageway.
Chase laughed.
I didn’t understand what was so funny, but it didn’t bother me. I was content to watch.
The Fisherman paused, looking to Chase from within his personal cloud of black fog.
“After him,” Chase ordered. The Fisherman nodded, glancing at me before going inside the secret passage.
“Feel free to join us, Nick. I’m sure there are all kinds of fun surprises inside. Let the chase continue!” With that, Chase hopped down into the passage, landing in a playful splash, before wading further inside.
The apathy that had saturated my mind faded slowly, lingering like a bad cold. It took minutes before I felt strongly enough about anything to motivate me to move.
Finally, my connection to Nell snapped me back to alertness. She was busy dealing with the fog and her captives, I needed to go alone if I wanted to keep up.
I took a shuddering breath, trying to shake the horrible feeling Chase’s influence had left me with.
The doors at the entrance to the building swung open and Daria stepped through, along with a wave that sloshed more water into the lobby. Daria was soaking wet and she wasn’t even breathing heavily despite the fact that she must have swam here from the H.E.S.P. boats.
She nodded to me before starting to wring out her long red hair. She was sporting a large, strangely patterned bruise across her shoulder.
“Did they go in there?”
“Yeah. Secret Organ lair I guess. What happened to the Aberrants?”
“Neve had the brilliant idea to lure them outside, to see if they remember their swimming lessons. It had mixed results. Neve is still dealing with one of them. She has it handled, so she sent me over to help.”
“I’m glad,” I said as I eyed the dark passageway. “It’s giving me the creeps. Plus Chase is around. Let’s be cautious.”
Daria walked over to the desk and picked up a metal paperweight. “His power’s got a range right? I’ve got a good cricket pitch, we’ll deal with him at a distance.”
“That suits me fine, just keep your head on. Nothing ever goes to plan when he’s around.”
Daria went down the steps first. The water was only knee-high but the cold seeped into my feet. The fog didn’t reach here, other than the lingering wisps of the Fisherman’s path.
The hallway was narrow, I could touch both sides if I reached out, and the water wasn’t helping with the claustrophobic feeling either. I imagined getting trapped in one of these halls, water rising to the ceiling until I couldn’t breathe. Bad thoughts. Focus up.
The passage turned up ahead and rounding the corner, we saw the hallway continue down another set of stairs, the walls widening enough that a small car could fit.
Luckily there were lights on as we went deeper, but they were odd. Stuck to the ceiling and upper walls at random, the misshapen bulbs looked more like the shells of sea-life than man-made. They glowed from within with a light tinged a pale green.
Daria made a high-pitched sound as she stepped down into waist-high water. I started to notice objects floating past us in the dim light. Sodden, illegible papers. Pens that leaked ink into the water. A children’s toy car. I scooped it out of the water and turned it over in my hands. My only hope is that someone at Organ has a kid at home who left this in their pocket.
There were doors lining the passage, with labels painted onto the concrete. “Holding Cell 13”. “Testing Room 21”. Thick metal bands ran across the already imposing doors. The facility appeared to have been sealed off. Which meant that Seth had a key, unsealing things as he went. At least it made following in his footsteps easy enough.
A door near the end of the hall was open, “Testing Room 24”. Inside was a thick glass window that separated the side we were on from a much larger space. Something brown and leathery sat motionless on the other side, an amorphous blob. I eyed it warily. There was another door on our side, so we went through.
Still keeping my eye on the thing behind the glass, I almost bumped into Daria as she came to a halt.
“What the fuck…”
Something tall loomed in the next hallway, its head reaching the roof and blocking out the ceiling lights. While it remained still, it was flickering with motion. Like poorly blended frames in an animation, the thing shifted rapidly between different positions, never quite being in the same spot, making it almost smear across my vision, like I’d stared too long at a bright light, except this thing was what I wasn’t supposed to be looking at. It swayed and left a blurry trail, like my eyes had a film on them.
Every so often, I would see something in the abstract shapes. Children’s drawings of faces or arms. Paintings that turned out poorly, the subjects lost in the smear of colours. I didn’t recognize any of these images, yet it evoked familiarity. Somehow I knew that I had been the one to draw those things, to paint something and then change my mind a dozen times before I was finished because I was just a kid.
It just watched us, yet every cell in my body was screaming at me that this thing was bad news.
“Nick… I don’t like the smell of this thing,” Daria murmured. “Maybe we back out and try another path.”
The uncharacteristic hesitancy from Daria was enough to convince me.
I backed up into the testing room.
An alarm blared, cutting through the silence. “Test procedure begin.”
I saw the Aberrant move, stretching across my sight towards Daria.
Then the door slammed shut, metal bands shooting across into indents in the wall, sealing me off.
“Shit!” I shouted, turning to see the other door closing as well. The image of the Aberrant imprinted on my vision faded slowly.
I searched for a mechanism to open the door, a switch, a lever, anything. But there was nothing. Brushing my fingers against the walls under the water, I traced the room. Surely there would be controls somewhere.
Something made me stop as I checked underneath the large glass window. There was a faint sound I could hear just beyond the ringing alarm. A kind of hissing like a rattling breath.
Like air being sucked away.
I glanced up and saw that there was a vent connecting this room to the adjacent one that was through the window, where that thing sat in the water. It wasn’t sealed off.
The brown wrinkled sac split open, revealing a massive mouth. It sucked in without pausing. One massive inhale, making the air noisily exit my side through the vent.
Someone had etched something into the glass.
Windbag.