The Wicked City (24 page)

Eric threw his head back and laughed.

“What the hell?” June ground out. Maybe he was wearing fancy earplugs or something.

Eric’s eyes glittered with malevolence. “Get him on his feet.” He jerked his head toward Jason. “Or I’ll get him up myself, and he won’t like it.” He turned and opened the door. “Now. Time’s wasting.”

June, still weak and dizzy, could barely stand on her own, let alone help anyone else stand, but she didn’t want Eric touching her brother. She crawled over to him.

Muse crawled over as well and tried to help her, despite her being as short and weak as June.

“This isn’t going to be good,” Muse whispered.

“You’re telling me,” June muttered.

Somehow, together, they managed to get Jason on his feet. He was like a dead weight across June’s back and she nearly collapsed after moving only the several feet to the door. What awaited them outside the room
wasn’t
good at all.

In the hallway, two men holding guns stood on either side of Eric, one a heavily-muscled, stocky black man, the other a tall white man with close-shaved hair. Both were dressed as security guards and wore headphones. They were the same headphones the researchers had worn while doing experiments with Jason and June.

The white man stepped forward, gun trained on June, and pulled out of his shirt pocket a black ball with straps attached. June had seen the gag once already, at the park. She shrank back, making Jason wobble. Her withdrawal didn’t deter the bastard. He stuffed the ball into her mouth and pulled the straps around her head. June snarled behind the gag, but didn’t fight, afraid they’d shoot her to make a point.

“You’re such an asshole,” Muse spat at Eric.

“The other Siren, too.” Eric motioned to Jason. “I know you’re hardly a threat, but let’s make you look like your twin sister, hmm?”

The black man produced a second gag and affixed it on Jason. He didn’t fight, either. He just sagged and allowed them to do it. June wanted to punish them all. She wanted to punish herself.

The guards took off the headphones.

“Cuff them as well,” Eric said.

June raged some more as her hands were secured behind her. The black man cuffed Jason and started leading him, weaving and stumbling, down the hallway.

“Where are you taking us?” Muse demanded, as she and June were goaded after them. “They’re purposely blocking their thoughts so I can’t read anything,” she said to June.

“Don’t be so eager to see the end of this,” Eric said. “If I were you, I’d be hoping for as much time as I’ll allow you.”

They walked down the hallway and passed by a bank of windows. Outside, night had fallen, the skyscrapers of downtown glittering in the distance. The hallway was empty and eerily quiet, the buzz of the overhead lights mingling with their collective footsteps. A clock hanging over a desk said 8:12.

After several minutes of walking, they reached a set of double doors and the guards led them through. They stepped into a narrow green tile room with a row of metal sinks along one wall and another set of double doors on the other side. The place looked like a surgery prep room.

“What’s going on?” Muse asked. “Where are we?” Clearly, once provoked to anger she wasn’t so demure and quiet anymore.

“Are you ready to witness what your beloved’s intelligence-gathering has been leading to?” Eric asked her.

“What are you talking about?” Muse asked.

“Right this way.”

Eric went through the doors first. The guards forced the three of them after him.

The room beyond was bigger and brighter, full of medical equipment, the walls the same green tile as the outer room. The room looked like an operating theatre, but more sinister, like a mad scientist’s laboratory. The assessment probably wasn’t far off. A group of people—four men and two women, all wearing white lab coats—stood in the middle of the room. Someone else stood in the room, too.

“Micha!” Muse gasped.

June stumbled and almost fell.

Micha stood in the midst of the group, wearing the jeans and T-shirt he’d had on earlier, the sweater June and Sam put on him gone. He looked disheveled but alert.

“You should be happy to see him,” Eric said. “He’s the only reason I’m letting you live right now.” He turned to Micha. “Feeling a bit more lively? Withdrawal from that stuff was an unforeseen consequence. If we’d gotten to you sooner we could have given you something to take the edge off.”

“What the hell is going on?” Muse demanded.

June jerked at her cuffs, making wet, seething sounds behind the gag. Saliva dripped down her chin, but she didn’t care how undignified her current state had rendered her. Her jaws hurt. Her head hurt. The pain made her angrier.

Eric stepped up to the group. The brilliant overhead light shone on his hair, turning the silver strands translucent and showing the pink of his scalp. “Mr. Bellevue is going to make history.”

“How could you do this?” Micha sounded perfectly lucid. “How could you betray everyone? All your lies about wanting to protect the community, all that bullshit about making the Institute a safe haven for the paranormal.”

“I do want to protect paranormal people,” Eric said, with affected affront. “They’re no good to me dead. Haain’s crazy disciple has been a thorn in my side for quite some time.”

“Robbie didn’t do anything under Sam’s command,” Muse said.

“Whether he’s Haain’s charge or not, it doesn’t matter. He almost took out my first test subject, and for that I would have been greatly vexed.”

“You’re going to give Micha the serum?” Muse asked. Apparently, she knew everything Sam knew. “Why? He’s not the only one campaigning for paranormal rights. Is this supposed to be his punishment?”

“Punishment?” Eric put a hand to his heart. “This is an
honor
. But you’re right, there’s nothing particularly special about him.” He gave Micha a patronizing pat on the shoulder. “You were just convenient, Mr. Bellevue. Easy to get to and prep. But you
will
be special. Very special.”

“What do you mean, prep?” Micha asked.

“You need special enzymes for the serum to work,” Muse said. “There’s an agent you have to take to build them. That’s what we found out. We just couldn’t figure out what the agent was.”

“I haven’t taken anything,” Micha said.

“You have, actually.” Eric tilted his chin up. “You were convenient because of your association with—formerly—top members of this facility.”

Dread stole across Micha’s features. “Oh God. Rose…”

June widened her eyes.
A means to their end.

Eric chuckled. “Yes. It was a terrible inconvenience for me, but maybe my men did you a favor when they accidentally shot her.”

“How was she giving it to me?” Micha asked.

“I never asked her. It’s a tasteless, odorless powder, so I’m sure in anything she had access to that you were drinking. Really quite easy.”

“Drinking…” Micha said.

June recalled Micha talking about Rose’s coffee. He didn’t have late-stage abilities. Rose had been feeding him the serum.

“Allow me to offer my condolences on your wife, by the way,” Eric said. “Know that she was not meant to be eradicated. She was a vital and treasured researcher, and I’m sorry to have lost her.”

“What is this prepping agent?” Micha asked. “What’s it supposed to do?”

“It’s a special compound we created.” Eric clasped his hands, sounding pleased Micha had asked. “It creates special receptors in your cells. We’ve found these receptors in almost all classifications of paranormal people, and also, specific hormones that bind with the receptors, unlike anything normal people produce. It’s fascinating science. You can read all about it once you’ve experienced it. Now that we’ve built the receptors, we’ll give you the hormones.”

“How do you know it won’t harm him?” Muse asked. “Have you tested it on anyone else?”

“We did some animal experimentation,” Eric said. “It’s perfectly safe.”

June pictured a bunch of paranormal rats and monkeys running around.

“Animals aren’t humans,” Muse said. “What if the receptors didn’t form? You don’t know what the hormones might do to him.”

“Experiments suggest formation of the receptors can spark bouts of paranormal ability even before the hormones are introduced.” Eric looked at Micha. “Have you been experiencing abilities?”

Micha didn't answer, but he glanced at June. He
had
been reading her mind. Under the light, Micha’s face appeared sunken and sallow, like the face of a man sick for a long time, but his eyes were full of healthy rage.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Eric said. “Unfortunately, when you got cut off from the prepping agent upon your wife’s death, it affected your health. But you won’t have to worry about that anymore. We’ll take good care of you.”

“You can’t do this!” Muse lurched forward. “I won’t watch you destroy him for your sick notion of science.”

“Enough of this,” Eric snapped. “Shut that little bitch up.”

The white guard grappled with her.

Muse bucked against him. “No! You can’t—”

He clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Here.” Eric grabbed a roll of surgical tape from a cart and tossed it over.

The black guard helped hold Muse down on the floor. For being so little, she gave them a hell of a fight. They placed the tape over her mouth and wrapped several layers around her head, over her hair. She made desperate muffled sounds against the tape, breathing fast through her nose. They yanked her arms behind her, bound her wrists as well, and hauled her up on her knees.

June and Jason were pushed to the floor. June growled behind her gag.

“All right then,” Eric addressed the group of researchers. “Let’s begin this.” He strode across the room.

The researchers dispersed, save for one man and one woman. The two led Micha to a bed in the center of the room, and the man told him to take off his shirt.

“You’re going to pay for this,” Micha said after Eric. “You won’t get away with it. And if I survive it, I’ll never jump through your hoops and pretend I gave my consent.”

“We have ways of keeping you from talking, don’t worry about that.” Eric added ominously, “And you don’t necessarily have to survive it for us to release the results.”

The three of them probably wouldn’t be around to call bullshit, either.

Micha was told again to remove his shirt. He pulled it up and over his head, not resisting, but still obviously furious.

When they turned him around, the tattoo on his back was visible in the bright light, spanning the space between his shoulder blades. The tattoo was, as she thought before, a nautical compass rose, colored gold and rust, the letters at each point in black calligraphy. She wasn’t close enough to take in all the detail, but each degree had been marked and the sunburst in the middle painstakingly textured. Something so intricate took several sittings. Nobody got a tattoo so complex done on a whim; the design clearly had deep, personal meaning. He wanted to be a guide, to provide direction.

The sight of the tattoo made it all the more poignant when he lay silent, while the two researchers affixed restraints to his ankles and wrists. Tears slipped from her eyes.

“Don’t be nervous,” Eric said from across the room. “If anything goes wrong, these people are trained medical professionals. This is going to be exciting.”

June wished she could wipe the tears from her cheeks. Instead she wept harder, silently, behind her gag. Micha gave her a faint smile, as if to assure her everything would be all right. But it wouldn’t be, and she couldn’t trick herself into believing it would.

The woman started prepping Micha’s arm for an injection. The man placed sensors attached to wires on his chest. Nothing could stop the awful forward momentum of the moment.

“We’re going to inject you with a small dose of hormones first,” Eric said. “We’ll be watching your vital signs closely. If there doesn’t seem to be any distress, we’ll give you another larger dose. Once we know you’re physically stable, we’ll give you an MRI, so we can see what’s going on inside you. We’ll be documenting this. You’ll be in the history books. Or at least the scientific journals.” He chuckled wryly. “The first blank human to receive paranormal powers. Think of the adulation.”

No doubt the adulation would all be Eric’s.

They wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Micha’s right arm and wheeled a crash cart over to the bed. The sight of it made things scarier. One of the men brought a tray over; a syringe rested on it, filled with pale blue fluid. The woman picked up the syringe. Micha was unflinching.

“This is a cocktail of various hormones,” Eric said from his vantage point. “It represents several different paranormal classifications. We’ll see if any of them stick.”

Muse’s eyes were wide above the tape. Jason looked about to topple over. June wanted to scream behind the gag, but she couldn’t make a sound.

The room was deathly quiet as the needle slid into Micha’s arm.

June sat slumped against one of the green tile walls. The awkward position, arms behind her back and legs folded beneath her, had long since pushed her body past discomfort to pain, and then to numbness. Muse sat beside her in a similar pose, head hanging, the occasional jerk or tremor of her muscles making her quake. Jason sat on the other side of Muse, slumped and gazing across the room in a daze. They had probably tortured him in a similar room, tied him down and done terrible things to him like they were doing to Micha.

In the immeasurable amount of time they’d been watching, Micha experienced a wide range of physical reactions June considered bad, but Eric didn’t seem overly concerned. She suspected even if Micha burst into flames, Eric probably wouldn’t be concerned; he’d turn a fire extinguisher on him and give him another dose.

Micha turned frighteningly pale within the first few minutes after the shot, as if all the blood had run out of him, as if he were dead. Then he became flushed, his skin reddening and glistening with sweat. He shook for a while, and then he was deathly still. June had seen people detox in the same manner. He didn’t cry out or look anywhere but above him, into the lights.