4.109: Bait And Run

Saina pulled a couple more people into the link, one at a time, to ask for updates. I didn’t know them or have any context for what they were discussing, but she didn’t drop her link with me the entire time. I think she was worried I might freak out again.

In my defence, a lot was happening rather quickly.

Finally, my vision cleared, and my choices of viewable location were just the Pit and the hospital.

No. I had two views of the hospital to choose from. The space inside my little curtained area, and the space directly outside it. We were looking through the eyes of somebody standing guard. They weren’t facing the curtains, apparently deciding that a sick teenager handcuffed to a bed wasn’t the problem. They were watching the rest of the room, currently empty, for trouble.

“Gertie, I’ve got Kayden with me,” Saina said. “You’ve got a shift check in about three minutes.”

The guard – Gertrude, I realised, I recognised her hands – looked down at her own hands and idly tapped one against the back of the other in what could be mistaken for a bored or nervous movement.

“Should be,” Saina said. “Kayden, you can walk, right?”

“I can’t go anywhere right this second, but I’m pretty sure my legs work,” I said, testing them out a bit to be sure. “Should… should they not?”

“They should. I just don’t know what the lingering effects of magic are like for you.”

“Oh, no, that’s fine. The magic of the potion is gone.”

“Okay. Gertie, give us a pan, would you?”

Gertrude scanned the room slowly in one broad sweep, giving us a full visual. I didn’t need it; I knew every inch of this place. I’d cleaned and catalogued it enough times. The beds were lined up against the right wall, all the way from the front of the room to the back, each behind their own curtain. I was in the one closest to the door. In the back wall was a small door near the beds, leading to a bathroom, and the rest of the wall was glass, overlooking a snowy landscape, with a door in the middle.

On the left wall, the one opposite the beds, were the doors to the storage rooms, as well as some locked medicine cabinets in the main room itself. And in approximately the centre of the room, although closer to the back than the front, was Malas’ work desk.

Gertrude was stationed outside the bed closest to the door, the one I’d already surmised that I was in.

“Kayden,” Saina said, “don’t do anything yet, but do you see a way out of the handcuffs?”

I took a look. “This particular bed has always had a wobbly guard rail,” I said. “I might be able to unscrew or detach it? I know where the loose screw is, but I don’t have anything to…”

“Look up for a sec.”

I looked up.

“That picture frame. How’s the picture secured? Metal clips?”

“Yes! Big ones!”

“Guard coming,” Mae’s voice cut in.

Saina’s link dropped out, and I was alone in my mind. I lay down and pretended to go back to sleep. Someone pulled aside the curtains; there was a pause, where I assume I was being watched, before an older man had a brief conversation with Gertrude in Ido, too quick and quiet for me to follow. The curtains closed again.

About half a minute later, Saina was poking at my mind again. I let her in.

“We should have about thirty five minutes,” Saina said. “Kayden, can you get free?”

“Let’s find out.” I disassembled the photo frame. Everything about it was oversized, including the big metal clips that were supposed to hold the picture in place. I tore one free of the old wood, slicing my thumb open in the process, but there was no time to worry about that now.

The hospital beds in Refujeyo were pretty sturdy. The last thing you wanted was a bed collapsing with a patient in it. They were bulky things of welded metal joints and tightly screwed plastic attachments, and most of the screws I wouldn’t have a hope of turning even with a proper screwdriver. But they were also old, and rarely replaced, and the safety bars on this one had been driving healer apprentices mad for a long time before I came on the scene. I knew exactly how that goddamned bar moved whenever you tried to hold it to move the bed. I knew exactly where the broken weld and the loose screw were.

My movement was rather restricted by the cuff on my right wrist and the pulse monitor on my left hand. I moved the pulse monitor to my right between beats, giving me a free hand to work with, and leaned over the side of the bed. The loose screw was next to a broken weld joint at one end of the safety rail; if I got it loose, I couldn’t detach the rail (other screws and welds held it in place), but I could probably create enough of a gap to slide the handcuff free of the bed.

It took me a little while to get the right angle with the metal clip to turn the bolt, and I cut my hand a couple more times in the process, but I got it done. The screw clattered to the floor, I put all my weight on the rail, and I was just able to push it far enough from the bed to slide the cuff out.

I cuffed it to my right wrist, next to the other one, to stop it from swinging about and getting caught on anything. The cuffs weren’t tight enough to really bother me, but I still didn’t like the feel on my wrist.

“Good work,” Saina said. “Are you secured in any other way?”

“When I take this monitor off my finger, Malas will be alerted,” I said. “Otherwise, no.”

“Okay. Be ready. Gertie, another look at the room?”

Gertrude did another sweep. Then she looked back down at her hands, idly tapping something with one on the back of the other.

“Right, good point. Kayden, Gertrude can’t help us. We need her where she is for the fallout of this. When you go to escape, she’s going to try to stop you. You have to beat her.”

“Beat –? She was a trained combatant before she became a sekkie! What am I supposed to do?”

Gertrude tapped something on her hand and then looked up at Malas’ desk.

“There’s a syringe already of Khylia’s Dream lying on the bottom shelf of that desk,” Saina explained.

Khylia’s Dream was a sedative. Fast acting, but very short term; six minutes at most before the patient woke up. It should be safe, but…

“You cannot be expecting me to randomly jab a syringe into a friend in the middle of a fight. Do you know how many delicate organs you can tear up doing that? The needle could break off in – ”

Gertrude was tapping something on her hand again.

“She’s literally standing in the best medical facility in the world,” Saina translated. “It’ll be fine. The problem I see is, are you faster than Gertrude?”

“No. Not even close. But I don’t need to be. Can we see the desk again?”

Gertrude looked at the desk again.

“Right. Okay.”

“I’m cutting you out of the link now, Gertie,” Saina said.

I got up. I had a plan.

One thing I’d noticed when Gertrude panned the room was that the soundproofed curtains around all of the beds were closed. Unless there’d been some horrible accident, there was no way that all of the beds were filled, but I’d seen Malas do this before, when Saina had been injured. He did it sometimes when high profile people were in the hospital, so that any random gawkers trying to talk their way in wouldn’t know what bed they were in. It seemed a waste of time given that I was already under guard (I had to assume there were a lot more guards outside the room, too), but I didn’t care about any of that.

The important thing was, the entire row of beds were hidden both visually and aurally from Gertrude.

I didn’t need to burst out from behind my curtain, take her by surprise, and try to outrun her to the desk. I could get a lot closer.

I was in the bed closest to the door. The desk was closer to the back of the room than the front. If I moved about five beds down, I’d be within metres of it, and Gertrude would have to cross a lot more distance to reach it than me.

I started moving.

There was a patient in bed three. Probably an Initiate; she looked young, anyway. She stared at me with wide, terrified eyes, while I smiled and put a finger to my lips. She shrank back into her covers.

I got to the curtains around bed five. I prepared myself. I knew exactly where Malas’ desk was from here. I was ready. I could do this.

I dashed forward.

I’d forgotten just how fast Gertrude was. I mean, I knew she was fast, but by the Points! In the second or two it took me to reach the desk, she noticed me, launched into action, and flew most of the way across the room. I spotted the syringe; it was one of those automatic syringes that the put emergency antihistamines in, the kind where you just press the active end to the patient’s flesh and it auto-injects the drug. The safety cap has already been removed.

I scrabbled for it, while eighty kilograms of furious sekuranti slammed into my side at great speed.

Things from Malas’ desk scattered everywhere. Gertrude had my left hand behind my back before I even hit the ground, but with the other I reached out and grabbed the syringe. Her grip on my wrist was like iron. A hand locked around my right wrist – or tried to. Gertrude grabbed the unexpected bulk of the handcuffs, he hand slipped off, and I swung the syringe behind me blindly at the bulk of her body.

The needle hit flesh, and released. Gertrude immediately went limp. I struggled out from under her and used a small fraction of my precious six minutes to get her into the recovery position.

“We need to move, Kayden,” Saina said.

“I know, but how? The hall outside must be swarming with guards, right? If only to keep onlookers away.”

“We’re not going outside. Kylie still owns Duniyasar. It seems you’re already bleeding, so…”

“I don’t remember the runes.”

“Hammond, the Duniyasar runes?”

Hammond handed Saina a piece of paper. She looked at the runes sketched on them while I painted them onto the glass door as small as I could. I opened the door, but took the time to clean the glass before walking through. No need to let anyone know where I went.

Gertrude started to sit up, groaning, just as I pulled the door shut behind me.

I stood outside one of the stone arches surrounding Duniyasar that acted like portals. If I squinted up at the tower on the temple, I thought I could just about see the people moving around in there, painting sigils.

Di Fiore was pulled into the link again.

“Okay,” Saina said, “he’s clear of the hospital. We need a portal.”

Di Fiore took one of Duniyasar’s little portal flags and stuck it in one of the portal controls. A couple of stone arches away from me, a doorway activated.

“How is this place not under guard?” I asked.

“It was under guard,” di Fiore said. “We took care of it.”

“Did you – ?”

“They’re fine. They’re locked in Kylie’s room.”

“And now that Kayden’s safe, I have no reason not to bar any more of them from entry,” Kylie mumbled from her position slumped against the pillar. I’d been a bit distracted to really pay attention before, but the Destiny was moving restless within me. She was channelling magic, although I wasn’t sure why.

Channelling magic, and perfectly aware the whole time. Apparently her past few months of constant ‘practice’ had paid off.

I didn’t have time to linger. Gertrude would have had to raise the alarm of my escape immediately, and the sekuranti would probably figure out where I’d gone, once they finished searching the hospital ward. I took the portal, and di Fiore closed it behind me, covering my tracks.

“Okay, Kayden,” Saina said, “you’re in – ”

“I recognise the tunnel,” I said. It was one of the more obscure parts of the school, but I’d paced it several times, mapping for Max. “Where am I going? I mean, to the Lake of Inquisition, obviously, but…”

“You’ll want the tunnel coming out into a cliff overlooking the lake, the one where you usually talk with Kylie. You’ll need to avoid the populated areas of the school; I’m not sure how…”

“Easy,” I said. The tunnel in question was the one I’d discovered in my initiation semester, when fighting with di Fiore over the fake Guardian Ring. It was reachable from the valley we always entered the school from after the holidays, and that was reachable from my current position quite easily. I headed off.

I was almost at the valley, when I ran into two students, apparently sneaking off somewhere to be alone. They stared at me; at my black robes, at my bleeding hand, and finally, at my face. They bolted.

“Fuck!” I said.

“Do not tell me you got caught,” di Fiore said.

“Just some witnesses; they’ll raise the alarm.”

“Then keep moving, you dolt. The sekuranti can’t find you at the Lake of Inquisition unless they send Inquisitors after you. Do you know how much time that’ll take to arrange?”

He had a good point, but I didn’t want to tell him that. I kept moving. The way was dark, out of range of the school’s crystal network, but I knew where I was going. I’d taken this path enough times before.

There was a janitor waiting for me at the end of the tunnel, my packed bag at his feet. He held a glowing crystal in one hand for light. He was fully covered, but even before he spoke, I knew who it was.

“Hi,” said Ma – the janitor in Max’s body.

“Hi,” I said.

He handed me my oxygen tank. I shouldered it and went to pull the mask on.

“Not yet,” he said.

“Why? What are we waiting for?”

“Malas. He’s been alerted to your escape and told where you are. He can find this place, too. He should be here in a few minutes.”

“Then shouldn’t I be moving?” Malas knew that what I was doing was going to destroy his locus and kill him. He had to know that, right? He’d do anything to stop me. “I can’t risk getting caught.”

“You won’t be. But we need to lure him close.”

I shouldered my backpack. Glanced down the hall from whence I’d come. Glanced at the lake below. Glanced at the janitor.

Oh. He wasn’t here just to give me my stuff.

“You’re going to kill him,” I said.

“Don’t look at me like that. He’s going to die today, yes?”

“Yes, but – ”

“And when he does, do you have any way to stop his spells from getting free, finding a new host, being uncontainable without a locus, and killing them? And doing it again? And again?”

“No.”

“Those spells need to be destroyed. And drowning him in that lake is the only way to destroy them.”

I sighed. “You’re going to die.”

“That was always going to be the case. Mind, then soul, then body, they tell me; this was always the best path forward, with the least casualties.”

“You’ve barely been born. You could’ve had another hundred and fifty, two hundred years.”

“Not worth the price. You know that. We all made our choices to be here today.”

“Yeah.”

“I have something for you.” He fished around inside his robes, and pulled out two objects. “These were on my person when I was born,” he explained. “I assume they were his. They don’t mean anything to me, but I… I think they meant something to him. That they might mean something to you.”

I stared. In his hand was, indeed, two of Max’s possessions. A silver compass, runes etched along both needle arms; his fetish, the one he’d used to save Kylie from Lydia. And an awl, threads of silver tracing runes through the wooden handle, runes etched onto the metal spike. His spell-extracting tool. The one he’d used to blow a hole in the tunnel when we’d explored the well under Duniyasar, to sacrifice himself to allow Kylie and I to escape.

I took them in one trembling hand and carefully tucked them away. “Thank you,” I whispered.

Hurried footsteps raced down the tunnel. We had mere seconds left. I opened my mouth to say goodbye, and realised… I didn’t know this janitor’s name. I was pretty sure they had names; Reginald, their apparent leader, had had a name. I’d never learned this guy’s; I’d just called him Max, a name he didn’t recognise. He was about to give up everything, kill his boss, himself and his community, sacrifice the true staff of Refujeyo, to save a humanity that hadn’t even been born yet. And I hadn’t even learned his name.

It seemed weird to ask now.

“Good luck, Staffbreaker,” I said. It would have to do.

He nodded. “Good luck, Heartbound.”

Malas came into view. I pulled my oxygen mask on, ran to the edge of the cliff, and jumped.

Fell down, down towards that magic water.

Bound for the heart of Refujeyo.