Hex (15 page)

“Fine.” The first scientist nodded, then she looked back at Ali and addressed her as if she was an imbecile, enunciating every syllable: “We have finished examining you,” she said. “Meals will be brought to you twice a day. You may interact with the other test subjects if you wish. There is a clearly signed washing room, for the use of the subjects on this corridor, three doors away from this room. We will return when it is time for your second series of tests. If you are obedient and not obstructive you will be treated well.” Then both scientists left the room, taking Ali's discarded clothes with them in a sealed plastic bag. Ali could hear the booted footsteps of the guards following them away down the corridor.

Once they had gone she reached up to touch the white ear-stud in her right ear. It had been concealed by her hair for most of the examination, but the few times when it must have been seen the scientist had paid no attention. She had seemed reluctant even to look at Ali, plainly considering her on a par with an unpleasant micro-virus she had been ordered to test. It was a new experience for the spoiled rich kid from Belgravia, and one that Ali was anxious to forget.

Walking to the door of the room, she looked out at the corridor. It was plain and white, stretching for quite a long way. No one was visible in either direction and Ali left the room cautiously. She could see doors set into the walls at regular intervals. One had a sign on it marked
Washing Room.
At one end of the corridor was an elevator; at the other end was a set of double doors with large panes of shatterproof glass set into them. Ali walked toward the end of the corridor with the doors in it, resisting the urge to look into the rooms she passed on either side. When she reached the doors, she pushed them open gingerly. There wasn't much to see. Another corridor stretched out, again in two directions, double doors at both ends. Halfway up this second corridor was another washing room.

Ali felt any desire to explore further leeched out of her by the featureless, institutionalized atmosphere of the facility. She wondered how she would ever find Rachel. But she supposed she had better try. Returning to her own corridor, she walked down to the elevator. There was an unmarked touchpad beside it. Ali didn't have the nerve to press it. Instead she began to methodically work her way down the corridor, looking in each of the rooms. They were all marked with a short code sequence, but the codes didn't seem to be arranged in any order.

At first Ali's curiosity was not indulged. The first three rooms were all empty and apparently unoccupied, not even containing the medical equipment she had found in her own. The fourth was also unoccupied, but the room was full of medical scanners; like the other equipment Ali had seen in the lab they had no computer interface. The bed was unmade and an untouched tray of food lay on the small table. The tray was plastic and divided up into sections; each of which held a puréed substance of different colors. The only utensil was a metal spoon. It was the most unappetizing meal Ali had ever seen; she wasn't surprised that it had been left uneaten. Moving on she looked through the window of the next room.

A child lay unconscious on the bed, linked up to the machines that surrounded it. Tubes were connected to his mouth and nose, and monitors were attached to his wrists and forehead. He didn't look more than six or seven years old. Going into the room to look at him more closely, Ali felt as if she was desecrating a tomb, one of the cemeteries that still existed in parts of Europe, unusable for farmland or industrial expansion. The boy was like the living dead, lying in the midst of a mass of machinery, like a fly in the web of a mechanical spider.

She heard footsteps behind her as someone else entered the room and she turned to see Luciel, meeting his shadowed eyes contritely.

“This is why I didn't want you to look around, just yet,” he told her. “It's hard to take, at first.”

“Are a lot of people like this?” Ali asked.

“Some,” Luciel replied. “Not everyone's as bad as this, though.” He bit his lips before adding: “A few are worse.”

“What could be worse than this?” Ali asked in horror and realized almost instantaneously that she didn't want to know.

“We don't talk about it,” Luciel said. Not looking at the boy on the bed, he headed out of the room. Ali followed him and waited as he closed the door behind them.

“What's his name?” she asked.

“I'm not sure.” Luciel shrugged. “Does it matter? Jack or Jesse, something like that. He used to cry at night and he wet the bed. And he was always asking questions.”

“Don't you care?” Ali asked incredulously, and she felt like Wraith.

“I don't know.” Luciel met her eyes unashamedly. “Is it wrong to be glad it's not me?”

“I'm not sure.” Ali thought for a while, leaning up against the corridor wall. “I think I'd feel the same way. But . . . I have a friend, a sort of friend, who said that the reason Hexes didn't help each other was that anyone clever enough to escape the CPS wouldn't care about someone who got caught. I was angry with her for thinking that way, because she only cares about herself.”

“Was she a Hex?” Luciel asked softly, checking to see that they weren't being overheard.

“Yes,” whispered Ali, wondering if Raven was listening, and what the girl would say later if she was.

“And she hasn't been caught?” Luciel asked, even more quietly if it was possible.

“No,” Ali replied.

“Then maybe she was right to think that way,” Luciel said. “I didn't and I was caught. If it would have changed anything I'd have been as selfish as I could.”

Ali didn't say anything, but inwardly she resolved that she wouldn't be leaving the lab alone, even if she didn't manage to find Rachel. Now that she'd seen two other inmates, she felt guilty at the thought of leaving without them. She realized what Wraith had meant about the callousness of the experimentation; just a few hours in the lab had convinced her that he was right. But the thought of Rachel recalled her to the fact that she had a mission.

When Ali reminded Luciel that she wanted to find someone, he was perfectly willing to help.

“It's not as if there's anything else to do here,” he pointed out. “There's nothing to read, and nothing to see. We don't get access to vidscreens, and God forbid that we should even
look
at a computer terminal.”

“Do you know if there's a main computer control room?” Ali asked as casually as she could.

“I guess there must be,” Luciel replied, puzzled. “But if there is, we'd never get the chance to see it.”

“I guess not,” Ali agreed. Looking down the long corridor, she felt apprehensive. “How many people are there here?”

“Hundreds, I think,” Luciel said, adding: “But people keep dying, and they bring in new Hexes all the time. Mostly kids.”

“
Is everyone a Hex?” Ali asked, remembering Raven's insistence that the CPS had got it wrong. “Definitely a Hex?”

“I guess so,” Luciel said. “No one who comes here is ever sent back home again, anyhow.”

•  •  •

When Wraith returned to the hotel suite Kez was packing up the electronic equipment.

“What are you doing?” he asked immediately. “Where's Raven?”

“She's spoken to Ali,” Kez said, trying to choose the response least likely to annoy Wraith. “She thinks it's time to get closer to the lab; Ali wants us to be ready to break in if she gets into any trouble.”

“I can't believe that Raven would care about that,” Wraith said sarcastically. “Or that you do, come to think of it.”

“I don't want anything to happen to Ali,” Kez said, carefully packing up the homemade explosives.

“You surprise me,” Wraith said coldly and Kez felt a sudden flash of anger. He felt that Wraith was treating him unfairly, especially considering that he had lied for him, so he could find his sister.

“Why do I surprise you?” he asked, “You told Raven you'd never known anyone with fewer morals, so how can you be surprised that I lied to you?”

Wraith met Kez's eyes.

“Maybe because I wanted to trust you,” he said. “I tend to automatically suspect Raven's advice because I don't understand her motivations. But I thought I did understand you.”

“Because there isn't much to understand?” Kez asked.

“Because you're not so different from the gangers I knew in Denver,” Wraith told him. He studied Kez for a while. “I can guess why you lied, Kez, and this time I'll forget it. But don't do it again. I have to be able to trust someone, and this group is so mismatched that it really has to be you.”

“Does that mean you want the group to stay together?” Kez asked, considering how such an intention would affect him.

“Perhaps, if we're successful in breaking Rachel and Ali out of the lab.”

“OK, then.” Kez had made his decision. “You can trust me.”

Wraith nodded, although he still wasn't sure if he could believe Kez's promise. He began crating up the rest of the gear they would need to take with them, deliberately ignoring Raven's heaps of lasdisks. Now that Ali was inside the lab the operation had become too serious for his sister's eccentricity.

Raven emerged from her room before he was finished, obviously ready to leave. She didn't look very different from when she had first arrived in the gangland slum district. But instead of her jacket she was carrying a long coat, one of her more recent acquisitions, which she began to load with some of the smaller and more complex pieces of electrical equipment.

“The Countess has transport and muscle backup waiting,” she told Wraith. “We'll need a combat weapon of some kind for Kez.”

“Can you use a gun?” Wraith asked the boy and Kez shrugged.

“I'm better with a knife.”

“Too risky,” Raven said, echoing Wraith's unspoken thoughts. “You won't get close enough to use it.”

“I'll show you how to operate a laser pistol,” Wraith said. “It sights automatically and it burns rather than blasts.”

“Is that what you carry?” Kez asked the ganger and Raven grinned.

“It's generally regarded as a breach of etiquette to ask a ganger that question,” she informed him.

“Since we're going in on this raid together, it's best to know what kind of firepower each of us has,” Wraith pointed out. “I have been carrying a laser pistol but I think breaking into the lab will require something heavier. I'll get that from the Countess and you can use my pistol.”

“What about Raven?” Kez asked curiously, eyeing the deep inner pockets of the girl's long coat, into which her tools had disappeared.

“Keep guessing,” she told him, with a sideways glance at Wraith. Kez looked inquiringly at the ganger.

“I don't even know if she carries weapons,” he said. “Is there anything you want from the Countess, Raven?”

“If there is, I'll deal with it myself,” she said. “But don't worry about how I'll defend myself, Wraith. This isn't the first time I've been part of this kind of operation.” She smiled slightly, but didn't say anything more, and neither Wraith nor Kez asked anything else.

They left the hotel suite half an hour after Wraith's return, once the skimmer was loaded with what they would need to attack the lab. Raven dealt with checking out of the Stratos, paying from one of the immense credit balances she had persuaded a bank to give her. She also arranged to have her disk collection packaged up and sent to Bob Tarrell, with the compliments of AdAstra. Wraith had refused to take it with them and Raven, now that she was no longer suffering from the monotony of the search, didn't really feel the need to surround herself with high-decibel rock music.

However, she did retain a few disks, so that as the skimmer wound its way down through the levels of the city, a pounding backbeat filled the vehicle. Raven drove fast, bringing back memories for Kez of the sickening trip she had sent the flitter on when he first encountered her. Wraith sat in a grim silence, mentally checking and rechecking his plans. He was very aware of the fact that Ali was in Kalden's laboratory and felt that it was his responsibility to get her out again. Too many people had died already for him to sacrifice Ali for a chance to save Rachel.

•  •  •

Ali had begun to dread finding Rachel. It had been made clear to her that anyone who'd been in the lab for over a year was unlikely to be found undamaged. And some of the experiments being performed in the lab were horrific. Luciel had actually been one of the luckier ones. The CPS scientists had used their imaginations to the utmost when devising experiments to test the capabilities of the child Hexes brought into the lab. On Ali's floor alone there seemed to be endless corridors of test subjects and she had no idea what might lie above or below. Luciel had informed her that the elevator was restricted to laboratory staff and had no more idea than her of the actual size of the facility.

Ali hadn't found Rachel among the children, and any kind of methodical search was proving difficult. She had first ventured out of her room when the others were having the first of the two meals of the day, served at midmorning. But before long the silent corridors were very different. The younger children seemed relentlessly hyperactive and antisocial, racing down the corridors and banging into anyone who got in their way. Then a lot of the older ones were unwilling even to speak to Luciel, let alone Ali, and there were many who were unable to speak. They were forced to progress slowly and Ali was grateful that Luciel had agreed to help her, since most of the other test subjects regarded her with suspicion. Her companion explained it as jealousy, that she hadn't been subjected to the methods of the scientists' endless quest for knowledge. His bruised arms and jerky, uncertain movements were almost a badge of honor in the facility and Ali discovered that he had been there longer than most people.