Kirev's Door (9 page)

As for Kirev himself, he only nodded, not speaking either.

He knew Tan was right.

Yet, it was strange that a part of him still hated to see such beauty destroyed.

7

ORGANIC

KIREV WALKED DOWN the cement-block walled corridor, in the midst of eight other seers, including the five he’d already been with at the Sutro Heights mansion. Two other seers had been left at the front of the building, to guard the entrance, and communicate with them on walkie-talkies in the event anyone approached the building.

The building itself had been nondescript from the outside.

Not even bunker nondescript…more like a run-down schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere nondescript, with a few high windows but otherwise featureless and in need of a few coats of paint. A few hours east of anywhere in the Bay Area that had a real population, the complex might have been unfindable if it hadn’t been for the twenty-foot-high electric fence that surrounded its perimeter, topped with razor wire, and the smaller cement bloc wall that surrounded the main buildings.

Most of the structures Kirev had seen in the last few miles before they arrived had been barns, along with a few single-story ranch houses, hardware stores and gas stations. Even the road that split off from the main highway had been dirt more often than it had been paved, and Kirev had glimpsed cows through the back windows of the truck as they drove by in the moonlight.

Venai and the others told him that a small airport lived out here too, used almost exclusively by cowboy crop dusters, fair balloons and the occasional recreational flyer. The labs utilized the airport too, but generally they trucked in what they needed from the highway itself and other back roads.

Getting inside hadn’t been difficult really, not compared to what Kirev expected.

There had been security guards, of course. Locks. Guns.

Most of it was useless against seers. They’d used pushes and the stolen badges to get past security at the main gates; using more of a middle way kind of approach, as Wreg put it, to avoid raising any immediate alarm. They knew if the complex was unreachable for long, given what they’d left behind at Sutro Heights, there was a good chance the military would be sent out here, since it was a government-funded research facility.

The seers at the front desk would cover any communications between the lab building itself and those front gates.

Wreg led them from there into a series of shafts where they rappelled down the walls with hooks and cables versus using the elevator, which utilized a key that none of them had been able to get. That part, while new to Kirev himself, went smoothly enough, too…so much so that he wondered why they had bothered to go after the humans at that cocktail party at all.

Now that they were in the
real
downstairs, however, several floors below the main labs, which were primarily housed in the cement basement of the aboveground structure, Kirev began to understand the need for the preliminary infiltration. He especially understood why they’d risked so much for the blueprints they’d pulled off of old man Bilford.

How they would have ever found this place without them, he had no idea.

Wooden doors with white-painted windows lined the cement corridor every ten or so paces on either side of the white, cement corridor. Kirev saw numbers etched on most of those, and each of them appeared to be locked when he scanned them with his eyes.

Wreg didn’t pause at any of them, however. He walked through the long passageway with barely a glance to either side, other than to occasionally send thoughts to one of the others who had been with him to read Bilford.

Kirev might not have known about that much if they didn’t occasionally verbalize their responses to one another, if with maddeningly cryptic brevity.

“Yes…then right,” Tan said, affirming something Wreg sent to him.

“I don’t think so…” Wreg began. “Ah. Yes. Right. I see what you mean.”

“Another one?” Rigor muttered. “What if we can’t?”

“I can feel it now,” Wreg said reassuringly. “It won’t be a problem, brother. Trust me.”

Kirev bit his lip, wanting to ask.

Instead he held the handgun he’d been given out in front of him but aimed at the floor, his finger resting on the barrel above the trigger. He increased the length of his steps when the other seers around him did theirs, pacing them even as he kept his light coiled discreetly around his body, his fingers tight around the gun.

He’d already been warned not to send up any flares down here. The lower levels were likely being watched by seers, periodically at least, and Kirev didn’t have the sight skills in actual or the military training to be able to operate unseen in a place like this, not even for a short time.

“There,” Wreg said then, pointing to a side corridor off the main. It wound to the right, just as they’d been saying. “At the end of that.”

Tan nodded, then jogged up ahead, Rigor at his side.

They reached a flat expanse of wall, a nondescript white.

They were all just standing there then.

Kirev stared at the wall, then around at the others, wondering what he was missing. Then Rigor pulled off his gloves with his teeth and began feeling over the flat surface of the wall with his bare hands. Kirev saw the others watching Rigor minutely, their bodies taut, their expressions holding a tension he could almost feel, even with his light guarded.

Following their eyes back to the wall, that time, Kirev gasped.

It had moved.

The fucking
wall
had moved, like it was alive.

He was still staring when he saw it again…a distinct ripple of motion over the front of that white surface, like liquid skin.

“Gaos…di'lanlente a' guete!
What the fuck is that!” he cried out.

“Silence!” Ute said, glaring at him.

Kirev clamped his mouth shut, doing as he was told.

He had to clench his jaw to do it. He watched as Rigor continued to stroke the wall, almost like it was a giant cat. Kirev continued to stare, clenching his jaw so hard it hurt, when a sudden seam appeared in the middle of that blank, strangely white surface. That seam formed into two sliding doors as Kirev watched.

He continued to stare, wide-eyed, feeling his heart slam against the ribs of his chest, as that seam opened, revealing what looked like another elevator shaft. Inside the shaft, the wall looked like dirty cement, nothing like that strange, skin-like white of the outer wall.

Kirev bit his lip until he tasted blood, fighting to remain quiet.

The seers around him didn’t speak either.

Instead they stood there, watching as Wreg poked a cautious head inside the opening. After he’d looked up and down the shaft, he clicked his fingers again, motioning Ute forward with the rappelling gear. Within minutes they had it set up again and Wreg was on his way down.

For the first time, Kirev felt himself balk at going further.

Even so, when Ute motioned him forward next, after Tan and Rigor had followed Wreg, he barely hesitated. Forcing his legs and body forward, he stood there, holding his hands up with the gun in his hand as she strapped on the harness.

When she slapped him smartly on the back, indicating he was ready, he didn’t hesitate either.

Taking a deep breath, he held onto the cables and jumped into that dark.

AT THE BOTTOM, there was only one room.

Low-ceilinged and rectangular in shape, it seemed to stretch the length of a football field as the ceiling tiles lit up in symmetrical rows, with almost nothing in the way of furniture apart from a series of enclosed, glass-looking pods every six or so feet. Each of those containers stood at about chest height, Kirev noticed, with round, covered holes where a scientist might insert their hands without disturbing the sterility of whatever lived inside.

They reminded him of images he’d seen in a magazine once, of a human child born with some disease that prevented him from living in regular air with regular bacteria and germs.

Kirev didn’t know if the lights came on by themselves, or if one of the seers had triggered them with a switch, but the entire ceiling seemed to glow as he walked out over that linoleum floor. Looking up, he couldn’t see any lit tubes or bulbs of any kind embedded in that ceiling, either. Instead, the tiles themselves seemed to emit their own form of illumination, brighter than any artificial light Kirev had ever seen.

He saw Tan looking at those same lights before he turned, giving Rigor a hard look.

“You think those are alive, too?” Rigor whispered.

“Alive?” Kirev said, whispering as well. “What does that mean?”

Ute answered though, speaking in her regular voice as she strode deeper into the room, walking down the middle aisle between those glass cases.

“…It means they are building machines of us now, little brother,” she said, her voice cold, stripped of anything but hatred. “It means the humans have found a new excuse to kill even more of our kind. We will now light their homes. Likely power their refrigerators…”

Kirev felt the hated seething off her like a physical force.

Still, he could make almost no sense of her words. He looked back at Wreg, who was peering into one of the glass-enclosed cases nearer to the elevator. When the older seer looked up, he glanced at Venai, who had gone pale, Kirev realized.

He decided to keep his mouth shut for now, if only because he wasn’t sure he could deal with his own emotional reactions if he were to understand fully. Now was not the time, he told himself. He could ask them all the questions he needed later.

Even so, he found himself moving closer to one of those glass cases himself. Still gripping his gun in both hands, he moved until he was alongside it, peering in with his gun still aimed forward if towards the floor. Once he’d focused through the glass window, however, he stopped, blinking down at what he could see through the transparent pane.

Whatever it was, it had living light.

Kirev’s eyes followed the thing’s aleimic field, as it moved liquidly around the small cage. It did look like metal, but it moved like some kind of sea creature…or like the wall had upstairs. Undulating along the bottom of its metal and glass cage, it emitted a faint form of distress, primitive, but noticeable enough that Kirev felt the emotion deep in his gut.

“Gaos,”
he breathed, staring down at the thing.

He could feel it now, some remnant of consciousness, like a part of it had been stripped from its host, leaving only the bare motor functions of its light behind.

“Gaos…”
he said again, then burst out, “Who would do this? How could any creature do something so obscene?”