Shudder (Stitch Trilogy, Book 2) (30 page)

Finally, she groaned in frustration
and turned around, stalking quickly to the gleaming white chair on
the opposite side of the room. She lifted it over her head and
looked pointedly back toward the door, then turned her body toward
the window and chucked the chair with all her might.

The chair bounced off the thick glass,
but the thin plastic blinds bent under its weight, one end of the
unit detaching from the wall, the individual strands sticking out
in all directions like reeds in a sterile white marsh.

She retrieved the chair from the floor
and raised it up once again, turning towards the door with malice
shining in her eyes. Those eyes were the only part of her face that
Isaac could see through the bandages, and they looked serious. She
angled her body toward the medical equipment, the chair still
dangling threateningly above her head. “Your stupid machines are
next!” she shouted.

That seemed to get the attention of
whoever she was speaking to. A moment later a sigh of relief
crossed her lips and she put the chair down and collapsed onto the
bed, curling into a tight ball. Isaac guessed she wasn’t feeling as
strong as she wanted them to believe.

Intrigued, he waited beside the vent,
afraid his movements might draw her notice. The seconds ticked by
interminably, and an eternity passed before something occurred to
Isaac – somehow, the woman seemed familiar to him. Was it possible
she was one of the rebels?

A sudden whoosh sounded and the door
to the room slid open. The patient sat up quickly in bed as a
gawky, greasy-haired young man slunk into the room, rubbing beady,
sleep-rimmed eyes under his thick glasses.

“
Phoenix,” he yawned. “I
wasn’t expecting the pleasure of your company at this hour.” A mild
irritation plucked at his high, whiney voice as his eyes skated
over the broken blinds.

“
Stop calling me that,”
she said firmly. “That’s not my name.”

He smiled through thin lips, and some
reflex in Isaac felt an urge to punch him. There was something very
irksome about this guy, some kind of underlying aura of arrogance
despite his scrawny, slumped façade. The image of a weasel with an
attitude problem kept popping into Isaac’s head; he wanted to wipe
the smirk right off his ugly little face.

“
Very well then,
Elizabeth
. I see your
memory is finally returning.”

Isaac’s mouth dropped.
Elizabeth? Was that…
Lizzie
down there?

It couldn’t be. The hair was right,
but she seemed so small, so drained, almost a girl – not the tall,
shapely, vivacious woman he remembered.

“
Yes,” she growled. “I
remember what you did to me. I remember being
stoned
practically to
death.”

From his vantage point, Isaac could
see just the back of Lizzie’s head, but he could only imagine the
glare that had accompanied her accusation, given the flint in her
voice. What had they done to her?

Her visitor – the Developer she’d
called him? – dragged the chair over to the bed and sat down,
sighing heavily through his narrow, bony shoulders. “I’m sorry for
that, truly,” he squeaked. “We never meant for it to turn so…
savage.”

Lizzie didn’t seem
satisfied with that explanation. “You didn’t mean for a
stoning
to turn
savage
?”

“
It wasn’t meant to be a
stoning,” he countered quickly. “We just wanted you to understand
who you were dealing with, so you could see why we’d put a small
group in charge here instead of letting the masses govern
themselves. We thought they’d declare you guilty and we’d bring you
back in for ‘punishment’ and that would be the end of it – we never
expected them to take justice into their own hands. It was just
meant to be an elucidatory exercise…” He trailed off.

Elucidatory? Isaac shook his head. Who
was this guy? Just the sound of his voice grated on Isaac, let
alone his vocabulary.

“
But why?” Lizzie
insisted. “What do you want from me? Why do you keep telling me all
this stuff?”

“
We need your help,
Elizabeth.” He looked at her plaintively. “We want peace, the same
as you. We want to negotiate a treaty with the rebels, and we
need
you
to be
our envoy. If you didn’t see where we were coming from, you could
never represent us fairly. So we had to find a way to show you, a
way for you to truly understand why we made the decisions we made,
so that you could explain to the rebels that we really
are
all working toward
the same thing. We never meant for you to get hurt.”

He seemed sincere enough, but
something about him still bugged Isaac. Lizzie wasn’t quite ready
to forgive either, apparently.

“
Then why not just
tell
me that, from the
beginning? Why keep me locked up here, calling me ‘Phoenix,’
letting me spend weeks wondering who the hell I am and how I ended
up in this place?”

He frowned apologetically.
“You suffered a great trauma, and you were healing. Your mind was
in a fragile state already. We were afraid you’d blocked out those
memories for a reason, that your psyche was protecting itself. We
thought if we forced the memories on you too soon, it would cause
irreparable damage. We wanted your memory to come back naturally,
when
you
were
ready for it.”

Isaac wondered who this “we” was he
kept talking about. He’d mentioned something about putting people
in charge… Could this rodent be one of Paragon’s elusive leaders?
If so, Isaac wished his brother could see this – Joe would have
snapped this guy over his knee in a heartbeat.

“
Not to mention, we
understand that some of what we did here in Paragon might sound…
distasteful, especially to someone who’s invested so much in the
resistance. It was selfish of us, but we recognized that your
temporary memory loss gave us an opportunity – a clean slate, a
chance for us to explain and for you to consider, unburdened by
bias.”

“
But why me?” Lizzie
questioned. “You could have taken anyone, all those prisoners, all
the people on the dramas. Why did you choose
me
?”

“
Because we know who you
are, Elizabeth. We know Regina is leading the rebels, and we know
your connection to her. Who better to convince the rebel leader to
put down her saber than her own
daughter
?”

Isaac couldn’t argue with that – if
Regina wouldn’t listen to Lizzie, she wouldn’t listen to
anyone.

“
I still don’t understand,
though. Why would you even
want
to negotiate with the rebels? You’ve been
fighting us this whole time, taking people captive, forcing them to
do your bidding on the shows. Now all of a sudden you say you want
peace – why the sudden about-face?”

He sighed again, a deep, weary sigh.
“We thought we could quell the rebellion on our own,” he admitted,
“round you all up and put a stop to it, with or without your
consent. But, it’s become clear that that isn’t working. And, well…
we – Paragon – can’t afford to lose you. Any of you.”

Isaac narrowed his eyes as Lizzie
asked the exact question that was toying at his mind. “Why does
Paragon ‘need’ us?”

The Developer seemed to hesitate. He
chewed his lip and looked silently at her for a moment, like he was
rolling something over in his mind. Finally, he spoke.

“
I wasn’t sure if we
should tell you this… but it seems you’re leaving me no choice.” He
took a deep breath and released it slowly with a puff. “You know
what we were trying to achieve, right? The state the world was in –
the environment crumbling, the constant wars, nuclear terror,
famine, death – it was wholly unsustainable. Our planet needed a
reset, and
we
–
the human species – were the cause of
all
of it.”

“
I know,” Lizzie nodded.
“The world was a mess. When the outbreak happened, it gave us a
chance to start over. And you and the Engineers were trying to make
sure we did it right this time. I’m not sure I agree with your
methods… but the sentiment seems fair enough. You told me all of
this already.”

“
Yes,” the Developer
nodded. “Except… there’s one thing we left out earlier. One thing
we didn’t tell you.”

Lizzie waited, still as an effigy, the
only sound in the room the periodic pulsing beeps from the machines
beside her bed.

Isaac’s eyes were glued to the grate,
the cadence of his heart quickening with each breath.

The Developer took another deep breath
and leaned in towards Lizzie, his voice barely a whisper. “What we
haven’t told you yet –”

He paused, searching her eyes before
he dropped his bombshell.

“–
is that the outbreak
wasn’t
exactly
a
mistake.”

32. BREAKOUT

Alessa mopped the sweat from her brow
as she watched the last of her men turn the corner, heading back
out toward the side door that Regina’s prison guard had left open
for them. She was on her own now, and time was running
out.

Her team had managed to free a handful
of prisoners, but Janie hadn’t been one of them. Alessa had been
sending Carlos’s soldiers back one by one, each accompanying one or
two of the rebels they’d freed. Regina’s guard had supplied them
with the patrol routes and a master unlock code, and they’d
furtively stolen their way through most of the prison complex
without yet drawing Paragon’s notice. Only the solitary wing was
left now, and Alessa was praying that she would find Janie
within.

The prison complex was a big winding
loop, and Alessa was by the far end of the solitary wing. She would
work her way out, checking the cells as she went and taking whoever
she could find with her. Hopefully Janie would be one of
them.

Please
let Janie be one of them.

Looking down the long hall, Alessa
observed with despair that there had to be at least a hundred cells
in this wing, and here in the deepest part of solitary they started
at number 1. She couldn’t possibly have time to check them all. How
was she ever going to locate her sister in this maze?

The soft patter of footsteps
approaching from down the hall set Alessa’s heart aflutter – there
must be a patrol headed her way. She retreated around a corner and
braced herself, listening.

Click, clack, click, clack. It sounded
like only one pair of footsteps, as far as she could tell, and it
was still a ways off. She pulled the rubber fingerprint slip over
her hand and punched the master code into the pad by the nearest
cell, swiping her disguised finger over the scanner. The locks
released with a clang and she quickly scurried into the
dark.

Alessa choked back her hysteria at
being in one of Paragon’s claustrophobic prison chambers again. She
was not about to let herself end up here a second time, that was
for sure.

Steeling her nerves, she reached out
and pulled the door shut behind her, leaving only a sliver of a gap
to prevent the door from locking. Her ear pressed against the tiny
opening, Alessa waited for the footsteps to ring clear outside the
door.

Click, clack, click, clack, click,
clack. Each step grew louder as the unknowing guard approached,
until finally, they stopped, just beside the cell.

Alessa’s heartbeat thrummed in her
chest as she held her breath. Had the guard noticed something
amiss?

She couldn’t wait for him to answer
that question – she needed to act. It was now or never.

Alessa thrust the heavy door open into
the hall with an explosive strength, bursting out from behind it.
As she’d hoped, the guard was near enough to catch the door full in
the face.

He had time only for one astonished
yelp before Alessa caught him round the neck in a tight choke hold.
Within seconds, he was unconscious.

Glancing up and down the hall, she
noticed what had alerted the guard to her presence – of all the
cells in this part of the hallway, only the keypad on the door
she’d been hiding behind was illuminated. Did that mean the rest of
them were empty?

She dragged the collapsed guard into
the cell and locked it behind her. She knew from experience that no
sound he made would escape, but the other guards were sure to
notice the keypad eventually. She just hoped the next patrol would
be far enough off to give her time to get away.

Alessa swiftly made her way down the
hallway, the adrenaline throbbing in her veins. It was only a
matter of time before another guard would come by, and she still
had a lot of searching to do before then. She was relieved, at
least, that she wouldn’t have to open every cell.

All of the keypads appeared to be dark
until the teens. Alessa opened the first lit door she came to and
called into the blackness beyond the threshold. “Hello?”

She was greeted with a deep, pained
moan. Opening the door wider, the light from the hall cast onto the
feeble shape of a man draped across the cot. “I’m here to rescue
you,” she explained.