Forty-Two
“Izaiah.” Mikaela stood, remaining behind her desk, and placed
her hand on his arm as he walked past. He’d been too
preoccupied to notice her any other way. “Izaiah? Why did
Zarant military take Star and Kahn into custody?”
It had been difficult not to notice. Kahn may have been the
only one in handcuffs, but Star had a nerve neutralizer pointed
directly at her back, giving away her status as a prisoner.
Izaiah stopped and looked at her small, delicate hand on his
lapel. His eyes went to hers and he gave her a pitiful, burdened
smile. He wanted to protect her from the truth. Spare her the
heartache.
No words needed to be said. Slowly, her hand dropped to her
side. “It’s Roberto, isn’t it?” Mikaela asked, slowly falling back,
into her seat. She’s done something to him.
Devon’s door opened and Zachary stormed out, uttering in
what sounded like Mandarin to Izaiah’s ears.
“Sir?” Izaiah asked, shooting Mikaela a piercing glare
intended to keep her quiet. Zachary would not take kindly to her
presumptuousness.
“I want that status report on my desk, immediately!” He
stopped only long enough to clarify his demand and marched off.
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“Of course.” He nodded then looked around, at the other
staffers, and knew that not one of them was as engrossed with
their work as they were pretending to be. “Mikaela.” He used the
full capacity of his authority. “To my office. Now!”
“Mikaela.” A familiar voice call out to her as she exited the
transport booth. Kendra was the militant security protocol
implementer. No one who knew her dared to cross her.
“Mikaela, you’re still not showing as a permanent resident. This
tells me that you haven’t gone for your software update.”
Mikaela smiled outwardly, meanwhile inwardly she wanted
to tell her shove off.
“I haven’t had time.”
“Make time. Go now.” The diminutive, gray haired woman
spoke in a fashion reminiscent of a dictator.
“Kendra, I have to meet with Chase and Michelle before I
have to get back to the San Francisco SunSafe. I’ll do it
tomorrow. I promise.” She had a date with Devon and she was
planning to use that date to extract as much information about
Roberto’s whereabouts as possible.
“That doesn’t work for me. It only takes a couple of minutes.
Go now.” Before Mikaela could protest again, she added, “Don’t
vex me, I’m not in the mood.”
Mikaela was wearing the requisite skull cap with a ponytail of
wires running between it and a small box on the technician’s
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desktop. As she stood idle, waiting for the upload process to
complete, she spotted Chase from the corner of her eye.
Unable to ping his neurochip during an upload, her eyes
impatiently focused on the upload-bar her visual cortex was
projecting before her, willing it to go faster. Increasing her
stature by standing on her tippy-toes, she followed his brown
mop of hair as it made its way down the hallway and into a
room. With a bit of a neck-strain she was able to monitor the
door for his reemergence.
“Chase!” she called out at a decibel that should have assured
her his attention the second he walked out.
“Mikaela, please don’t shout while I’m standing directly
before you,” said the woman who was pushing the software
update to her neurochip. She shook her head and swallowed
down her annoyance.
“Oh. Of course. I’m sorry.” Mikaela apologized, embarrassed
that she’d completely discounted the woman’s presence.
The second the update was complete, Mikaela removed the
cap from her head, wires and all, and pinged Chase’s neurochip
as she chased after him. For a millisecond, he seemed to glance
over his shoulder, in her direction. And then he turned back
around and began walking away from her, with naturally long
strides that allowed him to cover twice the ground that she could.
Why are you ignoring my pings?
After a few minutes of giving chase, she realized they were in
the prisoner’s wing.
Wait, is he going to my grandmother’s holding cell?
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He was. With slight apprehension, she followed him into her
room. As soon as she entered he took her by the shoulders and
covered her mouth with his. Slowly, but firmly, his hands glided
downward, to the small of her back and pressed her into his
form. To his surprise, she didn’t resist. Quite the opposite. Her
appetite for him seemed to be as rabid as his was for her.
Mortified, she looked around wondering why she had let it go
that far. “We just had sex in my grandmother’s bed.”
“We did.” He said, placing a kiss on her forehead. “Don’t
worry, she won’t be back for a while.”
He was swooning and she clearly had reservations about it all.
Chase took a deep breath. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She said, although something clearly was. “Where
is my grandmother? I have to see her next.”
“She’s being interrogated.”
A scowl formed on her brow. “By who? And why did you
come to her room if you knew she wasn’t here?” Lila had been
“aggressively questioned” on several occasions and they still
hadn’t extracted one tidbit of valuable information from her.
It bothered Chase that Mikaela was behaving as if they hadn’t
just had a passionate sexcapade. His heart was still racing.
“By Jennifer. Michelle was getting nowhere with her.” He
gave her a mischievous grin. “I was actually on my way to the
interrogation when I heard you call my name.”
“Wait, you heard me?”
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With a sly grin he leaned in to kiss her but she pulled back. “I
did.” He brushed a lock of hair out of her face.
She realized that it was all a ploy to get her to follow him,
what she couldn’t figure out was why she wasn’t frustrated about
it; in fact, she was glad it worked out the way it did.
“Chase.” She took his hand in hers and sat beside him. His
attention had to be brought upwards, away from her unbuttoned
blouse. “Look, I like you… a lot, but I’m sort of in a
dysfunctional relationship right now… and well, this,” she was
moving her pointing finger between them, “would really
complicate things.”
He rubbed his face. “Devon.” He said, shaking his head in
utter disapproval. “The charade is over. You can forget about
him. He’s of no use to us. What we need is to know where the
Incrium fusion plant is, and we already know Zachary is keeping
him out of the loop. Or, are you and Devon… have you … do
you love him?”
She looked down at her hands. It wasn’t fair. When she met
Devon she thought he was perfect. Ironically, she’s been pushing
Chase away because having him around made it harder for her to
be around Devon. And now she knew why. Chase is the perfect
one. Devon is a façade. He’s not a genuine good guy. If he were,
he wouldn’t have been working with Lila.
“Yes, we have.” Chase’s heart sank like a stone. “And, no. I
don’t love him.”
She stood and finished getting dressed.
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Perhaps it was the air displacement from her movement, but a
remanence of her scent wafted towards him and struck him,
causing his heartbeat to quicken.
She was too focused to notice the longing burning in his eyes.
“I hate how this has all turned out. Not too long ago we
thought that taking the multinationals down would be easy. Get
access to their server and use their own information against
them. The masses would revolt and overrun them.” She thought
of the piles of human remains scattered about the dark SunSafes.
“There’s no one left to revolt. They’ve murdered everyone,
including my mother, and now, maybe even my father.”
Chase did a double take. “Wait, Roberto?”
“My father. He was taken from his cell, just like Rangel.” She
shook her head. “Chase, it’s all gone so bad.”
Chase pursed his lips. “More than you know.” The respiration
machines were only putting out a quarter of the oxygen they
were designed to output. The engineers were working on the
problem, but that could take more time than they had. “Zarant
began fusing Incrium again and the oxygen levels are
plummeting.” He fell back onto the bed. “We think that that is
why they expedited the genocide. Starving them was taking too
much time. Wasting too much oxygen. That’s also why they’re
turning the world upside down looking for our respiration
technology.”
Mikaela thought for a moment. “Can we survive of their
oxygen… the respiration machines?”
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“No.” Chase was shaking his head. “Incrium fusion eats up
too much oxygen at too fast a clip for our machines.” He was
pulling on his shirt. “We have to find the Incrium fusion plant,
fast.”
“How fast?”
Chase didn’t want to worry her but decided she had a right to
know.
“Forty-eight hours, give or take a couple.”
Mikaela had shock written all over her face. It dawned on her
that her father’s disappearance was the least of her worries.
“It doesn’t make sense. Why would they induce their own
extinction… mankind’s extinction?!”
Chase shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Silence filled the space between them as they assimilated the
conversation.
“I’m seeing Devon tonight.” A forlorn look came over Chase
that made her wish she hadn’t told him. “Hopefully I can extract
some information from him.”
“Hopefully.” He did not approve. Knowing that he couldn’t
change her mind about seeing Devon, and preferring not to know
how, exactly, she intended to extract information from him, he
asked a question he wouldn’t mind knowing the answer to.
“Why were you looking for me?”
Mikaela sat and brought her legs up under her then faced
Him.
After only a moment’s hesitation she asked, “Haven’t you
wondered why Zachary hasn’t made an effort to find my
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grandmother? I mean, according to rumor, she’s supposed to be
the love of his life.”
Chase gave a dismissive head tilt and replied, “I just assumed
he was looking for her, quietly. After all, he is married to another
woman who, from what I hear, has a wrath equal to Lila’s.”
“Well.” She adjusted and moved her ankle so that it would no
longer be shoved into her other leg. “It turns out that my
grandmother has been pulling his strings. She has a dossier on
him… every minute detail of every single body he’s buried.
Including the body of his wife’s father. The woman he
apparently lives for. You see, at some point, Zachary had made
some really big, but really bad, investments. He had become
insolvent and needed his wife’s inheritance to bail himself out
quietly.”
“He murdered his father-in-law?”
“He did, and my grandmother has capitalized on that
information for over forty years.”
Chase was still processing the information when he asked,
“She’s been blackmailing him all of these years!?”
Mikaela was nodding “He pays her a healthy stipend every
month and she gets special access to him. And there’s more. It
turns out my grandmother has been using bits of information to
turn some of Zachary’s people against him and feed her
information.”
“Wait! How do you know all of this?”
She shrugged. “It turns out Zachary doesn’t know everything,
including the fact that Izaiah is my biological father. As my
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biological father, he’s worried about my wellbeing and thought I
should know the source of the power my grandmother wields. In
fact, he’s quite sure that the minute they find Lila’s document
stash, my life will be in grave danger. Apparently, Zachary is
keeping me around as leverage.”
“Do you trust him… Izaiah?”
“I do.” Although how much she trusted him, she couldn’t say.
Definitely not enough to disclose her double life with Lazador.
Chase brightened up and asked, “Do you think there’s other
information in that dossier, like the location of the Incrium
fusion plant?”
Mikaela shrugged. “I don’t know, but I was thinking I could
use that information to persuade someone to help me find my
father. Maybe we could identify someone who could help us
with the plant’s location.”
Chase agreed. “As much as I hate to admit it. Until we know
for sure, you should keep up appearances with Devon.”
“Jennifer! What have you done!?” Michelle demanded as she
entered the interrogation room and witnessed the bruises running
up and downs Lila’s arms. Her right cheek and left eye seemed
to have received similar treatment.
“She needs to be incentivized.”
There was a relatively new lump on the old woman’s
forehead.
“My god, Jennifer. She’s in her nineties.”
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Unmoved, Jennifer looked at her prisoner and said, “And
Rangel was in the middle of her life when Lila, her own mother,
cut it short. And what about all of those people dying on a daily
basis because of her?” Seething, she added, “She deserves worse.
Look at her smug face. She doesn’t even show remorse.”
Unable to control her anger, Jennifer slapped her.
Lila felt the shock of impact reverberate through her. She
didn’t blink or look away, determined to keep what was left of
her dignity, but she felt he lip tear and blead.
Although the treatment seemed cruel, because she was an old
woman, Michelle couldn’t bring herself to intervene. Zachary
may be the monster everyone demonizes, but Lila was most
certainly the woman behind the curtain. She would get no mercy
from her—only contempt.
“It won’t get easier, Lila.” Jennifer reminded her for the
millionth time. “Where is the Incrium fused?”
The one pertinent piece of information was the location of the
Incrium fusion plant. It needed to be stopped and destroyed, but
they couldn’t find its location. For some reason, its whereabouts
wasn’t discussed in any of the files on Zarant’s server.
Disgusted by Lila’s stolidity, Michelle bent down and got eye
to eye with her. “Listen. Neither you, nor any of your kind will
ever live in that Glassdome. As we speak, our people are filling
it with what you call the “less desirable”.” She smiled as the
hologram projector came on line. People were shown looting the
gleaming new food-warehouses and lounging in homes that were
fit for a King. “Your Glassdome has been appropriated.”
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Lila finally cracked. “Zachary won’t let this stand.”
Jennifer shrugged. “He can’t stop it. We’ve taken over
Zarant’s server and shut down all of his precious transport
booths, everywhere.”
Lila seemed to think she’d caught them in a lie. They couldn’t
shut down the Transports if they were, as Michelle said,
transporting the “less desirables” in.
But as the live feed continued, she saw it. A young woman
was holding a small gadget. From that gadget, a large gateway
had opened and was presently spewing out emaciated swaths of
filth, into her precious Glassdome.
“They don’t belong there.” She declared, self-righteously.
Michelle turned on her. “No. You don’t belong there.”
“Grandmother!” Mikaela cried out from the shock of seeing
her grandmother so black and blue.
Lila grinned inwardly. It was obvious they had no intention of
ever letting Mikaela see her in such condition.
Dumbfounded, Michelle and Jennifer witnessed Lila deflate
her posture and sag her facial features, turning herself into a
beaten, feeble old woman.
“Mika! Oh, thank God.” She moaned with a touch of agony
and despair as she displayed her arms for her granddaughter to
see the bruising.
Shocked, Mikaela froze in place as her eyes seemed to trace
over every bruise and scab. Lila was so purple in some places
that it seemed as if the paper thin skin would burst from the
pressure of the coagulating blood beneath it.
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“Mika.” Jennifer stepped into her path. “I’m sorry, but this is
how it has to be.”
Mikaela’s eyes hardened and her jaw set. “I know.” She
brushed Jennifer aside and kneeled before her grandmother. “I
just came for this.” She grabbed hold of Lila’s necklace and
yanked it off.
“Mikaela!” her grandmother growled, reaching for the
priceless gem.
“Carry on. And make sure she sees the images of my
mother’s body hanging off the meat hooks.”
“How dare you, you thankless little bitch? You’re just like
your mother!”
Mikaela looked at Jennifer who had a confused look about
her.
“She’s not going to give you any answers, but we can
leverage this.” She tossed the large green emerald to a confused
Michelle who, upon close examination, noticed a small seam
along the top of the silver-dollar sized emerald. When she
opened it there were multiple dime sized thumb drives inserted
into its core.
“You should go now. I would get Pavah to take lead. She’ll
know a few of the players.”
“What are we looking for?”
“You’ll know when you see it.” Mikaela replied. “Chase will
fill you in on the details.”
With that, Chase kissed her and briefly held her tight before
leading Jennifer and Michelle out of the room. Mikaela stared at
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her grandmother for a few minutes then shot her with a nerve
neutralizer.
“You probably have never been shot by a nerve neutralizer
before. Don’t panic. You’ll only be paralyzed for twenty
minutes. Your lungs and your eyeballs will work… which is
perfect because I want you to be a prisoner of this image.”
As Lila slowly became entombed in her own body, Mikaela’s
neurochip uploaded Rangel’s file to the hologram projector. Two
seconds later, the image on the hologram was of a bloodied,
naked Rangel with hooks protruding just above her breasts.
Perhaps it was just a reaction to the paralysis, but Mikaela felt
a warm pleasure from the teardrop that materialized and ran
down her grandmother’s cheek.
“Okay, I have to run.” She said, kissing her grandmother’s
forehead.
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