Chapter 237 Woman as She Ought to Be
POV: Isla | Ancient asylum level
The chamber comes off the table and I am already moving before I have consciously decided to move, which is what three years of medical work in crisis environments produces, which is the body acting on pattern recognition before the thinking part of the mind has completed its assessment, and the pattern here is falling object, fragile, irreplaceable, and my hands are under the chamber before it hits the floor.
The impact travels through my arms and into my shoulders and I absorb it the way you absorb a blow you are braced for, by letting the force move through rather than stopping it at the point of contact, and the chamber is in my hands and it is intact, the seals holding, the hum of the preservation equipment continuing at its correct pitch, and I know it is intact because the pitch does not change and the pitch is the thing I have been tracking since the moment the chamber came open and Lucia became visible inside it.
Fell and Callum are on the floor together, the specific tangled violence of two people who have collided at full speed, and Fell is smaller than Callum and older in the biological sense and the collision has produced a situation where Callum is dominant, his weight and his werewolf-enhanced strength pressing Fell into the asylum floor, but Fell has his shields still active at a reduced level and the shields are producing an effect at skin contact that I can see in the specific way Callum is managing the contact, which is with effort, the silver burn of a physical barrier working against him.
I am on my knees on the floor with the chamber in my arms and I am looking at Lucia inside it, at the form that has been maintained at precise parameters for eighteen months, at the life that Valentina died this morning with on her lips, and I understand in the specific complete way that you understand things when you are holding them that this is what everything has been for, this specific chamber and this specific life inside it, and I am not going to put it down and I am not going to let anything happen to it.
The Hermetic mage who comes through the side door is one of the reinforcements from the upper level, one of the ones that Cormac did not fully contain, and he comes through the door with the specific focus of someone who has assessed the room and identified the primary target, which in this room with Callum wrestling Fell on the floor and Isla on her knees with the chamber is the chamber, and he is moving toward the chamber and toward me with the specific quality of someone who has been told that the chamber is the program and the program is the priority.
I do not put the chamber down.
The strike he throws is a Hermetic offensive ward, the compressed energy type that the Order uses in facility security, and it is aimed at the chamber and it hits me instead because I turn my body between the strike and the chamber and the hit lands across my left side, which is the specific searing quality of Hermetic offensive energy, and it burns through the left side of my ribs and into the muscle beneath and I feel the damage as information rather than sensation in the first seconds, which is how the body manages large damage in the moment of it, which is by giving you the time you need to act before it gives you the pain.
I hold the chamber.
"You're safe," I say, to Lucia, to the chamber, to the hum of the preservation equipment continuing at its correct pitch. "I promise. Your father's coming."
The mage is raising for a second strike when something hits him from the side with the force of a body moving very fast, which is Dante, who has come back down from the evacuation level, and the mage goes into the east wall among the storage cases and the storage cases come down and the room fills with the sound of the failed embryos scattering across the asylum floor and Dante puts the mage down with the efficiency of nine years of hunter training applied to a single target.
I am still on my knees and the chamber is still in my arms and the left side of my body is now communicating the damage to me clearly, which is the pain arriving as the moment allows it to arrive, and it is significant, and I know what significant means in the medical context, which is that the tissue damage is real and the blood loss is real and the specific quality of the floor coming up to meet me is the quality of the body beginning to prioritize its own management over the tasks I have been assigning it.
I do not let go of the chamber.
Callum's voice comes from somewhere above me, which is where above is when the floor is where you are, and it has the quality his voice has when something has happened that he was not prepared for, which is not a quality I have heard often from Callum but which I know, and it says:
"No. Not you too."