Chapter 190 CXC

Chapter 190 CXC
Isabell’s POV

"The theory," she started.

"The theory is wrong," I said. 

"Or it is incomplete. The memories are not recoverable through stimulation because they are not here.”

You are going to cause permanent damage to pathways that I need for the work I am actually supposed to do, which is seal the Covenant, which is what you say you want." 

I looked at her directly. "Turn it off."

She looked at her colleague. He looked at the readings on the equipment. There was a long moment then he reached over and disengaged the stimulation.

The pressure receded. I lay back against the pillow and breathed and tasted blood and felt my hands shaking in the specific way that adrenaline and neurological protest combined.

The nosebleed continued for another several minutes, slowing gradually as they removed the electrodes and cleaned the contact points with the automatic efficiency of people performing a procedure that had not gone as planned but that they were not going to acknowledge had not gone as planned.

They left without speaking. I lay in the white room and pressed the sheet against my nose and thought about Aria.

I thought about her face on that pavement, the last thing I had clearly seen before the tranquilizer took me was not frightened, not panicking. Holding the phone, her eyes on me. Saying Xavier's name into the phone clearly and without trembling.

She had been standing in the light the way I had told her to stand.

I thought about her in Levi's apartment, sitting between my knees while I did her hair, asking me if I was going to tell her. Patient and certain and six years old, carrying the knowledge of something that I had needed a DNA test and a week of processing to approach.

She had always known she had dreamed of me for her entire conscious life and she had always known, and she had waited in the specific patient way that she waited for things, without pushing, without demanding, just present and certain and waiting.

I thought about what that had cost her Six years of a dream that the real person was somewhere she couldn't reach.

I pressed the sheet harder against my nose and felt something move through me that was not grief and not anger and was not any of the things I had been feeling for the past four days of white room and clinical neutrality and Callum's earnest arguments.

It was something colder and more settled. I was going home. Whatever it took, whatever condition this facility was in when I left it. However this situation was resolved.

I was going home to my daughter when the explosion happened at approximately two in the morning.

I knew it was two in the morning because I had been counting hours from the last meal, which had been seven hours ago by my estimate, which put the time somewhere in the deep middle of the night.

The first explosion was distant, the sound reaching me through the walls as a deep percussive thud rather than the sharp crack of something close. The building registered it through vibration, a tremor in the floor and the walls that lasted less than a second.

Then the lights went out. The white room in complete darkness was a different space entirely. The white that had been everywhere became nothing, and the complete absence of light in a room with no windows and a sealed door was total.

I sat up in bed.

The emergency lighting came on three seconds later, red panels at floor level that produced enough light to see the room's outline but not enough to see it clearly, casting everything in the low red quality of a space that had moved from operational to crisis mode.

Then the second explosion, this one was closer. It was close enough that the wall to my left vibrated significantly and something in the ceiling cracked and a thin line of dust fell from the junction of the wall and ceiling.

Fighting.

I could hear it now, the sounds of physical combat coming through the walls, muffled but unmistakable. Shouted commands, the impact sounds of people and objects, the specific acoustic texture of a space that had gone from controlled to chaotic.

I got out of bed.

The IV line was still in my arm. I looked at it for a second and made the decision that a doctor should not make their own IV line, and then I made it anyway and pulled it out with the controlled steady motion of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and would deal with the consequences later.

I pressed the inside of my elbow hard against my arm to manage the bleeding and went to the door.

The magnetic lock was on the other side. The door had no handle on my side. But the magnetic lock required power, and the power had just been disrupted by two explosions.

I pushed the door and it did not open. Backup power for the lock then, separate circuit from the main lights.

I stepped back and looked at the door and thought about what I knew about the facility from Callum's descriptions and from four days of listening to the sounds the building made and mapping them to the layout he had described during his second visit.

The access corridor was on the other side of this door. Running north to south. The fourth door from the northern access, which was where I was. Which meant the northern access was three doors to my right in the corridor.

Which meant whatever was happening at the northern access was three doors and a locked door away from me.

The sounds of fighting intensified. Closer now, definitely on the other side of the wall to my left, moving along the corridor.

I went back to the bed and pulled off the IV stand, separating the pole from the base with three twists that used the thread connecting them. The pole was metal, approximately a meter and a half long, not particularly heavy but solid.

I went back to the door.

I was standing beside it, out of the direct line of the opening if it came inward, IV pole in both hands, when the magnetic lock made a sound that was the specific sound of a system losing power at the secondary circuit level.

A different explosion closer the lock clicked.

The door opened inward fast, pushed from the outside, and the first thing through it was not a person but light, the beam of a tactical flashlight sweeping the room, and behind the light were two people in dark clothing moving fast with the coordinated efficiency of a trained extraction team.