Riley's Paradox, page 23
part #9 of Hearts of ICARUS Series
Her eyes immediately shifted to the other side of the screen where the new data was, but before she could read it the screen went dark. Hissing with annoyance, she moved to the next bed and once again positioned herself in front of the screen to wait.
While she waited she thought about the number of days she’d seen on the first woman’s screen. Nineteen days had passed since she and the other women had been placed in the same room. The first time she’d awakened as Bastet was three days after that. And it had been four days since her last time out, just as she’d guessed.
Apparently, her ability was improving as slowly as it usually did whenever she hadn’t used astral projection for a long time. And yet, she felt stronger than she’d ever felt before while using astral projection. Another in a growing list of oddities and unanswered questions.
When the orderly finally turned the view screen on, her eyes went directly to the upper right corner. Sure enough, there was a white square with two lines of bold red text inside of it. The first line read; Tank 866-2T. The second line read; Day 7.
The screen went dark and the orderly moved to the last bed on that row. Riley followed, wondering why she felt like she had ice trickling through her non-existent veins.
The red square on the third bed read Tank 867-2T, Day 7. Riley quickly scanned the rest of the screen for new information. Finding none, she turned away before the screen went dark, and was already on the fourth bed waiting by the time the orderly got there.
She made a silent bet with herself which, when the orderly turned the screen on a few moments later, she won. As she’d guessed, the square read Tank 868-2T, Day 7. She wasn’t surprised to find that her own tank number was 869, or that the woman in the last bed was 870.
After the orderly left the room, she sat down, wrapped her tail around her paws, and thought. There was no doubt in her mind that the word Tank referred to the blue cylinders in the room at the other end of the corridor.
Could the numbers refer to individual tanks? That felt right, but there were thirty tanks and only six women. Either she was wrong, or she needed more information. She had a strong feeling that it was the latter rather than the former.
The numbers were sequential, which made sense. What disturbed her about them most was that they were in the high eight hundreds. Did that mean that there were approximately nine hundred women, or more, lying comatose in beds like herself and her silent roommates? If so, the facility she was in was much bigger than she’d imagined. Or they’d been doing this, whatever this was, for a long time.
She really did need more information to answer those questions, so she set them aside and moved on to the 2T designation. It reminded her of the way room locations were marked in schools, motels, apartments, medical centers, and the like. That only helped to a point, though, since she had no idea what exactly was being marked. Was it a floor or level in a building? An entire building amongst other buildings? A corridor? A room?
She tried to remember if she’d seen any signs or markings above or on any of the doors in the corridor. When she couldn’t remember one way or another she knew that it was because she’d never looked. She growled softly, irritated with herself. Fortunately, she could correct that omission easily enough.
Finally, why was there a number for a tank above each bed? And what did Day 7 refer to? Seven days for what?
The answer came to her as soon as she asked herself the question. Seven days referred to how long the tiny biological objects had been in the tanks. Given the fact that each screen over each bed kept track of the number of days each woman had been in Room 3, it made sense that the objects in the tanks would be counted in the same manner.
If she was correct, that meant the objects had only been in the tanks for three days when she’d first seen them. She wondered if they could have grown enough in the past four days for her to identify them, but honestly had no idea. She’d have to look at them to find out.
What were the objects anyway? Clones?
She shuddered at the thought, but it was the only explanation she could think of. She knew the Doftles used cloning for a number of things, including their Nomen. They’d even used genetic material taken from Rayne Dracon to create some of their hybrids, which were grown in tanks. She hadn’t seen anything to make her think there were Nomen or Doftles wherever she was, but that didn’t mean much. Nomen had tried to abduct her on the skyport after all.
The new information made her even more desperate to discover what was in those tanks than she’d been before. She was reluctant too now that she knew the tanks were somehow connected to herself and the other women. But she had to do it.
***
The white cat with the blue teardrop on her forehead and turquoise eyes stepped through the last door on the right side of the corridor. She paused, turned around, and looked up at the door she’d just come through. On the wall beside the door was a six inch by six inch white square with Room 3 printed on it in black ink. She stared at the number for a moment before turning back around to look at the door directly across the corridor. Her eyes fixed on a white square beside that door, a duplicate of the previous one except that the number was different. Room 4.
After a brief hesitation, the cat crossed the corridor and stepped through the door of Room 4. She took in the room at a glance, completely unsurprised by the gray walls, gray floor, and six high narrow beds.
Leaping onto the bed nearest the door, she saw that all six beds were occupied by young women. All of them wore white med gowns. All of them were completely still, lying flat on their backs, arms at their sides, eyes closed, feet bare. Each one had a bundle of wires and tubes running from beneath their gowns to a panel on the wall above their bed.
Rather than examine the room and its occupants more closely, the cat jumped down to the floor, returned to the corridor, and trotted to the next door, which was labelled Room 5. She stepped through the door and discovered that it was exactly the same as Room 4, as was Room 2, which was directly across from it. The only differences she’d seen so far were the faces of the young women lying motionless on the beds.
She entered the final door, Room 1, which was directly across from the tank room. The room was the same as the others except that this time the cat was surprised to find two men wearing white lab coats in the room, one on either side of the first woman inside the door. She hesitated a moment, then leapt up onto the foot of the bed to see what was happening.
The woman was unconscious like all the others, but she was lying on her side. One of the men was tapping at the screen above the bed while the other worked at something on her back. A moment later he picked up the bundle of wires and tubes which were no longer connected to the woman, and handed them to the man across from him. He in turn let them drop so that they hung from the panel on the wall.
They rolled the woman onto her back, then the first man bent down to something beneath the bed. There was a metallic click, then the men began rolling the bed away from the wall. Startled, the cat leapt down to the floor and watched as the men rolled the bed out of the room. She followed them into the corridor, then watched as they rolled the bed up to and through the double doors, which swung shut behind them.
Staring at the doors with apparent indecision, the cat didn’t move for a long minute. Finally, she turned toward the tank room. She paused to look up at the white square mounted just above a security keypad. It was the same as those beside all of the other doors, except this one was labelled Room 2T. Her ears and tail twitched a few times, then she stepped forward. Just before her nose touched the door she was caught up in an invisible force and dragged backward down the corridor.
The cat didn’t put up a fight, though she did seem surprised. Her surprise changed quickly to resignation. Seconds later she vanished through the same door she’d entered from.
***
Win leapt from his bed before he even got his eyes open, the need to follow the dream cat back through the door to Room 3 at the end of the corridor so strong that he felt the adrenaline pumping into his veins. Fists clenched tightly at his sides, he forced himself to concentrate on slowing his harsh gasping breaths to something approaching normal. It took several minutes but eventually he was able to fill his lungs with air and relax.
He crossed his stateroom to the small chiller in the corner without turning on any lights, and retrieved two bottles of water. He drank the first one quickly, then carried the other back to his bed where he sat down. Only then did he let himself think about the new dream.
The cat seemed physically stronger than in previous dreams. It was also more serious and determined, not at all hesitant or fearful as it had been before. While the dream itself was more horrifying than those before it, it was also more satisfying.
The cat had done something he’d been wishing it would do from the start, which was to enter the other four rooms along the corridor. He was glad that the cat leapt up onto one bed of each room, providing him with a view of the occupants, though he was sickened to learn that they were all women, and they were all unconscious.
Six women in four different rooms, including the one woman who’d been removed from Room 1 in the dream. Twenty four women, then. But there were thirty tanks.
If the tanks were connected to the women somehow, and he had a very strong feeling that they were, then there must be another six women. If the room the cat always exited from, Room 3, also had six women, that would account for the discrepancy.
Given the cat’s lack of surprise and curiosity when she viewed the other rooms, he had no doubt that his conclusion was correct. Which meant that the cat, if it was Riley, was in Room 3, laid out on a narrow bed, unconscious. Just like the others.
Thirty tanks. Thirty women.
Since the cat always came out of the same door, he’d assumed from the beginning that Riley was in that room. They all had. He’d also wondered if there were more people being held behind the other doors, and if they were connected somehow to the tanks.
Now he knew that they were, though he almost wished he didn’t. He shook his head at himself. Information was always a good thing. The more you had, the better you could plan for whatever was coming. In that light, he was glad to have a few answers.
He still didn’t know what the biological objects were, and apparently neither did the cat. He’d sensed her frustration when she’d been unable to enter the tank room, and he shared the feeling. He really wanted to see if the objects had grown enough to be identified.
Win opened the second bottle of water and sipped it as he went over the dream slowly and carefully. This time he was searching not just for answers, but for questions, too.
He wondered why the cat had made a point of stopping to look for the room numbers beside each door. She’d never done that before, and he didn’t remember seeing them in any of the previous dreams, either. He had a feeling that the cat had discovered something and was verifying it.
Six doors, five of them numbered sequentially. The sixth room, the tank room, was not labelled the same as the others. That was significant. He didn’t have a clue what the 2T meant, but he wasn’t convinced it mattered. What mattered was that the tank room was identified differently. It was part of a different group, with a different purpose.
Why had the men in white coats taken a woman out of Room 1? She hadn’t looked ill, or injured, or any different than the other women. She was pale and a little thin, but all of the women he’d seen were like that.
The cat had been surprised by it, too. She’d been torn between following the bed through the double doors and entering the tank room. For whatever reason she’d chosen the tank room. When she’d looked at the label beside the tank room door, her reaction had been…surprised? Irritated? He wasn’t sure what her emotion had been, but she’d definitely reacted to it.
Win frowned as a half formed thought crossed his mind. Every dream ended when the cat either vanished or was dragged back to the door it came out of. Did that mean the cat had limited time to explore? He nodded to himself. That sound reasonable.
How the cat was created, or why they were dreaming of it in the first place was unknown. But he now knew that there were at least twenty four women, and most likely thirty women, including Riley. And they were all unconscious.
Himself and his brothers had been worried for several days now because they’d received no response to their shared bond call to Riley. But one must be conscious to detect a bond call when it arrived. If Riley was unconscious, she couldn’t have received it.
Of course, that begged the question of how she managed to send them a bond call to begin with. Win tapped the side of his water bottle with his fingers as he ran through the dream again, and again. Unable to come up with an answer, he decided to discuss the matter with his brothers.
He finished his water and got up to dispose of the container. Glancing at the clock he saw that it was well past the middle of the night and headed into the bathroom. Maybe a long hot shower would help him relax enough to get a few more hours of sleep. If he was really lucky, it would be dreamless.
Chapter 15
Three days later
Riley fought the urge to pace while she waited for the orderly since it wasted energy. An obvious consequence that she hadn’t even considered while pacing during her previous time out with Bastet. It was only after Bastet was suddenly pulled back long before she expected that she realized how much energy she’d thoughtlessly burned.
She was glad that she’d learned so much during her last outing, but also frustrated that she hadn’t been able to go into the tank room. She was also worried about the woman who had been removed from Room 1. She had a very bad feeling about that.
Identifying the biological objects was her main priority today. Her best guesses were still either clones, or hybrids. Either one made her shudder with revulsion each time she thought about them. She knew what the Doftles had done with some of the genetic material they’d taken from Rayne Dracon. And others.
To her surprise and relief, the door slid open and the orderly entered much sooner than usual. She leapt up onto the first bed and waited as patiently as she could. Finally, the screen went on, and her eyes went to the white square with red print. Day 11. Only three days had passed since she’d last been out as Bastet.
She shifted her eyes to the opposite side of the screen but didn’t catch the number of total days she’d been in Room 3 before the orderly turned it off. She leapt to the next bed and looked for that number first. 22. So, yes, it had been three days since her last outing.
She followed the orderly around the room, checking each screen carefully for new information or changes. After he turned off the final screen she jumped off the bed.
She’d only seen the biological objects once, when they’d been in the tanks for three days. She didn’t see them at all last time, so eight days had passed since her first look.
“There should be a significant increase in size this time,” she thought hopefully as she started toward the door.
Nudge.
She froze mid-step. What the hell was that?
Whatever it was, it felt strangely familiar. She waited a couple of moments, but whatever had happened didn’t repeat itself. Moving more slowly, she started walking toward the door again, trying to figure out what was familiar about it.
Nudge. Nudge.
She went still again, focusing hard on the sensation itself. It was a little bit like talking to her sisters while they were in their alter forms. That’s why it was familiar. She hadn’t done that in a few years though, which is probably why it took her so long to identify it.
Her tail lashed suddenly as shock and fear raced through her. Was one of her sisters here after all?
But…no. It couldn’t be one of her sisters in a tank. She and her sisters were petite, but the tanks were still far too small to hold one of them. Now that she thought about it, the tanks were too small to hold clones, too. Maybe they started them in small tanks until they reached a certain stage, then moved them?
That didn’t really make much sense, but as she knew absolutely nothing about clones or tanks she couldn’t rule it out, either. Besides, if it wasn’t clones, then what did the tanks hold?
Nudge.
Riley closed her eyes and focused on the odd sensation again. There was something there. Something both familiar and unfamiliar. She continued to focus on it until it gradually became clearer.
It was a path! A completely new and unfamiliar path. She studied it, wondering where it had come from, and how it was possible to have a path in her mind that she knew nothing about.
Nudge. Nudge.
Concentrating on the sensation, she began to follow it right up to and through the door.
***
A small white cat with a blue teardrop on its forehead and turquoise eyes emerged from the last door on the right side of the corridor. She walked along the wall, her step slow and hesitant, ears cocked back slightly. She was only half way to the next door when her step faltered. She went completely still for a long moment, then began walking again, moving more slowly. Several steps later she stilled again, her body stiff.
It took a little longer before the cat began walking again, but she moved more quickly, her eyes forward and a little unfocused. She stopped just before reaching the tank room, her head tilted to one side for a moment before turning to face the door. Her body flinched slightly, then one paw rose as though to step forward before pausing uncertainly. Another long moment passed before the cat seemed to make up her mind and lower the paw to the floor. The tip of her tail twitched as she crossed the corridor and stepped through the tank room door.
She looked up and around the dim room before walking past the first two tanks of the first row, her steps uncertain. Now and then she glanced at the tanks above her as she moved between them. After reaching the end of the first row, she started up the second one, her steps even slower now, as though she was following something elusive.
