Once inside, she bolted the door and ran down the stairs to the laboratory. Thank the Gods, no one was working on the cadvers this evening, although the surgical table was decorated with new dark stains.
Terese put the glowbulb on its coil, and the beasts hissed, roared and bared their gums at her. The monsters had made the air stale and rank, despite the struggling air purification mechanism in the corner. Jools’s mindlocked squad must have found more cadvers in the Wastes since Terese’s last visit. One cadver had no legs and rattled the bars from the floor. Another had no hands and yet another had no arms. On that last cadver, the gray skin hadn’t healed over the missing limbs in the same way it would have in a human. The stumps had brittle growths, pathetic misshapen vestiges, doomed never to regain their former condition, the cadver’s regrowth halted by Seeker experiments. She ignored the cadvers as best she could.
Her modified shockpole took only moments to melt the door that she and Fejak had used. She ran down the stairs to the lower level. Screaming continued behind her. She put on the bulb. On this floor, a severed cadver head followed her with its eyes but made no noise, though its mouth flapped. The head was stuck on a metal rod, and controlled an arm not originally its own, in a separate cage, which flailed wildly. A pair of lungs, green, rotted and malformed, inflated and deflated next to a brain that had been removed from its housing and left to float in a tank of green liquid.
There were other things. Worse things.
How could anyone, let alone a Seeker, justify this? There was no passage prohibiting anything like this in the Seeker codes, because why would there be? How could the Founders have predicted this?
The final level down housed a workshop. While it was easier to look at, it was harder to think about. Several items on a shelf were from the Armer Immersion Chamber. Squat, rectangular towers of shiny black metal. Repositories, or batteries, storing the chaos siphoned from the immersion pods she’d supervised in Armer.
The same exact repositories; she remembered the serial numbers.
And beside them, rows of mechanisms running on chaos energy. Dark mechanisms.
She exhaled through her teeth. Whatever these cylinders and orbs were for, they were powered by chaos energy. Chaos energy that was supposed to have been harmlessly dispersed outside Polis Armer. This was the chaos workshop she’d been searching for.
And Seekers had built it.
Eleven minutes had passed since she’d entered Mathra’s chambers. The men and women she’d paralyzed would be moving their fingers by now. Within ten minutes, they’d be crawling to unbolt the Holder’s apartments.
To work!
Ironically, Terese’s training within the Immersion Chamber would be Sumad Reach’s undoing, since it was there that she’d learned what was necessary to destroy this place. She opened the chaos repositories’ maintenance hatches and retrieved thick cords from her backpack. It was a simple matter of attaching the cords to the repositories and cutting off the blunt-nosed plugs at their end. Chaos energy would pour from the repository unstopped. It wouldn’t dissipate like smoke in a breeze. Instead, it would clump together, waiting to be used. Eventually, it would scatter, but not within the next few days. Which was fine, because she probably needed only another quarter of an hour.
Calm hands. Keep it together.
Her hands flew at their task. Why hadn’t she and the rest of the Immersion Project team been mindlocked like Jools’s team? She could only guess, but it probably had something to do with the fact that the Sumadan ‘scientists’ hadn’t had regular ease of access to the dozens of Seekers working on the project.
But, Gods, what if they’d had more time in Armer? Could they have secured enough to mindlock hundreds of people like Jools? And a better question: Was Lijjen in full command of his own choices? What if Patzer wasn’t insane like she’d supposed, but instead so tightly controlled, he couldn’t make rational decisions?
Terese went to work on the nodes cloaking the underground laboratory from Polis’s sight. With the pole set to a new frequency, she disintegrated the clay surrounding the cloak node, exposing its round yellow light, expanding and contracting like a heartbeat. That node, one of a network surrounding the basement, somehow obscured chaos energy from Polis. She pushed the cord in the hole and attached it to the blinking node.
Then, she plopped large globs of a gel she’d bought from an apothecary every few steps as she ascended, dropping one of the chaos-powered mechanisms into each.
The cadvers were still howling when she re-entered the upstairs room. Red foam leaked from the mouth of a bigger, older grinning cadver, at least ten years since infection. The largest cadver she’d ever taken had looked just short of fifty years. A spare shockpole hanging on the wall subdued the cadvers into twitching heaps, as using her own modified shock pole might have killed them, which she did not want yet.
Shouts and yells rose from just outside the corridor while she was still smearing the solution on the cadvers’ cage locks.
Gods, she’d thought she had more time!
It would be a small group of select Missionaries coming for her, since not every Seeker knew of this place. She sighed. Only the most ambitious, people like her, would have been told.
The gel hadn’t had enough time yet. She’d have to delay her pursuers, somehow. Just by a few minutes. But she couldn’t take on what sounded like… ten Seekers out there.
What could she do?
Her eye caught on the drawer containing the cage keys. She had an idea. It was worth a try.
There was one empty cage left. The cadvers howled hungrily, clawing at her in futility as
