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Fourteen

The Search

Agnes stared across at me from her stool, gauging my face. I hadn't spoken since we woke up from our little power nap after she nearly tore me in half with her dick, and she was picking up on it pretty quickly that I was... I mean I wasn't angry, but I definitely wasn't happy, either. My little distraction from my missing brother had completely derailed into painful misery and I was having a helluva time pretending it hadn't. Guess I wasn't a great liar.

"Why didn't you stop me if it hurt?" Agnes asked. She sounded reproachful. That was a laugh, you weren't the one in pain. I was the one who bled--two thin streaks of red down the sides of my drying pants now, about three inches long each. Two nice bright patches to show everybody in line of sight how much of an idiot I was.

I didn't have an answer I felt like saying out loud, so I just shrugged.

Agnes looked down at her hands. "I thought you understood what you were getting yourself into, you seemed so eager. I shoulda known better. Warned you. I'm sorry."

This time it was my turn to look away. I rubbed my arm as my left ear spasmed sheepishly. Truth be told, even if she had warned me ahead of time, I still would have done it, and probably I would have been even less likely to stop her in the middle of it, just out of sheer obstinacy. I really was my own worst enemy.

"Can..." I started, then coughed. "Can we just forget about this and look for my brother? Please?"

Agnes swallowed and nodded, pulling herself off the stool and moving to a small bookshelf in the corner. She snatched up a roll of parchment almost as long as her arm and brought it to the exam bed. She jerked her head to the side. "Up. I need the free space." I reluctantly slid off the bed and stood next to it as she went to unfurl the parchment. She stopped when she saw there was still some residual stickiness from our coitus all over it. She sighed, grabbed her nearby shirt, and wiped vigorously before putting the parchment down and putting on the smeared clothing.

A blueprint rolled out in front of me as I grabbed my stained, still-damp shirt off the nearby stool and pulled it on, and it took me several seconds to realize what I was staring at: the blueprints for the Spike, or at least four floors of it. Three circles took up slightly less than a quarter of the large parchment, and one circle took up slightly more than a quarter--the main floor. The inside of the Spike was actually square, despite the circular walls. I thought it was an odd design choice but decided not to comment. What did I know about architecture?

I suddenly had a realization about something I had noticed the very first time Leon and I had been sent up to the eighth floor. I'd thought the eighth floor looked bigger than the first because the inner corridor, the one with the balcony looking all the way down to the Yard in the center, was do dang wide, but now I saw that wasn't actually the case. The huge suite, the wide corridor, the two together seemed wider because the spaces on the first floor were so cramped in comparison, but the first floor was actually massive. Dozens and dozens of rooms of all shapes and sizes, with what had to be thousands of feet of hallways connecting them all together in a twisty labyrinth surrounding the great big gap in the middle where the Yard stood.

Agnes pointed at a series of three rectangular rooms connected to each other, left of the huge central square that had to be the Yard. "We're here." She drew her finger across to a series of corridors and small boxy rooms near the bottom of the circle. "The main cells." She drew her finger waaaay up the circle to the top and pointed at a lone square in a series of twisty-looking corridors I knew well at this point, and didn't even need her to tell me what it was: "elevator."

She then drew her finger all the way over to the right side of the first floor blueprint and pointed at another series of smaller-looking corridors with very few doors leading to mostly blank spaces, with a handful of more boxy rooms I assumed were a second set of cells. "Generators and circuit breakers. All the power in the Pit goes through here. Lots of narrow tunnels somebody small could get into. There's also an access shaft to the basement somewhere in that mess, but nobody ever uses it. If we need to go to the sub-level, we just take the elevator."

I blinked. "Sub-level? What's down there?"

Agnes didn't look at me. "Nothin' important. Supplies. Backup generators. Fuel. Boilers. That kinda thing."

I narrowed my eyes at her, but if she saw, she didn't react. The way she said that was a little too casual. "Uh huh," I muttered. "Any way Leon went up instead of down? I doubt he'd be stupid enough to go back to the suite, but there was another half of that floor we never really saw, plus the six floors between this one and that."

Agnes shook her head. "Warden's quarters on the other side of your floor, and he has the only key. Besides, only way up is through the elevator, and there's guards posted at every floor but the top, twenty-four-seven. They didn't report seeing Leon, let alone engaging with him. Plus, we found two unconscious guards, kicked to shit, near the generator rooms. Seems a safe bet he went in there."

I sighed and put my hands on my hips. Staring at the blueprints, I said, "Do you have schematics for the basement? Just in case he went down there?"

Agnes shook her head. "Not that I'm aware of. It hasn't been used since I've been here."

I studied her face then. Her eyes flicked to me and then quickly away, staring very pointedly at the map. She was lying. I was ready to hit her, I was so frustrated. After all that had happened, she was going to lie to me? Furious, I stormed toward the door. "Fine. Let's go."

Agnes hustled over to me and grabbed my arm. "Hold on now, sweetie, we need a plan! We can't just go rushing in on this. Those generator halls are a mess, you could get lost in that nonsense for hours!"

I yanked my arm away from her and glared. "Who is Geist?"

Agnes opened her mouth to retort, then snapped it shut in--far as I could tell--genuine confusion. "Uh. What?"

"Who," I repeated slowly, "is Geist? To me? To Leon?"

"I don't understand, honey."

"When the Warden mentioned Captain Geist earlier, he said 'your,' then stopped himself. 'Our' what?"

Agnes shook her head. She looked like she was actually at a loss. "I truly have no idea, Nola. I'm sorry."

"Then what good are you?" It was awful mean to say, but I wasn't feeling too generous at the moment. I stalked over to the door and threw it open. The five Scrofa outside turned their porcine snouts to me, halberds at the ready. "I know where to start looking for my brother," I said. "Am I allowed to go look for him? Or you gonna stand there and wait for him to come back and kick your asses, too?"

The Scrofa looked at each other, and for the first time in my entire life, in all my waking memory in the Pit, the guards looked nervous. Gods, they were actuallyscared of my brother. I couldn't wait to tell him that. I figured he'd need a pick-me-up right about now.

One of them finally turned back to me and nodded curtly. I turned and gave Agnes a cold stare. "You coming or what?"

Agnes looked at me in a new way too, though I found I didn't like it as much on her: she was scared of me. I hated that look. It made me feel mean, the way I'd felt when I'd hit Patrice, or when I'd been jealous of Rika. But so far as I knew, Agnes had also never lied to me before. She deserved a little punishment for that, if nothing else.

I started off down the hallway, a pile of guards directly behind me. I heard the door to the lab click closed, and the heavy footsteps of Mender Agnes joined in with the Scrofa. I picked up the pace, trying to recall exactly which direction to the generators. When we reached the elevator, I knew I was going the right way, but I paused for a moment to consider the rickety box anyway. Patrice and Tanya were probably in their usual cells, but where was Rika? Had they taken her to the suite, or one of the cells on the first floor? I assumed the latter--the cells were closer, and it was easier to get to her if they needed her as collateral against me or my brother's actions. I considered them for a moment before continuing.

I already knew how this was going to end. There was no way the experiment would continue now. My guts clenched at the thought, but there was nothing for it. The Warden had threatened to shut it down, but there was no threat, not really. Agnes's reaction to his words had been way too hysterical for a threat. The Warden had promised her. He just couldn't say it in front of the prisoners when he still needed us alive to find my brother. I had to think of a way out of here. There were too many guards to fight all at once by myself--even with Leon, it would be dicey. But if I could get to the others, the five of us stood a chance. Whatever Agnes had been lacing our food with was clearly wearing off. Patrice's telepathy, Tanya's telekinesis, my gravity thing, Leon's Sight, and Rika's... uh... Faith... thing? Shit, we could do some serious damage. But I had to get to them, first. And first stop was my brother, no question.

I sighed and turned right at the elevator, heading down the long corridor toward the cells and the generators. I ignored several left turns and kept heading vaguely east until I was forced to turn right. Now I stopped, as the Yard stood to my right and several turns off this corridor stood to my left. I glanced uncertainly at them, trying to recall the map. A big hand gently rested on my shoulder. Agnes had come up beside me, and she solemnly pointed at the third left turn ahead of me. I made for it.

The new corridor went on for a good eighty feet, dozens of doors and intersections passing by me. A low, throbbing buzz tickled my ears faintly as we walked, growing steadily louder, until I had almost reached the end of the corridor. There, Agnes turned us right again and we came to a stop down a short, ten-foot corridor at a wall with a shockingly narrow opening from floor to ceiling, created by two big metal boxy shapes. The hum was almost deafening now, and it was definitely coming from the boxes. I'd seen these in the mechanical engineering manual. These were generators. They ran on some kind of oil derived from fissures, mostly found in badlands to the northwest and northeast of us. A couple on the northern border to Meridia along the land bridge far to the south. They chugged noisily, vibrating slightly, which I assumed was causing the throbbing buzz I'd first heard. Now I couldn't hear the buzz over the sound of the generators roaring.

Agnes turned me to face her and yelled, "Be careful in there! Don't touch the generators, they run hot! Find your brother and get him back here!"

I glared at her, and she recoiled a little. Maybe I was being unfair, but she had to know there was no way I was bringing Leon back to her so the Warden could throw us all back in the Pit. Or, maybe he wouldn't. Ol' Reginald's slip of the tongue seemed to imply we meant something to Captain Geist, and he seemed real keen on not pissing her off. But that wouldn't save Rika, or Patrice or Tanya. We all needed to escape, together. And whoever was in the Pit, if we could manage it--but gods, that was a long shot.

I didn't respond to Agnes, just moved into the narrow space between the generators. I brushed my knuckles against the one to my left and immediately recoiled, nearly bumping into the right-hand one in the process but stopping just short. The fur had vanished from my knuckles and the skin beneath had instantly blistered. Ow. She wasn't kidding. I turned sideways and inched my way along instead. I technically had enough space to face forward, but one errant swing of my hand could earn me another burn, and I wasn't interested. After about ten feet of that, I came out into a cramped square of space.

The heat off the generators made the air thick and heavy here. The walls behind me were comprised of the two generators, with what looked like more of them down either direction. Ahead of me were row upon row of what seemed like big iron shelves at first, until I glanced down one and realized they were full of switches, dials, and softly glowing orange diodes. Circuit breakers. Holy crap, there were a lot of them. I mean the Spike was a pretty big building, but still, it seemed excessive.

I moved out of the line of sight of Agnes and the guards before I slipped down one of the rows and followed it for a good twenty feet before exiting out the other side, into a sort of squat, narrow corridor with the pinstriped lines of circuit breaker walls on one side and an actual wall on the other, broken by occasional three-foot wide corridors further into the generator area. Probably storage rooms or something on the other side. Now that the generators weren't right next to me, the air didn't feel so hot and heavy. I looked left to right--nothing but more corridors off into dimly lit oblivion--then went left. There was a dark splotch down that way, and something about it drew me to it. Besides, I couldn't recall the blueprints very well, so one direction was as good as the other.

Somewhere in this mess was a service ladder going into the sub-level, and I just knew Leon had gone there, knew it in my gut. Plus, there was absolutely, unequivocally something down there that Agnes and the Warden didn't want me to see, so of freaking course I was going to go see it. But, Leon first.

I hustled down the little hall, my ears brushing against the low ceiling as I jogged, gathering up dust and cobwebs that tickled the inside of my ears. The rows of circuit boards created a strange, flickering image of the area I'd come from as I ran past them. After about thirty feet, I reached a wall and a right turn. I quickly discovered why it was dark here: the electric torch on the wall had burst at some point, apparently. Small shards of glass littered the floor, which I gingerly swept aside with my bare foot before I could step on any of it. Looking up, I saw the faint outline of a room beyond the right turn, and what might have been the top rung of a ladder. I stepped in cautiously, moving toward the rungs with slow deliberation. I didn't want to fall in the--

The ground suddenly vanished under my foot and I tumbled into the floor.