Page 22

CHAPTER 22

Diana was going to kill someone. She wasn’t sure if it was possible to tear out a man’s throat with a roadrunner’s beak, but she was willing to take a literal stab at it.

With Costa limp and bleeding on the sand, they had ordered her to shift, and she couldn’t think what else to do other than obey. Then she was placed in a cage so small that she couldn’t possibly have shifted human again without badly hurting herself.

That was a few hours ago. She had spent the airplane flight very uncomfortably wedged in the back of the cargo area, unable to see where they were going or what was happening with Costa. She did hear when he woke up, which was a huge relief; there was a scuffle, some yelling and cursing, and she dimly heard them telling Costa to pipe down or they’d throw her cage out of the plane. At this point she almost wished they’d just get it over with; if it came to that, she was willing to at least try shifting human to see if she could break the cage. But Costa apparently capitulated, because there was no more fighting that she could hear. After that, they flew on for a long, hard-to-judge while, and then she felt them losing altitude for a landing.

They covered the cage with a canvas tarp, and so, once again, all she had to go on was her other senses. The cage was placed in some kind of motor vehicle and they drove for a time. Diana tried squawking and shrieking, but no one paid any attention, so she decided to save her energy and breath for the next opportunity she got at an escape.

She had absolutely no intention of falling asleep. In fact, if anyone had suggested that she could fall asleep under these circumstances, she would have thought them out of their mind. But it was very dark in the cage, she couldn’t really move much, and she’d had a very stressful twenty-four hours with little sleep the night before ... or the previous night, for that matter. It was hard to wrap her mind around the fact that it had been only two days since her house burned down.

So she dozed in the gently rocking cage. Sudden cessation of movement woke her up. She crouched unhappily in the cage, wishing she could at least see. (And bite.)

The cage moved again. Footsteps, voices. She was being carried somewhere. Then the cover was whipped off the cage and she found herself in a large, too-bright, too-white space.

Diana closed her eyes against the glare. Fortunately, as a desert bird, she was well adapted to bright conditions, and she half-slid her avian third eyelid over her eyes before peering around.

What she saw made her heart rate accelerate. She was very clearly in some sort of lab.

Her cage was sitting on a large stainless steel countertop. All around her, there were metal lab tables, shelves and gurneys of tools, and expensive-looking equipment of various types. Diana had no idea what she was looking at specifically, but the place reminded her a little of her high school science lab except much bigger and with more expensive-looking stuff in it.

I bet an angry roadrunner could do a lot of damage in here.

She saw no sign of Costa, which worried her desperately, but she reminded herself that they’d shown no signs, so far, of killing either of them. He had been alive on the plane, and if they were going to commit murder, it made the most sense to do it out in the desert, rather than here in presumed civilization.

Where are we, anyway? She had no idea which direction the plane had been flying. They could be just about anywhere in a few hours’ flight radius from the eastern Arizona area, which was a great deal of territory.

There were a few people in the room. Two of them (a man and a woman) wore lab coats, while the other two Diana recognized as two of the goons from the desert. Their dusty tactical gear and weapons looked strikingly out of place in the lab, especially next to the clean white lab coats of the scientists.

“The roadrunner is the next test subject?” the male scientist asked, and Diana squawked and pushed herself as far back in her cage as she could.

“Yes,” the woman said. There was a sharp-edged, no-nonsense air to her. “You!” she added, snapping her fingers at Goon #1. “Help Mike restrain her.”

“I think we’re done here,” said Goon #2. “I’m going to go check on the other one.”

“Yes, go, whatever.”

The scientists descended on the cage. Diana proceeded to make as much of a nuisance of herself as possible, squawking and flapping even though it meant bashing her wings on the inside of the cage. She did not like the words “test subject” at all .

Frantic fluttering did her little good. Wearing a pair of heavy gloves, the male scientist, who she assumed was Mike, deftly stuck a series of metal rods through the cage bars, somewhat clumsily aided by Goon #1. It was evident the lab had done this before. The rods didn’t do anything except confine Diana, but she found herself crowded into an even tinier section of the cage, barely able to move anything except her head.

The female scientist, who Diana decided to think of as Ms. Frankenstein, drew up a syringe from a bottle, then donned a heavy glove on her off hand similar to the ones Mike was wearing. It looked like the sort of thing someone would use to restrain a rabid raccoon.

Diana tried to yell “No!” It emerged as “Awk!”

“Stop fighting, you troublesome creature.”

Frankenstein used her gloved hand to slide open a small door in the side of the cage that Diana hadn’t even noticed, exposing Diana’s shoulder, neck, and part of her wing. While Diana tried to maneuver her head around to bite her, Frankenstein wrapped her gloved fingers firmly around Diana’s torso. Diana struggled, but she felt the sharp sting as the needle was jabbed into her shoulder and then withdrawn. Frankenstein snapped the side door shut, while Diana shook with fear and rage.

“No, leave those,” Frankenstein told Mike, who had begun to withdraw the rods pinning Diana in place. “We’ll keep her confined until we see if there’s going to be a reaction, and then we’ll need to move her to a bigger cage and feed her.”

A bigger cage didn’t sound like good news for her chances of not being a roadrunner anytime soon, and she didn’t like the sound of if there’s going to be a reaction any more than she’d appreciated test subject. Diana shivered, and gradually realized it was more than just the aftermath of adrenaline and thwarted anger making her shake. There was a cold sensation spreading out from the injection site. Her wing on that side felt strange, heavy, and numb. She also experienced an odd, sharp taste in the back of her throat.

What on earth did they give me?

She told herself firmly that the objective wasn’t to kill her. There was no point in using a shifter for testing if it was just a poison or something; any lab animal would have served as well.

But what is it going to do ?

Mike was now taking some measurements, including weighing the cage, Diana and all. She hissed and occasionally tried to peck or bite him through the bars, and nearly went ballistic when he brought another needle, but this one was merely for drawing blood.

The door opened. Diana hissed louder when the person who came in turned out to be Farley. He’d cleaned up a bit, and his broken arm was in a sling, which just made the bruises on his face stand out more vividly. Diana wished she’d had a chance to give him some new ones.

“Hey, you’re both needed in Lab 2,” Farley said.

Frankenstein looked up from her laptop. “Now what? We’re in the middle of something.” Mike was labeling the blood samples.

“I don’t know. It sounded urgent. Halsted has some questions about one of the test subjects who’s developed a problem. I didn’t ask any questions.”

“Fine, whatever.” Frankenstein closed the laptop and pointed at Farley. “I need more blood samples from you when we’re done.”

“Yeah, you’ll get ‘em.”

Frankenstein and Mike left the room. Farley went swiftly to the door they’d just left through, peered out, then hurried over to Diana’s cage and started pulling out the metal rods confining her.

Diana squawked in disbelief. “Shhh!” Farley hissed at her. He felt around for a bit one-handed until he managed to spring the clamps holding the cage door shut, and for the first time in what felt like forever Diana was able to tumble out onto the lab table.

She shifted immediately. Farley stifled a yelp and turned his back.

“What are you up to now?” Diana whispered fiercely at him. She slid off the table and grabbed a discarded lab coat off the back of someone’s chair. She had to work one-handed as well; the arm that had been injected was nearly useless, and was starting to experience an odd cramping, burning sensation. “What’s your deal?”

“I hate what they’re doing here,” Farley whispered back. “I want to help.”

“Oh yeah, sure. I’ve heard that before!” Diana looked around for some kind of weapon. There were a lot of loose items, but not much that looked like it could be used offensively. She grabbed a laptop and wielded it one-handed at Farley like a short, wide club. “Stay away from me!”

“I really am trying to help!” Farley protested.

“ If you wanted to help, you could’ve showed up ten minutes earlier, you know, before they stuck me with some kind of experimental drug.”

“They gave it to me, too.”

Diana looked at him in shock, now taking in the pallor that made the bruises stand out so clearly. He was shivering a little, which she had simply taken for pain from his broken arm. “How recently?”

“While they were treating me after we got here. I thought it was just an injection for pain. Then the doc told me they’d decided to incorporate me into ‘the program’.” He made air quotes with his good hand.

“What happens to test subjects in ‘the program’?”

“I have no idea. I really don’t want to find out. Can we get out of here before they come back and find you loose?”

“Just a minute.” Diana scanned the room for a bag or a box. Nothing looked immediately useful, so she spread a lab coat on a table and started piling things on it: the laptop, the blood samples, scattered paperwork that had been laying on a desk.

“Do you have to do this now?” Farley protested.

“Yes. If the SCB is going to undo what’s been done to us, whatever it is, they’ll need information.” She opened a lab fridge which turned out to be full of samples. Diana grabbed a handful at random. “Did you see Costa at all? Do you know where he is? Did they inject him too?”

“I did see him, and I don’t think so.” Farley avoided her gaze. “I got the idea they want him in the arena, and didn’t want to risk taking him out of commission before the fights.”

The shifter fights—of course. That was what they had been talking about on the flight. No surprise that Costa’s airplane-baiting had drawn the attention of people who were interested in recruiting and betting on shifter gladiators. Diana supposed it was better than some of the possible alternatives.

“Okay,” she said, bundling up the lab coat around its contents. With one of her arms nearly out of commission, she couldn’t carry any more than this. “Which way to Quinn?”

“You mean the way out of here, right?”

“ You can leave. I’m not going without?—”

There was a sudden loud buzzing that reminded Diana of an office building fire alarm. A computerized female voice announced, “There has been a security breach. Please remain calm and stay in your assigned section.”

At the same time there was a series of loud clunking sounds that Diana recognized, an instant too late, as computerized locks slamming shut. She stopped her efforts to bundle up the coat and ran to the door. Yanking on it did nothing.

Farley looked horrified. “There must have been an alarm on your cage.”

“In that case it would have gone off when you let me out, not a few minutes later. This is something else.” Something Costa-related, Diana was almost positive. She looked around. There was another door on the far side of the lab, but she guessed before she tried it that it wouldn’t open.

“These doors must have some kind of emergency override, right?” There was a keypad next to the door. Diana examined it. Keys, a card swipe, and for good measure a biometric fingerprint reader. They really covered all their bases.

“Yeah, I’ve seen people using them,” Farley said. “I don’t know how it all works. I’m just the taxi driver.” He shuddered abruptly, an all-over shiver that seemed less to do with what he was talking about and more involuntary, and sat down weakly in a lab chair.

Diana could guess why. She felt feverish and shaky herself. On the bright side, her arm was coming back online, so she could use it a little more.

Absently, she buttoned up her borrowed lab coat as high as it would go so she was in less danger of flashing the world (well, flashing Farley) every time she moved. Then she began opening cabinets, looking in every one.

“What are you after?” Farley looked even worse, shaky and pale; Diana was no longer sure he would be able to stand up. If he couldn’t, he was on his own, she thought grimly.

“I don’t know. Something to open the door. Someone might’ve left a spare key card or something.”

The buzzer had cut out after the computer announced the emergency, but it came on again for a few staccato bursts, making her jump. “There is a security breach in progress,” the voice announced. “Please remain in place or proceed to the nearest secure location.”

“Was that gunshots I just heard?” Farley asked.

Diana paused in the act of rummaging through the cabinets. Standing still, she did hear some distant crackling that might have been fireworks—or gunfire muffled by several layers of security doors.

“Costa,” she murmured, “what on earth are you doing?”