“Okay,” Malik echoed, eyes still closed. Then he opened them on the view of the Ranch spread out ahead. He formed his hands as if he meant to encompass the Ranch, holding it in a frame of fingers. He breathed deeply.
Cruz felt the invisible blast of pain that came from Malik. It was like someone had suddenly opened a dam and a huge wave was rushing past her. It did not touch her, but Cruz felt its power. And she saw and heard its effects on the men and women down in the greenbelt. Most fell to their knees, on their backs, on their sides. Others ran in wild panic, batting at their bodies as if they were on fire. All screamed.
So many different ways that people expressed agony, Cruz thought. Some high-pitched, some lower register; some a single long ululation, others cursing, and still others making animal noises. One man sounded as if he were barking.
This must be what hell sounds like.
Cruz suddenly realized how calmly she was taking this. Human beings, men and women whose only sin was enlisting and being assigned to the monstrosity that was the Ranch, were crying like babies, writhing like animals, running in panic. And her first thought had not been Those poor people! but a distant, chilly What strange sounds people make when they are in pain.
Malik nodded. “Now, Shade.”
Shade tapped the button on her GoPro and was off like a bolt from a crossbow, blowing past trees, sailing effortlessly over the writhing, desperate security men. She reached a guarded gate and used her momentum to leap over both of the fourteen-foot-tall chain-link fences. A millisecond later she was at the first building. She paused and heard a noise like something from a madman’s nightmare: screams and cries from every direction, some muffled by walls, others shrill and near.
She went in, and it was like passing through some modern interpretation of Dante’s “Inferno,” a bright-lit, neutral-colored office-building hell. Men and women lay in corridors screaming, with tendons standing out in their necks, with eyes bulging, fingers clawing at their own flesh.
She didn’t even need her speed. She could have strolled through the place eating an ice-cream cone. But she could feel that Malik had ended his brutal assault. Gradually the effects of Malik’s pain blast would lessen; people would wipe their tears and change their soiled underpants and get back to work. But having been briefly exposed to Malik’s first assault, she knew it would be some time before people were really functional. What Malik did, the power that he had, was impossible for the human mind to process easily, or easily move past. Even now the sense memory of it was like a wound in her brain, a wound that had only begun to scab over and was a long way yet from healing.
A wound I deserve.
Shade spun back up to full speed and within a minute or so had found an access point from the aboveground Ranch to the underground heart of the place.
She stood there atop a newly repaired scaffolding, vibrating, staring, taking in an impossible sight. It was much as Dekka had described it, but no description could have prepared Shade for the sheer size, the vast space that could have been used as a landfill for half a dozen sports stadiums, with room left over for a scattering of shopping malls.
It was roughly rectangular, with massive, intimidating towers at the corners like something out of a maximum security prison. Cells lined much of the wall space, some only at ground level, others stacked atop each ot
her, most fronted by bulletproof glass so thick that what light escaped from inside those cells was faintly green. Those glass barriers also had the effect of making it impossible to see into a cell without being almost directly in front of it.
The Ranch’s hidden underground was a work in progress, with construction equipment and a crane. The crane must have been rotating when Malik had struck—it had smashed into a stone wall, precipitating a small rock slide. She saw the operator in profile. He seemed to be bent over, head between his knees, either crying or throwing up.
Everywhere uniformed guards and white-coated technicians sat or lay stunned, weeping, wiping snot from their faces, reeking of their loosened bowels. None was yet on their feet, but they would be soon.
Shade knew she had limited time, but she could not stop looking—and more importantly, showing. She had learned from her earlier experiment with the camera that at full speed it showed little but blur. So she zoomed from cell to cell and paused, counting slowly, keeping the camera fixed for what she calculated was a full second of real time.
It was a video tour of man-made evil. Cell after cell housed monstrosities, horrors, the results of experiments so devoid of human compassion or decency they reminded Shade of what the Nazi monster Dr. Mengele had done in Auschwitz. A one-second take was a long time for the morphed Shade, and at many of the cells she had to close her eyes. There were things she did not want to see.
But interestingly, few of these poor creatures in the cells showed the effects of Malik’s pain blast. It seemed the Rockborn were, if not totally immune, at least much less affected by the Malik effect. Good and bad. Good that Shade could function; bad that Malik would have no power against someone like Dragon or Knightmare.
There had to be a control room. Shade took in the layout of the place, saw an oblong building perched on a shelf at the far end of the chamber, presumably a head office. But, she imagined, controls would be . . . yes, probably in what was evidently, based on rust weeping from one steel panel, the oldest of the towers. In a blink she was in the tower, racing methodically around, coming at last to the uppermost room, which evoked an airport’s control tower, with distorting bulletproof glass all around, framing a podium console with a touch screen embedded. She tapped it slowly, letting her finger remain in contact.
She was prompted with, Fingerprint not recognized.
“Yeah, I figured that,” Shade muttered. She grabbed a woman technician who was sobbing in the corner, dragged her by the wrist, and placed her finger on the screen, which obediently opened up.
Still no one had recovered enough to sound an alarm, let alone form a reaction force. Slowed now only by the processing speed of the computer, Shade clicked through the menu until she was confident she had what she wanted.
The tiers of cells had to be opened one by one: A Block, Tier One; A Block, Tier Two; B Block, Tier One—through eight separate releases. A digital map showed cells turning from green to red as she unlocked them.
Not all the prisoners were quick to emerge—some had been human enough to suffer from Malik’s pain wave. Some no longer possessed a body capable of moving on its own. Something like a great, fat centipede the size of a school bus emerged from one of the cells and instantly chomped into a prostrate guard, leaving his torso looking like an apple with a bite missing.
Was a giant carnivorous centipede really the intended result of these mad scientists’ work?
Shade ran up onto the roof of the tower and then leaped slightly upward so that she would fall in real time, which seemed almost comically slow, but which allowed her to take in more detail. She landed atop a big yellow bulldozer’s cockpit, then bounced up to balance on the raised steel blade, like a general astride a very unusual horse.
There, she de-morphed and looked down at an audience unlike anything seen in the history of life on Earth—morphs and monsters, cyborgs and Rockborn.
“I’m Shade Darby,” she said. “I’m the one who opened your cells.”
A creature larger than most and as strange as any, a bizarre, impossible melding of man, robot, and porcupine, spoke in a strained but piercing voice.