Orphan of Mythcorp (37 page)

“
What’s going on?” Kana asked. We were
standing at the foot of my father’s . . . sleep tube.

I spoke out of the side of my mouth to keep
the woman from noticing my puke breath.

“
Castor’s trying to get her attention.
Marie has a hard time focusing on real life stuff.”

Kana giggled; a kittenish sound that matched
her facial features. “It’s freaky cool to hear you talk about her.
Knox spoke of her the same way.”

“
You knew her, right?” I asked,
watching Castor chase Marie around the lab.

“
Yeah,” Kana smiled. “Back before
Crowley forged Faustus in the basement, Marie did a lot of the
reconnaissance for us.”

Castor grabbed hold of Marie, but the
slippery spook phased through his grasp and dropped into another
Alcor tank. If we didn’t have the dread of Ash and Nimrod hanging
over our heads, I might have laughed.

“
What was Marie like in life?” I
asked.

A wistful smile played across Kana’s face,
and I noticed for the first time that she did not wear makeup. Her
complexion was flawless; she didn’t have a single line. “Marie was
crazy smart. But she always seemed sad. After she died—just a few
floors below us, actually—Knox explained that her sadness was
caused by her condition; synesthesia.”

I whispered: “Marie’s heading our way.”

‘
Unhook the hoses and wheel him down to
the med station on eleven,’ Marie ordered, before twirling back to
Castor. After sticking her tongue out at him, she started leaping
and generally pretending she was a ballerina. I sighed.

“
What did she say?” Kana
asked.

I told her. After convincing the group that
unhooking the hoses and wheeling my father down to the med lab were
all Marie would tell me (‘for now’ I added, hoping it was the
truth), Faustus proceeded to unhook all the hoses.

A few of them, those that could be yanked out
after depressing their brass collars, hissed and spat liquids and
gases, while others unscrewed and simply flopped to the floor, limp
as—

“
So,” Faustus said, thrusting a
spitting tube away from his face, “this won’t kill him? Unhooking
all these?”

“
Isn’t he already technically dead?” I
said, eliciting a snort from Faustus. “I don’t know, okay? Marie
said unhook them, so we’re unhooking them. What happens if when we
try to leave, Nimrod is standing outside the door?”

Faustus dropped the last tube and
clapped. “Man, this is just like
Forever
Young
, when those two brats are unfreezing Mel Gibson.
Anyway, you shouldn’t worry about Nimrod. What should be giving you
the heebie-jeebies is the thought about what will happen after we
leave and they find the door locked and the key card
gone.”

“
Ash isn’t going to like that,” I
sighed. I hadn’t thought about it until then. The hissing had
stopped by now but the machines were all beeping like mad, setting
my jitters off.

“
We’ll have to leave the door open,”
Izzy announced from behind me on the platform.

Faustus wiped his hands on his jeans as he
walked up to Izzy. “And why do we ‘have to leave the door
open’?”

“
Think. We need time to wake Knox,” she
said this to Faustus in her snarky voice, which gave me a warm
gooey feeling. “If we lock the door behind us, Ash will come after
us. Are you following me?” She waited. Faustus said nothing and
Kana looked confused, so Izzy continued. “If we leave the door
open, they will enter and get busy working on the
sorcerer.”

“
I don’t think I’m following you,” Kana
said.

Izzy stomped her crutches. “For crying out
loud. Ash doesn’t have ghosts who formerly worked here to guide him
through the process of waking Crowley, sooo . . . he’ll have
learned how to do it himself. We could probably wake Knox here too,
if your frigging ghost wasn’t so daft. With Ash lurking here, we’ll
have time to—”

“
Thaw out the Knoxicle in the med lab
without anyone trying to shoot us,” Faustus interjected, beaming. I
was just glad I hadn’t needed Izzy to clarify.

“
Hey,” Kana called out. “That crystal
stuff surrounding Knox doesn’t look so pink anymore.”

I followed her up onto the platform and
peered through the glass door at my father. It was true. Maybe the
thawing process had already started—hopefully in the correct
way.

“
We better get going then,” Izzy said.
“Um, how do we get it off of this pedestal?”

“
We don’t,” Faustus smirked, and looked
over at Kana, who returned his smirk. “She does.”

Once the platform was free of us hangers-on,
Kana leapt off to the floor at the foot of the tank, grabbed the
base, and lifted with her back as if she were doing a dead lift.
Groaning and creaking as security bolts gave way. She did the same
on the other end. Once she’d bent the bars out of the way, Kana
yanked the ramp out of its place from underneath the platform. The
tank was on wheels, which made me wonder.

“
Why is the tank on wheels?”

‘
Probably a security thing,” Faustus
declared, getting out of Kana’s way as she slowed the tanks descent
down the ramp. “Fire code states: If there’s a fire, you have to
get
everybody
out.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

At the door, I paused, and shoved. I’d almost
forgotten how dark the rest of Mythcorp was. But as far as I could
tell, no one was waiting to clobber us. No one, that is, except for
Sanson’s spooks, who dove into the room in an effort to restrain
us. Other than inciting an excessive amount of sneezing, the spooks
failed to harm my team.

Castor and Marie had fled a while back, so
they too were safe.

Sanson was still obviously close by, but he
didn’t seem interested in stopping us. So I said, “It’s clear.
Let’s go.”

Once the tank and everyone was out and Kana
was pushing it down the hall, I made sure the door was unlocked,
and then ran down the hall after them.

We were ten feet from the stairwell exit when
Izzy asked, “How do we get it down the stairs?”

Sanson

“
I don’t get it,” I said as we drifted
out from our hiding place. “Why did they leave the door open? Why
would they make it easy for us to wake the sorcerer?”

Ash entered the Cryonics lab first, zipping a
peek inside to make sure it was clear. “They left it open, because
at least one person in that group has a brain. In fact, I was
counting on this. Agravaine, Lamorak, you know what to do. Let’s
get to work.” He led us inside.

While the other Morai set about grabbing
trays of syringes and adjusting dials on the machines, Ash led me
up to a huge white tank nestled on a platform.

There was another platform across the room to
the left. That one was empty.

Ash climbed the steps and set his elbows onto
the lid of the great white tank. He gestured me to come up. I did.
“Look in there,” he smiled.

I leaned over beside Ash and peered through
the thick running the length of the top. A very long, lanky old man
lay encased in some kind of hardened pink solution. “The sorcerer
Crowley,” I whispered, as if it was a hallowed name. “Jeez. How old
is he?”

“
Nimrod believes he was around a
hundred and nine years old when they froze him fifteen years
ago.”

“
Holy crap.”

“
Exactly,” Ash seemed pleased by my
response. “Come on. Let the boys work.” He stepped down off the
platform just as Lamorak was replacing one of the thick red hoses
with a thick black one.

I had a thousand questions, and my thermal
beeped every fifteen minutes, but I kept silent, sitting on a stool
off to the side while the Morai—teens no older than
myself—performed procedures beyond our teachers’ capabilities. I
didn’t want to know how they knew these things; it was more than
likely it had something to do with Nimrod.

More than an hour passed like this.

My limbs were growing progressively stiffer,
but I was hoping the sorcerer would be awake before I was forced to
inject another vial of nanites.

Sometime around one in the morning, Ash came
over to me, a smile cracking his face. “Can you believe how close
we are? Another hour or so and he should be free of that crap.
Another hour after that he’ll be talking, and then I’ll convince
him to bring our parents back. We’ll finally be able to go and find
every last monster responsible for slaughtering our folks during
the War.”

“
After
he lifts
my curse, right?” I did not want to be around for that whole
retribution deal.

“
Right,” Ash sounded surprised. “After
he lifts your curse. Obviously.”

I gawked at the little Morai yahoo. He did
not look at me. I stood. “You were never planning on lifting my
curse, were you?”

He still refused to look at me.

“
Hey! This was all to get me to help
you—that business with Kant and the whole seducing of Lexi? You’ve
been playing me this whole time!” When he didn’t respond, I grabbed
his shoulder and whipped him around to face me. “Haven’t
you?”

He slid out of my grasp. “Don’t be so
superstitious. There is no curse. You contracted a rare medical
disorder—that’s all.”

We stared each other down, seething rage and
all that. To keep from throttling the colossal jerk, I changed the
subject. “Where’s Nimrod anyway?”

Ash let the air between us fill up with
silence before answering. “He’s probably down in the forging labs.”
As if revealing a tantalizing and awesome secret, he whispered:
“He’s kept an M2 drive of Alexander, downloaded the day before the
Purge. Combining this memory and personality profile with stored
samples of Alexander’s DNA, Nimrod will be able to forge a second
Alexander Icon.”

“
Wait. What?”

“
Who did you think was going to run
Mythcorp?” Ash said. “Us? A bunch of teens? No. Alexander was the
perfect man. He was going to—”

“
That monster’s rise to power is what
caused the War!”

“
No!
Knox
caused the War,” Ash slammed the wall with
his right hand. He took a moment to calm himself, and then softened
his voice. “Stand with me and you’ll have nothing to
fear.”

“
Would you two shut it,” snapped
Agravaine. “We’re almost done.”

Ash walked over to help his pals.

Panic crept in. Ash had been playing me all
along. I may have been immune to his Mesmer, but he’d duped me all
the same. I couldn’t remain in the same room as this arrogant prick
for one second longer.

I turned, snatched up my backpack from the
floor, and ran out of the lab.

Behind me Agravaine yelled, “The zombie’s
bolting. I told you we couldn’t trust him.”

“
Keep working,” Ash said as he started
after me.

What was the maniac planning on doing? He
couldn’t Mesmerize me, and I was done being his dupe. All that left
was physical violence, and he wasn’t strong enough to . . .

Oh crap. He wasn’t chasing me—he was going to
get Nimrod. Ash was going to sic his Hunter on me!

Where could I go? As I rounded the corner and
picked up the pace, a picture of Morgan appeared in my mind. Morgan
had despised Ash longer than I had. And Morgan had that lethal
little woman and the demon on his side. Yes. It sucked, but joining
Morgan was my only option.

And I had a pretty good idea where they had
taken Knox. Two opposing considerations vied for acknowledgement in
my head: would they take me in, even if I told them what Nimrod and
Ash were really up to? And, would I reach them before Ash found
Nimrod and sent him after me?

Marie—through the constant intervention of
Castor—spewed a sort of spook instructional manual for waking the
frozen. I hoped to forget the grosser details of this cryonic
revival.

It involved reworking the wiring of the
capsule—which we could have avoided had Marie given us instructions
inside the Cryonics lab!—reprogramming the capsules’ quantum brain,
and other technical hoopla way over my head. Hours of tense
waiting, expecting Nimrod or some Ash-hole to come by to give us
hell at any second, passed uneventfully.

It’s not even worth mentioning the bodily
fluids my father’s system evacuated during his awakening.

“
What time is it?” I asked Kana, who
was sitting beside me on a gurney, polishing one of her dirks. Her
legs were so short that she’d had to hop up—an act I may have
enjoyed a smidgen too much.

She handed my question to Faustus, who was
preoccupied with avoiding the icky stinking goo mucking the floor.
He huffed and checked his watch. “Well, Morgan, it is half past one
in the morning. Why, do you have some pressing engagement? No?
Goody.”

We’d manage to thaw my father out
sufficiently to safely remove him from the tank and to lay him flat
on a gurney. After injecting him with a myriad of colorful liquids
(I was the only one who seemed concerned that these fluids were
fifteen years old), Izzy had covered him with heated blankets. She
was still with him, readjusting the coverings with tender and
finicky care.

I envied my father this attention from the
cute girl, almost enough to be willing to get myself frozen to
receive the same treatment—almost.

Maybe it was the blasted DT’s, but I could
see heat waves rising from my father’s body, pink and
phantasmagoric. I watched for a few ticks, mesmerized, until my gut
started grumbling again. I ran off to the bathroom and evacuated my
own fluids. While in the bathroom, I noticed an outlet and decided
to try and recharge the cane. First I stupidly shoved the tip of
the sword into the socket. My arm trembled as I was electrocuted.
Fortunately I clopped to the floor and the sword clattered down
too. Turned out all I needed to do was press the silver crow-head
against the outlet, and it would gather electrical energy from an
arc summoned out of the wall. Naturally, I happened to be holding
the metal when I did this, so I got another quick jolt. The purple
crow-peepers began to glow: the weapon was fully recharged.