I returned to the ‘recovery’ room with the little torch and the bottles of lighter fluid I retrieved from Vicki Carter’s handbag. I piled all the mattresses from the beds on the floor and doused them in accelerant. Before setting them ablaze, I looked up at the sprinkler head. I hoped that the others had completed their part, or this fire might not last too long. All I could do at this point, was trust them. I ignited the torch and touched it to one of the mattresses. They burned, hot and hungry, creating a billowing black cloud of smoke that was as thick as a physical object. Time to leave. I turned and ran down the corridor, away from the assuredly toxic cloud. It took only a moment for the fire alarm to kick in, filling the building with a desperate wail that rattled my teeth in my skull. I looked back to see the sprinklers closest to the fire sputter to life and shower the flames for a moment, before drying up with an anticlimactic dribble. I grinned. Good, they had succeeded in sabotaging the water supply at the main line. Which meant they had almost certainly begun the second part of the plan by now. I needed to hurry. By the time I reached the elevator, the prisoners were gone. I hoped that they would make it out. Maybe the fire would be enough of a distraction. I saw the elevator descending and hid out of sight of the door and waited for the people they would surely send to investigate. The door pinged and a man in firefighting gear, carrying an industrial fire extinguisher stepped out. I stepped up behind him as he passed, and locked my arm around his throat. I had one last dose of the sedative to use. He thrashed for a few moments, then slumped against me. I dragged him into a side room, and I took his heat resistant coat, hood, boots, oxygen tank and fire extinguisher. Then, I shoved him into the corner, out of sight of the door. Finally, with smoke filling the basement, I bolted for the elevator. Upstairs was chaos. People sprinted down the halls and I could hear shouting and gunshots in the distance. They hadn’t made it out clean, it seemed. Bad for them, but good for me. Disguised as I was, no one even looked at me as I strolled down the hall and into the server room. I plugged a thumb drive into the computer and started the download. There was a lot of data I needed to retrieve, and not much time to do it. As I waited, I began spacing lighter fuel-soaked pieces of bedsheet throughout the room. I needed to make sure that the servers were destroyed. I splashed the last of the lighter fluid across the floor in front of the servers and set a trail out the door. I could not be in the room to light this one. All there was to do now was wait for the necessary files to finish transferring, switching drives when necessary. There were things I had to leave behind. But I hoped that they would still be preserved somewhere, in the archives of the international headquarters, or in paper copy. The switch to digital had been recent and most records still physically existed somewhere. But some of this information was about to go up in flames, forever. Hopefully I had saved what was important. I fingered the trigger on the blow torch. I put my ear to the door, no more gunshots, no more shouting. Whatever had happened, it had moved away from here. It was time. I slipped from the room as silently as possible, then sparked the torch and lit the accelerant trail. This fire was bigger than the one in the basement, and it would spread faster, more to feed it in the drywall and the carpeting. With any luck, it would consume the whole floor. I headed for the exit. The halls had emptied out, the building was filling with smoke at an alarming rate. Lucky I had a smoke hood. Still, it wouldn’t do to tarry. I made for the fire stairs, but as I neared the door, a man with a clipboard stepped in to block my way.
“Where are you going? The fire is back there!” he pointed at the orange glow behind me.
I coughed enthusiastically, counting on the mask disguising my voice,
“Somebody has set fires all over the building,” I coughed again. “It’s out of control, we can’t fight it. You’d better join the others in evacuating.”
Fear touched his eyes. The human aversion to fire ran deep and was very hard to ignore.
“We can’t lose the building.”
“I don’t think we are going to get a choice,” I snapped.
Nodding slowly, he turned to evacuate, but I stopped him,
“Warn the others, everyone you see.”
He nodded and ran off. I headed for the fire stairs. I hadn’t exactly been lying. By now there would be fires on basically every floor of the building, if Mark and Vasili had done their job properly. It was necessary, there weren’t enough of us to retake the building, but fire was a great equalizer. I just didn’t really like having to use it. People could easily be killed. At least all the other offices in the tower were empty. Our scouts had reported that the Domini had shut down the building when they took over, not wanting to risk sharing their space so intimately with a large number of humans. If those offices were full, I never would have proposed this. This risk of civilian casualties would be too high. As it stood, the danger was only to our people, and they had signed up for it. Still… I shook my head; the fact was it could save lives, too. Help the prisoners get out, help me get out with what we needed. And the more of the place we could destroy, the less of our own technology and resources they could turn around and use against us. All of the information on the Partials was stored here. Our files, addresses, family information, contact info, everything they had on us. With it gone, we would be much safer. They would also be less likely to figure out what I had stolen. It was what we had to do. But I still didn’t like it. I ran for the door, eager to put this place behind me as soon as possible. Despite all that had happened, I didn’t really want to see this place burn.
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I had only just placed my foot on the first stair when I felt the hand on my shoulder and a shove threw me off balance. I stumbled, putting my arms up to cover my head I rolled down the steps and slammed into the wall of the landing below, my arm resting on the fire extinguisher and the oxygen bottle at my feet. It could have been worse, the landing was less than a dozen steps down, but this was still really going to hurt when those painkillers finished wearing off. I groaned and looked up from the floor to see a figure at the top of the stairs, obscured by the smoke rapidly filling the stairwell.
“I thought I heard your voice, Rayna. What luck, running into you here,” she began to descend the stairs.
“Suzette.”
This was just perfect. I moved to push myself up off the floor to meet her.
“I wouldn’t do that, Rayna,” Suzette chided. She smiled as she showed me the gun in her right hand, now carefully trained on me. “You might have a spinal injury, you should stay very still, after a fall like that.”
In that moment, I very much wished that I hadn’t given all the weapons I had found to the escapees. I could really use a gun right now.
“Nice of you to be so concerned about me, Suzy. Here I thought we never got along.”
“Why would we get along, Rayna? After all, you are a waste. No good for breeding, not even for feeding. It disgusts me.”
I couldn’t help but laugh,
“God, is that all? I was hoping for something a little less trite. As if I haven’t heard that a hundred times before,” I rolled over slightly, propping myself on the one elbow, freeing my right hand from under my body. “I don’t exist to be of use to you.”
“That is precisely the problem. The world will be more efficient with us in charge. But maybe you can be of use, for once,” she had reached the landing, standing over me with a little smile on her face. “Where is Simon?”
“In what world would I tell you that?”
“I don’t plan to give you a choice in the matter.”
She leaned down to grab my arm and I blasted the fire extinguisher directly into her face. She shrieked and reeled back, lost in a cloud of CO2 that was surely burning her eyes and lungs, based on her coughing and screaming. She did manage to fire one wild shot, whether accidentally or on purpose, but it hit a wall, nowhere near me. I jumped up and grabbed her wrist, we struggled for the gun, until her grip slipped and sent it toppling over the railing, down deeper into the stairwell. Good enough, I was more than her match in a straight fight. Partially blinded, she clawed at my face and neck, trying to shove me back, over the railing and down the stairs. I swung the empty extinguisher at her head. The first hit knocked her to the ground, the second I heard something crack. Nose or skull, I wasn’t sure. It didn’t really matter, either way she wasn’t getting back up. I dropped the extinguisher, and it clanged in the now silent stairwell. I did a quick search of her pockets and retrieved her cell phone. Nothing else of interest popped out at me, and the smoke was growing so thick that I could barely see. It was time to go. I scrambled down the steps, I could feel a limp developing. The drugs had mostly worn off by now, clearly. And I was really going to be hurting tomorrow. I shook it off, I needed to focus on surviving this, tomorrow would take care of itself. I reached the ground floor with sweat pouring down my back, I shed the firefighters coat and dropped it in the stairwell. I looked at the exit door but decided against it. Everyone would have evacuated there, and I didn’t want to run right into a group of armed agents. So, I turned and headed into the building, detouring out a side entrance the emptied into the alley out back. At first, it looked like that had worked, there was no group gathered at this side of the building.
“Hands in the air,” the voice barked
Of course they would have someone watching the exits. I sighed and began to raise my arms, considering my options. I was too tired for this. And wherever Suzette’s gun had ended up, I hadn’t been able to find it in the smoke. Seeing me waiting compliantly, the incubus stepped out from behind the dumpster and began walking towards me. I didn’t have long to think of a solution here. And that was when the car slammed into him from behind, throwing him forward several feet and knocking him to the pavement.
“Get in,” Vasquez barked through the open window.
I didn’t need to be asked twice. I scrambled into the passenger seat, and he accelerated out of the alley before anyone else could intervene.
“How did everything go inside?” I asked, holding onto the grab handle as he whipped around a corner, trying to shake a pursuer.
“See for yourself.”
As we pulled back onto the highway, I looked back at the building that had housed our offices. Bright flames licked from the windows and smoke billowed out from the roof.
“So, pretty well, then?” I chuckled. “Looks like we won’t be back at work on Monday, eh?”
“I doubt it,” Mark smirked.
“Did Vas make it out alright?”
“Yeah, he picked up some of the prisoners and is bringing them back to the warehouse. I said I would stay and look for you.”
“What if I hadn’t made it out?”
He just shrugged, eyes firmly on the road. A topic not worth discussing.
“How many of them made it?”
“6 of ours got out. They should be there when we get back. 4 were recaptured. 2 were killed trying to escape.”
I took a deep breath, better than it could have been, worse than it should have been.
“And Jessica?”
“She made it. She was with the group Vasili spotted. We thought it was you, at first.”
“You were meant to.”
Vasquez laughed.
“She’s still unconscious.”
“Well, that’s good news. Hopefully, it means we can keep Tom on the inside.”
“Won’t they suspect him of the fires, if not freeing you?”
“Nope, he wasn’t even in the building, they sent him home when he dropped me off. Didn’t want him around when they were prepping me, I suppose. Just in case.”
Vasquez nodded,
“Well then, it went as well as we could have hoped, Ray. We got 7 people back.”
“And got 2 killed, left 4 behind. I don’t like those numbers, Mark. I don’t like leaving anyone behind.”
“Tough choices are the burden of command.”
“Who said I wanted to command?”
“Nobody. But near everyone says you are going to have to. Unless you want to put it all on James.”
I groaned loudly,
“That isn’t fair.”
“What about any of this is fair?”
I had to admit, he had a point.