Devra was in a box. Not figuratively, but literally. A converted shipping container, maybe like one of those micro hotel rooms she’d heard of in Asia, but shielded somehow and being bombarded with Exotic Matter. They weren’t trying to torture her... maybe they were studying her through cameras, but if they were, she wasn’t very interesting to watch. She spent most of her time meditating – recompiling herself. Trying to survive this.
How long had it been? She didn’t know. That was speculation. It had been days. Maybe weeks. She had no way to measure time. She also had no way to measure what the inoculation had done to her.
She did know what it had done to those who had come in contact with her. Hwang had – the best word she could use for it – self-destructed – had what looked like a seizure, expending the last of his energy to crawl into a fetal ball… and die
.
The world had been amazingly clear for Devra. It was like a game. She heard guards running down the hall. The door was locked. There was no key card on Hwang’s body thus the only point of vulnerability was the giant two way window. Devra had thrown a chair through it. It shattered. She saw Fan in a catatonic state. She wasn’t dead... not yet. She was still breathing. Devra felt nothing as she watched Fan. It wasn’t coldness. It was absence. There was only one relevant issue. She was breathing.
Guards broke in. Their reaction was, in some ways similar to Hwangs. Only Antoine Smith was unaffected. But then he’d been exposed to Dark XM before.
He subdued her.
When she awoke, it was in the box.
She had been there ever since.
She liked the darkness. Seeing was painful in its clarity. It was like seeing the world without ornamentation – like a flowchart or an engineering diagram. Without sentiment. Without illusion. Pure. Not exactly like the dripping text in the Matrix, but somehow she was reminded of the metaphor.
Her guess was that Hwang died from from the shock brought on by this. From the sharpness of this sight. The same phenomena, shielded by the glass had frozen, maybe killed Fan.
The box was moving. To where? As best she could discern it had been transported out of the lab by truck and loaded onto an airplane. She could only speculate on speed and direction.
But she was being taken somewhere. Where and for what purpose?
She had worked out three scenarios:
1) She was being taken to a remote facility for study.
2) She was being taken to a distant place to be killed with no traces leading back to Hulong.
3) She was simply being taken ‘away’ without a plan, while various interested parties argued over what to do.
The latter seemed the most likely.
And Hubert is on the move, and is not.... happy
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