Walk in the light: Legend novella

Day (33)

Day

A boy with a telecoms unit clipped to his ear barged into the room. One of Anden's guards standing by the door blocked his path with an outstretched arm.

"Hey! You don't have authorizati-"

"We know where she is!"

**********

"Why is it getting faster?" I asked the teenage kid everyone was standing around. He pulled the stuff on his computer into the table projection with a few taps on the display.

"It changes with her heartbeat."

The geographical map on the table was replaced by some sort of radar map, with a green dot dropped in the middle of the table and greens rings spreading out concentric to the dot. All eyes were on the display.

"Zoom out." Anden commanded, the display changed to where the nearest boarders were visible. There was a sudden wave of silence as everyone made sense of the map.

"It's the Mediterranean Sea" I recognized, eyebrows drawn together. Hours of forced studying geography in Antarctica finally showed some sign of possibly paying off. She wasn't moving, and it wasn't as if June just decided to take a swim in the ocean.

"Are you sure?" Someone asked, equally as baffled.

"Yes" the teenage kid answered, still typing things. A plane appeared above the green dot, flying in circles around it. "This is the real time position of P733. They picked up the signal a couple minutes ago-"

"I thought it wasn't working."

"It could be a distance problem, and to factor out weather, we equipped the planes with new technology that restarted the controls in her neck. After it rebooted, it is under our operation, we can access and disrupt pretty much any device within a ten meter radius of her. The signals are weak, which doesn't make sense since waves travel faster in water. Something is disrupting the signal. But she's in deep, maybe even on the ocean floor. Couple thousand feet at least."

Goddy hell.

**********

I looked over at the image of her on the screen again. It was a projection, not too clear, it reminded me of looking through one of the first color televisions, the kind I saw a few times when I was young. She looked like a dark-haired, more athletic version of sleeping beauty. The feed was drawn from a camera in her room, she was in some sort of laboratory. She wore a white patient gown and may have passed for peaceful if her wrists, ankles and waist weren't strapped down to one of those surgery chairs. A sudden flashback of Eden in a similar contraption flashes across my mind and I had to stare at the nearest light to burn it away.

There was a glowing ring that cast down orange light over her head. Her hair was undone, it almost touched the floor in a dark halo around her. These people were seriously paranoid, what did they think she could hide in a hair tie? My heart felt constricted just looking at her. I was listening to the steady pings- an audio of the signals in her tracker, along with the circles still going out from the green dot on the display across the room- they had started getting faster and it made my pulse rise with it. As if my heart is trying to lock in with her heartbeat.

The first thing I noticed aside from the fact that she was alive and looked unharmed was that they took her ring. My fingers immediately enclosed around mine and as of right now I was playing with it in habit. Every ping I flip it around. The more I stared at the vacant spot it was supposed to be on her hand, the more my pulse rose.

If they hurt her. I'll kill them.

Apparently the cruel fates had set their eyes upon me and heard my promise. They thought it amusing to see if I would keep it.

**********

The pings got faster all of a sudden, the display next to the table showing that her pulse had risen from 92 to 134 in a couple seconds. I watched her intently but she wasn't moving, what were they doing to her? No one else was in the room.

"What's going on!" Anden commanded, his distress mirroring mine. It was the first time I had seen his demeanor change, him having stayed indefinitely more calm than I when June vanished, but the thought flew away as the space between the pings reduced. It sounded like a bomb was about to go off. My throat constricted.

"We're trying to get her vital readings, sir." A nearby girl spoke into her Bluetooth unit.

"P733? Yes, can you get any closer to the surface? I know, S66 is not in the radius yet. Yeah, hold on." She and everyone around her sitting at computers were either typing frantically or speaking over each other.

I concentrated on June on screen, despite knowing this would be in my nightmares later. She fought against her constraints, the metal digging into her wrists. Her skin there started to bruise green. Suddenly she gasped silently, we had no audio feed so I could only imagine if she had screamed or not. Her head whipped to the side as her back arched upwards. Her face was turned away from the camera, so I couldn't tell if she was in pain but somehow I still knew that she was. My heart throbbed in my chest painfully but I couldn't look away. I wished they had taken me instead. In that moment, the light shining on her head changed to blue. In a split second she relaxed, her whole body dropping down like a rag doll as her pulse suddenly backed down to 59, faster than what was supposed to be possible.

The pings were steady for the next few minutes. I let myself relax the muscles I didn't know were tensed. Opening my hand I realized that I had crushed the ring in my palm and the metal imprints were turning my flesh pale purple.

I returned the ring to its original shape as ice trickled down my spine and slid the promise back on my finger.

I'm gonna kill them.