GOLDEN AGE | ON HIATUS

XIII | SASHA

[13]

SASHA DID NOT LIKE LABS. They brought back memories of being caged, helpless, or both, a combination which she decidedly was not a fan of. The stench of rubber tickled uncomfortably in her nostrils, and she held back a sneeze, holding onto the ends of her hair for some sort of stability. She'd tied it up, which rarely happened - usually, the waves were let free to tangle together, do whatever they wanted. Water was always near it, so trying to dry it was never going to work. The Siren, as her name implied, couldn't stay out of water.

Even now, her shoe dipped into a puddle from the huge water tank in the corner of the room, a stream trickling on the slick tile. She hopped over the rest of the puddle, gazing at the damp toe of the shoe dejectedly.

"I wonder when this was last used," she thought aloud, eyes travelling across the entire room.

"Like, last week. See?" Wildfire pointed at an electronic screen. It gave a weak beep, green binary wafting over the static. Sasha considered trying to read it, but before she could, he'd already murmured, "175". Wildfire was good at coding - he'd always been. It wasn't because of the numbers, per se, but because of the thrill of uncovering something new, a pattern that took a while to figure out. And when it was cracked, the grin on his face couldn't compare to anything else.

"Anything useful that you can gather?"

The ghost of a smile passed over his face as he stood at the control panel. "I can set off a detector that bars all the doors for the bottom ten floors, how about that?"

Sasha nodded thoughtfully. "Meaning no civilians can interrupt?"

"Precisely."

She brushed off the thoughts of people wrapped up in high-stakes investigations, people who really needed Crux. Somewhere in Semper, she knew that someone would die because of their decisions today. But it was a price that needed to be paid. They couldn't afford any screw-ups (though it was hypocritical of her to think so) when the fate of Semper City lay so heavily on their shoulders.

"Wait." Wildfire knitted his eyebrows, eyes flashing threateningly in the greenish light of the monitor of the control panel. "Files. There are files. Some of them aren't even encrypted. God, Crux need to up their security game. This-" he prodded the table, "is terrible. No biggie, just seven million people's data, and it's not even secure!" Grunting with frustration, he continued tapping away at the keyboard, growing angrier by the second.

Sasha stepped away, hoping to find something in the endless filing cabinets lining the walls, their metal outside a shiny black that reflected the bright light above them. In that light, the control room looked more like an operating room than anything else, and she shuddered at the memory of the familiar feeling of a needle in her flesh. The high that came after the injections was more often that not followed by a deadly low, screams and agony as they lay in their beds, thrashing in pain and throwing up every morsel of food that met their lips.