Swooped | ✓

Chapter 49: Flying the Coop

When you're locked in a room of silver and ice, time was something that could not be defined. After what felt like eons, Harriet and Professor Brakel had come back to take more samples, and I fought back, struggled, snapped at them like the feral creatures they had caged in the lab outside. Unlike those birds, however, I was stronger and larger, and despite my bindings Professor Brakel found it hard to extract more blood and tissue samples with me wriggling around.

So, they dosed me with more tranquillisers, and I slipped into unconsciousness again.

"It'll... It'll take the pain away," Harriet murmured, adopting that same soothing tone she did when she fed me cough syrup when I had a cold during my childhood.  But instead of sweet, slightly tangy medicine mixed with fruit juice, it was a cocktail of benzodiazepines washed down with the bitterness of betrayal.

"You could stop the pain if you let me go. You wouldn't cause anyone any pain if you just stop all of this," I said in the minutes before the drugs took an effect. 

"I can't," Harriet said, shaking her head with a pained expression on her face. "You know this research is my life. We're finally achieving things, great things. No one has discovered anything like this before, we'd be creating a whole new world-"

"There is nothing great in what you're doing, Harriet," I said, starting to feel a little light-headed, my words slurring slightly. "People will find out... They'll denounce you, strip you of everything. Your title, your job, your life."

"They won't find out," Harriet said, frowning as she neatly tucked the pills she had given me into a box, putting it back onto the shelf. "Trevor hired people who... know what they're doing."

I knew she was referring to the men who had abducted Lark and Milo, and now me. The ones who had shot me and beaten me. They were no scientists, but hired thugs. Professional killers, likely.

"Oh yeah?" I said, head beginning to droop, a small smile managing to creep across my face, maybe due to the euphoric effect of the drugs, but also because of the small kernel of hope beginning to blossom in my chest. "You have people... What makes you think I don't have people too?"

When I woke up again, my metabolism clearing the drugs from my system in record time (likely at the expense of my liver, I should probably get that checked out sometime), I found that the maniacal Professor Brakel and my now self-demoted ex-Godmother hadn't hacked off any of my limbs or features, though Piper was feeling a little more bald than usual. The male line in my family didn't suffer from male pattern baldness, but I hoped premature feather-loss wasn't permanent. 

Apart from my thinning feathers, there was also a tightly wrapped bandage around my left arm which ached, a little red seeping through the clean white plaster. It wasn't in an area used to draw blood, so maybe they had hacked away at my skin a little, at least enough to get some tissue samples.

I wasn't a guinea pig, but a guinea duck. This fucking sucked.

Despite my somewhat eloquent quip about having 'people', I was slightly miffed when I woke up in the fridge still very much alone, with only Maggie and Piper to keep me company. 

While I was doped up on drugs, I was very sure that my Parliament, with the aid of the police, would be able to find me and rescue me, like the damsel in distress that I was at the moment. Now sober, and decidedly bleeding a bit more than before, the hope I had been nursing was beginning to chip away, if just a little. I wanted to have complete faith that they would find me, that Lark would rally her mum and the taskforce to track me down, that the GoGos would go old school and drive around looking for clues, or that Milo would tap his fingers against a keyboard and magically know where I was, but it was hard.