Chapter 5 - Nineteen Minutes
"What happens at six?" I asked.
My father grabbed the emergency console. "They're preparing to move six subjects. In their condition, the trip could kill them."
"Why only six?"
"They're the ones who've begun talking."
That sentence made the floor seem to tilt beneath me.
Iris pulled a crowbar from the maintenance rack. "We open the doors."
"Not like that," Elias said. "Their lungs depend on calibrated support. You open a chamber without stabilization, you could stop a heart."
"You keep saying you care," I snapped. "Show us something useful."
He led us to a nurse's station and handed over printed patient charts. They weren't copies of my mother in any way that mattered. One had taught herself to read using discarded labels. Another drew houses on napkins. A third had refused to let a technician call her by a number.
"Her name?" I asked.
"She calls herself Noelle."
I pressed my palm to the glass. Noelle touched it from the other side.
A low mechanical rumble came from the service shaft. The transport lift was rising toward the tank room.
Iris found a red emergency lever behind the nurse's desk.
"Mechanical lock on the lift," she said. "I can stop it."
"It'll alert Rusk," Elias warned.
"She already knows we're here."
I helped Iris pull. The lever stuck, then gave with a shriek. Somewhere below us, the lift halted.
The screen went black. For one hopeful second, everything became quiet.
Then emergency lights flickered on. Rusk's voice returned, no longer amused.
"Very well. If I can't move the subjects, I'll move the problem."
The air vents snapped open. A sharp chemical smell spread through the lab.
Elias slammed a mask over Noelle's air intake and shouted, "Clara, don't breathe that!"
Iris dragged me toward the floor hatch. She'd already started coughing.
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As my knees weakened, three heavy knocks sounded from below.
And beneath the hatch, someone began cutting through the bolts from the other side.
