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The alarm kept blaring, rattling around in her skull as though it was about to drive her brain out her ears, and the half-out lighting made the lab a strange, dangerous place. When she screamed, Bennett's voice came out high and shrill. She had meant it to be urgent, compelling, something Caroline might listen to.
She fought the panic spiraling up from inside her like she might have fought tides pulling her underwater. She had to think, she had to keep thinking, thinking was her only possible weapon here. Yet here she was, screaming her head off like an idiot. Caroline was going to leave her here, trapped under the rubble, for Rossum. Bennett deserved to be left.
Caroline was saying something Bennett could barely understand about working late and not knowing things, and Bennett was babbling, and at that instant their eyes converged on the fire ax on the wall.
Her arm was trapped. Her arm, most likely, would have to come off anyway. It was her best chance.
The shattering glass was barely audible beneath the ringing silence filling her ears. Bennett thought, though it seemed to be walled off by solid glass, that she was probably going into shock. She could think, now; Caroline wasn't leaving her.
Caroline raised the ax, face entirely blank.
“Wait!” Bennett said. “Tourniquet--”
“What can we use?” Caroline said, casting around.
“That won't be necessary,” someone said from behind the doorway; time ran out.
Caroline might have made it, if Bennett hadn't stopped her.
Bennett wished, for the first time in her life, that she was the kind of romance novel heroine-type girl who was prone to fainting. Fainting have been nice; she would rather not have been conscious for the rest of this.
“Caroline,” she said, trying to focus through the shock and pain, and the disturbing lack of sensation down her left arm. “Don't fight them.”
Caroline's lips parted like she was going to speak, but no words came out. Her face was still utterly blank, but Bennett imagined she could see betrayal in her eyes – a fanciful sort of thing to think. The only thing she saw in Caroline's eyes was the squinted look of someone in a room with air full of dust particles and smoke.
“Excellent advice, Miss Halverson,” Adelle DeWitt said crisply. “If only the rest of your judgment was as sound.”
Bennett closed her eyes so she could stop looking at Caroline, and tried to work for loss of consciousness.
The only good part of the next seventy-two hours was that they took Caroline away before the interrogation, which meant she never had to find out about most of what Bennett had done. Rossum's interrogators told her otherwise, of course – told her that Caroline had been horrified to hear what she'd done, that she had said she wished Bennett would die, that she had cursed her name.
Through this, Bennett clung to the fact that telling her would have been a supremely stupid thing to do. As it was, Caroline still cared for her and might be controlled with a threat to Bennett. If she knew, she would stop caring. Rossum would have only her own well being to hold over her, and it was obvious that Caroline didn't care much for that. On the other hand, telling Bennett that Caroline had abandoned her was supremely logical, carrying an effect of isolation. Most likely they would offer to forgive her for her trespass soon as well.
Thirty-six hours in and awake, Bennett stared down at her hands; her previously symmetrical and now decidedly mismatched hands. The left hand was covered in bandages and splinted, but they had cuffed both to the desk, anyway. Protocol.
She tried not to think about kissing Caroline last night – no, it was the night before last, it had been more than a day. She tried not to think about the nauseating innocence with which she had gone into Caroline's wardrobe, looking for clothing for her first day at the new lab.
Well. She certainly had made some impression.
The interrogator was pacing, and Bennett thought about asking if they were going to make her a Doll.
Stupid question. Dolls were beautiful; they were also able, at least in body, which was the important and unfixable part. She already knew her hand was irreparable. She was worthless as a slave to Rossum, unless it was as a test subject, and others were less dangerous for those purposes. Bennett had designed many of the protocols used on them; she could easily disrupt them as well.
Most likely they would finish interrogating her and then shoot her.
Oh, god, Caroline, Bennett thought, and clamped it down. If they made Caroline a Doll, she would be safe, happy in her various personas, and much less likely to get herself killed than she was now . If they didn't--
Just as well that she had died without finding out what Bennett had done. Bennett tried very hard to convince herself of this, because she knew that if she kept thinking about Caroline, she would break.
Not that there was much for her to give away by breaking. Interrogation accomplished compliance rather than gaining information, which was probably why they kept asking her for records she and Caroline had kept. There was nothing to give them, there; only the endless repetition of truthful and useless answers that the interrogators, of course, assumed were lies.
No, her only accomplice was Caroline. No, she wasn't working for a group; if Caroline was, she had never told Bennett. No, they hadn't had a higher purpose or plan beyond the explosion.
The explosives were from a college lab. No, no one had given her access. She had put them together herself. She had had no accomplices putting together the explosives.
No, she hadn't been working for Caroline when she first started working for Rossum. No, Caroline didn't know about the Dollhouses. No, she had only told her that she was experimenting on mice. No, Caroline had no idea that she had ever worked for Rossum before.
Bennett had no idea if they gave up because they believed her or because they had decided continuing was useless. She had no idea if it mattered. She hadn't slept in seventy-two hours. More than that, because they had gone into the lab late at night; she hadn't slept in almost ninety hours.
She had totally lost track of the hours by the time the last interrogator left, replaced by a woman in a lab coat. Bennett stared at the needle sliding into her vein with some relief, and thought, so it wasn't a bullet.
She was both surprised and mildly distressed when she woke up.
The sheets were very white, and very stiff. The lights were fluorescent. Her mouth was very dry, and there was a strand of hair falling into her face and driving her slightly mad.
She was also restrained, tied down to the bed, and that was what made the words slip out, finally: “Are you going to make me into a Doll?”
“I'm sure you're already aware of the answer to that, Miss Halverson,” DeWitt said, from unnervingly close by on the side her head was turned away from.
Bennett turned her head and immediately regretted it; the world spun, and she bit her lip to stop herself from vomiting. Drugged, she thought hazily. The needle.
At least she had an excuse for asking stupid questions.
“My arm,” she said.
“Will most likely recover no function,” DeWitt said. “You may wish to have it amputated and replaced with a prosthetic.”
“I may wish,” Bennett repeated, dully. “You aren't going to shoot me.”
“On the contrary, Miss Halverson, you are a valuable asset. We don't dispose of those lightly.” DeWitt stood. “Those of your current projects that are transportable have been relocated to this building, with the exception of number 114, as it was agreed that allowing you access to potentially destructive materials was a poor idea at the moment. You will not be allowed out of the building, but you will have access to anything you require as long as it's approved by the security team. Your personal belongings have been searched and moved from your dorm room into the living quarters here, and I believe there is a map of areas accessible to you waiting with them.”
“I – I don't understand,” Bennett said.
“We considered making you into a Doll with a reconstructed version of your personality,” DeWitt said. “A more cooperative one, less inclined to feel guilt. However, there were problems; as the interrogators were unable to determine exactly how long you'd been working for Miss Farrell, we were uncertain how much of your memory would need to be modified, and it was also felt that some of your brilliant intellect – and, therefore, your use – might be... damaged by the procedure.”
“I see,” Bennett said, feeling as though she should be feeling something. The space in which the possibility of feeling existed, however, was hollow inside her. Her thoughts echoed across it.
Caroline was gone; she had nothing except her work, and that did not require emotion.
“I suggest you don't give us reason to reconsider that, again,” DeWitt said.
“Yes,” Bennett mumbled.
She would blame the following stupidity – the last she was allowed for some time – on the drugs. “What about Caroline?” she said.
“I'm afraid that Miss Farrell does not share your state of usefulness,” DeWitt said. “Consequently I believe security has disposed of her in a shallow grave somewhere.”
“Oh,” Bennett said, and let her head drop back against the pillow.
She supposed she should be thinking of escape. That it was possible was nearly unquestionable, if her requests were only being screened by an ordinary security team. You could make almost anything explode if you were determined enough and had a decent command of chemistry, and most of the locks in any of Rossum's building were electric, both hackable and physically modifiable.
She couldn't bring herself to care, just now.
She hated herself for the fact that the following three years were not, in fact, the worst years of her life.
She wanted them to be; she tried very hard to make them the worst. She put nothing into her office but bare necessities and sat in it for long hours, thinking about the interrogation. She pictured Caroline's reaction to every Doll they sent her; Dolls who had malfunctioned and needed to be studied, repaired if possible, sent to the Attic or disposed of if not.
She kept a list of all of those Dolls that were disposed of, to the Attic or immediately to graves. At first the list was in her head; when she realized no one really cared what she did, she kept it on paper in her bedroom. She didn't usually know their names, so she wrote down their designations, the dates and any personal information she gleaned from scraps of memory in the process of investigating errors: Daphne, January 28, favorite food was lemon meringue; Lima, June 16, competed in 4H as a child.
She looked at the names every morning, while she ate breakfast. She knew that her security team thought she felt guilty, as did her supervisors.
(“You don't care that I get attached to them?” she said, once.
“On the contrary,” the man in charge of the lab said. “You work harder when you're attached. You check everything twice, try very hard to save them. Our rate of disposal per quarter has halved since you began work. They're substantial investments for Rossum, you know. We appreciate that.”)
The truth was that she felt nothing. She looked at the list in an attempt to remind herself to feel guilty; she looked at the list and imagined Caroline berating her, telling her that her mistakes had gotten people killed, that she was a murderer.
That sometimes accomplished twinges of emotions.
Mostly, however, Bennett felt very little. Her life in the lab reminded her of middle school – the actual worst years of her life – that way; little flashes of emotion like flickers of light in a dark room. Like middle school, she woke, ate, worked and went to sleep alone, barely speaking except when necessary. Like middle school, people whispered and stared at her when they saw her; but unlike middle school, when they actually spoke to her it was invariably respectful.
She had anything she needed for experimentation as fast as Rossum could arrange it, and she had the command of the labs – provided she didn't try to escape. There was no question of funding running out, no scrabbling for grants, no grading or teaching class between lab work.
She could very nearly have convinced herself she had everything she wanted. It was everything she had wanted, anyway, and it was only at night, asleep, with her thoughts safe behind her closed eyes and lack of Active architecture, that she let herself think of what she was missing: Caroline.
Caroline would have wanted her to be miserable. She would have wanted her to rage against Rossum every day, cry over every death, scream at the guards and throw things and slit her wrists in the bathroom. Caroline would never have understood the impulse to give in and concede that Rossum was doing more good than harm, or at least giving her what she wanted. Caroline would have been strong.
Caroline would never have understood why she started working for Rossum in the first place, back when she was an undergrad – or why she went back, eyes wide open, to experiment on something more exciting than mice.
Three years into her captivity, Bennett had assembled a list of deaths long enough to fill several pages of her notebook, made four major breakthroughs in imprinting technology, and collaborated twice with a man named Topher as amoral as she suspected she had been herself before Caroline. She had also read a library's worth of books, learned to cook in the kitchenette in her bedroom, and adjusted to having one hand. Her typing speed on her adaptive keyboard was close to what it had been before, though it was obnoxious to have to take multiple trips when she carried objects from room to room.
Three years into her captivity, Rossum had gotten lazy, or complacent, or simply stopped considering how they had acquired their captive scientist, because they made a rather serious mistake.
The mistake was contained in the LA Dollhouse's security footage. She was in the process of investigating an error in the cognition of an Active called Alpha; unfortunately she didn't have the Active himself available because he had killed a number of people in the Dollhouse and then escaped. To her irritation, she had to make due with scans of a number of his personas, the recorded testimony of various witnesses, and security camera footage from the month before the incident.
The security camera footage, of course, covered the movements of all personnel in the Dollhouse, though only the portions concerning Alpha, his handler and what seemed to have been his direct targets had been copied for Bennett. She was skimming through the day before the massacre a third time, irritably composing an email to DeWitt explaining that she was a neuroscientist, not an FBI profiler, and consequently blood splatter was more or less meaningless to her, when she saw it.
Caroline.
Bennett froze for an instant, then deliberately moved to pick up her coffee cup. She forced her expression to calm – no, not back to lax boredom, she had moved and needed it to look natural. She glared at the footage and did not allow her eyes to track Caroline through the hall.
The Dollhouse might be a giant content it was bigger than all competition, therefore complacent most of the time – but if they had any reason to check the footage in her lab, they might notice.
She watched Alpha, and out of the corner of her eye she watched the door that Caroline – the other Active, an Active who might merely look like Caroline – had gone through.
Five seconds, six, she didn't dare speed it up and miss what she was looking for, and the door opened again. This time Bennett was completely sure; it was Caroline. Caroline Farrell had not been shot and dumped into a shallow grave, but turned into a Doll.
Most likely, her backup would be on file in the LA Dollhouse. Naturally Bennett couldn't just request it, but achieving physical access--
Well. They had just asked her to consult on an issue concerning a security breach. It was a spectacular one, on a scale easily adequate to explain unusual behavior on her part; and she could certainly come up with something she could do more easily on the scene.
She also could gain access to a great deal of information about the layout of the Dollhouse, as relevant to investigating a previous security breach as to causing another one. She had every excuse to ask for that material.
Bennett settled back into her chair. She took another sip of coffee. She let the tapes play out past Caroline's exit, and watched them for fifteen more minutes before she closed the tape.
She wrote the email after all, telling DeWitt that she had nothing to say about the massacre at great length in her usual irritable tone; she added one line at the end as a hook, offering that the capacity for problem solving shown by Alpha's circumvention of the security measures in the house was interesting and she had a few ideas, if DeWitt would send her more information on the subject. That information would provide her with an excuse to go to LA, and a means of breaking out again.
A means of rescuing Caroline.
The dark room where her emotions should have been was lit up brilliantly, doors and windows she had long since forgotten thrown wide. Light poured in, and hope, and a thousand things she had forgotten people could feel.
She had almost forgotten she was a person at all.
Bennett wanted to skip, to scream, to throw open the lab windows, to go to the bottle of wine in her fridge and get extremely drunk. She would do none of these things; she would finish up at the lab and go back to her bedroom precisely at the usual time. She would make dinner and eat it alone, read for an hour, and go to sleep.
Meanwhile, in LA, DeWitt would get her email and speak to her security officer. The information about the LA Dollhouse's layout and security would be sent to her. Bennett would make a plan; a good plan, a careful plan, nothing like the reckless idealism that had gotten her and Caroline into this situation in the first place. Her kind of plan – not Caroline's.
Then Bennett would come for her.
After three years, even to be hated by Caroline would be dizzying, like wine on an empty stomach.