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The last sky Janine sees is that of a bright, cloudless day in mid-July, sun beaming down on her shoulders with intent as he heads from the bus into the Optimology headquarters. It was a lovely day – any sane person would’ve taken the day off if they could, but something had just been itching at her to go and find out what was really going on behind those glossy double doors. Religious nuts always had something shady going on out of the public eye, whether that was culty practices or drug rings.
(Something was wrong here, she could tell that much.)
She’d made it in deep, or at least thought she had, past security cameras and Optimologists in their strange red robes, winding deeper and deeper through the sleek modern hallways into a building that she knew shouldn’t have been nearly that deep. It hadn’t been anything particularly juicy, an unauthorised underground extension wasn’t exactly front-page news, but it was something. And something small was always the first step on the trail to a much, much bigger story.
None of the files she found were of much interest, though, no matter how many offices she snuck into. Tax returns blurred into health inspections blurred into blah blah blah, up until two little words caught her eye. Biological resources.
What kind of religious movement had internal accounts of biological resources?
The same kind of religious movement that has some kind of labyrinth below their building, she supposed, but kept on reading, and flipped through the duller papers with a keener eye, settling down behind the desk she’d found them at with half an eye on the door. New security systems, construction costs, printing fees for books and pamphlets she knew Optimology had never distributed, not with names like that (“the Book of Victims” gets circled twice).
More interestingly, she finds juicier topics: lawsuits paid off before they could reach court, bribes given to keep prying eyes away from the headquarters. Medical supplies no building short of a hospital should be going through. Researcher salaries. Weapons.
Then, and only then, had she realised she might be in over her head. A distant sound down the corridor made her twitch, and the realisation that they were coming closer made her check her phone – she still had signal, just about – and quickly began typing out a report. She snapped picture after picture of the files as she bundled the few she’d scribbled on into her bag, the rest jammed back into their files and stowed.
If she hurried, the police might just find this place in time. She might not have been smart enough to get a job with a real paper, but she was smart enough to know people who spent that much on weapons and medical supplies didn’t let their prisoners go that easily.
With a last, triplicate tap on the keyboard of her phone, the report fired off.
Then, the people. The alarm going off. The protests that she was just a reporter, they were just a church, that she hadn’t seen anything weird, just in time for a blindfold to be wrapped over her eyes and her mouth taped shut. They had taken her down in the lift, and finally took off the blindfold right as they threw her into the cell.
Samantha – Dr Harty, please – had helped get the tape off her mouth, undone the cuffs still around her wrists after demanding the key from their guard on medical grounds. Infection, or some bullshit like that. The first words Janine ever said to her were thank you.
The first words Samantha said back were save it, before introducing herself.
She rolls her eyes when Janine tells her she’s a journalist, and looks smugly self-satisfied when she tells her how she ended up here. It’s irritating, but somehow…less, than it should be. God knows Janine’s met a million people who rolled their eyes at her, but it hits a little less hard when they just convinced a guard to uncuff you.
When Janine asks her how she ended up here, all Samantha tells her was that she was working for them, and they betrayed her. All she says when Janine asks what she did for them is, “That’s classified. I don’t want it all over the front cover of some cheap rag.”
Janine pauses a moment, thinks. Looks at the woman in front of her, with her tightly-tied hair, smudgeless glasses and bleach-white labcoat, like a picture cut from a new article, staring her down with her razor-sharp gaze. Then she says, “Would you be okay with it if I told you I worked for a reasonably-priced rag?”
And somehow, as if by magic, the terrible joke somehow makes the ice-cold woman locked in here with her snort. Janine does the polite thing and chalks it up to the situation, chuckling quietly alongside her like they’re not trapped god-knows how deep under a religious headquarters that turned out to be the kind of group that locks people in cells when they don’t want them talking. They laugh, quietly, and somehow talking is a little easier after that.
(Something is wrong here, still, in the stilted stiffness of Harty’s hands, her shoulders, her voice.)
What little of her eyes Janine can make out behind the flash of her glasses is grey. A deep, cloudy grey, like the sky right before it rains. Janine’s always loved rainy days, always found it a little easier to work under the soft patter of rain falling against the windows of her flat.
She – “Samantha, if we’re going to be working together” – proves sharp as a tack, the kind of working partner Janine would have killed for on an investigation before she learned the value of not getting dragged around. As it is, though, she almost appreciates Samantha leading every conversation, every plan, when she’s the one who actually knows the layout of the place. Considering Janine’s expertise is breaking into buildings and escaping without being noticed, the plan they make is actually something of a team effort.
The guard change is at the same time every day. Samantha knows the ways to the lifts, knows they’re the only way out, and that they’ll need an accepted ID to operate them. Janine knows how to subdue a person who wasn’t expecting it, and that people never brace for trouble when it’s after their break but still more than half an hour before the end of their shift. Together, they figure out the guards’ shifts always last for exactly six hours.
It still takes time to figure out: time to plan, time to track the guards, time to figure out the rhythm of this hellhole. Time to sleep, to eat, to talk. They have to do something besides stare at the walls and plan, after all. Not to mention that they can’t exactly chat about the weather.
At least the food is worth talking about, considering it’s almost perfectly managed to be terrible. Some kind of vegetable substance with chickpeas, served lukewarm with shitty little disposable spoons that somehow manage to taste more than the actual food. When she tells Sam that it makes sense for a pain cult to be this talented at making food terrible without being cliché, the other woman almost snorts it out through her nose.
Because that’s what they are, it turns out. Samantha tells her so on the second day. A pain cult.
Who knew that, rather than predatory recruitment tactics or insider trading, Optimology’s real secret was an inner cabal dedicated to the concept of pain. And she thought BDSM cults had fallen out of style!
Still, between the planning, the bad food, and the explanations about startup religions’ hidden secrets (hadn’t that been a fun conversation about Meridian Health Group, not everyone knew the bit about the branding) Dr Samantha Harty proves to be pretty good company. She keeps it quiet when Janine sleeps later than her, politely averts her eyes when either of them use the cell’s bizarrely loud toilet, and when Janine wakes up from another stress dream, she usually finds her already awake, reading some of the cult material that gets passed into their cell with their food. And she doesn’t even roll her eyes that much anymore when Janine jokes about them trying the Patty Hearst approach.
(She’s softer than she seems, in the quiet moments. When Janine sobs herself to sleep on the fourth night, balled up in the fetal position on her bare mattress, she wakes later in the night with Sam’s labcoat cast over her like a blanket. Sam is snoring on the other mattress, hair loose, a pamphlet still open beside her, and it doesn’t matter that Janine wakes up the next morning to find the labcoat back where it belongs on Sam’s shoulders. She remembers it happened.)
It’s early in the sixth night when Janine rolls onto her side and asks her, “Do you know what the deal is with that guard?”
Something about him frightens her. A twitch in her shoulders, a flickering instinct to run and hide. She recognises the man he’s dressed as – as much as the others, who or whatever they are – but that isn’t what makes her hands shake at the sight of him.
Sam’s mouth tightens, and Janine can see her hand clench up on her jacket for a moment – just a single, clean moment – before it relaxes. “No. Not enough, at least.”
“…Then can you tell me not enough?”
“I shouldn’t. I’ve seen how far you journalists can stretch a quote.” Despite the edge to her words, she’d said them with a soft, unnameable something to her eyes, and Janine had let the subject drop. She’d talked Sam’s ear off about early 21st century crime dramas instead until she’d finally heard the other woman start to snore, and didn’t say a word about it when the lights came on the next day.
Samantha’s eyes are blue. It’s hard to tell from behind her glasses, but whenever she takes her glasses off to try to sleep on the thin, barely-there mattresses that pass for beds here, Janine can see the space where the grey breaks into that soft, misty sky-blue. Clear sky through clouds.
It suits her perfectly.
Theo’s eyes are blue. Janine and Samantha find him when they hear a horrific, wet crash from the lift shaft, so unlike the usual sound of the lift coming down with another red-robed freak that her stomach flips before they even see him. They had already made it out of their cell: the breakout had been difficult, but Samantha knew how to guess the codes and she knew how to pick the old-style locks, because, after all, people knew better than to trust just a keypad to hide their secrets these days. There could be some kind of journalist sneaking around with a notepad and free time, god forbid!
But as for the lift, she had tried to bolt for the sound as soon as she heard it. Samantha had grabbed her arm to try to stop her, to pull her away now that the plan had gone south, but it had been useless when one of the cultists and his guard were already approaching. Janine had been the one to grab her arm instead and drag her to the lift, the smell of blood already thickening in the air as they approached, and once again it was Sam who talked the guard into doing what she wanted as the cultist dragged Janine away.
It was a long few hours before Sam came back. She’d texted Janine – Sam had told her that the local network still worked early on – but a text, even with instructions on what to do, hadn’t been the sight of her, and Janine had almost collapsed in relief when the door to the bunkrooms finally opened.
(With the guard gone the entire cellar was about as secure as a cereal box, and there was no point in staying once the cultist had sloped off to god-knows-where and the guard was busy guarding Sam. It was easy to break out again, so Janine had simply taken it upon herself to explore, and to find the weapons Sam had asked her to. The guns came out from the lockers in the bunkroom, and so she’d stashed them there while she took a look at the rooms around: it was only when she thought she’d seen someone skulking around the corridors, someone that wasn’t in Sam’s labcoat that she’d fled back there to hunker down.)
It hadn’t been Sam. It hadn’t been the guard, either
The man from the lift is half-dead, and looks it. Just from a glance Janine can see casts holding his arm and legs together, half his face black with bruises, stitches running beneath the hems of the torn, collared shirt around his body like trails of ants…in any other situation, she’d have demanded he get onto one of the beds and rest before something else snapped.
Now, though, she just asks his name.
Dacabe. It’s a strange name, but for once, she doesn’t press him on it. When he asks her for the guns Sam had wanted, she hands them over without question, not even to ask why Sam was asking him to carry the guns to her, and not Janine herself.
Sam’s smart. Sam was the one who figured out how to keep at least one of them out of the cell when their escape plan blew up in their faces, and Janine finds herself with no doubt that she’ll figure out how to carry it through, even now. She’ll get them out of there, all three of them. Janine knows she will.
(Something is wrong here, and it’s not just the dirt-floored corridor and the flickering torches on the walls like a medieval dungeon.)
It’s not that she’s afraid. She’s…nervous, but the guards shouldn’t be enough to scare her with a gun in her hand, right, even if there’s a horrible little feeling that a weapon won’t be enough to stop him. The only reason she hands the guns to Theo and doesn’t follow him is because Sam told her to stay put until she told her to move. That’s it. Her mouth doesn’t go dry at the thought of leaving the bunkroom again, Her hands aren’t still shaking from seeing someone down the corridor, and thinking for a moment – just a moment – that it was the guard again.
She stays there until she hears footsteps again, waiting there in the horrible, whining not-silence of the ancient fluorescent lights until the door opens once again. Theo limps in first, cast thunking on the floor with every staggered step, followed by…Sam. Still with her gun in hand, hair still neatly tied back as Janine rushes up to her.
“Sam!”
Only reflex holds her back from grabbing her by the hands, eager as she is that Sam’s alive, thank god, she’s alive – that, and the look on Sam’s face that stops her in her tracks.
“I’m sorry, Janine.” It’s the first time Janine has ever seen her look like she regrets anything, and it hits like a punch to the gut. “They overpowered us.”
The conversation continues, but she can barely process any of it besides that the plan had failed, again. That and that her call had reached the police all those weeks ago, and that help had been sent, only for that help to be…Theo. Who arrived, half-dead, after a cultist had shoved him down the lift shaft for coming to investigate an illegal extension. Because he was a council building inspector.
They heard her call, and all they sent was a building inspector. Not the police, not the fucking armed response. Just a building inspector.
God, she wants to cry.
Sam’s new plan is the same one as before. Overpower the guard and the cultist, get out – the same one that failed already. Theo interrupts them arguing about it to demand his own answers, and he gets them, as much as they can be given. It’s not as though she has any answers about the man in red that they saw, who apparently stopped the cultist and his guard from killing them both.
When they try the locks, they don’t work, because of course they don’t. That’d be too easy. It may only be a timelock, but it still seals them in, barricade and cell door combined with nothing to do but wait for morning, lights still whining overhead like unswattable mosquitoes.
Nothing to do but wait for morning. Thank god they’re in a bunkroom, even if all that’s present are only a pain cult’s idea of an actual bed. At least it was better than the cell mattresses. They even have blankets, and pillows, even if they’re practically paper-thin. Optimology is the kind of pain cult who have kneeling cushions to worship their god of pain, though, so she supposes they could be worse.
Theo falls asleep first, thank god, both for his sake and for theirs. He needs the rest, and she and Sam need to talk. Now. At least before dawn, before the doors open and they go and try to take down the cultist again.
She waits until they’re both settled on their bunks before she starts. “Sam. You can’t be serious about just… trying again.”
“Do you have any better ideas? If so, I’d love to hear them.” Sam’s in the middle of shucking her shoes before she goes to sleep, the stupid high-heels Janine still can’t believe she wore to do…whatever it was that she did here. “We’re locked in here until morning, anyway. That’s plenty of time.”
Janine scoffs, before lowering her voice to a hiss. This isn’t Theo’s argument, and she wants him to stay out of it – if he can even still be woken up by such little things as noises in the state he’s in. “It already failed! What more do you need to know?”
“The guard took us by surprise: it seems he wasn’t as neutralised as I’d thought. That won’t happen tomorrow.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I know them.” The words are neither a threat, nor insisted. Sam states it like a fact. The sky is blue, the mattresses are thin, and she knows exactly what the cultist and his creepy guard are going to do. “Canning will be locked up in his office, and he’ll have his pet guard outside, keeping watch. All we have to do is lure him away and take him down for good, and Canning will have to listen to us. He can’t talk his way out of a gun to his head.”
It’s more solid than she expected, somehow. She knows Sam used to work here – knows she did something, knows she won’t talk about it, knows they betrayed her and locked her away to make sure word would never get out – but it still feels strange that she knows more than the schedules and wider secrets. A thought of Sam and the cultists gathered around the breakroom drinking coffee comes to mind, ridiculous enough to only barely fail to crack her frown.
“…I’ll come help, once I know the guard can’t stop us.” The idea of facing one of them makes her skin crawl, but she thinks she can deal with Canning if she has a gun. All bets are off if she’s unarmed, though, it’s only fair.
Something about what she says makes Sam pause, though. Pause to direct a long, hard look at her, before she asks, “What’s gotten into you about the guards? You didn’t say anything about them before.”
“I don’t know. I can’t explain it, they just… creep me out.” Sam opens her mouth to say something, but Janine isn’t done. “Whenever I see them, I just feel like something terrible is going to happen if I don’t run away.”
(Something is wrong with them. Something at the very core of them, each and every one wrong in a way that sends goosebumps down her arms and a cold sweat down her back. She feels it, deep in her marrow, and something deeper still is what tells her that they’re a threat.)
Sam waits for a long, long few moments before responding, eyes locked onto Janine’s own like the scope of a sniper, sharp enough to pierce. Then, she says, “I suppose it can’t be helped. I’ll make sure you know when the guard is neutralised.” She keeps saying it like that: neutralised. “Then you can assist us with Canning.”
Janine nods, and it seems like that is that. Sam finishes getting undressed for bed; Janine just lies down, watching the bars of the bunk over hers as she listens to the whine of the lights and the soft rustles of Sam shedding her labcoat. Then, a creak of the bunk as she sits down, more rustling as she gets under the covers. A slide of paper against paper as she opens one of the cult books left by the bed.
There isn’t the intimacy of darkness, nor the privacy of the cell walls to shut out the world outside. Still, Janine rolls onto her side to look at Sam, sitting at the head head of the bed with her nose in one of the cult’s books.
She takes out her ponytail at night, and takes off her glasses to read before she sleeps – she did it even in the cell, but it’s still strange to see her without either, just as it’s strange to see her without her labcoat. Like a bird without feathers, or a tortoise without its shell. There’s a sharp kink to her hair just below her ears, probably where a hairband holds it in place during the day, and Sam keeps tucking it behind her ears to read and it keeps falling out. It’s cute. If Sam is even the kind of person that can be called cute, to be fair, even if Janine thinks she can.
Her eyes are sharp, even when she’s doing nothing more than reading books she’s told Janine are complete bunk. All the books here are crazy stuff about people their god’s favourite servant killed, and a mad prophecy about how a dead kid’s body, mind and soul being destroyed will somehow bring their god into the real world, for all the good bringing a god of pain into the world could do.
Sam reads the books like she’s researching them, learning their secrets, making a battle plan, even. Maybe she is. She’s smart enough to use the cult’s beliefs against them, to twist everything she can learn from them into a better, more efficient plan.
It’s still cute when her hair falls in her face.
Janine is still watching her when Sam’s sharp eyes glance over to her, and the other woman asks, “Can I help you?”
It’s not a warning, even though Janine’s face still goes beet-red. She rolls away, and hears Sam chuckle behind her, even as she digs her face into the thin pillow. Pain cultists and their terrible choices in bedsheets.
She stays there for what feels like hours, but can’t be more than a few minutes, not with Sam still awake behind her. The pillow is scratchy against her ear, her hair pinned against the side of her face. How long has it been since she’s washed it? All of her feels gross when she stops to think about it, like her skin doesn’t fit right, the dirt caught under her nails and on her clothes clinging to her in a scratchy, uncomfortable layer that she can’t wait to scour off.
With a sigh, she rolls onto her back, gazing up once again at the bars of the bunk overhead. A quick glance to her side shows that Sam’s slipped down in the bed, propping up only her neck and shoulders to keep reading under the ever-bright lights, stubborn until the end. She’ll probably fall asleep with the book still in her hands, and wake up tomorrow annoyed she’s lost her page.
It’s funny. She knows so much about Sam – probably more than almost anyone in her life, with how cold the woman acts – and yet she still knows so little.
That’s the thought going through her head when she asks, “Are you ever going to tell me what you did here?”
Sam freezes for a long moment. Janine can see that she’s stopped turning pages, stopped reading, but gives her the time she needs regardless. She’s rewarded when Sam sighs, shutting her book altogether and setting it down beside herself. “I wish you’d never had the chance to wonder.”
The honesty hits sharply, the downturn to Sam’s eyes even sharper. Something in Janine twitches at the sight of the other woman brought so low, twinges and shifts, like a needle shoved between the bones of her ribs.
“You wish-?”
There’s a pause, and a sigh. A rustle of sheets as Sam rolls onto her side.
“I wish,” And god, Sam’s hand is like ice when it wraps around Janine’s own, “That we’d met under better circumstances, Orzechowski.”
Janine laughs quietly at that, and it’s impossible to tell the source of the lump in her throat as she does so, just barely able to squeeze out, “Maybe I’d have come to interview you about a discovery you made.”
“More likely a rumour I was having an affair with a celebrity, and I’d have to convince you that all that’d happened was a sponsorship.”
She’s right, and that makes it funnier. Tonight isn’t a night for real laughter, not when Theo is still clinging onto sleep on the other side of the room, and when Janine thinks about it she hasn’t really, truly laughed since she’s got here, but they share a quiet chuckle all the same.
Sam returns to her book, afterwards, and Janine lets her gaze go back to the bunk overhead, all the grey-painted metal seeming a little less bleak than it had before. Not exactly lustrous, nor especially anything besides the bare minimum, but if she squints she can almost see a little blue in there – a little bit of light reflecting off of it, bringing out a tiny bit of iridescence to the paint.
She never wants to have to see this shade of paint again. She wants to go home to her shitty little flat with the grimy windows and her roommate who’s probably been wondering where she’s been for the past two weeks, considering she usually warns her when she goes haring off on an investigation that’ll take more than a few days. God, what she wouldn’t give to be in her own bed right now, with her own stash of pillows and blankets to sink into and let the world outside her window be muffled out of existence. The lights are still whining overhead, barely blocked out by the upper bunk.
“We’re getting out tomorrow.” Janine starts, turns to look at her, but Sam’s gaze hasn’t turned from her book. “There has to be a second exit – it’d be mad not to have one, when something as small as a blackout could take the lift out of service and trap everyone down here, and I’m certain I know where it is. If we can’t get out through the lift, we’re getting out through there.”
It’s reassurance. Given as she’s somehow always known Sam does, direct, blunt, never quite admitting to anything as unprofessional as a desire to make Janine feel better, but reassurance nonetheless.
“…Thank you.”
Sam turns another page. “Don’t bother thanking me. I want to get out of here too.”
Janine chuckles at that, and for a moment, one brief moment – everything feels like it just might turn out okay.
(Something is horribly wrong here, and it feels like an open wound waiting to happen.)
In the morning, Sam doesn’t ask her to leave the bunkrooms with her when she goes to investigate the corridor, just tells her that she’ll call her when she’s needed before she slips out the door. Janine sets herself up in the attached breakroom instead, reads a few books of the cult’s mad prophecies in lieu of anything better to do as she waits for her phone to buzz. It’s boring, but the safe kind of boring, the kind of boring she’s come to crave after a full week of boring meaning watching the guard outside their cell, waiting for him to switch with another guard to note down the time of shift change.
Theo must have woken up at some point, but he clearly didn’t bother with breakfast considering the first she hears of it is when her phone buzzes and it’s his voice on the other side.
(She can’t really blame him for not eating. If she was in the kind of state he is, she would be in much of a mood to eat anything either. Hell, from what little Sam told her about his injuries, he may not even have the kind of stomach he can eat with right now.)
They need her help to open the Hub, he says. She’s the only one that can help them.
Something in her rebels at the idea of leaving the bunkroom, the dull, claustrophobic four walls that are the only place she’s felt safe in in the last week. Even if Sam’s right, even if there’s a way out through the Hub they need her to open, the guard – her stomach twists horribly, an urge spiking to pry open the nearest locker and lock herself inside, to seal herself away where they can’t get at her ever again.
She’s the only one who can help them, Theo tells her again. The cultist is locked up, and the guard is dead, properly dead this time. At least she assumes so, based on the waver in Theo’s voice as he says it. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who can kill someone and just…walk it off. People sound more certain when they lie, she’s come to find, when they’ve rehearsed everything and can say it confidently. Honest people waver, stammer, misremember details; only liars can tell you everything without stuttering.
Regardless, Theo’s words draw her out of the bunkroom and down the hall, every step as quiet as she can make it, head on a swivel to meet the two of them at the door of a huge gate she’s never noticed before. It doesn’t fit the look of this whole place, really, but she knows better than to ask why a shuttle door is in a dirt-and-brick cellar, not when every word is more time for them to be found again.
Sam points her to one of the wheels on the sides of the gate, and takes the other herself. Together they spin them, raising the door, inch by inch – no wonder they needed her help, god knows Theo couldn’t have done this – but eventually the door is open, and the three of them are standing in front of it, nothing but darkness beyond. It’s bad news. She doesn’t have to be a journalist to tell them that, and she can tell Theo agrees, even if all he says is that it doesn’t look like a lift.
It’s bad news. She can tell, by the way the hairs on her arms raise and an urge rises to run from it, the distant breeze from inside stinking of cold dirt and smoke. Something is screaming at her to check that the guard isn’t here, isn’t lying in wait to ambush them inside.
We can’t go in there is what her mind screams at her to say. We’ll die if we go in there. You’ll die if we go in there. All that escapes from her suddenly-dry throat is “Sam.”
We’ll find another way. You have Canning, right? We can find his ID card, get the lift working again, go out through there. This way is just…
Sam doesn’t so much as twitch at the sight of it, even when Janine’s own instincts are screaming at her to flee, worse than the guards, worse even than when she was hiding in that office all those days ago, listening to the sounds of footsteps thundering down the hall. Something in Janine wants to reach out, grab her sleeve, demand another way.
But it’s Sam, isn’t it? She didn’t make it this far by backing down.
“Wait here. I’ll check it out.”
With that, Sam vanishes inside, the darkness swallowing her as completely as if she never existed to begin with.
In the silence that follows, Theo shares her thoughts – he knows it’s dangerous, asks if they should follow after her. It’d be a good idea, a great idea even, to give her some backup to face whatever lies inside the horrible blackness ahead, but… she can’t. Not now, not ever, not unless she knew exactly what was in there and what it could do, and it’s all she can do to brush him off with a nervous laugh and an offer to only do so if he goes first.
Theo has a broken leg, arm and neck. Somehow, she doesn’t feel as cowardly as she should for asking him to go first.
(He can’t feel the awful, horrific wrongness of this place like she can.)
It’s then that Sam stumbles back out, hands still stuck firmly in her pockets, blue eyes wide as saucers behind her glasses. They’re askew, just slightly. Like she’d tried to adjust them, but didn’t quite put them back on right – like she’d forgotten, somehow. She doesn’t say a word.
“…Sam?” The word echoes, more concern than inquiry, hanging in the air for a long, heady moment.
Sam’s glassy eyes twitch bulge in their sockets. Her shoulders sag. She coughs, just once.
Red spills down Sam’s shirt in a river, rich and bloody and terribly, awfully bright, a river of a more vivid scarlet than Janine could have ever imagined before this waking night terror of a week. A part of her realises that it’s the same colour as the cultists’ robes, and she just barely stops herself before she vomits.
Sam steps, stumbles, looks upwards at them both. Janine almost sobs at the look in her eyes – glassy, blank, yet somehow… afraid. Like she can’t see what’s in front of her anymore, but whatever was behind her was worse than oblivion.
Slowly, hesitantly, Janine reaches out to her. Her fingers brush Sam’s sleeve, tacky red clinging to her fingertips like paint, stinking of iron like the kiss of a gun.
It’s only then that Sam finally collapses.
They take her body to the medical room. It’s the only place they can think of, really, somewhere to keep the body until…until. Janine carries her. Theo opens the doors, and finds the blanket to cover Sam’s body with when just looking at the ruin of Sam’s throat makes Janine want to vomit. It’s respectful, and it’s practical, too, because even the constant chill of this place can’t keep her from decay forever. As awful as seeing her like this is, the barest idea of seeing her start to rot is worse.
So, they cover her with the cloth. Then, silence reigns.
Janine doesn’t know what to say – how could she? How could she put it into words? Sorry you died. Sorry I was too scared to go with you. Sorry I went to Theo when I heard him hit the ground. Sorry. Even if she could come up with a chain of words that didn’t start and end with sorry, the lump building in her throat forbids anything but a tiny, hitching sob from making its way out. Theo says their goodbyes instead, and somehow Janine finds herself both grateful for and angry at the act.
It’s not – he’s not bad at it. He says the right things. Your sacrifice won’t be in vain. We’ll get out of here, and bring help. I wish I could have known you for longer. It’s just…
There’s a certain emptiness to his eyes as he speaks. Not despair, not grief, just…blankness. Like a priest at a funeral, reciting a eulogy for someone who didn’t know and doesn’t miss. The realisation makes Janine’s stomach flip, even if she knows the nausea that rises in her throat isn’t logical.
Theo hadn’t known Sam like she had. She was...cold, yes, direct, almost scarily cynical, but Theo hadn’t seen the person she’d spent so many hours with in that cell. Theo hadn’t sat with that Sam under the heavy gaze of the security cameras, figuring out how to make their escape under the nose of the people who’d locked them in. Theo hadn’t seen the Sam that had held her gaze and whispered to her that, no matter what, she’d make sure the two of them got out of there. He hadn’t met the Sam that told her about the wild nights out when she was still getting her degree, about the skies in Puerto Rico, the exact ins and outs of how she’d fucked up an experiment in her second year bad enough that the entire lab needed decontaminating.
The Sam who held her hand when the cell felt so close she could cry.
It’s not fair. It’s not fair.
Storming out of the room is more of a dream than a memory, less of a dream and more of simply being outside, back digging into the ancient stone walls, cold seeping into her legs from the dirt floor. She’s curled up, back to the wall and arms wrapped around her knees, eyes damp, throat aching. Her teeth are clenched hard enough to hurt.
It’s not fair.
Sam is gone. Sam is gone, and Theo doesn’t care because he never knew her. Sam is gone, and she never got them all out. The realisation pierces down to bone, to the marrow beneath, flaying down further into the very core of her. Sam never got them out, and she never will. She’ll never do that little glasses-flash that Janine knows she must’ve practised to get right, or snort at a joke that took her off guard, or snore in her sleep again.
She won’t be there when Janine wakes up from a nightmare, not saying a word as she turns another page, letting Janine come to in the silence.
She won’t be there. She won’t be anywhere, ever again.
Janine feels cold. She feels empty. She feels the places in her forearms where her nails have dug in, tight and unforgiving, the realisation that Sam’s promise was broken more painful than any cut ever could’ve been.
She thinks about the sky. She thinks about Sam’s eyes. She thinks about Sam’s throat, open and bloody.
She thinks about home.
She thinks, for a single moment, about her father.