Demitria Lunetta - In the End

We push past him into his lab and he closes the door behind us, locking it. The lab looks like a scaled-down version of the main lab, with equipment I couldn’t even begin to understand. At the far end is another closed door.

“How do you still have power?” Rice asks.

“I rerouted it from the main lab using my laptop.” Ken taps his computer. “When Dr. Reynolds made his announcement, I thought it was a drill, and when the power went out, I figured no one else would need it. . . .” He stares at Kay and me in our synth-suits. His eyes flick from me to her.

“Tell me one of you is Kay.”

Kay pulls down her hood. “You know I’m always showing up to save your ass.”

“I didn’t know my ass needed saving.” He motions around the well-lit lab. “As you can see, I’m doing fine here.” Ken grins, and I’m amazed at how similar they look. Before, when I saw them together on the hover-copter, I was in so much shock, I didn’t have time to process their similarities. They’re even the same height.

They may look alike, but I know there’s a huge difference in their priorities. I face Ken. “Where’s Brenna?” I ask. If she’s down here, she’s in danger too.

“She’s safe,” he assures me.

“And the camera?” Rice asks, motioning to where it hangs in the far corner of the ceiling. He looks at me. “Dr. Reynolds will know we’re in here now.”

As the words leave Rice’s mouth, the power fails and the door pops open.

Ken shakes his head. “No,” he says petulantly and too loudly. “I made sure I’d have power so I could finish my work.”

“Dr. Reynolds turned off the power,” Kay tells him. “He released the Floraes to kill us.”

Ken refuses to understand. “He wouldn’t do that. Not to me. My work is too important.” He folds his arms.

“Where does that door go?” I ask, motioning to the far end of the room.

“It’s . . . nothing.”

Kay steps up into his face. “There are at least twenty Floraes running around, if not more by now,” she tells him. “Where the hell does that door lead?”

“It’s . . . It’s my personal office. Oh, just go. It’s open. There’s a manual lock inside. There aren’t any cameras. I didn’t want anyone spying on my results.” As I head to the door, I feel a twinge of guilt over scrambling for cover when I should be rescuing Baby, but I know we have to regroup and formulate a plan.

Rice gets the door open and goes inside while Kay and I wait at the door for Ken. He opens a drawer and takes out a folder.

“The Floraes aren’t interested in your data,” I tell him. “You’re wasting time.”

“These are my notes.” Somewhere in the maze of the lab, someone screams. “I don’t know why Dr. Reynolds is doing this. . . .”

“Ken, hurry!” I shout. I can hear Them snarling from the hall. Ken runs to us and shoves his notes at me.

“Hold these. . . . I have to get the blood samples. They might destroy those if they smell the blood.”

“No—” Kay tries to grab his arm to haul him in the room, but he shakes her off. He doesn’t even make it halfway across the room before a Florae flashes in from the hall and takes him down. Kay rushes to his side and I try to go and help her, when Rice yanks me into the back room and slams the door shut, leaving me with a horrible snapshot of the creature perched atop Ken, ripping into the side of his face and lapping up his blood.

I push against Rice, who is latching three separate bolts. “I have to help Kay!” I scream at him, forcing him from the doorway. My hands shake as I undo the bolts while Rice pleads with me.

I can still hear Ken’s screams, until he falls abruptly silent. Rice is at my back and whispers, “I was just trying to save you, Amy. I wanted you to be safe.”

I pull open the door and am knocked aside by a figure in black. Kay. She enters the room and collapses onto the floor, her hood pulled aside. I join her on the floor. Dazed, I try to comfort her as she weeps into her hands. She looks up at me. “I couldn’t save him,” she whispers and, for the first time, I see Kay’s pain. Rice is with us now and pulls Kay to a cot in the corner. He makes her sit down so she can collect herself.

“Just . . . Let’s give her a moment,” he tells me.

My hood is stifling, and I pull it down to get some air. I feel numb. It’s as if seeing all this death has turned my insides to ice.

“Amy?” a voice behind me says, pulling me from my thoughts. I turn and find a familiar face staring back at me from a chair in the opposite corner.

“Brenna?”

She’s alive, and she looks healthy, her skin no longer a deathly paper white.

“It’s about damned time you showed up,” she tells me with a grin.

Maybe I’m not numb after all—when I see her, I’m so happy, I let out a tiny sob of joy.

I rush to Brenna and hug her. She still looks more fragile than before, but she’s better. Her skin is cool to the touch, meaning she’s probably beaten her infection.

Suddenly there is a frenzied scratching at the door. My head snaps around.

“They can’t get through,” Rice assures us.

I glare at him, still angry that he prevented me from helping Kay when she needed me most. Even if Ken was already bitten, I could have been at Kay’s side.

“Where’s Ken?” Brenna asks. “I can’t believe he let you guys in here. I haven’t seen anyone but him for days.”

“He didn’t make it,” I say softly, glancing at Kay. Her face tightens, but she closes her eyes and takes a breath. I know she is fighting her pain, trying to push it down until later.

“Oh, hey.” Brenna’s eyes widen. “You must be Ken’s sister?” Brenna asks. “Holy crap, you look just like him. Sorry about what happened. . . . I mean, despite the fact that he kidnapped me. He talked about you a lot. He wished he could have spoken with you more.”

Rice nods. “He was a good guy. He was a brilliant researcher.”

“Yeah, he was great,” Brenna says. “You know, except for the whole holding-me-against-my-will thing.”

I push Brenna with my elbow and shush her, but Kay just stares at us. For a moment I think she’s going to break down again, but instead she lets out a small bark of a laugh. “Ken was . . . complicated,” she says, her voice strong and clear.

“He was a genius,” Rice says quietly. “When I first met him four years ago, when this was still a university, he was one of the few people who was nice to me. Over time, though, he just got more and more secretive, more locked down into himself. Dr. Reynolds tends to bring that out in people.” He looks at me. “Amy, what do you have there?”

I’m still clutching Ken’s notes to my chest. “He wanted to save these. . . .”

Kay stares at them, then says to Rice, “Well, have a look. See what Ken thought was more important than his life.”

I hand the notes over to Rice, who takes them back to Ken’s desk and starts reading.

“I guess he did try to make me comfortable,” Brenna tells us, eyeing Kay. “He brought me books, which were way boring, but at least he tried. He talked to me about you, too,” she tells Kay. “The stories were pretty exciting. He was proud of you.”

“Maybe,” Kay tells us, her jaw tight, “you should all stop trying to comfort me about Ken for a moment and spend your energy trying to figure out how we’re going to get the hell out of here alive.”

We listen to the Floraes scratch and snuffle at the door and watch Rice riffle through Ken’s notes.

“This is pretty remarkable,” he says, bending low over them, oblivious. “He was getting somewhere.” He looks up at Brenna. “Did any of the other researchers visit you?”