THE BLUE ROSE

PART 3: IN THE CHAMPAGNE ROOM

Chloe’s almost shocked not to hear screaming when she wakes. Despite the horrific events of what she’s choosing to call the previous day, things seem calm in the staff room, where the shutters are still closed and the survivors still variously huddled in anxious knots and sleeping fitfully with rolled-up jackets and coats for pillows. No panic, no peril, no terror. No Jessie, she remembers belatedly, with a deep and unexamined grief. Chloe herself feels disgusting: her hair and makeup are a mess and her clothes are creased and dusty from sleeping on the floor, and her deep-seated drive to keep herself primped and pristine is pulling hard at her mind, making it difficult to focus on anything but the need to please. With the exception of the most agonisingly protracted punishments (and perhaps technically the all-school mud-wrestling tournament), Chloe has rarely actually felt dirty since she was remade, and it’s not a sensation she’s enjoying one bit. Lottie and Nicci are stirring, too, disturbed by Chloe extricating herself from the three-part tangle they’ve made of their limbs overnight, and the two of them wordlessly turn smeared doll-eyes and confused pouts from her to the huddle of nervous staff gathered by the door.

“-don’t see why they wouldn’t tell anyone,” someone says, sounding distraught.

“For the last time, I’ve been on the fucking door all night, and nobody left,” replies Warner, clearly exhausted and on his very last, most terminally frayed nerve.

“So you’re saying three people just disappeared, are you?” scoffs another voice, high-pitched and oppositional.

“Considering what’s been going on, can you really be sure they didn’t?” the first speaker replies, very obviously a man on the edge.

“What’s been going on is that we’re under attack,” says the woman, with the certainty of someone whose rationalisations are all that’s standing between them and a screaming breakdown. “Hallucinogens in the water, or high-frequency sound, or microwaves, maybe. And while we’ve all been stumbling around seeing monsters and nightmares and all sorts of nonsense, their people will have been in and out with all our secrets before anyone even noticed. I guarantee it; now we’ve gotten whatever it was out of our systems, we’ll see just what the bloody hell is that?”

This last part is accompanied by a wet bubbling, tearing sound, and now there certainly is screaming, because the three missing members of staff have come back.

There’s an uncovered mirror in one corner, half-hidden by the heavy bookshelves, Chloe sees as she hurriedly slips into her stilettos, and helps Lottie and Nicci to do the same. Someone must have removed the sheet from the frame in the throes of either delusion, denial or external influence; that’s how the missing trio were taken, she concludes, and that’s how they’ve returned, but certainly not unchanged. The grotesque figures at the centre of a rapidly expanding stampede of panicked staff look like reflections in shattered glass, but cast impossibly in solid flesh; they’re split, vivisected by a web of jagged lines, as if they’ve been sliced through by some too-perfect edge then crudely reassembled, asymmetrical and raw, each dripping piece slightly out of place and held to its neighbours by stringy red filaments that stretch and contort with revolting sounds as they advance.

“We have come have come have commme to spread the worrrd,” says one of the three, naked and buzzing, lurching forward clumsy and puppetlike on legs chopped into a dozen ill-fitting parts, straining and stretching horribly as they shamble along.

“Rejjjoice,” chorus the other two, voices similarly mushy and glottal. “Rejoice annnd sinng! The day is here is hhhere and all are welcccome in the great cold mmetal pushhhing through skin the vvvein contorts I feel it movinnng but it is not mme I am I ammmnn.”

The lead returnee abruptly lunges, arms elongating as their lengthwise segments slip apart along fibrous red faultlines to reach further than should be possible and pull a lagging technician into a crosshatched embrace. Sasha screams in disgust as the former woman’s sectioned hands sink through her victim’s clothing and skin while the man gasps soundlessly and jackknifes like a dying fish. Then there’s an almost indescribable, sense-defeating noise, like breaking glass might sound if glass were meat, and a tortured, animal lowing and a split-second crack, and the victim is shattered too. This process is almost worse for how sudden it is; it’s as if every part of the man’s body is pulled in different directions along invisible joins, each hunk of skin and muscle and bone yanked apart a few centimetres, starting at the points where his assailant’s hands are buried in his back and radiating out like a spiderweb. The same wet, red ligaments keep the quivering pieces of flesh loosely bound together as what used to be a person regains its feet, stumbling like a broken doll, and through lips split impossibly into multiple pieces, bubbles the word “Rejjjoicce!” in a voice of liquid ruin.

“Thhe light shall strikke shhhall strike the Lennnss and refracct and refffract and refractttt,” says one, stopping and cocking its head as if to listen to a song none of the girls can hear.

“The prissson shall shatterr at laaasttt,” replies another, an older woman with her whole skull split into four unequal parts, the white of bone and the grey of cerebral matter visible between those thick red strands. “Rejoiccce! Rrejoice and sinngggg!”

Nicci, Sasha and Cecily are fully in the grip of screaming panic by this point, cowering against the wall and the shuttered window, and Chloe feels like she’s come unmoored from her body as she watches all four shattered husks each take another victim in their arms. A cacophony of unhearable sound briefly drowns out the screams and shouts of the surviving staff, and the lurching creatures’ numbers are doubled; Chloe can’t imagine how the girls are possibly going to get past them to the door. She’s desperately trying to communicate to the shrieking Nicci and the dumbstruck, aghast Lottie that they need to make a dash for it while the former staff are occupied, before eight become sixteen, when she distinctly hears Warner’s voice say “Fuck this,” in the same weary tone she’d expect if he was sick of paperwork. Then a rapid fusillade of shots cuts through the panic and the awful noise, and if the bullets slamming into the heads of three of the monsters don’t put them down then they certainly give them pause, shattering and splintering their flesh along fresh faultlines, leaving them staggering and keening as they reckon with their altered shapes.

“Move it, cunts!” Warner bellows, and it takes Chloe a second to realise he’s referring to her and the others. In fact, to her utter disbelief, he actually seems to be prioritising them, directing his men to open a path for the girls to escape while the remaining staff scream and struggle unaided. A few survivors are shoving and clawing their way toward the door in an animal frenzy, and one wild-eyed, terrified guard is ignoring Warner and firing long bursts into the creatures pursuing them, almost as many of his bullets impacting human flesh as the monsters’, but otherwise the girls appear the primary focus of their keepers’ efforts.

“Nics, Lottie, come on!” Chloe gasps, taking a wrist in each hand and half-pulling the pair of them past the reeling, shattered things, hugging the right-hand bookshelves and trusting Sasha and Cecily to stay true to form and look out for one another. She sees one of the nascent wives from the senior class crying and begging what remains of her classmate to stop, to say something, to remember what they’ve been through together, as the mumbling remnant lunges in to take her; Chloe grips Lottie and Nicci all the harder, haunted by the certainty she’d be doing the same in the luckless girl’s position.

“Come on, come on, move!” Warner yells, firing another deafening burst past the fleeing girls, and the answering shriek is so close behind that Chloe immediately thinks, panicking, that he must have hit Sasha or Cecily, before she’s roughly grabbed around the shoulders by one of the guards and half-dragged, half-thrown out the door, away from the chaos and into the eerie quiet of the corridor, to land on her ample butt alongside a ragged little group of traumatised-looking staff. Nicci and Lottie are bundled out beside her, and as she staggers back to her feet, steadying herself against the wall opposite, the last thing Chloe sees through the opening are the faces of Cecily and Sasha, whole and unhurt and frozen in disbelieving shock as Warner’s men slam the door on them.

Before the bolt even slams home, Chloe’s bellowing at the top of her voice at the guards and Warner himself. “No, no, what the fuck are you doing? Open the fucking door! Sasha and Ceci are still in there! They wasn’t touched! They’re fine! You gotta let them out, they’re gonna-

Chloe only stops shouting when Warner delivers a ringing smack to the back of her head, startling her into brief, blinking silence.

“Be grateful we bothered to save you, bitch,” he growls, hot and loud right in her ear, and Chloe’s traitorous libido makes her shiver with arousal even as she fights to keep her anger and grief from driving her to do the unthinkable and kneeing Warner right in his capacious balls.

“Sash… Cecily…” Lottie breathes, reaching pointlessly toward the door, from behind which the sounds of violence and terror can still be heard. Nicci erupts into even more dramatic sobs as she absorbs the fact their classmates are really gone.

“We can… we can get them back, right?!” she sniffs. “If we stop it? If we find Vivi and tell her… and make her stop, they’ll be okay, right?! Sashie and Cici, they… they’ll be okay!?!”

“The lot of you, shut the fuck up!” Warner barks, clearly at zero patience, levelling his gun in the girls’ direction. “We are not finding anyone. We are not saving anyone. We are getting ourselves out of here. And if anyone decides to play silly fuckers, I will shoot them in the fucking head, do you understand? You and you, do you know how to use one of these?” he demands, waving a serious-looking handgun stock-first toward marginally the more together-looking of the four remaining staff, an unfamiliar man and woman who shakily respond in the affirmative. “Right. You will be at the rear: you will call out anything even slightly troubling that you see, you will stay with the group, and you will not fucking fire without my express permission. Do I make myself clear?”

Both newly-armed survivors, one with Warner’s sidearm and the other with one of the guards’, nod a little too sharply, checking their weapons with what Chloe can only hope is a basic level of competence. There’s a tent in Warner’s pants, presumably from getting to exercise his authority so bluntly, and if he’s aware of the three pairs of eyes following it - because even Lottie’s not immune - he’s doing a good job of disguising it. “Hawley and Parish, up front with me, and keep that fucking gear secure if you know what’s good for you,” he says, indicating the hefty packs and kit bags carried by both guards. Even amid the fear and grief some part of Chloe wonders why Warner bothered to save the bags, but it’s very much at the back of her mind as the girls are roughly shoved into the middle of the group. “You useless sluts stay between us and keep the fuck quiet,” Warner hisses. “If they make a fuss, you’ve got my permission to give them a little tap, and if they try to run then shoot the stupid cunts,” he tells the others. Chloe usually gets weak at the knees and damp in the panties hearing Warner giving orders, but she’s surprised to find all she feels is afraid of him and of what the seething mass of fear and overcompensatory anger driving the man might make him do, because it’s clear he hasn’t saved them out of the kindness of his heart.

“Sorry, Nics, but I think they’re gone,” Chloe murmurs, out of a sense of obligation not to leave the poor girl under any illusions. The trio are led sullenly away from the staff room, hemmed in front and back by gun-toting Blue Rose employees and feeling none the safer for it. The door has stopped banging and rattling now, and from inside there’s the unmistakable sound of wet, glottal voices raised in unison, chanting or singing words the girls can’t decipher but which make them feel oddly dizzy when they try to, a development which has clearly factored into Warner’s desire to get moving.

Nicci sniffs and dabs at her thoroughly ruined eye makeup with her one remaining pom-pom, which she miraculously still has hold of, and has taken to clutching like a security blanket. “It’s okay, Chlo, I know. I’m just… I’m just so scared and sad. Sasha and Ce… and Ce… they were always so nice, and pretty, and Ceci made my name sound all sexy and Sasha would let me braid her haaaaaiiiirrrr, and it’s not… it’s not faaaaiiirrr!!!” she wails, and with that she’s absolutely gushing tears again, and Chloe takes a tight hold of her hand and pulls the smaller girl close against her side.

“Are you doing okay, Chlo?” Lottie whispers, on Chloe’s other side. “I mean, considering.”

“I’ll do, innit,” Chloe replies, tears running silently down her own cheeks for Sasha and Cecily and Jessie and the four meagre piles of ash in the dorm, putting on a half-hearted smile nonetheless. Lottie takes her other hand, and the contact is more of a comfort than she’d have thought, so the three of them stay like that as they’re chivvied along between their captors-slash-protectors, hands clasped tight and bodies pressed together. One of the staff sniggers at them, presumably thinking of the men they used to be and how they’d have reacted to seeing themselves holding hands in their skirts and high heels, but Chloe can’t even bring herself to find the mockery arousing; instead she glares darkly at the floor and grasps even tighter to the only two people she truly cares about in the world.

-

The passage of time has not improved the state of what Fitchley referred to as the mirror-maze. In fact, things are clearly deteriorating fast in the halls of the Blue Rose, and despite regular muttered statements of disbelief from the guards and staff, nobody can seriously deny that reality is by this point completely out to lunch. The spaces the group passes through are just about recognisable, and continue to resemble the map of the facility in some very loose sense, but nothing has been left unaltered; vaulted ceilings and hardwood panelling intersect at uncomfortable angles with pillars and arches carved from some chthonic black stone, etched with disturbing bas-reliefs fleetingly revealed by the guards’ roving torchbeams and gone again as if slithering back into the dark. And it truly is dark: where windows are present, and the malfunctioning shutters are either open or - more worryingly - torn clean away, outside is only more blackness, lawn and sea and rocky shore swallowed entirely by the improbable night. The one guard who pressed his face against the glass for a better look has been tremblingly pale and silent ever since, and spends a lot of his time scratching frantically at the shredded skin of his arms and face.

The group travels across what might still be the staff and teaching wings unchallenged by anything or anyone, scant comfort considering the suddenness of what happened in the staff room, and the scuttling and just-in-earshot mumblings echoing out of the dark in front and behind. Warner leads with what seems like unshakeable confidence, and Chloe has no idea whether she’s more afraid that he’s leading them in endless circles out of an inability to admit he’s lost, or that he knows exactly where he’s going, and where that information might have come from. There isn’t one among the staff and guards who she hasn’t caught muttering incomprehensibly to themselves, who hasn’t reacted violently to a presence only they seemed to see, and in a handful of cases, fired a wild burst into the looming dark and been reprimanded harshly by Warner. That something is worming its way progressively further into their heads seems painfully clear, and Chloe’s left perplexed as to why she, Nicci and Lottie seem so unaffected. Since the trip to the morgue the previous day, she’s come to admit, reluctantly, that some of the thoughts and images sleeting through her mind might not be entirely her own, but she’s so used to the regular intrusion of huge imaginary cocks, gallons of cum and rippling male bodies into her mind’s eye that the faint, beseeching whispers and unsettling images are easy enough to ignore.

Even if nobody dares acknowledge it openly, and the mere suggestion has already been enough to spark arguments that have almost led to violence, there are definitely things moving in the dark. Low, creeping silhouettes rustle and mutter just beyond the guards’ torchbeams, but whatever is out there seems content to watch and wait, leaving the survivors to stare terrified into every nook and corner and to grow more and more panicked and jumpy with every dry slither and quiet chuckle from the shadows. Eventually, after a huddled dash across a particularly ominous iteration of the main hall, where the high ceiling slowly recedes upward into the blackness with a sound like a hundred nails scraped down a pane of glass, Warner keys open a recessed staff-only door and ends up somewhere the girls immediately recognise: the other end of the service corridor which opens on the communications room, still familiar even if it now twists and contorts through multiple complete rotations along its length, leaving doors hanging open on the ceiling and floor, spilling their rooms’ contents into their deadfall counterparts beneath. The entrance to the comms room is only a few degrees off, which speaks to either implausibly good luck or invisible assistance, and Warner kicks the door open in its warped frame without expressing surprise or suspicion.

“Stay here. Keep your eyes open,” he grunts, shouldering past his guards, making no effort to close the door behind him. Chloe isn’t sure whether he’s decided they’re past the point of secrets now, or whether he expects to be the only one walking away, and neither thought is especially comforting. Inside the room, Warner cycles methodically through satellite radio frequencies, calling forth blasts of almost-comprehensible static and snatches of eerie, atonal song before he zeroes in on a calm, composed voice.

“-ssage repeats. This is an emergency broadcast for the Commonw -kkhcch- lia. A serious natural disaster has disabled communications and made outside conditions potentially hazardous. You are advised to remai -hhtcchkt- rs, to lock doors and windows and to avoid contact with unknown parties. Cover or destroy all mirrors and reflective surfaces. Repeat: cover or destroy all mirrors and reflective surfaces. Do not answer telephone calls, and -kkkchhhttch- the sky. Message repeats. This is-“

The numbers roll forward under Warner’s trembling hands, eventually locating a studiedly bland English accent.

“-re seeing here is impossible, Trevor. It’s as -hhtccchh- skyline is splintered into pieces, and there’s no way the buildings should possibly still be standing, but it does appear that they are. Workers from the offices are running, screaming, there’s total panic, and- oh, there are people, they’re -kkkhcht- gathered around the base of the Shard, and -shsskch- praying, oh god, are those their arms? I’m not sure what I’m seeing here: they must have been badly injured or, or I don’t know, I -kcssscht- floating, up into an enormous circle in the air, and… oh. Oh. It knows us, Trevor. It knows us because it’s always been there, looking back from our reflections. It’s seen everything, Trevor, all our sins and our shame. It knows what I did, Trevor. It knows, and It sees, and nothing we do can change that, so I ha… I have, I have to. I ha, huh, huurhgghhh, hah, huuhhahahaha…”

“Marie? Marie, are you… Marie? Ah… we, ah, seem to have lost the video feed, I’m afraid, but I… if the images we just saw were somehow real, and the ongoing dis -kkkhhhcht- firm that, then all I can say is… may god help us all.”

Warner searches on, alighting briefly on similarly desperate transmissions in Thai, Arabic, Russian, passing through bands of wailing that make patterns dance before the listeners’ eyes, quiet sobbing in what could be one or ten or thousands of voices. When he pauses, Chloe notices a light marked ‘CRYPT.’ blinking red on the control board.

“-elieve there’s some kind of an origin point to this madness, and -hhchhht- n end to it once and for all. The President has authorised any and all measures necessary, up to and including a nuclear strike. We’ve got our b -chhttth- nalysts on it, and I’m told they’re making progress triangulating a source. -ttcttcht- fueling as I speak. The -kkchhhhc- ve a target we are ready to bring the hammer down. That is all.”

“God, this is worldwide,” Lottie breathes, eyes wide, heedless of the pair of guards twitching and muttering beside her in the eerie, empty silence that follows.

“Everything will be different. That’s what Violet said,” Chloe replies quietly, sounding bleak and feeling almost out of hope.

“Then we’ve got to stop her!!” Nicci declares, surprising everyone, including apparently herself. “I mean, like, duh, we can’t let the world end! Right?? If there’s no world then there’s no Daddy, and no headpats, and no tiny lil sexy outfits that make your boobies look great, and no fancy parties and no big tasty cocks!! I don’t wanna live in a world where there’s none of that stuff because there’s no, like… world!!”

“Fuck yeah. You’re right, babes. Violet knows us; I think she’ll listen. We still got a chance here,” Chloe says, buoyed up by Nicci’s surprisingly effective motivational skills. “We just gotta make her see reason.”

“I suppose we can try to find her,” Lottie says, although she doesn’t sound especially optimistic. “The old creep said something about a lens? Any idea where that might be?”

“It doesn’t matter, because we aren’t fucking looking for anyone, or didn’t you hear me before?” Warner snarls, barging back out of the comms room and shoving Lottie hard up against the wall. The wash of voices from the speakers has been replaced by a stop-start tone, somewhere between Morse code and an old modem, crackling out in a staccato pattern that clearly means something to him even if it’s opaque to everyone else.

“What’ve you got, Sir?” the marginally more together of the two guards dares to ask, hefting his bulging pack as if to emphasise his dutiful service.

“The bolthole,” Warner replies, looking smug while a wide-eyed Lottie is still pinned under his arm, her giant chest heaving with quick, frightened breaths. “A secure offsite bunker for the VIPs and management, just in case the shit came down hard on this fucking place. Not that they had this particular kind of shit in mind,” he adds with an unexpected bark of laughter, shoving Lottie aside as if he’s decided she isn’t worth the effort. She almost falls, her centre of gravity being what it is, but Chloe moves to steady her just in time. “Needs all sorts of codes and authorisations to get in, of course, but I’ve got that sorted. The transponder’s up and running, the evacuation launch is still in the dock, and I can’t think of a better place to ride this shitshow out than a billionaires’ private hidey-hole, can you?”

“Sir, no, sir!” the guard replies crisply. In Chloe’s professionally submissive opinion he’s slightly over-egging it, but the good-soldier act seems to please Warner, who’s in a worryingly manic mood since he found the transponder signal, and seems so brittle that she’s anticipating explosive violence the second something doesn’t meet his immediate approval.

“So you see, nobody’s pissing about trying to save the world or whatever,” he says, face shoved an inch from Lottie’s, threat radiating off him like furnace heat. “Leave that to the cunts with the fancy planes and bombs, darling. You and me and the rest of us are going to get nice and comfy and wait for this all to be over, and then we’ll see what we can see. Understand?”

“Yes, Sir,” Lottie murmurs meekly, but there’s defiance in her downcast eyes, even if only Chloe and Nicci know her well enough to see it.

“And you… hhnn… you know the way to these boats, do you?” one of the staff asks with decidedly less deference, clutching at his head and staring nervously into the deep, yawning darkness.

“I know where to go,” Warner answers, and it’s clear he believes that’s sufficient. There’s something febrile and dark behind his eyes as he stares into those same depths, and Chloe can easily understand why nobody dares question him further.

-

In the face of the man’s cast-iron certainty and deteriorating mental state, the girls’ only option is to plunge back into the shadowy maze with him, plodding along in grim silence, waiting either for one of the vague shapes breathing in the dark to finally come for them, or for somebody to snap. The tired, footsore procession traverses classrooms and offices and empty halls; at one point progress is blocked by an indistinct thing that hauls itself wetly into the middle of a narrow service corridor, the guards’ torchbeams sliding off it like oil on water, chattering in a voice Chloe finds naggingly familiar. A few short bursts of gunfire from the guards see it rustling off into the dark, chuckling like the whole thing’s been a giant prank. Nobody can say how long they spend trudging through the nightmare maze, nor how much progress they might have made toward their goal, but the frequency with which the staff and even the pair of guards challenge Warner seems to increase in direct proportion to his fast-dwindling certainty. None of the Rose employees are bothering to hide their faltering grip on reality by this point, ranting and shrieking and sobbing unexpectedly, murmuring disturbing answers to questions nobody asked, and are being kept from running howling into the dark only by a combination of cajoling, threats and the occasional violent outburst from their leader, who’s barely holding together any better himself.

“This was supposed to be it!” Warner barks explosively, slamming a meaty hand against the wall blocking yet another nonsense snarl of architecture. “I followed the… this was the right fucking way, I know it was, so what the fuck is this?” he demands of the wainscoting. “Right, fuck it, turn around. We must have gotten off track somewhere. Chop chop, get moving, come on,” he snaps, suddenly all brusque enthusiasm. The girls’ feet are hurting badly by now, but the thought of going without heels is as intolerable as the day the compulsion was etched into their brains, and the situation doesn’t exactly invite asking for a break. Chloe has one of Nicci’s arms clasped around her shoulders to let her take some of the weight off, and is trooping dutifully along behind what has become a ragged, disorganised group, silently certain that Warner is picking directions at random and is too egotistical and fragile to admit it. For what must be the fiftieth time she’s considering potential opportunities for the three girls to make a break for it, more certain than ever they’d be better off without both automatic weapons and the decreasingly steady hands holding them. Unfortunately, they’re presently halfway down what might almost be the long, straight corridor between the girls’ dorm and the trophy shelves, but carved mostly out of black stone and illuminated by great, searing pulses of a sourceless not-quite-light that shoots down its length with a sound like cracking ice and affords exactly zero opportunities to slip away. It’s as one of these unearthly waves passes, leaving the staff and guards moaning and clenching their teeth in pain but the girls curiously untouched, that the group first hears a chorus of giggles echoing out of the grasping darkness both ahead and behind, and raises weapons in a poor approximation of readiness.

“Who’s there? Show yourselves, now!” Warner demands, sounding less commanding and more scared than he might have intended. The voices respond by drifting closer, breaking into full-blown peals of high-pitched laughter at the nervous darting motion of the man’s torchbeam, while keeping just outside the radius of the light. Lottie elbows Chloe, who nods, eyes wide; all three of the girls know that cruel, cut-glass laugh entirely too well.

“Hello, Mr Warner!” calls Margot sweetly, shrugging off the darkness like a cloak, pale, icily beautiful face revealed suddenly mere feet from the lead guard’s. She’s flanked by four of her classmates, and a flurry of nervous glances behind reveals the other five, standing stock-still and oddly loose-jointed in the pulsing unlight. All of the wives are naked, and their surgically-sculpted curves and high, faux-natural tits look somehow even more perfect than usual, as if the collapse of rational reality has been good for their skin; if anything they’re too flawless, more like life-size porcelain dolls than human beings, and their eyes reflect the light in a way that makes Chloe think of hard, cold things buried deep under the earth.

“Stop pissing about and get the fuck over here, sluts!” snaps Warner, oblivious to the signs everyone whose mind isn’t halfway out to lunch can clearly see. Nicci’s jumping up and down on the spot and flapping her hands, mute with fear, desperately trying to attract his attention, but neither he nor any of his armed subordinates notice or care.

“And Chloe, Lottie and Nicci, too! So good to see you, girlfriends!” trills Margot, and there’s a strange undertone to her speech, a second voice spitting mangled vowels laden with anger, hurt, the most abject misery. Chloe and Lottie pull Nicci toward the wall as Margot takes a step forward, a bright smile pasted on her face, and five guns are waveringly raised to point in her direction.

“Oh now, there’s no need for that, my dears,” Margot purrs. (No want no need unasked undone but what matters anything now?) shrieks the second voice, simultaneously. The girl’s lithe body slinks another few steps forward with her familiar hip-wiggling gait, for all the world as if she’s back in Seduction and Self-Objectification class. “We just wanted to catch up with our (catch snatch latch me lock my flesh and lose the key) favourite little serving-girls, and show you the lovely gifts our tall, dark, handsome new suitor was kind enough to bestow. What’s wrong, Lottie? No snappy little comeback this time? Cat got your tongue, hmm?”

“I said stop, bitch!” Warner bellows, giving the girl no time at all to acquiesce before he squeezes off a deafening burst of gunfire directly into Margot’s smiling face. Impossibly, she dodges, twisting to the side in a sudden blurred burst of speed, and it’s now that the truth of what she’s become is revealed; fused to Margot’s back is a second face, a second torso, another set of hips and arms and legs, bent and wasted with horribly discoloured skin hanging loose. It’s from this second Margot that the tortured voice emanates, as she writhes and gropes helplessly for release from the prison of her own flesh. Chloe finds herself wondering whether this emaciated wreck isn’t the real Margot and the placid, too-perfect replica to whom she’s grafted a reflection, like Fitchley, given substance through the nightmare workings of whatever awful power has blessed her. If so, the original has become utterly feral with the change, as the doubled Margot snatches up one of the stunned survivors and it’s the anguished passenger who lets out a horrible, animal shriek, whose limbs stretch like dripping tar to reach and rip and claw, who bites and tears with sharp little teeth and drops hunks of steaming meat to the ground even while her smiling other-self bears her and her prize away in a series of flawless balletic twists and pirouettes. Lottie chokes and Nicci erupts in a full-throated scream; Chloe turns frantically back and forth, desperately seeking a gap between the predatory mean-girls steadily advancing, smirking and giggling and dodging whip-quick away from each round fired in their direction. What used to be Amelia darts forward; to everyone’s shock, not least Amelia’s, Nicci catches the bifurcated trophy wife a surprisingly solid crack on the jaw despite having her eyes screwed shut in fear, although the extent of the damage seems to be a single drop of blood welling on the girl’s lower lip, which she licks up with a flicking, inhumanly long tongue and a delighted grin.

“Oh, Nicci, you’ve got some (meal and bone and organ meat) spunk in you after all!” laughs Amelia, raising her arms and pointing her toes like a ballerina, as her grotesque second-self reaches up with spindly limbs and easily hoists her to the ceiling. “Not as much as Chloe, aha, but still; I’m (too close too much the brightness burns oh god help me please) impressed!”

“You know,” she continues, amused, looking down her nose in familiar fashion at the carnage now erupting as her classmates fall on the staff like starving dogs, although they seem to be leaving the three serving-girls to her. “I did always think (and now my thoughts are the bread at Its table) you were wasted scrubbing floors and serving drinks with the menials. So devoted to your dream (of the putrid sea of stars the boiling vast beneath) hubby, and all your lovely domestic fantasies! Really (not real it’s not real it’s not real it’s), you’re almost one of us, darling! You can still have it, you know,” she confides, creeping seductively closer, borne hand-over-hand along the ceiling by her conjoined reflection. “You can be wedded (the grey inside your skull the marital bed) to something bigger and more powerful than you could ever imagine! You can feel His will (It It It It is no He deluded deranged dissolved gone girl gone) completely dominate yours. It’s so much more (no more no, more yes more please no more) than any piddly little man could do. It’s bliss, Nicci-“ Amelia says, holding out an inviting hand from her high vantage. “-and all you have to do is say yes.”

Chloe and Lottie both look at their sister, who’s got an extravagantly pink nail to her lips in her signature ‘thinking’ pose, which she’s been known to occupy for a full twenty minutes before responding. Neither girl believes Nicci would betray them, exactly, but they’re uncomfortably aware of how easily she tends to lose track of events, how even the faintest whiff of a powerful man can make her temporarily forget everything up to and including her own name, and how she’s always vociferously pined to join the trophy wives. So while they trust her, they’re both poised to grab an arm each and make a run for it as she takes a deep breath and looks up at Amelia, who’s hanging there like a puppet, smiling with every impression of genuine, radiant warmth.

“Ewwww!! NO!!!” Nicci responds, finally, flapping her hands in absolute disgust. “Like I want a gross yucky ugly face sticking out the back of my head!! Like I’d serve some nasty weird mirrory thingy!!! Like I’d want to be anbything but a pretty little dummy bimbo girl for my man, not some icky smelly monster!!! Yuck!!!”

Chloe squeezes Nicci’s arm from a fierce upwelling of pride, as Lottie interposes herself between both of them and the dangling, twitching creature, and Amelia pitches forward to reveal the champing jaws of her nightmare inverse self, illuminated from behind by wild bursts of fire from the embattled guards.

“That’s a shame,” she sighs, from underneath. “At least I’ll have something sweet (red the red) to bring to His table, I suppose. He’s such a generous lover (It slips beneath the skin and fills and fills so far beyond the point of bursting) but He certainly can be demanding, too! Still, it’s a wife’s duty to give her husband what he desires, and what ours desires is, well… meat.”

The arms of the emaciated half of Amelia swing her effortlessly along the ceiling toward Lottie, while her perfect, unblemished forward-self reaches back with popping joints to grasp and snare and snag. Chloe grabs Lottie by the shoulder, but amid the chaos and death there’s nowhere to run that isn’t full of lashing limbs and desperate gunfire.

“Amelia, stop!” she screams, and whatever the girl’s become, she does hesitate a moment, lifting her primary face with a delighted smile, perhaps expecting the girls to beg to be allowed to join her and her sisters after all. Thus distracted, she doesn’t see Warner coming until his gun barrel slams into her rear-facing forehead and he’s unloading multiple three-round bursts through both halves of her skull. Whatever gifts the wives’ new patron has given them, they don’t appear to include protection against those bullets which actually strike home, as great matted gobs of black matter splash against the wall, cold and stinking, leaving Amelia’s corpse to flop limply to the floor in front of the three petrified girls.

Margot, presently using both sets of limbs in unison to help two of her classmates slowly, sensuously lever apart a shrieking guard, snaps her head up and howls as she senses one of her girls die.

“You stupid, ugly brute, what have you done?” she screams with her forward face. Her nightmare half seems to forcibly wrench their shared body around to face Warner, leaving her other self flailing bonelessly behind as she scuttles along the floor and halfway up the wall, teeth snapping and mad eyes bulging from their sunken sockets. The other wives are either engaged with their own victims or standing off and watching, looking now aghast and vengeful but holding back, making Chloe suspect that Margot has somehow communicated to her sisters that she wants the three of them for herself. Warner doesn’t wait for Margot to reach him; he squeezes off a couple of shots in the enraged, eight-limbed creature’s direction, then tosses his empty rifle aside and draws the heavy-looking handgun Chloe sighted through a veil of fresh cum in his office, what feels now like a decade ago. He snatches up the huge fallen pack from the sad, stringy ruin that used to be one of his guards, and almost without pause he hammers shots in the direction of the smirking wives blocking the way back down the corridor.

“Come the fuck on!” he bellows at the three girls, startling Chloe, who assumed they’d been abandoned and had been just about to grab the other two and bolt. Hurrying back up the corridor in his wake, she can’t help noticing the way he’s favouring his right leg as he squeezes off round after round to keep the pursuing wives at bay. She sees Lottie stumble over the other guard’s corpse, and yanks her back to her feet, unable to avoid also seeing how close behind them the frenzied Margot and her class have come.

“Lottiiieeee! Where are you going, doll? I thought you were desperate to get rid of those ridiculous tits, those comical lips, that gigantic bubble butt? I can help, darling! All you need to do is come here, and we’ll snip, snip, snip, snip snip!” Margot shrieks, sounding utterly deranged as she’s borne along by her hideous twin. The other wives are fast, but they don’t seem able to match Margot’s preternatural ability to dodge every shot; eventually a bullet finds the calf of one of the girls and the abdomen of another, leaving them writhing and screeching in pools of their own coldly seething black fluids. Of the remaining two, Warner hammers one in the temple with the butt of his gun almost before she can react, sending the doubled girl reeling with a sickeningly wet crunch. Tegan, the other, slips under his follow-up blow as if her bones have turned to rubber, rising and striking like a snake, sinking the sharp-tipped fingers of one mirror-hand under his ribs while she carves deep gouges into his neck with the other. Warner bellows in pain and rage, losing his grip on the gun, and Chloe’s heart drops into the soles of her feet. To her astonishment, though, the man rallies, rising and slamming his assailant into the wall with the full weight of his hulking body, so hard there’s a dark stain left behind when she staggers away dazed. From a fleeting glance behind, Chloe’s surprised to see Margot slow her pace in order to attend to her fallen girls, but she’s back to the chase almost instantly, her furious screeches amplified by the affront, and Chloe runs all the harder in anticipation of those horrible, bony talons catching at her flesh. Warner snatches her arm and drags her and the others like a flailing, busty human chain into an unremarkable little cul-de-sac just off the main corridor, containing a supply cupboard and not much else. The huge, bleeding man lurches to a halt next to an unremarkable wall panel and fumbles with something at his belt, eventually managing to repeatedly slap some kind of ID card against the expensive wood. There’s a beep and a soft clunk, and the whole section of cherrywood panelling slides back, revealing a bare, fluorescent-lit concrete hallway, into which Warner staggers and the girls tumble just as Margot rounds the corner, teeth bared, claws raised and hungry. She braces herself against the frame and, ropes of unnatural muscle visibly coiling beneath her skin, tries with all four arms to keep the hidden door from closing, but she’s forced to let go with a hiss of frustrated rage before she loses her fingers to the mechanism. Warner slumps against one stark, grey wall, jaw clenched in obvious pain, hands clamped around his wound; Nicci, Chloe and Lottie all collapse to the floor from exhaustion and adrenaline, sobbing and holding one another, while innumerable hands outside batter and scrape uselessly against the heavy steel. Chloe frantically checks and re-checks over Nicci and Lottie, finding nothing worse than scratches and scrapes and, having ascertained that Warner is functionally incapacitated, finally, gratefully allows herself to pass out.

-

“Nooooo, nonono, th… this is the basement!!” Nicci’s wailing, when Chloe groggily swims back up to the harsh, unwelcome light of consciousness. “We can’t be down here!! Nobody can!! It’s super-extra-quagruble forbidden!!”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to punish us now, Nics,” Lottie says. She turns to face Warner, who Chloe isn’t sure whether she’s relieved or disappointed to see still alive. The wounds in his side and neck look to have been bandaged competently enough, with supplies from an open medical kit, and the multiple discarded ampoules of some unnamed, Blue Rose-concocted injectable mean there’s no way to know in what condition his physical and mental capabilities might be.

“How many of these hidden entrances are there, anyway?” Lottie asks him, apparently continuing an ongoing line of questioning, and Chloe’s taken aback for a moment at how unlike herself she sounds, until she realises it’s because there isn’t even a hint of submissiveness in her tone. Warner gives the girl an appraising look, as if seeing her clearly for the first time.

“Not that many,” he grunts. “Next nearest is… down by the Medical back door… and the morgue. We’re lucky your… friends… decided to jump us where they did.”

“Right. Lucky,” Lottie says sourly. “But why didn’t you bring us down here before, if the doors are that heavy and only senior staff can get in?” she demands. “What aren’t you telling us?”

Warner coughs, draws breath with a long, rattling wheeze that doesn’t sound especially reassuring, in Chloe’s largely uninformed opinion. “Don’t like coming down here at the best of times. Can’t… can’t imagine all this fucking nonsense has improved it any. You’ll see… what I mean.”

“Can we still get to the boat through here, though, Sir?” Chloe ventures, unable to quite break the compulsion to show deference, and angry at herself for it. Warner nods and, grunting from the pain, levers himself wearily to his feet; Chloe’s amazed by his resilience, doubly so by the fact he’s still able to heft the bulky pack he salvaged from his dead subordinate, although it’s clear it’s costing him to do so.

“Service tunnel from… observation area comes right out at the dock,” he says, sounding as if he’s marshalling his stamina as he goes, as if acknowledging there’s an escape route, however tenuous, has given him a second wind. That or the experimental chemicals. “Now stop asking me stupid questions, you dumb… sluts, and let’s go.”

He waves the black, featureless card over a reader by the far door, which beeps and opens onto a similarly austere stairwell lined in the same bare concrete and lit by flickering fluorescent tubes, which activate slowly and with an audible click and hum. “Don’t… get any ideas about taking this off me, cunts. Biometric pairing. If I die you’re… fucked. Starve down here, if they don’t get you first,” Warner mumbles, and Chloe isn’t sure whether he means Margot and her sisters or an unspecified they waiting below. Neither sounds encouraging. “Lucky I need you, or…”

Warner falls abruptly silent, and Chloe wonders if the pain’s undermining his self-control, has made him say more than he intended. She looks sidelong at him, labouring his way down the stairs with the bag hosted over his shoulder and his teeth gritted, and decides now probably isn’t the wisest time to press the man. Lottie meets her eyes, and there’s a burning there that Chloe suspects might not bode well for the injured Warner if the girls weren’t relying on him to keep opening doors, so instead they concentrate on keeping their own balance, their towering stilettos clearly not the kind of footwear these bare metal steps were designed to accommodate. The stairwell wends down into the dark, leading the diminished party deeper and deeper in zig-zagging stages, far below the level of Medical or the storage areas, to a depth the girls didn’t know the facility plumbed, assuming depth means anything much any more. Warner is clearly struggling by the second flight, and the subsequent four don’t do him any favours, but he lurches on in stoic silence. Apart from his huffing and the four sets of shoes clattering on metal stairs, there’s no sound to be heard whatsoever; the distant wet lurching and furtive groans that were a constant source of fear on the surface levels have seemingly been left there along with their originators, and the silence becomes oppressive long before the end of the descent is in sight.

Finally the group reaches another shuttered high-security door, which Warner waves his card against and sends ratcheting up into its housing with a terrifyingly loud clack-clack-bang. The girls cautiously follow their chaperone into a low-ceilinged, white-walled space where spindly shadows dance in Warner’s torch beam; the girls initially recoil in fear, but a longer look reveals the room as a laboratory or operating theatre or both, packed with sterile, staggeringly expensive-looking equipment in stainless steel and glass arrayed around a series of examination tables, fitted with head restraints and trays of gleaming surgical tools. Some of the gear is instantly recognisable to the girls: a much bulkier relative of the conditioning equipment they’ve all been subjected to, albeit with its electronic guts exposed like a high-tech vivisection. It’s also inescapably apparent that this setup is designed to allow a surgeon access to the subject’s exposed brain while the rig is in place, and the mild erotic thrill Chloe has been feeling at the memory of her own conditioning is instantly replaced with nauseous horror.

“What do they do down here?” she breathes, although she suspects she can guess.

Warner scoffs. “You really… never wondered where they perfected all the shit they use on you silly cunts?” he wheezes.

“Jesus Christ,” Chloe murmurs. “I always thought they just tested it on us.”

“We’re a non-replenishable resource,” Lottie says, looking around the room in fascination and seemingly only half-aware of who she’s responding to. “Think about it: we’re here because, one way or another, we came to the attention of someone powerful, right? Pissed them off or posed a threat or just seemed like someone they’d like to own. And they didn’t want a random brainwashed fuck-doll, they wanted us, specifically, broken and remade. If the Rose really, terminally ruined one of us, there’d be no way to replace us. So they have to be certain their procedures work before they risk their precious raw material. I always suspected there was somewhere like this, but knowing it’s been under our feet the whole time…”

“Hang on, if they’re testing stuff down here… who are they testing it on?” Chloe reluctantly asks, full of sickly dread.

“Not my department,” Warner says gruffly, but even he sounds uncomfortable. “Now if you three can manage to keep your fuckholes shut for five minutes I’d appreciate it, because we are far from home and dry.”

Thus chastened (except for Lottie, in both senses) the girls gingerly pick their way across the room, unable to avoid noticing the light-boxes displaying images of the awful aftermath of experimental surgeries: the x-rays of facial bones shaved past the point of failure, of noses collapsed into cavernous ruin, grafts gone foul and gangrenous, body parts less readily identifiable but no easier to look at. The smell of antiseptic is overpowering, and Chloe’s stomach rebels at whatever it is that it isn’t quite covering. Nicci bumps against a tray of spotless surgical implements and lets out the tiniest squeak of shock, but nothing stirs in the dark except the echoes of the girls’ own footsteps. Chloe is acutely aware that this is, in a sense, where she was born, even if she’s never so much as set foot on the secret sub-basement level before, and she finds herself moving through the lab with something akin to reverence, an attitude she chooses to see in Lottie’s obvious caution rather than, e.g. trying not to knock anything over with her gargantuan tits.

The door on the far side of the laboratory opens on a corridor tiled in glossy white ceramic, only identifiable as part of a secret house of horrors by the arm and leg restraints built into the wheelchair lying on its side a few feet in, and by the placards inserted in wall-mounted slots next to innocuous doors reading things like ‘Volitional override research’ and ‘Neuroablation trials’. Warner is clearly unwilling to linger, and once the girls hear the soft sounds coming from inside some of those rooms, they’re all too eager to hurry along in his limping wake. At the end of the corridor is yet another security door and another staircase leading down, and here Warner stops them for a moment, looking as if the mere act of addressing them is causing him pain.

“Listen, what you’re going to see down here… it was bad before, and there’s no way it isn’t worse now. So do not stop to gawk or have a little cry, do you hear me?” he says, as forcefully as he’s currently able, which is moderately, the Blue Rose’s novel pharmaceuticals having apparently taken effect. “I’ve still got the only ticket out of here, and I will not hesitate to leave you cunts behind.”

Upon exiting the stairwell, of course, the first thing the girls do is stop and gawk, and Nicci does indeed start to cry. Warner stomps and fumes and threatens, but it’s clear now that the balance of power has shifted, and that he’s both unwilling to leave without them and unable, in his present physical condition and without a weapon, to force them to comply. So the trio are mostly free to take in the human cost of the innovations that have reshaped their bodies and minds.

As for what that actually looks like, it’s a long, bare corridor in that same white tile, fluorescent tubes struggling to life as dormant motion sensors are triggered, casting a bleak pallor over reinforced glass and steel from floor to ceiling, demarcating square cells evenly spaced on both sides. It’s twitching bodies hanging in rows from straps; limbs removed, raw, sutured stumps twitching in helpless misery. It’s nests of IVs and catheters, feeding tubes and stoma bags, beeping monitors marking ceaseless, merciless time. Beseeching eyes rolling above mouths sewn shut, or clamped open to expose awful invention within. Further along, naked stumblers are packed in like cattle, minds bleached bare by some failure of the conditioning process, still useful for their all-too-yielding flesh. A few mumble one word, or a name, and who can say whether they recall its meaning? One, a middle-aged woman with sore-pocked, wasted skin, bangs her head compulsively against the heavy glass, heedless of the greasy smear of blood and hair. There’s a perpetual chorus of desolate moans rising from those victims still intact enough to despair; strapped-down, clamped-open bodies sprouting noses, ears, inflated breasts and lips, patchworks of grafted skin and exposed, transplanted bone wherever there’s space for the surgeons to practice their art. The mad proliferation of body parts reminds Chloe of Ms. Fields and of Margot’s coterie, but this predates any creeping violation of reality’s boundaries, is the measured, meticulous work of human hands, and is therefore somehow so much worse.

“Who were they?” Chloe breathes, feeling dizzy from the shock and the horror of it, unable to quite tear her eyes away.

Warner attempts a nonchalant tone, but it’s obvious he’s more affected than he’ll let on. “Failed spies. Staff who tried to turn traitor, or endangered the operation. The families of people the high-ups wanted compliant. Persistently defiant subjects,” he says, looking pointedly at Lottie, who glances away. “The rest come in shipments on the supply boats, and I never bothered to find out where they get them, so don’t fucking ask.”

“We’re getting these people out,” Lottie says, sounding hollow and furious and as if she’s stating an immutable fact.

“Damn fucking right we are,” Chloe agrees instantly, squeezing Nicci’s hand tight before she moves to stand resolutely beside Lottie, heart pounding in her chest at the levels of open defiance she’s discovering herself capable of.

Warner squares his shoulders, ruddy face somewhere between rage and desperation. “If you hadn’t noticed, most of these sad fucks aren’t exactly walking out of here. So unless you’re planning to carry them to the boat one at a time just so they can fucking croak there from being taken off all this life-support shit, your cute little moment of heroism isn’t achieving anything but wasting time. We have to go.”

“Well, put them out of their misery, then! Anything but just leaving them like this!” Lottie says, eyes hard and bright.

“Weren’t you listening to the radio, you thick twat? Bombs could start dropping on this hellhole any second. Whole nations are shitting themselves bloody out of fear this madness is going to keep spreading, and we’re standing at ground fucking zero. And you want me to what, go into each cell and strangle these poor cunts to death one by one? They’ll get their sweet release when the whole place is vapourised, and if you don’t want to go up with them, we need to fucking move!” Warner bellows, raising a hand and stepping forward despite his injuries, clearly intending to emphasise his point using Lottie’s face. Chloe moves half a step forward, without a plan or even a clear intention, torn more than ever between loyalty to her sister and subservience to authority, hardly rating her chances of physically impeding even a weakened Warner but unable to just stand there and watch. Then there’s a click, surprisingly quiet against the anguished sounds of the cells, and Warner halts, a wry grin spreading across his face even as a vein pulses fit to burst in his forehead. Chloe whirls around in confusion, and is astonished to see Lottie levelling a handgun she must have grabbed when she pretended to trip, her aim surprisingly steady, safety off, extravagantly manicured finger ready on the trigger.

Apparently, Nicci is equally stunned. “How did you… where did you… wait, was that in your butt?!” she gasps, never more sincere.

“Nicci,” Lottie says, her tone conveying that maybe there will be better moments. Warner, still smiling, raises his hands and takes a step back.

“No, for real, was it in your butt, though?” Chloe can’t quite keep herself from murmuring, which succeeds in raising a snort from Lottie.

“Well, well, well. Threatening a superior, that’s a few demerits for sure. I always said you could use another couple of sessions in the chair,” Warner says mockingly. “All right then, what’s the next step, Charlotte? Because we both know you cunts need me if you’re planning to get off this island before it turns into a lump of coal sticking out of the sea, and as fucked as I already am, there’s nowhere you can shoot me that you can be sure I won’t bleed out before we even get to the fucking boat. So just put the gun on the ground and kick it over here, and we’ll forget this stupid little mutiny ever happened, all right, you silly bitch?”

“What’s in the bag, Warner?” Lottie demands instead, voice taut and urgent, and Chloe gets an illicit thrill quite different to her usual just from hearing her talk down to him like this.

Warner barks an utterly humourless laugh and deposits the bag carefully on the floor between two reinforced observation windows, beyond which more of the Blue Rose’s experimental subjects writhe and groan in their own personal hells, oblivious to the drama unfolding. Lottie motions with the gun, and Warner sighs and unzips the over-full pack, revealing a collection of grey, impact-resistant cases surrounded by a spaghetti tangle of cabling and nondescript electronic parts. It’s only upon seeing the familiar blank faceplate of the neuroprogramming helmet and its bulky magnetic-induction coils that Chloe mentally rearranges it all into a skeletonised version of the conditioning rig.

“He’s doing a fucking Jurassic Park, innit!” she blurts as realisation dawns. “Like the big guy, whatsisname, Nerdy.”

“You don’t remember your old name, but you do remember that,” Lottie says, sheer astonishment briefly chasing the tension from her voice.

“Does that mean there are going to be dimosaurs?! I don’t wanna be eaten off the toilet!!” Nicci squeaks.

“Okay, well, we’ve found the one thing conditioning can’t erase, and it’s the plot to Jurassic Park, apparently, which comes as a surprise,” Lottie says, sounding mildly stunned. “I’m pretty sure there aren’t going to be dinosaurs, Nics. Like ninety-five per cent. Ninety at worst. And yeah, Chlo, weirdly, you’ve actually got it: he’s trying to cut and run with the conditioning tech, aren’t you, Sir?”

You are reading story The Blue Rose at novel35.com

“Do you have any idea how much this shit is worth?” Warner says, closing the bag and hefting it back onto his shoulders with a grunt of pain. “The dried-up old bitch in charge was always terrified of what she had. Spent her life building the stuff, then bottled it when it was finally done. You wouldn’t believe some of the offers she turned down for what they invented here; thought it’d destroy the world if it ever got out, or some bullshit. But complete, to-spec, non-invasive mental rewriting: every government and agency in the world would sell the fucking farm for that! And they’re using it to make men into big-titted sluts, for fuck’s sake! Billions, girls; billions on top of billions. Even you can understand that’s a lot, yes?”

“And what about us?” Lottie asks, still visibly digesting that. “You’ve gone out of your way again and again to keep the three of us safe. So we must figure into this plan of yours. We’re part of the package you’re looking to sell, aren’t we?”

Warner lets a grin spread across his face and treats the girls to a slow clap. He edges forward and Lottie shuffles back, keeping a fixed distance between herself and the huge man despite his injuries. “Clever girl,” he sneers. “My contacts tell me they’ll need some living examples of the end product to reverse-engineer it all. Probably could have managed with just Chloe or the other one, but a bit of redundancy never hurt, eh?”

“So what, if we come with you we end up like these… people?” Chloe demands, indicating the stumbling, ruined figures drooling on the other side of the glass, her conditioned deference fighting with loyalty to her sisters and losing. “You get a nice fat payday, private island, whatever the fuck, we get our heads cut open and needles stuck in? What’s to stop us turning our sexy arses round and taking our chances upstairs? Or shooting you right here and now?”

Warner lets out a long, deep sigh, turning a look on the girls that Chloe’s never seen before; somehow stripped of his usual swagger, and unexpectedly vulnerable for it. Either he’s an unexpectedly good actor, or she’s actually seeing him for what might be the first time. “Look, I know it’s over,” he concedes, and he sounds so sincere that the tug-of-war going on in Chloe’s brain almost has her wanting to comfort him. “I’m not head of security, and you’re not… servants, or captives, or property or whatever, any more; I know that. What I’m proposing is a partnership. Listen, I’ve been told they don’t need anything more invasive than an MRI scan, and if that changes, we walk away. It’s not as if we’ll be wanting for buyers. We can dictate the terms. What I’ve got is worthless without you, and vice versa, but together, we can make out like kings and goddamned queens. Tell me you don’t want that, even a little bit, after all the shit you’ve been through.”

“Some of it at your hands,” Lottie snorts, keeping her aim fixed on a point between Warner’s eyes. “We’re really supposed to trust you?”

“You’ve got the gun,” Warner says, shrugging as best he can. “But if we’re doing this, we really do need to get the fuck out of here ASAP. I wasn’t joking about the bombs.” With that, he turns, leaving Lottie pointing the gun at his back, maybe trying to demonstrate trust or maybe genuinely so desperate to move that he’s willing to risk it. Lottie gradually lowers the weapon, with a sidelong glance at Chloe, who shrugs helplessly. Nicci looks genuinely lost, but she dutifully follows along with the other girls as they trail their erstwhile trainer at a safe distance.

“So uh… all the stuff you’ve like, said, and, uh… done? Like, with me? Since you’re showing us this other side of you or whatever now, I gotta know: how much of that was, you know… real?” Chloe says, moving up alongside the big man, mostly to distract herself from the fresh horrors still being revealed in the cells to both sides. Her innards feel like they’re turning end over end, and she’s overflowing with emotions she doesn’t have names for; she doesn’t know whether her conditioning’s failing or she’s having some sort of breakdown, or whether she’s just tired and scared and consumed with loss and want.

“Well, you are a stupid cocksocket, that’s real,” Warner says, with a smirk that makes things happen beneath Chloe’s skirt.

“It was just going to be you, you know,” he murmurs after a few silent moments, without turning to face her.

“What was?” she asks, delicate brow creased in sincere confusion.

“I didn’t exactly mean to do it like this, mind you,” he continues as if she hadn’t spoken. “This has been a complete donkey show from top to bottom. But I’ve been planning this for a while, and when I pulled the trigger, it was you I was going to take. To… rescue, I suppose.”

“You was gonna run away with me?” Chloe breathes, unable to quite believe what she’s hearing, especially considering the illicit fantasies she’s indulged during her time at the Rose. “But like… why? Why me?” she can’t help asking, blindsided and slightly dazed.

“God, I sound like a twat, but I actually really fucking like you, Chloe,” Warner admits, with a little self-deprecating chuckle. “When we were… alone, you’d go on about shit you were never going to be able to do. Having an Instagram. Working some stupid job, being a ring girl or model or whatever. Being on Love fucking Island. I guess I got it into my head that we could, you know, be together. On the outside. Like normal people. Really, really fucking rich normal people,” he adds, shooting her a quick sidelong grin that’s only slightly spoiled by his blown-out pupils and sheet-pale complexion.

“Sir,” Chloe breathes, overwhelmed by images of herself as Warner’s girlfriend, arm-candy, fucktoy, wife, a maelstrom of guilty feelings roiling inside her, not all of them easily interpreted or entirely positive. She’s almost relieved when Warner suddenly tenses and Lottie raises her gun again, this time at the new sounds coming from one of the cells near the end of the hellish corridor, beside a broad set of vertical doors and yet another pair of high-security shutters. Cautiously moving closer, the noises gradually resolve into words, just about the first coherent thing the group has heard coming from anywhere in the awful underground labs.

“I say, is there someone out there?” a reedy voice calls, plummy English vowels cracked and desperate and entirely incongruous given the surroundings. “If anyone can hear me, I need help!”

The observation window reveals a short, stocky man of perhaps fifty, in sweat-stained shirtsleeves and tweed, occupying one of four rather more traditional holding cells at the very end of the pens; a bare cot, a toilet and nothing more, dimly reminiscent of the White Room in miniature. His pounding on the glass echoes the brain-scorched husks further back, although thankfully he’s using his fists, and it appears he’s unable to see Warner and the girls from his side. Chloe squints at the little man, then turns to where Lottie’s holding the gun precisely equidistant between Warner and the window, a look of unexpected excitement on her face.

“I know this fella!” she exclaims. “He was one of the VIPs at the reception, and he was banging on about… hang on, shit, you know what? I think this might be Violet’s owner! And if what she said about getting sent here by some sort of traitor in the cult is true, this is the guy, innit? Laurence or something, she called him. I bet he knows a shitload about what’s going on! Maybe he can stop this, right?”

“You heard the lady, Warner. Let’s get him out,” Lottie says, the barrel of her gun settling firmly on their nominal escort.

“Are you suicidal or just stupid?” Warner growls, some of his familiar affect reasserting itself. He appears to swallow it back down by sheer force of will, and ends up looking merely extremely exasperated. “We don’t have time to be dicking about with some weird little toff. This is getting stopped the hard way whether we like it or not, and we need to decide if we want to be here when that happens,” he grunts, between gritted teeth.

“Consider it a chance to demonstrate our new relationship of mutual trust and co-operation,” Lottie says, sounding to Chloe like she’s enjoying herself a little too much, considering there’s every reason to believe the threat of bombs falling is both real and imminent. “Let him out, if you please.”

Warner’s face darkens, but he wordlessly waves his access card over a reader by the cell door and taps the associated keypad a couple of times, which results in a piercing buzz that sets the pitiful victims in the other cells moaning and howling, and has the girls glancing fearfully back down the starkly-lit corridor in case it’s attracted anything unsavoury. Then the glass-and-steel door swings smoothly open with an audible retracting of locking bolts, revealing itself as a two-way mirror, and the balding little man practically tumbles out into the antiseptic chill of the holding area and away from its reflective gaze.

“I take it things are bad,” he says by way of an introduction, after doing an almost comic double-take at his bleeding and battered rescuers, three resembling embattled porn stars wearing tattered costume-party outfits and one held at gunpoint by another. Chloe hesitantly nods. “I’ve failed, then. It’s over,” he murmurs, and the flickering of hope she’s been nursing gutters and dies.

“Wow, you are such a downer, dude,” Nicci says, one hand on her hip, clearly unimpressed.

“We brought the weird little fuck down here after whatever happened with your girl in Conditioning,” Warner mutters, sounding like he’s about to crack a tooth from clenching his jaw. “Figured it must be sabotage. You’re lucky the place has gone to shit,” he says to the erstwhile captive, with a glimmer of malicious pleasure. “You wouldn’t have liked what came next.”

“So, are you the one who had Violet sent here?” Chloe asks bluntly, ignoring him.

“Vi… ah. Yes, they did inform me that was h… her new name,” the man replies, compulsively clutching one stubby hand in the other. “My name is Nicholas Laurent, and yes, I engaged the services of this terrible place. A necessary evil, I believed, in the hope that, well…”

“That the Vessel wouldn’t break the ancient prison? That the Flaw in the Mirror wouldn’t come back into the world?” Lottie finishes smoothly, sounding surprisingly confident with concepts that would have seemed absurd only days ago. Chloe doesn’t fail to notice how visibly the man flinches at the sound of that name.

“You’re acquainted with the nature of the situation, then,” he responds, with raised eyebrows.

“Courtesy of Mr. Fitchley, who I assume you also know,” Lottie replies.

“Hah! They must truly have been desperate if they winkled that old revenant out of his crypt,” he says bitterly, with a dismissive sniff of his veiny, port-red nose. “It’s some small consolation to think I gave them a headache before the world ends, at least.”

“Jesus Christ. Walk and talk if you really fucking must, but we have to move,” Warner growls, and stomps off ahead while the girls and the bemused Laurent form a rear-guard.

The whole end of the corridor is given over to a cargo lift, by which means Chloe assumes the subjects enter and leave, but Warner shakes his head when she moves in that direction, and despite her aching legs she’s willing to accept the wisdom of avoiding a space that could so easily become a cage. Instead the group takes one of the two security doors recessed on either side; the shutter retracts with a rattling whir, and Chloe braces herself for further horrors, but what lies beyond is nothing worse than a records room, a claustrophobic maze of filing cabinets and lockers labelled with numbers and codewords. It occurs to her that her original identity might be in there somewhere, and she’s vaguely curious, but she’s hardly sad to let it lie in the interest of expediency; similarly, Nicci picks up this or that file in a distracted, magpie-like way, but each is quickly proclaimed ‘boring!!’ and tossed over her shoulder without even being read. Lottie, who Chloe would have expected to go weak at the knees at the prospect of delving into the Blue Rose’s secrets, seems far more interested in questioning the diminutive Mr. Laurent, and in keeping Warner firmly in her sights. So the group troops on, between the darkened ranks of shelving, the only sound Laurent’s quavering, reedy voice.

“I was raised in the Sacred Brethren of the True Reflection,” he says, sounding melancholy. “A believer born and bred, my parents and their parents before them believers, and surrounded by the faithful since my earliest days. For most of my life I’ll admit I treated it as something of an esoteric social club, really, albeit one with some rather strange traditions and an undeniable, if minor, element of the supernatural. Still, for all that the elders would rant and rave about it, I allowed myself the comfort of believing the Emergence was a white elephant; the Flaw in the Mirror was certainly something real, and rather terrifying at that, but the notion of It bursting forth in order to remake the world, of It lifting us at Its right hand to be Its saints, scions, enactors of Its immortal will… it seemed a fiction meant to remain eternally just out of reach, to appeal to those whose only fears in life were the march of time and the limits of even their money and power.”

“But?” Lottie prompts, sparking a fit of giggling from Nicci.

“Ah, but,” Laurent goes on, tone portentous, “when we assembled in the caves beneath Collingswood Manor, when we watched that poor child forced to drink quicksilver and lye, when we heard the terrible voice from inside the great, ancient mirror, and the words It spoke… I was forced to accept that it was all real, and horribly imminent. I was petrified, quite frankly. I sought a way to stop it, before my fellows called down apocalypse upon us all. Killing the Vessel was, unfortunately, not an option: our scriptures made very clear that by such a late stage, the Vessel’s flesh would repel mortal harm, and that to attempt it would only bring forth the fury of the entity the boy was born to contain. I spent two years clandestinely searching for a solution while my brethren continued to prepare the Vessel, and my eventual course was a desperate one, attempted only when I saw that the Vessel had reached the very cusp of totality. Our holy book was extremely clear on one subject, you see: that of the Vessel’s sex. Previous generations of believers had actually abandoned their attempts, had written off generations of selective breeding and meticulous preparation when the elect had failed to produce male issue. Our Lord, we believed, naturally favoured the masculine, and for It to be invited into anything less than a male host was a guarantee of the most disastrous failure. Now, I had heard whispers of the Blue Rose and its services, of course; those of my means and station were, ah, its bread and butter, you might say. With the greatest of regrets I sought it out, and liquidated the vast majority of my family’s holdings in order to afford to have that poor, doomed boy taken from under the noses of the Brethren, and… well, transformed, in the hope that the Flaw would now find her an unpalatable housing for Its terrible radiance.”

“But it didn’t work, clearly,” Lottie states flatly.

“Sitting in that cell, with nothing to do but ruminate on my failure, it seemed so stupid,” Laurent says sadly, shaking his head no. “The Flaw neither notices nor cares one whit about the gender of Its Vessel. Why would It? It is so far above such human distinctions as to make the very notion laughable. The Brethren’s obsession with the subject was merely the product of generations of pompous male leaders attempting to justify their position via selective interpretation of the whispers. If only I had realised sooner.”

“Okay, right, fine, so that didn’t work. Cross it off the list, what a shame, boo fuckin’ hoo. What’s Plan B?” Chloe asks, with a note of desperation. “The world ain’t ended yet. Violet’s here somewhere, and whatever else is inside her head, she still seems to like us, right? I think she’ll let us get close. When we get there, what can we do?”

“There’s nothing to be done,” says Laurent, hands spread in resignation. “Nothing at all. It was already too late when I sent young… Violet to this abhorrent place. It’s most definitely too late now. At last I see that clearly.”

“Which is why we need to go!” Warner snarls, between his teeth.

“Hah, no, I’m afraid you misunderstand,” Laurent says regretfully, vigorously shaking his sweat-streaked, balding head. “When the Master breaks free of the mirror, It will refashion this world into one more befitting Its glory. Everything and everyone will be destroyed, save those few It might choose to preserve. There will be nowhere whatsoever to hide.”

“Bullshit,” Warner snaps. “Don’t listen to this crap; we’re getting out of here, we’re getting our fucking money, and we are not looking back.”

“Do as you will,” Laurent says equivocally, shrugging. “It won’t change anything now.”

Behind her, Chloe hears a rustling sound and turns, half-expecting to be snatched by some unseen abomination, only to find Lottie opening deep metal drawers and plucking out files as if she knows precisely where to look. She glances up, permanent pout and Botoxed brow just about conveying anxiety and a hint of guilt, but Warner either hasn’t noticed he’s no longer at gunpoint or is choosing to ignore it in the interest of expediency. Before hurrying back, Chloe watches her stuff a handful of papers into the waistband of her pencil skirt, but it hardly seems the moment to ask about it, and in any case something much more worrying is happening: she can feel it building, like the pressure before a storm, and sees Nicci and Lottie glancing around them in a panic, while Laurent clutches, groaning, at his head, and Warner stumbles hard on his injured leg.

“Hey, so does anyone else feel a little-“ Nicci begins, but by then it’s on them; a soundless, deafeningly loud eruption of something that deepens the shadows, sends papers fluttering into the air, seems to stretch and distort the dimensions of the room in ways that aren’t fully comprehensible with the standard package of human senses.

“Ghhg… it’s very close now,” Laurent exclaims, coughing up a thin stream of watery vomit. “The nylhc uhn fvighr, the universal lens! It is descending across the veil as we speak! We have to get above ground! We have to bear witness!”

“Not fucking likely!” Warner snaps, rattling impatiently at the next door, which has gotten wedged into its frame as the surrounding metal has warped like heated plastic. The awful screech of glass scraped against glass is audible from back the way they came, is quickly increasing in volume and urgency, and the security chief’s efforts are becoming more frantic in time with it.

“Tell me, the other cells, back in that house of horrors - did they have the same doors as mine?” Laurent asks, and there’s something intensely ominous to Chloe about his choice of question.

“Yeah, I think so,” she replies slowly. “They was that two-way stuff, innit, so you could see through from the corridor, but the other side was…”

“A mirror,” Lottie finishes for her.

“Oh dear.”

The door on the other side of the records room doesn’t burst open so much as melt into a viscous mass of thick, stringy slurry. The cacophony of wailing, moaning and mindlessly repetitive babble that follows is sickeningly similar to the sounds from the experimental cells, but turned furious, hateful, undiscerning in its hunger for revenge. First through are the limbless torsos, now mirror-fused radially into one amorphous, ten-foot circle of ribs and pelvises flexing in unison, actually floating slowly through the air with a sound like fracturing ice; a multitude of eyes set in a broad ring swivel wildly to track their prey while within, a central starfish-shape of gasping, conjoined mouths lows and bellows liberation from their stitches. The whole awful aggregate beats at the ceiling, the walls, knocks heavy cabinets effortlessly aside with dozens of thrashing, flesh-spackled IV tubes and sinewy cables, whipping the air in a wash of antiseptic stink and an explosion of stone and plaster. Lottie fires off five shots, but it couldn’t be clearer she’s never actually used a firearm before, and it’s sheer luck that one of them smacks into a half-subsumed skull with a wet slap, bringing forth a gush of black ichor and halting the writhing thing as it drifts and crackles over the second row of filing cabinets. The giant amalgam of tortured victims rolls and spasms, screeching seemingly more from surprise than real injury, which just opens the way for the brain-bleached stumblers to pile through beneath it, entirely heedless of its angrily lashing plastic tendrils. The changes wrought upon these are reminiscent of the fate that befell the survivors in the staff room, but here the shattered-mirror refraction is concentrated on the subjects’ heads, each of which has been almost entirely lost in a flower-like spray of jagged glass shards. The outsized, misplaced reflections of rolling eyes, gaping mouths, distended noses and ears swim in and out of view in these broken pieces of mirror, sometimes in the usual arrangement, sometimes in a wild proliferation of tens of maddened pupils, hundreds of gnashing teeth, here and gone as quickly as Chloe can blink. The stumblers are uncoordinated and chaotic, half of them tearing at each other or wandering aimlessly, but there are so many it seems inconceivable that the cells can have held them all, and behind them looms something larger, shadowed, infinitely more unsettling; something that moves with the same squelching groan that stalked the girls through the hallways, and that everyone present is deeply, fundamentally desperate not to see in any greater detail.

Warner aims kick after kick with his good leg into the spot by the door’s lock again and again, grunting with the pain of supporting himself with every attempt. Lottie’s fumbling with a spare clip she must have had the foresight to scavenge, but the narrow avenues through the racks are already teeming with naked, mirror-headed reflections, groaning forgotten names through mouths that only exist in distorted reflection. Laurent is screaming cultish imprecations, hands raised like a revivalist preacher, but to no appreciable effect; Chloe has Nicci gathered up in the corner by the door, and for a moment she thinks she’s breathing her last as powerful hands take hold of her, before the pair of them are wrenched through the door by Warner.

Lottie follows at Nicci’s heels, snapping off two more rounds with slightly more confidence, although Chloe can’t see whether she hit anything substantial. Laurent piles through last, still spitting sharp, jarring consonants with obvious frustration at the lack of results, and then a panting, grimacing Warner slams his access card against the panel, bringing the heavy shutters ratcheting down and sealing the broken door. How long it will hold, Chloe can’t say, especially given the malleable nature of matter lately, but it’s temporarily reassuring nonetheless.

The group has emerged halfway down a white-tiled passage identical to the subject holding area, and the realisation rapidly dawns that there’s no time to catch their breath; these cells are just as full with the mutilated, sutured cast-offs of the Blue Rose’s medical research, and behind the two-way glass they’re fully caught in the mirror’s gaze, flesh doubling and refracting like some all-powerful idiot child is blowing soap bubbles in meat. Chloe’s momentarily taken aback once again by the sheer human cost of the facility’s work, but before she can do more than stare she’s being hustled past a succession of cell doors by Warner. In cage after cage are sights no eye should have to witness, a nightmare bestiary of victims beating cracks into the reinforced material, melting their way free via what might be the sheer force of their hatred, struggling and dragging their fevered anatomy through glass suddenly as gauzy and light as lace. Wasted arms and broken fingers and less identifiable, mirror-borne appendages reach and grope, and Chloe cries out as she feels sharp edges almost catch her thighs and ankles despite Warner’s protective bulk in front, but then they’re through. Lottie and Nicci are clinging together, the former smacking away questing hands with the butt of the gun, and Laurent has made it almost unscathed, perhaps finally receiving some small indulgence from the god he may or may not even still revere. The security shutter slams closed behind them with a reassuringly weighty bang, instantly followed by a frenzied rattling from the far side as the first of the former victims tries to break through.

“What the fuck!” Chloe exclaims, struggling to catch her breath. “This… god or whatever, why’s it after us all of a sudden? Most of the weird shit was happy enough moaning and crawling around upstairs, but it’s gone proper mental since we come down here. Is it ‘cause we want to stop it? Is it ‘cause we can?”

“Or because this little twat betrayed it,” grunts the badly lacerated Warner, eyeing Laurent, and it isn’t immediately clear whether or not he’s serious.

“This isn’t personal,” Laurent pants, leaning against the wall for support. “This is simply… the result of tortured minds… suddenly elevated by exposure to the energies of the Master’s prison. The moment of completion is so… so very close now; every part of that aeons-old trap is moving into a grand alignment as we speak, leaking waves of change and unbound… metaphysical reflection. Some have theorised that the Flaw’s true nature may not be of mirrors at all, although of course, that was considered rank heresy by the Brethren,” he says, with the air of someone giving an unprompted lecture on his favourite make and model of train.

Warner looks at the sweat-soaked aristocrat like he’s going to slap him, but instead lays the weight of his stolen conditioning gear on the floor, then slides down the wall to follow it. Blood has saturated the bandages wrapped around his ribs, and the dressing covering the deep slashes to one side of his neck has come away entirely, leaving his skin dangerously pale where it isn’t bloody, and his breaths shallow. Everyone takes Warner’s collapse as tacit permission to rest for a moment, although it doesn’t seem to have been a conscious decision on his part; nevertheless the battering against the security door seems to abate, as if the horrors on the other side have agreed to a brief armistice. The survivors are in another bare corridor, sister to the one connecting the conditioning lab to the subject pens on the other side of the secret facility; here the legends on the doors read ‘Mitosis Tanks’ and ‘Osteogenesis study #2’ and so on. There’s faint weeping from behind one, and a sort of wavering, distant song from another, so Chloe keeps her curiosity in check and leaves the handles well alone, and bats Nicci’s inquisitive fingers away no fewer than three times before she gets the message.

“If it’s any consolation, I am impressed by your fortitude,” Laurent proclaims awkwardly, out of nowhere and to the group at large. “I myself have some level of resistance to the whispers, borne of long experience, but I confess I am finding it difficult to stave off their influence; I suspect my flesh may not be for very much longer wholly my own. You four, on the other hand, seem quite unaffected, which I find astonishing. In the ladies’ case I theorise it may be connected to the, ah, neural tampering they have been subject to, but as for you, sir…”

Lottie raises her head from where she’s been crouched, supporting the exhausting weight of her breasts with crossed arms against her knees and trying to catch her breath, watching the others with narrowed eyes but saying nothing.

“Chlolo thinks about big, hard cocks so much there’s no room for anything else in her cute lil’ head!!” Nicci giggles. “And I don’t have any thoughts at all!!”

“But Lottie’s not been in the chair half as much as me and Nics, and she’s fine,” Chloe protests. Lottie looks uncomfortable and glances away. “And Mr. Warner, he’s not conditioned at all.”

“It may simply be down to a surfeit of willpower, in which case I say bravo and well done, sir,” Laurent says. Warner just growls between clenched teeth, which adequately conveys his opinion and his physical condition in one.

Lottie murmurs something under her breath, still refusing to meet Chloe’s eye, an expression somewhere between anger and guilt pasted on her exaggerated, semi-mobile features.

“What was that, Lots?” Chloe asks, sincerely confused.

“I said, it’s not as if Warner hasn’t been conditioned,” Lottie repeats, brandishing the papers she took from the records room, which look to be printed copies of brain scans and reams of text. “Big man in charge, all that alpha-dog bullshit, it’s just as manufactured as anything we’ve been made to feel.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Warner grunts, but it’s clear that’s as far as his ability to stop Lottie talking actually goes.

“No, go on, what are you saying?” Chloe demands, furrowing her exaggerated brows.

“According to this, all the front-of-house staff are conditioned,” Lottie replies. “Not the researchers down here, and not the menial workers in the laundry and kitchens and stuff, but everyone else. Mr. Warner here thinks he’s worked at the Blue Rose for four years, don’t you, Patrick?” she asks, looking the bleeding hulk of a man in the eyes. Warner just glares back, something in his expression complicated and unreadable.

“You’ve actually been here nine,” Lottie says, clearly taking some amount of pleasure in being the one to deliver the truth, even here at what could easily turn out to be the end. “Once a year they sedate you in your sleep and put you in the chair for a little touch-up. Every year, you believe it’s the beginning of your fourth. The other staff get the same story, just like you’re given theirs. You’re compelled not to question any contradictions. Exactly the same as us,” she laughs humourlessly, eyes burning.

Warner barks a harsh laugh in reply, which turns into a rattling cough. “You think I don’t know that, you dozy twat?” he snaps, anger overriding his newfound, brittle civility. He appears to read in the girls’ expressions that he’s made a misstep, and lets out another of those long, deep sighs. “You know how hard it is to find sexual sadists with the right moral flexibility, enough control not to take it too far, who’re into girls with cocks and who won’t burn out after three months and have to be taken to the pens before they can blab?” Warner wheezes, trying and failing to chuckle. “So yeah, of course they make us. Why the fuck do you think I’ve been planning to get away? This place is hell, and it deserves to burn, but I’ve no desire to burn with it.”

Chloe feels her heart twist, imagining for a moment a Warner standing behind the one she knows, a better man twisted by the Rose into something vicious and cruel, albeit still with an absolutely enormous penis. Her fear of him, her aching, increasingly guilty lust for his depredations, her dream of domestic bliss at his side, the deep loathing that’s been inexorably growing inside her since she saw him leave Sasha and Cecily to die, since current events began a process of recontextualising past events that she feels powerless to stop; Chloe’s insides are churning as if she’s swallowed something she can neither digest or expel. She’s no stranger to being pushed and pulled between poles - by the nature her creators gave her she’s a creature of opposing drives, a dynamo of lust and submission powered by the conflict within herself - but she senses herself drifting free of all her prior anchors, and she doesn’t yet know where she’ll come to rest.

Grunting in pain, Warner claws himself back up the blood-smeared concrete and hoists the bag of stolen equipment back onto his shoulders. He sways a little, but he grits his teeth and steadies himself with reserves of willpower that Chloe’s quietly astonished haven’t yet run dry. With unspoken assent, the girls and the trembling Mr Laurent, who seems to be belatedly feeling the shock of his first encounter with the changed denizens of the Rose, hoist themselves to their weary feet and fall into step behind.

“Chlo. Look at this,” Lottie whispers, sidling close and slipping her a couple of loose papers while the other survivors’ attention is elsewhere. Chloe’s so wrapped up in her internal turbulence that she almost reacts with annoyance and shoves the papers back, but her fundamental trust in Lottie makes her swallow the feeling and skim through them as best she can while she walks, thankful at least for the still-functioning fluorescent lights.

“What the f-“ Chloe breathes, eyes alighting on specific phrases on the page, but before she can say more or Lottie can shush her, she’s interrupted by a horrific screeching, scraping sound as the hallway’s angles stretch and distort through more than the conventional dimensions. The ceiling slides away upwards like a receding elevator, taking the lights with it and plunging the survivors into glowering darkness, and there’s a resounding crash from behind, announcing yet more victims-turned-pursuers spilling from where the security door and most of the wall has refracted into a hail of jagged light; heads, wetly swollen to double or triple their normal size like overripe fruit, dragging pulsing tails of organs behind them, horrific scars making a bloated maze out of roughly shaven skulls. Each has tens of scrabbling fingers protruding from its lumpen neck, and each pulls itself toward the horrified survivors in a chorus of choking, mumbling desperation, trailing lungs flexing as they smear viscous tracks on the concrete. The girls and Laurent follow Warner down the hall at a limping run, kicking as best they can at grasping appendages, while the shrieking mass of the gigantic torso-amalgam-thing, crackling, lashing, screaming through the air, follows its sibling horrors out of the impossible geometries behind. The far door rattles open on a cluttered storage space with towering shelves full of medical supplies, bolted ceiling-to-floor and difficult for the wave of miscreations to squeeze through until the ongoing shockwaves of irreality happen to turn the metal into wax or mucus or skin. Given a little breathing room, the group navigates another cavernous lab full of surgical equipment and unpleasantly suggestive, sealed vats, from within one of which Chloe swears she hears repetitive thumping. Finally, after another set of shutters, Lottie yells in wordless relief at the sight of concrete stairs leading upwards, visible at the end of a dim-lit, unfinished-looking service passageway with a stencil reading ‘DOCK ACCESS’ sprayed on one wall. A heavy steel door stands closed at the top, and the survivors make for it with a burst of energy borne of sheer desperation and the faintest flicker of hope. The gibbering, shrieking tide of the Blue Rose’s castoffs isn’t far behind, emerging from liquefying sections of wall, doors turned gelatinous and permeable, corners twisted into tortured intersection with points elsewhere in space. Laurent helps Nicci up when she lets out a squeak of shock and trips, which earns the fussy little man a significant bump in Chloe’s esteem; when Warner clutches his injured side, grunts and stumbles against the bare wall, leaving a lurid red streak, she’s powerless to prevent herself doubling back in turn.

“Chloe, don’t!” Lottie yells despairingly, from a few steps further up.

“What about the door? We need him!” she calls back, hopelessly aware that isn’t at all why she’s hesitating.

“I’ve got it! It’ll open, trust me! Just leave him and go!” Lottie shouts back, but all Chloe can think about is Warner telling her he’d picked her, that she was special, that he was going to take her with him when he escaped. She could be his forever.

“Good girl, Chloe,” Warner grunts, setting off a cascade of feelings that threaten to sweep her away, as she returns dutifully to his side and helps him stagger another few steps to the base of the stairs. Mirror-faced revenants and distended, bulging-eyed heads are forcing their way through the thick, gluey strands of whatever the door from the lab has become, and it’s clear there’s no way he’s going to reach the top in time in his condition. Chloe shrugs Warner’s leg-thick bicep off her shoulders, savouring the heat and musky smell and solidity of him, and reaches up to slip the strap of the overloaded pack free, a burden he helps her take from him with visible relief.

“Sir,” Chloe says, only moments later, coming to a dead stop two steps above the labouring Warner, trailing the bag she can barely even manage to drag up each stair. His sweat-soaked face looks up at her with an expression she’s never seen on him before, a mixture of pain and desperation and something she can very nearly convince herself is love. She reaches a decision. “What’s the Forfeiture Protocol?” she says, although she isn’t really asking at all.

“I don’t know! What… the fuck does that matter now? We’re almost there, Chloe! We can be together, away… from this shithole! Go!”

“’Forfeiture Protocol. All senior staff above Class A to have installed a core volitional override designed to facilitate salvage of essential equipment and data from the Facility in the event of an irrecoverable Level Five emergency, prior to Lethe and Pyrrhus Protocol activation and sanitisation of digital and physical evidence respectively. Override to be experienced as an imperative belief that staff member has for some time planned the covert theft and sale of Facility data and technology; Subject will be compelled to acquire and safeguard at least one but ideally three Products, under the conviction that they intend to effect rescue and/or pursue a romantic relationship with possessor of highest neuroplasticity index (see Study F8-R), here designated the Primary. Upon arrival at backup drop site B-2 and delivery of equipment and data, staff member to be terminated and Primary Product’s cerebrospinal tissue excavated and preserved as per Schedule 9A.”

“Want to hear more?” Chloe asks Warner, looking straight into his ice-blue eyes as the first fleshy ribbons and spirals of chattering teeth reach the bottom of the stairs and begin their laborious ascent. “It goes on.”

“What… the fuck… was that meant to be?” Warner gasps, though it’s patently obvious he understood most of what Chloe just recited. “That’s… that’s not true. It can’t be. I’m… no. That’s bullshit. No.”

“Turns out you’re just a puppet, mate. Even when you think you’re finally doing something for yourself, you’re just following orders like a good little boy,” Chloe says dispassionately. Behind Warner’s dumbstruck face she can see the twitching limbs and bloated bodies of the Blue Rose’s victims clambering over one another as the swelling mob mills and seethes and tries to reach the pair of them, but in the grip of her cold certainty she feels no particular hurry.

“Chloe, please! They’re coming!” Lottie yells down from the top of the stairs; neither Chloe nor Warner pay her any attention.

“God… fuck you, bitch,” Warner snarls suddenly, and Chloe swears there are steady tears scoring tracks down his grime-streaked face. “Fuck you and fuck this fucking place. No, fuck, wait, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t… we can still go, Chloe. It doesn’t matter where it comes from. What I feel is still real. You’re… We can…”

“You should know I was gonna do this anyway. I just wanted you to understand you’re no better than me,” she tells him, by way of a reply. Mustering as much strength as she has left, she manages to lift the heavy bag and throw it hard into Warner’s chest. Desperately he grabs at it, still compelled by conditioning or avarice or both to keep hold of his prize. By now there’s a shrieking, shuddering mass of wet, contorted bodies packed wall-to-wall at the base of the stairs, stretching back to fill the whole rough concrete tunnel with sharp-edged glass and precisely sectioned flesh. In shock, or perhaps resignation, Warner only seems to summon the will to survive once it’s already too late; he scrabbles uselessly at the wall with his free hand, still barely clutching the bag with the other, but between his weak leg and badly injured side, he has no hope of regaining his balance before he goes tumbling down the cold, hard steps, limbs windmilling, precious cargo flying free. His cry of surprise and pain turns almost immediately to a throat-shredding scream of agony as mindlessly groping fingers sink beneath his skin, and syringe-tipped IV tubes find homes in his eyes. Blood sprays in great mist-edged spurts, painting a section of wall and ceiling arterial red, as Lottie and Nicci cry out again for Chloe to hurry, and this time she turns and takes the last dozen steps in a few painful bounds. The heavy, airlock-like steel door at the top is, inexplicably, hanging wide open without the need for Warner’s access card, and Nicci reaches out from the other side to pull her through. Lottie and Laurent shove the great slab of steel closed on mercifully well-oiled hinges, and it slams with a resounding clunk, locking the still-shrieking Warner inside with his moaning, lumpen tormentors.

“Jesus, Chloe!” Lottie exclaims, as Laurent prods at the keypad until there’s a decisive thud of bolts sliding home. “I was going to shoot him! I thought I’d have to convince you… I thought you’d defend him! What happened?”

“He left Sasha and Cecily to die, just ‘cause they wasn’t useful to him,” Chloe says, simply, although her eyes are brimming with tears. “He was cruel, he was selfish, he loved having power over people. And I… I fuckin’ loved that shit, I wanted that shit, but even I can see he was a bad person, you know? I don’t… I don’t think it matters whether that was ‘cause he was conditioned to be or ‘cause he chose to be. He still was. In the end you gotta be the person you are, right? That’s all you got. And the person he was, was gonna keep hurting us. Now he can’t.”

“You can be surprisingly deep when you’re not thinking about cocks all the time,” Lottie says, taking Chloe’s hand in hers, broken-nailed fingers clasped.

“Who told you I’m not thinking about cocks? I’m in mourning for the absolute unit the world just lost,” Chloe says with a brittle grin, tears now running steadily down her cheeks.

“I’m really proud of you, babes,” Lottie says, tears trickling down her face now too. She drops the gun and wraps her sister in her arms, the two girls’ huge implants compressed against each other in a way Chloe finds inappropriately arousing given the circumstances, and from the growing tent in her skirt she can tell Lottie does too. Before the pair of them can get too distracted, Nicci’s increasingly frustrated attempts to get their attention finally break through the haze of adrenaline comedown and fragile euphoria.

“I said, I’m like, super sorry or happy for you or whatever, but we are in the boaty docky thing and there’s no boat!!!” Nicci exclaims, fists clenched, stamping a foot in what for her is an incandescent rage. “First everyone tells me we’re gonna have to leave, which is odviassley terrible, and when I work super extra hard to kinda amlost be okay with that and be stolic and not conplain, now there’s no frickin’ boat!!!”

Chloe regretfully disentangles herself and takes a belated look around: the girls are indeed in a cavernous docking area roughly carved out of the island’s bedrock and supported by heavy, utilitarian concrete-and-steel pillars. It appears completely separate from the surface-level one they’ve all seen on the island’s North side, where Lottie made her play for the mainland, which makes her wonder how much more traffic the facility received than the front-of-house staff were ever aware of. The space is lit by fluorescent striplights hanging on long cables from the distant ceiling, and the inadequate light reveals a horseshoe-shaped concrete inlet within which seawater slaps and froths in a channel leading out into darkness, and presumably eventually to some hidden cove at the island’s foot. What there isn’t, notably, is a boat, and the chaotic mess of ropes, pallets and discarded equipment strewn around the mooring posts implies that any previously in situ were launched in a hurry.

Lottie sighs, gun held loosely at her side and, now Warner is gone, safety firmly on. “Nobody really expected it to still be here, though, right?”

“Put your hand down, Nics,” Chloe says gently. The four of them stand there for a moment, battered and bleeding in the remains of their sexy costumes and tweed suit, variously appreciating the sheer unlikelihood of their survival, anticipating imagined horrors to come, and compulsively fantasising about cock again, because it’s been a minute.

“He did say it was a secret launch. Maybe there’s a hidden door or something?” Lottie ventures.

“Shame some twat killed him before he could tell us, really,” Chloe replies with a bitter laugh. The pair of them have a cursory look around, but in the absence of any neon signs pointing the way to the extra-special double-secret dock, they draw a blank, and both privately conclude this place was probably about as secret as it got.

“Wonder if this means another arsehole’s already done one with some poor girl and a bag of gear,” Chloe says, once they’ve given up and she’s planted her ample rear on a handy pallet of plastic-wrapped medical supplies and begun gingerly massaging her aching feet.

“God, I hope not,” Lottie replies.

“Yeah. Grim as. Hey, Lots?” Chloe adds, trying to make it sound like an afterthought but coming across perhaps a shade too casual. “How’d you know exactly where to find the paperwork about Warner’s secret conditioning stuff?”

“Lucky guess,” Lottie replies hastily, and looks away rather than meet Chloe’s eye.

Nicci lets out a startled squeak of fear at a sudden metallic clang from across the damp, echoing space, and Lottie spins, gun at the ready. The thick steel door emits one loud, decisive bang, then falls ominously silent. Almost without pause there’s a clanking and rattling from the opposite side of the cavern, and the girls’ attention instantly darts over to where, shadowed in the far corner, the concrete enclosure for the cargo elevator pierces the rough ceiling, its loading bay half-hidden by crates and containers seemingly abandoned when all hell broke loose. The lift’s arrival is announced by a jarring buzz and a conclusive thud, the red light mounted above it shining like an ominous beacon in the half-light.

“Does that look like an invitation to anyone else?” Lottie mutters warily.

“Perhaps we are to have box seats for the end of everything,” Laurent says, finally roused from his silence by the prospect of a commanding view of the apocalypse.

“Perhaps we can still stop it,” Chloe echoes, shooting a brief glare at the man for his fatalism. She straightens what’s left of her torn, bloodstained stewardess’s scarf and turns to the others, eyes sparkling amid smeared, streaked mascara, looking resolute in the tatters of her uniform. “Listen, this has gotta mean Violet’s helping us, right? I mean, suddenly a lift to the surface turns up just when we needed it? Like the door just opened for us? Come on, right? What if she, I dunno, wants us to talk her out of it? Like, subconsciously? What if she don’t want to go through with it?”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Lottie replies, looking intensely tired. “But it isn’t as if we’ve got any other options.” She steps forward to join her sister; Laurent shuffles up to meet them, offering his wordless assent. Finding herself alone and being by her manufactured nature inexorably drawn to the in-group, Nicci hurriedly flounces forward to join the others as if she’d been there all along. With a grunt, Laurent chivalrously pulls up the heavy two-part outer door for the girls, and everyone steps into the cold, grimy lift with no shortage of trepidation. As Chloe presses the button marked G with a broken acrylic and the whole assembly whirs and grinds into upward motion, left lingering on the salty, still air of the secret dock is Nicci’s voice.

“Hey!! Where’d Mr. Warner go?!”

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