She crawled down to the floor and eased out behind the last man, her gaze sweeping the roof to find the water tanks. There were six banks of them, each feeding the sprinklers on several floors. She stayed very still, right up against the wall until her skin and hair adjusted fully to the new background. Only then did she begin her slow crawl across the roof, making for the nearest tank while the soldiers spread out and swept the large space.
Up so high the wind was a menace, blowing hard and continuously at the men. They stumbled as it hit them in gusts. She stayed low to the ground, almost on her belly. She stopped once when one of the soldiers cursed in a mixture of Mandarin and Shanghainese. He cursed the weather, not Cheng. No one would dare curse Cheng, afraid it would get back to him.
Cheng considered himself a businessman. He'd inherited his empire and his intellect from his Chinese father and his good looks and charm from his American movie star mother. Both parents had opened doors for him, in China as well as the United States. He had expanded those doors to nearly every country in the world. He'd doubled his father's empire, making him one of the wealthiest men on the planet, but he'd done so by providing to terrorists, rebels and governments classified information, weapons and anything else they needed. He sold secrets to the highest bidder, and no one ever touched him.
Bellisia didn't understand what it was that drove people to do the terrible things they did. Greed. Power. She knew she didn't live the way others did, but she didn't see that the outside world was any better than her world. Maybe worse. Hers was one of discipline and service. It wasn't always comfortable and she couldn't trust very many people, but then outside her world, the majority didn't seem to have it much better.
The cursing soldier stopped just before he tripped over her. She actually felt the brush of the leather of his boot. Bellisia eased her body away from him. Holding her breath. Keeping her movements infinitely slow. She inched her way across the roof, the movements so controlled her muscles cramped in protest. It hurt to move that slowly. All the while her heart pounded and she had to work to keep her breathing steady and calm.
She was right under their noses. All they had to do was look down and see her, if they could penetrate her disguise. She watched them carefully, looking out of the corners of her eyes, listening for them as well, but all the while measuring the distance to the water tanks. It seemed to take forever until she reached the base of the nearest one. Forever.
She reached a hand up and slid her fingers forward using the setae on the tips of her fingers to stick. Setae--single microscopic hairs split into hundreds of tiny bristles--were so tiny they were impossible to see, so tiny Dr. Whitney hadn't realized she actually had them, in spite of his enhancements. Pushing the setae onto the surface and dragging them forward allowed her to stick to the surface easily. Each seta could hold enormous amounts of weight, so having them on the pads of her fingers and toes allowed her to climb or hang upside down on a ceiling easily. The larger the creature, the smaller the setae, and no seta had ever been recorded that was small enough to hold a human being--until Dr. Whitney had managed unwittingly to create one.
Her plan was to climb into the water tank and wait until things settled down and then climb down the side of the building and get far away from Cheng. She was very aware of time ticking away, and the virus beginning to take hold in her body. Already her temperature was rising. The cold water in the tank would help. She cursed Whitney and his schemes for keeping the women in line.
The girls had been taken from orphanages. No one knew or cared about them. That allowed Whitney to conduct his experiments on the female children without fearing repercussions. He named them after flowers or seasons, and trained them as soldiers, assassins and spies. To keep them returning to him, he would inject a substance he called Zenith, a lethal drug that needed an antidote, or a virus that spread and eventually killed. Sometimes he used their friendships with one another, so they'd learned to be extremely careful not to show feelings for one another.
She started up the tank, allowing her body to change once again to blend in with the dirty background. The wind tore at her, trying to rip her from the tank. She was cold, although she could feel her internal temperature rising from the virus, her body beginning to go numb in the vicious wind. Still, she forced herself to go slow, all the while watching the guards moving around the roof, thoroughly inspecting every single place that someone could hide. That told her they would be looking in the water tanks as well.
A siren went off abruptly, a loud jarring blare that set nerves on edge. It wasn't the same sound as the first siren indicating to the workers to go immediately to the dorms. This was one of jangling outrage. A scream of fury. They had found her wig, mask and lab clothes. They would be combing the building for her. Every duct, every vent. Anywhere a human being could possibly hide.
She had researched Cheng meticulously before she'd ever entered his world. It was narrow, rigid, autocratic, with constant inspections and living under the surveillance of cameras and guards. Cheng didn't trust anyone, not his closest allies. Not his workers. Not even his guards. He had watchers observing the watchers.
Bellisia was used to such an environment. She'd grown up in one and was familiar with it. She also knew all the ways to get around surveillance and cameras. She was a perfect mimic, blending into her environment, picking up nuances of her surroundings, the language, the idioms, the culture. Whitney thought that was her gift. He had no idea of her other abilities, the ones far more important to the missions he sent her off on. All the girls learned to hide abilities from him. It was so much safer.
The guards reacted to the blaring siren with a rush of bodies and the sound of boots hitting the rooftop as they renewed their frenzied searching. She kept climbing, using that same slow, inch-by-inch movement. It took discipline to continue slowly instead of moving quickly as every self-preservation cell in her body urged her to do.
She relied heavily on her ability to change color and skin texture to blend into her surroundings, but that didn't guarantee that a sharp-eyed soldier wouldn't spot her. The pigment cells in her skin allowed her to change color in seconds. She'd hated that at first, until she realized it gave her an advantage. Whitney needed her to be a spy. He sent her out on missions when so many of the other women had been locked up again.
She gained the top of the tank just as one of the soldiers put his boot on the ladder. Slipping into the water soundlessly, she swam to the very bottom of the tank and anchored herself to the wall, making herself as flat as possible. Once again she changed color so that she blended with tank and water.
She loved water. She could live in the cool liquid. The water felt soothing against her burning skin. In the open air, she felt as if her skin dried out and she was cracking into a million pieces. She often looked down at her hands and arms to make certain it wasn't true, but in spite of the smoothness of her skin, she still felt that way. The one environment she found extremely hostile to her was the desert. Whitney had sent her there several times to record its effects on her, and she hadn't done well. A flaw, he called it.
The soldier was at the top of the tank now, peering down into the water. She knew each tank had soldiers looking into it. If they sent someone down into the water, she might really be in trouble, but it appeared as if the soldier was just going to sit at the edge to ensure no one had gone in and was underwater. Once it was dark, the soldiers should have completed their search and she should be able to slip up to the surface and get air.
Right now she was basking in the fact that the water was helping to control the temperature rising in her from the virus. Whitney had injected her every time she left the compound where she was held, to ensure she would return. She'd always managed to complete her mission in the time frame given to her, so she had no idea how fast-acting the virus was. The water definitely made her feel better, but she didn't feel good at all. Her muscles ached. Cramped. Never a good thing when trying to be still at the bottom of a water tank with soldiers
on the lookout above her.
Night fell rapidly. She knew the guards were still there on the roof and that worried her. She had to be able to climb down the side of the building, and she couldn't even get out of the tank as long as the guard was above her. She also needed air. She'd risked blowing a few bubbles but that wasn't going to sustain her much longer. She needed to get to the surface and leave before weakness began to hit. She had been certain the soldier would leave the tank after the first hour, but he seemed determined to hold his position. She was nearly at her max for staying submerged.
Bellisia refused to panic. That way lay disaster. She had to get air and then find a way to slip past the guard so she could climb down the building, get to the van waiting for her and get the antidote. She detached from the wall and began to drift up toward the surface, careful not to disturb the water. Again, she used patience in spite of the urgent demands her lungs were making on her.
After what seemed an eternity, she reached the surface. Tilting her head so only her lips broke the surface, she drew in air. Relief coursed through her. Air had never tasted so good. She hung there, still and part of the water so that even though the guard was looking right at her, he saw nothing but water shimmering.
A flurry of activity drew the guard's attention and she attached herself to the side of the tank and began to climb up toward the very top. She was only half out of the water when the shouted orders penetrated. They wanted hooks dragged through the containers to make certain no one was hiding in them with air tanks. So many soldiers tromped up onto the roof that she felt the vibrations right through the container. Spotlights went on, illuminating the entire roof and all six containers. Worse, soldiers surrounded each one, and more climbed up to the top to stand on the platforms.
Bellisia sank slowly back into the water, clinging to the wall as she did so, her heart pounding unnaturally. She'd never experienced her heart beating so hard. It felt as if it would come right out of her chest, and she wasn't really that fearful--yet. Her temperature was climbing at an alarming rate. She was hot and even the cool water couldn't alleviate the terrible heat rising inside of her. Her skin hurt. Every muscle in her body ached, not just ached, but felt twisted into tight knots. She began to shiver, so much so she couldn't control it. That wasn't conducive to hiding in a spotlight surrounded by the enemy.
She stayed up near the very top of the tank, just beneath the water line, attached to the wall, and made herself as small and as flat as possible. There was always the possibility that she could die on a mission. That was part of the . . . adrenaline rush. It was always about pitting her skills against an enemy. If she wasn't good enough, if she made a mistake, that was on her. But this . . . Peter Whitney had deliberately injected her with a killer virus in order to ensure she always returned to him. He was willing to risk her dying a painful death to prove his point.
He owned them. All of them. Each and every girl he took out of an orphanage and experimented on. Some died. That didn't matter to him. None of them mattered to him. Only the science. Only the soldiers he developed piggybacking on the research he'd conducted on the girls. Children with no childhood. No loving parents. She hadn't understood what that meant until she'd been out in the world and realized the majority of people didn't live as she did.
All of the girls had discussed trying to break free before Whitney added them to his disgusting program to give him more babies to experiment on. The thought of leaving the only life they'd ever known was terrifying. But this--leaving her to die in a foreign country because she was late through no fault of her own. She had the information Whitney needed but because he insisted on injecting her with a killer virus before she went on her mission, she might never get that information to him. He liked playing God. He was willing to lose one of them in order to scare the others into compliance.
Something hit the water hard, startling her. She nearly jerked off the wall, blinking in protest against the bright lights shining into the tank. Her sanctuary was no longer that. The environment had gone from cool, dark water--a place of safety--to one of overwhelmingly intense brilliant light illuminating the water nearly to the bottom of the tank. A giant hook dragged viciously along the floor, and she shuddered in reaction.
A second hook entered the water with an ominous splash as the first was pulled back up. The next few minutes were a nightmare as the tank was thoroughly searched with hooks along the bottom. Had a diver with scuba gear been hiding there, he would have been torn to pieces.
She let her breath out as they pulled the hooks back up to the top. They would leave soon and she could make the climb out of the tank and across the roof. Already she could tell she was weaker, but she knew she could still climb down the side of the building and get to the van where Whitney's supersoldiers waited to administer the antidote to the poisonous virus, reducing it to a mere illness instead of something lethal.
The hook plunged back into the water, startling her. She nearly detached from the wall as the iron dragged up the side of the tank while a second hook entered the water. This was . . . bad. She had nowhere to go. If she moved fast to avoid the hook, she would be spotted. If she didn't, the hook could tear her apart. Either way, she was dead.
The sound, magnified underwater, was horrendous on her ears. She wanted to cover them against the terrible scraping and grinding as the point of the hook dug into the side of the tank. She watched it come closer and closer as it crawled up from the bottom. The other hook came up almost beside it, covering more territory as they ripped long gouges in the wall.
She tried to time letting go of the wall so neither hook would brush against her body and signal to the men on the other end that there was something other than wall. She pushed off gently and slid between the two chains, trying to swim slowly so that movement wouldn't catch eyes. She stroked her arms with powerful pulls to take her down, still hugging the wall as best she could below the hooks. If she could just attach herself on the path already taken, she'd have a good chance of riding this latest threat out.
The advantage of going deeper was that the light didn't penetrate all the way to the bottom. She just had to avoid the hooks as they plunged into the water and sank. Once she was deep enough, the soldiers above her wouldn't be able to see even if she did make a jerky movement to prevent the hook from impaling her.
She made it about halfway down when the hooks began their upward scraping along the wall. Once again she stayed very still, the sound grating on her nerves, her heart pounding as the huge hooks got closer and closer. This time she did a slow somersault to avoid getting scraped up by either hook. The dive took her lower into the tank. She didn't see how they could possibly think anyone could stay under water that long, and by now certainly they would have discovered a scuba tank.
The soldiers were thorough, plunging the hooks deep and dragging them up the walls without missing so much as a few inches of space. Bellisia realized they had to have perfected this method of searching the tanks by doing it often. That made sense. The tanks were large and Cheng was paranoid. No doubt the many floors and laboratories were being searched just as thoroughly.
There, in the water, listening to the sound of the chains scraping up the walls, she contemplated the difference between Cheng and Whitney. Both had far too much money. Whitney seemed to need to take his research further and further out of the realm of humanity and deeper into the realm of insanity. No government would ever sanction what he was doing, yet he was getting away with it. At least his motive, although twisted, was to produce better soldiers for his country.
Cheng wasn't affiliated with his government as far as she could tell. He worked closely with them, but he wasn't a patriot. He was out for himself. He seemed to want more money and power than he already had. She'd researched him carefully, and few on the planet had more than he did. Still, it wasn't enough for him. Yet he had no family. No one to share his life with. He didn't work for the sake of knowledge. He existed only to make money.
Bellisia was awar
e of her heart laboring harder and the pressure on her lungs becoming more severe. That was unusual. She'd taken a large gulp of air and she should have had quite a bit of time left before she had to rise, but it felt as if she'd been underwater a little too long, even for her. Of course Whitney would find something that would negatively impact her ability in the water. He didn't want her to use that means as an escape route.
She had no choice but to begin her ascent. She tried to stay to the side of the tank they'd already dredged. It was terrifying to be in the water as the large, heavy hooks slammed close to her again and again. It was inevitable, given the many strikes the soldiers made at the water, and it happened as she was just pushing off the wall to allow her body to rise slowly, naturally. A hook hit the bottom of the tank and was jerked upward and to the left, right across her back and arm. She folded herself in half to minimize the damage, but it hit hard enough to jar her, even with the way the water slowed the big hook down.
She felt the burn as the point ripped her skin open. It was a shallow wound, but it stung like hell and instantly there was blood in the water. She had to concentrate to close those cells to keep from leaking enough blood that the soldiers would notice. Under her skin she had a network of finely controlled muscles that aided her in changing the look and feel of her body's surface skin. Now, she used them to squeeze the cells closed and prevent blood from pouring into the water, at least until the spotlights were turned off.
It seemed to take forever as she continued to rise, her lungs burning and her muscles cramping. All the while the horrible splash and scraping of the hooks continued. Twice she had extremely close calls, and once more the tip barely skimmed along her body, hitting her thigh, ripping her open. It was much harder to control the bleeding this time as she was weaker and needed to break the surface before her muscles went into full cramps.
She was relieved when the hooks were pulled from the water and the soldiers began to climb down the ladders back to the roof. Instantly she kicked the remaining four feet to the surface and took in great gulps of air. She clung to the side for several long minutes, resting her head against the wall while she tried to breathe away the inferno inside her. She couldn't keep doing this for Whitney. She wouldn't survive. He made them all feel as if they were nothing. She knew she wasn't alone in wanting to escape because they all talked about it, late at night when one or two could disrupt the cameras and recording equipment and they were alone in the dorms.