Read The Singular Six (The Chronicles of Eridia) Page 24

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  An hour later Maggie threw herself into a chair in a trashed office and said, “How large is this place?”

  Since leaving the vat-room, they had passed through a variety of labs, storage areas, and offices. They had also run across a dining hall with a sign above the entrance that read “Blue Wing Cafeteria,” disheartening evidence that the complex was vast enough to merit multiple cafeterias.

  In all that time, they had found no sign of the Marauders. Considering the abundance of graffiti on the way in, logic dictated that the Marauders would express themselves similarly on the inside of the complex. But they had seen nothing. Nor had they seen any indication that anyone had been in this area in years.

  “I am beginning to think we should have taken the east branch of the corridor,” she told Freud.

  “Perhaps.”

  Her eyelids began to droop. She forced them back open. Sitting down had been foolish. Her body needed rest. Lots of it. Sure, she had had that little nap after her altercation with Klaus von Klaus, but it hadn’t been enough. Now her exhaustion was catching up with her again.

  She wasn’t sure if she could fight it. Should she try? That was the question, wasn’t it? What kind of peril were Adam and Dagmar and Anna in anyway?

  “I get the impression you wish to sleep, but are concerned that you should remain awake to rescue the others,” said Freud.

  “That is a very succinct assessment of the situation,” she said, hating how drowsy-thick her voice sounded.

  “If it helps, my analysis is as follows: Had the Marauders wished to kill Mr. Frankenstein and Ms. Dagmar, they would have done so immediately upon catching them. The fact that they did not suggests that they wished to keep them alive for one reason or another. Torture is, of course, a possibility, as is a showy execution, both of which are precisely the sort of barbarous behavior one would expect from antisocial beings who have almost completely given themselves over to their ids. But the Marauders are nevertheless human and require sleep as all men do. Thus, given the lateness of the hour—it is shortly before midnight—and given that the Marauders appear to be active primarily during the day, it is therefore most likely that either our companions have already been killed by execution or torture, or are currently restrained in some form to await execution or further torture tomorrow. In other words, I suspect that very little will happen one way or another at least until dawn.”

  “Hmmm,” said Maggie, forcing her eyelids up for what seemed like the thousandth time. “But if all the Marauders are asleep, would this not be the best time to…to…”

  She fell asleep.

  Freud ran a full system scan to make sure nothing had been damaged during the day’s activity, set an internal wake-up alert for four-thirty a.m.—four-and-a-half hours of sleep should suffice for Ms. Frankenstein—then entered standby mode to rest his processors for the inevitable confrontation tomorrow, in whatever form it would take.