“Here,” Iko whispered, pulling open a door down the hall. Jacin and Cinder ducked in after her and shut the door, careful to not make a sound.
The lab was empty—or at least, empty of people. Conscious people. The walls were lined with shelves of suspended-animation tanks, filling up the space from floor to ceiling. Each tank hummed and gurgled, their insides lit with faint green lights that made the bodies look like frozen corpses. The far wall was full of even more tanks layered like shut drawers, making it a checkerboard of screens and statistics, glowing lights and the soles of feet.
Cinder and Iko ducked behind two of the tanks. Jacin backed himself against the wall so he would be hidden if the door opened and able to take anyone by surprise.
The first voice was met with another, male this time. “… plenty in stock, but it would be nice if they gave us some indication that this was going to…”
Jacin inhaled as the voice grew louder, until footsteps were right outside the door. But the footsteps and voices soon faded in the other direction.
Iko peeked around the base of the tank, but he held a finger to his lips. Cinder’s face appeared a second later, questioning.
Jacin gave a cursory glance to the rest of the lab. Each of the suspension tanks had a small tube that connected it to a row of holding containers. Though most of the tubes were clear, a few of them were tinted maroon with slow-flowing blood.
“What is this place?” Cinder whispered. Her face was twisted with horror. She was staring at the unconscious form of a child, maybe a few years old.
“They’re shells,” he said. “She keeps them here for an endless supply of blood, which is used in producing the antidote.”
When a shell was born and taken away, their families were told they were being killed as part of the infanticide laws. Years ago they had actually been kept in captivity—secluded dormitories where they were regarded as little more than useful prisoners. But one day those imprisoned shells had raised a riot and, unable to be controlled, managed to kill five thaumaturges and eight royal guards before they’d been subdued.
Since then they’d been considered both useful and dangerous, which had led to the decision to keep them in a permanent comatose state. They were no longer a threat and their blood could more easily be harvested for the platelets that were used for the letumosis antidote.
Few people knew the infanticide laws were fake and that their lost children were still alive, if barely.
Jacin had never been in this room before, though he’d known it existed. The reality was more appalling than he’d imagined. It occurred to him that if he’d succeeded in becoming a doctor and escaped his fate as a palace guard, he may have ended up in this same lab. Only, instead of healing people, he’d be using them.
Iko had gone back to the door. “I don’t hear anyone in the hallway.”
“Right. We should go.” Cinder brushed her fingertips over the tank of the young child, her eyes crinkled with sadness, but also—if Jacin knew anything about her—a touch of determination. He suspected she was already planning the moment when she would come back here, and see them all freed.
Sixty-Nine
The two people they’d heard in the hallway were nowhere to be seen. They soon found the door labeled DISEASE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, right where the diagram had told them it would be.
The lab was filled with designated stations—each one with a stool, a metal table, a series of organized vials and test tubes and petri dishes, a microscope, and a stand of drawers. Impeccably clean. The air tasted sterile and bleached. Holograph nodes hung on the walls, all turned off.
Two lab stations showed evidence of recent work—spotlights blaring on petri dishes and tools abandoned on the desks.
“Spread out,” said Cinder.
Iko took the cabinets on the far side of the room; Cinder started pawing through open shelving; Jacin started in on the nearest workstation, scanning the labeled drawers. In the top drawer he found an outdated portscreen, a label printer, a scanner, and a set of empty vials. The rest were full of syringes and petri dishes and microscope lenses, still in protective wrapping.
He moved on to the second station.
“Is this it?”
Jacin’s attention snapped to Iko, who was standing in front of a set of floor-to-ceiling cabinets with their doors thrown open, revealing row upon row and stack upon stack of small vials, each filled with a clear liquid.
Jacin joined her in front of the cabinets and lifted one vial from its tray. The label read EU1 PATHOGENIC BACTERIA—“LETUMOSIS” STRAIN B—POLYVALENT VACCINE. It was identical to the lid on the next vial, and the next.
Jacin’s gaze traveled over the hundreds of trays. “Let’s get a rolling cart from maintenance and fill it up with as many trays as we can. We probably won’t need all this for one sector, but I’d rather it be in our possession than Levana’s.”
“I’ll get the cart,” said Iko, rushing for the door.
Cinder ran a finger across a row of vials, listening to them clink in their trays. “This right here is half the reason Kai is going through with this,” she whispered, then clenched her jaw. “This could have saved Peony.”
“This is going to save Winter.” When he heard the cart in the hallway, Jacin started pulling trays off the shelves, and together they loaded the cart as high as they could, stacking tray upon tray of antidote. His pulse was racing. Every time he shut his eyes he could see her in that tank, clinging to survival. How long would the immersion protect her? How long did he have?