Helix: Episode 9 (Countervail)

Chapter 5

Chapter Five

The Powder Tower, Prague Headquarters, Praha 1

Sophia stepped out of the cell.

Sweat collected in her eyebrows and under her arms. Every muscle in her body ached, and her skin burned. She didn’t know how much longer she had left.

Denton was long gone, leaving them barefoot and unarmed. Sophia wanted to recover their phones, and hopefully their shoes and belts, but that would take time they didn’t have.

‘Soph, a little help,’ Jay said. ‘I’m feelin’ dizzy.’

Nasira had collapsed in his arms, her groans the only noise in the tower. Now Jay was hauling her across the stone floor, gritting his teeth in pain. He was going nowhere fast.

We won’t make it.

‘Hate to say it,’ Jay said, ‘but maybe we needed Olesya.’

‘It’s too late for that now,’ Sophia said.

‘What about the train? If we can make it there...’

She couldn’t read his emotions anymore—her ability was all gone—but she could feel them. Jay didn’t want to die here. But despite her rapidly declining health, Sophia herself felt strangely calm. Her best strategy would be to leave both Jay and Nasira behind and find the train alone.

That was the kind of thinking she’d expect from … Denton.

‘Soph?’ Jay said. ‘We gotta find our weapons.’

Sophia propped up against the door. ‘No time. We go straight for the tunnel.’

Jay helped Nasira along, but was using all his energy doing so. Braced against each other, the pair of them seemed able to walk. Just.

Sophia listened outside the door, but heard only distant footsteps as soldiers moved around the headquarters. She turned to ask Nasira to reach out with her magnetoception and build an internal map of the place. But Nasira’s abilities were gone too, leaving her with only confusion and distress.

Sophia felt them too, slowing her thoughts while making her heart race.

She opened the door and moved quickly. With no escape route mapped out, she had to rely on Denton’s directions. She turned left, Jay and Nasira stumbling behind her as carefully as they could.

The tower was surprisingly bare, with white stone walls and the occasional decoration in the form of claw-like iron lamps. The brick floor was cold against the soles of her feet.

Up ahead, a dead Purity soldier lay against the wall, her white uniform stained red. Denton’s work, and fortunately unnoticed until now. Sophia took the soldier by her leg and dragged her back to their cell. It took almost all her remaining energy to do so, and left a smear of blood across the floor—she had to hope any soldiers would misinterpret it as the blood of Purity’s prisoners.

Denton and his operatives had stolen their uniforms from somewhere, which meant there were probably more dead soldiers in the tower, perhaps killed less brutally and with less blood to stain the gear. Sophia hoped they wouldn’t be discovered anytime soon.

Jay and Nasira’s shuffling footsteps echoed down the corridors behind her. The walls were now a mismatch of large and small bricks, and the place felt like some kind of labyrinth. She reached a T-intersection, listened for a moment, then stepped around the corner to the right. If she spotted anyone, she hoped they’d be close enough for her to take them down quickly—if she could even manage that. Her fast walk was becoming less of a fast walk and more of a wobble.

Her expiration date was coming up.

The corridor led to a set of seven steps, each only an inch high but long enough that she needed several strides to reach the next one. She climbed to the top, entering a medieval hall the length of a commercial airliner, and completely empty. The ceiling was high and vaulted, with dark tracery that curled and weaved around it; three chandeliers hung low over old, polished floorboards, their orange glow casting the Gothic hall in a sinister light.

From somewhere in the distance, there came shouting.

Jay and Nasira caught up with her, their breathing ragged; Nasira was a shade paler, her forehead beaded with sweat. ‘I think they found a dead body,’ she said, almost choking on the words.

‘Where’s the tunnel?’ Jay asked, his words slurred.

In the wall at the other end of the hall was an archway, another row of steps beyond. If Denton were telling the truth, the tunnel would be through there.

‘Just keep moving,’ Sophia said. ‘I’ll go ahead and open it.’

With the last of her energy, she ran across the hall, her bare feet quiet on the floorboards. But as she reached the archway, she stopped in her tracks.

Emerging from inside it, no fewer than six Purity Guard, their weapons leveled at her.