Summus Proelium

So, it was down to Alloy and me to get in the school, sneak through the whole place without getting caught by any of the armed troops patrolling around it, plug this USB drive in, and get Eits to trigger the thing so it could disable all the Biolems. Oh, and we had to do it in a way that left us able to save the hostages from anyone in there who wasn’t a Biolem just in case they reacted violently to their buddies keeling over. Two of us and hostages in three different locations. Three with Eits, but I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about getting directly involved in something like that. Sure, he’d already called us over here and he was going to be helping out with shutting down the Biolems, but I’d already gotten him severely hurt once before. I didn’t want to ask him to do anything else that might result in worse happening. Besides, we’d contacted the Ministry. They had to send someone over here. We would have help once this all went down. I’d much rather picture Fisher throwing these guys around than Eits getting himself shot.

Either way, first we had to actually get the drive where it belonged without getting caught. Having any of those patrolling guys stumble across us and open fire would really screw up our entire plan. Fortunately, that was one place where Eits could help. I’d already sent him a message about what we were doing, and he replied by sending my phone a live video feed of the security cameras nearest to that secret basement room. Peyton and I were at the top of the stairs after going through the room I’d used for training. I’d asked Paige and Sierra about waiting in that room, but they felt safer in the tunnel beyond. It was further away from the signal this USB was going to broadcast. They weren’t sure it would reach down into that room, but better safe than sorry. We had enough problems right now without those two getting shut down.

Crouching there together at the top of the stairs, the two of us watched my phone screen. One of those groups of three patrolling guards was passing by that northeast stairwell, the one just in front of where this semi-hidden door was. They passed out of sight of the camera, and I strained my ears, trying to listen. There was absolutely no reason for them to come to this door, let alone open it, but still. It would hardly be the first time something unexpected happened to completely complicate something we were trying to do. Case in point: this entire situation from start to finish. This whole thing had started simply because we told Irelyn a lie about what was going on with Paige, and she had gone to investigate. Which led to… to this, all of it. Yeah, sure, we weren’t responsible for everything. Amanda had already been working with Pittman and they would have just found another way to unleash this plague or whatever. But still, we were the reason it had happened this way. And it seemed like every time we tried to fix it, something else just happened to make it even worse. It was getting old.

Thankfully, in this case, we didn’t have that problem. A few seconds after the guys we were watching vanished from that camera, Eits changed the view a bit. Now half the screen was taken up with that view, while the other half was showing the view from the camera at the top of those stairs. We could see those three guys just reaching the top of those stairs. They paused for a moment, clearly chatting with each other (if only these cameras came with sound) before turning to walk back down that other corridor.

Other than that, with those guys gone, our way out of this room was clear. Peyton and I glanced at one another, nodded, then I carefully turned the handle and pushed it slowly while activating the black paint I had already put on the thing as we were waiting. Yeah, I was pretty sure the door wouldn’t squeak anyway, but there was no sense in risking anything stupid happening just because we made assumptions.

With the door open, we slipped out, but didn’t go any further than that. We made sure to stay away from the cameras, since we were pretty sure these guys were watching them too. It wasn’t like Eits was the only one with access. Well, he could be, but it would mean locking them out of the system and they might notice something like that.

Fortunately, there was something he could do without being obvious about his presence. Once Peyton and I were in that space next to the door, I sent him a quick text that we were ready. He, in turn, put a countdown on the video feed (one only we could see, I assumed) going from ten. When it approached zero, I gave both of us a shot of black paint, as we got ready. The moment the countdown ended, the two of us shot forward, right into camera view. But we wouldn’t show up on it. Eits was looping the footage of both that camera, and the one upstairs (the one those three guards had just been on a moment earlier) just long enough for us to get past them both. The countdown had been while he waited for those guards to get far enough away that whoever was monitoring the feed wouldn’t notice them suddenly vanish off it.

Just before the two of us reached the stairs, I grabbed Peyton around the waist. She held on tight, while I used a shot of red against the ceiling above to yank us all the way up there without ever touching a single step. We landed, and I reflexively looked down the hall. The trio we’d been waiting for were nowhere in sight, but this was a long hallway and someone could come into view at any point. Even with Eits monitoring, something could always go wrong.

There was a classroom door right there, and Peyton was already checking the knob. It was locked, but she just transformed one of her marbles into a gooey key shape. It slipped into the lock, hardened in the right places, and she twisted it. Just like that, the door was open and we went right through. A second later, the door was closed and locked once more. We were out of sight, and I sent Eits a salute emoji message so he could put the cameras back to normal.

And now we were safely in an English classroom. Not mine, I attended the one across the hall, but it all looked familiar enough. There were two narrow bands of dim lights all around the room, one just a few inches off the floor and the other a few inches down from the ceiling. So at least we weren’t standing in complete darkness.

Keeping her voice low, Peyton whispered, “Dude, are there fifteen desks in this place? You have fifteen person classrooms? I’ve got forty-three people in my English period, and that’s average. And are those iPads? Why would you guys leave your--wait are those classroom iPads? Like, separate brand new thousand dollar computer pads for each class that-- okay, you know what? I kinda want to rob you people right now.”

“Let’s hold off on that, Robin Hood,” I retorted with a little self-conscious blush. “At least until we make sure no one in here is gonna die.” After a brief pause, I added, “Besides, those iPads are only middle of the road, really. Not that good for anything advanced, and they’ve got trackers on them. You take them out of here, not only will they be able to find you, they can also disable the thing so it’s about as useful as a brick. Except not, since bricks can be very useful in the right circumstances. A frozen iPad is just… nothing.”

“Sometimes, it’s not about having a new toy, PB,” she retorted. “It’s about sending a message. But yeah, probably not the right time for messages. Unless that message is, ‘hey all the bad guys are tied up would you people come collect them?’”

My head bobbed a bit at that. “Yeah, that sounds like a good message to me. So, let's do this so we can send it.” Even as I was saying that, I crossed to the back corner of the room. The library was at the end of this row of classrooms, but we had to get there first. Part of me felt a little guilty about how we were planning on doing that, but not enough to risk being seen by doing it any other way. With those groups patrolling, even Eits could only help so much. The safest and quietest way to get there was to make some holes in the walls and go right through these classrooms. And hey, with my new black-pink combination, we could push through the material like it was soft sand instead of clay.

While I was making that black-pink hole for us to push our way through, conserving as much paint as I could, Peyton checked her phone before grimacing. “Hobbes says they called the shop, wanted to talk to you. She gave them the runaround and said to send proof that they actually have hostages. But we’re pretty sure they’ll figure out something’s up if the pictures they’re sending over don’t get you on the phone.”

Grimacing, I thought about how bad it would be to whisper my way through a conversation like that. But if I spoke up, there was a chance someone in the hall could hear. Or--wait. “Have them send the call to Poise,” I replied, “she can fake my voice.” It was already a fake voice as it was, so this would be like two levels of fake. “Just have her try to negotiate, talk them down, whatever she needs to do to stall. We’re getting there.”

Even as I said that, she and I were both crawling carefully through the hole I’d made and into the next classroom. Eits had put the video from the security camera in this hall back on my phone, so I could see three different guys coming the opposite way. But they weren’t here yet, so we kept moving. Now wasn’t the time to dilly dally. Staying low, we made our way past more desks (twelve in this one, which really made Peyton scoff). Reaching the opposite wall without ever standing up fully, I started to paint a new hole there. When the trio on the camera got close enough that they could conceivably hear us moving, both of us went completely still. And, of course, it was this classroom that those guys chose to stand right outside of as they stopped to chat. We couldn't make out their words, but I could hear the murmur of voices. If I didn't know any better, I would have said they were doing it deliberately just to fuck with us. Could they just move the hell on already?

While we were waiting, Peyton held her phone up for me to see. There was a message from Paige letting us know that she had stalled these guys by telling them that we were going to talk about letting Pittman go. We figured they wouldn’t give us much time for that, but they’d probably feel safe enough with their lookouts in place to let us squirm trying to come up with another solution for at least a few minutes. The others back at the shop just had to make it look like we were scrambling and caught off guard. I had faith they could play it up enough to make these guys think they were winning. Again, thanks to Eits, our biggest advantage here was that we found out what was happening before they could get their people in place to watch us.

Eits really was the MVP of this whole thing. And if we managed to get through this without losing any hostages, it would be completely thanks to him.

Finally, the Chatty Cathies outside stopped talking and moved on down the hall. Did the fact that they had actually stood there and talked with each other mean that at least two of the three were human and not Biolem? Or did it mean they were advanced Biolems? But would the advanced versions need to talk out loud with each other? Paige and Sierra tended to send direct communication over their private connection. Maybe two of them were advanced Biolems communicating out loud with the third, who was human. Or--okay yeah it really wasn’t important right now. Time to move on.

Gradually, the two of us continued through one classroom after another. We stayed low, kept watching the security camera feed to stop when anyone was nearby, and generally did our level best to move as quickly as possible without getting caught. And without giving the people here, whoever and whatever they were, any reason to even suspect that someone might have managed to sneak past their defenses.

Eventually, we made it into the library itself, at the rear of the second floor where the reference books were. Unfortunately, the area we needed was up one level, on the third/top floor. That was where the server room was. Which wouldn’t have been as much of a problem given we could just go through the ceiling, if it wasn’t for one thing: the patrols had changed. Now we had one group of three standing around the middle of this part of the library. They were separated from us by several rows of bookshelves, a few desks, and other bits and pieces. But if we went up to the ceiling, they’d notice. And even if they didn’t notice then, they would definitely spot the hole we’d leave there. We couldn’t even make our way back to find another way around, because there were guys out in the hallway too. And we couldn’t simply go back into the previous room before going up from there, because there were other guys in that part of the library. Which was just totally fantastic. Once again, I almost would’ve thought they were fucking with us and knew we were here the whole time, but they had set up positions like that in other, more distant parts of the school too. They didn’t know we were here, they were just covering potentially vulnerable areas now that they knew we might try to find a way in. Even though they had to assume we were still contained back in the shop, they were doing all this just in case. It was so, so incredibly annoyingly competent.

Honestly, I was just jumpy. A couple different times as we were moving through those classrooms, I could have sworn I saw the shadow of a person inside the room with us, but there was never anyone there. This whole situation was making me paranoid.

We were stuck here in the back of the second floor of the library and needed to be on the third floor. But we couldn’t just jump up to go through the ceiling, and we couldn’t go out into the hall to go around these guys. We needed some other way to get there, and we needed to do it as quickly as possible. They might be willing to wait for a few minutes to see what we did back at the shop, to let us figure out that we were ‘trapped.’ But that wouldn’t last forever. Any minute now, they were going to get suspicious. And we really didn’t need them to have any reason to start paying even more attention to what was going on around here. If they started peeking into individual classrooms to double check and ended up finding the holes in the walls that I’d left behind… it wouldn’t be good.

Peyton and I hadn’t spoken to each other out loud, not even in a whisper, since we came into the room. Yes, there was a fair bit of distance and obstacles between us and those people, but if any of them were Biolems we didn’t want to risk being overheard. Fortunately, the lights in here were all on so we could have our phones out and communicate that way, through text on the screen, without exposing ourselves. We batted around a few different ideas about how to get upstairs, dismissing the first couple as too dangerous before settling on the best chance we had under the circumstances. It was simple. We were going to have to sneak around those guys and get to the far opposite side, where there was a small storage closet. We could get in there, which would hide the hole I made. And it was far enough away from the group upstairs so they wouldn’t spot us coming up. Even better, it was right near the server room.

The hard part was going to be that whole ‘getting around these guys without being spotted’ problem. Which was where all the lights in here being on became a bad thing. There were no shadows to hide in, and only so much cover. From the area those guys were standing around in, there were several spots where we would need to go right past their field of vision. But we could do it. We just had to take it one step at a time, literally. First, I gave both of us black paint, put one hand on Peyton’s arm, then waited. She, in turn, put a floating marble platform under our feet, lifting us a couple inches off the floor. I gave the marble a shot of black as well. We weren’t going to risk walking, even with the paint. Instead, she would float us forward while I kept applying paint to make sure even our movements through the air were completely silent.

Meanwhile, Eits was watching the security camera view of the area where those guys were. Every time we came to the edge of an open area where they could have seen us, we waited there. My eyes were locked to my phone, while I kept one hand on Peyton’s arm. The second those guys were all looking in the wrong direction, Eits would send a ‘go’ message. I, in turn, would activate the next bit of black paint while squeezing Peyton’s arm. When she felt that squeeze, she would send us forward through the open space.

It was a nerve wracking time, obviously. Both because it took far too long for those guys to stop looking our way, and because they could always turn back at the exact wrong moment. But we kept going, and bit by bit, we made it to the opposite side. Finally, we stepped off the marble platform, very carefully opened the closet door (yes, I painted that black as well), and slipped inside.

From there, it was easy. I black-pink painted the ceiling and Peyton carried us up through it on another marble platform. That put us on the right floor, right next to the server room. After taking a second to make sure the group up there was sufficiently far away and hadn’t noticed us, I used one more little bit of pink on the lock before quietly pushing the door open.

And just like that, we were in the server room. Staying low, both of us moved to the back, finding a slot to stick the USB drive in. Once it was there, I breathed out. “Okay,” I whispered almost inaudibly, “hope you’re ready, Eits.

“Cuz it’s just about time to shut these guys down.”