There’d been nothing to do but to go to the cryo-chambers and hope the centuries-long sleep would allow them to live again once they woke.
Only four of the two dozen who’d survived the beast wars had woken though.
Franchine had killed the rest.
Lornia’s lips thinned down as she headed for the room where the machinery labored on. Franchine. That arrogant and determined being who’d done his experiments in secret and without conscience.
He’d mutated the creatures, which was why they had attacked in the first place, and been so hard to kill as well.
Franchine, who had been willing to risk everything—even his life and the lives of all those behind the Speaker’s door and inside Tralam—to try to find immortality.
In the end, he had.
But it had cost nearly every life there—even his.
Lornia had woken to find Franchine not just ancient, but insane. He’d been dying even as she had woken. He’d somehow managed to pretend to be going into cryo, but he had arisen from that frozen bed and began his experiments all over again, that time using his own people for his unwilling subjects. How hard they had suffered, Lornia did not want to know. The bones, the desiccated remains, had told the story enough—and she had wanted to see or hear no more.
She’d been lucky. Franchine had somehow discovered that taking his fellow dwellers out of cryo to experiment upon them only ensured their deaths. He’d found a serum and used it on the ones who had remained, and on himself.
That serum had kept him alive for centuries while he did his best to perfect it. When she had woken, it was to find that she alone had survived his experiments and that she had been altered in ways that were irreversible and terrible.
The machinery room door had once been closely guarded. Now it stood open. She entered it slowly. The machine that kept Tralam from falling into the nothingness sat in the center of the room, all its aging tech lining the walls of the room and everything blinking and beeping and whirring away as the machine struggled not to die too.
Lornia went to it. She lifted her hands and settled them upon the face of the panel. The panel lit up. Her heart ached.
If the machine died—she died.
Maybe it would be better to let that happen.
“They’re coming.”
That voice spoke up inside her head again, and her teeth gritted. Was it possible or had she too gone mad from the long isolation and loneliness?
The machine groaned and labored; the lights blinked and winked out. Darkness blurred her vision. Lornia felt the floor falling out from under her feet. Panic hit her hard.
Franchine had done this, made her part and parcel of the machine, and she hated him for it. Hated him for all of it.
But mostly, she hated herself for being too afraid of death to let it all, herself included, just end.
The machine groaned. A stinking burning smell rolled up. Her nose wrinkled in disgust. More panic hit. Life or death. Everything. Always, and she was always and forever stuck, unable to choose death and without any hope of ever having life again.
