Page 87 of Petals for Vicious Secrets

Brendon, Carson and Ayla formed the last group. The latter didn’t seem very convinced about risking her life next to two guys that she had never met before, but since they needed a panom and Jake and Lenna weren’t splitting up, and Ciaran and Hope hadn’t even considered it either, the debate was settled.

Indianna put her badge on the wall of the dark alley and traced a four-petal panom mark with it, the metallic piece scratching against the bricks. When she finished the last petal, the circle of the panom opened a tunnel through the wall, and she put a hand inside, presumably to keep it open. Lenna could see the bright lights of the corridors on the other side of the tunnel.

“After you.” Indianna nodded to Hope.

Hope jumped in, crawling towards the lights, followed by Ciaran, Nina, and finally Indianna, who said, “See you soon.” Her black bob bouncing over her shoulders as she crawled was the last thing they saw before the wall closed and was back in place, as if nothing had ever happened.

Lenna smiled at Jake, Sasha and Theon, waving the badge Brendon had given her. “Let’s become official saviors.” She winked, and turned to the wall to draw the same mark she bore on her chest.

57

Hope

The Beftac Center for Injured Beings was absolute chaos.

Indianna was guiding Nina, Ciaran and Hope through side corridors that were mostly empty, save for a couple of beings that had been crushed under what appeared to be shelves full of machinery.

Hope had caused this. Her panomquake had killed them. Even if she had countless lives in her hands, these deaths made a tight knot in her chest, very similar to the one her mother’s death had caused. A growing knot of Cardinals-damned guilt.

Luckily, they had encountered no roixers yet. Had the distraction in the Houses made them be focused elsewhere? Or perhaps roixers were never around the Beftac Center, except in the security vaults of the fifth floor on the Southern wing.

Every single door in the building had to be opened with the badge, which was both ridiculous and extreme in equal parts. The doors were extra layers of security, especially if roixers were never around here, but they were not soundproof.

The screams, cries and desperate sobs of the beings had been filling Hope’s ears and brain since she had entered the building through the tunneled wall. The worst part was that not all of them were adult voices. No. Even running across one of many maintenance rooms, it was obvious. There definitely were infants and children suffering too.

Suffering because of her. Because of her newly released magic that had almost killed her, because of her direct connection to the Cardinals, or the Fifth knew exactly what it had been. She would have stopped to reflect if there was anything that she could have done differently. Anything to avoid such a panomquake with disastrous consequences. Except she was using those disastrous consequences as a distraction to rescue her friend’s brother.

Cardinals guide her. But right now, Indianna was the one guiding her. Through maintenance rooms full of broken equipment and a couple small fires Ciaran had extinguished, making water appear from his hands; laundry rooms flooded because of destroyed pipes; and multiple laboratories where it had been a miracle that none of them had tripped over parts of microscopes and shards of glass from vials and flasks.

The areas where patients lived were close enough to still hear the despair and pain of the beings and the multiple beeping monitors and alarms, but distant enough to not see them.

“Southern wing, everyone,” Indianna said, placing the metal badge against the crystal door that opened an instant later, revealing a circular room with a ceiling five-stories high above them, leading to multiple corridors in each level. Hope had underestimated how big a healing center could be.

Indianna turned towards the second on the left, running in silence as the other three followed her. There were beings agonising here, and other rooms were dead quiet, the only noises of gas escaping from ports on the walls. Hope saw Indianna’s steps faltering, her pace slowing down as if she was going to enter the rooms and help the patients. Deep down, Hope wished Indianna did exactly that. These people didn’t deserve to die. But Indianna didn’t enter those rooms, instead she started sprinting, as if trying to resist the urge to go in a completely different direction.

Steps, door, badge, more doors, more badge-touching, change of corridors, more steps. Hope’s sense of orientation was very refined, and yet she doubted if she would be able to walk all the way back in the first attempt.

On the next turn of a corner, they faced a wide-eyed healer with dry blood on his forehead holding onto a pole. He swallowed, his eyebrows lifting as he looked at Ciaran and Hope. “Weapons are forbidden in the Beftac Center.”

“They are with me, John,” Indianna said, a reassuring smile on her beautiful face.

The ginger-haired man’s face frowned, as if he was trying to make sense of what his colleague had just said, and then glanced at the daggers that Hope was now gripping in each hand, and shook his head vigorously, taking a step towards the wall where a big, triangular, red button was.

“Don’t—” Indianna started.

But the man was too close, his index finger mere inches of the button that no doubt would alert the whole damned Beftac Center if not also the Organ House. Over Hope’s dead body, this mission was going to be risked by someone not listening.

The dagger hit John’s skull right in between his eyes, and his body hit the floor a heartbeat later, his finger safely away from the red button.

Hope would have said sorry if it had made a difference. But it didn’t make any.

Stepping over his dead corpse, they continued their way to the fifth floor. If she hadn’t lost count—and she knew she hadn’t—they were one floor away. Indianna’s badge let them in another set of stairs, and they rushed up.

Compared to the rest of the Beftac Center, the fifth floor of the Southern wing was too damn quiet.

Indianna put a finger on her lips and Hope felt a tickle on her skin as a violet message appeared on her forearm. Ciaran and Nina also read Indianna’s ink on their bodies.

The message was gone, and Hope nodded. The other end, where the second group, the one formed by Lenna, Jake, Sasha and Theon, would arrive shortly, if everything had gone well and if by some Cardinals’ blessed miracle hadn’t gotten lost in the labyrinth that this place was.

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